Archive for December, 2019

Canoe schemata nama gary anaconda

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".

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Pinyin to Hanzi Two Way Conversions

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.

Best!

Apollo

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Enteral fever

Fuchsia Dunlop has a real talent for finding these things (cf. "Explosion Cheese Durian Pie" [9/23/19]):

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Crosstalk about topolects

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):

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Multilingualism in Philadelphia's Chinatown

Sign spotted by Diana Shuheng Zhang on December 7, 2019:

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Communicative disfluencies interpolations

In the past few days, I've encountered some nice examples of the communicative interpretation of what I've suggested we ought to call "interpolations" rather than "disfluencies".

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"National Language" in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region

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.)

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Amazing new Japanese words

These come from the following nippon.com article:

"Pay It Forward: The Top New Japanese Words for 2019" (12/13/19)

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.

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Seeding Mars

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D for Dog, L for Love

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:

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Quantum Supremacy

For the past couple of months, the phrase "Quantum Supremacy" has been on my to-blog list, based on points and counterpoints like "Google scientists say they’ve achieved ‘quantum supremacy’ breakthrough over classical computers" (WaPo 10/23/2019) and "IBM Says Google’s Quantum Leap Was a Quantum Flop" (Wired 10/21/2019). My interest, at least on the LLOG dimension, was not in the argument about how difficult a particular problem is for classical computers, but rather in the use of the word supremacy.

Now I can take this one off the stack, because a recent SMBC does a better job than I would have:


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Please stoop

Photograph from Paul M in Taipei:

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be;eza

Sign on the front of a fashion store (shoes and handbags) in Taipei:

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