Language Log

It's not only in the United States that linguists have failed in their responsibility to educate the public. As Geoff Pullum explained yesterday, the English Teachers Association of Queensland (Australia) recently published a teachers' guide to grammar that was "full of utter howlers". And some of the discussion of the controversy is not much better. For example, Graham Young wrote today in a blog post at the National Forum ("Grammar's taught to grammarians", 6/14/2008):

The Romans, driven I suspect by their infatuation with standardisation (which palls in comparison to ours, but they caught the disease first), invented grammar. It didn't exist before them, people just spoke languages.

This short passage contains several implicit indictments of my profession's educational failures.

Yesterday, I described Olga Feher's demonstration that species-typical songs emerge, over several generations, in an isolated colony of zebra finches founded by birds raised in isolation ("Creole birdsong", 5/9/1008). I compared this pattern to Derek Bickerton's "bioprogram" hypothesis, first put forward in his 1981 book Roots of Language, and discussed again in his 2008 book Bastard Tongues ("A Trail-Blazing Linguist Finds Clues to Our Common Humanity in the World's Lowliest Languages"). As the Wikipedia article on the "language bioprogram hypothesis" explains, Derek's idea is that

when the linguistic exposure of children in a community consists solely of a highly unstructured pidgin[,] these children use their innate language capacity to transform the pidgin, which characteristically has high syntactic variability, into a language with a highly structured grammar.

I also mentioned some of the subsequent debate over the bioprogram theory of creolization, quoting from an encyclopedia article by John Rickford and Barbara Grimes. Some of this debate has focused on whether the process of regularization in creole languages is complete in the first generation of native learners, or takes several generations. I observed that Bickerton's general idea ought to be consistent with a multi-generational emergence of a cognitive phenotype, where the species-typical pattern results from the accumulation of learning biases over several iterations.

However, some of Bickerton's critics have seen multi-generational creolization as evidence against his hypothesis. And to my surprise, it seems that he agrees with them. In an interesting comment on my post, he wrote:

Mark, you say that "Where social learning is involved, perhaps it's normal for the phenotype to emerge over multiple generations." And you may well be right, since social learning has nothing to do with creolization. How can you "socially learn" something for which you have no model, which didn't exist until you made it?

Some time ago Geoff Pullum wrote about the connection between the song "Happy Birthday" and linguistics, via Archibald Hill, Professor of Linguistics at the University of Texas, who inherited part of the rights to the song. The convoluted story of the copyright to the song has now been sorted out by Robert Brauneis in a paper available here. Professor Brauneis is guest-blogging on the topic today at the Volokh Conspiracy.

You might have thought that the Roman empire was doomed by barbarian invasions, lead poisoning, the loss of masculine values, or climate change. But Jim Bisso at Epea Pteroenta has pointed out that at the very height of the empire's power, in the reign of Trajan, Roman culture had already been compromised by an insidious agent that you probably have never considered, though it's obvious in retrospect.

One of the sturdiest linguistic canards is that George Bernard Shaw facetiously proposed spelling fish as ghoti, with gh pronounced as in laugh, o as in women, and ti as in nation. This respelling, the story goes, was intended by Shaw to highlight the absurdity of English orthography. But ghoti appears nowhere in Shaw's writings, according to devoted Shavians who have thoroughly scoured his works. The earliest attribution of ghoti to Shaw that I've found is from 1946, and the attributor is Mario Pei, not always the most reliable source when it comes to language-related information. By that point, ghoti had been circulating in the popular press for nearly a decade. Previously, the earliest known appearance of ghoti was from a 1937 newspaper article discovered by the redoubtable Fred Shapiro. That still allows for the slight possibility that Shaw was the originator, if unnamed. But now Matthew Gordon of the University of Missouri-Columbia has antedated ghoti — all the way back to 1874. And the 1874 article is quoting a source from 1855, a year before Shaw was born.

On the wall behind the table where I usually sit to blog, there's a framed print, shown in faded miniature on the right. The title below the picture is "Dr. Syntax Making a Discovery".

But there's not a subjunctive or a preterite in sight. The couple in the foreground, though perhaps engaged in discovery, don't look very intellectual. The old geezer in the background seems to be examining a tree — but it's a willow, not a representation of constituent structure or grammatical relations. What gives?