A few months ago, the distinguished member of the Académie française Alain Finkielkraut was featured in a video where he deplored the loss of “a word which used to exist in the [French] language and disappeared from it”, ie. “compersion”. Apparently, little does he know that “compersion” was actually coined in the 1970s by the Kerista Community of San Francisco, in the context of polyamory, to describe the joy felt in knowing that your better half finds pleasure and happiness with other sexual partners! So that, far from being the old French word that he thinks it is, it is actually an English borrowing from the late 20th century… in other terms, the very nemesis of the Académie — not to mention the moral overtones of the term, quite the antithesis of the conservatism of that institution…
Laelia Veron, a colleague from the Université d’Orléans, Christophe Benzitoun from the Université de Lorraine and I worked together on debunking Finkielkraut’s claim for an academically informed yet humorous biweekly spot that Laelia has on French public radio France Inter.
He also formed a close friendship with the Austrian-born philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, the founder of linguistic philosophy, who was a Fellow of Trinity College and later became Professor of Philosophy at the University. They met regularly on afternoon walks and engaged in endless discussions during the time that Wittgenstein prepared his second book entitled The Nature of Philosophical Investigations, in which he considerably modified his original position put forward in his first book, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. In the introduction to the later work Wittgenstein paid the most generous tribute to Sraffa's unceasing interest in philosophical problems and to his capacity and readiness to engage in endless discussions. He stated in the Introduction to his second book (translated from the German original) that 'it was this stimulus to which I owe the most momentous ideas of this book' (italics in the original).1
1It was a question of Sraffa's which convinced him that language and reality do not necessarily have a common logical form.
The psammo- component of the winning word in this year's Scripps National Spelling Bee, psammophile, is of interest to me because it is a good example of European-Sinitic lexical correspondence. The Ancient Greek word psámmos (ψάμμος) means ‘sand’. When used together with a definite article (ἡ ψάμμος), it also means ‘the sandy desert’. Examples can be found in Herodotus: ‘the sandy desert’ of Libya (4.173), Ethiopia (3.25), and Egypt (3.26). In Sinitic, ‘sandy desert’ is 沙漠 (MSM shāmò / Tw soa-bô·). From psammos to shāmò, it is easy to see three processes of simplification that may have taken place to transform the Greek loan: simplification of the initial cluster ps- > s-, that of the medial -mm- > -m-, and the loss of the final -s. The simplification of ps- > s- is also seen in Greek derived English words such as psyche, pseudo-, and psalm.
Yuan (?) dynasty (1271-1368) jade seal in the Bristol Museum:
Know what language this is, or even what it says? Yes? Please get back to me. No? Please retweet it until somebody does. (But be aware, it's stumped some quite clever people who've already been asked, so it isn't obvious) Also, advance apologies if it isn't the right way up 1/2 pic.twitter.com/w7ZFggITAs
Listen to Malaysian comedian Nigel Ng (aka "Uncle Roger"), who has had his Weibo and bilibili social media accounts banned due to "violation of relevant regulations":
The ban comes one day after Ng uploaded this clip to various social media platforms. pic.twitter.com/8Wwf2aTrfZ
I've recently seen many articles like this one, "You probably don't need to learn to code anymore" (Medium 6/5/2023), arguing that Large Language Models will make human programming (and human programmers) unnecessary. These arguments puzzle me, because my experience with LLMs suggests that they can't be relied on even for very simple programming tasks. After the fold, I'll give a recent example from (the experimental version of) Bard.
Analysis – Bilingual road signs send a signal – that the country values te reo Māori. But going bilingual was confusing and National would not support it, National's Simeon Brown told voters in blue-ribbon Tauranga recently.
However, a quick scan reveals the answer itself is not as straightforward as some of the commentary on the debate has suggested – that it is a straw man.
I was stunned when I read the following article in the South China Morning Post, both because it was published in Hong Kong, which is now completely under the censorial control of the People's Republic of China (PRC) / Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and because it raises some disturbing political issues and troubling linguistic problems.
Confucius uncovered the truth of the Shang dynasty but agreed with King Wen and the Duke of Zhou to cover up disturbing facts
Beijing’s claimed triumph over Covid-19, for instance, may not echo with all who endured the draconian quarantines.
