Language Log

From François Lang:

This headline (WP [11/1/24]) completely garden-pathed me–especially because of "watch strikes"!

I've rarely encountered a garden-path sentence in the wild, i.e., not in the context of a linguistic discussion of garden-path sentences.

"On Baalbek’s edges, the displaced watch strikes rain down on their city"

Today's Frazz:

(…and with the New York Department of Environmental Conservation…)

Like many other online text sites, the New York Times now offers synthetic text-to-speech readings for (most of) its stories. TTS quality has improved enormously since the 1980s, when I worked with Bill Dunn from Dow Jones Information Services on (the idea of) a pre-internet version of digital news delivery, including synthesized audio versions. (See "Thanks, Bill Dunn!", 8/6/2009, for a bit more of the story.)

And this morning, while doing some brainless form checking, I listened to the audio version of Victor Mather and Jesus Jiménez, "After 7 Years, P’Nut the Squirrel Is Taken Away and Then Put Down", NYT 11/1/2024, which starts this way:

P’Nut, a pet squirrel with a popular Instagram page, was seized by state government officials on Wednesday in Pine City, N.Y., and later euthanized to test for rabies.

And why doesn't she have a Wikipedia page?
[Update– and now she has one, thanks mainly to commenter Jessamyn.]

I came across her works in a recent search for background information. The Penn Library's Online Books Page offers links to 35 of her publications; The Internet Archive offers 90 results, 87 of which seem to be valid;  Amazon offers links to 92 (versions of her) publications; Google Books oddly returns only 7 results.

All of Johnsen's works, as far as I can tell, were published by the H.W. Wilson Company, which does have a Wikipedia page. And most of her publications were (annotated) compilations of works by other authors, published as part of the company's "Reference Shelf":

(though some seem to have been published before that series was started.)

We've looked at the Chinese of the first item en passant before (here), but not in detail, and the English of this version merits investigation:

Or a sketch of the history, anyhow, since there's far too much of it to cover in a mere blog post.

The idea of immigrants as "garbage" is in the news because of Donald Trump's assertion in a speech and an interview last week that "we're like a garbage can for the rest of the world", followed by Tony Hinchcliffe's offensive jokes at Trump's MSG rally about Puerto Ricans (who are American citizens, of course, but are often lumped in with Spanish speakers from Central and South America). And then there was Joe Biden's comment, and Trump's trash truck stunt in Wisconsin.

Let's go back 102 years, to a quotation from William Joseph Simmons, the Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, in an address delivered on April 30, 1922, and published in the Klan's journal The Searchlight:

Right here within our own borders, the great and mighty city of Boston, which tries to lay claim that it is the cradle of America (tries is all it can do), and holds itself up as the paragon of American principles, has, if my information is correct, seventeen schools in which the English language is never spoken, and not an English thought or an American ideal. These schools are for the children of French-Canadians who have come across the border and each of these schools are under the domination of a foreign potentate who is in nowise sympathetic with American ideals and institutions. Right here in our own land twenty-one towns in the state of Connecticut are under the domination and control of the Italian-Dago influence. Then you hear folks talk about "we Americans” and of America as the melting-pot where the stamp and impress of all nations can come in and shape our destinies. It is no such thing. It is a garbage can! Not a melting-pot. . . . My friends, your government can be changed between the rising and the setting of one sun. This great nation, with all it provides, can be snatched away from you in the space of one day, and that day no more than ten hours. When the hordes of aliens walk to the ballot box and their votes outnumber yours, then that alien horde has got you by the throat. . . . Americans will awake from their slumber and rush out for battle and there will be such stir as the world has never seen the like. The soil of America will run with the blood of its people.

Andrew Gelman, "Freakonomics does it again (not in a good way). Jeez, these guys are credulous", Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science 10/28/2024:

From the team that brought you “good-looking parents are 36% more likely to have a baby daughter as their first child than a baby son” and “The PDO cool mode has replaced the warm mode in the Pacific Ocean, virtually assuring us of about 30 years of global cooling” (background here and here) comes a new nugget of 24-carat credulity:

I [economist and author Steven Levitt] cannot think of an academic whose research findings have more consistently surprised me than my guest today, Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer. She’s a scientist, but her results seriously challenge the beliefs of mainstream science.

If the findings consistently surprise you, and they seriously challenge the beliefs of mainstream science, then maybe you should more seriously consider the possibility that these findings are wrong! Langer’s much-publicized work has been questioned before (for example, here and here).

