28487
#ielts #toefl #gre #english_vocabulary #english
Idiom of the Day
cost the earth
To be exorbitant or burdensome in expense. Watch the video
➖ @EngSkills ➖
Language Log
Gender, dialect, and taboo vocabulary in court
In case (like me) you haven't been following the murder trial of Karen Read, this article provides the background: Kim Stelloh, "Karen Read is accused of killing her Boston police officer boyfriend. Here's what we know about the murder trial", NBC News 6/7/2024. The current media fever focuses on the testimony of (Massachusetts State Police investigator) Michael Proctor, forced on the witness stand to read some text messages that hit a trifecta of gender, regional, and vocabulary biases:
Proctor spells c u n t and AJ objects, Auntie Bev said they are your words, so use them.
Friend – "Is she hot"
Proctor – "She's a whack job cunt, yes she's a babe, weird Fall River accent though, no ass" pic.twitter.com/Vdx3wY9uPW
— FreeKarenRead (@Free_Karen_Read) June 10, 2024
I didn't know what a "Fall River accent" is, weird or not — but Google offers some fragments of information (larded with varying amounts of bias…), e.g.:
"How to speak Fall River"
"Do Bristol County accents sound more like Boston or NYC to you?"
"Massachusetts Fall River Accent"
"DION: We speak Fall River, not English, 07-28-08"
A few past posts on English-language accent prejudice:
"Lazy mouths vs. lazy minds", 11/26/2003
"The beauty of Brummie", 7/28/2004
"Those sleepy, slurry southerners", 11/27/2006
"Whodunit sociolinguistics", 7/11/2016
"What makes an accent good or bad?", 11/17/2020
"Accent, power, and persuasion", 3/6/2022
➖ @EngSkills ➖
Word of the Day
cudbear
Definition: (noun) A purplish-red dye derived from certain lichens.
Synonyms: archil, orchil.
Usage: The monks secured a small sample of cudbear to see if it could be used in their illuminated manuscripts.
Discuss
➖ Sent by @TheFeedReaderBot ➖
➖ @EngSkills ➖
Language Log
Not
Lately I've been seeing greater use of this kind of sentence structure: "He is an awesome hero — not". And (mis)negation has always been a favorite topic for discussion on Language Log. Consequently, I'm calling to your attention two recent publications on "not".
"'Not' in the Brain and Behavior." Cas W. Coopmans, Anna Mai, Andrea E. Martin, PLOS Biology 22, no. 5 (May 31, 2024): e3002656.
Negation is key for cognition but has no physical basis, raising questions about its neural origins. A new study in PLOS Biology on the negation of scalar adjectives shows that negation acts in part by altering the response to the adjective it negates. https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3002656.
Language fundamentally abstracts from what is observable in the environment, and it does so often in ways that are difficult to see without careful analysis. Consider a child annoying their sibling by holding their finger very close to the sibling’s arm. If asked what they were doing, the child would likely say, “I’m not touching them.” Here, the distinction between the physical environment and the abstraction of negation is thrown into relief. Although “not touching” is consistent with the situation, “not touching” is not literally what one observes because an absence is definitionally something that is not there. The sibling’s annoyance speaks to the actual situation: A finger is very close to their arm. This kind of scenario illustrates how natural language negation is truly a product of the human brain, abstracting away from physical conditions in the world.
…
"Negation Mitigates Rather than Inverts the Neural Representations of Adjectives." Arianna Zuanazzi, Pablo Ripollés, Wy Ming Lin, Laura Gwilliams, Jean-Rémi King, David Poeppel, PLOS Biology 22, no. 5 (May 30, 2024): e3002622. https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3002622. Abstract
Combinatoric linguistic operations underpin human language processes, but how meaning is composed and refined in the mind of the reader is not well understood. We address this puzzle by exploiting the ubiquitous function of negation. We track the online effects of negation (“not”) and intensifiers (“really”) on the representation of scalar adjectives (e.g., “good”) in parametrically designed behavioral and neurophysiological (MEG) experiments. The behavioral data show that participants first interpret negated adjectives as affirmative and later modify their interpretation towards, but never exactly as, the opposite meaning. Decoding analyses of neural activity further reveal significant above chance decoding accuracy for negated adjectives within 600 ms from adjective onset, suggesting that negation does not invert the representation of adjectives (i.e., “not bad” represented as “good”); furthermore, decoding accuracy for negated adjectives is found to be significantly lower than that for affirmative adjectives. Overall, these results suggest that negation mitigates rather than inverts the neural representations of adjectives. This putative suppression mechanism of negation is supported by increased synchronization of beta-band neural activity in sensorimotor areas. The analysis of negation provides a steppingstone to understand how the human brain represents changes of meaning over time.
Psycholinguists are linguists too, are they not? Selected readings
* "Not not" (4/15/17)
* "A thousand things to say… Not!" (7/19/15)
[h.t. Edward McClure]
➖ @EngSkills ➖
Idiom of the Day
be (the) bomb
To be excellent, extremely entertaining, or of very high quality. Watch the video
➖ @EngSkills ➖
to certain consequences, the general reader would remain deeply unsatisfied. First, such an explanation seems to involve a double-standard: The exact same behaviors are to be explained in different ways depending solely on whether they are performed by humans or by other primates. Second, such a simplistic account seems to fly in the face of the reality of our close common ancestry—is there not some biological doctrine that could be invoked to bolster the probability that when two species are closely related, similar behavior must be attended by similar psychological causes?
[O]ur reinterpretation hypothesis proposes that the majority of the most tantalizing social behaviors shared by humans and other primates (deception, grudging, reconciliation) evolved and were in full operation long before humans invented the means for representing the causes of these behaviors in terms of second-order intentional states. In this sense, our reinterpretation hypothesis may be the evolutionary analog of Annette Karmiloff-Smith’s (1992) concept of ‘representational redescription,’ which she posits as a major driving force in human cognitive development. Her proposal envisions a process in development whereby information implicitly in the mind is progressively recoded at increasingly explicit levels both within and across domains in ways that make this information increasingly available to the mind. One interpretation of our hypothesis is that humans have uniquely evolved the psychological mechanisms that allow for the most abstract levels of representational redescription (Karmiloff-Smith, 1992). But then what causal role is left for second-order intentional states? In our view, the highest level psychological descriptions of behaviors do not necessarily directly prompt the behavior they attend. To be sure, in some cases they may do so, but in many other cases they may serve to regulate behavior at a higher level of hierarchical description. In many cases, however, they may merely be convenient (and useful) ad hoc descriptions of our behaviors — behaviors that both can and do occur without such descriptions.
Note the analogy between those "reinterpetation" issues and the question of whether LLM AI systems (and humans) "understand" the logic of their complex associative patterns.
➖ @EngSkills ➖
Word of the Day
Word of the Day: stamina
This word has appeared in 123 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence?
➖ @EngSkills ➖
Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
xerox
to photocopy something
➖ @EngSkills ➖
Idiom of the Day
boil (something) down to (something)
To reduce or simplify (something) to the most basic, essential, or fundamental element(s). Watch the video
➖ @EngSkills ➖
Language Log
A Kuchean shift in terminology from Indo-Iranian to Tocharian
Sino-Platonic Papers is pleased to announce the publication of its three-hundred-and-forty-eighth issue:
"A Historical Perspective on the Central Asian Kingdom of Kucha," by Angela F. Howard. http://www.sino-platonic.org/complete/spp348_kucha.pdf
ABSTRACT
The article reexamines the dating of the earliest Buddhist cave paintings in the ancient Kingdom of Kucha, which was located in what is now Xinjiang, paying particular attention to the site of Kizil. Based on multiple Carbon-14 results spanning thirty years, historical and religious documents, and the author’s in situ research, the dating proposed is earlier than the traditional one, considered to be circa 500 AD. The latter was formulated, close to a century ago, by the scholar-explorer Ernst Waldschmidt on the basis of the “Indo-Iranian” style and is still used in art historical literature. Relying especially on Kucha’s comprehensive history, this paper suggests that the earliest cave paintings might have been coeval with the flourishing of Buddhism in Kucha during the fourth century. Given the centrality of the Tocharian language to the Sarvāstivādin Buddhist school associated with Kucha’s monasteries and the relative stylistic independence of Kucha from India, the author recommends adopting the term “Tocharian style” rather than “Indo-Iranian style” to describe artistic production in Kucha prior to the Tang.
Keywords: Tocharian, Central Asia, Caves
—–
All issues of Sino-Platonic Papers are available in full for no charge.
To view our catalog, visit http://www.sino-platonic.org/
Showing that art history and linguistics cannot be divorced from each other. Selected readings
* "The origins and affinities of Tocharian" (8/20/23)
* "The geographical, archeological, genetic, and linguistic origins of Tocharian" (7/14/20) The language, the people, and their history
* "Tocharian love poem" (4/1/20)
* "The sound and sense of Tocharian" (5/4/20)
* "The Tocharian A word for 'rug' and Old Sinitic reconstructions" (1/3/20)
* "The Tocharian A word for 'rug' and Old Sinitic reconstructions, part 2" (1/26/20)
* "Tocharian C: its discovery and implications" (4/2/19)
* "'Tocharian C' Again: The Plot Thickens and the Mystery Deepens"
* "Tocharian, Turkic, and Old Sinitic 'ten thousand'" (4/23/19)
* "Tocharians" (Wikipedia)
* "Tocharian languages" (Wikipedia)
* J. P. Mallory, The Problem of Tocharian Origins: An Archaeological Perspective (Sino-Platonic Papers, 259 [Nov. 2015]; free pdf, 63 pp.)
* "James Mallory, The problem of Tocharian origins: A doorway to insanity" (12/13/12; 1:11:39) — pay particular attention to what happens at 10:42
* "Hannes A. Fellner (Vienna): Linguistic Contact between Indo-European and Old Chinese" (2015; 29:03)
* "Genetic evidence for the spread of Indo-Aryan languages" (6/22/17) Archeology and language
* "The importance of archeology for historical linguistics" (5/1/20)
* "University of Texas Linguistics Research Center" (4/24/20)
* "Archeological and linguistic evidence for the wheel in East Asia" (3/11/20)
* "Horses, soma, riddles, magi, and animal style art in southern China" (11/11/19)
* "Of armaments and Old Sinitic reconstructions, part 6" (12/23/17) — particularly pertinent, and also draws on art history as well as archeology
* "Of felt hats, feathers, macaroni, and weasels" (3/13/16)
* Walter, Mariko Namba. "Tocharian Buddhism in Kucha: Buddhism of Indo-European Centum Speakers in Chinese Turkestan before the 10th Century C.E." Sino-Platonic Papers, 85 (1998).
* Xu, Wenkan. "The Discovery of the Xinjiang Mummies and Studies of the Origin of the Tocharians". The Journal of Indo-European Studies, 23.3-4 (Fall/Winter, 1995), 357–369.
* Xu, Wenkan. "The Tokharians and Buddhi[...]
Language Log
Fissures in the Great Firewall caused by X
Things are becoming dicey for the CCP/PRC regime:
"A cartoon cat has been vexing China’s censors – now he says they are on his tail"
By Tessa Wong, Asia Digital Reporter, BBC (6/10/24)
Here's the dilemma faced by the Chinese communist authorities. It would be very easy for the censors to shut down all VPNs and invoke strictly draconian internet controls that would make it impossible for netizens to communicate with the outside internet. But that would mean that China would no longer have access to external information and communication, which the government desperately needs if they are going to continue to acquire advanced technology and science from abroad, not to mention operate their economic initiatives such as BRI (Belt and Road Initiative).
Mixing my metaphors, VPNs are a two-edged sword by means of which China can have its cake (keep out non-communist ideology) and slice / eat it too (make money and acquire technology from the capitalist, democratic West). Mixing the metaphorical melange still further, they want a Chinese internet that is both open and closed. Sorry folks. No go. Can't have it both ways.
We've been through this all before (see the bibliography below), i.e., people have been using VPNs to jump over the Great Firewall for decades, but something is different now. What has happened to make the situation truly perilous for the communist government at this critical point?
I believe a critical mass has been reached whereby Chinese citizens no longer deceive themselves into believing that Weibo and other heavily censored social media networks in the PRC can afford them access to the full riches of the www. Furthermore, so long as they are allowed to purchase and use VPNs, they now have a reliable vehicle for obtaining and sharing data, knowledge, ideas, opinions, and views freely, namely X. This is a truly perilous situation for the PRC/CCP.
What makes it all the more ironic is that the current tipping point has been reached in no small measure by an art school student in Italy named Li Ying.
Mr Li has since become a vital chronicler of information deemed politically sensitive by Beijing. His X account is a window into Xi Jinping’s China where authorities’ vice-like grip on information keeps tightening. From major protests to small acts of dissent, corruption to crime, it is zealously scrubbed off the Chinese internet, only to turn up on Mr Li’s account.
…
Li’s online existence began with writing and posting love stories on Weibo, the Chinese microblogging platform. “I was someone who had made love my main creative theme, I had nothing to do with politics,” the son of two art teachers explained. Even the 2019 pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong, which Beijing stamped out, hardly made an impact on him: “I was just like many ordinary people, I didn’t think that the protests had anything to do with me.”
Then the pandemic struck. As China sealed itself off, Mr Li – by now studying at a prestigious art school in Italy – became desperate to find out what was going on back home. Scouring social media, he was shocked to read about the crushing lockdowns: “There were people starving, even jumping off buildings… the feeling at the time was of a lot of suffering and pressure.”
He started discussing these stories on Weibo. Some followers privately sent him their stories asking him to publish on their behalf, which he did. Censors took notice, and blocked his account.
Undeterred, he began a cat-and-mouse game, setting up a new Weibo account each time they shut one down. Fifty-three accounts later, he had enough: “I said okay, I’m going on Twitter.”
On X, unfettered by China’s censors, yet accessible through virtual private networks, Mr Li’s following grew. But it only really exploded, to more than a million, in lat[...]
Word of the Day
Word of the Day: disparate
This word has appeared in 255 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence?
➖ @EngSkills ➖
Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
quickie | quicky
a sexual act that lasts a short time
➖ @EngSkills ➖
Idiom of the Day
it ain't over till/until the fat lady sings
The final outcome cannot be assumed or determined until a given situation, event, etc., is completely finished. ("Ain't" is a colloquial contraction of "is not.") The phrase refers to the stereotypically overweight female sopranos of the opera, particularly the Valkyrie Brünnhilde, whose aria concludes Richard Wagner's opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen. It is often used in reference to organized competitions, such as sporting events, political elections, or the like. Watch the video
➖ @EngSkills ➖
Language Log
Nebraska: "Flat Water"
When you hear the name "Nebraska", the first thing you think of is probably "corn" and "cornhuskers", at least that was what always passed through my mind.
No longer. Now having come roughly halfway across this long (430 miles) state and finding myself in Central City, I have gained a keen (I would even say "palpable") sense that it means "flat river". That's because, from one end to the other, I'm following Route 30 / Lincoln Highway, and it was easy for the surveyors who laid out the Lincoln Highway (our nation's first transcontinental road) to follow the Platte River. You guessed it, which I also did long ago, that "platte" is French for "flat", and that decidedly is what this river is all about: flat, flat, flat.
That's why it meanders about across the state, breaking up into different channels and side waters. There's an old folk saying that the Platte River is a mile wide and an inch deep, which accounts for the strange, flat bottomed boats with airplane engines mounted on them that people have to skim across the surface of the river with its shallow, sandy bottom, somewhat in the manner of the airboats in the Everglades.
Nebraskier ("Flat Water") — that's exactly how around 1714 French fur trappers and explorers transcribed the name given to the river by the Otoe people, which the French translated as "rivière platte".
Also living around here were the Pawnee, and I was privileged to have the opportunity to run along the Dark Island Trail which passed by their tribal ceremonial grounds. Following that trail, I crossed the Platte on the 1,072-foot long, old wooden Bader Bridge, which is breathtakingly full of character:
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQVythcU1VCAiPccjLo8xo_5LF6R1Pb2WtwJQ&s
Other notable trails that historically passed through this area are the Oregon, California, Mormon, and Bozeman trails. When I am in Grand Island, I will run through the winter stopover of the Mormon people as they headed to the west.
Henceforth, whenever I see or say the name "Nebraska", I will have visions of a shimmering expanse of water flowing from the western end of the state all the way to Omaha ([actually Umoⁿhoⁿ or Umaⁿhaⁿ] in the Omaha language means "Upstream People" or "Against the Current" [source]], where its waters join the Missouri, which enters the mighty Mississippi at St. Louis, five hundred miles to the southeast.
Selected readings
* "Language Log asks: Mari Sandoz" (5/20/24)
* "How and why some insects sing" (6/10/21)
➖ @EngSkills ➖
Language Log
Dark cuisine
"Lattes with onions are a hit in China", by Allan Rose Hill, Boing Boing (6/7/24)
Some might call that "over the top", I would call it "under the bottom".
It's all part of a trend referred to as hēiàn liàolǐ 黑暗料理 ("dark cuisine").
Dark cuisine basically refers to food and drinks that put people's sensibilities to the test.
Basic Barista provides a recipe that boils down to the following: Finely chop a bunch of spring onions and drop them in a glass. Add ice, pour in milk, and then dump in that double shot of espresso.
[VHM: many people pour in some soy sauce too.]
Or try vanilla ice cream topped with chili crisp:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b1/Vanilla_ice_cream_with_chili_crisp.jpg/220px-Vanilla_ice_cream_with_chili_crisp.jpg
The more disgusting and repulsive recipes are, the more people are lapping them up. Dark cuisine is the culinary counterpart of dark humor.
If you do an image search on 黑暗料理, there are plenty of examples that look quite nauseating.
Is this the reflection of a society that has become bored, jaded, perverted to the point that even a good Chinese meal no longer attracts them?
Selected readings
* "Mair Eating" (7/9/12)
* "Stir-fried stones" (8/2/23)
* "Awful offal" (3/26/18)
* "Offal is not awful" (12/9/16)
[Thanks to Mark Metcalf]
➖ @EngSkills ➖
Word of the Day
Word of the Day: haphazardly
This word has appeared in 54 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence?
➖ @EngSkills ➖
Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
hunky-dory
good, fine, going well
➖ @EngSkills ➖
Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
bring out (1)
to release a new product
➖ @EngSkills ➖
Language Log
ChatGPT is bullshit
So say Michael Townsen Hicks, James Humphries & Joe Slater — "ChatGPT is bullshit", Ethics and Information Technology 2024.
The background is Harry Frankfurt's philosophical definition of the term in his essay "On Bullshit":
What bullshit essentially misrepresents is neither the state of affairs to which it refers nor the beliefs of the speaker concerning that state of affairs. Those are what lies misrepresent, by virtue of being false. Since bullshit need not be false, it differs from lies in its misrepresentational intent. The bullshitter may not deceive us, or even intend to do so, either about the facts or about what he takes the facts to be. What he does necessarily attempt to deceive us about is his enterprise. His only indispensably distinctive characteristic is that in a certain way he misrepresents what he is up to.
This is the crux of the distinction between him and the liar. Both he and the liar represent themselves falsely as endeavoring to communicate the truth. The success of each depends upon deceiving us about that. But the fact about himself that the liar hides is that he is attempting to lead us away from a correct apprehension of reality; we are not to know that he wants us to believe something he supposes to be false. The fact about himself that the bullshitter hides, on the other hand, is that the truth-values of his statements are of no central interest to him; what we are not to understand is that his intention is neither to report the truth nor to conceal it. This does not mean that his speech is anarchically impulsive, but that the motive guiding and controlling it is unconcerned with how the things about which he speaks truly are.
The abstract from Hicks et al.:
Recently, there has been considerable interest in large language models: machine learning systems which produce human-like text and dialogue. Applications of these systems have been plagued by persistent inaccuracies in their output; these are often called “AI hallucinations”. We argue that these falsehoods, and the overall activity of large language models, is better understood as bullshit in the sense explored by Frankfurt (On Bullshit, Princeton, 2005): the models are in an important way indifferent to the truth of their outputs. We distinguish two ways in which the models can be said to be bullshitters, and argue that they clearly meet at least one of these definitions. We further argue that describing AI misrepresentations as bullshit is both a more useful and more accurate way of predicting and discussing the behaviour of these systems.
One of many relevant past LLOG posts: "Bullshit: Invented by T.S. Eliot in 1910?", 8/17/2005.
[h/t Ben Zimmer]
➖ @EngSkills ➖
Language Log
Povinelli et al. on "Reinterpretation"
In yesterday's "AI deception?" post, I proposed that we ought to apply to AI an analogy to the philosophical evaluation of "theory of mind" issues in animals. And one of the clearest presentations of that evaluation is in Daniel Povinelli, Jesse Bering, and Steve Giambrone, "Toward a science of other minds: Escaping the argument by analogy" (2000). You should read the whole thing — and maybe look through some of the many works that have cited it. But today I'll just present some illustrative quoted passages.
A central assumption of cognitive science is that mental states play a causal role in generating the behavior of most encephalized biological organisms. But the cognitions of humans, at least, include more than first-order emotions, desires, plans, beliefs, and such—we also reason about these states and processes. Premack and Woodruff (1978) coined the term “theory of mind” to refer to this capacity. “Such a system,” they observed, “may properly be viewed as a theory because such [mental] states are not directly observable, and the system can be used to make predictions about the behavior of others” (p. 515). Indeed, core aspects of this system of second- (and higher-) order representations may be a more or less universal feature of human cognition (Povinelli & Godfrey, 1993; see Lillard, 1998, for a review). In this essay, we examine two questions about the seemingly universal aspects of theory of mind. First, what causal role do our second-order representations of mental states play in generating our behavior? Second, are we alone in possessing such a theory of mind?
Philosophers have formulated answers to both of these questions using various a priori arguments, but perhaps the most pervasive of these is the argument by analogy. This argument assumes that we can know which mental states produce which of our behaviors through introspection— or at least something very much like introspection (e.g., Russell, 1948). Thus, the argument asserts, we are justified in postulating specific mental states in other species by analogy to ourselves. That is, if we know that mental state x causes behavior y in ourselves, then we are on firm ground in inferring mental state x in another species to the extent that it exhibits behavior y (Hume, 1739–1740; Romanes, 1882, 1883). In this essay, we critically examine some common assumptions about the role that second-order mental states play in generating the behavior of human and nonhuman primates. Some of these assumptions are explicit in the argument by analogy, whereas others simply appear to follow from it. We show that the argument by analogy fails to recognize the complexity of social behavior that can be generated by first-order intentional states—as evidenced by recent empirical research, which we discuss in some detail.
At this point, our general reader may be puzzled. How is it, they will wonder, that chimpanzees—especially chimpanzees!—can exhibit the remarkably sophisticated social behaviors so eloquently described by Jane Goodall (1971, 1986), Frans de Waal (1982, 1989, 1996) and others, without possessing at least an inkling of others as psychological agents? After all, the social world of primates is one in which dominance status, recent positive or negative interactions, and complicated and shifting alliances all play major roles in determining what should be done next. To wit, how could it be that nonhuman primates deceive and manipulate each other (e.g., de Waal, 1986; Byrne & Whiten, 1985; Whiten & Byrne, 1988) if they do not represent each others’ beliefs? Furthermore, how could chimpanzees share with us so many of these social behaviors, down to the finest level of detail, and yet interpret them so differently? If we were to reply that these animals just learn, through trial and error, that certain behaviors lead[...]
Word of the Day
hellion
Definition: (noun) A mischievous, troublesome, or unruly person.
Synonyms: devil, heller.
Usage: He chased the young hellions out of his yard, but the boys had already trampled his wife's precious flowerbeds, and the blooms could not be salvaged.
Discuss
➖ @EngSkills ➖
Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
take out (2)
to remove something from a container, a pocket, a bag, etc.
➖ @EngSkills ➖
sm". In Studies in Central and East Asian Religions, 9 (1996), 1–17.
* Xu, Wenkan. "Beyond Deciphering: An Overview of Tocharian Studies over the Past Thirty Years". In Great Journeys across the Pamir Mountains. Leiden: Brill, 2018. Pp. 128–139.
* Wei, Lanhai, Hui Li, and Wenkan Xu. "The separate origins of the Tocharians and the Yuezhi: Results from recent advances in archaeology and genetics". In: M. Malzahn, Michaël Peyrot, Hannes Fellner, and Theresa-Susanna Illés, eds. Tocharian Texts in Context: International Conference on Tocharian Manuscripts and Silk Road Culture, June 25-29th, 2013. Bremen: Hempen Verlag, 2015. Pp. 277-300.
The origin of the Tocharians and their relationship to the Yuezhi (月氏) have been debated for more than a century, since the discovery of the Tocharian language. This debate has led to progress on both the scope and depth of our knowledge about the origin of the Indo-European language family and of the Indo-Europeans. Archaeological evidence supporting these theories, however, has until now sadly been lacking
Two by Hamp
* Eric P. Hamp, with annotations and comments by Douglas Q. Adams. "The Expansion of the Indo-European Languages: An Indo-Europeanist’s Evolving View". Sino-Platonic Papers, 239 (August, 2013), 1-14.
