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Word of the Day
Word of the Day: olfactory
This word has appeared in 28 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence?
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
nick (2)
to arrest somebody
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
put together (2)
to select several things and combine them to create something
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Language Log
How AI affects the environment: electricity
"The complex environmental toll of Artificial Intelligence:
AI is very much mostly not green technology"
Devika Rao, The Week US (21 March 2024)
I do not mean to be an alarmist or a negativist, but this is something that people are talking / concerned about, so we should take a look at it too. Artificial intelligence (AI) technology has been advancing quickly, and demand is growing across the world. With this shift, the need for electricity is also growing at a potentially unsustainable rate. Experts worry that power development will not be able to keep up with AI growth. AI can also fuel misinformation and harmful spending which can worsen the climate crisis. Can the negative side effects of AI coexist with the technology's potentially positive attributes?
AI is gradually becoming a larger part of our lives as it carves its way into a number of industries and everyday technologies. "The artificial intelligence compute coming online appears to be increasing by a factor of 10 every six months," said Elon Musk at the Bosch Connected World conference. (AI "compute" refers to the "computational resources required for artificial intelligence systems to perform tasks, such as processing data, training machine learning models, and making predictions," said Komprise.)
…
The biggest risk AI poses for the climate comes from the sizable computing it requires. "It is important for us to recognize the CO2 emissions of some of these large AI systems," Jesse Dodge, a research scientist at the Allen Institute for AI in Seattle, said to Scientific American. It is also difficult to ascertain how much AI will truly affect the climate because "different types of AI — such as a machine learning model that spots trends in research data, a vision program that helps self-driving cars avoid obstacles or a large language model (LLM) that enables a chatbot to converse — all require different quantities of computing power to train and run," said Scientific American.
The marvels of AI boil down to the flow and control / manipulation of electricity (like the neurons of our brains). Similarly, bitcoin mining requires enormous amounts of electricity. Much as we admire and rely on Google in all of its manifestations, it requires vast farms of energy gobbling supercomputer servers to store its oceans of data. All of this electricity has to come from somewhere, and its usage generates large amounts of heat, which significantly alters the surrounding environment.
We tend to think of electricity as "clean", but that's only at the user end. At the maker end, it is usually "dirty" in brutally physical ways.
Ah, if only we could capture, harness, store, and distribute the raw, electric energy of lightning bolts! In the mythic age, Zeus had his Keraunios (Κεραυνιος ["of the Thunderbolt"]; Latinized Ceraunius), Thor had his hammer Mjölnir, and Indra had his vajra. In the modern era, Nikola Tesla built his mega generators: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/~bgzimmer/tesla.jpg Getting there. Selected readings
* "Mushroom language?" (1/9/24) — alleged electrical aspects in fungi
* "The AI threat: keep calm and carry on" (6/29/23)
[Thanks to Wang Chiu-kuei]
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ter Island). New radiocarbon dates on the Rongorongo script. Scientific Reports 14, 2794.
[2] Langdon, R. and Fischer, S. R. 1996. Easter Island's 'deed of cession' of 1770 and the origin of its Rongorongo script. The Journal of the Polynesian Society 105, 109–124.
[3] Daniels, P. 2006. Three models of script transfer. Word 57, 371–378.
[4] DeFrancis, J. 1989. Visible Speech: The Diverse Oneness of Writing Systems. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
[5] Powell, B. 2009. Writing: Theory and History of the Technology of Civilization. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.
[6] Sproat, R. 2023. Symbols: An Evolutionary History from the Stone Age to the Future. Cham, Switzerland: Springer Nature.
[7] Davletshin, A, 2022. The script of Rapa Nui (Easter Island) is logosyllabic, the language is East Polynesian: Evidence from cross-readings. The Journal of the Polynesian Society 131, 185–220.
[8] Sproat, R. 2010. Ancient symbols, computational linguistics and the reviewing practices of the general science journals. Computational Linguistics 36, 585-594.
Above is a guest post by Kyle Gorman and Richard Sproat
The extant rongorongo tablets are inventoried and transcribed here.
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re a true writing system.
But what does “true writing system” mean? Humans have invented hundreds if not thousands of symbol systems that convey some sort of meaning, but what is rare was the discovery that one could use symbols not for their meaning but for their sound. The first step of this process is the so-called rebus principle, whereby one can write “I can see you” as ️, and this principle ultimately led scribes to discover that a word can be decomposed into a sequence of semantically-meaningless units of sound, units that can be used to organize a writing system. This realization—in some sense the discovery of phonology itself—was made in every one of the pristine inventions mentioned above, and it is this discovery that has so rarely occurred in human history. All of these ancient systems were mixed systems in that they had symbols used for their meaning, or to represent individual words, but they also had symbols that were used for their sound(s). Indeed, as DeFrancis [4] argues, there is no way to construct a true writing system without being able to notate phonological information—if by writing one means the ability to notate in graphical form basically anything one might say out loud.
Now there are some who take a more inclusivist view of writing opposed to the exclusivist view that we sketched in the previous paragraph. Powell [5], for example, defines writing as “a system of markings with a conventional reference that communicates information”, a definition that does not even mention the notion “language”. On that definition, writing could include mathematical or musical notation, road signs, or Ikea assembly instructions, and thus there have been hundreds if not thousands of “writing systems” that have been invented, some by non-literate cultures [6]. But if one adopts this broad view of what writing constitutes, then it is not clear that the pristine invention of “writing” was rare at all.
This brings us back to rongorongo and F24's central thesis. To date it has not been demonstrated that rongorongo was a writing system in the exclusivist sense discussed above. Many researchers have attempted to decipher rongorongo as a mixed semantic-phonetic system along the lines of Sumerian, Egyptian, Ancient Chinese, or Mayan. Yet no one has yet succeeded in proposing more than tentative suggestions about possible interpretations of a handful of rongorongo glyphs.
The most recent attempt is by Davletshin [7], who uses evidence from “cross-readings” (cases where different glyphs are inter-substitutable in identical environments, and where one finds multiple instances of these patterns) to suggest that the language underlying the system was “East Polynesian”. Yet the set of proposed readings is very small, and many of them seem equivocal at best. As Davletshin himself notes, rongorongo presents as ideal a situation as a would-be decipherer could hope for. There is a lot of text—several thousand glyphs spread over a few dozen tablets, all of it digitized; we know what language the islanders spoke, and we know a lot about its structure; and, a great deal is known from ethnographic studies about how the texts were used. If the system was a true writing system in the exclusivist sense, why has it been so resistant to decipherment? If on the other hand it was some sort of mnemonic system—like Naxi symbology, Dakota winter counts, Australian message sticks or Lukasa memory boards [6]—then any attempt to decipher it as a semantic-phonetic writing system is bound to fail.
So while F24 might be correct that rongorongo was invented prior to European contact and therefore could not have been inspired by outside influences, nothing in their demonstration supports the notion that its invention falls into the category of rare invention that characterized the known invention of writing in Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, or Meso-America. F24 see rongorongo as a parallel to these i[...]
Funny Or Die (Youtube)
Being An Adult Means Gracefully Leaving A Conversation (Bless These Braces)
Kylie Brakeman tells Tam Yajia she truly became an adult when she learned to gracefully leave a conversation.
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Idiom of the Day
when pigs can fly
At a time that will never come to pass. (Used to show skepticism or cynicism over someone's hypothetical remark.) Watch the video
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Word of the Day
haggard
Definition: (adjective) Showing the wearing effects of overwork or care or suffering.
Synonyms: careworn, drawn, raddled, worn.
Usage: His face was ghastly pale; his chin had a brown cut on it—a cut half healed; his expression was haggard and drawn, as by intense suffering.
Discuss
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Language Log
Sino-Iranica and Sino-Arabica
Coming soon. https://t.co/mHuBzXyGrx pic.twitter.com/V2dTUkbAWt
— Jeffrey Kotyk (@JeffreyKotyk) March 20, 2024
New book from Brill:
Sino-Iranian and Sino-Arabian Relations in Late Antiquity
China and the Parthians, Sasanians, and Arabs in the First Millennium
Series:
Crossroads – History of Interactions across the Silk Routes, Volume: 8
Author: Jeffrey Kotyk
What type of exchanges occurred between West and East Asia in the first millennium CE? What sort of connections existed between Persia and China? What did the Chinese know of early Islam?
This study offers an overview of the cultural, diplomatic, commercial, and religious relationships that flourished between Iran and China, building on the pioneering work of Berthold Laufer’s Sino-Iranica (1919) while utilizing a diverse array of Classical Chinese sources to tell the story of Sino-Iran in a fresh light to highlight the significance of transcultural networks across Asia in late antiquity.
This is a much-needed book, to fill in the void left after the publication of Berthold Laufer's great Sino-Iranica: Chinese Contributions to the History of Civilization in Ancient Iran (Chicago, 1919)
Selected readings
* "A Persian word in a Sinitic topolect" (3/10/20)
* Berthold Laufer, Sino-Iranica: Chinese Contributions to the History of Civilization in Ancient Iran, Publication 201, Anthropological Series, Vol. XV, No. 3 (Chicago: Field Museum of Natural History, 1919)
[h.t. Geoff Wade]
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Idiom of the Day
the idiot box
slang A television set, or television in general. Watch the video
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Word of the Day
turbid
Definition: (adjective) Having sediment or foreign particles stirred up or suspended.
Synonyms: murky, cloudy, muddy.
Usage: It was now early spring, and the river was swollen and turbulent; great cakes of floating ice were swinging heavily to and fro in the turbid waters.
Discuss
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Funny Or Die (Youtube)
No First Kiss Should Taste Like Pesto (Bless These Braces) @deadeyebrakeman #comedy #podcast
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Funny Or Die (Youtube)
Most Random with Kylie Brakeman (Bless These Braces: Episode 4)
Comedian Kylie Brakeman (The Tonight Show, Artists On Artists On Artists On Artists podcast) stops by to chat with Tam about freak trains, old Facebook statuses, and the girl who campaigned to be Most Random in her middle school yearbook.
Get notified when we drop new episodes, news, and show extras: https://norby.link/ceiRm2
Chapters
02:25 - Adult stuff they did this week
04:30 - Middle school in 2010; "Randomness"
06:55 - Middle school, popularity, and walking in circles pretending to have friends
08:06 - Freak trains
09:16 - Kylie's first kiss
12:43 - First period
14:04 - Going to Bat Mitzvahs and other coming of age ceremonies
15:00 - New Bat Mitzvah theme for today
17:50 - Texting people selfies
18:33 - The best Facebook statuses from Kylie's teen years
25:28 - Learning how to leave a conversation
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Idiom of the Day
in a/the flash of an/the eye
So quickly as to seem almost imperceptible (i.e., in the space of time it takes a person to blink). Watch the video
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Word of the Day
excursive
Definition: (adjective) Of, given to, characterized by, or having the nature of digression.
Synonyms: rambling, digressive, discursive.
Usage: What started as a few excursive remarks soon turned into a long, rambling speech about this and that.
Discuss
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reapplying tape as needed.
Voice disorders are prevalent across all ages and demographic groups; research has shown that nearly 30% of people will experience at least one such disorder in their lifetime. Yet with therapeutic approaches, such as surgical interventions and voice therapy, voice recovery can stretch from three months to a year, with some invasive techniques requiring a significant period of mandatory postoperative voice rest.
“Existing solutions such as handheld electro-larynx devices and tracheoesophageal- puncture procedures can be inconvenient, invasive or uncomfortable,” said Chen who leads the Wearable Bioelectronics Research Group at UCLA, and has been named one the world’s most highly cited researchers five years in a row. “This new device presents a wearable, non-invasive option capable of assisting patients in communicating during the period before treatment and during the post-treatment recovery period for voice disorders.”
If it proves practicable, this revolutionary new device is sure to be a great for individuals who have have speech production difficulties. Selected readings
* "Nasality" (8/18/23)
* "Allergese" (4/30/15)
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Language Log
AI-assisted substitute vocal cords
This is what the device looks like and how it is made: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/~bgzimmer/vocalcords.jpg Jun Chen Lab/UCLA
The two components — and five layers — of the device allow it to turn muscle
movement into electrical signals which, with the help of machine learning,
are ultimately converted into speech signals and audible vocal expression.
"Speaking without vocal cords, thanks to a new AI-assisted wearable device"
The adhesive neck patch is the latest advance by UCLA bioengineers in speech technology for people with disabilities"
Christine Wei-li Lee, UCLA Newsroom (March 14, 2024) Key takeaways
*
* Bioengineers at UCLA have invented a thin, flexible device that adheres to the neck and translates the muscle movements of the larynx into audible speech.
* The device is trained through machine learning to recognize which muscle movements correspond to which words.
* The self-powered technology could serve as a non-invasive tool for people who have lost the ability to speak due to vocal cord problems.
In the past, I recall witnessing individuals who had lost the function of their vocal cords holding a battery powered device that made a buzzing sound (like a Jew's harp) to their throat and making different shapes with their mouth to produce what resembled words.
People with voice disorders, including those with pathological vocal cord conditions or who are recovering from laryngeal cancer surgeries, can often find it difficult or impossible to speak. That may soon change.
A team of UCLA engineers has invented a soft, thin, stretchy device measuring just over 1 square inch that can be attached to the skin outside the throat to help people with dysfunctional vocal cords regain their voice function. Their advance is detailed this week in the journal Nature Communications.
