Search Results
Mandarin tongue twister
Trending on Weibo, a Chinese microblogging website: [So as not to give anything away, all syllables are separated and not divided into words.] Nǐ de huò lā lā lā bù lā lā bù lā duō? Huò lā lā lā bù lā lā bù lā duō yào kàn nǐ de huò lā dé duō bù duō. […]
Purchase wine, buy beer
30 years ago, Don Hindle explored the idea of calculating semantic similarity on the basis of predicate-argument relations in text corpora, and in the context of that work, I remember him noting that we tend to purchase wine but buy beer. He didn't have a lot of evidence for that insight, since he was working […]
Jipangu = Japan Country?
This was supposedly Marco Polo's word for Japan. It has recently come back in vogue for films, games, etc. It would seem that "Jipangu" (also spelled "Zipangu") is cognate with Jap. Nihonkoku / Nipponkoku, Ch. Rìběnguó 日本國, Kor. Ilbon-guk, Viet. Nhật Bản Quốc , but in none of the Chinese topolects I'm aware of does […]
Image search results
Yesterday my wife challenged me to identify the person in a photo she sent. I decided to cheat, by using Google Image Search — and the results were very strange. We've posted often about weird AI behavior in Speech-to-Text and Machine Translation and other NLP applications. Image processing has its own litany of weirdness, which […]
Alphabetical storage, ordering, and retrieval
We just had a good discussion about a Sinitic language written with an alphabet: "The look, feel, and sound of Dungan language" (10/15/20) Under "Selected readings" below, there are listed additional earlier posts about writing Sinitic languages with Romanization. One of the major advantages of the alphabet over a morphosyllabic / logographic ideopicto-phonetic writing system […]
World's worst superhero
From John pitchford's Twitter feed (@Johnnypapa64): World’s worst superhero. pic.twitter.com/gkjElEVW6n — John pitchford🌹 (@Johnnypapa64) August 1, 2020
"As best as we could have hoped for"
Scott Bixby & Asawin Suebsaeng, "The Biden and Trump Shows: It’s Mr. Rogers Vs. ‘Someone’s Crazy Uncle’", The Daily Beast 10/15/2020: “He didn’t spend the whole time yelling, he didn’t piss himself… so this was as best as we could have hoped for,” said one Trump campaign adviser. Someone asked me about the "as best […]
The look, feel, and sound of Dungan language
Here are a couple of YouTube videos by way of example:
Trefoils across Eurasia: the importance of archeology for historical linguistics, part 4
Hour-long video: "A Sacred Emblem: Trefoil in Early Korean Metalwork and Beyond": October 8, 2020 – Trefoil or “three-leaved plant” is a stylized form found in artifacts and architecture across culture and time. Dr. Minjee Kim begins the story with her first encounter with a gold headdress ornament of the Balhae kingdom (698-926) and traces […]
Why "deep learning" (sort of) works
A recent SMBC implicitly calls Aristotelian taxonomies into question: Mouseover title: "Like look at these leaves. 14 oakitudes, minimum."
Deformed blocks
From Graeme Orr: I found this children’s toy at a local newsagency. The manufacturer has the class to ape Lego and Minions, but not to hire an English translator. I wonder what went awry. ‘Deformed’ might connote blocks that can take any form?