"The great late Alphonse Capone"

May 26, 2025 @ 7:16 am · Filed by under Usage

Donald Trump's recent West Point commencement address has gotten plenty of media coverage. But what I noticed was something linguistic, which the commentariat unsurprisingly ignored, namely a violation of expected modifier order (in a passage around 45:46 in the cited recording):

I went through a very tough time with some very
radicalized sick people
and I say I was investigated more than the great
late Alphonse Capone. Alphonse Capone was a monster
he was a very hardened criminal
I went through more investigations than Alphonse Capone
and now I'm talking to you as president can you believe this
can you believe it

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"It is forbidden to dog"

May 25, 2025 @ 4:28 pm · Filed by under Lost in translation, Signs


(Source: posted and removed on Reddit;
the same image has been previously posted)

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Baker's octave

May 25, 2025 @ 7:30 am · Filed by under Linguistics in the comics

A recent xkcd:

Mouseover title: "169 is a baker's gross."

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Imagining reggae

May 25, 2025 @ 6:12 am · Filed by under Language and music, Language and psychology

I seldom dream, but last night a line got stuck in my brain:  "dub it up", repeated over and over, with a crisp reggae beat.  I couldn't figure it out, and was annoyed that I didn't know what it meant.

I don't think that I had ever heard it before in my waking life.

The first thing I did after washing up in the morning was google it.  Turns out there was a record called "Let's dub it up" by a male British artist named Dee Sharp (b. 1956 in London; to be distinguished from the more famous American female singer Dee Dee Sharp [b. Philadelphia 1945]).  I listened to the Dee Sharp song here (Fashion records 1980), and was astonished to find that it had the same melody and beat as the repeated line in my dream, so I must have heard it at some time in my life, whether I was aware of it or not.

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Dynamic Philology

May 24, 2025 @ 12:47 pm · Filed by under Linguistics as a discipline


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Pilled-maxxing

May 24, 2025 @ 6:09 am · Filed by under Idioms

A couple of relatively recent English compounding forms are getting more common in the media: X-pilled and X-maxxing.

"The Man Who ‘A.G.I.-Pilled’ Google"
"Red-pilled culture is corroding young men’s brains"
"This mom ‘de-pilled’ her teen son. What is that and why are people praising her?"
"Are you pope-pilled? Here's your guide to the 2025 Conclave."
"California Democrats get ‘abundance-pilled’ as they look for a path forward"
"Are Q-Pilled Family Members Lost for Good?"
"What the Hell Is Testosterone-Maxxing and Why Are Gym Bros Doing It?"
"“Sleepmaxxing” Is Trending—I’d Caution Against It"
"Happy hour-maxxing: An Old Port bar crawl that gets you more for less"
"OPINION: Stop the protein maxxing, start eating what you want"
"What is the aura maxxing ? The tik tok trend explained"
"WTF Is ‘Fertility Maxxing’? Why It’s Gaining Attention Among People Trying to Get Pregnant"

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A radical proposal for sinographs

May 23, 2025 @ 5:31 am · Filed by under Language reform, Writing systems

Letter to the editor of Taipei Times (4/29/25) by Te Khai-su / Tè Khái-sū:

Abolish Chinese characters

A few months ago, under the overhang walkway (teng-a-kha, or Hokkien architecture) of a Tainan side street, I saw a child — perhaps 10 years old — hunched over one of the collapsible tables of her parents’ food stall, writing columns of “hanzi” (漢字, Chinese/Han characters), each in their dozens.

A familiar, if rather sad sight in Taiwan — although not nearly as spectacular as Hugo Tseng’s (曾泰元) evocative account in this newspaper (“Rejuvenating ‘Chinese character,’” April 20, page 8), where he recalled the legend of Cangjie’s (倉頡) creation of hanzi, describing how “millet grains rained from the sky and the ghosts and gods wept at night.”

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Sogdians on the Silk Road

May 22, 2025 @ 12:04 pm · Filed by under Language and business, Language and ethnicity, Language and history

For the past week, I have been preparing a major post on Middle Iranian and associated peoples who transited and traded across Eurasia during the Middle Ages, so it was fortuitous that I received the following photograph from Hiroshi Kumamoto:


Xinhua News Agency//Getty Images

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Superstition industry in the PRC: buzzwords as belief

May 22, 2025 @ 11:24 am · Filed by under Artificial intelligence, Language and religion

Another superlative article from our Czech colleagues:

China’s Superstition Boom in a Godless State
In post-pandemic China, superstition has surged into a booming industry, as youth turn to crystals, fortune-telling, and AI oracles in search of hope and meaning.
By Ansel Li, Sinopsis (5/13/25)

Introduction

It is one of history’s more striking ironies: the People’s Republic of China, an officially atheist, Marxist-Leninist regime that has long sought to suppress all forms of organized religion, now finds itself caught in a tidal wave of superstition. Post-pandemic, what began as a trickle has become a torrent—an uncontrolled spread of fortune-telling, lucky crystals, and spiritual nonsense, growing in the vacuum left by institutional faith and spread further by a hyper-connected internet society.

