Language Log

Samuel Johnson has been commemorated on a special 50p coin, as Geoff Pullum notes, but he's not the only linguist (or linguistically inclined scholar) that has been pictured on currency.  Sejong the Great, the 15th-century Korean ruler who developed the Hangul alphabet, can be found on the South Korean 10,000-won banknote.

This is from the most recent series of South Korean currency (the 2006-2007 series), though Sejong has been featured on Korean banknotes in the past. According to Wikipedia, the new note also features text from Yongbieocheonga, the first work of literature written in the Hangul script.

For more about Sejong and Hangul, see Bill Poser's Oct. 9, 2005 post, "Hangul Day." And for more pictures of scientific scholars on paper currency, see the online collection of Jacob Bourjaily.

In the comments on "Logical prescriptivism" (5/25/2009), where the inconsistency of "myself" vs. "himself" was under discussion, the fact that it's "thyself" rather than "theeself" came up.

But in addition to 15,869 instances of "thyself", Literature Online finds 19 instances of "theeself", all from 19th century drama or from dialogue in 19th century novels. And the authors include Dickens, Trollope, and Twain.

A recent publication (Rajesh P. N. Rao, Nisha Yadav, Mayank N. Vahia, Hrishikesh Joglekar, R. Adhikari, and Iravatham Mahadevan, "Entropic Evidence for Linguistic Structure in the Indus Script", Science, published online 23 April 2009; also supporting online material) claims a breakthrough in understanding the nature of the symbols found in inscriptions from the Indus Valley Civilization.

Two major types of nonlinguistic systems are those that do not exhibit much sequential structure (“Type 1” systems) and those that follow rigid sequential order (“Type 2” systems). […] Linguistic systems tend to fall somewhere between these two extremes […] This flexibility can be quantified statistically using conditional entropy, which measures the amount of randomness in the choice of a token given a preceding token. […]

We computed the conditional entropies of five types of known natural linguistic systems […], four types of nonlinguistic systems […], and an artificially-created linguistic system […]. We compared these conditional entropies with the conditional entropy of Indus inscriptions from a well-known concordance of Indus texts.

We found that the conditional entropy of Indus inscriptions closely matches those of linguistic systems and remains far from nonlinguistic systems throughout the entire range of token set sizes.

Don Ringe's guest post back on January 6, "The Linguistic Diversity of Aboriginal Europe", sparked a lively discussion, and Don responded with a series of other posts responding to questions and comments: "Horse and wheel in the early history of Indo-European", "More on IE wheels and horses", "Inheritance versus lexical borrowing: a case with decisive sound-change evidence", "The linguistic history of horses, gods, and wheeled vehicles", "Some Wanderwörter in Indo-European languages".

Now, despite his claim that "after this I'm going to have to stop posting for a while", he's sent another essay:

Here is an interim post clearing up some outstanding questions; the last part turned into an in-depth discussion of the "thorn cluster" problem that will probably be published somewhere eventually.  I do mean to get back to the "IE homeland" problem, but that won't be possible till the summer.

Here's hoping that he gets drawn back in again earlier than that!

Last week, in honor of Darwin's birthday, we featured a guest post by Tecumseh Fitch: "Musical protolanguage: Darwin's theory of language evolution revisited". A few days later, Derek Bickerton contributed a critical commentary.  Now Tecumseh has sent in a response to Derek — or, perhaps I should say, Prof. Fitch has contributed a response to Prof. Bickerton — which is presented below.

In response to W. Tecumseh Fitch's post "Musical protolanguage: Darwin's theory of language evolution revisited"  (2/12/2009), Derek Bickerton sent the commentary presented below.

A guest post by W. Tecumseh Fitch, on the Occasion of Charles Darwin's 200th Birthday.

On the 200th anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin, let's stop to ponder their contributions to the English lexicon. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, Darwin is credited with the first known English use of 144 different words, including creationist, phylogeny, archaeopteryx, alfalfa, and rodeo. And his birthday-mate Lincoln? Only one: Michigander.

Read more about it in my Word Routes column on the Visual Thesaurus.

I've recently read David W. Anthony's book The Horse, the Wheel, and Language, and I especially appreciated his clear explanation of the complex world of Eastern European and Central Asian archaeology. There's a lot of new and relevant information, but you really do need a good guide — the facts and conjectures are complex enough, but the difficulty is multiplied many fold by the evolved disciplinary nomenclature, which is sometimes so baroque as to defy parody.

Published today: R. D. Gray, A. J. Drummond, and S. J. Greenhill, "Language Phylogenies Reveal Expansion Pulses and Pauses in Pacific Settlement", Science 323(5913):479:483, 23 January 2009. The abstract:

Debates about human prehistory often center on the role that population expansions play in shaping biological and cultural diversity. Hypotheses on the origin of the Austronesian settlers of the Pacific are divided between a recent "pulse-pause" expansion from Taiwan and an older "slow-boat" diffusion from Wallacea. We used lexical data and Bayesian phylogenetic methods to construct a phylogeny of 400 languages. In agreement with the pulse-pause scenario, the language trees place the Austronesian origin in Taiwan approximately 5230 years ago and reveal a series of settlement pauses and expansion pulses linked to technological and social innovations. These results are robust to assumptions about the rooting and calibration of the trees and demonstrate the combined power of linguistic scholarship, database technologies, and computational phylogenetic methods for resolving questions about human prehistory.

An unusually clear explanation of the project, along with a great deal of background information, is available on the web here.

Don Ringe's guest post "The Linguistic Diversity of Aboriginal Europe" (1/6/2009) led to a series of additional posts in response to readers' questions: "Horse and wheel in the early history of Indo-European", "More on IE wheels and horses", "Inheritance versus lexical borrowing: a case with decisive sound-change evidence", "The linguistic history of horses, gods, and wheeled vehicles". This morning brings another in the series.

As in Don's earlier posts, there's quite a bit of technical detail; but it seems that many readers are happy to follow Don through the historical undergrowth. Even if you find some of the terminology and typography puzzling, these posts may give you a  picture of how historical linguists think and reason.

And as before, because the typographical details are very important in this sort of discussion, and I'm not certain that I've rendered them correctly in html, a pdf of the post is here.

Arnold's post on linguistic(s) put me in mind of something I never got around to blogging last year. The hook was Richard Zoglin's appreciation of George Carlin in Time:

Most famously, Carlin talked about the "seven words you can never say on television," foisting the verboten few into his audience's face with the glee of a classroom cutup and the scrupulousness of a social linguist.

"Social linguist" — I had an image of Geoff Pullum at a cocktail party, with one hand in his blazer pocket and the other wrapped around a martini glass. But on reflection I figured the phrase was what the writer had made of hearing sociolinguist. In fact social linguist gets 700+ Google hits, most of them almost certainly the products of mishearings:

"Language is never about language," said social linguist Walt Wolfram. (Associated Press)

Barbara Kannapell, a social linguist based in Washington, said the shortage of sign-language interpreters is a national problem. (New York Times)

In a popular book of that name, social linguist Deborah Tannen has documented just how much our culture is dominated by an "adversarial frame of mind." Kenneth Plummer, Intimate Citizenship (U of Washington Press)

You'd have to say, then, that these are eggcorns in the technical sense. But does it really matter? I mean, "social linguist" could have been the standard term, right?

This started with Don Ringe's guest post "The Linguistic Diversity of Aboriginal Europe". He followed up with a more detailed account of "Horse and wheel in the early history of Indo-European", and an answer to some questions under the title "More on IE wheels and horses", and then this morning's post "Inheritance versus lexical borrowing: a case with decisive sound-change evidence".

Readers have added a large number of interesting and provocative comments and questions (110 on the original post alone). As usual, responses are often too long to fit comfortably in the comment format, and our traditional practice has been  to respond in follow-up posts where interest and time permit.

Continuing that tradition, I've posted below Don's response to a comment by Etienne on Don's follow-up post on the history of the word for horse. Though the background is complex, this fragment of the conversation is quite coherent on its own.