Archive for Errors

Unforeseen circumcisions: dual misfirings

Sign on the door of a Pizza Hut eatery in Timmins, Ontario:


(source)

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Xi's peculiar vocabulary

From another tweet / X-effusion by the Master Muckraker, Fang Zhouzi / Fang Shimin:

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Mistakes in a fraudulent Chinese letter to the Israeli consul in Chengdu

From the Twitter / X account of the famous popular science writer and muckraker, Fang Zhouzi / Fang Shimin:

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Abbreviated and nonstandard kanji

From Nathan Hopson:

I have been reading some handwritten documents from the 1960s and 1970s, and have been reminded that even beyond abbreviations, there were still "nonstandard" kanji in use. I guess this took me off guard mostly because these are school publications.

On the abbreviated side, the most obvious example is:

第 → 㐧

The "nonstandard" kanji that interested me most were these two:
1. 管 → 官 part written as 友+、

image.png

2. 食缶 as a single character, but paired with 食 to be 食[食缶]

image.png

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Signs of the phonetics of Moroccan French

[This is a guest post by Scott Mauldin]

I recently visited Marrakesh and was fascinated by the signs that I submit in the attached photographs. Ostensibly these were originally a kind of business sign that artisans and professionals could hang on their businesses or homes to advertise their profession, but they have evolved into something slightly different for touristic consumption as they now sometimes feature the faces of celebrities or even items.

They're interesting in themselves as a cultural item, but if you look closely at the photos the truly fascinating bit are the "errors" and deviations from standard French spelling. These signs are often made by artisans without a formal education in French and sometimes are phonetic renderings that encode Maghrebi French pronunciations.

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An example of ChatGPT "hallucinating"?

Definition

In artificial intelligence (AI), a hallucination or artificial hallucination (also occasionally called delusion) is a confident response by an AI that does not seem to be justified by its training data.

(source)

I had mentioned such AI hallucinating in a previous post once or twice (see "Selected readings"), so it's good to have a concrete example.

Is the account below an instance of ChatGPT "hallucinating"?  Its explanation of gato-por-liebre (cat-for-hare) in Spanish would seem so.

[The following is a guest post by Conal Boyce.]

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Egregious errors

From Taiwan News (3/25/23), by Keoni Everington:

"Taiwanese 'Hello Kitty' English-Chinese dictionary has 70 'egregious errors'

Publisher ACME Cultural Enterprise Co has admitted errors but not recalled dictionaries"


Cover of dictionary, example of misspelling. (Eryk Smith photo)

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"Crisis" mentality infects China

From the recent meeting between Putin and Wang Yi (Director of the Office of the Central Foreign Affairs Commission of the Chinese Communist Party):

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Scot-free

Next time you hear or use the expression "scot-free", don't think that it has anything to do with Scots language or Scot people.  I have always avoided using this expression because I didn't want to disparage a whole people.  But "scot-free" is such a useful phrase that I wished I could use it with a good conscience.  So finally I looked it up and found that it has a completely different derivation from that of the name of the language and the people.

(colloquial) Without consequences or penalties, to go free without payment.

From Middle English scotfre, from Old English scotfrēo (scot-free; exempt from royal tax or imposts), equivalent to scot (payment; contribution; fine) +‎ -free.

(Wiktionary)

 

scot
 (skŏt)

n.

Money assessed or paid.

[Middle English, tax, partly from Old Norse skot and partly from Old French escot, of Germanic origin; see skeud- in Indo-European roots.]

(AH Dict. 2016 5th ed.)

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Chairman Xi the orator. Not

At this most important moment of his career, when he is about to be crowned emperor for life of the CCP / PRC, Xi Dada commits a whole slew of bloopers and blunders, gaffes and goofs, and the camera has caught him in flagrante delicto:

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"Firebug"?

Eric P. Smith writes:

Is there a name for a typographical error like the following?  If not, perhaps we should call it a “Firebug”.

Since 2021, Truss has served as the Secretary of State for Fireugb Cinnibweakth and Development affairs.

Liz Truss, who may well be the UK’s next prime minister, was Secretary of State not for some obscure Scottish Gaelic department with an indecipherable name, but for “Foreign Commonwealth and Development affairs”.  The typist’s right hand has strayed one quantum to the left, so that O has become I, M has become N, and so on.  The hands will have physically collided with the left index finger on the T of “Commonwealth” and the right index finger above the G next to the H, and the collision must have jogged the right hand back onto the straight and narrow, apparently without the typist even noticing.

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Right to left

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The weirdness of typing errors

In this age of typing on computers and other digital devices, when we daily input thousands upon thousands of words, we are often amazed at the number and types of mistakes we make.  Many of them are simple and straightforward, as when our fingers stumblingly hit the wrong keys by sheer accident.  People who type on phones warn their correspondents about the likelihood that their messages are prone to contain such errors because they include some such warning at the bottom: 

Please forgive spelling / grammatical errors; typed on glass // sent from my phone.

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