Language Log

Interesting combination of scripts for the Military Bookstore on Dì'ān mén xī dàjiē 地安门西大街 (" Di'anmen West Street") (lots of concrete barriers out front!):

the jeremy cunt megamix -> pic.twitter.com/hCALNNOSYx — Hannah Jane Parkinson (@ladyhaja) June 10, 2019

Andrew Lopez, "David Griffin on staff changes, team makeup and his relationship with Danny Ainge", The Times-Picayune 4/23/2019: "We’re certainly going to add infrastructure. There’re really good bones there, they had some very good people here. I don’t look at this as a situation where we have to come in a sweep everything away to […]

[Update by Mark Liberman: Knowledgeable commenters have serious objections to the content of this guest post (e.g. John McWhorter, Sally Thomason), and others cite apparently racist content and publication location in other writings by John Day (e.g. Suzanne Kemmerer, Jamie). It was a serious mistake to have given this work a platform on this blog, […]

The latest xkcd: Mouseover title: "NPR encourages you to add comments to their stories using the page inspector in your browser's developer tools. Note: Your comments are visible only to you, and will be lost when you refresh the page."

Professor Emeritus Petr Sgall, professor of Indo-European, Czech studies, and general linguistics at Charles University in Prague, passed away on May 28, 2019 in Prague, the day after his 93rd birthday. Over a lifetime of distinguished work in theoretical, mathematical and computational linguistics, he did more than any other single person to keep the Prague […]

Activists gathered at Tiananmen Square on May 14th, 1989: Source:  "China’s Great Firewall threatens to erase memories of Tiananmen:  VPN crackdown and sophisticated censorship make it harder to access outside information", by Karen Chiu, abacus (6/3/19)

The current xkcd: Mouseover title: "[20 minutes later] ", hi.""

These are jokes circulating on the Chinese internet.  Not all of them have to do with Chinese languages per se in the narrowest sense. Mandarin Guānhuà 官話 (lit., "officials' talk", "Mandarin")

Janelle Shane, "Once again, a neural net tries to name cats", 6/3/2019: Last year I trained a neural net to generate new names for kittens, by giving it a list of over 8,000 existing cat names to imitate. Starting from scratch, with zero knowledge of English or any context for the words and letter combinations it […]

From Martijn Wieling: We have created a questionnaire about rating English accents and judging English audio samples from non-native speakers of English. We'd like to get as many native English speakers as possible to provide their judgements about the audio samples and I was hoping you'd be willing to link the questionnaire. Note that the […]

Wired newsletter 6/3/2019:

Troll watch WATCHWORD:  When one goes fishing for trolls, the trolls are almost always certain to bite. We've recently had a succession of posts on trolls (see "Readings" below).  We all know that there are lots of trolls lurking out there all over the internet, and they are up to no good.  They cause much […]