Language Log

Jeremy Roebuck, "Defendant with no language proves difficult to prosecute", Philadelphia Inquirer 1/11/2011:

As [Juan Jose Gonzalez Luna] has next to no language skills, his case has baffled Montgomery County courts since his arrest on drug trafficking charges late last year. While courts have come a long way in providing access to interpreters in a host of exotic languages, no one is sure how to translate for a man who knows no language at all. […]

Accommodating those with limited access to language is a rare problem in U.S. courts, but one that judges have met with limited success.

Many have avoided the problem, declaring such defendants incompetent to stand trial. Others have relied on a complex and imperfect method of interpretation, one still viewed with skepticism by many in the legal profession.

And while most courts say they do their best, a good effort is not good enough, said Michele LaVigne, a lawyer and scholar at the University of Wisconsin Law School.

It is not, after all, that defendants like Gonzalez are incompetent to stand trial, but that the U.S. court system largely remains ill-suited for trying them.

"The law is a language-based system," she said. "Drop someone in who can't access that immediately, and we still don't know what to do with them."

Stanley Fish, discussing John Paul Stevens' reasoning about the value of anonymous speech ("Anonymity and the Dark Side of the Internet", NYT 1/3/2011):

… it is not true that a text’s meaning is the same whether or not its source is known. Suppose I receive an anonymous note asserting that I have been betrayed by a friend. I will not know what to make of it — is it a cruel joke, a slander, a warning, a test? But if I manage to identify the note’s author — it’s a friend or an enemy or a known gossip — I will be able to reason about its meaning because I will know what kind of person composed it and what motives that person might have had.

Antonin Scalia, arguing for a textualist rather than intentionalist theory of legal interpretation ("Law and Language", First Things 11/2005; discussed here; a pirated version appears to be here):

Two persons who speak only English see sculpted in the desert sand the words “LEAVE HERE OR DIE.” It may well be that the words were the fortuitous effect of wind, but the message they convey is clear, and I think our subjects would not gamble on the fortuity. […]

If the ringing of an alarm bell has been established, in a particular building, as the conventional signal that the building must be evacuated, it will convey that meaning even if it is activated by a monkey. […]

What is needed for a symbol to convey meaning is not an intelligent author, but a conventional understanding on the part of the readers or hearers that certain signs or certain sounds represent certain concepts. In the case of legal texts, we do not always know the authors, and when we do the authors are often numerous and may intend to attach various meanings to their composite handiwork. But we know when and where the words were promulgated, and thus we can ordinarily tell without the slightest difficulty what they meant to those who read or heard them.

Back in April, I wrote a blog entitled "A Ban on Roman Letter Acronyms?"   In it, I discussed the proposal by the Chinese chairman of the International Federation of Translators, Huang Youyi, to purify Chinese of English expressions.  At the time, no one (outside of Chinese rulership circles) ever thought that it would really happen.  It seemed too preposterous and unworkable.  No matter how much the  language censors and purity zealots detested the look of English words and Roman letters in Chinese writing, they'd never be able to enforce such a ban.

Tom Jackman, "Dropped 'at' in Va. law yields acquittal in school bus case", WaPo 11/30/2010:

Virginia law on passing a stopped school bus has been clear for 40 years. Here – read it yourself:

"A person is guilty of reckless driving who fails to stop, when approaching from any direction, any school bus which is stopped on any highway, private road or school driveway for the purpose of taking on or discharging children."

Yes, drivers must stop a school bus which is, er, stopped.

Wait. Is something missing there?

Indeed. The preposition "at" was deleted in 1970 when the law was amended, the statute's history shows. And a man who zipped past a school bus, while it was picking up children with its lights flashing and stop sign extended, was found not guilty recently by a Fairfax County Circuit Court judge.

"He can only be guilty if he failed to stop any school bus," Judge Marcus D. Williams said at the end of the brief trial of John G. Mendez, 45, of Woodbridge. "And there's no evidence he did."

What speech acts are permitted under the various restrictive laws current in the British Isles, and what penalties accrue to people who step outside the bounds laid down by the law? As I have often mentioned here before, the UK has no real constitutional guarantee of free speech, so a lot of things that any American would take to be unquestionably expressible turn out to bring down fines or imprisonment if you say them in the UK. But since all the cases have hidden complexities, and the issue strikes me as important, and I am currently the only Language Log correspondent in the British Isles, I thought I would give you an update. I will deal with four cases: the Ranting Diplomat, the Mad Bishop, the Robin Hood Airport Twitter Bomber, and (perhaps the strangest of them all, a story from Ireland): Fruit Bat Fellatiogate.

