Language Log

When I entered the Airbnb where I'm now staying, one of the first things that caught my attention was the following utensil:

From John Rohsenow, via Mabel Menard, comes this bit of Japanglish:

(source)

Joshua Benton, "If other media companies thought about brand equity the way Elon Musk thinks about Twitter’s (er, X’s)", Nieman Labs 7/24/2023:

In the spirit of Tronc, Elon Musk has decided to throw away more than a decade of brand equity by changing the name of Twitter to…the letter X. Imagine if more media executives followed his lead.

Benton offers several analogies, of which the first one is (in my opinion) the best:

NEW YORK, July 24, 2023 — The New York Times Company (NYSE: NYT) is proud to announce the new brand identity of its flagship news product: -.

The new glyph-driven name, to be pronounced “hyphen” or “The News Organization Formerly Known As The New York Times,” connects the company to its rich, 172-year-long history — in particular, the period from 1851 to 1896 in which it displayed its name as “The New-York Times.”

Notice in a men's room at Dunhuang, far western Gansu Province:

I never heard of it in America or Europe (seems to be a quite recent phenomenon — by that name — but see below for the deeper history of the activity).  Apparently it has taken off in China during the last year:

Stooping Takes China by Storm as Zoomers Scour the Streets for Junk

Cash-strapped young Chinese have developed a sudden passion for furnishing their homes with discarded items found on the street. Their parents are horrified.

By Fan Yiying, Sixth Tone (Jul 18, 2023)

Stooping has its roots in New York, where there is a long tradition of people leaving unwanted furniture on the stoops of their apartment buildings. The name “stooping” was coined in 2019 by a couple from Brooklyn, who set up an Instagram account sharing photos and locations of discarded items in the city. The feed — Stooping NYC — has amassed nearly half a million followers.

——–

The article I am calling to your attention in this post is of extraordinary importance for its potential to link together many of the themes we have repeatedly investigated during nearly the last two decades on Language Log (see the bibliography below for a sampling of relevant posts).

To make it easier for non-specialist readers, here are a few brief identifications of essential languages and peoples (all late Classical and early Medieval):

Bactrian (Αριαο, Aryao, [arjaː]) is an extinct Eastern Iranian language formerly spoken in the Central Asian region of Bactria (in present-day Afghanistan) and used as the official language of the Kushan and the Hephthalite empires.

The Kushan Empire (Ancient Greek: Βασιλεία Κοσσανῶν; Bactrian: Κοϸανο, Košano; Sanskrit: कुषाण वंश; Brahmi: , Ku-ṣā-ṇa; BHS: Guṣāṇa-vaṃśa; Parthian: , Kušan-xšaθr; Chinese: 貴霜; pinyin: Guìshuāng) was a syncretic empire, formed by the Yuezhi, in the Bactrian territories in the early 1st century. It spread to encompass much of what is now Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Northern India, at least as far as Saketa and Sarnath near Varanasi (Benares), where inscriptions have been found dating to the era of the Kushan Emperor Kanishka the Great.

It's already happening.

Of course, we don't want our students to use AI software to help them write their papers, but the fact of the matter is that some of them, especially among those who have poor English writing skills, are already routinely doing so.  Their attitude seems to be that they will do the basic research and sketching out of the argument, and then they have AI tools make it sound nice.  In some cases, they even ask AI bots to assist them with the data search that goes into their paper.

Some may argue that this is completely unacceptable, that such students should be expelled right away, but where do you draw the line on computer assisted research and writing?  Moreover, this is clearly not the same thing as plagiarism, because the individual who is relying on a chatbot to help him or her is not appropriating the intellectual property of another person.  He/she is utilizing material that he/she specifically requested a machine to create / produce on his / her behalf and at his / her direction.  In other words, the electronic tools are acting as extensions of his / her brain.

Screenshots from @泰拳刚猛 on Weibo:

Another of those kraftvoll German words that grips you viscerally and won't let you go, like Schadenfreude (memes).  Naturally, you could also say "Eskapismus", "Wirklichkeitsflucht", or "Weltflucht" to get across roughly the same idea, but it just wouldn't have the oomph of Realitätsflucht.

What made me think of "Realitätsflucht" at the present juncture?  This article by john Schindler:

Top U.S. Spies Warn: War with China Looms…And It’s Not Looking Good

The intelligence alarm is pinging Red in the Western Pacific – but is anybody, even the White House, paying attention?

Top Secret Umbra (7/18/23)

Competition among various AI services will spur them to further heights.

ChatGPT, Bing, Bard and DeepL: Which one offers the best Japanese-to-English translation?

by Karin Kaneko, Japan Times (7/18/23)

Kaneko, working with her editors at Japan Times, devised an ingenious test for comparing the quality of several translation tools in different categories of writing.  Since this experiment is so innately interesting and inherently revelatory, I will provide extensive quotations, adding romanization of the Japanese passages from GT (not an easy task for me!).  To be fair to GT, and simply out of curiosity to see how it compares with the newer type of AI translation services, I will also invite GT to translate all three of the chosen passages.  N.B.:  All three of the GT English translations have been added by me.

Whatever that means.

That's what we get when we enter into AI translation software (GT, Baidu, Bing, DeepL) this key term — "双泛" — from this important policy document concerning the governance of Xinjiang issued by the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region Committee of the CCP.

Shuāng 双 is simple:  it means "double".  Fair enough.  But 泛 in this disyllabic expression is notoriously difficult to deal with.  It can be pronounced either fàn, in which case it means  "to float on water; to drift; to spread out; to be suffused with; to flood; to overflow; superficial; non-specific; extensive; general; pan-; careless; reckless", fěng, in which case it means "to turn over; to topple over; to be destroyed; to be defeated; to fall", or fá, in which case it signifies the sound of water.

"Ben Crump retained by group of Northwestern athletes amidst hazing scandal", WGN News 7/17/2023:

EVANSTON, Ill. — A group of athletes from Northwestern University has retained a prominent civil rights and personal injury attorney in the midst of the hazing scandal within the football program.

On Monday morning, Ben Crump along with co-counsel Steven M. Levin of Chicago-based Levin & Perconti announced that they’ve been retained by eight former student-athletes at the school.

In a news release, the lawyers say they were subject to the hazing and are also in conversations with others as well.

Photo taken in a Shanghai hotel: