Language Log

Something for everyone

An eminent Chinese historian just sent these two sentences to me:

Yǒurén shuō AI zhǐ néng jìsuàn, ér rénlèi néng suànjì. Yīncǐ AI yīdìng bùshì rénlèi duìshǒ

有人說AI只能計算，而人類能算計。因此AI一定不是人類對手。

"Some people say that AI can only calculate, while humans can compute.  Therefore, AI must not be a match for humans".

Google Translate, Baidu Fanyi, and Bing Translate all render both jìsuàn 計算 and suànjì 算計 as "calculate".  Only DeepL differentiates the two by translating the latter as "do math".

This is something I was going to write about in the early part of December, 2023, but got sidetracked by too many other things.  Now I'm going through my e-mail clutter to clean out old messages that I had neglected to take care of back then.  At that time, more than half a year ago, "PUA" was still very popular.  Although speech fashions change rapidly in China, it was so viral then that I suspect it is still relevant today, so let's take a good look at it.

When I first encountered "PUA", I had no idea what it meant nor how to pronounce it (the same sort of feeling of being at sea when I initially heard "hawk tuah"), so I started looking around for what it might mean.  Clearly, from the contexts in which I was hearing it, PUA was not "Pandemic Unemployment Assistance", which was a federal and state government program back in the day.

I fairly quickly came to the realization that the term "PUA" is derived from the American English phrase “pick-up artist”.  Well, I'd never heard of that either, so had to educate myself about that too.

A random cat video that showed up on Facebook:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_iSxFL6_Wg

"Siting Yao’s bilingual dictionary translates Chinese lesbian slang:  The London-based graphic designer illustrates unique language expressions and humorous anecdotes in her colourful, graphic guide to queer code."  By Ellis Tree, It's Nice That (4 July 2024)

Is monolingualism a normal, natural, necessary state of affairs for human beings?

Can you imagine a world in which there were only one language?  How is that even possible?

These are questions that come to mind after reading Gina Anne Tam's deeply thought provoking "Mandarin Hegemony: The Past and Future of Linguistic Hierarchies in China", pulse (4/18/24).

Tam begins with a gripping, hard-hitting scene that we at Language Log were already well aware of last fall:  "Speak Mandarin, not Cantonese, even in Macau" (10/31/23).  Here are the opening paragraphs of her article:

At a concert in Macau in the autumn of 2023, Cantopop superstar Eason Chan used an interlude to talk about his songwriting process. Suddenly, shouts from the audience interrupted his soliloquy, as a few fans demanded that he shift from speaking in his native Cantonese, the majority language in Macau, to Mandarin, the Chinese national language. Chan stopped and quickly launched into a multilingual lecture, reprimanding those who deigned to tell him what to speak. In English, Cantonese, Mandarin, and Thai, he defended multilingualism for the freedom it grants: ‘I love speaking in whatever way and language I want’ (Huang 2023).

[Basic information about Kalmyk (Mongolic language) and Julius Klaproth (1783-1835) below.]

For researchers of Julius Klaproth or those interested in Kalmyk language, I'm preparing to catalogue this Kalmyk-German glossary believed to have belonged to Klaproth. Any suggestions as to which book it is a glossary of? pic.twitter.com/SfSPyvZR3W

— Royal Asiatic Society (@RAS_Soc) April 4, 2024

Sign at a hotel in Japan:

Sino-Platonic Papers is pleased to announce the publication of its three-hundred-and-thirty-seventh issue:

“Tocharian Bilingualism, Language Shift, and Language Death in the Old Turkic Context,” by Hakan Aydemir.

pdf

ABSTRACT

The death of a language is a sad and dramatic event. It is, however, a fact that many languages died out in the past and are now dying out as well. However, although we often know the time and causes of present or recent language deaths and have a relatively large amount of information about them, we often do not know the time and causes of past language deaths, or our knowledge of these processes is very limited. In other words, the very limited written sources or linguistic material make it very difficult to study “language shift” or “language death” phenomena in historical periods.

I knew that in the future it would come to this.  More than forty years ago, I predicted that one day China would have to make a choice between Hanyu Pinyin and English when it comes to phonetic writing.  As we say in Mandarin, "guǒrán 果然" ("as expected / it turns out")….

It seems that there's been quite a flap over the replacement of signs for subway station stops from English to Hanyu Pinyin, as documented (verbally and visually [many photographs]) in this Chinese article.  Naturally, the Chinese characters are there in either case, but what people are complaining about is the replacement of English with Hanyu Pinyin.  For example, changing "Library" to "Tushuguan" or "Hefei Train Station" to "Hefei Huochezhan".

From Tom Mazanac:

I came across this sign on the subway recently: