35152
#ielts #toefl #gre #english_vocabulary #english
Language Log
Polysyllabic sinoglyphs
From Markus Samuel Haselbeck, responding to Egas Moniz-Bandeira on Twitter/X:
As the discussion of polysyllabic sonography goes on, I want to add a character that I recently discovered in a Chinese restaurant, here in Leuven. I guess it is pronounced Zhōngguó (中國), China? https://t.co/1cc65vq4fC pic.twitter.com/UveFSHK3dz
— Markus Samuel Haselbeck (@CiaoCiaota) April 8, 2024
Proof that the sinoglyphic writing system is open-ended, both with regard to the number of sinoglyphs it includes and the number of syllables each glyph contains.
Selected readings
* "A new polysyllabic character" (4/3/16)
* "Polysyllabic characters in Chinese writing " (8/2/11)
* "Polysyllabic characters revisited" (6/18/15)
* "The unpredictability of Chinese character formation and pronunciation" (2/6/12)
* "Yet another polysyllabic Chinese character" (10/31/16)
* "The infinitude of Chinese characters" (9/9/20) — with an extremely long bibliography
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ng at a school, I highly recommend they check out ChinaICAC. Please feel free to pass along my email to any students you know who might be interested in such a career path. Closing remark by VHM
Regardless of what you may have heard from other sources or read in the media about declining applications and enrollments from PRC students, at a place like Penn the number of students from the PRC who apply and enroll continues to grow. At the same time, their quality ceaselessly improves, such that the competition to get into good schools is ever more intense. I must say that teaching M.A. students from China during the past decade or so has been one of the greatest joys of my entire career.
It is interesting that many of them, especially those who receive their degree from the Graduate School of Education, go back to China to take up a position as "college counselor", thus ensuring a constant stream of self-perpetuating students who go abroad to seek higher education. Selected readings
* "'Chinese — Traditional'" (1/30/11)
* "Yes-no questions in mathematics and in Chinese" (2/10/17)
* "The degendering of the third person pronoun in Mandarin " (12/12/13)
* "The degendering of the third person pronoun in Mandarin, pt. 2" (10/16/17)
* "Roman-letter Mandarin pronoun of indeterminate gender " (9/9/16)
* "Sweden's gender-neutral 3rd-person singular pronoun " (4/13/17)
* "Gender bending " (10/6/15)
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Language Log
Chinese (il)logic from inside
[Prefatory note: The Chinese author of this guest post, TCI (encrypted acronym to protect her identity) holds a humanities M.A. from a top tier American research university which she attended from 2016 to 2018. She has been employed for several years as an adviser to students in China who desire to study abroad (especially the USA) in high school, college, or university. Her statement will be followed by the remarks of a long experienced, well established practitioner of that profession (application counselor) in China who explains its aims and modus operandi.
The author (TCI) emphasizes what she considers to be a lack of logic in Chinese thought. It is ironic that her focus is very much on the gender of personal pronouns at a time when many people in America are trying to do away with or downplay that aspect of personal pronouns. Before dismissing what she says out of hand, bear in mind that for TCI it is a cri de coeur. She grew up in China learning one system of thought, came to America and struggled to learn another, and now she has gone back to China and is trying to teach the next generation of students who want to come to America and think like Americans how to be less fraught in learning this new way of thinking.
Although, in this essay, TCI cites her examples mainly from the gender of personal pronouns, she could also also do so with regard to tense, number, conjunctions, and other facets of language usage. In her mind, these misusages are not the failure of inadequate language training, but of not subscribing to the demands of strict logic. Mind you, this is what TCI genuinely believes. Since she is the one who time and again has felt that her way of thinking was illogical, we have to try to get inside her head and sympathize with why she feels that way and empathize with her efforts to overcome such feelings of illogicality.] TCI
As I have been tutoring my sister writing her English essay lately, I realized that she, and along with her many peers, aren't very logical when it comes to writing academically or talking / storytelling. I then realized I had the same issue when I first came to the States as a high school sophomore. When I wrote essays for my English class, I expressed lots of personal opinions. Instead of using concrete evidence to support my point of view, I used different adjectives to explain my point. In one word, I wasn't very logical. As time went on, I gradually got better. But I now realize it's not only me, or my sister. The majority of Chinese students have this issue.
I discussed this matter with some friends who also studied in the US or the UK. One thinks it's because Chinese schools don't teach logical thinking. I think that is partly true. But when I think of it at greater length, I wonder could it be more than the school's teaching? Is it because Chinese, as a language, is totally different from English? [VHM: emphasis added] Is it the same with people's habits of thinking or speaking? For example, he/she/it in English vs. tā 他/她/它 in Chinese. In English, he/she/it sound totally different, are spelled differently, have different variants (such as his/hers/its), while in Chinese 他/她/它 all sound the same. Their variants 他的/她的/它的 still sound the same. The only difference is how you write it on paper. I searched for 他/她/它 in the oracle bone scripts. These three characters look drastically different as you can imagine.
I wonder could it be possible that in a Chinese setting, confusions exist and people get used to them. For example, I tell SC [a friend] that another friend didn't do well in a test 他/她考試沒考好 tā kǎo shì méi kǎo hǎo. SC wouldn't know if it's a girl or a guy that I am referring to without knowing who I am talking about. Because it's just tā 他/她. But I wouldn't explain to SC that tā is a girl or a guy. I would just ass[...]
Idiom of the Day
in the view of (someone)
In someone's or some group's opinion. Watch the video
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Word of the Day
platitude
Definition: (noun) A trite or banal remark or statement, especially one expressed as if it were original or significant.
Synonyms: banality, cliche, commonplace, bromide.
Usage: A trite platitude about his not caring to lose her was on his lips, but he refrained from uttering it.
Discuss
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apparent ancient Longobard sample unearthed in Hungary).
It is possible to speculate endlessly about the historical migrations that led to E-V22’s present-day distribution, both in China and elsewhere. Yet I note that the Dungan-Manchu-Mongol-Liaoning branch shares as a brother lineage the Caucasian-Iranian group consisting of three samples with respective Talysh, Persian, and Georgian-Azerbaijani origins. Does this nearly 8,000-year-old Irano-Chinese lineage (with a Czech exemplar nested within them) reflect a more recent Silk Road-era migration eastward, or does the Chinese branch have altogether different, more ancient origins? More fodder for speculation: there is an ancient Xiongnu E-V22 sample among the data underlying a study from just last year entitled “Genetic population structure of the Xiongnu Empire at imperial and local scales.” Perhaps the sequencing of more ancient DNA will one day give us the complete historical migratory picture, but the phylogeny of this lineage does seem to point in a westerly direction.
finis Selected readings
* "Genetic evidence for the peopling of Eastern Central Asia during the Bronze Age and Early Iron Age" (4/9/21) — felicitously published exactly three years before today's post
* "Early Indo-Europeans in Xinjiang" (11/19/08)
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Word of the Day
Word of the Day: prowess
This word has appeared in 222 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
veep
the vice president
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
keep down (2)
to stop a noise from getting too loud
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up the same length of time. But Japanese also has some pretty elaborate ways to fill uncertain space.
By way of conclusion:
There are so many elements of language that it is impossible for a single metric like “speed” to cover all of these aspects. It’s kind of like asking “Which country is best?” The answer will change depending on all kinds of variables not specified in the question. That’s not to say there’s not some value in attempting to answer it, though.
Anyway, the fastest language is Japanese.
But that doesn't mean it is the most efficient (in conveying a specified amount of information in a given amount of time).
Now, let's imagine Japanese spoken with a southern drawl:
Watashi no namae wa Mifune Toshio, Tōkyō shusshin desu.
私の名前は三船敏夫、東京出身です。
Waa-taa-shii noo naa-maae waa Mii-fuu-nee Too-shii-oo, Tōō-kyōō shuu-sshiin dee-suu.
"My name is Toshio Mifune and I'm from Tokyo."
From the time I began to read Japanese texts (all sorts: newspaper and journal articles, essays, stories, etc.), I was astonished by how many particles, verbal forms, and other linguistic devices the language had for expressing reservation, reconsideration, uncertainty, indecisiveness, hedging one's bets, waffling, probability, surmise, and so on and so forth. Sometimes I would read a sentence or paragraph that was filled with such hypothetical, suppositional, speculative expressions and, having reached the end, say to himself, "What did the author say? What did he mean?" Then I'd read it again and still couldn't decide for sure what he was trying to declare or affirm. For me, indeterminateness came to constitute the genius of Japanese language. Simple declarative sentences are not their forte.
The fastest sustained speech I ever heard was that of a village headman in west central Bhojpur District of Nepal. Whether he was speaking Nepali or Rai, the words spewed from his mouth like bullets from a machine gun. I always marvelled at how people could possibly comprehend him. I understood about 80-90% of Nepali speech at normal speed, but listening to the village headman, I could only catch about half or less of what he was saying. Incidentally, he was the only person for many miles around who had a horse. Selected readings
* "Speed vs. efficiency in speech production and reception" (9/11/19)
* "How fast do people talk in court?" (3/21/09)
[h.t. Alan Kennedy]
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Language Log
Fast talking
The topic of this post is one that deeply fascinates me personally, but also has a bearing on many of the main concerns of the denizens of Language Log: information, efficiency, density, complexity, meaning, pronunciation, prosody, speed, gender….
It was prompted by this new article:
What’s the Fastest Language in the World?
Theansweriscomplicated. [sic]
by Dan Nosowitz, Atlas Obscura (April 2, 2024)
The article is based upon the work of François Pellegrino a senior researcher in linguistics and cognitive science at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Paris and Université Lumière Lyon II, France.
…
Francois Pellegrino is mostly a quantitative linguist, meaning his work often includes measuring differences among languages and hunting for explanations behind those differences. He’s worked on language speed a few times, including on one study that compared 17 different languages in a variety of metrics.
Pellegrino prefers looking at syllables rather than individual sounds (phonemes, to linguists) or words. “So the sounds per syllable, you have two ways to look at it,” he says. “You have one way, which is to look at how fast they are produced and what kind of information they convey. But you can also basically ask people to listen to unknown languages and ask them whether it sounds fast or not. So you have the perceptual aspects, and the articulatory and production aspects.”
There are a whole bunch of metrics used to measure all this stuff. There’s the total number of syllables per unit time, which you might think would be fairly simple to measure but is not; Pellegrino’s team decided to rely on the “canonical” pronunciation, so the word “probably” would be noted as three syllables even if the speaker pronounces it “probly.”
Then there’s “information density,” which theoretically refers to the quantity of information conveyed per second. This is even tougher; it turns out to be an absolute nightmare to actually define. There’s a technical meaning devised by a guy named Claude Shannon that involves, basically, how quickly a listener can reduce their uncertainty about the message they’re getting. This involves calculations of the number of possible syllables in a language, the relative popularity of each of those syllables, and the probability that a certain syllable will follow another. All the Shannon stuff is kind of abstract and involves a lot of math that, frankly, made my head hurt.
Perhaps some of the specialists on information theory who are reading this can explain the "Shannon stuff" we need to know in slow, simple terms.
Linguists like Pellegrino have found that there’s an inverse correlation between, basically, how many syllables you can cram into one second and how much information you can cram into one second. Japanese, for example, has an extremely high number of syllables spoken per second. But Japanese also has an extremely low degree of complexity in its syllables, and much less information encoded per syllable. So the syllables come out at a faster rate, but you need more of them to convey the same amount of information as a slow language, like, say, Vietnamese.
But you can also argue that a language like Vietnamese, or even English, is wildly more efficient than Japanese. Japanese syllables contain, mostly, a consonant followed by a vowel, like ko, and Japanese also only has five vowels. English, though we have five letters to represent vowels, has around 20 different vowel sounds. Just by using “A” in different places we can get the vowel sounds in “cat,” “can,” “cane,” “calm,” and a bunch more. Single syllables in English can be extremely complex: the word “strength” involves big annoying clusters of consonants. Vietnamese goes a step further, adding tones, so the tune or pitch of a syllable can also carry value. (Japanese has a system of emphasizi[...]
Word of the Day
Word of the Day: sophomoric
This word has appeared in 18 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
hang | hang out
to spend time with
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
bring out (1)
to release a new product
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Word of the Day
Word of the Day: cachet
This word has appeared in 88 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence?
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Funny Or Die (Youtube)
Try And Say This Phrase Without Laughing (Bless These Braces) #podcast #funnyordie #siblings
"""I have to diagnose you with a really serious disease..."" Sophia Benoit tells Tam Yajia about her favorite childhood game on this week's Bless These Braces.
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ume SC knows whom I am talking about according to the setting or the context of our conversation. So maybe when Chinese students write, because of their Chinese way of thinking, they assume lots of common understandings. So they don't need to be so logical? When they write, they tend to be all over the place? I also thought of how Chinese as a language could be more complicated than English? Sometimes by looking at how certain characters are structured helps one understand the context, such as 人 rén (person) vs. 眾 zhòng (lots of people), while in English it's person vs. crowd. Because Chinese language is structured in such complicated ways, therefore people just don't pay so much attention to the logic? (I am not saying that Chinese or English is better than the other, just trying to figure out why are most Chinese students illogical )
I am not sure if this example demonstrates my point clearly. I remember when I first came to the States, I had the strangest problem with my English speaking. I mixed the usage of he/she when I could express the rest of the sentence without any problem. Sometimes, even though I knew clearly I was talking about a girl, I would say "he xxxxxx". It was like part of my brain wasn't functioning properly. But I overcame the issue in about two to three weeks as I got used to English speaking everyday. I asked around and found out I wasn't the only one who suffered from this problem.
This may help to explain why many of my colleagues do not like to admit students directly from China to our graduate programs, demurring, "They don't know how to think". Instead, my colleagues prefer that Chinese students study somewhere else (a "feeder" school) before coming to Penn. Francis Miller
Francis, who received a B.A. from Penn in May 2013, and then finished his M.A. in December 2013, both from the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, offers the following observations on higher educational counseling in China (remember that TCI is a higher education counselor in China):
I worked for a boutique edu consulting company called AIC Education in Beijing from 2015-2017, and then at Xi’an Tie Yi High School from 2018-2023. This year in August I’m starting work with my wife at Avenues Shenzhen.
The role is usually referred to as a "college counselor" or something similar. For example, my official title is Dean and College Counselor. In Chinese, there are lots of different ways to say college counselor, but I think the most professional way for a school-based counselor is "shēngxué zhǐdǎo 升学指导 ("guidance for further studies") For example, before, my title at my school in Xi'an was "shēngxué zhǐdǎo zhǔrèn 升学指导主任" ("Director of Continuing Education Guidance"). Some schools use a more clunky direct translation from English like hǎiwài dàxué zīxúnshī 海外大学咨询师 ("Overseas University Consultant / Counselor") or something like this. This is not to be confused with people who work at companies or are "independent education consultants", who are usually known as liúxué zīxún gùwèn 留学咨询顾问 ("Study Abroad Consultant"), or simply as an "agent" (zhōngjiè 中介), however zhōngjiè 中介 in Chinese and "agent" in English mean quite different things in this field. Not that you need / want to know the nitty gritty, but an agent is usually a person or company who has a contractual relationship with a university to facilitate recruiting and is compensated with commissions on a per-capita basis based on the number of students who apply and/or enroll at the university, while in Chinese zhōngjiè 中介 is usually the company with consultants who shepherd students through the application process for a (sometimes hefty) fee and/or may write and submit college applications on the student's behalf.
The biggest professional organization for school-based college counselors is China Institute of College Admission Counseling (ChinaICAC– click on the link to get impressive evidence of the large size of this organization). If you know of students who are interested in worki[...]
Word of the Day
Word of the Day: fabricate
This word has appeared in 30 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
beat box
to create rhythmic percussive sounds with your mouth, especially when accompanying rhymes or rapping
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
set off (2)
to make something explode or blow up
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Language Log
The E-V22 haplogroup and its East Asian congeners, ancient and modern
[This is a guest post by Matthew Marcucci]
Population genetics is proving to be astonishingly useful in aiding the study of history, linguistics, archaeology, anthropology, and other disciplines. One means of studying ancient human migrations is analysis of the so-called yDNA haplogroup. In reviewing the modern-day distribution of my own yDNA haplogroup, I have come upon a fascinating contemporary Chinese lineage that may ultimately derive from an ancient or medieval Iranian or Caucasian source population.
Briefly, yDNA haplogroups result from the following basic process: All men inherit Y-chromosomal DNA from their own fathers. Random mutations in this yDNA are then passed on to the sons of those in whom they first occurred, and the process repeats ad infinitum. (An analogous process occurs in women's mitochondrial DNA, which is transmitted to both sons and daughters.) Through the approximate dating of these mutations, men can be differentiated into groups一so-called “haplogroups”一demarcated by their most-recent shared paternal-line ancestor. Here, for example, is a recent paper published in the Journal of Human Genetics that analyzes the yDNA haplogroup frequencies among modern Japanese men. A handy way to represent this pattern of genetic inheritance that ultimately links all men back to a “Y-chromosomal Adam” is by means of a phylogenetic “family” tree.
