Language Log

In the news today I came across this rather strange report from the Associated Press:

MIAMI — U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials say they have intercepted a rare and dangerous insect found in a shipment of flowers at a Miami airport that could cause significant damage.

Officials said Saturday they were examining a box of flowers last week at Miami International airport when they found Hemiptera. Hemiptera's are typically aphids, cicadas, and leaf hoppers and comprise about 80,000 different species. They feed on the seed heads of grasses and sedges. The insect is found in South America.

Officials believe it is the first time the insect has been found in the U.S.

Yesterday the six-week faculty and the second-session three-week faculty ended our teaching stints at the 2009 Linguistic Institute sponsored by the Linguistic Society of America and the University of California at Berkeley. The two second-session Language Loggers, Adam Albright and I, were in complementary distribution with the two first-session Language Loggers, Geoffs Nunberg and Pullum: we did not meet in Berkeley. Not all of us have finished our work for our classes — I still have 15 of my 42 papers to grade — but our tight-knit community — living in the same dorm, sorry, residential unit (palatial by my loooong-ago student-era standards) and eating at the same university dining hall (spectacular by my ditto standards) — is history.

A couple of days ago, I posted about a problematic modified rebus, in the form of a heart with a skull and crossbones superimposed ("Love to Die / Death", 7/31/2009).  Now we have yet another complicated graphic combination consisting of a pictograph plus a sinographic semantic key / classifier (or radical) plus a slash over the pictograph.

… on Language Log and my blog, available here.

An editorial by Miranda Robertson in the latest Journal of Biology, "Of primordial genomes and cooperative kittens", discusses the problems that horizontal gene transfers pose for phylogenetic analysis of bacterial genomes:

The extraction of tree structures from the web of gene transfers requires that transferred genes be subtracted by some means from the database of genes used to construct the trees. […]

Whether because of horizontal gene transfer or the compression of branching events early in the evolution of prokaryotes, the lines of vertical descent […] defy resolution, at least for now and perhaps for ever. There is a character in the comic opera The Mikado, by WS Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, who claims: 'I can trace my ancestry to a protoplasmal primordial atomic globule. Consequently my family pride is something inconceivable.' Inconceivable and probably misplaced, it would seem. The character is named, more appropriately even than Gilbert could have imagined, Pooh-Bah.

I'm sitting at San Francsico Airport waiting for my ride (my plane came in half an hour early from London — take that, air travel grumblers!), and beside me is a British Airways cabin crew member waiting for a friend. He just told me about a flight he was once on where an overhead bin opened accidentally and a didgeridoo fell out and hit a passenger on the head so hard that medics on the flight recommended he be taken off the flight at the first opportunity to land. It's hard to believe people would take seriously the idea that you were just sitting reading when you suffered a head wound from a falling didgeridoo. On the same flight there had been a case of vomiting, and a passenger who had fouled his pants. At the end of the whole flight the pilot said to the crew, "Let's take stock. We've had a spew, a poo, and a didgeridoo. You couldn't make it up, could you?" And I swear I didn't. Poetry in real life. My flight to California, I'm so glad to say, was much less eventful; nothing to write poetry about.

[This post is uncategorized, and I really think it has to be. If our system of categories allowed it, I would mark it "uncategorizable".]

Quoting from the new blog The Translation and Interpretation Intitiative for Iranian Protesters:

The Translation and Interpretation Initiative for Iranian Protesters (TIIIP) is an ad hoc initiative to produce free, publication-ready translations and high-quality interpretations of the written and spoken communication streaming out of Iran in the Farsi (Persian) language in the form of e-mails, YouTube videos, Facebook entries, press releases, etc.

The work is being done at the translate4iran wiki. The biggest need is for people who can translate from Persian into English, but they add that

Please recall that you don’t have to be a Farsi translator or even a Farsi bilingual to help! We desperately need help from English writers, editors, proofreaders, publication relations professionals, techies, geeks, and administrative personnel. There is a role for everyone!

The latest (20 June) New Scientist has an article ("Are orangs our nearest relatives?" by Graham Lawton, pp. 6-7) on an article in a recent Journal of Biogeography (by Jeffrey Schwartz and John Grehan) proposing a family tree for primates in which orangutans rather than chimpanzees are the closest relatives of human beings. (Schwartz has been arguing this position for about 20 years.) The now-orthodox position is based on DNA similarities, which Grehan argues fails to distinguish between "derived novelties" and "primitive retentions". Other evolutionary biologists dispute this.

My purpose here is not to judge the evidence and the arguments, but only to point out that the derived novelty vs. primitive retention distinction is a familiar one from the field of linguistic taxonomy, where it goes under the names "shared innovations" vs. "shared retentions", shared innovations outweighing shared retentions in establishing how closely languages are related to one another.

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.