Language Log

Banner displayed on the main campus of Huazhong University of Science and Technology in Wuhan, capital of Hubei Province, by members of the women’s basketball team:

A couple of recent LLOG posts ("What a tangled web they weave", "A long short-term memory of Gertrude Stein") have illustrated the strange and amusing results that Google's current machine translation system can produce when fed variable numbers of repetitions of meaningless letter sequences in non-Latin orthographic systems. [Update: And see posts in the elephant semifics […]

From a Twitter account:

Today's Non Sequitur:

In Finnish, that is. Garrett Wollman ("Some linguistic observations from my trip to Finland", Occasionally Coherent 4/14/2017) notes that Finnish morphology differentiates between "surface" and "interior" relationships of position and motion: toward at away surface allative -lle “onto” adessive -lla/-llä “on” or “at” ablative -lta/-ltä “off” or “away” interior illative -Vn/-hVn (for stems ending in V) […]

Somebody just sent me a note that begins, "I don’t doubt that the letter is fake…".

As just observed ("What a tangled web they weave"), successive repetitions of short sequences of Japanese, Korean, Thai (and perhaps other types of) characters cause Google's Neural Machine Translation system to generate surprisingly varied and poetic English equivalents. Thus if we repeat 1 through 25 times the two-character Thai sequence ไๅ |ไ| 0x0E44 "THAI CHARACTER SARA […]

In "Sinological suffering" (3/31/17), "Aphantasia — absence of the mind's eye" (3/24/17), and other recent posts, we examined the difficulty, for some the near impossibility, of mastering how to write hundreds and thousands of Chinese characters.  Yet, if one wishes to become literate in Chinese, one simply must do it.  Until the 21st century, there […]

…when neural nets are recursive:

This is NOT a post about misnegation, a frequent topic at Language Log.  This is a reflection on the sublimity of nonnegation, which is not quite the same as transcendental affirmation.  It is a linguistic and philosophical inquiry on the absence of nothingness. First comes the linguistics; at the end comes the philosophy. In Mandarin, […]

A friend of mine who works in the Federal government recently received an email posing this rhetorical question: How do agencies mitigate risks and achieve FedRAMP compliance in multi-tenant environments to successfully pave their way to the cloud? He naturally wondered whether there can ever be a paved road leading to a cloud. And I […]

Because I like the Chinese term tǔ 土 ("earth; soil; dirt; ground; earthy; rustic; colloquial") so much, I was going to add the substance of the remarks below as a comment to the "Fun bun pun" (4/9/17) post, in which we devoted a lot of attention to one of my favorite expressions, "tǔbāozi 土包子" ("earthy […]

We've looked fairly intensively at transcriptions of our new President's name in Chinese and, en passant, in Japanese, Korean, and other languages: "Trump translated" (8/31/16) — about halfway down in the o.p. "Transcription of "Barack Obama", "Hillary Clinton", and "Donald Trump" in the Sinosphere" (10/2/16) "Chinese transcriptions of Donald Trump's surname" (11/23/16) For those who […]