Posted by Victor Mair

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=70094&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=cattle-raiding-in-medieval-ireland-and-elsewhere

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Cattle raids were often depicted in Irish mythology, such as the famous Táin Bó Cúailnge (The Cattle Raid of Cooley).

Cattle raiding is the act of stealing live cattle, often several or many at once. In Australia, such stealing is often referred to as duffing, and the perpetrator as a duffer.  In other areas, especially in Queensland, the practice is known as poddy-dodging with the perpetrator known as a poddy-dodger. In North America, especially in the Wild West cowboy culture, cattle theft is dubbed rustling, while an individual who engages in it is a rustler.

(Wikipedia)

TIL cattle thievery still goes on in a big way in Pakistan, where it is sometimes referred to as "lifting".  See here. I wonder if its roots go back to pre-Islamic (i.e., Indo-Iranian) times.

Oh, I forgot to draw attention to the video narrator's pronunciation of "cattle".  Mea culpa.

Selected readings

• J. P. Mallory, In Search of the Irish Dreamtime : Archaeology & Early Irish Literature (London:  Thames & Hudson, 2016) — Ulster Cycle; Táin Bó Cúailnge (Cattle Raid of Cooley)
• Bruce Lincoln, "The Indo-European Cattle-Raiding Myth", History of Religions, Vol. 16, No. 1 (Aug., 1976), pp. 42-65
  
• "The cattle-keeping Bai of Yunnan" (1/18/22)
• "Indo-European 'cow' and Old Sinitic reconstructions: awesome" (1/16/20)
• "Galactic glimmers: of milk and Old Sinitic reconstructions" (1/8/19)
• "Know your Narts: cattle rearing and cattle raiding" (6/6/20)
• "Cattle raid, spray, whatever" (12/21/13) — be sure to read all the comments
• "Translating the I ching (Book of Changes)" (10/11/17)

[Thanks to Sunny Jhutti]

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Posted by Victor Mair

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Complaint upheld against Belgian ticket inspector who said ‘bonjour’ in Flanders
Ilyass Alba also said ‘goeiedag’ on train in Dutch-speaking region but he breached country’s strict language rules
Jennifer Rankin in Brussels, The Guardian (16 Jul 2025)

Go figure!  The train was in Flanders and nearing Brussels, which is officially bilingual.

I asked AIO whether Ilyass Alba is a Flemish name.  It answered:

• • Ilyass is a masculine given name with Arabic, Turkish, and Persian origins derived from the Arabic name Elias, which refers to the prophet Elijah.
  • Alba is a surname that can be Spanish, Italian, Romanian, or Scottish Gaelic in origin. While Alba can be a surname of Belgian origin, the surname is not among the top 10 most common surnames in the Flemish Region of Belgium.
    

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Posted by Victor Mair

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The Weird Way Language Affects Our Sense of Time and Space
The languages we speak can have a surprising impact on the way we think about the world and even how we move through it.
Matt Warren and Miriam Frankel
This post originally appeared on BBC Future and was published November 4, 2022. This article is republished here (getpocket, Solo) with permission.

When I first scanned this article, I thought it was so lackluster, especially on contentious waters that we had successfully navigated just a few weeks ago (see "Selected readings"), I decided not to write about it on Language Log.  However, several colleagues called the article to my attention and said that it raised interesting questions, so I have gone ahead and posted on it despite my reservations.

Cognitive scientist Lera Boroditsky, one of the pioneers of research into how language manipulates our thoughts, has shown that English speakers typically view time as a horizontal line. They might move meetings forward or push deadlines back. They also tend to view time as travelling from left to right, most likely in line with how you are reading the text on this page or the way the English language is written.

This relationship to the direction text is written and time appears to apply in other languages too. Hebrew speakers, for example, who read and write from right to left, picture time as following the same path as their text. If you asked a Hebrew speaker to place photos on a timeline, they would most likely start from the right with the oldest images and then locate more recent ones to the left. 

Mandarin speakers, meanwhile, often envision time as a vertical line, where up represents the past and down the future. For example, they use the word xia ("down") when talking about future events, so that "next week" literally becomes "down week". As with English and Hebrew, this is also in line with how Mandarin traditionally was written and read – with lines running vertically, from the top of the page to the bottom.

So much for monolinguals.

Things start to get really strange, however, when looking at what happens in the minds of people who speak more than one language fluently. "With bilinguals, you are literally looking at two different languages in the same mind," explains Panos Athanasopoulos, a linguist at Lancaster University in the UK. "This means that you can establish a causal role of language on cognition, if you find that the same individual changes their behaviour when the language context changes."

Bilingual Mandarin and English speakers living in Singapore also showed a preference for left to right mental time mapping over right to left mental mapping. But amazingly, this group was also quicker to react to future oriented pictures if the future button was located below the past button – in line with Mandarin. Indeed, this also suggests that bilinguals may have two different views of time's direction – particularly if they learn both languages from an early age. 

One of the most discussed Whorfian topics on Language Log has to do with grammar and economics.

In 2013, Keith Chen, a behavioural economist at the University of California, Los Angeles, set out to test whether people who speak languages that are "futureless" might feel closer to the future than those who speak other languages. For example, German, Chinese, Japanese, Dutch and the Scandinavian languages have no linguistic barrier between the present and the future, while "futured languages", such as English, French, Italian, Spanish and Greek, encourage speakers to view the future as something separate from the present.

He discovered that speakers of futureless languages were more likely to engage in future-focused activities. They were 31% more likely to have put money into savings in any given year and had accumulated 39% more wealth by retirement. They were also 24% less likely to smoke, 29% more likely to be physically active, and 13% less likely to be medically obese. This result held even when controlling for factors such as socioeconomic status and religion. In fact, OECD countries (the group of industrialised nations) with futureless languages save on average 5% more of their GDP per year.

This correlation may sound like a fluke, with complex historical and political reasons perhaps being the real drivers. But Chen has since investigated whether variables such as culture or how languages are related could be influencing the results. When he accounted for these factors, the correlation was weaker – but nevertheless held in most cases. "The hypothesis still seems surprisingly robust to me," argues Chen. 

Despite all of their enthusiastic debates over whether some languages can make us wealthy and healthy and other languages make us poor and perilous, linguists are still arguing over whether the language we speak can leave us successful in business and robust (!) in life.  I wonder, though, whether the question has been properly phrased, and what Benjamin Lee Whorf himself would say of the economic claims that are being made on his behalf.

Selected readings

• "Sapir-Whorf redux" (5/15/25)
• "Linguistic relativity: snow and horses" (4/15/25)
• "Keith Chen, Whorfian economist" (2/9/12)
• "Keith Chen animated" (9/7/2013)
• "Cultural diffusion and the Whorfian hypothesis" (2/12/12)
• "Whorfian Economics" (2/21/12) — guest post by Keith Chen
• "Thought experiments on language and thought" (2/22/12)
• "Keith Chen at TED" (2/20/13)
• "How Your Language Affects Your Wealth and Health:  An international study suggests languages shape how we think about the future, and how we plan for it", by Ozgun Atasoy, Scientific American (March 19, 2013)
• "Why speaking English can make you poor when you retire", Tim Bowler, BBC News (2/23/13)

[Thanks to Mark Metcalf and Richard Warmington]

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Posted by Mark Liberman

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In a comment on "Alignment", Sniffnoy wrote:

At least as far as I'm aware, the application of "alignment" to AI comes from Eliezer Yudkowsky or at least someone in his circles. He used to speak of "friendly AI" and "unfriendly AI". However, the meaning of these terms was fairly different from the plain meaning, which confused people. So at some point he switched to talking about "aligned" or "unaligned" AI.

This is certainly true — see e.g. Yudkowsky's 2016 essay "The AI alignment problem: why it is hard, and where to start".

However, an (almost?) exactly parallel usage was established in the sociological literature, more than half a century earlier, as discussed in Randall Stokes and John Hewitt, "Aligning actions" (1976):

A substantial body of literature has been developed within the symbolic interactionist tradition that focuses upon various tactics, ploys, methods, procedures and techniques found in social interaction under those circumstances where some feature of a situation is problematic. Mills' (1940) concept of motive talk, Scott and Lyman's (1968) discussion of accounts, Hewitt and Hall's (1973) and Hall and Hewitt's (1970) quasi-theorists, and Hewitt and Stokes' (1975) disclaimers are among the contributions to this literature. In addition, some of Goffman's work (1959; 1967; 1971) addresses itself to a similar set of issues, and McHugh's (1968) analysis of the concept of the definition of the situation is pertinent to the question of how people deal with problematic occurrences.

