Language Log

Email from a colleague in computer science, listing some of the mistranscriptions in the Zoom captions of his office hours:

timing problem -> tiling problem
bulletin annually -> boolean formulae
satisfy your ability -> satisfiability
fire patterns -> tile patterns
inquisition -> position
valuables -> variables
double fines -> double prime
double poison -> ?
amen -> m, n
wine is in the continent of age -> ???
I do not want a diet climb to brian -> ???

I will stop here and I hope that you can all satisfy your ability with no double fines
and avoid inquisition.
Who is brian?

New book from Columbia University Press:

The Culture of Language in Ming China:  Sound, Script, and the Redefinition of Boundaries of Knowledge

$35.00  £28.00

Publisher's description:

The scholarly culture of Ming dynasty China (1368–1644) is often seen as prioritizing philosophy over concrete textual study. Nathan Vedal uncovers the preoccupation among Ming thinkers with specialized linguistic learning, a field typically associated with the intellectual revolution of the eighteenth century. He explores the collaboration of Confucian classicists and Buddhist monks, opera librettists and cosmological theorists, who joined forces in the pursuit of a universal theory of language.

When I first mentioned this remarkable video on Language Log nine years ago, it was buried in this post, "The Westernization of Chinese" (9/6/12), under "this phenomenal video".  I always regretted that I didn't make it more accessible (didn't know how to post YouTubes directly back then), so now here is Miss Lin in all her glory:

From Bryan Van Norden:

There is a funny story about a recent publication of mine.  The Chinese translation of my essay, "Why Are Platonists So Horny? What Murdoch’s 'The Nice and the Good' Can Teach Us" just came out.  However, my hard-working translator mistakenly rendered "horny" in my original title (sèmí 色迷) as "thorny" (jíshǒu 棘手)! I told the translator, and he said that he will fix the mistake, so in case it is changed soon online, a screenshot of the original is copied below.

From Mark Swofford:

The back of a restaurant stand going up in front of the Banqiao train station as part of a temporary market for the Christmas season.

On one side of the Taiwan Strait, yesterday the PRC announced its draconian language policy for the coming decades:

"Important new policies on language and script in the PRC" (11/30/21)

Meanwhile, on the other side, Taiwan proclaimed a very different aspiration:

"2030 bilingual policy to help Taiwan connect with the world: NDC head", Focus Taiwan (12/1/21)

The policies are nothing new for either side, simply an intensification of their goals in recent years, the PRC more toward language standardization and monolingualism, and Taiwan more toward linguistic diversification and multilingualism.

The Google Doodle for November 30 featured Lotfi Zadeh.

The Doodles page explains that

Today’s Doodle celebrates world-renowned Azerbaijani-American computer scientist, electrical engineer, and professor, Lotfi Zadeh. On this day in 1964, Zadeh submitted “Fuzzy Sets,” a groundbreaking paper that introduced the world to his innovative mathematical framework called “fuzzy logic.”

You can learn more about this contribution from the Wikipedia page on Fuzzy Mathematics. What I learned, from reading the Other Contributions section of Zadeh's Wikipedia page, was his role in the invention (discovery?) of the z-transform.

Since this statement was issued by none other than the State Council (Guówùyuàn 國務院), it is evident that they attach great significance to these new rules, regulations, and directives.

The State Council, constitutionally synonymous with the Central People's Government since 1954, is the chief administrative authority of the People's Republic of China. It is chaired by the premier and includes the heads of each of the cabinet-level executive departments. Wikipedia

The translation is by Google, with a few minimal changes by me.  Although not perfect, the translation should suffice to give a good indication of the seriousness which the CCP attaches to matters of language and script.

Original Chinese version:  http://www.81.cn/yw/2021-11/30/content_10111766.htm

I'm in Seattle, attending the 181st meeting of the Acoustical Society of America. It's been a few years since I attended an ASA meeting in person, so I'm not sure whether this is the first time they've offered pronoun stickers for attendees to add to their badges. But it's the first time I've encountered this option. The ASA's explanation:

Responding to the English translation of the Chinese epitaph on "Matteo Ricci's tombstone" (11/24/21), rit malors remarks:

It's the first time I encounter the word "sobriquet" for hào 號. Later I browse the Wikipedia and find that there is an entry for hào 號 as "Art Name" (in China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam).

In a "matched guise" test, subjects are asked to evaluate "various traits including body height, good looks, leadership, sense of humor, intelligence, religiousness, self-confidence, dependability, kindness, ambition, sociability, character, and likability", for the same content presented by the same speaker in different languages, or perhaps by the same speaker associated with different pictures. The goal is to uncover linguistic or ethnic stereotypes.

This twitter "experiment" takes the idea in a different direction, using an associated picture to shift the interpretation of an ambiguous word:

pic.twitter.com/YS8r2dvJN2

— Sharon 🌹🚰 ✝️ 🛡️ (@Sharon_Kuruvila) November 23, 2021

This is a supplement to "Tang (618-907) poetry in Min pronunciation" (10/14/21).  The following remarks are by Conal Boyce:

So far it seems the artist’s viewpoint is missing from the discussion. At the top of the thread, Victor Mair mentions two musical compositions of mine, and also kindly cites my unpublished Ph.D. dissertation in References. But the music and the thesis (both of 1973-1976 vintage) are almost wholly unrelated. (What is related tangentially to my compositions from that period is my paper called ‘Min sandhi in verse recitation,’ Journal of Chinese Linguistics, 1980, 8:1-14.) What do I mean by ‘the artist’s viewpoint’? My main task during 1973-1976 in Taiwan was to finish writing my dissertation on the rhythms used by my informants in their recitation of Sòngcí ([VHM:  Sòng lyric meters] sometimes in MSM, sometimes in Min) — nothing to do with music per se (except the abstract connection through ‘rhythm’).

"WHO — You cannot be Xi-rious! The WHO’s decision to skip the Greek letter Xi in its ludicrous naming system shows exactly who controls it", by David Spencer, Taiwan News, Contributing Writer, 2021/11/28:

(source)