Idiom of the Day
get on like a house afire
Of two or more people, to enjoy one another's company very much from the start and become good friends at once. (Used when people are meeting for the first time.) Watch the video
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easier, and more accurate. Plans and proposals for lexicon, dictionary and thesaurus creation are also in place, which makes the website more worthwhile to watch out for in the future.
The author explains:
At the moment, the site consists of four major modules, with others still under active development:
1.
1. A high-resolution oracle bone font.
2. A database including over 52,288 glyphs.
3. A Multi-purpose text editor for inputting transcriptions.
4. Geographical and timeline visualizations.
In this two-part article, I will explain the programming technology that made them possible and the academic considerations behind the creation of these modules. In doing so, I hope that some reflections on my attempts regarding font development, database building, and interface design can be helpful for palaeography studies and the general field of DH.
The remainder of this long, first part of the two part post explains in technical detail how the font is constructed and how it is accessed and applied. The author concludes:
In general, this combination of the font as the base glyph compilation and the database interface as the base search tool firmly guarantees the correct input of desired oracle bone graphs and sets the foundation for future development of a genuine glyph database that covers the functions of a dictionary, lexicon, and eventually a transcription corpus. Some effort has to be made in order to become familiar with the functionalities of these modules of course. But compared to the current academic situation where everything is done by copy-pasting images, it is no doubt a worthwhile attempt towards the efficient utilization of the textual resources this field has to offer.
This is indeed a great improvement over the "drawing" and "copy-pasting" of individual glyphs (don't forget that there are 50,000+ of 'em!) that has heretofore constituted the state of the field. It's an ambitious project, but remains to be perfected and utilized.
A closing note. This post by Peichao Qin has appeared in The Digital Orientalist, which has also published scores of other posts on the application of DH and AI for the study of South Asian, Central Asian, East Asian, African, Middle Eastern, etc. languages, Selected readings
* "Nomadic affinity with oracle bone divination" (11/25/20)
* "Oracle" (3/21/14)
* "Paleographers, riches await you!" (10/28/16)
[Thanks to Geoff Wade]
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Parker yelled at us about some BS #CreatorsForKamala #gotv #DNC2024 #GeorgiaYoungDemocrats
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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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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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Poor Mr. Fardass #BrianHuskey #WillFerrell #ZachGalifianakis
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@nimayndolo pulled a Paul Mescal #KMK #DNC2024 #CreatorsForKamala
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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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Word of the Day
interpenetrate
Definition: (verb) Spread or diffuse through.
Synonyms: imbue, permeate, pervade, diffuse, riddle, penetrate.
Usage: Crossing his arms on his chest, as if to control this new sensation of delight, he drank in delicious draughts of that mysterious air which interpenetrates at night the loftiest forests.
Discuss
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Language Log
Font making for oracle bone inscription studies
"Jingyuan Digital Platform: Font Making and Database Development for Shang Oracle Bones (Part 1)", Peichao Qin, The Digital Orientalist (9/17/24)
If you're wondering what "Jingyuan" means, it's a fancy, allusive way to say "Mirrored contexts [for thorough investigations]" ([gézhì] jìngyuán [格致]鏡原) (source), just a means for the creator of the platform to give it a proprietary designation.
A goodly proportion of Language Log readers probably have some idea of what oracle bone inscriptions are, but just to refresh our memories and for the benefit of new and recent readers who are not familiar with the history of Sinographic scripts, I'm going to jump right into the third paragraph of Qin's article, which is like a basic primer of oracle bone inscription studies.
Oracle bone inscriptions (OBI), also known as the oracle bone script, can be dated to the later part of the Shang dynasty (ca. 1250 B.C. – 1046 B.C.). It is the inscriptional product of pyromantic divination conducted by Shang elites, a controlled process of systematic drilling of hollows and burning of metal rods to produce cracks on turtle shells or ox scapulae, and the subsequent record-keeping practices of Shang scribes to keep track of the relevant divination events (also see Henry’s post). The oracle bone script, in general, is known to possess highly complex character structures and a huge number of variant forms. Since its first discovery in 1899, over 4,000 characters and 50,000 distinct variants have been identified. The 125-year-long development of the scholarship has produced a lot of useful literature related to the decipherment studies of individual characters and transcriptions for published oracle bone corpora, offering invaluable materials for relevant linguistic and historical examinations of the Shang dynasty. However, the lack of font support and coherent encoding for both archaic and modern forms of the oracle bone characters, and the long absence of efficient database query support have often made the field rather difficult to navigate for both beginners and advanced learners. The input of oracle bone glyphs and database building have been constantly relying on copying and pasting rubbings [of] images which are not so easily indexed and searched.
To return to the beginning of the post, wherein the author gives the rationale for their creation of the platform:
Tired of struggling to find and type out complex oracle bone script characters? You’re not alone. For years, scholars and enthusiasts alike have faced the frustrating challenges of working with these ancient inscriptions—challenges that stem from the lack of a proper font and efficient search tools. An insane number of characters, variants and transcriptions are out there right now thanks to more-than-a-century-long discoveries and research. Imagine spending hours and hours just trying to locate a single glyph or having to manually piece together characters from a mixture of strokes and blot marks using low-resolution rubbings. This not only creates problems for scholars who want to read the texts and search for the relevant literature, but also for enthusiasts who just want to type the character and create non-pixelated artworks. This was the reality for the oracle bone script, until now.
I’m excited to introduce the Jingyuan Digital Platform, a brand-new solution designed to transform how we interact with Shang oracle bone inscriptions. This platform offers two major game-changing tools: the world’s first ultra high-resolution font for oracle bone script (available for free download here) and a comprehensive, user-friendly search engine for these ancient glyphs. Whether you’re typing in Word, designing a poster, or conducting in-depth research, the platform streamlines the entire process, making it faster,[...]
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Man-maids Tale
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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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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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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
dag
an unfashionable or socially awkward person
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