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maru_feed Mar. 15th, 2026 11:00 pm)languagelog_feed Mar. 15th, 2026 05:25 pm)China to Enshrine Xi-Era Ethnic Policy in New Law
by Chenghao Wei, NPC Observer (3/5/26)
The following is the introductory paragraph to the prospectus for the NPC's proceedings next week:
Next week, China’s National People’s Congress (NPC) is expected to adopt a Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress (Law) [民族团结进步促进法]—designed to codify General Secretary Xi Jinping’s new orthodoxy for governing China’s ethnic minorities. That doctrine, known as the “Important Thinking on Improving and Strengthening Ethnic Work,” reflects the “Second-Generation Ethnic Policies” promoted by several prominent scholars. In a nutshell, this new “assimilationist” approach aims “not just to strengthen citizens’ sense of belonging to a larger, unified Chinese nation under the Party but also to mute expression of other—in the Party’s view, competing—identities.”
Chapter II is where the plan focuses on language policy:
Chapter II (Building a Shared Spiritual Home)lays the ideological foundation for the assimilation project. It affirms the policy of fostering identification with “the great motherland, the Chinese nation, Chinese culture, the Communist Party of China, and socialism with Chinese characteristics” through patriotic education, education in official historical narratives, publicity of “the fine Zhonghua traditional culture,” and promotion of “Chinese cultural symbols and image of the Chinese nation” (arts. 11–14).
This Chapter then affords language and education particular attention. It incorporates the relevant rules of the newly revised Law on the Standard Spoken and Written Chinese Language [国家通用语言文字法], but often goes beyond them. For instance, it codifies the goal of having preschoolers become proficient in Putonghua and requires that Chinese characters be displayed more prominently than minority scripts if both must be used in public (art. 15, paras. 2, 4). It also tasks the education and ethnic affairs ministries with developing textbooks on “the community of the Chinese nation,” while requiring all schools to integrate that concept into their curricula (art. 16, paras. 1–2; art. 18, para. 1). This Chapter does vow to support the standardization, digitization, and preservation of minority texts (art. 15, para. 5), but the goal of such investment is to “protect languages from being completely forgotten rather than protecting their ongoing, everyday use by living people.”
Finally, this Chapter broadly requires media, internet service providers, families, among others, to promote the Party’s ethnic policy (arts. 19–21). Parents are reminded of their duty to provide lawful family education and are prohibited from “instilling in minors ideas detrimental to ethnic unity and progress” (art. 20, para. 2).
There's not much ambiguity about where they're headed with regard to language.
Selected readings
- "NPC Delegate Proposes To End Foreign Language Translation" (5/31/20) — that was six years ago; it didn't happen
- "Badge of honor: Language Log is blocked in China" (12/26/19) — with an account of other major banned websites: Wikipedia (all languages), The Guardian, Al Jazeera, Hackernews, Imgur, Google, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and many other invaluable websites were already off-limits to Chinese citizens for years. The internet in China is severely decimated by the CCP government.
- "The Arithmetic of Party-Speak: The 19th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party is just around the corner — and that means the machine of political discourse is humming away at high speed" (8/28/17).
- "The mind-numbing official-speak of the CCP" (8/29/17
[Thanks to June Teufel Dreyer]
languagelog_feed Mar. 15th, 2026 03:10 pm)Well, I'm not so sure about this:
What I find much more interesting and compelling is the video embedded in this article:
Humpback whale songs are structured like human language
Languagelike patterns in whale songs could make them easier for whales to learn
By Alexa Robles-Gil, Science (6 Feb 2025)
I strongly encourage LL readers to watch / listen to the video. What you will hear are eerie, enchanting humanoid sounds: eructations, belches, burps, whistles, squeaks, croaks, groans, melodic glides; repeated bilabials, velar stops, and other phonemic signals that, at least to my ear, may convey meaning.
The mysterious grunts and moans of the humpback whale have long captivated humans—so much so that we put recordings of them onto the Voyager spacecraft to convey the sounds of Earth to other life forms. A new study published today in Science reveals an unexpected similarity between human and humpback vocalizations: The songs have a statistical structure similar to that of human language.
