Language Log

Sign on the front of a fashion store (shoes and handbags) in Taipei:

Paul M. sent in this photograph of the front of a fashion shop on Yongkang Street, Da’an District, Taipei City, Taiwan:

Photograph of a campaign billboard in Taiwan showing President Tsai Ing-wen, who is up for reelection on January 11, with one of her two beloved cats: (Source: anonymous colleague)

Following up "Shelties On Alki Story Forest" (11/26/2019) and "The right boot of the warner of the baron" (12/6/2019), here's some recent testimony from engineers at Google about the brittleness of contemporary speech-to-text systems: Arun Narayanan et al., "Recognizing Long-Form Speech Using Streaming End-To-End Models", arXiv 10/24/2019. The goal of that paper is to document […]

The vast majority of people, both inside and outside of China, input characters on cell phones, computers, and other electronic devices via Hanyu Pinyin or other phonetic script.  Naturally, this has had a huge impact on the relationship between users of the Chinese script and their command of the characters, since they are no longer […]

In the discussion of Boris Johnson's misperceived phrase ("Was it 'people of colour' or 'people of talent'?", 12/6/2019), several people expressed the opinion that "people of talent" is an unexpected way to refer to the group that he wants to welcome. Thus Rose Eneri: My question is why does Mr. Johnson use such as odd […]

When I was learning Mandarin over half a century ago, the more grammatically minded Chinese language teachers argued that historically and functionally there were multiple "le" particles that just happened to end up being written with the simple two-stroke character 了.  Then a contrary movement set in, and linguists tried to prune down all the […]

The start of today's SMBC:

Jim Waterson, "Channel 4 apologises over subtitle error on viral Boris Johnson clip (Tory anger after tweet claims PM said ‘people of colour’ instead of ‘people of talent’)", The Guardian 12/6/2019: Channel 4 News has apologised after a subtitling error wrongly claimed Boris Johnson had discussed whether “people of colour” should be allowed into the […]

Dick Margulis saw this in a hospital waiting room in the University of Hong Kong Shenzhen Hospital:

Annie Ropeik, "N.H. Defends Laconia Law Barring Female Nudity In U.S. Supreme Court Appeal", New Hampshire Public Radio 12/6/2019: New Hampshire has filed a response with the U.S. Supreme Court in the so-called “Free the Nipple” case of three women arrested for going topless at Weirs Beach in 2016. The high court had asked to […]

Here at the UNESCO LT4All conference, I've noticed that many participants assert or imply that the problems of human language technology have been solved for a few major languages, especially English, so that the problem on the table is how to extend that success to thousands of other languages and varieties. This is not totally […]

I'm in Paris for the UNESCO International Conference Language Technologies for All (LT4All), which happens to coincide with another event in France, a national strike that (among other things) created a very long trip from the airport. In my hotel's elevator there was a sign whose first sentence taught me a couple of new words: […]