Language Log

A few days ago, I cited the discussion in the Indian press about the nature and source of misspellings in the document claiming responsibility for the recent attacks in Mumbai ("Terrorist speech recognition?", 12/1/2008). Yesterday, I saw some discussion of pronunciation and word choice in what is said to be a recorded telephone conversation between one of the terrorists and TV journalists. Thus Yogi Sikand, "Lies of the Lashkar", Rediff, 12/4/2008:

Not possessing a television set myself, it was only just now that was I able to listen to the recording, hosted on the Internet, of a conversation which took place some days ago between a terrorist holed up at Nariman House in Mumbai and calling himself 'Imran Babar' and reporters of the India TV channel.

It is plainly evident from the conversation that the terrorist was a Pakistani, most likely a Punjabi. This is obvious from his accent and the sort of Urdu he speaks. One can easily make out that he had been carefully tutored by his mentors who masterminded the deadly terror assault on Mumbai to intersperse his hate-driven harangue with some Hindi words (shanti, parivar etc) and to use Urdu words in the typical Hindi way (jabardasti instead of zabardasti etc.) so as to give the misleading impression that he and the other terrorists with him were Indian Muslims, not Pakistanis. The terrorists claimed to belong to the 'Deccan' in India, but it is obvious that this was not at all the case.

The latest xkcd:

People have had a lot of fun with FCC chairman Kevin Martin's claim that "the F-word "inherently has a sexual connotation" whenever it's used. Daniel Drezner asked, "If I say 'F#$% Kevin Martin and the horse he rode in on,' am I obviously encouraging rape and bestiality?" And as Chris Potts makes clear, if you measure a word's connotations by the items it co-occurs with, fucking doesn't seem to keep particularly salacious company. So it's simply wrong to claim that these emphatic, expletive, and figurative uses of the word (e.g., as in fuck up etc.) fall afoul of the FCC's rules, which define indecency as language that  “depicts or describes… sexual or excretory activities or organs.” 

But hang on. Emphatic fucking may not depict or refer to sex, and may not even bring it explicitly to mind. But the link is still there. Why would these uses of the word be considered "dirty"  if they weren't polluted by its primary literal use? And what could be the original source of that taint if not the word's literal denotation (or at least, of its denotation relative to the attitudes that obscene words presuppose about sex and the body)? In fact if fuck and fucking weren't connected to sex in all their secondary uses, they would serve no purpose at all. 

Studs Terkel, who died recently, at the age of 96, had a special place in the hearts of some linguists — those who were studying the syntax (and accompanying pragmatics) of colloquial English, back in the old days, before very large corpora and automated search techniques were easily available.

In a recent posting mostly on parts on speech, in particular the category of wise in "The wise talk because they have something to say", I quoted a book of advice for writers in which this example is attributed to Plato. I didn't pursue the attribution, but now Rochelle Edinburg, a philosophy grad student at Princeton, writes to ask about it:

… the quote in question is attributed to Plato. However, I have been searching for any hint of the original in Plato's works, and have yet to find one. Do you know where this quote originally appears? Or, for that matter, why someone would use such a poorly attributed quote in a textbook on writing style?

I agree with Politico's John Harris and Jim Vanderhei that the charges of media bias against the McCain campaign are exaggerated. On the other hand, no one ever went broke overestimating the media's capacity for offhand condescension, as witness these excerpts from the transcript that ABC published of Elizabeth Vargas' interview with Sarah Palin:

ELIZABETH VARGAS: If it doesn't go your way on Tuesday … 2012?

GOV SARAH PALIN: I'm just … thinkin' that it's gonna go our way on Tuesday, November 4….

… PALIN: Absolutely not. I think that, if I were to give up and wave a white flag of surrender against some of the political shots that we've taken, that … that would … bring this whole … I'm not doin' this for naught.

…PALIN: Well, I think that people can … can read the comments and hear the comments that he made, because again, the, the refreshing thing about that tape being revealed … from 2001… it's candidness there. It's not … it didn't seem to be his typical scripted, kinda … rhetorical message read off a TelePrompter.

Now you wouldn't expect the transcribers to photoshop Palin's anacolutha and false starts (though I don't think the public's need for full information would be compromised if they cleaned up a repeated "the" here and there). But do they imagine that Palin is the only one of the candidates who drops a g now and again, much less says kinda for kind of or gonna for going to? And if you want to hear condescension compounded, listen to Wolf Blitzer having a Tina Fey moment as he reads from the Vargas interview transcript and dutifully drops Palin's g's where indicated.

Arnold's discussion of the use and misuse of the archaic English verbal endings -est and -eth calls to mind an earlier and perhaps more significant case, namely the misuse of these endings in the original text of the Book of Mormon, the fundamental sacred text of the Church of Latter Day Saints.

I know that many of you will be wondering whether Language Log has been keeping up with the spread of linguification. We have, of course. Teams of interns are combing the periodicals and amassing huge quantities of data that we do not really know what to do with (the data may all be eventually turned over to Melvyn Quince in the Surveys department). But just to assure you that we are keeping up with developments, let me show you the beginning of an article that recently appeared in an important UK magazine (and I should note that the article was actually written by a senior lecturer in creative writing — whom I will not embarrass by naming):

Among the dirty words in arts and humanities departments these days, "progress" is one of the dirtiest. No one would dream of using it without irony or the qualifying phrase "myth of" as a prefix.

To check this, our in-house textual scientists did a Google search on progress and myth of progress limited to UK academic sites (.ac.uk), and these were the results:

Any questions about that?

The complexity of the English vowel system, specifically the tense/lax distinction, in nefarious conspiracy with our phonemic word-initial glottal fricatives, strikes again: France's foreign minister was quoted as saying that he wasn't too worried about Iran potentially developing nulcear weapons, because Israel would eat them before that could happen.

Perhaps M. Kouchner might consider a quick burst of training in the HPVT method.

Hat tip to Andrew Carnie.

In an op-ed in Saturday's New York Times, Steve Pinker tries to explain or extenuate some of Sarah Palin's linguistic derelictions, real and alleged. Among other things, he says that Palin shouldn't be taxed for saying "nucular," which is

 …not a sign of ignorance. This reversal of vowel-like consonants (nuk-l’-yer —> nuk-y’-ler) is common in the world’s languages, and is no more illiterate than pronouncing “iron” the way most Americans do, as “eye-yern” instead of “eye-ren.”

I agree with Pinker's overall conclusion that Palin shouldn't be on the hook for this one, but I think both of the claims here are wrong. It's not a phonetic process, and if it isn't exactly a sign of ignorance, it's the legacy of it. 

Dr. Edward S. Klima died on September 25 at the age of 77 from complications of brain surgery. Dr. Klima was founder and professor emeritus of the Department of Linguistics at UC San Diego (my home department), adjunct professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, and associate director of the Salk's Laboratory for Cognitive Neuroscience.

Dr. Klima's wife and longtime collaborator is the equally eminent Dr. Ursula Bellugi. Perhaps their best-known work is their book The Signs of Language (Harvard University Press, 1979), which was named the Most Outstanding Book in the Behavioral Sciences by the Association of American Publishers. This book was instrumental not only in establishing the importance of sign language research in linguistics and cognitive science more broadly, but also in affirming the finding — not widely appreciated at the time — that sign languages are natural human languages in the same way that spoken languages are. Drs. Klima and Bellugi were jointly awarded the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award by the American Psychological Association in 1993.

UCSD has a news release here, and the New York Times obituary is here.

In the 13 September NewScientist's "Feedback" column: a note beginning "There should be a law against it, we grumble", with a report that back in June Reuters distributed a story on the Japanese company Genepax, which claims to have produced a car that runs on "nothing but water". The magazine noted that the claim has been debunked a number of times over the past few years, but keeps re-surfacing. A possible remedy:

We thought for a moment we had a way of stemming the tide of water stories. Surely those clever people who write word-processor programs that put annoying green wiggles under our sentences with notes like "the grammatical passive voice has been used" [nice deployment of the passive!] could add a feature that crosses sentences out in red with the note "this does not happen in the real world". Shouldn't that feature be made mandatory in news organisations?

But then we remembered that when Microsoft tells us off about our grammar we invariably click on "Ignore rule" and proceeed blithely on. Back to the drawing board…

While filing some examples of summative constructions, I came across the discussion of summative modifiers in Joseph Williams's Style: The Basics of Clarity and Grace (I have the 3rd ed., of 2008), which made me wonder whether we had said good things about Williams's books on style here on Language Log. The answer is yes, but just barely, so it's time for a note. And for a late notice that Williams (long-time professor of English at the University of Chicago) died in February.