Language Log

There's a huge controversy over whether the police commander uses the Mandarin word "tóngzhìmen 同志们" ("comrades") at around 2:15 in this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFbVZ8nt81Y&feature=youtu.be&fbclid=IwAR3OMBoGhctYGWQIBdkyVL1DX1dCQnrslp0g8Q1Q_WFV62BMlxOMyg8ChRA

Twitter is a good medium for this:

Here is the methodology: Quantum Bullshit Detector reads paper or article. If it is bullshit, Quantum Bullshit Detector labels it bullshit. If it is Not Bullshit, Quantum Bullshit Detector labels it Not Bullshit.

— Quantum Bullshit Detector (@BullshitQuantum) April 1, 2019

By Dianne Gallagher, Catherine Shoichet and Madeline Holcombe, "680 undocumented workers arrested in record-setting immigration sweep on the first day of school", CNN 8/8/2019 [emphasis added]:

After immigration authorities rounded up hundreds of workers in a massive sweep at seven Mississippi food processing plants, friends and family members are desperately searching for answers.

A crowd waited outside a plant in Morton, Mississippi, on Thursday morning, hoping authorities would release their loved ones. Many had been by later in the afternoon.

Video footage from CNN affiliates and Facebook live showed children sobbing as they waited for word on what had happened to their parents. […]

Speaking to reporters outside a plant in Canton, Mississippi, Mayor William Truly Jr. said he was concerned about the impact the arrests would have on the local economy — and on the community.

"I recognize that ICE comes under the Department of Homeland Security, and this is an order of the United States. There's nothing I don't think anybody can do about it," he said. "But my main concern is now, what happens to the children?"

Representative Devin Nunes (R-Calif) is described as a "farmer" on the ballots that voters in his district use. Back before the 2018 election, a group of his constituents petitioned to get this label changed, on the grounds that his family farm is a dairy they own in Iowa, in which he plays no operational role. The petition was rejected, but now Nunes is suing the petitioners, on the grounds that they conspired with "dark money" organizations to injure his campaign.

Rep. Nunes previously sued Twitter and various satirical Twitter authors including Devin Nunes' cow and Devin Nunes' Mom. The main result so far was to give @DevinCow more than 600,000 followers, and to generate a set of other Nunes-related parody authors on Twitter, such as @DevinNunesDog and @nunes_goat.

The people he's suing this time include Hope Nisley, a librarian at Fresno Pacific University, and Paul Buxman, a retired tree-fruit farmer.  We learn more about Mr. Buxman from an 8/2/2019  Fresno Bee story by Brianna Calix, "This is the farmer Devin Nunes’ campaign is suing. He’s praying for his congressman", including the fact that he's unlikely to see comparable gains in social-media impact:

Buxman only three months ago saw the internet. He doesn’t own a computer. He doesn’t have an email address.

“I’ve never seen a Twitter, or e-face, face deal – whatever that is,” he said. “I’m not a conspirator. I’ve never read anything Devin has written. Only since seeing the internet, I see why people are tired of it, with the bad comments. You’re better off without it.”

From a recent article on the Vanity Fair site by Abigail Tracy ("'There's Blood on the Hands of Members of Congress': Frustrated Democrats Debate Strategy as Mitch McConnell Holds Gun Control in His Pocket," published Aug. 6):

Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, who was elected weeks before the 2012 mass shooting in Newton, Connecticut, expressed dismay at the lack of inaction in Congress.

Obligatory screenshot:

It's our old friend, misnegation. Murphy was surely expressing dismay at the lack of action, or inaction, in Congress.

Thai sign over a sink in a restroom, from Alexander Bukh on Facebook:

From Nora Castle, who came across this restaurant which has just opened in Coventry, England:

China Daily News headline:

"Xinjiang Uygur sees big influx of visitors", by Cheng Si (8/7/19)

N.B.:  "Domestic travelers accounted for 98 percent of those visiting the region, while the top three sources of overseas visitors were Kazakhstan, Russia and Mongolia."

Never mind that it's hard to imagine why tourists would be rushing to the world's largest concentration camp.  The wording of the title left me reeling:  what is this "Xinjiang Uygur" that is seeing a "big influx of visitors"?  As the subject of a passive sentence about an increase of tourists, that locution strikes me as ungrammatical and unidiomatic.  (If they changed the last word and wrote "Xinjiang Uygur sees big influx of borrowings", then I could understand the first two words as referring to the standard Uyghur language of the region.)

I'm not the only person who feels that  way.

A Twitter thread from Incunabula, starting here:

Language development – in this case sign language – happens in real time, as the need arises. To ensure needed supplies reach them quickly, Hong Kong’s protesters have developed a unique system of hand signals, to send messages through the crowd about what equipment is required. pic.twitter.com/1G5YTGhya0

— Incunabula (@incunabula) August 5, 2019

From the Facebook page of the Hong Kong poet, Tammy Ho Lai-Ming, president of PEN Hong Kong, as reproduced in Andrea Lingenfelter, "At This Moment, Everyone Is a Revolution: The Poems of Tammy Ho Lai-Ming and the Hong Kong Crisis", Blog // Los Angeles Review of Books (8/4/19):

Taylor Telford, "‘Emotion detection’ AI is a $20 billion industry. New research says it can’t do what it claims", WaPo 7/31/2019:

In just a handful of years, the business of emotion detection — using artificial intelligence to identify how people are feeling — has moved beyond the stuff of science fiction to a $20 billion industry. Companies such as IBM and Microsoft tout software that can analyze facial expressions and match them to certain emotions, a would-be superpower that companies could use to tell how customers respond to a new product or how a job candidate is feeling during an interview. But a far-reaching review of emotion research finds that the science underlying these technologies is deeply flawed.

The problem? You can’t reliably judge how someone feels from what their face is doing.

A group of scientists brought together by the Association for Psychological Science spent two years exploring this idea. After reviewing more than 1,000 studies, the five researchers concluded that the relationship between facial expression and emotion is nebulous, convoluted and far from universal.

I recently had reasons to consult a book published in 1961, "Structure of Language and its Mathematical Aspects", Proceedings of Symposia in Applied Mathematics, Volume XII, edited by Roman Jakobson.

The table of contents:

W. V. Quine – Logic as a source of syntactical insights
Noam Chomsky – On the notion “Rule of Grammar”
Hilary Putnam – Some issues in the theory of grammar
Henry Hiż – Congrammaticality, batteries of transformations and grammatical categories
Nelson Goodman – Graphs for linguistics
Haskell B. Curry – Some logical aspects of grammatical structure
Yuen Ren Chao – Graphic and phonetic aspects of linguistic and mathematical symbols
Murray Eden – On the formalization of handwriting
Morris Halle – On the role of simplicity in linguistic descriptions
Robert Abernathy – The problem of linguistic equivalence
Hans. G. Herzberger – The joints of English
Anthony G. Oettinger – Automatic syntactic analysis and the pushdown store
Victor H. Yngve – The depth hypothesis
Gorden E. Peterson and Frank Harary – Foundations in phonemic theory
Joachim Lambek – On the calculus of syntactic types
H. A. Gleason, Jr. – Genetic relationship among languages
Benoit Mandelbrot – On the theory of word frequencies and on related Markovian models of discourse
Charles F. Hockett – Grammar for the hearer
Rulon Wells – A measure of subjective information
Roman Jakobson – Linguistics and communication theory

Photograph in the Wall Street Journal, "Hong Kong Protesters Fill Streets in District With History of Violent Clashes:  Police are under pressure to contain weeks of tear-gas-soaked demonstrations against mainland China’s growing influence", by John Lyons and Joyu Wang (8/3/19):