Past posts on Donald Trump's rhetoric
A couple of weeks ago, a reporter asked me for an interview "to discuss the style of Donald Trump's campaign events, the role his rhetoric plays in them, and why they’ve been an effective tool for him".
I explained that I haven't held any focus groups or done any polls, so I don't have any empirical basis for opinions about the role that "the style of his campaign events" plays in making them "an effective tool for him". But over the past 8 years, many LLOG posts have analyzed several aspects of his rhetorical style, both the text and the delivery, which are strikingly different from other contemporary American politicians and public figures. Specifically, these posts have described his
- Repetition
- Informality
- Fluency
- Melody
This has nothing to do with the political and cultural orientation of his speeches — the same techniques could in principle be applied to the promotion of internationalism rather than nationalism, for example. No doubt the content is a large part of the reason for his appeal, but the rhetorical affinity with professional wrestling is probably the rest of it, as discussed in "The art of the promo", 10/31/2020.
You'll find the list of relevant past posts past the fold — I invite you to look for one or more of the four features in each post.
But in a way, the most striking thing about the list is its length.
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AI plagiarism
"The Times Sues OpenAI and Microsoft Over A.I. Use of Copyrighted Work", NYT 12/27/2023:
The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement on Wednesday, opening a new front in the increasingly intense legal battle over the unauthorized use of published work to train artificial intelligence technologies.
The Times is the first major American media organization to sue the companies, the creators of ChatGPT and other popular A.I. platforms, over copyright issues associated with its written works. The lawsuit, filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan, contends that millions of articles published by The Times were used to train automated chatbots that now compete with the news outlet as a source of reliable information.
The suit does not include an exact monetary demand. But it says the defendants should be held responsible for “billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages” related to the “unlawful copying and use of The Times’s uniquely valuable works.” It also calls for the companies to destroy any chatbot models and training data that use copyrighted material from The Times.
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Auld Lang Syne in Cantonese
[from a long-time Language Log reader]
One of the well known Cantonese versions of Auld Lang Syne: 友誼萬歲 jau5 ji4 maan6 seoi3 “Long Live Friendship” from Hong Kong:
朋友 再見聲聲 往昔歡笑 來日記取
pang4 jau5 zoi3 gin3 seng1 seng1 wong5 sik1 fun1 siu3 loi4 jat6 gei3 ceoi2
Farewell friends, happy memories of the past,
Retrieving in the future.
憶記舊日情誼 痛哭歡笑 在校園裡
jik1 gei3 gau6 jat6 cing4 ji4 tung3 huk1 fun1 siu3 zoi6 haau6 jyun4 leoi5
Recalling past sentimental bonds, crying and laughing at school.
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Translation blues: how to render "shall" in Sino-American trade agreements
Excerpt from Ambassador Robert Lighthizer’s recent book, No Trade is Free, on the use of "yīng" 应 or "jiāng" 将 to translate "shall" in official trade agreements:
«We relied primarily on these USTR [United States Trade Representative] officials in the Office of China, Affairs, the Office of Innovation and Intellectual Property, the Interagency Center on Trade Implementation, Monitoring, and Enforcement, and the Office of the General Counsel, and their work was invaluable in ensuring that there were no gaps between the English text and the Chinese text.
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Old Long Since: Firefly light, snow on the window
Yesterday, on New Year's Eve, I was sending around, to family and friends, the lyrics and melody of the beloved song we sing at this time of year (here [The Choral Scholars of University College Dublin], here, [Rod Stewart]). I also circulated the Wikipedia article so that people could know the ballads and folk songs that preceded Robert Burns' famous poem (1788).
This morning when I awoke, I received the following message from Martin Schwartz:
It is indeed interesting to see how these Scottish sentiments are presented in this East Asian language. Thoughtfully, the source provided an English translation for the Japanese.
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Effective X
"The 'Effective Accelerationism' movement doesn't care if humans are replaced by AI as long as they're there to make money from it", Business Insider 12/30/2023:
The Effective Accelerationism movement — a staunchly pro-AI ideology that has Silicon Valley split over how artificial intelligence should be regulated — appears to be walking a razor's edge between being a techno-libertarian philosophy and a nihilistic, even reckless, approach to advancing one of the world's most significant technological developments. […]
A riff on the effective altruism, or "EA," philosophy touted by tech influencers like Sam Bankman-Fried and Elon Musk, e/acc took off in 2023, though its exact origins remain unclear. The movement has attracted a cast of unlikely characters, including venture capitalist Marc Andreessen and convicted fraudster Martin Shkreli.
"EA and e/acc are mostly the same people," Emmett Shear, the former interim CEO of OpenAI, said in an interview with Meridian. "Their only difference is a value judgment on whether or not humanity getting wiped out is a problem."
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The Miracle of Western Writing
The following essay is from the Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci's (1552-1610) Xī zì qíjì 西字奇蹟 (The Miracle of Western Letters) published in Beijing in 1605. This was the first book to use the Roman alphabet to write a Sinitic language. Twenty years later, another Jesuit in China, Nicolas Trigault (1577-1628), issued his Xī rú ěrmù zī (Aid to the Eyes and Ears of Western Literati) 西儒耳目資 at Hangzhou. Neither book had much immediate impact on the way in which Chinese thought about their writing system, and the romanizations they described were intended more for Westerners than for the Chinese, but their eventual impact on China was enormous, and it is still unfolding.
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“Misaharan ini na punapunan” — indigenous languages in Taitung, Taiwan
[This is a guest post by AntC]
This T-shirt I had to buy *immediately*:
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"Crawlen"?
A.A. wrote:
In the recent Christmas movie "Jingle Smells", a character says "[if I had experienced what you did] I would have crawlen into a bottle too". Is this usage of the form crawlen grammatical in English? Perhaps a dialect thing? Because to my ear it sounds valid, but others have said that to them it sounds like a mistake.
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Q. Pheevr's Law again
A few days ago, a journalist asked me for an interview about Donald Trump's rhetoric, "to discuss the style of his campaign events, the role his rhetoric plays in them, and why they’ve been an effective tool for him". In preparation, I made a list of past LLOG posts about Trump's rhetorical style,, and I'll post the whole (shockingly long) list later on, with the attempt at a summary that I prepared for the interview. Clearly I've joined the rest of the world in being drawn in by Trump's attention-seeking techniques — but that's not the point of this post.
One of the hundreds of posts in my list was "Q. Pheevr's Law", 5/17/2016. The background was an earlier post about modificational anxiety, "Adjectives and Adverbs", where Q.Pheevr had suggested in the comments that
it looks as if there could be some kind of correlation between the ADV:ADJ ratio and the V:N ratio (as might be expected given that adjectives canonically modify nouns and adverbs canonically modify verbs)
I tested this idea, and found a striking relationship — with an interesting stylistic footnote about the debate transcripts of some politicians, including Donald Trump.
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Retrospective censorship of Uyghur texts
From a memoir by Uyghur poet Tamir Hamut Izgil, Waiting to Be Arrested at Night, Bruce Humes posted on his Ethnic ChinaLit blog (12/30/23) this brief excerpt about how content, once commissioned and approved by the Chinese state, became grounds for incarceration of researchers, writers and editors:
Huítóu kàn gōngchéng 回头看工程 — Xinjiang’s Ominous “Looking Back Project”
Uyghur poet’s memoir recalls the Xinjiang administration’s retroactive hunt for unPC content in textbooks once commissioned, edited and published by the state:
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The consequences of interpreting: the Qianlong Emperor, Lord Macartney, George Staunton, and Li Zibiao
I'm led to this topic by a consideration of one of the six books that made the short list for the Wolfson History Prize, which is the UK's most prestigious history book prize, as introduced by Sudhir Hazareesingh, who is interviewed by Sophie Roell, in "The Best History Books of 2023", Five Books (11/12/23).
Because this is Language Log, we skip directly to Henrietta Harrison’s The Perils of Interpreting, which is about a key episode in Chinese history when, in 1793, the British envoy Lord Macartney (1737-1806) was rebuffed by the Qianlong emperor (1711-1799). Roell prompts Hazareesingh to tell her about this book, what it’s about, and why the judges liked it.
Hazareesingh responds (with slight amplifications and modifications):
In a narrow sense, this is a twin biography. It’s about two translators who are actors in this big drama of the encounter between the British and Chinese empires in the late 18th and early 19th century—from the 1790s through to the Opium Wars in the late 1830s.
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