Language Log

I've been taking advantage of the rabid interest in "Downton Abbey" lately to report on some verbal anachronisms that have cropped up in the show's second season (originally broadcast on ITV in the UK late last year and now wrapping on PBS in the US). Over the past few days I've written about it in columns for The Boston Globe and the Visual Thesaurus, and I was interviewed on the topic for NPR Morning Edition earlier today. I also put together a video compilation of questionable lines from the show, and it's been making the rounds in culture-y corners of the blogosphere:

Last spring, I took a look ("Phonemic diversity decays 'out of Africa'?", 4/16/2011) at an interesting paper by Quentin Atkinson ("Phonemic Diversity Supports a Serial Founder Effect Model of Language Expansion from Africa", Science 4/15/2011). Atkinson argued that a survey of sound systems around the world supports the so-called serial founder effect (SFE) "in which successive population bottlenecks during range expansion progressively reduce diversity", just as a similar survey of human genetic and phenotypic diversity does. He also argued that the phonemic-diversity evidence points to an origin in Africa, again just like the genetic evidence.

I expressed some skepticism about this argument, mainly based on some of the choices that Atkinson made in quantifying "phonemic diversity". One choice that I considered in detail was the critical role played by a few features such as tone, which (on the time scale of human global migration) are at least as likely to result from innovation and areal spread as from survival.

Now Keith Hunley, Claire Bowern, and Meghan Healy ("Rejection of a serial founder effects model of genetic and linguistic coevolution", Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 2/1/2012) have taken another look at the genomic and phonemic predictions of the SFE.  They chose a very different way of coding the distribution of phonemes — formally analogous to the way that they coded genetic variation — and this time, the phonemic data gave very different results.

A couple of days ago, The Telegraph quoted an actor and a television producer emitting typically brainless "Kids Today" plaints about how modern modes of communication, especially Twitter, are degrading the English language, so that "the sentence with more than one clause is a problem for us", and "words are getting shortened". I spent a few minutes fact-checking this foolishness, or at least the word-length bit of it — but some readers may have misinterpreted my post as arguing against the view that there are any on-going changes in English prose style.

[Below is a guest post by Arika Okrent.]

This weekend I had the pleasure of attending a celebration for the 30th anniversary of the establishment of the Linguistics Department at Gallaudet University. Gallaudet is the world's only university for the deaf. Nearly all the undergraduates at Gallaudet have some kind of hearing loss (a very small number of hearing students may be admitted each year), while the graduate school (offering programs in audiology, deaf education, psychology, and interpretation, among others) has a significant number of hearing students. I received an M.A. in Linguistics from Gallaudet in 1997.

In yesterday's post "Deceptively valuable", I made use of counts from the Google Books ngram dataset, as seen through Mark Davies' convenient interface. That was a case where the ngram dataset's flaws (uncertain metadata, lack of ability to look at context, etc.) are more than balanced by its virtues. In thinking about some of the other issues involved, I remembered a case that makes it possible to check the ngram dataset's answers against those given by another historical collection: the trend over the past century for Americans to replace "sneaked" with "snuck".

In response to "Strunk and Ptah", 10/6/2011, Reader KD has pointed me to a passage in James P. Allen, "Middle Egyptian: an introduction to the language and culture of hieroglyphs", 2000, which describes a real instance of ancient Egyptian prescriptivism.  Crucial background is provided by the history of demonstratives in Egyptian:

Inspired by Mark Liberman's post, "Putting the X in AXB," I spent some time trying to find the origin for this venerable snowclone. A quick check of newspaper databases uncovered "putting the fun in fundamentals" from November 1912, and it turns out that the fall of 1912 was when the snowclone snowballed. It's a nice example of how, even a century ago, lingua-memes could "go viral" (and go stale).

