Language Log

"Hebei official’s shirt logo removed for ‘aesthetic reasons,’ triggering speculation among netizens"

By Global Times (Sep 05, 2023)

Official photos of a city Party chief in North China's Hebei Province, with his shirt's logo removed by editing, have sparked a wide-ranging discussion among Chinese netizens, with some speculating that it was a move to obscure the price of the clothing. 

In an article posted via Nangong city's official WeChat account on Sunday, the official's daily work was released, with one picture of his shirt logo in, followed by another two pictures without shirt logo. Some netizens questioned the reasons why they removed the shirt logo, and some checked the similar coat prices online discovering the high retail price for the item, according to media reports.

During the past few weeks, we've looked at the throttling of Cantonese in Hong Kong.  Now, far to the north of the Chinese empire, the CCP is ramping up the war against Mongolian:

Inner Mongolia: China accused of 'cultural genocide' for school language shift

Debi Edward, ITV News (9/1/23)

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Inner Mongolia is the latest province in China where ethnic minorities have had their language forcefully phased out from the education system.

At the school drop-off point, we visited in the capital, Hohhot, nothing appeared to have changed.

We saw children waved off by their parents, some speaking in their native Mongolian language.

But from the start of this school year children from nursery to senior school will find all lessons conducted in Chinese.

I've previously written more than once about the problem of compound words whose meaning is partly but not entirely related to the meanings of their parts, often referring back to a passage in my 1992 chapter with Richard Sproat, "The Stress and Structure of Modified Noun Phrases in English":

We now turn to N₀ compounds where a paraphrase links the two words in the compound with a predicate not implicit in either one. We are limiting this category to endocentric compounds, so that their English paraphrase will be something like 'an N1 N2 is an N2 relative-clause-containing-N1,' e.g., 'an ankle bracelet is a bracelet that is worn on the ankle,' or 'rubbing alcohol is alcohol that is used for rubbing'. The range of predicates implied by such paraphrases is very large. Since this type of compound-formation can be used for new coinages, any particular compound will in principle be multiply ambiguous (or vague) among a set of possible predicates.

Consider hair oil versus olive oil. Ordinarily hair oil is oil for use on hair, and olive oil is oil derived from olives. But if the world were a different way, olive oil might be a petroleum derivative used to shine olives for added consumer appeal, and hair oil might be a lubricant produced by recycling barbershop floor sweepings.

Today's examples come from a Xeet due to Dr. Laura Grimes and Dead Soul Poetry:

This is a simple-minded follow-up to "New models of speech timing?" (9/11/2023). Before getting into fancy stochastic-point-process models, neural or otherwise, I though I'd start with something really basic: just the distribution of inter-syllable intervals, and its relationship to overall speech-segment and silence-segment durations.

For data, I took one-minute samples from 2006 TED talks by Al Gore and Tony Robbins.

I chose those two because they're listed here as exhibiting the slowest and fastest speaking rates in their (TED talks) sample. And I limited the samples to about one minute, because I'm interested in metrics that can apply to fairly short speech recordings, of the kind that are available in clinical applications such as this one.

This is a problem that has been troubling colleagues across the country.

"Why fewer university students are studying Mandarin"

Learning the difficult language does not seem as worthwhile as it once did

Economist (Aug 24th 2023)

China | How do you say “not interested”?

Ten years ago Mandarin, the mother tongue of most Chinese, was being hyped as the language of the future. In 2015 the administration of Barack Obama called for 1m primary- and secondary-school students in America to learn it by 2020. In 2016 Britain followed suit, encouraging kids to study “one of the most important languages for the UK’s future prosperity”. Elsewhere, too, there seemed to be a growing interest in Mandarin, as China’s influence and economic heft increased. So why, a decade later, does Mandarin-learning appear to have declined in many places?

"Elusive Ernie: China's new chatbot has a censorship problem"   

By Stephen McDonell, BBC, 1 day ago

It seems that Ernie's favorite response is "Let's talk about something else", particularly when you ask it a "difficult" question.

There are many statistics used to characterize timing patterns in speech, at various scales, with applications in many areas. Among them:

1. Intervals  between phonetic events, by category and/or position and/or context;
2. Overall measures of speaking rate (words per minute, syllables per minute), relative to total time or total speaking time (leaving out silences);
3. Mean and standard deviation of speech segment and silence segment durations;
4. …and so on…

There are many serious problems with these measures. Among the more obvious ones:

1. The distributions are all far from "normal", and are often multi-modal;
2. The timing patterns have important higher-order and contextual regularities;
3. The timing patterns of segments/syllables/words and the timing patterns of phrases (i.e. speech/silence) and conversational turns are arguably (aspects of) the same thing at different time scales;
4. Connections with patterns of many other types should also be included — phonetic and syllabic dynamics, pitch patterns, rhetorical and conversational structure, …

Thæ're serious:

Why There's A Campaign To Re-Introduce A Historic Letter Back Into The Alphabet

It all stems from Old English

By Kate Nicholson, HuffPost (9/6/23)

FWIW:

"The Oldest (Known) Song of All Time"

Includes spectrograms of different reconstructions.

Although this YouTube was made three years ago, I am calling it to the attention of Language Log readers now that I know about it because it draws together many themes we have discussed in previous posts.

In an off-topic comment (4/27/08), DDeden requested an English translation of the subtitles of a video about "Cotton: from fluff to dyed cloth the traditional Chinese way" (the video is embedded in this tweet).  It seemed a worthwhile endeavor, since the film itself was visually quite informative, though the subtitles looked rather sketchy.

I asked Zhang He, who is familiar with this kind of traditional technology, if she could transcribe the subtitles and give us an idea of what they say. She kindly obliged us by writing the following, extended comment, which I give in full with transcription and translation, both because of its innate value and because of the extraordinary circumstances under which she did it (described at the bottom).

From Brian Miller:

I believe it was your comment here on a 2019 use of a phrase in China politics or press

“Thus my second surmise was that, by 'black hand', the CCP / PRC mean 'stealthy manipulator who remains totally out of view'.  But how does it get that meaning in Chinese?”

There seem to be a lot of people complaining about it these days, so maybe there's something to worry about here.  Francois Lang, who called this current wave of criticism to my attention asks whether academia is isolated from such horrors.

FWIW, here's what it's like in business:

"A look at the most annoying workplace jargon and why people are bothered so much"

NPR (September 5, 20235:15 AM ET), Heard on Morning Edition

I'll mention my favorite right off the bat:  "reach out to you".  I don't think it made the NPR list.