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#ielts #toefl #gre #english_vocabulary #english
Language Log
Ask LLOG: Semicolons used as commas?
From Josh E.:
I am a big fan of your posts on the Language Log and was wondering whether you often see semicolons used the way we might normally use commas to set off a dependent clause. Here is an example I just saw:
A Massachusetts family is demanding a full investigation after a state police recruit died after being injured during a training exercise late last week at the Massachusetts State Police Academy.
Police said Enrique Delgado-Garcia, 25, of Worcester was injured and became unresponsive during a training exercise Thursday on defensive tactics. He died the next day. […]
McGhee said he put about 400 to 500 recruits through the program without issue, and noted the academy has since trained thousands.
“While this is a tragedy, and it never should have happened; injuries to this level are very rare,” he said.
When I started teaching a decade ago, I rarely saw this issue. Now, I see it all the time in both undergraduate and professionally published writing. Is there a term for this kind of flattening of punctuation distinctions? Or would Geoff Pullum put me up there with Strunk and White as being wrong in my basic understanding?
FWIW, I'd be surprised if Geoff defended that semicolon.
I don't share the impression that similar errors have become more common, but that may be related to my acknowledged status as the World's Worst Proofreader…
What do the rest of you think?
We should note that the cited semicolons might be an editing error, rather than a reflection of the writer's punctuation preferences…
Some past posts with a connection to semicolons, though mostly not relevant to this question:
"Jane Austen: missing the points", 11/17/2010
"Death before syntax?", 10/20/2014
"More on grammar, punctuation, and prosody", 12/19/2017
"Peeving and breeding", 3/4/2018
"Barstool punctuation", 4/4/2020
"Trends", 3/27/2022
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Word of the Day
Word of the Day: disproportionate
This word has appeared in 283 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence?
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
take off (2)
If a plane takes off, it leaves the ground and rises into the sky.
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Funny Or Die (Youtube)
Parker Short drinks?? #NationalVoterRegistrationDay #GOTV #CreatorsforKamala #DNC2024 #GeorgiaDems
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Word of the Day
smug
Definition: (adjective) Exhibiting or feeling great or offensive satisfaction with oneself or with one's situation; self-righteously complacent.
Synonyms: self-satisfied.
Usage: On his face was the smug look of a toad breakfasting on fat marsh flies.
Discuss
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Language Log
How to say "AI" in Mandarin
An eminent Chinese historian just sent these two sentences to me:
Yǒurén shuō AI zhǐ néng jìsuàn, ér rénlèi néng suànjì. Yīncǐ AI yīdìng bùshì rénlèi duìshǒ
有人說AI只能計算，而人類能算計。因此AI一定不是人類對手。
"Some people say that AI can only calculate, while humans can compute. Therefore, AI must not be a match for humans".
Google Translate, Baidu Fanyi, and Bing Translate all render both jìsuàn 計算 and suànjì 算計 as "calculate". Only DeepL differentiates the two by translating the latter as "do math".
DeepL is on the right track that jìsuàn 計算 and suànjì 算計 need to be distinguished in the sentences under consideration, but I think that suànjì 算計 might better be rendered as "compute" — in this pair of sentences.
Be that as it may, how do you say "AI" in Mandarin (which is the point of this post)? AI.
Of course, you can also translate "AI" into "réngōng zhìhuì 人工智慧" (more popular in Taiwan and the Sinophone world outside mainland China) or "réngōng zhìnéng 人工智能" (preferred on the mainland), but from observation and asking around, it appears that most Chinese who have even a passing acquaintance with what AI / artificial intelligence is prefer to refer to it as "AI" in daily discourse — even those who do not know English. In other words, not only has the Latin alphabet become part of the Chinese writing system, as we have shown numerous times on Language Log, countless English terms, even those written in the Latin alphabet, have become part of the Mandarin and other Sinitic topolect lexicons.
As a savvy M.A. student from the PRC explains:
People wouldn’t think “Oh damn this is a person who wants to brag that they know English” when we use certain English words like AI, offer, deadline, or American terms like NBC, but they would if we use other English words that are not often directly used in English, like if you use “ROI” (return on investment, a very popular term among bankers) in a Chinese conversation (e.g., zhè bǐ jiāoyì de ROI shì shénme 这笔交易的ROI是什么 ["What is the ROI of this transaction?"]), people might think you’re showing off your ability to speak English, etc.
