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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
hustler (1)
a person, usually male, who has sex for money
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Language Log
An assessment of AI in China
For those who are interested in the development of AI in the PRC, the following article is probably the most complete and forthcoming report on the state of the field. Drawbacks are that is excessively lengthy and machine translated, with some parts awkward or difficult to understand.
Where Does China Stand in the AI Wave?
China’s top policy experts discuss the US-China gap, open vs. closed, and societal implications.
Nicholas Welch, ChinaTalk (May 10, 2024)
The introduction summarizes the article:
In this article, ChinaTalk presents the highlights and a full translation of a panel discussion on AI (archived here) that took place six weeks ago in Beijing. Hosted by the non-profit organization “The Intellectual” [Zhīshì fēnzǐ] 知识分子 — whose public WeChat account serves as a platform for discussions on scientific issues and their governance implications — the panelists delved into a wide range of topics, including:
*
*
the state of China’s AI industry, discussing the biggest bottlenecks, potential advantages in AI applications, and the role of the government in supporting domestic AI development;
*
the technical aspects of AI, such as whether Sora understands physics, the reliance on the Transformer architecture, and how far we are from true AGI;
*
and the societal implications — which jobs will be replaced by AI first, whether open- or closed-source is better for AI safety, and if AI developers should dedicate more resources to AI safety.
The article is long and rambling, so I won't attempt to abridge it, but I will say one thing in its defense, which is that the three panelists seem to agree in general: the key issues for the improvement of AI in the PRC are:
* 1. the development of TALENT, though they do not have a clear, workable idea of how to achieve that goal
* 2. quantity is not as important as QUALITY, though again, they do not offer workable guidelines for maintaining that desideratum
* 3. they focus on ECOSYSTEM development, which is great, but they barely define what the issues and goals are, let suggest how to reach them
The panelists repeatedly recognize that the United States is far advanced ahead of the PRC in diverse aspects of AI, but they do not mention what the chief causes of that disparity are: a.) political constraints and b.) the nature of their epistemological "software" and "hardware". These are things very difficult — given the sociopolitical environment — even to mention.
Selected readings
* "The perils of AI (Artificial Intelligence) in the PRC" (4/17/23)
* "Vignettes of quality data impoverishment in the world of PRC AI" (2/23/23)
* "The implications of Chinese for AI development" (10/25/21)
[h.t. Bill Benzon]
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Word of the Day
hibernal
Definition: (adjective) Of or relating to winter.
Synonyms: brumal, hiemal.
Usage: Our teacher described the first activities of bears as they emerge from hibernal sleep.
Discuss
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Idiom of the Day
get in(to) hot water
To provoke or incite anger, hostility, or punishment against oneself; to cause or encounter trouble or difficulty, especially that which will result in punishment or reprisal. Watch the video
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
open up (3)
If you open up a new business, you set it up and start trading.
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Funny Or Die (Youtube)
Robby Hoffman Just Needed One Nugget To Be Happy (Bless These Braces)
"Why can't I have such a happy meal?"" Robby Hoffman tells Tam Yajia all she wanted was a nugget.
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Funny Or Die (Youtube)
The Highs And Lows Of Freak Trains (Bless These Braces)
Kylie Brakeman tells Tam Yajia there's nothing worse than being abandoned for a freak train.
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Funny Or Die (Youtube)
You'll Never Guess Who Joanna Hausmann Called After She Got Her First Period (Bless These Braces)
Joanna Hausmann was so excited when she got her first period, she just had to tell someone.
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Funny Or Die (Youtube)
Gil Ozeri Had To Hide This Cassette Tape (Bless These Braces)
Gil Ozeri tells Tam about the tape he ordered to learn the art of multiple orgasms.
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Funny Or Die (Youtube)
Shoutout To Robby Hoffman's Great-Uncle Eddie (Bless These Braces)
Would you put ointment on your Great-Uncle's feet? Robby Hoffman did.
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What Tam Yajia Said Every Night As A Kid (Bless These Braces)
Tam tells Gil Ozeri what she had to say to herself about Hitler every night before bed.
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Funny Or Die (Youtube)
"Should I Wash My Feet?" (Bless These Braces)
"A stench of cheese eminated from my feet." Tam Yajia remembers a particularly bad sleepover with Sophia Benoit on this week's Bless These Braces.
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this is my memory of what I learned in 2010, and it might well be wrong in parts. But it suggests what Victor and Wikipedia said about Maltese may be more a matter of politico-religious prejudice than the conclusion of linguistic analysis.
See also Martin Zammit, "The Sfaxi (Tunisian) element in Maltese", 2014:
Much to the frustration of the linguist and the historian alike, the facts surrounding the diffusion into Malta of some form of Arabic dialect, or dialects, are still shrouded in the mists of time. Neither the Arab Muslim geographers and historians nor travelers have been very informative about the Arab experience in Malta. […]
Muslim Sicily was certainly a main source of Arabic diffusion into the Maltese islands, particularly from the year 1053 onwards, in the wake of the fall of Sicily’s central government and the ensuing civil war. This migration coincided with a similar migration which, according to the historian al-Marrākushī, left the coastal towns of NorthAfrica and the interior regions and sought refuge in Sicily, Fez and Spain. These people were fleeing from the Banū Hilāl and the Banū Sulaym incursions which had reached Ifrīqiya by the year 1052. Even though al-Marrākushī does not mention Malta, “… there is a very good probability that many fled to Malta as well as Sicily.” Whatever dialectal varieties had reached the Maltese islands, towards the end of the 11th century these started coming into regular contact with the Romance languages of Malta’s military, civil and religious rulers. By the first half of the 15th century, such linguistic contact ultimately forged the lingua maltensi.
Zammit cites a long list of shared phonological and morpho-syntactic traits between Sfaxi Tunisian and Maltese, and also notes that "Tunisian, particularly sedentary, dialects and Maltese share substantial common lexicon".
A picture of somewhat greater divergence emerges from A. Čéplö et al., "Mutual intelligibility of spoken Maltese, Libyan Arabic, and Tunisian Arabic functionally tested: A pilot study" (2016):
It was found that there exists asymmetric mutual intelligibility between the two mainstream varieties of Maġribī Arabic and Maltese, with speakers of Tunisian and Libyan Arabic able to understand about 40% of what is being said to them in Maltese, against about 30% for speakers of Maltese exposed to either variety of Arabic. Additionally, it was found that Tunisian Arabic has the highest level of mutual intelligibility with either of the other two varieties.
But Čéplö et al. start their paper this way:
In Neo-Arabic dialectology, the concept of mutual intelligibility is often invoked – whether in positive (Ryding 2005) or negative terms (Abu-Haidar 1992) – to conveniently illustrate various claims about the nature of the complex linguistic landscape that is Arabic and the relationship between the Arabic varieties. As one of those varieties, Maltese is also a topic in the mutual intelligibility discussion, where the claims range from total lack of mutual intelligibility with any variety of Arabic (Owens 2010) to anecdotal evidence asserting that speakers of Arabic (usually Tunisian Neo-Arabic; see Chaouachi 2014) are able to understand Maltese nearly perfectly.
Presumably variations in the various earlier subjective and anecdotal claims, as well as the results of their controlled study, depend partly on the substantial variation in what counts as "Maltese" or "Tunisian" or "Libyan" Arabic. But it seems entirely wrong to exclude Maltese from a taxonomy of Arabic "colloquials" or "vernaculars" (i.e. Arabic languages), purely on the grounds of its borrowings from Italian.
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Language Log
Tocharo-Sinica
Language Log has been fortunate to have had several guest posts and numerous comments by Douglas Adams, doyen of Tocharian studies in America (see "Selected readings" for a sampling). Now, stimulated by the recent post on Chinese chariotry, he has written the following ruminations in response.
I read with interest the material on early Chinese chariotry. It was far outside my competence to judge. As you knew, I was most interested in the comment that was looking to the possibility of Tocharian > Chinese lexical borrowings. As you also know, it has long been my suspicion that there was more west > east influence on Chinese language and culture than is generally realized. And the "westerners" involved were most likely to have been Tocharians of one sort or another ("Tocharian D"?). It's probably not only PIE pigs and honey that, via Tocharian, show up in Chinese.
It's a pity that the ancient Chinese, like the ancient Greeks, were so totally uninterested in the "barbarian" languages that were their neighbors. We have our single sentence example of the Jie language recorded, not in a difficult Greek alphabet transcription, but rather in an inscrutable Chinese character transcription. (Inscrutable because reconstructing pre-Middle-Chinese Chinese phonology makes reconstructing PIE phonology look like child's play.) Adding to the problem of course is that Chinese phonology, at all times, renders that incorporation of foreign words possible only at the cost of (considerable) deformation. Look, for instance, at how poor Buddhacinga's name is rendered (Fótúchéng 佛圖澄 [many people used to mispronounce that Fótúdèng]) (ca. 232–348 AD) . Who would have guessed?
I'm still suspicious that the name given by the Chinese to the Kuchean royal house, Bai, may be connected to the homophonous designation of the "barbarian" rulers surrounding the nascent Chinese state on the North China Plain. And, speaking of royalty, is it possible that wang 'king' might be from pre-Tocharian *wnatke (TchA nātäk 'lord'), which in turn might be cognate with Greek (w)anakt– '[Mycenean] king.' (TchA nāśi 'lady' would equally be the equivalent of Greek (w)anassa 'queen' from pre-Greek *wanakyā-, both irregularly related to 'king/lord' [where's the *-t-?]. The latter word survives in Modern Greek in pant-anassa 'all-queen,' an epithet of the Virgin Mary.) But, even if true, who's going to believe it?
This is but a taste of what is to come. Doug is preparing a paper that touches on one of these subjects at greater length. It is tentatively titled "Resurrecting an Etymology: Greek (w)ánax ‘king’ and Tocharian A nātäk ‘lord’" and will probably appear in Sino-Platonic Papers sometime this summer.
Selected readings
* "Tocharian words for oil" (6/22/22)
* "The origins and affinities of Tocharian" (8/20/23) — lengthy, classified bibliography
* "Tocharian C: its discovery and implications" (4/2/19)
* "The geographical, archeological, genetic, and linguistic origins of Tocharian" (7/14/20) — with a comprehensive bibliography
* Hajni Elias, "The Southwest Silk Road: artistic exchange and transmission in early China", published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 March 2024; Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, First View, pp. 1 – 26. This article has impressed me to such a degree that I have rechristened the road she wrote about as "The Southwest Bronze Road".
* "From Chariot to Carriage" (5/5/24)
* "An early fourth century AD historical puzzle involving a Caucasian people in North China" (1/25/19)
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Word of the Day
Word of the Day: bazaar
This word has appeared in 103 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence?
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
get away with
to do something illegal or immoral and not get caught or punished
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Language Log
Words
Ellen Gutoskey, "15 Fascinating Linguistics Terms You Didn't Learn in School", Mental Floss 5/10/2024:
Grade school English teachers do their best to send you off into the world with at least a cursory understanding of how language works. Maybe you can tell your dependent clauses from your independent ones and your transitive verbs from your intransitive ones. Maybe you’re even pretty savvy at distinguishing between basic rhetorical devices—hyperbole versus oxymoron, simile versus metaphor, and that sort of thing.
But unless you majored in linguistics in college or routinely spend your free time reading grammar blogs, there’s a whole world of words to describe language mechanics that you’re probably not aware of. Here are 15 of our favorites, from formal terms like amphiboly to colloquial ones like snowclone.
Oddly, there are only 14 words listed:
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/MentalFloss15.png
Whatever the total count, two of the them (eggcorn, snowclone) were coined on LLOG. [SP points out in the comments that "word" number 6 is actually two words, epenthesis and syncope, so the total is 15 after all…]
In other lexical news, SMBC lists 12 Dysgraphomophones:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/SMBC_Dysgraphomophone.png
Mouseover title: "Genuinely ashamed how much time was wasted on this."
The AfterComic:
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/SMBC_DysgraphomophoneAfter.png
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Word of the Day
Word of the Day: rancorous
This word has appeared in 40 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
ecofreak
a person with strong views on the importance of protecting the natural environment
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Funny Or Die (Youtube)
Ron Funches On Black And Jewish Communities (Bless These Braces)
Ron Funches tells Tam Yajia about the partnership between the Black and Jewish communities on the latest episode of Bless These Braces.
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Funny Or Die (Youtube)
Were Retainer Necklaces A Trend? (Bless These Braces)
Were retainer necklaces a trend or was this just a part of Tam Yajia's childhood?
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Funny Or Die (Youtube)
A Bat Mitzvah At A Hotel With A Dark History (Bless These Braces)
"Put your lipstick on and mind your f****** P's and Q's." Link in bio for this week's full episode of Bless These Braces with Tam Yajia and her guest Megan Gailey.
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Funny Or Die (Youtube)
Notwithstanding Is Such An Adult Word (Bless These Braces)
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Funny Or Die (Youtube)
Therapy Hits Different In Spanish (Bless These Braces)
Tam Yajia and her guest Joanna Hausmann both recommend doing therapy in Spanish.
