It was an honour to speak with Uyghur language activist Abduweli Ayup on an episode. From 37:36.
becauselanguage.com/101-talkin-c...
I have been working on societal impacts of language technology since late 2016, and my nightmare example since pretty early on has been using automatic transcription in emergency services systems.
And today I learn it's happening *in my own city*
www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news...
Short 🧵>>
15 June is Uyghur Language Day
www.uyghurcongress.org/en/26131/
It's a good day to remember that governments are carrying out language oppression
and a lot of brave people are working to maintain their language under unbelievable conditions.
aɪ laɪk tu ɔ̃t
ɔ̃t
ɔ̃t
ɔ̃pəlz æn bənɔ̃nɔ̃z
And I don't like pompous dipshits, but we are both going to have to get used to disappointment, Lou.
Like, I was going to say the racism.
But people saying "like" a few times?
That's what got him to write an entire article?
Redundancy is a great strategy in language because repeating some information allows the hearer to recover the meaning if it was lost (say, in a noisy environment). Having to repeat information is what’s inefficient — not redundancy.
Also, it allows words to amplify meaning, as with intensifiers.
Serious response:
Imprecision is a great strategy in language because being able to choose a general word saves the speaker some processing time and offloads some of the work onto the hearer, who has likely already predicted what the speaker will say. Allows a good balance of speaker/hearer effort.
My god, what a stupid article though.
The tagline:
"Junk speak, like junk food, encourages verbal littering. It has to be one of the worst things about life in Britain"
Think about life in Britain, and then realise that someone wrote that down as one of the worst things. Land's sake.