Language Log

Word of the day from Robert Macfarlane:

Word of the day: “sjushamillabakka” – ‘between the sea & the shore’, i.e. in the shifting space between high & low tide, neither quite water nor quite land. Metaphorically, therefore, a threshold or border realm (Shetland, archaic). pic.twitter.com/dUZDIuHmy8

— Robert Macfarlane (@RobGMacfarlane) April 29, 2018

A couple of weeks ago, we asked:  "The end of the line for Mandarin Phonetic Symbols?" (3/12/18)

The general response to that post was no, not by a long shot.

Now, in addition to all the other things one can do with bopomofo, one can use it to confound PRC trolls, as described in this article in Chinese.

You may have thought that idea of rhinoceroses peeving about semicolons (when they're not snorting and snuffing) was silly. But the comments on Mark's post Peeving and breeding have devolved to a level of even greater silliness: the pressing question of whether to type one space after a period or two.

…and between intertextuality and self-indulgence.

Mark Liberman's "Real tone" (2/7/18), replying to "Tones for real" (2/5/18), is a nice demonstration of what's happening in real speech.  The question for John McWhorter and all serious language teachers / learners is how much of it can be systematized and regularized?  In other words, how much of it can be taught / learned?

I will be blunt:  I don't think that the discernment and production of speech can be taught / learned at this ad hoc, microphonemic level.  That is why the very best teachers and best students I know do not focus on lexemes or morphemes, but rather on phrases, clauses, or even whole sentences.

A lot of the most effective political keywords derive their force from a maneuver akin to what H. W. Fowler called "legerdemain with two senses," which enables you to slip from one idea to another without ever letting on that you’ve changed the subject. Values oscillates between mores (which vary from one group to another) and morals (of which some people have more than others do). The polemical uses of elite blend power (as in the industrial elite) and pretension (as in the names of bakeries and florists). Bias suggests both a disposition and an activity (as in housing bias), and ownership society conveys both material possession and having a stake in something.

And then there's entitlement, one of the seven words and phrases that the administration has instructed policy analysts at the Center for Disease Control to avoid in budget documents, presumably in an effort, as Mark put it in an earlier post, to create "a safe space where [congresspersons'] delicate sensibilities will not be affronted by such politically incorrect words and phrases." Though it's unlikely that the ideocrats who came up with the list thought it through carefully, I can see why this would lead them to discourage the use of items like diversity. But the inclusion of entitlement on the list is curious, since the right has been at pains over the years to bend that word to their own purposes.

I hope you appreciate the wisdom of the new policy on naming hurricanes that was announced here on September 11. The latest brutal storm to devastate the islands of the eastern Caribbean would not have been named for the mother of Jesus; it would have been named "Hurricane Malaria." That's more like it. Nasty names for nasty stuff. You know it makes sense.

Jonathan Benda posted this on Facebook recently:

Reading [Jan Blommaert's] _Language and Superdiversity_ in preparation for my Writing in Global Contexts course in the fall. Does anyone else think the following conclusions about this sign are somewhat wrongheaded?

.. or at least six weeks of it, will be spent at the 2017 Jelinek Summer Workshop on Speech and Language Technology (JSALT) at CMU in Pittsburgh. As the link explains, this

… is a continuation of the Johns Hopkins University CLSP summer workshop series from 1995-2016. It consists of a two-week summer school, followed by a six-week workshop. Notable researchers and students come together to collaborate on selected research topics. The Workshop is named after the late Fred Jelinek, its former director and head of the Center for Speech and Language Processing.

Today's xkcd: slightly unfair, but funny:

Mouseover title: "The pile gets soaked with data and starts to get mushy over time, so it's technically recurrent."

I just received an email from a total stranger, a young blonde woman dressed fetchingly in pink (she included two photographs). She may want a romantic relationship with me. But to clarify why I use the modal auxiliary ("may want" rather than "wants"), let me share with you the entire text of the message:

hello how are you doing amd marry from benaughty i will be happy to here from you

One scarcely knows what to say.