What in the hell motivates the tweeting craze? Twitter seems insane to me. If all my Language Log posts had to be 140 chars I wouldnt be abl

And people wreck their lives tweeting. A UK politician's "joke" suggesting a muslim writer should be stoned to death got him arrested by th

Ian Preston, a London economist, did a bit of research of his own into the issue of the police officer who has been accused of having a little passive-aggressive fun by peppering his inquest evidence with song titles. "It seems to me," Ian remarks in a classically British understated way, "that the evidence cited on this in newspaper discussion is a little underwhelming."

It sure is. Ian not only found yet more song titles in the same police testimony; he then undertook the experiment of checking another random text for comparison, and found song titles there too. What's more, the second text he took was an email on an entirely non-song-related topic from a professional grammarian. What's more, the professional grammarian was me.

A rather extraordinary language story broke in the UK yesterday when a police officer was put on suspension for allegedly peppering his testimony at an inquest with phrases taken from song titles, as a prank. One of the fuller news stories is the one in the tabloid newspaper The Sun (read it here). The question is not, of course, about whether it would be professionally improper to play jokes on a coroner by finding excuses to insert song titles into sworn testimony at an inquest involving the shooting of a civilian by a police marksman; it would be grossly offensive. The question is how an offense of this sort could ever be proved given that song titles are, as everyone must surely know, so frequently taken from everyday phrases and clichés that are extremely frequent in everyone's speech.

In the recent case of Berghuis v. Thompkins [560 U.S.____(2010) (docket 08-1470)] the U.S. Supreme Court ruled five to four that persons being interviewed by the police are required to articulate their answers to the Miranda warning that they have the right to remain silent. The case originated when Van Chester Thompkins was being questioned about a shooting in which one person was killed. Instead of invoking his Miranda right to remain silent, Thompkins simply remained silent, which is what the warning seemed to be allowing him to do. In fact, he remained silent through two hours and forty-five minutes of questioning, at which point the detective asked him if he believed in God and prayed, to which Thompkins spoke for the first time, saying "yes." The detective then asked him, "Do you pray to God to forgive you for shooting the boy down?" Thompkins again answered "yes," but refused to produce a written statement.

I ought to be grateful to see any sort of sporadic twitching of anti-racism, since I despise racists so much, but as I have said before, I sometimes find it hard to summon up a great deal of enthusiasm for some UK victories over hate speech. Let me tell you about a story I meant to mention back at the end of June but didn't get around to. It seems to have almost completely slipped away from public notice in the six weeks. The aspect of it that is likely to astonish Americans acquainted with the First Amendment is that a black city councillor, speaking in a council meeting in Bristol, England, in remarks about a race-related issue before the council, was prosecuted for a criminal offense, and fined, because she (allegedly) used the word coconut. The minor point, of linguistic and philosophical rather than legal relevance, is that strictly she didn't use the word at all.

From the Fox TV forensic psychology police-procedural show Lie To Me (Male Investigator is talking to Female Investigator about a suicide note she has decided is fake):

Male Investigator: Let me ask you something: how can you tell if this thing is fake if it's been typed?

Female Investigator: Word choice, repetition, and the use of passive or active voice can tell you a lot about the person who wrote this.

Of course! Passive versus active voice. Why didn't I think of it. That should tell us what we need to know about who wrote the note.

According to Nicholas Keung, "All immigrants face mandatory language test", The Star, 7/20/2010:

Born and raised in New York, Dodi Robbins graduated from Harvard University and has been practising law for 13 years.

Her first language is English. Yet like all other skilled immigrants applying to settle in Canada, the American corporate lawyer must now take a language test to prove her English is good enough to settle here.

“I was outraged, insulted and floored,” said Robbins, who obtained her law degree at Benjamin N. Cardozo Law School in New York. A mother of two, she has been working in Toronto on a work permit for four years as compliance and regulations counsel for an international financial services company.

“I almost fell off the chair. I’ve been practising law here for years and I have to prove my proficiency in English?”

Last month Ottawa made its language proficiency test mandatory for all skilled immigrant applicants, including native English and French speakers. The so-called “ministerial instructions” stipulate officials are not to process applications without language test results, starting June 26.

Canada's House of Commons has passed bill C-232, which requires that justices of the Supreme Court of Canada understand both English and French without the assistance of an interpreter. This will become law unless vetoed by the Senate or denied royal assent by the Governor General (which is exceedingly unlikely). Amazingly, the bill is a private member's bill introduced by a member of the New Democratic Party, which holds only 36 of 308 seats.