Language Log

Yesterday, on New Year's Eve, I was sending around, to family and friends, the lyrics and melody of the beloved song we sing at this time of year (here [The Choral Scholars of University College Dublin], here, [Rod Stewart]).  I also circulated the Wikipedia article so that people could know the ballads and folk songs that preceded Robert Burns' famous poem (1788).

This morning when I awoke, I received the following message from Martin Schwartz:

It is indeed interesting to see how these Scottish sentiments are presented in this East Asian language.  Thoughtfully, the source provided an English translation for the Japanese.

There are many things about Papua New Guinea (PNG) that make it unique (the abundance of its flora and fauna, its ritualistic cannibalism, its political complexity, etc.), but above all for me is the huge number of its languages, especially considering its relatively small population on such a large amount of land (see below for some details).

Papua New Guinea (abbreviated PNG; /ˈpæp(j)uə … ˈɡɪni, ˈpɑː-/ ^ⓘ, also US: /ˈpɑːpwə-, ˈpɑːp(j)ə-/^[12]) is a country in Oceania that comprises the eastern half of the island of New Guinea and its offshore islands in Melanesia (a region of the southwestern Pacific Ocean north of Australia). Officially the Independent State of Papua New Guinea (Tok Pisin: Independen Stet bilong Papua Niugini; Hiri Motu: Independen Stet bilong Papua Niu Gini), it shares its only land border with Indonesia to the west and it is directly adjacent to Australia to the south and the Solomon Islands to the east. Its capital, located along its southeastern coast, is Port Moresby. The country is the world's third largest island country, with an area of 462,840 km² (178,700 sq mi).

[This is a guest post by H. Krishnapriyan]

As I explained here in February of this year:

One time on an expedition around the western part of the Taklamakan Desert in the center of Asia more than a decade ago, the Chinese driver played Lady Gaga's "Poker Face" scores of times.  He had other discs, but he only played that song, and he played it over and over and over again.  I liked it the first 10-15 times I heard it, but after that it started to drive me insane, and finally I had to tell him to stop. He was not happy.  Then, a few hours later or the next day, he would launch the Lady Gaga "Poker Face" litany all over again.

(slightly modified)

There was one phrase that Lady Gaga repeated more than a dozen times (actually twenty), and I had no idea what she was saying.  I listened as hard as I could, but the best I could make out was "Keereezmy, keereezmy", though sometimes I thought it was "Kill his mind, kill his mind". 

Since that time, I've probably heard the same song another thirty or forty times, and the line in question still sounds like "Keereezmy, keereezmy" or "Kill his mind, kill his mind".

I'm not the first person to use that word, but I probably mean it in a distinctive way.  What I'm talking about is not the usual sort of earworm / öhrwurm [recte ohrwurm] that gets stuck in your brain and you just can't make it go away.  That's the usual kind, and I get it fairly often, maybe once a week or so.  The attack I had this morning was more diabolical.

It seemed that every song I heard on the radio immediately became an earworm — including music without words.  After one song was embedded in my consciousness, the next one I heard would also intrude, until they all became a jumble.

"The Oldest (Known) Song of All Time"

Includes spectrograms of different reconstructions.

Although this YouTube was made three years ago, I am calling it to the attention of Language Log readers now that I know about it because it draws together many themes we have discussed in previous posts.

Competition among various AI services will spur them to further heights.

ChatGPT, Bing, Bard and DeepL: Which one offers the best Japanese-to-English translation?

by Karin Kaneko, Japan Times (7/18/23)

Kaneko, working with her editors at Japan Times, devised an ingenious test for comparing the quality of several translation tools in different categories of writing.  Since this experiment is so innately interesting and inherently revelatory, I will provide extensive quotations, adding romanization of the Japanese passages from GT (not an easy task for me!).  To be fair to GT, and simply out of curiosity to see how it compares with the newer type of AI translation services, I will also invite GT to translate all three of the chosen passages.  N.B.:  All three of the GT English translations have been added by me.

I am prone / prey to earworms.  Sometimes when I'm seriously affected / infected by one, it takes me weeks to get rid of the scourge, and I have to resort to all sorts of devices and deceptions to disinfect them from the space between my ears and the auditory cortex inside the lateral sulcus of the temporal lobe).  (N.B.:  I realize that there is at least one person on this list who detests slashes, but I find them useful for conveying a range of related meanings, among many other applications). 

Unfortunately, in certain cases all it takes is to hear the name of or a line from an infectious song to trigger the ear worm, e.g., "Karma Chameleon" by Culture Club (for about the first hundred times I heard this song, I thought Boy George was saying "cama-cama-cama chameleon" and I had no idea what it meant [I thought it was just ladi-ladi-ladi-da sounds like Janis Joplin in "Me and Bobby McGee"] (uh-oh, just entered a danger zone by saying that).  And now practically every time I turn on the radio, I hear Taylor Swift's "Karma", so I quickly get into double earworm territory.

This picture troubled me:

(source)

The next event in the Salon Sanctuary concert series is "Victorious Secret: Love Gamed and Gender Untamed in the Sparkling Courts of the Baroque":

Before the bars of gender binaries caged the mainstream operatic imagination, a golden age of fluidity guided the vocal soundscape. Virility declared itself with the castrato’s clarion high notes, while femininity spoke in earthy tessiture that plunged to shimmering depths.

Texts of the period revel in ambiguity, unfurling genderless narratives of anonymous lovers and unnamed beloveds. Stories of active pursuit and passive reverie remain alike at loose ends, with neat resolutions many movements away.

Please join us for this special program in honor of Pride Month, as the music of the past reveals a golden underground of nonbinary riches, accompanying us in our witness to a new Renaissance.

I listened to this Harry Styles song dozens of times on the radio, and every time I heard him sing "You know it's just the same as it was" over and over:

Sophie MacDonald asks:

I have been an on-and-off reader of Language Log for several years, and have always enjoyed your contributions, though I’m not a linguist. I do work on formal language theory sometimes, but very much within mathematics and computer science, not linguistics.

Recently, a music theorist colleague asked me for help with a question. She is engaging with the body of literature that applies linguistic ideas and methods to the study of music, and she is in particular working with the idea that it is hard to give a definition of a chord or a melodic phrase that actually makes sense within musical practice. She was asking for linguistic sources indicating the difficulty of saying what a word is, which might be useful for the point she is making.