* Hamp, E. P. (1998). “Whose were the Tocharians?: Linguistic subgrouping and diagnostic idiosyncrasy,” in The Bronze Age and Early Iron Age Peoples of Eastern Central Asia, ed. V. H. Mair, 1: 307–346. Washington and Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Man and the University of Pennsylvania Museum.
➖ @EngSkills ➖
e 2022 during the White Paper protests against China’s punishing zero-Covid measures.
His account became an important clearing house for protest information; at one point, he was deluged with messages every second. Mr Li hardly slept, fact-checking and posting submissions that racked up hundreds of millions of views.
Online death threats from anonymous accounts soon followed. He said the authorities arrived at his parents’ home in China to question them. Even then, he was sure life would return to normal once the protests died down.
“After I finished reporting on the White Paper movement, I thought that the most important thing I could ever do in this life was finished,” he said. “I didn’t think about continuing to operate this account. But just as I was thinking about what I should do next, suddenly all my bank accounts in China were frozen.
“That’s when I realised – I couldn’t go back anymore.”
The ball is in your court, Mr. Xi. You want safety, security, and stability for your communist regime? Shut down the VPNs. Make it truly impossible to communicate on a large, global scale via X.
He won't do it.
Eventually, the Chinese people will also consult Google, Wikipedia, and many other worldwide sources of material that are currently closed to them.
And that is how a determined, energetic, creative art student in Italy is helping to shape the future of China Selected readings
* "God use VPN" (12/28/15)
* "Mixing (or ignoring?) metaphors" (6/9/24)
* "Badge of honor: Language Log is blocked in China" (12/26/19)
* "The ultimate protest against censorship" (11/27/22)
* "The reality of censorship in the PRC" (10/13/16)
* "The face of censorship" (1/11/19)
* "Bad words on WeChat: go directly to jail" (12/17/17)
* "The letter * has bee* ba**ed in Chi*a" (2/26/18)
* "Censoring 'Occupy' in China" (10/24/11)
* "Using riddles to circumvent censorship in China" (3/6/18)
* "Peppa Pig has been purged" (5/2/18)
* "Censored letter" (12/19/14) — about a nine-year-old boy who suggested that Xi Jinping lose weight
* "Excessive quadrisyllabicism" (2/17/18)
* "Censored belly, Tibetan tattoo" (8/28/17)
* "Chinese translation app with built-in censorship" (11/29/18)
* "Lepus oryzinus" (2/10/18)
* "Banned in Beijing" (6/4/14)
* "Where's Xi?" (9/11/12)
* "Digraphia and intentional miswriting" (3/12/15)
* "It's not just puns that are being banned in China" (12/7/14)
* "Annals of literary vs. vernacular, part 2" (9/4/16)
* "The PRC censors its own national anthem" (2/9/20)
* "Hemorrhoids outbreak" (914/21)
* "Typos as a means for circumventing censorship" (7/22/22)
* "Circumventing censorship in the PRC" (11/7/21) — with a very long bibliography
* "Melon eaters and censorship in the PRC" (12/8/21)
* "Blocked on Weibo" (8/23/13)
* "'Bad' words" (12/5/21)
* "Franco-Croatian Squid in pepper sauce" (3/12/09)
* "Mee Tu flavor" (11/29/18)
* "Lepus oryzinus" (2/10/18)
* "'Grass Mud Horse' and other homophonic puns threatened with extinction" (7/15/22)
➖ @EngSkills ➖
Language Log
AI deception?
Noor Al-Sibai, "AI Systems Are Learning to Lie and Deceive, Scientists Find", Futurism 6/7/2024:
AI models are, apparently, getting better at lying on purpose.
Two recent studies — one published this week in the journal PNAS and the other last month in the journal Patterns — reveal some jarring findings about large language models (LLMs) and their ability to lie to or deceive human observers on purpose.
That adverbial phrase "on purpose" is just the first of many ways that the the article and the cited papers attribute communicative intentionality and "theory of mind" to chatbots, without any serious discussion of the relevant philosophical problems.
The whole question of communication and deception in such exchanges reminds me of the literature on the analogous issues in animal behavior, for example Dorothy Cheney and Robert M. Seyfarth. "Vervet monkey alarm calls: Manipulation through shared information?", 1985, and their 1990 book How Monkeys See the World. One relevant passage from the book:
To attribute beliefs, knowledge and emotions to both oneself and others is to have what Premack and Woodruff (1978) term a theory of mind. A theory of mind is a theory because, unlike behavior, mental states are not directly observable
[. . .]
