Sounds of human language in media and history.
I promise I'll write about things besides Japanese and LLMs. But first, a brief word on "language mixing." I have occasionally encountered situations where LLMs suddenly and without warning begin mixing English and non-English words. Usually, the non-English language also has a non-English script. I've encountered Arabic , Korean, Japanese, and Chinese. The Japanese may be understandable in…
While watching a video, I encountered this anecdote: When the novelist Soseki Natsume (1867–1916) was an English teacher, one of his students translated the English phrase “I love you” as 我君を愛す / ware kimi o aisu. Soseki pointed out that Japanese people don’t say 愛す / aisu (to love), and that the best translation would actually be 月が綺麗ですね / tsuki ga kirei desu ne (the moon is beautiful, isn’t…
In my last post on ChatGPT, I wrote about ChatGPT's love for 'gremlins': I would like to finish off with some random comments that I couldn't quite fit elsewhere. One is that most of the "ChatGPT" words, like 'realm', come from a business register or otherwise formal register. There are other ChatGPT words you can notice if you play around with its other registers. For example, if you attempt to…
A leak from gaming company GameFreak had a curious note that caused fans to go wild. One Pokemon character, Cyrus, was described as “自閉的”. One of the earliest machine translations of this stated that this meant that the character is "autistic." This got a lot of attention and quickly spread throughout the fandom. The entire sentence is: 彼は自分が完璧でないことが大嫌いであり、いつしか他人をも嫌うようになっていた。（完璧主義者、 自閉的 ） He hated…
Ten years ago, on this date and at this hour and minute, I wrote the very first post for "Ace Linguist." I was graduating college, planning to go to grad school, and thinking my resume really needed spiffing up. It was with this intention that I created 'Ace Linguist', with the name as an analogy to the game series 'Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney'. It would serve as a place to store my observations…
A casual observation. It seems English gerunds or present participles, such as 'streaming', 'jogging', 'rock climbing', are fairly popular as loan words in other languages. Of course, any part of speech can become a loan word (and English has been a fruitful source of nouns and verbs), but I'm particularly fascinated by the popularity of the gerunds. A handful of examples - my Russian professor in…
Hello! December was a very busy and personally important month to me. While I am still working on some very big stuff behind the scenes, nothing is quite ready for publishing. What is ready is some interesting finds I've made. We've got a wide variety of languages covered today! If you're a millennial, you may recall the direct-to-video sequel "The Lion King 2," which featured a song titled…
Today's topic is Billy Joel and the inconsistent appearance of the New York accent in his music. Billy Joel, being born and raised in New York City, has some New York-ish features in his speech, such as a COT-CAUGHT distinction. Noticeably, his interviews don't seem to show any non-rhoticism. The beatles for a l[ɔ]ng time (source) Your browser does not support the audio element. Paul McC[ɑɹ]tney…
Pretty much everyone who has used ChatGPT for an extended period of time has noticed that it has a particular way of writing. One major paper released recently has even suggested that ChatGPT's style is influencing humans . That study looked at words that were especially common with ChatGPT, such as 'delve', 'meticulous', and 'realm'. 'Dive' is also common for copy, as seen in this video on…
I'm curious to know if anyone else likes to play 'games' with phonology every now and then. One thing I like to do is to take a sentence, replace every vowel with the same vowel, and see how comprehensible it is, as well as the aesthetic result. For example, you could replace every vowel with [i], which creates a really pinched sound but doesn't really make it difficult to understand the sentence.…
Added a new left navigation bar to the layout! This has major articles from the blog over the years. I've organized them based on whether they're part of the Dialect Dissection series, a major article, or broken down by linguistics subcategory. Not every article is here, just ones I liked enough to want to put on the sidebar. (Some of the early articles, for example, are not quite good enough to…
Wanted to share this - on April 17, Ace Linguist passed 1 million views! Thank you to all the readers, past and present, who've come here! - Karen
A reader sent me an email asking me for information on the relationship between the Japanese trilled R, yakuza speech, and working class masculinity. I found some posts which I thought might be interesting for readers of this blog, as well: First, this Stack Exchange post : If you're referring to the kind of allophone on /r/ that typically appears in yakuza speech, as you said yourself, it is…
Some interesting links I've found this month. Old English Mann "Mann and Gender in Old English Prose: A Pilot Study" - A look at the use of the word 'mann' in Old English hagiographies and whether it was applied to mean "man" (as in male human) or "person." It appears that mann was often used in the same way we would use "person" today, though it had already begun taking on the implication of…
I recently encountered the following party game: Mumbo Jumbo , based on trying to pronounce a word while wearing a mouth-stretcher. Basically, you wear a mouth-stretcher, and then you are asked to read out a phrase. Your teammate has to figure out the phrase you're trying to say. The mouth-stretcher means that you cannot make labials. Of course, the words are selected to take advantage of this…
Hello, happy to report that I have made another appearance on Paul Meier's fantastic podcast, "In a Manner Of Speaking"! Paul, Cameron and I discussed British and American accents in popular music , which is a topic that I've been interested in discussing for a long time. I hope you'll listen and enjoy the podcast; we had a tremendous time making it.
Since September 2017, I've been updating posts to the site monthly. This was a way for me to both continue making content for the site to keep it on people's minds, and a deadline that would force me to work on content so things didn't slip out of my own mind. I used to be able to do these updates monthly with the occasional "no update this month" post. My life has changed substantially in 7…
I'd been hoping to launch a better tool for lexical set analysis this month, but it didn't work out. Hopefully for September. I finished reading "Language vs Reality" by Nick Enfield, and I'd recommend it for anyone interested in the topic of limitations of language. I was especially interested by the idea that the purpose of language is to create different Schelling points (ways to coordinate…
No post this month due to personal circumstances. Was planning on writing a review of a new book but I wasn't able to get it finished in time. - Karen
In the anime “Chihayafuru,” a team of high schoolers plays a card game called ‘karuta’. It’s based around hearing a reader read a poem aloud, and then finding the card corresponding to that poem on the floor. You can see an example in the following illustrative video: There are 100 poems in the version of karuta played in the anime. The phonological qualities of the poems matter - for example, 7…
The IPA is a pretty good invention, allowing us to transcribe languages with as much precision as we feel is necessary. It's especially useful for language learners, as each IPA character's name is basically an instruction on how to pronounce it. However, you should be careful when it comes to the IPA, because a transcription is not always reality! To start with a trivial example, consider that…
We all know when someone is listing something in a speech, but what is it about the intonation that tells us a list is happening? I had always thought there was a particular intonation contour associated with lists. Some researchers of intonation have argued this as well, suggesting there are particular intonation contours for particular lists: They are likely to have one of the following…
Things are, hopefully, looking a little better. Some lessons learned from the past year are to not take on very large projects, as cool as they would be. I recently began reading "Language vs Reality" by Nick Enfield. The subtitle - "Why Language is Good for Lawyers and Bad for Scientists" - should give you a hint as to the topic matter. I've only just begun, so no review yet, but the thesis is…
Hello, no post for February due to the usual reasons (too many obligations). I'll leave you with a random observation of mine. I was recently playing Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door in anticipation for the remake that is coming out. I noticed that the phrase "this guy" appears very frequently - "this guy likes to do this", "what do you think of this guy?" I had never noticed before, but this…
Enregistration is the process by which linguistic features become associated with particular contexts. For example, light novels having long, sentence-length titles is now so established that it's an easy way to parody light novels. Phonology can also be 'enregistered,' such as the vowels that make up Indie Girl Voice . While these two examples are obvious because they 'stick out', enregistration…