Language Log

Rick Rubenstein wrote:

Is the usage "I can't speak to the Iranian situation" as opposed to "I can't speak [about/regarding] the Iranian situation" relatively recent (or at least recently accelerating), as I perceive it to be? I feel as though I first noticed it about a decade ago, and found it very strange. I'm now almost accustomed to it.

There's no question that "speak to (a topic)" is quite a bit more recent than "speak of (a topic)", and somewhat more recent than "speak about (a topic)". But Rick is probably not old enough to have noticed the difference.

In an age where (as Language Log has often had occasion to remark) many purported public apologies are just mealy-mouthed expressions of regret ("I'm sorry it all happened"), or grudging self-exculpatory conditionals ("If some people think I shouldn't have said it, I'm sorry they were upset"), it is good to see a genuine and direct apology for once, addressed (though more than half a century too late) to a man who deserved admiration, gratitude, and respect, but was instead hounded to death. The UK Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, has released a statement regarding the treatment of Alan Turing in the early 1950s, and the operative words are:

on behalf of the British government, and all those who live freely thanks to Alan's work I am very proud to say: we're sorry, you deserved so much better.

That's how to say it (ignoring the punctuation error — the missing comma after work): not a bunch of evasive mumbling about how unfortunate it all was, but a simple "We're sorry."

I learn here that that John McIntyre (whose name has often come up in these parts) has now left the Baltimore Sun. Yet another language writer on a newspaper (who was not merely retailing peeves — quite far from that, in John's case) to bite the dust. I hope that we will hear from him in another venue soon.

[(myl) It didn't take long: as of April 30, 2009, John was blogging again at http://johnemcintyre.blogspot.com/, still under the title "You Don't Say". Welcome back! ]

Irving John "Jack" Good, who died on April 5 at the age of 92, is best known to linguists as the author of a paper on mathematical ecology. The paper is I.J. Good, "The Population Frequencies of Species and the Estimation of Population Parameters", Biometrika 40(3-4) 237-264 (1953), and its abstract reads as follows:

A random sample is drawn from a population of animals of various species. (The theory may also be applied to studies of literary vocabulary, for example.) If a particular species is represented r times in the sample of size N, then r/N is not a good estimate of the population frequency, p, when r is small. Methods are given for estimating p, assuming virtually nothing about the underlying population. The estimates are expressed in terms of smoothed values of the numbers n_r (r = 1, 2, 3, …), where n_r is the number of distinct species that are each represented r times in the sample. (n_r may be described as `the frequency of the frequency r'.) Turing is acknowledged for the most interesting formula in this part of the work. An estimate of the proportion of the population represented by the species occurring in the sample is an immediate corollary. Estimates are made of measures of heterogeneity of the population, including Yule's 'characteristic' and Shannon's 'entropy'. Methods are then discussed that do depend on assumptions about the underlying population. It is here that most work has been done by other writers. It is pointed out that a hypothesis can give a good fit to the numbers n_r but can give quite the wrong value for Yule's characteristic. An example of this is Fisher's fit to some data of Williams's on Macrolepidoptera.

… as translated by Nancy Friedman from the original MoDonese.

The following sign is posted in a New York City shop window:

People seem to imagine the prepositions, like other so-called "function words", belong to a fixed and fairly small list that is handed down to us unchanging over the centuries: at, by, for, from, in, into, of, off, on, to, under, with, within, without, a few others, and that's it for our lifetime. But it's not like that. Not only is the list of prepositions longer than people think (probably over 200 items in all), it is growing. New prepositions pop up from time to time, some borrowed from other languages and others derived from various sources within English. Brett Reynolds and Rodney Huddleston have discovered a new one. Brett heard somebody say (about a water contamination in Walkerton, Ontario): "How is the water, post Walkerton?" And he suspected this meant post had to be a preposition, so he mailed Huddleston about it. Huddleston had already collected an example of the same kind: Post the wash-out from the credit crunch, most assets globally were overpriced (The Weekend Australian, 26-27 April 2008, page 39). And then just today he got a piece of mail including the sentence Post the entitlement offer, the only remaining bank facility is with ABN AMRO Bank. That's three. Get used to it, folks: we have a new preposition amongst us. Post is already in most dictionaries as a prefix. Expect the dictionaries to add "prep" to the entry in… oh, about fifty years or so would be my guess (dictionaries don't exactly work like greased lightning when it comes down to new usages like this: the new words they add every year or two are mostly new nouns).

I know that Language Log has already (e.g. here) mentioned the widespread would of, though I haven’t seen a whole lot about the gradual expansion of that of into uses like hadn’t of where there never would have been a  have (oh! I tried to be funny and write ‘would of been’ but Word automatically turned it into 'would have been' – but at least its little pop-up offered the option of restoring it and even to “stop automatically correcting ‘would of been’” – that’s very open-minded of them!), suggesting that 'of' is becoming a general marker for counterfactual modality, but I just have to report a really beautiful example I heard on my favorite public radio station, WFCR of Amherst, on Feb. 16 during their recent fund drive, out of the mouth of a very literate member of their development staff, K***, –- I’ve even met her and been interviewed by her, and I won’t name her simply because she might be embarrassed and I wouldn’t want to cause that. You know how the announcers have to just keep talking all the time to try to fill the time interestingly enough in between repeating the phone number to call – I’m impressed that they stay as coherent as they do. Anyway, the other announcer, a regular classical music host, had just said something interesting about some composer, and K*** replied, “I didn’t know that, and certainly wouldn’t of have without listening to WFCR.”

I came across an interesting innovation in English morphology while reading this article on "Inukpasuit, Inuit and Viking contact in ancient times". Recounting an Inuit legend, the author says:

Angered by her reluctance, the rich shaman called upon other equally strong shamuses to punish her.

The usual plural of shaman is shamans. shamuses is the plural of shamus, American slang for "private detective", apparently from Yiddish shammes "sexton", due to an equation of the duties of the sexton of a synagogue with those of store security.

One other free speech note from Britain. Today we celebrate the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin, probably the greatest of all the scientists that the UK ever produced. (I know, it depends a lot on how you rank Newton.) Here at Edinburgh we celebrate Darwin as one of our own, and there will be several different events this afternoon. Darwin started as an undergraduate here. (Hated it — said his geology lectures were deeply boring. Whenever I go off to teach a class here, I keep that in mind. Don't be boring. You don't know who's out there among the undergraduates.) He was getting nowhere with the plan to get a degree in medicine, and went away to Cambridge to study theology (astonishingly, he was going to become a country vicar in the Church of England!). But he had joined a student natural history society at Edinburgh, and did other biological work as well, and when he eventually became a full-time (though unpaid and non-professorial) biologist in later life, and developed the radical idea of the gradual evolution of species through natural selection, his devout wife was a bit shocked, but told him he should not suppress his scientific ideas because of her faith. Now that is my ideal of the right attitude toward free speech. Respect me, and whatever religious faith I may have; but know that my beliefs don't override your right to hold and express your opinions, no matter what they are. Darwin's wife Emma truly heard the music. She understood what linguistic, intellectual, and religious freedom should really mean in a diverse and democratic society. And whatever the polemics Darwin was exposed to, despite the formally theocratic nature of the British state (where the monarch also leads the established church), he was never exposed to legal threat for his expression of his ideas.

With all Chinese schoolchildren studying English from elementary school, advertisers saturating the media with English-laden slogans, and English peppering text messages and other electronic communications, there is bound to be a significant amount of English-Sinitic interference in daily usage. What we are also seeing, I believe, is the emergence of hybrid forms of Chinese and English in which not only the lexicons, but also the grammars and the phonologies of the two languages merge with each other in surprising ways.

I here offer, first, an example of Chinese affecting English, and then an instance of English affecting Chinese.

For a couple of days before the inaugural, the most emailed article on the NYT website was Stanley Fish's column "The Last Professor" (1/18/2009), which returns to a favorite theme of his:

In previous columns and in a recent book I have argued that higher education, properly understood, is distinguished by the absence of a direct and designed relationship between its activities and measurable effects in the world.

See "Après Fish, le déluge?", 1/15/2008, for some discussion of his earlier discussions. His reason for revisting the allegedly endangered purity of higher education, this time, is to review a book:

This view of higher education as an enterprise characterized by a determined inutility has often been challenged, and the debates between its proponents and those who argue for a more engaged university experience are lively and apparently perennial. The question such debates avoid is whether the Oakeshottian ideal (celebrated before him by Aristotle, Kant and Max Weber, among others) can really flourish in today’s educational landscape. It may be fun to argue its merits (as I have done), but that argument may be merely academic – in the pejorative sense of the word – if it has no support in the real world from which it rhetorically distances itself. In today’s climate, does it have a chance?

In a new book, “The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the University,” Frank Donoghue (as it happens, a former student of mine) asks that question and answers “No.”

Determined inutility is one thing — Prof. Fish is free to choose that path if he wants to — but determined ignorance of history is something else again.

I’ve been attending annual meetings of the Linguistic Society of America for over 50 years now, and this now stands out for me: either linguists are getting younger or most of the linguists I know are no longer around. One of my major reasons for attending these meetings is to visit and hang around with old friends, which is becoming less and less possible. Last year, at the Chicago meeting, I ran into one of the icons of our field, Eric Hamp, and had a great conversation with him. But there weren’t many old-timers at this year’s meeting. Yes, I meet a lot of younger linguists but that’s not quite the same thing for the elderly, like me. Of the 1,500 registered participants there, I knew only a handful, and most of them were a generation younger than me but still near or over the usual retirement age. LSA meetings are geared to young people trying to make their mark in the field, so that should be expected, I suppose.