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Tam Yajia And Joanna Hausmann Are Probably Cousins (Bless These Braces)
Joanna Hausmann and Tam Yajia probably have the same allergies.
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Tam Tells Ron Funches About An Important First (Bless These Braces)
Ron Funches tells Tam Yajia about the many cartoon characters he was crushing on as a kid.
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Funny Or Die (Youtube)
Yiddish Has Some Very Useful Words (Bless These Braces)
Joanna Hausmann and Tam Yajia talk about their favorite Yiddish words. Like a hair that pokes out of your chin.
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Language Log
Maltese Arabic: Correction?
In Victor's recent post "Arabic and the vernaculars, part 6", he wrote that "I do not include Maltese because of the Romance superstrata". A more elaborate version of this idea can be found in the Wikipedia article, which tells us that
Maltese […] is a Semitic language derived from late medieval Sicilian Arabic with Romance superstrata spoken by the Maltese people. […] Maltese is a Latinized variety of spoken historical Arabic through its descent from Siculo-Arabic, which developed as a Maghrebi Arabic dialect in the Emirate of Sicily between 831 and 1091. As a result of the Norman invasion of Malta and the subsequent re-Christianization of the islands, Maltese evolved independently of Classical Arabic in a gradual process of latinization. It is therefore exceptional as a variety of historical Arabic that has no diglossic relationship with Classical or Modern Standard Arabic. Maltese is thus classified separately from the 30 varieties constituting the modern Arabic macrolanguage.
Both Victor and Wikipedia are somewhat wrong, or at least misleading — and my main evidence for this is an amusing anecdote. So onwards…
The 2010 LREC conference was held in Valetta, Malta. One of the other attendees was my colleague Mohamed Maamouri, a native speaker of Tunisian Arabic who has extensive research and publications on relevant topics, starting from his 1967 Cornell thesis The Phonology of Tunisian Arabic. His Google Scholar listing also includes "Language education and human development: Arabic diglossia and its impact on the quality of education in the Arab region" (1998), "Dialectal Arabic telephone speech corpus: Principles, tool design, and transcription conventions" (2004), "Developing LMF-XML Bilingual Dictionaries for Colloquial Arabic Dialects" (2012), The Georgetown Dictionary of Iraqi Arabic (2013) and The Georgetown Dictionary of Moroccan Arabic (2019).
The area around the conference venue in Valetta was oriented toward tourism, and so the personnel in restaurants, coffee shops and similar sites communicated with their customers in English, French, or other European languages. But among themselves they spoke Maltese — and naturally enough, Mohamed often joined their conversations.
Since he was clearly part of the conference crew, the puzzled response was "How do you know Maltese?" His answer (in Tunisian Arabic) was "Oh, I'm actually speaking Tunisian".
And the reaction was total shock. Eyebrows went up, eyes opened wide, bodies jumped back. This was WTF type shock,, not "how wonderful" type shock — the clerks and baristas were clearly upset at the idea that Maltese and Tunisian are not only mutually intelligible, but are sometimes indistinguishable, at least at the level of brief conversational exchanges.
After a couple of such experiences, Mohamed changes his responses, to something like "Oh, my mother is Maltese…" And of course he also looked into the matter at greater length, including discussions with local Maltese linguists. The conclusion (at least as far as I recall, 14 years later): Despite the strong socio-political divergence over the many centuries during which Malta resisted first the Arab conquest of the Maghreb and southern Italy and Spain, and then the Ottoman conquest of the eastern Mediterranean, some varieties of Maltese Arabic are apparently quite close to some varieties of Tunisian Arabic.
How can that have happened? Apparently, it's partly because of what happened in the 11th century to get the Maltese language started; but it's also because Malta is actually quite close to Tunisia by sea, and over the centuries, there was a lot of under-the-table cultural and commercial contact. This also apparently includes a certain number of families with branches in both countries. http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/MaltaTunisiaSicilyMap.png As I said, [...]
Word of the Day
plexor
Definition: (noun) A small hammer with a rubber head used in percussive examinations of the chest and in testing reflexes.
Synonyms: percussor, plessor.
Usage: When the doctor tapped my knee with the plexor, my reflex was so strong that I almost kicked him in the head!
Discuss
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Idiom of the Day
land of plenty
A fictional or imagined utopian place where there is an abundance of everything needed to survive and flourish. Watch the video
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