Language Log

[This is a guest post by Nathan Hopson]

I recently received the following delightful question from Hilary Smith (University of Denver) about the origins of the term for protein in Chinese (dànbáizhì) and Japanese (tanpakushitsu). Thanks to her for pointing me down this lovely rabbit hole!

The hanzi/kanji used are identical (蛋白質), though in written Japanese the term is often タンパク質 or たんぱく質 because the 蛋 character is not one of the “regular use” kanji (常用漢字 jōyō kanji) selected by the officially announced by the Japanese education ministry for mastery during compulsory education.

From a Facebook page with Army background in Taiwan:

Facebook page for Voice of Han Broadcasting Network
(漢聲廣播電台 hànshēng guǎngbō diàntái)
from Taiwan's Ministry of National Defense

"Not Lost In Translation: How Barbarian Books Laid the Foundation for Japan’s Industrial Revolution", by Alex Tabarrok, Marginal Revolution (July 22, 2024)

I am grateful to Alex Tabarrok and his colleague Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution University of George Mason University's Mercatus Center for introducing me to what is one of the most mind-boggling/blowing papers I have read in the last decade.

First, here is Tabarrok's introduction, and that will be followed by selections from the revolutionary paper to which I am referring.

Japan’s growth miracle after World War II is well known but that was Japan’s second miracle. The first was perhaps even more miraculous. At the end of the 19th century, under the Meiji Restoration, Japan transformed itself almost overnight from a peasant economy to an industrial powerhouse.

After centuries of resisting economic and social change, Japan transformed from a relatively poor, predominantly agricultural economy specialized in the exports of unprocessed, primary products to an economy specialized in the export of manufactures in under fifteen years.

A few years ago (in "…'such matters as Opinion, not real worth, gives a value to'", 11/20/2016), based on reading Mary Astell's 1694 work A serious proposal to the ladies, for the advancement of their true and greatest interest, I asked:

Why did authors from Astell's time distribute initial capital letters in the apparently erratic way that they did?

 And I quoted Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Introduction to Late Modern English, 2009:

The use of extra initial capitals, according to Osselton, steadily increased during the first half of the eighteenth century to about 100 per cent around the 1750s after which this practice was drastically reduced and, fifty years later, abandoned completely. The reason for giving up the practice to capitalise all nouns was pressure from writers, who felt that they could not longer make use of capitals to emphasize individual words, as they had been accustomed to do before such idiosyncratic use of capitals was standardised by the printers.

This doesn't really answer the question asked today in an email from Joseph Huang, who links to my 2016 post, and asks: "I saw your blog post about capitalization. I am wondering whether you have studied capitalization in the Constitution."

This has become a hot button issue in recent weeks.

Do we need such a term?  What does it signify?

Is there any other kind of Taiwanese?

We have Australian English, British English, and American English; we have Canadian / Quebec French and Belgian French and Louisiana French (I love to hear it), and Swiss French…; Caribbean Spanish, Castilian Spanish, Andean Spanish, Rioplatense Spanish, Canarian Spanish, Central American Spanish, Andalusian Spanish, Mexican Spanish…; Taiwan Mandarin, PRC Modern Standard Mandarin (MSM), Sichuan Mandarin, Northeastern Mandarin….

What's the contrasting / distinguishing term for "Taiwan(ese) Taiwanese"?

"Some German tongue-twisters", posted on 21/07/2024 by StephenJones.blog   

Whereas the mind-boggling “tapeworm words” in my post on Some German mouthfuls are of a practical nature, the realm of fantasy opens up whole new linguistic vistas. In a stimulating article, Deborah Cole introduces the work of the Berlin-based cabaret performer, playwright, and pianist Bodo Wartke.

"Augmenting parametric data synthesis with 3D simulation for OCR on Old Turkic runiform inscriptions: A case study of the Kül Tegin inscription", Mehmet Oğuz Derin and Erdem Uçar, Journal of Old Turkic Studies (7/21/24)

Abstract

Optical character recognition for historical scripts like Old Turkic runiform script poses significant challenges due to the need for abundant annotated data and varying writing styles, materials, and degradations. The paper proposes a novel data synthesis pipeline that augments parametric generation with 3D rendering to build realistic and diverse training data for Old Turkic runiform script grapheme classification. Our approach synthesizes distance field variations of graphemes, applies parametric randomization, and renders them in simulated 3D scenes with varying textures, lighting, and environments. We train a Vision Transformer model on the synthesized data and evaluate its performance on the Kül Tegin inscription photographs. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, with the model achieving high accuracy without seeing any real-world data during training. We finally discuss avenues for future research. Our work provides a promising direction to overcome data scarcity in Old Turkic runiform script.

"China deploys censors to create socialist AI:  Large language models are being tested by officials to ensure their systems ‘embody core socialist values’", by Ryan McMorrow and Tina Hu in Beijing, Financial Times (July 17 2024)

Chinese government officials are testing artificial intelligence companies’ large language models to ensure their systems “embody core socialist values”, in the latest expansion of the country’s censorship regime.

The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), a powerful internet overseer, has forced large tech companies and AI start-ups including ByteDance, Alibaba, Moonshot and 01.AI to take part in a mandatory government review of their AI models, according to multiple people involved in the process.

The effort involves batch-testing an LLM’s responses to a litany of questions, according to those with knowledge of the process, with many of them related to China’s political sensitivities and its President Xi Jinping.

Today's xkcd:

Mouseover title: IMO the thymus is one of the coolest organs and we should really use it in metaphors more."

From Jeff DeMarco:

The fanfic fourth book in the sāntǐ 三体 ("three-body [problem]") series, translated by Ken Liu has the following sentence:

Women dressed in flowing silk dresses oared elegant barges over the placid waterways, singing folk ditties in the gentle, refined accents of the Wu topolect …

Read the rest of this entry »

Chapter 1

A professor in China who is collaborating with a famous American professor of Chinese literature wanted to read one of my Language Log (LL) posts because he had heard that it's being widely discussed around the world.  However, because of China's rigid censorship rules, he couldn't open the LL post.

The Chinese professor asked the American professor to help him gain access to my post.

The American professor asked me to help the Chinese professor.

I suggested to the Chinese professor to use a VPN.  Without a VPN, Chinese are not able to access LL, Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Google, X, etc., etc.  In other words, without a VPN, Chinese are cut off from most of the information on the internet that is outside the Great Firewall, i.e., most of the cutting edge, valuable information in the world.

The Catch 22 is that it is a crime to use a VPN in China.

Can you imagine having to live in a benighted place like the PRC?

From François Lang: