Language Log

At some time after my breakfast tomorrow morning, as I get ready to leave for my office at the University of Edinburgh, the moment will suddenly arrive when the exact time and date (in all day/month/year syntax formats) is 08:08:08 08/08/08. Why does that seem so special and noteworthy?

I know that in Chinese the number 8 sounds like the word meaning "prosperous"; but that can't be relevant, because I know almost nothing of Chinese — I can't even tell whether a sign says ‘dining hall’ or ‘translate server error’. And of course there is nothing cosmically interesting about any particular date or time: the time will be different in each different time zone, and the date will be different in some of them. It's not a matter of rarity either: every time/date combination is exactly as rare as every other. Yet it still seems like it would be really cool to send out an email, or post to Language Log, with a 08:08:08 08/08/08 time stamp (though the server would probably have the time wrong by a few seconds, which would screw things up)… or to take Barbara her morning coffee at exactly 08:08:08 on the morning of 08/08/08.

Most of the spam that I receive is in English, but I have also received spam in French and Chinese. A moment ago I received for the first time a spam message in Hungarian (a language that I do not understand). I can't decide whether or not to be pleased.

Although unintentionally humorous unilingual signs and labels are not as numerous as those that are bilingual, one does come upon them from time to time. Randy Alexander sent me this notice that he saw on a shop front window in Changchun, Jilin. It may be translated: "Starting from today, it is forbidden to urinate or defecate anywhere you please in this place. Fine 200-500 RMB." I get the "anywhere you please" from SUI2DI4 随地 ("anywhere; everywhere; any old place; wherever you please"), which is widely used in such phrases as SUI2DI4 TU3TAN2 随地吐痰 ("spit any old place"). The latter, by the way, is one form of Pekingese behavior that the authorities are trying to curb before the fast-approaching Olympics.

Last Sunday's Foxtrot tries to explain the popularity of texting among teens:

It's a cute theory, but it's almost certainly false.

Mark's post about linguistic celebrities reminds me of a conversation I had quite some years ago with David Perlmutter, whom linguists will know for his work on syntax and sign language. We asked each other who was the most famous person we had met. After running through candidates well known in academia but perhaps less so in the wider world, such as Noam Chomsky, chemist Konrad Bloch, and neurologist Norman Geschwind, I guessed that the most famous person I had met was Senator Patrick Leahy, who was our district attorney before he ran for the Senate and was the speaker at my high school graduation. David's answer was President Eisenhower. When I asked him how he had met President Eisenhower, he told me the following story.

Almost a year ago, I posted here (well, at the old LL site) about a new peer-reviewed, open access journal affiliated with the Linguistic Society of America. The journal is called Semantics and Pragmatics (S&P), and I'm coeditor, together  with Kai von Fintel. The big news today is that we have published our first article, and it's a doozy – Donkey anaphora is in-scope binding, by Chris Barker and Chung-chieh Shan. To give Language Log readers a picture of some of what interests formal semanticists I'll fill you in with a little background on the paper – abstruse stuff, but it has applications. Then (and I hope you'll excuse the awkwardness of me slapping my own back, but who else is gonna do it?) I'll give you an update on how S&P is doing.

A conference I recently attended — I conceal its identity to spare the blushes of the organizers — had apparently forged enough connections to industrially applicable linguistic research to make it succumb to the blandishments of business-school jargon. (If one sups with the devil one should use a long spoon.) Every participant was given one of those fancy plasticized file folders to hold the program and so on, and on this fancy folder was emblazoned the following slogan:

• innovate • connect • achieve

I stared at the unrequested folder for some time, thinking of Orwell, and trying to imagine what ghastly school of business management Newspeak must have spawned the slogan.

NYTimes addresses Russian readers

Something new, at least to me . Together with today's article in the New York
Times At Expense of All Others, Putin Picks a Church, there's a sidebar:

I think that's neat.
Of course you'd have to be reading the NYT in English to start with, or be
alerted by a friend. But it's the first case I know of one of the major American
newspapers making an actively non-English-only presence. (But is it really
starting with Russian rather than, say, Spanish, or does this just reflect the
fact that I pay more attention to their news about Russia?)

It wasn't very long ago that an important part of a field linguist's armamentarium was his or her stock of cassette tapes. One didn't want to run out, so one was always trying to find good quality tapes at a good price and kept stashes of them in cool, dry places.