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cellio) wrote2025-07-08 08:10 pm
Last night I looked out the window a few minutes after nominal sunset and saw an unusual and impressive color in the sky. Naturally, I ran outside to snap a few pictures before it disappeared.
These are unedited cell-phone photos, hastily framed because I know things like this don't last long. ( Read more... )
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agonyaunt2025-07-08 05:14 pm
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languagelog_feed) wrote2025-07-08 05:06 pmMok Ling sent me an article from China Times with the following percipient observations:
Today I'm bringing you this short article for LL. A Korean pop idol, Solar — that's her stage name, Mandarinized as 頌樂; her real name is 김용선 (Hanja: 金容仙), romanized Kim Yongsun) — has made headlines for speaking very fluent Mandarin after just 7 months of learning it. She has also released a full song in Mandarin with Taiwanese artist 9m88 and taken countless interviews with Taiwanese media in Mandarin as well (see this "What's in My Bag" interview with Vogue Taiwan.)
Solar's secret (other than apparently practising 4 hours every day) is, of course, bypassing characters altogether. On this Weibo post (3rd image [click to open and enlarge]) she reveals that she's been learning Mandarin purely using Pinyin all this time, and even strictly observing the spelling rules!
It's certainly a feat, and another mark on the scoreboard for the "ZT" method.
I wouldn't say that Solar's Mandarin is perfect, but after learning it for just seven months, I would have to declare that her command of the language is amazing. Her delivery is fluent, natural, and confident. Solar's Mandarin doesn't sound "foreign" at all. She is able to express herself freely and with wit.
This is how Mandarin could become a rival to English as the world language, but I doubt that it will ever come close to challenging English in the coming decades. The Chinese people — including those who teach Mandarin as a foreign / second language — are too viscerally wedded to the cumbersome, hard-to-learn sinographs as the only proper way to write Sinitic languages. Never mind that Dungan and POJ Taigi have proven that you don't need the Chinese characters to command a spoken Sinitic language at native level, and you can use alphabetic scripts for writing too.
John Rohsenow, who is a regular reader and commenter on Language Log, is the authority on the ZT experiment, and Mark Swofford, long-time webmaster of Pinyin.info and the site's blog, Pinyin News, is also a contributor to Language Log.
Selected readings
languagelog_feed) wrote2025-07-08 12:08 pm"Indonesia Volcano Eruption Sends Ash Soaring 11 Miles High", NYT 7/7/2025:
A volcanic eruption in Indonesia on Monday sent an ash cloud soaring about 11 miles high, far higher than a plume produced by the same volcano when it erupted last month.
Mount Lewotobi Laki-laki, on the southeastern Indonesian island of Flores, spewed the ash when it erupted for about six minutes on Monday morning, the national volcanic agency reported. It erupted several more times later in the day.
That’s a lot of ash: The cloud was nearly four times taller than the three-mile-high one that Mount Lewotobi Laki-laki produced when it erupted last month.
That's also a lot of syllables — eight in the name Lewotobi Laki-laki, nine if we include Mount.
A quick check of the 13,251,059 geographical names at geonames.org turns up plenty that are as long or longer, although we should probably not count organizational names like "Centro de Estudios Superiores Unidad Profesional Interdisciplinaria de Ingeniería y Ciencias Sociales y Administrativas Instituto Politécnico Nacional" or "Edna Bay Volunteer Fire Department and Emergency Medical Services". But that still leaves plenty of things like "Middle Fork North Prong Little Black River" or "Right Hand Prong West Fork Pigeon River" or "Little Mattamiscontis Mountain".
Curiously, "Lewotobi Laki-laki" isn't in the list, although "Sungai Dato Laki-laki" is.
Sungai is Indonesian for "river", and laki is Indonesian for "man", so as discussed in "Lewotobi Laki-laki" (11/8/2024), "Sungai Dato Laki-laki" means something like "male Dato river", and unsurprisingly there is also a "Sungai Dato Perempuan", or "female Dato river".
I'm guessing that the use of "male X" vs. "female X" for mountains and rivers has some kind of metaphorical interpretation — but it's not clear what the metaphor is.
As noted in the earlier post, the male peak of mount Lewotobi is smaller than the female peak, as well as being more active:
The size metaphor might go either way, as in the "mother of all X" idiom, or the fact that in Yoruba drum families, the biggest drum is the "mother drum". But other connections are obviously possible.
So in the first place, can anyone define for us the geographical and linguistic distribution of the "male X" and "female X" naming practice for things like mountains and rivers? And second, what is the figurative meaning of the distinction?
conuly) wrote2025-07-10 02:20 amconuly) wrote2025-07-09 08:59 amjazzyjj) wrote in awesomeers2025-07-07 09:45 pmpf_mod) wrote in poetry_fiction2025-07-07 09:25 pmlanguagelog_feed) wrote2025-07-08 12:01 am
The 11 tracks of TREC2025 are underway, collectively constituting the 2025 edition of the "Text Retrieval Conference" organized by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. See the call for details and links, and this site for a few words about its history going back to 1992.
Wikipedia has more historical information, although the article's section on "Current tracks" is from 2018, which is not exactly "current".
And the Wikipedia article also doesn't give a clear picture of what TREC accomplished in its early years. Here's what it says about TREC-1:
In 1992 TREC-1 was held at NIST. The first conference attracted 28 groups of researchers from academia and industry. It demonstrated a wide range of different approaches to the retrieval of text from large document collections. Finally TREC1 revealed the facts that automatic construction of queries from natural language query statements seems to work. Techniques based on natural language processing were no better no worse than those based on vector or probabilistic approach.
There's a whole book of published reports from The First Text Retrieval Conference (TREC-1), and it's all free to read. But you may find its 518 pages a little daunting, so you could start with the 20 pages of Donna Harman's clear and compelling Introduction. Or maybe just this brief passage from that source:
There is a long history of experimentation in information retrieval. […]
In the 30 or so years of experimentation there have been two missing elements. First, although some research groups have used the same collections, there has been no concerted effort by groups to work with the same data, use the same evaluation techniques, and generally compare results across systems. The importance of this is not to show any system to be superior, but to allow comparison across a very wide variety of techniques, much wider than only one research group would tackle. Karen Sparck Jones in 1981 commented that:
Yet the most striking feature of the test history of the past two decades is its lack of consolidation . It is true that some very broad generalizations have been endorsed by successive tests: for example…but there has been a real failure at the detailed level to build one test on another. As a result there are no explanations for these generalizations, and hence no means of knowing whether improved systems could be designed (p. 245) .
This consolidation is more likely if groups can compare results across the same data, using the same evaluation method, and then meet to discuss openly how methods differ.
The second missing element, which has become critical in the last 10 years, is the lack of a realistically sized test collection . Evaluation using the small collections currently available may not reflect performance of systems in large full-text searching, and certainly does not demonstrate any proven abilities of these systems to operate in real-world information retrieval environments. This is a major barrier to the transfer of these laboratory systems into the commercial world. Additionally some techniques such as the use of phrases and the construction of automatic thesauri seem intuitively workable, but have repeatedly failed to show improvement in performance using the small collections. Larger collections might demonstrate the effectiveness of these procedures. The overall goal of the Text Retrieval Conference (TREC) was to address these two missing elements. It is hoped that by providing a very large test collection, and encouraging interaction with other groups in a friendly evaluation forum , a new thrust in information retrieval will occur. There is also an increased interest in this field within the DARPA community, and TREC is designed to be a showcase of the state-of-the- art in retrieval research. NIST's goal as co-sponsor of TREC is to encourage communication and technology transfer among academia, industry, and government.
The "very large text collection" that she references was assembled at LDC, and was published in 1993 as Harman & Liberman, TIPSTER. That dataset included 1,077,909 documents from seven sources: the AP Newswire, the Federal Register, U.S. Patents, Department of Energy reports, the Wall Street Journal, the San Jose Mercury News, and Ziff Davis magazine articles. [I believe that the Patents and the San Jose Mercury News documents may not have been used in the TREC-1 evaluation, though I'm not certain of this.]
Most previous R&D in digital document retrieval and information extraction had worked with hundreds or thousands of documents, generally all of one kind. In the preparations for TREC-1, Donna Harman explained to me that she wanted to show that such retrieval and extraction problems could be solved at a commercially-relevant scale, and that collaborative research would iteratively improve performance. She set a target of million documents of half a dozen different types — which was not an easy ask at that time, seven to eight years before Google was founded, when the World Wide Web was not very wide or very deep.
I won't bore you today with the painful details of how we managed it. There were a few things already lying around — see "Thanks, Bill Dunn!" (8/6/2009) for one set of memories — but it was a scramble to find archives of documents, mostly in the form of truckloads of old-school 9-track tapes, to decrypt and standardize their mutually-incompatible and sometimes nearly-impenetrable formats, to get legal distribution rights, and to send the results around to the conference participants.
The spectacular success of the TREC conferences is worth emphasizing, given the damage recently done to government funding of (American) research and development in pre-commercial areas. There's been a fair amount of documentation and coverage of this issue — Phil Rubin, formerly the Principal Assistant Director for Science at the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) in the Executive Office of the President of the United States, has assembled what he calls a "running diary of ignominy".
TREC is of course an acronym for "Text REtrieval Conference", but it's also a pun on the work trek, which the OED glosses as
South African. In travelling by ox-wagon: a stage of a journey between one stopping-place and the next; hence, a journey or expedition made in this way; (also) journeying or travel by ox-wagon.
Now in general use elsewhere: a long journey or expedition, esp. one overland involving considerable physical effort.
…with the etymology
< Cape Dutch trek = Dutch trek draw, pull, tug, march, < trekken, trek v.
languagelog_feed) wrote2025-07-07 08:17 pmThe title of this song attracted my attention: "Fāngyán de ànshāng 方言的黯伤" ("The sadness of topolect").
I listened to it here, but couldn't catch everything that the singer was saying. I asked Zhaofei Chen what she heard, and here's what she gleaned from listening to the recording:
tà shàng zhè tǔdì huáichuāizhe mèngxiǎng qiānxǐ
gùxiāng de fāngyán chuǎngjìn xīnlǐ mòmò suíxíng
xuānxiāo zhōng ǒu'ěr màochū jǐ jù shúxī
yèwǎn níhóng shǎnshuò zhàoliàng chéngshì de lúnkuò
fánhuá lǐ nà fāng shuǐtǔ de qìxí jiǎnruò
chénshì de jiézòu rú cháoshuǐ bān xiōngyǒng
mòshēng de yǔyán rú fēng bān sìyì fàngzòng
wǒmen nǔlì róngrù què zài xīnlǐ shēn chùliú
liú yīfāng kōngjiān gěi gùxiāng de yīn ruò (?)
chéngshì de gāolóu què jiāng zhè měihǎo tōu
fāngyán de yīnliàng suízhe shíjiān zài xiāoshòu
踏上这土地 怀揣着梦想迁徙
故乡的方言 闯进心里 默默随行
喧嚣中偶尔冒出 几句熟悉
夜晚霓虹闪烁 照亮城市的轮廓
繁华里 那方水土的气息减弱
尘世的节奏 如潮水般汹涌
陌生的语言 如风般肆意放纵
我们努力融入 却在心里深处 留
留一方空间 给故乡的音若（？）
城市的高楼 却将这美好偷
方言的音量 随着时间在消瘦
Set foot on this land and migrate with dreams in mind
The dialect of my hometown enters my heart and follows me silently
A few familiar words occasionally emerge in the hustle and bustle
Neon lights flicker at night, illuminating the city's silhouette
In the bustling city, the breath of the land and water has weakened
The rhythm of the world surges like the tide
Unfamiliar language is as unbridled as the wind
We try to fit in, but deep in our hearts we stay
Leave a space for the sound of hometown (?)
