Postcard from Athens

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In Athens for the EACL (European chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics). Weather lovely, wish you were here. Athens more beautiful than I had expected. And for me, a grammarian married to a philosopher and interested in logic and mathematics, being in Greece is utterly awe-inspiring. The Greeks invented alphabets (writing systems that separate the consonants from the vowels) and the Western tradition of grammars (which basically start with Dionysius Thrax; yes, Panini in India was much earlier, but that is not where today's grammatical tradition comes from, because no one in Europe knew about it until late in the 18th century). They founded modern Western philosophy, linguistics, mathematics, and logic. Barbara and I walked across a patch of ground called the Ancient Agora and realized that this was where Socrates taught. It is unbelievable. And then you climb up to the Acropolis and see the Parthenon and you realize it's unbelievably more unbelievable than you ever believed.

So, did I identify anything linguistic enough to justify putting this postcard on Language Log? Not really. But Barbara and I did have a giggle each day as we flipped the Do Not Disturb card on our door handle to signal that our hotel room was ready for cleaning. The hotel had not appreciated the vital nature of the little particle up, and they had printed on the card the words Make My Room. Somehow, since Clint Eastwood's Sudden Impact (filmed in Santa Cruz), that seemed very funny ("Go ahead!"). I have no idea why make up the bed and make the bed are basically equivalent but make up the room and make the room are not. Not everything about English syntax and semantics is regular and logically explicable. Some of it is as messy and lawless and unpredictable as Athens traffic or Dirty Harry's policing methods.



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