Language Log

PLS RT. NEED HELP. Looking for people who speak Meso-American indigenous languages (e.g., zapotec, nahua, ma'am, quich'e, maya, mixe, mixteco) to translate remotely (via telephone) for immigrant families speaking with their lawyers. Email support@l4gg.org.

— #L4GG (@lawyers4goodgov) June 22, 2018

Please spread the word.

At some point early in April, the LLOG Facebook page stopped getting automatically updated with links to new posts. Thanks to Ben Zimmer, this has been fixed, and at some point soon, we'll try to restore FB links to the missing posts.

No, not polyvinyl chloride. This is the (first run of the) Prosody Visualization Challenge, organized by Agnieszka Wagner, Anne Cutler, and  Grażyna Demenko, in association with Speech Prosody 2018.

From Bjarke Frellesvig (University of Oxford), Stephen Wright Horn (NINJAL), and Toshinobu Ogiso (NINJAL):

We are very pleased to announce the first public release of the
Oxford-NINJAL Corpus of Old Japanese (ONCOJ). We will be grateful if you
would circulate and share this information as appropriate.

The corpus is avallable through this website: http://oncoj.ninjal.ac.jp/

In an evening session on March 24, at the 2018 Association for Asian Studies Conference in Washington DC, there was a surprise announcement: publication of Texts and Transformations: Essays in Honor of the 75th Birthday of Victor H. Mair, edited by Haun Saussy.

At least the announcement was a surprise to Victor. According to this blog post at Cambria Press,

The evening began with short speeches about new books by Shen Jiawei and Mabel Lee, Albert Welter, Jonathan Stalling, Megan M. Ferry, Christopher Rea, Liu Jianmei (and Mabel Lee), and Carolyn T. Brown.

Then Professor Haun Saussy was asked by Toni Tan, director of Cambria Press, to come up to speak. While Professor Mair was aware that Professor Saussy was working on an edited volume, he had no idea that this was a festschrift being put together in his honor and that it would be unveiled that very night. So when Toni Tan asked Professor Saussy to take the stage, Professor Mair was under the impression that Professor Saussy was coming up just to say a few words about the forthcoming book. Little did he know that he would be presented with the highly anticipated top-secret volume that was the talk of the AAS.

It's here. Not the car battery, and not another one of the movies, but the First DIHARD Speech Diarization Challenge and the associated Interspeech 2018 special session.

As discussed in "My summer" 6/22/2017, I spent a couple of months last summer in Pittsburgh working with a couple of dozen other people on a workshop project with the title "Enhancement and analysis of conversational speech", whose primary focus was automatic diarization: determination of who spoke when.

The opening and closing presentations for this workshop are available here — see also "Too cool to care", 8/12/2017, and Bergelson et al., "Enhancement and analysis of conversational speech: JSALT 2017", ICASSP 2018.

On the weekend of January 19-20, 2018, there was a Tangut Workshop at Yale University.  Organized by Valerie Hansen and sponsored by the Yale Council of East Asian Studies, this was an intense, exciting learning experience for the 35 or so people who were in the room most of the time.

Many readers may be scratching their heads and asking, "Tangut?  What's that?  And why should we at Language Log be concerned with it?"

Today we celebrate the life and legacy of Martin Luther King Jr.

One of my favorite Martin Luther King Jr. quotes come from a speech he delivered at a retreat attended by staff of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in South Carolina, one year before he was assassinated:

“We have moved from the era of civil rights to the era of human rights, an era where we are called upon to raise certain basic questions about the whole society. We have been in a reform movement… But after Selma and the voting rights bill, we moved into a new era, which must be the era of revolution. We must recognize that we can't solve our problem now until there is a radical redistribution of economic and political power… this means a revolution of values and other things. We must see now that the evils of racism, economic exploitation and militarism are all tied together… you can't really get rid of one without getting rid of the others… the whole structure of American life must be changed. America is a hypocritical nation and [we] must put [our] own house in order.” (King 1967)

The people have spoken. At the American Dialect Society annual meeting in Salt Lake City (held in conjunction with the Linguistic Society of America), the 2017 Word of the Year has been selected, and it's fake news. (Yes, yes, we all know that's technically two words, just like dumpster fire, the choice for 2016. The "word of the year" can be a lexicalized phrase: see my response to Geoff Pullum on this point back in 2011.)

As we enter the second half of the 15th year since we started Language Log, we've been reflecting on the past and planning for the future.

Language Log will be off the air for a while this weekend, due to building-wide electrical repairs.

One of the Forbes "30 under 30" for science — Zhou Yu:

I continue to be astonished by the sheer volume of the junk email I get from spam journals and organizers of spamferences, and by the linguistic ineptitude of the unprincipled responsible parties. I have been getting dozens per month, for a year or more: journal announcements, calls for papers, requests for conference attendance, subscription information, and invitations to editorial boards. Today I got a prestige invitation that began thus:

After careful evaluation and reading your article published in Journal of Logic, Language and Information entitled “On the Mathematical Foundations of", we decided to send you this invitation.

Clearly the careful evaluation and reading did not enable them to get to the end of my title (it does not end in of). And what was the invitation?

In light of your remarkable achievements in Critical Care, we would like to invite you to join the Editorial Board of Journal of Nursing.