Language Log

pic.twitter.com/WO2XxMNUUW

— The Telegraph (@Telegraph) May 2, 2018

Maybe only 33 words for it, but tens of thousands of words about it…

[h/t Francis Thompson]

The porcine princess seems innocuous enough, but for some reason(s), the Chinese government has decided to censor her:

"China bans Peppa Pig to combat 'negative influence' of foreign ideologies" (businessinsider.com)

"Chinese video app targets 'subversive' Peppa Pig in online clean-up" (CNN)

"China gives 'subversive' Peppa Pig the chop" (AFP)

More links here.

Why go after poor Peppa Pig?  How about Hello Kitty?  Micky Mouse?

I've been noticing a lot of wellness around recently. The word, that is — like Manlu Liu, "Penn announces new position of Chief Wellness Officer to centralize and improve resources", The Daily Pennsylvanian 4/24/2018:

Penn will institute the position of a chief wellness officer, Penn President Amy Gutmann announced in an email to all Penn undergraduate students on April 24.

According to the email, the chief wellness officer will oversee a new department at Penn called "Student Wellness Services" that will include Counseling and Psychological Services, the Student Health Service, and the Office of Alcohol and Other Drug Program Initiatives.

Jason Cox, who sent the following photograph to me, says that his "uncle-in-law has this all over the place":

A while back, I peeved about the people for whom public devotion to single-spacing after a period is a form of virtue-signaling. I’ve now learned that the one-space-or-two issue has found its way into the journal Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics, which has posted “Are two spaces better than one? The effect of spacing following periods and commas during reading” ($) by Rebecca Johnson, Becky Bui, and Lindsay Schmitt.

The paper came to my attention via Matthew Butterick, the author of Typography for Lawyers and the free, online-only Butterick’s Practical Typography ("Are two spaces better than one? A response to new research"). He writes:

Ap­par­ently de­fy­ing Bet­teridge’s Law, the study claims to show that two spaces af­ter a pe­riod are eas­ier to read than one. On its face, this also seems to con­tra­dict my long­stand­ing ad­vice to put only one space be­tween sen­tences.

Be­cause the study costs $39.95 for a PDF, I’m cer­tain the so­cial-me­dia skep­tics rush­ing to claim vic­tory for two-spac­ing have nei­ther bought it nor read it. But I did both.

True, the re­searchers found that putting two spaces af­ter a pe­riod de­liv­ered a “small” but “sta­tis­ti­cally … de­tectable” im­prove­ment in read­ing speed—about 3%—but cu­ri­ously, only for those read­ers who al­ready type with two spaces. For ha­bit­ual one-spac­ers, there was no ben­e­fit at all.

Fur­ther­more, the re­searchers only tested sam­ples of a mono­spaced font on screen …. They didn’t test pro­por­tional fonts, which they ac­knowl­edge are far more com­mon. Nor did they test the ef­fect of two-spac­ing on the printed page. The au­thors con­cede that any of these test-de­sign choices could’ve af­fected their findings.

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https://twitter.com/jenlikespizza/status/990730742052225024

On Friday, April 27, I participated in "Seeking a Future for East Asia’s Past:  A Workshop on Sinographic Sphere Studies" at Boston University.  Among the participants was Terry Kawashima who talked about the commodification and fetishization of kanji.  The following paragraphs are a revised version of a portion of her remarks:

There's an impression among some people that "deep learning" has brought computer algorithms to the point where there's nothing left to do but to work out the details of further applications. This reminds me of what has been described as Ludwig Wittgenstein's belief in the early 1920s that the development of formal logic and the "picture theory" of meaning in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus reduced the elucidation (or dissolution) of all philosophical questions to a sort of clerical procedure.

Several recent articles, in different ways, call into question this modern view that Deep Learning (i.e. complex networks of linear algebra with interspersed point nonlinearities, whose millions or billions of parameters are automatically learned from digital examples) is a philosopher's stone whose application solves all algorithmic problems. Two among many others: Gary Marcus, "Deep Learning: A Critical Appraisal", arXiv.org 1/2/2018; Michael Jordan, "Artificial Intelligence — The Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet", Medium 4/19/2018.

And two upcoming talks describe some of the remaining problems in speech and language technology.

A Cantonese grad student from Guangzhou sent me this headline that means something very different in Cantonese and in Mandarin:

Mandarin

Érzi shēng xìngbìng, mǔ bèi gǎn ānwèi 儿子生性病,母倍感安慰
("When her son contracted a venereal disease, the mother felt redoubled happiness").

Cantonese

Ji4zi2 saang1sing3, beng6 mou5 pui5 gam2 on1wai3 儿子生性,病母倍感安慰
("[Given that] her son is obedient, the sick mother felt redoubled happiness")

Word of the day from Robert Macfarlane:

Word of the day: “sjushamillabakka” – ‘between the sea & the shore’, i.e. in the shifting space between high & low tide, neither quite water nor quite land. Metaphorically, therefore, a threshold or border realm (Shetland, archaic). pic.twitter.com/dUZDIuHmy8

— Robert Macfarlane (@RobGMacfarlane) April 29, 2018

The video embedded in this article features North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un speaking at the historic summit meeting with South Korean President Moon Jae-in at Panmunjom inside the demilitarized zone yesterday:

"Hang on, what language is Kim Jong-un speaking?  Livestreaming reveals that the North Korean leader has a unique ‘Swiss-influenced’ accent, a result of his years studying at a German-language boarding school near Bern", Crystal Tai, SCMP (4/27/18).