Language Log

This is a story we've been following for well over a decade (see "Selected readings").  Improbable as it may seem that the Korean alphabet might be adaptable for writing an Austronesian language of Indonesia, there are some promoters of this idea who continue to push it enthusiastically:

"An Indonesian Tribe’s Language Gets an Alphabet: Korea’s
The Cia-Cia language has been passed down orally for centuries. Now the tribe’s children are learning to write it in Hangul, the Korean script."  By Muktita Suhartono, NYT (Nov. 4, 2024)

These fourth graders are not studying the Korean language. They are using Hangul to write and learn theirs: 

Cia-Cia, an indigenous language that has no script. It has survived orally for centuries in Indonesia, and is now spoken by about 93,000 people in the Cia-Cia tribe on Buton Island, southeast of the peninsula of Sulawesi Island in Indonesia’s vast archipelago.

"To what extent is science a strong-link problem?", Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week, 10/30/2024 [emphasis added]:

Here’s a fascinating and worrying news story in Science: a top US researcher apparently falsified a lot of images (at least) in papers that helped get experimental drugs on the market — papers that were published in top journals for years, and whose problems have only recently become apparent because of amateur sleuthing through PubPeer.

I’m going to wane philosophical for a minute. In general I’m very sympathetic to Adam Mastroianni’s line “don’t worry about the flood of crap that will result if we let everyone publish, publishing is already a flood of crap, but science is a strong-link problem so the good stuff rises to the top”.

The author's discussion of crap publications in top science journals is worth reading and discussing, but this morning let's focus on waning (and waxing) adjectival.

Following up on Rapscallion, here's another culinary pun with a lexico-musical connection:

When two names far apart
Share a PIE start
That's a *móri…

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— New-Cleckit Dominie (@ncdominie.bsky.social) November 3, 2024 at 11:57 AM

A recent Bluesky post by George Takei, re-skying (?) @GraniteDhuine:

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— George Takei (@georgetakei.bsky.social) November 3, 2024 at 10:00 AM

Juliana Kim and Miguel Macias, "Satellite images show the devastation from Spain's deadly floods", NPR 11/2/2024 [emphasis added]:

Satellite images show a devastating transformation of eastern Spain, where catastrophic flash floods have killed more than 200 people and upended entire towns.

NASA Earth Observatory captured the image from its Landsat 8 satellite a day after the historic downpour. It showed parts of the eastern province of Valencia submerged in floodwaters. Meanwhile, the channel of the Turia river and the L'Albufera coastal wetlands were filled with the sentiment-laden deluge.

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.