“This is a really elegant paper,” says whale biologist Shane Gero of Carleton University, who was not involved with the work. “When we listen long enough and when we look, we find more complexity in these animal communication systems.” The findings suggest this structure might exist because whale songs, just like human language, are communication systems transmitted through social learning, Gero says.
Some animals, such as dogs, make their vocalizations instinctively—they don’t need to learn how to bark. But like human language, humpback whale song is culturally transmitted. Male humpbacks learn the songs, thought to be used to attract mates, from other males. Also like language, humpback whale songs have patterns and structure—individual “elements,” such as a single grunt, combine to form phrases, strung together into “themes” that make up a song, which can last 30 minutes.
So does whale song have some of the features that make it easier for human babies to learn language? To find out, whale biologist Ellen Garland from the University of St. Andrews and her team turned to babies for inspiration. Infants, confronted with a stream of nonstop language, must figure out where the boundaries of words are. They learn to discern individual words by detecting statistical patterns. The sounds within a given word are repeated often, making this chain of sounds predictable—but it’s less predictable which word will come next, so these “dips” in probability hint at a word boundary. Garland and her team segmented recordings of whale song using the same technique.
…
When Garland’s team applied the method to 8 years’ worth of songs from a humpback population in New Caledonia, she was “dumbfounded” to find that whale song structure aligns with a pattern found in human language. Across different languages, researchers have found a predictable relationship in how often common and rare words appear in language: For instance, the most common word in English (“the”) appears twice as often as the second most common word (“of”). This statistical pattern—called Zipf’s law—is thought to make language easier to learn. And the humpback whale song showed a similar pattern. This suggests Zipf’s law might emerge in any complex, culturally transmitted communication system.
The findings don’t suggest whales have a language, where combinations of sounds have fixed meaning and join together in grammatical structures, Garland emphasizes. But the research offers scientists an “amazing window” into how this core property of human communication appears in other species.
To me, these whale sounds are not meaningless, but I have no idea what they mean.
Selected readings
- "A new look at sperm whale communication" (5/8/24)
- "Sperm whale talk" (5/15/23)
- "Orca emits speech-like sound; reporters go insane" (1/31/18)
- "Moby Zipf" (6/1/19)
- "Dolphin naming?" (5/9/06)
- "Dolphins using personal names, again" (1/23/13)
- "Cetacean needed" (3/27/24)
[h.t. Cynthia Hagstrom]
opera_ramblings_feed Mar. 15th, 2026 03:11 pm)
Here’s my take on what’s coming up in the Met “Live in HD” cinema series in the 2026/27 series. There are again eight operas in the series. One is a work new to the Met, two are new productions and five are repertory shows. There’s also a special that goes out live on September 19th; Twenty Years of the Met in Cinemas: An Anniversary Celebration, hosted by soprano Renée Fleming. Expect a tightly scripted orgy of self congratulation!
And so to the operas:
October 3rd – Mozart – Così fan tutte – Phelim McDermott’s co-pro for the Met and ENO. Nothing very exciting here though Gerry Finley as Don Alfonso is definitely a plus.
October 17th – Verdi – Macbeth – This is a new production by Louisa Proske. It has Quinn Kelsey as Macbeth and Lise Davidsen as his missus which is a pretty strong combo. Yannick conducts. Definitely promising.
December 5th – Saint Saëns – Samson et Delila – It’s a good cast. I’d be happy to see Clay Hilley as Samson and Aigul Akhmetshina as Delila. I’m not familiar with ether the director or the conductor.
January 23rd – Puccini – La Fanciulla del West – This is a new production by Richard Jones who can be pretty good. It’s a role debut for Sondra Radvanovsky as Minnie and it features Chris Maltman as the “good guy”. Keri-Lynn Wilson conducts. Not a bad bet.
March 20th – Puts – Silent Night – Kevin Puts’ WW1 drama has been getting around. I’ve not seen it on stage but I was not much taken by the music on CD. Maybe it comes over better with visuals? The cast is stellar with Elza van der Heever, Rolando Villazon and Ben Bliss.
April 3rd – Massenet – Manon – It’s a Laurent Pelly production which is a plus. And it has Nadine Sierra and Matthew Polenzani who are both excellent. Another pretty good bet.
