Language Log

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.

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?