Despite the evidence of my most recent relevant post, the best current speech-to-text systems still make mistakes that a literate and informed human wouldn't. In this recent YouTube video on the history of robotics research, the automatic closed-captioning system renders "DARPA" as "Dartmouth":
I've always been fond of this pretty, little word, but I seldom use it in my own speech (maybe once every five or ten years), because it seems too triumphant. This morning, however, after a long, numerical list of steps that some colleagues and I need to take, followed by a conclusion we wished to […]
I asked several Indo-Europeanist colleagues: In Hittite, Tocharian, Indo-Iranian (Indic and Persian), Greek, Albanian, Germanic, Armenian, Celtic, Anatolian, Italic, Lithuanian, Balto-Slavic, Macedonian, Phrygian, and other IE languages, do you ever find reflexes (derivatives) of these two PIE roots in close association / linkage with each other? PIE root *gene- "give birth, beget," with derivatives referring […]
Over brunch the other day, a question came up that I've wondered about in the past: Who was the "Major Dickason" of Major Dickason's Blend? Skipping my imaginary histories, here's the real story.
Two nights ago, it was raining heavily, with lightning and thunder every so often. As I was peering out into the blackness of my backyard, all of a sudden, a bright light flashed on. At first I thought it was lightning, but then I realized that someone or something had set off the light. It […]
…or maybe we should call it a "semantic jump"? It's a pun that illustrates how word meanings can evolve along sensible paths that become obscure as time passes and culture changes. Which is one of the reasons that the reconstruction of linguistic history gets harder as time depth increases. Here's the upper scene in the […]
We've had extensive discussions about the Old Sinitic reconstruction of the Sinitic word for "wheat". Although we've been circling around it for quite some time now, we haven't yet nailed it down securely, but we're close. While we're still occupied with "wheat", Martin Schwartz sends in this terse, seemingly cryptic, but extremely interesting information about […]
This is part of a long series of Language Log posts in which we pondered the phenomenal memorization skills of persons of Indian heritage (see "Selected readings" below). So you know what's happening in the following astonishing video, let me begin by giving a basic definition, etymology, and explication of what happens in this intricate […]
Beautiful WSJ OpED (6/22/23) by Gerard Gayou, a seminarian of the archdiocese of Washington, who is studying theology at the Pontifical North American College in Rome: The Guiding Light of Latin Grammar The language reminds us of what our words mean and of whom we’re called to be. —– Nothing bored me more during the […]
The word eggcorn was originally proposed in a LLOG post almost 20 years ago — "Egg corns: folk etymology, malapropism, mondegreen, ???", 9/23/2003. And the word is now recognized by most current English dictionaries and other relevant sources, which gloss it variously, e.g. — the Oxford English Dictionary, ("An alteration of a word or phrase […]
I was stunned when I read the following article in the South China Morning Post, both because it was published in Hong Kong, which is now completely under the censorial control of the People's Republic of China (PRC) / Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and because it raises some disturbing political issues and troubling linguistic problems. […]