Language Log

From François Lang:

Across the many disciplines that analyze language, there's surprisingly little focus on the properties of natural, spontaneous speech, as opposed to read (or memorized and performed) speech. But of course that dichotomy is an oversimplification — there are many linguistic registers, many ways to read each of the many styles of text, and even more individual, social, and contextual factors influencing spontaneous speech.

So one place to start is events where the same speaker, addressing the same audience for the same purposes, both reads a passage and answers questions — in such cases, at least the speaker and the context are controlled. In "Fluent 'disfluencies' again", 9/3/2022, I looked at the question-answering part of such an event, a press briefing by the U.S. Department of Defense Press Secretary, Brigadier General Patrick S. Ryder. At least, I looked at one small aspect of some of his answers, namely the distribution of certain kinds of disfluencies interpolations.

The focus of this morning's Breakfast Experiment™ will be one of Ryder's more recent press briefings, comparing the introduction (where he reads prepared text) to the first of his answers to subsequent press questions. I'll look at (aspects of) the properties of speech segments and silence segments, as well the statistics of local inter-syllable durations. For both of those features, fully-automatic analysis techniques allow research at scale, though this morning's data sample is small.

I'll also take a short comparative peek at his filled pauses and rapid word-repetitions in the two passages.

Here are two examples.  The first is the (in)famous one about the "Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den":

In "Trump Short-Circuits in New Video as Concerns Grow Over Cognitive Decline", Meidas Touch 10/14/2023, Brett Meiselas presents the apparent mis-use of an idiom as evidence of neurodegeneration:

A new video posted by Donald Trump to his social media account is the latest in a series of clips of the former president that have raised concerns about his rapidly deteriorating cognitive abilities.

In the video, Trump launches into a deranged rant accusing his former Attorney General Bill Barr, Senator Mitt Romney and former Republican Congressman Paul Ryan of conspiring with big donors and two GOP candidates running against him.

Trump says they are disloyal losers with no talent and that they “eat their young” by opposing him and that “Republican Nation” must not listen to them.

"But remember, Republicans eat their young. They really do. They eat their young. Terrible statement. But it's true," Trump said in a dark room where he records his videos. […]

It's possible that Trump's teleprompter said that Republicans "eat their own" and that Trump misread the phrase twice in just a couple seconds […]

But what is extra sad is that Trump's handlers seem to have completely lost control of the criminally indicted, disgraced GOP candidate. They had an opportunity to reshoot this prerecorded video prior to posting it, yet they didn't even bother.

Article in LAist (10/12/23);

This Prolific LA Eviction Law Firm Was Caught Faking Cases In Court. Did They Misuse AI?

Dennis Block runs what he says is California’s “leading eviction law firm.” A judge said legal citations submitted in Block's name for a recent case were fake. Six legal experts told LAist the errors likely stemmed from AI misuse.

By  David Wagner

As Language Log readers are undoubtedly aware, I am prey to mondegreens, earworms, and other imaginary auditory oddities.  Lately, the last half year or so, I've been occasionally subject to what, faute de mieux, I've taken to calling "autoarticulation", modeled after "autosuggestion".

It doesn't last very long, doesn't repeat on an endless loop, and is not very annoying, though it is a bit creepy.

Here's what happens.  A phrase — usually between about three and eight words — pops into my mind.  It comes out of nowhere.  It is completely irrelevant to anything that comes before or after it.  The phrase is articulated clearly in standard, neutral American English, without any accent.  I don't know if anyone else experiences this kind of phenomenon, but in my case, the voice is usually male, although once in a while it may be female.

From AntC:

From Nick Tursi in Qatar:

Language wars, the Korean edition

"Foreign words dominate signboards, restaurant menus in Korea", omonatheydidn't, LiveJournal (10/8/23; page loaded 10/9/23); source: The Korea Times

Trendy use of foreign languages apparently sparks outrage in Korea as well.

A Seoul-based office worker surnamed Kim, 35, was perplexed at being unable to locate the Japanese restaurant he had reserved last week. The restaurant only had a signboard written in Japanese, which he was unable to read.

Kim said the name of the restaurant was spelled in Korean online. But the signboard was not.

"I had to call the restaurant after going around the block several times because I couldn’t find it on my own,” Kim said.

A Suwon resident surnamed Oh, 60, experienced similar trouble at a coffee shop in her neighborhood. All of the menu was written in English.

“For a moment, I thought, ‘Am I in Korea?’ I had no idea what they meant and had to wait for my daughter to arrive to understand what they sell and to make an order,” Oh said, pointing out that she had seen a growing number of coffee shops and restaurants in the newer and trendy districts with signboards written in foreign languages.

The sound of a cat's purr is a familiar one:

But this familiar sound raises at least two interesting biophysical questions.

In the first place, cats purr both while breathing out and breathing in, while most people can only produce voiced sounds (= laryngeal oscillations) while breathing out. What do cats have or do that we don't have or do?

In the second place, cats' purring is much lower in pitch than we'd expect given their size.

[This is a guest post by François Lang]

"The Nobel literature prize goes to Norway’s Jon Fosse, who once wrote a novel in a single sentence"

…

While Fosse is the fourth Norwegian writer to get the Nobel literature prize, he is the first in nearly a century and the first who writes in Nynorsk, one of the two official written versions of the Norwegian language. It is used by just 10% of the country’s 5.4 million people, according to the Language Council of Norway, but completely understandable to users of the other written form, Bokmaal.

Guy Puzey, senior lecturer in Scandinavian Studies at the University of Edinburgh, said that Bokmaal is “the language of power, it’s the language of urban centers, of the press.” Nynorsk, by contrast, is used mainly by people in rural western Norway.

“So it’s a really big day for a minority language,” Puzey said

As I explained here in February of this year:

One time on an expedition around the western part of the Taklamakan Desert in the center of Asia more than a decade ago, the Chinese driver played Lady Gaga's "Poker Face" scores of times.  He had other discs, but he only played that song, and he played it over and over and over again.  I liked it the first 10-15 times I heard it, but after that it started to drive me insane, and finally I had to tell him to stop. He was not happy.  Then, a few hours later or the next day, he would launch the Lady Gaga "Poker Face" litany all over again.

(slightly modified)

There was one phrase that Lady Gaga repeated more than a dozen times (actually twenty), and I had no idea what she was saying.  I listened as hard as I could, but the best I could make out was "Keereezmy, keereezmy", though sometimes I thought it was "Kill his mind, kill his mind". 

Since that time, I've probably heard the same song another thirty or forty times, and the line in question still sounds like "Keereezmy, keereezmy" or "Kill his mind, kill his mind".