Not letting the facts interfere with a good headline

'Well don't say I didn't warn you', as Stephen Hawking might have said. What he actually said was this:

“Success in creating effective AI, could be the biggest event in the history of our civilization. Or the worst. We just don’t know. So we cannot know if we will be infinitely helped by AI, or ignored by it and side-lined, or conceivably destroyed by it,” ...

“Unless we learn how to prepare for, and avoid, the potential risks, AI could be the worst event in the history of our civilization. It brings dangers, like powerful autonomous weapons, or new ways for the few to oppress the many. It could bring great disruption to our economy.”   

         Source 

Last week Apple put their foot in it, in a mistake that, while essentially trivial, had  huge implications for journalism. This extract from a  BBC report of the (ridiculous) event ends 'Apple has made no comment.' But that doesn't mean they did nothing. In my search for traces of the story I was often stymied by 404 errors, and I suspect there has been an attempt at a web-wide clean-up attenpt, thankfully resisted by the BBC

 A major journalism body has urged Apple to scrap  its new generative AI feature after it created a misleading headline about a high-profile killing in the United States.

The BBC made a complaint to the US tech giant after Apple Intelligence, which uses artificial intelligence (AI) to summarise and group together notifications, falsely created a headline about murder suspect Luigi Mangione.

The AI-powered summary falsely made it appear that BBC News had published an article claiming Mangione, the man accused of the murder of healthcare insurance CEO Brian Thompson in New York, had shot himself. He has not.

Now, the group Reporters Without Borders has called on Apple to remove the technology. Apple has made no comment.

Screen grab of AI's Grossest Hour
(not its finest)

The BBC was not alone:

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) said this week that Apple's AI kerfuffle, which generated a false summary as "Luigi Mangione shoots himself," is further evidence that artificial intelligence cannot reliably produce information for the public. Apple Intelligence, which launched in the UK on December 11, needed less than 48 hours to make the very public mistake. 

"This accident highlights the inability of AI systems to systematically publish quality information, even when it is based on journalistic sources," RSF said. "The probabilistic way in which AI systems operate automatically disqualifies them as a reliable technology for news media that can be used in solutions aimed at the general public."

Because it isn't reliably accurate, RSF said AI shouldn't be allowed to be used for such purposes, and asked Apple to pull the feature from its operating systems. 

Source

But an expert speaking last week on BBC News did not fully agree that 'AI shouldn't be allowed to be used for such purposes'. She said that there should always be a human being 'in the loop...

<tangent>
She really did say that, I'm afraid. 'Which loop?' I remember thinking at the time. When there are several people sharing information, and a boss says 'Keep me in the loop', that makes sense. It's still gross managerese, it's still a lamentable cliché, but at least it makes sense. In this case, though, an AI engine is exposed to thousands of reports and millions of possible summaries, and regurgitates a patent lie. Where's the loop in that?
</tangent>

... '

The Byte  reported the mistake thus:

"I can see the pressure [HD: on? for? to get?] getting to the market first, but I am surprised that Apple put their name on such [a....

<tangent>
With acute regret I have to concede that the speaker may have meant to omit the article – he was, after all, a 'professor in media policy' (whatever that is).
</tangent>

...?] demonstrably half-baked product [HD's emphasis; I just applaud the phrase]," Petros Iosifidis, a professor in media policy at City University in London, told the BBC. "Yes, potential advantages are there — but the technology is not there yet and there is a real danger of spreading disinformation."

However, this danger is one that's fundamental of [HD:sic...

<tangent> 
'Oh dear', as my grandson might say. This bit of writing really leaves a lot to be despaired. Meanwhile back at that article...
</tangent> 

...generative AI, and not just Apple's flavor of it. AI models routinely hallucinate and make up facts. They have no understanding of language, but instead use statistical predictions to generate cogent-sounding text based on the human writing they've ingested  

 And finally..

 On 22 March 2025 my choir  is joining forces with Bracknell Choral Society. for a performance of The Dream of Gerontius:

<autobiographical-note>
The first time I sang this extraordinary piece my mother (whom saints preserve [and they better had]) was in the audience.
</autobiographical-note>

You've got just over a month (as from publication date) to snap up the Earlybird deal.

b

Unspeakable

My latest discovery in the podiverse is Unspeakable. I first became aware of this last February when the BBC aired (unexplained initially, I think – at least, the announcer didn't say that the next edition would be in more than eight months). On that occasion  MrsK and I reached for the Off button as soon as we heard that it was 'a new gameshow presented by Phil Wang', though she beat me to it (a measure of her antipathy – I'm more tolerant of self-satisfied not-very-funny comedians).

There are four sorts of contributor to Unspeakable:

• Phil Wang, who I suspect may be an acquired taste (though if so I've no interest in acquiring it)
• Susie Dent
• A panel of comics
• The audience (audience participation seems to be de rigueur nowadays)

Each of the panel champions a new word to express a thing or feeling unexpressed in English; they each suggest also a word they could do without. The only contributor who is reliably worth listening to is Susie Dent, though some of the others have their moments. In an early edition (it's been running for over a month, and I didn't make a note of the precise reference...

<inline-ps>
Found it, here. She also pointed that the first 'harlot' was a man
</inline-ps>

...) she explained something that has been puzzling me for years.

<brain-teaser time-served-in-idle-speculation="40-50 years">
Why does bimbo have a masculine ending (-o not -a) when it refers (NB: today) to a sort of woman?

Bimbo is an affectionate diminutive of a word that already has the diminutive suffix -ino: bambino (a haby boy....

<erm-not-sure>
Italian is one of my sketchier language 'conquests' (border skirmish is more like it) and for all I know the one word may serve for any baby.

<aha-but...>
But just this week I heard, on the news, an Italian woman to her bambina. Which points to bambino not being confusingly unisex.
</aha-but...>

The name 'Bambi' looks to me like a back-formation from bambino, coined perhaps by a first- or second-generation Italian-speaking immigrant to the US....

<tangent type="side-swipe, silly">
(If so, what would be the title of an Italian translation of Bambi? Babe? [I warned you it was silly.])

 <meta-tangent type="more-serious">
(But the "first- or second-generation Italian-speaking immigrant to the US" idea doesn't work, as the Disney fim is based on a book by an Austrian, whose only link to Italy that comes immediately to hand (well, to browser, actually) is that in the same year as publishing Bambi: Eine Lebensgeschichte aus dem Walde [the book the film is based on] he also published Der Hund von Florenz [a novel set partly in Florence] – which at least suggests that he may have spoken Italian].

</meta-tangent>

 </tangent>

</erm-not-sure> 

The modern English 'bimbo' refers to a less than intelligent wonan, so why isn't it bimba? 
</brain-teaser>

Susie Dent explained that the original bimbo was male. (I'm paraphrasing there. I doubt if she would have said 'original', as the etymolgy is confused and uncertain, Etymonline suggests that the word started life in the early nineteenth century, referring to a drink.)

But by the end of that century it referred (mostly) to a person:

From 1860-1910, Bimbo as a proper name is frequent: It is the name or part of the name of several race horses, dogs, and monkeys, a circus elephant (perhaps echoing jumbo), and a jester character in a play. It is in the title of a three-act musical farce ("Bimbo of Bombay"), and the name of a popular "knockabout clown"/actor in England and several other stage clowns. Also it appears as a genuine surname, and "The Bimbos" were a popular brother-sister comedy acrobatics team in vaudeville.

A separate bimbo seems to have entered American English c. 1900, via immigration....

By 1919 it began to be used generally of a stupid or ineffectual man, a usage Damon Runyon traced to Philadelphia prize-fight slang.... The word ...turn[s] up in Philadelphia papers' accounts of prizefights (e.g. "Fitzsimmons Is No Bimbo," Evening Public Ledger, May 25, 1920). The male word bimbo continues to appear as a derogatory term for a thug or bully through the 1940s ....

By 1920 the female word with a sense of "floozie" had developed, perhaps boosted by "My Little Bimbo Down on Bamboo Isle," a popular 1920 song in which the singer (imploring the audience not to alert his wife) tells of his shipwreck "on a Fiji-eeji Isle" and his "bimbo down on that bamboo isle... she's got the other bimbos beat a mile."

This Google Ngram shows how 'Bimbo' as a name (the red line) had a clear lead until about 1980, when 'bimbo' (without an initial capital, represented  by the green line) starts to ramp  up steeply, until by 2006 it is in the lead.

L'Envoi

(And I wonder if some wag at Google  decided that the Trumpian – ALL CAPS – version should be represented by an orange line.)

That's enough. This has already been long overdue.

b

Update: 2024.12.18.16:05 – Added <inline-ps />

Fanny MendelsTochter

<explanation>
Perhaps the title of this post needs a bit of explanation. Fanny, the daughter of Abraham  Mendelssohn, was educated musically alongside her brother Felix (four years her junior). But after a few years her father (who was worldly-wise enough to append the name 'Bartholdy' to his name before becoming a pillar of the bourgeoisie) decreed that her destiny was as a mother and home-maker, so he would fritter away no more on her education; she was banished from the music room, except for ornamental purposes.  

But Mendels Sohn (Mendel's son) was Felix, who by a chromosomatic accident 'merited' a musical education; so any of the names usually given her by historians (Fanny Mendelssohn, Fanny Hensel, Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel.... autcetera), seems to me a little demeaning. I have adopted the Icelandic naming convention (used by several female composers of contemporary music such as Karólina Eiriksdóttir, Selma Björnsdóttir,  Haldis Bjarnadóttir...

<hmmm possibilty-of-update="5">
The Wikipedia list of female composers includes four -dóttirs, all born since 1951. I wonder if this naming convention is a recent phenomenon.
</hmmm>

...) whereby a man is a -sohn and a woman is a -dóttir. This still leaves the woman as a man's chattel, but at least the father has some genetic input. And I've kept her German-ness: Fanny MendelsTochter.

</explanation> 

Abraham wrote to Fanny, (then in her early teens) in 1820:

Music will perhaps become his [i.e. Felix's] profession, while for you it can and must be only an ornament.  

Thus fortified in her resolve to be a composer of significance, she wrote (mainly) songs, rather than anything designed for the concert hall, and this limit to her ambitions was something that she herself embraced (rather pathetically – but what else could she do that wouldn't involve her incarceration as a lunatic?):

I lack the ability to sustain ideas properly and give them the needed consistency. Therefore lieder suit me best, in which, if need be, merely a pretty idea without much potential for development can suffice. 

Letter to Felix, 1835

 By the time she wrote this she had been married for five or six years, and her generous and supportive husband, William Hensel, encouraged her to publish (previously discouraged by her family...

<oops>
Not content with simply discouraging it, they actually involved her in a musicological fraud, allowing her to publish six of her lieder as part of her little brother's opus 8 and 9. This led to an embarrassing mistake made during Felix's tour to Great Britain, when he was invited to Buckingham Palace to accompany Queen Victoria (soprano). She chose one of 'his' lieder – presumably because she found some sisterly fellow feeling in it – and he had to admit that it was his big sister's.

</oops>

...) and sponsored musical soirées that attracted the great and the good from the local musical scene. But she published as 'Fanny Hensel' and is known to history as either Fanny Mendelssohn or Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel.

Prime Video are showing a fascinating program called Fanny: the Other Mendelssohn. It's 2 hours long and I'm working my way through it. If you can, it's worth a look.

That's enough for now

b

 

Third time lucky?

In 2014 I wrote (here) about, among other things, the song sung by Catherine Deneuve in Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, 'Ne me quitte pas'. Revisiting that post in 2018 I added an afterthought that was meant to clarify my earlier piece but was unlikely to, because it assumed readers would go to YouTube and listen to the song in question. To make it even less scrutable, my 2018 note used a bit of French teacher's jargon – e-muet. All things considered, it was a pretty duff attempt at communication.

 <prescript>
Those words had been set to a very different tune (Very different?... Discuss) about five years earlier by Jacques Brel. It's hard to say exactly how long before, as the gestation period of  a song is presumably much shorter than that of a sung-through film, so 'about five years' will have to do. Brel's Ne me quitte pas was followed a few years later by Dusty Springfield's If you go away to the same tune. But this time, it seems to me that the English version does preserve the sentiment of the original. [2024 note: I had previously objected to the translation of the film song.]

The line Ne me quitte pas starts out, uncomfortably for the translator, with two unstressed syllables. So the two obvious options are 'Never go away' (which is pathetic) and 'Don't you go away', which is bathetic (it sounds as though it should be followed by something like '...you little minx'). The Parapluies de Cherbourg song avoids the problem by splitting the unstressed words over two lines; even then, I don't think the underlay (as we say in the trade – the way the words fit the tune) would get a very high mark in a Grade V Theory exam. The amour's stress is wrong, and the ne is left out on a limb.

<2018_PS ref="YouTube clip">
The guilty setting is from 1'45" to 1'52", and I missed  – when first writing – another serious deficiency. I gave only two problems: the stress on amour and the isolation of ne at the end of a line. I missed a third: the stress on the e-muet at the end of quitte.
</2012_PS>

Anyway 'If you go away' works for me in the Jacques Brel song.
</prescript>

Here's a third attempt.

The words Catherine Deneuve sings (to the tune known to us impoverished Anglophones as 'I will wait for you') are

Mais mon a-mour ne

Me quitt-e pas

<misericord>
(I should explain the tag misericord, for non-students of monastic choir stalls furniture. There is, surprisingly, a website that tells you all about misericords if you've got time to kill. But I'll save you the bother of doing your own research. A misericord was a sticking out bit attached to the bottom of a hinged seat in choir stalls. It allowed a monk singing Prime at some ungodly...

<parenthesis>
Perhaps not le mot juste 
</parenthesis> 

... hour to take the weight off his feet – thus affording misericordia.   An English version of that French lyric is here. The equivalent lines are sung from 0'37" to 0'46".

I have used this device, which takes pity on the user's infirmity in some physical respect, as a metaphor for an explanation that takes pity on a reader's presumed ignorance.

</misericord>

She stresses the first syllable of amour, which (like all French polysyllables is stressed, in spoken French, on the last); this leaves the ne (not complete in meaning until it gets its pas, so not meriting stress) in an automatically stressed position at the end of a line.

We come now to the last sentence of my 2018 PS, and the central word in it, e-muet. I don't know whether French teachers today use the word 'e-muet' but mine did. 

<autobiographical-note>
He – Cedric Baring-Gould...

<meta-autobiographical-note>
[the reason, incidentally, for my choice of  college, as a former pupil of his had been the first in my school to go to Cambridge]
</meta-autobiographical-note>

... – also used a huge Grundig reel-to-reel magnétophone. He schlepped this multi-kilo apparatus, day in day out, from classroom to classroom, realizing  – unusually for the time – the importance, in modern language teaching, of giving learners the actual sounds of native speakers. Today's MFL (modern foreign language) teachers have recourse to YouTube for examples from real-life foreign speakers, thus avoiding curvature of the spine; not so for poor old Cedric.)

