Language Log

No sooner have we addressed "The politics of frozen garlic in Taiwan" (1/11/24) than we now must look at the implications of dried mango for the current election in that island nation.  Here we will not be studying the obscene usage (gàn) that "dry" (gān) often gets mixed up with.  For those who are interested in that topic, which Language Log has been following since 2006), check out the last two items in "Selected readings") below.

Today's mango excitement derives from a pun based on the expression "dried mango" (mángguǒ gān 芒果乾); it has nothing to do with "$%#@!" mango.  The near pun is for "wángguó gǎn 亡國感" ("sense of national subjugation"), where wáng 亡 means "perish; death; die", though in this phrase, "subjugation" has become the usual translation.  Of course, guó 國, means "nation; state", and note that the "K" of KMT (Kuomintang [Wade-Giles romanization of 國民黨] "Nationalist Party") or the "G" of GMD (Guómíndǎng [Pinyin romanization of the same name]) is that same word, guó 國 ("nation; state").

According to Toyin Falola, "No Gree for Anybody!", HeartOfArts 1/12/2024:

I am writing this piece from Lagos. “No Gree” is what you now hear at every moment, every corner. […]

No Gree for Anybody seems to be a personal avowal to not compromise or concede and to maintain unwavering determination against factors and people that could impede one’s aspirations or thwart the pursuit of one’s desires.

The issues discussed in "AI plagiarism" (1/4/2024) are rapidly coming to a boil. But somehow I missed Margaret Atwood's take on the topic, published last summer — "Murdered by my replica", The Atlantic 8/26/2023:

Remember The Stepford Wives? Maybe not. In that 1975 horror film, the human wives of Stepford, Connecticut, are having their identities copied and transferred to robotic replicas of themselves, minus any contrariness that their husbands find irritating. The robot wives then murder the real wives and replace them. Better sex and better housekeeping for the husbands, death for the uniqueness, creativity, and indeed the humanity of the wives.

The companies developing generative AI seem to have something like that in mind for me, at least in my capacity as an author. (The sex and the housekeeping can be done by other functionaries, I assume.) Apparently, 33 of my books have been used as training material for their wordsmithing computer programs. Once fully trained, the bot may be given a command—“Write a Margaret Atwood novel”—and the thing will glurp forth 50,000 words, like soft ice cream spiraling out of its dispenser, that will be indistinguishable from something I might grind out. (But minus the typos.) I myself can then be dispensed with—murdered by my replica, as it were—because, to quote a vulgar saying of my youth, who needs the cow when the milk’s free?

To add insult to injury, the bot is being trained on pirated copies of my books. Now, really! How cheap is that? Would it kill these companies to shell out the measly price of 33 books? They intend to make a lot of money off the entities they have reared and fattened on my words, so they could at least buy me a coffee.

Photograph taken outside a shop in Hong Kong:

Sign at a hotel in Japan:

From Nick Kaldis:

This article begins with a brief reference to the chanting of ‘frozen garlic’ ("凍蒜" dongsuan, Taiwanese pronunciation for "當選" dangxuan "to get elected") in campaign rallies for Taiwan's presidential and legislative elections in two days.

—-

‘Frozen Garlic!’ Taiwan Likes Its Democracy Loud and Proud

At the island’s election rallies, warming up the crowd for candidates is crucial. “You have to light a fire in their hearts,” one host says.

By Chris Buckley and Amy Chang Chien; NYT (1/11/24) Photographs and Video by Lam Yik Fei

Since the NYT is between a high firewall (you can't even see the title of the article), I also provide this link to the whole article at MCLC (Modern Chinese Literature and Culture) Resource Center (The Ohio State University).

Today's xkcd:

From Antonio Fortin:

I’m re-reading Asimov's Foundation novels after nearly 35 years and I came across this example in Book 1, which just seems like a mess:

“I don’t say, though,” added Barr, “that there aren’t cases where tech-men haven’t been bribed.”

