Language Log

Lacey Wade, a postdoc in the Penn Linguistics Department, is featured in the most recent episode of Big Ideas for Strange Times:

I was puzzled by apparently mixed messages in the protest sign featured here:

Fox anchor Eric Shawn, somewhat shaken, responds to his show's live B-roll of today's MAGA rally in DC: "We just saw a very disturbing sign, it said 'Coming for Blacks and Indians, welcome to the New World Order.'" pic.twitter.com/Ayfh2QjtwL

— Matthew Gertz (@MattGertz) November 14, 2020

A headline in today's Guardian tells us that "Supreme court plans an attack on independent judiciary, says Labour" — but you'll probably guess without even following the link that plans is a plural noun rather than a 3rd-person singular tensed verb, and that the phrase "Supreme court plans" probably refers to someone's plans for the court, rather than the court's plans for something.

But here's the first line of the story, anyhow:

Government-backed plans to reduce the size of the supreme court and rename it have been condemned by Labour as an assault on the independence of the judiciary.

I’ve been working on a description of Kamala Harris’ distinctive prosody for a while now, so when I saw Maya Rudolph’s parody of Harris’ victory speech on SNL last Saturday (which happened less than 3 hours after the original!), I wondered if it might shed more light on what’s happening with Harris herself.

In Friday's New York Times:

"A Record of Horseback Riding, Written in Bone and Teeth:  Close examination of horse remains has clarified the timeline of when equestrianism helped transform ancient Chinese civilization", by Katherine Kornei (11/13/20)

More archeological evidence that the horse, horse riding, and related equestrian technologies and culture came to East Asia from the Eurasian interior before the rise of extensive trade along the Silk Road during the Han Dynasty (202 BC-9 AD), and that these developments had a profound impact on the civilization and political organization of East Asia.

The Wikipedia entry for Gritty, cited in my post "Liberté, Égalité, Gritté", used the modifier "outcoming" [emphasis added]:

When Philadelphia played an outsized role in determining the 2020 presidential election, social media users depicted Gritty, as the city personified, defeating outcoming incumbent Donald Trump.

Philip Anderson quickly objected in the comments:

But “outcoming” (as an adjective) in the Wikipedia quote? Incoming or outgoing, surely?

Some discussion ensued, with opinions on several sides of the question.

Melissa Jeltsen, "Lawyers For Mentally Ill Woman Set To Be Executed By U.S. Contract Coronavirus", Huffpost 11/12/2020.

Watching this this CNN story on YouTube I noticed some really weird closed-captioning. You can try it for yourself — open the story on YouTube, turn CC on using the controls on the bottom right of the video panel, and see what you get.

In case it gets fixed, or your environment is different for some reason, I recorded a short sample:

A chart in Wikipedia ("Indo-European vocabulary") [rearranged here] — see under "Bodily functions and states" — shows the connection between words for "sleep" and "dream" in IE languages, including Tocharian.

1. PIE: *swep- "to sleep", *swepnos "dream (n.)" 

2. English: archaic sweven "dream, vision" (< OE swefn); NoEng sweb "to swoon" (< OE swebban "to put to sleep, lull") 

3. Gothic: ON sofa "sleep (v.)" 

4. Latin:  somnus "sleep (n.)"

5. Ancient Greek: húpnos "sleep (n.)"

6. Sanskrit: svápnaḥ "sleep, dream (n.)" 

7. Iranian: Av xᵛafna- "sleep (n.)" NPers xwãb- "sleep" 

8. Slavic: OCS spěti "sleep (v.)", sŭnŭ "sleep (n.), dream (n.)" 

9. Baltic: OPrus supnas "dream", Lith sapnas "dream"

10. Celtic: OIr sūan, W hun "sleep (n.)" 

11. Armenian: kʿnem "I sleep", kʿun "sleep (n.)"

12. Albanian: gjumë "sleep (n.)"

13. Tocharian: A ṣpäṃ, B. ṣpane "sleep (n.), dream (n.)" 

14. Hittite: sup-, suppariya- "to sleep"

"Coronavirus (COVID-19) Update: FDA Authorizes Monoclonal Antibody for Treatment of COVID-19", U.S. Food and Drug Administration 11/9/2020:

Today, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued an emergency use authorization (EUA) for the investigational monoclonal antibody therapy bamlanivimab for the treatment of mild-to-moderate COVID-19 in adult and pediatric patients.

“Bamlanivimab”

Try saying that 5… or 9 times fast!

Jimmy tries to pronounce the new COVID antibody treatment https://t.co/Ua2rpQ0D0j #FallonMono #FallonTonight pic.twitter.com/LuDHpFuJt2

— The Tonight Show (@FallonTonight) November 11, 2020

Charles Yang* is perhaps best known for the development of the Tolerance Principle, a way to quantify and predict (given some input) whether a rule will become productive. He is currently Professor of Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania, where he collaborates with various researchers around the world to test and extend the Tolerance Principle and gain greater insight into the mechanisms underlying language acquisition.

How did you get into Computational Linguistics?

I’ve always been a computer scientist, I never really took any linguistics classes and I was interested in compilers. I was doing AI, so it was kind of natural to think about how human languages were parsed. I remember going to the library looking for stuff like this and I stumbled onto the book “Principle Based Parsing” which was an edited volume and it was incomprehensible. It was fascinating, actually, I wrote [Noam] Chomsky a physical letter way back in the day when I was a kid in Ohio and he kindly replied and said things like there’s recent work in syntax and so on. That was one of the reasons I applied to MIT to do computer science because I was attracted to the work of Bob Berwick who was the initiator of principle based parsing at the time. While doing that, I also ran across Mitch Marcus’s book. I don’t think I quite understood everything he was saying there but his idea of deriving syntactic constraints from parsing strategies was very interesting. I started reading Lectures on Government & Binding among other things. I applied to MIT, I got in. I had some marginal interests in vision, I was very attracted to Shimon Ullman’s work on the psychophysical constraints of vision. [It was] very much out of the Marrian program as opposed to what was beginning to become common, which was this image processing based approach to vision which was just applied data analysis which didn’t quite interest me as much.

I'm a few days late with this, but better late than never — Gritty as La Liberté guidant le peuple:

Liberté, Egalité, Gritté pic.twitter.com/p1Jnaf54de

— Sov Cit Decider (@alicelfc4) November 6, 2020

It has become a meme in China to make fun of people speaking with a Henan accent.  Here are two videos of women dancing and singing Christian songs in Yùjù 豫剧 ("Henan opera") that are circulating on the Chinese internet to the accompaniment of much merriment:  first (for Easter, eulogizing the scene of the Resurrection of Jesus; folkish), second (in praise of Jesus, with an industrial, commercial, official flavor).

Comment by a Chinese friend on the first song-and-dance:

Just think of saints who resurrect from tombs riding in sedan chairs carried by angels and flying to heaven in throngs! It makes me laugh so hard. The girl in red with a piece of cloth over her head is obviously a bride. So it becomes a scene of wedding in progressing to heaven. What a combination of local customs with religion!

Further remark by the same friend:

As for the second piece, it will work perfectly well if "Zhǔ 主“ ("Lord") is replaced by "Dǎng 党“ ("Party").