</autobiographical-note>

And  another thing:

<autobiographical-note
In the many Berkshire Youth Choir concerts I attended during the early Noughties my least-favourite (and therefore seemingly most common) piece was Gwyn Arch's setting of The Sound of Silence.

<brickbat-dodging>
That's not BYC in the clip, I hasten to add. But it's the Gwyn Arch setting.
</brickbat-dodging>

Where Paul Simon has 'Neath the halo of a-a streetlamp' Gwyn Arch has 'Neath the halo of a streeeetlamp'. And while a solo voice can just about get away with that 'a-a' it seems to me that a few dozen voices singing streeeetlamp'. sound plain ridiculous.
</autobiographical-note

'Up up my friend and quit your blog

Or surely you'll grow double' 

as Wossname put it. That's enough.

b

All about that base

The recent kerfuffle about the Chagos Islands was covered in detail by the Independent. These opening paragraphs give a flavour of the piece:

An extraordinary blame game has erupted dragging in Liz Truss and James Cleverly following Sir Keir Starmer’s shock decision to hand over the Chagos Islands to Mauritius.

The deal is meant to secure the future of a secretive military base on the island of Diego Garcia, but it has left the UK without sovereign territorial control over a piece of land that is crucial to Western security in the Indian Ocean. The US-UK base will remain on Diego Garcia, but this latest development has led to fears that China could achieve its goal of setting up bases on the Chagos Islands.

The sudden announcement was rapidly followed by a furious tweet from Tory leadership contender James Cleverly calling the Labour government “weak, weak, weak”. However, it quickly emerged that the talks to hand over the islands were instigated by Mr Cleverly himself before being halted by his successor as foreign secretary David Cameron.

This piece reminded ...

<inline-ps>
sic for heaven's sake., does nobody proof-read this stuff?
</inline-ps>

 ...of a post I wrote iin the early days of this blog, (more than eleven years ago) about how the word 'plagiarist' was derived from the Latin plagiarius.

<prescript>
'A plague/pox on...' was a popular curse in Shakespeare's time. Some time later (I have a feeling I first met it in Regency Buck [ – in my early teens I was led astray by the literary tastes of my older sister] a cuss-word with similar force was 'Zounds' (which I originally mentally misvocalized to rhyme with 'sounds'). It is derived by attrition from the expression used by Chaucer's Pardoner: By Goddes Wounds; but by the time the Regency Buck got hold of it any explicit reference to God, or even the wounds of Christ...

<2024-addition>
(one in each hand and foot, and one in his side [whence unda fluxit et sanguine, as singers of Mozart's sublime setting of Ave Verum Corpus may remember]). There were many others, whose relevance will become apparent: read on.
<2024-addition>

 

... had been ironed out:        'S 'ounds.  

In the 1970s, the UK committed the act of a plagiarius (keep up...a kidnapper or underhand dealer) in doing the Chagossians out of their birthright so that the Americans could build an airbase within easy range of the Soviet Union). And in 2010 the UK government (the smylere with the knyf under the cloke) established a marine conservation area in the archipelago (butter wouldn't melt...) which – with its no fishing law – would (gosh, fancy that) prevent the islanders from returning.

Diego García: an airstrip surround by a marine conservation area

 

When that news broke in 2010 I wondered about the name of the archipelago. The colonizing powers (I'm thinking chiefly of Spain and Portugal, who had the appropriate religious background) were wont to name islands with religious references: Trinidad or Dominica , for example, the latter named after the Lord's Day– when Columbus 'discovered' it. Even El Niño refers to a particular Niño, whose official birthday is celebrated at the time of that meteorological phenomenon off the coast of the Spanish-speaking Chile.

So, feverishly, I supposed that the Chagos Archipelago must have five islands (one for each hand – or wrist if the preacher was of the hell-fire persuasion – one for each foot, and one for the lance in the side). The atlas disproved this, so I moved on to a more numerous source of wounds: the scourging would have left hundreds of  marks.  But the fever of folk etymology passed: Goddes Wounds were not chagos but chagas. Another fine mess a little learning had gotten me into!
<prescript>

This old post came to mind when the long-overdue return of the Chagossians' birthright (greeted by some unconvincing, not to say disingenuous, transparently self-serving, and plain silly) protests from Tory hopefuls.

When I first heard about the settlement with Mauritius – particularly the 99 year lease on Diego García – I thought "Hmm... That old "99 year lease"' trick didn''t turn out so well with Hong Kong, did it?' But let's face it: the chances of humanity surviving into the 22nd  century aren't great one way or another (war, pestilence, meteor-strike etc [ably assisted by climate change], and besides by 2223 most if not all of the Chagos Islands will be under water anyway; according to the Foundation for Environment, Climate and Technology:

There is considerable interest in the long-term consequences of global warming on sea level, both globally and at the regional or local level. The current consensus is that global mean sea level has risen at a rate of about 2 mm yr-1 during the 20th century, and at about 3.2 mm yr-1 over the last 20 years, but there is also large variability in the magnitude at regional scales. In the Indian Ocean, in particular, recent studies have highlighted the large degree of spatial variability in sea level. According to the most recent assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, current estimates project a sea level rise of 0.5 to 1.2 meters by 2100, with the possibility of several more meters beyond.

Rising sea levels are of particular relevance to low lying coastal areas of the world, including the coral atolls and islands of the world’s tropical oceans. In this context, the coral atoll islands of the Chagos Archipelago are vulnerable, although they lie close to an area of the Indian Ocean where studies have suggested that recent sea-level rise may have been small. The island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean is a critical logistics hub for U.S. and British forces in the Middle East. Due to its exposure to the extreme weather in the Indian Ocean, changing temperatures and increasing rainfall, Diego Garcia faces the threat of coastal erosion and flooding. The highest point above sea-level is 22 feet, but the island’s mean height above sea-level is 4 feet. Diego Garcia is threatened by the effects of climate change because its average height above sea level is just over one meter. A sea-level rise of a several feet would force the US military to undertake a costly and difficult military relocation process. 

Source

That's enough for today; I hope the Chagossians now shivering in Crawley finally get Mauritius (an improbable lattter-day colomial power) to re-home them – preferably somewhere where they're allowed to fish.

b

Update: 2024.10.23.16:50 – Added <inline-ps />

 

 

 

The Great Escape

After more time than I'd like spent in hospitals...

<parenthesis>

That's right, two not to mention the  dozen or so I've been in in the past, though only once overnight...

<autobiographical-note>
Tonsillectomy in the King Edward Memorial Hospital, Mattock Lane, Ealing W13. As I was a larger than usual rising 11 year-old, and they had me down as plain '10', they found that I didn't fit in any of the pyjamas in the children's ward. So, it being 1962 and all that that implied in terms of awareness of PTSD, they put me in the adults' ward rather than move the pyjamas (which was probably more than someone's job was worth). It was not the happiest fortnight of my life, and is it any wonder that I'm not perfectly house-trained?
</autobiographical-note>

...  The one where I first went to A&E didn't have the facilities to deal with my subdural haematoma...

<autobiographical-note>
Details are a bit vague, but I've said before that, whereas some people are ambi-dextrous, I am ambi-sinistral (and don't bother looking that up, unless I've chanced on a real word for two-sided cack-handedness – a result,  perhaps, of the Wrong Pyjamas [see above])
</autobiographical-note>

... so they kept me in there for 48 hours' observation... 

<autobiographical-note>
The 48 hours expired on the afternoon of the Sunday before Bank Holiday Monday...

<parenthesis>
(non-UK readers need know only that Bank Holiday is when nothing happens [except in the NHS, which soldiers on with more than usual under-staffing] )
</parenthesis>

... and it took the diplomacy and tact of my daughter to spring me from 'durance vile' , when they threatened to keep me in for another night.
<autobiographical-note>

...and they sent me home until the head-aches got worse and I went to A&E again, who  gave me a second CT scan and blue-lighted me to the John Radcliffe in Oxford, where they have the appropriate nut-crackers. 
</parenthesis>

...I'm home again and sleeping soundly (not at this very moment). While I was banged up I reflected on how there's an arms race between more and more urgent-sounding alarms and the way the nursing staff (with only one pair of hands) react; but I don't feel like writing about it just now. There's a possible update to come, but don't hold your breath.

b

PS my post-operative stupor was interrupted by an email saying that I'd been shortlisted for the u3a short story competition (which, appropriately enough, had the theme "Escape" – though hospitals didn't come into it when I wrote my entry). If it wins, it'll be published in the next edition of Third Age Matters.

 Update: 2024.10.03.20:50  – Added PPS 

PPS

Man proposes and clerical errors dispose. The short story short-listed – read  it here if you like, but don't believe the byline...

<inline-ppps>
They've now updated that  page.
</inline-ppps>

... – isn't mine. Mine is here. In my – not entirely unbiased – view, it's better; though I'm not too disappointed, as I wrote it about thirty years ago and just added a phrase or two to make it fit the 'escape' theme.

In other news, those nutcrackers missed a bit; and a second haematoma on the other side...

<guess type="untutored">
(preumably a contrecoup injury that didn't show up on the first CT scan)
<guess>

... needed to be drained as well. I'm home again after a second operation, and on the mend. 

 Update: 2024.10.04.10:50  – Added <inline-ppps />

 

 

Babel

 

With  unusual speed I have just finished reading a Father's Day present (don't judge; < 3 months is good going for me). When I first received it I initially feared (as did MrsK) that I'd done my usual trick of not updating my wishlist  and being given a duplicate of something I'd already read. But no; the two books had crucial similarities and jacket designs

:

<anal-observation> 

Babel is neater, as the colours repeat at regular offsets (down 2 rows to get the next column:  

B > A > B... etc [restarting at the top row when you reach the bottom, natch]. The letter colours for LINGO are ALL OVER THE SHOP. What was the designer thinking? 

