Language Log

Imagine my surprise yesterday when (after 21 hours of traveling involving four airports in three countries) I stumbled toward baggage claim in the Tallinn airport and saw a photograph of Barack Obama on the side of a large trash can, next to this legend:

Yes We CAN

Jah Meie Oskame!

I passed the first trash can without quite registering this rather surprising ad; then my brain caught up with my eyes, so I inspected the next trash can carefully, and wrote down the Estonian words. Later I asked one of my kind Estonian hosts what Jah Meie Oskame means — not surprisingly, it means "Yes We Can" — and what the link given on the ad (www.pakendiringlus.ee) was about. Turns out to be an ad for recycling. Not, say, an exhortation to dump the U.S. President in the trash. Whew.

I was too jet-lagged yesterday to register much else, but at the opening reception for the conference — the 12th International Conference on Minority Languages — I learned that the three distinctive lengths of Estonian consonants and vowels are not always indicated in the orthography, and I was told that (some dialect of?) the Finnic language Livonian has FIVE distinctive lengths of consonants and vowels. I think it was Livonian. It was certainly a five-way length distinction in either consonants or vowels, or both. But possibly I merely dreamt this, or maybe they were kidding me. I am very gullible even when I've had some sleep.

Anya Lunden wrote me yesterday with an instance of "who or whom", from commenter i_am_right on Jon Carroll's San Francisco Chronicle column:

We still don't know who or whom the Zodiac killer is or was … (link)

Lunden wondered whether the writer was using whom to convey some category distinction, like gender (or, in some of the examples below, number), or whether the writer was just wrestling with the problem of choosing who or whom in this context. I'm inclined to the latter idea. But first a little more data.

Generalization is the essence of rationality. But the ways that human languages encourage us to generalize can cause enormous damage to rational thinking, especially in combination with the natural human preference for clear and simple stories over complicated ones.

I've cited many examples involving journalists or popular authors, most recently with respect to the effects of poverty on working memory ("Betting on the poor boy: Whorf strikes back", 4/5/2009). But in fact, this is a problem that afflicts everyone, even prize-winning behavioral economists.

Hello, blogosphere — the fifth collection of Simpsons linguistic humor is up, here. Enjoy!

BioMedCentral continues to be a source of found poetry: today's mail alerts me to John J Wiens, "Estimating rates and patterns of morphological evolution from phylogenies: lessons in limb lability from Australian Lerista lizards", continuing the proud tradition of last week's odor plume flux.

Heidi and I posted a few times last month about the job market in linguistics (see Counting linguistics job ads and dissertations for links and data). In the comments, Eric wondered:

Honestly curious here: are numbers of applicants for particular jobs a matter of public record (at least, at public institutions)? It would be good to contrast the numbers above with some numbers that show how many folks are actually competing for individual jobs.

I think we can agree that Ben Roethlisberger, who won the Super Bowl for the second time last night, has finished hitting the iceberg. Unfortunately, "starting to hit the iceberg" remains a rarely-used cliché.

Yesterday's news brings another constructional innovation, courtesy of Agence France Presse ("Americans giving Obama extraordinary support: polls", 1/18/2009):

A survey conducted by The New York Times and CBS News found a US public eager to give the president-elect a wide berth as he attempts to turn around a faltering US economy, tackle global warming, help solve the intractable Middle East peace process, along with a plethora of other mammoth challenges.

"Whether Ruth Madoff knew of her husband’s scheme or whether she didn’t are two unnerving possibilities."

That's the lead on the front page of the NYTimes this morning pointing to this article.

What a sentence! We can blame it squarely on the front-page-online editors, because it isn't in the article; I found in the article a sentence that has almost exactly the form I was going to suggest as the right way to say what they obviously intended: "In the social circles where the couple once traveled, both possibilities are unnerving — that Ruth Madoff was in on this, or that she wasn’t.", using that instead of whether. I would also have used and instead of or, given that they've spoken of "both possibilities". (I guess I would use or if they had written "either possibility is unnerving". But I know that we tend to be relaxed about and's and or's, so that part doesn't surprise me.)

I know that things like this often happen, but I never saw such an extreme example — the two whether-clauses presented as alternatives are actually, on standard analyses going back to Karttunen's 1977 article in the first issue of Linguistics and Philosophy, synonymous, since each is implicitly disjunctive with its negation and they are negations of each other.

I actually didn't understand what they had in mind until I got to the end of the sentence. Initially I thought it was a much more benign phenomenon of just inserting a second 'whether', and that this was going to be what Zaefferer calls an 'unconditional' — e.g. "Whether Ruth Madoff knew of her husband’s scheme or whether she didn’t, she may still be considered culpable …", equivalent to "Whether she knew or not, she may still …".  So this is not just a matter of stylistics — there's just no way to literally read the first part of the sentence as an itemization of the two unnerving possibilities.

This morning's NYT article on conflict at the New School mentioned a linguistic dimension (Lia W. Foderaro and Marc Santora, "To New School Critics, Their Leader Lacks Focus", NYT, 12/21/2008):

Even a 2005 campaign intended to help integrate what one professor called academic “silos” fell flat with names that made clear the programs were part of a larger whole but were tortuous to say: Parsons the New School for Design; Eugene Lang College the New School for Liberal Arts.

The institutions in question used to be known as "Parsons School of Design" and "Eugene Lang College". Although the new names are certainly longer,  they're not exactly tongue twisters — if they're "tortuous to say", it must be because of their unusual syntax. (And of course the names of such institutions are always in practice reduced to a syllable or two, in this case "Parsons" and "Lang".)

According to a recently-released glossary, that's the official Yoruba translation of "notification area", which is "the area on the right side of the Windows taskbar [that] contains shortcuts to programs and important status information".

About four years ago, I discussed an article in the NYT that dealt (in a confused and confusing way) with issues of endangered language preservation, mother-tongue literacy, and computer access in Africa ("African language computer farrago", 11/13/2004). The featured project was Tunde Adegbola's work with the African Languages Technology Initiative (ALT-i).

A post on the Yoruba Affairs newsgroup, which I subscribe to, recently announced that (a draft of?) the Yoruba Glossary for Microsoft's Language Interface Pack has just been released, as a partnership between ALT-i and Microsoft Unlimited Potential (whose acronym is, of course, "UP", not "MUP"). At 196 pages and 2000-3000 terms, this is a substantial document.

Linguification is still alive and well. In a Morning Edition interview on NPR today Rob Chametzky heard Condoleezza Rice saying, "To mention Robert Mugabe in the same sentence with the President of the United States is an outrage." No it isn't.

Can you translate games, in the sense that you can translate languages? More precisely, can you translate an instance of one game — a match or a round or whatever — into an instance of another game, as you can translate a sentence or a paragraph of Chinese into a sentence or a paragraph of English?

Helen DeWitt sensibly says that you can't. But I think that there's more to the story.