Language AI on overdrive 🖥️, accent controversy in LOTR 💍, new word "galdem" 📘
Welcome to English in Progress!
English in Progress is a newsletter that compiles and summarizes new writings and new discoveries concerning the English language. Linguistics, sociolinguistics, etymology, phonology, lexicography, pragmatics, world Englishes and more, from the Anglosphere and beyond.
Aimed at English-language professionals, but still written in plain English, so you don’t actually have to know what those previous words mean. (But if you do, it will still be interesting for you, promise!)
My first newsletter (sounds like a kids’ toy!)
This very first newsletter is heavy on Artificial Intelligence news. Why? Because there is so much of it, and it is so important to just about everybody. Especially those who make their money writing or translating.
But if you are not into technology, don’t despair! Scroll on to find news about new English words that have entered the dictionaries in the past few weeks, and some fun stuff about Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones and more.
Artificial Intelligence
There have been so many new developments on language-related AI recently it can be hard to keep up.
AI image generators - will prompt writers take over from illustrators?
Of all the new AI out there, AI image generators have been most dominant in the media. There are a ton of generators out there to play with, and the resulting images can be quite astounding. If you want to try it out yourself, Midjourney is a good one if you have a Discord account (you get 25 free goes), but Craiyon is probably the most easy-to-use for people like the readers of this newsletter who love language more than they love technology. You have to sit through quite a few advertisements, and the quality isn’t the best, but it is fun and informative to try this out yourself. (New image generators are popping up like mushrooms, so there might already be another easy-to-use one like Craiyon out ther..)
But Heddwen, this newsletter is about English, not illustration! Ah, but you see, this AI development arguably takes illustration away from illustrators, and gives it to writers. The creativity no longer comes down to image creation, it comes down to prompt writing. Write a good prompt, get a good image. Write a crappy prompt, get a crappy image. (Although, in a development that kind of makes my brain bleed out of my ears a little bit, there is now also an AI that can automatically generate prompts for the image AI. Ouch.)
An AI breakthrough in Automatic Speech Recognition
Then on to automatic speech recognition (ASR). In my little bubble of translators, people have been using Dragon for more than two decades. They talk to their computer, and it types out the words; handy if you have an injury that prevents you from typing (or if you just don’t like doing it).
But now we have ASR that uses machine learning to get iteratively better at typing what it hears. It is called Whisper, it’s open source, and the jury is still out about how much better it is than the ASR systems we already had. Here’s a cool YouTube video that dives in really deep.
Robots that write
A slightly older development, but perhaps the most important one when it comes to language: AI writers. These robots write texts, and write them surprisingly well. There’s at least 46 of them out there already, and again, I suggest you give a few of them a try. Copy.ai is a good one to start with; it lets you generate 2000 words per month for free, and is said to be one of the better ones that you can use for free.
Chatbots are also getting better
Perhaps unsurprisin, considering robots are getting so good at writing: chatbots are also getting better, with character.ai being the latest hot trend. This chatbot pretends to be a celebrity, and does so pretty convincingly, apparently. It is at least better than the ads-in-your-face-everywhere Replika, which was pretty unconvincing when I tried it out.
Movies & TV
Ruckus over accents in Lord of the Rings
There’s been a lot of discussion on the use of accents in Lord of the Rings: the Rings of Power. The lofty Elves and Numenorians speak with an accent based on upper-class English (Received Pronunciation), the besieged Southlanders have a northern-English accent, the free-spirited Harfoots (proto-hobbits) sound Irish and the proud dwarves sound Scottish. All of this has put quite a few people’s backs up. This Guardian article gives an excellent summary of all the controversy so far.
Interest in Game of Thrones conlang
And if I’m featuring Lord of the Rings, of course I have to give some linguistic content for that other blockbuster series of this autumn: Game of Thrones, House of the Dragon. For this series, the media is not focused on accents, but on High Valyrian, the fictional language spoken by the upper classes, especially the Targaryans. Originally consisting of only a few words, it has since been developed into a fully-fledged constructed language (or a conlang, for those in the know), and has even been added to language-learning app DuoLingo.
But this newsletter is about English, not Valyrian! Luckily Collins Dictionary has written a piece on the English of the series, walking us through some of the medieval-sounding terminology used in the series, like “kingsguard”, “fielty” and “lickspittle”.
Movie about Native Americans can be watched in their own language
Another media story that is not about English, per se, but still interesting and important: the movie Prey, part of the Predator franchise, is set 300 years ago and follows a Native American tribe as they try to fight off a murderous alien monster. Though filmed in English, the entire movie can be watched in Comanche, the language of the tribe in question. The film is out on Hulu in the US and Disney+ in many other countries.
New words
OED adds “galdem”, “mandem” and “damfino”
The OED (Oxford English Dictionary), the behemoth of dictionaries, has done its quarterly update this September and has added more than 650 words. Among them “galdem” (a group of women, as in “Where my galdem at?”; the male version of this word is “mandem”), cornetto (an Italian pastry filled with cream), and “damfino” (damned if I know).
Cambridge notes “stealth help”, “sibling novel” and “romantasy”
Cambridge does not give an update on words added, instead writing an article once a week on new words they have noticed. In September, they wrote about “stealth help” (a story that is “self help” without the reader noticing), “sibling novel” (a novel with the same characters as another, but not part of a series) and “romantasy” (part romance, part fantasy).
Merriam-Webster adds “dumbphone”, “laggy” and “yeet”
US-oriented dictionary Merriam-Webster adds “dumbphone” (mobile phone that is not a smartphone), “greenwash” (make something appear more environmentally friendly than it really is), “laggy” (as in a laggy video call), “yeet” (to throw with force), “adorkable” (dorky and adorable), “oat milk” (oat milk) and many more for 2022, after their last update in October 2021.
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