Language Log

This morning, as is my wont, I stepped out on my stoop to test the weather.  Across the street, I saw children running around picking up eggs that had been hidden in the grass here and there and delightedly putting them in the baskets they held with one hand.  These eggs were colored, all right, but made of plastic, not the kind of natural eggs we used to spend a lot of time on boiling and dyeing and, if we were fancy and clever, making designs and even using multiple colors through a combination of melted wax and various tools and techniques.  I fondly recall the olfactory and tactile sensations of vinegar, melted wax used during the process, and smooth egg shells.

Really elaborately decorated Easter eggs are called pysanky (plural form of pysanka from the Ukrainian word pysaty meaning "to write" (source), cf. Russian письменность ("writing").  You don't have to be a pro and make pysanky like the ones shown here, but you can derive a lot of fun and satisfaction making your own colored Easter eggs that are dyed and decorated in a fashion that is commensurate with your time and talents.

Back in the day, we used to talk about strange typos and tried to figure out how they happened.

Here's a good one.

I typed the following sentence:

Once that one foodstuff you said everybody likes to consume but is hard to resist and is not good for us?

Xi Jinping is celebrated as the first national leader of the People's Republic of China who speaks Modern Standard (MSM) rather than some heavily accented Sinitic dialect / topolect.  That is basically true, though he slurs and swallows his words, and is (in)famous for his numerous verbal gaffes (see "Selected readings" below).  Now the pseudoscience and fraud muckraker Fang Shimin / Fang Zhouzi has pointed out another alleged language error perpetrated by President / Chairman / Party Secretary of the CCP while he has been at the APEC meeting in Peru the last few days.

习主席访问了三次秘鲁，还是坚持把“秘鲁”说成密鲁，以后“秘鲁”的读音也要改了吗？央视还提醒过习主席要怎么读“秘鲁”，太大胆了。 pic.twitter.com/LtR0sGVwT3

— 方舟子 (@fangshimin) November 18, 2024

A random cat video that showed up on Facebook:

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

Sign on the door of a Pizza Hut eatery in Timmins, Ontario:

(source)

From another tweet / X-effusion by the Master Muckraker, Fang Zhouzi / Fang Shimin:

“管总”这词是古代白话文，现在基本不用，原意是指某个人或某个部门管各种事务，“一个问题”怎么“管总”？哪个秘书想出来的新用法？ pic.twitter.com/jPdr3KzP6a

— 方舟子 (@fangshimin) November 19, 2023

From the Twitter / X account of the famous popular science writer and muckraker, Fang Zhouzi / Fang Shimin:

以色列领事馆公布的这封“一个陌生中国人的来信”，应该是在电脑上写好、打印出来，然后再抄写。所以有输入错误，把“公元”输入成了“公园”（书写只会把“公园”错成“公元”，不会反过来）。抄写的人写字水平太差，最常见的简单的字“且”“己”“组”都写错了，中国低年级小学生写这些字也不可能错。 pic.twitter.com/3GpUPS5k4b

— 方舟子 (@fangshimin) November 16, 2023

From Nathan Hopson:

I have been reading some handwritten documents from the 1960s and 1970s, and have been reminded that even beyond abbreviations, there were still "nonstandard" kanji in use. I guess this took me off guard mostly because these are school publications.

On the abbreviated side, the most obvious example is:

第 → 㐧

The "nonstandard" kanji that interested me most were these two:
1. 管 → 官 part written as 友+、

2. 食缶 as a single character, but paired with 食 to be 食[食缶]

[This is a guest post by Scott Mauldin]

I recently visited Marrakesh and was fascinated by the signs that I submit in the attached photographs. Ostensibly these were originally a kind of business sign that artisans and professionals could hang on their businesses or homes to advertise their profession, but they have evolved into something slightly different for touristic consumption as they now sometimes feature the faces of celebrities or even items.

They're interesting in themselves as a cultural item, but if you look closely at the photos the truly fascinating bit are the "errors" and deviations from standard French spelling. These signs are often made by artisans without a formal education in French and sometimes are phonetic renderings that encode Maghrebi French pronunciations.

Definition

In artificial intelligence (AI), a hallucination or artificial hallucination (also occasionally called delusion) is a confident response by an AI that does not seem to be justified by its training data.

(source)

I had mentioned such AI hallucinating in a previous post once or twice (see "Selected readings"), so it's good to have a concrete example.

Is the account below an instance of ChatGPT "hallucinating"?  Its explanation of gato-por-liebre (cat-for-hare) in Spanish would seem so.

[The following is a guest post by Conal Boyce.]

From Taiwan News (3/25/23), by Keoni Everington:

"Taiwanese 'Hello Kitty' English-Chinese dictionary has 70 'egregious errors'

Publisher ACME Cultural Enterprise Co has admitted errors but not recalled dictionaries"

Cover of dictionary, example of misspelling. (Eryk Smith photo)

From the recent meeting between Putin and Wang Yi (Director of the Office of the Central Foreign Affairs Commission of the Chinese Communist Party):

Next time you hear or use the expression "scot-free", don't think that it has anything to do with Scots language or Scot people.  I have always avoided using this expression because I didn't want to disparage a whole people.  But "scot-free" is such a useful phrase that I wished I could use it with a good conscience.  So finally I looked it up and found that it has a completely different derivation from that of the name of the language and the people.

(colloquial) Without consequences or penalties, to go free without payment.

• • Synonym: beat the rap

    to get off scot-free

  • (archaic) Free of scot, free of tax.

From Middle English scotfre, from Old English scotfrēo (“scot-free; exempt from royal tax or imposts”), equivalent to scot (“payment; contribution; fine”) +‎ -free.

(Wiktionary)

(AH Dict. 2016 5th ed.)