Language Log

Following up on "The dynamics of talk maps" (9/30/2022), I created and parameterized such representations for the published CallHome conversations in Egyptian Arabic, American English, German, Japanese, Mandarin, and Spanish. The goal was mostly just to set up and debug an analysis pipeline, including the extraction of 14 first-guess parameters per conversation, on the way to analyzing the much larger set of much more diverse conversational data that's available.

But just for fun, I used t-SNE to reduce the 14 dimensions to 2 for visualization purposes. I didn't expect much, but some differences emerged in the distribution of points for conversations in the different languages:

All Japanese individuals who have attended elementary school since WW II have been taught to read and write romanized Japanese, and romanization is widely used for computer inputting and for other specialized purposes, particularly for those involving foreigners who do not know kana and kanji, but by no means for everyday reading and writing by Japanese citizens.  There are numerous different schemes for the romanization of Japanese, but the three main ones are:  Hepburn, Kunrei-shiki, and Nihon-shiki.  More about each of them below, but first a rough comparison of the two leading systems:

From Momoko Jingu, "Cultural agency now weighing romanization of Japanese words", The Asahi Shimbun (10/1/22).

From Yuanfei Wang in Hong Kong:

In sending along the photograph below, Geoff Dawson writes:

I find it hard to believe it takes nine characters. Curious as to what they really say.

From a furniture shop in South Melbourne Australia.

This is a story about the frustration of a mom in China over the fact that the character for her child's surname, cuàn 爨, has 30 strokes (some sources say 29).

Aside from its use as a surname, this monstrosity of a glyph can also mean "to cook" and "oven; cooker; cookstove".  Although cuàn 爨 certainly should have been a candidate for simplification, so far as I know, no simplified character for it exists, at least none that is official.

There are a dozen or so alternate forms, e.g., 熶, but most of them are very obscure and cannot be found in electronic fonts.  See here for a few.

Katie Deighton, "What Can’t the Internet Handle in 2022? Apostrophes", WSJ 9/29/2022:

Sybren Stüvel is an Amsterdam-based software developer with a fairly uncommon name and a surprisingly common predicament.

As he completes the tasks of daily life, computers refuse to accept his name as valid or mangle it entirely. A credit card provider rejected his moniker, a Vancouver hotel hit bumps locating his reservation—as he stood there exhausted from a nine-hour plane trip—and an airline wouldn’t let him check into a flight. “You can imagine my stress level,” he said.

While buying insurance, he said, “They asked me to confirm that my last name is indeed Stüvel.”

Over the years, across many disciplines, there have been many approaches to the analysis of conversational dynamics. For glimpses of a few corners of this topic, see the list of related posts at the end of this one — today I want to sketch the beginnings of a new way of thinking about it.

Netizens in Taiwan are having fun sharing a photo of a beverage promotion that comes with a Winnie doll in a bottle.

(source of photo and article in Chinese)

https://imgur.com/q15pXDT

Last spring, when Shanghai was in the midst-of a harsh, months-long lockdown, so many people were thinking of running away from the city that they even developed a "RUN-ology" (rùnxué 潤學, i.e., how to escape and go abroad), where "RUN" is a Chinese pun for English "run".

Original meanings of Mandarin rùn 潤:

1. wet; moist
2. sleek
3. to moisten; to wet
4. to polish (a piece of writing, etc.); to touch up
5. profit (excess of revenue over cost)

(source)

"RUNning away from Shanghai" (5/13/22)

I am making this post because I think it is something that we should be aware of and try to understand in terms of the motivations of the Chinese government in enacting and carrying out these policies.

"First-level discipline a new starting line of calligraphy", China Daily (9/28/22)

I have mixed feelings about the International Phonetic Alphabet. It's good to have standard symbols for representing phonological categories across languages and varieties. You need to know the IPA in order to understand books and papers on many speech-related subjects, as well as for practical things like learning to sing the words of songs in languages you don't know. And the IPA is certainly better than the various clunky alternatives for (symbolic) dictionary pronunciation fields. So I teach it in intro courses.

As native speakers of English, we have a direct, non-analytical understanding of the differences among "look", "see", and "watch", the three main verbs for expressing visual perception.  The first indicates that we have a purposive gaze at / toward / for something; the second that our sight focuses on what we were looking for; and the third adds a durative aspect of observing what we were looking for and saw.

A few days ago, I came across a mention of the term "look-see", and it brought back the memory of when I first learned the Mandarin word kànjiàn 看見 ("see") half a century ago, which struck me powerfully as having the same construction as "look-see".  Moreover, I knew enough about pidgin English to realize that "look-see" had a strong pidgin Gefühl to it.