Unsolicited Advice

Here's something cute, following along the language talk the other day. See if you can read this: Hint: The plaintext is in English. You don't need to know Chinese to read it, but knowing something about how Chinese works might help. Priming not required, although depending on how flexible your recognition vocabulary is, it might be faster to guess some chunks from context rather than reading them explicitly.

I have realized in the past few years that I am not really kidding when I talk about having a 'magic language sense'. There is something about the time-worn repetition about true language that catches my attention when I see it, even if it's not a language I speak, or it's disguised as something else. There is a limit; blocks of Enigma text don't trip it, for instance, although intellectually I've inhaled enough about cryptography to recognize that's what it (probably) is. The format typically used by numbers stations says to me that there is a message there, although since it's probably an arbitrary correspondence code I have no idea what it says, or that it's not all padding and gibberish. A big tip off that I'm actually noticing something , even if I don't precisely know what it is, is that the language sense works better when I have context, and generally best when I have large amounts of text to look at. Perhaps an equally big clue i...

In compensation for yesterday's rant, have this example of why I really hope Sebastian Stan is in something (other than Captain America  movies) that doesn't hoover like a nuclear-powered shop vac: Aside from being a very pretty man, he is also very good at his job. And apparently an accent sponge. Let's be real for a moment here. He was born in communist Romania ; odds that English is his proper first language are, shall we say, low. It may not have been his second, either. "Moved to Austria when he was eight," given the time frame, sounds functionally equivalent to, "mother hauled them both out of the post-revolutionary chaos as fast as was practical," and would have dumped him into a teutophone country. At best, he might have grown up bilingual English-Romanian in an environment with, at the time, virtually no native speakers of English, and the ones he could find were overwhelmingly likely to be not American . I've no idea of the penetrati...

I don't know if you've ever run into it, but there's a thing on YouTube called the "accent tag". It's a list of vocabulary words and questions that you're supposed to answer on camera in whatever your native accent is, basically to show people on other parts of the planet how you talk. Most of them are pretty ordinary, but occasionally you get a fantastic mashup. This young lady here popped up when I was searching for "transatlantic accent". She has not actually got one -- it's a specific regionless accent, popular among actors and some of the American upper classes prior to and during WWII -- but she dubbed hers this, as she picked it up accompanying her father on a lot of ocean crossings as a kid. The word list is really just a collection of shibboleths, and it's very heavily biased towards American regional accents. "Wash" turns into "warsh" in Missouri; "caramel", "New Orleans", "may...