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June 29th, 2025 08:08 am - 2025 Manly Wade Wellman Award Shortlist

Posted by Mike Glyer

The shortlist for the 2025 Manly Wade Wellman Award for North Carolina Science Fiction and Fantasy revealed June 27 by the North Carolina Speculative Fiction Foundation. The 12 titles are: The winner(s) will be announced at ConGregate 11 on Friday, July 11, 2025 in Winston-Salem, NC as … Continue reading

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June 29th, 2025 06:24 am - Medley

Posted by Greg Ross

By Louis Phillips, a poem that reads the same upside down:

 MOM
SWIMS
 WOW

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June 29th, 2025 01:44 am - Pixel Scroll 6/28/25 The Ineluctable Modality Of The Pixels

Posted by Mike Glyer

(1) 2027 WORLDCON SITE SELECTION. Site Selection voting for the 2027 Worldcon is now open. Voting closes August 15. Montréal in 2027 is the only bid on the ballot. “2027 Worldcon Site Selection Voting Opens”. (2) CONCURRENT SEATTLE NEWS. Mia Tsai’s … Continue reading

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June 28th, 2025 10:23 pm - Masochism: a bad rap from inception

Posted by Victor Mair

Long ago (half a century), I had occasion to translate the word "masochism" into Chinese.  At that stage, I wasn't even sure what "masochism" itself meant.  Supposedly it was "the madness of deriving pleasure from pain", I guessed especially sexual pleasure — something like that.

Wanting to give the most accurate possible translation into Chinese, I thought I should begin by investigating the etymology of the word, as is my bent.  So I pulled out my trusty 1960 Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary, my lexical vade mecum.  Here's what it had (has — I still keep it on my desk):

[After L. von Sacher-Masoch (1835-1895), Austrian novelist, who described it.]  Med. Abnormal sexual passion characterized by pleasure in being abused by one's associate; hence any pleasure in being abused or dominated.

My recollection is that, at the time, I couldn't readily find an English-Chinese dictionary that had the term "masochism" in it, so I may have made up this rendering for it myself, although I'm not absolutely certain that I did so:

zìnüèdài kuáng 自虐待狂 ("madness of self abuse") (129 ghits)

Be that as it may, there's no doubt that the most common translation of "masochism" in Chinese today is this:

shòunüèkuáng 受虐狂 ("madness of enduring / accepting / receiving abuse") (13,700.000 ghits)

It seems that nobody attempted to render "masochism" in such a way that it would reflect the fact that it derived from a person's surname.

Now, more than half a century later, wanting to see the latest understanding of the term, I looked it up in two current etymological reference works.

Wiktionary:

From German Masochismus, coined alongside Sadismus in 1886 by Richard von Krafft-Ebing in his book Psychopathia Sexualis. Named after Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, whose novel "Venus in Furs" explores a sadomasochistic relationship, +‎ -ism.

In more detail, Etymonline:

"sexual pleasure in being hurt or abused," 1892, from German Masochismus, coined 1883 by German neurologist Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1840-1902), from name of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (1836-1895), Austrian utopian socialist novelist who enshrined his submissive sexuality in "Venus in Furs" (1869, German title "Venus im Pelz").

Sacher-Masoch's parents merged their name when they married; his maternal grandfather Dr. Franz Masoch (1763-1845) was born in Moldova Nouă in what is now Romania. The surname might be toponymic from a village that is now in northern Italy; or it might be a Germanized form of a Czech surname that amounts to a double-diminutive of given names with a prominent Ma- or -maš element (Tomaš, Mattej, etc.)

I wondered what Leopold von Sacher-Masoch himself thought of having this embarrassing disorder named after him.  As mentioned above,

The term masochism was coined in 1886 by the Austrian psychiatrist Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing (1840–1902) in his book Psychopathia Sexualis:

…I feel justified in calling this sexual anomaly "Masochism", because the author Sacher-Masoch frequently made this perversion, which up to his time was quite unknown to the scientific world as such, the substratum of his writings. I followed thereby the scientific formation of the term "Daltonism", from Dalton, the discoverer of colour-blindness.
During recent years facts have been advanced which prove that Sacher-Masoch was not only the poet of Masochism, but that he himself was afflicted with the anomaly. Although these proofs were communicated to me without restriction, I refrain from giving them to the public. I refute the accusation that "I have coupled the name of a revered author with a perversion of the sexual instinct", which has been made against me by some admirers of the author and by some critics of my book. As a man, Sacher-Masoch cannot lose anything in the estimation of his cultured fellow-beings simply because he was afflicted with an anomaly of his sexual feelings. As an author, he suffered severe injury so far as the influence and intrinsic merit of his work is concerned, for so long and whenever he eliminated his perversion from his literary efforts he was a gifted writer, and as such would have achieved real greatness had he been actuated by normally sexual feelings. In this respect he is a remarkable example of the powerful influence exercised by the vita sexualis be it in the good or evil sense over the formation and direction of man's mind.

Sacher-Masoch was not pleased with Krafft-Ebing's assertions. Nevertheless, details of Masoch's private life were obscure until Aurora von Rümelin's memoirs, Meine Lebensbeichte (My Life Confession; 1906), were published in Berlin under the pseudonym Wanda v. Dunajew (the name of a leading character in his Venus in Furs). The following year, a French translation, Confession de ma vie (1907) by "Wanda von Sacher-Masoch", was printed in Paris by Mercure de France. An English translation of the French edition was published as The Confessions of Wanda von Sacher-Masoch (1991) by RE/Search Publications.

(Wikipedia)

Suppose your name was Plarich and somebody coined the term Plarichism as "deriving pleasure from eating insects" because you actually ate some bugs.  Wouldn't you be upset at having insect-eating named after you?  Wouldn't it be better / more scientific to call it entomophagy?  Mutatis mutandis, ditto for some Latinate version of "the madness of deriving sexual pleasure from pain", rather than "masochism".

I will not attempt to sort out the similarities and differences with sadism, with which masochism is often linked, thus sadomasochism, except to say that, although it looks as though it might have a more conventional etymology ("sad"), sadism too is named after an individual, the French libertine Marquis de Sade (1740–1814).

From French sadisme and German Sadismus. Named after the Marquis de Sade, famed for his libertine writings depicting the pleasure of inflicting pain to others. The word for "sadism" (sadisme) was coined or acknowledged in the 1834 posthumous reprint of French lexicographer Boiste's Dictionnaire universel de la langue française; it is reused along with "sadist" (sadique) in 1862 by French critic Sainte-Beuve in his commentary of Flaubert's novel Salammbô; it is reused (possibly independently) in 1886 by Austrian psychiatrist Krafft-Ebing in Psychopathia Sexualis which popularized it; it is directly reused in 1905 by Freud in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality which definitively established the word.

(Wiktionary)

Incidentally, here's a bit of trivia that may interest some Language Log readers:  "Sacher-Masoch is the great-great-uncle, through her Austrian-born mother Eva von Sacher-Masoch, Baroness Erisso, of the late English Rock star and film actress Marianne Faithfull. She passed away in January of 2025".  (source)

 

Selected readings

 


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June 28th, 2025 10:46 pm - 2027 Worldcon Site Selection Voting Opens

Posted by Mike Glyer

The Seattle Worldcon committee opened Site Selection voting for the 2027 Worldcon today. Montréal in 2027 is the only bid on the ballot. Voting closes August 15. Vote electronically, by mail, or in person at the convention. To vote you … Continue reading

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June 28th, 2025 04:00 pm - [June 28, 1970] Welcome to Blood Island (Four Filipino Fright Films)

Posted by Victoria Silverwolf

by Victoria Silverwolf Hands Across the Pacific For about a decade, a company called Hemisphere Pictures has released movies that are Filipino/American co-productions.  Filmed on location in the Philippines, these are often war stories or adventure films.  In order to get folks like me into theaters, they also make horror movies. A quartet of these … Continue reading [June 28, 1970] Welcome to Blood Island (Four Filipino Fright Films)

The post [June 28, 1970] Welcome to Blood Island (Four Filipino Fright Films) appeared first on Galactic Journey.


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June 28th, 2025 01:48 pm - Barkley — So Glad You (Didn’t) Ask #100, A Column of Unsolicited Opinions

Posted by Mike Glyer

Testify, Live From Chicago: Civil Trial #20251103225 By Chris M. Barkley. (Author’s Note: In this, one of the rare instances where I am the focus of the story, I am going to only report what I saw, heard or did, … Continue reading

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June 28th, 2025 06:11 am - “The Sniffle”

Posted by Greg Ross

In spite of her sniffle
Isabel’s chiffle.
Some girls with a sniffle
Would be weepy and tiffle;
They would look awful,
Like a rained-on waffle,
But Isabel’s chiffle
In spite of her sniffle.
Her nose is more red
With a cold in her head,
But then, to be sure,
Her eyes are bluer.
Some girls with a snuffle,
Their tempers are uffle.
But when Isabel’s snivelly
She’s snivelly civilly,
And when she’s snuffly
She’s perfectly luffly.

— Ogden Nash


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June 28th, 2025 12:53 am - Pixel Scroll 6/27/25 Han Scrollo Filed His Pixel First

Posted by Mike Glyer

(1) EXEMPLARY WORLDBUILDING. Martha Wells recommends ten “Sci-Fi and Fantasy Books That Will Transport You to Other Worlds” in the New York Times. Link bypasses the paywall. World building is my favorite part of science fiction and fantasy. Whether I’m … Continue reading

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June 27th, 2025 06:15 pm - Quick Thinking

Posted by Greg Ross

During lunch one day at Los Alamos, Richard Feynman told his colleagues, “I can work out in sixty seconds the answer to any problem that anybody can state in ten seconds, to 10 percent!”

He had completed several challenges when mathematician Paul Olum walked past.

‘Hey, Paul!’ they call out. ‘Feynman’s terrific! We give him a problem that can be stated in ten seconds, and in a minute he gets the answer to 10 percent. Why don’t you give him one?’

Without hardly stopping, he says, ‘The tangent of 10 to the 100th.’

“I was sunk: you have to divide by pi to 100 decimal places! It was hopeless. … He was a very smart fellow.”

(From Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!, 1985.)


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June 27th, 2025 04:00 pm - [June 27, 1970] Deeper than Amber, more mindless than a Worm… (June Galactoscope: The Third)

Posted by Amber Dubin

And yet our June Galactoscope continues!  We have a work by a brand new novelist (though the author is no longer new to the SFnal scene), an exciting novel by a vanguard of the New Wave, and the return of two familiar but still fresh writers.  Science fiction truly is a young man's game this … Continue reading [June 27, 1970] Deeper than Amber, more mindless than a Worm… (June Galactoscope: The Third)

The post [June 27, 1970] Deeper than Amber, more mindless than a Worm… (June Galactoscope: The Third) appeared first on Galactic Journey.


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June 27th, 2025 11:24 am - Computational phylogeny of Indo-European

Posted by Victor Mair

Alexei S. Kassian and George Starostin, "Do 'language trees with sampled ancestors' really support a 'hybrid model' for the origin of Indo-European? Thoughts on the most recent attempt at yet another IE phylogeny".  Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 12, no. 682 (May 16, 2025).

Abstract

In this paper, we present a brief critical analysis of the data, methodology, and results of the most recent publication on the computational phylogeny of the Indo-European family (Heggarty et al. 2023), comparing them to previous efforts in this area carried out by (roughly) the same team of scholars (informally designated as the “New Zealand school”), as well as concurrent research by scholars belonging to the “Moscow school” of historical linguistics. We show that the general quality of the lexical data used as the basis for classification has significantly improved from earlier studies, reflecting a more careful curation process on the part of qualified historical linguists involved in the project; however, there remain serious issues when it comes to marking cognation between different characters, such as failure (in many cases) to distinguish between true cognacy and areal diffusion and the inability to take into account the influence of the so-called derivational drift (independent morphological formations from the same root in languages belonging to different branches). Considering that both the topological features of the resulting consensus tree and the established datings contradict historical evidence in several major aspects, these shortcomings may partially be responsible for the results. Our principal conclusion is that the correlation between the number of included languages and the size of the list may simply be insufficient for a guaranteed robust topology; either the list should be drastically expanded (not a realistic option for various practical reasons) or the number of compared taxa be reduced, possibly by means of using intermediate reconstructions for ancestral stages instead of multiple languages (the principle advocated by the Moscow school).

Discussion and conclusions

In the previous sections, we have to tried to identify several factors that might have been responsible for the dubious topological and chronological results of Heggarty et al. 2023 experiment, not likely to be accepted by the majority of “mainstream” Indo-European linguists. Unfortunately, it is hard to give a definite answer without extensive tests, since, in many respects, the machine-processed Bayesian analysis remains a “black box”. We did, however, conclude at least that this time around, errors in input data are not a key shortcoming of the study (as was highly likely for such previous IE classifications as published by Gray and Atkinson, 2003; Bouckaert et al. 2012), although failure to identify a certain number of non-transparent areal borrowings and/or to distinguish between innovations shared through common ancestry and those arising independently of one another across different lineages (linguistic homoplasy) may have contributed to the skewed topography.

One additional hypothesis is that the number of characters (170 Swadesh concepts) is simply too low for the given number of taxa (161 lects). From the combinatorial and statistical point of view, it is a trivial consideration that more taxa require more characters for robust classification (see Rama and Wichmann, 2018 for attempts at estimation of optimal dataset size for reliable classification of language taxa). Previous IE classifications by Gray, Atkinson et al. involved fewer taxa and more characters (see Table 1 for the comparison).

Table 1 suggests that the approach maintained and expanded upon in Heggarty et al. 2023 project can actually be a dead-end in classifying large and diversified language families. In general, the more languages are involved in the procedure, the more characters (Swadesh concepts) are required to make the classification sufficiently robust. Such a task, in turn, requires a huge number of man-hours for wordlist compilation and is inevitably accompanied by various errors, partly due to poor lexicographic sources for some languages, and partly due to the human factor. Likewise, expanding the list of concepts would lead us to less and less stable concepts with vague semantic definitions.

Instead of such an “expansionist” approach, a “reductionist” perspective, such as the one adopted by Kassian, Zhivlov et al. (2021), may be preferable, which places more emphasis on preliminary elimination of the noise factor rather than its increase by manually producing intermediate ancestral state reconstructions (produced by means of a transparent and relatively objective procedure). Unfortunately, use of linguistic reconstructions as characters for modern phylogenetic classifications still seems to be frowned upon by many, if not most, scholars involved in such research — in our opinion, an unwarranted bias that hinders progress in this area.

Overall one could say that Heggarty et al. (2023) at the same time represents an important step forward (in its clearly improved attitude to selection and curation of input data) and, unfortunately, a surprising step back in that the resulting IE tree, in many respects, is even less plausible and less likely to find acceptance in mainstream historical linguistics than the trees previously published by Gray & Atkinson (2003) and by Bouckaert et al. (2012). Consequently, the paper enhances the already serious risk of discrediting the very idea of the usefulness of formal mathematical methods for the genealogical classification of languages; it is highly likely, for instance, that a “classically trained” historical linguist, knowledgeable in both the diachronic aspects of Indo-European languages and such adjacent disciplines as general history and archaeology, but not particularly well versed in computational methods of classification, will walk away from the paper in question with the overall impression that even the best possible linguistic data may yield radically different results depending on all sorts of “tampering” with the complex parameters of the selected methods — and that the authors have intentionally chosen that particular set of parameters which better suits their already existing pre-conceptions of the history and chronology of the spread of Indo-European languages. While we are not necessarily implying that this criticism is true, it at least seems obvious that in a situation of conflict between “classic” and “computational” models of historical linguistics, assuming that the results of the latter automatically override those of the former would be a pseudo-scientific approach; instead, such conflicts should be analyzed and resolved with much more diligence and much deeper analysis than the one presented in Heggarty et al. 2023 study.

Despite all the energetic discussions of our previous attempts, it appears that the question of IE phylogeny has not yet been put to bed.

 

Selected readings

[Thanks to Ted McClure]


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June 29th, 2025 10:33 am - NHC Atlantic Tropical Weather Discussion
665
AXNT20 KNHC 291032
TWDAT

Tropical Weather Discussion
NWS National Hurricane Center Miami FL
1215 UTC Sun Jun 29 2025

Tropical Weather Discussion for North America, Central America
Gulf of America, Caribbean Sea, northern sections of South
America, and Atlantic Ocean to the African coast from the
Equator to 31N. The following information is based on satellite
imagery, weather observations, radar and meteorological analysis.

Based on 0600 UTC surface analysis and satellite imagery through
0930 UTC.

...SPECIAL FEATURES...

Tropical Depression Two is centered near 19.9N 95.9W at 29/0900
UTC or 40 nm NNE of Veracruz Mexico, moving WNW at 8 kt. The
depression is forecast to turn a bit more NW today and reach the
coast of eastern Mexico by tonight. Estimated minimum central
pressure is 1010 mb. Maximum sustained wind speed is 30 kt with
gusts to 40 kt. Slight additional strengthening is possible before
the system moves inland, but it should quickly dissipate over the
rugged terrain of Mexico Mon. Numerous moderate to isolated strong
convection is noted within 90 nm of the center. Seas have
increased to 8 to 10 ft and will likely build further through
today. Heavy rainfall over the Mexican states of Veracruz, San
Luis Potosi, and Tamaulipas may lead to life-threatening flooding
and mudslides, especially in areas of steep terrain.

Please read the latest HIGH SEAS and OFFSHORE WATERS FORECASTS
issued by the National Hurricane Center at website -
https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/text/MIAHSFAT2.shtml and
https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/marine/offshores.php for more details
For the latest TD Two NHC Forecast/Advisory and Public Advisory,
please visit www.hurricanes.gov for more details.

...TROPICAL WAVES...

A new tropical wave has emerged off the coast of Africa this
morning and has an axis positioned along 18W, extending southward
from 18N. It is moving W at 10 kt. Scattered moderate convection
is noted from 09N to 14N between 17W and 22W.

An east Atlantic tropical wave axis is along 30W from 18W
southward, moving W at 10 kt. No significant convection is
associated with this wave at this time.

A central Atlantic tropical wave axis is noted along 54W from 14N
southward, moving west at around 15 kt. Scattered modeate
convection is present ahead of the wave from 09N to 12N between
54W and 60W.

A well-definited tropical wave in the eastern Caribbean has an
aixs along 66W extending from Puerto Rico to central Venezuela. It
is moving W at 10 to 15 kt. Scattered moderate convection is noted
across the SE Caribbean in association with this wave, mainly S of
15N and E of 70W.

...MONSOON TROUGH/ITCZ...

The monsoon trough extends from the coast of Senegal SW to 08N30W.
The ITCZ continues from 08N30W to 06N49W. Scattered moderate
convection is observed up to 100 nm along either side of the ITCZ
between 30W and 42W.

...GULF OF AMERICA...

Please read the SPECIAL FEATURES section for information on
Tropical Depression Two in the Bay of Campeche.

A surface trough north of T.D. Two is generating scattered
moderate convection from 21N to 27N W of 91W. The surface trough
that had been inducing some convection on waters near the Florida
coast has moved inland, with associated convection over land. A
1021 mb high pressure is centered in the NE Gulf. Away from T.D.
Two, moderate to fresh SE winds and seas of 3 to 5 ft dominate the
western Gulf. For the eastern basin, mainly gentle SE winds and
seas of less than 3 ft prevail, along some moderate E winds and
seas to 4 ft are impacting the Florida Straits and adjacent Gulf
waters.

For the forecast, aside from T.D. Two, a surface ridge will
dominate the northern Gulf waters through early week.

...CARIBBEAN SEA...

A 1022 mb Bermuda High continues to promote a trade-wind regime
across much of the Caribbean Sea. Refer to the Tropical Waves
section information on convection in the SE basin. Fresh to
locally strong E winds and seas of 6 to 8 ft are evident at the
south- central basin. Fresh E winds with 5 to 7 ft seas dominate
the Gulf of Honduras. Moderate to fresh winds and seas of 4 to 6
ft dominate the remainder of the basin, except for the NW, where
seas are 2 to 4 ft.

For the forecast, the pressure gradient between the Bermuda High and
lower pressure in the SW Caribbean associated with the E Pacific
monsoon trough will support fresh to strong trades across most
of the central and SW Caribbean into mid-week. Winds will pulse
to near- gale force off Colombia and in the Gulf of Venezuela,
with rough seas. Fresh to locally strong winds over the Gulf of
Honduras will continue into tonight.

...ATLANTIC OCEAN...

Convection in association with and upper-level low centered just E
of the Bahamas has diminished overnight. The remaining convection
in the basin is associated with tropical waves and the ITCZ and is
described in the named sections above. A subtropical ridge axis
extends across the northern waters, leading to light to gentle
winds and seas less than 4 ft for waters N of 25N. To the south,
moderate to locally fresh trades and seas of 5 to 7 ft dominate.
The highest trades and seas are closest to the Lesser Antilles.

