The Argo, Danaus, and Sesostris: On Allusions to Two First-Ship Traditions in Apollonius’s Argonautica

Against recent skepticism, this article proposes that Apollonius’s Argonautica alludes to the variant traditions that regarded either the Argo or the ship of Danaus as the first that ever sailed. Both variants predate Apollonius, and the poet nods to each at different points in his epic. Most novel is my argument that the rare word Δαναΐς (1.137) constitutes a subtle allusion to the tradition that Danaus’s ship, the “Danais” (Δαναΐς, scholium ad Argonautica 1.1–4e), was the world’s first ship. Neither tradition jibes with Apollonius’s mythological chronology, but Danaus’s voyage nevertheless provides a resonant Greco-Egyptian exemplar for the Argonautic expedition.

See No Evil, Speak No Evil? Morality, Evolutionary Psychology, and the Nature of International Relations

A central theme in the study of international relations is that anarchy requires states to set aside moral concerns to attain security, rendering IR an autonomous sphere devoid of ethical considerations. Evolutionary and moral psychology, however, suggest that morality emerged to promote human success under such conditions. It is not despite anarchy but because of anarchy that humans have an ethical sense. Our argument has three empirical implications. First, it is almost impossible to talk about threat and harm without invoking morality. Second, state leaders and the public will use moral judgments as a basis, indeed the most important factor, for assessing international threat, just as research shows they do at the interpersonal level. Third, foreign policy driven by a conception of international relations as an amoral sphere will be quite rare. Word embeddings applied to large political and nonpolitical corpora, a survey experiment in Russia, and an in-depth analysis of Hitler's foreign policy thought suggest that individuals both condemn aggressive behavior by others and screen for threats on the basis of morality. The findings erode notions of IR as an autonomous sphere and upset traditional materialist–ideational dichotomies.

Analyzing Subword Techniques to Improve English to Sinhala Neural Machine Translation

Neural machine translation (NMT) is a remarkable approach which performs much better than the Statistical machine translation (SMT) models when there is an abundance of parallel corpus. However, vanilla NMT is primarily based upon word-level with a fixed vocabulary. Therefore, low resource morphologically rich languages such as Sinhala are mostly affected by the out of vocabulary (OOV) and Rare word problems. Recent advancements in subword techniques have opened up opportunities for low resource communities by enabling open vocabulary translation. In this paper, we extend our recently published state-of-the-art EN-SI translation system using the transformer and explore standard subword techniques on top of it to identify which subword approach has a greater effect on English Sinhala language pair. Our models demonstrate that subword segmentation strategies along with the state-of-the-art NMT can perform remarkably when translating English sentences into a rich morphology language regardless of a large parallel corpus.

Articulation of geminate obstruents in the Ikema dialect of Miyako Ryukyuan: A real-time MRI analysis

The Ikema dialect of Miyako Island in Okinawa, Japan, has typologically rare word-initial and voiced geminate obstruents (e.g. /vva/ ‘you’, /ffa/ ‘child’, /tta/ ‘tongue’, /badda/ ‘side’). These sounds are marked in two ways: Voicing through geminate obstruents is hard to produce and initial voiceless plosives seem to be difficult to perceive. This study investigated real-time magnetic resonance imaging (rt-MRI) to examine the articulatory settings underlying contrasts between singleton and geminate obstruents. Our analyses of two male speakers’ utterances showed the following five characteristics: (i) geminate obstruents in Ikema have longer duration of articulatory constrictions regardless of position and consonant types; (ii) the voiced alveolar plosive geminate /dd/ is articulated with a larger linguopalatal contact than its singleton counterpart but such difference depends on the speaker for the voiceless plosive pair /tt/–/t/ and the fricative pairs /ss/–/s/ and /zz/–/z/; (iii) alveolar voiceless plosives /t/ and /tt/ have a greater degree of linguopalatal contact than their voiced counterparts /d/ and /dd/, respectively, but fricatives show inter-speaker variation; (iv) fricatives do not show any systematic difference in degree of (midsagittal) linguopalatal contact between geminates and singletons, or between voiceless and voiced consonants; and (v) voiced geminate obstruents are accompanied by pharyngeal expansion for both speakers and by lowering the larynx for one speaker, and never by lowering of the velum. We also observed that voiced fricatives tend to realize as affricates, which we interpret as part of the articulatory adjustments for (full) voicing of phonologically voiced geminate fricatives.

The Rare Word Issue in Natural Language Generation: A Character-Based Solution

In this paper, we analyze the problem of generating fluent English utterances from tabular data, focusing on the development of a sequence-to-sequence neural model which shows two major features: the ability to read and generate character-wise, and the ability to switch between generating and copying characters from the input: an essential feature when inputs contain rare words like proper names, telephone numbers, or foreign words. Working with characters instead of words is a challenge that can bring problems such as increasing the difficulty of the training phase and a bigger error probability during inference. Nevertheless, our work shows that these issues can be solved and efforts are repaid by the creation of a fully end-to-end system, whose inputs and outputs are not constrained to be part of a predefined vocabulary, like in word-based models. Furthermore, our copying technique is integrated with an innovative shift mechanism, which enhances the ability to produce outputs directly from inputs. We assess performance on the E2E dataset, the benchmark used for the E2E NLG challenge, and on a modified version of it, created to highlight the rare word copying capabilities of our model. The results demonstrate clear improvements over the baseline and promising performance compared to recent techniques in the literature.

The newspaper “Babochka” (1829–1832) as a linguistic source

The article deals with the newspaper “Babochka” as an important source for philological research, which objectively reflects the linguistic processes of its time. Translated articles selected from leading periodicals in Europe and America, creatively revised by the authors, included the Russian reader in the world media space. A differential approach is used in the article that focuses primarily on the dynamic elements of the lexical and semantic system. The newspaper presents the innovations of the early 19th century, including borrowings, foreign language inclusions, complex adjectives formed in Russian, and dialect words. As a result of the analysis of the source, the emergence of new meanings for words already in use was noted, the dating of a number of new lexemes was clarified, and contexts for their semantization were identified. The work concludes that the rare words and rare word usage recorded in the texts of the newspaper “Babochka” can be considered as valuable materials for historical lexicology.