L
Language Log
languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu · Group blog · on HN since 2008
Language Log is a group blog by linguists, including Geoffrey Pullum, on grammar, language use, and linguistic research.
What HN saysCommenters cite it as a source against prescriptive grammar rules and Strunk and White, and for long-running coverage of language myths.
427HN people shared it
280linked it in comments
306stories submitted
3.8Kstory points
3 months agolast shared
2008people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Language Log19 people · 2 points · first shared 2008 · discussion on HN
- 2The Passive in English (2011)13 people · 7 points · first shared 2012 · discussion on HN
- 3The directed graph of stereotypical incomprehensibility (2009)11 people · 86 points · first shared 2009 · 16 comments on HN
- 4Post 99211 people · first shared 2009
- 5Index10 people · first shared 2012
- 6Two Dots Too Many (2008)9 people · 186 points · first shared 2013 · 42 comments on HN
- 7"Hemingway" on Hemingway9 people · 8 points · first shared 2014 · discussion on HN
- 8"Begging the question": we have answers9 people · 4 points · first shared 2010 · discussion on HN
- 9It's not easy seeing green (2015)8 people · 1 points · first shared 2015 · discussion on HN
- 10The Roots of Lisp (2002) [pdf]7 people · 3 points · first shared 2018 · discussion on HN
- 11Prediction and Entropy of Printed English – Claude Shannon (1950) [pdf]6 people · 2 points · first shared 2011 · discussion on HN
- 12Post 276 people · first shared 2010
- 13Merriam-Webster gives “vaccine” a new definition5 people · 3 points · first shared 2021 · 4 comments on HN
- 14Post 182375 people · first shared 2015
- 15Ultraconserved words? Really?4 people · 8 points · first shared 2013 · 1 comments on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
telemachos · 2012-11-26
In addition to the "50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice" article that Zed links, Language Log[1] is a great source if you want to learn more about the problems with prescriptivism and Strunk and White in particular. Geoffrey Pullum is one of the founders, and he writes there often.
[1] http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/
quuxplusone · 2025-12-27
Seems somewhat reminiscent of the "Petition of Who and Which" (1711), Spectator #78:
https://books.google.com/books?id=c6MIAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA86
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=20844
But if I understand https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46395467 correctly, this em-dash broadside was itself AI-generated, so any similarity to the above might be completely unintended by the human who wrote the prompt. (Anyway, the similarity is superficial or spiritual at best.)
zimpenfish · 2025-11-26
Brief mention on Language Log back in 2009[0] says 'They are saying that teaching the list of "-cei-" words directly is a better strategy than teaching the rule: it is not sufficiently general to pay its way.'
Which is basically saying the rule is worthless?
[0] https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1525
klik99 · 2025-09-14
The amazon "I'm sorry but I cannot fulfill this request it goes against OpenAI use policy. My purpose is to provide helpful and respectful information to users-Brown" listing reminds me of this restaurant in Shanghai when I lived there. The chef who opened it was famous in his local area and wanted a beautiful name for the Shanghai location, and have it in English to reflect the cosmopolitan international city of Shanghai. So he chose a line from his favorite poem, put it through google translate and named it, in big letters above the entrance, "Translation not Found".
Edit The story above that I heard was likely an exaggerated version of this: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=301 - I still like the urban legend version I heard so keeping it up there.
Tainnor · 2025-07-08
absolutely nothing, except that some pencil-pushers with poor understanding of grammar somehow dislike it even though they often can't even identify it correctly.
Language log has been writing about this for so long it's not even funny: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?cat=54
Although the best place to start is probably here: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2922
jcranmer · 2025-07-07
"the points already made" is what is known as the "bare passive", and yes, it is the passive voice. You can see e.g. https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2922 for a more thorough description of the passive voice.
As I said elsewhere, one of the problems with the passive voice is that people are so bad at spotting it that they can at best only recognize it in its worst form, and assume that the forms that are less horrible somehow can't be the passive voice.
robinhouston · 2025-04-14
On the theme of difficult ideas explained using a limited vocabulary, I suppose one has to mention xkcd's Thing Explainer as well as George Boolos's classic _Gödel's Second Incompleteness Theorem Explained in Words of One Syllable_:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thing_Explainer
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/BoolosOneSyllable.pdf
SllX · 2024-10-11
> your beloved
Don’t put words in my mouth.
> Maybe the whole world should adopt universal language with saner spelling and leave english to anglosphere?
The rest of the world could. They won’t. But they could. You could use this as part of your spelling reforms: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=81 :)
lacker · 2024-09-06
It's a shame that I like Y Combinator the organization so much, because I find the y combinator as a programming concept to be aesthetically displeasing.
It only makes sense in the untyped lambda calculus, where types are all conflated and errors are forbidden. It relies on the fact that you can take any x and "apply x to itself". These properties are essentially gimmicks of the untyped lambda calculus. It's like the saying "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler." The untyped lambda calculus, they made it even simpler.
Yes, you can reduce everything to a very tiny number of combinators, but at the cost of making everything ugly. It is much cleaner to use Lisp and reduce everything to a slightly larger set of primitives. Ironically (?) one of the best explanations of this is PG's own The Roots Of Lisp - https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/llog/jmc.pdf
FabHK · 2024-07-29
The excellent Language Log blog has a whole series of articles about the "Eskimo words for snow" myth:
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3497
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?cat=37
https://snowclones.org/2007/05/31/if-eskimos-have-n-words-for-snow-x-h…
And a book:
https://www.amazon.com/Eskimo-Vocabulary-Irreverent-Essays-Language/dp…
082349872349872 · 2024-05-25
More directly, here's superposition (as opposed to classical pure states) in hanzi: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=64175
[If Google's xlation can be believed, note that syntactically the 3rd and 5th columns repeat in:
吾生也有涯 而知也无涯 yet semantically they group differently between the lines:
吾生/也有/涯 而/知也/无涯 compare resonance in aromatics]
msla · 2024-02-29
You can look at the whole rest of the page I linked to for ways in which Esperanto is irregular and parochial.
For example:
http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/v.html
There's a whole word class (words ending in AŬ) which is essentially a "Wastebasket Taxon" for his vocabulary: There is no regularity to what ended up there, merely arbitrary choice. That's acceptable in a natural language, but Esperanto is Modern and Scientific and Regular As Oat Bran, right?
> In China, for example, Esperanto was used to introduce western languages.
Really? Do you have any evidence for this? I follow a blog which frequently discusses such things (language use in China) and it's never been mentioned:
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/
simonh · 2023-01-02
This one is my favourite, along similar lines:
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=11907
upwardbound · 2022-02-08
Good question. I followed the citation in wikipedia and it points to this article:
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1997 In the comment thread there, people are discussing the question you raise.
Essentially, it's the inclusion of the word "they" which makes the sentence incorrect. If the word "they" was removed it would be valid and would mean what you read it as.
cies · 2021-11-09
Maybe wikipedia also changed it (did you check?), Webster did change it:
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=50886
> Also, mRNA is not the only type of vaccine for COVID.
I know.
> Which definition of "vaccine" do you subscribe to that these "treatments" don't fit into?
It's all marketing at this point. mRNA-treatment does not sell. Vaccine elicits people's trust, and obedience.
> would you clarify which definition of "experimental" you subscribe to?
Not FDA approved in the US. "approval pending"
> And do you have a source for "testing standards were reduced"?
These kind of drugs take years to develop. This stuff was done in a few months. They skipped some steps in the process. Understandable, but still...
ekidd · 2021-08-29
The deepest and most radical opinions of Lisp are:
- You should be able to implement Lisp-in-Lisp within a few pages of code. This a profound and remarkable design constraint. (See http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/llog/jmc.pdf (PDF) for an introduction.)
- Syntax would only hide the fact that code is a simple data structure that can be manipulated like any other data structure.
Just like Rust's strong opinions buy you stress-free threading and bit-banging, Lisp's opinions ensure that it's an almost ideal environment for inventing domain-specific language extensions.
But Rust is poorly suited to object graphs where everything mutates everything else, and Common Lisp is poorly suited to proving that a large program obeys certain strict rules.
I love opinionated tools, but I try to choose ones with the "right" opinions for the task at hand.
fsloth · 2021-08-13
Excuse the following harshness. But it is due to the dismissive tone I am responding to.
Bullshit. "Lisp" is completely adequate description of a specific succint, elegant and infinitely portable formalism to describe programs - even without the ecosystem.
It is compact and elegant. The concepts within a Lisp like system can be expanded to help in myriad programming tasks.
It's like a koan that cannot be repeated enough until every programmer has implemented a lisp interpreted at least once.
I refer to the "Roots of Lisp".
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/llog/jmc.pdf
waterhouse · 2021-08-06
See https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2290 for some details. I would summarize by saying, there were words involved (i.e. the Latin "petitio" and Greek "αἰτεῖσθαι") that have multiple meanings (a modern analogue being "plead", which can mean "ask"/"beg", but can also mean "plead to the court [some statement of fact]"—i.e. to make a claim), and the word "beg" comes from a translator selecting one of the wrong meanings. Also, "the question" is really a poor choice to mean "the original point to be proven"/"the conclusion"/"the point in question".
