One small point went unnoticed in Sally Thomason's very sharp two-part critique (here and here) of Tecumseh Fitch's recent short article in Nature. It was spotted by my sharp-eyed Edinburgh colleague Bob Ladd. The artwork accompanying Fitch's article depicts the tree of Indo-European language relatednesses. And the branch leading toward such languages as Russian is labeled "ISLAMIC".
It is possible that Fitch never saw this at the proof stage, and will learn about it here on Language Log. Nature sends proofs by fax or PDF, and the artwork isn't always in final form when the author checks the text.
Bob and I both felt that the most likely explanation for the slip (there is of course no such language family as "Islamic" anywhere) must lie not in sheer idiocy (nobody thinks Russian belongs to a family of Islamic languages, surely) but in (a)~somebody's handwriting having been misread by an artist who was just copying lettering and not thinking about plausible historical relationships between languages and (b)~the high frequency of "Islamic" relative to what was actually intended, namely "Slavic". (Frequency commonly affects the direction that error takes; recall the case I discussed in "Hammer, jammer, slammer, stammer, grammar".) To check the guess, I looked at the number of pages found by Google News (UK) for searches on these words. Slavic: 247. Islamic: 52,561. The defence rests.
Posted by Geoffrey K. Pullum at October 17, 2007 05:11 AM