32.3915, Media: Twas the Night Before Christmas (Linguists' Edition!) + other seasonal fun

Tue Dec 14 06:48:16 UTC 2021

LINGUIST List: Vol-32-3915. Tue Dec 14 2021. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 32.3915, Media: Twas the Night Before Christmas (Linguists' Edition!) + other seasonal fun

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Date: Tue, 14 Dec 2021 01:46:51
From: Dave Sayers [dave.sayers at cantab.net]
Subject: Twas the Night Before Christmas (Linguists' Edition!) + other seasonal fun

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

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