Languagehat

languagehat writes, over at metafilter:

Yeah, this is complete bullshit. Actual linguists weigh in in this LH thread [ http://www.languagehat.com/archives/004994.php ];

Marie-Lucie Tarpent writes:

The article announces "Eurasiatic" (a hypothetical supergroup originally suggested by Joseph Greenberg of "Amerind" notoriety) as a major discovery by scientists (not linguists) but seems somewhat confused as to its relation with PIE. It also quotes a few words which the authors interpret as culturally too important to have been lost or replaced, so that they have lasted 15,000 years (one of these words is "bark" (of a tree) for which the authors propose an explanation). Like Renfrew and the Proto-World people, the authors do not seem to differentiate between the survival of a lexical item (although made unrecognizable through millennia of phonological changes) and the survival of the sounds that compose it (which are independent of the meaning of the whole word) (eg Renfrew et al thought that words for 'nephew' had endured almost unchanged for hundreds of years because of the importance of this concept, but actually this longevity is due to the fact that the consonants in the word had been more resistant to change than others, as shown by the behaviour of those consonants in other words totally unrelated semantically to 'nephew'). In any case, the article does not cite any actual forms, only meanings. Read it at your own risk.

And Piotr Gąsiorowski says:

This is exactly the…

78.000, pretty good for a second language; the test's maximum appears to be 85.000.

The alternatives to choose between appear to be LLM-generated, you can see a few patterns ("now" and "forever" appear a lot).

Years ago, I used to play a similar game that you could keep playing and where you levelled up when you had enough words correct in a row, or down for a single mistake. A fun thing about it was that at very high levels, it got easier for me because they mixed in some old English words which were essentially the same as in Dutch, my native language. There was a charity aspect to it as well, I think it was https://freerice.com/ , but they seem to have simplified the game now.

The university of Ghent (Belgium) also used to have an interesting test which rated your proficiency according to average scores at certain education levels. There I got 41.000 (IIRC), which was rated as average for a university-level native English speaker. An update at the bottom of https://languagehat.com/ghent-vocabulary-test/ discusses where that test went and has a few alternatives.

> Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s new translation of 52 Chekhov stories

Oh no, oh no, oh no. Their “method” absolutely disagrees with any author with a tight writing style, and Chekhov's tired narration with a tiny drop of irony is tight.

https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/the-pevearsion-of-russian-literature/

http://www.thinkaloud.ru/feature/berdy-lan-PandV-e.html

https://www.librarything.com/topic/260074

https://readingroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/10/29/the-art-of-translation/#comment-206

http://languagehat.com/the-translation-wars/

http://languagehat.com/more-translation-wars/

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/06/23/socks-translating-anna-karenina/

http://languagehat.com/janet-malcolm-vs-pv/

https://kaggsysbookishramblings.wordpress.com/2013/06/01/why-i-dont-read-pevear-and-volokhonsky-vtranslations/

https://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2013/01/the-pevearvolokhonsky-hype-machine-and-how-it-could-have-been-stopped-or-at-least-slowed-down/

just for the heck of it: I stuck "best anagram in English" into Bing ChatGPT and it agreed with that blog.

Bing answer:

There are many anagrams in English. One of the best anagrams in English is "cinematographer" and "megachiropteran" which means a giant bat. It is 15 letters long, and the only letters that stay together are the E and the R².

Source: Conversation with Bing, 5/4/2023
(1) The Best Anagram in English. : languagehat.com. https://languagehat.com/the-best-anagram-in-english/.
(2) Anagram Solver - Find all Available Words - Word Finder. https://word.tips/anagram-solver/.
(3) The 50 best-ever anagrams? - Anagram Genius. https://www.anagramgenius.com/gem1.html.
(4) The Universe of Discourse : I found the best anagram in English. https://blog.plover.com/lang/anagram-scoring.html?ref=upstract.com.
(5) Complete List of Anagrams : Anagram - English for Students. http://www.english-for-students.com/Complete-List-of-Anagrams.html.

In his introduction to the book, The Best of Cordwainer Smith, J J Pierce recounts a story about Linebarger:

"While in Korea, Linebarger masterminded the surrender of thousands of Chinese troops who considered it shameful to give up their arms. He drafted leaflets explaining how the soldiers could surrender by shouting the Chinese words for ‘love’, ‘duty’, ‘humanity’ and ‘virtue’ – words that happened, when pronounced in that order, to sound like “I surrender” in English. He considered this act the single most worthwhile thing he had done in his life."

Further analysis here: https://languagehat.com/chinese-endangered/