Language Log

…and not just for women:

A recent xkcd:

Mouseover title: "AAAAAA A ÃA̧AȂA̦ ǍÅÂÃĀÁȂ AAAAAAA!"

In an Australian novel, I recently encountered hundreds of cases where an informal assent is spelled in an unexpected way, e.g. "Yair, that’s true enough."

Variety told us a few days ago that Bad Bunny's new album made it to first place on the Billboard 200 — "Bad Bunny Beats Taylor Swift in Extremely Tight Race to No. 1 on Albums Chart". In other coverage, Pitchfork's review leads with the assertion that "Bad Bunny synthesizes the past and present sound of Puerto Rico for an anthemic, cross-generational album", and connects the music to the island's social and political history.

My focus this morning is on the album's non-standard capitalization ("DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS" = " I should have taken more photos"). We can start with a difference in editorial choices: Pitchfork follows the album's use of upper and lower case letters in its title, while Variety standardizes the spelling (“Debí Tirar Más Fotos”). The English translation in either case is of course the same, "I should have taken more photos".

[There's supposed to be an embedded skeet below, which is sometimes not coming through — so here's a screenshot:

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Thought about responding to the and realized that I'd rather stick my tongue in a light socket so go me, I can learn.

— Elizabeth Bear (@matociquala.bsky.social) January 9, 2025 at 4:08 PM

My 1/2/2025 post "American health care in 1754" quoted at length from Benjamin Franklin's account of the founding of Pennsylvania Hospital. The main point was the striking difference between then and now in the attitudes of (some) business leaders. But since this is Language Log rather than Health Care Politics Log, I suggested "the obvious stylistic change in sentence length" as a linguistic angle, with a link to the slides for my presentation at SHEL12 in 2022, "Historical trends in English sentence length and syntactic complexity". And Julian reponded in the comments: "Clearly commas were cheaper, in those days".

(…and with the New York Department of Environmental Conservation…)

Like many other online text sites, the New York Times now offers synthetic text-to-speech readings for (most of) its stories. TTS quality has improved enormously since the 1980s, when I worked with Bill Dunn from Dow Jones Information Services on (the idea of) a pre-internet version of digital news delivery, including synthesized audio versions. (See "Thanks, Bill Dunn!", 8/6/2009, for a bit more of the story.)

And this morning, while doing some brainless form checking, I listened to the audio version of Victor Mather and Jesus Jiménez, "After 7 Years, P’Nut the Squirrel Is Taken Away and Then Put Down", NYT 11/1/2024, which starts this way:

P’Nut, a pet squirrel with a popular Instagram page, was seized by state government officials on Wednesday in Pine City, N.Y., and later euthanized to test for rabies.

Andreas Stolcke responds to "English is innocent" (10/10/2024):

The historical facts cited are correct, but they don't explain why the frequency of 's rose in the post-WW2 period, and again after about 2005 (= the internet), as indicated by the Google Ngrams plot below.

The bump in the post-war era (after 1957) could be an effect of the Allied occupation (delayed by the book publishing process), which was reversed by the mid-1990s, and then encouraged again by the internet half a century later.

So my bet is still on an English (language) influence.

Yesterday's guest post by Andreas Stolcke, "English influence on German spelling", covered Duden's grudging admission that 's is allowed in certain restricted contexts, and noted the widespread negative reaction attributing this "Deppenapostrophe" (= "idiot's apostrophe") to the malign influence of English.

But Heike Wiese, via Joan Maling, sent a link to Anatol Stefanowitsch, "Apostrophenschutz", Sprachlog 4/26/2007, which offers a very different take.

Below is a guest post by Andreas Stolcke.

This is an item maybe worthy of a note on Language Log — Philip Oltermann, "Germans decry influence of English as ‘idiot’s apostrophe’ gets official approval", The Guardian 10/7/2024:

A relaxation of official rules around the correct use of apostrophes in German has not only irritated grammar sticklers but triggered existential fears around the pervasive influence of English.

Establishments that feature their owners’ names, with signs like “Rosi’s Bar” or “Kati’s Kiosk” are a common sight around German towns and cities, but strictly speaking they are wrong: unlike English, German does not traditionally use apostrophes to indicate the genitive case or possession. The correct spelling, therefore, would be “Rosis Bar”, “Katis Kiosk”, or, as in the title of a recent viral hit, Barbaras Rhabarberbar.

However, guidelines issued by the body regulating the use of Standard High German orthography have clarified that the use of the punctuation mark colloquially known as the Deppenapostroph (“idiot’s apostrophe”) has become so widespread that it is permissible – as long as it separates the genitive ‘s’ within a proper name.

From Josh E.:

I am a big fan of your posts on the Language Log and was wondering whether you often see semicolons used the way we might normally use commas to set off a dependent clause. Here is an example I just saw:

A Massachusetts family is demanding a full investigation after a state police recruit died after being injured during a training exercise late last week at the Massachusetts State Police Academy.

Police said Enrique Delgado-Garcia, 25, of Worcester was injured and became unresponsive during a training exercise Thursday on defensive tactics. He died the next day. […]

McGhee said he put about 400 to 500 recruits through the program without issue, and noted the academy has since trained thousands.

“While this is a tragedy, and it never should have happened; injuries to this level are very rare,” he said.

When I started teaching a decade ago, I rarely saw this issue. Now, I see it all the time in both undergraduate and professionally published writing. Is there a term for this kind of flattening of punctuation distinctions? Or would Geoff Pullum put me up there with Strunk and White as being wrong in my basic understanding?

From Lane Greene on bluesky:

This is an unusual transcript (of Harris/Walz by CNN), filled with "gonna", "wearin'", "I'll tell ya", "pulling outta the race".
These things are ubiquitous in speech, but most transcribers would change these to "going to", "wearing", "I'll tell you", "out of".
edition.cnn.com/2024/08/29/p…

[image or embed]

— Lane Greene (@lanegreene.bsky.social) Aug 30, 2024 at 7:06 AM

[Here's an image if the embedding doesn't work for you…]