One exchange caught my linguistic (as opposed to sports fan) attention:
Angelo Cataldi:
Doug, did you ever think this would happen to you?
Doug Pederson:
I did.
Angelo Cataldi:
You did.
Doug Pederson:
I did.
I did.
I did, I didn't think it was going to happen in year two
but
you know, Angelo, listen, i- if- if-
if I don't get into this business
not wanting to win the Super Bowl,
I'm going to go do something else,
you know?
When Erica Hendry asked me for thoughts about features of Donald Trump's style in last week's SOTU, the only contribution I could think to make to her article ("Trump’s language shifts from ‘I’ to ‘we’ in State of the Union address", PBS News Hour 1/31/2018) was the thought that in a speech like that one, which the president delivered but probably didn't write, the main indications of his personal rhetorical style would be the place where what he said deviated from the RAPFD ("Remarks As Prepared for Delivery").
For several years, John McWhorter has been studying Mandarin very seriously. He and I have, from time to time, corresponded about the best, most effective, most efficient way to do that. After years of assiduous learning, it seems that he has recently experienced a kind of satori about one of the most challenging aspects of acquiring fluency in spoken Mandarin: the tones.
Douglas Hofstadter has a critical article in the latest issue of The Atlantic (1/30/18):
"The Shallowness of Google Translate: The program uses state-of-the-art AI techniques, but simple tests show that it's a long way from real understanding." (1/30/18).
Hofstadter criticizes GT for not being as good as himself at translating from French, German, and Chinese into English. I will let others respond to his critique of the French and German translations, but I will comment on his critique of the Chinese to English translation.
On the weekend of January 19-20, 2018, there was a Tangut Workshop at Yale University. Organized by Valerie Hansen and sponsored by the Yale Council of East Asian Studies, this was an intense, exciting learning experience for the 35 or so people who were in the room most of the time.
Many readers may be scratching their heads and asking, "Tangut? What's that? And why should we at Language Log be concerned with it?"
At some point in the recent past, after a few long and fuzzy quasi-days checking annotations for the DIHARD challenge, I found myself dozing off while re-reading a random e-book that turned out to be Charles Stross's Halting State, and was caught short by this sentence:
They call this place the Athens of the North — there’s got to be something you can do by yourself on a summer night, hasn’t there?
I thought to myself, "That's got to be wrong, doesn't it?"
The following article by Xiong Bingqi appeared in today's (2/1/18) China Daily, China's leading English language newspaper: "Ancient texts not a burden on students". Here are the first two paragraphs of the article:
The newly revised senior high school curriculum includes more ancient Chinese poems and prose for recitation, sparking a public discussion on whether it will increase the burden on students. A Ministry of Education official has said recitation should not be regarded as a burden, as it will make students more familiar with traditional culture.
Some people consider an increase in the number of subjects, texts or homework raises the students' burden, while reducing them eases their burden. But they fail to identify the real source of students' burden. By learning something they are interested in or something that is inspiring, the students will actually gain in knowledge and resolve, so such content cannot be an additional burden on them.
Published today in Proceedings of the Royal Society B you will find (provided you have the necessary institutional credentials or library membership) a paper entitled "Imitation of novel conspecific and human speech sounds in the killer whale (Orcinus orca), by José Z. Abramson, Maria Victoria Hernández-Lloreda, Lino García, Fernando Colmenares, Francisco Aboitiz, and Josep Call. The paper is about the conditions under which killer whales can be induced to use their blowholes to imitate sounds that they hear. And it will not be a huge surprise to Language Log readers that the world's newspapers immediately lost their minds. The Daily Mail, a scurrilous Conservative-oriented English tabloid, on its very successful soft-porn-laden website, used the headline "Orca on the blower: Killer whale learns to talk." Hundreds of largely plagiarized stories are springing up around the world under similar headlines (don't make me try to list them). They can do this because when the topic is language, you don't have to maintain any pretense of seriousness. You can just make stuff up. Nobody (other than maybe Language Log) is going to call you on it.