LINGUIST List 32.3915
Tue Dec 14 2021
Media: Twas the Night Before Christmas (Linguists' Edition!) + other seasonal fun
Editor for this issue: Everett Green <everettlinguistlist.org>
Date: 10-Dec-2021
From: Dave Sayers <dave.sayers
cantab.net>
Subject: Twas the Night Before Christmas (Linguists' Edition!) + other seasonal fun
E-mail this message to a friend Hello and /jəʊhəʊhəʊ/! Here we are again, ready to hang up our mortar boards with our stockings, and enjoy a well-earned period of grading, reading, preparing, writing, and maybe some eating, drinking and being merry.
And of course, there’s also my Christmas poem! In case you’re tired of it by now, I’ve gathered up – as I do every year – some new amusing seasonal bells and baubles related to linguistics!
Last year, I ended with a rendition of Mariah Carey’s Christmas classic, where the lyrics had been fed through multiple layers of Google Translate:
https://youtu.be/qG9XiLRHdvg. This especially tickled people’s festive funny bones. So I decided to continue in a similar techy vein now, not least because I’ve also since been working hard forecasting future language technology (ahem,
https://doi.org/10.17011/jyx/reports/20210518/1).
First, some old-fashioned tech: Jingle Bells played by 13 floppy drives and a hard drive!
https://youtu.be/fV0pEZUBE68?t=16. Or a C64 plucking out the same tune:
https://youtu.be/p9JClx--cbU?t=100 Then there’s the ‘UkuRobot’ (
https://techcrunch.com/?p=1683455) twanging out George Michael’s Last Christmas:
https://youtu.be/RfMz728_g-4 And check out these assembly bots jamming out Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer!
https://youtu.be/uJked_BD4GA?t=54 So far, lots of fun, but let’s get on to the linguistic connection, with everyone’s favourite buzzword: Artificial Intelligence! Especially language bots. You may know these for writing newspaper articles, even whole books:
https://medium.com/the-research-nest/interesting-novels-written-by-artificial-intelligence-d407e330fe07. But they have also created seasonal songs! Here’s a fascinating collaboration of a super-intelligent bot and a talented but significantly more mortal professional human musician:
https://youtu.be/Lobod7UOqgs. The video is long but worth it! If you want to skip the creative process for the final song, go to
https://youtu.be/Lobod7UOqgs?t=1028. All together now, ‘Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer, the holy deity, on Christmas Day he had a baby!’ The first AI-generated Christmas song is transgender inclusive, yay!
And this tech is constantly improving, by churning over huge databases of music and lyrics, picking up patterns, and transforming those into new songs. As the musician in that video said, watch out for AI-generated pop songs soon!
All this is a little window into the fact that our robot overlords will soon not only make songs but also speak to us on increasingly complex topics, while also cleverly augmenting our language via wearable tech, integrated with our own squishy input devices (eyes, ears, hands). For more on this exciting and daunting future, and its implications for all us linguists, I shamelessly re-plug the report I co-wrote (with a few dozen co-authors) this year. Hey, it’s free!
https://doi.org/10.17011/jyx/reports/20210518/1 Ok, enough. It's poem time. Here we go folks, with the first three stanzas...
"Twas the night before Christmas in the ivory tower,
Not a creature was stirring at the midnight hour,
Twas a problem for linguists who live to hear sounds,
Consonants, vowels (open or round).
We linguists were nestled all snug in our beds,
While visions of fricatives danced in our heads.
Snug in our gowns and our four-cornered caps,
We pondered enigmas like bilabial taps.
When out on the lawn there arose such a clatter.
I sprang from the bed hoping for research matter.
Away to the window I flew like a flash,
Hoping my equipment would record and not crash..."
The poem continues here:
https://academia.edu/9856733. Enjoy!
Festively yours,
Dave
--
Dr Dave Sayers
Senior Lecturer, Dept Language & Communication, U. Jyväskylä, Finland
Chair, 'Language in the Human-Machine Era' |
www.lithme.eu Founder/Moderator, TeachLing |
www.jiscmail.ac.uk/teachling https://jyu.academia.edu/DaveSayers Linguistic Field(s): Discipline of Linguistics
Page Updated: 14-Dec-2021