Language Log

Patience pays off:

Official Swedish dictionary completed after 140 years

One hundred and thirty-seven full-time employees have worked on Swedish Academy Dictionary over the years since 1883

Agence France-Presse in Stockholm
Wed 25 Oct 2023

———-

The definitive record of the Swedish language has been completed after 140 years, with the dictionary’s final volume sent to the printer’s last week, its editor said on Wednesday.

0:00 Etruscan 

0:39 Sumerian 

1:25 Ancient Greek 

2:24 Urartian

3:24 Avestan 

3:50 Egyptian 

4:41 Akkadian 

5:34 Sanskrit

6:33 Hittite 

7:31 Latin 

8:28 Phoenician 

9:14 End

It is with deep sadness that I report the passing on October 14, 2023 of Tsu-Lin Mei, professor of Chinese historical linguistics at Cornell University.  Tsu-Lin was born on February 14, 1933 at the Peking Union Medical College Hospital in Beijing. He received his B.A. from Oberlin College in 1954, his M.A. (in Mathematics) from Harvard in 1955, and his Ph.D. (in Philosophy) from Yale in 1962. He joined Cornell in 1971 as Associate Professor of Chinese Literature and Philosophy, chaired the Department of Asian Studies, directed the China-Japan Program (the East Asia Program), and was the Hu Shih Professor from 1994 to his retirement in 2001.  After retiring from Cornell, he served as a visiting professor at Stanford University, Peking University, the Chinese Academy of Social Science in Beijing, National Taiwan University, and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, among others.

He was elected to Academia Sinica in Taiwan in 1994.

Kevin Drum, "Calling all linguists", 10/20/2023:

You know what I'd like? I'd like a qualified linguist with a good ear to listen to a Joe Biden speech and report back.

A couple of weeks ago I spent some time doing this, and Biden's problem is that his speech really does sound a little slurred at times. My amateur conclusion was that he had problems enunciating his unvoiced fricatives, which suggests not a cognitive problem but only that his vocal cords have loosened with age.

Since When Does Eric Adams Speak Spanish, Yiddish and Mandarin?

He doesn’t. But New York City is using artificial intelligence to send robocalls featuring the mayor’s voice in many languages.

By Emma G. Fitzsimmons and Jeffery C. Mays, NYT (Oct. 20, 2023)

The calls to New Yorkers have a familiar ring to them. They all sound like Mayor Eric Adams — only in Spanish. Or Yiddish. Or Mandarin.

Has the mayor been taking language lessons?

The answer is no, and the truth is slightly more expensive and, in the eyes of privacy experts, far more worrisome.

The mayor is using artificial intelligence to reach New Yorkers through robocalls in a number of languages. The calls encourage people to apply for jobs in city government or to attend community events like concerts.

“I walk around sometimes and people turn around and say, ‘I just know that voice. That voice is so comforting. I enjoy hearing your voice,’” the mayor said at a recent news conference. “Now they’re able to hear my voice in their language.”

New York City’s embrace of the technology came this week as Mr. Adams announced a 50-page “action plan” for artificial intelligence — an effort to “strike a critical balance in the global A.I. conversation,” he said, by embracing its benefits while protecting New Yorkers from its pitfalls.

I knew that in the future it would come to this.  More than forty years ago, I predicted that one day China would have to make a choice between Hanyu Pinyin and English when it comes to phonetic writing.  As we say in Mandarin, "guǒrán 果然" ("as expected / it turns out")….

It seems that there's been quite a flap over the replacement of signs for subway station stops from English to Hanyu Pinyin, as documented (verbally and visually [many photographs]) in this Chinese article.  Naturally, the Chinese characters are there in either case, but what people are complaining about is the replacement of English with Hanyu Pinyin.  For example, changing "Library" to "Tushuguan" or "Hefei Train Station" to "Hefei Huochezhan".

Here we go again, but this time on a grander and more dramatic scale:

Pras Michel of Fugees seeks new trial, contends former attorney used AI for closing argument

The hip-hop artist convicted on campaign finance and foreign influence charges seeks to set aside the jury’s guilty verdicts.

By Josh Bernstein, Politico (1016/23)

Notice the high stakes of this trial, since the defendant, among many other serious, wide-randing charges, is accused of acting as an unregistered foreign agent for China.

Fugees star Pras Michel, who was convicted in April on charges of conspiring to make straw campaign donations, witness tampering and acting as an unregistered foreign agent for China, appears to be breaking new legal ground by calling for a new trial by claiming his defense attorneys allegedly relied on artificial intelligence to compile their final argument for the jury.

In a withering motion filed Monday night with a federal judge in Washington, Michel’s new attorneys argued that his Los Angeles-based lawyer David Kenner relied on the fledgling technology at critical points in Michel’s trial, contributing to “prejudicial ineffective assistance of counsel.”

As soon as I saw David Kenner's name and photograph bruited in this case, I thought, "Isn't he one of the most prominent celebrity lawyers in LA?"

Indeed, he is.  See here and here.

From shaing tai, via a group on Facebook, photograph taken at the New Otani Inn in Tokyo:

Following up on "Wok talk: a real-life retronym!" (10/16/23), Jim Millward remarks:

My wife (Punjabi background) and her family call the "wok-shaped pan" they use for cooking vegetable or meat dishes "kurai" (that's my phoneticization–it could be aspirated or unaspirated k / g, I'm not good at hearing the difference).  I've seen these and we've got a couple–they are indeed parabolic curved-sided heavier metal pans, though some have small diameter flat bottoms for convenience.   Other pots and pans are called patila.   The dishes, generally, are bartan.  The kurai, she just told me, is specifically the "wok-shaped pan." 

[This has been drifting down my too-long to-blog list for almost 16 months — but better late than never, I guess, and the world could use some pejorative-flavored humor…] 

Colin Morris, "Compound pejoratives on Reddit – from buttface to wankpuffin", 6/28/2022:

I collected lists of around 70 prefixes and 70 suffixes (collectively, “affixes”) that can be flexibly combined to form insulting compounds, based on a scan of Wiktionary’s English derogatory terms category. The terms covered a wide range of domains, including:

• • scatology (fart-, poop-)
  • political epithets (lib-, Trump-)
  • food (-waffle, -burger)
  • body parts (butt-, -face, -head, -brains)
  • gendered epithets (bitch-, -boy)
  • animals (dog-, -monkey)

Most terms were limited to appearing in one position. For example, while -face readily forms pejorative compounds as a suffix, it fails to produce felicitous compounds as a prefix (facewad? faceclown? facefart?).

Taking the product of these lists gives around 4,800 possible A+B combinations. Most are of a pejorative character, though some false positives slipped in (e.g. dogpile, spitballs). I scraped all Reddit comments from 2006 to the end of 2020, and counted the number of comments containing each.

From François Lang:

Across the many disciplines that analyze language, there's surprisingly little focus on the properties of natural, spontaneous speech, as opposed to read (or memorized and performed) speech. But of course that dichotomy is an oversimplification — there are many linguistic registers, many ways to read each of the many styles of text, and even more individual, social, and contextual factors influencing spontaneous speech.

So one place to start is events where the same speaker, addressing the same audience for the same purposes, both reads a passage and answers questions — in such cases, at least the speaker and the context are controlled. In "Fluent 'disfluencies' again", 9/3/2022, I looked at the question-answering part of such an event, a press briefing by the U.S. Department of Defense Press Secretary, Brigadier General Patrick S. Ryder. At least, I looked at one small aspect of some of his answers, namely the distribution of certain kinds of disfluencies interpolations.

The focus of this morning's Breakfast Experiment™ will be one of Ryder's more recent press briefings, comparing the introduction (where he reads prepared text) to the first of his answers to subsequent press questions. I'll look at (aspects of) the properties of speech segments and silence segments, as well the statistics of local inter-syllable durations. For both of those features, fully-automatic analysis techniques allow research at scale, though this morning's data sample is small.

I'll also take a short comparative peek at his filled pauses and rapid word-repetitions in the two passages.

Here are two examples.  The first is the (in)famous one about the "Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den":