This year's champion, Ananya Vinay, is a 12-year-old sixth-grader from Fresno, California. The runner-up, Rohan Rajeev, is a 14-year-old eighth-grader from Edmond, Oklahoma. One of the co-champions from last year, Nihar Janga of Austin, Texas, was 11 and the other, Jairam Hathwar, of Painted Post, N.Y., was 13. Speaking of youthfulness, this year home-schooled Edith […]
From Simon King: We need your help with the Blizzard Challenge listening test for 2017. Please take part yourself, and encourage your colleagues and students too. Feel free to forward this message to your local mailing lists. Speech Experts (you decide if you are one!) take part here. Everyone else, do it here. It's a […]
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June Teufel Dreyer noticed that the People's Daily and other official outlets refer to Okinotori as a jiāo 礁, reef, which fits her understanding of the geology involved. The Japanese, hoping for a larger Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), say it is an island. The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) definition […]
Devin Henry, "Globe heaps scorn on Trump for Paris exit", The Hill 6/3/2017: “I really think that is the major consequence of today: it’s not about the Paris agreement,” said Christiana Figueres, the former head of the United Nation’s climate change mission. “I think the real problem today and the real sadness is the […]
Their legions grow with each passing day. This post is about what they are called in Chinese (see below). The Chinese people were fascinated with Trump even before he was sworn in as POTUS: "Year of the cock" (1/4/17) See also the references in the second half of the third post cited below. Now that […]
From Hwa Shi-Hsia: I have a question for Language Log. My sister in Malaysia recently bought an MP3 player with a feature listed as "The fire cow charging". My father figured out that it meant a transformer or power adapter, but he couldn't come up with a plausible explanation. An acquaintance from Hong Kong responded […]
In "Political sound and silence II" I noted a large difference in measures of speaking rate across the Weekly Addresses of the past three American presidents: N Speech (sec.) Silence (sec.) Total (sec.) Mean Duration % Speech Words WPM (overall) WPM (excl. silence) Bush 2008 48 8262 1976 10237 213 0.807 24483 166.9 206.9 Obama […]
The covfefe fun continues. My personal favorite is the covfefe recipe: And then there's Riane Konc, "Covfefe…For Her", The New Yorker 6/1/2017: Covfefe is for the flat-earthers. For the woman who doesn’t just believe what she’s told. We salute you, freethinker. We see you on the basketball court, trying to dribble a Frisbee. You’re a […]
Today's xkcd: Mouseover title: "The top search for every state is PORN, except Florida, where it's SEX PORN." And the lesson doesn't just apply to maps, of course…
In a comment on "Political Sound and Silence II", 5/30/2017, and referencing "Trends in presidential pitch II", 5/21/2017, unekdoud asked Are there are any trends over the Weekly Addresses for these measures? In particular, is speech duration or speech % correlated with median pitch? There's certainly a relationship (r=0.55) between speaking rate (words per minute counting speech regions […]
Many people have called my attention to this article by Didi Kirsten Tatlow in the New York Times: "A High-Proof Tribute to Tiananmen’s Victims Finds a Way Back to China" (5/30/17) The article begins: It’s a big journey for a little bottle, even one so potent in alcohol and symbolism. The liquor bottle — whose […]
If you've got a spare hour or two, check out #covfefe on Twitter. Or just read a news summary or ten.
In "Political Sound and Silence", 2/8/2016, I compared the joint distribution of speech segment durations and (immediately following) silence segment durations in the Weekly Addresses of Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama: Today I thought I'd add a similar graph for President Donald Trump's Weekly Addresses so far in 2017: