Language Log

From Michael David Johnson:

I found this sign (image below) on Queen's Road West near Exit A of the Sai Ying Pun MTR in Hong Kong. The shop was closed but I think it's a Chinese Medicine shop. Google gives me no results for "recycled bezoar" or "bezoar reciclado," so I seek your knowledge. Bad translation or just something that's not (ever) written in English? I assume from the Portuguese that this must be popular in Macau too?

This elevator panel image was sent to me by Nick Kaldis:

Today's SMBC:

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.