Language Log

Bruce Rusk thought Language Log readers might be interested in a bit of digraphia from Vancouver: an “escape room” company (on this phenomenon, see here), with several locations in Vancouver and its environs, uses the Sinograph chū 出 ("go out / forth; exit") in place of the letter E in its name, “出XIT” (where it looks like a doubled, rotated E). The logo looks like this:

Yesterday morning on the commute to Penn, I was intrigued by a series of six articles in the latest New Yorker (5/16/16) that appeared under the rubric "Uninvent this":  Mary Karr on high heels, Charlie Brooker on dancing, Carrie Brownstein on conference calls, Lee Child on fiction, Alexandra Kleeman on mirrors….  When I reached the sixth and last one, I was so stunned that I almost dropped the magazine and nearly fell out of my seat.

Yesterday Google announced the open-source release of SyntaxNet,

an open-source neural network framework implemented in TensorFlow that provides a foundation for Natural Language Understanding (NLU) systems. Our release includes all the code needed to train new SyntaxNet models on your own data, as well as Parsey McParseface, an English parser that we have trained for you and that you can use to analyze English text.

Writing about Donald Trump's language, Ben MacIntyre ("Trump’s cleverest trick is sounding stupid", The Times 5/13/2016) brings in the usual suspects: Basic English, Flesch-Kincaid readability, "bigly". He starts this way:

In 1930, the English linguist CK Ogden invented a pared down, simplified form of language as a tool for teaching English as a second tongue. His “Basic English” included a vocabulary of just 850 words, 18 verbs, and a radically reduced grammar. Anyone with a grasp of Basic English would be able to understand anyone else with the same rudimentary skills.  

HG Wells was intrigued and horrified by the idea, and in his 1933 novel The Shape of Things to Come he depicted a totalitarian government ruling a world in which Basic English becomes the global lingua franca.  

Donald Trump has forged his own Basic English, a blunt, reduced, idiomatic form of speech that is comprehensible to any American with the educational skills of the average ten-year-old. Trumpspeak appals his critics, delights his supporters with its directness, and represents one of the keys to his successful bid for the Republican nomination.

Kyle Gorman stumbled upon something strange happening to the Wikipedia article on "List of blacklisted keywords in China".  The first item under "General concepts" is mínzhǔ 民主 , which means "democracy".  However, what Kyle saw there as the definition yesterday was "chicken nuggets".  After he told me about it, I went there and saw the same thing:  "chicken nuggets".

"The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) added 19 Singaporean terms and 13 Hong Kong terms in its latest update."  So reports BBC News in "Singapore terms join Oxford English Dictionary" (5/12/16)

Here are the lists:

Neville Ryant and I are experimenting with the use of audiobooks to study linguistic variation. As a contribution to that research, we'd like to ask Spanish-speaking readers to give their opinions about fifteen short samples, using an interactive survey posted here.

Thanks in advance for your help!

Yesterday's SMBC starts this way:

John Oliver on TV Science — featuring the TODD talks ("Trends, Observations, and Dangerous Drivel"):

"Figures reveal ethnic variations in prevalence of alcohol-related diseases", The Scotsman 5/9/2016 [emphasis added]:

Irish people living in Scotland are more than twice as likely to end up in hospital or die from alcohol-related diseases as white Scottish people, research has found.

The risk for women from a mixed ethnic background is almost 100 times that of white Scots, scientists concluded. […]

Compared to the white Scottish population, women of mixed ethnicity are 99% more likely to to [sic] require hospital stays or die from alcohol-related disease.

This is enough to warn us that we're dealing with a hard-to-believe level of numerical illiteracy. Apparently the writer interpreted "99% more" as meaning "almost 100 times" more — and no editor caught it, either at The Scotsman or at any of the other papers that reprinted the story.

Liwei Jiao sent me the following photograph of a framed picture that he bought:

I've mentioned my old friend Liu Yongquan in various posts and comments — see, inter alia, here, here, and here, where I wrote:

A colleague, Liu Yongquan 刘永泉, who spent most of his life working in Beijing as an applied linguist (especially concerned with machine translation and computer applications), spoke quite good MSM, referred to people who speak "like that" (as I have described colloquial Pekingese in the above paragraph) as méi xiūyǎng 没修养 ("lacking cultivation"). I'm not sure where Liu originally came from, though I think it was from somewhere in the northeast. He had a curious speech mannerism: whenever he said zhè'er / zhèr 这儿 ("here") and nà'er / nàr ("there"), they always came out as zhèher and nàher. For the first few months when I heard him talk like that, I thought that it was an affectation, but later I heard the same pronunciation from a few other people, so I suppose it has some basis in a regional variety of Mandarin.

Following up on this story, Matt Blaze makes a key point (and see the whole conversation):

(whispers to flight attendant): "I don't want to upset anyone, but I think the man in 15C is modeling credit default swaps".

— matt blaze (@mattblaze) May 7, 2016