April 24th – Verdi – Otello – It”s a Bartlett Sher production which puts me off. Brian Jagde in the title role is a plus though.
June 5th – Wagner – Parsifal – The excellent François Girard production which eventually didn’t get done in Toronto! This time round at the Met Piotr Beczala sings the title role. The rest of the cast is pretty good too. The original cast recording including Kaufmann and Pape is still available on Blu-ray.
The new Macbeth and Fanciulla are the highlights for me. I’d be curious about Silent Night and there are some house/role debuts that are attractive but, overall, the whole concept is starting to feel a bit tired.
Not appearing in this line up is Mizzy Mazzoli and Royce Vavrek’s Lincoln in the Bardo which is probably the Met production I would most like to have seen!
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c_ent Mar. 15th, 2026 11:53 am)(It's anonymous, and you don't need to have read or seen any Jin Yong books or adaptations to participate in the survey -- there are also questions about respondents' interest in wuxia more generally, how you tend to consume Chinese media, how much your reading choices are influenced by things like translation quality, prices, formats, illustrations, etc.)
Survey link: Reading Chinese Wuxia (Martial Arts) Fiction in English
I enjoyed filling it out, and the question about book covers has made me interested in reading a Jin Yong novel I hadn't heard much about before! (Which surprised me, since I feel like I'm normally not very influenced by covers.)
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dw_maintenance Mar. 14th, 2026 01:04 pm)Happy Saturday!
I'm going to be doing a little maintenance today. It will likely cause a tiny interruption of service (specifically for www.dreamwidth.org) on the order of 2-3 minutes while some settings propagate. If you're on a journal page, that should still work throughout!
If it doesn't work, the rollback plan is pretty quick, I'm just toggling a setting on how traffic gets to the site. I'll update this post if something goes wrong, but don't anticipate any interruption to be longer than 10 minutes even in a rollback situation.
opera_ramblings_feed Mar. 14th, 2026 04:14 pm)I have a very ambiguous relationship with Benjamin Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia. Britten’s music I love and there’s a pretty dramatic story (albeit nonsense historically) trying to escape from Ronald Duncan’s weird Christo-prophetic and somewhat overripe libretto. Centaurs casting their seed among the stars? Anyone? So I was most interested to see what Anna Theodosakis would do with it in her production for UoT Opera currently playing at Harbourfront Centre.
I was impressed. Her production comes as near as any I’ve seen to overcoming the difficulties. She sets the piece in the present; Roman officers in dress uniforms, the Male and Female Chorus looking like Central Casting’s ideal of the power couple; he in blue suit and red tie, she in knee length red dress. Lucretia doesn’t actually die but the propaganda effect is the same. Her story goes viral. Coupled with the scene where hidden characters chant slogans like “Down wwith the Etruscans” and “Rome for the Romans” the weird prophetic elements feel more Fox News than Revelations. Using a simple unit set with mainly flowers as props and some drapery is also pretty effective.
So, we can enjoy the music without worrying too much about getting our feet wet in Christ’s blood and the music making is excellent. This is tricky music and it’s well done here (note I saw the Friday cast, who will sing agin on Sunday. There are some changes from the Thursday/Saturday cast). I think pride of place goes to Christian Matta as the Male Chorus. He has a lot of music to sing and a difficult character to pull off and he is just totally convincing. Ironically perhaps, the title character, sung here by Taline Yeremian, has less to do (I don’t think Mr. Duncan cared much for women) but she does it really well. Her smoky mezzo has the gravitas needed for Lucretia and she’s a fine actor. In the scene where she approaches Collatinus on his return from the war time seems to stand still.
The Roman officers are all very good. One could argue that Josh Gibson’s Tarquinius is more bombastic than truly threatening but it works and he sings well. Omar Hilaloğlu and Mena Lukic are very effective as Collatinus and Junius. All three performers manage the emotional transition from drunken camp revels to tragedy and revolt very well. Delaney Dam and Sloane Ryan as Lucretia’s maids are pretty good too. Dam manages to act well beyond her years and Ryan pulls Lucia’s girlish naivety off very well. I always feel that the Female Chorus is rather let down by the libretto. The character should be more than some kind of sub-Socratic foil for her male counterpart but she isn’t! That said Zyion Stephens made a pretty good fist of what the part does get and was quite touching in the final scene.