This phenomenon is not merely a return to old habits or rural mysticism. It has become a nationwide consumer frenzy, driven by the very demographic the Communist Party hoped would be its most rational constituency: the young and educated. In chasing these modern symbols of hope, they are losing more than just money.

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Untranslatability and human rights

May 21, 2025 @ 12:12 pm · Filed by under Language and philosophy, Philosophy of Language, Translation

Blake Shedd called my attention to 

…an article on philosophy / human rights and how a Chinese translation of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights (available online from Philosophy Now, 118 [February-March, 2017], 9-11, and also available here from the website of one of the authors) raises some questions of hermeneutics.

Here's the article:

Hens, Ducks, & Human Rights in China:  Vittorio Bufacchi & Xiao Ouyang discuss some philosophical & linguistic difficulties

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Bionic brains

May 20, 2025 @ 8:15 am · Filed by under Artificial intelligence, Biology of language, Cognitive science

China Develops Robots to Implant Chips into Human Brain

A Chinese technology news website reported that the CyberSense flexible microelectrode implantation robot, developed by the Institute of Automation at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, has passed the preliminary acceptance stage for Shenzhen’s major scientific infrastructure project on “Brain Mapping and Brain Simulation.” The robot is designed to implant flexible microelectrodes – thinner and softer than a strand of hair – into the cerebral cortex of experimental animals, providing crucial support for brain-computer interface (BCI) and neuroscience research.

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Grammatical intuition of ChatGPT

May 19, 2025 @ 7:03 am · Filed by under Artificial intelligence, Evolution of language, Grammar

Grammaticality Representation in ChatGPT as Compared to Linguists and Laypeople, Zhuang Qiu, Xufeng Duan & Zhenguang G. Cai, Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 12, no. 617 (May 6, 2025). 

Abstract

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional performance across various linguistic tasks. However, it remains uncertain whether LLMs have developed human-like fine-grained grammatical intuition. This preregistered study (link concealed to ensure anonymity) presents the first large-scale investigation of ChatGPT’s grammatical intuition, building upon a previous study that collected laypeople’s grammatical judgments on 148 linguistic phenomena that linguists judged to be grammatical, ungrammatical, or marginally grammatical (Sprouse et al., 2013). Our primary focus was to compare ChatGPT with both laypeople and linguists in the judgment of these linguistic constructions. In Experiment 1, ChatGPT assigned ratings to sentences based on a given reference sentence. Experiment 2 involved rating sentences on a 7-point scale, and Experiment 3 asked ChatGPT to choose the more grammatical sentence from a pair. Overall, our findings demonstrate convergence rates ranging from 73% to 95% between ChatGPT and linguists, with an overall point-estimate of 89%. Significant correlations were also found between ChatGPT and laypeople across all tasks, though the correlation strength varied by task. We attribute these results to the psychometric nature of the judgment tasks and the differences in language processing styles between humans and LLMs.

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Jianwei Xun: Fake philosopher

May 17, 2025 @ 8:04 pm · Filed by under Artificial intelligence, Language and philosophy

Jianwei Xun, the supposed philosopher behind the hypnocracy theory, does not exist and is a product of artificial intelligence
A collaboration between an essayist and two AI platforms produced a book that reflects on new forms of manipulation

Raúl Limón, EL PAÍS (4/7/25)

The entire proposition behind this scheme is so preposterous and diabolical that I am rendered virtually speechless.

The French city of Cannes hosted a roundtable discussion on February 14 called “The Metamorphosis of Democracy – How Artificial Intelligence is Disrupting Digital Governance and Redefining Our Policy.”

The debate was covered in an article by EL PAÍS after Gianluca Misuraca, Vice President of Technology Diplomacy at Inspiring Futures, introduced the concept of “hypnocracy” — a new form of manipulation outlined in a book by Jianwei Xun called Hypnocracy: Trump, Musk, and the New Architecture of Reality. However, this Hong Kong philosopher does not exist, as revealed by Sabina Minardi, editor-in-chief of the Italian magazine L’Espresso.

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