We refer to these phenomena collectively as aligning actions. Largely verbal efforts to restore or assure meaningful interaction in the face of problematic situations of one kind or another, activities such as disclaiming, requesting and giving accounts, constructing quasi-theoretical explanations of problematic situations, offering apologies, formulating the definition of a situation, and talking about motives illustrate a dual process of alignment. First, such activities are crucial to the process in which people create and sustain joint action by aligning individual lines of conduct when obstacles arise in its path. Second, and of particular import for the present analysis, aligning actions can be shown to play a major part in sustaining a relationship between culture and conduct, in maintaining an alignment between the two in the face of actions that depart from cultural expectations or definitions of what is situationally appropriate.

More from later in the paper:

Much, though not all, that is problematic in everyday life can be conceived in terms of a metaphor of alignment, a term that has a double meaning in the present analysis. First, alignment is a central metaphor in the interactionist analysis of conduct formation. Social interaction is con- ceived as a process in which people orient their conduct toward one another and toward a common set of objects. In this mutual orientation of conduct, an effort is made by participants to align their indi- vidual acts, one to another, in the creation of joint or social acts. 

[…]

The second meaning of alignment — and in the present essay the more crucial one  — revolves around the fact that problematic situations often involve misalignment between the actual or intended acts of participants and cultural ideals, expectations, beliefs, knowledge, and the like. "Alignment" in this sense has to do with perceived discrepancies between what is actually taking place in a given situation and what is thought to be typical, normatively expected, probable, desirable or, in other respects, more in accord with what is culturally normal.

That second sense is exactly what is now meant by alignment in the "AI alignment" discussion, or so it seems to me.

Yudkowsky's 2016 essay doesn't cite the sociological usage, and there's no bibliography to check — according to footnote 1 , "This document is a complete transcript of a talk that Eliezer Yudkowsky gave at Stanford University for the 26th Annual Symbolic Systems Distinguished Speaker series". I don't find a reference in a quick scan of his other publications  either, so presumably he perceived the term as just a normal part of the language of intellectual discourse.

Also unclear to me is the connection between the sociologists' alignment and the D&D version.

But anyhow, as the earlier post noted, "alignment, like journey, is an old word that has been finding new meanings and broader uses over the past few decades".

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Posted by Mark Liberman

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In a comment on "Alignment", Bob Ladd wrote:

I was also curious about "track" in the announcement quoted in the OP. I don't think I've ever been to a conference where you can focus on a specific "track". Is this a tech thing? An AI thing? Or have I just not been paying attention?

The portion of the AAAI-26 page in question [emphasis added]:

AAAI-26 is pleased to announce a special track focused on AI Alignment.

Similar language can be found in the pages for AAAI-25:

AAAI-25 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and a range of other activities to be announced.

And the same sentence in the page for  AAAI-24:

AAAI-24 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and a range of other activities to be announced.

A similar usage can be found in the announcements for "Special Sessions" at Interspeech 2024 and Interspeech 2025:

Inaugurated for Interspeech 2024, the BLUE SKY track will again be open for submission this year. The Technical Program Chairs would like to encourage authors to consider submitting to this track of highly innovative papers with strong theoretical or conceptual justification in fields or directions that have not yet been explored. Large-scale experimental evaluation will not be required for papers in this track. Incremental work will not be accepted. If you are an 'out-of-the-box' thinker, who gets inspiration from high-risk, strange, unusual or unexpected ideas/directions that go purposefully against the mainstream topics and established research paradigms — please consider submitting a paper on this challenging and competitive track! Who knows you might launch the next scientific revolution in the speech field? Please note that to achieve the objectives of this BLUE SKY track, we will ask the most experienced reviewers (mainly our ISCA Fellow members) to assess the proposals.

Like may similar conferences, IEEE ICASSP 2025 has an "Industry Track". Here's a similar list from ACL 2025.

And back in 2013, the IEEE published a page on "Conference tracks" in the "2013 7th IEEE International Conference on Digital Ecosystems and Technologies (DEST)", which lists tracks A ("foundations of digital ecosystems and complex environment engineering") through K ("Big data ecosystems").

So without further delving, we can conclude that "track" has been widely used for a while to mean a set of conference presentations that are temporally and spatially diffuse, but topically coherent. This is  useful for participants finding their way through multiple parallel sessions, and (at least sometimes) it also plays a role in the refereeing of submission.

The cultural orbit of this usage is not clear to me — I don't see it in materials for LSA or MLA meetings, but it's certainly common in conferences like AAAI, Interspeech, IEEE, ACL, and so on. Before thinking about Bob's question, it never occurred to me that it was not a natural and universal usage.

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Posted by Mark Liberman

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In today's email there was a message from AAAI 2026 that included a "Call for the Special Track on AI Alignment""

AAAI-26 is pleased to announce a special track focused on AI Alignment. This track recognizes that as we begin to build more and more capable AI systems, it becomes crucial to ensure that the goals and actions of such systems are aligned with human values. To accomplish this, we need to understand the risks of these systems and research methods to mitigate these risks. The track covers many different aspects of AI Alignment, including but not limited to the following topics:

This reminded me of my participation a few months ago in the advisory committee for "ARIA: Aligning Research to Impact Autism", which was one of the four initiatives of the "Coalition for Aligning Science".

Alignment, like journey, is an old word that has been finding new meanings and broader uses over the past few decades. I suspect a role for Dungeons & Dragons, which has been impacting broader culture in many ways since the 1970s:

In the Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) fantasy role-playing game, alignment is a categorization of the ethical and moral perspective of player characters, non-player characters, and creatures.

Most versions of the game feature a system in which players make two choices for characters. One is the character's views on "law" versus "chaos", the other on "good" versus "evil". The two axes, along with "neutral" in the middle, allow for nine alignments in combination. […]

The original version of D&D (1974) allowed players to choose among three alignments when creating a character: lawful, implying honor and respect for society's rules; chaotic, implying rebelliousness and individualism; and neutral, seeking a balance between the extremes.

In 1976, Gary Gygax published an article title "The Meaning of Law and Chaos in Dungeons and Dragons and Their Relationships to Good and Evil" in The Strategic Review Volume 2, issue 1, that introduced a second axis of good, implying altruism and respect for life, versus evil, implying selfishness and no respect for life. The 1977 release of the Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set incorporated this model. As with the law-versus-chaos axis, a neutral position exists between the extremes. Characters and creatures could be lawful and evil at the same time (such as a tyrant), or chaotic but good (such as Robin Hood).

For some metaphorical extensions, see "Alignment charts and other low-dimensional visualizations", 1/7/2020.

A quick scan of Google Research results shows a steady increase in references including the word alignment, though 2014 or so. (I've included counts for the word results to check for general corpus-size increases).

  YEARS   ALIGNMENT RESULTS  RATIO
1970-1974   19000   200000   10.53
1975-1979   31700   350000   11.04
1980-1984   56900   355000    6.24 
1985-1989  119999   305000    2.54 
1990-1994  207000   362000    1.75 
1995-1999  363000   546000    1.50
2000-2004  644000   799000    1.24 
2005-2009 1080000   856000    0.79 
2010-2014 1220000   760000    0.62 
2015-2019 1200000  1260000    1.05 
2020-2024  967000  1800000    1.86

And a graphical version:

It would be interesting to track the evolution, across the decades in various cultural areas, of meaning and sentiment for alignment and aligning.

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Posted by Victor Mair

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• "Context Shift, Word Drift: The Meaning Transference of the Word Prèet in Thai Society." Kumhaeng, Korrakot et al. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 12, no. 1 (July 8, 2025): 1050. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-025-05454-y.

This research investigates the semantic change and conceptual metaphor of the Thai word prèet (/เปรต/), which originates from the Pali-Sanskrit term meaning “departed.” The primary objective is to explore how the term’s meaning has shifted in contemporary Thai society, where it is now used pejoratively to criticize behaviors such as excessive greed, gluttony, immorality, and social deviance. Data for this study are drawn from both historical texts, particularly the Traibhumi Phra Ruang (a prominent Thai Buddhist text from the 14th-century Sukhothai period), and modern Thai linguistic usage. The analysis employs conceptual metaphor theory, focusing on metaphors like SOCIAL DEVIANCE IS MONSTROSITY, MORAL FAILURE IS DEGRADATION, GREED IS HUNGER, and SPIRITUAL LIMINALITY IS MONSTROSITY. to understand how these shifts reflect changing cultural and societal values. Additionally, Impoliteness Theory is applied to examine how prèet functions as a linguistic tool for social critique. Findings show that the semantic evolution of prèet reveals an intricate relationship between language, culture, and metaphor, as it transitions from a religious concept to a vehicle for social commentary. The implications of this study highlight the dynamic nature of language in reflecting societal shifts.

