Language Log

Quick! How do you parse this headline? "Resisting reunification by force to get Taiwan nowhere: mainland spokesperson" (Xinhua, 5/25/17)

Sharon Begley, "Trump wasn’t always so linguistically challenged. What could explain the change?", STAT 5/23/2017: STAT reviewed decades of Trump’s on-air interviews and compared them to Q&A sessions since his inauguration. The differences are striking and unmistakable.   Research has shown that changes in speaking style can result from cognitive decline. STAT therefore asked experts […]

Adrienne LaFrance has an eye-opening article about "The Westernization of Emoji" in The Atlantic (5/22/17).  Here's the summary statement at the beginning: The takeout box and the fortune cookie are perceived as emblems of Chinese culture, when they’re actually central to the American experience of it.

Yesterday's Dumbing of Age:

There's a curious article by Kathy Chu and Menglin Huang in the Wall Street Journal (5/21/17): "How a Toddler Who Loves Eating Transfixed China:  2½-year-old Xiaoman is an online sensation, bringing fame, a Pampers ad and questions about her weight" https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-a-toddler-who-loves-eating-transfixed-china-1495387268 If you have difficulty reading the whole article via the embedded link, try this […]

Wired.com has some perfect linguaphile clickbait: “Watch People With Accents Confuse the Hell Out of AI Assistants.”  By “accents” they mean, non-American ones (e.g., Irish English). The AI Assistants were Siri, Amazon Echo, and Google Home. I’m curious about how well the voice recognition systems in these devices work with varieties of spoken English, so […]

At the instant of posting this, there are only 18 places remaining out of the 40 maximum in Linguistics 183 001, David Peterson's summer session course at UC Berkeley on "The Linguistics of Game of Thrones and the Art of Language Invention." 3 to 5 p.m., Mon/Tue/Wed/Thu, May 22 to June 30. It's not a 'Structure of […]

During last year's presidential campaign, Donald Trump was repeatedly insistent that everyone should use the term "radical Islamic terrorism". For example, his reaction to the Orlando massacre, from Inside Edition 7/13/2016: Your browser does not support the audio element. Announcer: Trump spoke out about the massacre today, saying the president is afraid to call it an […]

Today's SMBC: Mouseover title: "On second thought, let's just leave them in the box."

If you haven't done so already, read Andrej Karpathy, “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Recurrent Neural Networks". And then Janelle Shane, "New paint colors invented by neural network".

In Trends in presidential pitch (5/19/2017), I observed that the median fundamental frequency (= "pitch") of President Trump's weekly addresses has increased  steadily since January, by about 30%.  As a point of comparison, I did the same calculation for President Obama's first few months of  weekly addresses, from 1/24/2009 to 5/23/2009, in comparison to Trump's weekly […]

[This is a guest post by the inimitable satirist, S. Tsow] [1.0 is this: "BARF (Belt and Road Forum)" (5/19/17)] Xi Jinping ("Mr. Eleven" [XI]) calls his New Silk Road initiative "One Belt, One Road"  (Yidai-Yilu).  A map I have shows a land route in the north, going westward, bifurcating at Urumchi, and ending at […]

We are currently in the midst of a massive propaganda barrage unleashed upon the world by the People's Republic of China.  It's all about something that started out being called "Yīdài yīlù 一帶一路" ("One Belt One Road"), at least that's what it was named when I first heard about it a year or two ago.  […]