Language Log

Hilary Hanson, "Paris Hilton's Split-Second Voice Change Leaves People Absolutely Stunned", Huffpost 6/29/2024:

Paris Hilton floored social media users this week by seamlessly shifting her vocal register midsentence as she spoke before Congress. […]

When Rep. Claudia Tenney (R-N.Y.) asked Hilton for her thoughts on incorporating mental health care into new legislation, Hilton responded first by complimenting the lawmaker’s outfit.

“I love your jacket. The sparkles are amazing,” Hilton said.

Tenney joked, “I had a little bling here for today,” to which Hilton replied, “Yes, I wanted to find out who made it later.”

Hilton delivered her fashion comments in a relatively high voice with lots of vocal fry. However, as she continued speaking and began to discuss mental health care, her voice shifted to a noticeably deeper register.

“But I think the most important thing is, they need access to therapy counseling, mentorship and other community-based programs,” she said, with her voice dropping on the word “but.”

A video of the testimony can be found on CSPAN (or CSPAN's X account).

Google Translate adds Cantonese support, thanks to AI advancement:  “Cantonese has long been one of the most requested languages for Google Translate. Because Cantonese often overlaps with Mandarin in writing, it’s tricky to find data and train models,” Google said.  By Tom Grundy, Hong Kong Free Press (June 30, 2024).

The Google Translate app has been expanded to include Cantonese, thanks to generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) advancements.

In 2022, Google began using Zero-Shot Machine Translation to expand its pool of supported languages. The machine learning model learns to translate into another language without ever seeing an example, Google said in a Thursday blog post. Now it is using AI to expand the number of supported languages.

It added 110 new languages this week, in its largest-ever expansion, thanks to its PaLM 2 large language model.

[This is a guest post by Brian Pellar]

. . . the consonants are the letters or ciphers which assemble around the vowels to form the words, just as the constellations assemble around the Sun, image of the Divinity, and compose the community of stars over which it presides.                                                                        — Hebreu Primiti

The Consonants of Command

Dear Professor Mair,

In regard to your question, “Is there some sense in which we could think of the 12 aspects/signs/symbols of the alphazodiac as comprising/encompassing the basic sounds of the universe?” I’ve dabbled a bit with some intriguing answers in my papers. For instance, in my very first paper, SPP 196, I placed in the endnotes a very interesting reference from the Gospel of the Egyptians (a Nag Hammadi text) that I feel might bear a relationship to the structure and the underlying “sacred” vowels that comprise the Logos/Word — the breath of God — of the alphazodiac. More specifically,

the “three powers” (the Father, Mother, and Son) give praise to the unnamable Spirit — and the “hidden invisible mystery” that came forth is composed of seven sacred vowels (i.e., the Son “brings forth from the bosom/the seven powers of the great / light of the seven voices, and the word/[is] their completion”), with each of those seven vowels repeated exactly twenty-two times (“iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii[iii]/ ēēēēēēēēēēēēēēēēēēēēēē /oooooooooooooooooooooo/uu[uuu] uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu/eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee/aaaaaaa[aaaa]aaaaaaaaaaa/ ōōōōōōōōōōōō ōōōōōōōōōō”) (Robinson 1990: 209–210). [SPP 196, pp. 38-39].

Abner Li, "Google Messages adopts double FAB to promote Gemini", 9to5google 6/26/2024:

Gemini in Google Messages exited beta at I/O 2024 last month and now features a double FAB design.

In a rather prominent push, the “Start chat” floating action button now has a smaller Gemini FAB just above it. When you’re dealing with the rectangle, the square looks misaligned. Everything is visually correct upon scrolling.

There’s some precedent for this look in Google Drive where the “New” FAB is paired with a scan shortcut. However, the camera disappears when scrolling.

A couple of days ago, I did a web search to find out how late the King of Prussia mall was open, and landed on the Wikipedia page for the "census-designated place" King of Prussia, which (as I knew) includes lots of stuff besides the mall. Reading the article and following links, as one does, I learned something new, namely why in the world an "edge city of Philadelphia" was named after Frederick the Great.

Aside from etymology, one of my favorite language study activities before college was diagramming sentences.  Consequently, I was delighted to be reminded of those good old days by this new (June 19, 2024) article in The Public Domain Review:  "American Grammar: Diagraming Sentences in the 19th Century".  This is a magisterial collection of crisply photographed archival works that you can flip through page by page to study at your leisure.

The works collected are the following:

James Brown, The American Grammar (Philadelphia, PA: Clark and Raser, 1831).

Frederick A. P. Barnard, Analytic Grammar; with Symbolic Illustration (New York: E. French, 1836.

Oliver B. Peirce, The Grammar of the English Language (New York: Robinson and Franklin, 1839).

Solomon Barrett, The Principles of Grammar (Cambridge, MA: Metcalf and Co., 1857).

Charles Gauss and B. T. Hodge, A Comprehensive English Grammar (Baltimore, MD: Pan Publication Co., 1890)

Stephen Watkins Clark, A Practical Grammar (New York: A. S. Barnes and Co., 1847).

Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg, Higher Lessons in English (New York: Clark and Maynard, 1880).

"Significant energy source found under US-Mexico border", KXAN 6/23/2024 [emphasis added]:

Researchers have found a significant source of geothermal energy underneath the U.S.-Mexico border along the Rio Grande, which could lead to promising clean energy development in the rural region. […]

“There’s a thin, 10- to 15-mile-wide region that runs parallel or along the Rio Grande that has very high heat by at least by most standards, and even in the interior part of the county, which is probably two-thirds of the county,” Ken Wisian, head of the research team, told NewsNation. […]

“Geothermal has a lot to offer rural communities, underserved communities, something like Presidio checks every block on the very large federal investment in production in tax credits on renewable energy,” Wisian said.

Tangutologists and Old Chinese aficionados take note: the whole 2024 Festschrift for M.V. Sofronov, produced on the occasion of his 90th birthday in 2019, is now available via C. Harbsmeier's academia page: https://t.co/hGUhgrgauE pic.twitter.com/zH7zxY0YjG

— Wolfgang Behr (@behrwolf) June 27, 2024

Philip Resnik, "Large Language Models are Biased Because They Are Large Language Models", arXiv.org 6/19/2024:

This paper's primary goal is to provoke thoughtful discussion about the relationship between bias and fundamental properties of large language models. We do this by seeking to convince the reader that harmful biases are an inevitable consequence arising from the design of any large language model as LLMs are currently formulated. To the extent that this is true, it suggests that the problem of harmful bias cannot be properly addressed without a serious reconsideration of AI driven by LLMs, going back to the foundational assumptions underlying their design.

ICYMI:

"Internet Not Killing Off Dialects within Russian as Many Suppose but Increasing Their Diversity, Moscow Scholar Says",  Paul Goble, Window on Eurasia (6/7/24)

It is widely assumed that the Internet is contributing to the homogenization of languages and killing off both dialects and local variants; but in fact, a Moscow scholar says, a new survey of Russian as spoken in the cities of that country finds that in many places, dialects are unexpectedly expanding.

Ivan Levan, a specialist at the Moscow Institute of the Russian Language at the Russian Academy of Sciences, says that he and his colleagues have recently found “about 2,000” new words that vary from city to city and were not recorded in V.I. Belikov and V.P. Selegey’s 2005 work on Languages of Russian Cities (yandex.ru/company/researches/2021/local-words).