Following up on recent posts suggesting that speech-to-text is not yet a solved problem ("Shelties On Alki Story Forest", "The right boot of the warner of the baron", "AI is brittle"), here's a YouTube link to a lecture given in July of 2018 by Michael Picheny, "Speech Recognition: What's Left?" The whole thing is worth following, but I particularly draw your attention to the section starting around 50:06, where he reviews the state of human and machine performance with respect to "noise, speaking style, accent, domain robustness, and language learning capabilities", with the goal to "make the case that we have a long way to go in [automatic] speech recognition".
Apollo Wu, who was a long-term translator at United Nations headquarters, sent me the following note:
Dear Victor,
I wish to acquire a language tool for two way conversions between Pinyin and Hanzi texts. Do you know if any do exist? I sometimes write Pinyin texts and want to convert them to characters for some Chinese readers who are not familiar with Pinyin.
In the last few days, we've been discussing the notion of "national language" and its relationship to other languages and topolects spoken in China. Here's a famous 6:47 comic skit filmed in 1980 featuring the late Mǎ Jì 马季 and his straight man, Zhào Yán 赵炎, called "Guǎngdōng huà 广东话" ("Cantonese") (I will describe its contents below):
Many people have been asking me about the use of the term Guóyǔ 国语 ("National Language") for "Mandarin" in Xinjiang today. Here's an inquiry from Peter Moody:
I have encountered what seems to be an anomaly in contemporary Chinese usage, and have been assured that you are among those most capable of addressing it.
I was reading an analysis by a Darren Byler, a "Xinjiang Scholar," of a 2017 classified directive from Zhu Hailun, Gauleiter of Xinjiang, on how properly to run the concentration camps in that territory (https://supchina.com/2019/12/04/a-xinjiang-scholars-close-reading-of-the-china-cables/). (I have not looked either at the full English translation of these directives, or the Chinese text, although both are available. I figured the analysis would give the gist of them.)
I'll list the words first, then explain which one is my favorite.
A prefatory note: nearly half of the words on these lists are based wholly or partly on borrowings from English, though they are assimilated into Japanese in such a manner that they are unrecognizable to monolingual English speakers.
When confirming reservations on the phone with clerical folks in certain southeast Asian countries, Paul Midler noticed they often used variations of the NATO phonetic alphabet. “D for Dog” and “L for Love” seemed to be a couple consistent additions. Passing through a travel agency in Thailand, he saw this:
