Language Log

I've long since given up writing about the fakeness of the term "nor'easter" (see "Nor'easter considered fake", 1/25/2004; "The storm is real, the word is still fake", 1/22/2005), partly because it's futile, and partly because it doesn't matter, and mostly because people are entitled to use phony dialect forms if they want — here as elsewhere, usage is et ius et norma loquendi.

The abstract of Shijulal Nelson-Sathi et al., "Networks uncover hidden lexical borrowing in Indo-European language evolution", Proc. Roy. Soc. B, published online 11/24/2010:

Language evolution is traditionally described in terms of family trees with ancestral languages splitting into descendent languages. However, it has long been recognized that language evolution also entails horizontal components, most commonly through lexical borrowing. For example, the English language was heavily influenced by Old Norse and Old French; eight per cent of its basic vocabulary is borrowed. Borrowing is a distinctly non-tree-like process—akin to horizontal gene transfer in genome evolution—that cannot be recovered by phylogenetic trees. Here, we infer the frequency of hidden borrowing among 2346 cognates (etymologically related words) of basic vocabulary distributed across 84 Indo-European languages. The dataset includes 124 (5%) known borrowings. Applying the uniformitarian principle to inventory dynamics in past and present basic vocabularies, we find that 1373 (61%) of the cognates have been affected by borrowing during their history. Our approach correctly identified 117 (94%) known borrowings. Reconstructed phylogenetic networks that capture both vertical and horizontal components of evolutionary history reveal that, on average, eight per cent of the words of basic vocabulary in each Indo-European language were involved in borrowing during evolution. Basic vocabulary is often assumed to be relatively resistant to borrowing. Our results indicate that the impact of borrowing is far more widespread than previously thought.

Prescriptive rules are often the result of someone's idiosyncratic attempt to apply logic to a half-understood question of linguistic analysis. In promoting his new book Strictly English, Simon Heffer recently provided us with two examples ("English grammar: Not for debate",  9/11/2010, and "Mr. Heffer huffs again", 9/12/2010).

Such exercises are sometimes motivated by a genuine change in the language, which brings some particular question to the would-be logician's attention.  Thus Ben Zimmer pointed out ("Further 'warning'", 9/12/2010) that Mr. Heffer's worry about intransitive warn correlates with a century-long trend of increasing use, originating in the U.S. and spreading to the U.K.

But in some cases, prescriptive confusion has reigned for centuries on both sides of the Atlantic, because usage is mixed and the idiosyncratic logic of self-appointed experts has pointed in different directions. In this morning's Breakfast Experiment™, I planned to discuss one such example and present some historical evidence. But as often happens, the facts turned out to be more interesting than I expected.

A couple of weeks ago, I promised to say something about Guy Deutscher's 8/26/2010 NYT magazine article, "Does Your Language Shape How You Think?".  I was reminded of this still-unfulfilled obligation by Ange Mlinko's 9/7/2010 piece in The Nation, "Bluer Rather Than Pinker", which is a review of the new book (Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages) that Deutscher's NYT article was promoting. I'm still putting off Deutscher, but I'm going to take Mlinko to task for two howlers about the history of linguistics, one major and one minor.

Mlinko is a poet who occasionally writes on linguistic topics for The Nation. But poetic license applies at best only to poems, not to book reviews.  Even poets should be responsible for basic historical truth.

Kate Gladstone writes to draw my attention to an "interesting oddity about some people's (wrong) notions of how the English language sounded in a quite recent period of history". Commenting at Barking Carnival a couple of days ago, "Nero" decried the "sad state of subject-verb agreement" and the decay of penmanship, and also advanced this interesting hypothesis about the past fifty years of phonetic history:

I read an interview in Rolling Stone with the cast of AMC’s Mad Men and one of the actors said they have to be very careful with all of their pronunciation. “There was no ‘gonna’ or ‘shoulda’ back then [in the 1960's]”

David Craig asked whether Anand Giridharadas is suffering from the Recency Illusion in his small piece on "so" (Follow My Logic? A Connective Word Takes the Lead, NYT 5/21/2010), which observes that

“So” may be the new “well,” “um,” “oh” and “like.” No longer content to lurk in the middle of sentences, it has jumped to the beginning, where it can portend many things: transition, certitude, logic, attentiveness, a major insight. […]

From xkcd a little while ago:

Following up on yesterday's Snuck-gate post — and on "Snuckward Ho!", 11/29/2009 — I thought I'd take advantage of Mark Davies' new Corpus of Historical American English to provide a graphical summary of the origin and progress of the strong past tense of sneak.

In my latest Word Routes column on the Visual Thesaurus, I take a look at Harry McCracken's excellent historical analysis of the word fanboy, from something of an in-joke among underground cartoonists in the '70s to an all-purpose techie put-down in the '00s. I throw into the mix the acronymic mnemonic FANBOYS, standing for for, and, nor, but, or, yet, and so, a list that is supposed to constitute a class of "coordinating conjunctions" that pattern alike. Geoff Pullum has already noted the bogosity of this list here, and my column relies on further dismantling of the FANBOYS myth by Brett Reynolds of English, Jack and Karl Hagen of Polysyllabic. My final question:

What I'm wondering is, could there have been any cross-pollination between the grammatical mnemonic and the fanboys of comics, science fiction, and the like? If teachers of English composition were keeping FANBOY(S) alive as an acronym in the '50s and '60s, perhaps that had an indirect effect on those underground cartoonists who started using it in the '70s. That's assuming they were paying attention during their language-arts classes and not just reading comic books!

Read the whole column here.

In the most recent ethnic violence in Nigeria's Plateau State, the victims were "members of Plateau’s leading ethnic group, the Berom, in the villages of Ratt and Dogona Hauwa" (Adam Nossiter, "Clashes kill dozens in central Nigeria", NYT 3/7/2010, update with fuller casualty count here), and the perpetrators were "Fulani herdsmen".

Some excellent background on this conflict can be found in a report by Roger Blench, "Access Rights and Conflict over Common Pool Resources on the Jos Plateau, Nigeria", Report to the World Bank on Jigawa Enhancement of Wetlands Livelihoods Project, 9/13/2003:

Plateau State is distinctive for its high level of ethnolinguistic diversity, and it is populated by a great variety of small groups living in hamlets, with a complex clan organisation and ritual kingship systems. This has ensured that no one language or people is dominant, although the largest ethnic groups are probably the Berom, Ngas and Tarok. Gunn (1953) gives a useful overview of the main ethnic groups of the Plateau region.

Fulɓe movement into the lowland regions is less well chronicled, but it is generally more recent than the movement onto the Plateau. A low human population, low levels of tsetse and mosquitoes and unlimited grassland drew Fulɓe pastoralists from all over the semi-arid regions. Fulɓe established themselves in all parts of the Plateau and originally lived alongside cultivators with minimal friction. To judge by interviews, Fulɓe settlement began in the late nineteenth century but was given a great boost by the end of warfare consequent on colonialism (Morrison 1976).   [links added]

Doyle Redland has the story:

Charles Darwin saw the history of languages as a model for "descent with modification" in biological evolution; and researchers from Thomas Jefferson to Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza and beyond have been excited about the idea of combining linguistic, biological, and geographical evidence to shed light on the history of human populations.

Most recent linguists and anthropologists who are knowledgeable about such topics have been skeptical about how close we should expect linguistic and biological descent to be, in general. There are many ways, both wholesale and retail, for people to end up speaking a language different from the language of their ancestors, and similarly many ways for genes to flow from one speech community to another.

A recent contribution to the skeptical side of the discussion is Hafid Laayouni et al., "A genome-wide survey does not show the genetic distinctiveness of Basques", Human Genetics, published online 1/16/2010.

The winner of the 2009 Dutch Word of the Year, as selected in an online poll conducted by the Van Dale dictionary group and Pers newspaper, was ontvrienden, a social networking verb equivalent to English unfriend or defriend. NRC Handelsblad recently reported that ontvrienden can be found in the Dutch historical dictionary Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal with citations back to 1626:

The entry quotes references dating from 1626 and 1658. One is a reference to the infamous courtesan of Lais, a woman so beautiful — and sexually available — that she drew pupils away from a famous philosopher, "defriending" him in the old-fashioned sense of the word. "Today you can defriend someone. In the past, you were defriended," said Wouter van Wingerden, a linguistic consultant with the Society for the Dutch Language.

The other reference is found in Psalm 88:8, translated in the King James Bible as "Thou hast put away mine acquaintance far from me." The Dutch version quoted in the Woordenboek might be close to 400 years old but it is definitely more concise. It reads 'Mijn vrienden hebt ghy my ont-vrindt,' which translates to "My friends thou hast defriended."

The word fell into disuse after the 17th century, perhaps because the Netherlands had few friends left. By 1672, the young Dutch republic found itself at war with France, England, and the dioceses of Cologne and Munster.

Similarly, unfriend, the New Oxford American Dictionary Word of 2009, is dated by the OED back to 1659. For further thoughts on the revival of unfriend and ontvrienden, see my latest Word Routes column on the Visual Thesaurus, "'Sleeping Beauties' in English and Dutch."