The thirteen piece chamber ensemble was excellent with some very fine playing in some of the rather exposed solo lines. Harbourfront Centre is perfect for a work on this scale but with no real pit, stage/orchestra balance can be tricky. Conductor Sandra Horst managed this most effectively as well as bringing out some of the really fine solo lines Britten builds into this score.
I don’t think ‘m ever going to fall in love with The Rape of Lucretia but this production and performance made a good case for it.
There are two more performances; this evening and Sunday afternoon.
Photo credit: Hugh Li
languagelog_feed Mar. 14th, 2026 03:58 pm)I don't recall whether we've had anything interesting to say about "Pi Day", other than a reference to SMBC's "PIE Day" back in 2023.
Today's Frazz notes the adjacency to the Ides of March:
No doubt there are other Pi Day comics this year — looking back further, there's a collection from Pragmatic Mom a year ago, and a few years earlier from nebusresearch, and many others…
There's certainly no other mathematical construct with as many comic-strip resonances, though there are some obvious opportunities for tau.
Update — as Gretchen McCulloch points out, Wikipedia cites a historical family connection between π and PIE. William Jones (1675-1749)
was a Welsh mathematician best known for his use of the symbol π (the Greek letter Pi) to represent the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter
while his son, Sir William Jones (1746-1794)
is known for being one of the earliest scholars to assert the kinship of the Indo-European languages, albeit not the first.
languagelog_feed Mar. 14th, 2026 01:56 pm)Grammarly recently became part of Superhuman, and then began the shockingly unethical practice of pretending to offer writing advice from living people, without getting their permission or even informing them.
Some coverage:
"Grammarly Is Offering ‘Expert’ AI Reviews From Your Favorite Authors—Dead or Alive", Wired 3/4/2026:
Once relied upon only to proofread for correct grammar and spelling, the writing tool Grammarly has added a host of generative AI features over the past several years. In October, CEO Shishir Mehrotra announced that the overall company was rebranding as Superhuman to reflect a new suite of AI-powered products. […]
Perhaps most insidiously, however, Grammarly now has an “expert review” option that, instead of producing what looks like a generic critique from a nameless LLM, lists a number of real academics and authors available to weigh in on your text. To be clear: Those people have nothing to do with this process. As a disclaimer clarifies: “References to experts in this product are for informational purposes only and do not indicate any affiliation with Grammarly or endorsement by those individuals or entities.”
Stevie Bonifield, "Grammarly is using our identities without permission", The Verge 3/6/2026:
Grammarly’s “expert review” feature offers to give users writing advice “inspired by” subject matter experts, including recently deceased professors, as Wired reported on Wednesday. When I tried the feature out myself, I found some experts that came as a surprise for a different reason — one of them was my boss.
Julia Angwin, "Why I’m Suing Grammarly", NYT 3/13/2026:
A few days ago, an awkward sentence written by the editing service Grammarly flashed across my screen: “Could Meta be quietly leveraging this intimate information to refine ad targeting or fuel its vast business interests in unseen ways?”
The writing was clunky, the point weirdly unspecific. Grammarly had been offering paying users editing suggestions, supposedly from a handful of writers — including me. Pop a piece of prose into its service and little editing bubbles would emerge on the page from “Julia Angwin,” suggesting things like, “Lead with personal stakes to boost immediacy.” That sentence about Meta was something Grammarly apparently thought I would suggest.
Like all writers, I live by my wits. My ability to earn a living rests on my ability to craft a phrase, to synthesize an idea, to make readers care about people and places they can only access through words on a page. Grammarly hadn’t checked with me before using my name. I only learned that an A.I. company was selling a deepfake of my mind from an article online.
And it wasn’t just me. Superhuman — the parent company of Grammarly — made fake editor versions of a range of people, including the novelist Stephen King, the late feminist author bell hooks, the former Microsoft chief privacy officer Julie Brill, the University of Virginia data science professor Mar Hicks and the journalist and podcaster Kara Swisher.
Angwin adds:
At this point in a story about A.I. exploitation, I would normally bemoan the need for new laws to tackle the novel harms of a new technology. But in this case, there is an old law that’s able to do the job.
In my home state of New York, the century-old right of publicity law prohibits a person’s name or image from being used for commercial purposes without her consent. At least 25 states have similar publicity statutes. And now, I’m using this law to fight back. I am the lead plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit against Superhuman in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, alleging that it violated New York and California publicity laws by not seeking consent before using our names in a paid service.
After a wave of criticism, the Superhuman chief executive, Shishir Mehrotra, announced that the company was disabling the feature while it reimagined how to give “experts real control over how they want to be represented — or not represented at all.” In a statement to The Atlantic, Mr. Mehrotra said that the company “believes the legal claims are without merit and will strongly defend against them.”
Grammarly long ago burst the "plastic fetters of grammar" to enfold (however imperfectly) the whole Trivium; and now has d-AI-gested the Quadrivium plus (presumably) philosophy and theology and all the practical arts, as presented by experts and celebrities past and present.
We can see this ironically as a corporate move in favor of open-access humans.
Update — More from Kaitlyn Tiffany at The Atlantic: "What was Grammarly Thinking?", 3/12/2-26:
To my dismay, I was unable to summon the AI version of myself. I pasted in numerous articles I’d written and numerous fake articles that I had asked a chatbot to make up. But Grammarly seemed to think other writers were more expert in these articles’ subject matter and therefore more qualified to advise me. It suggested tech journalists, pop-culture academics, and legendary practitioners of narrative nonfiction. I wouldn’t appear. My boss tried too. He messaged me: “i have both claude and chatgpt writing fake essays in an attempt to fool a different AI into presenting me with an unauthorized simulacrum of one of my writers.” He failed. We both felt bad about the way we were spending our time.
languagelog_feed Mar. 14th, 2026 12:33 pm)The etymology, according to the OED:
Apparently cognate with Old Saxon drano, dran (with uncertain vowel length: see note) (Middle Low German drāne, drōne; German regional (Low German) drāne, drōne; > German Drohne) and probably also with Old Saxon dreno, Old High German treno, tren (Middle High German tren, all with short vowel), all in the sense ‘drone bee’, further etymology uncertain, probably ultimately < a Germanic verbal base for making a kind of loud, continuous sound (compare droun v.); the noun was apparently formed from this verbal base with reference to the loud buzzing sound made by bees and similar insects, perhaps sometimes specifically with reference to the males of some species buzzing aggressively when the hive is disturbed.
The semantic drift:
From Old English — Sense 1. A male bee in a colony of honeybees or other social bees (more fully drone bee). Sometimes also: the male of a social wasp or ant.
The drone is produced from an unfertilized egg. Its sole function is to fertilize a new queen.
From 1529 — Sense 2.a. A person who does little or no useful work, or who lives off others; a lazy person.
From 1875 — Sense 2.b. A person who is engaged in, or made to do, dull, repetitive, or meaningless work.
From 1936 — Sense 3.a. Originally U.S. Navy. A remotely piloted or autonomous unmanned aircraft, typically used for military reconnaissance or air strikes.
The 1936 citation:
In the event no signal is received after two minutes a timed relay will place the robot plane, or ‘DRONE’, as it will be called hereafter, in a turn.
D. S. Fahrney, Radio Control of Aircraft (National Archives U.S.: Rec. Group 72, ID 7395560) 30 December 3
In quot. 1936 the capital letters indicate that DRONE is a military code name.
As usual, the success of the coinage has depended on several forces driving semantic drift. There's flying, making a buzzing noise, defending the nest or attacking invaders, flying in swarms, not doing regular or creative work, …
Whatever it is, talk to us about it here. Tell us what you liked or didn't like, and if you want to talk about spoilery things, please hide them under either of these codes:
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You have until midnight your time on Friday, March 20, to answer this prompt. Please post your fills of the prompt as separate entries to the community (i.e. not replies to this entry), tagged with the prompt tag. You may post multiple standalone drabbles per entry in addition to drabble sequences and series.
