Carm's corner

Posted by Victor Mair

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=70110&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=memes-typos-and-vernacular-english-in-a-12th-century-latin-homily

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=70110

Before I introduce what to me is one of the most stupendous humanities discoveries I have encountered in the last six decades, I have to explain briefly why it is so exciting.   Namely, here we get to witness the emergence of a few bits of vernacular English in a religiously imbued medieval Latin matrix.  This is exactly how medieval vernacular Sinitic started to appear in the framework of Classical Chinese / Literary Sinitic during the heyday of medieval Buddhism.  Just as in the medieval Christian homilies of Peterhouse MS 255, we see the common (sú 俗) preachers of Dunhuang resorting to vernacular language and popular "memes" in their "transformation texts" (biàn[wén] 變[文]) to keep the attention of their auditors / readers.

I wrote my undergraduate thesis on Geoffrey Chaucer's (d. 1400) Troilus and Criseyde.  That was a long time ago, sixty years, in fact.  Imagine my surprise when I opened the New York Times yesterday and discovered that this medieval romance was back in the news.

900-Year-Old Copyist's Error May Unravel a Chaucer Mystery
The Tale of Wade, twice referred to in Geoffrey Chaucer’s poems, survives only in a tiny fragment. Two academics argue a scribe’s error deepened the confusion around it.
Stephen Castle, NYT (7/15/25)

What's all the fuss about "The Tale of Wade"*?  It seems that two Cambridge scholars at Girton College, Seb Falk and James Wade, after spending three intensive years of research, have solved a thorny textual problem that has bewitched scholars for centuries.

*This Wikipedia article on "Wade (folklore)" contains a rich assemblage of myth and lore stretching back to Old Norse and Old English that reveals the close association of Wade and his boat, with water, sexuality, and fertility.

N.B.:  It is only by coincidence that one of the Cambridge researchers, James Wade, has the same surname as the name of the hero of "The Tale of Wade" dating to a millennium earlier.

Here's a translation of the passage on Wade's boat from Chaucer's "Merchant's Tale":

It is clear that here Wade's boat is being used as a sexual euphemism.

(from the above cited Wikipedia article)

As presented in the NYT article, the abstruse argumentation and dense documentation of the Falk & Wade paper are difficult for the non-specialist to follow, so I will supplement Castle's account with other materials, starting with the official Cambridge announcement of the seminal Falk-Wade discovery.  A simple version of the announcement may be found here:

Lost English legend decoded, solving Chaucerian mystery and revealing a medieval preacher's meme
Edited by Sadie Harley, reviewed by Andrew Zinin, Phys.org, Science X (2025-07)

Here is the elaborate treatment of the announcement prepared by Tom Almeroth-Williams:

The Song of Wade:  Decoding a lost English legend, solving a Chaucerian mystery, and revealing a medieval preacher’s meme

By Tom Almeroth-Williams, University of Cambridge (7/16/25)

This is a virtuoso demonstration of the achievement of Falk-Wade.  For those who do not have a lot of time to spend on medieval English philology and are not acquainted with its aims and usages, I strongly recommend that you skip to the 4:00 film at the end of Almeroth-Williams' essay.  Here you will hear Seb Falk and James Wade explain lucidly in layman's terms what they have achieved in their technical paper.

Prior to the excellent film, Almeroth-Williams gently guides his reader through the Falk-Wade paper by other means as well, including this introductory summary:

A medieval literary puzzle which has stumped scholars including M.R. James for 130 years has finally been solved.

Cambridge scholars now believe the Song of Wade, a long lost treasure of English culture, was a chivalric romance not a monster-filled epic.

The discovery solves the most famous mystery in Chaucer's writings and provides rare evidence of a medieval preacher referencing pop culture in a sermon.

The breakthrough, detailed in The Review of English Studies, involved working out that the manuscript refers to ‘wolves’ not ‘elves’ [VHM:  this is the "typo" referred to in the title of this post], as scholars previously assumed.

Dr James Wade and Dr Seb Falk, colleagues at Girton College, Cambridge, argue that the precious literary fragment, first discovered by M.R. James at Cambridge in 1896, has been “radically misunderstood” for the last 130 years.

Some choice quotations:

“Here we have a late-12^th-century sermon deploying a meme from the hit romantic story of the day,” Seb Falk says. “This is very early evidence of a preacher weaving pop culture into a sermon to keep his audience hooked.”

“Many church leaders worried about the themes of chivalric romances – adultery, bloodshed, and other scandalous topics – so it’s surprising to see a preacher dropping such 'adult content' into a sermon,” Wade explains.

…

“Lots of very smart people have torn their hair out over the spelling, punctuation, literal translation, meaning, and context of a few lines of text,” says James Wade.

A very attractive feature of Almeroth-Williams' presentation are crystal clear photographs that you can enlarge by gliding over them with your mouse, and then having him (A-W) deftly encircle the critical features of the text with highlighted boxes.  For example, by such means, the names "Wade" and "Hildebrand" (Wade's father) leap off the page.  In another place, we get to see the precise place where the letters "w" and "y" are muddled, so that a word that has been interpreted as "elves" for nearly a thousand years actually was "wolves".

In the next section, "Chaucer and Wade", Almeroth-Williams describes how the authors of the paper on the homily in Peterhouse MS 255 clarify the great medieval poet's invocation of the Song of Wade:

The Song of Wade was hugely popular throughout the Middle Ages. For several centuries, its central character remained a major romance hero, among other famous knights such as Lancelot and Gawain. Chaucer twice evoked Wade in the middle of this period, in the late 1300s, but these references have baffled generations of Chaucer scholars.

At a crucial moment in Troilus and Criseyde, Pandarus tells the ‘tale of Wade’ to Criseyde after supper. Today’s study argues that the Wade legend served Pandarus because he not only needed to keep Criseyde around late, but also to stir her passions. By showing that Wade was a chivalric romance, Chaucer’s reference makes much more sense.

In ‘The Merchant’s Tale’, Chaucer’s main character, January, a 60-year-old knight, refers to Wade’s boat when arguing that it is better to marry young women than old. The fact that his audience would have understood the reference in the context of chivalric romance, rather than folk tales or epics, is significant, the researchers argue.

In the following section, Almeroth-Williams shows how the Cambridge researchers pay more attention to the entirety of the Humiliamini sermon and its usages than previous scholars have.  This is where they identify Alexander Neckam, or one of his acolytes, as the probable author of this homily on humility.

Almeroth-Williams concludes his essay with an extract from the new translation of the sermon referring to Wade:

‘Dear [brothers], as to the fact that he says, ‘humble yourselves’, etc. – it could be considered that humility which is against the mighty hand of God is of a particular kind. For there are three kinds of humility: the humility of guilt; the humility of punishment; and the humility of penance.

Now, by the humility of guilt our first parent [Adam] was so humbled that, although he was made master of the whole world before his sins and ruled over everything that was in the world, after his sin, on the other hand, he could not even defend himself from a worthless worm, that is, from a flea or louse. He who was similar to God before sin, was made dissimilar through sin; since ‘by this poison a rose is sometimes turned into spikenard.’

Thus Adam was, from a human, made as if he was non-human; not only Adam, but almost everyone becomes as if non-humans. Thus they can say, with Wade:

‘Some are wolves and some are adders; Some are sea-snakes that dwell by the water. There is no man at all but Hildebrand.’

Similarly, today some are wolves, such as powerful tyrants, who if they can justly take the things of those subject to them, take them; but if not, [do so] by any means. Some imitate serpents, of which there are three kinds. Others become lions, like the proud ones whom God opposes; enough has been said of pride in the art of preaching. Others are foxes, such as cunning detractors and flatterers who speak with a double heart, who have honey in their mouth but bile in their heart. Others are gluttons like pigs, of whom the prophet says ‘their throats are open graves’; and thus each is judged similarly. Indeed, this humility is bad and perverse.’

Here's the original Latin text, with the tantalizing snippets of Middle English intermixed (in the penultimate paragraph quoted here( :

K[arissimi], hoc quod dicit ‘hu[miliamini] sub po[tenti]’ etc.—potest perpendi quod alia est humilitas que est contra potentem manum Dei. Triplex enim est humilitas: humilitas scilicet culpe; hu[militas] pene; hu[militas] penitentie.

Humilitate autem culpe, in tantum humiliatus est primus parens noster,¹⁰⁶ quod cum dominus tocius mundi efficeretur ante peccata et in omnibus que in mundo erant dominaretur, post peccatum uero, a uili uermiculo, scilicet, a pulice siue pediculo se minime potuit defendere. Qui similis fuit Deo ante peccatum per peccatum factus est dissimilis; quia ‘hac [lue] rosa [non]numquam uertitur in saliuncam’.¹⁰⁷

Adam itaque de homine factus est quasi non homo; nec tantum Adam, sed omnes fere fiunt quasi non homines. Itaque dicere possunt cum Wade: ‘Summe sende [ƿ]lues & summe sende nadderes; sum[m]e sende nikeres the bi den ƿater [ƿ]unien. Nister man nenne bute ildebrand onne.

Similiter, hodie aliqui sunt lupi, utpote potentes tiranni, qui [176va]¹⁰⁸ sibi subditorum res si iuste accipere possunt accipiunt; sin autem quocunque modo. Alii imitantur serpentes, quorum triplex est genus. Alii efficiuntur leones, utpote superbi quibus resistit Deus;¹⁰⁹ satis de superbia dictum est in arte predicandi. Alii sunt wlpes, sicut dolosi detractores adulatores qui loquntur in corde et corde,¹¹⁰ qui habent mel in ore fel autem in corde.¹¹¹ Alii sunt gulosi ut sues, de quibus dicit propheta ‘sepulcrum patens est g[uttur]’;¹¹² et sic de singulis simile habetur iudicium. Hec siquidem humilitas mala est & peruersa.

Now let us turn briefly to the original paper of Falk and Wade:

"The Lost Song of Wade: Peterhouse 255 Revisited"
Seb Falk, James Wade, The Review of English Studies (16 July 2025)

Abstract

Short verses from the Song of Wade survive in an early-thirteenth-century sermon collection found in Cambridge, Peterhouse MS 255. They constitute the only known surviving fragment of a legendary romance that was widely known in medieval and renaissance England but now entirely lost. The fragment was first discovered [VHM:  in 1896] by M. R. James and Israel Gollancz, and since then several scholars have considered the sermon’s English quotation to parse its meaning and speculate on what it says about the ‘Legend of Wade’. Despite such attention, there has been no sustained attempt to situate this fragment in the context of the sermon in which it appears. In this essay we return to Peterhouse MS 255 to re-consider them in light of the sermon in which they are quoted. We offer a new plain-sense meaning of the English fragment and suggest the most likely arrangement of its verse form, both of which animate a fundamental re-thinking of what glimpse these verses can give us into the world of a romance otherwise unknown, and into a lost legend as it was understood by readers and audiences in later medieval England, Geoffrey Chaucer among them. We provide an edition and translation of the full sermon, and analyse the sermon’s contents and composition, suggesting identifications for its sources, origins, and audiences. We also provide fresh analysis of the ways that preachers constructed their sermons, drawing from up-to-date natural philosophy and deploying memes from the world of romance and real-life chivalry.

Conclusion

This essay proposes a new text and translation of the Wade fragment, with all its implications for how we might imagine the world of the lost Song of Wade. It also postulates that the author of this sermon may be none other than Alexander Neckam [1157=1217] himself, and gestures towards an intellectual milieu of creative, even playful experimentation where even English romance, like the flea or the worm, can play a natural role in moral instruction and edification. The richly visual, dramatic descriptions of serpents, lions and wolves, self-abasing knights, and kings in sackcloth, are set in a virtuoso rhetorical performance. It all makes for a captivating effect in an era when sermons served to generate the same depth of emotional response as mass media today.⁹⁹ And in this genre of medieval media broadcast, we find the Wade legend, like the ‘viral’ account of Hugh of Gournay, deployed as a meme, a compact unit of transmission that freights cultural memory, such as tunes or catch-phrases or clothing fashions.¹⁰⁰ If Alexander Neckam, or the Neckam-inspired sermonizer, invokes the Wade legend as a meme, then he is only the first known writer to do so, for it is precisely as a meme that Wade is used in Middle English, from the Bevis-author through Chaucer to Malory.

This new reading of the Wade legend as a chivalric meme has been spurred by an appreciation of its situation in the Humiliamini sermon. By providing an edition and translation of the sermon here, we hope that its intellectual and emotional energy might resonate with other readers in ways that we have not had the time to explore or capacity to understand. (It is, after all, a lesson in humility.) We also hope that this essay goes some way towards illuminating what Jack Bennett considered the best-known crux in Chaucer’s writings. The preferred reading of ‘wolves’ for ‘elves’ dramatically shifts the ground, and invites us to re-imagine the known world of Wade from c.1200 on, from one less germane to Germanic epic than congruent with courtly romance, less invested in the mythological sphere of giants and monsters than in the warring of human chivalric adversaries. Such a shift turns the crux into a crutch of literary memory; it helps make sense of Chaucer’s evocation of Wade at instances of courtly intrigue, in moments of high tension in the world of fin amour. It may be one of Chaucer’s most brazen anachronisms, to have a performance of a Middle English romance resound within the ancient walls of Bronze-Age Troy, but to see the Wade allusion in the Troilus as a pointedly chivalric allusion is to understand it as part and parcel of a broader ‘medievalizing’ project. When the courtiers of Chaucer’s Troy listened to romance to model their own chivalry and steer their own passions, whose romance did they hear? It was Wade’s.

Here is how Stephen Castle of the NYT nicely explicates some of the key points in the Falk-Wade paper:

The fragment seemed to refer to a man alone among elves and other eerie creatures — something from the story of a mythological giant, or of a heroic character like Beowulf who battled supernatural monsters.

That would make it a surprising tale for a romantic go-between to read to a maiden, as happens in Chaucer’s “Troilus and Criseyde,” or to appear as an allusion in one of his “Canterbury Tales” about a wealthy man marrying a younger woman.

The new research, published on Wednesday in Britain in “The Review of English Studies,” suggests that the “elves” sprang from a linguistic error by a scribe, who miscopied a word that should have meant “wolves,” and that Wade in fact belonged to a chivalric world of knights and courtly love — much more relevant to Chaucerian verse.

…

The new study concludes that the sermon’s scribe confused a runic letter that was still found in Middle English, and pronounced ‘w,’ with the letter ‘y.’ That, it says, turned “wlves” into “ylves.”

…

“Here were three lines apparently talking about elves and sea monsters which exactly puts you in this world of Beowulf and other Teutonic legends,” said Dr. Wade. “What we realized is that there are no elves in this passage, there are no sea monsters and, in the study of the handwriting, everyone has gotten it wrong until now.”

The research took three years, he said, adding that he believed the error occurred because the scribe was chosen for familiarity with Latin.

“One’s suspicion, although we can’t prove this, is that the reason he messes up the Middle English is because he’s never written English before,” said Dr. Wade.  [VHM:  N.B. !!!!]

The mentions of Wade, the two academics argue, show both the sermon’s author and Chaucer deploying contemporary popular culture to appeal to a wider audience in the way that politicians, artists or preachers still do today.

“The way the poem is quoted in the sermon as a meme — something which was widely understood — tells us something about how ubiquitous it was,” said Dr. Falk.

To me, this is all very familiar, because the same sorts of things were happening in medieval Dunhuang as scribes were trying to forge means to record vernacular with characters that theretofore had only been used for writing Classical Chinese / Literary Sinitic.  Typos aplenty!

Afterword

In the film, Falk and Wade show pages of the manuscript they studied.  It has drawings, some of them colored, of animals that illustrate attributes of human beings / behavior.  One of these drawings is a quite realistic colored rendition of a bovine munching on a bunch of green grass and, at the other end, emitting a huge balloon of green methane gas.  These drawings of animals remind me very much of the Voynich manuscript, which must have been modeled on medieval bestiaries, that we have discussed numerous times on Language Log

Selected readings

• "Five old, white men" (6/24/23)
• "Old, Middle, and Modern English" (9/2/23)
• Victor H. Mair, "Buddhism and the Rise of the Written Vernacular: The Making of National Languages,” Journal of Asian Studies, 53.3 (August, 1994), 707-751
• Victor H. Mair, "Lay Students and the Making of Written Vernacular Narrative: An Inventory of Tun-huang Manuscripts", Chinoperl Papers 10 (1981), 5–96.
• Victor H. Mair, Tun-huang Popular Narratives (Cambridge [Cambridgeshire] ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
• Voynich and midfix" (7/3/04)
• "Voynich code cracked?" (5/16/19)
• "The indecipherability of the Voynich manuscript" (9/11/19)
• "The Voynich Manuscript in the undergraduate curriculum" (10/10/19)
• "Once again the Voynich manuscript" (4/21/24)
• "Yet again the Voynich manuscript" (9/11/24)
• "Latin, Hebrew … proto-Romance? New theory on Voynich manuscript:  Researcher claims to have solved mystery of 15th-century text but others are sceptical", Esther Addley, The Guardian (5/15/19)

[Thanks to John J. Tkacik]

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=70110&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=memes-typos-and-vernacular-english-in-a-12th-century-latin-homily

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=70110

Posted by Mark Liberman

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=70096&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=replication-of-failure-to-replicate

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=70096

Today's xkcd:

Mouseover title: "Maybe encouraging the publication of null results isn't enough–maybe we need a journal devoted to publishing results the study authors find personally annoying."

Actually, there's a long history of scientific and scholarly publications based on personal annoyance — my favorite is the 1955-1961 back-and-forth between Herb Simon and Benoit Mandelbrot, discussed in "The long tail of religious studies?", 8/5/2010. And I have to confess that an occasional bit of annoyance has motivated some LLOG posts.

Anyhow, there's been some progress in relevant attitudes at journals, scientific and technical societies, and funders, towards promoting (and even requiring) the replication-friendly open publication of data, code, etc. — though there's still a long way to go…

A few relevant past posts:

"Open Data and Reproducible Research: Blurring the Boundaries between Research and Publication", Berlin 6 Open access Conference (11/12/2008)
"Human Language Technologies in the United States:Reflections 1966-2008", MYL Berlin 6 slides, 11/12/2008
"Reproducible research", 11/13/2008
"Reproducible Science at AAAS 2011", 2/18/2011
"Replication Rumble", 3/17/2012
"Textual narcissism", 7/13/2012
"Textual narcissism, replication 2", 7/14/2012
"Literate programming and reproducible research", 2/22/2014
“Statistical Challenges in Assessing and Fostering the Reproducibility of Scientific Results”, NRC Workshop 2/26/2015
"Reliability", 2/28/2015
"Replicability vs. reproduciblity — or is it the other way around?", 10/31/2015
"Replicate vs. reproduce (or vice versa?)", 2/15/2018

Update — We should note that publishing open data and code is only one step towards a solution. In honest and intelligent research, there are still the problems of parameter choices, analysis method choices, and uncontrolled co-variates. And across the spectrum of motivated, biased, and less honest research, those problems get worse.

Still, access to data and code makes it easier to detect and fix such problems.

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=70096&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=replication-of-failure-to-replicate

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=70096

Posted by Mark Liberman

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=70070&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=a-dashing-wizard

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=70070

From Jesse Sheidlower:

I hereby offer to supervise an MA thesis focused entirely on this one passage.

#linguistics

[image or embed]

— Jesse Sheidlower (@jessesword.com) July 17, 2025 at 2:02 PM

The cited passage is from Terry Prachett's 1987 novel Mort.

Here's the context:

    Three men had appeared behind him, as though extruded from the stonework. They had the heavy, stolid look of those thugs whose appearance in any narrative means that it’s time for the hero to be menaced a bit, although not too much, because it’s also obvious that they’re going to be horribly surprised.
     They were leering. They were good at it.
     One of them had drawn a knife, which he waved in little circles in the air. He advanced slowly towards Mort, while the other two hung back to provide immoral support.
     “Give us the money,” he rasped.

After some back-and-forth:

     “I think we kill you and take a chance on the money,” he said. “We don’t want this sort of thing to spread.”
     The other two drew their knives.
     Mort swallowed. “This could be unwise,” he said.
     “Why?”
     “Well, I won’t like it, for one.”
     “You’re not supposed to like it, you’re supposed to—die,” said the thief, advancing.
     “I don’t think I’m due to die,” said Mort, backing away. “I’m sure I would have been told.”
     “Yeah,” said the thief, who was getting fed up with this. “Yeah, well, you have been, haven’t you? Great steaming elephant turds!”
     Mort had just stepped backwards again. Through a wall.
     The leading thief glared at the solid stone that had swallowed Mort, and then threw down his knife.
     “Well, —- me,” he said. “A —-ing wizard. I hate —-ing wizards!”
     “You shouldn’t —- them, then,” muttered one of his henchmen, effortlessly pronouncing a row of dashes.
     The third member of the trio, who was a little slow of thinking, said, “Here, he walked through the wall!”

One quasi-linguistic note, for anyone who takes Jesse up on his offer: I presume that the image in Jesse's skeet comes from a printed book, because the Kindle version (inappropriately) eliminates the spaces corresponding to the boundaries of the bleeped words:

That's a typographical convention that annoys me when it eliminates spaces next to punctuational dashes. In Jesse's image, there are spaces on both sides of all of the dashes, except after the ones preceding "ing". That also strikes me as inappropriate to context — in the text reproduced above, I've added spaces around each bleeped word, but not between the intra-word letter-bleeping dashes.

Another linguistic question is how the readers of the Audible audiobook version render the dashes. However, I'm not willing to spend $23.24 to learn the answer (or even the special Audible-member price of $10.49), since my master's thesis days are long past.

In related news, there's a new-ish edition of The F-Word ….

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=70070&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=a-dashing-wizard

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=70070

Posted by Mark Liberman

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=70056&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=interpersonal-and-socio-cultural-alignment

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=70056

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".

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=70056&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=interpersonal-and-socio-cultural-alignment

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=70056

Posted by Mark Liberman

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=70026&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=alignment

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=70026

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.

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=70026&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=alignment

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=70026

Posted by Victor Mair

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=70014&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=bibliographical-cornucopia-for-linguists-part-2

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=70014

• "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]

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=70014&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=bibliographical-cornucopia-for-linguists-part-2

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=70014

Posted by Mark Liberman

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=70004&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=recursive-summarization

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=70004

Today's SMBC:

The mouseover title: "I saw an article that said it was a 3 minute read then offered an AI summary, and I believe it may be included in an eventual epitaph for civilization."

