Idiom of the Day
get in(to) hot water

To provoke or incite anger, hostility, or punishment against oneself; to cause or encounter trouble or difficulty, especially that which will result in punishment or reprisal. Watch the video

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Word of the Day
Word of the Day: rancorous

This word has appeared in 40 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence?

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Word of the Day
hibernal

Definition: (adjective) Of or relating to winter.
Synonyms: brumal, hiemal.
Usage: Our teacher described the first activities of bears as they emerge from hibernal sleep.
Discuss

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Language Log
Words

Ellen Gutoskey, "15 Fascinating Linguistics Terms You Didn't Learn in School", Mental Floss 5/10/2024:

Grade school English teachers do their best to send you off into the world with at least a cursory understanding of how language works. Maybe you can tell your dependent clauses from your independent ones and your transitive verbs from your intransitive ones. Maybe you’re even pretty savvy at distinguishing between basic rhetorical devices—hyperbole versus oxymoron, simile versus metaphor, and that sort of thing.

But unless you majored in linguistics in college or routinely spend your free time reading grammar blogs, there’s a whole world of words to describe language mechanics that you’re probably not aware of. Here are 15 of our favorites, from formal terms like amphiboly to colloquial ones like snowclone.
Oddly, there are only 14 words listed:

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/MentalFloss15.png

Whatever the total count, two of the them (eggcorn, snowclone) were coined on LLOG. [SP points out in the comments that "word" number 6 is actually two words, epenthesis and syncope, so the total is 15 after all…]

In other lexical news, SMBC lists 12 Dysgraphomophones:

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/SMBC_Dysgraphomophone.png

Mouseover title: "Genuinely ashamed how much time was wasted on this."

The AfterComic:

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/SMBC_DysgraphomophoneAfter.png
➖ Sent by @TheFeedReaderBot ➖

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Language Log
An assessment of AI in China

For those who are interested in the development of AI in the PRC, the following article is probably the most complete and forthcoming report on the state of the field.  Drawbacks are that is excessively lengthy and machine translated, with some parts awkward or difficult to understand.

Where Does China Stand in the AI Wave?
China’s top policy experts discuss the US-China gap, open vs. closed, and societal implications.

Nicholas Welch, ChinaTalk (May 10, 2024)
The introduction summarizes the article:

In this article, ChinaTalk presents the highlights and a full translation of a panel discussion on AI (archived here) that took place six weeks ago in Beijing. Hosted by the non-profit organization “The Intellectual” [Zhīshì fēnzǐ] 知识分子 — whose public WeChat account serves as a platform for discussions on scientific issues and their governance implications — the panelists delved into a wide range of topics, including:

*
*
the state of China’s AI industry, discussing the biggest bottlenecks, potential advantages in AI applications, and the role of the government in supporting domestic AI development;

*
the technical aspects of AI, such as whether Sora understands physics, the reliance on the Transformer architecture, and how far we are from true AGI;

*
and the societal implications — which jobs will be replaced by AI first, whether open- or closed-source is better for AI safety, and if AI developers should dedicate more resources to AI safety.
The article is long and rambling, so I won't attempt to abridge it, but I will say one thing in its defense, which is that the three panelists seem to agree in general:  the key issues for the improvement of AI in the PRC are:

* 1. the development of TALENT, though they do not have a clear, workable idea of how to achieve that goal
* 2. quantity is not as important as QUALITY, though again, they do not offer workable guidelines for maintaining that desideratum
* 3. they focus on ECOSYSTEM development, which is great, but they barely define what the issues and goals are, let suggest how to reach them

The panelists repeatedly recognize that the United States is far advanced ahead of the PRC in diverse aspects of AI, but they do not mention what  the chief causes of that disparity are:  a.) political constraints and b.) the nature of their epistemological "software" and "hardware".  These are things very difficult — given the sociopolitical environment — even to mention.
Selected readings

* "The perils of AI (Artificial Intelligence) in the PRC" (4/17/23)
* "Vignettes of quality data impoverishment in the world of PRC AI" (2/23/23)
* "The implications of Chinese for AI development" (10/25/21)

[h.t. Bill Benzon]

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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
get away with

to do something illegal or immoral and not get caught or punished

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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
hustler (1)

a person, usually male, who has sex for money

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wane

Idiom of the Day
get in the last word

To express the final point or opinion in an argument or discussion, especially in a way that decisively or conclusively ends it. Watch the video

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Language Log
Fake science journals

Parse that however you wish, we're plagued with them.

