Language Log

Long, but worth reading — Tom Simonite, "What Really Happened When Google Ousted Timnit Gebru", Wired 6/8/2021.

The crux of the story is this paper, which is now available on the ACM's website: Emily Bender, Timnit Gebru, Angelina McMillan-Major, and Shmargaret Shmitchell, "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?🦜" In Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, pp. 610-623. 2021.

As a result of a (somewhat strange) review process, described at length in the Wired article, Timnit Gebru and Margaret Mitchell were fired (or declared to have resigned) from their leadership roles in Google's Ethical AI group.

I was going to title this post "Insect vocalisms", but thought better of it, because I didn't want anyone to think I was claiming any kind of linguistic quality for the mind-boggling acoustic phenomenon that I witnessed on Saturday.  Though what I heard was not language in any way, shape, or form, it did impart an overwhelming message.

I was on a long run in the mountains of western Pennsylvania.  I started out from Breezewood and headed for Bedford along Route 30 (Lincoln Highway).  As I ran happily at a comfortable clip, I was puzzled by a shrill ringing noise that accompanied me all the way.  I couldn't tell where the loud, high-pitched sound was coming from.  For awhile I thought it might be some mining operation underground, but I soon dismissed that theory because it lasted too long and I seemed to be enveloped in the noise.  All around me were forests and woods, and the constant ringing seemed to be emanating from them.

The question of language survival in Taiwan is far more complex than whether Taiwanese (and Hakka and Cantonese) will die at the hands of Mandarin.  Helen Davidson probes the real situation in:

"Healing words: Taiwan’s tribes fight to save their disappearing languages
The island’s Indigenous people are in a race against time to save their native tongues before they are lost forever"

Guardian (6/8/21)

The author introduces us to Panu Kapamumu, speaker and guardian of his native language, Thao / Ngan.  Right away, we come up against a thorny thicket of linguistic verities:  "Normally, Kapamumu speaks in a mix of the two languages he knows better than his own – Chinese and English."

Yesterday I got a strange email message, apparently from American Express. The first strange thing: gmail showed it with no Subject and no content:

But then it got stranger…

Atul Gawande, "Why doctors hate their computers", 11/5/2018, underlines the often-noted difficulty of working with badly-designed software:

I’ve come to feel that a system that promised to increase my mastery over my work has, instead, increased my work’s mastery over me. I’m not the only one. A 2016 study found that physicians spent about two hours doing computer work for every hour spent face to face with a patient—whatever the brand of medical software. In the examination room, physicians devoted half of their patient time facing the screen to do electronic tasks. And these tasks were spilling over after hours. 

But the most interesting part of the article, at least for me, was the discussion of reading the  records rather than writing them.

From Geoff Pullum's 10/21/2004 LLOG post:

My student Nick Reynolds reports on a beautiful example of singular they found in an exchange of graffiti. Someone had scrawled this on the wall:

Vote Arnold 4 prez

— recommending a vote for Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger as President of the United States. Someone else, mindful perhaps of Schwarzenegger's ineligibility for that post, had scrawled something obscene below it about the first writer's ignorance. But a third person, mindful of how the future may resemble the world of the Terminator movies in which our governor had his greatest movie successes, added this response:

This person is not ignorant.
They are a prophet.
The machines will rule us.

From a 4/27/2021 Penn State Faculty Senate resolution on "Removal of Gendered & Binary Terms from Course and Program Descriptions", about how to "[m]ove away from the use of gendered pronouns when referring to students, faculty, staff, and guests in course descriptions and degree programs":

Replace he/him/his and she/her/hers with they/them/theirs

"Lying flat" used to be a common phrase referring to people vapidly lounging around with no particular deeper meaning. But now it’s becoming a trend for the younger generation who don’t want to make an effort to work so hard as they did in the past. This has become more popular since COVID-19 as more people start to work from home (I guess it’s not as intensive as what they are used to do in offices).

生育还是生肓？ pic.twitter.com/GBPx07QSaT

— Chenyu_Liang (@chenyuliang) May 31, 2021

It rained for the last two or three days, so someone wrote me a note saying she was looking forward to "ameagari no aozora 雨上がりの青空" ("blue sky after the rain").  I knew what she meant, but when I started to analyze the semantics of the verb, I was drawn into a vortex of uncertainty about how the simple verb "agaru 上がる", whose primary meaning is "rise; go up", could mean "stop".  That, however, is to look at the kanji shàng 上 with the eyes of a specialist in Sinitic languages, where it has these meanings:

preposition:  on; above; upon; on top of

adjective:  upper; last; previous; superior; preceding; topmost; overhead; higher; better

adverb:  up

verb:  rise; go up; board; mount; climb; apply; send in; fill; present; leave for; serve; submit; supply; first  

prefix:  over-

From a Telegram channel on an Instagram site (canto_calligraphy):

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Cantonese Calligraphy 粵書 (@canto_calligraphy)

Below is a guest post by Devin Grammon and Anna Babel.

Both linguists and non-linguists commonly use the term “native speaker” to describe someone who grew up speaking a particular language and who is fully proficient in that language. Often, we invest native speakers with authority regarding how someone should speak a language – for example, native speakers are often preferred as instructors in the second-language classroom, or sought after as linguistic informants for field methods classes or as research assistants for fieldwork or analysis of linguistic data. Indeed, the idea of being a native speaker is tied to ideas of authenticity, as in the commonly held dialectological wisdom that elderly, rural male speakers with all their teeth are the best informants. But where does the term come from, and what does it really mean?

As part of the run-up to the celebration of the 100th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) that will take place in July, scenes like this are increasingly common on the streets of the PRC:

"We Need To Get Real About How the Pandemic Will End:  Even more transmissible new variants means that more people will get infected or vaccinated, and that's how it will all end".  By Zeynep, Insight (5/28/21):

[A]s far as I can tell from vast amounts of trial and real life evidence, every single vaccine out there does a very very good job against preventing severe disease and death.

If what Zeynep says about "every single vaccine out there" is true, we are destined for some dire end times indeed.