Language Log

In this post, I wanted to do something that I thought would be fairly simple, viz., address the question of the "rectification" of Russian place names in areas proximate to populations speaking Sinitic languages.  This sort of rectification is also a hot topic where Russia borders on Ukraine.  There, however, the task is simpler, because Russian and Ukrainian are both written in Cyrillic, whereas, in the Russo-Sinitic case, the former is written in the phonetic Cyrillic alphabet, while the latter is written in morphosyllabic Sinoglyphs, a completely different type of writing system.

Everywhere we encounter references to the transliteration of Chinese characters into alphabetic scripts (or vice versa), whereas I maintain that cannot be done because the Sinitic writing system doesn't have any letters that can be transferred over into the letters of an alphabetic script.  Consequently, when talking about the conversion of Sinoglyphic writing to alphabetic scripts, I always speak of it as transcription.

Technically, transliteration is concerned primarily with accurately representing the graphemes of another script, whilst transcription is concerned primarily with representing its phonemes.

(ScriptSource)

From the recent meeting between Putin and Wang Yi (Director of the Office of the Central Foreign Affairs Commission of the Chinese Communist Party):

Today I had a revelation about my handwriting on the blackboard.

By far the majority of students in all of my classes come from mainland China.  They are by nature reticent to speak up, but when it comes to engaging in discussion about material that I have written on the board, they are essentially deadly silent.

I know they're smart and should be able to respond to at least some of my questions, but often they just stare intensely at the writing on the board, almost as though they are in pain.

My handwriting is famously poor, as I have confessed and documented in numerous previous Language Log posts, so I do try to slow down a bit and write clearly when at the board, but often my impatience gets the better of me, and when I speed up, all bets are off that others will comprehend.

Today, I intentionally wrote as clearly as possible (for me).  Still no reactions from the class.  I became frustrated and asked them why they did not answer.

Some snippets:

Limited data sets a hurdle as China plays catch-up to ChatGPT

Lack of high-quality Chinese texts on Internet a barrier to training AI models.

Ryan McMorrow, Nian Liu, Eleanor Olcott, and Madhumita Murgia, FT, Ars Technica (2/21/23)

…

Baidu struggled with its previous attempt at a chatbot, known as Plato, which analysts said could not even answer a simple question such as: “When is Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma’s birthday?”

Analysts point to the lack of high-quality Chinese-language text on the Internet and in other data sets as a barrier for training AI software.

GPT, the program underlying ChatGPT, sucked in hundreds of thousands of English academic papers, news articles, books, and social media posts to learn the patterns that form language. Meanwhile, Baidu’s Ernie has been trained primarily on Chinese-language data as well as English-language data from Wikipedia and Reddit.

…

From the importer's label, carefully placed to obscure the safety instructions (the "do"s and "do not"s) of an electronic gas igniter:

From Jenny Chu:

Knowing your interest in multi-modal writing systems, I thought you might be amused by the attached screencap. It is from a WhatsApp group chat of S6 (final year) students in Hong Kong; one of them is asking the others what they would like to do on the afternoon of their last day of classes:

Yesterday in my Classical Chinese class, we were reading Ouyang Xiu's (1007-1072) "Discussion on 'Biographies of Eunuchs'" in the New History of the Five Dynasties (written 1036-1039, published 1072).  Here's the relevant passage:

Móu zhī ér bùkě wéi. Wéi zhī ér bùkě chéng. Zhì qí shén zé jù shāng ér liǎng bài. ——“Xīn wǔdài shǐ huàn zhě chuán lùn”

謀之而不可為。為之而不可成。至其甚則俱傷而兩敗。 ——《新五代史宦者傳論》 

[Because of the special circumstances of this post, I will not adhere to my usual custom of providing Pinyin Romanization, Hanzi transcription, and English translation all three together.]

So everybody knows what we're talking about:

Baozi (Chinese: 包子), Pao-tsih or bao, is a type of yeast-leavened filled bun in various Chinese cuisines. There are many variations in fillings (meat or vegetarian) and preparations, though the buns are most often steamed. They are a variation of mantou from Northern China.

(source)

Early on in his presidency, Xi Jinping picked this up as one of his nicknames, like Winnie the Pooh, both from his puffy shape.  Both fall under the category of "rǔ bāo 辱包" ("disgracing the dumpling").

[This is a guest post by Conal Boyce]

Here I’ll recount some recent exchanges I had with ChatGPT. Given the scope of ChatGPT, and the fact that it’s in a self‑described intermediate state, our various impressions of it as of February 2023 must be like those of the three blind men examining an elephant — except the elephant is running. In the heart of the professional programmer, ChatGPT creates existential dread since it can spit out in a few seconds a page of code which would have required hours or days for him/her to write and debug — and that only after a lifetime of coding. For the rest of us, for the moment at least, it just provokes curiosity perhaps.

From the Twitter account of the famous popular science writer and muckraker, Fang Zhouzi / Fang Shimin:

先把外资都赶跑、吓跑了，再死皮赖脸地请回来？ pic.twitter.com/FepFOsJnpY

— 方舟子 (@fangshimin) February 20, 2023

Big news from China yesterday:

"2,200-year-old flush toilet — oldest ever found — unearthed at palace ruins in China"

Aspen Pflughoeft, Miami Herald / Yahoo
Thu, February 16, 2023 at 5:37 PM EST

What a gift to humanity!

All the terms in the title of this post mean one or another kind of toilet, but function differently and date from different times and places.  We've talked about many types of toilets on Language Log before (for a few see "Selected readings" below).  Here I want to focus on two Chinese models, one dating to two millennia ago that was recently discovered archeologically, so we don't have a proper name for it yet, and an archaic-sounding one, mǎtǒng 馬桶 ("horse bucket"), that is the current, conventional, common term for the toilet across China.