[E]ven without a theory of mind, monkeys are skilled social strategists. It is not essential to attribute thoughts to others to recognize that other animals have social relationships or to predict what other individuals will do and with whom they will do it. Moreover, it is clearly possible to deceive, inform, and convey information to others without attributing mental states to them.
[. . .]
However, the moment that an individual becomes capable of recognizing that her companions have beliefs, and that these beliefs may be different from her own, she becomes capable of immensely more flexible and adaptive behavior.
[. . .]
Most of the controversy surrounding animal communication. . . centers on second- and third-order intentionality — whether animals are capable of acting as if they want others to believe that they know or believe something. . . Higher-order intentionality implies the ability to attribute knowledge, beliefs and emotions to others. Attribution, in turn, demands some ability to represent simultaneously two different states of mind. To do this an individual must recognize that he has knowledge, that others have knowledge, and that there can be a discrepancy between his own knowledge and theirs.
Because chatbots have very different strengths and weaknesses from animals — and different bots can have different architectures — the issues are going to work out differently. But I think it's worth keeping the philosophical history in mind. Also, the role of game theory :-)…
Update — For many decades before the current LLM "AI" developments, people have been writing (old-fashioned) programs to play games like poker and bridge, where the human versions involve concepts of communication, bluff, deception, and manipulation. And no one anthropomorphized those programs in the same way. That doesn't mean that the current AI anthropomorphization is wrong, just that there's a lot more to consider than just how the programs behave.
A few relevant past posts:
"Conversational game theory: the cartoon version", 11/24/2003
"Desires, beliefs, conversations", 2/18/2004
"'Chimps have tons to say but can't say it'", 1/11/2010
"Theory of mind in the comics", 7/14/2010
"Inscriptional theory of mind, again", 7/15/2010
"Theory of mind hacks", 9/24/2013
"Deadlock", 3/2/2018
"Theory of mind", 3/22/2018
"'Cognitive fossils' and the Paleo Mindscape", 11/25/2021
➖ @EngSkills ➖
Word of the Day
perdition
Definition: (noun) The abode of Satan and the forces of evil; where sinners suffer eternal punishment.
Synonyms: Hell, infernal region, nether region, Inferno.
Usage: She feared the fires of perdition and listened closely to the preacher's sermon about purity of heart and avoiding sin.
Discuss
➖ @EngSkills ➖
Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
fall apart
If something falls apart, it breaks into pieces or parts start falling off.
➖ @EngSkills ➖
Language Log
Mixing (or ignoring?) metaphors
Matt Taibbi has gotten some teasing for mixing metaphors in a recent Xeet about DJT's conviction:
That’s . . . a lot of metaphors.
[image or embed]
— Radley Balko (@radleybalko.bsky.social) Jun 7, 2024 at 6:42 PM
Scott Lemieux, among others, linked to Taibbi's 2009 analysis of Thomas Friedman's propensity to mix metaphors ("Vampire squid guy: “I have determined that as plain as the nose on your face prosecuting [Republicans] for white collar crime would be a wolf in sheep’s clothing that crosses the Rubicon on steroids”).
Obviously, people "mix" metaphors precisely when the metaphors in question are dead to them, or never were alive — and given the whole non-metaphorical Neanderthals theory, we could tease metaphor-misers for having more Neanderthal genes that then rest of us. I won't do that, because (at least according to the not-very-reliable Genographic Project) I'm 4% Neanderthal + 3.8% Denisovan.
A couple of fun mixed-metaphor images added by others to the thread:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/MixedMetaphors2.jpg
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/MixedMetaphors3.jpg
And one about that Hobbesian jungle:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/MixedMetaphor4.jpg
Here's a 2020 Richard Lederer column "Mixed-up metaphors hit the bull’s eye on the nose", with lots of good examples…
➖ @EngSkills ➖
Word of the Day
pinafore
Definition: (noun) A sleeveless garment similar to an apron, worn especially by small girls as a dress or an overdress.
Synonyms: jumper, pinny.
Usage: Dolly came into the yard sobbing and crying, with her little blue frock and white pinafore spattered all over with mud.
Discuss
➖ @EngSkills ➖
