Language Log

This year's champion, Ananya Vinay, is a 12-year-old sixth-grader from Fresno, California.  The runner-up, Rohan Rajeev, is a 14-year-old eighth-grader from Edmond, Oklahoma.  One of the co-champions from last year, Nihar Janga of Austin, Texas, was 11 and the other, Jairam Hathwar, of Painted Post, N.Y., was 13.

Speaking of youthfulness, this year home-schooled Edith Fuller of Tulsa, Oklahoma was the youngest contestant ever to make it to the finals.

"At 5, Girl Becomes Youngest To Qualify For National Spelling Bee" (NPR, 3/8/17)

That was in March.  By the time of the national spelling bee, she had turned 6.  It's ironic that little Edith was knocked out on a technicality that was introduced to the national spelling bee for the first time this year.

From Simon King:

We need your help with the Blizzard Challenge listening test for 2017.

Please take part yourself, and encourage your colleagues and students too. Feel free to forward this message to your local mailing lists.

Speech Experts (you decide if you are one!) take part here.

Everyone else, do it here.

It's a fun test – you get to listen to paragraphs from children's stories! It takes about 45 minutes to complete; you can take a break at any point, then continue where you left off.

Deadline for completion: 15th June 2017

June Teufel Dreyer noticed that the People's Daily and other official outlets refer to Okinotori as a jiāo 礁, reef, which fits her understanding of the geology involved.  The Japanese, hoping for a larger Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), say it is an island. The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) definition is that a rock incapable of sustaining life (“life” is not defined; could be human life, animals, plants, bacteria?) is not an island. The government of Japan position is that Okinotori isn’t a rock, since it is composed of coral.  Yet the character, which she assumes the Japanese use as well, clearly contains the rock element.   So, June asked, can coral be considered a rock?  In this case, there are substantial implications.

Devin Henry, "Globe heaps scorn on Trump for Paris exit", The Hill 6/3/2017:

“I really think that is the major consequence of today: it’s not about the Paris agreement,” said Christiana Figueres, the former head of the United Nation’s climate change mission.  

“I think the real problem today and the real sadness is the absolute death blow to the international credibly of the current U.S. leadership. … The blow to the international political credibility of the United States really cannot be underestimated.”

Their legions grow with each passing day.  This post is about what they are called in Chinese (see below).

The Chinese people were fascinated with Trump even before he was sworn in as POTUS:

"Year of the cock" (1/4/17)

See also the references in the second half of the third post cited below.

Now that Trump has been President for more than four months, he is all the more popular among certain segments of the Chinese population.  Even top politicians who are jockeying for power at the 19th Party Congress to be held this fall are modeling themselves after Trump:

"China’s Leadership Reshuffle 2017: Rising Stars; How China’s regional chiefs use Trump tactic in race for top" (Choi Chi-yuk, SCMP, 6/3/17)

One mentioned Communist Party chief Xi Jinping’s name 26 times in a speech, another mentioned poverty 90 times

From Hwa Shi-Hsia:

I have a question for Language Log. My sister in Malaysia recently bought an MP3 player with a feature listed as "The fire cow charging". My father figured out that it meant a transformer or power adapter, but he couldn't come up with a plausible explanation. An acquaintance from Hong Kong responded that:

"It's actually a transformer. Of course, transformer is too long to say so it was shortened to 'former', or 火馬. That became 火牛 because that's just how Hong Kong Cantonese evolves."

In "Political sound and silence II" I noted a large difference in measures of speaking rate across the Weekly Addresses of the past three American presidents:

And in "Trends in presidential speaking rate", I showed that

… across the first few months of Weekly Addresses, President Trump is tending to talk somewhat faster as well as using a higher range of pitches.

I wondered about the causes:

This might simply reflect a choice to use more words per pause group — pre-pausal lengthening would thus be amortized over a large number of words, and similarly for phrase-final lowering. Or perhaps the distribution of words per pause group is stable, with the speaking rate and pitch range increasing for phrases of a given length. Or both. I’ll test these hypothesis another morning.

The covfefe fun continues.

My personal favorite is the covfefe recipe:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BfIKEuUhpm8

And then there's  Riane Konc, "Covfefe…For Her", The New Yorker 6/1/2017:

Covfefe is for the flat-earthers. For the woman who doesn’t just believe what she’s told. We salute you, freethinker. We see you on the basketball court, trying to dribble a Frisbee. You’re a Covfefe woman.

Today's xkcd:

Mouseover title: "The top search for every state is PORN, except Florida, where it's SEX PORN."

And the lesson doesn't just apply to maps, of course…

In a comment on "Political Sound and Silence II", 5/30/2017, and referencing "Trends in presidential pitch II", 5/21/2017, unekdoud asked

Are there are any trends over the Weekly Addresses for these measures? In particular, is speech duration or speech % correlated with median pitch?

There's certainly a relationship (r=0.55) between speaking rate (words per minute counting speech regions only) and median f0, in the Weekly Addresses for Donald Trump's first few months as president:

Many people have called my attention to this article by Didi Kirsten Tatlow in the New York Times:

"A High-Proof Tribute to Tiananmen’s Victims Finds a Way Back to China" (5/30/17)

The article begins:

It’s a big journey for a little bottle, even one so potent in alcohol and symbolism.

The liquor bottle — whose label commemorates the 1989 crackdown on democracy demonstrators in Tiananmen Square in Beijing — made a monthslong trip around the world and arrived in Hong Kong days before the 28th anniversary of the killings on Sunday and one year after it was produced in Chengdu, in the southwestern Chinese province of Sichuan.

If you've got a spare hour or two, check out #covfefe on Twitter. Or just read a news summary or ten.

In "Political Sound and Silence", 2/8/2016, I compared the joint distribution of speech segment durations and (immediately following) silence segment durations in the Weekly Addresses of Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama:

Today I thought I'd add a similar graph for President Donald Trump's Weekly Addresses so far in 2017: