Language Log

Big birds in the Bible.

"‘On Eagles’ Wings’: Comfort and Translation,The bird is most probably not cited in the Bible."  WSJ Opinion (1/6/25)

A dilemma.

Rosemary Roberts, of Waterbury Connecticut, writes:

Eli Federman’s op-ed “The Bald Eagle Is Heaven-Sent” (Dec. 31) brings to mind the beautiful hymn “On Eagles’ Wings,” which is often sung both at Roman Catholic funeral Masses and at many protestant church services. While most of the hymn is based on Psalm 91 from the Old Testament, the refrain is based on Exodus 19:4, when God told the Israelites, after their flight from Egypt, that He had carried them “on eagles’ wings” through their times of trial. The refrain reads:

"Will AI make translators redundant?"  By Rachel Melzi, Inquiry (3 Dec 2024)

The author is a freelance Italian to English translator of long standing, so she is well equipped to respond to the question she has raised.  Having read through her article and the companion piece on AI in general (e.g., ChatGPT and other LLMs) in the German magazine Wildcat (featuring Cybertruck [10/21/23]) (the article is available in English translation [11/10/23]), I respond to the title question with a resounding "No!".  My reasons for saying so will be given throughout this post, but particularly at the very end.

The author asks:

How good is AI translation?

Already in 2020, two thirds of professional translators used “Computer-assisted translation” or CAT (CSA Research, 2020). Whereas “machine translation” translates whole documents, and thus is meant to replace human translation, CAT supports it: the computer makes suggestions on how to translate words and phrases as the user proceeds through the original text. The software can also remind users how they have translated a particular word or phrase in the past, or can be trained in a specific technical language, for instance, by feeding it legal or medical texts. CAT software is currently based on Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models, which are trained through bilingual text data to recognise patterns across different languages. This differs from Large Language Models (LLM), such as ChatGTP, which are trained using a broader database of all kinds of text data from across the internet. As a result of their different databases, NMTs are more accurate at translation and LLMs are better at generating new text.

In the discussion of "The cost of commas", RfP wrote  "I would be interested in seeing figures for the difference in the relative use of periods between Franklin and Lodge, in relation to the use of commas and semicolons".

It's obvious that the secular trend in English towards shorter sentences will tend to reduce the frequency of periods, at least in the case of works where periods are rarely used as part of numbers and similar non-phrasal symbols. And therefore the frequency of commas relative to periods should increase, if a similar number of commas were divided by a smaller number of periods. That's actually the opposite of what we see, presumably because each longer sentence in the older works was divided up by a larger number of periods:

And as we'll see, commas may also simply have gone out of fashion in the middle of the 20th century.

I love potato chips, but am not a fan of french fries, so I'm all confused when I'm in Britain where "chips" are "crisps" and "fries" are "chips"!

One reason I like potato chips is because they are salty and savory to counteract all the sweets I consume, so I keep a big box of 18 small bags of chips and Doritos, Cheetos, and Fritos on hand to rescue me from hunger pangs whenever I feel them coming on.  But I dislike Pringles because they're not real.

The British take their crisps more seriously than any other nation
No other snack bridges the class divide in the same way
Economist (12/19/24)

This is a book review of Crunch: An Ode to Crisps. By Natalie Whittle. Faber; 256 pages; £18.99

My 1/2/2025 post "American health care in 1754" quoted at length from Benjamin Franklin's account of the founding of Pennsylvania Hospital. The main point was the striking difference between then and now in the attitudes of (some) business leaders. But since this is Language Log rather than Health Care Politics Log, I suggested "the obvious stylistic change in sentence length" as a linguistic angle, with a link to the slides for my presentation at SHEL12 in 2022, "Historical trends in English sentence length and syntactic complexity". And Julian reponded in the comments: "Clearly commas were cheaper, in those days".

In a comment about the video lecture in yesterday's post about David Lodge, JPL asked:

Why does he say "phenonemon" [sic] (purposefully enunciated) at 4:42?

Sino-Platonic Papers is pleased to announce the publication of its three-hundred-and-sixty-second issue — “Divine Support and World Conquest in the Stele Inscriptions of Qin Shi Huangdi and the Res Gestae of Augustus,” by Dan Zhao.

ABSTRACT: This paper comparatively examines the propaganda of the first emperors of China and Rome, Qin Shi Huangdi and Augustus. Focusing on the interplay between divine support and claims of world conquest and utilising the Qin stelae and the Res Gestae Divi Augusti as case studies, this paper will argue that both early imperial Chinese and Roman propaganda shared extremely similar rationales and methods. Divine support and military victories were intimately linked and mutually dependent. As such, the emperors' claims to unprecedented levels of divine support also impelled them to claim successful world conquest, lest the very ideological foundations of their regimes be called into question.

Today's xkcd:

Mouseover title: "You may notice the first half of these instructions are similar to the instructions for a working nuclear fusion device. After the first few dozen steps, be sure to press down firmly and fold quickly to overcome fusion pressure."

John Cotter, "David Lodge, British Novelist Who Satirized Academic Life, Dies at 89", NYT 1/3/2025:

David Lodge, the erudite author of academic comedy and a wide-ranging literary critic, died on Wednesday in Birmingham, England. He was 89. […]

The author of 15 novels and more than a dozen nonfiction books as well as plays and screenplays, Mr. Lodge was twice shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and his work has been translated into dozens of languages.

The Booker Prize non-winning was featured in headlines from the AP ("British author David Lodge, twice nominated for Booker Prize, dies at 89") and the Independent ("Booker Prize-shortlisted author David Lodge dies at the age of 89"), and mentioned prominently in several other obits — so I want to give  Lodge the last word on this topic, via his 2018 interview in The Times, which ran under the headline "David Lodge: ‘The Booker prize is good for the novel but bad for novelists’":

“The Booker prize has created a huge long line of losers, as Mr Trump would probably call them, and there are enough chances to fail in the literary world without going through that.”

David Lodge is one of the prize’s most notable unwinners. At the age of 82 this former professor of English literature, with 15 novels to his name, is probably the most distinguished novelist of his generation not to win it. Not that failure ought to bother him. It has been a nice little earner. He has mined the great seams of frustrated ambition, bungled relationships and sexual disappointment to create superb social comedy in novels such as Changing Places (1975), Small World (1984) and Nice Work (1988).

And I should mention that The Booker Prizes's web page for David Lodge, along with listing his three failures to win, features the fact that he chaired the prize committee in 1989.

This is a truly impressive form of calligraphy, the likes of which I've never seen before:

What won't they think of next as means for writing sinographs?

[Guest post by Frank Chance in response to my latest post.  Gives me hebi-jebies.]

Reading  your recent Language Log post on turtles (mostly about Kucha) on New Year’s Day made me wonder whether there should be a Language Log post on snakes.  There are two very different characters used for snake in Japanese – 巳 mi, used almost exclusively for the zodiac sign and in counting (it is a homonym for three ), and　蛇  hebi., also read as ja, particularly in such compounds as 大蛇 daja, also read as Orochi.  That name is known to giant monster fans from 八岐大蛇  Yamata no Orochi, the eight-forked (and hence eight-headed) great snake mentioned in Nihonshoki, the oldest Japanese history text.  Tea aficionados and dance fans know it from a type of umbrella with a red dot where the spines meet, called a 蛇の目傘 janome-gasa or snake-eyed parasol. Janome was in turn a corporate name for a maker of sewing machines.