Language Log

On June 1 in Iowa, Donald Trump gave a speech in which he attacked Ron DeSantis from several angles. One of them was DeSantis' variation in pronunciation of his last name (see "Pronouncing 'DeSantis'", 6/3/2023), which Trump characterized as "changing his name", while introducing a puzzling (but promising?) new linguistic term, "syllabolic":

But uh he's going around saying "oh well I can serve for eight years
it takes eight years to fix it".
No he made a big mistake —
uh just like you don't change your name
in the middle of a uh election.

Changed his name in the middle of the election, you don't do that.
You do it before, or after, but ideally you don't do it at all.

I liked it before anyway, I liked his name better before,
I don't like the name change, shall we tell him that?

uh but uh most people don't know what I mean,
no he's actually sort of changed a name.

It's uh syllabolic, they call it,
wants a syllabolic name.

Cantonese — its nature, its status, its past, present, and future, its place in the realm of Sinitic languages and in the world — has been one of the chief foci of Language Log.  Consequently, it is my great pleasure to announce the publication of the three-hundred-and-thirty-fourth issue of Sino-Platonic Papers:

“The Concept of the Cantophone: Memorandum for a Stateless Literary History,” by Wayne C. F. Yeung.

https://sino-platonic.org/complete/spp334_cantophone.pdf

This is a landmark work of scholarship that penetratingly probes the position of Cantonese — and thereby all "Chinese" topolects — in the complex mix of language, literature, nation, politics, and culture.  

"Language change (about to be?) in progress" (6/12/2023) linked to media commentary on divergent features of Northeast Philadelphia speech, e.g. "Side effect of the highway collapse: A perfect example of Northeast Philly hoagiemouth", Billy Penn 6/11/2-23. Some of the characterization was extremely evaluative:

Philadelphians have perfected torturing vowels like medieval Europe perfected torturing people. Every syllable is drawn and quartered, chained to the breaking wheel, boiled alive. https://t.co/frLFfwG3NR

— Erin "MY BOXES" Ryan (@morninggloria) June 11, 2023

The Billy Penn article was gentler and more descriptive:

You can really hear the accent in the elongated roundness of all the “ooo” words he speaks, the way he drags out the end of others, and how he softens each and every consonant (“phouen,” “tex messagessss,” “schreenshoz”).

But in fact, none of the commentary describes this man's speech in an accurate way.

How many are there?

Taiwan’s unrecognized indigenous tribes are reviving dead languages to achieve recognition

There are currently 16 officially recognized indigenous peoples in Taiwan. The Pingpu — which comprise 10 groups on the island’s lowlands — are lobbying to make that number 17, and they’re doing it by reviving lost languages and culture.

By Jordyn Haime, The China Project (6/5/23)

In contemporary Mandarin, many of the speakers of these languages are called shāndì tóngbāo 山地同胞 ("mountain countrymen / compatriots"), which meshes well with the opening paragraph of Haime's article:

Long before Chinese settlers came to the flat, sprawling lands of the Pingtung plain — the southern Taiwanese county now known for its pineapple and mango production — the area was inhabited by Pingpu (plains indigenous) tribes like the Makatao. Waves of colonization pushed indigenous tribes from their ancestral lands and closer to the mountains, or in some cases, to the other side of the island.

The next event in the Salon Sanctuary concert series is "Victorious Secret: Love Gamed and Gender Untamed in the Sparkling Courts of the Baroque":

Before the bars of gender binaries caged the mainstream operatic imagination, a golden age of fluidity guided the vocal soundscape. Virility declared itself with the castrato’s clarion high notes, while femininity spoke in earthy tessiture that plunged to shimmering depths.

Texts of the period revel in ambiguity, unfurling genderless narratives of anonymous lovers and unnamed beloveds. Stories of active pursuit and passive reverie remain alike at loose ends, with neat resolutions many movements away.

Please join us for this special program in honor of Pride Month, as the music of the past reveals a golden underground of nonbinary riches, accompanying us in our witness to a new Renaissance.

Main dish served as part of a college cafeteria lunch in Nanchang, China:

[This is a guest post by Chris Button]

OC uvulars tended to condition rounding (e.g OC q- becoming EMC kw-). In the case of ʁ-, we sometimes get m- (for a modern-day example, note how惟, which also had a ʁ- onset in Old Chinese, gives an m- reflex in Fuzhou Min). The classic example is 卯, where Pulleyblank once postulated ʁ- and Li Fang-kuei notes lack of evidence for a cluster, such as ml- or mr-, in its Tai loan. Unfortunately Li’s Tai evidence tends to either be ignored (e.g. 丑 ^hr- is often erroneously reconstructed with a nasal ^hn- based on misleading xiesheng evidence) or overly literally interpreted (e.g. 戌 χ- being treated as something like sm-).

Current big news around here is the collapse of an elevated section of Interstate 95 due to a tanker truck fire.

As Wikipedia explains, I-95 "is the main north–south Interstate Highway on the East Coast of the United States, running from U.S. Route 1 (US 1) in Miami, Florida, north to the Houlton–Woodstock Border Crossing between Maine and the Canadian province of New Brunswick". It's also an important connection between the Great Northeast and the rest of Philadelphia, which enables this linguistic joke:

By the time I-95 is repaired and contact can be re-established with Northeast Philadelphia, our respective languages are likely to have diverged so much as to be mutually unintelligible.

— Ryan Godfrey (@rgodfrey) June 11, 2023

I just ran across a particularly impressive garden path sentence in Bernd Heinrich's book RAVENS IN WINTER (p. 268); it took me several tries to get this sentence to parse grammatically:

"Even the wolverine is said to do nothing to drive ravens off that land beside it and steal its food."

(Of course parsing is no problem if the sentence is spoken.  But in written form, for me at least, "and steal its food" just didn't seem to fit at first.  My mis-parse was reading "off" as the head of a prepositional phrase.)

[This is a guest post by Charles Belov]

I pasted the following Thai, which I got from a YouTube channel, into Google translate. The results were mostly in English, but Google Translate injected some apparent Tamil as well and then just gives up and leaves some of the Thai untranslated.

"ตลอดระยะเวลาการทำงานในวงการบันเทิงมันทำให้เราได้เรียนรู้ว่าจริงๆ เเล้วความสุขอยู่รอบตัวเราไปหมด เเล้วความสุขมันง่ายมาก จริงๆ บางทีความสุขมันก็ไม่ต้องมีเงินเยอะมากมาย ความสุขในชีวิตของผมมันคือการมีอิสรภาพ

ผมรู้สึกว่ามันเเค่ต้อง balance ชีวิตให้มากขึ้น รักตัวเองให้เป็น เงินก็ต้องหา เเต่ก็ต้องให้เวลากับตัวเอง เเคร์ตัวเอง เเคร์คนอื่นน้อยลง"

ฟิล์ม ธนภัทร คนหิวความสำเร็จ กับอิสรภาพของชีวิต

translated to English as:

"During the time of working in the entertainment industry, it made us learn that really, happiness doesn't need much money, so much happiness. in my life it is கெர்பியைப்ப்பு

I feel that you have to find balance in your life, but you have to make time for yourself, take care of yourself, and take care of others less"

Film ตันที่ร ตั้วิที่ สุ้วิต้ามี่ สุ้าวิต้วั่ม

From Daniel Deutsch:

We had a long drive yesterday, so we listened to a “robot” reading the entire indictment. It certainly isn’t flawless, but I was surprised by how good it is, especially when it gets “excited” while enacting dialogue.

Indeed, the text-to-speech quality is quite good — though unfortunately they don't tell us which TTS software they used.

Here's the opening, which is indeed entirely clear and even nearly natural-sounding:

The most famous instance of the use of an apostrophe in Hanyu Pinyin romanization is in the place name "Xi'an", the capital of Shaanxi (the doubled "a" is another story) Province.

Xī'ān 西安 — two characters signifying "Western Peace"

If you don't use an apostrophe to separate the syllables, you end up with the monosyllable "xian", which — depending upon the tone and the character it is meant to represent — could mean dozens of different things.

Mark Swofford has carried out an interesting investigation on "Mandarin words with more than one apostrophe", Pinyin News (6/11/23).

Benj Edwards has a mirthful article in Ars Technica (6/9/23)

Researchers discover that ChatGPT prefers repeating 25 jokes over and over

When tested, "Over 90% of 1,008 generated jokes were the same 25 jokes."

[includes an AI generated image of "a laughing robot"]

On Wednesday, two German researchers, Sophie Jentzsch and Kristian Kersting, released a paper that examines the ability of OpenAI's ChatGPT-3.5 to understand and generate humor. In particular, they discovered that ChatGPT's knowledge of jokes is fairly limited: During a test run, 90 percent of 1,008 generations were the same 25 jokes, leading them to conclude that the responses were likely learned and memorized during the AI model's training rather than being newly generated.

The two researchers, associated with the Institute for Software Technology, German Aerospace Center (DLR), and Technical University Darmstadt, explored the nuances of humor found within ChatGPT's 3.5 version (not the newer GPT-4 version) through a series of experiments focusing on joke generation, explanation, and detection. They conducted these experiments by prompting ChatGPT without having access to the model's inner workings or data set.

…

[Jentzsch and Kersting] listed the top 25 most frequently generated jokes in order of occurrence. Below, we've listed the top 10 with the exact number of occurrences (among the 1,008 generations) in parenthesis: