Language Log

From the Names Desk at Language Log Plaza, a bulletin from the October 31 New Scientist, p. 6:

ALIEN worlds deserve more romantic names. So says Wladimir Lyra at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany, who has proposed mythological monikers for the known exoplanets.

The profusion of planets discovered around other stars in the past 15 years are known only by drab and hard to decipher strings of numbers and letters – at least officially. Instead, Lyra suggests that the 400 exoplanets found so far should be named after characters from Greek and Roman mythology, in the same way the planets in our own solar system were. For example, MOA-2007-BLG-400-Lb becomes "Achilles" (arxiv.org/abs/0910.3989).

Alas, Lyra's suggestions are unlikely to become official. The International Astronomical Union, which approves names for objects in our own solar system, considers it impractical to name exoplanets, given how many of them are likely to be discovered.

On beyond the dwarf planet Pluto and off to other worlds!

First, a new twist on a story that our legal desk covered back in February: at the annual Ig Nobel awards ceremony earlier tonight, the Prize for Literature was awarded to the Garda Síochána na hÉireann (i.e. the Irish Police Force) for the 50 or more speeding tickets they've issued in the name "Prawo Jazdy", Polish for "driver's license."

And as if that wasn't enough onomastic excitement, the 2009 Ig Nobel Prize for Veterinary Medicine was awarded for work reported in Bertenshaw, C. and Rowlinson, P., Exploring Stock Managers' Perceptions of the Human-Animal Relationship on Dairy Farms and an Association with Milk Production, Anthrozoos: A Multidisciplinary Journal of The Interactions of People and Animals 22:1, pp. 59-69, 2009. Specifically, Dr. Bertenshaw and Dr. Rowlinson share the prize for their demonstration that (and here I quote from the article's abstract): "On farms where cows were called by name, milk yield was 258 liters higher than on farms where this was not the case (p < 0.001)."

Yet all this groundbreaking research leaves me with more questions than answers. What is the causal direction behind the correlation? And if my cow produced 238 liters too little milk, would I admit to the researchers the names I used for her? And how much milk can an Irish policeman get from a speeding Polish cow?

Yesterday an applicant from China came to my office and introduced herself to me as Runxiao ("Moist Dawn").  However, in previous correspondence, she had always referred to herself as Layn (a variant of Lane; other variants of the name Lane are:  Laen, Laene, Lain, Laine, Laney, Lanie, Layn, Layne, and Laynne ("living near a lane"; "descendant of Laighean or Luan" in Gaelic) — so say the name books.  When I asked her which name she preferred, she said, "You can call me Runxiao."

"But what about Layn?" I asked.  "Didn't you used to go by the name Layn?"

"Oh, yes!" she replied cheerfully with a gleaming smile.  "When I was in China, I called myself Layn, but now that I'm in America, I call myself Runxiao."

In the past week my new credit card had been sent by courier service to someone called "Pullem"; a student paper had cited a linguist named "Pollum" for work of mine; and a kindly administrator had sent out an email to a large list in Edinburgh congratulating "our own Geoff Pullman" on being elected to the British Academy. Things had not been going well. But now the general quality of life was improving. United Airlines had asked me to switch to a later (and delayed) flight via London Heathrow on my way back from San Francisco, and for this had given me an upgrade to business class. Definitely a mood-changer. No longer the 247th economy-class passenger from the left in the departure lounge: I'm an F.B.A., and I'm sitting in business class sipping free champagne over the Rocky Mountains. Dinner is coming up soon, with a smoked salmon starter and real metal cutlery. Life is sweet. The long, long wait to board is forgotten, and I'm actually mellow. And now the purser was coming down the aisle with a seating plan on a clipboard so he could ask each passenger by name about their menu choices ("Mr. Fortescue, Mrs. Fortescue: can I ask you about your main course preferences tonight?"). He arrived at my seat and checked his clipboard. "Mr… Pullman?"

Obituary in the New York Times, Monday 11 May:

Venetia Phair Dies at 90; as a Girl, She Named Pluto

She died on 30 April at her home in Banstead, Surrey.

Apple previewed iPhone OS 3.0 earlier this week, and they conveniently posted a video of the event on their website. I was grateful to be able to watch the video, mostly because I wanted to hear how the folks at Apple pronounce the name of the iPhone-centric game designing firm ngmoco:).

Two little notes about Obama’s name and morphology:

1). In an article in the NYT yesterday I came across the verb form ‘Obama-tizing’ (hyphen in the original), and realized that because his name ends with a vowel, you can’t just add –ize. But why the choice of ‘t’ as epenthetic consonant? It doesn’t sound totally natural to me, but I don’t know any other consonant that would sound better. Is it just because there are various Latinate groups of words with a ‘t’ in some of their forms like ‘sane – sanity – sanitize’? I found the neologism overcommatize on this fun page from Rice University, so maybe –tize is the accepted allomorph of –ize for vowel-final words?

2).  What happens you decline the name “Barack Obama” in Russian?
My ears perked up when they put “Barack Obama” in the instrumental case (as object of ‘with’) on the radio in Moscow yesterday: Barakom Obamoj – and I realized that morphologically, Barak becomes a first-declension noun – native Russian nouns that end in a hard consonant are all first-declension masculine –, while Obama, ending as it does in –a, becomes a second-declension noun, and the great majority of those are feminine. And I wasn’t sure whether that was “peculiar” or not – I noticed it, but would a Russian? The situation with prototypical Russian names is that for men both names are first-declension consonant-final masculine (Mikhail Gorbachev), and for women both are second-declension –a final feminine (Raisa Gorbacheva).

Fidel Castro is evidently alive and well — and writing rambling, incoherent columns on political onomastics. As Julia Ioffe of the New Republic blog The Plank reports, Castro's latest editorial for Granma Internacional is a "deliciously confusing" excursus on White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and his name. Here are the opening lines in Spanish and English:

¡Qué apellido tan extraño! Parece español, fácil de pronunciar y no lo es. Nunca en mi vida conocí o leí el nombre de alumno o compatriota entre decenas de miles, que llevara ese nombre.
¿De dónde proviene?, pensé.

What a strange surname! It appears Spanish, easy to pronounce, but it’s not. Never in my life have I heard or read about any student or compatriot with that name, among tens of thousands.
Where does it come from? I wondered.

Recently I discovered that there's a fish named after my mother, Marion Grey, who was an ichthyologist specializing in the taxonomy of deep-sea fishes: it's called Bathylagus greyae, a.k.a. Grey's deepsea smelt. While looking around the relevant website (Hans G. Hansen's Biographical Etymology of Marine Organisms), I noticed something oddish. The Latinized name greyae didn't surprise me much, because -ae is the genitive singular suffix of the Latin first declension, the major declension for feminine nouns in Latin. It's maybe a bit strange from a Latin perspective, because Latin nouns in this class have a nominative singular ending in -a, and like most English family names Grey ends in a consonant; and Latin third-declension nouns end in a consonant, so they could've provided a model for scientific names. Still, using the Latin first-declension ending for the possessive of a non-Latin woman's name seems like a reasonable decision, given the much greater productivity of the dominant noun class. No, it was the genitive formation of organism names honoring men that struck me as peculiar.

I'm at the Linguistic Society of America meetings (in San Francisco) and spent part of the morning sitting in on the LSA's Executive Committee meeting. The part I attended was mostly about a fairly long document detailing the programs of the society and their objectives. In the midst of this came a digression on linguistic (adjective) vs. linguistics (noun) as a modifier of a noun.

The specific question was: should the text refer to the linguistic community or the linguistics community?

In the end, a vote was taken, and the S version (nominal) won handily over the version without the S (adjectival).

Geoff Pullum argues that the bleeping of Rod Blagojevich shields him from a full public appreciation of his foul-mouthedness: "somehow you don't get the measure of Rod Blagofuckinjevich's coarseness and contempt for the public by merely learning that he regarded his gubernatorial privilege as valuable; 'a fuckin' valuable thing' gets across more of the flavor of the man." Quite true. On the other hand, Americans have gotten so used to reading between the bleeps that it's still possible to appreciate (and satirize) Blago's coarseness in censored mode. Nightly satirists like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert have already taken their shots, and now Saturday Night Live plays on his bleepability. [We had a link to the video here, but it has been killed off by an NBC copyright claim.]

For some time now I have been in syntactic pain over what appeared to be a TV show in the UK with a completely ungrammatical title. It's a competitive ballroom dancing show on BBC TV, compered by the octogenarian Bruce Forsyth (who after what must be half a century on TV is still using his catchphrase greeting "Nice to see you, to see you, nice" every single time he confronts a camera). The name of the show is Strictly Come Dancing.

I was baffled by it. It doesn't seem to have a parse at all. You simply can't use a manner adverb like strictly to modify an invitation like "Come dancing". What on earth was going on? It was many months before I realized that almost certainly Wikipedia would reveal all for me, if I just swallowed my foolish pride and looked the show up. Wikipedia — always great on showbiz topics — did not let me down. And I could have kicked myself.

As reported by Der Spiegel and picked up by the New York Times blog The Lede, two German cartographers have created The Atlas of True Names, which substitutes place names around the world with glosses based on their etymological roots. It's a very clever idea, but in execution it enshrines some questionable notions of "truth."