Somehow, Language Log has yet to take notice of the international sensation that is "Gangnam Style," the deliciously weird Korean pop video that currently has more than 560 million views on YouTube. Here's a good opportunity to rectify that oversight: among the countless spoofs of the video is this one by enterprising MIT students, featuring […]
According to Stephen Cass, "Unthinking Machines", Technology Review 5/4/2011: Some of the founders and leading lights in the fields of artificial intelligence and cognitive science gave a harsh assessment last night of the lack of progress in AI over the last few decades. During a panel discussion—moderated by linguist and cognitive scientist Steven Pinker—that kicked […]
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With the coming of email, a vital resource that once had a real cost became essentially free for everyone. Once it used to cost at least a few pennies to send a communication through the mail, but now it is free. And one of the awful results is a new kind of deviant linguistic behavior […]
Several people have sent me pointers to the linguistically-themed 9/27/2023 NYT crossword puzzle. For some discussion by Sam Corbin, see "Talk, Talk, Talk", NYT 9/26/2023 ("Scott Koenig puts silly thoughts to bed with a clever crossword"), which includes a quotation from the puzzle's author: I first learned about Professor Chomsky as an undergraduate linguistics minor. […]
I've wondered for a long time why Biblical inerrantists have a big problem with biological evolution, which contradicts Chapter 1 of Genesis, but not so much with historical linguistics, which contradicts Chapter 11. But in "Linguistic Confusion and the Tower of Babel", National Catholic Register 6/21/2023, Dave Armstrong argues that the usual interpretation of the […]
A few years ago, I began to notice that the scientific and technical papers relentless spammed at me, by academia.edu and similar outfits, were becoming increasingly surrealistic. And I soon learned that the source for such articles was systems for "article spinning" by "rogeting" — automatic random subsitution of (usually inappropriate) synonyms. Those techniques were […]
[Please read all the way to the bottom of this post. There are some big surprises here, including references to a book and an article on linguistics by the novelist Tom Wolfe (1930-2018), who's clearly on the wrong side of the political fence. Despite the spate of mostly unremittingly anti-Wolfe comments, many important issues about […]
…and ending a sentence is like dying. What do I mean by this weird and even creepy statement? Short answer: Your probability of continuing to live is not constant, but decreases exponentially as you get older. (Actuaries know this as the Gompertz-Makeham Law of Mortality, usually expressed in terms of your probability of dying.) A […]
Amazingly, it appears that Henry Lee Smith Jr. has no Wikipedia page, despite a notable career in science, public service, and the media. According to his 1972 NYT obituary: In 1940, when Dr. Smith was 27 and a member of the Department of English at Brown University, he came to public attention on the radio […]
Geoffrey Pullum, "Chomsky's Forever War", National Review 2/17/2022: Few American linguists were puzzled when they saw the title of Randy Allen Harris’s book about events in their discipline between 1965 and 1975: “The Linguistics Wars.” Academic feuds are famously bitter, but the hostilities that Harris chronicled were unusual even by the standards of the humanities […]
Last weekend, there was a memorial service at Penn for Lila Gleitman, who passed away in August. The hundreds of people physically present were joined by a large crowd on Zoom, where the automatic closed captioning was turned on. And so the audience got to see a large sample of speech-to-text versions of Lila's name, […]
Until Chairman Xi started going after the entertainment world, and especially foreign entertainment, the Chinese people were deeply enamored of Korean soap operas, boy bands, K-Pop girl groups, and so forth. They idolized the Korean stars, watched their performances, and would even go on pilgrimages to important places associated with them. Moreover, as with J-pop, […]