On an average day, I receive solicitations to write papers from them three or four times.  Sometimes they offer me editorships or guest editorships for designated issues.  Sometimes (but not often) they offer me money.  All such e-mails immediately go in the trash, but they leave a bad taste and are unsettling.

What's really bad now is that, whereas they used to come from places I had never heard of, now the fake science sickness has infected some of our mainstream publishing  houses.

"Flood of Fake Science Forces Multiple Journal Closures:
Wiley to shutter 19 more journals, some tainted by fraud"
By Nidhi Subbaraman, WSJ (May 14, 2024)
Why do we have far more of this skulduggery and dishonesty now than we did in the past?

The manifestations of this malaise are more than you can shake a stick at.

Fake studies have flooded the publishers of top scientific journals, leading to thousands of retractions and millions of dollars in lost revenue. The biggest hit has come to Wiley, a 217-year-old publisher based in Hoboken, N.J., which Tuesday will announce that it is closing 19 journals, some of which were infected by large-scale research fraud.

In the past two years, Wiley has retracted more than 11,300 papers that appeared compromised, according to a spokesperson, and closed four journals. It isn’t alone: At least two other publishers have retracted hundreds of suspect papers each. Several others have pulled smaller clusters of bad papers.

Although this large-scale fraud represents a small percentage of submissions to journals, it threatens the legitimacy of the nearly $30 billion academic publishing industry and the credibility of science as a whole.

The discovery of nearly 900 fraudulent papers in 2022 at IOP Publishing, a physical sciences publisher, was a turning point for the nonprofit. “That really crystallized for us, everybody internally, everybody involved with the business,” said Kim Eggleton, head of peer review and research integrity at the publisher. “This is a real threat.”

Subbaraman, the author of the WSJ article, provides concrete examples of flagrant attempts to circumvent or compromise the legitimate review process.  Although dastardly, some of them are hilarious.  One of the good guys, Guillaume Cabanac, a computer-science researcher who studies scholarly publishing at the Université Toulouse III-Paul Sabatier in France, scans the breadth of the published literature, some 130 million papers, looking for a range of red flags including “tortured phrases.”

Cabanac and his colleagues realized that researchers who wanted to avoid plagiarism detectors had swapped out key scientific terms for synonyms from automatic text generators, leading to comically misfit phrases. “Breast cancer” became “bosom peril”; “fluid dynamics” became “gooey stream”; “artificial intelligence” became “counterfeit consciousness.” The tool is publicly available.

At the center of these unscrupulous enterprises are the “paper mills” —

businesses or individuals that, for a price, will list a scientist as an author of a wholly or partially fabricated paper. The mill then submits the work, generally avoiding the most prestigious journals in favor of publications such as one-off special editions that might not undergo as thorough a review and where they have a better chance of getting bogus work published.

Legitimate scientists and publishers are using AI to spot tell-tale signs of submission fraudulence, but the fraudsters fight back with AI tools of their own to confuse and overwhelm the genuine scientists and honest publishers.

“It’s like a virus mutating,” said Dorothy Bishop, a psychologist at the University of Oxford, one of a multitude of researchers who track fraudulent science and has spotted suspected milled papers.

…[...]

Scientific papers typically include citations that acknowledge work that informed the research, but the suspect papers included lists of irrelevant references. Multiple papers included technical-sounding passages inserted midway through, what Bishop called an “AI gobbledygook sandwich.” Nearly identical contact emails in one cluster of studies were all registered to a university in China where few if any of the authors were based. It appeared that all came from the same source.

What to do?  Instead of always being on the defensive and at the mercy of the culprits, the accredited authorities should go on the offensive and work for the enactment of laws and penalties.  Make these crimes of sham scholarship cost. Selected readings

* Archive for Open Access
* "Beyond the zombies: How we might get out of the science publication disaster" (8/28/17)
* "Bad Science" (10/19/13)

[thanks to Mark Metcalf]

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Language Log
Aspects of Maltese linguistics

[Full disclosure:  the reason I am so consumed by the Arabic vernaculars is because of their own inherent, intrinsic nature, but I must confess that I'm also preoccupied by their comparative parallelism with the Sinitic "topolects".  The workings of both are extremely difficult to comprehend.]

This post is to follow up on VHM's "Arabic and the vernaculars, part 6" (5/12/24) and Mark's "Maltese Arabic: Correction?" (5/13/24), plus J.W. Brewer's excellent first comment to the latter.

Mark ends his post thus:  "…it seems entirely wrong to exclude Maltese from a taxonomy of Arabic 'colloquials' or 'vernaculars' (i.e. Arabic languages), purely on the grounds of its borrowings from Italian."  I would not want to do that.

To provide for a more nuanced evaluation of the position of Maltese vis-à-vis the Arabic vernaculars, below I cite several scholarly accounts of the subject and related issues.  Extensive coverage of the history of the languages on Malta is provided. Britannica

Maltese language, Semitic language of the Southern Central group spoken on the island of Malta. Maltese developed from a dialect of Arabic and is closely related to the western Arabic dialects of Algeria and Tunisia. Strongly influenced by the Sicilian language (spoken in Sicily), Maltese is the only form of Arabic to be written in the Latin alphabet."

That's the bare bones.  As we shall find in the following paragraphs, the complexities of Maltese are far greater than can be told in such a capsule description.
Maltese, ch. 11 of The Cambridge Handbook of Arabic Linguistics

"A Peripheral Dialect in the Historical Dialectology of Arabic"

from Part II – Arabic Variation and Sociolinguistics

by David Wilmsen Maltese is one of the so-called 'peripheral' dialects of Arabic, language varieties that are descended from Arabic but that have for various reasons become isolated from contact with its mainland. Summary David Wilmsen examines Maltese, a peripheral dialect of Arabic. Of those, Maltese stands out as remarkably unusual. Unlike other dialects of Arabic, it is an official language of the state in which its speakers reside, the Republic of Malta, as well as being an official language of the European Union. It boasts a long literary tradition, a language academy, an active press, scholarly journals and societies devoted to it, and an ever-growing digital presence, including a large online, freely accessible corpus encompassing hundreds of millions of words. It is therefore an easily accessible language for linguistic research. The chapter examines Maltese in light of linguistic thinking about so-called enclave dialects, showing that Maltese conforms to the general characteristics of remnant dialect groupings, in that it does borrow from the languages with which it comes into contact, it does undergo independent internal change, and it does retain features of its founder languages. As such, Maltese can be instrumental in demarking the latest date for the emergence of a range of features found variously in mainland dialects of Arabic.

MYL's comment on Arabic "colloquials" vs. Romance languages here:

Contemporary Arabic "colloquials" are approximately as different from one another as the various Romance languages are — having diverged from the original form, sociolinguistically and geographically, at just about the same time as the descendants of Latin did.

Obviously the ideology is radically different — it's as if the official view were that Latin is the only correct language, while French, Spanish, Italian, Romanian, etc. are just the lawless and errorful result of inadequate education.

Sorting out the position of Maltese within the Arabic branch of the Afro-Asiatic language family will profit from a deeper dive into the latter:

Symposia Melitensia (L-Università ta' Malta).[...]

2007, Vol. 4, pp. 1-52

"Between typology and diachrony : some formal parallels in Hebrew and Maltese"

by Alexander Borg Abstract

Hebrew and Maltese are obliquely related members of the Semitic language family. Past comparative research inspired by Bible translation highlighted in atomistic fashion a number of common traits in these two languages. The present research probes aspects of selected phonological, morphological, syntactic, and lexical traits in Biblical and Israeli Hebrew from the comparative perspective of contemporary Maltese. Given the fact that the latter may well retain substratal elements inherited from Phoenician and Punic, the parallels tentatively indicated here, particularly in the lexical domain, may provide the basis for a reconstruction of the earliest diachronic stage of the Maltese word stock. If on the mark, it also seriously calls into question claims advanced in recent historical work on Maltese to the effect that the Arab invasion of the Maltese Islands in the 9th century entailed the complete annihilation of the indigenous population thereby breaking the continuity with the linguistic heritage of pre-Arabic ancient Malta.

Returning from this brief, comparative inquiry into one facet of the deep relationships of Maltese, we now take a broader view of the language.

"Maltese, a Language so Unique in Europe:

Arabic origins, Sicilian and Italian vocabulary and a strong influence of English are the characteristics of an original European language with a long history: Maltese."
by Joseph M. Brincat (University of Malta [L-Università ta’ Malta]), Orient XXI (5/7/22)

Because it affords such a comprehensive, informed account of the engrossing linguistic situation on Malta, I will quote extensively from Professor Joseph / Giuseppe Brincat's article.

Situated in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, Malta and Gozo present an intriguing linguistic picture. Although they are nearer to Sicily (93 km) than to Tunisia (288 km) and Libya (355 km), the Catholic, culturally and genetically European inhabitants still speak a language that is basically a variety of Arabic spoken in the Maghreb and Sicily around the year 1000. Its survival is unique because Sicily, Spain and Pantelleria abandoned Andalusi and Siculo-Arabic, but Malta was spared language shift by the Normans, Swabians, Anjevins, Aragonese and Castilians although it had remained part of Sicily. When Charles V of Spain ceded it to the Knights of St. John in 1530 it became an autonomous state, but the Grand Masters (French, Portuguese or Catalan, with a handful of Italians) did not apply a linguistic policy on the spoken level. They were content to use Latin and Italian as high languages. Besides, education was poor and literacy hovered around 10%, and so the population remained mostly monolingual.

Under Muslim rule (870 – 1091) the population was less than ten thousand inhabitants, but under the Knights of St John it reached 100,000 till 1798. It kept increasing during the British period and now surpasses 500,000. The disproportion between its territory (316 km2) and its population, together with the large number of Sicilian, Italian and English surnames, and a few French and Spanish ones, reveals the importance of immigration in shaping the local language.

I met a Chinese family who happily and successfully spent some years running a business in Malta, using English for their daily needs and transactions, before moving to America, where they are now happily residing and using more Chinese than they did in Malta.

Brincat's article probes the earliest evidence for language usage on Malta and finds that the first inscriptions are in Punic, "the Phoenicians having settled there in the 7th century B.C."  That was succeeded by Greek and Latin.

Then follows an important paragraph on the linguistic history of Malta:

The language spoken today shows no substrate because Arabic was introduced in a sudden manner. Al-Himyari describes a ferocious Muslim raid in 870 (255 [...]

A. H.) and a new settlement in 1048-49 (440 A. H.) composed of Muslims and slaves. Depopulation between the conquest and the settlement is suggested by the lack of both Muslim and Christian cemeteries, and also by the local toponyms which recall the Arabic place-names of Medieval Sicily, especially by the component of raħal or Ħal (Rahal gidit and Rachal saphy in Sicily, Raħal Ġdid and Ħal Safi in Malta). The Maltese language, too, has a marked affinity with the Maghrebin variety that was spoken in Sicily in the Norman age. Roger’s conquest introduced Romance elements in Sicily and Malta, where Arabic customs prevailed from 1091 to 1127 until Roger II reasserted his rule and society took on a European lifestyle.

Another vital section of Brincat's article is titled "From Punic to North African Arabic":

Definitions of the Maltese language differed: the locals saw it as unique and called it lingua maltensi (1436), lingua melitea (1549), whereas foreign travellers heard unfamiliar sounds and called it parlata africana (1536), parlar saracino (1558), “un langage arabe corrompu” (1694). Hieronymus Megiser was intrigued: “Although they are Christians, they make use of a language which is Saracen, Moorish, or Carthaginian or ‘lingua franca’, which is a kind of Arabic and which has its origin in Hebrew”. The scientific classification of the Semitic languages was still distant, but Megiser deserves credit for printing a booklet on Maltese, the Propugnaculum Europae in 1606, listing 121 words in German translation. Jean Quintin (1536) associated the Maltese language with the Punic inscriptions and, although the script had not been deciphered yet, the idea pleased many scholars in Malta and the myth was perpetuated for political, religious, and racial reasons. However, the historian Gian Francesco Abela (1647) had understood the real origins of Maltese, was aware of the Arabic substrate in the Sicilian dialect and knew that a similar language was spoken in Pantelleria. In 1810 Wilhelm Gesenius gave scientific proof that the origins of Maltese lied in a North African dialect of Arabic, but the Punic myth was upheld by some local scholars up to the 20th century.

The standardization of Maltese was a slow process. At first only a few isolated words appeared in notarial deeds and in the minutes of the local government, mostly place-names and domestic objects, but around 1470 Petrus Caxaro wrote a poem of sixteen lines, a cantilena, modelled on Romance genres. It is revered as the earliest text in the Maltese language. Occasional phrases in administrative texts show that Sicilian/Italian words were adapted according to Maltese grammar rules. An example from 1473 in a Sicilian sentence shows the word “isfeduene” which is from sfidare, to defy, with initial i for today’s j, a morpheme in the conjugation of verbs in the present tense, third person singular and plural, with the inflectional ending –w, that indicates the third person plural, jisfidaw (they defy), and the pronominal suffix –na, which means “us”, therefore “they defy us.”

Brincat then moves on to outline the impact of war and religion on the development of Maltese:

A knight from Provence, Thezan, wrote instructions on firing muskets for Maltese-speaking troops, a short grammar and a glossary of 3,000 words in two sections, Maltese-Italian and Italian-Maltese. Thezan faced a dilemma which troubled sixteenth and seventeenth-century writers: the spelling of sounds that are not Latin. Today Maltese has only two such sounds, aspirate h (ħ) and the glottal stop (q), but in those days pronunciation was closer to the Arabic. Thezan added ten Arabic letters to the Latin alphabet, but Gian Pietro Francesco Agius De Soldanis opted for a wholly Latin alphabet in his grammar (1750) and dictionary of 12,000 entries. Later, Michel Antonio Vassalli published his grammar in 1791 and 1827, and a lexicon in 1796 with 18,000 entries, adopting twelve letters from Greek [...]

and Punic but not from Arabic.

In the meantime two important steps were taken in the domain of religion. Ignazio Saverio Mifsud wrote sermons in Italian and in Maltese, and enriched the latter with many Italian words and Latin phrases, attempting a literary style that rose above everyday speech. Even more far-reaching was the translation of the Italian catechism into Maltese by Francesco Uzzino in 1752. This had no literary ambition but for the first time all Maltese boys and girls learned it by heart for their First Holy Communion. Religious terms like fidi, liġi¸ sagramenti, Apostoli, Spiritu Santu, etc. were learnt by constant repetition. As for most domains, both high (administration, culture, law and medicine) and low (carpentry, fishing, building), words denoting religion, churches and their furniture, are largely of Sicilian origin.

Brincat then moves on to examine Napoleonic and English attempts to influence the development of Maltese more toward Francophone and Anglophone usages at the expense of Italian ones, but I won't go into the details of that here.

The final sections of Brincat's article trace the growth of English in the language mix on Malta after it became a British colony in 1813 and the rise of the Maltese language among the population.

Knowledge of Italian and English was limited to educated persons: in 1842 the former was spoken by 11% and the latter by only 5% of the population, but when English became compulsory for employment with the British forces, the Police, the Civil Service, and for emigration, the figure rose to 22.6% in 1931. After the Second World War Malta changed completely. English became fashionable, cinemas showed English and American films, pop songs replaced opera and, most important of all, in 1946 primary education became compulsory, teaching only Maltese and English. The battle against Italian was favourable to the Maltese language because the English had realized that its promotion was indispensable to end the long cultural battle.

Throughout the 19th century Maltese literature grew and found its highest expression in Dun Karm Psaila in the early 20th, while grammars, dictionaries and schoolbooks completed codification. The alphabet was standardized, consisting of Latin letters with a few diacritics: dots distinguished palatal ċ and ġ from velar k and g, voiced s became ż, crossed ħ identified the aspirate, j and w were adopted for the semi-consonants, x was adopted for sh and q for the glottal stop. This followed the principle of one letter for one sound but għ and h, both mute, were retained for etymological reasons. In 1924 cable radio relayed the BBC on one channel and Maltese programmes on the other, and for the first time standard Maltese was heard everywhere by illiterate dialect speakers. A chair of Maltese was set up at the University in 1937 and exams in both official languages were compulsory for jobs in the Civil Service.

How and when did Maltese become an official language on the island of Malta?

Maltese was given official status with English and Italian in 1934. Italian was removed in 1936, but came back in 1957 when Italian television could be viewed from Malta. It assumed a new role now: no longer official, nor limited to culture, it became a passive tool for entertainment and information, kept the highest audience up to the 1990s when local stations got a bigger share, and is still watched by about 20% in prime time. Italian is also the favourite foreign language in the secondary schools. English is the teaching medium of half the subjects in the schools and of all subjects except languages at University. It is also preferred for reading and sending emails and sms, and for ATM banking, but Maltese is spoken by over 90% of the population and boasts two daily newspapers (three in English), three major TV stations, and local radio channels. Production of books and plays is also healthy. In 2003 Maltese became one of the official languages of the European Union.

Where does that leave "pe[...]

ripheral" Arabic, a question that is vital to the debate on the Arabic vernaculars that has been taking place on Language Log for the last few years?  The status of Maltese is crucial for the whole debate, which has significant implications for linguistic taxonomy that go well beyond Arabic and Semitic.

A snapshot of today’s language is revealed by the composition of the lexicon. In Joseph Aquilina’s Maltese-English Dictionary (1987-1990) Arabic words make up 32.4%, Sicilian and Italian 52.5%, English 06.1%. The MED includes archaisms and rare terms among its 41,016 entries, but the Concise version reflects actual usage: its 22,649 entries show more Sicilian and Italian words (61.61%), less Arabic words (22,42%) and a slight increase in English words (8.45%). However, Arabic words comprise grammatical terms and the fundamental vocabulary, and are more frequently used. Together with the rules of grammar (although simplified) they define the language as a variety, albeit “peripheral”, of Arabic. A few examples from the domain of the family will suffice here: members of the inner nucleus have Arabic names: omm, iben, bint, ir-raġel, il-mara, tifel, tifla, (mother, son, daughter, husband, wife, boy, girl), but the word for father is Sicilian, missier. The other members have Sicilian/Italian names: nannu, nanna, ziju, zija, neputi, neputija, kuġin, kuġina, (grandfather, grandmother, uncle, aunt, nephew/grandson, cousin), and the word for family is familja and for relatives qraba. The complementary nature of Arabic and Sicilian/Italian is also seen in the days of the week (Monday to Sunday): it-Tnejn, it-Tlieta, l-Erbgħa, il- Ħamis, il-Ġimgħa, is-Sibt, il-Ħadd; but the months of the year are: Jannar, Frar, Marzu, April, Mejju, Ġunju, Lulju, Awissu, Settembru, Ottubru, Novembru, Diċembru. This stratigraphy marks all the other domains; for example about “bread” we see: ħobż, hobża, qoxra, lbieba, frak, ftira (bread, loaf, crust, crumb, crumbs, low circular shaped bread); bezzun, tal-kexxun, panina, ċabatta, malji (roll, sandwich loaf, flat roll, braided roll); sandwich, toast, baguette.

Informal everyday speech sees a lot of code-switching: firstly, because as most subjects are taught in English their terms are the first words that come to mind; secondly, because young parents prefer to speak English to their babies. At present this is not leading to language shift, because as they grow up children see Maltese as an adult language. Nowadays, the source of innovation is no longer Italian but English: some common words are adapted (kettle > kitla), others are Sicilianized (evaluation > evalwazzjoni), others become false friends (related > relatat, involved > involut), and new formations are created (enforceable > inforzabbli, developers > żviluppaturi, privacy > privatezza, occupancy > okkupanza). This is necessary for the language to keep up with social progress. A tricky problem is how to write unadapted English words, like bicycle and washing-machine (bajsikil? woxing maxin?). It is not easy to decide whether they are irreplaceable or translatable. Otherwise, being recognizably English, they can be attributed to code-switching, in which case they are written in their original spelling.

