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.
The biggest taxi operator in New York, Evgeny "Gene" Friedman, now manages Cohen's 30+ NYC medallions or at least did the last time we spoke to him. Friedman has been struggling for the last year to keep his taxi businesses out of bankruptcy and himself jail.
The final three words of the boldfaced clause present a weird, and dare I say unusual, case of double ellipsis. The semantic content communicated by those three words (in the context of the sentence) is richer than you'd think could be expressed by only three words, especially given that one of them is merely the conjunction and. That content can be represented as follows, with the struck-through text standing for the content that the reader must infer:
Friedman has been struggling for the last year to keep his taxi businesses out of bankruptcy and to keep himself out of jail.
There's nothing unusual about the first omission; I don't see anything wrong with the clause to keep his taxi businesses out of bankruptcy and himself out of jail. But the omission of out of strikes me as very strange, and what's even stranger is that to my ear, the clause is worse if to keep is put back:
* Friedman has been struggling for the last year to keep his taxi businesses out of bankruptcy and to keep himself jail.
Wired.com has some perfect linguaphile clickbait: "Watch People With Accents Confuse the Hell Out of AI Assistants." By "accents" they mean, non-American ones (e.g., Irish English). The AI Assistants were Siri, Amazon Echo, and Google Home. I'm curious about how well the voice recognition systems in these devices work with varieties of spoken English, so I clicked. Sucker! Can't tell anything from the video except that it's fun to say "Add Worcestershire sauce to my shopping list" to a machine. This definitely beats asking Siri "What is the meaning of life?"
Mainly I was impressed by how poorly I understood the speakers. I have a bad time understanding other people's accents but that's only one data point. How well do people understand speech that is in the same language as their own but spoken with a different accent?
An acquaintance of mine has a new iPhone, which he carries in a pocket that is (relevantly) below waist level. He has discovered something that dramatically illustrates the difference between (i) responding to speech and (ii) responding to speech as humans do, on the basis of knowing that it is speech.
A neighbor of mine, a respectable woman retired from medical practice, set a number of friends of hers a one-question quiz this week. The puzzle was to identify an item she recently purchased, based solely on what was stated on the tag attached to it. The tag said this (I reproduce it carefully, preserving the strange punctuation, line breaks, capitalization, and grammar, but replacing two searchable proper nouns by xxxxxxxx because they might provide clues):
ABOUT xxxxxxxx He comfortable He elastic He quickly dry He let you unfettered experience and indulgence. Please! Hurry up No matter where you are. No matter what you do. Let xxxxxxxx Change your life, Become your friends, Partner, Part of life
In my introductory undergraduate course on English words, and in most undergraduate introductory courses on linguistics, students are invited to reflect on language and identity—how the way you speak communicates information about who you are—which they are typically very interested in. This isn't my beat, professionally speaking, but as a linguist I have a duty to help my students think through some of these issues (and, if they get interested, point them in the right direction to get really educated). To get started, I often play this one-minute clip of a Meshach Taylor Fresh Air interview from 1990, which is usually a good starting point for some discussion.
At my hotel here in Brno, Czechia, the shampoo comes in small sachets, manufactured in Düsseldorf, labeled with the word denoting the contents in a long list of suitable European Union languages. I can't tell you which languages they picked, for reasons which will immediately become apparent. Here are the first four:
Let me tell everybody a touching story: A blah blah blah blah. Suddenly, blah blah blah, blah blah…. After that he died. This is so touching. This story is called "The sorrow of an illiterate". Good night, everybody. See you tomorrow.
VHM: Pinyin transcription and translation added by me.
A screenshot from ESPN's home page has been making the rounds on Imgur and Reddit. It captures a tease to a column by Howard Bryant, and it's dubbed "Possibly the worst sentence ever."
A swazzle is a device made of two strips of metal bound around a cotton tape reed. The device is used to produce the distinctive harsh, rasping voice of Punch and is held in the mouth by the Professor (performer) in a Punch and Judy show.
Swazzle can also be pronounced or spelled Schwazzle or swatchel.
I like the fact that the performer is called "Professor"!
