See "PVC 1" (4/20/2018) for background. I ran the 51 PVC 1 audio files through the scripts described in "Some visualizations of prosody" (10/23/2016), and ginned up a poster describing a few of the results. Unfortunately poster-display technology doesn't yet include embedded audio playback, so this is an interactive version of the same content. [Note: […]
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Photograph of a packet of seeds purchased by Dara Connolly's wife in a Daiso 100-yen shop in Japan:
As you are aware, our fans in China and elsewhere around the world would like to translate "Language Log" into their own languages. The problem is that there are different words for "language" and "log" in the many languages that they wish to cover. For example, the Romance languages distinguish between the faculty of language—the […]
Just last week, Caity Weaver was waxing rhapsodic about Kim Cattrall's alveolar plosives in the New York Times Styles section: When Ms. Cattrall says the word “didn’t,” she respects each and every D and T. Indeed, it could be said that alveolar plosives — the consonant sounds made by tapping the tip of the tongue […]
[An introduction and guide to my series of posts "Corpora and the Second Amendment" is available here. The corpus data that is discussed can be downloaded here. That link will take you to a shared folder in Dropbox. Important: Use the "Download" button at the top right of the screen.] Before I get into the […]
During the month of May, we witnessed a major flare-up in Hong Kong over the status of Cantonese: "Cantonese is not the mother tongue of Hong Kongers" (5/4/18) — with references to more than two dozen earlier posts on Cantonese relevant to today's topic; in toto, the number of LLog posts touching on one or […]
Wonkier but more accurate title: "Generating the distribution of audiobook speech segment durations". In "Finch linguistics" 7/13/2011, I observed that the distribution of birdsong motif repetitions indicates that the underlying process is non-markovian in a particularly simple way: the probability of adding another motif to a zebra-finch song is not constant, but rather is an […]
I'm about to head to Poland for Speech Prosody 2018, and then to Helsinki for a CHIST-ERA committee meeting, so today's SMBC is especially meaningful to me:
This strip was recently reposted (colorized) in Danielle Corsetto's webcomic Girls With Slingshots:
[*cheesesteak; hoagie] Recently, a new phrase has swept through the internet in China: dìyù tuōyóupíng 地域拖油瓶. People who introduced me to this expression told me that it refers to somebody who is not good at or who is unfamiliar with things associated with the place where he / she is from. Of course, I had […]
Caity Weaver, "Kim Cattrall Can Talk to Me About Anything", NYT 6/6/2018: Because I’m one of the youngest people alive (29), I was not old enough to be interested in a program with “sex” in the title when “Sex and the City” premiered on HBO in 1998, 20 years ago today. Consequently, beyond the broadest […]
Vicki Needham and Niv Ellis, "Trump to face lion’s den at G-7 summit", The Hill 6/6/2018: President Trump will walk into a lion’s den of angry allied leaders at this week’s Group of Seven summit, where he is expected to face a firestorm of criticism over his decision to hit them with steep tariffs on […]
The University of Pennsylvania is instituting a Two-Step Verification for PennKey WebLogins. Up till now, our PennKey for login consisted of a Username and Password. After much effort and practice, I finally mastered that. Now, however, for the sake of greater security, after using our PennKey to log in, we will in addition be asked […]