Scott Adams, the Dilbert cartoon creator and diehard Trump promoter, has taken to the semi-jocular practice of adopting the mishearing of Trump's much-loved adjunct big-league, and using bigly as if it were a real adverb ("I just watched the debate on replay. Trump won bigly. This one wasn't close"). Adams is kidding, I think, but […]
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Today at ISCSLP2016, Xuedong Huang announced a striking result from Microsoft Research. A paper documenting it is up on arXiv.org — W. Xiong, J. Droppo, X. Huang, F. Seide, M. Seltzer, A. Stolcke, D. Yu, G. Zweig, "Achieving Human Parity in Conversational Speech Recognition": Conversational speech recognition has served as a flagship speech recognition task since the release of […]
Nathan Hopson came across a marvelous Japanese word from the interwar period the other day: naihoku ナイホク.
Listening to Donald Trump's 10/14/2016 speech in Charlotte NC, I noticed something that I hadn't noticed in listening to his earlier speeches. He often uses a loud isolated monosyllable as a way of transitioning between phrases — and perhaps also as a substitute for the filled pauses that he almost never uses. Some of these transitional syllables are particles like […]
Katy Steinmetz, "How Ruth Bader Ginsburg found her voice", Time Magazine: For three years, NYU linguistics professor emeritus John Victor Singler, along with researchers Nathan LaFave and Allison Shapp, pored over hours of audio of Ginsburg’s remarks at the Supreme Court. They used computer programs to analyze thousands of vowel and consonant utterances during her […]
[This is a guest post by David Moser] We're in the midst of moving to a new apartment. Yuck. So I'm packing boxes with our ayi, who is from Anhui province, and has been helping us with cooking and cleaning house for a few years now. I think she has at least a middle school […]
A. E. STALLINGS says: "At the news that Bob Dylan had won the Nobel Prize in Literature, poets, at least judging from my Facebook feed, were either very much pro- or very much con- (often along generational lines), delighted or outraged…" I found I fell into neither camp. At first, I was pleased to hear […]
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A father speaks [This is a guest post by Alex Wang, following up his remarks in "Learning to read and write Chinese" (7/11/16).] The more I learn Chinese to teach my younger son Chinese reading and writing the more I realize for lack of better word how “ridiculous” it is for a “significant / modern” […]
This is a photograph of a page from an essay written by a third grade student at an elementary school in Suining, Sichuan Province, China:
When we published the ABC Chinese-English Dictionary from Hawaii in 1996, the original American edition had this definition for Lin Biao: "veteran Communist military leader; Mao Zedong's designated successor until his mysterious death". Imagine our surprise when we discovered in the licensed edition of the dictionary from Shanghai the following definition: "veteran Communist military leader; […]
Since Bob Dylan got the Nobel Prize for Literature, here's an old music video with some words to open discussion: (I'm in China for ten days — Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai — so posting may be a bit erratic…)
The following video was posted to YouTube on 10/11/16: