Linguistics

Shared by John Rohsenow and David Cahill / Isham Cook: From Arthur Meursault (@emptymeursault) This is a trope with which we're intimately familiar. According to the Chinese government, of all peoples on earth, the Chinese people are unique in this regard, except that now, more and more, they are starting to hurt their own feelings, […]

The Large Language Model DistilBert is "a distilled version of BERT: smaller, faster, cheaper and lighter". A trained DistilBert model is available from Hugging Face, and recommended applications include "text classification", with the featured application being "sentiment analysis": And as with many similar applications, it's been noted that this version of "sentiment analysis" has picked […]

In "Voice-activated lights" (9/20/23), we saw how difficult it is even for native speakers of Modern Standard Mandarin to understand other varieties, and can be thankful to Zeyao Wu, who comes from the area where the topolect in the film is spoken, for kindly identifying and transcribing it for all of us. rit malors writes: […]

[This is a guest post by Martin Schwartz] The following is just an idle speculation for which I have no answer, but somehow I don't think mere coincidence is really a factor. A number of Old World languages of different groups show a word for 'dog' or a doglike beast of the type affricate/sibilant plus […]

I'm not the first person to use that word, but I probably mean it in a distinctive way. What I'm talking about is not the usual sort of earworm / öhrwurm [recte ohrwurm] that gets stuck in your brain and you just can't make it go away. That's the usual kind, and I get it […]

I showed this mp4 video to a dozen native speakers of Sinitic languages (mostly Mandarin), but no one could identify, much less understand, what it was: https://i.imgur.com/MesyF9r.mp4   (from imgur) Chau Wu ruled out Taiwanese, Hakka, and Cantonese, but he said that he heard words that sounded like chú sī 廚司 ("chef") and chǎocài 炒菜 […]

China’s Language PoliceWhy Beijing Seeks to Extend the Hegemony of MandarinBy Gina Anne Tam, Foreign AffairsSeptember 19, 2023 It's odd that the author knows about "topolect" and recognizes the inadequacy of "dialect" as a rendering of fāngyán 方言, but is unwilling to mention "topolect" in this article, which is so suitable for it. Maybe the […]

In recent weeks, the odd expression "kǒudài zuì 口袋罪" (lit., "pocket / bag crime"} has become a hot topic). It's a vague, catch-all term without any juridical / official standing, yet it has left many people troubled over its implications. To understand why people are unsettled over such a seemingly zany, innocuous term, we will […]

This is not at all the experience that I've had with multiple-authored papers — but it's funny: “Thanks everyone for comments on the draft, here it is revised with all your edits.” pic.twitter.com/pSV16wQqca — Ben Phillips (@benphillips76) September 17, 2023 And I've sometimes had analogous issues with "copy editing" — see e.g. "Spectrums", 5/24/2022…

From Jon Stewart's 1997 interview with George Carlin (starting at about 1:17.6): Your browser does not support the audio element. well- well uh to- to go backward with the question, don't forget, what we do is oratory. It's rhetoric. It's not just comedy, it's a form of rhetoric and- and with rhetoric, you- you look […]

[This is a guest post by Axel Schuessler] Some Old Chinese (OC) words that relate to religion, mythology and ritual, and words found in ritual literature (Yijing, Liji, Zhouli), have no Sino-Tibetan (ST) roots, but instead have connections with other language families. For comparison, the first section of this paper will list (§1) Sino-Tibetan […]

Edwin Flores and Maya Brown, "The 'no sabo kids' are pushing back on Spanish-language shaming", NBC News 9/16/2023: A growing group of young Latinos are using TikTok and social media to push back on not speaking perfect Spanish — an attempt to define their identity and heritage on their own terms. […] In recent years, […]

Fiendishly clever conlang (constructed language) invented by Eleanor Olson. Some Language Log readers will love it, some will hate it. Most will probably not understand what the devil she is up to with her Hànzìyǔ 汉字语 ("Sinoglyphish"). Natural writing systems are created with the intention of mapping to and recording the sounds of spoken languages. […]

"Hebei official’s shirt logo removed for ‘aesthetic reasons,’ triggering speculation among netizens" By Global Times (Sep 05, 2023) Official photos of a city Party chief in North China's Hebei Province, with his shirt's logo removed by editing, have sparked a wide-ranging discussion among Chinese netizens, with some speculating that it was a move to obscure […]

During the past few weeks, we've looked at the throttling of Cantonese in Hong Kong. Now, far to the north of the Chinese empire, the CCP is ramping up the war against Mongolian: Inner Mongolia: China accused of 'cultural genocide' for school language shift Debi Edward, ITV News (9/1/23) —- InnerMongoliais the latest province inChinawhere […]

This is a simple-minded follow-up to "New models of speech timing?" (9/11/2023). Before getting into fancy stochastic-point-process models, neural or otherwise, I though I'd start with something really basic: just the distribution of inter-syllable intervals, and its relationship to overall speech-segment and silence-segment durations. For data, I took one-minute samples from 2006 TED talks by […]

This is a problem that has been troubling colleagues across the country. "Why fewer university students are studying Mandarin" Learning the difficult language does not seem as worthwhile as it once did Economist (Aug 24th 2023) China | How do you say “not interested”? Ten years ago Mandarin, the mother tongue of most Chinese, was […]

I've previously written more than once about the problem of compound words whose meaning is partly but not entirely related to the meanings of their parts, often referring back to a passage in my 1992 chapter with Richard Sproat, "The Stress and Structure of Modified Noun Phrases in English": We now turn to N0compounds where […]

"Elusive Ernie: China's new chatbot has a censorship problem" By Stephen McDonell, BBC, 1 day ago It seems that Ernie's favorite response is "Let's talk about something else", particularly when you ask it a "difficult" question. For example, Ernie seemed baffled by the question: "Why is Xi Jinping not attending the upcoming G20 meeting?" […]

There are many statistics used to characterize timing patterns in speech, at various scales, with applications in many areas. Among them: Intervals between phonetic events, by category and/or position and/or context; Overall measures of speaking rate (words per minute, syllables per minute), relative to total time or total speaking time (leaving out silences); Mean and […]

Thæ're serious: Why There's A Campaign To Re-Introduce A Historic Letter Back Into The Alphabet It all stems from Old English By Kate Nicholson, HuffPost (9/6/23) FWIW: A new campaign hopes to make day-to-day life more gender-inclusive by reintroducing the ancient symbol Æ back into the alphabet. Five global organisations, Divergenres, Aunt Nell, Gender X, […]

"The Oldest (Known) Song of All Time" Includes spectrograms of different reconstructions. Although this YouTube was made three years ago, I am calling it to the attention of Language Log readers now that I know about it because it draws together many themes we have discussed in previous posts. Note by the author, hochelaga: The […]

In an off-topic comment (4/27/08), DDeden requested an English translation of the subtitles of a video about "Cotton: from fluff to dyed cloth the traditional Chinese way" (the video is embedded in this tweet). It seemed a worthwhile endeavor, since the film itself was visually quite informative, though the subtitles looked rather sketchy. I asked […]

From Brian Miller: I believe it was your comment here on a 2019 use of a phrase in China politics or press “Thus my second surmise was that, by 'black hand', the CCP / PRC mean 'stealthy manipulator who remains totally out of view'. But how does it get that meaning in Chinese?” I think […]

There seem to be a lot of people complaining about it these days, so maybe there's something to worry about here. Francois Lang, who called this current wave of criticism to my attention asks whether academia is isolated from such horrors. FWIW, here's what it's like in business: "A look at the most annoying workplace […]

9月1日，杭州高架禁止特斯拉通行。车主吐槽“这有点搞笑了呀”交警回复“是有点搞笑但是你要服从” pic.twitter.com/z7Tm7cN1Yi — 李老师不是你老师 (@whyyoutouzhele) September 1, 2023 The text says: 9 yuè 1 rì, Hángzhōu gāojià jìnzhǐ Tèsīlā tōngxíng.Chēzhǔ tǔcáo “Zhè yǒudiǎn gǎoxiàole ya”.Jiāojǐng huífù “Shì yǒudiǎn gǎoxiào dànshì nǐ yào fúcóng. 9月1日，杭州高架禁止特斯拉通行。车主吐槽“这有点搞笑了呀”交警回复“是有点搞笑但是你要服从” On September 1, a Tesla was banned from passing through the Hangzhou Elevated Highway.The car owner complained, "This is ..

That's one of the extreme nicknames for Xi Jinping that are being used to avoid censorship. It consists of the three tones for his name, Xí Jìnpíng 习近平. Likewise, netizens are referring to him as "2-4-2". He is also called "N" because that reminds people of ↗↘↗. Another emerging Xi nickname is “n-butane,” whose chemical […]

Tatar Tatars "Tatar Journalists More Likely to Cover Controversial Topics When They Write or Speak in Tatar, One of Their Number Says" Paul Goble, Window on Eurasia — New Series Monday, August 28, 2023 Staunton, Aug. 28 – Tatar journalists are more likely to cover controversial topics when they write or speak in Tatar […]

奥本海默中国大陆版本剪辑情况 pic.twitter.com/Nbjxy5PJ4J — 小径残雪 (@xiaojingcanxue) September 1, 2023 [link to full tweet here] Notice the title of each group of five panels: yuánbǎn 原版 ("original edition") for the uncut version, and jiǎnbǎn ✂️版 [=剪版] (meaning jiǎnjí bǎn 剪輯版) for the censored version — all the more notable for its being written in pen, not typed […]

The Differences between Old English, Middle English and Modern English By Danièle Cybulskie When people study Shakespeare in high school, I often hear them refer to his language as “Old English.” As far as the language goes, Shakespeare’s English actually falls under the category of “Modern English.” This may be a little hard to believe, […]