Language Log

Last week at the Chinese National People's Congress (NPC; the annual two-week meeting just ended), a delegate submitted a proposal to end foreign-language translations at press conferences and major events in order to "safeguard the dignity of the Chinese language".

"Chinese legislator proposes banning foreign translation at government press conferences"

Sarah Zheng, SCMP 5/27/20

Sign on the wall of a school:

(Source)

That's the title of a wonderful new Wikipedia article from a volunteer editor who has written scores of major articles (ancient Chinese thought, religion, culture, literature, language and linguistics, lexicography, etc.) for the online encyclopedia of record.  This one is about a peculiar type of ancient Chinese drinking vessel, the zhī 卮, which tilts over when full and rights itself when empty.  The vessel served as an analogy for a rhetorical device called zhīyán 卮言 ("goblet word"), "a mystical linguistic ideology, which is generally interpreted to mean fluid language that maintains its equilibrium through shifting meanings and viewpoints, thus enabling one to spontaneously go along with all sides of an argument."

Along with other neologistic figures of speech, zhīyán 卮言 ("goblet word") is featured in the 33rd and final chapter, "Tiānxià 天下 ("[All] Under Heaven"), which summarizes early Chinese thought, of the Zhuang Zi 莊子 (Master Zhuang), my favorite ancient Chinese text.  For a complete translation, see Victor H. Mair, tr., Wandering on the Way: Early Taoist Tales and Parables of Chuang Tzu (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1998; first ed. New York:  Bantam, 1994); also available as Zhuangzi Bilingual Edition, translated by Victor H. Mair (English) and Minci Li (Modern Chinese) (Columbus:  The Ohio State University Foreign Language Publications, production of the National East Asian Languages Resource Center, OSU, 2019) — this is actually a trilingual edition, since the 736 pages volume also includes the original Classical Chinese version.

Matthew Gault, "Here’s Why Men Are Pointing Loaded Guns at Their Dicks", Vice 5/27/2020:

Like with any other fandom, there’s levels to gun culture. In the online gun community there are "normies" and "fudds." Normies cover a range of people, anyone from a basic handgun owner to the completely uninitiated. Fudds—as in Bugs Bunny hunter Elmer Fudd—are the old heads, weirdos, and dedicated gun nuts. Some fudds hate normies and the way normies talk about guns. Even the normies who know their way around a firearm.

A chief complaint among fudds is the normie’s devotion to safety, typically manifested as knee-jerk praise of trigger discipline. For the uninitiated, watching trigger discipline refers to the act of keeping your finger off the trigger of a firearm until you’re ready to fire the weapon. It’s a safety basic, along with never pointing a gun at anyone or anything you don’t intend to harm, and always assuming a gun is loaded.

A recent Frazz:

This morning, someone sent me a message that began, "Welp, at least word boundaries are respected…".  I had no idea what he meant by the first syllable.  It didn't even seem like a word to me.  Or, I thought, perhaps it's a typo for "well".

Still, I was curious, so I looked around a bit, and found this entry in Merriam-Webster:

"Yes, 'Welp' Is a Real Word:  'Welp' is over 70 years old"

Update: This word was added in March 2018.

Social media is a place where informal language flourishes, which means that lexicographers get to chronicle the exploits of words that don't have much written use in edited prose—words like welp.

Chicago Tribune Tweet:  Welp, here comes the 1st accumulating snowfall of this winter….

Yep, the Chicago Tribune used welp. And yet:

Doug Lambert Tweet:  "Welp" is not a word….

Alex Hern, "Anti-porn filters stop Dominic Cummings trending on Twitter", The Guardian 5/27/2020:

Twitter’s anti-porn filters have blocked Dominic Cummings’ name from its list of trending topics despite Boris Johnson’s chief adviser dominating British political news for almost a week, the Guardian can reveal.

As a result of the filtering, trending topics over the past five days have instead included a variety of misspellings of his name, including #cummnings, #dominiccummigs and #sackcummimgs, as well as his first name on its own, the hashtag #sackdom, and the place names Durham, County Durham and Barnard Castle.

The filter also affects suggested hashtags, meaning users who tried to type #dominiccummings were instead presented with one of the misspelled variations to auto-complete, helping them trend instead.

This sort of accidental filtering has gained a name in computer science: the Scunthorpe problem, so-called because of the Lincolnshire town’s regular issues with such censorship.

Posted to the Twitter thread that began with the Arabic menu full of spectacularly bad mistranslations into English featured here ("Accuracy of sheep meat" [5/26/20]):

It reminds me of pic.twitter.com/wWEYOOKvjU

— robert affinity (@affinity292) May 25, 2020

Banner in Hong Kong:

(source)

So-called "verbal fluency" is one of the tasks we're using in the first iteration of the SpeechBiomarkers project (and please participate if you haven't done so!). Despite the test's name, it doesn't really measure verbal fluency, but rather asks subjects to name as many words as possible from some category in 60 seconds, like "animals" or "words starting with the letter F".

Here's the first ten seconds of one participant's "animals" response:

As you can hear, the audio quality is quite good, although it was recorded remotely using the participant's browser and their system's standard microphone. These days, standard hardware usually has pretty good built-in facilities for voice recording.

In order to automate the analysis, we need a speech-to-text system that can do a good enough job on data of this kind. As I've noted in earlier posts, we're not there yet for picture descriptions ("Shelties On Alki Story Forest", 11/26/2019; "The right boot of the warner of the baron", 12/6/2019). For "fluency" recordings, the error rate is worse — but maybe we're actually closer to a solution, as I'll explain below.

As is my custom, I was zipping along merrily, letting my fingers dance on the keys to transfer my thought-flow into typed words.  Usually when I'm in a good mood and this happens — which is almost always — I'm thinking thoughts in my head (speaking the sounds of the words I want to type) and letting the neuro-muscular synapses and reflexes take care of the actual writing.  It's really quite a nice, pleasurable collaboration between mind and body.

So, my normal practice is to think thoughts, "let my fingers do the walking", and enjoy watching what appears on the computer screen.  But I do have to keep an eye on what my fingers are producing, because sometimes it is hilariously wrong and only tenuously connected to what was going on in my brain.

So my mother's friend's husband is stuck in a hotel in Saudi Arabia and this is the order menu they gave him

Do I have any Arabic speaking followers that can help make sense of this but also, tag yourself, I'm "Normal doubt" pic.twitter.com/MVemyCCON9

— Vlada ✨😈✨ (@vladadraws) May 24, 2020

A large-enough-to-read image is here.

Twitter thread on small waterway names:

My husband wants to know what you all call this & where you live: pic.twitter.com/C9XAoXvAfI

— square peg mama (@squarepegmommy) May 23, 2020