#Languagelog

"'The purist jungle?'" (3/27/2026) featured Anne Abeillé's book "La Grammaire se Rebelle". As background, I should have cited "Le français va très bien, merci", Tract des linguistes 5/23/2023 (= "French is doing very well, thank you").…

That's the name of a very fine health care facility nestled in the wooded hills of Philadelphia's northwestern suburbs — Malvern, Tradyffrin, Bryn Mawr ("large hill"), Bala Cynwyd (named for towns in Wales), Haverford, Narberth, Radnor, Berwyn, Merion,…

This post documents one small step in a larger plan for improved evaluation of prosody in reading. It compares word-level timing in a large number of recordings, from the Speech Accent Archive at GMU, of 3038 people reading the 69-word "Please call…

Study of 1,700 languages reveals surprising hidden patternsLanguages may seem wildly different, but new research shows they follow surprisingly consistent—and deeply human—rules.…

Apparently our haplogroup (family of Joseph Charles Mair [Pfaffenhofen, Austria] and Esther Frieda Louise Boyce Mair [Zweismmen, Switzerland]) is U8a1a.…

Following up on Tuesday's DP link, today we have Wyatt G. Croog, "Harvard Launches 'Strategic Authenticity Initiative' to Help Students Seems Normal", The Harvard Crimson 4/1/2026: In an effort to address growing concerns that its students are “deeply…

There are many other episodes, for example Episode 25, featuring the musical genre Ambient Hyper Pop Shark Core Acoustic New Metal among many others: For some (partial and antique) background on that one, see "Genres" (8/22/2014).…

A student who's been working on LLM-style AI transformations of symbolically-represented music recently tried mapping a (fragment of a piece) back and forth between two genres, e.g. baroque and pop.…

John Burn-Murdoch, "Social media is populist and polarising; AI may be the opposite", *Financial Times* 3/28/2026: Every media revolution has transformed who distributes information, what messages are distributed and what form they take.

Anne Abeillé's recently-published book "La Grammaire se Rebelle" describes linguistic prescriptivism as "la jungle puriste" / "the purist jungle".