The tall buildings in the city steal this beauty
The volume of topolect diminishes over time
—–
(partial transcription; modified Google translatio
Zhaofei tells me that, from what she could catch, the song seems to be about someone who moves to a big city for work, and over time stops using their fāngyán 方言 ("topolect") because no one around them speaks it. But they could occasionally hear a few words of their fāngyán 方言 ("topolect").
Zhaofei is from Shenzhen, the third largest city in China (after Beijing and Shanghai), with 17.5 million population. At the beginning of the 80s, it was a county-level town with only about 30,000 (!) population, but then the central government decided to turn it into a Special Economic Zone (SEZ) to rival nearby Hong Kong, which was still a British colony at that time.
People, including Zhaofei's family, poured into Shenzhen by the millions (!) from all over China. One can imagine the linguistic cacophony of the city in those early years. Zhaofei says the song reminds her a lot of Shenzhen during the Opening-Up period. So many workers from all over China moved there, and people mostly speak Mandarin now because, as the national "common language" (pǔtōnghuà 普通话).
The gradual erasure of one's native tongue is inevitable when one moves to a place where another language is spoken.
Selected readings
[Thanks to Charles Belov]
minoanmiss) wrote in agonyaunt2025-07-07 03:14 pmlanguagelog_feed) wrote2025-07-07 03:17 pm
Dear Eric: I am very much enjoying the second time around following a long and less than joyful first marriage. My problem is plans for burial.
All of our children are terribly against our marriage even though both of our spouses were deceased at the time we met. Our children have virtually no relationship with us now and if there is any contact it is ugly.
I have a cemetery plot out of state with my deceased wife. My wife has a local plot with her deceased husband. I would like to get a new plot for the two of us but expect that any such request would receive pushback and be ignored.
My wife’s mother is buried with her second husband using her last name at the time of her death and her father is buried with a subsequent wife so there is precedent for what I want but I know her daughter would require that her mother be buried next to her father.
How do I get what I want?
I have not discussed any of this with my wife. If I did and she brought it up with her daughter the reaction would be for the daughter to express her displeasure by keeping the grandchildren from my wife. She has done that for less. If I am to get a plot, I should do that sooner rather than later as they are in short supply.
While living I would feel great joy if I could know that I could count on being buried beside my wife for all of eternity. Am I being silly to not just take the easy route?
— Burial Conflict
Plans: You have every right to make a burial plan that suits your life and your love. And — this might be controversial — you don’t have to tell your kids. If you have virtually no relationship as it is, you certainly don’t need to bend to their wishes. It seems there’s no pleasing them, anyway.
In general, it’s better to communicate about final wishes and plans for one’s end-of-life in advance. This helps intentions to be understood and gets questions answered while you’re still around to answer them. But the conflict that’s roiling your family complicates things.
Without knowing more about the circumstances of your marriage, I can’t say your kids are completely wrong, but the punishment you mentioned is more than concerning.
Perhaps they’re struggling with acceptance because of unprocessed grief, perhaps there’s something else going on that I’m not privy, too. Either way, the stated conditions dictate that the burial conversation should happen only between you and your wife right now. Once you’re both on the same page, you’ll know what the next step is. That might mean purchasing a joint plot that makes you happy and appointing someone other than one of your kids as executor. (That last part is probably wise regardless.)
There would still be a lot of complications, of course. Namely, one of you will predecease the other and at that point, presumably, the kids would find out the plan. So, while you are working on doing what brings you joy, I’d also encourage you to get down to the root of what’s going on with your kids.
jazzyjj) wrote in awesomeers2025-07-07 06:44 am