Language Log

This afternoon I passed by a group of high school kids from China going down the street outside of Williams Hall, the office building in which I work.  One of the girls said merrily, "Bur'ao", by which she meant Modern Standard Mandarin (MSM) bù zhīdào 不知道 ("[I] don't know").

The retroflex final -r is well known for northern varieties of Mandarin, but in Pekingese it seems that the mighty R has the ability to swallow up whole syllables, as in the example quoted in the previous paragraph.

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The Australian minister of transport and infrastructure, Anthony Albanese, recently plunged himself into an embarrassing situation that will probably stain his reputation permanently (see the Daily Mail's coverage here). He delivered a speech in which one passage, a piece of nicely honed rhetoric about the leader of the opposition (the Liberal party), was lifted with hardly any alteration from a speech that Michael Douglas was seen giving in a 1995 American romantic comedy, The American President (script by Aaron Sorkin). Naturally the two speech segments are now available side by side on YouTube. Albanese's staff, who prepared the speech for him (Albanese claims never to have seen the movie) had apparently forgotten that (1) millions of Australians have in fact personally visited a movie theater, and (2) some of them remember at least parts of movies that they have seen.

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Stanley Fish asks  ("Mind Your P’s and B’s: The Digital Humanities and Interpretation", NYT 1/23/2011):

[H]ow do the technologies wielded by digital humanities practitioners either facilitate the work of the humanities, as it has been traditionally understood, or bring about an entirely new conception of what work in the humanities can and should be?

After a couple of lengthy detours, he concludes that neither any facilitation nor any worthwhile new conception is likely: the digital humanities

… will have little place for the likes of me and for the kind of criticism I practice: a criticism that narrows meaning to the significances designed by an author, a criticism that generalizes from a text as small as half a line, a criticism that insists on the distinction between the true and the false, between what is relevant and what is noise, between what is serious and what is mere play.

In other words, he agrees with Noam Chomsky that statistical analysis of the natural (or textual) world is intellectually empty – though I suspect that they agree on little else.

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Almost the end of January, and not a single Language Log reader hasn't failed to complain about the lack of over-negation in any of this year's posts. But here's some naughtily nutty negation anyway:

"It's not that I don't doubt the sincerity of their desire to protect the talent. And believe it or not, we have the same ambition," Christian Mann, general manager of Evil Angel Productions who also serves on the porn industry's Free Speech Coalition, said last week after the council's vote. "We just don't believe their way is the best way." (Associated Press, LA mayor signs law requiring condoms in porn films, Jan. 24, 2012; widely syndicated story.)

Hmm. That's a curious lack of non-self-doubt. So does it mean Mann does in fact doubt the sincerity  of "their" desire to protect the talent? I don't think so.

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Near my hotel on the Plaça Imperial Tarraco in Tarragona, the indicators to tell pedestrians when they can cross the street have a countdown in seconds to the next green: a minute ticks by, the lights go yellow for the vehicular traffic at 6 seconds, then red at 3 seconds, and finally — 3, 2, 1, liftoff — the little green man is displayed and you can walk across. Only in Tarragona the little green man figure does not just pose in a walking sort of shape: he moves. Those little green arms and legs are working away: he seems to be race-walking. And that's not all: when there's only 7 seconds left, he begins to sprint.

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Six of us were dining in Tarragona on Tuesday night, and the topic of bottled water came up. We all agreed, it is a scandal that diesel fuel is being used to move bottled water around the earth's surface when often it has no chemical advantage whatever over tapwater. What an ecological disaster. What a ripoff. We all insisted we wanted tapwater, and our Spanish-speaking Catalunya-resident host clearly understood us. But three bottles of spa water duly arrived.

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Every year around this time, I write about the relevant Chinese zodiacal animal.  Here are some recent posts:

• 2011: rabbit
• 2010: tiger
• 2009: ox

2012 is the year of the dragon, which in Modern Standard Mandarin is lóng (simplified 龙 traditional / complicated 龍).

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We inaugurated "The Trent Reznor Prize for Tricky Embedding" back in 2005 to honor this inspired effort:

When I look at people that I would like to feel have been a mentor or an inspiring kind of archetype of what I'd love to see my career eventually be mentioned as a footnote for in the same paragraph, it would be, like, Bowie.

While I don't think that we've actually ever gotten around to awarding the prize again, we've nominated other candidates intermittently over the years. The latest to deserve nomination is Mark Steyn, for his channeling of Mitt Romney in "The Man Who Gave Us Newt", National Review 1/22/2012 (emphasis added):

Why is the stump speech so awful? “I believe in an America where millions of Americans believe in an America that’s the America millions of Americans believe in. That’s the America I love.” Mitt paid some guy to write this insipid pap. And he paid others to approve it. Not only is it bland and generic, it’s lethal to him in a way that it wouldn’t be to Gingrich or Perry or Bachmann or Paul because it plays to his caricature — as a synthetic, stage-managed hollow man of no fixed beliefs. And, when Ron Paul’s going on about “fiat money” and Newt’s brimming with specifics on everything (he was great on the pipeline last night), Mitt’s generalities are awfully condescending: The finely calibrated inoffensiveness is kind of offensive.

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Today's xkcd:

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In the Hotel Ciutat de Tarragona, the beautiful modern hotel in Tarragona where I am currently staying, I ate breakfast in the 1st-floor restaurant (Americans: that would be the 2nd floor), and then came out to take the elevator back up to my 5th-floor room (Americans: 6 floors up). But I was baffled: there was no button to call the elevator for upward journeys. There was just a button labeled with the Down-Arrow symbol for calling the elevator to go back down to the lobby on level 0. Some sort of security, I assumed, to ensure that random restaurant patrons don't go up in the elevator to wander up and down the halls looking for unlocked doors or stealable items. But then how was I to get back up to my room? I'm ashamed to report just how long it took me to resolve the conundrum here. Perhaps you would like to solve it for yourself before you read on.

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At the Barcelona airport, near the parking structure where I was waiting for a Plana bus to Tarragona yesterday (two hours on the flight; two hours waiting for a bus: sigh), is a large and prominent box of what is obviously important equipment of some kind; and it is clearly labeled as being exclusively for the use of bombers.

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The videos are now out — from the 50th-anniversary celebrations ("a scientific reunion") of the linguistics program at MIT, December 9-11, 2011. The schedule of the talks (with links to slides for them) is available here, with links to other material: a list of attendees, a list of the many poster presentations, videos of the main presentations, personal essays by MIT alumni, photographs from the event, a list of MIT dissertations from 1965 to the present, and a 1974 history of linguistics at MIT (particularly interesting for the years before the first officially registered graduate students entered the program, in 1961).

The eleven YouTube videos (of the introduction and the main presentations) can be accessed directly here.

(Thanks to Sabine Iatridou for the links.)

MIT linguists on Language Log (with dissertation dates): Barbara Partee (6/65), Arnold Zwicky (9/65), Mark Liberman (1975), Bill Poser (1984), Heidi Harley (1995). [David Pesetsky reminds me that although Kai von Fintel's degree is from UMass, he's now on the MIT faculty.]

In a series of Language Log posts, Geoff Pullum has called attention to the prevalence of polysemy and ambiguity:

The people who think clarity involves lack of ambiguity, so we have to strive to eliminate all multiple meanings and should never let a word develop a new sense… they simply don't get it about how language works, do they?

Languages love multiple meanings. They lust after them. They roll around in them like a dog in fresh grass.

The other day, as I reading a discussion in our comments about whether English draftable does or doesn't refer to the same concept as Finnish asevelvollisuus ("obligation to serve in the military"), I happened to be sitting in a current of uncomfortably cold air. So of course I wondered how the English word draft came to refer to military conscription as well as air flow. And a few seconds of thought brought to mind several others senses of the the noun draft and its associated verb. I figured that this must represent a confusion of several originally separate words. But then I looked it up.

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Another linguistically interesting passage from Ed McBain's Long Time No See:

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Ed McBain, Long Time No See, 1977 (the 32nd of the 87th Precinct novels):

“Mrs. Harris,” Carella said, “there are some questions we’d like to ask about your son and daughter-in-law.”

“Yes, certainly,” she said. “I’ll try to assist you as best I can.”

She was adopting the kind of formal speech many blacks used with whites, especially when the whites were in a position of authority. […]

“Mrs. Harris,” Carella said, “did your son and daughter-in-law have many friends?”

“Some, I believe.” Still the phony speech. Carella guessed she would use the word “quite” within the next several sentences. “Quite” was a sure indication that someone was using language he or she did not ordinarily use.

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You, dear readers, understand that the scientific study of language is, well, scientific. But the rest of the world doesn't always see it that way. So I thought I'd let you know that I've signed on to contribute to Discover Magazine's recently-launched science blog, The Crux, where you'll be able to read the occasional piece on language alongside some fine articles on particle physics or avian flu. My first post is on bilingualism's impact on cognition, and can be found here.

John Parkinson, "Boehner on Keystone Pipeline: ‘President is Selling Out American Jobs for Politics’", ABC News, 118/2012:

“President Obama is destroying tens of thousands of American jobs and shipping American energy security to the Chinese.  There’s really just no other way to put it,” Boehner, R-Ohio, said. “The president was given the authority to block this project only and only if he believes it’s not in the national interest of the United States. Is it not in the national interest to create tens of thousands of jobs here in America with private investment?  Is it not in the national interest to get energy resources from an ally like Canada, as opposed to some countries in the Middle East?”

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Someone recently told Tom Bishop (creator of Wenlin software for learning Chinese) that Google Translate is really good now, so he tried translating this English paragraph into Chinese (chosen randomly from the cave adventure game):

You are on one side of a large, deep chasm.  A heavy white mist rising up from below obscures all view of the far side.  A southwest path leads away from the chasm into a winding corridor.

The result is:

Nín shì yīgè dà de, shēn de hónggōu de yībiān. Yīgè chénzhòng de bái wù, cóng xiàmiàn shàngshēng yǎngàile suǒyǒu de yuǎnfāng de kànfǎ. Xīnán lùjìng xìnxī hónggōu, chéngwéi yīgè huíláng. 您是一个大的，深的鸿沟的一边。一个沉重的白雾，从下面上升掩盖了所有的远方的看法。西南路径信息鸿沟，成为一个回廊。

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In other language news today (Language Log tries to bring you all the important linguistic news of the day), an Australian snack food company has won the right to trademark the name Nuckin Futs for a nutty snack to be sold to adults in bars.

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[This is a guest post by Bob Ladd.]

Following the wreck of the Costa Concordia last weekend (one Italian comic suggested it should be renamed Costa Codardia, where codardia means "cowardice"), I've been temporarily taken on as a correspondent by Language Log's Italian desk in order to report on a few linguistic aspects of the already notorious telephone call between the Coast Guard captain De Falco and the ship's much criticized captain Schettino.

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