Language Log

This man is a Punjabi Hindu, speaking some Punjabi, some Hindi, with a lot of English mixed in, so you might be able glean a bit of what he is trying to say (he's being interviewed about a flood).

"Punjab flood: Man got interviewed, but no one could understand him"

Back in early April of this year, Kirinputra brought up this distinction at the end of a comment thread on Cantonese, but it came at the conclusion  of the thread, so — though it deserved discussion — there was no opportunity to hold one at that time.  Consequently, I reopen the deliberations now by quoting Kirinputra's final comment:

"Sinitic is like Romance" is not a working, truth-bearing analogy, esp. not for a layman audience. (Maybe some subset of Sinitic is like Romance, though.) "Sinitic" arguably harbors much more abstand diversity than Romance, for one thing. More importantly, Romance is by now evidence-based. Humans have a detailed understanding of the mechanics & timing of the divergence from a common ancestor. Sinitic is belief-based. The approach to the detailed reality is largely speculative & often circular.

From Peter Daniels:

Do the 7 or 8 (or whatever) “dialects” of Sinitic constitute what Hockett called an “L-complex,” like Romance, such that you could traverse the entire domain and never encounter neighboring villages that didn’t understand each other, with cultural centers where the language described in the regional grammar book and dictionary is spoken, or are they distinct languages as far back as one can look?

Thanks to the productive, enlightening discussion we had in the first part of this post, I could not help but think of "speed" as a category of modern life.  That led me to remember a book buried in my dungeon (downstairs study) that I had read about a quarter of a century ago.  It wasn't anything like William S. Burroughs Speed.  It was more on the order of a history of science work.

So I descended the stairs to my basement library.  It wasn't long before I found it:

Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything by James Gleick 

• • Topic: This popular book explores the modern, tech-driven obsession with speed and how it affects nearly every aspect of life, from our work habits and communication to our personal time.
  • Summary: Gleick discusses the "hurry sickness" of modern life and the paradox that even with time-saving devices, we feel more rushed than ever. 

 Philip Taylor noticed a new (to him) tendency of Vietnamese youngsters to watch on-line videos at 2x speed.  He writes:

My wife recently "imported" four members of her family from Vietnam (her sister, the latter’s husband, and their two children aged 11 and 13), and both children can be routinely heard watching/listening to online videos at 2x speed.  When I asked Lệ Hoa (my wife’s sister) about this, she said that in her experience it was pretty normal amongst Vietnamese youngsters.  I now wonder if the same is true for other cultures and what the motivation might be …

Julesy just keeps getting better and better:

I showed this mp4 video to a dozen native speakers of Sinitic languages (mostly Mandarin), but no one could identify, much less understand, what it was:

(from imgur)

Yuhan Zhang, Rachel Ryskin & Edward Gibson, "A noisy-channel approach to depth-charge illusions." Cognition, March 2023:

The “depth-charge” sentence, No head injury is too trivial to be ignored, is often interpreted as “no matter how trivial head injuries are, we should not ignore them” while the literal meaning is the opposite – “we should ignore them”. Four decades of research have failed to resolve the source of this entrenched semantic illusion. Here we adopt the noisy-channel framework for language comprehension to provide a potential explanation. We hypothesize that depth-charge sentences result from inferences whereby comprehenders derive the interpretation by weighing the plausibility of possible readings of the depth-charge sentences against the likelihood of plausible sentences being produced with errors. In four experiments, we find that (1) the more plausible the intended meaning of the depth-charge sentence is, the more likely the sentence is to be misinterpreted; and (2) the higher the likelihood of our hypothesized noise operations, the more likely depth-charge sentences are to be misinterpreted. These results suggest that misinterpretation is affected by both world knowledge and the distance between the depth-charge sentence and a plausible alternative, which is consistent with the noisy-channel framework.

Yuhan Zhang discusses the paper in a thread on Twitter.

Speaking of depth, I'm definitely out of mine when it comes to noisy-channel frameworks. But it isn't the case that I'm not so ignorant as to fail to recognize that this paper is not too unimportant for Language Log not to pay no attention to it.

(Hey, ChatGPT — betcha can't make sense out of that!)

[This is a guest post by Grant Newsham]

My mother was Rusyn. (Carpatho-Rusyn, Ruthenian, Lemko [in Poland]).  Originating in a small village, Volica, up in today's northeast Slovakia — though she grew up in coal country near Pittsburgh.  Her first language was Rusyn — but I don't think she really knew exactly what language it was until much later in life.  They had no real sense of nationhood.  She said she spoke 'Russian' — but referred to it as just 'Kitchen Russian' — or some inferior form of Russian.  I think it did kind of bother her – thinking that she was a hillbilly of sorts and speaking uneducated Russian.

However, the language is basically Ukrainian (with some differences) — so close that the Ukrainians don't consider it, or the Rusyns, as distinct entities.  After the communists were overthrown, the Slovak government allowed Rusyn nationality (and have set up some Rusyn-language schools [a cousin teaches at one]) and you'll see signs in Rusyn, but the Ukrainians still do not.  My grandfather was very clear that they were not Ukrainians.

A lament for the passing of Pekingese (Běijīnghuà 北京话) —  for those who don't understand Mandarin, just listen to a bit of what the presenter is saying for the flavor, then skip down to the explanations below the page break to find out what it's all about:

[This is a guest post by Jonathan Smith]

Here's an audio passage from a film I've been watching:

If you know Chinese, test yourself to see how much of it you understand.

An interesting new paper on speech and information rates as determined by neurocognitive capacity appeared a week ago:

Christophe Coupé, Yoon Oh, Dan Dediu, and François Pellegrino, "Different languages, similar encoding efficiency: Comparable information rates across the human communicative niche", Science Advances, 5.9 (2019):  eaaw2594. doi: 10.1126/sciadv.aaw2594.

Here's the abstract:

Language is universal, but it has few indisputably universal characteristics, with cross-linguistic variation being the norm. For example, languages differ greatly in the number of syllables they allow, resulting in large variation in the Shannon information per syllable. Nevertheless, all natural languages allow their speakers to efficiently encode and transmit information. We show here, using quantitative methods on a large cross-linguistic corpus of 17 languages, that the coupling between language-level (information per syllable) and speaker-level (speech rate) properties results in languages encoding similar information rates (~39 bits/s) despite wide differences in each property individually: Languages are more similar in information rates than in Shannon information or speech rate. These findings highlight the intimate feedback loops between languages’ structural properties and their speakers’ neurocognition and biology under communicative pressures. Thus, language is the product of a multiscale communicative niche construction process at the intersection of biology, environment, and culture.