Language Log

Or so it would seem, but the people who have looked at this scroll so far cannot make much sense of what's written on it.

Leonardo Boiko writes "It's still mid-February, but I feel like this is a strong contender nonetheless".

The source: Joshua Rhett Miller, "Pastor says nothing weird was going on with bound naked man in car", New York Post 2/13/2018.

The key phrase: “I won’t deny that he began to take his clothes off and propositioned me, but I will deny, on a stack of Bibles with God as my witness, that I did nothing".

Lorena Barba, "Terminologies for Reproducible Research", arXiv.org 2/9/2018:

Reproducible research—by its many names—has come to be regarded as a key concern across disciplines and stakeholder groups. Funding agencies and journals, professional societies and even mass media are paying attention, often focusing on the so-called "crisis" of reproducibility. One big problem keeps coming up among those seeking to tackle the issue: different groups are using terminologies in utter contradiction with each other. Looking at a broad sample of publications in different fields, we can classify their terminology via decision tree: they either, A—make no distinction between the words reproduce and replicate, or B—use them distinctly. If B, then they are commonly divided in two camps. In a spectrum of concerns that starts at a minimum standard of "same data+same methods=same results," to "new data and/or new methods in an independent study=same findings," group 1 calls the minimum standard reproduce, while group 2 calls it replicate. This direct swap of the two terms aggravates an already weighty issue. By attempting to inventory the terminologies across disciplines, I hope that some patterns will emerge to help us resolve the contradictions.

What's going on here?  How did Justin Bieber become an infix (more precisely tmesis) inserted between the "O" and the "K" of "OK"? 

Piers Morgan, "The wife-beater, the witch and the White House: Why the hell did Trump ever tell Rob Porter and Omarosa ‘you’re hired’?", Daily Mail 2/13/2018:

'Shut the f**k up, a**hole,’ snarled Omarosa Manigault-Newman at me. ‘How are your kids going to feel when they wake up and discover their dad’s a f**king f*gg*t?’

Yes, this is the same Omarosa Manigault-Newman who just spent a year inside Donald Trump’s White House.

I’ve met a lot of vile human beings in my life, from dictators and terrorists to sex abusers and wicked conmen.

But I’ve never met anyone quite so relentlessly loathsome as Omarosa; a vicious, duplicitous, lying, conniving, backstabbing piece of work.

Which beggars the question: what the hell was she doing inside the world’s most powerful building for 12 months?

I'm reading Paul Midler's What's Wrong with China (Hoboken, NJ:  2018).  Midler has spent two decades as a business consultant in East Asia and speaks Mandarin.  His book is replete with penetrating observations about many aspects of society and culture and is solidly based on extensive first-hand experience and deep learning in Chinese history.  Its pages are filled with keen observations about language usage in China, but it was only when I got near the very end of the book (p. 224) that I was caught up short by this paragraph:

It's here. Not the car battery, and not another one of the movies, but the First DIHARD Speech Diarization Challenge and the associated Interspeech 2018 special session.

As discussed in "My summer" 6/22/2017, I spent a couple of months last summer in Pittsburgh working with a couple of dozen other people on a workshop project with the title "Enhancement and analysis of conversational speech", whose primary focus was automatic diarization: determination of who spoke when.

The opening and closing presentations for this workshop are available here — see also "Too cool to care", 8/12/2017, and Bergelson et al., "Enhancement and analysis of conversational speech: JSALT 2017", ICASSP 2018.

[This is a guest post by Bathrobe]

Global Times have an article on the archaeological site mentioned in this recent LL post:

"Questionable Sino-Mongolian toponymy" (1/18/18)

The Global Times article is "Chinese-Mongolian archeological team study mysterious Xiongnu city" (2/5/18) by Huang Tingting.  The relevant section is:

Since 2014, Song's institute, the National Museum of Mongolia and the International College of Nomadic Culture of Mongolia have been excavating the Khermen Tal City site at the junction of the Orkhon River and one of its major tributaries – the Tamir River, also named Hudgiyn Denj, literally Three Interconnected Cities.

People have been wondering if there has been a language problem between North Korean and South Korean players on the combined Korean women's hockey team at the Olympics.  As a matter of fact, there is a gulf between the two nations in the language of hockey itself.

It all started with an English language South Korean newspaper making unsubstantiated claims that a staff member on President Trump's National Security Council was said to have mentioned that a limited strike against North Korea "might help in the midterm elections".

Why would "rice rabbit" become a buzzword in China?

The answer is simple:  it's one of the ways that Chinese netizens try to get around the banning of #MeToo by government censors.  The CCP doesn't like #MeToo because it enables women to organize and speak out against harassment and repression.

"China Is Attempting To Muzzle #MeToo", by Leta Hong Fincher, NPR (2/1/18)

One of the linguistically interesting aspects of Jason Kelce's victory-parade speech was his pronoun usage:

And you know who the biggest underdog is?
It's y'all, Philadelphia!
For fifty two years, y'all have been waitin' for this.

Although this is a perfectly idiomatic use of y'all, one thing about it is unexpected — Jason Kelce is from Cleveland Heights, Ohio, which is not in the y'all zone from a geographical point of view.