Language Log

Sean Swanick, "Shaikh Zubayr", Duke University Libraries Blog, 4/13/2016:

A man lost at sea, having drifted far away from his native Iraqi lands, comes a shore in England. In due time he will be nicknamed the Bard of Avon but upon landing on the Saxon coast, his passport reportedly read: Shaikh Zubayr. A knowledgeable man with great writing prowess from a small town called Zubayr in Iraq. He came to be known in the West as Shakespeare and was given the first name of William. William Shakespeare of Zubayr.

There are many euphemisms for saying that someone died, two of the most common being "passed away" and "passed on".  Lately, I've been hearing more and more people announce that so-and-so simply "passed".  The first few times that I heard it spoken that way, I thought it sounded strange.  Now, however, I'm so accustomed to this usage that it almost sounds normal, though I'm still barely to the point of being comfortable in saying it myself.

Anh Yeo is a Chinese from Vietnam.  Currently she is studying in a graduate program of Chinese language and literature at Tsinghua University.  To earn pocket money, she has taken up a job teaching Southeast Asia office workers Mandarin online.  In response to this post "Aborted character simplification in the mid-1930s" (10/5/24), which had much to do with character simplification (or not) in Singapore, she wrote to me as follows:

I had two lessons tonight teaching Pinyin. Southeast Asians learn Pinyin fast (similar alphabet + existence of tones in Thai and Vietnamese), but because of that students are reliant on Pinyin and cannot remember characters! I have students learning for 3-4 months and still have to read off Pinyin (recognizing fewer than 50 characters). I always thought the coexistence of characters and Latin alphabet in Mandarin interesting!

Andreas Stolcke responds to "English is innocent" (10/10/2024):

The historical facts cited are correct, but they don't explain why the frequency of 's rose in the post-WW2 period, and again after about 2005 (= the internet), as indicated by the Google Ngrams plot below.

The bump in the post-war era (after 1957) could be an effect of the Allied occupation (delayed by the book publishing process), which was reversed by the mid-1990s, and then encouraged again by the internet half a century later.

So my bet is still on an English (language) influence.

This paper's content is interesting — Mirzadeh, Iman, Keivan Alizadeh, Hooman Shahrokhi, Oncel Tuzel, Samy Bengio, and Mehrdad Farajtabar. "GSM-Symbolic: Understanding the Limitations of Mathematical Reasoning in Large Language Models." arXiv preprint arXiv:2410.05229 (2024). In short, the authors found that small changes in Grade-School Mathematics benchmark questions, like substituting different numerical values or adding irrelevant clauses, caused all the tested LLMs to do worse. You should read the whole thing for the details, to which I'll return another time.

Things are happening very fast with this "experimental" internet search tool.  I realize that it is a new technology, so naturally there are bugs and kinks that have to be worked out, and I don't want to be too harsh with it.  Moreover, at a certain level, it is already serving a yeomanly purpose.

For instance, I asked Google, "should ich be capitalized in the middle of a sentence".  AI Overview (henceforth AIO) promptly stepped in and provided the following straightforward response:

No, ich should not be capitalized in the middle of a sentence in German. In German, the first-person singular pronoun ich (I) is only capitalized when it is the first word in a sentence.

In English, the singular “I” is always capitalized when used as a first-person personal pronoun. This includes all contractions of “I”, such as “I'm” and “I'll”.

Other things to capitalize in the middle of a sentence include…. [details omitted here]

Jonathan Weisman, "As Trump Arrives, Aurora Insists It’s Not the ‘War Zone’ He Sees", NYT 10/11/2024.

And today's xkcd:

Christine Oh, "Wolf Humanities Center hosts linguist, columnist Ben Zimmer for lecture on 'keywords'", The Daily Pennsylvanian 10/11/2024:

The Wolf Humanities Center hosted Wall Street Journal language columnist Ben Zimmer at the ARCH building for a talk titled “Lexical Sleuthing in the Digital Age: On the Trail of Keywords and their Cultural Worlds” on Oct. 9.

Zimmer — who was a research associate at Penn’s former Institute for Research in Cognitive Science from 2005 to 2006 — gave a presentation on lexicology and linguistics followed by a question and answer session with roughly 40 attendees. The event drew a crowd of linguists and language enthusiasts from Penn's campus and the Philadelphia area.

[N.B.:  If you don't have time to read through this long and complicated post, cut to the "Closing note" at the bottom.]

Lately when I do Google searches, especially on obscure and challenging subjects, AI Overview leaps into the fray and takes precedence at the very top, displacing Wikipedia down below, and even Google's own responses, which have been increasingly frequent in recent months, are pushed over to the top right.

AI Overview, on first glance, seems convenient and useful, but — when I start to dig deeper, I find that there are problems.  As an example, I will give the case of the name of the Snake River, and maybe mention a few other instances of AI Overview falling short, but still being swiftly, though superficially, helpful.

Yesterday's guest post by Andreas Stolcke, "English influence on German spelling", covered Duden's grudging admission that 's is allowed in certain restricted contexts, and noted the widespread negative reaction attributing this "Deppenapostrophe" (= "idiot's apostrophe") to the malign influence of English.

But Heike Wiese, via Joan Maling, sent a link to Anatol Stefanowitsch, "Apostrophenschutz", Sprachlog 4/26/2007, which offers a very different take.

Ian Prasad Philbrick and Ashley Wu, "The 9 Elements of a Trump Rally", NYT 10/8/2024:

The energy for Mr. Trump’s third White House campaign comes from his rallies. Since President Biden dropped out of the race and Vice President Kamala Harris took the helm, Mr. Trump has held nearly 20 of them, speaking for about 90 minutes at each.

Like most politicians, he repeats things at every speech. Unlike most politicians, he offers a grim view of the country, makes up nicknames for his opponents and pledges to use the power of the government to punish his rivals.

To help readers experience what a Trump rally is like, we used video to break down the nine themes he consistently returns to.

Below is a guest post by Andreas Stolcke.

This is an item maybe worthy of a note on Language Log — Philip Oltermann, "Germans decry influence of English as ‘idiot’s apostrophe’ gets official approval", The Guardian 10/7/2024:

A relaxation of official rules around the correct use of apostrophes in German has not only irritated grammar sticklers but triggered existential fears around the pervasive influence of English.

Establishments that feature their owners’ names, with signs like “Rosi’s Bar” or “Kati’s Kiosk” are a common sight around German towns and cities, but strictly speaking they are wrong: unlike English, German does not traditionally use apostrophes to indicate the genitive case or possession. The correct spelling, therefore, would be “Rosis Bar”, “Katis Kiosk”, or, as in the title of a recent viral hit, Barbaras Rhabarberbar.

However, guidelines issued by the body regulating the use of Standard High German orthography have clarified that the use of the punctuation mark colloquially known as the Deppenapostroph (“idiot’s apostrophe”) has become so widespread that it is permissible – as long as it separates the genitive ‘s’ within a proper name.

The current xkcd comic: