000036.html:

000045.html:a story about emergent bracelet semiotics among Florida middle schoolers.

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000107.html:research on automatic information extraction 000144.html:

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reproduced from Mary Winsor's fascinating book Starfish, 000151.html:

Here's a set of simple illustrative examples, taken from work in a local 000164.html:

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I was a big fan of J.R.R. Tolkien when I was a kid. I've enjoyed reading the LOTR books out loud to my seven-year-old, and listening to him read them to me -- especially his Elvish and Orcish accents, which he rightly believes to be much better than my own.

000217.html:several alternative methods for accurate html reproduction 000220.html:

Here's a follow-up to Bill Poser's post 000221.html:Look here at 000259.html:

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I conjecture that biomedical text 000279.html: lengthening of adjacent consonants or vowels, as can be heard in this 000279.html:

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duer, dweor, 000293.html: dweorh, dwæruh, dweru, dwer, 000293.html: dwere, dwergh, dwargh, dwarghe, 000351.html:

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I need to 000526.html:

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I wrote about this in a presentation 000559.html:

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Like the feet, Handel's music 000589.html:

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The 000610.html: when I shot this picture last August 16. The original 000610.html:digital photograph of this monkey. Well, 1,593,104 bits less, as long as we're counting.

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000697.html: set SQUARE, as in Chingy's Right Thurr, whose chorus 000697.html: as far as I can tell. Here's 000697.html: of here shifting in Nelly's Hot 000697.html:here is a brief clip of J-Kwon's pronunciaton of everybody in the song "Tipsy", as cited by Halpern. It's hard to tell from a single, rapid, slurred rendition against a musical background, but it sounds like the "every" part has become a single rhotic vowel, which is somewhat centralized, though maybe it hasn't gone all the way to [ɚ] Note also that in this clip four and floor seem relatively r-less, and the pronunciation of here doesn't sound any more centralized than Nelly's did. But the way to characterize this way of talking would be to analyze some recorded interviews, not to puzzle over a few scraps of song. Finally, a fan site says that "cornell haynes" (i.e. Nelly) "was born in texas, but was moved to spain for three years", so who knows where his speech patterns come from? Chingy and J-Kwon seem to be St. Louis natives. ]

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Having found 000766.html:

The 000786.html:

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000811.html:src="http://ldc.upenn.edu/myl/spectrum-of-word-choice-patterns.png" 000864.html:

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and here is a link 000908.html: of Troy on NPR includes the following characterization 000912.html: be found in Ann D. Zwicky and Arnold M. Zwicky, "America's 000919.html: "Evolutionary Psychology 000960.html: 000960.html: 000960.html: 000960.html: 000960.html: 000960.html:here. 000960.html:here. After an 000980.html:

(link) 000980.html:

(link) 001000.html:

Did you walkˊ or rideˋ?

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In the 1987 paper, 001061.html:

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001080.html:says "these kinds of extremist thugs", just as all the sources except CNN's web site had it.

001087.html: for the right to access such videos), and verified that what W actually said 001122.html: because it includes some audio clips of past debates. If you focus on the passage 001135.html: and Free-be's." [warning -- these are ~1MB files -- .ppt, 001135.html: .pdf].

001135.html: notes in various ways, but here's the IsisFest handout (.pdf) 001171.html:href="http://ldc.upenn.edu/myl/llog/xxxxx.txt">here. Whatever the 001171.html:href="http://ldc.upenn.edu/myl/llog/xxxxx.txt">same file. Yyyyy's 001181.html:

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There's 001241.html:

We 001242.html:

And there's more, such as a chapter entitled "AND SOMETIMES", whose 001261.html:

But 001269.html: 001269.html: 001284.html: this week in the Chicago Tribune [registration required -- a copy 001284.html:

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In comics and movies, we're used to the idea of humans getting superhuman powers as a result of some sort of damage: a radioactive spider bite, dunking in toxic waste, irradiation by gamma rays or cosmic rays, whatever. There's an even longer history of mythic animals undergoing similar transformations. The idea of gaining powers by contact with feared pollutants makes magical sense but not biological sense, and so I'm not used to seeing it outside of fantasy.

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Continuing our earlier discussion of whether people sometimes feel real disgust in reaction to the speech of others, Paul Bloom sent me an electronic copy of a book chapter in which he discusses some closely related questions. This is chapter six of his new book 001345.html:

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The audio indicates that this was probably a transcriptionist's eggcorn for the expected "ham fisted" Granted, it's hard to tell. Brooks says something like 001369.html:

The audio makes it clear that Mark Shields said "de facto running mate", but presumably the transcriptionist did not know the Latin expression de facto, and so was willing to substitute the rather low probability string "dead factor" as the best available option. It's phonetically pretty reasonable: 001382.html:

On men, front is hot, back is not. But on women, it's back that's hot, while front is not. We're talking about vowels here, mind you, and Charles Darwin may be raising his eyebrows a bit as he discusses this matter with Edward Sapir and Aristotle at the University of Heaven.

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She also found a sex-linked effect with initial sonorants vs. obstruents: obstruents were hotter on males, sonorants on females, though only the female effect was significant. All of these effects were small -- about a quarter of a point on a 10-point scale, or less, as you can see from the graph.

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You can read their paper for the details, as well as for much interesting discussion. Their experimental materials were almost identical to Fitch & Hauser's -- sets of spoken syllables in either a male or a female voice, arranged in patterns that either 001400.html:

In a recent post, I linked to a preprint of a paper by Perruchet and Rey that severely criticizes an earlier paper by Fitch and Hauser. The topic is an important one, which interests people from many walks of life: the nature of cognitive differences between humans and non-human primates. I've given you links to both papers, but unless you've got a subscription to Science, you can't read Fitch and Hauser's side of the story, and you'll have to be satisfied with the picture presented in my earlier descriptions or in Perruchet and Rey's summary.

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John Locke It seems wrong to me to assert, as Chuck Anesi does, that 001404.html:

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As this sound clip makes clear, that's pretty close to what he actually said:

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The MS-NBC announcer, interestingly, committed several disfluencies in introducing the Bush clip, including mispronouncing (and partially correcting) the name of the town where the speech took place.

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At the 001433.html:

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An alternative to the special chording keyboards that I wrote about earlier is "voice writing", a method originally developed by Horace Webb more than 60 years ago. The basic equipment is traditionally a two-track recorder, a microphone for picking up the proceedings that are being transcribed, and a special "stenomask" which the transcriptionist can use to 001453.html:The approach has some problems, both for the human users and for the ASR systems. The human users need to learn to shadow others' speech accurately at high rates for long periods of time, while also entering the other sorts of information that a transcript requires. The ASR systems need to learn to deal with sotto voce or even whispered speech.

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It's not quite up to the level of "Let them eat cake". However, among recent symbols of ancien-regime arrogance, it's hard to beat what Jonathan Klein said, on the Fox News Channel on September 9, in a debate with Stephen Hayes about the authenticity of the 001496.html:

According to this CNN report, the U.S. Mint's new nickels feature a new profile of the well-known American linguist Thomas Jefferson. The reverse side will come in two kinds, one with the traditional buffalo, and the other featuring the Pacific Ocean, inscribed with the words that William Clark almost wrote in his journal when he reached the mouth of the Columbia River: "Ocean in view! O! The Joy!"

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Ron Rosenbaum is an accomplished journalist who recently debunked Elizabeth Kübler-Ross in an obituary at Slate. Gutsy stuff, since she's become 001508.html:

This time, the 001615.html:of their Science paper (Pierre Pica, Cathy Lemer, Véronique Izard, and Stanislas Dehaene, "Exact and Approximate Arithmetic in an Amazonian Indigene Group", Science, Vol 306, Issue 5695, 499-503, 15 October 2004). (Peter Gordon's paper from the same issue, "Numerical Cognition without Words", is here, and the discussion by Gelman and Gallistel, "Language and the Origin of Numerical Concepts", is here.)

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There are three mp3 clips, here, here and here.

001643.html:here, 001643.html:here, 001643.html:here.

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although unlike Finnegans Wake, Riddley Walker won the John W. Campbell Award. In addition to maintaining a Russell Hoban site called The Head of Orpheus, Dave Awl is a former member of the Neo-Futurists, who are responsible for one of my favorite pieces of speech act ~~analysis~~ synthesis.

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Note that 3.9 is a very low measure of "idea density", in the context of the study. According to the study's summary table, the mean "idea density" in early life autobiographies for nuns whose autopsied brains "met neuropathologic criteria for Alzheimer's disease" was 4.9 (95% confidence interval 4.6-5.3), while for nuns whose brains were free of Alzheimer's symptoms, the mean "idea density" was 6.1 (95% confidence interval 5.6-6.6).

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Hanzi Smatter is a blog "[d]edicated to the misuse of Chinese characters (Hanzi or Kanji) in Western culture". For those of us who are ignorant of Chinese characters in all their forms, it's especially nice that characters cited are identified with links to the Unihan database. 001697.html:

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Francis Heaney notes another popular eggcorn: get one's gander up, which has 1,070 Google hits, compared to 30,100 for "dander up". Some of the gander examples are witting wordplay -- suburbanites upset about goose droppings, and the like -- but most of them seem to come from people who've misunderstood the idiom, probably because their image of hot anger is better matched by a cranky goose than by cat scurf.

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Yesterday's NYT had an article by Andrew Revkin about 001741.html:

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An article published in Cell today compared the apparent rate of genetic evolution in four cases: nervous-system genes vs. "housekeeping" genes in primates vs. rodents (here, if you've got a subscription). The abstract:

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and you can easily hear the difference (in the individual notes) between the original and time-reversed versions. Here's a 001795.html:short drum passage and a time-reversed version of the same file, making the same point even more strikingly. Imagine trying to learn to recognize a particular rhythmic pattern in each case...

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001799.html:That's the gayest thing I've ever heard! The phonetic and phonological content of the perceptions of gay- and straight-sounding speech in English." MA thesis, Harvard University, 2003. I haven't seen a copy of Schuler's thesis, so I've based this post on a summary that Bert sent me.

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In a post on 1/15/2005 to the Risks Digest, under the heading "MapPoint explains Vikings?", Adam Shostack pointed out that

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Well, the distances are in miles, but that is not an anachronism, but rather (I imagine) an automatic response to the IP address from which I made the query. If you ask for the route in the opposite direction, you get a less scenic and interesting answer, as shown in the picture on the right. In this case, the distance is given as 476.1 miles, or 1209.8 miles less.

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The "shortest route" is indeed very striking, since it involves taking the ferry from Haugesund to Newcastle Upon Tyne, and then turning right around and taking the ferry back from Newcastle Upon Tyne to Bergen. I guess that's one way to get around the fjords. This also suggests what might be wrong with the route-finding program -- perhaps it doesn't include water travel in its distance or time cost functions... 001814.html:here is an image of the (anonymous) broadsheet. It's nice to see that Language Log is considered the Weblog of Record, if only for anonymous 17th-century religious-political song lyrics.]

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The National Weather Service is warning us that

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Bill Poser's observation about the Norwegian interpretation of the UT "Hook 'em Horns" signs is echoed by Lloyd Grove's remarks about its meaning in American Sign Language. The same hand configuration, sometimes [falsely] called mano cornuto, is used in parts of Italy for defense against the evil eye, or in other parts of Europe to insinuate cuckoldry. [Update 1/24/2005: see below.]

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The web site of 001889.html:

In this morning's news:

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According to ABC News and other outlets:

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The picture shows Language Log as visualized by Christine Sugrue's OrganicHTML, which apparently generates a pseudo-plant using "certain elements on a web site; colour, text, images, links, Flash, and primarily the table structure. This is why Flash-only sites or CSS-only sites end up generating rather sad looking plants." Too bad it doesn't get more from the words (look at the sad results from OrganicHTML-ing Language Hat). Christine's blog also led me to revisit Google Fight, where you can watch language duke it out with thought.

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The association of dogs and speech research in Geoff Pullum's recent post reminds me of a story. The time was 1977, about 3:00 a.m. one cold winter night. The place was Murray Hill, N.J., the home of AT&T Bell Labs research. Building 2, wing D, 4th floor, in the console room of the DDP-224 interactive computer. Joe Olive and I had been programming since dinner, and our new speech synthesis system was pronouncing its first phrases: "The birch canoe slid on the smooth planks." "Mesh wire keeps chicks inside." "The spot on the blotter was made by green ink." It sounded really good to us, maybe not totally natural, but clear as crystal.

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Science Express has just published a new study of (a virtual endocast from) the skull of (specimen LB1 of) Homo floresiensis. The abstract:

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The things I've read about Grammelot, and the bits of it that I've heard, remind me of Simlish, the fake language used in The Sims and its follow-on games. In case you're not a Sims person, here's a bit of Simlish motherese and some Simlish food enjoyment, just to give you the flavor of this "language".

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In today's NYT, Dave Itzkoff has an article on Cartoon Network's Adult Swim. If you haven't heard of this late-night collection of idiosyncratic animations, there are two reasons why you might want to check it out. The first reason is demographic:

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Aravind 001990.html:

Alexander, King of Jesters, seems to be wrong when he says that "Many jesters and fools spoke a gibberish language called Grammelot that was first described over 500 years ago." Similarly, Gianni Ferrario seems to be wrong when he says that "Grammelot is a form of theater invented by the comic actors of the Commedia dell'Arte of 1400, and is organized in an onomatopoeic mode, that is, it manages to evoke concepts by means of sounds that are not established or conventional words." At least they're wrong to imply that the term Grammelot dates from the 15th or 16th century. (See this earlier post for references and links). In fact, the term was apparently invented by Dario Fo, perhaps in connection with his 1969 play Mistero Buffo.

001990.html:href="http://www.bartleby.com/65/be/Beolco-A.html">

The confusion seems to have arisen because of Fo's references to the 16th-century playwright Angelo Beolco. In Fo's Nobel acceptance speech, he gave credit to "Ruzzante Beolco, my greatest master along with Molière", called him "until Shakespeare, doubtless the greatest playwright of renaissance Europe", and referred to the inspiration of Ruzzante's linguistic inventiveness:

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A couple of days ago, Eric Bakovic posted about an adverb that landed in the wrong phrasal slot: "I think that was clear from the day that I certainly met him." This morning, I heard another one in an NPR report on President Bush's Social Security roadshow in Iowa. Don Palmer, co-chair of the Linn County Republican Central Committee, expressing some skepticism about the plan, says "... there's a lot of still uh economic unrest here in Iowa..."

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Some recent observations of African elephants apparently learning to imitate sounds were noted by Henry Fountain in the NYT 3/29/2005:

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Watch the movie first.

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Looking at the frequency first, we see that this is one of the few phenomena in the natural or social world that doesn't show a power law distribution, as indicated in the plot on the right. Alert Per Bak! (Note: this is a feeble joke -- Per Bak is 002076.html:

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Jeff Erickson at Ernie's 3D Pancakes has an extensive review and discussion of the SCIgen affair, in which three MIT grad students got a randomly-generated paper accepted at one of the IIIS/SCI spamferences, as Jeff calls them. Jeff's post features an analysis of the response by the president of IIIS, Nagib Callaos, which Jeff calls a "mindboggling rambling rationalization".

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Geoff Pullum, being a syntactician, looked at the smoke over the Sistine chapel on 4/19 and saw a moral about the complex relations between form and meaning in language

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Here's a welcome contrast with the shabby treatment of Said el-Gheithy, the inventor of Ku (= "Ch'toboku"). 002098.html:

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It's not just copywriters. Graphic designers could use a bit of fundamental education in linguistics, too. Mark Swofford at Pinyin News takes a swipe at Chris Calori and David Vanden-Eynden, for the quotes attributed to them in an April 12 article in Metropolis Magazine, under the headline Graphics That Bridge a Linguistic Divide.

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Scientists are the worst offenders. A couple of years ago, I wrote a little program to find acronyms in the MEDLINE corpus. There are lots of them -- my not-very-smart program found more than 78,000 distinct acronym/definition pairings, many of which occurred many times. Thus GM-CSF was defined 2,401 times as "granulocyte-macrophage colony-stimulating factor", but was also defined by 150 other strings. In this case, these are basically all variant forms of the same term (including a shocking number of typos -- it seems that biomedical journals are not always very well copyedited) -- see this page for the complete list of variants, each preceded by the number of times my program found it as a definition for GM-CSF in MEDLINE.

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Jean-Frédéric Jauslin, director of the Swiss Office Fédéral de la Culture ("Federal Culture Office"), needs to learn to do research on the web, or to use a calculator, one or the other. Or perhaps he just needs a little more common sense and a little less arrogance. All of this, of course, is supposing that that he was quoted accurately by the reporter from silicon.fr. In such cases, my normal rule of thumb is to blame the journalist, but I might need to make an exception for culture bureaucrats.

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Jill Beckman sent in a link to a 6/18/2003 story by Neal Rubin in the Detroit News, about a balky rollercoaster:

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According to a NYT article by John Noble Wilford, the Wildlife Conservation Society has announced that the Laotian Rock Rat, known to locals as the kha-nyou, represents a new family of mammals, and has been given the scientific name 002152.html:Update 5/14/2005: Gene Buckley emailed a quote from another NYT 002155.html:

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002163.html:src="http://ldc.upenn.edu/myl/llog/DanglingParticiples.jpg"> 002165.html:

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It's been a while since we had a Language Quiz, so here's the audio for another one.

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This was a single sentence (audio clip here) from a VOA radio broadcast about events in Uzbekistan.

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002219.html:src="http://ldc.upenn.edu/myl/llog/FuzzyWhom.gif"> 002231.html:

He might also have cited this passage ( 002231.html:transcript, mp3) from (an old edition of) the NeoFuturist's show TMLMTBGB.

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002269.html:href="http://ldc.upenn.edu/myl/llog/ThroughThaWire1.wav">here.)

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002333.html:Jesse Sheidlower and 002333.html:Ron Butters, among others. For your reading convenience (and they're worth reading), I've snipped out those two declarations from the 814-page .pdf of the submissions that I downloaded from the USPTO.]

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No, it's not spam text. Matthew in Beirut reprints the subtitles of a pirated Chinese DVD of Revenge of the Sith, available in English on the DVD via remarkably poor quality Machine Translation. The title becomes "The Backstroke of the West", and it gets better from there.

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You can listen to Colin Hurley, who plays Thersites in this production, reading a few lines in a BBC Radio 4 interview. I've created a URL for just the relevant bit of the BBC RealAudio stream here, and a local clip here in .wav format. The lines that Hurley reads are a collage of fragments from Act 2, Scene 1, where Thersites is cursing Ajax (if you want to see Thersites' lines in context, the play's etext is here):

002355.html:in George Vecsey of the NYT's 002361.html:

Here's an audio clip -- the person saying "that's right" in the background of the recording is Larry Lessig. I'll have more to say about this passage later -- it's interesting linguistically, as well as a central point (in my inexpert opinion) in the case.

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uh monster's probably the¹ right word. [audio link]
002376.html: I am uh hardly in the² Walter Lippman category, uh about all I can say is that my rate of fire exceeds his [audio link]
002376.html: 002376.html: because for me the experience is the same. [audio link]

002376.html: but he blogs anonymously [audio link]

002376.html: uh that is a¹ very very preliminary discussion at this point, ((it-)) we've been sort of asked to uh [audio link]
002376.html: it's really just a-² a preliminary "what if" discussion [audio link]

002376.html:a vast exaggeration. [audio clip] 002379.html:

Victor Mair sent me some interesting observations about the slogan for the 2006 Beijing Olympics. The English version is "One World, One Dream", while the Chinese version is 002387.html:

My corrected transcript is here. I 've fixed a variety of omission, insertions and substitutions; divided the speech into breath-group-sized phrases; and noted the pronunciation of the indefinite article "a", with reduced forms ("uh", IPA [ə]) in blue and unreduced forms ("ay", IPA [ej]) in red.

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The Court has been acting not as a judicial body, but as a policy-making body. (audio link)

002387.html: as one of the justices has called it (audio link)

002387.html: including a Chief Justice. (audio link)

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Now joining the heavy metal umlaut is, apparently, the modish macron. To the right is a picture of the awning sign of a local hair place, VŌG. I walk past it frequently, wondering who's supposed to be attracted by evocations of Vogon style, but I didn't realize it was part of a trend. Recently, Phillip Jennings wrote in with news of "a new downtown Minneapolis salon named all-caps-something-or-other BLŪ", and also a magazine called "Modern HŌM". I can't find any web presence for either of these, but I'll take Phillip's word for it.

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CNN has the clip on their website (if the link doesn't work, try going through the story linked above), so I was able to verify that Arnold's memory is exact. I've extracted just the cited phrase here.

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That's indeed what the NYT transcript says she says, and the White House transcript says the same thing, but I like to check these things, so I inspected a recording of the event, and this time, the transcripts are correct: that's what she said.

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Jim Gordon pointed out by email that the 2005 Laws of the Game (LOTG), as published by Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), include one provision that is incoherent in its English version (p. 40 of the .pdf):

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So wrote Peter Porcupine in March of 1797, attacking Noah Webster for "grammatical inaccuracy" in a froth of phrases like "illiterate booby", "inflated self-sufficient pedant", "very great hypocrite", and even "something of a traitor".

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Nick Amautinuaq: We select / silau tsamanuktularininga / so that's why uh we uh try to create some uh new Inuktitut words.

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[Leahy's sound bit is here, if you don't want to listen to the whole NPR story. And the 10/19/2005 Leahy/Specter news conference is available from CSPAN 002582.html:discussed by Victor Mair, Chinese versions are longer phonetically, morphologically, lexically, orthographically, cybernetically and even conceptually.) And I've been told that some languages do indeed resist lexical borrowing, for language-internal reasons rather than for reasons of cultural preference.

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One of the most striking 002595.html:

From Frank DeFord's commentary about the new NBA dress code, 10/26/2005 on NPR's Morning Edition, this semantico-phonetically interesting passage:

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Here's another challenge to 002634.html:

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A couple of weeks ago, Amazon Web Services introduced the Mechanical Turk, which inverts the usual relationship in interactive computing by providing "a web services API for computers to integrate Artificial Artificial Intelligence directly into their processing by making requests of humans". The name is a reference to Wolfgang von Kempelen's Turk, an 18th-century chess automaton which pretended to be a sort of clockwork computer, but in fact incorporated a small, hidden, human player.

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The whole poem is a bit long for this post, so you can find it here.

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002668.html:here.

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You can find those "last minute" declarations by linguists, lexicographers, sociologists, psychologists and others in the case file here, including submissions from Jesse Sheidlower and Ron Butters.

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This post is already too long, so I'll reserve for another day an account of how you can test this theory with a couple of loaves of stale bread and a flock of ducks. And then the really interesting part is how this same idea might help explain the emergence of linguistic norms and other shared cultural patterns. For a preview, if you're interested, you can take a look at a couple of versions of a talk I've given on this subject -- an html version from 2000, and a powerpoint version from 2005.

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The first French telecommunications innovation since the Minitel is a WiFi rabbit, mysteriously named Nabaztag. It can produce sounds, move its ears and turn internal colored lights on and off. Apparently an accompanying application informs you about incoming email, the weather and so on, and also allows you to send an audio message (called a nabcast) to others. There is "an API you can use to directly adjust your rabbit's parameters: lightshows, ear position, TTS, music", so it can be nabhacked to do more interesting nabthings.

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In his 12/12/2005 speech at the Philadelphia World Affairs Council (transcript and video stream at the White House web site), the president leads with 18 seconds of phrases with final rises :

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The president then switches to a few phrases ending with the intonational falls that are more normal in his speeches (audio clip):

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And then comes the part that caught my attention: 43 seconds of relentless uptalk (audio clip):

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To highlight the prosodic issues here, consider the difference in sound -- and in the appearance of pitch tracks -- between the up-talk rendition of "economy" at the end of the passage quoted above, and a final-falling version of the same word in the middle of a sentence later in the same speech (audio clip):

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Jim Hanas thinks that "Marshalls Law" might not be an appropriate theme for a retail advertising campaign. But the responsible ad agency promises "a Big BANG! ... that enables a brand to explode into the marketplace", and who can provide a bigger bang than the armed forces? The actual laws in the ad copy are pretty wimpy, but a little editing would fix them: "You don't need ~~mistletoe~~ an M-16 to get your hands on something cute"; "The best way to hint at what you want, is to 002715.html:

In a 12/16/2005 PBS interview with Jim Lehrer, President Bush answered a question about Gulf Coast housing issues by saying, in part [audio link]:

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Indeed, disfluency of this sort is common even in the spontaneous or semi-scripted speech of professional "talking heads". For example, in Jim Leher's 12/16/2005 interview of George W. Bush, one of Lehrer's questions begins [ 20:16, audio]

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[1:29, audio] I- I- we- we- we- we don't talk about sources and methods

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[8:43.7, audio] At one point in time, if- if I'm not mistaken, looked like they- the- the- the- the- the- democracy was in the balance

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[10:11.6, audio] so that political people can use police forces to [pause] seek retribution uh in i- i- i- in society

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[11:26.3, audio] and- uh and- and- look we- we- and- and- and- by the way

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[12:00.4, audio] Yeah, it's- it's- it's- the biggest priority is winning.

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[17:53, audio] that's what- that's- that's what people- I think- I've always known that ...

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[21:46.5, audio] He ju- I- I- I- I'm worried about a theocracy. [Lehrer says "yeah" three times in the background]

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[24:42, audio] Yeah. It's a- it's a- it's a- it's a- it's b- belief in the system,

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[26:05, audio] I- I- I- and- I- dealing with John McCain is not ((a-)) [pause] a- a reluctant adventure for me, I enjoy it.

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[20:27.1, audio] {breath} ((I've be- oh look I mean heh)) {breath} uh

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[19:25.9, audio]

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Is truth really under attack in American society?

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There's an urban legend that an early speech recognition system heard "recognize speech" as "wreck a nice beach". That one's made up, but it's not a legend that BBN's Podzinger recently transcribed "say Jesus is Lord" as "Beijing this morning", or "a moment in your life" as "remote wooded delight". The perils of ASR should be getting some sympathy these days from the publisher of that Elmo book on potty training, the one where you press Baby David and hear (something that sometimes sounds like) "who wants to die?" for what was recorded as "who has to go?".

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Listen to his last sentence. (If you want to hear it in context, four sections of the interview are available on WTAW's web site -- part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4 -- and the quoted passage is at the very end of part 4.)

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This example is slightly unfair to the proponents of uptalk-as-self-doubt, since in the case just examined, final rises mark the members of a list (of conspiracy targets), and "list intonation" is another of the traditionally-recognized uses for rising contours in English. However, sequences of repeated poke-in-the-chest rises are frequent in this interview, and generally enumeration does not seem to be involved, except insofar as rhetorical repetition can be considered to be a sort of listing. (A small sample can be heard here, here, here.) The communicative crux in these examples is certainly not self-doubt, nor does it seem to be the mere implication that there is more to come. Perhaps the rises are intended to reach out and seize the listener's attention, like the Ancient Mariner's eye contact:

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It's musch harder to explain or excuse this one. We have to assume that the acoustic model was happy to regard this cough-like uh as a probable rendition of "Arafat" -- this is not the behavior of a healthy and effective stochastic model of the sound of the English language. And we also have to assume that the n-grams involved in "nasa's top arafat climate scientists" were estimated to be probable enough to yield a good language-model score for this string.

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The Feb. 11 Economist has a story about taxonomic marketing, leading with the fact that a Canadian online casino made the winning bid of $650,000 in an internet auction for the name of a newly-discovered Bolivian monkey. (Which therefore became Callicebus aureipalatii, or the Golden Palace titi. The wikipedia entry calls it the 002867.html:

There's some recent evidence that President George W. Bush really does believe in morphological regularization of toponymic adjectives:

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Jean Véronis has recently carried out two short studies in pornometry (one and two). The data comes from counting web hits with and without Google's SafeSearch (or similar porn filters) turned on. The ratio for different words varies quite a bit, which forms the basis of the Slut-o-meter created by Joël Franusic and Adam Smith. This is a frivolous little web app that evaluates "promiscuity" based on a formula that they give as

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No, it's not surprising that Americans have trouble with the arithmetic of freedom, although it would be great if everyone could reel off religion, speech, press, petition and assembly with just as much facility as they can name Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa and Maggie. A more surprising problem with arithmetic came in this passage:

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[As an example of how a genuine human song would show structure somewhat more like that of a humpback whale song, here's a plot of the discrete sequence autocorrelation of the lyrics to the children's song "Skip to my Lou":

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So says John Fiore, the actor who plays Gigi Cestone on The Sopranos. But then, luckily, there's Associate Justice Antonin Scalia. According to a story in the Boston Herald

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Back on Thursday, Josh Fruhlinger at the Comics Curmudgeon let loose with

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A couple of days ago, I posted about "Multicultural London English", discussed in the press as "Jafaican" (or sometimes "Jafaikan"). None of the stories included any sound clips, and so I asked for suggestions about how to find something more authentic than Ali G, my only previous point of reference for this way of talking.

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Abnu from Wordlab recommended Apache Indian's recent remake of Desmond Dekker's great 1969 reggae hit Israelites. "Apache Indian" is the stage name of Steven Kapur, who was born in Birmingham of East Indian ethnic background, and has pioneered what his website calls the "fusion of Reggae, Raggamuffin, Hip Hop and Bhangra". As this audio sample indicates, Apache's performance dialect (at least in this example) is transparently "fake Jamaican", and therefore the term "Jafaican" is a reasonable description. But he started out in Birmingham, and so this seems to be part of a broader cultural fusion that is not limited to London. (Dekker's original might be the most prolific source of mondegreens ever, by the way.)

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These young women (for example here) aren't speaking Jamaican, fake or otherwise, but they aren't speaking Cockney either. So I'm guessing that these are some variants of the "multicutural London English" that Sue Fox and her colleagues are talking about. (I'll freely admit ignorance of British dialectology; if you can characterize these accents more accurately, please let me know. The whole passage is available as a 3MB mp3 file here. I don't know when this segment was broadcast; if I find out, I'll substitute a link to the Radio 4 archives.)

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[Update: David Donnell writes:

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I was talking about "Host", by David Foster Wallace from the April, 2005 Atlantic. The internet version uses mouse-over colors and curious little pop-up windows -- which in my opinion don't work as well as the typography used in the paper magazine, described in my note to Tom. You can get a slightly better idea of the typography from this .pdf of page 5 of Wallace's article, taken from the copy which I downloaded at the time (since I'm a subscriber, of course, as you also should be). And the .pdf is still not as easy on the eyes and the mind as the paper version, which used colored backgrounds rather than colored outlines to link marginalia with phrases in the main text.
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Lane Greene sent in another example where final punctuation has apparently been copied into the body of a phrase in order to indicate emphasis, as in Best. Day. Ever. This time, though, the meaning is inverted:
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The May issue of Vanity Fair is the magazine's "first 'Green Issue'". The press release explains that "[t]he May cover features a quartet of eco–power players, capturing Hollywood glamour and activist passion: Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Al Gore, Julia Roberts, and George Clooney, photographed by Annie Leibovitz." The issue features an article by Gore, "The Moment of Truth", which starts like this:
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Another set of stitched-together emails, this time from Roger Shuy, Arnold Zwicky and Eric Bakovic:
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There are lots of interesting links on Dan's web site, but the best single thing to read is probably Daniel L. Everett, "Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirahã: Another Look at the Design Features of Human Language", Current Anthropology, Volume 46, Number 4, August-October 2005.
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I apologize to our UK readers for not posting this notice before the premiere at SOAS on May 17 of The Last Speakers,
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Here's the example of whistled speech that Dan gives in the cited article, with spoken and whistled version performed by Dan himself (he kindly sent it from a hotel room in Brazil, where he was on his way to another summer of field work). First the basic sentence, kái'ihí'ao 'aagá gáhí "there is a paca" (audio link):
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I've finally done my civic duty. I read The Da Vinci Code, and saw the movie. Reading the book was an anti-climax: I have nothing add to Geoff Pullum's deconstructions (look at the bottom of this post for a list). The cinematic signs and portents were ambiguous: on one hand, the theater was nearly deserted; on the other hand, a sophisticated fourth grader of my acquaintance thought the movie was better than X-Men, though not as good as The Terminal. But I agree with Geoff Pullum that traditional media are generally "Behind the Da Vinci Curve", and as further evidence of the superiority of the new-media coverage, I'd like to draw your attention to a recent post on The Medicine Box ("The Internet Theologian Explains The Da Vinci Code" 5/17/2006).
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I think this is probably too easy if I give you the whole song (and I don't want to bring down some transnational version of the RIAA on Sven and his friend and her CD supplier -- not to speak of me) so here's the first verse and the refrain.. Extra points if you figure it out by searching on-line dictionaries for transcribed words, but if you just recognize the language, that's great too, and it's even better if you know the band. Send me your answers and I'll post a summary.
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This morning, I asked about the language of a song sent in by Sven Godtvisken. JS Bangs gave the right answer right away:
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Why is the field of psychology (in the United States) roughly 10 to 100 times bigger than the field of linguistics, depending on how you quantify things? Is this a logical consequence of the two fields' relative amounts of intellectual interest and social importance? Or is it largely a historical accident? Back in January of 2005, I gave a talk at Stanford ("A Series of Unfortunate Events: The Past 150 Years of Linguistics", Stanford University, 1/28/2005; blog post, pdf of slides) in which I argued for the "historical accident" theory.
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Stephen Levinson's letter ("Language in the 21st Century", Language, vol. 82, no. 1, 2006) and Brian Josephs' reply ("Language in the 21st century: An assessment and a reply") are both well worth reading in their entirety, and so I've put up an unauthorized .html copy for those of you who are not LSA members. But what caught my attention was a particular numerical comparison in Dr. Levinson's letter.
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The "leaving was never my proud" line seems to be genuinely part of the lyric, not a mondegreen: listen for yourself (the full version is here).
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That superscript 42 is not the answer to life, the universe and everything. It's just a endnote, and it resolves to a reference to a particular scientific paper, namely Killgore, William D. S. CA; Oki, Mika; Yurgelun-Todd, Deborah A. "Sex-specific developmental changes in amygdala responses to affective faces." Neuroreport. 12(2):427-433, February 12, 2001. A footnote or endnote like that, as I'm sure you know, is how authors flag the authority by which they make non-obvious statements. And the claim that adult males are emotional children is certainly non-obvious -- whatever current sexual stereotypes may say.
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Well, I'll also provide a link to Laura Martin's seminal work, "Eskimo Words for Snow: A Case Study in the Genesis and Decay of an Anthropological Example", American Anthropologist, 1986, pp. 418-423.
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No, not that CIA, this one. This year's winner of the 003309.html:
I'm not sure why their profession ought to get in the way here, but certainly this is a new chapter in what Laura Martin called "the genesis and decay of an anthropological example". Kathrin Passig's own professional life has been quite diverse. Her ZIA page lists her special skills as "Internet, Web-Entwicklung, Perl, PHP, Filmuntertitelung, technisches und literarisches Übersetzen E-D, technisches Übersetzen NL-D" ("Internet, web design, Perl, PHP, film subtitling, technical and literary translation from English to German, technical translation from Dutch to German)".
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The wires are burning up, here at Language Log Plaza, with information about fake Chinese sayings. Email from Goh Eng Cher provided a link to research by Stephen E. DeLong and Keith Henson, indicating that the "ancient Chinese curse" usually rendered in English as "may you live in interesting times" was introduced into Western discourse in a science fiction story published in 1950. Specifically: Eric Frank Russell, writing as Duncan H. Munro, "U-Turn", Astounding Science Fiction, April 1950, p. 137. DeLong also quotes an email from Mauricio Diaz, who asserts that Carl Jung discusses the same phrase in his 1931 introduction to Richard Wilhelm's German translation of The Secret of the Golden Flower: A Chinese Book of Life. However, DeLong searched the English translation of the relevant book without finding any support for this attribution. And DeLong was also unable to find any evidence that this "ancient Chinese curse" was ever actually used by the ancient Chinese.
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In a recent debate with other New York Times columnists (Times Talks, U.S. Politics: What's Next?, July 17, 2006), Maureen Dowd got a big laugh when she said
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The very first instance of Sybil's column, published on January 9, 2006, critiqued some research on social networks published a mere three days earlier by Duncan Watts and one of his students (Gueorgi Kossinets and Duncan J. Watts, "Empirical Analysis of an Evolving Social Network", Science, 311 88:90, 6 January 2006). The archive of Sybil's columns is only available to Nature "Premium Plus" subscribers, at a cost of $15.99 per month. If you happen to be a Premium Plus subscriber, here is the link. If not, here's a poor person's version. Even more interesting is this version, apparently an earlier draft that went out by mistake on news@nature.com's RSS feed, and was duly posted at BioEd Online.
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It's recently fashionable for books and articles to enlist neuroscience in support of the view that men and women are essentially and unavoidably different, not just in size and shape, but also in just about every aspect of the way they see, hear, feel, talk, listen and think. These works tend to confirm our culture's current stereotypes and prejudices, and the science they cite is often overinterpreted, and sometimes seems simply to have been made up. I recently discussed an example from Leonard Sax's book Why Gender Matters ("Are men emotional children?", 6/24/2006), which David Brooks has used to support an argument for single-sex education. The latest example of this genre, released August 1, is Louann Brizendine's book "The Female Brain".
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On p. 36 of her new book The Female Brain, Prof. Brizendine writes: "Girls speak faster on average -- 250 words per minute versus 125 for typical males." In support of this assertion, the end-note in her book cites "Ryan 2000", which her biblography lists as Bruce P. Ryan, "Speaking rate, conversational speech acts, interruption, and linguistic complexity of 20 pre-school stuttering and non-stuttering children and their mothers", Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics, 14(1), pp. 25-51 (2000). Its abstract:
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There's a brief mention of some sex differences in speaking rate in a paper that Jiahong Yuan, Chris Cieri and I will be giving at ICSLP 2006 in September: Jiahong Yuan, Mark Liberman and Chris Cieri, "Towards an Integrated Understanding of Speaking Rate in Conversation". The link is to a four-page "extended abstract" that will go in the conference proceedings; given the four page limit, we cut our remarks on sex to
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[ Update #2 -- speech rate information for females and males in Dutch conversation can be found in Diana Binnenpoorte, Christophe Van Bael, Els den Os and Lou Boves, "Gender in Everyday Speech and Language: A Corpus-based Study", Interspeech 2005. Their data is from 50 male and 58 females who participated in face-to-face conversations, and 40 males and 61 females who participated in telephone dialogues. Speech rate measurements can be found in their Table 1:
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[Audio clip for this refrain is here. And here's another track with an upbeat message, "No turnin back".]
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In her recent U.S. District Court decision in the ACLU v. NSA case, Hon. Anna Diggs Taylor wrote:
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This reminds me of a point about intonation and meaning. About 35 years ago, I heard Martin Kay describe a sign on the London Underground that read (as he performed it) "DOGS must be carried". (Here's a more modern version of the sign, courtsy of Annie Moie's London Underground Tube Blog.) I've never figured out a really convincing explanation for why stressing "dogs" seems to encourage the interpretation "everyone must carry a dog", while stressing "carried" encourages the interpretation "if you have a dog, you must carry it".
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I've learned from Hugo Quené that late summer, which in English-language journalism is called the "silly season" and in German is called "Sommerloch" (= "summer hole"), is known as "komkommertijd" (= "cucumber time") in Dutch. That's the basis for the cucumber slices in this picture, which adorns an item on Noorderlog, the weblog of the Dutch science news site Noorderlicht, posted on August 29 under the title "Komkommerkoeien" (= "cucumber cows"). The cow part of the picture comes from Noorderlog's earlier post, "Koeiendialect" (= "Cow dialect"), which had credulously passed along the BBC's reproduction of a cheese company's press release.
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Knaus et al. looked at 8 language-associated brain areas (the left- and right-hemisphere instances of Heschl's gyrus (HG), the planum temporale (PT), the posterior superior temporal gyrus (pSTG), and the posterior ascending ramus (PAR)). They found that all 8 areas were substantially larger, on average, in their 12 male subjects than in their 12 female subjects. Because total brain volume was about 26% larger on average in their male subjects than in their female subjects, they adjusted the brain-region measurements with respect to each subject's total brain volume. (The magnitude of the TBV difference in their study seems surprisingly large -- I would have expected something more like 10%. Their table of raw and adjusted results is here.) In the adjusted measurements, 6 of the 8 areas were on average larger in their male subjects, while 2 of the 8 areas were on average larger in their female subjects. (Those two areas were Heschel's gyrus in the left hemisphere, and the posterior ascending ramus in the right hemisphere.)
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So Brizendine's statement "some verbal areas of the brain are larger in women than in men" is simply false, at least with respect to the data in this study. To make it true, her clause would have to be amended to read something like "all verbal areas of the brain are larger on average in men than in women, but when area sizes are adjusted for total brain volume, women came out ahead in two out of eight areas examined in one study". (A tabular survey of the -- variable and inconclusive -- results of other studies of sex differences in language-related brain areas, reproduced from the Knaus et al. paper, can be found here.)
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is Bruce P. Ryan, "Speaking rate, conversational speech acts, interruption, and linguistic complexity of 20 pre-school stuttering and non-stuttering children and their mothers", Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics, 14(1), pp. 25-51 (2000). I discussed this case at (excessive) length in an earlier post ("Sex and speaking rate"). You can read more about it there than you probably want to -- let's just say here that there's nothing whatsoever in that paper comparing speaking rates of boys and girls. I concluded that
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The only empirically-testable part of this is the daily word budget stuff, which is also featured in the book's jacket blurb. As discussed in an earlier post ("Sex-linked lexical budgets"), this meme began to appear in works of pop psychology in the early 1990s, which (in all the cases I've been able to track down) assert the difference without citing any empirical support. Garner 1997 and Pease 1997 are works of this type, and other works by Pease definitely include versions of the claim. I've read all the other books on the list, except for Lewis 1997, and I'm pretty certain that nothing can be found in them to support the idea that the "Men use about seven thousand words per day. Women use about twenty thousand". Since writing that post, I've continued to look into this, and what I've found confirms my belief that this like the "Eskimo words for snow" case analyzed by Laura Martin ( "Eskimo Words for Snow: A Case Study in the Genesis and Decay of an Anthropological Example", American Anthropologist, 1986, pp. 418-423), in which an invented statistic mutates and spreads through the literature on a purely ideological basis, without any empirical support at all.
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Sax's cited threshold values come from a classic study: John F. Corso, "Age and Sex Differences in Pure-Tone Thresholds", The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 31(4), pp. 498-507 (1959). Corso measured how loud tones of different frequencies had to be for subjects to hear them, across a range of frequencies from 250 Hz to 8,000 Hz. He tested a large number of males and females of different ages from the students, faculty and staff at Penn State. He presents the results in multiple tables of values, providing means and standard deviations of thresholds for different ears of subjects of different ages and sexes, for sounds of different frequencies. He presents one set of tables is for his whole population of subjects, and other set of tables from a "screened" group from which he eliminated subjects who had abnormal amounts of hearing loss. You can see copies of three of these tables here, here, and here.
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Corso's multiple tables contain hundreds of values. His Table 1 alone ("Summary of threshold data (SPL) by age groups, sex and ears for the original sample of subjects") offers 144 thresholds to choose from. Sax gives us two thresholds taken from this table: the threshold for a 3-kHz tone for a 43-year-old man was 30.5 decibles [sic] (dB), while the threshold for a 3-kHz tone for an 18-year-old girl was 7.3 dB.
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Here's the relevant slice from Corso's Table IV ("Summary of means and standard deviations combined for right and left ears of male and female subjects in the screened sample"):
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1. Jasnow, A.M. et al. (2006), "Estrogen facilitates fear conditioning and increases corticotropin-releasing hormone mRNA expression in the central amygdala in female mice", Horm Behav 49(2):277-86.
003565.html: 2. Bertolino et al. (2005), "Variation of human amygdala response during threatening stimuli as a function of 5'HTTLPR genotype and personality style", Biol Psychiatry 57(12): 1516-25.
003565.html: 3. Hamann (2005), "Sex differences in the responses of the human amygdala", Neuroscientist 11(4):288-93.
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003565.html: 5. Pezawas et al. (2005), "5-HTTLPR polymorphism impacts human cingulate-amygdala interactions: A genetic susceptibility mechanism for depression", Nat Neurosci 8(6): 828-34.
003565.html: 6. Sabatinelli et al. (2005), "Parallel amygdala and inferotemporal activation reflect emotional intensity and fear relevance", Neuroimage 24(4): 1265-70.
003565.html: 7. Viau et al. (2005), "Gender and puberty interact on the stress-induced activation of parvocellular neuroscretory neurons and corticotropin-releasing hormone messenger ribonucleic acid expression in the rat", Endocrinology 146(1): 137-46.
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A striking example of synchronicity -- September 24th was National Punctuation Day.
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I should have known that there would be a BBC science angle to this words-per-day business. David Beaver writes:
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Rosie Redfield writes:
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To see how this general approach might work, let's start out by trying it on some singing. I picked the first couplet of Janis Joplin's a capella prayer (from Pearl, 1971):
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Thus this couplet features pitches that are about a quarter-tone sharp relative to D, A, C#. But as Schreuder et al. suggest, we can also see this by looking at a histogram of pitch estimates. So I asked WaveSurfer to write out its F0 estimates for each centisecond of the two phrases shown above (right-click on the pitch pane, select "Save Data File"), and used the free software program R to calculate a histogram in quarter-tones relative to A 440 (the functions that I wrote to help do this are here).
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OK, cool! There's much more to be explored here -- but it's clear that there are well-defined modes in the histogram, and surely they must correspond to the pitches of the sung melody. But what would we see if we looked at something spoken rather than sung? Well, it happens that Janis introduces that song with a spoken phrase:
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Hmm. The modes are less clear -- pitches drifting around a bit in the performance? -- but still, it's not at all the smooth distribution that I might have predicted. (By the way, the script for producing the two previous histograms is here.)
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As for why I've always been somewhat skeptical about this whole musical-intervals-in-speech business, it goes like this. (You can find a more extensive discussion of these general issues in Mark Liberman and Janet Pierrehumbert, "Intonational invariance under changes in pitch range and length", pp. 157-233 in M. Aronoff and R. Oehrle, Eds., Language Sound Structure, MIT Press, 1984. The plots below are all taken from that paper, and if you don't follow the rather sketchy discussion here, you can read more about it in the scan of the paper that I've put online.)
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All the same, some of those F0 histograms seem to have very clear multi-modal structure. This is entirely consistent with a view of pitch scaling in which the relationships are not purely multiplicative -- there might indeed be a limited set of discrete favored pitch-classes, and/or a set of favored "intervals" in some extended sense, e.g. in ratios of baseline-units above a baseline. But free pitch-range variation, general down-drift and various other phenomena ought to produce pretty smooth F0 histograms most of the time. If that doesn't happen, it would be nice to know why. And looking at F0 histograms (allowing for the manifold problems of pitch tracking errors, segmental effects, etc.) is an interesting idea about how to look for patterns in the melodies of speech, without imposing any particular assumptions about which parts of the contour matter and which don't. Dipole statistics might be even more interesting.
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003668.html: 3. Laumann, E. O., Nicolosi, et al. (2005). "Sexual problems among women and men aged 40-80: Prevalence and correlates identified in the Global Study of Sexual Attitudes and Behaviors." Int J Impot Res 17(1): 39-57.
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This is W.H. Auden, reading the first two lines of his villanelle "If I Could Tell You":
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The extra functions used (like getf0 and h2st) can be found here. ]
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[The reasons for the phrase-length effect are discussed in another Language Log post, "The shape of a spoken phrase", 4/12/2006, and in a paper, Jiahong Yuan, Mark Liberman and Christopher Cieri, "Towards an Integrated Understanding of Speaking Rate in Conversation", ICSLP 2006.]
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Because proteins (and other biological macromolecules such as DNA and RNA) are finite-length strings of elements drawn from a finite alphabet, it's natural to describe them grammatically. And as a result, computational biology has long since borrowed the mathematical and computational tools of computational linguistics, and made good use of them in applications from gene-finding to protein-structure prediction. One of the first researchers to see the potential of such methods was David B. Searls, one of the founders of the Center for Bioinformatics at Penn, and now at GSK; a good source of insight is his 2002 Nature review article "The language of genes" (or try this link).
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I recall being taught in elementary school that a newspaper article is supposed to answer six questions. Some things have changed since I was a kid, and the most important one is the internet. So I'd like to suggest that the traditional list of six should be expanded to seven: who, what, where, when, why, how and URL. For all I know, those traditional six questions are the journalistic equivalent of the Eskimos' snow words, so let me put it more directly: reporters and editors, give me the *!%&@ URLs!
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The first one is Szu-Chen Jou, Tanja Schultz, Matthias Walliczek, Florian Kraft, and Alex Waibel, "Towards Continuous Speech Recognition Using Surface Electromyography", International Conference of Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP-2006), Pittsburgh, PA, September 2006.
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Here's the second paper: Matthias Walliczek, Florian Kraft, Szu-Chen Jou, Tanja Schultz, and Alex Waibel, "Sub-Word Unit based Non-audible Speech Recognition using Surface Electromyography", (ICSLP-2006), Pittsburgh, PA, September 2006.
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I'll blog from the conference site as time permits. I'm going to start with an entry that does have to do with linguistics and with blogging, but not with TLSX (though maybe there'll be some sort of connection, who knows). The subject is Ken Macleod's new novel, "Learning the world: A scientific romance", and I've had it on my to-blog list for a month or so.
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The motto of NaBloPoMo ("National Blog posting month") is a nice example of dog latin. (Though in former times "blog or die" might have been dog-latined as "aut blogare aut mori", with some approximation to an infinitive form of the verb blog, more closely echoing the original "aut vincere aut mori" = "conquer or die".) No matter what the pseudo-Latin morphology might be, though, I don't agree with the sentiment, since I make it a principle not to blog unless it feels like fun. Life has enough necessities without adding another.
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Do you own a copy of Merriam-Webster's Concise Dictionary of English Usage? If not, go immediately to your favorite bookseller and buy one. Believe me, it'll be the best $13.22 (or even $16.95, if you pay list price) that you've spent in a while. Geoff Pullum recommended it last year ("Don't put up with usage abuse", 1/15/2005), in response to a reader's question about what references or authorities to trust with respect to style and usage. Geoff used blurb-worthy phrases like "the best usage book I know of" and "this book ... is utterly wonderful", and I agree with him.
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I'm talking about Betty Hart and Todd Risley's classic research on social-class differences in language acquisition (Betty Hart and Todd Risley, "Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children", 1995; Betty Hart, "A Natural History of Early Language Experience", Topics in Early Childhood Special Education, 20(1), 2000; Betty Hart and Todd Risley, "The Early Catastrophe: the 30 Million Word Gap", American Educator, 27(1) pp. 4-9, 2003). This work was featured in Paul Tough's article in last Sunday's New York Times Magazine last Sunday, "What it takes to make a student".
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This is amusing. Apparently whoever moderates readers' comments over at the Daily Mail doesn't want Fiona Macrae's carelessness and credulousness to be exposed. She's the writer who basically copied out the press release for Louann Brizendine's book The Female Brain, using as her lede a factoid (about women talking three times more than men) which has repeatedly been debunked, most recently the day before in the Guardian, and which Dr. Brizendine herself has withdrawn after I pointed out that no actual studies support any similar numbers. (See this Language Log post for a list of links that go into mind-numbing detail on the factual background -- which is that the numbers reproduced in the Daily Mail piece are a pseudo-scientific urban legend, unconnected to any actual study; and that the many studies that do correlate talkativeness and sex find only small differences, often in the direction of more words from men.)
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Having struck gold with Fiona Macrae's article "Women talk three times as much as men, says study" (11/28/2006), The Femail section of the Daily Mail tried again the next day with Carol Sarler's Why we women will NEVER stop talking" (11/29/2006). Sarler takes a slightly different perspective on the topic: she spells Louann Brizendine's name correctly, and she argues with Brizendine's explanation for the alleged fact that women are several times more talkative than men:
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[Meanwhile, Bill Poser was seized by a fit of hackery, and modified wextract to use libsndfiles, which I had considered and rejected as too complicated. He even packed it up using Gnu autoconf and all. If you want to see how to use libsndfiles, or to use it for some other purpose, the tarball is here. Warning: you'll have to install libsndfiles first -- and you'll also have to execute ldconfig as root, since the libsndfiles "make install" command unaccountably fails to do that. If none of that makes sense to you, consider yourself lucky and move on.]
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We'll come back to the Quaternions vs. Vectorists issue another time (though if you're impatient, you can read this). An article in the Harvard Alumni Magazine ("I Love My Vincent Baby", September-October 2002) explains the "Rinehart" part:
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But the Rinehart story turns out to be quite a bit more interesting. Over the decades, the story underwent a curious series of re-interpretations. David Winter, ("Gordon Allport and the Legend of 'Rinehart'", Journal of Personality 64(1), 1996) describes the process.
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One study that will give us an idea of how this is likely to work out is John F. Dovidio, Clifford E. Brown, Karen Heltman, Steve L. Ellyson, Caroline F. Keating, "Power displays between women and men in discussions of gender-linked tasks: A multichannel study", Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 55(4), 580-587, 1988.
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Victor Mair sent in an article by Julian Ryall from the South China Morning Post of 12/16/2006, "Japanese forgetting how to write traditional characters", which begins:
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003969.html: It- it- look- what- pre- it- what- Colin Powell is saying, we're not winning, so therefore we must be losing,
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An audio clip of a larger portion of the exchange is here. Here's the official transcript (with video link that should start you out in the right place -- the White House transcript page gives a link to a video of the whole briefing).
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A couple of weeks ago, we batted around the witless lead of a BBC story about an effort to improve British kids' vocabulary:
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In the larger auditorium at Language Log Plaza, Geoffrey Nunberg, secretary-general of the Goropius Becanus Prize Committee, stands at the podium. As the audience falls silent, and 16th-century Antwerp guildhouses are projected on the screen behind him, Nunberg reads from the Wikipedia:
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According to the study's summary table, the mean "idea density" in early life autobiographies for nuns whose autopsied brains "met neuropathologic criteria for Alzheimer's disease" was 4.9 (95% confidence interval 4.6-5.3), while for nuns whose brains were free of Alzheimer's symptoms, the mean "idea density" was 6.1 (95% confidence interval 5.6-6.6).
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At 1,085 pages, Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day reminded one Amazon reviewer of Ambrose Bierce's comment: "The covers of this book are too far apart".
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We'd all be a lot safer, I suspect, if the intelligence functions of the Department of Homeland Security were turned over to the alumni-association industry. Those people are efficient, all-knowing and politely relentless. As I've moved through life since obtaining an MIT degree in 1975, I've apparently been adopted by the local MIT Club of every region that I've ever lived in, and every one of them sends me multiple email reminders of their frequent and interesting events, none of which I've ever actually attended.
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Not long after noting Plug Loafsley's v-like /r/, Thomas Pynchon takes up the phonetic motivations for sound change in a more direct (though less human) fashion. It's page 406 of Against the Day, and we're back with the Chums of Chance on the Inconvenience, now hanging around the First International Conference on Time Travel at Candlebrow U.:
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I spent this morning's blogging hour writing letters of recommendation, so I'll just point readers to the slides for a talk I gave on January 6, at the 2007 Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America. My title was "The future of linguistics", and a pdf of the abstract is here.
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(The whole letter in .pdf form is here.)
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In the 1638 Latin original, and Fellowes' 1847 translation:
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Back on the absorption front: the examples range from ones that are, for me, absolutely fine, though some grayish area, to truly wretched stuff. Here's a small collection of examples.
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One of the world's most reliable sources of mirth is gone -- Molly Ivins died yesterday.
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I enjoyed the game last night, but I mostly skipped the commercials. That wasn't for lack of interest -- it's just that now that we've got YouTube, we don't need to watch the superbowl anymore to see the superbowl commercials. And internet access to the whole inventory is a better way to see the pattern whole.
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Other versions of the semantics-based theory are discussed in Yasuhiro Shirai, "Is regularization determined by semantics, or grammar, or both?", J. Child Lang. 24 495-501, 1997.
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I don't have a copy of that presentation, which doesn't seem to be available on line [Update: here it is...], but I do have access to the Google News Archive, where a search for {"flew out to * field"} yields 1,300 hits like these (the first four hits at the moment):
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At some point around 2:00 a.m. this morning, Language Log's elderly linux server began to experience some disk problems, which caused apache to fail. I went in this morning and "fixed" it (at the cost of a distressingly large number of fsck repairs, whose exact nature and consequences I don't know -- it's been a while since I wrangled inodes, and I don't have time to check the details anyhow).
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But Bronstein also introduces other items in the same series, for example this one.]
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Dick Cavett's maiden "Talk Show" post over at the NYT has now racked up 573 comments. This wouldn't be worth noting at one of the popular political sites like Daily Kos or Little Green Footballs, but for a blog behind the Times Select wall, it's a lot. In comparison, Stanley Fish's long blog essay on presidential signing statements, posted a week earlier and still featured today on the index page at nytimes.com, has a mere 55 comments so far.
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Beth Milton wrote to remind us all of the recent efforts by the Committee for the Language of European Law -- or rather, we should say, le Comité Pour la Langue du Droit Européen (CPLDE) -- to make French the official legal language of Europe. There's a good description at EurActiv.com: "Group pushes to bolster French-language legal supremacy", 2/12/2007. (This article is also available as "Une campagne pour défendre la suprématie du français sur le plan juridique" and "Initiative zur Förderung von Französisch als erste Amtssprache"). Other stories on the same topic: "Campaign to make French sole legal language in EU", IHT, 2/7/2007; "Francophiles seek primacy for language of Montesquieu", EU Observer, 2/8/2007; David Charter, "French wheel out Napoleon to lay down the law", Times Online, 2/9/2007.
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Take a look at this paragraph by Philip Nobel ( "Lust for height", American.com, 2/23/2007):
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We Americans mostly don't care or even notice, but European excitement is building for the annual Eurovision song contest. And this year, the French are taking a new approach: the French entry L'amour à la française is half in English and half in (fractured) French, with the French lyrics sung in a fake English accent. According to fluctuat.net:
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Mary Haas explains the concept with an example("Interlingual Word Taboos", American Anthropologist, 53(3) 338-344, 1951):
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I'm attaching some of the exchanges that occurred in the local newspapers with the assistant school superintendent, Belmore [archived here -- myl]. Her comments make it clear why they really turned down the RF money: it was perceived as a defense against ceding control over the schools to the feds. A slippery slope argument.
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Edward's script is here. This is the same thing that my second script does -- though rather than use the rmultinom() function, I did it the hard way, by running N trials, each of which chooses 22 numbers between 1 and 26,0003 and assigns the choice to one of the 26 letters of the alphabet, in proportion to the number of nouns in CELEX2 starting with that letter. Being impatient, I used only 10,000 trials, but re-running it with 100,000 took about 30 seconds on my laptop, whereas Edward's script only took 2 or 3 seconds. The result is the same, though.
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It's linguistic synchronicity in action. After crossing nine time zones via two red-eye flights within 48 hours -- San Francisco to Philadelphia and Philadelphia to Paris -- I logged onto the hotel's wireless internet to read Arnold Zwicky's analysis of a dangling modifier in a recent Bizarro cartoon, and then went out to walk the streets of Paris, where I found a large fraction of the available vertical surfaces plastered with posters presenting the face of Nicholas Sarkozy and his presidential campaign slogan "Ensemble tout devient possible" ("Together everything becomes possible").
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[Kenny Easwaran writes:
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For a minute this afternoon, I thought that someone at the NYT has decided that the word for removal of Baathists should be "de-Baathfication" (Edward Wong, "Shiite Cleric Opposes Return of Baathists in Iraq", 4/2/2007). The subtitle on the online front page, and the third sentence of the article, both use that version of the word:
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A note from Fabio Montermini in Toulouse:
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Louann Brizendine's The Female Brain came out in the UK on April 2, in paperback. This time, the cover represents a woman's brain as a purse jam-packed with cell phone, mirror, cosmetics, photos and so on, in place of the (oddly 1970-ish) image of a brain-shaped tangled curly phone cord that adorned the dust jacket of the U.S. hardcover edition.
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004378.html: One of my most prized possessions is a little handbook of some 240 pages that was published in Xi’an, Shaanxi in 1993. The contents of the book are made up of commonly used expressions and sentences written, first, in Chinese characters. The next line is an English translation of the Mandarin expression or sentence. The third line is a transcription in Chinese characters of the English translation. As an example, please look at the bottom sentence on page 64: “Would you please speak slowlier [sic] (faster)?”. I will now render the Chinese transcription in pinyin and, in the manner of Mr. Yen, translate the individual characters into English (I give only one English meaning per character, whereas most of them are highly polysemous): 004382.html:
Since I'm a positive-thinking kind of person, and since the main reason for my trip to Michigan was to repeat a talk I gave on "The Future of Linguistics" at the January LSA meeting, I'm naturally looking for the disciplinary upside of this development. Perhaps the NOAA's National Weather Service will see the need to establish a branch for forecasting sociolinguistic disturbances, in keeping with their broader mission to "[save] lives by providing immediate alerts of severe weather warnings and civil emergency messages and giving critical lead time to respond and remain safe":
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Dan's most important paper on this general topic is "Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirahã: Another Look at the Design Features of Human Language", Current Anthropology, Volume 46, Number 4, August-October 2005.
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Never mind what the shrimp did to the cabbage -- look at what another bad Chinese-English dictionary entry did to a sofa! Joel Martinsen has drawn my attention to a blog post by Jeff Keller ("A reeeeaaally bad translation", 4/10/2007) which in turn points to a newspaper article (Jim Wilkes, "Racial slur on sofa label stuns family", Toronto Star, 4/6/2007) that starts this way:
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has pioneered the unspeakable brand, but I don't think I've ever encountered an unprintable brand, so Dilbert is pushing the envelope here. Perhaps this is why some branding firms are eager to hire linguists these days.
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The extraordinary PENNsound site has recently added an extraordinary trove of Ezra Pound recordings, along with an essay by Richard Sieburth, "The Sound of Pound: A Listerner's Guide". One of the most interesting aspects of Sieburth's essay, to me, was his description of Pound's encounter with the L'abbé Jean-Pierre Rousselot.
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Anil Dash has a fun post arguing that "Cats Can Has Grammar" (4/23/2007). Surveying lolcats and related phenomena, he quickly passes over the snowclone "I'm in UR X Ying your Z" and the whole Invisible X phenomenon, and focuses on "the newly dominant lolcats, of the family 'I Can Has Cheezeburger?'". He observes that
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Benson High School, a public high school founded in 1904, was recently designated by the Omaha [Nebraska] Public Schools as "a Magnet Center for Academic Research and Innovation". However, its first appearance in the national news didn't work out in a way that pleased OPS officials. The trigger was the March 2007 issue of the school newspaper, the Benson Gazette, which included a four-page section on The N-Word.
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It's not just cats anymore: http://community.livejournal.com/lolbrarians/.
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The second and final round of the French election is today. In past weeks, we've talked about the candidates' nicknames, and about a political cartoon's use of those names in a phonologically-defined phrasal template, among other trivial things. Today I want to drawn your attention to something more important: a professor of linguistics at l’Université de Provence, Jean Véronis, has established himself as a mainstream political commentator in France.
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If you can get to San Francisco this weekend, you won't want to miss Geoff Pullum at Writers With Drinks. According to the notice sent out by Charlie Anders, the founder and ringmaster of the event,
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Inspired by Geoff's post, this morning's Breakfast Experiment^TM at Language Log Labs deals with dolphin dialects. West Philadelphia is a bit short of suitable experimental subjects, so we've had to work with simulated cetaceans. However, there are some significant results, reported below.
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I'm way behind in posting readers' contributions of linguistic cat macros -- sorry to all -- but right now, you need to go read "I can hath cheezburger?" over at Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog. Here's how he describes his decision to create a set of "Lolpilgrimes" (his Miller is over on the right):
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This morning's mail included a note from Daniel Hyde, with a lovely example of WTF coordination from the English-language feed of China Radio International ("'Mao Zedong Actress' Astonishes Chengdu Citizens", CRI.cn, 3/28/2007):
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You'll want to check out the philolsophers at flickr. Francis Heaney likes these two best. I agree, but I also enjoyed this one, perhaps because I saw the original at an impressionable age. And this one has promise, though I don't think it's quite there yet.
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On Monday it was words for cheese ("Cheeseclones", 6/25/2007); today it's philanthropists. This is the last panel from J. Jacques' Questionable Content (#913), sent in by Alain van Hout. Note that in this case, the rhetorical force is not the traditional "just as the Eskimos have N words for snow, so the X (should) have M words for Y". Instead, the idea that the X have M words for Y, by itself, is used to imply an excessive amount of experience with Y.
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How many snowclones are there? The Snowclones Database, set up recently by Erin O'Connor, has only a half a dozen listed so far, but she writes that
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Today's snowclone of the day arrived in email from Josh DeWald:
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In a post the next day ("Sex differences in 'Communication events" per day?", 12/11/2007), I tried to evaluate the "communications events" claim by taking a look at John F. Dovidio, Clifford E. Brown, Karen Heltman, Steve L. Ellyson, Caroline F. Keating, "Power displays between women and men in discussions of gender-linked tasks: A multichannel study", Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 55(4), 580-587, 1988.
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The argumentative animal in this morning's Fusco Brothers is apparently supposed to be Axel the Wolverine, but I believe that most readers probably see him as a dog (or perhaps a giant rat):
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Emmanuel Maria Dammerer wrote to announce his "Buch von der deutschen Snowclonerey", which is "Versuch einer Definition der Snowclones mit bekannten deutschsprachigen Beispielen" ("A preliminary definition of the snowclone phenomenon, including a list of frequent German examples"). The site's name is itself a snowclone, taking off on the title of Martin Opitz's 1624 "Buch von der deutschen Poeterey".
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Email address autocompletion is an underappreciated peril of modern life. Once, the danger was failing to distinguish between "reply" and "reply all", or failing to notice that even a simple "reply" would go to a mailing list rather than to an individual. There are many entertaining stories, some of them true, about the consequences of this sort of carelessness.
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Tomorrow, Dragomir Radev and eight amazingly smart high-school students will be taking off for St. Petersburg (Russia, not Florida), to participate as the American entrants in the 5th International Linguistics Olympiad. There are two teams: the first team is Rachel Elana Zax, Ryan Aleksandrs Musa, Adam Classen Hesterberg, and Jeffrey Christopher Lim; the second team is Rebecca Elise Jacobs, Joshua Stuart Falk, Anna Tchetchetkine, and Michael Zener Riggs Gottlieb.
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For the other piece, you could start with Paul Graham's essay "The Roots of Lisp", and especially the code for the implementation of Lisp in itself. [In case you can't read the .ps file that he provides for the essay, a .pdf version is here.]
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I thought that Pete Ianace had come up with a clever pun, but he seems to mean it.
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One way to deal with these difficulties is to look at a great deal of data, and hope that all the complexities balance out somehow. Jiahong Yuan, Chris Cieri and I took this approach, in some research discussed in an earlier Language Log post ("The shape of a spoken phrase", 5/12/2006) and published in part as "Towards an Integrated Understanding of Speaking Rate in Conversation", ICASSP 2006.
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2003_10.html:a story about emergent bracelet semiotics among Florida middle schoolers.
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Here's a set of simple illustrative examples, taken from work in a local 2003_11.html:
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reproduced from Mary Winsor's fascinating book Starfish, 2003_11.html:
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Here's a follow-up to Bill Poser's post 2003_12.html:several alternative methods for accurate html reproduction 2003_12.html:
I was a big fan of J.R.R. Tolkien when I was a kid. I've enjoyed reading the LOTR books out loud to my seven-year-old, and listening to him read them to me -- especially his Elvish and Orcish accents, which he rightly believes to be much better than my own.
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duer, dweor, 2004_01.html: dweorh, dwæruh, dweru, dwer, 2004_01.html: dwere, dwergh, dwargh, dwarghe, 2004_02.html:
I need to 2004_02.html:
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The 2004_03.html: when I shot this picture last August 16. The original 2004_03.html:digital photograph of this monkey. Well, 1,593,104 bits less, as long as we're counting.
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I wrote about this in a presentation 2004_03.html:
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Having found 2004_04.html: set SQUARE, as in Chingy's Right Thurr, whose chorus 2004_04.html: as far as I can tell. Here's 2004_04.html: of here shifting in Nelly's Hot 2004_04.html:here is a brief clip of J-Kwon's pronunciaton of everybody in the song "Tipsy", as cited by Halpern. It's hard to tell from a single, rapid, slurred rendition against a musical background, but it sounds like the "every" part has become a single rhotic vowel, which is somewhat centralized, though maybe it hasn't gone all the way to [ɚ] Note also that in this clip four and floor seem relatively r-less, and the pronunciation of here doesn't sound any more centralized than Nelly's did. But the way to characterize this way of talking would be to analyze some recorded interviews, not to puzzle over a few scraps of song. Finally, a fan site says that "cornell haynes" (i.e. Nelly) "was born in texas, but was moved to spain for three years", so who knows where his speech patterns come from? Chingy and J-Kwon seem to be St. Louis natives. ]
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(link) 2004_05.html: 2004_05.html: 2004_05.html: 2004_05.html: 2004_05.html: 2004_05.html:here. 2004_05.html:here. After an 2004_05.html: "Evolutionary Psychology 2004_05.html: be found in Ann D. Zwicky and Arnold M. Zwicky, "America's 2004_05.html: of Troy on NPR includes the following characterization 2004_05.html:
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and here is a link 2004_06.html: and Free-be's." [warning -- these are ~1MB files -- .ppt, 2004_06.html: .pdf].
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In the 1987 paper, 2004_06.html:
Did you walkˊ or rideˋ?
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And there's more, such as a chapter entitled "AND SOMETIMES", whose 2004_07.html:
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In a recent post, I linked to a preprint of a paper by Perruchet and Rey that severely criticizes an earlier paper by Fitch and Hauser. The topic is an important one, which interests people from many walks of life: the nature of cognitive differences between humans and non-human primates. I've given you links to both papers, but unless you've got a subscription to Science, you can't read Fitch and Hauser's side of the story, and you'll have to be satisfied with the picture presented in my earlier descriptions or in Perruchet and Rey's summary.
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You can read their paper for the details, as well as for much interesting discussion. Their experimental materials were almost identical to Fitch & Hauser's -- sets of spoken syllables in either a male or a female voice, arranged in patterns that either 2004_08.html: 2004_08.html: 2004_08.html: 2004_08.html: 2004_08.html:
On men, front is hot, back is not. But on women, it's back that's hot, while front is not. We're talking about vowels here, mind you, and Charles Darwin may be raising his eyebrows a bit as he discusses this matter with Edward Sapir and Aristotle at the University of Heaven.
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She also found a sex-linked effect with initial sonorants vs. obstruents: obstruents were hotter on males, sonorants on females, though only the female effect was significant. All of these effects were small -- about a quarter of a point on a 10-point scale, or less, as you can see from the graph.
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The audio makes it clear that Mark Shields said "de facto running mate", but presumably the transcriptionist did not know the Latin expression de facto, and so was willing to substitute the rather low probability string "dead factor" as the best available option. It's phonetically pretty reasonable: 2004_08.html:
The audio indicates that this was probably a transcriptionist's eggcorn for the expected "ham fisted" Granted, it's hard to tell. Brooks says something like 2004_08.html:
Continuing our earlier discussion of whether people sometimes feel real disgust in reaction to the speech of others, Paul Bloom sent me an electronic copy of a book chapter in which he discusses some closely related questions. This is chapter six of his new book 2004_08.html:
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In comics and movies, we're used to the idea of humans getting superhuman powers as a result of some sort of damage: a radioactive spider bite, dunking in toxic waste, irradiation by gamma rays or cosmic rays, whatever. There's an even longer history of mythic animals undergoing similar transformations. The idea of gaining powers by contact with feared pollutants makes magical sense but not biological sense, and so I'm not used to seeing it outside of fantasy.
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Ron Rosenbaum is an accomplished journalist who recently debunked Elizabeth Kübler-Ross in an obituary at Slate. Gutsy stuff, since she's become 2004_09.html:
According to this CNN report, the U.S. Mint's new nickels feature a new profile of the well-known American linguist Thomas Jefferson. The reverse side will come in two kinds, one with the traditional buffalo, and the other featuring the Pacific Ocean, inscribed with the words that William Clark almost wrote in his journal when he reached the mouth of the Columbia River: "Ocean in view! O! The Joy!"
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It's not quite up to the level of "Let them eat cake". However, among recent symbols of ancien-regime arrogance, it's hard to beat what Jonathan Klein said, on the Fox News Channel on September 9, in a debate with Stephen Hayes about the authenticity of the 2004_09.html:
An alternative to the special chording keyboards that I wrote about earlier is "voice writing", a method originally developed by Horace Webb more than 60 years ago. The basic equipment is traditionally a two-track recorder, a microphone for picking up the proceedings that are being transcribed, and a special "stenomask" which the transcriptionist can use to 2004_09.html:The approach has some problems, both for the human users and for the ASR systems. The human users need to learn to shadow others' speech accurately at high rates for long periods of time, while also entering the other sorts of information that a transcript requires. The ASR systems need to learn to deal with sotto voce or even whispered speech.
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At the 2004_09.html:
As this sound clip makes clear, that's pretty close to what he actually said:
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The MS-NBC announcer, interestingly, committed several disfluencies in introducing the Bush clip, including mispronouncing (and partially correcting) the name of the town where the speech took place.
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It seems wrong to me to assert, as Chuck Anesi does, that 2004_11.html:
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There are three mp3 clips, here, here and here.
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2004_11.html:of their Science paper (Pierre Pica, Cathy Lemer, Véronique Izard, and Stanislas Dehaene, "Exact and Approximate Arithmetic in an Amazonian Indigene Group", Science, Vol 306, Issue 5695, 499-503, 15 October 2004). (Peter Gordon's paper from the same issue, "Numerical Cognition without Words", is here, and the discussion by Gelman and Gallistel, "Language and the Origin of Numerical Concepts", is here.)
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An article published in Cell today compared the apparent rate of genetic evolution in four cases: nervous-system genes vs. "housekeeping" genes in primates vs. rodents (here, if you've got a subscription). The abstract:
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Yesterday's NYT had an article by Andrew Revkin about 2004_12.html:

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Francis Heaney notes another popular eggcorn: get one's gander up, which has 1,070 Google hits, compared to 30,100 for "dander up". Some of the gander examples are witting wordplay -- suburbanites upset about goose droppings, and the like -- but most of them seem to come from people who've misunderstood the idiom, probably because their image of hot anger is better matched by a cranky goose than by cat scurf.
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Hanzi Smatter is a blog "[d]edicated to the misuse of Chinese characters (Hanzi or Kanji) in Western culture". For those of us who are ignorant of Chinese characters in all their forms, it's especially nice that characters cited are identified with links to the Unihan database. 2004_12.html:
Note that 3.9 is a very low measure of "idea density", in the context of the study. According to the study's summary table, the mean "idea density" in early life autobiographies for nuns whose autopsied brains "met neuropathologic criteria for Alzheimer's disease" was 4.9 (95% confidence interval 4.6-5.3), while for nuns whose brains were free of Alzheimer's symptoms, the mean "idea density" was 6.1 (95% confidence interval 5.6-6.6).
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although unlike Finnegans Wake, Riddley Walker won the John W. Campbell Award. In addition to maintaining a Russell Hoban site called The Head of Orpheus, Dave Awl is a former member of the Neo-Futurists, who are responsible for one of my favorite pieces of speech act ~~analysis~~ synthesis.
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Bill Poser's observation about the Norwegian interpretation of the UT "Hook 'em Horns" signs is echoed by Lloyd Grove's remarks about its meaning in American Sign Language. The same hand configuration, sometimes [falsely] called mano cornuto, is used in parts of Italy for defense against the evil eye, or in other parts of Europe to insinuate cuckoldry. [Update 1/24/2005: see below.]
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The National Weather Service is warning us that
2005_01.html:here is an image of the (anonymous) broadsheet. It's nice to see that Language Log is considered the Weblog of Record, if only for anonymous 17th-century religious-political song lyrics.]
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In a post on 1/15/2005 to the Risks Digest, under the heading "MapPoint explains Vikings?", Adam Shostack pointed out that
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Well, the distances are in miles, but that is not an anachronism, but rather (I imagine) an automatic response to the IP address from which I made the query. If you ask for the route in the opposite direction, you get a less scenic and interesting answer, as shown in the picture on the right. In this case, the distance is given as 476.1 miles, or 1209.8 miles less.
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The "shortest route" is indeed very striking, since it involves taking the ferry from Haugesund to Newcastle Upon Tyne, and then turning right around and taking the ferry back from Newcastle Upon Tyne to Bergen. I guess that's one way to get around the fjords. This also suggests what might be wrong with the route-finding program -- perhaps it doesn't include water travel in its distance or time cost functions... 2005_01.html: 2005_01.html:That's the gayest thing I've ever heard! The phonetic and phonological content of the perceptions of gay- and straight-sounding speech in English." MA thesis, Harvard University, 2003. I haven't seen a copy of Schuler's thesis, so I've based this post on a summary that Bert sent me.
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and you can easily hear the difference (in the individual notes) between the original and time-reversed versions. Here's a 2005_01.html:short drum passage and a time-reversed version of the same file, making the same point even more strikingly. Imagine trying to learn to recognize a particular rhythmic pattern in each case...
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The picture shows Language Log as visualized by Christine Sugrue's OrganicHTML, which apparently generates a pseudo-plant using "certain elements on a web site; colour, text, images, links, Flash, and primarily the table structure. This is why Flash-only sites or CSS-only sites end up generating rather sad looking plants." Too bad it doesn't get more from the words (look at the sad results from OrganicHTML-ing Language Hat). Christine's blog also led me to revisit Google Fight, where you can watch language duke it out with thought.
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According to ABC News and other outlets:
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In this morning's news:
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Alexander, King of Jesters, seems to be wrong when he says that "Many jesters and fools spoke a gibberish language called Grammelot that was first described over 500 years ago." Similarly, Gianni Ferrario seems to be wrong when he says that "Grammelot is a form of theater invented by the comic actors of the Commedia dell'Arte of 1400, and is organized in an onomatopoeic mode, that is, it manages to evoke concepts by means of sounds that are not established or conventional words." At least they're wrong to imply that the term Grammelot dates from the 15th or 16th century. (See this earlier post for references and links). In fact, the term was apparently invented by Dario Fo, perhaps in connection with his 1969 play Mistero Buffo.
2005_03.html:href="http://www.bartleby.com/65/be/Beolco-A.html">The confusion seems to have arisen because of Fo's references to the 16th-century playwright Angelo Beolco. In Fo's Nobel acceptance speech, he gave credit to "Ruzzante Beolco, my greatest master along with Molière", called him "until Shakespeare, doubtless the greatest playwright of renaissance Europe", and referred to the inspiration of Ruzzante's linguistic inventiveness:
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Aravind 2005_03.html:
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In today's NYT, Dave Itzkoff has an article on Cartoon Network's Adult Swim. If you haven't heard of this late-night collection of idiosyncratic animations, there are two reasons why you might want to check it out. The first reason is demographic:
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The things I've read about Grammelot, and the bits of it that I've heard, remind me of Simlish, the fake language used in The Sims and its follow-on games. In case you're not a Sims person, here's a bit of Simlish motherese and some Simlish food enjoyment, just to give you the flavor of this "language".
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Science Express has just published a new study of (a virtual endocast from) the skull of (specimen LB1 of) Homo floresiensis. The abstract:
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The association of dogs and speech research in Geoff Pullum's recent post reminds me of a story. The time was 1977, about 3:00 a.m. one cold winter night. The place was Murray Hill, N.J., the home of AT&T Bell Labs research. Building 2, wing D, 4th floor, in the console room of the DDP-224 interactive computer. Joe Olive and I had been programming since dinner, and our new speech synthesis system was pronouncing its first phrases: "The birch canoe slid on the smooth planks." "Mesh wire keeps chicks inside." "The spot on the blotter was made by green ink." It sounded really good to us, maybe not totally natural, but clear as crystal.
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Scientists are the worst offenders. A couple of years ago, I wrote a little program to find acronyms in the MEDLINE corpus. There are lots of them -- my not-very-smart program found more than 78,000 distinct acronym/definition pairings, many of which occurred many times. Thus GM-CSF was defined 2,401 times as "granulocyte-macrophage colony-stimulating factor", but was also defined by 150 other strings. In this case, these are basically all variant forms of the same term (including a shocking number of typos -- it seems that biomedical journals are not always very well copyedited) -- see this page for the complete list of variants, each preceded by the number of times my program found it as a definition for GM-CSF in MEDLINE.
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It's not just copywriters. Graphic designers could use a bit of fundamental education in linguistics, too. Mark Swofford at Pinyin News takes a swipe at Chris Calori and David Vanden-Eynden, for the quotes attributed to them in an April 12 article in Metropolis Magazine, under the headline Graphics That Bridge a Linguistic Divide.
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Here's a welcome contrast with the shabby treatment of Said el-Gheithy, the inventor of Ku (= "Ch'toboku"). 2005_04.html:

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Geoff Pullum, being a syntactician, looked at the smoke over the Sistine chapel on 4/19 and saw a moral about the complex relations between form and meaning in language
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Jeff Erickson at Ernie's 3D Pancakes has an extensive review and discussion of the SCIgen affair, in which three MIT grad students got a randomly-generated paper accepted at one of the IIIS/SCI spamferences, as Jeff calls them. Jeff's post features an analysis of the response by the president of IIIS, Nagib Callaos, which Jeff calls a "mindboggling rambling rationalization".
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Looking at the frequency first, we see that this is one of the few phenomena in the natural or social world that doesn't show a power law distribution, as indicated in the plot on the right. Alert Per Bak! (Note: this is a feeble joke -- Per Bak is 2005_04.html:
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Watch the movie first.
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Some recent observations of African elephants apparently learning to imitate sounds were noted by Henry Fountain in the NYT 3/29/2005:
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A couple of days ago, Eric Bakovic posted about an adverb that landed in the wrong phrasal slot: "I think that was clear from the day that I certainly met him." This morning, I heard another one in an NPR report on President Bush's Social Security roadshow in Iowa. Don Palmer, co-chair of the Linn County Republican Central Committee, expressing some skepticism about the plan, says "... there's a lot of still uh economic unrest here in Iowa..."
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This was a single sentence (audio clip here) from a VOA radio broadcast about events in Uzbekistan.
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It's been a while since we had a Language Quiz, so here's the audio for another one.
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According to a NYT article by John Noble Wilford, the Wildlife Conservation Society has announced that the Laotian Rock Rat, known to locals as the kha-nyou, represents a new family of mammals, and has been given the scientific name 2005_05.html:Update 5/14/2005: Gene Buckley emailed a quote from another NYT 2005_05.html:
Jill Beckman sent in a link to a 6/18/2003 story by Neal Rubin in the Detroit News, about a balky rollercoaster:
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Jean-Frédéric Jauslin, director of the Swiss Office Fédéral de la Culture ("Federal Culture Office"), needs to learn to do research on the web, or to use a calculator, one or the other. Or perhaps he just needs a little more common sense and a little less arrogance. All of this, of course, is supposing that that he was quoted accurately by the reporter from silicon.fr. In such cases, my normal rule of thumb is to blame the journalist, but I might need to make an exception for culture bureaucrats.
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He might also have cited this passage ( 2005_06.html:transcript, mp3) from (an old edition of) the NeoFuturist's show TMLMTBGB.
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Here's an audio clip -- the person saying "that's right" in the background of the recording is Larry Lessig. I'll have more to say about this passage later -- it's interesting linguistically, as well as a central point (in my inexpert opinion) in the case.
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You can listen to Colin Hurley, who plays Thersites in this production, reading a few lines in a BBC Radio 4 interview. I've created a URL for just the relevant bit of the BBC RealAudio stream here, and a local clip here in .wav format. The lines that Hurley reads are a collage of fragments from Act 2, Scene 1, where Thersites is cursing Ajax (if you want to see Thersites' lines in context, the play's etext is here):
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No, it's not spam text. Matthew in Beirut reprints the subtitles of a pirated Chinese DVD of Revenge of the Sith, available in English on the DVD via remarkably poor quality Machine Translation. The title becomes "The Backstroke of the West", and it gets better from there.
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2005_07.html:Jesse Sheidlower and 2005_07.html:Ron Butters, among others. For your reading convenience (and they're worth reading), I've snipped out those two declarations from the 814-page .pdf of the submissions that I downloaded from the USPTO.]
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CNN has the clip on their website (if the link doesn't work, try going through the story linked above), so I was able to verify that Arnold's memory is exact. I've extracted just the cited phrase here.
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Now joining the heavy metal umlaut is, apparently, the modish macron. To the right is a picture of the awning sign of a local hair place, VŌG. I walk past it frequently, wondering who's supposed to be attracted by evocations of Vogon style, but I didn't realize it was part of a trend. Recently, Phillip Jennings wrote in with news of "a new downtown Minneapolis salon named all-caps-something-or-other BLŪ", and also a magazine called "Modern HŌM". I can't find any web presence for either of these, but I'll take Phillip's word for it.
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My corrected transcript is here. I 've fixed a variety of omission, insertions and substitutions; divided the speech into breath-group-sized phrases; and noted the pronunciation of the indefinite article "a", with reduced forms ("uh", IPA [ə]) in blue and unreduced forms ("ay", IPA [ej]) in red.
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The Court has been acting not as a judicial body, but as a policy-making body. (audio link)
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Victor Mair sent me some interesting observations about the slogan for the 2006 Beijing Olympics. The English version is "One World, One Dream", while the Chinese version is 2005_08.html:
uh monster's probably the¹ right word. [audio link]
2005_08.html: I am uh hardly in the² Walter Lippman category, uh about all I can say is that my rate of fire exceeds his [audio link]
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2005_08.html: but he blogs anonymously [audio link]
2005_08.html: uh that is a¹ very very preliminary discussion at this point, ((it-)) we've been sort of asked to uh [audio link]
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From Frank DeFord's commentary about the new NBA dress code, 10/26/2005 on NPR's Morning Edition, this semantico-phonetically interesting passage:
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One of the most striking 2005_10.html:discussed by Victor Mair, Chinese versions are longer phonetically, morphologically, lexically, orthographically, cybernetically and even conceptually.) And I've been told that some languages do indeed resist lexical borrowing, for language-internal reasons rather than for reasons of cultural preference.
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[Leahy's sound bit is here, if you don't want to listen to the whole NPR story. And the 10/19/2005 Leahy/Specter news conference is available from CSPAN 2005_10.html:
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Nick Amautinuaq: We select / silau tsamanuktularininga / so that's why uh we uh try to create some uh new Inuktitut words.
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So wrote Peter Porcupine in March of 1797, attacking Noah Webster for "grammatical inaccuracy" in a froth of phrases like "illiterate booby", "inflated self-sufficient pedant", "very great hypocrite", and even "something of a traitor".
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Jim Gordon pointed out by email that the 2005 Laws of the Game (LOTG), as published by Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), include one provision that is incoherent in its English version (p. 40 of the .pdf):
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That's indeed what the NYT transcript says she says, and the White House transcript says the same thing, but I like to check these things, so I inspected a recording of the event, and this time, the transcripts are correct: that's what she said.
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The whole poem is a bit long for this post, so you can find it here.
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A couple of weeks ago, Amazon Web Services introduced the Mechanical Turk, which inverts the usual relationship in interactive computing by providing "a web services API for computers to integrate Artificial Artificial Intelligence directly into their processing by making requests of humans". The name is a reference to Wolfgang von Kempelen's Turk, an 18th-century chess automaton which pretended to be a sort of clockwork computer, but in fact incorporated a small, hidden, human player.
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Indeed, disfluency of this sort is common even in the spontaneous or semi-scripted speech of professional "talking heads". For example, in Jim Leher's 12/16/2005 interview of George W. Bush, one of Lehrer's questions begins [ 20:16, audio]
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[1:29, audio] I- I- we- we- we- we don't talk about sources and methods
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[8:43.7, audio] At one point in time, if- if I'm not mistaken, looked like they- the- the- the- the- the- democracy was in the balance
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[10:11.6, audio] so that political people can use police forces to [pause] seek retribution uh in i- i- i- in society
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[11:26.3, audio] and- uh and- and- look we- we- and- and- and- by the way
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[12:00.4, audio] Yeah, it's- it's- it's- the biggest priority is winning.
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[17:53, audio] that's what- that's- that's what people- I think- I've always known that ...
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[21:46.5, audio] He ju- I- I- I- I'm worried about a theocracy. [Lehrer says "yeah" three times in the background]
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[24:42, audio] Yeah. It's a- it's a- it's a- it's a- it's b- belief in the system,
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[26:05, audio] I- I- I- and- I- dealing with John McCain is not ((a-)) [pause] a- a reluctant adventure for me, I enjoy it.
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[20:27.1, audio] {breath} ((I've be- oh look I mean heh)) {breath} uh
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[19:25.9, audio]
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In a 12/16/2005 PBS interview with Jim Lehrer, President Bush answered a question about Gulf Coast housing issues by saying, in part [audio link]:
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Jim Hanas thinks that "Marshalls Law" might not be an appropriate theme for a retail advertising campaign. But the responsible ad agency promises "a Big BANG! ... that enables a brand to explode into the marketplace", and who can provide a bigger bang than the armed forces? The actual laws in the ad copy are pretty wimpy, but a little editing would fix them: "You don't need ~~mistletoe~~ an M-16 to get your hands on something cute"; "The best way to hint at what you want, is to 2005_12.html:
In his 12/12/2005 speech at the Philadelphia World Affairs Council (transcript and video stream at the White House web site), the president leads with 18 seconds of phrases with final rises :
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The president then switches to a few phrases ending with the intonational falls that are more normal in his speeches (audio clip):
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And then comes the part that caught my attention: 43 seconds of relentless uptalk (audio clip):
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To highlight the prosodic issues here, consider the difference in sound -- and in the appearance of pitch tracks -- between the up-talk rendition of "economy" at the end of the passage quoted above, and a final-falling version of the same word in the middle of a sentence later in the same speech (audio clip):
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The first French telecommunications innovation since the Minitel is a WiFi rabbit, mysteriously named Nabaztag. It can produce sounds, move its ears and turn internal colored lights on and off. Apparently an accompanying application informs you about incoming email, the weather and so on, and also allows you to send an audio message (called a nabcast) to others. There is "an API you can use to directly adjust your rabbit's parameters: lightshows, ear position, TTS, music", so it can be nabhacked to do more interesting nabthings.
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This post is already too long, so I'll reserve for another day an account of how you can test this theory with a couple of loaves of stale bread and a flock of ducks. And then the really interesting part is how this same idea might help explain the emergence of linguistic norms and other shared cultural patterns. For a preview, if you're interested, you can take a look at a couple of versions of a talk I've given on this subject -- an html version from 2000, and a powerpoint version from 2005.
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You can find those "last minute" declarations by linguists, lexicographers, sociologists, psychologists and others in the case file here, including submissions from Jesse Sheidlower and Ron Butters.
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Is truth really under attack in American society?
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Jean Véronis has recently carried out two short studies in pornometry (one and two). The data comes from counting web hits with and without Google's SafeSearch (or similar porn filters) turned on. The ratio for different words varies quite a bit, which forms the basis of the Slut-o-meter created by Joël Franusic and Adam Smith. This is a frivolous little web app that evaluates "promiscuity" based on a formula that they give as
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There's some recent evidence that President George W. Bush really does believe in morphological regularization of toponymic adjectives:
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The Feb. 11 Economist has a story about taxonomic marketing, leading with the fact that a Canadian online casino made the winning bid of $650,000 in an internet auction for the name of a newly-discovered Bolivian monkey. (Which therefore became Callicebus aureipalatii, or the Golden Palace titi. The wikipedia entry calls it the 2006_02.html:
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It's musch harder to explain or excuse this one. We have to assume that the acoustic model was happy to regard this cough-like uh as a probable rendition of "Arafat" -- this is not the behavior of a healthy and effective stochastic model of the sound of the English language. And we also have to assume that the n-grams involved in "nasa's top arafat climate scientists" were estimated to be probable enough to yield a good language-model score for this string.
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Listen to his last sentence. (If you want to hear it in context, four sections of the interview are available on WTAW's web site -- part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4 -- and the quoted passage is at the very end of part 4.)
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This example is slightly unfair to the proponents of uptalk-as-self-doubt, since in the case just examined, final rises mark the members of a list (of conspiracy targets), and "list intonation" is another of the traditionally-recognized uses for rising contours in English. However, sequences of repeated poke-in-the-chest rises are frequent in this interview, and generally enumeration does not seem to be involved, except insofar as rhetorical repetition can be considered to be a sort of listing. (A small sample can be heard here, here, here.) The communicative crux in these examples is certainly not self-doubt, nor does it seem to be the mere implication that there is more to come. Perhaps the rises are intended to reach out and seize the listener's attention, like the Ancient Mariner's eye contact:
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There's an urban legend that an early speech recognition system heard "recognize speech" as "wreck a nice beach". That one's made up, but it's not a legend that BBN's Podzinger recently transcribed "say Jesus is Lord" as "Beijing this morning", or "a moment in your life" as "remote wooded delight". The perils of ASR should be getting some sympathy these days from the publisher of that Elmo book on potty training, the one where you press Baby David and hear (something that sometimes sounds like) "who wants to die?" for what was recorded as "who has to go?".
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[As an example of how a genuine human song would show structure somewhat more like that of a humpback whale song, here's a plot of the discrete sequence autocorrelation of the lyrics to the children's song "Skip to my Lou":
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No, it's not surprising that Americans have trouble with the arithmetic of freedom, although it would be great if everyone could reel off religion, speech, press, petition and assembly with just as much facility as they can name Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa and Maggie. A more surprising problem with arithmetic came in this passage:
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Another set of stitched-together emails, this time from Roger Shuy, Arnold Zwicky and Eric Bakovic:
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The May issue of Vanity Fair is the magazine's "first 'Green Issue'". The press release explains that "[t]he May cover features a quartet of eco–power players, capturing Hollywood glamour and activist passion: Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Al Gore, Julia Roberts, and George Clooney, photographed by Annie Leibovitz." The issue features an article by Gore, "The Moment of Truth", which starts like this:
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Lane Greene sent in another example where final punctuation has apparently been copied into the body of a phrase in order to indicate emphasis, as in Best. Day. Ever. This time, though, the meaning is inverted:
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I was talking about "Host", by David Foster Wallace from the April, 2005 Atlantic. The internet version uses mouse-over colors and curious little pop-up windows -- which in my opinion don't work as well as the typography used in the paper magazine, described in my note to Tom. You can get a slightly better idea of the typography from this .pdf of page 5 of Wallace's article, taken from the copy which I downloaded at the time (since I'm a subscriber, of course, as you also should be). And the .pdf is still not as easy on the eyes and the mind as the paper version, which used colored backgrounds rather than colored outlines to link marginalia with phrases in the main text.
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A couple of days ago, I posted about "Multicultural London English", discussed in the press as "Jafaican" (or sometimes "Jafaikan"). None of the stories included any sound clips, and so I asked for suggestions about how to find something more authentic than Ali G, my only previous point of reference for this way of talking.
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Abnu from Wordlab recommended Apache Indian's recent remake of Desmond Dekker's great 1969 reggae hit Israelites. "Apache Indian" is the stage name of Steven Kapur, who was born in Birmingham of East Indian ethnic background, and has pioneered what his website calls the "fusion of Reggae, Raggamuffin, Hip Hop and Bhangra". As this audio sample indicates, Apache's performance dialect (at least in this example) is transparently "fake Jamaican", and therefore the term "Jafaican" is a reasonable description. But he started out in Birmingham, and so this seems to be part of a broader cultural fusion that is not limited to London. (Dekker's original might be the most prolific source of mondegreens ever, by the way.)
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These young women (for example here) aren't speaking Jamaican, fake or otherwise, but they aren't speaking Cockney either. So I'm guessing that these are some variants of the "multicutural London English" that Sue Fox and her colleagues are talking about. (I'll freely admit ignorance of British dialectology; if you can characterize these accents more accurately, please let me know. The whole passage is available as a 3MB mp3 file here. I don't know when this segment was broadcast; if I find out, I'll substitute a link to the Radio 4 archives.)
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[Update: David Donnell writes:
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This is a fragment of a work in progress. Jiahong Yuan, Chris Cieri and I have been exploring the ways that speech rate is affected by who you are, what you're talking about, who you're talking to, what language you're speaking, what setting you're in, how you feel about it all, and so forth.
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Back on Thursday, Josh Fruhlinger at the Comics Curmudgeon let loose with
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So says John Fiore, the actor who plays Gigi Cestone on The Sopranos. But then, luckily, there's Associate Justice Antonin Scalia. According to a story in the Boston Herald
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I've finally done my civic duty. I read The Da Vinci Code, and saw the movie. Reading the book was an anti-climax: I have nothing add to Geoff Pullum's deconstructions (look at the bottom of this post for a list). The cinematic signs and portents were ambiguous: on one hand, the theater was nearly deserted; on the other hand, a sophisticated fourth grader of my acquaintance thought the movie was better than X-Men, though not as good as The Terminal. But I agree with Geoff Pullum that traditional media are generally "Behind the Da Vinci Curve", and as further evidence of the superiority of the new-media coverage, I'd like to draw your attention to a recent post on The Medicine Box ("The Internet Theologian Explains The Da Vinci Code" 5/17/2006).
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Here's the example of whistled speech that Dan gives in the cited article, with spoken and whistled version performed by Dan himself (he kindly sent it from a hotel room in Brazil, where he was on his way to another summer of field work). First the basic sentence, kái'ihí'ao 'aagá gáhí "there is a paca" (audio link):
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I apologize to our UK readers for not posting this notice before the premiere at SOAS on May 17 of The Last Speakers,
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There are lots of interesting links on Dan's web site, but the best single thing to read is probably Daniel L. Everett, "Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirahã: Another Look at the Design Features of Human Language", Current Anthropology, Volume 46, Number 4, August-October 2005.
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Well, I'll also provide a link to Laura Martin's seminal work, "Eskimo Words for Snow: A Case Study in the Genesis and Decay of an Anthropological Example", American Anthropologist, 1986, pp. 418-423.
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That superscript 42 is not the answer to life, the universe and everything. It's just a endnote, and it resolves to a reference to a particular scientific paper, namely Killgore, William D. S. CA; Oki, Mika; Yurgelun-Todd, Deborah A. "Sex-specific developmental changes in amygdala responses to affective faces." Neuroreport. 12(2):427-433, February 12, 2001. A footnote or endnote like that, as I'm sure you know, is how authors flag the authority by which they make non-obvious statements. And the claim that adult males are emotional children is certainly non-obvious -- whatever current sexual stereotypes may say.
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The "leaving was never my proud" line seems to be genuinely part of the lyric, not a mondegreen: listen for yourself (the full version is here).
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Why is the field of psychology (in the United States) roughly 10 to 100 times bigger than the field of linguistics, depending on how you quantify things? Is this a logical consequence of the two fields' relative amounts of intellectual interest and social importance? Or is it largely a historical accident? Back in January of 2005, I gave a talk at Stanford ("A Series of Unfortunate Events: The Past 150 Years of Linguistics", Stanford University, 1/28/2005; blog post, pdf of slides) in which I argued for the "historical accident" theory.
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Stephen Levinson's letter ("Language in the 21st Century", Language, vol. 82, no. 1, 2006) and Brian Josephs' reply ("Language in the 21st century: An assessment and a reply") are both well worth reading in their entirety, and so I've put up an unauthorized .html copy for those of you who are not LSA members. But what caught my attention was a particular numerical comparison in Dr. Levinson's letter.
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This morning, I asked about the language of a song sent in by Sven Godtvisken. JS Bangs gave the right answer right away:
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I think this is probably too easy if I give you the whole song (and I don't want to bring down some transnational version of the RIAA on Sven and his friend and her CD supplier -- not to speak of me) so here's the first verse and the refrain.. Extra points if you figure it out by searching on-line dictionaries for transcribed words, but if you just recognize the language, that's great too, and it's even better if you know the band. Send me your answers and I'll post a summary.
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In a recent debate with other New York Times columnists (Times Talks, U.S. Politics: What's Next?, July 17, 2006), Maureen Dowd got a big laugh when she said
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The very first instance of Sybil's column, published on January 9, 2006, critiqued some research on social networks published a mere three days earlier by Duncan Watts and one of his students (Gueorgi Kossinets and Duncan J. Watts, "Empirical Analysis of an Evolving Social Network", Science, 311 88:90, 6 January 2006). The archive of Sybil's columns is only available to Nature "Premium Plus" subscribers, at a cost of $15.99 per month. If you happen to be a Premium Plus subscriber, here is the link. If not, here's a poor person's version. Even more interesting is this version, apparently an earlier draft that went out by mistake on news@nature.com's RSS feed, and was duly posted at BioEd Online.
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The wires are burning up, here at Language Log Plaza, with information about fake Chinese sayings. Email from Goh Eng Cher provided a link to research by Stephen E. DeLong and Keith Henson, indicating that the "ancient Chinese curse" usually rendered in English as "may you live in interesting times" was introduced into Western discourse in a science fiction story published in 1950. Specifically: Eric Frank Russell, writing as Duncan H. Munro, "U-Turn", Astounding Science Fiction, April 1950, p. 137. DeLong also quotes an email from Mauricio Diaz, who asserts that Carl Jung discusses the same phrase in his 1931 introduction to Richard Wilhelm's German translation of The Secret of the Golden Flower: A Chinese Book of Life. However, DeLong searched the English translation of the relevant book without finding any support for this attribution. And DeLong was also unable to find any evidence that this "ancient Chinese curse" was ever actually used by the ancient Chinese.
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No, not that CIA, this one. This year's winner of the 2006_07.html:
I'm not sure why their profession ought to get in the way here, but certainly this is a new chapter in what Laura Martin called "the genesis and decay of an anthropological example". Kathrin Passig's own professional life has been quite diverse. Her ZIA page lists her special skills as "Internet, Web-Entwicklung, Perl, PHP, Filmuntertitelung, technisches und literarisches Übersetzen E-D, technisches Übersetzen NL-D" ("Internet, web design, Perl, PHP, film subtitling, technical and literary translation from English to German, technical translation from Dutch to German)".
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I've learned from Hugo Quené that late summer, which in English-language journalism is called the "silly season" and in German is called "Sommerloch" (= "summer hole"), is known as "komkommertijd" (= "cucumber time") in Dutch. That's the basis for the cucumber slices in this picture, which adorns an item on Noorderlog, the weblog of the Dutch science news site Noorderlicht, posted on August 29 under the title "Komkommerkoeien" (= "cucumber cows"). The cow part of the picture comes from Noorderlog's earlier post, "Koeiendialect" (= "Cow dialect"), which had credulously passed along the BBC's reproduction of a cheese company's press release.
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This reminds me of a point about intonation and meaning. About 35 years ago, I heard Martin Kay describe a sign on the London Underground that read (as he performed it) "DOGS must be carried". (Here's a more modern version of the sign, courtsy of Annie Moie's London Underground Tube Blog.) I've never figured out a really convincing explanation for why stressing "dogs" seems to encourage the interpretation "everyone must carry a dog", while stressing "carried" encourages the interpretation "if you have a dog, you must carry it".
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In her recent U.S. District Court decision in the ACLU v. NSA case, Hon. Anna Diggs Taylor wrote:
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[Audio clip for this refrain is here. And here's another track with an upbeat message, "No turnin back".]
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On p. 36 of her new book The Female Brain, Prof. Brizendine writes: "Girls speak faster on average -- 250 words per minute versus 125 for typical males." In support of this assertion, the end-note in her book cites "Ryan 2000", which her biblography lists as Bruce P. Ryan, "Speaking rate, conversational speech acts, interruption, and linguistic complexity of 20 pre-school stuttering and non-stuttering children and their mothers", Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics, 14(1), pp. 25-51 (2000). Its abstract:
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There's a brief mention of some sex differences in speaking rate in a paper that Jiahong Yuan, Chris Cieri and I will be giving at ICSLP 2006 in September: Jiahong Yuan, Mark Liberman and Chris Cieri, "Towards an Integrated Understanding of Speaking Rate in Conversation". The link is to a four-page "extended abstract" that will go in the conference proceedings; given the four page limit, we cut our remarks on sex to
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[ Update #2 -- speech rate information for females and males in Dutch conversation can be found in Diana Binnenpoorte, Christophe Van Bael, Els den Os and Lou Boves, "Gender in Everyday Speech and Language: A Corpus-based Study", Interspeech 2005. Their data is from 50 male and 58 females who participated in face-to-face conversations, and 40 males and 61 females who participated in telephone dialogues. Speech rate measurements can be found in their Table 1:
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It's recently fashionable for books and articles to enlist neuroscience in support of the view that men and women are essentially and unavoidably different, not just in size and shape, but also in just about every aspect of the way they see, hear, feel, talk, listen and think. These works tend to confirm our culture's current stereotypes and prejudices, and the science they cite is often overinterpreted, and sometimes seems simply to have been made up. I recently discussed an example from Leonard Sax's book Why Gender Matters ("Are men emotional children?", 6/24/2006), which David Brooks has used to support an argument for single-sex education. The latest example of this genre, released August 1, is Louann Brizendine's book "The Female Brain".
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I should have known that there would be a BBC science angle to this words-per-day business. David Beaver writes:
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A striking example of synchronicity -- September 24th was National Punctuation Day.
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1. Jasnow, A.M. et al. (2006), "Estrogen facilitates fear conditioning and increases corticotropin-releasing hormone mRNA expression in the central amygdala in female mice", Horm Behav 49(2):277-86.
2006_09.html: 2. Bertolino et al. (2005), "Variation of human amygdala response during threatening stimuli as a function of 5'HTTLPR genotype and personality style", Biol Psychiatry 57(12): 1516-25.
2006_09.html: 3. Hamann (2005), "Sex differences in the responses of the human amygdala", Neuroscientist 11(4):288-93.
2006_09.html: 4. Huber et al. (2005), "Vasopressin and oxytocin excite distinct neuronal populations in the central amygdala", Science 308(5719): 245-48.
2006_09.html: 5. Pezawas et al. (2005), "5-HTTLPR polymorphism impacts human cingulate-amygdala interactions: A genetic susceptibility mechanism for depression", Nat Neurosci 8(6): 828-34.
2006_09.html: 6. Sabatinelli et al. (2005), "Parallel amygdala and inferotemporal activation reflect emotional intensity and fear relevance", Neuroimage 24(4): 1265-70.
2006_09.html: 7. Viau et al. (2005), "Gender and puberty interact on the stress-induced activation of parvocellular neuroscretory neurons and corticotropin-releasing hormone messenger ribonucleic acid expression in the rat", Endocrinology 146(1): 137-46.
2006_09.html: 9. Phelps (2004), "Human emotion and memory: Interactions of the amygdala and hippocampal complex". Curr Opin Neurobiol 14(2): 198-202.
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Sax's cited threshold values come from a classic study: John F. Corso, "Age and Sex Differences in Pure-Tone Thresholds", The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 31(4), pp. 498-507 (1959). Corso measured how loud tones of different frequencies had to be for subjects to hear them, across a range of frequencies from 250 Hz to 8,000 Hz. He tested a large number of males and females of different ages from the students, faculty and staff at Penn State. He presents the results in multiple tables of values, providing means and standard deviations of thresholds for different ears of subjects of different ages and sexes, for sounds of different frequencies. He presents one set of tables is for his whole population of subjects, and other set of tables from a "screened" group from which he eliminated subjects who had abnormal amounts of hearing loss. You can see copies of three of these tables here, here, and here.
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Corso's multiple tables contain hundreds of values. His Table 1 alone ("Summary of threshold data (SPL) by age groups, sex and ears for the original sample of subjects") offers 144 thresholds to choose from. Sax gives us two thresholds taken from this table: the threshold for a 3-kHz tone for a 43-year-old man was 30.5 decibles [sic] (dB), while the threshold for a 3-kHz tone for an 18-year-old girl was 7.3 dB.
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Here's the relevant slice from Corso's Table IV ("Summary of means and standard deviations combined for right and left ears of male and female subjects in the screened sample"):
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The only empirically-testable part of this is the daily word budget stuff, which is also featured in the book's jacket blurb. As discussed in an earlier post ("Sex-linked lexical budgets"), this meme began to appear in works of pop psychology in the early 1990s, which (in all the cases I've been able to track down) assert the difference without citing any empirical support. Garner 1997 and Pease 1997 are works of this type, and other works by Pease definitely include versions of the claim. I've read all the other books on the list, except for Lewis 1997, and I'm pretty certain that nothing can be found in them to support the idea that the "Men use about seven thousand words per day. Women use about twenty thousand". Since writing that post, I've continued to look into this, and what I've found confirms my belief that this like the "Eskimo words for snow" case analyzed by Laura Martin ( "Eskimo Words for Snow: A Case Study in the Genesis and Decay of an Anthropological Example", American Anthropologist, 1986, pp. 418-423), in which an invented statistic mutates and spreads through the literature on a purely ideological basis, without any empirical support at all.
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Knaus et al. looked at 8 language-associated brain areas (the left- and right-hemisphere instances of Heschl's gyrus (HG), the planum temporale (PT), the posterior superior temporal gyrus (pSTG), and the posterior ascending ramus (PAR)). They found that all 8 areas were substantially larger, on average, in their 12 male subjects than in their 12 female subjects. Because total brain volume was about 26% larger on average in their male subjects than in their female subjects, they adjusted the brain-region measurements with respect to each subject's total brain volume. (The magnitude of the TBV difference in their study seems surprisingly large -- I would have expected something more like 10%. Their table of raw and adjusted results is here.) In the adjusted measurements, 6 of the 8 areas were on average larger in their male subjects, while 2 of the 8 areas were on average larger in their female subjects. (Those two areas were Heschel's gyrus in the left hemisphere, and the posterior ascending ramus in the right hemisphere.)
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So Brizendine's statement "some verbal areas of the brain are larger in women than in men" is simply false, at least with respect to the data in this study. To make it true, her clause would have to be amended to read something like "all verbal areas of the brain are larger on average in men than in women, but when area sizes are adjusted for total brain volume, women came out ahead in two out of eight areas examined in one study". (A tabular survey of the -- variable and inconclusive -- results of other studies of sex differences in language-related brain areas, reproduced from the Knaus et al. paper, can be found here.)
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is Bruce P. Ryan, "Speaking rate, conversational speech acts, interruption, and linguistic complexity of 20 pre-school stuttering and non-stuttering children and their mothers", Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics, 14(1), pp. 25-51 (2000). I discussed this case at (excessive) length in an earlier post ("Sex and speaking rate"). You can read more about it there than you probably want to -- let's just say here that there's nothing whatsoever in that paper comparing speaking rates of boys and girls. I concluded that
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The first one is Szu-Chen Jou, Tanja Schultz, Matthias Walliczek, Florian Kraft, and Alex Waibel, "Towards Continuous Speech Recognition Using Surface Electromyography", International Conference of Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP-2006), Pittsburgh, PA, September 2006.
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Here's the second paper: Matthias Walliczek, Florian Kraft, Szu-Chen Jou, Tanja Schultz, and Alex Waibel, "Sub-Word Unit based Non-audible Speech Recognition using Surface Electromyography", (ICSLP-2006), Pittsburgh, PA, September 2006.
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I recall being taught in elementary school that a newspaper article is supposed to answer six questions. Some things have changed since I was a kid, and the most important one is the internet. So I'd like to suggest that the traditional list of six should be expanded to seven: who, what, where, when, why, how and URL. For all I know, those traditional six questions are the journalistic equivalent of the Eskimos' snow words, so let me put it more directly: reporters and editors, give me the *!%&@ URLs!
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Because proteins (and other biological macromolecules such as DNA and RNA) are finite-length strings of elements drawn from a finite alphabet, it's natural to describe them grammatically. And as a result, computational biology has long since borrowed the mathematical and computational tools of computational linguistics, and made good use of them in applications from gene-finding to protein-structure prediction. One of the first researchers to see the potential of such methods was David B. Searls, one of the founders of the Center for Bioinformatics at Penn, and now at GSK; a good source of insight is his 2002 Nature review article "The language of genes" (or try this link).
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[The reasons for the phrase-length effect are discussed in another Language Log post, "The shape of a spoken phrase", 4/12/2006, and in a paper, Jiahong Yuan, Mark Liberman and Christopher Cieri, "Towards an Integrated Understanding of Speaking Rate in Conversation", ICSLP 2006.]
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This is W.H. Auden, reading the first two lines of his villanelle "If I Could Tell You":
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The extra functions used (like getf0 and h2st) can be found here. ]
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To see how this general approach might work, let's start out by trying it on some singing. I picked the first couplet of Janis Joplin's a capella prayer (from Pearl, 1971):
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Thus this couplet features pitches that are about a quarter-tone sharp relative to D, A, C#. But as Schreuder et al. suggest, we can also see this by looking at a histogram of pitch estimates. So I asked WaveSurfer to write out its F0 estimates for each centisecond of the two phrases shown above (right-click on the pitch pane, select "Save Data File"), and used the free software program R to calculate a histogram in quarter-tones relative to A 440 (the functions that I wrote to help do this are here).
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OK, cool! There's much more to be explored here -- but it's clear that there are well-defined modes in the histogram, and surely they must correspond to the pitches of the sung melody. But what would we see if we looked at something spoken rather than sung? Well, it happens that Janis introduces that song with a spoken phrase:
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Hmm. The modes are less clear -- pitches drifting around a bit in the performance? -- but still, it's not at all the smooth distribution that I might have predicted. (By the way, the script for producing the two previous histograms is here.)
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As for why I've always been somewhat skeptical about this whole musical-intervals-in-speech business, it goes like this. (You can find a more extensive discussion of these general issues in Mark Liberman and Janet Pierrehumbert, "Intonational invariance under changes in pitch range and length", pp. 157-233 in M. Aronoff and R. Oehrle, Eds., Language Sound Structure, MIT Press, 1984. The plots below are all taken from that paper, and if you don't follow the rather sketchy discussion here, you can read more about it in the scan of the paper that I've put online.)
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All the same, some of those F0 histograms seem to have very clear multi-modal structure. This is entirely consistent with a view of pitch scaling in which the relationships are not purely multiplicative -- there might indeed be a limited set of discrete favored pitch-classes, and/or a set of favored "intervals" in some extended sense, e.g. in ratios of baseline-units above a baseline. But free pitch-range variation, general down-drift and various other phenomena ought to produce pretty smooth F0 histograms most of the time. If that doesn't happen, it would be nice to know why. And looking at F0 histograms (allowing for the manifold problems of pitch tracking errors, segmental effects, etc.) is an interesting idea about how to look for patterns in the melodies of speech, without imposing any particular assumptions about which parts of the contour matter and which don't. Dipole statistics might be even more interesting.
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Rosie Redfield writes:
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This is amusing. Apparently whoever moderates readers' comments over at the Daily Mail doesn't want Fiona Macrae's carelessness and credulousness to be exposed. She's the writer who basically copied out the press release for Louann Brizendine's book The Female Brain, using as her lede a factoid (about women talking three times more than men) which has repeatedly been debunked, most recently the day before in the Guardian, and which Dr. Brizendine herself has withdrawn after I pointed out that no actual studies support any similar numbers. (See this Language Log post for a list of links that go into mind-numbing detail on the factual background -- which is that the numbers reproduced in the Daily Mail piece are a pseudo-scientific urban legend, unconnected to any actual study; and that the many studies that do correlate talkativeness and sex find only small differences, often in the direction of more words from men.)
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I'm talking about Betty Hart and Todd Risley's classic research on social-class differences in language acquisition (Betty Hart and Todd Risley, "Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children", 1995; Betty Hart, "A Natural History of Early Language Experience", Topics in Early Childhood Special Education, 20(1), 2000; Betty Hart and Todd Risley, "The Early Catastrophe: the 30 Million Word Gap", American Educator, 27(1) pp. 4-9, 2003). This work was featured in Paul Tough's article in last Sunday's New York Times Magazine last Sunday, "What it takes to make a student".
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Do you own a copy of Merriam-Webster's Concise Dictionary of English Usage? If not, go immediately to your favorite bookseller and buy one. Believe me, it'll be the best $13.22 (or even $16.95, if you pay list price) that you've spent in a while. Geoff Pullum recommended it last year ("Don't put up with usage abuse", 1/15/2005), in response to a reader's question about what references or authorities to trust with respect to style and usage. Geoff used blurb-worthy phrases like "the best usage book I know of" and "this book ... is utterly wonderful", and I agree with him.
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The motto of NaBloPoMo ("National Blog posting month") is a nice example of dog latin. (Though in former times "blog or die" might have been dog-latined as "aut blogare aut mori", with some approximation to an infinitive form of the verb blog, more closely echoing the original "aut vincere aut mori" = "conquer or die".) No matter what the pseudo-Latin morphology might be, though, I don't agree with the sentiment, since I make it a principle not to blog unless it feels like fun. Life has enough necessities without adding another.
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I'll blog from the conference site as time permits. I'm going to start with an entry that does have to do with linguistics and with blogging, but not with TLSX (though maybe there'll be some sort of connection, who knows). The subject is Ken Macleod's new novel, "Learning the world: A scientific romance", and I've had it on my to-blog list for a month or so.
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2006_12.html: It- it- look- what- pre- it- what- Colin Powell is saying, we're not winning, so therefore we must be losing,
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An audio clip of a larger portion of the exchange is here. Here's the official transcript (with video link that should start you out in the right place -- the White House transcript page gives a link to a video of the whole briefing).
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Victor Mair sent in an article by Julian Ryall from the South China Morning Post of 12/16/2006, "Japanese forgetting how to write traditional characters", which begins:
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One study that will give us an idea of how this is likely to work out is John F. Dovidio, Clifford E. Brown, Karen Heltman, Steve L. Ellyson, Caroline F. Keating, "Power displays between women and men in discussions of gender-linked tasks: A multichannel study", Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 55(4), 580-587, 1988.
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We'll come back to the Quaternions vs. Vectorists issue another time (though if you're impatient, you can read this). An article in the Harvard Alumni Magazine ("I Love My Vincent Baby", September-October 2002) explains the "Rinehart" part:
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But the Rinehart story turns out to be quite a bit more interesting. Over the decades, the story underwent a curious series of re-interpretations. David Winter, ("Gordon Allport and the Legend of 'Rinehart'", Journal of Personality 64(1), 1996) describes the process.
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[Meanwhile, Bill Poser was seized by a fit of hackery, and modified wextract to use libsndfiles, which I had considered and rejected as too complicated. He even packed it up using Gnu autoconf and all. If you want to see how to use libsndfiles, or to use it for some other purpose, the tarball is here. Warning: you'll have to install libsndfiles first -- and you'll also have to execute ldconfig as root, since the libsndfiles "make install" command unaccountably fails to do that. If none of that makes sense to you, consider yourself lucky and move on.]
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Having struck gold with Fiona Macrae's article "Women talk three times as much as men, says study" (11/28/2006), The Femail section of the Daily Mail tried again the next day with Carol Sarler's Why we women will NEVER stop talking" (11/29/2006). Sarler takes a slightly different perspective on the topic: she spells Louann Brizendine's name correctly, and she argues with Brizendine's explanation for the alleged fact that women are several times more talkative than men:
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Back on the absorption front: the examples range from ones that are, for me, absolutely fine, though some grayish area, to truly wretched stuff. Here's a small collection of examples.
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In the 1638 Latin original, and Fellowes' 1847 translation:
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(The whole letter in .pdf form is here.)
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I spent this morning's blogging hour writing letters of recommendation, so I'll just point readers to the slides for a talk I gave on January 6, at the 2007 Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America. My title was "The future of linguistics", and a pdf of the abstract is here.
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In the early 1960s, millions of Americans were ready to listen to Martin Luther King's message, and the way that he delivered that message helped us to hear it.
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Not long after noting Plug Loafsley's v-like /r/, Thomas Pynchon takes up the phonetic motivations for sound change in a more direct (though less human) fashion. It's page 406 of Against the Day, and we're back with the Chums of Chance on the Inconvenience, now hanging around the First International Conference on Time Travel at Candlebrow U.:
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We'd all be a lot safer, I suspect, if the intelligence functions of the Department of Homeland Security were turned over to the alumni-association industry. Those people are efficient, all-knowing and politely relentless. As I've moved through life since obtaining an MIT degree in 1975, I've apparently been adopted by the local MIT Club of every region that I've ever lived in, and every one of them sends me multiple email reminders of their frequent and interesting events, none of which I've ever actually attended.
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At 1,085 pages, Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day reminded one Amazon reviewer of Ambrose Bierce's comment: "The covers of this book are too far apart".
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According to the study's summary table, the mean "idea density" in early life autobiographies for nuns whose autopsied brains "met neuropathologic criteria for Alzheimer's disease" was 4.9 (95% confidence interval 4.6-5.3), while for nuns whose brains were free of Alzheimer's symptoms, the mean "idea density" was 6.1 (95% confidence interval 5.6-6.6).
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In the larger auditorium at Language Log Plaza, Geoffrey Nunberg, secretary-general of the Goropius Becanus Prize Committee, stands at the podium. As the audience falls silent, and 16th-century Antwerp guildhouses are projected on the screen behind him, Nunberg reads from the Wikipedia:
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A couple of weeks ago, we batted around the witless lead of a BBC story about an effort to improve British kids' vocabulary:
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Take a look at this paragraph by Philip Nobel ( "Lust for height", American.com, 2/23/2007):
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Beth Milton wrote to remind us all of the recent efforts by the Committee for the Language of European Law -- or rather, we should say, le Comité Pour la Langue du Droit Européen (CPLDE) -- to make French the official legal language of Europe. There's a good description at EurActiv.com: "Group pushes to bolster French-language legal supremacy", 2/12/2007. (This article is also available as "Une campagne pour défendre la suprématie du français sur le plan juridique" and "Initiative zur Förderung von Französisch als erste Amtssprache"). Other stories on the same topic: "Campaign to make French sole legal language in EU", IHT, 2/7/2007; "Francophiles seek primacy for language of Montesquieu", EU Observer, 2/8/2007; David Charter, "French wheel out Napoleon to lay down the law", Times Online, 2/9/2007.
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2007_02.html:Dick Cavett's maiden "Talk Show" post over at the NYT has now racked up 573 comments. This wouldn't be worth noting at one of the popular political sites like Daily Kos or Little Green Footballs, but for a blog behind the Times Select wall, it's a lot. In comparison, Stanley Fish's long blog essay on presidential signing statements, posted a week earlier and still featured today on the index page at nytimes.com, has a mere 55 comments so far.
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But Bronstein also introduces other items in the same series, for example this one.]
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At some point around 2:00 a.m. this morning, Language Log's elderly linux server began to experience some disk problems, which caused apache to fail. I went in this morning and "fixed" it (at the cost of a distressingly large number of fsck repairs, whose exact nature and consequences I don't know -- it's been a while since I wrangled inodes, and I don't have time to check the details anyhow).
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Other versions of the semantics-based theory are discussed in Yasuhiro Shirai, "Is regularization determined by semantics, or grammar, or both?", J. Child Lang. 24 495-501, 1997.
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I don't have a copy of that presentation, which doesn't seem to be available on line [Update: here it is...], but I do have access to the Google News Archive, where a search for {"flew out to * field"} yields 1,300 hits like these (the first four hits at the moment):
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I enjoyed the game last night, but I mostly skipped the commercials. That wasn't for lack of interest -- it's just that now that we've got YouTube, we don't need to watch the superbowl anymore to see the superbowl commercials. And internet access to the whole inventory is a better way to see the pattern whole.
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One of the world's most reliable sources of mirth is gone -- Molly Ivins died yesterday.
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[Kenny Easwaran writes:
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It's linguistic synchronicity in action. After crossing nine time zones via two red-eye flights within 48 hours -- San Francisco to Philadelphia and Philadelphia to Paris -- I logged onto the hotel's wireless internet to read Arnold Zwicky's analysis of a dangling modifier in a recent Bizarro cartoon, and then went out to walk the streets of Paris, where I found a large fraction of the available vertical surfaces plastered with posters presenting the face of Nicholas Sarkozy and his presidential campaign slogan "Ensemble tout devient possible" ("Together everything becomes possible").
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Edward's script is here. This is the same thing that my second script does -- though rather than use the rmultinom() function, I did it the hard way, by running N trials, each of which chooses 22 numbers between 1 and 26,0003 and assigns the choice to one of the 26 letters of the alphabet, in proportion to the number of nouns in CELEX2 starting with that letter. Being impatient, I used only 10,000 trials, but re-running it with 100,000 took about 30 seconds on my laptop, whereas Edward's script only took 2 or 3 seconds. The result is the same, though.
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I'm attaching some of the exchanges that occurred in the local newspapers with the assistant school superintendent, Belmore [archived here -- myl]. Her comments make it clear why they really turned down the RF money: it was perceived as a defense against ceding control over the schools to the feds. A slippery slope argument.
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Mary Haas explains the concept with an example("Interlingual Word Taboos", American Anthropologist, 53(3) 338-344, 1951):
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We Americans mostly don't care or even notice, but European excitement is building for the annual Eurovision song contest. And this year, the French are taking a new approach: the French entry L'amour à la française is half in English and half in (fractured) French, with the French lyrics sung in a fake English accent. According to fluctuat.net:
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Benson High School, a public high school founded in 1904, was recently designated by the Omaha [Nebraska] Public Schools as "a Magnet Center for Academic Research and Innovation". However, its first appearance in the national news didn't work out in a way that pleased OPS officials. The trigger was the March 2007 issue of the school newspaper, the Benson Gazette, which included a four-page section on The N-Word.
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Anil Dash has a fun post arguing that "Cats Can Has Grammar" (4/23/2007). Surveying lolcats and related phenomena, he quickly passes over the snowclone "I'm in UR X Ying your Z" and the whole Invisible X phenomenon, and focuses on "the newly dominant lolcats, of the family 'I Can Has Cheezeburger?'". He observes that
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The extraordinary PENNsound site has recently added an extraordinary trove of Ezra Pound recordings, along with an essay by Richard Sieburth, "The Sound of Pound: A Listerner's Guide". One of the most interesting aspects of Sieburth's essay, to me, was his description of Pound's encounter with the L'abbé Jean-Pierre Rousselot.
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has pioneered the unspeakable brand, but I don't think I've ever encountered an unprintable brand, so Dilbert is pushing the envelope here. Perhaps this is why some branding firms are eager to hire linguists these days.
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Never mind what the shrimp did to the cabbage -- look at what another bad Chinese-English dictionary entry did to a sofa! Joel Martinsen has drawn my attention to a blog post by Jeff Keller ("A reeeeaaally bad translation", 4/10/2007) which in turn points to a newspaper article (Jim Wilkes, "Racial slur on sofa label stuns family", Toronto Star, 4/6/2007) that starts this way:
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Dan's most important paper on this general topic is "Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirahã: Another Look at the Design Features of Human Language", Current Anthropology, Volume 46, Number 4, August-October 2005.
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Since I'm a positive-thinking kind of person, and since the main reason for my trip to Michigan was to repeat a talk I gave on "The Future of Linguistics" at the January LSA meeting, I'm naturally looking for the disciplinary upside of this development. Perhaps the NOAA's National Weather Service will see the need to establish a branch for forecasting sociolinguistic disturbances, in keeping with their broader mission to "[save] lives by providing immediate alerts of severe weather warnings and civil emergency messages and giving critical lead time to respond and remain safe":
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Louann Brizendine's The Female Brain came out in the UK on April 2, in paperback. This time, the cover represents a woman's brain as a purse jam-packed with cell phone, mirror, cosmetics, photos and so on, in place of the (oddly 1970-ish) image of a brain-shaped tangled curly phone cord that adorned the dust jacket of the U.S. hardcover edition.
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A note from Fabio Montermini in Toulouse:
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For a minute this afternoon, I thought that someone at the NYT has decided that the word for removal of Baathists should be "de-Baathfication" (Edward Wong, "Shiite Cleric Opposes Return of Baathists in Iraq", 4/2/2007). The subtitle on the online front page, and the third sentence of the article, both use that version of the word:
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This morning's mail included a note from Daniel Hyde, with a lovely example of WTF coordination from the English-language feed of China Radio International ("'Mao Zedong Actress' Astonishes Chengdu Citizens", CRI.cn, 3/28/2007):
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I'm way behind in posting readers' contributions of linguistic cat macros -- sorry to all -- but right now, you need to go read "I can hath cheezburger?" over at Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog. Here's how he describes his decision to create a set of "Lolpilgrimes" (his Miller is over on the right):
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Inspired by Geoff's post, this morning's Breakfast Experiment^TM at Language Log Labs deals with dolphin dialects. West Philadelphia is a bit short of suitable experimental subjects, so we've had to work with simulated cetaceans. However, there are some significant results, reported below.
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If you can get to San Francisco this weekend, you won't want to miss Geoff Pullum at Writers With Drinks. According to the notice sent out by Charlie Anders, the founder and ringmaster of the event,
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The second and final round of the French election is today. In past weeks, we've talked about the candidates' nicknames, and about a political cartoon's use of those names in a phonologically-defined phrasal template, among other trivial things. Today I want to drawn your attention to something more important: a professor of linguistics at l’Université de Provence, Jean Véronis, has established himself as a mainstream political commentator in France.
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It's not just cats anymore: http://community.livejournal.com/lolbrarians/.
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On Monday it was words for cheese ("Cheeseclones", 6/25/2007); today it's philanthropists. This is the last panel from J. Jacques' Questionable Content (#913), sent in by Alain van Hout. Note that in this case, the rhetorical force is not the traditional "just as the Eskimos have N words for snow, so the X (should) have M words for Y". Instead, the idea that the X have M words for Y, by itself, is used to imply an excessive amount of experience with Y.
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You'll want to check out the philolsophers at flickr. Francis Heaney likes these two best. I agree, but I also enjoyed this one, perhaps because I saw the original at an impressionable age. And this one has promise, though I don't think it's quite there yet.
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Tomorrow, Dragomir Radev and eight amazingly smart high-school students will be taking off for St. Petersburg (Russia, not Florida), to participate as the American entrants in the 5th International Linguistics Olympiad. There are two teams: the first team is Rachel Elana Zax, Ryan Aleksandrs Musa, Adam Classen Hesterberg, and Jeffrey Christopher Lim; the second team is Rebecca Elise Jacobs, Joshua Stuart Falk, Anna Tchetchetkine, and Michael Zener Riggs Gottlieb.
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Email address autocompletion is an underappreciated peril of modern life. Once, the danger was failing to distinguish between "reply" and "reply all", or failing to notice that even a simple "reply" would go to a mailing list rather than to an individual. There are many entertaining stories, some of them true, about the consequences of this sort of carelessness.
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Emmanuel Maria Dammerer wrote to announce his "Buch von der deutschen Snowclonerey", which is "Versuch einer Definition der Snowclones mit bekannten deutschsprachigen Beispielen" ("A preliminary definition of the snowclone phenomenon, including a list of frequent German examples"). The site's name is itself a snowclone, taking off on the title of Martin Opitz's 1624 "Buch von der deutschen Poeterey".
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The argumentative animal in this morning's Fusco Brothers is apparently supposed to be Axel the Wolverine, but I believe that most readers probably see him as a dog (or perhaps a giant rat):
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In a post the next day ("Sex differences in 'Communication events" per day?", 12/11/2007), I tried to evaluate the "communications events" claim by taking a look at John F. Dovidio, Clifford E. Brown, Karen Heltman, Steve L. Ellyson, Caroline F. Keating, "Power displays between women and men in discussions of gender-linked tasks: A multichannel study", Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 55(4), 580-587, 1988.
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Today's snowclone of the day arrived in email from Josh DeWald:
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How many snowclones are there? The Snowclones Database, set up recently by Erin O'Connor, has only a half a dozen listed so far, but she writes that
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I thought that Pete Ianace had come up with a clever pun, but he seems to mean it.
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For the other piece, you could start with Paul Graham's essay "The Roots of Lisp", and especially the code for the implementation of Lisp in itself. [In case you can't read the .ps file that he provides for the essay, a .pdf version is here.]
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One way to deal with these difficulties is to look at a great deal of data, and hope that all the complexities balance out somehow. Jiahong Yuan, Chris Cieri and I took this approach, in some research discussed in an earlier Language Log post ("The shape of a spoken phrase", 5/12/2006) and published in part as "Towards an Integrated Understanding of Speaking Rate in Conversation", ICASSP 2006.
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