Language Log

The recent controversy about Florida's new State Academic Standards for Social Studies leaves something out, in my opinion. The point of contention is the assertion (p.6) that "Instruction includes how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit". Critics have taken this as an inappropriate pitch for the benefits of slavery, evoking the "Slavery as Positive Good" viewpoint that was common in the American south before the Civil War.

Missing from the discussion is the fact that the transfer of crucial skills sometimes went in the other direction. In the 17th and 18th centuries, enslaved Africans brought with them the technology that enabled wet rice cultivation in South Carolina and Georgia. Needless to say, the British colonizers knew nothing at all about how to grow rice, especially in converted mangrove swamps. This imported technology led to lucrative rice-cultivation plantations that were essential to Britain's colonization of North America.

Today's Non Sequitur:

[This is a guest post by Max Deeg.  Although the following text has profound implications for anyone who is seriously interested in the actualities of translation between two very different kinds of languages from antiquity, it is fundamentally a task for specialists to render this type of Middle Buddhist Hybrid Sinitic into English.  This is both because of the nature of the language itself and due to the fact that it is fairly lengthy.  Consequently, I will not provide phonetic annotations of the entire text, as is my usual practice for shorter passages on Language Log.]

Bianji on Sanskrit and Xuanzang as a translator.[1]

Introduction

The following passage is found in the twelfth chapter or fascicle (juan) of Xuanzang’s 玄奘 Datang Xiyu ji 大唐西域記 (Record of the Western Regions of the Great Tang) and is part of what I think is Bianji’s 辯機 (619-?) “Eulogy of the Record” (Jizan 記讚) added to the Record.[2]

The Datang Xiyu ji (Record of the Western Regions of the Great Tang) by the Chinese monk-pilgrim and translator Xuanzang (600?-664; travelled 629-645), arguably is one of the earliest Buddhist Chinese texts translated into a Western language and had an enormous impact on the historical research on Buddhism.[3] Originally written for the second Tang emperor Taizong 太宗 (598-649; ruled from 626) in less than one year after Xuanzang’s return from India in 645, the text gives information about the Central Asian regions Xuanzang travelled through on his journey to India (and back), about India and her different regions, with a focus on the state of Buddhism and its sacred places linked to the life of the Buddha and his disciples. Although the Record has mainly been used in a historicist-positivist fashion in modern scholarship, the text is a multifaceted complex work which contains several layers of “intentionality” that need to be taken into account carefully when reading and interpreting (hence also translating) the text. One of these intentional aspects is to “sell” Buddhism and the ideal of a Buddhist ruler to the Tang emperor.[4]

From Sarah Gao and Andrew Gao, "On the Origin of LLMs: An Evolutionary Tree and Graph for 15,821 Large Language Models", arxiv.org 7/19/2023:

That's not a vinyl — it's a "radial dendrogram" — showing the evolutionary tree of nearly 6,000 Large Language Models posted at Hugging Face. Zeroing in on one quadrant, so you can read the labels:

During the first twenty years of my academic career, if anybody asked me what my specialty was, I would have told them something like "medieval popular Buddhist vernacular Chinese literature".  In that usage of "vernacular", which I thought was the standard meaning of the term, I simply considered it a register of language and writing that is distinct from and contrasted with "classical" or "literary", and — to my mind — it was parallel to "popular" or "folk" in a cultural spectrum that ran to "elite" at the other end (I was going to say "at the top", but — being a partisan of "popular" and "folk" — I caught myself).

In college, as an English major, being a specialist on the vernacular meant that I was enamored of Chaucer, and in graduate school and as a young Sinologist, it signified that I concentrated on the first sizable body of non-classical / literary texts archeologically recovered from the far western Chinese site of Dunhuang, concerning which we have often touched here on Language Log, especially in recent weeks.

Ashley Belanger, "OpenAI, Google will watermark AI-generated content to hinder deepfakes, misinfo", ars technica 7/21/2023:

Seven companies — including OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Meta, Amazon, Anthropic, and Inflection —- have committed to developing tech to clearly watermark AI-generated content. That will help make it safer to share AI-generated text, video, audio, and images without misleading others about the authenticity of that content, the Biden administration hopes.

