SPECIMENSPECIMEN · SECONDARY · Chinese (Simplified) → English · 2010

出口 / EXPORT

An exit sign that offers the wrong sense of a word which has two, with no simplification and no machine anywhere in the story

secondary

Provenance

Languages
Chinese (Simplified) → English
Source
Photographs of Chinese public signage, widely circulated; this course has not recorded one itself
Source date
2010
Verification
secondaryReported by others. This course has not seen the artefact itself.
Mechanism
Polysemy resolved by frequency rather than by context

  1. Input

    出口

  2. Mechanism

    Polysemy resolved by frequency rather than by context

    Inference

  3. Printed

    出口 EXPORT

    Observed

出口 means exit. It also means export. The two senses are unrelated in English and inseparable in the written form, and a door in an airport is labelled with one of them.

出口   EXPORT

Why it opens the course

Nothing here is broken. No character was merged, no statistical model was trained, no network hallucinated. A word had two senses, something chose the wrong one, and the something could have been a dictionary, a phrase book, a contractor, or a person in a hurry.

That is the condition every other specimen in this corpus is a variation on, and it is why week 1 is about establishing the claim rather than diagnosing the fault. Until you can say what this sign promised, you cannot say it failed.

What this record does not establish

Which artefact. Signs of this kind are photographed constantly and reproduced without provenance, and the course has not recorded one in the field. It sits at secondary until somebody in this room takes the photograph.