Language Log

"Mysterious tablet with unknown language unearthed in Georgia", by Dario Radley, Archeology News (12/4/24)

Tablet with inscription in an unknown language, discovered in Georgia.
Credit: R. Shengelia et al., Journal of Ancient History and Archaeology

When I write in Chinese, I generally use pinyin input.  Yesterday, having finished a message to someone, I entered the following:  meiweiheng.  I was both surprised and pleased that up popped my full name in Chinese characters:  Méi Wéihéng 梅维恒.  In the past, I would usually have to call up the characters one or two at a time and choose the right ones from a list.  The fact that they came up in one fell swoop from "meiweiheng" was exhilarating.  It meant that I must be becoming better known on the Chinese internet.

Curious, I wondered what would turn up if I did a web search in Chinese, and was overwhelmed by the huge number of ghits.  But what briefly puzzled me was why this photograph was included at the top of the very first page:

When I went to the restroom at Heathrow Terminal 5 in London, I was stopped in my tracks by the sign "Cleaner's Sluice" on a door just outside.  I knew what a "sluice" was, in fact I knew several related meanings for sluice:

• • An artificial passage for water, fitted with a valve or gate, for example in a canal lock or a mill stream, for stopping or regulating the flow.
  • A water gate or floodgate.
  • Hence, an opening or channel through which anything flows; a source of supply.
  • The stream flowing through a floodgate.
  • (mining) A long box or trough through which water flows, used for washing auriferous earth.
  • (linguistics) An instance of wh-stranding ellipsis, or sluicing.

(Wiktionary)

That seems to be reader RBM's reaction to the headline "K-Pop Light Sticks Fire up Impeachment Protests in South Korea", Reuters 12/10/2024.

For whatever reason — maybe the picture at the top of the story — I understood the headline immediately. But the Berkeley Neural Parser makes the same mistake as RBM:

Today's SMBC:

According to the publicity page:

One fall day in 2018, Ellen Jovin set up a folding table on a Manhattan sidewalk with a sign that said “Grammar Table.” Right away, passersby began excitedly asking questions, telling stories, and filing complaints.

What happened next is the stuff of grammar legend.

Ellen and her filmmaker husband, Brandt Johnson, took the table on the road, visiting all 50 US states as Brandt shot the grammar action.

Chatting with my London cabbie on a longish ride, I was intrigued by how he frequently referred to "the Knowledge".  He did so respectfully and reverently, as though it were a sacred catechism he had mastered after years of diligent study.  Even though he was speaking, it always sounded as though it came with a capital letter at the beginning.  And rightly so, because it is holy writ for London cabbies.

From The Washington Post:

The Oxford English Dictionary blew it in The Oxford English Dictionary blew it in anointing “brain rot” as the word of the year.

First off, that’s two words. But the real miss was overlooking the rightful winner, “slop,” which was on the dictionary publisher’s short list for word of the year. That’s like Beyoncé losing the top Grammy award to Harry Styles.

From The Economist:

SOME YEARS it is hard to identify the main event, much less sum it up in a word. This is not the problem in 2024; the return of Donald Trump to the White House after a four-year absence is consequential not only for the world’s most powerful country but also for its neighbours and everywhere else. Which word can capture the mix of surprise, excitement and trepidation people feel as the MAGA movement returns to power?

OpenAI comms: [underspecific hype-y 'big tings coming!!' pls like and subscribe]
Google comms: [corporate vagueness about Gemini3-0011 v2 FINAL.docx on Vertex available to 14 users]
GDM comms: [we have simulated a rat's brain capable of solving 4D chess, but we're not sure why]…

— Séb Krier (@sebkrier) December 3, 2024

Previous LLOG coverage: "AI on Rs in 'strawberry'", 8/28/2024; "'The cosmic jam from whence it came'", 9/26/2024.

Current satire: Alberto Romero, "Report: OpenAI Spends Millions a Year Miscounting the R’s in ‘Strawberry’", Medium 11/22/2024.

OpenAI, the most talked-about tech start-up of the decade, convened an emergency company-wide meeting Tuesday to address what executives are calling “the single greatest existential challenge facing artificial intelligence today”: Why can’t their models count the R’s in strawberry?

The controversy began shortly after the release of GPT-4, on March 2023, when users on Reddit and Twitter discovered the model’s inability to count the R’s in strawberry. The responses varied from inaccurate guesses to cryptic replies like, “More R’s than you can handle.” In one particularly unhinged moment, the chatbot signed off with, “Call me Sydney. That’s all you need to know.”

This post doesn't cite any Iranian language materials directly, but I dare say that Iranian speakers were involved in the transmission of this large hoard from western Central Asia more than a thousand miles distant and were present in the British Isles during the first millennium AD.

"Amazing’ Viking-age treasure travelled half the world to Scotland, analysis finds", by Dalya Alberge, The Guardian (Sun 1 Sep 2024)

Lidded vessel is star object in rich Galloway Hoard and came from silver mine in what is now Iran

When I first encountered AI Overview (AIO) about half a year ago, I was amazed by how it would whirl and swirl while searching for an answer to whatever query I had entered into the Google search engine.  It would usually find a helpful answer within a second.

As the months passed, the response time became more rapid (usually instantaneous), the answers better organized and almost always helpful, but sometimes AIO would simply not answer.

About a week ago, I was stunned when occasionally AIO — after thinking for a split second — would declare that it didn't have an answer for what I had asked about.