wakest ⁂
wakest ⁂ boosted the activity
Stefan Bohacek
activity timestamp 5 days ago
"In Mandarin Chinese, World Wide Web is commonly translated via a phono-semantic matching to wàn wéi wǎng (万维网), which satisfies www and literally means "10,000-dimensional net", a translation that reflects the design concept and proliferation of the World Wide Web."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web

via https://mastodon.social/@mcc/114605076806447333

#internet#TheWeb#WorldWideWeb #chinese #language #linguistics
Stefan Bohacek
activity timestamp 5 days ago
"In Mandarin Chinese, World Wide Web is commonly translated via a phono-semantic matching to wàn wéi wǎng (万维网), which satisfies www and literally means "10,000-dimensional net", a translation that reflects the design concept and proliferation of the World Wide Web."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web

via https://mastodon.social/@mcc/114605076806447333

#internet#TheWeb#WorldWideWeb #chinese #language #linguistics
Stefan Bohacek
activity timestamp 5 days ago
Reminds me of the localization efforts on Mozilla's Firefox OS several years ago.

"Ibrahima Sarr, a Senegalese coder, led the translation of Firefox into Fulah, which is spoken by 20m people from Senegal to Nigeria. “Crash” became hookii (a cow falling over but not dying); “timeout” became a honaama (your fish has got away). “Aspect ratio” became jeendondiral, a rebuke from elders when a fishing net is wrongly woven."

https://archive.is/2025.01.09-014218/https://www.economist.com/international/2014/09/27/cookies-caches-and-cows

#technology #language #linguistics #translation #localization

Ulrike Hahn
Ulrike Hahn boosted the activity
Aurelie Herbelot (she/her)
activity timestamp last week
I was on semi-holiday this week, which means I had more time to ruminate, which means that I have got unusually p***ed off about things that I am anyway p***ed off about.

Today's topic: we linguists have messed up. Big time.

And the result of our messing up is that Big Tech is currently redefining #language. /1
Aurelie Herbelot (she/her)
activity timestamp last week
So now we are in the world of Large Language Models (note the 'Language' in there) and surprise, very few people are able to tell whether the machine is, in fact, generating language. Very few people even think to ask the question.

And it would be difficult to blame anybody because no one was ever told that language is a natural phenomenon with definitions, models and a whole scientific field behind it. /6
Aurelie Herbelot (she/her)
activity timestamp last week
Our collective lack of knowledge about #language is allowing Big Tech to redefine it the way they want. /7