Language Log

Some time ago, we had a discussion on the American Dialect Society mailing list about the Dictionary of the Scots Language (DSL). DSL consists of the Dictionary of the Older Scots Tongue and the Scottish National Dictionary, together making 22 volumes in print (plus a 2005 supplement). These amazing resources are now available on-line, providing searchable electronic versions of the fruits of scholarship on the Scots language. For free, no strings, available to anyone with web access. (DSL is just part of a larger set of resources, the Scottish Language Dictionaries, or SLD.)

I was astounded, and said so to the list. How was this managed, when parallel resources in English (for instance, the Oxford English Dictionary, the Dictionary of American Regional English, and the Historical Dictionary of American Slang) had scant prospect of getting a similar treatment within the foreseeable future? (The monumental English Dialect Dictionary is apparently being digitized — at the University of Innsbruck!) I exchanged e-mail with DSL staff and discovered just how fragile the whole business was: a subvention from the Scottish Arts Council provided the backbone of the support, and private donors supplied some support, but the enterprise seemed to survive on a phalanx of (unpaid) volunteers (and I suspected that the staff was not very well paid).

I intended to post to Language Log at the time, just to alert people that DSL was available on-line, but the posting fell behind other things and I never got back to it. Now, it turns out, the dictionaries are threatened.

At lunch on Saturday, Paul Armstrong asked me about my ask 'my request'. A mutual friend (Tom Limoncelli, who I'll quote in a moment) had peeved on his blog the day before about this usage, and Paul was somewhat taken aback by Tom's rancor; Paul himself didn't find the usage so bad.

At the time, I didn't recall having heard things like my ask before, though it turns out I had — memory is a VERY tricky thing — but I opined that the noun ask was likely to be venerable, probably going back to Old English. And so it is and does, but the full story is more interesting than a simple survival of a lexical item from a millennium ago.

Yesterday evening, I watched the TF1 reality show (or émission, as the French so appropriately say) Secret Story. My purpose was to revive my knowledge of French, and perhaps to learn a few new words. I was pleased that I could understand most of the dialogue, if not the decor; but one thing that I didn't understand was why a French reality show has an English name.

On my recent trip to Paris, I took time out Wednesday evening to go to the Louvre, which is open until 10 (that's 22h for those unambiguous Europeans) on Wednesdays. My eyes happened to encounter Un jeune homme présenté par Venus (?) aux sept Arts libéraux, which reminded me that one of these lovely young ladies would represent Grammar. Here they are, with Venus (whose question mark is in the Louvre label — that's not my editorial addition¹); I've omitted to photograph the young man.


Since it's clear that the top middle one is Logic (aka Dialectic), with her scorpion, and since Logic is one of the three liberal arts in the Trivium, I assume that one of the women on either side of her is Grammar — let's say the lady to her left holding a scroll.² Here she is in close-up (you can click on this or the above image for a bigger version):


Quite a charming-looking person, perhaps a little shy and young, but not at all offensive, right?

Twice a day, walking between my hotel and Acoustics 2008 at the Palais des Congrès, I pass by the Place des États-Unis, which is four street-segments surrounding a block-long median strip, between Avenue Kléber and Avenue d'Iéna. At one end, appropriately enough, there's a statue of Lafayette shaking hands with Washington. At the other end, also appropriately, there's a memorial to the American volunteers who died while serving in the Légion Étrangère during the first world war. The base of the memorial is inscribed with verses from Alan Seeger's "Ode in Memory of the American Volunteers Fallen for France", as translated into French by Alain Rivoire. For example:

Salut frères, adieu grands morts, deux fois merci. Double à jamais est votre gloire d'être morts pour la France et d'être morts aussi pour l'honneur de notre mémoire.

In the original high-Romantic English this was:

Hail, brothers, and farewell; you are twice blest, brave hearts.
Double your glory is who perished thus,
For you have died for France and vindicated us.

In between, less obviously, there's a ten-foot-high plinth surmounted with a bust of Myron T. Herrick.

Letter to the editor in the New York Times of 27 June (from James Bloom of Bethlehem, Pa.):

Paul Krugman's observations ["Home Not-So-Sweet Home", column of 23 June] about our uncritical bias in favor of home ownership and the widespread attitude toward home renters as second-class citizens calls to mind an exchange I had several years ago while ordering a pizza.

When I told the delivery dispatcher my address, she asked, "Is that an apartment or a home?"

I still don't know what the right answer would have been, though the pizza did arrive.

I was at first baffled by Bloom's bafflement, until I realized he was understanding home to refer one's domicile, the place where one lives, which could be either a house or an apartment (he might also have been assuming — contrary to fact — that apartments are only rented rather than owned, but this isn't clear from his story). The delivery dispatcher, on the other hand, was using home to mean 'house', and was asking whether the delivery was to be made to a residence accessible from the street or whether the deliverer would have to gain access to the interior of the building.

From the 12 June issue of the Bay Area Reporter (all the LGBT news that's fit to print, and more), a fascinating story (with photo) headed "Naked men meet cop". In its entirety:

Two naked men, Rusty Mills, left, and Lloyd Fisher, were walking in front of LGBT Community Center Saturday, June 7 when a San Francisco Police Department cruiser pulled over and Officer Lorenzo Adamson got out. Photographer Jane Cleland captured this exchange:

Adamson: "You can't walk around naked! That's indecent exposure!"

Mills: "It's only 'indecent exposure' if you engage in lewd behavior, and we're not being lewd."

Adamson: "I don't care about all that legal mumbo-jumbo. It's not normal to be walking around naked!"

Mills: "We're supporting World Naked Bicycle Day."

Adamson: "I don't care what you say, it's not healthy and no other police officers would disagree with me. And besides, you don't seem to have any supporters here."

Mills and Fisher were not cited and soon were on their way.

Adamson was clearly affronted. What interests me in this is the shifting grounds that he offers for his objection to the men's nakedness: first, it's against the law; then, it's "not normal"; then, it's "not healthy" (suggesting, I suppose, that exposed naughty bits are a threat to public health); finally, the men have no supporters for it.  But, finding no grounds for issuing a citation (even though rejecting "all that legal mumbo-jumbo", not the best position for a cop to take), he has to let them go on their way.

World Naked Bicycle Day is a genuine event, by the way, and it was indeed on June 7 (which was also the kickoff day at the LGBT Community Center for Pride Month in San Francisco). No bicycles are visible in the photo, nor are any people other than Adamson and the two naked men. (I would have thought there'd be more people on Market Street in the middle of the day.) Also no word about where the men came from or where they went to.

(The photo shows the men from the rear, of course. Naked buttocks don't count as naughty bits.)

This is chapter 2 in the story of APA (Avoid Potential Ambiguity). Here I'm going to look at whether the advice is useful. Suppose you convince J. Doe that some usage is to be avoided because it "could lead to ambiguity". Will Doe's speech and writing now be clearer?

Well, no. (They could even be a little bit harder to understand.)

The University of Edinburgh is co-ordinating the Blizzard Challenge, the only regular speech synthesis evaluation campaign in the world. And you can help. The systems are evaluated by having people listen to them in operation and reporting on what they hear. The listening test has now started, and if you have a computer with sound capability, and maybe a nice pair of headphones, you can be one of the expert evaluators. It's a chance to hear synthesis samples from over 20 leading academic and commercial research groups (and some lesser-known ones). Hundreds of listeners are needed for this test, so the organizers are turning to Language Log. Do think about taking part.

There are in fact have two parallel tests running this year: one on English, accessible if you click here, and if you have the necessary language skills, one on Mandarin Chinese, accessible if you click here. You can do both, if you speak both languages. Each one should take under an hour and can be done in several sessions if you prefer (the system will remember where you got to and pick up from there next time). If you know other people who might be interested in evaluating the speech quality of machines that talk, please encourage your students to take part.

I'm sorry that Geoff and Barbara had such a disappointing movie experience last night. Myself, I watched The Scorpion King on TV. For a movie to watch while doing other things it was fine. It has exotic settings and clothing, plenty of fighting and stunts without excessive gore, beautiful women, everything a guy could want.

This was not the first time I had seen it, so I knew what to expect, but when I first saw it, I was quite disappointed. Why? Well, I naively thought that it would be about the real Scorpion King, one of the small number of known figures from the late Pre-dynastic period of Egypt. He may have been the immediate predecessor of Narmer, who unified Upper and Lower Egypt and founded the First Dynasty, or he may have been the same king under a different name. Naturally, I figured that a movie called The Scorpion King would be about the unification of Egypt and perhaps would even portray the origins of the Egyptian writing system. Alas, that movie remains to be made.

Google Translate has added ten languages to its repertoire: Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech,Danish, Finnish, Hindi, Norwegian,Polish, Romanian and Swedish. With the languages previously available (Arabic, Chinese (traditional and simplified writing), Dutch, English, French,German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish), Google now handles 23 languages. These comprise less than one-half of one percent of the world's languages, but their speakers include more than half of the world's population.

We can read today at the Catholic News Agency's website and elsewhere that:

Linguistics has a profound human value. It is a science that opens the heart and the mind. It helps us to put our lives, our hopes, our problems in the right perspective. In this regard, and here I speak as a priest and a Jesuit, it is an apostolic instrument that can bring us closer to God.

Wait, my bad. It was Fr. Funes, Director of the Vatican's Observatory, speaking, and he actually said that Astronomy has a profound human value etc. etc. Nobody ever got closer to God by reading Language Log. But anyway, Funes went on to comment on the possibility of extraterrestrial life, saying that:

My friend Steven Levine wrote me a little while ago with a small question about English — about the verb process, accented on the second syllable, meaning 'to go, walk, or march in procession' (theOED's definition). Steven was familiar with the verb from Morris dancing, where a certain amount of proCESSing goes on. As Steven wrote:

There is a form of Morris dance called a "processional" — which means just what you'd think, a dance that moves the team along, usually at a brisk pace. You dance processionals when you are in a parade.

Among Morris dancers, I have often heard the verb "process" (accent on the second syllable) used to described doing this. "We're going to process down Nicollet Mall after we finish dancing at the library."

But then he found himself writing the word for the first time and noticed the homography problem: there's another verb process, accented on the first syllable. That drove him to the dictionaries, where he found no trace of proCESS. Was this just Morris dancer jargon? Should he avoid using it outside the Morris dancing community? If so, how (with proceed, for instance)? And should he avoid it in writing (for fear of ambiguity)?

Ask Language Log comes to the rescue!