Obviously, the intended message is that there are cases where tech-men have been bribed, but I’m struggling to arrive at that meaning from the sentence. Shouldn't “haven’t” be “have”? Maybe Language Log readers could help.

So says Stuart Jay Raj, a Thai-based Australian polyglot who speaks several tonal languages.  Here is a half-hour video by him which is linguistics heavy, but is actually an effort to simplify and systematize how tones work.  For example, Raj makes a sharp distinction between pitch and tone, something that many people get all mixed up about.  Not to mention intonation, which we have often discussed on Language Log.

In this episode, Raj focuses on Burmese, but in other presentations he focuses on different tonal languages and on general principles.

Judd Legum, "Florida school district removes dictionaries from libraries, citing law championed by DeSantis", Popular Information 1/10/2024:

The Escambia County School District, located in the Florida panhandle, has removed several dictionaries from its library shelves over concerns that making the dictionaries available to students would violate Florida law. The American Heritage Children's Dictionary, Webster's Dictionary for Students, and Merriam-Webster's Elementary Dictionary are among more than 2800 books that have been pulled from Escambia County school libraries and placed into storage. The Escambia County School District says these texts may violate HB 1069, a bill signed into law by Governor Ron DeSantis (R) in May 2023.

HB 1069 gives residents the right to demand the removal of any library book that "depicts or describes sexual conduct," as defined under Florida law, whether or not the book is pornographic. Rather than considering complaints, the Escambia County School Board adopted an emergency rule last June that required the district's librarians to conduct a review of all library books and remove titles that may violate HB 1069.

Today's Non Sequitur:

[Several days ago, I had prepared a post on this topic, but Mark scooped me with his "Mushroom language?" (1/9/24).  His coverage of the counterposed Adamatzky and Blatt, et al. papers is superior to mine, so I will just strip out that part of my post and leave the remaining observations with which I had bookended my discussion of the two contesting studies.]

This is a question that I have often pondered myself, viz., how do colonies of more or less loosely associated cells communicate among themselves so that they can become tissues, organs, and so forth:

Under a microscope, the first few hours of every multicellular organism’s life seem incongruously chaotic. After fertilization, a once tranquil single-celled egg divides again and again, quickly becoming a visually tumultuous mosh pit of cells jockeying for position inside the rapidly growing embryo.

Yet, amid this apparent pandemonium, cells begin to self-organize. Soon, spatial patterns emerge, serving as the foundation for the construction of tissues, organs and elaborate anatomical structures from brains to toes and everything in between. For decades, scientists have intensively studied this process, called morphogenesis, but it remains in many ways enigmatic. (source)

Michael Blatt, Geoffrey Pullum, Andreas Draguhn, Barry Bowman, David Robinson, and Lincoln Taiz , "Does electrical activity in fungi function as a language?", Fungal Ecology 2024:

Abstract: All cells generate electrical energy derived from the movements of ions across membranes. In animal neurons, action potentials play an essential role in the central nervous system. Plants utilize a variety of electrical signals to regulate a wide range of physiological processes, including wound responses, mimosa leaf movements, and cell turgor changes, such as those involved in stomatal movements. Although fungal hyphae exhibit electrical fluctuations, their regulatory role(s), if any, is still unknown. In his paper “Language of fungi derived from their electrical spiking activity”, Andrew Adamatzky, based on a quantitative analysis of voltage fluctuations in fungal mycelia, concludes that the patterns of electrical fluctuations he detects can be grouped into “words” analogous to those found in human languages. He goes on to speculate that this “fungal language” is used “to communicate and process information” between different parts of the mycelium. Here we argue on methodological grounds that the presumption of a fungal language is premature and unsupported by the evidence presented, that the voltage fluctuations he detects are likely to originate as nonbiological noise and experimental artifacts, and that the measured electrical patterns show no similarity to any properties of human language.