As a reminder, this community has no official presence elsewhere. You are encouraged to share the prompt on social media, if you so desire. It may take me a bit to create the AO3 collection, so please be patient.
Also, I'm going to go ahead and drop a link to the prompt suggestions post here. New suggestions are always, always welcome.
opera_ramblings_feed Mar. 13th, 2026 03:55 pm)Sam Holcroft’s A Mirror opened on Thursday evening at 918 Bathurst in an ARC production directed by Tamara Vuckovic. It’s a complex play with many levels and multiple places where the boundary between play and audience dissolve. The first “framing device” has us as the audience for an “unlicensed” play which s being performed under the cover of a wedding.
The characters in the forbidden play are Director of Culture Celik; Adem, an ex-soldier and car mechanic with an extraordinary memory for dialogue and some aspirations as a playwright; Mei, another former soldier (female) now reassigned to the Ministry of Culture and Bax, a once successful playwright much broken down by drink and the death of his wife.
The setting is a Soviet style republic in a perpetual state of war with constant shortages of essential goods and terrible housing conditions. Only the privileged, like Celik, lead tolerable lives and they do that only as long as their loyalty to party and state is unquestionable. Despite this Celik thinks he can use his position to nurture and protect actual art and artists. Adem is to be one of his protegés who will, with the help of Bax, be transformed into an acceptable official playwright. He has also taken a shine to Mei who intends to educate to be his assistant.
The trouble is that Adem has just the one skill; the ability to recall and reproduce what happened exactly which leads first to misunderstanding and then to tragedy. Celik’s ego driven desire to be the country’s “cultural saviour” while staying firmly onside with the party cannot be reconciled with reality. Nor can his infatuation with Mei coexist with Mei’s attraction to Adem.
This plays out in a series of scenes, mostly in Celik’s office interrupted by the occasional reversion to the wedding as police sirens are heard. There’s a hilarious scene where the players act out a really terrible play by Bax about a battle which both Mei and Adem were wounded in. In Bax’ “heroic” play a captain defeats an entire enemy army armed with a sickle whereas in reality Adem and Mei were among the few survivors. Adem’s play is, as we have come to expect, a word for word account of what actually happened. Celik is furious. But we are never allowed to forget that we are watching a play; there are cuts back to the wedding, a half naked Mei announces they are going to cut the sex scene and so on.
Finally Adem fatally compromises Celik who seeks revenge. “Reality” intrudes on the “play within a play”. We have to sort out who is playing who in whose play. What is “fact”? What is “fiction”? And so, what is “true”? And what is “art”? On top of that, what is permissible? And who gets to decide? And in case we think this is ancient history the play closes with a montage of the 350 words and phrases the Trump administration has banned from official documents ranging from “abortion” to “women”.
It’s an intense high energy production with some terrific performances. Nabil Traboulsi is electric, almost manic, as Celik. He manages to capture the mien of a man who is at once egotistic, sincere and completely delusional and, in the last analysis, a coward. Paul Smith plays Adem as a sort of Everyman with a certain naive optimism that slowly evaporates. Craig Lauzon’s Bax is wonderfully depressing; a man of talent brought down by system and circumstances. Jonelle Gunderson is quite complex as the not as naive as she first appears Mei. Courtney Stevens plays a key role in the finale.
The direction and stagecraft is fast paced backed up by evocative lighting and sound design that mixes some quite dissonant effects with lyrical cello playing by Rita Dottor. It all makes for effective use of 918 Bathurst laid out like a church which further draws the audience into the action.
It’s a complex multi-level piece that kept me deeply engaged for two hours. On one level it appears to look back to a past that is gone, though not so long ago, but it also raises questions about the future as we witness creeping censorship (and not just in the US) and the apparent reappearance of “forever wars”. Disturbing but compelling theatre.
A Mirror runs at 918 Bathurst until March 28th.
Photo credit: Kendra Epik
Thanks, WikiMedia!
Exact taxonomy is still under debate, but call it a handful of species with numerous subspecies. Like other cuckoos, they are parasitic, laying eggs in the nests of other birds to be raised by them. The name is from Hindi koyal, from Sanskrit kokila, after the bird's call.
---L.