Language Log

Mark Mandel was surprised to see "shooting dead" apparently used as a noun phrase in a Guardian headline: "Two officers arrested over shooting dead of six-year-old Louisiana boy",11/7/2015. The obligatory screenshot:

Matt Anderson called my attention to a short (15:49), enigmatic 1959 Chinese film:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKYMO73hLRY

From China Miéville's Embassytown, the start of the relationship between Avice and Scile:

He’d finished the bulk of his research. It was a comparative study of a particular set of phonemes, in several different languages— and not all of one species, or one world, which made little sense to me.

“What are you looking for?” I said.

“Oh, secrets,” he said. “You know. Essences. Inherentnesses.”

“Bravo on that ugly word. And?”

“And there aren’t any.”

“Mmm,” I said. “Awkward.”

“That’s defeatist talk. I’ll cobble something together. A scholar can never let mere wrongness get in the way of the theory.”

“Bravo again.” I toasted him.

From David Moser:

I attended an all-day series of talks today at an academic institution. Some of the panels were in Chinese, some in English.  One that I found particularly interesting was an afternoon panel with the CEOs of several Chinese companies. The panel was supposed to be in Chinese, but I found it hilarious that all of these participants, steeped as they are in American and Western culture and business, seemingly can no longer speak pure Chinese.  It is simply impossible for them.  Some of the panelists could hardly speak even one sentence without throwing in an English word or two.   I started writing down some of their code-switching, but it was so ubiquitous I soon stopped even trying.  Here are some examples:

Since both consist of carefully managed and skillfully manipulated sound, music and language blend into each other.  This is most evident in song, of course, where language and tonality exist simultaneously.  But sometimes the human voice is treated as an instrument, and language recedes into the background.  On the other hand, something else human that is more ostensibly musical, namely whistling, can be used for the communication of ideas and information, tasks that are usually reserved for language.  See the great Wikipedia article on "Whistled language" and the masterful Wikipedia article on "Transcendental whistling", also this YouTube video:

"Whistled language of the island of La Gomera (Canary Islands), the Silbo Gomero". (10:20)

Greg Corrado, "Computer, respond to this email", Google Research Blog 11/3/2015:

I get a lot of email, and I often peek at it on the go with my phone. But replying to email on mobile is a real pain, even for short replies. What if there were a system that could automatically determine if an email was answerable with a short reply, and compose a few suitable responses that I could edit or send with just a tap? […]

Some months ago, Bálint Miklós from the Gmail team asked me if such a thing might be possible. I said it sounded too much like passing the Turing Test to get our hopes up… but having collaborated before on machine learning improvements to spam detection and email categorization, we thought we’d give it a try. […]

We’re actually pretty amazed at how well this works. We’ll be rolling this feature out on Inbox for Android and iOS later this week, and we hope you’ll try it for yourself! Tap on a Smart Reply suggestion to start editing it. If it’s perfect as is, just tap send. Two-tap email on the go — just like Bálint envisioned.

Two days ago, we contemplated the wonders of the short Polish-American surname Dzwil.  Today we turn to a much longer, but equally wondrous, Hungarian-American surname, the one in the title of this post.

For some seemingly impenetrable Hungarian surnames, it helps an English speaker to have mnemonic devices to produce a passable pronunciation.  An example is the surname of the Berkeley Sinologist, Mark Csikszentmihalyi.  Mark is the son of the Chicago, and later Claremont, psychologist and management specialist, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (in Hungarian orthography that would be Csíkszentmihályi Mihály).   Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is the creator of the concept of "flow", a highly focused mental state.

A panel from today's SMBC:

Arika Okrent, "Translation Error Announces 'Clitoris Festival' in Spain", Mental Floss 11/2/2015:

The town of As Pontes in northwestern Spain has held a festival to celebrate the local leafy green delicacy of grelo, or broccoli rabe, since 1981. This year, visitors who went to the festival website hoping to find useful information were surprised by the announcement of a "Clitoris Festival" and the claim that "the clitoris is one of the typical products of Galician cuisine."

Municipal spokesman Monserrat García explained that the mistake was the result of automatic Google translation from the local language of Galician into Castilian Spanish.

For the last few weeks, as I walk by the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology on my way to work, I've been noticing equipment marked "Dzwil" that belongs to a masonry construction company engaged to firm up the foundations.

Naturally, every time I saw that word I said to myself, "I wonder how they pronounce it".

This is a guest post by Herbert Terrace and Michael Studdert-Kennedy, in the form of a response to Marc Hauser, Charles Yang, Robert Berwick, Ian Tattersall, Michael Ryan, Jeffrey Watumull, Noam Chomsky, and Richard C. Lewontin, "The Mystery of Language Evolution", Frontiers of Psychology 2014.

Herb Terrace explains:

At Charles Yang's suggestion, Michael Studdert-Kennedy and I would like to offer a commentary to Language Log in response to an article that appeared in 2014 in Frontiers of Psychology […]. That commentary was peremptorily rejected by Frontiers without explanation.

A couple of great posts by Ben Schmidt at Bookworm: "Vector space models for the digital humanities", 10/25/2015; and "Rejecting the gender binary: a vector-space operation", 10/30/2015.

Update — A quick experiment by a Penn grad student, which confirms that somewhat plausible things emerge from fairly small and fairly noisy datasets…