Language Log

The University of Edinburgh is co-ordinating the Blizzard Challenge, the only regular speech synthesis evaluation campaign in the world. And you can help. The systems are evaluated by having people listen to them in operation and reporting on what they hear. The listening test has now started, and if you have a computer with sound capability, and maybe a nice pair of headphones, you can be one of the expert evaluators. It's a chance to hear synthesis samples from over 20 leading academic and commercial research groups (and some lesser-known ones). Hundreds of listeners are needed for this test, so the organizers are turning to Language Log. Do think about taking part.

There are in fact have two parallel tests running this year: one on English, accessible if you click here, and if you have the necessary language skills, one on Mandarin Chinese, accessible if you click here. You can do both, if you speak both languages. Each one should take under an hour and can be done in several sessions if you prefer (the system will remember where you got to and pick up from there next time). If you know other people who might be interested in evaluating the speech quality of machines that talk, please encourage your students to take part.

I'm sorry that Geoff and Barbara had such a disappointing movie experience last night. Myself, I watched The Scorpion King on TV. For a movie to watch while doing other things it was fine. It has exotic settings and clothing, plenty of fighting and stunts without excessive gore, beautiful women, everything a guy could want.

This was not the first time I had seen it, so I knew what to expect, but when I first saw it, I was quite disappointed. Why? Well, I naively thought that it would be about the real Scorpion King, one of the small number of known figures from the late Pre-dynastic period of Egypt. He may have been the immediate predecessor of Narmer, who unified Upper and Lower Egypt and founded the First Dynasty, or he may have been the same king under a different name. Naturally, I figured that a movie called The Scorpion King would be about the unification of Egypt and perhaps would even portray the origins of the Egyptian writing system. Alas, that movie remains to be made.

Google Translate has added ten languages to its repertoire: Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech,Danish, Finnish, Hindi, Norwegian,Polish, Romanian and Swedish. With the languages previously available (Arabic, Chinese (traditional and simplified writing), Dutch, English, French,German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish), Google now handles 23 languages. These comprise less than one-half of one percent of the world's languages, but their speakers include more than half of the world's population.

We can read today at the Catholic News Agency's website and elsewhere that:

Linguistics has a profound human value. It is a science that opens the heart and the mind. It helps us to put our lives, our hopes, our problems in the right perspective. In this regard, and here I speak as a priest and a Jesuit, it is an apostolic instrument that can bring us closer to God.

Wait, my bad. It was Fr. Funes, Director of the Vatican's Observatory, speaking, and he actually said that Astronomy has a profound human value etc. etc. Nobody ever got closer to God by reading Language Log. But anyway, Funes went on to comment on the possibility of extraterrestrial life, saying that:

My friend Steven Levine wrote me a little while ago with a small question about English — about the verb process, accented on the second syllable, meaning 'to go, walk, or march in procession' (theOED's definition). Steven was familiar with the verb from Morris dancing, where a certain amount of proCESSing goes on. As Steven wrote:

There is a form of Morris dance called a "processional" — which means just what you'd think, a dance that moves the team along, usually at a brisk pace. You dance processionals when you are in a parade.

Among Morris dancers, I have often heard the verb "process" (accent on the second syllable) used to described doing this. "We're going to process down Nicollet Mall after we finish dancing at the library."

But then he found himself writing the word for the first time and noticed the homography problem: there's another verb process, accented on the first syllable. That drove him to the dictionaries, where he found no trace of proCESS. Was this just Morris dancer jargon? Should he avoid using it outside the Morris dancing community? If so, how (with proceed, for instance)? And should he avoid it in writing (for fear of ambiguity)?

Ask Language Log comes to the rescue!

In a recent post ("Creole birdsong?", 5/9/2008), I mentioned Derek Bickerton's "language bioprogram hypothesis". Derek responded with a long comment. Since I responded to his comment with another post ("A multi-generational bioprogram? Derek Bickerton objects", 5/10/2008), I invited him to respond in kind. The guest post below is the result.

My posting on getter better (and its sisters and its cousins and its aunts, which I'll refer to as GetterBetter as a group) has elicited considerable comment, both here on Language Log and on languagehat's blog. I've responded to several of the Language Log comments with comments of my own (which might have to be reworked into full-fledged postings), but there's at least one issue that comes up in both places and is, I think, important enough to merit a posting on its own, even though the central point is one I've posted about many times before: the thin line between error and mere variation.

Just in case you haven't already seen it, you should go check out WALS Online:

The data and the texts from The World Atlas of Language Structures, published as a book with CD-ROM in 2005 by Oxford University Press, are now freely available online.

WALS Online is a joint project of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and the Max Planck Digital Library . It is a separate publication, edited by Martin Haspelmath, Matthew S. Dryer, David Gil and Bernard Comrie (Munich: Max Planck Digital Library, 2008).

A couple of weeks ago, Ben Zimmer told me that he was leaving Oxford University Press, where he was Editor for American Dictionaries, to become Executive Producer of the Visual Thesaurus online site. I was happy for Ben's career advancement, but I had another reaction that had nothing to do with him. When I talk with undergraduates about the jobs that studies in linguistics might prepare them for, "executive producer" has never been one of them. Before now.

Last year I wrote about citation plagiarism and why there is no such thing. I just discovered a comment on this by Miriam Burstein at The Little Professor which requires some discussion.

I've had a few opportunities to overhear (or over-read) some strange example sentences while I've been spending more time here in the west wing basement of Language Log Plaza. Here are a couple of them for our readers to mull over before I comment on them (and invite your comments on them) sometime later this week.

1. I'll never forget how he must have felt. (overheard)
2. Aren't you glad you archived instead of deleted? (over-read)

From Phineas Q. Phlogiston, "Cartoon Theories of Linguistics, Part ж—The Trouble with NLP", Speculative Grammarian, CLIII(4), March 2008:

This is only the second cartoon about computational linguistics that I know of. The first one is also rather negative, but I guess that this is only to be expected from cartoonists, who are on the whole much more likely to criticize something than to praise it.

The illustration is from Taro Gomi, An Illustrated Dictionary of Japanese Onomatopoeic Expressions, by way of a new addition to our blogroll, The Ideophone, by Mark Dingemanse.