For the forecast west of 55W, the Bermuda High and associated
ridge will prevail across the region through late week. Moderate
to fresh E to SE winds and moderate seas will prevail S of 25N.
Fresh to locally strong E winds will pulse from late afternoons
into the overnights N of Hispaniola through the period. Gentle to
moderate winds and slight to moderate seas are expected elsewhere.


$$
Konarik

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June 27th, 2025 08:10 am - 2025 Manning Award Nominees

Posted by Mike Glyer

San Diego Comic-Con International has announced the 2025 nominees for the Russ Manning Promising Newcomer Award. The Manning Award is presented to a comics artist who, early in his or her career, shows a superior knowledge and ability in the art … Continue reading

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futilitycloset_feed
June 27th, 2025 06:17 am - A Medieval Mystery

Posted by Greg Ross

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Adoration_of_the_Christ_Child_Follower_of_Jan_Joest_of_Kalkar.jpg

In this 1515 painting, The Adoration of the Christ Child, the angel immediately to Mary’s left appears to bear the characteristic facial features of Down syndrome (click to enlarge). This would make the painting one of the earliest representations of the syndrome in Western art.

Unfortunately, little is known about it. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, which owns it, has identified the painter only as a “follower of Jan Joest of Kalkar.” Researchers Andrew Levitas and Cheryl Reid have suggested that the painting may indicate that individuals with Down syndrome were not regarded as disabled in medieval society. But so little is known about the work or its creator that it’s hard to establish a reliable conclusion.

“After all the speculations, we are left with a haunting late-medieval image of a person with apparent Down syndrome with all the accouterments of divinity. It is impossible to know whether any disability had been recognized or whether it simply was not relevant in that time and place.”

(Andrew S. Levitas and Cheryl S. Reid, “An Angel With Down Syndrome in a Sixteenth Century Flemish Nativity Painting,” American Journal of Medical Genetics Part A 116:4 [2003], 399-405.) (Thanks, Serge.)


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June 27th, 2025 01:13 am - Pixel Scroll 6/26/25 The Scroll Has Been Left Open Too Long And The Pixel Has Gone Flat

Posted by Mike Glyer

(1) MAKING AMENDS. James Davis Nicoll leads us to “Five SFF Stories About Making Amends” at Reactor. We’ve all been there. We’ve said an unnecessarily unkind word, spurned a plea for help, inadvertently transformed the entire human race into shambling … Continue reading

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futilitycloset_feed
June 26th, 2025 06:41 pm - The Studious Bather

Posted by Greg Ross

A puzzle from Chris Maslanka’s The Pyrgic Puzzler, 1987:

A bathtub will fill in 3 minutes if the plug is in and the cold tap only is turned on full. It will fill in 4 minutes if the plug is in and the hot tap only is turned on full. With the plug out and both taps off, a full tub will drain in 2 minutes. How long will it take to fill the empty tub if the plug is out and both taps are turned on full?

Click for Answer</>

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June 26th, 2025 06:26 pm - mini-AIR: Country Singer Subglottal Glimpse, and more

Posted by Marc Abrahams

The June issue of mini-AIR just went out. It includes a glimpse at this study: “Estimated Subglottal Pressure in Six Professional Country Singers,” Thomas F. Cleveland, R.E. (Ed) Stone, Jr., Johan Sundberg, and Jenny Iwarsson, Journal of Voice, vol. 11, no. 4, 1997, pp. 403-9. What is mini-AIR? mini-AIR is our monthly wee, free email […]

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languagelog_feed
June 26th, 2025 05:39 pm - Animal calls are not comparable to human speech

Posted by Victor Mair

But can they still tell us something useful about language?  Here are two new papers that address that question:

I.

"What the Hidden Rhythms of Orangutan Calls Can Tell Us about Language – New Research." De Gregorio, Chiara. The Conversation, May 27, 2025.

In the dense forests of Indonesia, you can hear strange and haunting sounds. At first, these calls may seem like a random collection of noises – but my rhythmic analyses reveal a different story.

Those noises are the calls of Sumatran orangutans (Pongo abelii), used to warn others about the presence of predators. Orangutans belong to our animal family – we’re both great apes. That means we share a common ancestor – a species that lived millions of years ago, from which we both evolved.

Like us, orangutans have hands that can grasp, they use tools and can learn new things. We share about 97% of our DNA with orangutans, which means many parts of our bodies and brains work in similar ways.

That’s why studying orangutans can also help us understand more about how humans evolved, especially when it comes to things like communication, intelligence and the roots of language and rhythm.

Research on orangutan communication conducted by evolutionary psychologist Adriano Lameira and colleagues in 2024 focused on a different species of orangutan, the wild Bornean orangutan (Pongo pygmaeus wurmbii). They looked at a type of vocalisation made only by males, known as the long call, and found that long calls are organised into two levels of rhythmic hierarchy.

