Language Log

Someone recently wrote to tell me that he had:

…constructed a linguistic theoretical framework based on the principle of "one-to-one correspondence between Chinese characters or symbols and their semantics", aiming to explore the mathematical basis of language symbol structure, semantic relationships, and context adaptation.

It was a longish communication and all in Chinese except for one word.  He said that he had a 50-page "Beamer" presentation that he wanted to show me to convince me of the worthiness of his project.  "Beamer" was the only word in his message that I couldn't understand.  So I google it, and AIO instantaneously returned the following:

The first four panels of today's SMBC:

In this comment to "'Neutrino Evidence Revisited (AI Debates)' | Is Mozart's K297b authentic?" (11/13/24), I questioned whether John Searle's "Chinese room" argument was intelligently designed and encouraged those who encounter it to reflect on what it did — and did not — demonstrate.

In the same comment, I also queried the meaning of "understand" and its synonyms ("comprehend", and so forth).

Both the "Chinese room" and "understanding" had been raised by skeptics of AI, so here I'm treating them together.

Following up on yesterday's Macquarie announcement, here are some more 2024 Words Of The Year in Engish:

• Dictionary.com: demure (see also CNN's coverage, with more details and links)
• Collins Dictionary: brat (CNN's coverage)
• Cambridge Dictionary: manifest
• Oxford (voting — shortlist is slop, romantasy, lore, brain rot, demure, and dynamic pricing)
• Merriam-Webster — 2024 choice still pending

Apparently today is "National Linguistics Day":

National Linguistics Day is a new awareness campaign which is designed to be a focal point in the year to get people thinking, talking and learning about the science of language.

The Macquarie Dictionary's Word of the Year was announced yesterday, and it's enshittification.

Macquarie is catching up here, since enshittification was the American Dialect Society's WOTY in 2023.

The Macquarie announcement gives us a gloss ("the gradual deterioration of a service or product brought about by a reduction in the quality of service provided, especially of an online platform, and as a consequence of profit-seeking"), but not a citation or a quotation for the origin.  The ADS announcement explained the source, and gave a quote, but didn't give us a link:

The term enshittification became popular in 2023 after it was used in a blog post by author Cory Doctorow, who used it to describe how digital platforms can become worse and worse. “Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification,” Doctorow wrote on his Pluralistic blog.

 So here's the source for that ADS quote: Cory Doctorow, "Tiktok's enshittification", pluralistic.net 1/12/2023.

Just edited a piece mentioning the companies Hays, Schroders and Lloyds. They were named for men called Hay, Schröder and Lloyd but all (I checked) officially lack an apostrophe.

People occasionally throw a fit—illiteracy triumphant!—but it does not seem to have done any harm whatsoever.

— Lane Greene (@lanegreene.bsky.social) November 25, 2024 at 7:03 AM

For a few of you, this post advertises an opportunity. I'm one of the organizers of a special session at Interspeech 2025, "Challenges in Speech Data Collection, Curation, and Annotation". Or for short, "Speech Data CCA".

For the rest of you, this is yet another discussion of the large number of interpretations for (almost) any random 3-letter initialism — Acronym Finder yields 311 hits for CCA.

A couple of days ago we examined the mystifying Literary Sinitic / Classical Chinese (LS/CC) collocation 惡惡 (here).  After considering several different ways to pronounce and interpret the elements of this expression, we decided that, in most instances, it should be read wùè and be rendered as "hate evil".

Today we'll go much more slowly and deliberately through a brief classical occurrence of 惡惡 to gain a better appreciation for the meaning of the dyad 惡惡 and how to appreciate its nuances in actual use.

Here I shall quote a short passage from Lǐjì 禮記 (Record of rites) (ca. 3rd c.-1st c. BC):

Suǒwèi chéng qí yì zhě, wú zì qī yě, rú wù èchòu, rú hào hǎosè, cǐ zhī wèi zì qiān. Gù jūnzǐ bì shèn qí dú yě.

所謂誠其意者、毋自欺也。如惡惡臭、如好好色。此之謂自謙、故君子必愼其獨也。

After having been away for a couple of months, when I returned home, I found this message from Maia Karpovich:

Yesterday, I ordered some 100 watt 'corn bulbs' from Amazon to deal with the darkness in my bedroom. The box came with some 'warm tips' included as an insert.

For the past five years or so, Jeffrey Barg has been writing a column for the Philadelphia Inquirer called "The Angry Grammarian". The last one appeared on February 23 of this year, and Barg moved his peeves to Substack. At about the same time, his musical rom-com premiered at Theatre Exile in Philadelphia.

Linguists are prone to feel that the word "grammarian" should belong to them, not to prescriptivist scolds like the one in Elle Cordova's skit. And we often object even more strongly to "grammar" being used as the justification for condemnation of non-standard spellings, punctuation, word usage, etc., both because of the prescriptivist stance and also because the issues involved belong to aspects of usage (like orthography and lexical semantics) that are not part of what we call grammar.

But the OED's primary definition for grammarian is

An expert or specialist in grammar; a person who studies, writes about, or teaches grammar. Also more generally: an expert in or student of language; a linguist, a philologist; (formerly also) †a person of great learning (obsolete).

Sometimes (esp. from the 17th to early 19th centuries) somewhat depreciative, implying that a person is pedantic, too focused on minutiae, or overly concerned with rules and conventions.

The depreciative sense is illustrated in an 1806 citation from Henry Kirke White:

All that arithmeticians know, Or stiff grammarians quaintly teach.

"Oldest Alphabet Discovered in Ancient Syrian Tomb Redefines History of Writing", by Chrissy Newton, Debrief (November 21, 2024)

A research team at Johns Hopkins University has discovered evidence of the world’s oldest alphabetic writing, carved onto finger-length clay cylinders, outdating other scripts by 500 years. 

Recovered during excavations in a tomb in Syria, the writing is believed to date to around 2400 BCE. This new finding disrupts how archaeologists understand where the alphabet originated, and how it was shared across civilizations, societies, and cultures, leaving anthropologists with new questions about what the findings mean for early urban civilizations.  

“Alphabets revolutionized writing by making it accessible to people beyond royalty and the socially elite,” said Glenn Schwartz, a professor of archaeology at Johns Hopkins University who discovered the clay cylinders in a statement. “Alphabetic writing changed the way people lived, how they thought, how they communicated.”

“And this new discovery shows that people were experimenting with new communication technologies much earlier and in a different location than we had imagined before now,” he added. Schwartz will share details of his discovery on Thursday, Nov. 21, at the American Society of Overseas Research’s Annual Meeting.