To access an article in the Financial Times yesterday I found myself confronted with a short market-research survey about laptops, tablets, and smartphones. Answer three our four layers of click-the-box questions, and I could get free access to the article I wanted to look at. A reasonable bargain: clearly some company was prepared to pay […]
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Tim Leonard points out that today's Questionable Content has a piece of dialogue in which their (in "their ship"), though referring to a male individual, could not felicitously be exchanged for his:
A couple of days ago, in a café in Paris, someone noticed a young woman intently watching the Clinton/Trump debate, and commented "Isn't watching the debate so much better than working?" But the debate watcher was Ye Tian, a postdoc at the Laboratoire de linguistique formelle, Université Paris Diderot (Paris 7), part of a project whose […]
[This is a joint post by Eric Baković and Kai von Fintel, cross-posted at Kai's blog.] We have been following an ongoing story involving Zombie Lingua with great interest. For those unaware of it, and perhaps for those with only some awareness of it, here is what we currently know. It will help to start […]
Drawn by a seven year old in Los Angeles:
Yesterday, Buzzfeed published an article titled "This Woman Ate A Pork Bun In A Typhoon And Now Everyone Loves Her" (9/28/16). It featured this drawing:
A little over a year ago, we had our first look at "Konglish", Korean-style English. If it was thriving then, it seems to be positively luxuriant now: "The Beauty and Perils of Konglish, the Korean-English Hybrid" (Margaret Rhodes, WIRED, 9/29/16)
Let me explain, very informally, what a predictive text imitator is. It is a computer program that takes as input a passage of training text and produces as output a new text that is composed quasi-randomly except that it matches the training text with regard to the frequencies of word or character sequences up to […]
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Please, talk to each other. It's important to linguists that there should be plenty of chat. We need language live, on the hoof. Millions of spoken word tokens everywhere, so that we can (for example) compare Donald Trump's amazingly high proportion of first-person singular pronouns to the average for non-narcissists like typical Language Log readers. […]
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Here we go again: "Samsung’s Galaxy On7 goes official" (Marketing-Interactive, 9/28/16) As we’ve covered shortly two weeks ago, the pronunciation of “7″ sounds like “penis” in Cantonese, and the latest Samsung Galaxy On7 launch has once again stirred up discussion on the internet in Hong Kong. The Cantonese pronunciation of “On9″ [sic: there seems to be a mix-up here] […]
The Economist, in a leader last April about the Panama Papers revelation, which I really should have brought to your attention sooner (it fell through the cracks of my life), told us that "The daughters of Azerbaijan's president appear secretly to control gold mines." They appear secretly? Where are these secret appearances? Are they scheduled in […]
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On the fence around a construction site that I walk past every day is this sign:
According to these two articles, Google Translate is taking a quantum leap forward in the quality of its services, starting with Mandarin to English: "Google says its new AI-powered translation tool scores nearly identically to human translators" (Quartz, 9/27/16) "An Infusion of AI Makes Google Translate More Powerful Than Ever" (WIRED, 9/27/16)