Language Log

Seen by François Lang at the meat counter at The Great Wall in Rockville, MD:

Taiwanese may be fading in Taiwan (see "Selected Readings" below; except for foreign diplomats and the like!), but in France it is thriving:

"Language of our own: Fun Taiwanese classes gain popularity in France"

By Tseng Ting-hsuan and James Lo, Focus Taiwan (8/10/2023)

In a classroom in Paris, Taiwan's top envoy to France François Wu (吳志中) was serenaded with ballads from his homeland, sung not in French or Mandarin, but in Taiwanese Hoklo.

For approximately two hours, the University of Languages and Civilizations (Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales, INALCO) classroom was filled with the sounds of French students trying their hand at performing songs in Taiwan's version of the Southern Min dialect.

From Stan Carey at Sentence First, a lucid and deeply empirical dive into the question "Has ‘greenlit’ been greenlighted?".

From Tom Mazanac:

I came across this sign on the subway recently:

"Pèihuò 配货" is not a new term to me.  I knew it quite a while ago as it is used in supply chain studies with the meaning of "distribution; prepare goods for delivery according to an order"), as in the expression "pèihuò zhōngxīn 配货中心" ("distribution center").  Now, though, it has morphed into something altogether different.   if you Google "配货" today, it's all about this:

"‘Quiet luxury’ trend gets a fresh spin in China"

The stealth-wealth look has come to signify a new form of status

By Annachiara Biondi, Financial Times (8/14/23)

Despite the evidence of my most recent relevant post, the best current speech-to-text systems still make mistakes that a literate and informed human wouldn't.

In this recent YouTube video on the history of robotics research, the automatic closed-captioning system renders "DARPA" as "Dartmouth":

From the weibo of People's Daily  (Rénmín rìbào 人民日報):

On the inside (N.B.) doors of a lift in Wuhan (yes that [in]famous Wuhan):

"Lost in translation — navigating accents in a changing world"

Joe Horgan, Irish Post (8/7/23)

An engaging story:

WHEN I first started associating with English people I had to translate when my father spoke to them. I’d grown up in a very large Irish community in an immigrant area in an English city and it wasn’t until I went away to a northern English polytechnic that I really got to know English people.

When they met my dad he would speak and they would smile and look worriedly at me and I’d say he’s asking if you want a cup of tea and if you’ve eaten.

Perhaps Victor can point us to an analogous ambiguity in Chinese poetico-political history:

It's hard to keep up with the waves of hype and anti-hype in the LLM space these days.

Here's something from a few weeks ago that I missed — Xiaoxuan Wang et al., "SciBench: Evaluating College-Level Scientific Problem-Solving Abilities of Large Language Models", arxiv.org 7/20/2023:

I've always been fond of this pretty, little word, but I seldom use it in my own speech (maybe once every five or ten years), because it seems too triumphant.  This morning, however, after a long, numerical list of steps that some colleagues and I need to take, followed by a conclusion we wished to reach, I just blurted out "Voilà!" and felt good about it.

…if you haven't noticed, is good. There are many applications, from conversing with Siri and Alexa and Google Assistant, to getting voicemail in textual form, to automatically generated subtitles, and so on. For linguists, one parochial (but important) application is accurate automatic transcription of speech corpora, and the example that motivates this post comes from that world.