Jenny Kleeman, "‘You tried to tell yourself I wasn’t real’: what happens when people with acute psychosis meet the voices in their heads?" The Guardian, 10/29/2024: "In avatar therapy, a clinician gives voice to their patients’ inner demons. For some of the participants in a new trial, the results have been astounding."

I learned about early trials of this idea about 15 years ago from Mark Huckvale, who developed the voice-morphing technology that allows a therapist to sound like (one of) the hallucinated speakers, through a dashboard that looks like this:

And Mark is one of the authors of the 2018 paper that  the Guardian article leads with: Tom Craig et al., "AVATAR therapy for auditory verbal hallucinations in people with psychosis: a single-blind, randomised controlled trial". The Lancet January 2018.

An outstanding Chinese scholar of Central Asian art history and archeology told me that any mention of Tūjué / Tújué 突厥 online or on social media would be subject to censorship by the authorities in the PRC.  Since Tūjué  突厥 is an important early name of the Turks, that makes it hard to do serious, honest research on the history of the Turkic peoples in Chinese.

Tūjué  突厥

Etymology

Ultimately from a form which also gave rise to the name Türk (cf. (Türük)), but the phonetics are difficult to reconcile.

It has been suggested that this is a transcription of Rouran *türküt, a plural of the Mongolic type, composed of *türk +‎ *-üt (cf. Khalkha Mongolian -үүд (-üüd)) (Pelliot, 1915). Pulleyblank (1965) proposed that this is a direct transcription of Türk.

Middle Sinitic (ca. 600 AD):  thwot kjut

(Wiktionary)

Reading through Étienne de La Vaissière's massive magnum opus, Asie Centrale 300-850:  Des routes et des royaumes (2024), I came to a screeching halt when my gaze alighted on this photograph (III.6, p. 71):

Limestone relief of Saluzi ("Autumn Dew"), one of the Six Steeds of Zhao Mausoleum, along with an unknown human general. The general switched horses with the emperor and cared for Saluzi; he is seen here pulling an arrow out of Saluzi's chest. On display at the Penn Museum in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. (source)

Please do not check in a dictionary or online before you try to pronounce the name just by looking at it.

We have regional varieties of English:  Australian, American (with many subvarieties), Indian (South Asian), and so forth.  Cantonese is spread all around the world, especially in Southeast Asia, so it is not surprising that it has also developed its own regional variants.  In this post, we will concentrate on a comparison of Hong Kong and Malaysian Cantonese.

"Lost in communication:  Just because we speak Cantonese doesn’t mean we can understand each other", by Mandy Li, The Hong Konger (16 October 2024)

Mandy Li remembers the first time she worked with a Malaysian colleague:

In Malaysia, a sizeable portion of the population have Cantonese heritage so can speak the language. They also enjoy watching Cantonese dramas. So, when my colleague learned I was from Hong Kong, she naturally switched to Cantonese when speaking to me. I was astonished to find that I could not understand everything she said.

Whisper is a widely-used speech-to-text system from OpenAI — and it turns out that generative AI's hallucination problem afflicts Whisper to a surprisingly serious extent, as documented by Allison Koenecke, Anna Seo Gyeong Choi, Katelyn X. Mei, Hilke Schellmann, and Mona Sloane,"Careless Whisper: Speech-to-Text Hallucination Harms", In The 2024 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency,  2024:

Abstract: Speech-to-text services aim to transcribe input audio as accurately as possible. They increasingly play a role in everyday life, for example in personal voice assistants or in customer-company interactions. We evaluate Open AI’s Whisper, a state-of-the-art automated speech recognition service outperforming industry competitors, as of 2023. While many of Whisper’s transcriptions were highly accurate, we find that roughly 1% of audio transcriptions contained entire hallucinated phrases or sentences which did not exist in any form in the underlying audio. We thematically analyze the Whisper-hallucinated content, finding that 38% of hallucinations include explicit harms such as perpetuating violence, making up inaccurate associations, or implying false authority. We then study why hallucinations occur by observing the disparities in hallucination rates between speakers with aphasia (who have a lowered ability to express themselves using speech and voice) and a control group. We find that hallucinations disproportionately occur for individuals who speak with longer shares of non-vocal durations—a common symptom of aphasia. We call on industry practitioners to ameliorate these language-model-based hallucinations in Whisper, and to raise awareness of potential biases amplified by hallucinations in downstream applications of speech-to-text models.