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Translating Shakespeare
April 23, 2026 @ 7:17 pm
· Filed by
Victor Mair
under
Language and literature
Peeving
Translation
‘If This Be Magic’ Review: A Great Feast of Languages
Shakespeare has resonated with audiences in Swedish, Swahili and beyond. But translating the Bard requires some difficult choices.
By Henry Hitchings, WSJ (April 22, 2026)
Transferring Shakespeare's works into another language is hard work:
Samuel Johnson complained, more than 250 years ago, that William Shakespeare’s style was “ungrammatical, perplexed, and obscure.” Many students and theatergoers since have shared that view. Yet even if we agree with Johnson, it has become customary to celebrate instead the playwright’s linguistic resourcefulness and dazzle: his flair for coining words and twisting old ones into new shapes, his taste for double meanings and calculated ambiguity.
The obscurity condemned by Johnson derives in part from Shakespeare’s readiness to draw on vocabulary that would have struck even his contemporaries as bewilderingly nonstandard. Today many of us are as likely to be disorientated by his fondness for folklore and myth, his assumptions about religion and social order, and his immersion in the conventions of Elizabethan and Jacobean theater.
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Sadness in speech: minor thirds?
April 23, 2026 @ 3:15 pm
· Filed by
Mark Liberman
under
Language and music
In "
Poem in the key of what
" (10/9/2006), I blogged about a paper by Maartje Schreuder, Laura van Eerten and Dicky Gilbers, "
Speaking in major and minor keys
". Its abstract:
In music the difference between sad and cheerful melodies is often indicated as a difference between a minor and a major key. In order to investigate whether the same difference can be found in language, we analyzed intonation contours in emotional speech. We made cluster analyses in order to find out which fundamental frequencies were most present in the contours. Furthermore, we analyzed the musical scores of sad and cheerful speech as well. In the pitch contours of all speakers we found intervals of three semitones in sad passages and intervals of four semitones in cheerful passages. We therefore conclude that emotional speech melody, just as musical melody, involves major and minor modalities.
expressed some skepticism
The idea behind this paper is that the pitch contours of speech naturally express the same sorts of melodic intervals that occur in music. This is an old idea, prominent already in Paṇini's work two and a half millennia ago, but Schreuder et al. have a new idea about how to look for the phenomenon. While it's clear that musical intervals are part of the stylized forms of speech that we call "chanting", I've always been skeptical that well-defined intervals (in the sense of small-integer ratios of pitch values) play a role in unchanted speech. I'll explain some reasons for my skepticism later in this post. However, it would be fun to be wrong on this one.
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Extreme heat in Japan
April 22, 2026 @ 8:02 am
· Filed by
Victor Mair
under
Names
Vocabulary
Japan announces new name for days over 40C after hottest summer ever
", by Ruth Wright, Euronews (4/20/26)
They have words for it.  The one that's taking the online media by storm is
kokushobi
酷暑日.  That literally means "harsh / cruel + hot days".  I can attest to this characterization of scorching  days in Japan.  I remember one summer in Kyoto, which I wouldn't think of as a particularly hot city, when I stood on the sidewalk and was getting ready to cross the street, the pavement of which seemed to be melting under the shimmering heat waves.
The cited article gives other currently popular words for dog days (7/3/25-9/11/26 in America this summer) in Japan.
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Code-mixed headline
April 21, 2026 @ 1:40 pm
· Filed by
Mark Liberman
under
Headlinese
A note from Ambarish S.:
There’s an ongoing controversy in India with Prime Minister Modi being accused of blackface during an election campaign in the south, where people have darker skin on average.
The Alert
(a Hindi news website of unknown reputation) had the following Hindi sentence on it’s X:
तमिलनाडु रैली में मोदी जी का लुक वायरल!
where only the postpositions (में and का) and arguably the honorific जी are Hindi! तमिलनाडु and मोदी are proper nouns, while रैली, लुक and वायरल are respectively “rally", “look" and "viral”. The whole thing translates to “Modi Ji’s look at Tamil Nadu rally viral”.
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Comments (1)
ish
April 20, 2026 @ 4:51 pm
· Filed by
Victor Mair
under
Affixes
Humor
Language and entertainment
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Somatic sounds in the hospital
April 19, 2026 @ 1:31 pm
· Filed by
Victor Mair
under
Animal communication
Language and medicine
I never dreamed that I would be subjected to an
MRI
or a
CAT
scan or other sophisticated diagnostic system that enables medical specialists to see detailed tomographic images from inside your body.