The new bioelectric system, developed by Jun Chen, an assistant professor of bioengineering at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, and his colleagues, is able to detect movement in a person’s larynx muscles and translate those signals into audible speech with the assistance of machine-learning technology — with nearly 95% accuracy.
The breakthrough is the latest in Chen’s efforts to help those with disabilities. His team previously developed a wearable glove capable of translating American Sign Language into English speech in real time to help users of ASL communicate with those who don’t know how to sign.
The tiny new patch-like device is made up of two components. One, a self-powered sensing component, detects and converts signals generated by muscle movements into high-fidelity, analyzable electrical signals; these electrical signals are then translated into speech signals using a machine-learning algorithm. The other, an actuation component, turns those speech signals into the desired voice expression.
The two components each contain two layers: a layer of biocompatible silicone compound polydimethylsiloxane, or PDMS, with elastic properties, and a magnetic induction layer made of copper induction coils. Sandwiched between the two components is a fifth layer containing PDMS mixed with micromagnets, which generates a magnetic field.
Utilizing a soft magnetoelastic sensing mechanism developed by Chen’s team in 2021, the device is capable of detecting changes in the magnetic field when it is altered as a result of mechanical forces — in this case, the movement of laryngeal muscles. The embedded serpentine induction coils in the magnetoelastic layers help generate high-fidelity electrical signals for sensing purposes.
Measuring 1.2 inches on each side, the device weighs about 7 grams and is just 0.06 inch thick. With double-sided biocompatible tape, it can easily adhere to an individual’s throat near the location of the vocal cords and can be reused by[...]
nventions, and while they may well believe that rongorongo does indeed fit that bill, the evidence provided does not justify this claim. If and when the system is successfully deciphered as a true writing system, then and only then will that claim be justified.
The authors submitted an earlier version of this piece to Scientific Reports as a reply to the Ferrara et al. paper and, as one might have anticipated, it was rejected. According to the editors: In the present case, while we appreciate the interest of your comments to the community, we do not feel that they advance or clarify understanding of the paper by Ferrara et al. to the extent required for publication in Scientific Reports. Namely, while we appreciate the discussion of whether rongorongo should conceptually be considered or not a true writing system, this point does not necessarily fall within the scope of the Ferrara et al. study, which focused on the origin and dating of rongorongo.
Which of course is nonsense, since while indeed the paper’s actual demonstrated result was rather narrow in scope, the claimed implications of the study were far reaching and were clearly the main point that the authors wanted to push. But of course we know the real reason the editors do not want to publish a response of this kind: the paper has attracted lots of attention, which in turn translates into eyeballs migrating to the journal’s site. A piece that detracts from the narrative that is pushed in all of this publicity does not serve their needs.
That said, we rather doubt that this kind of laxness would pass muster in the “hard” sciences. Suppose there were some group of organisms X that are of uncertain relation to another lineage Y, but where X was believed in any case to have evolved after Y. Let us assume both of these lineages are long extinct, so that there is no way to use gene sequencing to establish the relationship, and one must do it solely on the basis of morphology. Suppose then someone publishes a paper reporting on a possible case of a much earlier specimen of X and presents the conclusion that “this suggests that the X-Y lineage evolved much earlier than previously believed”. Suppose further that such a submission made it past review with that claim intact—doubtful in the case of biology, but not uncommon in work related to topics such as writing systems. Then if someone wrote a reply pointing out that the relation of X and Y has by no means been established, we hardly think that would result in an editorial response of the form “while we appreciate that the discussion of whether X and Y are related is of general interest, the point of this paper was to establish a dating for X”.
On the other hand, such sloppiness seems to be commonplace in the top science journals when it comes to issues related to language, and especially when it comes to writing systems and symbol systems more generally. The second author has had to deal extensively with this kind of stuff before [8]. But to be fair, many who work on writing systems are also not clear and consistent about what they mean by “writing”, and sometimes seem happy to capitalize on the vagueness surrounding the term.
We want to end with one point that should perhaps go without saying, but is nonetheless important to make clear. Even if rongorongo is finally established as not being a writing system in the exclusivist sense, this would not detract from its significance as a cultural artifact. Clearly rongorongo was a central part of Rapa Nui culture, and understanding how it worked and how it was used by the culture is of importance to understanding one of the most enigmatic human societies in history. The Easter Islanders clearly invented something of great value. We only ask that researchers not muddy the waters by claiming an affinity to other systems, where that affinity has in fact never been demonstrated. References
[1] Ferrara, S. et al. 2024. The invention of writing on Rapa Nui (Eas[...]
