Language Log

Damián Blasi, Susanne Michaelis and Martin Haspelmath, "Grammars are robustly transmitted even during the emergence of creole languages", Nature Human Behaviour 2017:

[W]e analyse 48 creole languages and 111 non-creole languages from all continents and conclude that the similarities (and differences) between creoles can be explained by genealogical and contact processes, as with non-creole languages, with the difference that creoles have more than one language in their ancestry. While a creole profile can be detected statistically, this stems from an over-representation of Western European and West African languages in their context of emergence. Our findings call into question the existence of a pidgin stage in creole development and of creole-specific innovations. In general, given their extreme conditions of emergence, they lend support to the idea that language learning and transmission are remarkably resilient processes.

Email from Damián Blasi puts it more bluntly:

The basic conclusions are that 1) creoles clearly continue the linguistic structure of the languages that preceded them, 2) we don't have any evidence for a pidgin stage preceding creoles and 3) no evidence for purely creole features (like SVO) whatsoever.

Sign on a Sino-Tibetan restaurant:

(Source)

Just got off the phone with my 2nd-grader granddaughter, Samira.  She was in her dad's truck out on some errand with him.  She had a new cell phone and was excited to talk to me on it.

Her dad got out to pick up some things he had left behind at a store.  Thereupon Samira started to tell me about her grand plan to do housework for the neighbors so that she could save up enough money to buy a "marmay tay".

"What is a 'marmay tay', honey?" I asked

She tried to explain, but no matter what she said, I just couldn't grasp what a "marmay tay" was.

Finally, my son got back to the truck.

"Tom, what is this 'marmay tay' that Samira wants to buy?"

Ding Xueliang, a professor of PRC history and contemporary Chinese politics at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, has called attention to the difference between

Máo Zédōng sīxiǎng 毛泽东思想 ("Mao Zedong thought")

and

Máo Zédōng de sīxiǎng 毛泽东的思想 ("Mao Zedong's thought")

Similarly, there is a significant difference between

Xí Jìnpíng sīxiǎng 习近平思想 ("Xi Jinping thought")

and

Xí Jìnpíng de sīxiǎng 习近平的思想 ("Xi Jinping's thought")

More than 2,400 researchers have now signed an "Open Letter to NIH Director Francis Collins" that starts like this:

We are writing to request that NIH delay implementation of its policy that sweeps basic science into a clinical trials framework until adequate feedback about its impact is obtained from the affected scientific community. We wholeheartedly agree with NIH’s goals of increasing scientific transparency and rigor, but we ask that you consider alternative mechanisms to accomplish those goals that would have fewer adverse effects on basic research.

The background is a new definition of what counts as a "clinical trial", to be enforced starting 1/1/2018 ("NIH's Definition of a Clinical Trial"):

A research study in which one or more human subjects are prospectively assigned to one or more interventions (which may include placebo or other control) to evaluate the effects of those interventions on health-related biomedical or behavioral outcomes.

Interpreted literally, this means that a study of priming effects on speech perception in healthy undergraduate students might count as a "clinical trial", since "human subjects are prospectively assigned to one or more interventions" (the priming part), and speech perception is a "health-related biomedical or behavioral outcome". Or maybe not. NIH has given some bizarrely irregular examples of how to interpret this rather general definition — thus vision and memory in adults are apparently "health-related outcomes" but learning in children is not.

In various areas of Edinburgh there are signs that say "Peripheral Controlled Zone." What exactly would you do if you encountered one of these signs? What would it mean to you? Not much? That's the hallmark of nerdview.

What is peripheral to what? Who is controlling what? What is peripheral control? Why are you being told this? Nothing becomes clearer as you mull over what it says. They might as well have put up a sign saying "Argle bargle nurff gugga mongmong gooboo wah Mon – Fri 8:30am – 5:30pm."

But worse, if you did know what it meant you would become aware that it could not possibly be relevant to you.

David Bandurski has done the world a great service by providing a point by point translation and valuable exegesis of the essentials of President Xi Jinping's "important speech" delivered in Beijing on July 26, 2017.  See his:

"The Arithmetic of Party-Speak:  The 19th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party is just around the corner — and that means the machine of political discourse is humming away at high speed" (8/28/17).

As presented in state media products such as “Xi Speak in Pictures” (Xí yǔ tújiě 习语图解), the essence of the Core Leader's directives may be boiled down to and designated by the following magic numbers:  2, 3, 5, 9, 8, 3, 2.

[This is a guest post by Jichang Lulu.]

Imagine that a certain phrase could be potentially offensive to the authoritarian rulers of a country you would like to do business in. To promote that business, you intend to display images of certain professionals who work for you. One of these professionals has indelibly inscribed the potentially offensive phrase on their belly. The professional activity you wish to promote typically involves barebelliedness.

This is a guest post by Martin Haspelmath, building on our continuing coverage of Open Access in linguistics.

By now, everyone knows that scholarly publication is serious trouble. The actual costs of disseminating content have plummeted drastically, and yet academic institutions are paying more and more to the commercial publishers. This feels deeply wrong — as if Facebook charged us for posting cat videos. In some fields such as linguistics, there has been a lot of discontent for quite a while. Johan Rooryck's efforts to take the old "Lingua" away from Elsevier have been widely publicized, and Elsevier's handling of the situation, as well as the continuation of "Zombie Lingua", are regular talking points among linguists.

Listen to this brief four-syllable phrase, and answer a simple question:

once the eggs hatch

Is the end of the last sylllable ("hatch") higher or lower in pitch than the start of the first sylllable ("once")?

China fired the first shot with this infamous Doklam video called "7 Sins of India".  It's all about a remote spot on the border between Bhutan and Tibet, where India is now confronting China in an attempt to preserve the territorial integrity of tiny Bhutan.  This is the same area through which China invaded India in 1962, pushing south as far as Siliguri.

India has now countered China's propaganda video, which has been dubbed crudely racist by many, with a cute, corny video of its own called "Dangal in Doklam".

"Dangal in Doklam: After 7 Sins, Here’s India’s Sonu Song for China"

Deeksha Sharma    the quint

Updated: 23 August, 2017 9:18 AM IST

Laurent Binet, La septième fonction du langage — The seventh function of language. This looks like an interesting book — pulp meta-fiction featuring Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Umberto Eco, Noam Chomsky, Louis Althusser, Paul de Man, Jean-François Lyotard,  Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida, John Searle, Morris Zapp, Gayatri Spivak, Bernard-Henri Lévy, Julia Kristeva, Philippe Sollers, Jacques Lacan, Camille Paglia, and more. There are reviews by Michael Dirda in the Washington Post ("Who killed Roland Barthes? Maybe Umberto Eco has a clue.", 8/23/1017), by Nicholas Daves in the New York Times ("A Postmodern Buddy-Cop Novel Sends Up the World of Semiotics", 8/16/2017), by Anthony Domestico in the San Francisco Chronicle ("‘The Seventh Function of Language,’ by Laurent Binet", 817/2017), etc. And there's a play, scheduled for the Théâtre de Sartrouville in November, and various other venues in France through the spring of 2018. No doubt the movie rights have already been snapped up.

Versions in French and in English are available from the usual places.

From Elijah Z. Granet:

I am an avid reader of Language Log, and am writing with a question that has puzzled me for sometime, and which, as far as I can tell, has never been addressed. I would be quite grateful if you could spare a moment of your valuable time to help me figure out this odd occurrence.