Language Log

From Phineas Q. Phlogiston, "Cartoon Theories of Linguistics, Part ж—The Trouble with NLP", Speculative Grammarian, CLIII(4), March 2008:

This is only the second cartoon about computational linguistics that I know of. The first one is also rather negative, but I guess that this is only to be expected from cartoonists, who are on the whole much more likely to criticize something than to praise it.

The illustration is from Taro Gomi, An Illustrated Dictionary of Japanese Onomatopoeic Expressions, by way of a new addition to our blogroll, The Ideophone, by Mark Dingemanse.

Overheard on Locust Walk: "What you need to do is call him up and be like, 'why are you doing this to me?'"

Something about this struck me — maybe it's because I'm old enough that I still think of be like as a description of behavior associated with speaking, rather than a simple synonym for say. But I should have know better — {"call him up and be like"} gets 7,590 web hits on Google, which is a lot for a six-word sequence.

A few weeks ago, Seth Roberts visited Penn to give a talk about self-experimentation, and I took advantage of the opportunity to invite him to dinner with 15 or 20 students in Ware College House, where I'm Faculty Master. There was a lively discussion, mostly about Seth's "Shangri-La Diet" ideas.

Seth turned the tables before dinner by interviewing me about blogging. He took notes on his laptop, and sent me a draft the next day, and I promised to look at it and get back to him with corrections — and then I forgot about it until he reminded me yesterday. As it turned out, it didn't really need any changes, but I adjusted a few words here and there, and he's published it on his blog: "Interview with Mark Liberman about Blogging", 4/16/2008.

Having commented in an idle moment on what and/or means and why we have it, I started to receive email from people solemnly informing me that they were native speakers but in their variety of English or had only the exclusive meaning, where the disjuncts can't both be true. In other words, these are people who think that in their variety of English, if I say If Gordon Brown or the Pope is in the USA today I'll eat a copy of Strunk and White, I do not have to eat a copy of that disgusting little book The Elements of Style: I luck out on the grounds that (as it happens) both of them are in the USA today.

I hate to sound dogmatic, but my correspondents are actually wrong about their own native language.

One form of American Exceptionalism — resistance to texting — is definitely gone:

Shortly before the Great Language Log Server Meltdown, there was a reader-inspired post on the conversational sequence "yeah no" (4/3/2008), which in turn inspired a lot of interesting reader reaction ("'Yeah no' mailbag", 4/3/2008; "Yet another 'yeah no' note", 4/4/2008).

And just as I was distracted by the old server's death on 4/6/2008 (R.I.P.), other readers sent in a number of fascinating examples of "yeah, no" in TV shows, movies, advertisements, and books.

So a week or ten days late, here they are.

Alex Boulton writes to draw our attention to a curious case of misplaced bowdlerization on the French-language web page of the English Writing Lab of the Hanyang University Center for Teaching and Learning:

The text on the Writing Lab's web page remains in English, regardless of which of the 10 language options the viewer chooses. But the navigational text changes — and apparently something else changes as well.

My post "The discovery of Dr. Syntax" (4/11/2008) ended like this:

No one today would think of calling a schoolteacher “Dr. Syntax”, even in areas where primary schools are still called “grammar schools”. I’m inclined to see this as a loss, though an ambiguous one. The image of Syntax in the 18th century may have been largely a negative one, but at least the name recognition was high.

Several readers wrote to set me straight: "grammar schools", they explained, are secondary schools, not primary schools.

But the school where I started first grade, one of two public elementary schools in the town of Mansfield, Connecticut, was called "Storrs Grammar School"!

In response to Charles Troster's question about a world map showing the adjectival forms of place names, Stephen Powell wrote:

Here's a map of adjective endings for the countries of the world, as suggested by Charles Troster. It was actually very easy to put together using the country data included in Mathematica 6.0; the full code is below.

The key is:
blue = -ese
green = -ian
red = -an
pink = -ish
purple = -i
brown = -er
yellow = -ic
grey = anything else (or Mathematica doesn't know)

It's just matching strings, so Thailand is purple, when that obviously isn't an -i suffix. And Mathematica hasn't recognized Kosovo yet, so that's in green along with (the rest of) Serbia.

(Click on the map to get a larger version.)

In response to my post on the quasi-regular morphology of words like Nepalese vs. Tibetan, Charles Troster writes:

The thought occurred to me – wouldn't it be neat to have a map of the world, coloured in by which ending is used to describe its people? I started trying to make one of these myself, and halfway through I realized I was mixing up the adjectival forms and the demonyms willy-nilly. Maybe if someone a bit more into map-making figured out how to do it :)

Even from the portion I did, though, it's quite amazing to get a visual on how certain endings really only hang out in certain parts of the world. However, "-ian" and "-an" are quite universal and they appear a little bit everywhere.

I agree, it would be neat to see such a map. If you know where this has already been done, or if you do it, let me know and I'll post the map or a link to it.

Yesterday, Mr. Verb asked some questions about morphology and politics:

On News Hour just now, I swear I heard Bush talk about the Tibe[tʃ]an people. I'm puzzled. This is a case of /t/, like the last sound in Tibet, affricating, that is, becoming a 'ch' sound. That is hardly in and or itself striking — actually is regularly pronounced a[ktʃ]ually. But this doesn't usually happen in this environment. Put an -an on Montserrat and see if you get a [t] or an affricate for the adjective form for that place. […]

Is there some pattern here I don't know about? Bush wasn't obviously reading, so that kind of reading-based pronunciation error is probably out. Is Bush treating this (by analogy?) like -tion suffixes? Was he extending the pattern of affrication noted above? Is he really and truly not a competent speaker of English? What's happening?

As it happens, this is a question that I can answer.