Language Log
Was rongorongo an independent invention of writing?
Below is a guest post by Kyle Gorman and Richard Sproat: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/Ferrara_Fig1X0.png Ferrara et al. [1] report on the results of a study of several specimens of kohau rongorongo, the enigmatic, undeciphered texts of Easter Island (also known as Rapa Nui). These texts, inscribed on wood—mostly driftwood that washed ashore on the island—may have numbered in the hundreds during the mid 19th century, when the system is known to have been in use. Roughly two dozen inscribed artifacts survive today. Ferrara et al. claim, on the basis of carbon dating, that one of them was inscribed before European contact in the 18th century, and thus represent “one of the few independent inventions of writing in human history”.
Naturally it is this latter point in particular that has attracted attention in the popular science press. See for example here, here, here and here. So, while the actual results of the paper are quite modest in that they establish the dates of one piece of wood that ended up being carved with glyphs, the authors clearly intend a much more sweeping interpretation of these results. And true to form, the popular science press is happy to help spread a story that, in the words of one of the articles linked above, “could rewrite history as we know it”.
It has long been an open question whether rongorongo was first developed before or after European contact in the 18th century; if the system was developed after contact, then there is a possibility that its invention was a case of stimulus diffusion [2] rather than an independent invention. Ferrara et al. [1] (henceforth, F24) estimate that the wood used for one tablet, known as tablet D, or Échancrée, is from a tree felled around 1500. If the wood (an African species, Podocarpus latifolius) somehow made it to Easter Island in the period between 1500 to before the early 18th centuries, and if it was inscribed with glyphs during that period, then clearly rongorongo was an independent invention. As the authors admit, the dating of the wood merely provides a terminus post quem for this text's creation. Échancrée was not discovered in its archaeological context. We do not know how or when the wood actually reached the island nor when it was inscribed, and F24 provide no specific proposals regarding these matters. Indeed this is one of the weaknesses of the paper: providing a plausible mechanism for how a piece of African wood could have made it to the Eastern Pacific between 1500 and the early 18th century would seem to be of some importance for the authors’ intended thesis. After all, a plausible alternative is that the wood first came to Europe via some established trade route, and only later dropped off a ship near Easter Island once regular exploration of the Pacific began in the 18th century. In that case, we could no longer be sure it did not arrive there after contact.
Still, while one cannot draw many firm conclusions from F24’s results, they are at least consistent with their claim that rongorongo is an instance of a very rare phenomenon in human history: the “pristine” invention of writing by a culture not in contact with any other literate culture.
But is this conjecture warranted? In order to answer that one needs to be much clearer on what this rare event consisted of. Putting Easter Island to one side, writing is known to have been invented in four ancient cultures: Mesopotamia, Egypt, China and Meso-America. It has even been suggested that Egypt may have borrowed the idea (though not the details) of writing from Mesopotamia [3]. Some would add the Indus Valley as a possible fifth site of invention, but thus far nobody has convincingly demonstrated that the cryptically short Indus Valley texts we[...]
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Language Log
Symposium on Indo-European food
Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study (SCAS)
Symposium on April 11, 2024
Registration by 4th April at the latest
11 April, 11:15 a.m. SYMPOSIUM
Indo-European Food: Linguistic, Archaeological and Biomolecular Perspectives
ABSTRACT:
The symposium Indo-European Food – Linguistic, Archaeological, and Biomolecular Perspectives aims to explore the intricate relationships between the spread of Indo-European languages, the archaeological evidence of food production and consumption patterns, and biomolecular insights into ancient diets. This interdisciplinary event brings together leading experts from linguistics, archaeology, and biomolecular sciences to discuss the latest research findings and theoretical frameworks that illuminate the role of food in the migration, settlement, and cultural integration of Indo-European populations.
Download the programme >> (PDF)
Pre-registration is required for the event by 4th April 2024 at the latest.
Register here >>
Click here to view the full information in a browser (including the abstract, programme and registration link)
Selected readings
* "Proto-Indo-European laks- > Modern English 'lox'" (12/26/20)
* "Daughter of Holy Cow" (11/18/20) — "one who milks"
* "Turandot and the deep Indo-European roots of 'daughter'" (3/16/20)
* "More on Persian kinship terms; 'daughter' and the laryngeals" (3/18/20)
* "The geographical, archeological, genetic, and linguistic origins of Tocharian" (7/14/20)
* "Galactic glimmers: of milk and Old Sinitic reconstructions" (1/8/19) — with a long list of relevant posts
* "Of shumai and Old Sinitic reconstructions" (7/19/16)
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