Language Log

In "Text-as-data journalism? Highlights from a decade of SOTU speech coverage" (Online Journalism Blog 2/5/2018), Barbara Maseda surveys some of the ways that "media has used text-as-data to cover State of the Union addresses over the last decade".

When Erica Hendry asked me for thoughts about features of Donald Trump's style in last week's SOTU, the only contribution I could think to make to her article ("Trump’s language shifts from ‘I’ to ‘we’ in State of the Union address",  PBS News Hour 1/31/2018) was the thought that in a speech like that one, which the president delivered but probably didn't write, the main indications of his personal rhetorical style would be the place where what he said deviated from the RAPFD ("Remarks As Prepared for Delivery").

For several years, John McWhorter has been studying Mandarin very seriously.  He and I have, from time to time, corresponded about the best, most effective, most efficient way to do that.  After years of assiduous learning, it seems that he has recently experienced a kind of satori about one of the most challenging aspects of acquiring fluency in spoken Mandarin:  the tones.

There was a big city-wide party last night here in Philadelphia, but the Philadelphia Orchestra, got on board back in early December:

"Alexa Loses Her Voice" won USA Today's Super Bowl Ad Meter:

I believe that this was also the first Super Bowl ad to raise a technical question about speech technology.

Douglas Hofstadter has a critical article in the latest issue of The Atlantic (1/30/18):

"The Shallowness of Google Translate:  The program uses state-of-the-art AI techniques, but simple tests show that it's a long way from real understanding." (1/30/18).

Hofstadter criticizes GT for not being as good as himself at translating from French, German, and Chinese into English.  I will let others respond to his critique of the French and German translations, but I will comment on his critique of the Chinese to English translation.

Yesterday's edition of the comedy radio news quiz "Wait, wait, don't tell me" featured some discussion of the Talking Orcas story that Geoff Pullum discussed a few days ago in "Orca emits speech-like sound; reporters go insane", 1/31/2018. The whole discussion is worth a listen:

On the weekend of January 19-20, 2018, there was a Tangut Workshop at Yale University.  Organized by Valerie Hansen and sponsored by the Yale Council of East Asian Studies, this was an intense, exciting learning experience for the 35 or so people who were in the room most of the time.

Many readers may be scratching their heads and asking, "Tangut?  What's that?  And why should we at Language Log be concerned with it?"

At some point in the recent past, after a few long and fuzzy quasi-days checking annotations for the DIHARD challenge, I found myself dozing off while re-reading a random e-book that turned out to be Charles Stross's Halting State, and was caught short by this sentence:

They call this place the Athens of the North — there’s got to be something you can do by yourself on a summer night, hasn’t there?

I thought to myself, "That's got to be wrong, doesn't it?"

The following article by Xiong Bingqi appeared in today's (2/1/18) China Daily, China's leading English language newspaper:  "Ancient texts not a burden on students".  Here are the first two paragraphs of the article:

The newly revised senior high school curriculum includes more ancient Chinese poems and prose for recitation, sparking a public discussion on whether it will increase the burden on students. A Ministry of Education official has said recitation should not be regarded as a burden, as it will make students more familiar with traditional culture.

Some people consider an increase in the number of subjects, texts or homework raises the students' burden, while reducing them eases their burden. But they fail to identify the real source of students' burden. By learning something they are interested in or something that is inspiring, the students will actually gain in knowledge and resolve, so such content cannot be an additional burden on them.