Language Log

I spend a lot of time these days (now that it's June and the long winter is nearly over) walking around Edinburgh alone, letting the architecture of the city and its myriad pleasant surprises inspire and comfort me. (There is pain to be grappled with: my lovely philosopher partner Barbara died of cancer on May 14, exactly a month ago, and the grief will take a long, long time to fade even slightly. Language Log kindly gave me four weeks of compassionate leave.) Sometimes there are little linguistic things to make me smile. There was one today. I had often walked past it but never noticed it before. On St. Stephen Street in the New Town there is a modest little shopfront divided between two businesses, the one on the left a bijou real estate office and the one on the right a boutique selling fancy infusion-beverage products. I don't know if they colluded, or if one chose a name based on the other, but the real estate office is named "The Property Shop" and the adjacent business calls itself "The Proper Tea Shop".

Jason Eisner writes:

Language Log readers might enjoy the syllabic /l/ extravaganza from the most recent Prairie Home Companion.

Gil Scott-Heron died yesterday at the age of 62 — a remarkable performer whose politically charged combination of music and poetry had an enormous influence on the development of hip-hop culture. One of my favorite spoken-word performances by Scott-Heron appeared on the 1978 compilation, The Mind of Gil Scott-Heron: " The Ghetto Code (Dot Dot Dit Dot Dot Dit Dot Dot Dash)." It's full of linguistic play, including an explanation of "old-fashioned ghetto code" used to mask phone conversations from snooping authorities.

The code involved infixation of "ee-iz" [i:ɪz] between the onset and nucleus of stressed syllables. So-called "[IZ]-infixation" would later become popular in rap music (particularly as used by Snoop Dogg), though OED editor at large Jesse Sheidlower has found examples back to a 1972 glossary on New York drug slang. There was also a predecessor in the talk of carnival workers (carnies), with the word carn(e)y represented in the code as kizarney. (See Joshua Viau's "Introducing English [IZ]-Infixation: Snoop Dogg and bey-[IZ]-ond" for some background.)

You can hear the whole performance on YouTube here. The relevant part starts at about 6:28:

An amusing "Anglo-EU Translation Guide" has been circulating widely in recent weeks. This seems to come from the same source as an old Economist column ("I understand, up to a point", 9/2/2004; discussed here), which attributed the joke to "the Dutch, trying to do business with the British", and which also gave some examples from a list "written by British diplomats, as a guide to the language used by their French counterparts".

According to Stan Carey at Sentence First:

λ♥[love] is written and sung by Christine Collins, a writer and self-described time traveller [Doctor Who fan] from the U.S. She describes it as “a convenient, terminology-dropping, non-gender-specific love song for all your linguist-seducing needs”.

"Eskimo’s kennen nog maar drie woorden voor sneeuw", De Speld, 3/21/2011 ("Eskimos now have only three words for snow") — subtitle "Klimaatverandering debet aan taalverarming" ("Climate change to blame for language impoverishment"):

Een uitgebreid taalonderzoek onder 1.000 Inuit heeft uitgewezen dat het aantal woorden dat hun taal kent voor sneeuw is gereduceerd tot drie. In 1996, de laatste keer dat een dergelijk onderzoek werd uitgevoerd, waren dit er nog tien. De trend lijkt onomkeerbaar. In 1965 kenden de Eskimo’s nog honderd woorden voor sneeuw.

An extensive linguistic study of 1,000 Inuit has found that the number of words for snow in their language has been reduced to three. In 1996, the last time a similar study was conducted, there were ten. The trend seems to be irreversible: in 1965, the Eskimos had a hundred words for snow.

(Apologies for the poor quality of my translations from Dutch…)

Those who hate text message abbreviations will be dismayed to learn of how far they have spread. Here is the sign at the gas station on the Gitksan reservation in Hazelton, British Columbia.

From The Onion News Network:

This report that French is a hoax is too funny not to pass on.

Promoted from a comment on yesterday's post "How Mubarak was told to go, in many languages", this is a protest sign from Italy showing Silvio Berlusconi getting the iconic Italian boot:

To mark 20 years of the Theoretical Linguistics program at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Hungary, our friends there celebrated with remarkable panache:

This is funny, though unfair:

In an article entitled "Yuan more pun" on The Economist's "Johnson" blog (Oct 28th 2010), Lane Greene Gideon Lichfield has tracked a long string of bad puns based on the name of the Chinese unit of currency.  The Economist's Yuan groaners stretch back several years.