Language Log

David Moser has sent in another example for what he calls our xiaobian 小便 ("lesser convenience") collection:

The sign says: Xiǎobiàn bùshì rén 小便不是人. A literal translation would be "Urination is not a person." Since that doesn't make sense, we might reinterpret the sign as "Urination is not human." But that doesn't make sense either, since we all have to urinate at regular intervals: what could be more human?

This started out to be a short report on some cool, socially relevant crowdsourcing for Egyptian Arabic. Somehow it morphed into a set of musings about the (near-) future of natural language processing…

A statistical revolution in natural language processing (henceforth NLP) took place in the late 1980s up to the mid 90s or so. Knowledge based methods of the previous several decades were overtaken by data-driven statistical techniques, thanks to increases in computing power, better availability of data, and, perhaps most of all, the (largely DARPA-imposed) re-introduction of the natural language processing community to their colleagues doing speech recognition and machine learning.

There was another revolution that took place around the same time, though. When I started out in NLP, the big dream for language technology was centered on human-computer interaction: we'd be able to speak to our machines, in order to ask them questions and tell them what we wanted them to do. (My first job out of college involved a project where the goal was to take natural language queries, turn them into SQL, and pull the answers out of databases.) This idea has retained its appeal for some people, e.g., Bill Gates, but in the mid 1990s something truly changed the landscape, pushing that particular dream into the background: the Web made text important again. If the statistical revolution was about the methods, the Internet revolution was about the needs. All of a sudden there was a world of information out there, and we needed ways to locate relevant Web pages, to summarize, to translate, to ask questions and pinpoint the answers.

Fifteen years or so later, the next revolution is already well underway.

According to James C. McKinley Jr., "Rare Storm Hits Texas, Causing Chaos for Drivers", NYT 2/4/2011:

Paul McDonald, a forecaster with the service, said the mass of arctic air that had blanketed much of the country had caused three days of frigid weather in Texas as well, freezing the ground. Then overnight, two low-pressure systems moved into the state — one from New Mexico and one from the Gulf of Mexico — and collided with the cold air, producing snow and ice. Though Texas usually has balmy enough temperatures this time of year to melt ice and snow as it hits the roadways, this time the pavement iced over.

“If the air had not been so cold, we would have seen a little light draggle, but cause the air was so chilly it turned into snow,” he said. “We get about one event like this every 10 years.”

The most recent xkcd takes on the scourge of Trochee Fixation:

(Click on the image for a larger version.)

Dean Barrett sent in this thought for the day from Yunnan Province:

The English rendering of the Chinese sign sounds somewhat profound and even poetic, but what does it really mean?

Yesterday's Beetle Bailey, pointed out by Karen Davis:

[Update: a memorial page for Bill, to which people can contribute thoughts, pictures, etc., can be found here.]

It saddens me greatly to report that William F. Shipley passed away on January 20, 2011. He was 89 years old. Bill was my first linguistics professor, my first advisor and mentor, my first academic collaborator, and my dear, dear friend. I already miss him more than I am able to put into words.

Bill completed his dissertation under the direction of Mary Haas at UC Berkeley in 1959, a grammar of the Native California language Maidu (published in the University of California Publications in Linguistics series in 1964, with a dictionary and texts published in 1963). In 1966, he left an appointment at Berkeley to be among the very first faculty to participate in the big experiment that UC Santa Cruz was at the time, and he retired from UCSC in 1991.

William Page, in his comment on "Happy New Year Rabbit You," correctly informs us that it is au courant to refer to gay men as "rabbits" (tùzǐ 兔子).  As for why gay men are referred to as "rabbits," this custom is said to have its basis in "Tale of the Rabbit God," about a deity who protected homosexuals, from Zǐbùyǔ 子不語 (What the Master [i.e., Confucius] Did Not Talk About), an old collection of strange stories by the famous Qing Dynasty author, Yuan Mei (1716-1797).  There are other speculations about the origins of using tùzǐ 兔子 ("rabbit") to refer to male homosexuals, but none of them seems as convincing to me as the one I have just offered.

There are many related terms, such as tùerye 兔兒爺 ("wabbit dad"), which refers to a gay. And tù bǎobǎo 兔寶寶 ("bunny darling / precious") refers to someone who is the girl boy in a gay relationship.

In the latest Tom The Dancing Bug:

All you whomophiles who were outraged by last month's casual reference to the death of whom, your day joke has come!

As my friends and acquaintances know, I'm a rather unreliable correspondent. I write a lot of messages, and I make a lot of phone calls, but the list of messages and calls that I ought to make always grows larger.  In fact, there seems to be a sort of positive feedback principle at work, whereby every time I discharge a communicative obligation, that very action somehow pushes several new tasks onto the stack. A similar problem afflicts my To Blog list, which reliably expands in direct proportion to my attempts to reduce it. No doubt I'm Doing It Wrong.

A few days ago, Michael Ramscar sent me a fascinating series of email messages, in which he wove together several recent LL themes:  coffee cup sizes, difficulties with multiple negation, word order typology, and the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. My contribution was limited to various forms of "you don't say!" and "tell me more", so I proposed, with his permission, to edit his emails together into a guest post.

But this morning, when I searched my email archive for the messages in question, I discovered a much earlier note from Michael that's almost equally interesting. So this one comes first. I'll get back before long to his theory about coffee drinks, modifier order, grammatical gender, and the cognitive processing of negation — really I will!