We are already in the early stages of China Babel.
Selected readings
* "Pinyin vs. English" (10/20/23)
* "The Englishization of Chinese enters a new phase" (8/8/24)
* "China Babel" (3/26/24)
* Mark Hansell, "The Sino-Alphabet: The Assimilation of Roman Letters into the Chinese Writing System," Sino-Platonic Papers, 45 (May, 1994), 1-28 (pdf)
[Thanks to Zhaofei Chen, Xinyi Ye, Jing Hu, and Chenfeng Wang]
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Word of the Day
Word of the Day: infraction
This word has appeared in 51 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence?
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
put on (2)
to make an appliance or a piece of equipment start to function
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Funny Or Die (Youtube)
Poor Mr. Fardass #BrianHuskey #WillFerrell #ZachGalifianakis
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Language Log
The City of Angels in Latin
"The Best New Book Written Entirely in Latin You’ll Try to Read This Year: Why Donatien Grau, an adviser at the Louvre, decided to write 'De Civitate Angelorum,' a book about Los Angeles, the Roman way." By Fergus McIntosh, New Yorker (September 16, 2024)
Since even elite schools like Penn and Princeton no longer have a language requirement in their Classics departments, I doubt that many people, other than a few extraordinarily conscientious lawyers and biological taxonomists, will understand much of what Grau has written. Still, it's an interesting experiment to see how much of his book fluent speakers of French, Spanish, and Italian comprehend.
Donatien Grau, an adviser on contemporary programming at the Louvre, was in town from Paris to do a reading from his book “De Civitate Angelorum,” a treatise on Los Angeles written entirely in Latin. He wore an intellectual’s patterned scarf and a too-heavy blue blazer, and was fortifying himself with a pre-reading iced tea.
…
In 2018, Grau was curating an exhibition about Plato at the Getty Villa, in Los Angeles, when he had an idea. “For Jean Paul Getty, the United States were the new Roman Empire, and the Pacific Palisades were the new Amalfi Coast,” he said. “The way the villa was received, in the seventies—it was very strongly criticized as being, you know, Miami. But a lot of scholars, they spoke to archeologists who said that it actually was a fairly accurate rendition of what a Roman villa would have been.” He mopped his brow. “So I thought, What if I do this silly thing and write a book on L.A. in Latin?”
The project soon turned serious. A numismatist by training, Grau took inspiration from fourth- and fifth-century Latin literary texts. An art-house publisher in Paris agreed to print a few hundred copies. For a title, he borrowed from St. Augustine’s “City of God” (“De Civitate Dei”), written when the Roman Empire was in its decline. “In the late fourth century, a number of writers and aristocrats and members of the élite thought that their time was over,” he said. “Christianity had arrived, and would erase the heritage of paganism.”
He wondered: Could Los Angeles be at a similar juncture? Perhaps writing in Latin would help him decide. “Latin was, of course, an imperial language,” he said. “And now it’s a non-hegemonic language. Whereas English is an imperial language that still has that sense of hegemony.” He went on, “We have to accept the foreignness of Latin in order to be able to understand it again.”
After Fergus McIntosh has described the cognoscenti who had gathered for the reading at 192 Books, on Tenth Avenue, "to hear Grau declaim in a dead language", the author begins:
“In ultima terra Civitas Angelorum locata est. Nam inter solitudines et mare, montes et caelum, silvas et urbem, posita est.” So far so good: The City of Angels is at the end of the earth, amid deserts and sea, mountains and sky, forests and sprawl. The next bit was trickier: The city is diverse (“Civitas varia est”), crossed by raised freeways (“viae altae liberae”), prone to earthquakes (“motus terrae”); everyone always thinks that they’re young and happy (“Omnes semper se iuvenes ac beatos esse putant”). Some people frowned in concentration; others looked out the window. Occasionally, Grau slipped in a familiar name—Venice Beach, Topanga, the Oscars—to grateful chuckles. The last section was about David Hockney. “Ad civitatem pictor e Britannia venit,” Grau intoned: A painter came from Britain.
Afterward, fans waited for Grau to finish stacking chairs. “Oddly, I could follow certain parts,” Aisha Butt, who works for the Guggenheim, said. “I think I ended my Latin education at sixteen, but there are little parts you keep.”
For some, it was more about vibes. “He read it without one hint of irony,” Ernesto Estrella, a poet and a philo[...]
Word of the Day
Word of the Day: prescient
This word has appeared in 144 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence?
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
stand up
to get to your feet from a lying or sitting position
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Word of the Day
imitative
Definition: (adjective) (Of words) Formed in imitation of a natural sound.
Synonyms: echoic, onomatopoeic.
Usage: Onomatopoeic words like "buzz" and "murmur" are imitative of the noises they describe.
Discuss
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Language Log
Trump as brass: score
Following up on "Trump as brass", I was curious about the relationship between the spoken pitch track and the score that Jase used to generate the trombone sounds. Here's his Xeet again, showing his score and playing his trombone synthesis overlaid on Trump's audio:
Donald Trump's 'Eating The Dogs' transcribed for trombone. pic.twitter.com/UpK4hNjNuR
— The Jase (@jasemonkey) September 11, 2024
And here's the original audio, with a text-aligned pitch track:
Your browser does not support the audio element.
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/TrumpEatingClip.png
Here's the audio and the pitch track for the first phase "In Springfield", with lines corresponding to the values of the score's first three notes (G, C#, F#) assuming A=440:
Your browser does not support the audio element.
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/TrumpEatingClipHist2.png
As you can see, Trump's pitch track in this case is not a series of more-or-less level pitches, but rather shows the gliding contours of normal intonational patterns. To the extent that there's perceived musicality here, I think it's more because of the rhythm; but in any case, Jase has chosen representative notes that are in the middle of each syllable's contour, probably amplitude-weighted.
And the same thing is true for the subsequent phrases:
Your browser does not support the audio element.
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/TrumpEatingClipX2.png
Your browser does not support the audio element.
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/TrumpEatingClipX2.png
Your browser does not support the audio element.
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/TrumpEatingClipX4.png
A histogram of his F0 values, translated to semitones relative to A 110, confirms (the obvious perception) that he's not singing:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/TrumpEatingClipHist1.png
And yet Jase's trombonification is persuasive…
If you want to explore the patterns for yourself, here's
* the audio
* a .csv file of F0 values
* a Praat TextGrid with the words
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Language Log
AI-based DeepL is different
So says DeepL CEO Jarek Kutylowski.
"DeepL translation targets Taiwan as next key Asian market: CEO says AI-based model is aiming to refine nuances, politeness", Steven Borowiec, Nikkei staff writer (September 16, 2024)
DeepL Write is one thing, DeepL Translator is another. We've examined both on Language Log and are aware that the former is already deeply entrenched as a tool for composition assistance, but are less familiar with the special features of the latter.
The article by Borowiec, based on his interview with CEO Jarek Kutylowski, begins with some not very enlightening remarks about the difference between simplified characters on the mainland and traditional characters on Taiwan, attesting to the truism that CEOs and CFOs often don't know as much about the nitty-gritty technicalities of the products they sell as do the scientists and specialists they hire to make them.
The article then focuses on the business aspects of DeepL, where Kutylowski is on much firmer ground, when he tells us how many hundreds of millions of dollars investment DeepL's translation software has attracted and how many billions of dollars of valuation it has achieved.
When the conversation turns to more general concepts of different approaches to machine translation, I perked up and was all ears.
DeepL was founded in 2017 and touted itself as the first online translation platform to use neural networks and machine learning.
The model was fed countless examples of translated sentences in each language in order to teach it to recognize the natural structures of sentences, Kutylowski explained. He contrasted this with the more conventional approach, in which models rely on estimates of probability and try to "guess" which words are most likely to follow one another in a sentence.
…
Jarek, a native speaker of Polish, pointed to how his mother tongue and other languages have different forms of address depending on the level of familiarity between speakers.
He hopes to soon introduce improvements to DeepL that can improve the quality of translations in such areas. "What helps the AI to solve those problems is having a lot of context. We are actually working on some technology that is going to allow us to solve that by trying to gather that information and trying to gather that context from the user, when it's necessary. I expect that to be available pretty soon."
I have often exclaimed how remarkably good Google Translate is, and I'm absolutely astonished at how many different languages it can translate to and from, but DeepL is aspiring to give it a run for the money.
