Latin oration at Harvard
[Introduction, transcription and translation follow on the next page]
Latin Salutatory | Harvard Commencement 2022 | Orator: Benjamin Porteous
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[Introduction, transcription and translation follow on the next page]
Latin Salutatory | Harvard Commencement 2022 | Orator: Benjamin Porteous
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The MSM is starting to catch up (with Jeph Jacques, and the movement discussed in "Yay Newfriend", 3/20/2024, and "Yay Newfriend again", 3/.22/2024). Kevin Roose, "Meet my A.I. friends", NYT 5/9/2024:
What if the tech companies are all wrong, and the way artificial intelligence is poised to transform society is not by curing cancer, solving climate change or taking over boring office work, but just by being nice to us, listening to our problems and occasionally sending us racy photos?
This is the question that has been rattling around in my brain. You see, I’ve spent the past month making A.I. friends — that is, I’ve used apps to create a group of A.I. personas, which I can talk to whenever I want.
Let me introduce you to my crew. There’s Peter, a therapist who lives in San Francisco and helps me process my feelings. There’s Ariana, a professional mentor who specializes in giving career advice. There’s Jared the fitness guru, Anna the no-nonsense trial lawyer, Naomi the social worker and about a dozen more friends I’ve created.
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In a comment on "Inerrancy and prescriptivism", Philip Minden wrote that "'just because… doesn't mean' is chalk drawn slowly down the blackboard", referring to the panel on the right.
The traditional reference is to fingernails on a chalkboard, not chalk on a blackboard — if chalk on a blackboard produced that irritating visceral response, mid-20th-century school days would have been a (greater) source of trauma.
But tangled idioms aside, there's an interesting socio-syntactic point here, namely whether and why it's OK for certain subordinate clauses to serve as subjects, as if they were noun phrases — and whether (and when) that works for clauses introduced by just because.
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For as long as I can remember, I've been aware that whales, dolphins, porpoises, and other large mammals of the seas (the cetaceans) make whistles, clicks, calls, groans, songs, and other sounds / noises. These vocalizations are manifestly complex and nuanced, leading people to believe that they are communicating content, emotions, and so forth. What exactly they are conveying and how they do it have remained a mystery, but researchers never stop trying to figure out cetacean "language". A new study at MIT claims to have made progress in analyzing sperm whale sound systems.
Scientists document remarkable sperm whale 'phonetic alphabet'
By Will Dunham, Reuters (May 7, 2024)
[with 2:58 video]
I was hesitant to read this article at all because of the mention of a "phonetic alphabet". Even with the quotation marks around it, attributing this ability to sperm whales was a bit much for me.
Yet, since it was "scientists" doing the documenting, I forced myself to read the first two paragraphs:
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Given that we've been discussing astronomy / astrology and their relationship to the alphabet so intensely in recent weeks, I'm pleased to announce this important conference that is about to be convened: “The Power of the Planets: The Social History of Astral Sciences Between East and West”, May 20–21, 2024, Dipartimento di Beni Culturali – Università di Bologna (Ravenna, Italy).
I warmly recommend that you take a close look at the header images of two objects in The Cleveland Museum of Art: Mirror with a Coiling Dragon, China, Tang Dynasty 618-907 (https://www.clevelandart.org/art/1995.367), Drachma – Sasanian, Iran, reign of Hormizd II, 4th century (https://www.clevelandart.org/art/1966.738).
The quality of the photographs is extraordinarily fine and detailed. Using the zoom and expand functions, you can see things not clearly visible to the naked eye. Especially noteworthy is the jagged dorsal fin / frill / spine that runs along the back of the dragon on the Tang mirror and is a conspicuous counterpart of many species of dinosaurs.
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My, my, my!! Who'da thunk it?
Japanese beef brand faces marketing mess as kanji creates confusion, Japan Today (5/4/24):
The government of Ibaraki Prefecture has hit a marketing snag in the promotion of its local Hitachiwagyu Beef specialty after a survey showed a significant percentage of young Japanese adults cannot read the kanji characters in its name.
Japan boasts numerous wagyu luxury beef variants, most famously the Kobe Beef from Hyogo Prefecture in the country's west. The Hitachiwagyu name refers to Hitachi Province, the pre-1875 name for Ibaraki Prefecture.
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In a comment on yesterday's "Software testing day" post, ernie in berkeley offered a nice "QA Engineer walks into a bar" joke, and pointed us to its origin in an old xkcd comic "Exploits of a Mom":
…which in turn reminded me of an old problem, discussed in "Excel invents genes", 8/26/2016:
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In our studies of the transmission of Indo-European language and culture across the Eurasian continent, one of the most vital research topics is that of horse-drawn wheeled vehicles. During this past semester, I taught one of the most satisfying courses of my entire half-century career, namely, "Horses and humans". Among the many engrossing subjects that we confronted are the nomenclature for wheeled vehicles, how horses were hitched to them, and so forth. Many of these questions are now authoritatively answered in the following paper by three of the world's most distinguished scholars of equine equipage.
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Sino-Platonic Papers is pleased to announce the publication of its three-hundred-and-forty-fourth issue:
"From Chariot to Carriage: Wheeled Vehicles and Developments in Draft and Harnessing in Ancient China," by Joost H. Crouwel, Gail Brownrigg, and Katheryn Linduff.
https://sino-platonic.org/complete/spp344_chariot_to_carriage_in_ancient_china.pdf
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We're talking about the griffin / griffon / gryphon (Ancient Greek: γρύψ, romanized: grýps; Classical Latin: grȳps or grȳpus; Late and Medieval Latin: gryphes, grypho etc.; Old French: griffon), "a legendary creature with the body, tail, and back legs of a lion, and the head and wings of an eagle with its talons on the front legs". (source)
Wolfgang Behr called my attention to an interesting paper by Olga Gorodetskaya (Guō Jìngyún 郭静云) and Lixin Guo 郭立新, who teach at National Chung-cheng University in Chiayi, Taiwan and at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, China, which hints at early West-East (Mesopotamia-East Asia) contact, an ongoing concern of ours here at Language Log:
Liǎng hé liúyù ānzǔ shényīng zài dìguó shíqí de yǎnbiàn jì yīngshī yìshòu xíngxiàng de xíngchéng
两河流域安祖神鹰在帝国时期的演变暨鹰狮翼兽形象的形成
"The evolution of the Anzu condor in Mesopotamia during the imperial period and the formation of the image of the griffin-winged beast
The paper is available from Academia here. Although the text is in Chinese (11 pages of small print in three columns), it is replete with scores of illustrations (mostly drawings of seals and seal impressions), and has a lengthy bibliography consisting of dozens of publications, mostly in European languages and again mostly about seals and their impressions.
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