Language Log

Errors in punctuation sometimes result in misinterpretation, but they usually don't arouse the moral outrage that plagiarism does. Some should.

On June 24, 1826 Thomas Jefferson wrote, in a letter to Roger C. Weightman:

May it be to the world, what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all,) the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government.

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Dipping randomly into another one of Roy Peter Clark's Glamour of Grammar essays ("What the Big Bopper Taught Me About Grammar", 5/8/2008), I found this curious piece of revisionist intellectual history:

In our common culture, grammar has taken on at least three sets of meanings and associations. It still refers to the etiquette of writing and reading, the conventions that allow us to create a standard written English, the technical term for which, according to critic John Simon, is "grapholect."

This view of grammar is sometimes called "prescriptive," which is how I came to understand in 1959 (at the age of 11) that, when the Big Bopper sang "… but baby I ain't go no money, honey," he was using language in a way that would have gotten his ass kicked by Sister Catherine William. […]

Then, of course, along came "descriptive grammar," a movement that had the unmitigated gall (why is gall always unmitigated?) to sneak "ain't" in the dictionary, a discipline of language that could take into account the Big Bopper's nonstandard usage, including that surely double negative.

Underpinning this rebellion against Emily Post conformity was something called "transformational" or "generative" grammar, described by scholars such as Noam Chomsky, before he became a political critic and darling of the left.

This explanation evokes another common collocate for unmitigated, namely nonsense.

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Roy Peter Clark is composing a new grammar book, to be called "The Glamour of Grammar". For the past couple of months, he's been posting selections on the web site of the Poynter Institute, where he's "director of the writing center, dean of the faculty, senior scholar and vice president". Each post has an email link asking readers to "Help Roy write his next book".

Yesterday, Linda Seebach sent me a link to one of these posts, "Why the Littlest Words Can Mean a Lot" (5/28/2008), drawing attention to a passage where Prof. Clark's call for help was well advised:

Articles are slippery. You might be fooled into thinking that a can only be used in the singular and that the carries the plural until you read "A million dollars will get you the rarest baseball card in the world."

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The latest issue of the New Yorker (July 7 & 14) has a Roz Chast cartoon (p. 75), "seven words you can't say in a cartoon", that's a tribute to the late George Carlin and his famous "Filthy Words" routine, "seven words you can't say on television". All the "words" are strings of obscenicons (credit to Ben Zimmer for the coinage, an alternative to the blander cursing characters), those punctuation marks, stars, spirals, and the like that are used to compose representations of cursewords in cartoons. (We've posted here many times on obscenicons.)

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Here on Language Log we have recently been twitted by readers who believe we have been insufficiently attentive to celebrity linguists, in particular Noam Chomsky (I find the idea that we should choose topics for our postings using personal fame as a guiding metric bizarre, but there it is). Mark Liberman has now responded, linking to a frivolous Facebook group pitting Chomsky against Labov. We've been frivolous about Chomsky before, in a posting about Ali G's interview of him; in two postings about Chomsky as the object of sexual arousal; and in a posting quoting Woody Allen's "The Whore of Mensa".

But (as Bruce Webster suggested to me) we seem not to have discussed the famous Chomskybot, which has been around in one version or another for about twenty years.

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I suppose sometimes it's only natural for us to use words or phrases even when we're not quite sure what they mean. Or maybe we have our own individual notion of their meanings. But one might expect law enforcement to use words that have some clearly agreed upon meaning when they talk openly in criminal investigations about the people who are their suspects, targets or even possible witnesses. In recent years, person of interest seems to have been added to this list of descriptors. But what, you may ask, is a person of interest?

Google provides 412,000 hits, so the phrase is not exactly a new kid on the street. We don't know exactly when person of interest elbowed its way into use by law enforcement but it's likely to have shown up sometime in the 1970s, and then it really got noticed about the time of the 1996 Olympics bombing in Atlanta. You may recall that at that time the FBI leaked the name of Richard A. Jewell as a person of interest. Jewel was  eventually exonerated, sued the media rather successfully for tainting his reputation, and got a public apology from the then Attorney General, Janet Reno. 

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The United States Mint has announced the release of its first coin with readable Braille on it, a commemorative silver dollar in honor of Louis Braille, the creator of Braille, to be released next year. The Braille is on the reverse.

Yesterday evening, I watched the TF1 reality show (or émission, as the French so appropriately say) Secret Story. My purpose was to revive my knowledge of French, and perhaps to learn a few new words. I was pleased that I could understand most of the dialogue, if not the decor; but one thing that I didn't understand was why a French reality show has an English name.