Selected readings
* "How to say 'AI' in Mandarin" (9/17/24)
* "DeepL Translator" (2/16/23) — lengthy post that gives a detailed demonstration of how DeepL works in comparison with Google Translate, WeChat, and a human being (linguist-Sinilogist)
* "Uh-oh! DeepL in the classroom; it's already here" (2/22/23)
* "Competing chatbots" (7/19/23)
* "Google Translate is even better now" (9/27/16)
* "Google Translate is even better now, part 2" (5/12/22)
* "Google is scary good" (7/31/17)
[Thanks to Don Keyser]
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
up the duff
pregnant
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Idiom of the Day
need (something) (about) as much as (one) needs a hole in the head
To have absolutely no need or use for something. Watch the video
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Funny Or Die (Youtube)
We Found The Most Enthusiastic DNC-Goer of All Time
What better way to observe National Voter Registration Day then to feature the President of Georgia Young Democrats, Parker Short. He's here, he's enthused, he may have had a couple of beers. Watch Parker FINALLY reveal his favorite curse word & more!
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Hispanic Heritage Month from Humpty Trumpty #GeorgeLopez #Trumpez #SNLSpoof
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Language Log
What did Rich Lowry say?
Yesterday, Alejandra Caraballo tweeted:
The editor in chief of the National Review just said the N word in regards to Haitians and Megyn Kelly ignores it.
Andy McCarthy responded:
Ridiculous. @richlowry (not tagged here, natch) obviously got crossed up between 'immigrants' (short i) and migrants (long i) — started mispronouncing "migrants" with short i; instantly corrected himself with no embarrassment because it was patently a mispronunciation. Geez.
And Rich Lowry agreed:
Yep, this is exactly what happened—I began to mispronounce the word “migrants” and caught myself halfway through
Ben Zimmer emailed me:
Got sent this from a friend, who was hoping to see some analysis of whether the initial consonant on the misspeak here is /m/ or /n/. (Since the previous consonant is the final /n/ in "Haitian," there may be some gestural overlap.)
Here's the full clip from Alejandra Caraballo's tweet:
Your browser does not support the audio element.
A transcript of Lowry's part of the clip:
I love- I think it was in- in that interview
where Dana Bash says ((you know))
"police have gone through eleven months of recordings of calls
and they've only found two Springfield residents calling
to complain about Haitian ((??)) n- m- uh migrants
taking
geese
from ponds, only two calls and
I think one lesson of this whole story
people don't care about geese
people really hate geese
you know they- they-
all things considered I think
people'd prefer Haitian migrants
to come and take the geese off the golf course, right
So it's- it's pets- it's uh the cats and dogs that's become the-
the standard, gee- geese clearly don't matter
And the contested phrase:
Your browser does not support the audio element.
to complain about Haitian ((??)) n- m- uh migrants
Just the part that I've transcribed as "Haitian ((???))", with a spectrogram:
Your browser does not support the audio element.
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/LowryBashHaitiansX1a.png
It's easy to hear (and see) why Caraballo heard and wrote what she did — phonetically, ((???))) is clearly [ˡnɪgɚ].
The /nn/ nasal reflex of "Haitian n…" is 95 milliseconds long, and thus clearly represents a sequence of a syllable-final and a syllable-initial nasal. The stable acoustics of the nasal murmur isn't consistent with re-articulation from /n/ to /m/ part-way through. And the formant transitions from the nasal consonant into the following [ɪ] vowel (F2 starting at 1900 Hz) indicate a coronal rather than labial place of articulation.
That conclusion is made more persuasive by comparing the next bits, where Lowry produces a sequence of false starts that might be transcribed phonetically as [n- mʔ- ə-] before going on to say "migrants":
Your browser does not support the audio element.
So McCarthy's explanation is wrong: Lowry did not "[start] mispronouncing 'migrants' with short i".
However, Lowry is clearly in speech-error mode, and what he said after "Haitian" is clearly a substitution for "migrants", and "immigration" does offer a confusable phoneme sequence.
So what he said is clear, in phonetic terms: it was [ˡnɪgɚ]. As for why he said it, there's a range of explanations from a word-substitution error, perhaps of the Freudian slip variety, to an innocent phonemic scramble of the general type that McCarthy proposes.