• "When Dialects Collide: How Socioeconomic Mixing Affects Language Use." Louf, Thomas et al. EPJ Data Science 14, no. 1 (July 10, 2025): 47. https://epjdatascience.springeropen.com/articles/10.1140/epjds/s13688-025-00563-9.

The socioeconomic background of people and how they use standard forms of language are not independent, as demonstrated in various sociolinguistic studies. However, the extent to which these correlations may be influenced by the mixing of people from different socioeconomic classes remains relatively unexplored from a quantitative perspective. In this work we leverage geotagged tweets and transferable computational methods to map deviations from standard English across eight UK metropolitan areas. We combine these data with high-resolution income maps to assign a proxy socioeconomic indicator to home-located users. Strikingly, we find a consistent pattern suggesting that the more different socioeconomic classes mix, the less interdependent the frequency of their departures from standard grammar and their income become. Further, we propose an agent-based model of linguistic variety adoption that sheds light on the mechanisms that produce the observations seen in the data.

• "Re-Examining Second Language Acquisition of English Reflexives: New Evidence for Lexical Learning Driven Process and against First Language Transfer." Zeng, Li et al. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 12, no. 1 (July 9, 2025): 1063. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-025-05466-8.

This study re-examines second language (L2) acquisition of English reflexives by testing 98 first language (L1)-Chinese learners of L2 English with different proficiency levels and 12 native English speakers as controls. Using a truth-value judgment task, we systematically tapped the learners’ judgments of various types of antecedents including long-distance objects. The results show that L2 English learners’ errors in referring English reflexives to long-distance antecedents cannot be due to L1 transfer of Chinese reflexive referential pattern. Instead, these errors align with those documented in the literature on native English children’s acquisition of reflexives. Moreover, as L1-Chinese learners’ English proficiency improved, most of them unlearned the errors, and performed similarly to native English adult controls. This developmental trajectory recapitulates the pattern seen in native English children’s acquisition of reflexives. These findings cast doubt on the view of L1 Chinese transfer and provide support for the Lexical Learning Hypothesis.

• "Metaphor Interpretation in Jordanian Arabic, Emirati Arabic and Classical Arabic: Artificial Intelligence vs. Humans." Zibin, Aseel et al. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 12, no. 1 (July 1, 2025): 942. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-025-05282-0.

This study examines how well humans, both Jordanians and Emiratis, and four AI tools—ChatGPT-4, ChatGPT-3.5, Google Gemini, and Ask PDF—can understand metaphors in Classical Arabic (CA) and its everyday forms in Jordanian Arabic (JA) and Emirati Arabic (EA). We tested fifty participants from Jordan and the UAE on their grasp of various colloquial and CA metaphorical expressions. Two distinct tests were employed, each comprising 40 items. Test 1 was administered to Jordanian participants and included 20 metaphorical expressions in Jordanian Arabic and 20 metaphorical expressions in Classical Arabic. Similarly, Test 2 was administered to Emirati participants and contained 20 expressions in Emirati Arabic and 20 expressions in Classical Arabic. The Mann–Whitney U test was employed to evaluate differences in accuracy and interpretation between AI tools and human participants from both regions in the contexts of colloquial and Classical Arabic. The results showed that participants from Jordan had a better understanding than the AI tools, likely due to their strong cultural background. In contrast, the Emirati participants performed similarly to the AI. The AI tools were more effective at interpreting CA metaphors compared to Emirati participants; AI tools are typically trained on diverse datasets and that usually leads to strong performance in interpreting formal or Classical Arabic expressions. These findings emphasize the need for improvements in AI models to boost their language processing abilities, as they often miss the cultural aspects required for accurately interpreting figurative language. This study adds to the ongoing discussion about AI and language interpretation, revealing both the potential and the obstacles AI faces when dealing with culturally rich and context-sensitive language.

Religions, topolects, language learning, AI — linguistics is exciting and ever changing, never boring.

[Thanks to Edward M "Ted" McClure]

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