28487
#ielts #toefl #gre #english_vocabulary #english
Word of the Day
baccarat
Definition: (noun) A card game in which the winner is the player who holds two or three cards totaling closest to nine.
Synonyms: chemin de fer.
Usage: Because baccarat attracts wealthy players who place enormous bets, a casino can win or lose millions of dollars a night on the game.
Discuss
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
cranky
irritable, easily annoyed
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the dialectometric approach is to examine the data without assuming any particular bin boundaries, and to let the number and nature of the divisions emerge from the quantitative analysis.
There are many interesting methodological issues in the Huang et al. paper, but (for now) I'll leave readers to explore them on their own.
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Language Log
Dialectometry
Every individual's speech is variable — and when we look beyond the individual, we see variation across space, time, style, and social structure — among other dimensions. And these variations are generally gradient rather than abrupt, although standardization efforts by national or regional governments may try to eliminate the variation.
For millennia, scholars have noted and catalogued these patterns of variation — and for the past couple of hundred years, this study has been called dialectology. But until 1970 or so, people interested in this topic faced an uncomfortable choice: you can either pretend (falsely) that the variation can be put into a few well-defined boxes; or else you can limit your research to compiling very large lists of who said what where, when, and why.
About 50 years ago, some European researchers began trying to get past this dichotomous barrier, under the banner of "dialectometry". For a recent survey, see Martijn Wieling and John Nerbonne, "Advances in dialectometry", 2015 (from which I'll quote a long explanation):
The great tradition of European dialect geography produced innumerable detailed maps depicting the geographic distribution of variation, especially in word choice, pronunciation, and morphology. Researchers naturally sought to identify the deeper geographic and social structures that might be assumed to underlie many details and that might be examined as potentially explanatory. But as Bloomfield’s (1933, p. 340ff) classic discussion of this work noted, the maps of individual features often simply did not coincide, leading him to conclude that “in this respect […] dialect geography proved to be disappointing.” The problem usually revolved around how one should distinguish dialect areas, but modern dialectology recognizes that geographic distributions may involve continua or even scattered settlements.
Jean Séguy (1971, 1973) is credited with taking the liberating step of examining not individual features, but rather large aggregates of features, effectively asking how often two sites differ with respect to a given set of features (such as lexicalizations, but also the pronunciation of selected sounds, or the realization of a given morpheme). It is historically noteworthy that Haag (1898) had suggested something very similar, namely counting the isoglosses that separated sites to assay the strength of a putative border separating them, as noted by Bloomfield (1933) in the chapter cited above. Séguy not only took this step but presciently applied it to one of the foundational questions in dialect geography, the relation between aggregate linguistic differences and geographic distance (Séguy 1971).
In a programmatic article, Nerbonne (2009, p. 179) summed up the motivation for dialectometry’s attention to aggregates rather than individual features, arguing that the common practice of abstracting away from many details of phonetic variation is an implicit sort of aggregation that all variationists have accepted, and further noting that individual features are inevitably noisy (interpreting Bloomfield’s point above in this way). He also observed that the sheer number of available features makes it likely that a researcher focused on individual features can find some feature or other that coincides with a putative social or geographical influence, exposing the researcher to the danger of “cherry picking” — working with features that are selected (perhaps innocently) to confirm his or her hypotheses. Nerbonne (2009, pp. 190–91) finally notes that moving the analysis from the (categorical) level of individual features to the (numerical) level of aggregates enables language variationists to study general relations such as the law-like relation between linguistic differences and geographic distance demonstrated by Séguy (1971).
[…]
Whereas Black (1976) introduced mult[...]
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What happens when you reveal you've never seen Hamilton to the wrong person.
Tamara Yajia revealed she’s never seen 'Hamilton' and Dylan Adler was stunned. Link in bio for the full episode of Bless These Braces. Hear the full conversation on this week's Bless These Braces with Tam Yajia.
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Word of the Day
Word of the Day: interloper
This word has appeared in 33 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
wacky | whacky
strange or funny in a silly or bizarre way
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Language Log
Non-defined flower
This is a recent instagram post of the Vietnamese singer Suni Ha Linh.
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View this post on Instagram
A post shared by SUNI (@sunihalinh)
The translation is accurate.
búbèi dìngyì de huā
不被定义的花
"undefined flower(s) / non-defined flower(s) / flower(s) that is/are not defined"
Who knows what she meant? Unspecified? Random?
Selected readings
* "Off my head there is a path" (2/4/11)
* "Tiny grass is dreaming" (5/24/12)
* "Getting off with your lover" (10/13/13)
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Word of the Day
arbor
Definition: (noun) A shady resting place in a garden or park, often made of rustic work or latticework on which plants, such as climbing shrubs or vines, are grown.
Synonyms: bower, pergola.
Usage: I never saw such a garden—large and shady, full of box-bordered paths, and lined with long grape-covered arbors with seats under them.
Discuss
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Word of the Day
Word of the Day: propound
This word has appeared in five 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
rubber
a condom
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Language Log
Chinese dialectometry: fundamental flaws
Really happy to announce our new (open access) paper was finally published today in @LinguisticsJ!
"Geographic structure of Chinese dialects: A computational dialectometric approach"https://t.co/oyNPabq0CN
with He Huang (lead author), Lei Jia and Zhuo Chi
A short … pic.twitter.com/ldXwh3FDCU
— Jack Grieve (@JWGrieve) April 23, 2024
This is the cited paper:
"Geographic structure of Chinese dialects: A computational dialectometric approach", by He Huang, Jack Grieve, Lei Jiao, and Zhuo Cai, Linguistics (De Gruyter Mouton [April 23, 2024]) https://doi.org/10.1515/ling-2021-0138 Abstract
Dialect classification is a long-standing issue in Chinese dialectology. Although various theories of Chinese dialect regions have been proposed, most have been limited by similar methodological issues, especially due to their reliance on the subjective analysis of dialect maps both individually and in the aggregate, as well as their focus on phonology over syntax and vocabulary. Consequently, we know relatively little about the geolinguistic underpinnings of Chinese dialect variation. Following a review of previous research in this area, this article presents a theory of Chinese dialect regions based on the first large-scale quantitative analysis of the data from the Linguistic Atlas of Chinese Dialects, which was collected between 2000 and 2008, providing the most up-to-date picture of the full Chinese dialect landscape. We identify and map a hierarchy of 10 major Chinese dialect regions, challenging traditional accounts. In addition, we propose a new theory of Chinese dialect formation to account for our findings.
Keywords: Chinese dialects; dialectology; dialectometry; geolinguistics; typology Conclusions
To conclude, in this article we have presented the first large-scale dialectometric analysis of Chinese dialect survey data, uncovering hidden structure in regional variation in Chinese, including proposing new theories of modern Chinese dialect regions and of the historical formation of Chinese dialect regions. Our results both support and challenge standard views in Chinese dialectology, providing a quantitative basis for future research in Chinese dialectology, as well as for cross-linguistic typological analysis. This study also highlights the importance of adopting a quantitative and data-driven approach to dialectology. Geolinguistic data is voluminous, high-dimensional, and spatially related, and it is therefore challenging to effectively and efficiently detect and understand relationships and patterns in dialect data. Crucially, extending our scientific understanding of geolinguistic phenomenon must generally rely on the discovery, interpretation, and presentation of multivariate spatial patterns. Dialectometry is a powerful tool that integrates computational, visual, and cartographic methods together to detect and visualize multivariate spatial patterns. It bridges our linguistic knowledges with data-driven, quantitative research and provides us a new way to evaluate previous theories and explore new issues objectively, as we have demonstrated for the Chinese language in this study, leading to new and important insights about regional variation in one of the most important languages in the world.
The conceptual defects of this paper are evident from the first paragraph of the Introduction:
Chinese is a group of language varieties that forms the Sinitic branch of the Sino-Tibetan family. It is the mother tongue of 1.2 billion people, approximately 16 % of the World’s population. Understanding the geographic structure of Chinese dialects and the relationships between these dialects is important because it allows us to better understand the history of Sinitic languages, which is crucial for resolving questions about the formation of [...]
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Tam's Mom Has A Side Hustle (Bless These Braces)
Tam talks about her mom's unique side hustle on this week's Bless These Braces with guest Dylan Adler.
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Word of the Day
amulet
Definition: (noun) An object worn, especially around the neck, as a charm against evil or injury.
Synonyms: talisman.
Usage: It was sorcery, magic of the worst kind, thought Buldeo, and he wondered whether the amulet round his neck would protect him.
Discuss
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Word of the Day
Word of the Day: hardscrabble
This word has appeared in 31 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence?
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Idiom of the Day
keep (someone) in the loop
To keep someone informed about and/or involved in something, such as a plan or project, especially that which involves or pertains to a specific group. Watch the video
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
run up
If you run up a bill or a debt, you get goods or services on the understanding that you'll pay for them later.
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idimensional scaling (MDS) to linguistics, Embleton (1993) applied the technique specifically to dialectometry (see Embleton et al. 2013 for more recent work on alternative MDS visualizations). MDS takes a site × site distance table as input and tries to assign the sites in the table to coordinates in a small-dimensional space, typically consisting of two or three dimensions. Nerbonne et al. (1999) mapped MDS coordinates to color values for the first time, providing visual correlates in response to the frequent critique found in dialect atlases and treatises that the division of the language area into different dialect areas did little justice to the gradual nature of dialect boundaries. Figure 1 shows an example of one of these MDS maps, visualizing Dutch phonetic variation, together with a legend providing examples of words and how they are pronounced in their “fuzzy” areas. Heeringa’s (2004) dissertation used this form of presentation as well. Heeringa identified “typical” word pronunciations by selecting words whose distances correlated highly with the (distances on the basis of the) dimensions proposed in MDS, effectively the intensity of the colors shown in Figure 1 .
Figure 1 — legend: The three most important multidimensional scaling dimensions (together accounting for more than 85% of the variation in the location × location distance table) have been mapped to red, green, and blue, thereby providing a comprehensive visualization of Dutch phonetic variation. The five legends provide some typical pronunciations in the areas with the purest colors. Note that areas are genuine, even though borders are gradual. http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/DutchDialectometry1.gif For more, you can read the rest of that article — or some of the other references offered by Google Scholar.
You'll learn that similar approaches have also been used to characterize stylistic, social, and temporal patterns of variation. And you'll also learn that this tradition has not in general tried to add to (or even really use) the inventory of terms for ways of talking, such as dialect, topolect, sociolect, idiolect, ethnolect, variety, style, …
Rather, the point has been to replace Bloomfield's disappointment with insight — by exploring ways to analyze and visualize the complex patterns of variation. This effort has been most successful as a way of looking at patterns in space, as in the figure reproduced above.
Beyond applications to European languages, such techniques have been applied to Berber, Javanese, Iranian, Lalo, and others. But as far as I know, the (different varieties of) Han languages (or dialects or topolects or whatever) have not yet been analysis in this way, although a large initial tranche of needed data has been provided by the Linguistic Atlas of Chinese Dialects.
And based on that source, He Huang, Jack Grieve, Lei Jiao, and Zhuo Cai have published "Geographic structure of Chinese dialects: a computational dialectometric approach". One of that publication's many maps is reproduced below — the authors comment that
This map clearly shows that the Chinese dialect landscape is highly complex, consisting neither of a single dialect continuum nor a collection of distinct dialect areas separated by sharp borders. Instead, it includes clear dialect areas of relative homogeneity and varying sizes separated by both relatively sharp borders and areas of more gradual transition. http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/Grieve3Dimensions.jpeg The use of the term "dialect" in these publications starts with the (translations of the) Chinese sources. But the term is problematic, because it describe a collection of ways of talking that are at least as diverse (and mutually (un)intelligible) as the Romance "dialects" like French and Italian and Spanish, or the Germanic "dialects" like German and Dutch and English. For some of the varieties, it probably makes sense to use the term "language" — and for others, perhaps Victor Mair's term "topolect" makes more sense. But the point of [...]
Language Log
The call / name of the gecko
This is a garrulous little creature who vainly and profoundly likes to enunciate its own name.
Lots more gecko gabbing here:
Note the wide range of vocalizations and verbalizations.
The Neo-Latin gekko and English 'gecko' stem from Indonesian–Malaysian gēkoq, it is a Malay word borrowed from Javanese, from tokek, which imitates the sounds that some species like Tokay gecko make.
(Wikipedia)
A splendid new paper by Olivia Anna Rovsing Milburn on the lore and literature of the gecko ("Noises Off: The Image of House Geckos and Tokay Geckos in Imperial Era Chinese Literature") will soon be published in Sino-Platonic Papers.
Selected readings
* "Another early polysyllabic Sinitic word" (9/21/21) — a detailed disquisition on the Sinitic word for "gecko" (géjiè 蛤蚧), including in a number of different topolects, with a lengthy bibliography
* "That gecko's pleasant accent: Martin and Mellors" (6/16/10)
* "Magical Penis Wine" (9/23/21)
*
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Word of the Day
annunciation
Definition: (noun) A formal public statement.
Synonyms: proclamation, declaration, announcement.
Usage: A long and dramatic drum-roll signaled that a royal annunciation was about to be delivered.
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Idiom of the Day
inch-perfect
Extremely accurate; very well placed or perfectly judged. (Used especially of maneuvers, moves, or shots in sport.) Primarily heard in UK. Watch the video
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
keep down (1)
If you keep something down, you stop it from increasing in size or number.
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Funny Or Die (Youtube)
The wickedly talented Dylan Adler has the perfect theme if he had a Bar Mitzvah today
The wickedly talented Dylan Adler has the perfect theme if he had a Bar Mitzvah today. Hear the full conversation on this week's Bless These Braces with Tam Yajia.
Get all 10 episodes of season 1 now, and stay in touch for new episodes, news, and show extras: https://norby.link/ceiRm2
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
go for (1)
to try to get something or achieve something
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Idiom of the Day
in (one's) dotage
In a state of senility or mental decline due to old age. Watch the video
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the linguistic landscape in eastern Eurasia, as well as processes of language variation and change more generally. Critical observations, questions, and exegesis
Chinese is — note the singular form of the verb
a group — not a single entity
language varieties — what is a "language variety"? how does it differ from a language? how does it differ from a dialect?
group… forms [a] branch — is "Chinese" a group or a branch? or both? in any event, whether a group or a branch, by any linguistically acceptable definition, "Chinese" consists of more than a single language, not just a mass of "dialects"
Sinitic — what is this? how does it relate to Chinese? the authors say that "Chinese" is a "group of language varieties [i.e., languages]" that "forms the Sinitic branch of the Sino-Tibetan family" in other words, Chinese is essentially equivalent to Sinitic, but — in their minds — perhaps the Chinese group is not exactly equivalent to the Sinitic branch if they are not exactly equal, how do they differ? it's all very muddy and murky
That's just my critical analysis of the first sentence of the Introduction. The rest of it reads like AI-generated superficial, vapid blather, which is true of much of the rest of the paper when it is not citing and interpreting data.
Methinks the authors of this paper have been seduced and confused by the compilers of the Linguistic Atlas of Chinese Dialects, the chief source of their data, into thinking that "Chinese" is a single language ("the mother tongue") spoken by 1.2 billion people and that it consists of thousands of mutually intelligible "dialects".
Nothing could be further from the truth, linguistic and otherwise.
My assessment of the paper under review may seem to be unnecessarily harsh. In actuality, it is not much different from countless other studies in Chinese dialectology that cannot distinguish between family, branch, group, language, dialect, and fāngyán 方言 ("topolect").
—
P.S.: This has nothing to do with armies and navies, a topic we've fruitlessly discussed ad nauseam on Language Log countless times in the past.
P.P.S.: As for the mutual intelligibility of so-called "Chinese dialects", listen to this 4-year-old kid from Tianjin, which is close (70 miles) to Beijing, singing in the local Muttersprache.
P.P.S.: If we can't call all those multitudinous strains of language in China "dialects", what would be a good alternative? I propose "lect" (see especially the last sentence in the passage below).
In sociolinguistics, a variety, also known as a lect or an isolect, is a specific form of a language or language cluster. This may include languages, dialects, registers, styles, or other forms of language, as well as a standard variety. The use of the word variety to refer to the different forms avoids the use of the term language, which many people associate only with the standard language, and the term dialect, which is often associated with non-standard language forms thought of as less prestigious or "proper" than the standard. Linguists speak of both standard and non-standard (vernacular) varieties as equally complex, valid, and full-fledged forms of language. Lect avoids the problem in ambiguous cases of deciding whether two varieties are distinct languages or dialects of a single language.
(Wikipedia) Selected readings
* "The future Sinitic languages of East Asia" (4/21/24)
* "Language, topolect, dialect, idiolect" (10/3/23) — with extensive bibliography (during the last two decades, the Language Log posts on the classification of Sinitic and its lects, large and small, are countless)
* "Topolect was specifically invented in 1991 by Victor Mair as a translation of 方言 (fangyan) to get around the whole language/dialect bombshell when it comes to Chinese", Hacker News (7/4/21) — with minimal, yet essential, bibliography
[Thanks to Hiroshi Kumamoto]
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Language Log
Despite their faces…
Jennifer Rubin, "Has Trump’s family abandoned him? I’m answering your questions", WaPo 4/24/2024:
Q: Are Republicans the party of no? Why can't Republicans say yes? Instead of getting a border deal in exchange for Ukraine funding, they got nothing.
A (Jennifer Rubin, Opinion Columnist):
Yup. They are the masters at cutting off their noses despite their faces. Remember that they really do not want to solve the problem. They want an ongoing crisis they can use against Biden. This is all to deny Biden a "win." Their obligations to their constituents and to their oaths evaporate in the face of performance politics.
Other have taken the same path, e.g.
Chris Cillizza, CNN 2/12/2018: The point here is that Jordan’s carping is sound and fury, signifying not much. If congressional Republicans managed to throw Ryan out, it would be cutting off their noses despite their faces.
There's an entry in the Eggcorn Database, of course.
The obligatory screenshot:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/DespiteTheirFaces.png
[h/t Russinoff]
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Language Log
AI and real-time translation in Korea
Speaking of Korean translation and AI, as we did in recent posts (see "Selected readings"), let us take a look at the latest developments in Korea:
New AI-based translation tools make their way into everyday life in Korea
AI equipped with natural language processing software, which allows it to interpret human language in various contexts, is gaining the most attraction among mainstream users among all AI services
Jung Yu-gyung, Hankyoreh (2024-04-23)
More and more, AI is becoming a part of daily life:
On Monday, SK Telecom unveiled its AI-based translation program “TransTalker,” which offers real-time interpretation for 13 languages, including Arabic, Russian, Vietnamese and Indonesian. Lotte began testing the translation service on Friday through its information desks on the first floor of Lotte Department Store's Avenuel Jamsil and on the first floor of Lotte World Mall. Both locations receive over a thousand visits from foreign tourists every day. Lotte has reported that the majority of users are surprised at the effectiveness and clarity of the interpretative service.
Users simply speak into a microphone installed onto a clear screen at the information desk. The AI interpretation service then translates the user’s question into Korean, which is displayed on a monitor on the other side for an employee. The Korean employee then replies in Korean, which is then interpreted back into the user’s native language on a screen. The program can interpret between English, Korean, Japanese, Mandarin, Arabic, Spanish, Vietnamese, Thai, Indonesian, Malaysian, French, German and Russian.
The program is equipped with software designed for speech recognition, natural language processing, translation engines, and large language models (LLM). Lotte Department Store plans on increasing the number of locations that utilize the service.
Meanwhile, faculty in colleges and universities are worried that AI devices will make things so easy for students that they will not undertake the nitty gritty of writing and translating by themselves.
Selected readings
* "Korean oralization of Literary Sinitic" (4/23/24)
* "Macroeconomics of AI?" (4/23/24)
[Thanks to Don Keyser]
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
rub out (2)
to kill somebody
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Idiom of the Day
be in with a chance
To have a good chance or high probability of doing or accomplishing something. Primarily heard in UK. Watch the video
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