When the Google Ngram Viewer came out, I tempered my enthusiastic praise with a complaint ("More on 'culturomics'", 12/17/2010):

The Science paper says that "Culturomics is the application of high-throughput data collection and analysis to the study of human culture".  But  as long as the historical text corpus itself remains behind a veil at Google Books, then "culturomics" will be restricted to a very small corner of that definition, unless and until the scholarly community can reproduce an open version of the underlying collection of historical texts.

I'm happy to say that the (non-Google part of) the Culturomics crew at the Harvard Cultural Observatory have taken a significant step in that direction, building on the work of the Open Library. You can check out what they've done with an alpha version of an online search interface at http://bookworm.culturomics.org/. But in my opinion, the online search interface, alpha or not, is the least important part of what's going on here.

In a great use of comic art, Roy Boney Jr. has created a graphic feature for the magazine Indian Country Today about the history of the Cherokee syllabary developed by Sequoyah in the early 19th century. Boney begins with the syllabary's inception and early use, and continues all the way through technological developments like the Selectric typewriter and Unicode standardization. Check it out here.

I gave a talk a few weeks ago at the Laboratoire de Phonétique et Phonologie in Paris, founded in 1897 by L'abbé P.-J. Rousselot. Antonia Colazo-Simon took this picture of l'abbé and me:

A striking recent paper by Quentin Atkinson ("Phonemic Diversity Supports a Serial Founder Effect Model of Language Expansion from Africa", Science 4/15/2011) has been the subject of a lot of discussion recently. Its abstract:

Human genetic and phenotypic diversity declines with distance from Africa, as predicted by a serial founder effect in which successive population bottlenecks during range expansion progressively reduce diversity, underpinning support for an African origin of modern humans. Recent work suggests that a similar founder effect may operate on human culture and language. Here I show that the number of phonemes used in a global sample of 504 languages is also clinal and fits a serial founder–effect model of expansion from an inferred origin in Africa. This result, which is not explained by more recent demographic history, local language diversity, or statistical non-independence within language families, points to parallel mechanisms shaping genetic and linguistic diversity and supports an African origin of modern human languages.

This post is the promised short discussion of Michael Dunn, Simon J. Greenhill, Stephen C. Levinson & Russell D. Gray, "Evolved structure of language shows lineage-specific trends in word-order universals", Nature, published online 4/13/2011. [Update: free downloadable copies are available here.] As I noted earlier, I recommend the clear and accessible explanation that Simon Greenhill and Russell Gray have put on the Austronesian Database website in Auckland — in fact, if you haven't read that explanation, you should go do so now, because I'm not going to recapitulate what they did and their reasons for doing it, beyond quoting the conclusion:

These family-specific linkages suggest that language structure is not set by innate features of the cognitive language parser (as suggested by the generativists), or by some over-riding concern to "harmonize" word-order (as suggested by the statistical universalists). Instead language structure evolves by exploring alternative ways to construct coherent language systems. Languages are instead the product of cultural evolution, canalized by the systems that have evolved during diversification, so that future states lie in an evolutionary landscape with channels and basins of attraction that are specific to linguistic lineages.

And I should start by saying that I'm neither a syntactician nor a typologist.  The charitable way to interpret this is that I don't start with any strong prejudices on the subject of syntactic typology. From this unbiased perspective, it seems to me that this paper adds a good idea that has been missing from most traditional work in syntactic typology, but at the same time, it misses two good ideas that have been extensively developed in the related area of historical syntax.

Last night Jay Leno presented an advertisement by someone a little bit confused about Mexican(-American) culture: it urged people to get ready for Cinco de Mayo on May 6th. "Cinco de Mayo" of course means "the fifth of May". In this case the confusion is real – Cinco de Mayo does not fall on the sixth of May, but in theory it could. "Cinco de Mayo" is the name of a holiday. The holiday is named after the day on which it falls, but the name is not itself a date. That means that we can imagine a future in which the holiday is still named "Cinco de Mayo" but falls on another date. It might be decided to celebrate on another day but to keep the traditional name, or Mexico might adapt a different calendar, one that had no month called "Mayo".