At some point in the recent past, after a few long and fuzzy quasi-days checking annotations for the DIHARD challenge, I found myself dozing off while re-reading a random e-book that turned out to be Charles Stross's Halting State, and was caught short by this sentence: They call this place the Athens of the North […]
The following article by Xiong Bingqi appeared in today's (2/1/18) China Daily, China's leading English language newspaper: "Ancient texts not a burden on students". Here are the first two paragraphs of the article: The newly revised senior high school curriculum includes more ancient Chinese poems and prose for recitation, sparking a public discussion on whether […]
Published today in Proceedings of the Royal Society B you will find (provided you have the necessary institutional credentials or library membership) a paper entitled "Imitation of novel conspecific and human speech sounds in the killer whale (Orcinus orca), by José Z. Abramson, Maria Victoria Hernández-Lloreda, Lino García, Fernando Colmenares, Francisco Aboitiz, and Josep Call. […]
One of the most widely noted aspects of last night's SOTU address was the president's pronunciation of "Obamacare" as if it were spelled "Opamacare": Your browser does not support the audio element.
RichG sent in a link to Matt Pierce and David Montero, "Warrants in Las Vegas mass shooting reveal name of additional 'person of interest", LA Times 1/30/2018 [emphasis added]: Authorities were looking into an additional "person of interest" following the mass shooting in Las Vegas that killed 58 people and wounded hundreds of others, according […]
In a post on this blog recently Mark Liberman raised the lively area of so-called "adversarial" attacks for modern machine learning systems. These attacks can do amusing and somewhat frightening things such as force an object recognition algorithm to identify all images as toasters with remarkably high confidence. Seeing these applied to image recognition, he […]
John R. Quain, "Alexa, What Happened to My Car?", NYT 1/25/2018 [emphasis added]: And even though voice bots like Alexa and Google’s Assistant can be taught to recognize different voices — well enough to cater to each family member’s favored Pandora stations, for example — they do not offer any sort of biometric security, such […]
Currently making the rounds is a video from Conan showing a standup appearance by the Finnish comedian Ismo Leikola. In his experience of learning English as a second language, he says, "I think the hardest word to truly master has been the word ass." He muses on the peculiar application of -ass as a slangy […]
A curious case of a forced-choice sentence-completion question on a ninth-grade exam at a high school in Taiwan is briefly discussed on Lingua Franca today, for a very general non-linguist readership. It merits a slightly longer and more serious treatment, which I thought Language Log readers might appreciate. The exam question basically asks for a […]
According to the Sino-British Joint Declaration signed by the Prime Ministers of the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the United Kingdom (UK) governments on December 19, 1984, the way of life in Hong Kong would remain unchanged for a period of 50 years from the time of its handover to the PRC in 1997. […]
Is it my imagination, or has there been a drop in GNP (Gross National Peeving) across the Anglophone world? I'm not seeing nearly the volume of "Angry linguistic mobs with torches" that I (think I) did a decade ago. So the recently viral story about this sign on the door of the Continental bar makes […]
Screenshot from Nikita Kuzmin's WeChat:
Jay Livingston sends a compendium of tautologies from The Wire: