Language Log

Chattels personal, personal chattels, and (fresh) fish

Margaret Marks once again demonstrates that my ignorance of legal terminology is even more profound than I had imagined, by exploring the distinction between chattels personal and personal chattels.

I await with interest her judgement on the point raised by this exchange which seems to involve a novel instance of the sorites paradox:

Mr. Alexis FitzGerald: ... There is another point I should like to raise. It is, perhaps, a question I should be able to answer myself. Do we have a definition of personal chattels which entirely, completely and satisfactorily excludes what is intended to be free from the particular transaction which is to be avoided? I do not find anything in the Principal Auctioneers Act which this Bill is amending. While in that Act there is no definition of a personal chattel there is a reference to some particular type of goods which are excluded from the requirement of a licence. If an auction of fresh fish, for example, is not to be the subject of [419] the requirement of the provisions of subsection (1) of section 6, has it to be there spelled out that, as such, it is not a personal chattel? At what stage does it become a personal chattel? When it reaches your dish or when it has been extracted from the sea——

Mr. Cooney: When it is no longer fresh.

If I understand Dr. Marks' reasoning, fish (once caught) are always chattels personal (since they are not real), but may or may not be personal chattels (since they may or may not be things like "toilet articles, bags, umbrella"). Is the crucial question then whether a fish becomes like a toothbrush by virtue of being portable, or by virtue of being inedible? I look forward to the day that Margaret's readers in the Irish legal profession come back on line and clear this up. Or at least provide further elaboration, in the ancient Irish tradition of exact but somewhat puzzling regulations concerning fish:

''For digging in a churchyard to steal from it, for making a dam in a stream to take an excess of fish, or for stealing a hunter's tent, your cattle will be taken to the animal pound for three to ten days, depending on the circumstances."

For some further discussion of "legal regimes based on sharp but unpredictable distinctions among similar objects ", see the quote from Eben Moglen in this Language Log post from last fall.

[Update: the Irish are still offline, apparently, but Margaret Marks created, posted and explained this diagram of the ontology of property in English law:

]

The status quo just can't stand

In my last post, I would have liked to have given you all a link to the full text of the article by Just et al. from the August edition of Brain, entitled "Cortical activation and synchronization during sentence comprehension in high-functioning autism: evidence of underconnectivity". But instead I just linked to the abstract, because unless you have a subscription to Brain, the full-text link would have taken you to an Oxford University Press screen informing you that "You may access this article (from the computer you are currently using) for 24 hours for US$27.50", and I suspect that only a few of you care enough about the topic to pay that much for that little.

If you really want to read the article, and don't have a subscription, you might be able to find a public library in a big city that subscribes. Otherwise, you'll have to pay, or wait a while.

Brain is published by Oxford University Press, and like many other publishers, OUP is dipping its toes in the water of Open Access. According to this item at Peter Suber's excellent Open Access News, there was a news note in the July 27 Library Journal to the effect that

"After positive initial results from Oxford University Press's open access 'experiment' with Nucleic Acids Research (NAR), the press announced it will move to a full open access publishing model from January 2005. It has been published under a subscription model for 32 years and includes around 1000 original research papers per year; OUP said NAR was 'the first journal of such stature to make a complete switch from a subscription to OA model.' Said Martin Richardson, managing director of Oxford Journals, 'To fulfill our role as a university press we felt a responsibility to the scholarly communities we represent to explore it as a viable publishing model.' Rachel Goode, communications manager, noted that there is a huge correlation between institutions that subscribe to NAR and authors who contribute to it, making the journal a particularly good candidate for open access."

Sounds promising. But there's one more sentence in the quote from Rachel Goode:

"'I don't think the market is ready beyond certain subject areas,' she said."

Oof. But before you get too depressed about this July 27 quote, here's a July 28 quote from another Open Access News posting. The speaker is the director of the National Institutes of Health, and the quotation is taken from an article in The Scientist:

"National Institutes of Health (NIH) director Elias Zerhouni indicated at a gathering of 43 scientific journal publishers and editors Wednesday (July 28) that eventually all NIH-financed research will be freely available to the public. Zerhouni stopped short of setting deadlines for depositing full-text materials in the searchable PubMed database, as recommended in a House Appropriations Committee report released earlier this month. Instead, he asked the publishing executives to inform him how best to manage material so that the public can freely use it. 'The public needs to have access to what they've paid for,' Zerhouni told commercial and nonprofit publishing executives at a meeting he called on the NIH campus....'The status quo just can't stand.' " [emphasis added]

There are significant economic issues here, both theoretical and practical, but he's right.

The Just et al. paper that I wish you could read is directly in Zerhouni's cross hairs. The acknowledgement at the end explains that "This research was supported by the University of Pittsburgh-Carnegie Mellon University-University of Illinois at Chicago Collaborative Program of Excellence in Autism (CPEA), Grant P01-HD35469 from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development." And NICHD in turn is "is part of the National Institutes of Health, the biomedical research arm of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services".

Autism as lack of neurological coordination

In the August issue of Brain, there's an article by Marcel Just, Vladimir Cherkassky, Timothy Keller and Nancy Minshew, presenting evidence from functional MRI brain imaging for a new hypothesis about autism. They suggest that autism is not mindblindness due to a faulty theory-of-mind module, nor is it runaway maleness overwhelming empathy with analysis. Instead, it's underconnectivity: "a deficiency in the coordination among brain areas".

According to the CMU press release:

In explaining the theory, Marcel Just, one of the study's lead authors and director of Carnegie Mellon's Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging, compared the brain of a normal person to a sports team in which the members cooperate and coordinate their efforts. In an autistic person, though some "players" may be highly skilled, they do not work effectively as a team, thus impairing an autistic's ability to complete broad intellectual tasks. Because this type of coordination is critical to complex thinking and social interaction, a wide range of behaviors are affected in autism.

Here's the full abstract:

The brain activation of a group of high-functioning autistic participants was measured using functional MRI during sentence comprehension and the results compared with those of a Verbal IQ-matched control group. The groups differed in the distribution of activation in two of the key language areas. The autism group produced reliably more activation than the control group in Wernicke's (left laterosuperior temporal) area and reliably less activation than the control group in Broca's (left inferior frontal gyrus) area. Furthermore, the functional connectivity, i.e. the degree of synchronization or correlation of the time series of the activation, between the various participating cortical areas was consistently lower for the autistic than the control participants. These findings suggest that the neural basis of disordered language in autism entails a lower degree of information integration and synchronization across the large-scale cortical network for language processing. The article presents a theoretical account of the findings, related to neurobiological foundations of underconnectivity in autism.

Although the findings deal only with language, and in fact only with specific aspects of sentence comprehension, the paper's discussion extends the hypothesis to much broader ideas about autism as characterized by, or even caused by, lack of adequate integration among different brain areas.

This is a plausible and interesting idea, for which the authors cite a range of other evidence. But the contribution of this particular experiment should be interpreted a bit more cautiously, it seems to me. The task studied is a very specific and limited one: visually presented text with binary choices between interpretations:

The cook thanked the father.
Who was thanked? cook -- father

The editor was saved by the secretary.
Who was saving? editor -- secretary.

It's certainly interesting that there's a significant difference between the autistic and the control groups in the distribution of brain activity in performing this simple task. The autistic group showed more activity in Wernicke's area, and less activity in Broca's area. Putting it more generally, the autistics showed more activity in posterior language-related parts of the brain, and less activity in anterior language-related parts of the brain. This suggests greater focus on the words and their meanings, and less focus on how the words were put together. It seems to me to raise a host of interesting questions -- were the autistics just trying harder to figure out who did what to whom on the basis of meaning rather than form, as the authors suggest? or were they composing elaborate taxonomic theories about the entity classes involved? "Let's see, cook::father, secretary::editor, teacher::??" or might they have more efficient Broca's areas, which therefore were working at a lower duty cycle, needed less blood flow, and therefore looked less active to fMRI?

But I'm more concerned about the argument for lack of coordination, which depends on finding lower correlations among activity levels in different brain "regions of interest" (RoIs). fMRI measurements of activity levels are very noisy. A lower correlation in activity levels between two regions might reflect the fact that they are genuinely less coordinated, but it might also reflect the fact that the measurement of one of them has a lower signal-to-noise level. Which it would, given that its task-related activity level is lower.

So in evaluating this particular argument, I'd like to see the full dataset. There are some convincing-looking pictures

Fig. 2 Examples of functional connectivity between LDLPFC and LIFG (Broca's area) in individual participants, shown as the activation time series in the two brain regions, with vertical bars indicating boundaries between seven epochs of sentences of the same type. (A) Autistic participant with low functional connectivity, r = 0.31, where the two time series do not closely track each other. (B) Control participant with high functional connectivity, r = 0.79, where the activation time series in the two regions is highly similar.

and some significant (though not overwhelming) overall statistics ("When the functional connectivities of the two groups were compared in each ROI pair separately, every single one of the 10 reliable (P < 0.05) differences (out of 186 comparisons) showed a lower functional connectivity in the autistic group ... Although about nine differences might be expected to be reliable by chance, the uniform direction of difference is not expected by chance.") But I'd like to be able to play with the original data, to convince myself that they're not seeing the results of SNR differences rather than coordination differences.

Let me emphasize that I find the coordination hypothesis interesting and attractive. On one level, it seems directly opposed to the mindblindness or "theory of mind module" hypothesis, due originally to Frith et al.:

"...in a normally developing child, the computational capacity to represent mental states has an innate neurological basis. In the autistic child damage to the circumscribed system of the brain has occurred, and this prevents the normal operation of the critical cognitive mechanism"

If you subtract the idea that "theory of mind" is a highly localized function, the two ideas are less opposed -- "theory of mind" is a late-developing ability that plausibly depends on difficult coordination of several different brain regions, and (to the extent that a single brain region is singled out) shows heavy involvement of anterior regions near those that were less active in the autistic group in this experiment (which of course required no "theory of mind" reasoning at all).

The coordination idea seems less easy to square with Simon Baron Cohen's notion of autism as " extreme maleness", runaway male analytic thought (with concomitant deficits in female-associated empathizing, natch). Though you could spin out a theory about female brains being more integrated, etc. -- and of course some people have done that...

So maybe Marcel Just and Simon Baron Cohen are working from different ends of the autistic elephant. Or maybe one of them is struggling in the dark with a palm tree that happened to be nearby. Stay tuned.

[The Just et al. paper was brought to my attention by Fernando Pereira]

couldan't, shouldan't, wouldan't

I followed Mark's link to Nathan's Notebook and found the following interesting clipping from a text transcript of Jon Stewart's appearance on Larry King Live on June 25.

Stewart has just mentioned that he is "not a pacifist" -- "As a matter of fact, I like bombing countries." Larry King is surprised, and Stewart clarifies:

Well, just purely for the knowledge of geography. It's just fascinating to learn about these countries. ... I didn't know Kabul was the capital of Afghanistan until we started bombing it. ... If we would haven't gone to war there, I certainly wouldn't have known that.

Would haven't? Totally ungrammatical, I think, and take comfort in the fact that at the top of the transcript page it says plainly:

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

I've never heard anyone actually utter one of these types of examples; if I didn't have a paper to get back to, maybe I'd hunt down some audio/video of the Jon Stewart appearance on Larry King to hear what it sounds like. It really is so strikingly ungrammatical to me that I can't even clearly imagine how it would sound.

But then I Googled {"would haven't"} and got 5,930 hits. (Of course, Google helpfully asks Did you mean: "would have", which would have gotten me 15,300,000 hits.) Here are some more interesting results (taking reductions of HAVE into account, which as we all know are often spelled in various ways):

Although I find all of the modal-HAVE-n't examples in the left-hand column ungrammatical, I'll assume that these are not errors of some sort and that some speakers find them grammatical. But I have vague memories of reading somewhere (probably something by (Pullum &) Zwicky?) that n't can only be enclitic to the highest verb in a verbal projection (in this case, the modal) affixed to finite auxiliaries (including modals) [as Zwicky & Pullum (1983:507) point out; see update below]. So what gives? Here's my hypothesis:

1. Some speakers have reanalyzed modal + reduced HAVE as a single verb finite auxiliary/modal.
2. The modal-HAVE-n't examples written with unreduced HAVE are not really pronounced with [hæv] -- they're pronounced the reduced way, with [ǝv] or just [ǝ].
3. Speakers who find the modal-HAVE-n't forms grammatical are among those who have reanalyzed modal + reduced HAVE as a single verb, which is what allows n't to be enclitic affixed in this context.

I wouldn't be surprised to find that there is work out there somewhere showing that (1) is true, or at least plausible. (Remember, I'm a phonologist, I don't read much of this stuff anymore. For all I know, the whole topic I'm talking about here has already been addressed somewhere.)

The empirical claim in (2) needs verification, and in fact one might surmise that the separated Google results directly contradict it:

On average, then, I found about 232 instances of unreduced HAVE for every one instance of reduced HAVE (all three spellings combined) in the relevant examples. That's pretty striking. But here's what I think: a person writing down one of these examples really doesn't have much choice. Consider the options. Even if this person often writes e.g. woulda or would of, adding enclitic affixing n't to one of these is extremely odd. Enclitic The affix n't doesn't really fit well on would've either, because the result is a form with two apostrophes. So the person is left with would haven't -- not perfectly consistent with the reduced pronunciation, but the best orthographic alternative under the circumstances.

I realize this isn't quite sufficient evidence to reach the conclusion in (3), but that's my story and I'm sticking to it until I hear a better alternative. (Arnold? Geoff? Bueller?)

Interestingly, the single hit for could'ven't that I came across is an example sentence in a handout from a talk given by David Lightfoot. The sentence is starred:

34.	a.	Kim visited NY and Jim could've VPe.
	b.	Kim visited NY and Jim couldn't VPe.
	c.	Kim visited NY and Jim couldn't've VPe.
	d.	I'd've visited NY.
	e.	*Jim could'ven't seen it.

The reason? Apparently:

32.	E.	Syntactic rules can affect affixed words, but cannot affect clitic groups.
	F.	Clitics can attach to material already containing clitics, but affixes cannot.

(As far as I can tell, there are no principles A-D anywhere in the handout. Maybe this is an example of auto-numbering in Microsoft Word gone haywire.)

Assuming that n't is an affix but that 've and 'd are clitics [as shown by Zwicky & Pullum 1983; see update above], the contrast between (34c,d) and (34e) follows from (32F).

(32E) is necessary to explain the following contrast. (33a) is grammatical because couldn't is an affixed word and thus licensed, by (32E), to invert with the subject Kim. (33b) is ungrammatical because could've is a clitic group and so is not licensed to invert.

33.	a.	Couldn't Kim see that?
	b.	*Could've Kim seen that?

So, now I wonder a few things.

1. What would Lightfoot [rather, Zwicky & Pullum; see update above] say about the grammaticality for some speakers of modal-HAVE-n't examples like (34e)?
2. How do speakers who find the modal-HAVE-n't examples grammatical judge the form in (33b)? (My hypothesis predicts that (33b) should be grammatical for them.)
3. What am I still doing awake?

Good night.

[ Comments? ]

Mixed action of ejectment

The OED has this to say about the origin in legal history of the standard names John Doe and Richard Roe:

John Doe, (a) (Eng. and U.S. Law), the name given to the fictitious lessee of the plaintiff, in the (now obsolete) mixed action of ejectment, the fictitious defendant being called Richard Roe; (b) name given to an ordinary or typical citizen (see also quot. 1942)

The earliest citation given is 1768:

1768 BLACKSTONE Comm. III. xviii. 274 The security here spoken of..is at present become a mere form: and *John Doe and Richard Roe are always returned as the standing pledges for this purpose.

Further enlightenment, including the distinction between personal chattels and chattels real as applied to fresh and unfresh fish, may or may not be available here, in a fascinating discussion which I have not had time to read.

Not Joao Euro

Fernando Pereiro emailed to explain that the Portuguese "John Doe" equivalent, given in the list that Robin Stocks copied from Blick Online who copied it from funnyname.com, is not just "Joe Euro" at all.

The Portuguese "João Ninguém" from that list has yet a different meaning from John Doe or Joe Bloggs. It's not (AFAIK) used in legal proceedings, nor does it refer to the average Joe. Instead, it has a picaresque meaning, going back at least to sixteenth century play "Auto da Lusitânia" by Gil Vicente. In it, "Todo o Mundo" ("everybody") is a rich merchant, and "Ninguém" ("nobody") is a poor man who discuss what they wish for in this world, while two demons (Berzebu and Dinato) joke for the gallery playing on the double meaning of the characters' names:

Ninguém	Buscas mais, amigo meu?		What else do you seek, my friend?
Todo-o-Mundo	Busco a vida e quem ma dê.		Life and who will give it to me.
Ninguém	A vida não sei que é, a morte conheço eu.		Life I don't know, but death I do.
Berzebu	Escreve lá outra sorte.		Write down this finding.
Dinato	Que sorte?		What finding?
Berzebu	Muito garrida: Todo-o-Mundo busca a vida, e Ninguém conhece a morte.		Very colorful: Everybody seeks life, and nobody knows death.
Todo-o-Mundo	E mais queria o paraíso, quanto devo para isso.		I also want to get to heaven without anybody getting in the way.
Ninguém	E eu ponho-me a pagar quanto devo para isso.		And I am paying what I owe to get there.
Berzebu	Escreve com muito aviso.		Write (this) down carefully.
Dinato	Que escreverei?		What?
Berzebu	Escreve que Todo-o-Mundo quer paraíso, e Ninguém paga o que deve.		That everybody wants heaven, but nobody pays what they owe.

"Ninguém" is the traditional honest loser who will not get his reward in this world. Later, "João Ninguém" seems to have acquired a more comical or tragicomic cast in Brasil, but I don't know about that in detail.

 

Posted by Mark Liberman at 01:49 PM

Doing the Kenosha kid

At the end of one of our obsessive efforts to construe a puzzling song line, I mentioned "the extended riff in Gravity's Rainbow on the phrase 'you never did the Kenosha kid'". A couple of readers asked me about this. I guess it's worth going over, if only to show that somebody else can be just as overanalytically playful as we sometimes are. Of course, this was a fictional character in a drug-induced delirium, but we'll take our role models where we can find them.

The context is London in 1944, when a thousand V2 rockets were raining down. The behavior of an American soldier named Tyrone Slothrop has shown an uncanny correlation with V2 landing sites. This is discovered because he puts stars on a map of London to locate his sexual connections, in a pattern which is recognized by a statistician who has been making his own map of rocket strikes. The thing is, Slothrop's hook-ups precede the rockets by a day or so, in what will turn out to be a victory for a farcical generalization of Pavlov over a real application of Poisson. But that's another subject entirely -- the point is that Slothrop's map gets him interrogated under sodium amytal, a technique first documented in 1943 as narcoanalysis, and sometimes referred to as "truth serum".

Sodium amytal, which is known chemically as sodium amobarbitol, is a barbiturate which, when administered intravenously, produces a relaxed and sleepy state in the subject. While in this state the patient tends to become more talkative, uninhibited, and spontaneous with what appears to be less guarded and defensive speech and behavior. Sodium amytal is not “truth serum” and individuals can lie or otherwise report misinformation under the influence of this barbiturate. However, individuals with dissociation of identity typically respond with overt symptoms and signs of their dissociative disorder including flashbacks, abreactions, and visual imagery with narratives by the patient in alternate dissociated identity states.

In Slothrop's case, one of the themes of his reaction to the drug is an obsessive meditation on alternative possible analyses of the six-word sequence "you never did the kenosha kid".

Pynchon's description starts with six alternative construals, organized as four cases with two subcases, and then explains

These changes on the text "You never did the Kenosha Kid" are occupying Slothrop's awareness as the doctor leans in out of the white overhead to wake him and begin the session. The needle slips without pain in the the vein just outboard of the hollow of the in the crook of his elbow: 10% Sodium Amytal, one cc at a time, as needed.

and then gives three more, for a total of nine. The first six construals (four cases) were

(1) A letter is sent from Slothrop (at the address "TDY Abreaction Ward, St. Veronica's Hospital") to "The Kenosha Kid, General Delivery, Kenosha, Wisconsin", asking "Did I ever bother you, ever, for anything, in your life?" The answer comes back

You never did.

The Kenosha Kid

Construals 2, 2.1, 3 and 3.1 are presented as dialogs:

(2) Smartass youth: Aw, did all them old-fashioned dances, I did the "Charleston", a-and the "Big Apple," too!

Old veteran hoofer: Bet you never did the "Kenosha," kid!

(2.1) S.Y.: Shucks, I did all them dances, I did the "Castle Walk," and I did the "Lindy," too!

O.V.H.: Bet you never did the "Kenosha Kid."

(3) Minor employee: Well, he has been avoiding me, and I thought it might be because of the Slothrop Affair. If he somehow held me responsible --

Superior (haughtily): You! never did the Kenosha Kid think for one instant that you ...

(3.1) Superior (incredulously): You? Never! Did the Kenosha Kid think for one instant that you ... ?

Construal (4) is presented in mock-epic narrative form:

(4) And at the end of the mighty day in which he gave us in fiery letters across the sky all the words we'd ever need, words we enjoy today, and fill our dictionaries with, the meek voice of little Tyrone Slothrop, celebrated ever after in tradition and song, ventured to filter upward to the Kid's attention: "You never did 'the,' Kenosha Kid!"

The construal numbered (5) -- which is the seventh if we count the variants (2.1) and (3.1) -- comes as a verb-final accusation:

(5) Maybe you did fool the Philadelphia, rag the Rochester, josh the Joliet. But you never did the Kenosha kid.

Number (6) -- or eight -- is one side of another conversation in a strangely imagined context:

(6) (The day of the Ascent and sacrifice. A nation-wide observance. Fats searing, blood dripping and burning to a salty brown ... ) You did the Charlottesville shoat, check, the Forest Hills foal, check. (Fading now ... ) The Laredo lamb, check. Oh-oh. Wait. What's this, Slothrop? You never did the Kenosha kid. Snap to, Slothrop.

Then there's 10 Kenosha-free pages featuring dream-sequence flashbacks to a jazz club in Roxbury MA (with a cameo appearance by Malcolm X as a shoeshine boy), and a long fantasy about Crutchfield the Westwardman and his Afro-Norwegian sidekick Whappo. Finally, back in dreamland Roxbury, the chapter ends with one last unnumbered variant:

In the shadows, black and white holding in a panda-pattern across his face, each of the regions a growth or mass of scar tissue, waits the connection he's traveled all this way to see. The face is as weak as a house-dog's, and its owner shrugs a lot.

Slothrop: Where is he? Why didn't he show? Who are you?

Voice: The Kid got busted. And you know me, Slothrop. Remember? I'm Never.

Slothrop (peering): You, Never? (A pause.) Did the Kenosha Kid?

[pp. 60-71 of the 1995 Penguin edition]

John Doe, Joe Farnarkle and John Furphy

[Following up on my earlier post " Matti, Nanashi and Fred"]. Robin Stocks' original post at carob (a blog) copied a list from Blick Online, which seems in turn to have gotten it from funnyname.com. Erin McKean (re)posted a relevant 2002 Verbatim column by Nick Humez.

I noticed an apparent typo in the Finnish name, but there is clearly a good deal more to say about this, starting with several of the comments on Robin Stock's post.

Minna from all-things-me added a more complete and believable correction of the Finnish name:

just letting you know that the Finnish version is a bit "off". It's actually Matti Meikäläinen

Minna should know, being actually Finnish, but the fact is that I should have see the vowel harmony problem too.

entangledbank made an important distinction:

'John Doe' and 'Richard Roe' are legal terms in the English-speaking world. They're not casual terms for the person in the street, which Joe Bloggs and Fred Nurke are, or in the USA Joe Public or Joe Sixpack. So I don't know whether any of these terms are translations of John Doe or just of Joe Bloggs.

Fred Nurke was a minor character in The Goon Show, the 1950s radio comedy, and taken up in wide use in Britain (and evidently in Australia) as a name for 'just some bloke'. I haven't heard of Mr Farnarkle but it's presumably of more recent invention, as farnarkling was a sport full of nonsense names invented by the New Zealand comedian Fred Dagg in the 1970s.

David Nash emailed me to agree, and explained further:

(except I go with the whG majority spelling Nurk rather than Nurke).
Fred Nurk is getting a bit more respectable, as in the model forms at http://www.pks.com.au/company/labwizardmarketfeedback.pdf
And, my parents' generation would instead say "Joe Blow".

A likely source of the furphy of "Farnarkle" is:

English (Australia): Fred Nurk, as in "afraid not" in a deep Aussie accent. Joe Farnarkle is another, a farnarkler is a bullshit artist.

-- Courtesy of Jeremy Ham http://www.funnyname.com/anonymous.html

where I suspect this Jeremy Ham to be indugling in a bit of farnarkling himself -- I've never heard "Joe Farnarkle" and Google only gets us to self-conscious listings.

In the legal context here, I think I've seen "A.N. Other" (but can't Google any for you).

If you wonder about furphy, as I did, here's a gloss and (long) explanation, starting

In the latest edition of The Australian Oxford Paperback Dictionary(1996) I entered furphy as a noun and an adjective and defined it as follows:

This Ozword comes from the name of [John] Furphy, a blacksmith and general engineer, who went to Shepparton from Kyneton in 1871 and set up a foundry. John Furphy designed a galvanised iron water-cart on wheels and his firm, J. Furphy & Sons, manufactured them. Each cart had the name FURPHY written large on the body. So successful were these carts that during World War 1 the Department of the Army bought many Furphy carts to supply water to camps in Australia and especially to camps in Palestine, and Egypt.

Fine -- but how did John Furphy's name come to be associated with rumours and lies? As far as I know, John Furphy was a most respectable and upright man, a Methodist lay preacher, and not in the least bit given to rumour mongering or telling tall tales. As a matter of fact, he often used the cast-iron ends of his carts to carry a variety of engraved moral advertisements, the following being typical:

WATER IS A GIFT OF GOD
BEER AND WHISKY OF THE DEVIL
COME AND HAVE A DRINK OF WATER

The standard account has it that the term furphy arose among Australian soldiers overseas during World War 1. It seems that when soldiers gathered around these water-carts, they became sites for gossip and rumour. Another story has it that the drivers of these water-carts carried gossip and rumour from camp to camp, no doubt making a good story better as they proceeded. Whatever the reason for the nexus, the nexus was soon established between the name on the cart and the rumour-mongering associated with the cart's arrival: the furphy was born as soldier slang. Shortly thereafter furphy (also spelled furfy and furphey) left the confines of the camps and established itself firmly as part of the general Australian language, a position it holds securely to this day.

What a great example of metonymy in action!

But one more thing: in legal parallel with John Doe we have Jane Doe. Female forms are rare in the lists cited so far -- is that because they're really not out there, or because they weren't collected?

[Update 1/6/2005: Philip Ryan writes to say that

Fred Dagg is actually the stage name of John Clark. Fred Dagg was his alter-ego, the canonical New Zealand sheep farmer.

The choice of the name "Dagg" was because a "dag" in Australian and New Zealand idiom is a silly, dumb, or idiotic person. Think Homer Simpson.

The word "dag" comes from the name for the shit, muck, and mess that gets stuck on sheep wool around the sheep's anus. Farmers and farmers-hands may regularly cut off the dags to keep their sheep clean. Or they are removed from the wool prior to processing, once the sheep is shorn.

]

Ain't I'm a stinkah

I think Mark's onto something when he writes that "ain't can be a sort of phrase-initial marker of questions and exclamations".

(Blah blah blah the obligatory links to previous relevant posts blah blah blah ...)

Mark cites the following examples:

(link) Ain't I'm a dog, I'm always steppin' around
(link) Ain't this is a great country -- free bologna sandwiches for profaners!!

Mark notes that the first is a "pretty solid citation" and that the second "might be a typo, I admit". My personal judgment is that the first is awful, but then again I didn't grow up hearing the relevant song. The second I find totally normal. If you follow the link, you'll see that this is the closing comment by a person who claims to have been arrested for holding a sign reading "F.U.G.W." along a Bush motorcade route. I take the comment to be sarcastic -- (and I mean sarcastic sarcastic, not could-care-less sarcastic).

Anyway, I think both examples make perfect sense if you take ain't to be a phrase-initial marker meaning something like "isn't it the case (that)", "don't you agree (that)", "it's clear (that)", or the like -- observe:

It's clear that I'm a dog; I'm always steppin' around.
This is a great country, don't you agree? Free bologna sandwiches for profaners!!

Mark then gives props to Trevor's alternative idea that there's a missing subject of ain't in the lyric we've been debating. Mark cites the following four examples to support this idea; curiously, only one of them (#3) has an actual missing subject.

1. you better focus, cos it ain't no one can quote this (link)
2. It ain't no cat can't get in no coop (from "Bill Labov's early work")
3. cos ain't no limitations on the things we do (link)
4. I know it ain't how it used to be (link)

All of these cases, including the subjectless #3, are examples of existential sentences. There is used as the subject of an existential sentence in standard English while it is used in most other situations in which a "dummy" or expletive subject is necessary. But in many nonstandard varieties of English, including AAVE, it fulfills both roles. Apparently, so may a null subject -- at least in some circumstances, such as the cos ain't no construction (and I mean "construction" in a relatively neutral sense -- I might have said "frame", but that might open up another can of worms).

(By the way, in case you found the 238 ghits for Mark's suggested {"cos ain't no"} search underwhelming, try adding the 18 for {"coz ain't no"}, the 89 for {"cus ain't no"}, the 533 for {"cuz ain't no"}, and the 3620 for {"cause ain't no"}.)

There's a lot I'm unsure of about the Ain't how that God planned it line, but I'm pretty sure it's not an existential that would thereby license a null subject. So what is it? The mystery remains.

Oh, yeah -- Happy Anniversary, Language Log!

[ Comments? ]

Calling Samuel Beckett

At the gym this evening, I didn't bring my mp3 player, thinking it would be a good chance to think. Think again. The most salient sound in the fitness room, cutting through the techno-musak and the thud of feet on the treadmills, was the young woman four machines over talking on her cell phone. She was there when I started, and until she left 25 minutes later, cell phone cradled against her ear, I could hear every word she said. But that wasn't the unusual part. The thing is -- and I swear this is true -- the only contentful noun stem that she uttered during the entire conversation was weather.

The first thing that I heard her say was

So what's the weather there?

OK, fair enough. After a brief silence, she continued

Well, go check weather.com.

Good idea. Then she emitted a series of four equally spaced versions of yeah, each different:

Yeah. [low falling intonation = "I get it"]

Yeah? [high rising intonation = "Really?"]

Yeah?!! [empatic rise-fall intonation = "yes of course, you stupid idiot!"]

Yeah... [mid level intonation, pharyngealized voice quality = "well, I guess so, but..."]

After a brief pause, she said

Ask him what the weather is like.

Curiously, weather was focused, as if she'd just been talking about other things. She then added

Well, I'd like to know about the weather.

I had figured that out already, and so had everyone else in the fitness room, but apparently the party at the other end of the line was having some trouble grasping the concept. So she repeated

What's the weather there now?

A scattering of back-channel responses intervened:

Yeah...

Right...

Uh huh...

OK...

And then she returned, without any indication of impatience, to her theme:

And how's the weather?

I'll spare you the transcript of the next 23 minutes.

Her accent was generic educated non-southern American, maybe with a touch of California. Her voice struck me as piercing and nasal, but it's a little hard to separate form from content in judging voice quality: "nasal" is often just a phonetic re-interpretation of "annoying".

It's possible to fill in the context, and the other side of her conversation, in a way that redeems this individual from idiocy, if not from rudeness. Maybe she was talking with a whole series of family members, and wanted some independent judgments; maybe she was worried about her rose bushes and her interlocutor only wanted to talk about his tennis elbow; who knows? The trouble with public phone conversations is that you can't stop yourself from trying to fill in the other side, at least half consciously. In my opinion, and Mark Twain's opinion too, and also according to some experiments, this makes such half-conversations seem much louder, more salient (and more annoying) than they otherwise would be.

The trouble with this particular conversation was that it kept getting harder and harder to make sense of it. This was not because it was made up of complex phrases. Nor was it because its phrases were especially ambiguous or contentless -- in fact, a conversation made up of nothing but versions of "yeah" and "OK" would have been less gripping, I think. It was her endless repetition of queries about the weather, performed in an invariant manner as if each was the first, that made this such a special experience.

Oh, as she walked out the door, 25 minutes later, she did introduce a new morpheme:

Well, is it raining?

A birthday card from the Trib

Nathan Bierma, whose own weblog Nathan's Notebook is in our blogroll, focuses on Language Log in his column this week in the Chicago Tribune [registration required -- a copy is here].

As Nathan points out, his article appears on the anniversary of Language Log's first post, give or take a day: "Wednesday marked Language Log's first birthday, a major milestone by blog standards."

Though I say it as shouldn't, I'll quote the article quoting Erin McKean:

"Language Log excels not only at delivering readable, witty and informative entries about cool language topics, but also at pointing out the places where linguistics has something pertinent and interesting to say about current events," said Erin McKean, editor of the language quarterly Verbatim and Chicago-based senior editor of U.S. dictionaries for Oxford University Press.

One of the things that struck me about this article was its headline, "Linguists share love of words with amateurs via Weblog":

Back in April, Geoff Nunberg wrote about the "culture of polarization" in the language area, looking at amazon.com's "customers also bought" lists for a sample of popular books on language. He found a striking division between what he called "popularizations of linguistics" and "books by language mavens and word-lore collectors".

As a bunch of academic linguists, we're definitely on the "popularization of linguistics" side of this gulf. In fact, Geoff's list of P of L authors includes three Language Log contributors (if I add him, as he modestly failed to do).

The headline phrase "love of words" evokes the "language maven and word-lore collector" side of things -- maybe the alternative headline "Linguists share love of language with amateurs via Weblog" would have expressed our purpose better. It would have fit in the same space in the on-line version of the paper, as shown above, which has plenty of white space after "with". Of course, I haven't seen the print version, where the space constraints might have been different.

But judging from the links and email that we get, I believe that our readers come from both sides of the linguistic divide. For that matter, many don't seem to be consumers of either kind of book. I'll take this as confirmation of my conviction that language ought to be intrinsically interesting on many levels to almost everyone, and I'll take the headline to mean that our stuff appeals to the word lovers as much as to those with other orientations.

I'll even come out of the lexicographic closet and admit to being a word lover myself, though my affections are not limited to that aspect of language.

[Headlines are usually added by an editor, not written by the journalist responsible for the article that runs under them, so this should not be taken as a criticism of the writer. In fact, it's bad manners to complain at all about such a nice birthday card. I'm just sayin', is all... ]

Matti, Nanashi and Fred

Robin Stocks at Carob (a blog) has a fascinating list of John Doe equivalents around the world, occasioned by a translation error in German stories about recent events in Michael Jackson's trial. The child involved in the trial is referred to as "John Doe" for the sake of anonymity, but apparently someone didn't get it, and so the papers write about "die Aufenthalte der Familie Doe" and the like.

I'm not sure that the German references are really wrong, since "Doe" is presumably what the court papers actually said, but anyhow, it's interesting to learn about Matti Meikalainaen (Finland) [which I think is a typo for "Meikalainen", originally the fault of Blick Online], Nanashi No Gombe (Japan), Fred Nurk (Australia) and the rest of them.

[Update: Erin McKean at Verbatim Magazine has re-posted a 2002 column by Nick Humez on the same subject.]

Old wine in new bottles

In 2002, translator Sibel Edmonds was let go by the FBI after she complained about poor-quality work and even sabotage in translations produced by other bureau linguists. The Justice Department's inspector general has produced a classified report on Edmonds' charges, some aspects of which were revealed in a July 21 letter to congress from FBI director Robert S. Mueller III. The NYT has gotten a copy of Mueller's letter, and Erich Lichtblau has an article about it today's paper.

According to the article,

Ms. Edmonds worked as a contract linguist for the F.B.I. for about six months, translating material in Turkish, Persian and Azerbaijani. She was dismissed in 2002 after she complained repeatedly that bureau linguists had produced slipshod and incomplete translations of important terrorism intelligence before and after the Sept. 11 attacks. She also accused a fellow Turkish linguist in the bureau's Washington field office of blocking the translation of material involving acquaintances who had come under F.B.I. suspicion and said the bureau had allowed diplomatic sensitivities with other nations to impede the translation of important terrorism intelligence.

The inspector general's report apparently concludes that Edmonds "was dismissed in part because she accused the bureau of ineptitude", in the words of Lichtblau's article, and also "found that the F.B.I. did not aggressively investigate her claims of espionage against a co-worker."

A few years ago, people used to say that the classic George Smiley/Harry Palmer type of spy story was finished, because the dramatic frame was gone. But it looks like the classical themes are back, in a new framework.

You better focus, cos it ain't no one can quote this

OK, we're having fun now, Eric and Trevor and I. The rest of you can sing along or tune out, your choice. Warning: without the backstory (here, here, here, here, here, here) this might not make sense. In fact, with the backstory... well, anyhow.

There's another couple of possibilities here, both for ain't and for that, in Chuck D.'s puzzling line "Ain't how that God planned it?"

First, ain't. There's some evidence that ain't can be a sort of phrase-initial marker of questions and exclamations:

(link) Ain't I'm a dog, I'm always steppin' around
(link) Ain't this is a great country -- free bologna sandwiches for profaners!!

The first of those is a pretty solid citation, being the from the title and refrain of a popular song, repeated many times in each performance. It might be a joke but it's not a mistake. The second one might be a typo, I admit. This construction -- obviously a reinterpretation of subject-auxiliary inversion -- tends to undermine a half-century of arguments about structure-dependence, but never mind.

As an alternative, I like Trevor's idea -- at least I think it was his idea -- that maybe there's a missing subject before ain't, in a construction like

(link)
BAM, I slam cos Lil' Bud is who I am
I guess you noticed but if you haven't noticed
you better focus, cos it ain't no one can quote this
paragraph that I gets ill with
I got the lyrics that them fools can't deal with

There's a famous linguistic example of this construction in Bill Labov's early work, "It ain't no cat can't get in no coop". You can find plenty of examples with a dropped subject, for instance by searching on {"cos ain't no"}: "cos ain't no limitations on the things we do".

And you can find plenty of examples where the predicate is a wh-clause, like

(link)
I know it ain't how it
used to be
but I'm not good
at being me
anymore.

Right, now that. Since God is unique, in the relevant theology, and also invisible, the obvious meanings of the demonstrative (that one not this one, that one I'm pointing at, etc.) don't seem to work, which is why we've been talking about that as a complementizer. But there's another sense for the demonstrative, which the OED glosses as

b. Indicating a person or thing assumed to be known, or to be known to be such as is stated. Often (esp. before a person's name: cf. L. iste) implying censure, dislike, or scorn; but sometimes commendation or admiration.

In this usage, there's no implication that the referenced entity is non-unique or visible:

(link) Man, I really have to get to that Pynchon someday.
(link) Sometimes, when I want to get a little freaky, I turn up some of that Louie Armstrong.

In fact, speaking of Pynchon and Armstrong, this whole thing reminds me of the extended riff in Gravity's Rainbow on the phrase "you never did the Kenosha kid".

How (that) now, brown cow?

Trevor at Kaleboel has responded to our responses to his response to ... oh, never mind.

In my last post on the subject, I admitted that I could accept subject-drop in a noninverted declarative, but not in a noninverted interrogative:

1. That ain't how God planned it.   →   ø Ain't how God planned it.
2. Ain't that how God planned it?   →   *Ain't ø how God planned it?

Taking advantage of this admission, Trevor writes:

If you listen to other recordings by Chuck D, I think you may find that he doesn't use intonation to distinguish between questions and statements in the way that speakers of standard English do. That makes me slightly curious as to why we're so sure he's nervously asking us "Ain't how that God planned it?" instead of rounding off the section by telling us emphatically--as his tone suggests--"Ain't how (that) God planned it!"

Consider the line right before the debated part of the lyric again:

All I want is peace and love on this planet

Trevor is suggesting that the line following this one is the emphatic assertion "Ain't how (that) God planned it!", with (I assume) the implicit subject and wh-comp analysis that Trevor originally suggested. So, the whole lyric "should be":

All I want is peace and love on this planet /
That ain't how God planned it!

But what does the "that" (i.e., the implicit subject of the line actually sung) refer to? If Chuck D. is asserting that something is not going according to God's plan, what is that something? Here are the likely phrasal possiblities from the preceding line that could substitute for the implicit subject:

1. [All I want is peace and love on this planet]_S
2. [Peace and love on this planet]_NP
3. [This planet]_NP

Consider now how each of these fits in the line:

1. [That [all I want is peace and love on this planet]_S]_S' isn't how God planned it!
2. [Peace and love on this planet]_NP isn't how God planned it!
3. [This planet]_NP isn't how God planned it!

Only the third of these seems to fit in the line in a way that makes sense in the context of the whole lyric; as my wife Karen has suggested to me, one can imagine "this planet" standing for "the situation on this planet, lacking peace and love", given the context of the whole lyric.

I'm still not persuaded, though. The interpretation I imagine for the interrogative fits much better in my mind:

Ain't [peace and love on this planet]_NP how God planned it? (where "it" = "things (to be)")

(Besides, I still stand by my claim that the unreduced vowel in Chuck D.'s "that" is pretty strong evidence that it is the demonstrative [ðætˀ], not the complementizer [ðǝtˀ]. Trevor is right to point out that Chuck D.'s intonation is not going to give us much in the way of clues, but I'm pretty confident about the unreduced vowel thing.)

So, in my view, we're back to my original question (sort of, since I'm restating it in the light of subsequent discussion): did Chuck D. say "how that" (specifically, wh-subject)? If so, is that an error or a point of variation? If not, what did he say? -- We are obviously having a hard time coming up with alternatives that don't leak.

[ Comments? ]

Skazeetch skazootch skazeetch skazootch

That's the sound of a magician sawing a box in half, according to MAD #213, March 1980, Page 15, as documented by The Don Martin Dictionary. You can add this to the other lexicographical references on comic-book sounds that we posted last week.

[ link via email from Jeff Erickson]

That's not how that ... is it?

Mark narrowly beat me to the punch in commenting on Trevor at Kaleboel's response to my post yesterday about the "Ain't how that God planned it?" lyric. I'm gonna have to (respectfully) go ahead and sort of disagree with Mark; I'm not so sure about the sensibility of Trevor's story.

Trevor writes:

I reckon that when Chuck D of Public Enemy sings

Ain't how that God planned it?

he is using "how that" where standard English speakers would use "how", and that the pronoun "that" is assumed in the "ain't" or what precedes it.

If I understand Trevor correctly -- and I think I do; Mark seems to have arrived at the same understanding -- he is saying that "how that" (wh-comp) in Chuck D.'s speech is "how" (wh alone) in standard English, and that there is an implicit pronominal subject of "ain't" (coincidentally, I assume, also "that"). Translating to standard English, then, we get:

Ain't (um, I mean, Isn't) that how God planned it?

Hmm. Now, I ain't no syntactician, but I'm suspicious of Trevor's wh-comp analysis of the "how that" in this case as well as of his assertion that there is an implicit-yet-unexpressed pronominal subject in this question.

Take the wh-comp analysis of "how that" first. In defense of this analysis, Trevor cites a case of "how that" that is undoubtedly wh-comp, and implies that he has found plenty more such examples:

The "how that"/"how" swap turns up in a variety of sources, including in 1513 in Douglas's Æneis (OED), where the "that" clearly does not refer to one particular (manifestation of) Aeneas:

How that Eneas socht ansueir at Apollyne

I'm not saying that Chuck D.'s speech couldn't have descended directly from the speech/writing of a 16th Century Scottish poet, or from the speech of the writers of any of the other 282 search results for "how that" in the OED quotations for that matter, though we still need to remove all the cases in which the "that" is clearly (part of) the subject of the clause following the "how". But if you just listen closely, Chuck D. pronounces "that" with a completely unreduced vowel; it's clearly [ðætˀ], not [ðǝtˀ]. In contemporary English, the complementizer "that" is only pronounced with an unreduced vowel in hyper-careful speech (if ever); I think we can all agree that Chuck D. is not being -- and has no reason to be -- hyper-careful in this case.

Now consider Trevor's implicit-subject assertion. Are inverted subjects dropped in (non-standard or standard) English? Certainly not in my dialect:

1. That ain't how God planned it.   →   ø Ain't how God planned it.
2. Ain't that how God planned it?   →   *Ain't ø how God planned it?

(Mark expresses similar skepticism about this point, too.)

These arguments notwithstanding, it just seems like a striking coincidence that these two things should go together in this case. Of course, Mark and I could just be misunderstanding Trevor after all. I hope he says more about it on his blog.

[ Comments? ]

(That's) how that

Trevor at Kaleboel offers a sensible story about where "how that" comes from, in the phrase from a Public Enemy song lyric that Eric Bakovic brought up the other day:

All I want is peace and love on this planet /
Ain't how that God planned it?

Eric observed that Chuck D. is both clear and emphatic in enunciating that paticular sequence of words. It goes without saying that a recording like this is examined carefully many times before it's released, and anything regarded as a mistake, or at least as contrary to the artist's intention, would normally be fixed.

Trevor suggests that the expected "that" after "how" is part of the archaic (and dialectal) pattern in which "that" combines with wh-words ("how that", "why that", "who that", "where that" etc.), while the expected "that" before "how" has been elided. He cites analogous cases in Dutch as well.

I'd come to a similar hypothesis about the extra "that" -- minus the Dutch dimension, where Trevor has the advantage of knowing the language -- and had even come up with a sampling of "that's how that" cases from the web. The first two of these are from poems in the style of traditional song lyrics, and thus represent (or imitate) an archaic state of the language preserved in a local dialect. However, the last two are from spoken transcripts. The first transcript is of an interview with a mainstream American speaker (a retired high school principal) while the second comes from an interview with someone who is not a native speaker, but whose transcribed speech seems otherwise quite fluent and correct.

(link) With a door closed in my face now, and that's how that I was greeted
(link) That's how that she paid all her bills.
(link) And that's how that I really got into the principalship.
(link) That's how that I got started thinking of the Equitable Building.

The thing is, getting the extra "that" after "how" is the easy part [Update: as Eric observes, keeping it fully stressed might be a problem, though]. It's the missing "that" that's hard. I didn't post about this because I couldn't think of any plausible way to get rid of that first "that".

It's true that "that" is often optional, but that's the complementizer "that" (as in "I think (that) I know the answer) rather that the demonstrative "that" (as in "Is that what you want?").

A sentence-initial demonstrative can often be deleted, as an example of the general phenomenon of prosiopesis, in which "the speaker begins to articulate, or thinks he begins to articulate, but produces no audible sound (either for want of expiration, or because he does not put his vocal chords in the right position) till one or two syllables after the beginning of what he intended to say".

This can give you things like

That's what I want   →   's what I want

but as far as I can see, it only works following a pause, or anyhow not in a context like

Ain't that how that God planned it?

So I wouldn't think twice about hearing "Ain't that how that God planned it?" -- in the right context and company I might even say it -- but the phrase that actually occurs in the song seems surprising to me.

But maybe some people allow more general that-deletion? Or maybe some more generic sort of pro-drop is involved?

Estuary English

Adding to our discussion of the intricate dance of regional and social variation in British speech, Kate Joester emails a comment about Estuary English:

I think there's probably another dimension in prejudice against Estuary English in particular. It's associated with "youth culture" and with being a fake accent acquired by speakers who are "really" something else in order to be youthful and cool.
It's the universal accent for imitating the stupid young and the mutton-dressed-as-lamb, no matter where they come from.

The opposite of that ever-popular LL post "When's the last time you heard an old person say "dadburn it", perhaps?

Here's a diagram from the Varieties of English site at Arizona, from the page on Estuary English, which makes a related point graphically. The diagram is copied (I think) from the original 1984 study by David Rosewarne, who wanted to describe the development of speech varieties in between the local dialects and the (mostly class rather than locality-based) "Received Pronunciation":

I guess that there might be a similar set of attitudes involved in the U.S. with respect to the spread of speech varieties perceived as originating among southern Californian "valley girls", though in that case there is the additional dimension of sex-related stereotyping.

The Queen's business

The following BBC News Online story about a British accent survey comes to some conclusions that complement Ray Girvan's comments and Steve Thorne's findings (both reported by Mark today).

The details of the survey are not particularly clear from the story, but the results are claimed to reflect people's perceptions of different accents in terms of such things as success in business, trustworthiness/honesty, aptitude for hard work, and reliability. Khalid Aziz, chairman of the Aziz Corporation (which carried out the survey), is quoted as saying:

"In terms of success in business the Geordie accent comes out right at the bottom. In terms of associating it with honesty, it comes right out at the top which is why there is a lot of call centres in that neck of the woods. The accent that is really bad was the Scouse accent which comes at the bottom of practically everything, particularly in terms of honesty. It is unfortunate and is clearly a stereotype."

Sid Waddell, a darts commentator, has a nice response to the survey results concerning his native Geordie accent:

"There is a paradox here. If Geordies are seen are [sic] the most honest, but don't get on in business, then what does that say about business? I think these views are a deeply ensconced stereotype coming from the fact that anyone who speaks with a strong regional accent is thick."

Good thing he didn't say "thick regional accent" ... :-)

I sometimes find it hard to blame regular folks (or PITS, as Arnold sometimes refers to them) for their linguistic prejudices, given how badly some of our own representatives are often portrayed in the media. For example, there's a link to the above story from the sidebar of another one entitled "Yoda 'speaks like Anglo-Saxon'". What is this story doing in the Education section? And was David Crystal really interviewed about how Yoda's OSV speech pattern could be used to educate children about embracing linguistic diversity?

Mr Crystal said his mission was for non-standard English to be recognised. "The history of English is a history of the non-standard language. The people I'm attacking are the purists who say language should never change and be 'like it was when I was a lad'. The message should be that we welcome diversity."

Another link from this story's sidebar takes you to one entitled "Do you speak Elf?" (also in the Education section). No linguists comment in this one, but a "special needs co-ordinator" at a Birmingham boys' school, who is offering after-hours courses in Elvish, says:

"The children really enjoy it. It breaks the idea that education should simply be aimed at getting a job. [...] It's very different from just studying a language like French: the boys are doing this for fun, like [Tolkien] did. That has to be a good thing."

I don't disagree, but consider some of the comments from readers of the story:

• Great. Will be really handy when these kids grow up into the real world and need to get jobs.
• Don't go learnin' Sindarin - it's bad for yer' elf.
• No, I am very glad to say that I do not speak "Elvish" and it will be a cold day in hell before I do.
• What an absurd idea. Most of the children I come across can't even speak English, never mind French or German or any other useful language. If grunting is a major element of elf vocabulary, the children should be brilliant at it.

Full disclosure: more of the comments are positive, or at least not negative. Some particularly good ones:

• I think that it is really great that these children want to learn it, because once you have acquired the skills of language learning, it is much easier to pick up another language, thus what they see as a fun pastime could actually turn out to be a big help to them in the future.
• My daughter (aged 14) and her friends have been studying Elvish in their school lunch hours for two or three years now. They really seem to enjoy it. It amazes me how deeply they get into the grammar of it, but this can only be helpful for their learning the more "mainstream" languages.
• Excellent stuff. They'll probably learn more grammar studying Sindarin than they will in modern mainstream education French or German.

(But this last one sadly continues: "More elves in our schools, that's what I say! Equip all teachers with longbows? Hmm. Not a bad idea. Now if only we can get that past the whining liberal orcs, there's a fighting chance of improving our education system.")

Finally, let's not forget everyone's real motivation for learning a foreign language: love, sweet love:

• I can't speak Elvish. But I wouldn't say no to learning it if all the Elvish-speaking fellas are as hunky as that Aragorn. I wouldn't mind being his Bess!

[ Comments? ]

The beauty of Brummie

Following up on recent posts about accent evaluation, here's a clear explanation by Steve Thorne of an experiment comparing how different English accents are perceived by native and non-native speakers.

In May 2002, I recorded short samples of 20 different accents of English... In order to limit the influence of extraneous variables, the speakers chosen were all male, white, aged between 35 and 40, and upper-working to lower-middle class. These recordings were played to 96 native and 109 non-native English speakers who were then asked to briefly describe each accent and rate each one on a scale of 1-10 (1 = very unpleasant, 5 = neutral, 10 = very pleasant).

According to Thorne:

... the native speakers reacted predictably. The French, Southern Irish, Edinburgh Scottish and Geordie (Newcastle-upon-Tyne) accents received the most favourable responses (none, incidentally, described the very nasal French accent as 'nasal'), the American and rural accents such as Cornish and Norfolk also did well, but Welsh, RP (Received Pronunciation), Northern Irish and accents associated with large urban conurbations such as London (Cockney) and Liverpool (Scouse) fared badly. No prizes for guessing which accent came bottom. Black Country.

Black Country is "an accent associated with the South Staffordshire area of the English Midlands". I'll freely confess that I had never heard of it, and so would not have guessed that it would come in last (or "come bottom", as Thorne puts it in that charmingly quaint UK-ish patois of his :-).

In the cited page, Thorne doesn't explain in detail who the "native speakers" were and where they came from -- that surely would make a big difference, since Americans' ability to distinguish among UK accents is usually rather poor, and their evaluative associations with UK accents are quite limited. I expect that the same is true in reverse for the British speakers with respect to American accents, though perhaps American television and movies have conveyed some clues about the stereotypes involved.

Anyhow, one of Thorne's original goals is to defend the speech of his native Birmingham, which seems to be something like the New Jersey or Brooklyn of England:

Ask a British person what their least favourite accent is, and they will more than likely say 'Brummie' - the variety of English spoken in the West Midlands city of Birmingham. Ask them why, and they will more than likely use adjectives such as 'nasal', 'monotonous', 'miserable' and/or 'ugly' to justify their responses. Such views are based on the belief that all other accents are higher in aesthetic value than Brummie, and even those who are prepared to accept that Brummie is not 'wrong' (and many aren't) seem fundamentally opposed to the idea that other accents are not more aesthetically pleasing. But is Brummie really ugly?

In support of his claim of anti-Brummie prejudice, Thorne quotes from a shockingly smug and nasty BBC page on "How to speak Brummie", which he accuses of speading untruths:

[A] common misconception about Birmingham intonation... is that it 'falls' at the end of sentences, and this leads to criticisms that it is 'dull', 'miserable', 'depressing' and/or 'downbeat': "In Brummie, the lowering suggests despondency and makes it less attractive to the listener . . . the lack of aural variation quickly begins to grate".

The results of Thorne's experiment support his intuition:

The responses of non-native speakers, on the other hand, were inconsistent - ranging from 'harsh' (for Brummie), through 'nice', to 'melodic', 'lilting' and 'musical', and from 'clear' (for Southern Irish), through 'boring', to 'disgusting'. Although there was no significant difference between the overall scores for each accent, many appeared to prefer the characteristically Brummie 'rising' and 'high tone at the end of sentences', criticising instead the 'cold and unemotional' character of Edinburgh Scottish - one respondent even going so far as to describe the Scottish speaker as 'untrustworthy'. Scouse was also praised on many occasions for its intonational distinctiveness - its clarity, 'pleasant tonality', and dynamic 'rolling of the r', but reactions on the whole were generally mixed, and there was little evidence to suggest that foreign speakers were dipping into the same adjective cluster as their British counterparts - no high occurrence, for example, of the words 'nasal', 'common', 'whingey', or 'wrong' to describe the Birmingham accent.

Thorne's conclusion:

These findings demonstrate that non-native speakers work to a totally different set of criteria when evaluating English accents, and do not discriminate on the same grounds as native English speakers. Judgements of the perceived beauty or ugliness of accents are based almost entirely upon a knowledge of the social connotations which they possess for those familiar with them.

Returning to that BBC Brummie page again, I observe that its author confidently asserts that

The Birmingham accent hits one note - usually a low one - and sticks to it no matter what. It is this lack of aural variation that is the principle cause of irritation for others. It is also the source of the stereotype of the unimaginative Brummie. The accent stays the same and never varies, and so subconsciously people assume the same must be true of the speaker.

although I suspect that this assertion has no factual foundation whatsoever.

It seems much more likely that the individual who wrote this BBC page has a standard old-fashioned snobbish distaste for Brummies, finds their accent to be irritating and unpleasant for the usual social-psychological reasons, and has decided to rationalize these competely irrational prejudices by offering a pseudo-scientific explanation in terms of hypothesized properties of Brummie intonation.

As Thorne points out, what this BBC page says about Brummie intonation is internally contradictory -- it is described as having "a downward intonation at the end of most sentences" which "suggests despondency and makes it less attractive to the listener", but it is also described as "[hitting] one note - usually a low one - and [sticking] to it no matter what". Thorne also points out that the different aspects of the description are in any case factually incorrect, and especially that "[a]n extensive use of rising rather than falling tones ... is typical in Birmingham speech". His non-native listeners bear him out, describing Brummie as "'melodic', 'lilting' and 'musical'".

One could also study this question using the tools of instrumental phonetics rather than native vs. non-native perception. Given an appropriate sample of speech, one could evaluate quantitative properties of pitch contours, such as percentage of final rises, falls and levels, or distributions of rates of change over final syllables or final post-stress regions. One could look at distributions of pitch values and their first couple of derivatives at different time scales, or the distribution of pitch shapes over syllables and words.

As far as I know, no one has ever done this, in a systematic way, in comparing different accents of English, though Pierre Delattre did something similar across languages, 50 years ago, in comparing the pitch contours of lectures by Margaret Mead and Simone de Beauvoir.

Standard = Neutral?

In response to my post on within-U.S. linguistic prejudice, Ray Girvan emailed:

I can fill in some UK equivalents on the basis of my experience.

Mainstream Scots English speakers ridicule teuchter (outer islands) accents and the Anglicised "pan loaf" accents of middle-class sections of Edinburgh and Glasgow.

In England, many British regional accents are considered acceptable by RP speakers: for instance, Scottish, Welsh, Northern Irish and Irish, Yorkshire, Lancashire and Geordie. But they tend to view speakers of southern rural (e.g. Devon or Norfolk) as yokels; and those of Estuary English, despite its growing user base, as uneducated. ("At the 1995 Conservative party conference the Minister of Education, Gillian Shephard, launched into a denunciation of EE, condemning it as slovenly, mumbling, bastardized Cockney").

There is also the plumminess factor.

In the U.S., the traditionally standard radio or television voice is perceived as being maximally bleached of all marked characteristics ("having no accent"). Linguistically this is nonsense, of course, but it does reflect a democratic set of values, in which the desired reference value is viewed as being at the middle or zero point of the descriptive space, rather than being at one extreme corner.

As I understand it, traditional BBC English, in contrast, is perceived by most people as being a marked value. In this 1999 article, Boris Johnson, after losing a BBC radio gig, claimed to be "the first casualty in a war against those 'what speak proper' - the victim of a fresh assault on the mode of speech once dubbed BBC English". The article says that

Radio veteran John Peel, whose show Home Truths will precede the Borisless Week in Westminster, swapped his public school accent for a Liverpudlian drawl during Beatlemania.

Peel is pictured as moving from one corner of the space (the "plummy" "BBC English" "public school" upper class corner) to a different one (the "Liverpudlian drawl" corner). This perspective is echoed by a quote from linguist J.C. Wells:

"People are no longer automatically inclined to assume what people from the upper classes do is worthy of imitating," he said.

With speakers of received pronounciation no longer monopolising higher education, the media and the government, the accent may have become as much a liability as any other.

"People have prejudices about the social group who use a certain accent, rather than the accent itself," said Professor Wells.

Wells' way of talking reflects the linguistic truth of the matter, which is that every way of talking is one "accent" or another, since the underlying descriptive system has no natural zero point.

However, the same article quotes "Gregory de Polnay, head of voice at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art" talking in a way that assumes the contrary:

Polnay thinks Boris could soon master a radio-friendly "neutral" accent.

The quotes from Polnay characterize upper-class speech in a way that is more stylistic than linguistic: "clipped vowels", "nasality", "pushing the sound of his voice down through the nose", "exaggerate his diction by pushing out phrases". These are rather different descriptive categories than a phonetician like Wells would use. I'm not sure whether they can be given any scientific validity by being reduced to properties of physiological or acoustic measurements, or even to properties of intersubjectively valid perceptual scales. I'm skeptical that Polnay's "nasality" has anything to do with the nose or the nasal passages and sinuses, for example. Perhaps these terms are just useful aids to performance, like the golf instructor's admonition to "be the ball".

But the main thing here is that Polnay seems to see the space of accents as having a zero point, a "neutral accent" which is in effect lack of accent, all other ways of talking being deviations from that. In any time and place, this is an evaluation placed on a space of linguistic variation, not any intrinsic property of the system itself. But it's also not the only way to view a linguistic standard.

From my outsider's perspective, it seems to me that the British have traditionally taken the view that the standard to be aspired to -- once known as "received pronunciation" or "RP" -- is definitely an "accent", a particular set of values in the space of linguistic variation. This is in contrast to American folk linguistics, in which the standard is usually seen as a pure and transparent form of speech that lacks all discernable properties.

The American folk view is scientific nonsense, but it reflects a democratic set of values, which I for one find laudable. So if the British are now coming around to the American view, they are improving their social attitudes at the same time that they are moving further away from understanding the linguistic facts of the matter.

Of course a better result, on both sides of the Atlantic, would be for people to learn to understand the space of linguistic variation, the space of social evaluation, and the relationship between them. Then they could make well-informed decisions about both.

How that?

Reading some of Arnold's posts on the thin line between error and mere variation reminded me of a song lyric that I've frequently wondered about.

The song is Public Enemy's "Fear of a Black Planet" (from the 1990 album of the same name). As you can clearly hear, Chuck D. sings:

All I want is peace and love on this planet /
Ain't how that God planned it?

Interestingly, the lyrics for this song on the band's official site are written as:

All I want is peace and love
On this planet
(Ain't that how God planned it?)

The following review of the album quotes the lyrics as they're actually sung on the album.

Is this an error or mere variation? Inquiring minds want to know.

[ Comments? ]

A new record for within-U.S. linguistic prejudice?

In earlier posts, we've discussed cultural prejudices about the speech of southerners and other groups within the U.S. Up to this point, Michael Lewis' reporting on the Microsoft anti-trust trial was my touchstone for density of linguistic prejudice in journalism, but now there's a new contender. It's a series of columns by Christie Vilsack, published about ten years ago in the Mount Pleasant (Iowa) News.

Christie Vilsack is the wife of the governor of Iowa, and a scheduled speaker (tonight?) at the Democratic convention in Boston. I haven't been able to find a copy of her columns, which I suppose must have been dug up by the active researchers at the RNC, but they were discussed and quoted at length in a 7/26/2004 article by David R. Guarino in the Boston Herald. (Guarino also has an Election 2004 blog, but there's no extra material there, at least so far). The story has also been picked up by the AP, the Washington Post, the Washington Times and other outlets.

Quotations from Vilsack's columns (published in 1994 and 1996) have her visting Atlantic City, NJ, and blasting people from the part of the country where I now live:

"Later, on the boardwalk, I heard mothers calling to their children, 'I'll meet yoose here after the movie,' "she wrote. "The only way I can speak like residents of New Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania is to let my jaw drop an inch and talk with my lips in an 'O' like a fish. I'd rather learn to speak Polish."

She also attended the Atlanta Olympics, and had this to say about the people she met there:

"When I ask for directions, I can't understand the slurred speech of southern Americans, who are so polite and eager to please," Vilsack said.

And she was made uneasy by those tricky bi-dialectal African-Americans:

"I am fascinated at the way some African-Americans speak to each other in an English I struggle to understand, then switch to standard English when the situation requires."

Guarino positions Vilsack in the traditionally despised role of censorious schoolmarm:

An educator for 30 years and former eighth-grade language teacher, Vilsack has made language and literacy priorities as first lady.

She has become a key power player in Iowa politics and is widely credited with breathing new life into Kerry's flagging presidential bid in January with her endorsment a week before the kickoff Iowa caucuses.

At the Jan. 12 endorsement event, Kerry said of Vilsack, "Christie is the first teacher, not just the first lady."

There is a certain amount of consistency here -- like Michael Lewis, Christie Vilsack is quoted as scorning the speech of southerners and people from New Jersey. Her problem with African-Americans is a somewhat unusual one, since they mostly get slammed for not mastering the standard version of English at all, so to be disturbed that they switch back and according to circumstances seems egregiously boorish. (Well, she wrote that she was fascinated, but Guarino is clearly expecting us to conclude that "fascinated" = "disturbed" in schoomarmish, though without the context it's hard to tell whether this is what she meant -- maybe she was just fascinated by the discovery of dialectal code-switching?) And I wonder whether Vilsack has any idea what Polish sounds like, or was just picking on Poles as an instance of a stereotypically despicable group.

Without the full context of the columns, it's hard to tell, but I'll speculate that what underlies Vilsack's quoted comments is the visceral distaste that some people feel for the speech patterns of particular other groups. Such distaste seems evident in Michael Lewis' reportorial obsession with the "booming hick drawl" of Microsoft's lawyer, for example. A classical example is Henry Higgins' exhortation of cockney Eliza Doolittle not to "sit there crooning like a bilious pigeon". The blogger at justoneminute (himself from New Jersey) cites an even more spectacular example:

This isn't all new - if I recall, it was H.L. Mencken who observed that the most effective method of birth control yet invented was a Brooklyn accent.

It's not easy to see just what determines which accents will seem disgusting to someone, and which will seem merely exotic or even attractive. Certainly racism, anti-semitism and so on are part of the picture, but probably not all of it, since these don't seem to explain the widespread prejudice against New Jersey (where I proudly lived for 15 years, myself), or the analogous prejudice in Europe against the speech patterns of Belgians. I've heard spectacularly prejudiced observations from Dutch people about Flemish speech, or from French people about Walloon speech. (Note to Americans: if a French person comments on your command of the French language by observing that they thought you were Belgian, it's probably not a compliment).

Meanwhile, Chistie Vilsack's husband Tom has apologized for signing an English-only bill a couple of years ago, which he says was forced on him by a Republican-controlled legislature).

OK, everyone, make a note: if you want to be a politician in 21st-century America, take a linguistics course and learn how to think and talk about dialect variation in a rational way.

Avoid those embarrassing gaffes! You too can learn to define and promote language standards without treating non-standard speech as lawlessness, stupidity, disease, laziness, duplicity or bad posture!

IPA in Japan

A couple days ago, Mark Liberman suggested some ways in which International Phonetic Alphabet might infiltrate pop culture, creating a more universal awareness of phonetic transcription. He might be pleased to know that in addition to British cameras and German beers, such an effort is also underway in Japan and Korea, where IPA transcriptions show up from time to time on product labels and in commercials.

I first became aware of this phenomenon a few years back. One day I was watching Japanese TV, and was startled to see the following commercial: a dog is shown sitting and looking attentively, while a woman's voice off-screen says "I love you..." The dog cocks its head, looks puzzled, and then barks "roof rooooof roof". The screen fades to black, and we see in neat block letters: [aɪ lʌv juː]. This is repeated several times. (If I ever knew what the commercial was actually for, I've forgotten by now.) I asked a Japanese (linguist) friend of mine about it, and she assured me that IPA familiarity is very high in Japan, because it is used in foreign-language dictionaries. (It has apparently been used in English-Japanese dictionaries since the 20s.)

I had thought the fad was pretty much over by now (decorative writing in French and Italian seem to be the new vogue), but recently I encountered the mysterious drink called [woː], manufactured by Kirin (picture above). It comes in Salty Cat, Monkey Fizz, and Bloody Wolf flavors, modeled on various cocktails. If you're curious and can read Japanese, there is a review here.

Kirin is also responsible for a drink called B-flat (bii furatto), which is written simply with the flat sign: ♭ Maybe their marketing division is actually a bunch of former opera singers?

IPA in beer (and other) ads

A couple of days ago, I speculated in a jokey way about how to promote the International Phonetic Alphabet by direct appeal to the general public. One of my silly fantasies involved brewers starting to label their products phonetically. It seems that in Germany at least, reality is running ahead of fantasy.

Abby Shoun writes, with photos, to tell me that

You might be interested in an ad campaign that was run recently here in southwestern Germany - you just may have gotten your wish! A German beer company used pseudo-IPA (adapted for German speakers) in a series of advertisements to highlight their connection to the local dialect, Schwäbisch, and its cultural associations. Here attached are pictures of two of the posters from the campaign. They've obviously tried to adopt genuine phonological notation (square brackets and length marks), but they've also deviated from IPA proper to mak