Language Log

Unfortunately, most customer service chatbots are not nearly this good: Customer Service Calls pic.twitter.com/CbU67Hpfts — Jeff Wright (@JeffRightNoww) May 19, 2020

It is well known that the PRC had a one-child policy from 1979-2015.  This means that, for most Chinese children born during this period, they would have no brothers and sisters.  As such, they were inestimably precious in a country that lacks adequate social benefits for people to live on after retirement, but who — […]

From the Chinese internet:

[The following is a guest post by John Mock.  I am impressed by how much detailed scholarship (although perhaps not always of great precision and rigor) on such an esoteric matter as that discussed herein already existed in the 18th and 19th centuries.] John Biddulph in his book Tribes of the Hindoo Koosh (Calcutta: Office […]

Watch a commenter enter "gòngfěi 共匪" ("communist bandits") in the blue selection panel, post it, and then see it disappear within 15 seconds. #YouTube "automatically" deletes a comment in Chinese, "Gongfei", which means "communist bandit", in 15 seconds. This person tested 3 times, same result. #油管 15秒內自動刪除「共匪」留言，網友連試三次皆如此。他們找了個比李飛飛更厲害的AI專家？ pic.twitter.com/MLCeko0SIY — Jennifer Zeng 曾錚 (@jenniferatntd) May 13, […]

Today King County Metro (in Washington State) announced that a "New public health Directive requires masks or face coverings on transit": Starting Monday, May 18 until further notice, passengers are required to wear masks or face coverings while riding transit. Additionally, Executive Dow Constantine has directed that all King County employees, including transit operators and crews, wear masks or face coverings when in public indoor […]

From a Taiwanese website Dūnmù jiànduì fángyì chūbāo! Mǎ Yīngjiǔ cue Cài Yīngwén dàoqiàn wǎng bào 1450 xiǎngfǎ 敦睦艦隊防疫出包！馬英九cue蔡英文道歉 網曝1450想法 For someone who is not intimately acquainted with the political and linguistic scenes in Taiwan, it is hard to make sense of this headline. Here are the easy parts: jiànduì 艦隊 ("fleet") fángyì 防疫 ("epidemic […]

I'm involved with several projects that analyze recordings from e-interviews conducted using systems like Zoom, Bluejeans, and WebEx. Some of our analysis techniques rely on timing information, and so it's natural to wonder how much distortion might be introduced by those systems' encoding, transmission, and decoding processes. Why might timing in particular be distorted? Because […]

There's an odd expression that has become virally popular in the PRC in recent weeks, viz., shuǎi guō 甩锅 (lit., "throw / toss the pot / pan", i.e., "shift the blame; pass the buck"). Expressions related to guō 锅 ("pot / pan") are not new.  For example, bèi guō 背锅 ("bear the blame"), and guō […]

Kim Willsher, "'La Covid': coronavirus acronym is feminine, Académie Française says", The Guardian 5/13/2020 ("Many in France have been referring to “le Covid” but guardians of French language rule otherwise"): The Académie Française, guardian of the French language, has said a big non to le covid. Not to the actual disease, but to the use […]

Tim Finin writes: President Trump said Fauci wants to "play all sides of the equation" about reopening schools. I thought that was an unusual phrase and used google to search for it without the token Trump. There were three hits.

"Prinderella and the Cince Told by Cynthia Hall Domine"

The CCP government has done its utmost to prevent Chinese citizens from viewing Matt Pottinger's remarkable May Fourth speech (see "Selected Readings" below) or even from reading about it or expressing their ideas concerning it.  Yet some of them have taken the risk of using illegal VPNs to jump the Great Firewall (GFW) and have […]