) 

</anal-observation>

Lingo was a book of which I once wrote here   '(a book that I'm deferring judgement on, as it refers to much that I don't know about but is not totally sound on the few things I do know about).'

Well, I feel the same about Babel only more so, at least as regards the extent of my ignorance; natural language really is quite extraordinary.

The Introduction sets the scene

The figure of 6,000 struck me as rather ungenerous. 7,000 is an estimate I've met – I'm not sure where.. But anyway, it's dwindling at an alarming rate, though maybe  not as fast as some would have us believe: a recent edition  of More or Less discussed this.

The Introduction to Babel goes on

As preparation for work on the book, Dorren began to study Vietnamese:

The '1-15' attempt  at gleaning a meaning reminds ne of an image I once used when speaking to a student, to refer to the opacity of another language: You're in  the dark, with only a pencil beam of light  occasionally, with Strobe-like flashes, giving you a partial view of what's next.

More to come, but guitar practice is overdue. An update will have to wait.

b

Update: 2024.09.03.17:14  –  Added PS

PS 

In the treatment of Spanish (English and Spanish are, argues Dorren, 'almost  uncannily similar' in one respect ...

<parenthesis>
(read the book to find out which – paraphrasing in this case is beyond me [without seriously oversimplifying])
</parenthesis>

...Babel divides ways of handling the idea of pssession into five 'types':

1. possessor possesses possession
   25% of all languages
2. possession is with possessor
   another 25%
3. (with respect to) the possessor there exists the possesssion
   20%
4. the possession is at/on/with the possessor
   20%
5. the possessor's possession exists
   10%

And this is typical (and editorially impressive) of the book: general observations about language are  made when they arise in language-specific cases. So each of the 20(-ish) chapters deals with one(-ish)...

<for.further-study>
Everywhere you turn in this world there's an-ish. I imagine some of these have provoked  no end of trollery on xitter ( Urdu vs Hindi...one or two? calling it 'Hindustani' worked before the Partition), but this sort of identity jiggery-pokery is par for the course when dealing with language.
</for.further-study>

...language, but ends up dealing with some general point about language and/or scripts. I found it hard work, but fascinating.

As usual with this author I occasinally had my doubts: why, for example, is the Spanish ñ only 'considered a separate letter'? It is one in my book (and is alpabetized as one in any Spanish book)...

<come-to-that>
And, on the subject of alphabetization, I wonder if elle (like enye [the IPA transcriptions /εljε/  and /εnjε/ underline the point]) shouldn't be 'considered a separate letter'': calle falls alphabetically after calzo, not after caliente.

<clincher type="aperçu not available to bookish research">
A fellow student on an Open University course pointed out that Spanish children (he had been one) have  alphabet blocks with separate 'l' and 'll'.  I wonder whether Spanish typesetters have a separate glyph for elle, rather than just a pair of ls (which might seem a bit loose).
</clincher> 

</come-to-that>

But I'm glad I read it, although it made me all too aware of just how un-understandable this stuff is.

 

The third envelope

 The newly-appointed CEO found that her...

<not-making-THAT-rookie-mistake>
Didn't expect me to assume the default CEO was male, did you?
</not-making-THAT-rookie-mistake>

... predecessor had left three numbered envelopes, marked

Mentally editing the instruction...

<criticisms>

To be opened: Why not just 'Open'?

In order: What else would you do with numbered envelopes?

In case of emergency: Errm.... isn't that just an emergency?
</criticisms>

... she gave them to her PA to file.

After the usual honeymoon period, the company got into difficulties. She epoened the first envelope. A note inside read

BLAME YOUR PREDECESSOR 

She did, and eventually the share price recovered. 

In the fullness of time the the company  fell on hard times again, and she opened the second envelope. A note inside read:

BLAME ADVERSE MARKET CONDITIONS

As you might expect...

<Storytelling-101>
I didn't just fall out of the coconut tree; what else was going to happen?
</Storytelling-101>

... eventually the company got into trouble a third time. Not knowing what else to do...

<Storytelling-101>
(but knowing how these things work)
</Storytelling-101>

....she opened the third envelope. The note inside read:

PREPARE THREE ENVELOPES

Call me Æsop.

b

N or M

Last Saturday's The Times mentioned...

<tangent>
(or perhaps homed in on [Self-referential, moi? ])
</tangent>

a point that I wrote about here) – the variation between 'home in on' and 'hone in on'. Rose Wild observed in the Feedback column  that the N-version was more common in American English than in British English, agreeing with the observation I made in that post, starting with a visit to the British National Corpus:

<pre-script>

'That's right' I thought; 'Only one instance. A solitary ignoramus got it wrong.'

<parenthesis>
Oh dear. Me and Cnut...

<HD24>
As usual with stuff I've written, I couldn't make sense of this at first . What I meant was that there was a tide in the usage, and my feelings about it didn't signify.
</HD24>

</parenthesis>

On the other hand there were many of the M-version ('hoMe in on') :

 

...[HD 2024: whereas in American English]

'Home in on' is the commoner of the two, but only by a whisker.

Finally, I used my favourite newly discovered language-related software tool to compare the two.

The expression 'home in on' took off about the same time as computers and related technologies used in guided weaponry, and for twenty years it had the field to itself. Then 'hone in on' appeared, but until the mid-'80s it never represented more than a quarter of its soundalike. Then, from the mid-'80s to the mid-'90s something strange happened: 'home in on' marked time, and 'hone in on' took advantage. It is as if a significant number of M-users tried the N-version as an experiment, and stuck with it; and this infected...

<parenthesis>
(is my prejudice showing?)
</parenthesis>

... the people who had not yet adopted either expression, with the result that for the next two decades the N-version rose in popularity more steeply than the original. Since then, shares have remained roughly stable, with the MEANINGFUL version outnumbering the NONSENSICAL one, but not by much.

</pre-script>

She wrote...

<parenthesis>
(in fact she attributed it to a correspondent, but she was sparing with quotation marks, so it's hard to tell who supplied the bit about  'making sense', which rather stuck in my craw.)
</parenthesis>

... that the substitution of 'hone in on' for home in on' was "an eggcorn – a phrase based on a mishearing that sounds like the original and catches on because it makes sense (sic: my emphasis)" . A hearer can make sense of it; I'm not convinced that is the same as making sense. Or perhaps it is. Discuss.

Interestingly (for me at least thinking, about unjustified Ns cropping up in popular usage) the previous week's Feedback column had referred to the tendency  in American English for 'careened' to occur when right-thinking people would have expected 'careered'.

<autobiographical-note>
(I first noticed this while listening to the Mud Slime Slim album, and assumed that James Taylor was the prime culprit.)
</autobiographical-note>

  But N seems to be a repeat offender here.

<brickbat-dodging>
And 'offender' is the wrong word of course.'He only does it to annoy/Because he knows it teases'
</brickbat-dodging>

In another case,...

<covering-his-back>
(not the same case – this is not a matter of N replacing another letter in the course of ongoing language use, but rather a matter of N spontaneously occurring in the course of language development – but still, it is a case of an N appearing where it's not expected)
</covering-his-back>

...'message'  has spawned 'messeNger', 'passage'=>'passeNger'... There must be others...

But I have promises to keep, etc.

b

Ne plus(-size) ultra

 

On 8 July Medsape published a piece on Ultra-Processed Food

What Is Ultraprocessed Food, and What Are Its Effects? 

with this intriguing note:

This story was translated from the Medscape Portuguese edition using several editorial tools, including AI, as part of the process. Human editors reviewed this content before publication.

Seldom  missing an opportunity to be intrigued, especially where Portuguese is concerned, I followed the link to the original, published  nearly a week earlier:

Alimentos ultraprocessados: Uma ameaça tão evidente quanto a crise climática?

The story is not 'AI-mediated mistranslation misrepresents important research'. As far as I can tell without the sort of fine-tooth-combery which I don't feel like doing at the moment; the two articles are broadly similar. But there is a fairly signficant editorial difference, at least in tone (partcularly as far as the headline is concerned). It doesn't take a Portuguese expert to see that 'uma ameaça' (the English cognate is 'menace') is more value-laden than the gentle 'what are its effects/'. And the comparison in tone is even more stark when the 'menace' is characterized as being 'as evident (obvious? unarguable? urgent? 'real and present"?) as the climate crisis'. 

 Another difference is socio-political. Where the English version has the subhead Proof of concept the Portuguese version (Brasilian I imagine, as the 2010 conference was held in São Paolo) has the defensive 

Avaliando a contradição: o canadense que testou a NOVA 

(how can a mere norteamericano put a Brasilian concept to the test? The effrontery!)

But I'm inclined to think that the comparison with the climate crisis may be apposite:

Monteiro ... highlighted a study showing that people with diets rich in ultraprocessed food consume many more calories, often exceeding 5000 per day, thus resulting in weight gain. The post hoc analysis of this study suggests that the hyperpalatability and high caloric density of these foods are the main factors contributing to this excessive consumption. Another point raised was the deterioration of the nutritional quality of foods due to ultraprocessing, which reduces the content of beneficial phytochemicals, such as flavonoids. According to Monteiro, these characteristics are "a recipe for diseases." Processing also "creates chemical contaminants, such as acrylamide and bisphenol, which have proven harmful effects on health," he added. He also addressed the problem of dependence on ultraprocessed food. About 14% of adults and 12% of children in the United States show signs of addiction to these foods, he said. Addiction may be amplified by aggressive marketing.

The issue is summed up in Dr Chris van Tulleken's award-winning book:

Ultra-Processed People: Why Do We All Eat Stuff That Isn’t Food … and Why Can’t We Stop?

 

. 