The Aftercomic:

Of course it's not just news…

• "Ambience Healthcare’s “Patient Recap” Offers Clinicians the First Chart Summarization Technology from an Ambient AI Platform"
• "WhatsApp adds Meta AI-powered 'Message Summaries' for all those unread texts"
• Using Meeting Summary with AI Companion

So far, none of the AI helpers offer emotionally indicative grunting noises. At least not as far as I know, though maybe Grok is on it?

Accurate graphical summarizations would actually sometimes be useful. Current AI poster generation is about posters to advertise an event, not the sort of figures that would be useful as a summary of complex material, e.g. here:

Update — As Gregory Kusnick notes in the comments, it goes in the other direction as well:

Fortunately there's another AI that can generate a three-minute exegesis of the grunt.

This suggests a new take on the old trope of translating back and forth between two languages (using either human or machine translators) — maximally summarize an essay, and then expand the summarization, once or many times.

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=70004&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=recursive-summarization

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=70004

Posted by Victor Mair

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69910&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=asterisk-the-gaul

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69910

A learned friend recently sent me a draft composition on medieval Chinese history in which he referred to "*" as an "asterix".  This reminded me that ten years ago I wrote a post, "The many pronunciations of '*'" (12/17/15), on this subject and we had a lengthy, vigorous discussion about it.

Given that lately we've been talking a lot about Celts, Galatians, and so on, I think it is appropriate to write another post on Asterix the Gaul, that famous French comic book character, and how he got his name.  Also inspired / prompted by Chris Button's latest comment.

I often hear "*" pronounced "asterix" or "asterick", and so on (e.g., "astrisk" [two syllables], esp. in rapid speech).  It's hard even for me to pronounce "*" or type the symbol those ways, so ingrained is the pronunciation "as-ter-isk".

First, a little refresher course on "*", how / when it came about, how it is written, how it is pronounced, and what it signifies:

The asterisk (/ˈæstərɪsk/ *), from Late Latin asteriscus, from Ancient Greek ἀστερίσκος, asteriskos, "little star", is a typographical symbol. It is so called because it resembles a conventional image of a heraldic star.

Computer scientists and mathematicians often vocalize it as star (as, for example, in the A* search algorithm or C*-algebra). An asterisk is usually five- or six-pointed in print and six- or eight-pointed when handwritten, though more complex forms exist. Its most common use is to call out a footnote. It is also often used to censor offensive words.

…

The asterisk was already in use as a symbol in ice age cave paintings. There is also a two-thousand-year-old character used by Aristarchus of Samothrace called the asteriskos, ※, which he used when proofreading Homeric poetry to mark lines that were duplicated. Origen is known to have also used the asteriskos to mark missing Hebrew lines from his Hexapla. The asterisk evolved in shape over time, but its meaning as a symbol used to correct defects remained.

In the Middle Ages, the asterisk was used to emphasize a particular part of text, often linking those parts of the text to a marginal comment. However, an asterisk was not always used.

One hypothesis to the origin of the asterisk is that it stems from the 5000-year-old Sumerian character dingir , though this hypothesis seems to only be based on visual appearance.

(Wikipedia)

Now, on to how Asterix the Gaul and the other characters in the comic got their names.

All the fictional characters in Asterix have names which are puns on their roles or personalities, and which follow certain patterns specific to nationality. Certain rules are followed (most of the time) such as Gauls (and their neighbours) having an "-ix" suffix for the men and ending in "-a" for the women; for example, Chief Vitalstatistix (so called due to his portly stature) and his wife Impedimenta (often at odds with the chief). The male Roman names end in "-us", echoing Latin nominative male singular form, as in Gluteus Maximus, a muscle-bound athlete whose name is literally the butt of the joke. Gothic names (present-day Germany) end in "-ic", after Gothic chiefs such as Alaric and Theoderic; for example Rhetoric the interpreter. Greek names end in "-os" or "-es"; for example, Thermos the restaurateur. British names usually end in "-ax" or "-os" and are often puns on the taxation associated with the later United Kingdom; examples include Mykingdomforanos, a British tribal chieftain, Valuaddedtax the druid, and Selectivemploymentax the mercenary. Names of Normans end with "-af", for example Nescaf or Cenotaf. Egyptian characters often end in -is, such as the architects Edifis and Artifis, and the scribe Exlibris. Indic names, apart from the only Indic female characters Orinjade and Lemuhnade, exhibit considerable variation; examples include Watziznehm, Watzit, Owzat, and Howdoo. Other nationalities are treated to pidgin translations from their language, like Huevos y Bacon, a Spanish chieftain (whose name, meaning eggs and bacon, is often guidebook Spanish for tourists), or literary and other popular media references, like Dubbelosix (a sly reference to James Bond's codename "007").^[68]

Most of these jokes, and hence the names of the characters, are specific to the translation; for example, the druid named Getafix in English translation – "get a fix", referring to the character's role in dispensing the magic potion – is Panoramix in the original French and Miraculix in German.^[69] Even so, occasionally the wordplay has been preserved: Obelix's dog, known in the original French as Idéfix (from idée fixe, a "fixed idea" or obsession), is called Dogmatix in English, which not only renders the original meaning strikingly closely ("dogmatic") but in fact adds another layer of wordplay with the syllable "Dog-" at the beginning of the name.

The name Asterix, French Astérix, comes from astérisque, meaning "asterisk", which is the typographical symbol * indicating a footnote, from the Greek word ἀστήρ (aster), meaning a "star". His name is usually left unchanged in translations, aside from accents and the use of local alphabets. For example, in Esperanto, Polish, Slovene, Latvian, and Turkish it is Asteriks (in Turkish he was first named Bücür meaning "shorty", but the name was then standardised). Two exceptions include Icelandic, in which he is known as Ástríkur ("Rich of love"), and Sinhala, where he is known as සූර පප්පා (Soora Pappa), which can be interpreted as "Hero". The name Obelix (Obélix) may refer to "obelisk", a stone column from ancient Egypt (and hence his large size and strength and his task of carrying around menhirs), but also to another typographical symbol, the obelisk or obelus (†).

For explanations of some of the other names, see List of Asterix characters.

The translators who created all of these different versions in so many languages are to be commended for maintaining the humorous spirit of the onomastics in the original.  "Vive 'Astérix le Gaulois'!"

Selected readings

• "The many pronunciations of '*'" (12/17/15)
• "Asses and asterisks" (8/14/17)

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69910&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=asterisk-the-gaul

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69910

Posted by Victor Mair

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69878&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=taigael-part-2

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69878

[This is a guest post by Chau Wu]

The Presbyterian Church in Taiwan (TPC) was first planted by British missionaries in Tainan, which later expanded to all southern parts of Taiwan, constituting the present Southern Synod of TPC. The most important pioneer among them was the Scottish missionary Rev. Thomas Barclay who worked in Taiwan-Fu (the present Tainan).  He was born in Glasgow, and matriculated at the University of Glasgow. While there, he studied under Sir William Thomson, later Lord Kelvin [according to Wikipedia]. The celebrated Lord Kelvin reminds me of the absolute zero degree in physical chemistry and the electric cable equation as the underpinning of the Transatlantic cable as well as the conduction of electric impulses along nerve fibers. 

The majority of Taiwanese Christians are Presbyterian. Those who are aware of the church history always associate the solid establishment of TPC with Barclay, and his name shows up in Barclay Memorial Park and Barclay Memorial Church in Tainan City. The following picture shows the church name on the lintel above the door of the church in POJ: Tâi-Lâm Tang-M̂ng Pa-Khek-Lé Kì-Liām Kàu-Hōe (Tainan East Gate Barclay Memorial Church). You see there are no Sinographs such as the expected 台南東門巴克禮紀念教會 on it!  Only the Romanized Taiwanese script.  Since Barclay was a Scot, I would say this title on the church lintel may qualify as a good example of Tâigael.

(From Wikipedia)

Interestingly, the present Northern Synod of TPC had its beginning in 60 churches established by Rev. George Mackay, a Scottish-Canadian who graduated with a theological degree from Princeton Theological Seminary and received postgraduate training in theology at Edinburgh University. His parents, George Mackay and Helen Sutherland, emigrated from Sutherlandshire of Scotland. So, here we have another case of Tâigael linkage, albeit by a generation removed from Scotland. On a personal note, my grandfather was the second earliest of his many students and was among the first 5 Taiwanese of northern Taiwan to receive baptism from him at Tamsui. The Presbyterian church at Tamsui has a marble plaque recording this event.

Perhaps to those of us among Language Log readers who are interested in Taiwanese linguistics, one of the most important figures is the Scottish missionary Rev. William Campbell.

William Campbell (Chinese: 甘為霖; Pe̍h-ōe-jī: Kam Ûi-lîm) (1841–1921) was a Scottish Presbyterian missionary to Formosa (Qing Taiwan). He wrote extensively on topics related to Taiwan and was also responsible for founding the island's first school for the blind.^[3] Interested in the early history of the island (particularly the Dutch era), his knowledge of the time was such that he was called "without doubt the greatest authority on this subject living".^[4] He was probably the first European to see Sun-Moon Lake,^[5] which he named Lake Candidius in honour of the seventeenth century Dutch missionary George Candidius.

…

Campbell arrived in Qing-era Taiwan in 1871 to begin his mission in southern Taiwan, being stationed in Taiwan-fu, the capital of Taiwan Prefecture (modern-day Tainan) and serving both Han Chinese and Taiwanese aborigines in the area.^[6] He was a contemporary of Thomas Barclay, James Laidlaw Maxwell and George Leslie Mackay, who were all engaged in missionary work in Taiwan.

(source)

A major contribution of his, “A Dictionary of the Amoy Vernacular Spoken throughout the Prefectures of Chin-chiu, Chiang-chiu and Formosa (Taiwan) 廈門音新字典” stands out as the Tâigael example par excellence. This dictionary, compiled by a Scot, is ironically for me a Taiwanese, the go-to handbook for studying Taiwanese historical linguistics.

Tâigael works wonders in the spread of gospel to Taiwan.

Selected readings

• "Pinyin: the proof is in the pudding" (7/8/25)
• "The politico-cultural implications of Taiwanese romanization" (3/12/25) — lengthy, essential bibliography of posts on Hoklo, writing with POJ, etc.
• "Confessions of an Ex-Hokkien Creationist" (9/20/16) — highlly informative about POJ, Hokkien, etc.
• "Tâigael" (7/4/25)

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69878&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=taigael-part-2

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69878

Posted by Mark Liberman

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69944&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=ai-win-of-the-day

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69944

In "Beautiful music and logical warts", I quoted (part of) the trollish conclusion of Rousseau's Lettre sur la Musique Française:

Je crois avoir fait voir qu’il n’y a ni mesure ni mélodie dans la musique française, parce que la langue n’en est pas susceptible ; que le chant français n’est qu’un aboiement continuel, insupportable à toute oreille non prévenue; que l’harmonie en est brute, sans expression, et sentant uniquement son remplissage d'écolier ; que les airs français ne sont point des airs ; que le récitatif français n’est point du récitatif. D’où je conclus que les Français n’ont point de musique et n’en peuvent avoir, ou que, si jamais ils en ont une, ce sera tant pis pour eux.

I believe I have shown that there is neither rhythm nor melody in French music, because the language is not capable of them; that French song is only a continual barking, unbearable to any unbiased ear; that the harmony is crude, without expression, and full of childish padding; that French airs are not airs; that French recitative is not recitative. From which I conclude that the French have no music and never will have any, or that, if ever they have some, it will be a disappointment for them.

There are some interesting issues behind Rousseau's argument that the prosody of the French language makes French music impossible — but more on that later. Struck by his evident trollishness, I asked Google "was Jean Jacques Rousseau an asshole?", and got this reply:

• Abandoning his Children: Perhaps the most glaring example cited is his abandonment of all five of his children (fathered with Thérèse Levasseur) to an orphanage, a practice he acknowledged in his Confessions. Given the extremely high mortality rates in such institutions during the 18th century, this was tantamount to a death sentence for his children. This act stands in stark contrast to his influential writings on education and the importance of family, particularly in works like "Emile, or On Education," leading to accusations of profound hypocrisy.
• Difficult Relationships and Paranoia: Rousseau was known for his volatile and difficult relationships with friends and fellow Enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire, Diderot, and David Hume. He was prone to paranoia, suspecting plots and betrayals, even from those who had offered him hospitality and support, like Hume.
• Self-Centeredness and Arrogance: Some interpretations of his personality suggest he was highly self-centered and driven by a need for admiration and recognition. Despite criticizing societal corruption, he seemed to indulge in the pursuit of fame and status.
• Misogynistic Views: Rousseau's views on women are considered highly problematic and misogynistic by modern standards. He viewed women as less rational and primarily destined for domestic roles, to be pleasing and subservient to men, according to ThoughtCo. This perspective was criticized even by some of his contemporaries, such as Mary Wollstonecraft.

• Context of the Era: Some argue that his actions and views, particularly regarding women, were largely a product of the societal norms and expectations of the 18th century, according to WordPress.com.
• Introspective Nature and Self-Critique: Rousseau was remarkably introspective and openly discussed his flaws and contradictions in his autobiographical works like "Confessions". This willingness to expose his own failings provides a degree of nuance to the picture.
• Influence of His Ideas: Despite his personal flaws, Rousseau's ideas on politics, education, and human nature have been profoundly influential and continue to be studied and debated.

No doubt most of this is copied in large chunks from stuff online, though I haven't verified the extent of direct plagiarism. And there are some problems, like the attribution of Lesley Kucharski's essay to "WordPress.com", and the false interpretation of her discussion as excusing Rousseau's misogyny rather than condemning it.

Still, fair is fair — Gemini could have done a lot worse.

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69944&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=ai-win-of-the-day

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69944