The link goes to a 7/21 White House with the title "FACT SHEET: Biden-⁠Harris Administration Secures Voluntary Commitments from Leading Artificial Intelligence Companies to Manage the Risks Posed by AI". One of that document's many bullet points:

• The companies commit to developing robust technical mechanisms to ensure that users know when content is AI generated, such as a watermarking system. This action enables creativity with AI to flourish but reduces the dangers of fraud and deception.

When I entered the Airbnb where I'm now staying, one of the first things that caught my attention was the following utensil:

From John Rohsenow, via Mabel Menard, comes this bit of Japanglish:

(source)

Joshua Benton, "If other media companies thought about brand equity the way Elon Musk thinks about Twitter’s (er, X’s)", Nieman Labs 7/24/2023:

In the spirit of Tronc, Elon Musk has decided to throw away more than a decade of brand equity by changing the name of Twitter to…the letter X. Imagine if more media executives followed his lead.

Benton offers several analogies, of which the first one is (in my opinion) the best:

NEW YORK, July 24, 2023 — The New York Times Company (NYSE: NYT) is proud to announce the new brand identity of its flagship news product: -.

The new glyph-driven name, to be pronounced “hyphen” or “The News Organization Formerly Known As The New York Times,” connects the company to its rich, 172-year-long history — in particular, the period from 1851 to 1896 in which it displayed its name as “The New-York Times.”

Notice in a men's room at Dunhuang, far western Gansu Province:

I never heard of it in America or Europe (seems to be a quite recent phenomenon — by that name — but see below for the deeper history of the activity).  Apparently it has taken off in China during the last year:

Stooping Takes China by Storm as Zoomers Scour the Streets for Junk

Cash-strapped young Chinese have developed a sudden passion for furnishing their homes with discarded items found on the street. Their parents are horrified.

By Fan Yiying, Sixth Tone (Jul 18, 2023)

Stooping has its roots in New York, where there is a long tradition of people leaving unwanted furniture on the stoops of their apartment buildings. The name “stooping” was coined in 2019 by a couple from Brooklyn, who set up an Instagram account sharing photos and locations of discarded items in the city. The feed — Stooping NYC — has amassed nearly half a million followers.

——–

The article I am calling to your attention in this post is of extraordinary importance for its potential to link together many of the themes we have repeatedly investigated during nearly the last two decades on Language Log (see the bibliography below for a sampling of relevant posts).

To make it easier for non-specialist readers, here are a few brief identifications of essential languages and peoples (all late Classical and early Medieval):

Bactrian (Αριαο, Aryao, [arjaː]) is an extinct Eastern Iranian language formerly spoken in the Central Asian region of Bactria (in present-day Afghanistan) and used as the official language of the Kushan and the Hephthalite empires.

The Kushan Empire (Ancient Greek: Βασιλεία Κοσσανῶν; Bactrian: Κοϸανο, Košano; Sanskrit: कुषाण वंश; Brahmi: , Ku-ṣā-ṇa; BHS: Guṣāṇa-vaṃśa; Parthian: , Kušan-xšaθr; Chinese: 貴霜; pinyin: Guìshuāng) was a syncretic empire, formed by the Yuezhi, in the Bactrian territories in the early 1st century. It spread to encompass much of what is now Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Northern India, at least as far as Saketa and Sarnath near Varanasi (Benares), where inscriptions have been found dating to the era of the Kushan Emperor Kanishka the Great.

It's already happening.

Of course, we don't want our students to use AI software to help them write their papers, but the fact of the matter is that some of them, especially among those who have poor English writing skills, are already routinely doing so.  Their attitude seems to be that they will do the basic research and sketching out of the argument, and then they have AI tools make it sound nice.  In some cases, they even ask AI bots to assist them with the data search that goes into their paper.

Some may argue that this is completely unacceptable, that such students should be expelled right away, but where do you draw the line on computer assisted research and writing?  Moreover, this is clearly not the same thing as plagiarism, because the individual who is relying on a chatbot to help him or her is not appropriating the intellectual property of another person.  He/she is utilizing material that he/she specifically requested a machine to create / produce on his / her behalf and at his / her direction.  In other words, the electronic tools are acting as extensions of his / her brain.