Brincat's concluding paragraph is profoundly telling:

Understandably, the pressure of English in a bilingual situation like Malta’s is very strong. As the 2011 Census shows, almost all Malta-born citizens know Maltese (99.6%) and English (91.3), many also know Italian (61.3%) and French (21.4%), but few know German (5.1% ) and Arabic (4.3%).

One thing is certain, the Maltese are proud of their language and have done much to study and preserve it, even in the face of overwhelming influence from English.

I am grateful to Mark for prodding me to look deeper into the evolution of Maltese as a language that is indeed "unique" and to examine the island nation of Malta as a[...]

fascinating linguistic laboratory. Afterword Britannica (this article has extensive coverage of all aspects of Malta's land, climate, flora and fauna, people (including ethnic groups and demographic trends), religion, economy, government, education culture, and history) Maltese and English are the official languages of Malta as well as official languages of the EU. Maltese resulted from the fusion of North African Arabic and a Sicilian dialect of Italian. It is the only Semitic language officially written in Latin script. English is a medium of instruction in schools. Italian was the language of church and government until 1934 and is still understood by a sizable portion of the population. The country of Malta became independent from Britain and joined the Commonwealth in 1964 and was declared a republic on December 13, 1974. It was admitted to the European Union (EU) in 2004. Selected readings

* "Maltese Google" (5/18/10)
* "Maltese email ARC" (6/9/21)
* "Mayor Pete's multilingualism" (4/18/19) — his father is from Malta
* "Recommended reading" (6/24/13)
* "Arabic proficiency levels" (6/23/07)
* "THE PROBLEM WITH FUSHA" (6/23/07)
* "Arabic proficiency levels" (6/23/07)

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Word of the Day
Word of the Day: innate

This word has appeared in 107 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence?

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Word of the Day
escritoire

Definition: (noun) A writing table; a desk.
Synonyms: secretaire, writing table, secretary.
Usage: In the large shining mahogany escritoire Mr. Osborne had a drawer especially devoted to his son's affairs and papers.
Discuss

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Language Log
Brown Revisited

A couple of months ago, I told you about a project to recreate the Supreme Court oral arguments associated with Brown v. Board of Education ("Spontaneous SCOTUS", 3/2/2024):

Years ago, Jerry Goldman (then at Northwestern) created the oyez.org website as

a multimedia archive devoted to making the Supreme Court of the United States accessible to everyone. It is the most complete and authoritative source for all of the Court’s audio since the installation of a recording system in October 1955. Oyez offers transcript-synchronized and searchable audio, plain-English case summaries, illustrated decision information, and full-text Supreme Court opinions

He rescued decades of tapes and transcripts from the National Archives, digitized and improved them, and arranged the website's interactive presentations of the available recordings. Jiahong Yuan and I played a role, by devising and validating a program to identify which justice was speaking when (See "Speaker Identification on the Scotus Corpus", 2008).

More recently, Jerry has inspired an effort to recreate oral arguments from famous cases that took place before the recording system was installed, starting with Brown v. Board of Education. Rejecting the idea of producing "deep fakes" using the existing transcripts and extant recordings of the justices involved, he and his colleagues decided to create what we might call "shallow fakes", where actors will perform (selections from) the transcripts, and a voice morphing system will then be used to make their recordings sound like the target speakers. The recreated clips will be embedded in explanatory material.

All the scripts have been written, and in a few months, you'll be able to hear the results — which I expect will be terrific.

And here it is, at https://brown.oyez.org!
There's also a YouTube video "How We Recreated the Brown v. Board of Education Oral Arguments":
A few earlier posts where the overall oyez.org project came up:

"Fun with co-voting percentages", 12/1/2006
"Stress in Supreme Court oral arguments", 6/17/2008
"Mining a year of speech", 1/19/2010
"Big Data in the humanities and social sciences", 5/31/2012
"NPR: oyez.org finishes Supreme Court oral arguments project", 4/25/2013
"Hearing interactions", 2/28/2018
"Vocalizations of wolves and justices", 2/17/2023

FWIW, I was on the advisory committee for the Brown Revisited project:

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/BrownAdvisoryCommittee.png

➖ @EngSkills ➖