One yDNA haplogroup, which happens to be my own, is denominated E-V22. A public online database of yDNA haplogroups, yFull, is helpfully organized in a phylogenetic manner, and the phylogeny of E-V22, at least based on the samples uploaded to yFull, reveals the following:
*
The E-V22 haplogroup appears to be roughly 11,800 years old, with a “TMRCA,” or time to most-recent common ancestor, of 8,200 “ybp,” or years-before-present.
*
While there are many deep and relatively old sublineages whose members have diverse geographical origins, there does appear to be a general pattern of E-V22 prevalence in/among the following regions and populations: the Arabian Peninsula and the Arab states of the Persian Gulf; diverse Jewish and related populations (including Bukharian, Ashkenazi, an apparent Moroccan Jewish, Italki, and Ashkenazi branch, the Samaritans [note: this lineage is apparently that of the Samaritan priestly class], and others); the Saho people, a Cushitic-speaking ethnic group of Eritrea and Ethiopia; and other groups such as Egyptians, Levantine Arabs, Sicilians, and at least one Caucasian-Iranian lineage. (There are Northwestern European exemplars, too.)
*
Perhaps surprisingly, there are no fewer than twelve reported samples on yFull with origins in the present-day People’s Republic of China, including a well-developed lineage of Chinese men who report their origins as Dungan, Manchu, Mongol, and in Liaoning [i.e., the gateway to Manchuria], and who share a common paternal-line ancestor who lived about 600 years ago, right around the tail-end of the Mongol Yuan Dynasty. (Note their Czech "brother lineage," with a TMRCA of 5,700 years-before present.) Zooming out a bit farther back on the overall E-V22 phylogeny, three more Chinese samples emerge who are nested within different lineages altogether: a self-described “Mandarin Chinese” isolate lineage with Shandong origins that has a TMRCA of 4,100 years-before-present; a Chinese sample with Mongolian origins who shares a common Armenian paternal-line ancestor as of 4,500 years ago, and who has even more remote Irish and British (exotic for E-V22!) paternal-line cousins; and a rather old Henan-based lineage with a Saudi cousin as of 6,200 years ago, and diverse brother lineages with Nablusi, Moroccan Jewish, and Khorasani Turkish origins, among others (including an [...]
Idiom of the Day
in (someone's) view
In someone's opinion. Watch the video
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Word of the Day
incantation
Definition: (noun) A ritual recitation of words or sounds believed to have a magical effect.
Synonyms: conjuration.
Usage: Hagar, the witch, chanted an awful incantation over her kettleful of simmering toads, with weird effect.
Discuss
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Funny Or Die (Youtube)
The Worst Part Of Accutane (Bless These Braces) #podcast #funnyordie #growingup #accutaine #acne
"Please, you know I'm not pregnant." Sophia Benoit remembers going on Accutane on an all new Bless These Braces with Tam Yajia.
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ng some syllables but is not generally regarded as a tonal language.) Generally speaking, the more complexity we can cram into a syllable, the more information it carries. [VHM: emphasis added] Japanese is faster than English—around 12 syllables per second, maybe even a couple more for an especially fast speaker—but if English can convey the same information in five syllables, is Japanese really “faster”?
The concept of how much “information” is disclosed in a certain syllable is pretty wooly, too. Languages are messy, inconsistent, and redundant. A direct translation of the English sentence “I am” to Spanish would be “Yo soy.” But the “yo” isn’t necessary and, in fact, would usually be omitted.
In Hebrew, there’s no verb for “to be,” so to express that you’re hungry, you would say “אני רעב” meaning “I hungry.” That Hebrew one is a good example, because the word for “hungry” actually has a gender involved; a woman would say “אני רעבה”, which adds an extra syllable, but also extra meaning. For a man, the English and Hebrew have the same number of syllables, but to actually convey all the information in the Hebrew, the English would have to be more like “I, a man, am hungry,” which is much longer.
