Language Log

An eminent Chinese historian just sent these two sentences to me:

Yǒurén shuō AI zhǐ néng jìsuàn, ér rénlèi néng suànjì. Yīncǐ AI yīdìng bùshì rénlèi duìshǒ

有人說AI只能計算，而人類能算計。因此AI一定不是人類對手。

"Some people say that AI can only calculate, while humans can compute.  Therefore, AI must not be a match for humans".

Google Translate, Baidu Fanyi, and Bing Translate all render both jìsuàn 計算 and suànjì 算計 as "calculate".  Only DeepL differentiates the two by translating the latter as "do math".

Yesterday, Alejandra Caraballo tweeted:

The editor in chief of the National Review just said the N word in regards to Haitians and Megyn Kelly ignores it.

Andy McCarthy responded:

Ridiculous. @richlowry (not tagged here, natch) obviously got crossed up between 'immigrants' (short i) and migrants (long i) — started mispronouncing "migrants" with short i; instantly corrected himself with no embarrassment because it was patently a mispronunciation. Geez.

And Rich Lowry agreed:

Yep, this is exactly what happened—I began to mispronounce the word “migrants” and caught myself halfway through

Ben Zimmer emailed me:

Got sent this from a friend, who was hoping to see some analysis of whether the initial consonant on the misspeak here is /m/ or /n/. (Since the previous consonant is the final /n/ in "Haitian," there may be some gestural overlap.)

"The Best New Book Written Entirely in Latin You’ll Try to Read This Year:  Why Donatien Grau, an adviser at the Louvre, decided to write 'De Civitate Angelorum,' a book about Los Angeles, the Roman way."  By Fergus McIntosh, New Yorker (September 16, 2024)

Since even elite schools like Penn and Princeton no longer have a language requirement in their Classics departments, I doubt that many people, other than a few extraordinarily conscientious lawyers and biological taxonomists, will understand much of what Grau has written.  Still, it's an interesting experiment to see how much of his book fluent speakers of French, Spanish, and Italian comprehend.

My debate analysis for The Economist included these charts:
:

Following up on "Trump as brass", I was curious about the relationship between the spoken pitch track and the score that Jase used to generate the trombone sounds. Here's his Xeet again, showing his score and playing his trombone synthesis overlaid on Trump's audio:

Donald Trump's 'Eating The Dogs' transcribed for trombone. pic.twitter.com/UpK4hNjNuR

— The Jase (@jasemonkey) September 11, 2024

Trombone, specifically:

Donald Trump's 'Eating The Dogs' transcribed for trombone. pic.twitter.com/UpK4hNjNuR

— The Jase (@jasemonkey) September 11, 2024

Abbie VanSickle and Philip Kaleta, "Conservative German Princess Says She Hosted Justice Alito at Her Castle", NYT 9/9/2024:

An eccentric German princess who evolved from a 1980s punk style icon to a conservative Catholic known for hobnobbing with far-right figures said on Monday that she hosted Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. and his wife at her castle during a July 2023 music festival.

Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis also told The New York Times that she viewed the justice as “a hero.”

Mark Swofford stumbled upon this church in Taipei:

Below is a guest post by Corey Miller.

Azi Paybarah of the Washington Post quoted Trump as follows:

“There’s about 19 different ways of pronouncing it, right,” Trump said falsely, during a speech in Michigan on Thursday. “But Kamala is, at least it’s a name you sort of remember.”

The most interesting part of this to me is the assertion that it was a false claim. I suppose the intuition is that there are two common ways to stress Kamala, either initially/antepenultimately or medially/penultimately, so that Trump's "nineteen" is clearly hyperbolic.

The "ABOUT COMMUNITY" description from r/BoneAppleTea:

Following up on "Type-token plots in The Economist" (9/6/2024), I lost some sleep last night doing some analyses of the presidential debate, which I shared with writers at The Economist to be published as "An alternative look at the Trump-Harris debate, in five charts",  9/11/2024. They lead with another type-token graph:

Perhaps as early as 1640, decipherers have tried practically everything to decode the maddeningly frustrating Voynich manuscript.  So far it has resisted all efforts to identify the language in which it was presumably written.  About the only way to make further progress in cracking the code is to apply some new technology.  As described in the following reports, it seems that a type of digital enhancement has become available and been used to fill in some of the gaps in the manuscript.

The first is the primary document, "Multispectral Imaging and the Voynich Manuscript", which appears on Lisa Fagin Davis' blog, Manuscript Road Trip (9/8/24).  She begins with an explanation of what the technology consists of.

According to Wikipedia, word salad

is a "confused or unintelligible mixture of seemingly random words and phrases", most often used to describe a symptom of a neurological or mental disorder. The name schizophasia is used in particular to describe the confused language that may be evident in schizophrenia. The words may or may not be grammatically correct, but they are semantically confused to the point that the listener cannot extract any meaning from them. The term is often used in psychiatry as well as in theoretical linguistics to describe a type of grammatical acceptability judgement by native speakers, and in computer programming to describe textual randomization.

The phrase {word salad} has become increasingly common recently in the popular press, most often as an insulting description of Donald Trump's spontaneous speech. See for example Sahil Kapur and Peter Nicholas, "'Incoherent word salad': Trump stumbles when asked how he'd tackle child care", NBC News 9/6/2024.