Language Log

In China and in the Sinophone diaspora, although Hakka may be relatively few in number, they are disproportionately influential in practically every realm of society, politics, and culture:  government, the military, literature, film, cuisine, business, academia, and so on and so forth.

"Hakka made an official language" (Taipei Times, 12/30/17)

Hakka is to be made the primary language in townships where half the people are Hakka, while some civil servants will be required to take a Hakka language test.

Hakka thus joins Taiwanese / Hokkien / Hoklo and Mandarin as an official language of Taiwan.  There are, of course, many other Sinitic and non-Sinitic languages spoken in Taiwan, including the aboriginal languages (mostly Autronesian, but some Malayo-Polynesian).  All school children in Taiwan (as in China) learn English from a young age, and Japanese is also influential, both from its having been the language of government and education during the colonial period and from its powerful contemporary cultural and commercial attraction.

David Smith, "Trump Tower meeting with Russians 'treasonous', Steve Bannon says in explosive book", The Guardian 12/3/2017:

Bannon has criticised Trump’s decision to fire Comey. In Wolff’s book, obtained by the Guardian ahead of publication from a bookseller in New England, he suggests White House hopes for a quick end to the Mueller investigation are gravely misplaced.

“You realise where this is going,” he is quoted as saying. “This is all about money laundering. Mueller chose [senior prosecutor Andrew] Weissmann first and he is a money-laundering guy. Their path to fucking Trump goes right through Paul Manafort, Don Jr and Jared Kushner … It’s as plain as a hair on your face.”

Today's SMBC:

One of Matt Wuerker's 2017 political cartoons:

A couple of weeks ago, a strange language misunderstanding occurred during the Regular Press Conference of the PRC foreign ministry spokesperson, Hua Chunying, on December 19, 2017.

During the press conference, a Japanese journalist raised a question in English. He asked:  "Giant panda Xiang Xiang who has traveled to Japan made its formal debut in a Tokyo zoo today. What is your comment  on this?  What influence will this have on China-Japan relations?"

Maybe it was because of his strong Japanese accent or the noise at the time, Hua Chunying was not able to follow him, especially at the beginning of the question.  She misunderstood to whom he was referring and thought it was "Shan Shan" (杉山 — pronouncing that name à la chinoise), a Japanese official. Therefore, she answered with standard diplomatic language. Not until a Chinese journalist pointed out her misinterpretation did Hua manage to move on and make it right.

I learned this morning that Aravind Joshi died yesterday at his home.

Among Aravind's many awards are the 1997 IJCAI Award for Research Excellence; the first ACL Lifetime Achievement Award, in 2002; the 2003 David E. Rumelhart Prize; and the 2005 Benjamin Franklin Medal, "[f]or his fundamental contributions to our understanding of how language is represented in the mind, and for developing techniques that enable computers to process efficiently the wide range of human languages."

Among his many fundamental contributions are the invention of Tree Adjoining Grammar, a "mildly context-sensitive" grammatical formalism that provides enough power to handle the phenomena of human language syntax while remaining computationally tractable; and the elucidation and application of Centering Theory, a framework for exploring "relationships among focus of attention, choice of referring expression, and perceived coherence of utterances within a discourse segment".

Aravind's personal influence has been just as important as his intellectual contributions. In nearly every academic and industrial research group in computational linguistics around the world today, you'll find his former students, postdocs, and colleagues. And you'll also find Aravind's connections widespread among theoretical linguists, sociolinguists,  psycholinguists, and even philosophers interested in language.

As we enter the second half of the 15th year since we started Language Log, we've been reflecting on the past and planning for the future.

Yesterday BBC's Radio 4 program "Today", the cultural counterpart of NPR's "Morning Edition", invited into the studio a robot from the University of Sheffield, the Mishalbot, which had been trained to conduct interviews by exposure to the on-air speech of co-presenter Mishal Husain. They let it talk for three minutes with the real Mishal. (video clip here, at least for UK readers; may not be available in the US). Once again I was appalled at the credulity of journalists when confronted with AI. Despite all the evidence that the robot was just parroting Mishalesque phrases, Ms Husain continued with the absurd charade, pretending politely that her robotic alter ego was really conversing. Afterward there was half-serious on-air discussion of the possibility that some day the jobs of the Today program presenters and interviewers might be taken over by robots.

The main thing differentiating the Sheffield robot from Joseph Weizenbaum's ELIZA program of 1966 (apart from a babyish plastic face and movable fingers and eyes, which didn't work well on radio) was that the Mishalbot is voice-driven (with ELIZA you had to type on a terminal). So the main technological development has been in speech recognition engineering. On interaction, the Mishalbot seemed to me to be at sub-ELIZA level. "What do you mean? Can you give an example?" it said repeatedly, at various inappropriate points.

Looking for something else, I stumbled on this unexpected Google Books description of Peter Guralnick's Searching for Robert Johnson:

The first two conditions, along with eight others, are covered in this interesting Sixth Tone article:

"An Awkward, Greasy Year: China’s Top Slang of 2017 " (12/28/17) by Kenrick Davis

Davis's presentation is excellent, so let us begin this post with two montages accompanying his article.

From Paul Sleigh:

From Geoff Dawson:

On display in a current exhibition at the National Library of Australia.

For reasons not strictly relevant to what follows, Yves Schabes and I have been analyzing the novels of Agatha Christie. (For the not-strictly-relevant background, see Xuan Le et al., "Longitudinal detection of dementia through lexical and syntactic changes in writing: a case study of three British novelists", Literary and Linguistic Computing 2011, and Graeme Hirst & Vanessa Feng, "Changes in Style in Authors with Alzheimer's Disease", English Studies 2012.)

It occurred to me to wonder whether the proportion of quoted dialogue might vary from text to text — and since the textual properties of dialogue are likely to be different from those of the narrative voice, this might influence the results of comparisons. So I ran a quick check on seven of Christie's novels, using as proxy the proportion of characters in the novels' texts in spans between quotation marks.