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A report from Heritage Daily:

A team of archaeologists and computer scientists have created an AI program that can translate ancient cuneiform tablets instantly using neural machine learning translations. In a paper published in the journal PNAS Nexus, from the Oxford University Press, the researchers have applied the AI program to translate Akkadian texts with a high level of accuracy. […]

According to the researchers: “Hundreds of thousands of clay tablets inscribed in the cuneiform script document the political, social, economic, and scientific history of ancient Mesopotamia. Yet, most of these documents remain untranslated and inaccessible due to their sheer number and limited quantity of experts able to read them.”

The AI program has a high level accuracy when translating formal Akkadian texts such as royal decrees or omens that follow a certain pattern. More literary and poetic texts, such as letters from priests or tracts, were more likely to have “hallucinations” – an AI term meaning that the machine generated a result completely unrelated to the text provided.

The goal of the neural machine translation (NMT) into English from Akkadian is to be part of a human–machine collaboration, by creating a pipeline that assists the scholar or student of the ancient language. Currently, the NMT model is available on an online notebook and the source code has been made available on GitHub at Akkademia. The researchers are currently developing an online application called the Babylonian Engine.

Nice to know that AI is good for something, although one does worry about the hallucinations… (Thanks, Bathrobe!)

I was reading this MetaFilter post, which begins:

“The whole story of why we’ll never get an LBD movie.” Over a year ago, Ashley Clements started producing The Look Back Diaries. After all of the episodes were discussed, she’s started discussing the behind-the-scenes tea […]

At this point I was distracted from wondering what the Look Back Diaries might be and started wondering about this use of “tea.” Fortunately, Google was at hand, and the first hit was this Later page:

In slang, “tea” is a term used to refer to gossip or inside information. It is often used in the phrase “spill the tea” or “serve the tea,” which means to share juicy or exclusive details about a situation or person.

In African American Vernacular English (AAVE), “tea” is used as slang to refer to gossip, news, or personal information. The origin of the term is uncertain, but it is believed to have originated in the LGBTQ+ community and then spread to other aspects of African American culture before being adopted by mainstream culture. The term “spilling tea” is often used to describe the act of sharing gossip or revealing personal information.

It goes on to share some idiotic ideas about where the term might have originated (yes, the word “acronym” crops up), but I get the idea, and once again am grateful for the instant knowledge available at the touch of a keyboard. Surprisingly, this sense is not in Green’s, and I wonder if my readers are familiar with it.

Bernhard Warner reports from Dublin for the NY Times (archived):

Like Henry Higgins, the phonetician from George Bernard Shaw’s play “Pygmalion,” Marius Cotescu and Georgi Tinchev recently demonstrated how their student was trying to overcome pronunciation difficulties. The two data scientists, who work for Amazon in Europe, were teaching Alexa, the company’s digital assistant. Their task: to help Alexa master an Irish-accented English with the aid of artificial intelligence and recordings from native speakers.

During the demonstration, Alexa spoke about a memorable night out. “The party last night was great craic,” Alexa said with a lilt, using the Irish word for fun. “We got ice cream on the way home, and we were happy out.” Mr. Tinchev shook his head. Alexa had dropped the “r” in “party,” making the word sound flat, like pah-tee. Too British, he concluded.

The technologists are part of a team at Amazon working on a challenging area of data science known as voice disentanglement. It’s a tricky issue that has gained new relevance amid a wave of A.I. developments, with researchers believing the speech and technology puzzle can help make A.I.-powered devices, bots and speech synthesizers more conversational — that is, capable of pulling off a multitude of regional accents. […]

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Jack Morava sent me a clip of Jorge Luis Borges talking about the English language; it was on Instagram, and looking around for a more accessible place to send people, I found Jordan M. Poss’s blog post, which has not only the clip (it turns out to be from a 1977 interview with William F Buckley Jr on “Firing Line”) but a partial transcript and Poss’s thoughts on it all. The transcript starts:

Borges: I have done most of my reading in English. I find English a far finer language than Spanish.

William F Buckley: Why?

Borges: Well, many reasons. Firstly, English is both a Germanic and a Latin language. Those two registers—for any idea you take, you have two words. Those words will not mean exactly the same. For example if I say “regal” that is not exactly the same thing as saying “kingly.” Or if I say “fraternal” that is not the same as saying “brotherly.” Or “dark” and “obscure.” Those words are different. It would make all the difference—speaking for example—the Holy Spirit, it would make all the difference in the world in a poem if I wrote about the Holy Spirit or I wrote the Holy Ghost, since “ghost” is a fine, dark Saxon word, but “spirit” is a light Latin word. Then there is another reason. The reason is that I think that, of all languages, English is the most physical of all languages.

The whole thing is transcribed, if in a rebarbative format, here. Of course it’s easy to poke holes in his linguistic analysis, but he’s not a linguist, he’s a writer talking enthusiastically about a language he loves, and I enjoy it — not to mention that it’s great to hear him speak. (I met him back in 1969, but my memory is not like Funes’s.) Thanks, Jack!

Katherine J. Igoe writes about this week’s special issue of the New York Times Book Review (archived):

The art of translation was on Gregory Cowles’s mind. It was the beginning of 2023, and Mr. Cowles, a senior editor on The New York Times Book Review, noticed the section was assigning more reviews of translated books than usual. […] He approached Juliana Barbassa, the deputy editor for news and features on the Books desk. “There’s this whole question: What is translated? Who decides that? Are we getting a full picture of what’s out there?” Mr. Cowles said.

Both editors saw the potential for a project that would bring attention to the craft in a new way. The first part of their monthslong effort appears as a special issue of The New York Times Book Review this weekend. In it, readers get a glimpse of the world of literary translation.

“For a very long time, translators were very much secondary characters. Their names weren’t on the cover, there was little recognition, they had few rights over the work. The pay was, and remains, not great,” Ms. Barbassa said.

[Read more…]

Language Documentation and Description (LDD) “is an international journal that publishes peer-reviewed research on language documentation, language description, and language support, broadly conceived”; at a Nick Nicholas Facebook post, Peter Austin commented:

There’s a bunch of interesting papers in this issue of LDD about the social lives of linguistic materials and the need to study the various “versions” of published “final” documents.

It does indeed look interesting, with titles such as “Philology in the folklore archive: Interpreting past documentation of the Kraasna dialect of Estonian” (Tobias Weber) and “Legacy materials and cultural facework: Obscenity and bad words in Siouan language documentation” (Saul Schwartz).

A public service notice: Globus Books is having a two-day online sale (20% off on orders of $40+) on July 3rd and 4th. If you want to buy some Russian books, now’s a good time.

And a personal note: today is my birthday, and I’ve already gotten some presents of Hattic interest, notably (from my generous wife) Keys to the “Gift”: A Guide to Vladimir Nabokov’s Novel, by Yuri Leving, which I’m extremely excited about — it’s my favorite Nabokov novel, which means it’s one of my favorite novels, period. On the sf front, I got This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, which got great reviews, and on the cop-show front, All the Pieces Matter: The Inside Story of The Wire, by Jonathan Abrams, which comes at the perfect time, since I just finished the fifth and final season of The Wire, which I continue to think of as the best TV show in existence. (Some people think the last season is the best, others the worst; I can understand both points of view, because the development of the earlier story arcs and characters was fantastic, whereas the newspaper stuff was disappointing by comparison to the general excellence of the show: dogged reporter Alma and honest, professional editor Gus vs. bad editors whose names I don’t even remember, which shows you how cardboard they are.) Tonight I’ll be dining on the traditional chicken curry, with lemon meringue pie for dessert. My wife knows how to keep me purring contentedly.

Helen DeWitt writes me as follows:

A reader, Scott Prater, bought me some coffees and wrote me a nice email about my latest book, and he also added the following:

I offer you a linguistic curiosity: the Valencian/Spanish expression, “me la bufa la gamba”. It’s only used in the Valencian region of Spain (the verb “bufar” is Spanish, but it has some additional connotations in Valencian), and its provenance seems to be murky, as is its literal meaning and grammatical construction. It means “I couldn’t care less”, a close relative to the more widespread Spanish “me importa un comino”; one could imagine Rhett Butler, at the end of Gone With the Wind, telling Scarlett O’Hara, “Frankly, my dear, me la bufa la gamba”.

I can’t figure out the role of “la gamba” in the expression, nor what the direct object “la” refers to in “me la bufa”. Does “la” refer to “la gamba”, in which case, who is doing the bufa-ing? Or is “la gamba” the subject of the sentence, and the “la” direct object refers to some (possibly pornographic) entity off-screen, one closely linked to “me”, the indirect object? And why a gamba? I’ve asked my Spanish linguist friends, it makes for great party conversation, but no one has been able to shed any light on either the etymology or the syntax of the expression.

I thought the knowledgeable readers of languagehat might have some ideas (Scott has agreed to my passing this on to you).

So: thoughts?

Fond as I am of Georges Perec (whose name, despite what many believe, does not have an accent aigu, even though it is pronounced as if it had one, [peʁɛk] — Perec is the Polish spelling of the name usually anglicized as Peretz, and once the family moved to France it got Frenchified in pronunciation), I was unaware of his “grand palindrome” of 1,247 words (5,566 letters), which you can read here (note once again that his name does not have an accent aigu, even though it is pronounced as if it had one). I suppose someone could translate the whole thing, but apparently only the beginning and end have been rendered into English, by David Bellos (his biographer) and Harry Mathews (his friend and fellow Oulipian), as quoted in this 2011 blog post by Stephen Saperstein Frug. The former begins:

Trace the uneven palindrome. Snow. A trifle, says Hercules. Unadorned repentance, this piece born [of] Perec. [If] the bow of reading is too heavy, read back-to-front.

The latter (and better):

Trace the unequal palindrome. Snow. A trifle, Hercules would say. Rough penitence, this writing born as Perec. The read arch is too heavy: read vice-versa….

For the renditions of the ending, as well as some jovial discussion, follow the link to Frug’s post. Thanks, David!

Erik at Sententiae Antiquae takes down the Aeneid:

The Aeneid had the supreme good fortune to become immediately canonical, assigned in schools as the equivalent of a “modern classic” in those early imperial days. Well, what else were kids going to study? Livius Andronicus? Ennius? Cicero’s de Consulatu suo? The Aeneid is a marked aesthetic improvement over all of these, but one must also bear in mind that Augustus’ imprimatur must have counted for something. One would not be surprised to find that any monarch’s pet poetic project had received substantial attention, especially when free and outspoken critical judgment became a dangerous luxury. It’s hard to overlook the fact that the Aeneid’s ringing endorsement of Roman empire and the (prophetically foreshadowed) personal lineage/divine right of the Julio-Claudians had something to do with its inclusion in the school curriculum at such an early date.

Why do we have all of Vergil but just a few insignificant scraps of Cornelius Gallus? Their relations to power may have some small part in this. Naturally, they objection arises: what about Ovid? Was he not on the outs? I’d venture to suggest that his survival in the face not only of imperial hostility but also of his manifest unsuitability to Christian sentiment is a testament to his tremendous aesthetic and literary merits.

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Simeon Tegel has a good Washington Post story (archived) about a linguist and his informant:

It’s a ritual that Roberto Zariquiey and Nelita Campos have engaged in for more than a decade. The odd couple — Zariquiey, a university linguist conducting postdoctoral research at Harvard; Campos, the last lucid speaker of her Indigenous language — sit at the roughhewn kitchen table of her raised cabin, overlooking a muddy stream in the village of Callería, deep in the Peruvian Amazon.

“You complain a lot,” Zariquiey teases Campos.

“No, you’re the one that never stops complaining,” cracks back Campos, barefoot, with long jet-black hair that defies her 75 or so years.

Zariquiey, a 44-year-old professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, is slowly extracting the Iskonawa language from Campos. He fires off questions, listens attentively to the answers and meticulously writes down all the details Campos can share: The vocabulary, grammar and syntax of one of the world’s most endangered languages. Throughout, the pair, who have built an unlikely mother-son relationship, joke incessantly.

Over time, Campos, who communicates with Zariquiey in both Iskonawa and Spanish, has managed to share much of this frequently onomatopoeic tongue from the Panoan family of languages of the Western Amazon. It’s heavy with polysemy — words with multiple meanings — and notable for allowing users to stack multiple verbs one atop the other. […]

[Read more…]