Language Log

shaing tai suggests this "possible clue about the mystery":

"11 Wàn yuán yī kē Angōng niúhuáng wán, guòqí 'shényào' chéng tiānjià cángpǐn hūyoule shéi”

Wèishéme guòqí de Angōng niúhuáng wán rúcǐ zǒuqiào? Shāndōng zhōng yīyào dàxué yào xuéyuàn shēngyào xì zhǔrèn Lǐ Fēng jiàoshòu fēnxī, xiànzài shìchǎng shàng zhǔyào shōugòu 1993 nián qián shēngchǎn de Angōng niúhuáng wán, qí zhǔyào yuányīn jiùshì,1989 nián wǒguó shíshī “Yěshēng dòngwù bǎohù tiáolì”, xiàndìng 1993 nián yǐhòu, yěshēng xīniújiǎo bèi mínglìng jìnzhǐ yòng yú zhìyào yuánliào, yuán yǒu de shèngyú xījiǎo yuánliào bèi fēngcún, yòng yú yánjiū děng tèshū yòngtú. Shēngchǎn chǎngjiā yúshì gǎi yòng shuǐniú jiǎo de nóngsuō fěn tìdài tā. Cǐwài, tiānrán niúhuáng, tiānrán shèxiāng yě hěn ángguì, yóuyú yuánliào xīquē, xiànzài de Angōng niúhuáng wán duō gǎi yòng réngōng shèxiāng děng tìdài pǐn.

Today's SMBC:

From Michael David Johnson:

I found this sign (image below) on Queen's Road West near Exit A of the Sai Ying Pun MTR in Hong Kong. The shop was closed but I think it's a Chinese Medicine shop. Google gives me no results for "recycled bezoar" or "bezoar reciclado," so I seek your knowledge. Bad translation or just something that's not (ever) written in English? I assume from the Portuguese that this must be popular in Macau too?

This elevator panel image was sent to me by Nick Kaldis:

Today's SMBC:

Someone recently wrote to tell me that he had:

…constructed a linguistic theoretical framework based on the principle of "one-to-one correspondence between Chinese characters or symbols and their semantics", aiming to explore the mathematical basis of language symbol structure, semantic relationships, and context adaptation.

It was a longish communication and all in Chinese except for one word.  He said that he had a 50-page "Beamer" presentation that he wanted to show me to convince me of the worthiness of his project.  "Beamer" was the only word in his message that I couldn't understand.  So I google it, and AIO instantaneously returned the following:

The first four panels of today's SMBC:

In this comment to "'Neutrino Evidence Revisited (AI Debates)' | Is Mozart's K297b authentic?" (11/13/24), I questioned whether John Searle's "Chinese room" argument was intelligently designed and encouraged those who encounter it to reflect on what it did — and did not — demonstrate.

In the same comment, I also queried the meaning of "understand" and its synonyms ("comprehend", and so forth).

Both the "Chinese room" and "understanding" had been raised by skeptics of AI, so here I'm treating them together.

Following up on yesterday's Macquarie announcement, here are some more 2024 Words Of The Year in Engish:

• Dictionary.com: demure (see also CNN's coverage, with more details and links)
• Collins Dictionary: brat (CNN's coverage)
• Cambridge Dictionary: manifest
• Oxford (voting — shortlist is slop, romantasy, lore, brain rot, demure, and dynamic pricing)
• Merriam-Webster — 2024 choice still pending

Apparently today is "National Linguistics Day":

National Linguistics Day is a new awareness campaign which is designed to be a focal point in the year to get people thinking, talking and learning about the science of language.

The Macquarie Dictionary's Word of the Year was announced yesterday, and it's enshittification.

Macquarie is catching up here, since enshittification was the American Dialect Society's WOTY in 2023.

The Macquarie announcement gives us a gloss ("the gradual deterioration of a service or product brought about by a reduction in the quality of service provided, especially of an online platform, and as a consequence of profit-seeking"), but not a citation or a quotation for the origin.  The ADS announcement explained the source, and gave a quote, but didn't give us a link:

The term enshittification became popular in 2023 after it was used in a blog post by author Cory Doctorow, who used it to describe how digital platforms can become worse and worse. “Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification,” Doctorow wrote on his Pluralistic blog.

 So here's the source for that ADS quote: Cory Doctorow, "Tiktok's enshittification", pluralistic.net 1/12/2023.

Just edited a piece mentioning the companies Hays, Schroders and Lloyds. They were named for men called Hay, Schröder and Lloyd but all (I checked) officially lack an apostrophe.

People occasionally throw a fit—illiteracy triumphant!—but it does not seem to have done any harm whatsoever.

— Lane Greene (@lanegreene.bsky.social) November 25, 2024 at 7:03 AM