And the question at the end of the title is not rhetorical: we can't stop because UPF is designed to be addictive.

<paranoia-alert status="query">

This isn't just another right-on hippy conspiracy theory. There aren't evil boffins rubbing their hands like the animated germs in the '50s toothpaste ad, saying 

We'll hurt her teeth and drive her crazy 

It's her fault for being lazy' 

There's no evil conspiracy. It's just good old Adam Smith's 'invisible hand'. UPF sells more, so the behaviour that leads to it is reinforced, putting a gastronomical spin on Gtesham's Law: 

Ultraprocessed drives out wholesome

</paranoia-alert>

He goes on:

Worth waiting for. Nuff said (more than enough).

b

 

 

 

A pigeon come home to roost

I was smugly glad to be proved right last week when a BBC newreader ascribed to the  Vice President an undeserved punctuation mark for a name. In May 2021 The Times published  a profile of Kamala Harris, originally published in a US journal. An American English speaker said something like 'It's pronounced  'Comma-la'. I wrote about this at the time.

Long-time readers of this blog will be accustomed to my banging on about how misleading 'sounds-like' pronunciation guides can be, especially in a teaching context. For the full pro-IPA rant see here,  but my point is simple: 'sounds-like' pronunciaton guides are useful only when they refer – and are understood to refer – to a particular speech event. In the case of that article, the speech event was between users of American English. For a user of British English Kamala is NOT pronounced 'Comma-la'. Here's the letter I wrote to The Times back in 2021:

<prescript> 
As a retired teacher of English as a foreign language I was disappointed to read Dana Goodyear's misleading and unhelpful pronunciation advice ('it's Comma-la'). 'Sounds-like' pronunciation aids, as I was always telling my fellow teachers, are no better than the memory of  a speech event. This speech event involved two people who were both speakers of American English. So 'comma-la' tells us about the stress but nothing about the vowels. A speaker of British English will be misled by this memory aid:

• there is no /ɒ/ in the first syllable
  

  <HD24 type="afterthought>
  /ɒ/ is the vowel sound in 'bot', 'cot', 'dot' etc. I realize I am hoist by my own petard here but I've got to allow for the lack of IPA-fluency in my readers
  </HD24>

• the schwa at the end of  'comma' is more-or-less the same in British English and in American English
• even a speaker of American English would have no idea about the last syllable (/ɑ/, /ɑ:/, or /ə/)
  

  <HD24 type="afterthought>
  It doesn't much matter what these represent, as I now realize there are many more possibilities. 

  </HD24> 

When I first read the Goodyear article I wronged the writer, assuming she was British and had  misled her readers by slavishly regurgitating her notes of what Harris had said. But what she wrote turns out to have been true for her speech community, and just misleading for speakers of British English (as I presume most of your readers are).

</prescript>

The 'Sounds like "Comma-la"' guide works only for stress, not vowel sounds. But some BBC Newsreaders (not all), presumably having read that article, insist on the /ɒ/.

<tangent subject="word-stress">
And while I'm on the subject of word-stress, Wimbledon is a regular source of linguistic entertainment: foreign names that Radio Five Live commentators have been blithely mispronouncing for the rest of the year suddently get the Radio Four treatment. Their newsreaders turn to the Pronunciation Unit on, for example, Medvedev:

In the case of Medvedev, we have had to compromise: we cannot expect non-Russians to pronounce this name in a perfectly Russian way because this would require broadcasters to have detailed knowledge of Russian pronunciation, which is not feasible.

Having carried out detailed research and consulted with Russian speakers, including a Russian phonetician, we concluded that correct stress placement and reflection of the soft (palatalised) 'v' in the stressed syllable were the most important aspects to highlight in our anglicised pronunciation.

The surname Medvedev stems from the Russian word for 'bear' medved' (with stress on the second syllable), so that it is important to retain this stress in the surname, hence our recommendation muhd-VYED-uhff.

Source 

For years tennis commentators have been using this name. For all I know, Medvedev himself may have abandoned all hope of getting Anglophone commentators to stress the second syllable. But when Wimbledon comes around the Pronunciation Unit comes to the fore; and BBC radio reports on different often have headlines that seem to refer to two different people.
</tangent>

Returning to Kamala. Trump, of course, gets it wrong. This may be intentional, as a Harris campaign video deals expressly with the name's pronunciiation; or it may just be the old political trick of deliberately mispronouncing an opponents name, as Churchill did with the Nazis and Thatcher did with Gal-ti-e-ri.

<tangent>
(which ...

<whatExactly>
[the sound /eə/]
</whatExactly>

... reminds me of the 'Spanish' speaker in a recent radio play I heard, who in the course of his espeech used the uniquely English /eə/ sound when saying the third syllable of 'Buenos Aires'; it's a diphthong all right, but the spelling is a clue to which one. I wish soi-disant foreigners in plays put a bit of effort into getting it right. Perhaps they could ask the Pronunciation Unit...
</tangent>

'Nuff said.

b

PS

My translations have gone off. Now I just have to wait by the phone for a few months