Grammar

NASA has awarded a grant to a company to produce a 3D food printer. Or at least that’s what I think this article from Yahoo! News‘ “The Sideshow” claims. I’m a bit unsure because the writer seems to be having trouble with English. He thinks algae is a proper noun, doesn’t know the plural of leaf (hint: it’s leaves), and uses the pronoun who to refer to a company: So, after reading that one sentence with three errors, I’m a little skeptical of anything this guy writes.  Which brings me to the issue of a certain 3D foot printer, mentioned here: and again here: Is that the same as the food printer? Just what kind of food would a 3D foot printer produce? Filet of sole? Corn? Filed under: Capitalizing, Plurals, Pronouns, Wrong words Tagged: capitalization, editing, funny writing errors, funny writing mistakes, plural, pronoun, proofreading, typo, typos, wrong word, Yahoo!, Yahoo! News

The following is a guest post by Richard Sproat: Regular readers of Language Log will remember this piece discussing the various problems with a paper by Rajesh Rao and colleagues in their attempt to provide statistical evidence for the status of the Indus “script” as a writing system. They will also recall this piece on a similar paper by Rob Lee and colleagues, which attempted to demonstrate linguistic structure in Pictish inscriptions. And they may also remember this discussion of my “Last Words” paper in Computational Linguistics critiquing those two papers, as well as the reviewing practices of major science journals like Science. In a nutshell: Rao and colleagues’ original paper in Science used conditional entropy to argue that the Indus “script” behaves more like a writing system than it does like a non-linguistic system. Lee and colleagues’ paper in Proceedings of the Royal Society used more sophisticated methods that included entropic measures to build a classification tree that apparently correctly classified a set of linguistic and non-linguistic corpora, and furthermore classified the Pictish symbols as logographic writing. But as discussed in the links given above, both of these papers were seriously problematic, which in turn called into question some of the reviewing standards of the journals involved. Sometimes a seemingly dead horse has to be revived and beaten again, for those reviewing practices have yet again come into question. Or perhaps I should in this case say “non reviewing practices”: for an explanation, read on. Not being satisfied by merely critiquing the previous work, I decided to do something constructive, and investigate more fully what one would find if one looked at a larger set of corpora of non-linguistic symbol systems, and contrasted them with a larger set of corpora of written language. Would the published methods of Rao et al. and Lee et al. hold up? Or would they fail as badly as I predicted they would? Are there any other methods that might be useful as evidence for a symbol system’s status? In order to answer those questions I needed to collect a reasonable set of corpora of non-linguistic systems, something that nobody had ever done. And for that I needed to be able to pay research assistants. So I applied for, and got, an NSF grant, and employed some undergraduate RAs to help me collect the corpora. A paper on the collection of some of the corpora was presented at the 2012 Linguistic Society of America meeting in Portland. Then, using those corpora, and others I collected myself, I performed various statistical analyses, and wrote up the results (see below for links to a paper and a detailed description of the materials and methods). In brief summary: neither Rao’s nor Lee’s methods hold up as published, but a measure based on symbol repetition rate as well as a reestimated version of one of Lee et al.’s measures seem promising — except that if one believes those measures, then one would have to conclude that the Indus “script” and Pictish symbols are, in fact, not writing. So for example in a paper published in IEEE Computer (Rao, R., 2010. Probabilistic analysis of an ancient undeciphered script. IEEE Computer. 43~(3), 76–80), Rao uses the entropy of ngrams — unigrams, bigrams, trigrams and so forth, which he terms “block entropy” — as a measure to show that the Indus “script” behaves more like language than it does like some non-linguistic systems.  He gives the following plot: For this particular analysis Rao describes exactly the method and software package he used to compute these results, so it is possible to replicate his method exactly for my own data. The results of that are shown below, where linguistic corpora are shown in red, non-linguistic in blue, and for comparison a small corpus of Indus bar seals in green.  As can be seen, for a representative set of corpora, the whole middle region of the block entropy growth curves is densely populated

Sharknado is apparently an actual movie, about to be released, about tornados made of sharks. The official synopsis: When a freak hurricane swamps Los Angeles, thousands of sharks terrorize the waterlogged populace. And when the high-speed winds form tornadoes in the desert, nature’s deadliest killer rules water, land, and air. I can't think of any other -nado coinages, aside from a brand name or two, but some must be Out There.

How many ways can you say the same thing? The writer for the Yahoo! News’ “The Sideshow” may be trying to answer that question when he tells us that penguins have wings and wing-like flippers and they are swimmers and aquatic and they are flightless and they don’t take to the skies: And he’s so fond of Mr. Speakman’s words that he repeats them for your benefit: Perhaps if the writer had read what he wrote, he’d notice the repetition. Perhaps if the writer had read what he wrote, he’d notice the repetition. Filed under: Department of Redundancy Dept. Tagged: editing, Eric Pfeiffer, proofreading, redundancy, repetition, The Sideshow, Yahoo!, Yahoo! News

Departing from Canadian stereotypes: "Toronto Mayor Rob Ford denies using crack cocaine", CBC News 5/24/2013 There has been a serious accusation from the Toronto Star that I use crack cocaine. I do not use crack cocaine, nor am I an addict. As reader F.H. observes "I do not use crack cocaine" is not the same as "I have never used crack cocaine" or "I didn't smoke crack cocaine on any video." I have the impression that the mayor has been responsible for a larger sample of denials than your average Canadian politician, but I may be guilty of stereotyping our neighbors to the north. The audio clip comes from this CBC video, 43 seconds into the video. Update — I neglected to link to a similar recent denial from Amanda Bynes, who is not yet the mayor of anything.

At the top of hundreds of webpages belonging to the Shenzhen Energy Corporation, a large power company in Guangdong Province, China, we find the following four main headings: sh?uyè ?? ("Home") x?nwén zh?ngx?n ???? ("News center") tóuz?zh? gu?nxì ????? ("Indicrteurseus") q?yè wénhuà ???? ("Culture") The English translations for items #1, 2, and 4 are acceptable (although I would prefer "Corporate culture" for the fourth one), but what in the world happened with the translation of the third item?  One wonders if the webmaster just dozed off and fell on the keyboard when he got to that one. Strangely, though, "Indicrteurseus" looks as though it should mean something, but it is difficult to determine precisely how it came to be the way it is. In trying to make sense of what was intended, I discovered that "indicrt" is actually a misspelling of the Dutch word indiceert ("indicates").  That, however, could hardly be relevant in the present case. The ending of "indicteurseus" looks vaguely Greek (cf. Perseus, Terseus, and so forth), but it's hard to see how that could be related to "Investor relations" either. At this point, I should mention that there are millions of instances where Chinese corporations correctly render tóuz?zh? gu?nxì ????? as "investor relations", and many common software translation programs provide the right translation. Here's my proposal for roughly what may have happened to produce "indicrteurseus".  First of all, like "investor", "indicrteur" begins with "in" and ends with "r", and they are of approximately the same length (8 letters vs. 10 letters), so there is little doubt that "indicrteur" is a transformation of "investor".  Note that "ind-" is a possible typo or miswriting for the first part of "investor". Next, "relation" can be abbreviated as "rlats", so the remainder of "indicrteurseus" after "indicrteur", namely "seus", may be accounted for as a distortion of something like "rlats".  Note that "rlats" and "seus" both end in an "s" and are of approximately the same length (5 letters vs. 4 letters). My hypothesis is premised upon the idea that someone who knew English scribbled "investor rlats" on a piece of paper and handed it to a web designer who had little to no command of English.  In other words, for "indicrteurseus" to have been derived from "investor relations" in all likelihood would have involved transmission through handwriting that was misinterpreted by the recipient whose job it was to enter what they were handed into the computer, but who was barely literate in English. [h/t Anne Henochowicz]

Emily sent in this picture of a t-shirt that her friend's son was wearing. This is wrong on so many levels. Thanks, Emily!

The writer for Yahoo! Movies isn’t even trying to spell Jason Sudeikis and Colin Farrell: How does one make up the spelling of names and still have a job? Filed under: Misspellings Tagged: Adam Pockross, bad spelling, Colin Farrell, editing, incorrect spelling, Jason Sudeikis, misspelled celebrities, misspelling, proofreading, spelling, spelling error, spelling mistake, Yahoo!, Yahoo! Movies

Just passed on by a member of Team Verb. We have mountains of evidence that immigrants to this country are doing everything they can to learn English, and here's yet more evidence for the point:

Since I have been unabashedly contemptuous of previous stories about dogs learning to understand human languages (for example, in I hammer home the point that fetching named objects is not understanding language in this post, which Mark Liberman followed up here), I think it is incumbent on me to acknowledge further developments in the area. So let me point out that Learning and Motivation has now published a paper about some experiments purporting to show that a 9-year-old border collie called Chaser who has learned rudimentary syntax. For example, it can differentiate To ball take Frisbee from its inverse, To Frisbee take ball, and perform the right action in each case. This Science News article gives a fairly full account of the results. Me? I honestly don't know what I think about this yet. Maybe you want to comment below? I'm cool with that.