I am strongly against prescriptivism telling people that a bad translation that makes no sense is correct. I recommend "assuming the conclusion" as a correct name.
abhgh · 2020-06-28
Recommend the paper "A Pendulum Swung Too Far"[0] as a nice take on Rationalism vs Empiricism. Interestingly, the paper was written in 2007 when the current crop of deep learning methods were not around (the provocative Hinton/Sutsekever/Krizhevsky paper was in 2012) ... so the pendulum has swung even farther! To the point that, as the post points out, we don't even have good statistical justifications for network architecture design choices. We have some answers, for some choices, but mostly a compendium of techniques empirically validated to work very well.
[0] http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/ldc/swung-too-far.pdf
thaumasiotes · 2019-06-26
The "begging" is a mistranslation of medieval Latin petitio, "logical postulate", as if it were classical Latin petitio, "begging".
The idiom descends in a continuous scholarly tradition from Aristotle and his original Greek refers more plainly to "assuming the original [conclusion]".
See https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2290 .
ben509 · 2019-05-31
#0 is correct. I'll recommend this piece on S&W [1] and specifically on point #5 [2].
These style guides, especially points #1 through #6, came about from bureaucrats who were essentially filibustering or otherwise obfuscating in their writing.
The root problem there was not the long-winded writing, it was their intent to hide bad things.
If you can make sure you're not carrying water for corrupt officials, you best strategy is to try to write natural prose. Yes, do look for wordy phrases or cliches, but don't obsess over adverbs or the passive voice.
[1] https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=15509
[2] http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003366.html
dorchadas · 2019-02-05
Sure. First off, note that if you read her 2002 work about gender, it often relies on a(n in) famous "bridge study". In 2002, she mentioned it as "publication forthcoming"; 17 years later, it still hasn't been published.
But a general good overview of her statements regarding to blame, and why they fail, can be found on LanguageLog [1]. I'd also recommend searching LanguageLog, as there's other articles discussing how she often overstates the conclusions, and how the media takes it ever farther. If you're on Reddit (can't access it currently on work WiFi), search in /r/linguistics and /r/badlinguistics to find even more criticisms of it (and other Linguistic Relativity research).
[1] http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2592
_emacsomancer_ · 2018-12-13
Strunk & White is, of course, nonsense and doesn't even follow its own made-up rules most of the time. See, e.g., http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=15509
dllthomas · 2017-12-05
You're free to have your preference, but as pertains to clarity of agency neither of those is any better than the other.
In fact as agency goes, it was not bombed "by an F18", it was bombed by a person using an F18, probably on orders (or by mistake when attempting to follow different orders) given by other people.
I've certainly enjoyed Orwell's writing, but his recommendations mostly aren't very well thought out (and he doesn't follow them very closely himself, or probably his writing would be worse). See also: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=992
conistonwater · 2017-06-03
I want to point out that one of the sources for that quora answer is this post on Language Log (http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=5669), which is well worth reading. There's quite a lot of good reading there about spelling, writing systems, and so on.
eponeponepon · 2017-01-14
For anyone in the habit of skipping/blocking/ignoring comments on articles, this one is worth a look: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=30359#comment-1526212
jbpetersen · 2016-10-30
Try checking out https://github.com/maryrosecook/littlelisp. It's a relatively very simple Lisp interpreter written in JS.
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/ldc/llog/jmc.pdf is another great resource for being introduced to Lisp.
acdha · 2016-06-29
Vocal fry is more commonly noticed and criticized in women but I haven't gotten the impression that there's definitive evidence that women do it more than men since most of the studies have been pretty small or localized.
Mark Liberman has been covering this for years over at Language Log and there appears to be a great deal of ongoing debate within the academic community:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/index.php?s=%22vocal+fry%22
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=20155 discusses male usage and briefly mentions the study from your second link.
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=13020 has some graphs of what exactly this means sound-wise and http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3626 discusses the history.
cbd1984 · 2015-12-08
Pullum, the author, is a regular contributor to Language Log, which is highly recommended.
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/
lgessler · 2015-11-06
This is a very misleading headline. As one commenter on the /r/linguistics discussion[1] notes,
>"Although the findings remain purely correlational, and not based on any experimental evidence", they use 10% of the world's languages, and the ecological factors all taken together amount to 25% of the factors influencing vowel/consonant distribution. Not very convincing.
The paper was given at a conference, so the findings are preliminary at best. The connection between geography and characteristics of language is still very poorly understood. For a similar idea, cf. Daniel Everett [of Pirahã fame]'s son's paper claiming that ejectives are correlated with altitude[2].
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/3rluhy/human_language_ma…
[2] http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4685