The amount of information can sometimes get even more dense. In the Paamese language, spoken on an island in Vanuatu, possessives can include information on the relationship between the speaker and the object. “My coconut” is not simply “my coconut.” The word for “my” could mean “my coconut, which I intend to eat,” or “my coconut, which I grew,” or “my coconut, which I intend to use in my household in some way other than eating or drinking.” This is a dramatically more efficient use of space than the English version! Is it, therefore, in some sense, “faster”?
Even in English, we can contract “I am” to “I’m,” though many contractions don’t actually save syllables (“shouldn’t” and “should not” are both two syllables). It is, in all languages, possible to delete quite a lot of syllables and still be able to convey information. Languages tend to be encoded with a lot of redundancy, but that does serve a purpose. Redundancy allows for understanding even if the listener isn’t used to the speaker’s accent, or can’t hear the speaker perfectly, or isn’t paying attention. If you edit a sentence down to the absolute bare minimum, it would take a pretty fair amount of concentration, and the right circumstances, to understand and maybe even make some educated guesses as to what the speaker is trying to convey.
…
Back to "Shannon's stuff":
Pellegrino, along with a few other researchers, released a paper in 2019 that received a great deal of attention among the admittedly small cohort of people who understand Claude Shannon’s math. The paper found that, in terms of sheer number of syllables spoken per second, the fastest languages of the 17 studied were Japanese, Spanish, and Basque. The slowest were Cantonese, Vietnamese, and Thai.
But! Just to offer a couple of explanations: All three of the fastest languages have only five vowels. The three slowest have upwards of 20, and all are tonal, meaning that there is a gigantic number of possible syllables in those languages.
What Pellegrino found is that, essentially, all languages convey information at roughly the same speed when all the factors are taken into account: around 39 bits per second. The higher the syllable-per-second rate, the lower the information density, which creates a trade-off that makes all languages around the same in terms of information rate.
…
Now on to aspects of language that border on poetry and music:
Another element that might provide some extra data is in what linguists call “prosody,” the intonation and rhythm of speech. Do we include pauses in our analyses? (Pellegrino did not; pauses don’t apply to the specific kind of speed he was looking at.) What about rhythm? Some languages, like, interestingly, Japanese and Spanish, fall closer on the spectrum to having each syllable take [...]
Funny Or Die (Youtube)
Flies In The Buttcrack with Sophia Benoit (Bless These Braces: Episode 7)
Sophia Benoit (Well, This Is Exhausting) stops by to look back on when she first felt like an adult, unique porn categories, and playing with dolls into middle school.
Get notified when we drop new episodes, news, and show extras: https://norby.link/ceiRm2
Key Moments
02:13 - The Worst Part Of Accutane
13:07 - "Should I Wash My Feet?"
15:10 - Try And Say This Phrase Without Laughing
19:37 - Sophia Prefers To Read Than Watch
21:20 - Going to France to Become an Adult
03:00 - Loving School
05:40 - She Wants Her Dad to Come Out
06:20 - Having Very Open Parents
07:50 - Playing With Dolls in Middle School
08:25 - Getting Boobs, Getting Your First Period
11:30 - No Bra? Wear a Coat
14:25 - Masturbating
17:08 - Fascinating Porn Categories
25:16 - Bat Mitzvah Themes
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Idiom of the Day
in a measure
To a certain degree or extent; somewhat. Watch the video
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Word of the Day
patella
Definition: (noun) A flat triangular bone located at the front of the knee joint.
Synonyms: kneecap, kneepan.
Usage: Having learned his lesson, the rollerblader wore kneepads to protect his patellae from further injury.
Discuss
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Language Log
Romeyka rescue
Ioanna Sitaridou's "Crowdsourcing Romeyka" project has been getting some coverage in niche media, and in at least one widely-read publication: Esther Addley, "Endangered Greek dialect is ‘living bridge’ to ancient world, researchers say", The Guardian 4/3/2024.
The crowdsourcing platform's interface seems well-designed and easy to use. There are a few obvious questions — for example, there's no protection against inappropriate or even malicious responses, so that the collected recordings will need to be checked by someone who knows Romeyka reasonably well.
Also, my own experience with browser-based data collection of this type has been that there can be level-setting and other audio quality problems, depending on the user's device, operating system, browser, recording context, etc. The hardware and software involved has been improving, so I hope that aspect of things works out well for the project.
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