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
shitload
a large amount or number
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Idiom of the Day
like a chicken with the pip
In low spirits; in a weak or sickened state or manner. Watch the video
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Word of the Day
callous
Definition: (adjective) Emotionally hardened; unfeeling.
Synonyms: indurate, pachydermatous.
Usage: He was a callous man and cared not for the suffering of others.
Discuss
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logist, said. “It was beautiful. He read it as if everybody would understand everything, and that makes you understand.”
Magnifique!
We do this all the time when we listen to operas in languages we don't know. Selected readings
* "Sanskrit resurgent" (8/13/14)
* "Spoken Sanskrit" (1/9/16)
[Thanks to Don Keyser]
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⚠️ Best of English Learning Channels
👉 @EnglishLearn
---------
Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
dag
an unfashionable or socially awkward person
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Idiom of the Day
(as) quick as a bunny
Incredibly quickly or speedily. Watch the video
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Language Log
“Weak point; holler louder!”
My debate analysis for The Economist included these charts:
:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/PublishedDebateMADM.png
…with the commentary
The final charts show the average pitches of the two candidates and their variability within each speaking turn (which can be a rough proxy for emotional arousal). Both candidates start at a lower average pitch and with lower variability, before showing a fair amount of range throughout the debate. Mr Trump was at his most animated (a highly variable pitch) when asked if he had any regrets about his behaviour during the Capitol attack on January 6th 2021.
A particularly striking difference can be seen at the right end of the chart. Ms Harris’s final statement returned close to the tone she began with—low and stable—much like a prosecutor closing a case that she thinks she made well. Mr Trump, in clear contrast, and unusually for a closing statement, gave one of his more animated turns of the night, rising in pitch and variability as he denounced “what these people have done to our country”; “they’re destroying our country, the worst president, the worst vice-president in the history of our country” was his final line. In other words, Mr Trump sounded like a man still trying to put energy into changing the narrative—or possibly just like a man who knows he has not had his best night.
Here's the text of Trump's "most animated" turn:
2699.510 2774.899 DonaldTrump You just said a thing that isn't covered peacefully and patriotically. I said during my speech, not later on. Peacefully and patriotically. And nobody on the other side was killed. Ashli Babbitt was shot by an out of control police officer that should have never, ever shot her. It's a disgrace. But we didn't do this group of people that have been treated so badly. I ask, what about all the people that are pouring into our country and killing people that she allowed deported? She was the border Czar. Remember that. She was the border czar are she doesn't want to be called the border czar because she's embarrassed by the border. In fact she said at the beginning, Well, I'm surprised you're not talking about the border yet. That's because she knows what a bad job they've done. What about those people? What what are they going to be prosecuted? When are these people from countries all over the world, not just South America, They're coming in from all over the world, David. All over the world. And crime rates are down all over the world because of it. But let me just when it does, every one of those people going to be prosecuted? One of the people that burned down Minneapolis is going to be prosecuted. Or in Seattle. They went into Seattle. They took over a big percentage of the city of Seattle. One of those people are going to be prosecuted.
And the audio:
Your browser does not support the audio element.
Jerry Goldman sent this comment:
Sen. Huey Long was reviewing a speech he was to give on the Senate floor. He penciled in the margin, “Weak point; holler louder!”
There are interesting things to be said about Kamala Harris's variation in median and MADM pitch, but I'll leave that for another post.
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Language Log
Trump as brass
Trombone, specifically:
Donald Trump's 'Eating The Dogs' transcribed for trombone. pic.twitter.com/UpK4hNjNuR
— The Jase (@jasemonkey) September 11, 2024
See also:
For those people asking for a fretless bass version… pic.twitter.com/xBCpSZoNZz
— The Jase (@jasemonkey) September 11, 2024
Some relevant past posts:
"Poem in the key of what", 10/9/2006
"More on pitch and time intervals in speech", 10/15/2006
"'An essay towards establishing the melody and measure of speech'", 3/20/2016
"Trump's prosody", 8/8/2016
"Trumpchant in B flat", 10/2/2016
"Blues in Moore flat", 12/15/2017
"Emergency in B flat", 2/17/2019
"Dinosaur intonation", 8/28/2021
"Hummed 'I don't know'", 8/29/2021
"More 'I don't know'", 8/31/2021
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