Language Log

Today's SMBC:

Trevor Noah's speech at the White House Correspondents' Dinner has gotten a lot of well-deserved praise. But what impressed me most about it was the quality of the "auto-generated" transcript associated with the YouTube version.

Assuming that "auto-generated" means "the output of automatic speech-to-text", the results are overall excellent — with a few odd glitches. For example, the transcript consistently renders "Covid" as "covert". The first one, at around 1:40 —

and uh covert risk aside can i just say
how happy i am that this event is
happening again for the first time in
three years

I am a fan of capital letters.  They let us know when a noun is a proper noun — the name of a person, a place.  But I also have to admit that they are something of a bane at times.  For example, I grew up learning that one should capitalize all terms in a title except for prepositions, words of three letters or less, definite and indefinite articles, and so forth.  For many publications, however, including here at Language Log, it seems to be house style not to capitalize all the terms of a title over three words in length, unless they are proper nouns.

This indefiniteness about whether or not to use capitals in titles gives me lots of headaches.  Because I'm a stickler for bibliographical exactitude, when I'm preparing my list of references and footnotes, it causes me much grief to decide whether to include capitals or not when different sources threat them dissimilarly.

Article by Clara Cini in Le Monde (4/27/22):

« C’est carré comme en Corée », de la fascination des rappeurs pour la dictature au tic langagier

"It's square like in Korea", from the fascination of rappers for the dictatorship to the language tic

[The above French to English translation is from Google Translate.  Since the entire article is in French, I will provide selected English translations done by Google Translate, with minimal editing by me.]

Preface

The expression from rap referred to the North Korean regime. Decontextualized, devoid of its “from the North”, it has lost its meaning and is now used mechanically.

Some amazing happenings at Shanghai's Tongji University, one of China's top institutions of higher learning.  It seems that, as part of the general lockdown of Shanghai, the students — locked in their dorm rooms for weeks on end — have been suffering like everyone else.  Not only do they lack sufficient food and water, the food that they are given is full of tapeworms and other such unwanted ingredients.  So they complained on Weibo, WeChat, and other social media platforms.  The authorities scrubbed and censored the complaints as fast as they could, but when things got out of hand, they decided to hold a large scale Zoom meeting with students, faculty, and administrators all together.

Then the students became really upset because the administrators not only did not reveal their true identities, they threatened students who complained with dire consequences.  Whereupon some students hacked the Zoom meeting and spread it all over the internet, to the point that the government could not keep up with all the postings, postings that elicited the sympathy of the public at large.

"American Sci-fi film 'Everything Everywhere All at Once' subtitles come under fire in Taiwan"

By Lyla Liu, Taiwan News, Staff Writer

2022/04/28

TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — American science-fiction film “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” starring Michelle Yeoh (楊紫瓊) and Jamie Lee Curtis, received criticism from Taiwanese audiences because of its subtitles after its Taiwan premiere on April 22.

…

The American drama has won the one-day championship for three consecutive days since Monday (April 25), according to the chart released by Taipei Box Office Observatory. In addition, it was selected as the opening movie for the 2022 Golden Horse Fantastic Film Festival.

…

This is physics, not surrealist poetry — K Kinjo et al., "Superconducting spin smecticity evidencing the Fulde-Ferrell-Larkin-Ovchinnikov state in Sr₂RuO₄", Science 4/21/2022:

Translational symmetry breaking is antagonistic to static fluidity but can be realized in superconductors, which host a quantum-mechanical coherent fluid formed by electron pairs. A peculiar example of such a state is the Fulde-Ferrell-Larkin-Ovchinnikov (FFLO) state, induced by a time-reversal symmetry–breaking magnetic field applied to spin-singlet superconductors. This state is intrinsically accompanied by the superconducting spin smecticity, spin density–modulated fluidity with spontaneous translational-symmetry breaking. Detection of such spin smecticity provides unambiguous evidence for the FFLO state, but its observation has been challenging. Here, we report the characteristic “double-horn” nuclear magnetic resonance spectrum in the layered superconductor Sr₂RuO₄ near its upper critical field, indicating the spatial sinusoidal modulation of spin density that is consistent with superconducting spin smecticity. Our work reveals that Sr₂RuO₄ provides a versatile platform for studying FFLO physics.

From the Guardian's front page:

The linked story is here.

Last week, I witnessed a palpable, powerful, poignant demonstration of tíbǐwàngzì 提筆忘字 ("forgetting how to write sinographs; character amnesia").  This happened in a colloquium where, during the discussion period, someone mentioned the standard eight-volume Historical Atlas of China (1982-1988) edited by the renowned geographer Tan Qixiang (1911-1992).  A member of the gathering requested that the name be written on the whiteboard in sinographs.  A colleague — a tenured professor of medieval Chinese history — popped up and said they could write the name in characters.

Already a little bit wobbly on the semantophore / radical on the left side of the first character (the surname), with a little bit of kibitzing from colleagues, the volunteer managed to produce the requisite semantophore after several false starts and erasures.  After that great achievement (producing the semantophore amid much embarrassment), they turned to the phonophore on the right side but were getting nowhere fast, even with suggestions from colleagues who were looking on.

Finally, someone looked up the name on their phone and presto digito*, the correct writing emerged:  譚其驤 / 谭其骧 (the group — scholars all — collectively preferred the traditional form over the simplified one).

—–

[*VHM:  I remember hearing this expression when I was young, but it barely exists on the internet, and I can't find it in dictionaries either.]

[This is a guest post by Jenny Chu]

It came up today when I was reading this somewhat viral post on Facebook. 

Package on a grocery store shelf:

This post follows in the path of its classic predecessor, "Dumpling ingredients and character amnesia" (10/18/14), must see.  Here we begin with this provisions list:

(source)

And how (not) to learn Literary Sinitic / Classical Chinese via Mandarin

A "Little Horatian Satire" by E. Bruce Brooks

A section of Classical Chinese Primer by E. Bruce Brooks and A. Taeko Brooks

The dominance of modern-Chinese based curricula may be inevitable in the present political climate, but it is objectively strange all the same. In practice, it prevents the classical language from being acquired by anyone who does not have a use for the usual prerequisite: two or three years of the modern language. The comparative philosophers and historians, the students of ancient technology, and those moved by mere intellectual and literary curiosity, are thus excluded at the outset. Is it healthy for the field, to have nobody to talk to in these neighboring disciplines? And what of the future Chinese classicists themselves, whose linguistic antennae are being tuned, by arduous toil, to a point 2,000 years later than the texts of primary interest to them?

What if the Mediterranean Classicists did as the Sinological Classicists do? An American college freshman with perfect SAT's and a burning desire to investigate the metrics of Horace walks into the Classics program advisor's office and announces her goal. She expects a welcome, and a fast-track Latin class. Instead, she gets the following: