Language Log

Eve Armstrong, "I Murdered Conan O'Brien and Nobody Will Ever Know — an exercise in inference sabotage", 3/30/2023:

Abstract: I employ an optimization-based inference methodology together with an Ising model, in an intentionally ineffectual manner, to get away with murdering an obstreperous scientific collaborator. The antics of this collaborator, hereafter "Conan O'Brien," were impeding the publication of an important manuscript. With my tenure date looming, I found myself desperate. Luckily, I study inference, a computational means to find a solution to a physical problem, based on available measurements (say, a dead body) and a dynamical model assumed to give rise to those measurements (a murderer). If the measurements are insufficient and/or the model is incomplete, one obtains multiple "degenerate" solutions to the problem. Degenerate solutions are all equally valid given the information available, and thus render meaningless the notion of one "correct" solution. Typically in scientific research, degeneracy is undesirable. Here I describe the opposite situation: a quest to create degenerate solutions in which to cloak myself. Or even better: to render measurements incompatible with a solution in which I am the murderer. Moreover, I show how one may sabotage an inference procedure to commit an untraceable crime. I sit here now, typing victoriously, a free woman. Because you won't believe me anyway. And even if you do, you'll never prove a thing.

"Kong Yiji" is one of the most famous short stories by Lu Xun (1881-1936), the most celebrated Chinese author of the 20th century.

"Kong Yiji" (Chinese: 孔乙己; pinyin: Kǒng Yǐjǐ) is a short-story by Lu Xun, the founder of modern Chinese literature. The story was originally published in the journal New Youth (Chinese: 新青年) in April 1919 and was later included in Lu Xun's first collection of short stories, Call to Arms (Chinese: 吶喊). The story's narrator reminisces about Kong Yiji, a pedantic scholar who became the laughing-stock of the tavern where the narrator worked. In the end, Kong's legs were broken as punishment for stealing books. He is a ridiculous and pathetic character, a symbol for the indifference between people in the old days.

In November, 2021, a small paperback published in Japan was selling well and causing a buzz among the twitterati. Here's the listing on Amazon (note the cover illustration).  The author acknowledges that he followed the style of (the Japanese translation of) A Day in the Life of Ancient Rome by Italian paleontologist, writer, and journalist, Alberto Angela, but the book is obviously the result of decades of data collection from the Chinese classics, as the endnotes (about 900 of them), ranging from Shǐjì 史記 (The Grand Scribe's Records; ca. 91 BC), Hàn shū 漢書 (Book of Han; 111 AD), Zhuāng Zǐ 荘子 (Wandering on the Way; 4th c. BC), Hán Fēi Zǐ 韓非子 (Master Han Fei; d. 233 BC) to Tàipíng Yùlǎn 太平御覧 (Imperial Reader of the Taiping Era; 977-983), show, supporting every bit of the statement in the text, a feature not found in Angela's above work (as far as I see in the French translation at hand). It is no wonder that the author reportedly received an immediate offer of Chinese translation from a Chinese publisher.

Despite its being a Middle Iranian language that has been extinct for a millennium, we've often mentioned Sogdian on Language Log.  That's because of its intrinsic linguistic interest, but also because its speakers, as I have often said, were Eurasian Kulturvermittlers par excellence and outstanding socioeconomic entrepreneurs.

Now we have a comprehensive, reliable grammar of Sogdian, which is cause for celebration:

Yoshida Yutaka 吉田豊 2022. Sogudogo bunpō kōgi ソグド語文法講義
[Lectures on Sogdian Grammar]. Kyoto: Rinsen. iv, 500 pp.
ISBN: 978-4-653-04188-7.

Although this hefty tome is in Japanese, Adam Alvah Catt has written an informative review that enables those who cannot read it themselves to get a good idea of the book's contents.

Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae, Volume 76: Issue 1 (March 17, 2023), 165-167

DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1556/062.2023.00325

URL:  https://akjournals.com/view/journals/062/76/1/article-p165.xml

Here I will make available the first, next to last, and last paragraphs of the review.

Today SMBC:

From Taiwan News (3/25/23), by Keoni Everington:

"Taiwanese 'Hello Kitty' English-Chinese dictionary has 70 'egregious errors'

Publisher ACME Cultural Enterprise Co has admitted errors but not recalled dictionaries"

Cover of dictionary, example of misspelling. (Eryk Smith photo)

From Rostislav Berezkin, who teaches at Fudan University:

The place where I stay is called Qibao town, now Minhang district of Shanghai. The name means "Seven Treasures". It comes from the name of the Buddhist temple called Qibaosi. Legend says that the temple was built by the Lu family to commemorate Lu Ji* and Lu Yun, brothers of the 3rd cent. AD who were very famous poets and politicians.  Their tombs were located there. It became known as Lubaosi (Precious Temple of Lu). But 500 years later the king of Wuyue (907-978) during the Ten Kingdoms (907-979) period visited the place. When he asked the name of the temple, he misheard it as "Six Treasures Temple"; "six" is pronounced somewhat like "lok" in modern Shanghainese (it's "luc" in modern Vietnamese, also an equivalent of the "entering" tone). Apparently this is very close to the medieval pronunciation of the Lu surname ("[main]land"). The king was perplexed because there are seven treasures in Buddhism, not six. Therefore, he decided to donate the precious manuscript of the Lotus Sutra in gold letters he had made before, so that it would constitute the seventh treasure. Then the monastery became known as the Qibaosi.

From François Lang:

I hope that pushes some linguistic buttons (assuming, of course, that no such word actually exists!).

The best I've come up with is "arhizomorphic", but I'm sure you and your Language Log groupies can do better!

New article by Stephen Johnson in Lifehacker (3/24/23):

"These Are the Most Savage Ways to Start or End an Email:

How you start and end your work email says something about your worth as a person"

N.B.:  This is about work email — a very different kettle of fish from personal email, email with friends, and email in general.  You work those things out on your own.  If the solutions you arrive at are suitable, the relationship will persist.  If not, it will wither.

Selections from Johnson's article:

How do you begin your work emails? Do you go with a simple “Hey?” Or are you into formal greetings like “Good afternoon?” or “Salutation, right, trusty, and well-beloved friend?” Or are you one of those absolute animals that just starts—with no foreplay at all? How about the closing? Are you one of those annoying, “Thank you in advance” people? Or are you more like, “Byeeeeee?”

Back in the pre-computer days, this wouldn’t be a question. There were hard-and-fast rules for business correspondence: You started the letter with “Dear, Mr. Jenkins,” and ended it with, “Sincerely yours.” Anything else would mark you as a communist or beatnik.

Hidden behind the Keurig in our departmental office, I've been noticing a gawky, ungainly, stray coffee mug with these three words on the side:

can

you

not

No capitalization and no punctuation.

I was mystified.  Whatever could that mean?  I can imagine an arch, haughty, snotty person saying that to someone implying that they don't want the person to whom they're talking to do whatever it is they're doing.  In essence, I suppose it means "You're bothering / bugging / annoying me"; "stop doing that"; "get lost".

Knowing how much I like to invent terms for things that have no name ("topolect", "character amnesia", etc.), and needing a word for the parlance produced by ChatGPT-4 and kindred AI chatbots, Conal Boyce asked me to coin a term for it.  I instantly obliged him by coming up with "pablumese" to designate the sort of language that is unremittingly neutral and takes no stance on any subject or topic it addresses.

Conal liked my invention and responded:

Here's one of the problems with ChatGPT and its brethren: Not only does it spew what Victor calls 'pablumese' but for technical questions it then mixes its pablumese with quantitative nonsense, creating a truly creepy kind of output.

I was curious to see how it would handle the question of how many copper atoms fit into the cross-section of a typical copper wire. It responded in a way that made it sound very knowledgeable, breaking everything down into tiny (sometimes condescending) steps, and yet, at the very end of its perfect logic, it botched its answer, because it was unable to do a conversion between millimeters and picometers correctly.

But here's the kicker: What makes this stuff maximally odious is that the creeps who design it will succeed in taking over the world anyway, because this week "version 4 is astonishingly better than the beta ChatGPT!!!" and version 5 next week will be astonishingly better than…. etc. etc. until they've improved it enough that it really will threaten the jobs of 3/4 of the human race. It must be an absolutely sickening time to be a young person, trying to plan one's career.

Sean Carroll's Preposterous Universe Podcast #230

Raphaël Millière on How Artificial Intelligence Thinks, March 20, 2023 / Philosophy, Technology, Thinking / Comments    

Includes transcript of the two hour podcast.

"The practical value of LLMs is high enough that it will induce Chinese to seek out the best systems, and they will not be censored by China.”

"Yes, the Chinese Great Firewall will be collapsing"

by  Tyler Cowen Marginal Revolution (March 21, 2023)

Something that the PRC censors had not predicted:

“People’s perspectives can be manipulated as they seek all kinds of answers from AI,” he was quoted as saying.

Fang, a computer scientist and former government official, is widely considered the chief designer of China’s notorious internet censorship and surveillance system. He played a key role in creating and developing the Great Firewall, a sophisticated system of internet filters and blocks that allows the Chinese government to control what its citizens can access online.