Language Log

Michael Carr writes, "While examining an iPhone dictionary app (KanjiDicPro), I got a laugh from the attached "bǐshùn biānhào' 笔顺编号." [VHM: bǐshùn biānhào' 笔顺编号 means "stroke order serial/code number"]

That's the question on a t-shirt designed by John Allison,  the author of the Bad Machinëry comic series:

Remember that dude? Always poppin' up in the corner? Wonder what he doin' now? Where he at now?

For those who are too young (or too old, or too fortunate in some other way) to have encountered the Microsoft's Office Assistant "Clippit", nicknamed "Clippy", the Wikipedia page may be helpful.

Lucy Jones, "Ralph Fiennes blames Twitter for 'eroding' language", The Telegraph 10/28/2011:

Speaking at the BFI London Film Festival awards in Old Street, London, the actor said that modern language "is being eroded" and blamed "a world of truncated sentences, soundbites and Twitter."

"Our expressiveness and our ease with some words is being diluted so that the sentence with more than one clause is a problem for us, and the word of more than two syllables is a problem for us," he said.

This sort of thing always makes me suspect that it's really our veracity and our ease with facts that is being diluted.

Tonight is the opening night for a new Broadway play called "Chinglish." I first heard "Chinglish" was coming to Broadway from, appropriately enough, Victor Mair, Language Log's resident expert on the tricky Mandarin-English translational divide. At first all I knew about it was the stylized logo for the show, with the title as Ch'ing·lish. (I thought the diacritic in the first syllable might be some sort of homage to the old Wade-Giles romanization of the aspirated voiceless alveopalatal affricate / t͡ɕʰ/ as ch', as in the Ch'ing Dynasty, now pinyinized as q. But I think it's also supposed to evoke the syllabic stress mark used for headwords in English dictionaries, since the syllable break has the conventional dictionary-style centered dot.) When I saw that the play was written by David Henry Hwang, who won a Tony Award for "M. Butterfly," I was hopeful. And now that I've seen the play and had a chance to interview Hwang about it, I can report that there is much about this funny, poignant play for Language Log fans to love.

Josh Fruhlinger sends along a sublime crash blossom from BBC News: "Dog helps lightning strike Redruth mayor." Requisite screenshot in case it changes:

A couple of days ago, Victor Steinbok sent to ADS-L some examples like this one, which he heard on a Canadian TV show:

I had to drive him on account of he lost his license.

From Laine Gates and Dolly Hayde:

One sentence from your recent post on Wernicke's aphasia (" . . . we here at Language Log are committed to taxonomies of nonsense that are as elaborate as possible") made us hopeful that you might be interested in the "salvage ethnography" project we've begun with the Google Reader Lexicon at http://googlereaderlexicon.wikispaces.com/.

See also "Please don't kill our last enlightenment tool", Dust and Trash 2/22/2011.; Sarah Perez, "Iranians Upset Over Google Reader Changes", TechCrunch 2/24/2011:

Combining two things from recent postings (linguist llama and referent finding):

(via Ellen Seebacher on Google+).

I'm spending three days in Tampa at the kick-off meeting for  DARPA's new BOLT program. Today was Language Sciences Day, and among many other events, there was a "Semantics Panel", in which a half a dozen luminaries discussed ways that the analysis of meaning might play a role again in machine translation. The "again" part comes up because, as Kevin Knight observed in starting the panel off, natural language processing and artificial intelligence went through a bitter divorce 20 years ago. ("And", Gene Charniak added, "I haven't spoken to myself since.")

The various panelists had somewhat different ideas about what to do, and the question period uncovered a substantially larger range of opinions represented in the audience. But it occurred to me that there's a simple and fairly superficial kind of semantic analysis that is not used in any of the MT systems that I'm familiar with, to their considerable detriment — despite the fact that algorithms with decent performance on this task have been around for many years.

Linguist Llama:

[Below is a guest post by Arika Okrent.]

This weekend I had the pleasure of attending a celebration for the 30th anniversary of the establishment of the Linguistics Department at Gallaudet University. Gallaudet is the world's only university for the deaf. Nearly all the undergraduates at Gallaudet have some kind of hearing loss (a very small number of hearing students may be admitted each year), while the graduate school (offering programs in audiology, deaf education, psychology, and interpretation, among others) has a significant number of hearing students. I received an M.A. in Linguistics from Gallaudet in 1997.

Last weekend I was on the NPR show "On the Media" to talk about how the word occupy has evolved since the beginning of the Occupy Wall Street movement in mid-September. I reiterated a point I had made in my Word Routes column the previous week, namely that the success of the movement has been helped along by the modular nature of the Occupy slogan, allowing any place name to fill the "Occupy ___" template. That template has shown up in protests around the world, from Frankfurt to Tokyo, with English Occupy generally left intact (perhaps for maximum media impact). In China, meanwhile, Occupy has a translation-equivalent that is being censored online.

It is asserted that the following passage contains an elementary grammatical error:

When I called to see her in June, 1842, she was gone a-hunting in the woods, as was her wont (I am not sure whether it was a male or female, and so use the more common pronoun), but her mistress told me that she came into the neighborhood a little more than a year before, in April, and was finally taken into their house; that she was of a dark brownish-gray color, with a white spot on her throat, and white feet, and had a large bushy tail like a fox; that in the winter the fur grew thick and flatted out along her sides, forming stripes ten or twelve inches long by two and a half wide, and under her chin like a muff, the upper side loose, the under matted like felt, and in the spring these appendages dropped off. [Henry David Thoreau, Walden; or, Life in the Woods, 1854.]