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September 13, 2023 @ 5:41 am
· Filed under Artificial intelligence, Information technology, Language teaching and learning, Writing
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 […]
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June 12, 2023 @ 6:48 am
· Filed under Humor, Language change
Current big news around here is the collapse of an elevated section of Interstate 95 due to a tanker truck fire. As Wikipedia explains, I-95 "is the main north–south Interstate Highway on the East Coast of the United States, running from U.S. Route 1 (US 1) in Miami, Florida, north to the Houlton–Woodstock Border Crossing […]
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April 11, 2023 @ 9:13 pm
· Filed under Censorship, Language and archeology, Language and astronomy, Language and politics
新时代祥瑞层出不穷 pic.twitter.com/bVm5Vn4XC4 — 方舟子 (@fangshimin) April 9, 2023
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February 23, 2023 @ 8:00 am
· Filed under Artificial intelligence, Computational linguistics, Data bases
Some snippets: Limited data sets a hurdle as China plays catch-up to ChatGPT Lack of high-quality Chinese texts on Internet a barrier to training AI models. Ryan McMorrow, Nian Liu, Eleanor Olcott, and Madhumita Murgia, FT, Ars Technica (2/21/23) … Baidu struggled with its previous attempt at a chatbot, known as Plato, which analysts said […]
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November 11, 2022 @ 8:12 am
· Filed under Gender, Grammar, Morphology
Size-wise, Estonia (45,339 sq. km; 17,500 sq. m) is much larger than Philadelphia (369.59 sq. km; 142.7 sq. m), but, in terms of population, Philadelphia (1,603,797) is slightly bigger than Estonia (1,313,796). I have been to Estonia, and was utterly captivated by the wealth of its art and architecture, the depth of its history, the […]
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September 14, 2022 @ 11:38 am
· Filed under Language and food, Language and history, Morphology, Orthography, Phonetics and phonology
The title of this article about the Belitung shipwreck (ca. 830 AD) is somewhat misleading (e.g., there is no direct evidence of Malayalam being spoken by any of the protagonists, but it is broadly informative, richly illustrated, and well presented. "Mongols speaking Malayalam – What a sunken ship says about South India & China’s medieval […]
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August 26, 2020 @ 5:08 pm
· Filed under Intonation, Orality, Phonetics and phonology, Prosody, Standard language, Tones, Topolects
Some folks think that intonation never overrides tones, but I'm convinced on the basis of empirical evidence that it does. For example: Nǐ xiǎng gàn hā 你想干哈 –> Nǐ xiǎng gàn há 你想干哈 ("what do you want to do?") — especially in the Northeast. Here are some other examples — all of them provided by […]
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July 4, 2018 @ 10:11 am
· Filed under Dialects, Language and education, Topolects
Recently there was quite a ruckus over the correct word to be used for "maternal grandmother" in second-graders' textbooks in Shanghai: "Much Ado About Grandma: Textbook Change Sparks Linguistic Debate: Critics call ‘waipo’ to ‘laolao’ change ‘cultural hegemony’ from the north", Kenrick Davis, Sixth Tone (6/22/18) "A debate over the word for ‘grandmother’ in China […]
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December 15, 2017 @ 9:57 am
· Filed under Language and culture, Language and gender, Language and society
In recent years, a rapid and important cultural change in the understanding of gender has been taking place in American society and beyond. A Harris poll from this year, reported in a Time Magazine cover story, found that “20% of millennials say they are something other than strictly straight and cisgender, compared to 7% of […]
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November 27, 2017 @ 6:44 am
· Filed under Rhetoric, Semantics
Ross Douthat, "Is There an Evangelical Crisis?", NYT 11/25/2017 (emphasis added): But it’s also possible that evangelical intellectuals and writers, and their friends in other Christian traditions, have overestimated how much a serious theology has ever mattered to evangelicalism’s sociological success. It could be that the Trump-era crisis of the evangelical mind is a parochial […]
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October 5, 2017 @ 7:55 am
· Filed under Taboo vocabulary
Reading Remy Tumin's article today discussing Stephen Colbert's guest appearance in Michael Moore's Broadway play ("Stephen Colbert Uses Profanity to Describe President Trump’s ‘Soul’", NYT 10/5/2017), I was struck by this passage: “Trump keeps summoning monsters of abstraction — things that aren’t real — they’re extensions of the ordinary, fears that you have that he […]
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June 10, 2017 @ 5:00 am
· Filed under Language and politics
On Friday, at a joint press conference with Romanian President Klaus Iohannis, Donald Trump begrudgingly took questions from Jon Karl of ABC News. Karl asked whether there are indeed recordings of Trump's conversations with former FBI director James Comey, as Trump once suggested on Twitter. Here is how he replied (emphasis mine): KARL: And you […]
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March 19, 2017 @ 12:28 am
· Filed under Computational linguistics, coordination, Grammar, Language and the law, Linguistics in the news, Parsing, Punctuation, Usage
Language Log often weighs in when courts try to nail down the meaning of a statute. Laws are written in natural language—though one might long, by formalization, to end the thousand natural ambiguities that text is heir to—and thus judges are forced to play linguist. Happily, this week's "case in the news" is one where the lawyers managed to […]
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