This was a groundbreaking discovery, showing that orangutan rhythms are structured in a recursive way. Human language is deeply recursive.

Recursion is when something is built from smaller parts that follow the same pattern. For example, in language, a sentence can contain another sentence inside it. In music, a rhythm can be made of smaller rhythms nested within each other. It’s a way of organising information in layers, where the same structure repeats at different levels.

Has wonderful videos.  The orangutans sound like they're saying something.  Listen.

Discussing "Third-Order Self-Embedded Vocal Motifs in Wild Orangutans, and the Selective Evolution of Recursion." De Gregorio, Chiara et al. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences (May 16, 2.

Abstract

Recursion, the neuro-computational operation of nesting a signal or pattern within itself, lies at the structural basis of language. Classically considered absent in the vocal repertoires of nonhuman animals, whether recursion evolved step-by-step or saltationally in humans is among the most fervent debates in cognitive science since Chomsky's seminal work on syntax in the 1950s. The recent discovery of self-embedded vocal motifs in wild (nonhuman) great apes—Bornean male orangutans’ long calls—lends initial but important support to the notion that recursion, or at least temporal recursion, is not uniquely human among hominids and that its evolution was based on shared ancestry. Building on these findings, we test four necessary predictions for a gradual evolutionary scenario in wild Sumatran female orangutans’ alarm calls, the longest known combinations of consonant-like and vowel-like calls among great apes (excepting humans). From the data, we propose third-order self-embedded isochrony: three hierarchical levels of nested isochronous combinatoric units, with each level exhibiting unique variation dynamics and information content relative to context. Our findings confirm that recursive operations underpin great ape call combinatorics, operations that likely evolved gradually in the human lineage as vocal sequences became longer and more intricate.

II.

"Animals Can't Talk like Humans Do – Here's Why the Hunt for Their Languages Has Left Us Empty-Handed." Jon-And, Anna et al. The Conversation, June 9, 2025.

Why do humans have language and other animals apparently don’t? It’s one of the most enduring questions in the study of mind and communication. Across all cultures, humans use richly expressive languages built on complex structures, which let us talk about the past, the future, imaginary worlds, moral dilemmas and mathematical truths. No other species does this.

Yet we are fascinated by the idea that animals might be more similar to us than it seems. We delight in the possibility that dolphins tell stories or that apes can ponder the future. We are social and thinking creatures, and we love to see our reflection in others. That deep desire may have influenced the study of animal cognition.

Over the past two decades, studies of thinking and language in animals, especially those highlighting similarities with human abilities, have flourished in academia and attracted extensive media coverage. A wave of recent studies reflects a growing momentum.

Two recent papers, both in top-tier journals, focus on our closest relatives: chimpanzees and bonobos. They claim these apes combine vocalisations in ways that suggest a capacity for compositionality, a key feature of human language.

In simple terms, compositionality is the capacity to combine words and phrases into complex expressions, where the overall meaning derives from the meanings of the parts and their order. It is what allows a finite set of words to generate an infinite range of meanings. The idea that great apes might do something similar has been presented as a potential breakthrough, hinting that the roots of language may lie deeper in our evolutionary past than we thought.

But there is a catch: combining elements is not enough. A fundamental aspect of compositionality in human language is that it is productive. We do not just reuse a fixed set of combinations; we generate new ones, effortlessly. A child who learns the word “wug” can instantly say “wugs” without having heard it before, applying rules to unfamiliar elements.

That flexible creativity gives language its vast expressive power. Yet while animal calls can be combined, nobody has observed animals doing this to create new meanings in an open-ended productive manner. They don’t scale into the layered meanings that human language achieves. In short: there are no wugs in the wild.

Significant progress in the conceptualization of what is humanlike about animal calls:  recursion, compositionality.

 

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June 26th, 2025 04:00 pm - [June 26, 1970] Hard Hats & Flower Power Collide

Posted by Gwyn Conaway

by Gwyn Conaway “Flowers are better than bullets.” This has been said upon occasion, especially over the last decade, but in bygone eras as well. War-weary Americans and English poets alike have waxed poetic over the familiar adage. These days, however, the sentiment is laced with gunpowder. Jan Rose Kasmir put flowers in guns pointed … Continue reading [June 26, 1970] Hard Hats & Flower Power Collide

The post [June 26, 1970] Hard Hats & Flower Power Collide appeared first on Galactic Journey.


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