Language Log

My fellow phonologist Geoff Nathan recently contributed a post to phonoloblog on the pronunciation of "Myanmar" by news readers. Another fellow phonologist, Darin Flynn, added a comment with a link to this post on TidBITS ("Your source for indispensable Apple and Macintosh news, reviews, tips, and commentary since 1990"), pointing out that Mac OS X's Dictionary program (featuring the New Oxford American Dictionary) lists the pronunciation of "Myanmar" as "Burma":

Incidentally: all images in this post are from my own copy of Dictionary, version 1.02 (© 2005), running on Mac OS X "Tiger" (version 10.4.11). The TidBITS sources are from a newer version of Mac OS X ("Leopard", version 10.5.2), which appears to include a newer version of Dictionary (but possibly with the same New Oxford American content).

Christopher A. Craig sends along a gem of a Cupertino (our term for a spellchecker-induced miscorrection), from today's "Washington Wire" blog on the online Wall Street Journal. The piece describes an anti-Obama Youtube video from the Republican National Committee that uses clips of other Democrats talking negatively about Obama in the past:

Clips of former President Bill Clinton and former candidate John Edwards are also used. “Rhetoric is not enough. High flatulent language is not enough,” says Edwards from a debate appearance.

Will nothing stop the wanton destruction of the Cupertino Effect? The latest victims of exuberant spellchecking are high school students in Middletown, Pennsylvania. According to reports by the Newhouse News Service and the Associated Press, the newly published yearbook of Middletown Area High School contains the following student names:

• Max Supernova
• Kathy Airbag
• Alexandria Impolite
• William and Elizabeth Giver
• Cameron Bandage
• Courtney and Kayla Throwback

Here's an experiment in creative use of the Comments feature. I want Language Log readers to help me try and find the earliest print occurrence of something that is just about impossible to search for. Here is our question: When was the first use in print of the device of punctuating the words or phrases in a sentence as separate sentences to show dramatically reduced speech rate? I. mean. Like. This. You can see a good example in the third panel of this PartiallyClips strip by Rob Balder. (Notice how hard it would be to find that using Google.) When did the use of this device start? I know it has been mentioned on Language Log, a year or so back, but I can't find the post and remember little about it except that finding the earliest occurrence was not mentioned.

Here's how we work: I start things off by giving a citation I just found from ten years ago. On page 28 of Robert Harris's novel Archangel (Hutchinson, London, 1998, hardback edition), a character who was tortured for a long time to get information out of him says with pride, "Not a word, boy. You listening? They did not get. One. Single. Word." That's the usage I'm talking about. So it's at least ten years old. Now, if you can find an occurrence that is earlier than that, and earlier than all the ones above yours in the list of comments below (if there are any yet), kindly supply the details. If this works right, we should get a list of successively older occurrences, each older than 1998 and older than all the ones preceding it. There should be no random chat about other interesting things about punctuation, or speculations about how they do this in Japanese, or reports about someone's pet parrot being able to read the newspaper, or any other irrelevant stuff. Just steadily older and older citations of uses of this typographical device. Got it? This will make the comments feature a really useful research tool, as opposed to being a sort of electronic toilet stall wall with free magic markers. That's. What. I. Want.

Because of the recent catastrophe in the Irawaddy delta, the names of the country formerly known as Burma are in the news again. The same thing happened last fall, when the news was full of protest marches led by Buddhist monks ("Should it be Burma or Myanmar?", BBC News Magazine, 9/26/2008):

The ruling military junta changed its name from Burma to Myanmar in 1989, a year after thousands were killed in the suppression of a popular uprising. Rangoon also became Yangon. […]

The two words mean the same thing and one is derived from the other. Burmah, as it was spelt in the 19th Century, is a local corruption of the word Myanmar.

They have both been used within Burma for a long time, says anthropologist Gustaaf Houtman, who has written extensively about Burmese politics.

"There's a formal term which is Myanmar and the informal, everyday term which is Burma. Myanmar is the literary form, which is ceremonial and official and reeks of government. [The name change] is a form of censorship."

If Burmese people are writing for publication, they use 'Myanmar', but speaking they use 'Burma', he says.

This reflects the regime's attempt to impose the notion that literary language is master, Mr Houtman says, but there is definitely a political background to it.

Richard Coates, a linguist at the University of Western England, says adopting the traditional, formal name is an attempt by the junta to break from the colonial past.

Leaving aside the notion that the local pronunciation is a "corruption", the BBC's discussion omits the most interesting part of the story, at least from an American point of view. They should have asked John Wells, whose discussion of the question I linked to at the time ("Myanmar is mama", 10/15/2007). And the explanations that I've heard and read this time around — yesterday on NPR, for example — again miss the key point. So here it is.

There is no 'r'!

A recent Associated Press wire story about the declining stock market contained an optimistic note from Phil Orlando, chief equity market strategist at Federated Investors. Orlando says the market is in decent shape, with two exceptions:

"Our view has been that the market, generally speaking, is in pretty good shape with the exception of the financial service companies and the consumer dictionary companies," he said.

The consumer dictionary companies? Are Merriam-Webster, American Heritage, et al. in trouble? Will they be needing a massive bailout from the Federal Reserve? Our lexicographical colleagues need not worry, since the AP article appears to be reflecting a different kind of dictionary trouble: the dreaded Cupertino effect.

In London en route to give a talk at a conference in Spain, I took an evening off to give my excellent brother Richard (he has done me so many favors) a really good birthday present. Richard is a long-time fan of the Four Seasons, so it couldn't have been clearer what the birthday present should be: center front-row dress-circle seats for Jersey Boys at the Prince Edward Theatre in the West End. It's an extraordinary production, extremely fast-paced, highly entertaining, and musically authentic. Nearly all of the greatest of the Four Seasons' hits and Frankie Valli's solo songs are performed in the course of a high-speed presentation of the group's life story. It's a wonderful night out.

The linguistic relevance of this, you ask? Well, of course there are linguistic aspects. This is Language Log, not Frankie Valli Log. Two linguistic points occurred to me.

It's a class-conscious respelling that's not used "to indicate that the speaker is uneducated or using colloquial, dialectal, or nonstandard speech".

(Click on the image for a larger version, as usual.)

From Robert Rummel-Hudson's blog Fighting Monsters with Rubber Swords, under the heading "What could I possibly add to this?":

(Hat tip to Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky.)

Last week, I discussed some of the things that Rev. Jeremiah Wright had to say at the National Press Club about race, language, and the brain ("Wright on language and linguistics", 4/29/2008). But I didn't discuss the passage that many journalists identified as the rhetorical and emotional core of his outburst. (Click the link to hear the audio.)

This is the transcript:

In our community, we have something called playing the dozens.
If you think I'm going to let you talk about my momma,
and her religious tradition, and my daddy, and his religious tradition, and my grandpa,
you got another think coming.

Or is it?

[Update 4/28/2008: Let me spoil the fun by pointing out that this post was supposed to be a joke. Apologies, for being excessively indirect again, to the half-a-dozen commenters who have earnestly informed me that English-language puzzles limit themselves to our standard 26 letters. I was just trying to underline, jocularly, Roger Shuy's jocular point that analogous limiting conventions in texting will probably not destroy … Oh, never mind.]

In a recent post, Roger Shuy warned us about the threat to civilization posed by the New York Times crossword puzzle:

Correct answers to the Times puzzles require no apostrophes to mark the important distinction between “its” from “it’s” or even to indicate possessive nouns. No correctly hyphenated words are permitted. And even though you know better, have you ever been able to use a comma, colon, semicolon, quotation mark, virgule, or question mark in a New York Times crossword puzzle? No, you haven’t! Not even periods after abbreviations. No spaces between words in phrases. No dashes in front of suffixes. How’s that for creeping whateverism?

As Roger observed, it's striking that those who urge action against the barbarian hordes of txters are unconcerned about the fifth column of crossworders in our midst. But Joe Gordon is sounding the tocsin. A long-time Language Log correspondent, Joe has sent me a series of notes on this subject, focusing especially on the New York Times crossword for Thursday, April 24, in which the clue to 28 across was "Mayo can be found in it", and the required answer is A-N-O. As Joe explains:

This is wrong … N is not the same letter as the one that appears in the word Year translated into Spanish. It is a different letter. I swear. Look it up.

Given the error, the clue reads, translated, "Mayo can be found in it", answer, "Anus".

Students of speech errors have long observed that they provide insight into the way language is organized mentally; the inadvertent slips that people make show that they know (tacitly) enormous amounts of stuff about their language. So do mistakes of another sort, in which people produce what they intend to, but this diverges in some way from what they are expected to produce in some community or context: persistent misspellings (not typos) like loose for lose, for example (discussed here). Many of these mistakes are "smart mistakes", which show that those who produce them know a lot about the standard system; at the same time, they are "mistakes of ignorance", meaning ignorance of the complete standard system — but actually ignorance of just one or two relevant details.

You might have thought that the Roman empire was doomed by barbarian invasions, lead poisoning, the loss of masculine values, or climate change. But Jim Bisso at Epea Pteroenta has pointed out that at the very height of the empire's power, in the reign of Trajan, Roman culture had already been compromised by an insidious agent that you probably have never considered, though it's obvious in retrospect.