For both of these devices, the patient lies on a flat surface and is inserted in a tube-like scanner.  They both make conspicuous noises all the while you are inside of them, and that is a normal part of their function. The CAT scan makes clicking, buzzing, humming, and whirring sounds.  The MRI is stranger.  You feel like you're going in a long winding, curving tunnel.  The one I was in made me think it had white brick walls interspersed with red glazed bricks.  I was a bit afraid that I would go so deep inside that I might never come out.
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Comments (11)
Way way
April 17, 2026 @ 5:56 pm
· Filed by
Victor Mair
under
Interjections and exclamations
Language and psychology
My rehab roomie has an unusual habit when speaking.  He randomly inserts the syllable "way" in his phrases (seldom finishes a complete sentence) and often repeats it multiple times.  Some examples:
I way
I way way
My wife way
My son way
I want way way way to toilet way.
Bed way
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Comments (24)
"Brocatives"
April 17, 2026 @ 5:03 am
· Filed by
Mark Liberman
under
Language change
Sociolinguistics
Following up on "
Bro!
", I've discovered a useful coinage from Canada: Matthew Urichuk and Verónica Loureiro-Rodríguez, "
Brocatives: Self-reported use of masculine nominal vocatives in Manitoba (Canada).
" In
It’s not all about you: New perspectives on address research
,  2019:
This study focuses on nominal vocatives that have been traditionally associated with male speakers and addressees (familiarizers in Leech’s terminology, 1999), and which we will call ‘brocatives’.
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Comments (10)
Bro!
April 15, 2026 @ 6:31 pm
· Filed by
Mark Liberman
under
Slang
Sociolinguistics
On walkways around Penn's campus, I'm hearing
bro
more and more often. Especially common, or at least especially striking, is a monosyllabic response meaning something like "You're kidding!"
A:
So then they [blah blah]…
B:
Bro!
…which I'm hearing as often among groups of female students as male students (though I admit that the added surprisal in that context might leave me with a false estimate of frequency).
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Comments (43)
Ackee names
April 14, 2026 @ 8:11 am
· Filed by
Victor Mair
under
Creoles and pidgins
Language and food
From Barbara Phillips Long:
In a cooking competition show that I was watching as an antidote to all the political news I read, the chefs were assigned canned ackee as an ingredient. I hadn't thought about ackee before; I mostly recognize the word from a song by Harry Belafonte that refers to ackee:
Down at the market you can hear
Ladies cry out while on their heads they bear
Ackee rice, saltfish are nice
And the rum is fine any time of year.
Jamaica Farewell
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Comments (10)
Recent language sciences references
April 12, 2026 @ 7:32 pm
· Filed by
Victor Mair
under
Animal communication
Announcements
Bibliography
Language teaching and learning
Lexicon and lexicography
Because there are so many excellent entries of interest to Language Log readers in various fields, I am including all of those in this extensive list;
Genetic History of Scythia
." Andreeva, Tatiana V. et al.
Science Advances
11, no. 30 (July 25, 2025): eads8179.
. Updated 27 March 2026.
Decoding Parrot Duets
: Complex Communication in Yellow-Naped Amazons." Dahlin, Christine R. et al.
Journal of Avian Biology
2026, no. 1 (February 12, 2026): e03552.
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Comments (12)
Distribution of acronym lengths
April 12, 2026 @ 8:32 am
· Filed by
Mark Liberman
under
Acronyms
Or maybe "initialism lengths"? Wiktionary defines
initialism
as "a term formed from the initial letters of several words or parts of words, which is itself pronounced letter by letter"; while some (fussy) people argue that the term
acronym
should be reserved for words like
laser
(= "
ight
mplification by
timulated
mission of
adiation") or
NATO
(= "
orth
tlantic
reaty
rganization").
Acronyms/Initialisms are (mostly) words, under any reasonable definition. But this category has the special property that most items have multiple specific and distinct senses, generally known to small groups and/or used in very special circumstances.
For example, American linguists know that LSA stands for "The Linguistic Society of America" — but the LSA didn't act in time to lock up
, which belongs to the "Louisiana Sheriffs' Association". And
Acronym Finder
gives
123 interpretations for LSA
, including the linguists but (curiously) not the sheriffs.
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Comments (22)
The whimsical vagaries of a young Indonesian man's name
April 11, 2026 @ 5:21 pm
· Filed by
Victor Mair
under
Borrowing
Language and politics
Language teaching and learning
Names
Sylvain Farrel is a student nurse from Indonesia.  He came to America four years ago and speaks perfect English.  I asked him how that is possible, how did he learn English so quickly?
Sylvain said that he studied English during his elementary and middle school education.  His national language is Bahasa (Indonesia), i.e., Indonesian.
By ethnic heritage, Sylvain is Chinese, Hokkien / Fujian on one side, and I think Hakka on the other side, but I'm not sure.
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