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On my recent trip to Paris, I took time out Wednesday evening to go to the Louvre, which is open until 10 (that's 22h for those unambiguous Europeans) on Wednesdays. My eyes happened to encounter Un jeune homme présenté par Venus (?) aux sept Arts libéraux, which reminded me that one of these lovely young ladies would represent Grammar. Here they are, with Venus (whose question mark is in the Louvre label — that's not my editorial addition¹); I've omitted to photograph the young man.


Since it's clear that the top middle one is Logic (aka Dialectic), with her scorpion, and since Logic is one of the three liberal arts in the Trivium, I assume that one of the women on either side of her is Grammar — let's say the lady to her left holding a scroll.² Here she is in close-up (you can click on this or the above image for a bigger version):


Quite a charming-looking person, perhaps a little shy and young, but not at all offensive, right?

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A headline from today's cnn.com entertainment page:

(1) Brinkley spouse slept with, gave teen $300K

This is a lovely example of FLoP coordination, what would be a routine Right Node Raising (with the NP teen shared between the two conjuncts), except that something extra, $300K, follows teen in the second conjunct, so that the two conjuncts are not parallel.

There are several extra twists in this one.

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From a reader in China:

This is screamingly funny.

Less funny is that that link seems to be blocked in China. I had to use a proxy server to read it. Why in the world would they block Language Log???

Well, we were once blocked by Websense (one of those "internet filtering" systems used by libraries and schools and such), but it turned out to be a mistake. In this case, I'm tempted to think that one of Bill's posts on Tibetan might be to blame, but maybe it's just another case of bycatch.

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In the (figurative) pages of Slate, Amanda Schaffer and Emily Bazelon have begun a six-part series on "The Sex Difference Evangelists", with four parts so far:

Meet the Believers (1 July)

Pick a Little, Talk a Little (1 July)

Empathy Queens (2 July)

Mars, Venus, Babies, and Hormones (3 July)

The series focuses on two books, our old acquaintance The Female Brain by Louann Brizendine and a new entry, Susan Pinker's The Sexual Paradox, which we haven't discussed here on Language Log (and which I haven't seen). They summarize Brizendine and Pinker's claims, and, in examining the evidence for these claims, review lots of literature (including some Language Log postings). Their bottom line on Brizendine and Pinker: "They're peddling one-sidedness, sprinkled with scientific hyperbole."

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Twice a day, walking between my hotel and Acoustics 2008 at the Palais des Congrès, I pass by the Place des États-Unis, which is four street-segments surrounding a block-long median strip, between Avenue Kléber and Avenue d'Iéna. At one end, appropriately enough, there's a statue of Lafayette shaking hands with Washington. At the other end, also appropriately, there's a memorial to the American volunteers who died while serving in the Légion Étrangère during the first world war. The base of the memorial is inscribed with verses from Alan Seeger's "Ode in Memory of the American Volunteers Fallen for France", as translated into French by Alain Rivoire. For example:

Salut frères, adieu grands morts, deux fois merci. Double à jamais est votre gloire d'être morts pour la France et d'être morts aussi pour l'honneur de notre mémoire.

In the original high-Romantic English this was:

Hail, brothers, and farewell; you are twice blest, brave hearts.
Double your glory is who perished thus,
For you have died for France and vindicated us.

In between, less obviously, there's a ten-foot-high plinth surmounted with a bust of Myron T. Herrick.

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That's what they call it, over at the Palais des Congrès in Paris:

Do you suppose that the Académie Française made them stick in the extra c? Anyhow, there are quite a few of these signs — I think I saw four, and probably there are more.

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Powerset is a search engine that allows users to express their queries as phrases, rather than a few keywords.  It uses natural language processing (NLP) technologies to analyze the verb-argument structure of a query and deliver more focused search results, initially just from Wikipedia.  Powerset has attracted interest from the NLP community, as its services promise to demonstrate the value of NLP - and of language analysis more generally - in extracting information from the trillion or more words of text on the web.  On Tuesday, Microsoft announced it has acquired Powerset, and that Powerset will become part of Microsoft's Search Relevance team.  I hope this takeover means that natural language search will become mainstream, scaled up to the entire web, and used far more widely than before [Powerset blog|Microsoft Live Search blog].

According to this BBC Report, the US Ambassador to Paraguay, James Cason, has released an album of songs in Guarani, the indigenous language. The BBC story has a clip if you'd like to hear him. He says that he began to study Guarani in Cuba before taking up his post in Paraguay. When he got off the plane he immediately gave a speech in Guarani, to the surprise not only of the Paraguayans but of the US mission, who were unaware that he had been studying the language. The US does not have a good reputation for diplomats who speak the local language, so this is really unusual. Part of the story here is no doubt the fact that Ambassador Cason is a career foreign service officer with long experience in Latin America, not a political hack. In any case, kudos to Ambassador Cason.

Although most Paraguayans are reported to be pleased with Ambassador Cason's album, Senator Domingo Laino, once a distinguished opponent of the Stroessner dictatorship, is not. In his opinion: "[Cason] sings horribly and his pronunciation of Guarani words is stammering. It is an offense to the Paraguayan people." I'm in no position to judge, but my suggestion to Senator Laino is: don't look a gift horse in the mouth. An ambassador who sings in Guarani is like a talking dog: it isn't how well he does it, it's that he does it at all.

According to reports by the Associated Press and Fox News, at Ellender High School in Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana, co-valedictorians and cousins Cindy and Hue Vo each briefly addressed their immigrant parents, who are not fluent in English, in Vietnamese during their valedictory speeches. Why is this in the news? Because school board member Ricky Pitre objects. For reasons that are not reported, he thinks that there is something wrong with speaking a little bit of another language and proposes to institute a rule that graduation speeches be entirely in English.

English-only advocates like to claim that immigrants refuse to learn English. Here are two kids of immigrant parents who have learned English well enough to be valedictorians and this jackass wants to rain on their parade? For shame! Why is it that school boards attract idiots like shit attracts flies?

Xin anh hãy nhận những lời chúc mừng của tôi Cindy Vo và Hue Vo!

(I hope I've go this right. Regrettably, my Vietnamese is no doubt much poorer than their English.)

Here's an article in yesterday's New Scientist: "Charades reveals a universal sentence structure." The ever eagle-eyed Ben Zimmer thrust it under our noses as we hung around the LL water-cooler this morning. My interest was piqued. It would be much easier to learn about language by playing charades than to use the extraordinarily laborious standard method, i.e. studying language.

The article reports on a new paper in the prestigious journal PNAS, "The natural order of events: How speakers of different languages represent events nonverbally", by Susan Goldin-Meadow, Wing Chee So, Aslı Özyürek, and Carolyn Mylander. I've taken a look at the PNAS paper, but for now I just want to give you my immediate reactions to the New Scientist article. I'll follow up with some comments on the PNAS paper later.

In the study the New Scientist article reports on, subjects with various native languages look at pictures involving characters doing things to other characters, and then they mime what they saw. And the main finding the New Scientist article reports is that:

"Regardless of the order used in their native spoken language, most of the volunteers communicated with a subject-object-verb construction."

Cute! But now it gets a little weird:

"Goldin-Meadow argues that this kind of sentence syntax might therefore be etched into our brains. Languages that veer away from this form, such as English, must have been influenced by cultural forces."

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From Victor Mair:

The Chinese characters are CAN1TING1 餐厅 ("dining hall")

[Source of photograph: Facebook; uploaded by Samuel Osouf; taken on the Beijing-Taiyuan expressway in June, 2008. Link sent to Victor by Ori Tavor.]

In the Palais des Congrès at Porte Maillot in Paris, the virtual placards for Acoustics 2008 are — oddly — sharing the announcement screens with Les Journées Francophones de Pathologie Digestive 2009 ("The French-Speaking Days of Digestive Pathology"). This struck me as odd for several reasons, starting with the name. It's the annual meeting of the Société Française de Gastroentérologie (SNFGE); and (for example) the Linguistic Society of America just calls its annual meeting its annual meeting, not "The English-Speaking Days of Language Analysis", or even just "The Days of Language Analysis" or whatever. Second, the SNFGE meets every year in March, and surely the Palais des Congrès, creaky as it is, must still have many events scheduled before next March. But finally, the 2009 meeting will actually have a different name, according to the SNFGE's web site:

Les JFPD deviennent les JFHOD !
Les Journées Francophones de Pathologie Digestive changent de nom en 2009 pour devenir les JFHOD (prononcer 'jifod') pour Journées Francophones d'Hépato-gastroentérologie et d'Oncologie Digestive.

The JFPD becomes the JFHOD!
The French-Speaking Days of Digestive Pathology will change its name in 2009 to become the JFHOD (pronounced 'jifod') for French-Speaking Days of Hepato-gastroenterology and Digestive Oncology.

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