Language Log

I was unaware until today (thanks to Paul Carter for the link) that at the Congress Dinner of the 2nd International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, in London on the 25th of July 1935, the assembled phoneticians heard toasts to the King and to the phonetic sciences, and a recitation, and a phonetic experiment, and Daniel Jones's performance of Chaucer's "Pardoner's Tale" in the original Middle English, and a demonstration of sign language, and finally the distinguished phonetician and linguist Harold E. Palmer took to the floor and performed a spectacular song that began:

I wish to be the pattern of a modern phonetician
To know the sounds of languages, and also in addition
The sum of their varieties, ancestral or collateral
Arranged upon the triangle, the square or quadrilateral . . .

You can read (or sing) the lyrics in full on this page. The tune, of course, is Gilbert and Sullivan's "Modern Major General". I just wish I'd been there. But I was born several decades too late.

A couple of years ago, Eyjafjallajökull erupted, and news announcers all over the world began tripping over their tongues. Now  JJ DOOM uses the name in the first verse of the track GUV'NOR from their new album KEYS TO THE CUFFS:

Catch a throatful from the fire vocal
Ash and molten glass like Eyjafjallajökull
Volcano out of Iceland
Go conquer and destroy the rap world like the white men

Since the death of Neil Armstrong on Saturday, many remembrances have told the story about his famously flubbed first words on the moon. From Ian Crouch on The New Yorker's News Desk blog:

When the lunar module, named the Eagle, touched down, following moments of radio silence that terrified the folks back in mission control, he relayed: “Houston: Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.” Later, as he made his way out of the lunar module (or LM), he described his progress in banal terms that, because of where they were coming from and what they conveyed, rose to the level of magic: “I’m going to step off the LM now.” And then he issued what is among the most famous proclamations of the last century—a jubilant counterbalance to F.D.R.’s “Day of Infamy” speech and a capstone to J.F.K.’s declaration that “we choose to go to the moon”—a statement that Armstrong had composed and prepared just hours earlier, in between the more pressing business of operating space equipment, according to Armstrong’s biographer, James Hansen: “That’s one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind.”

The flexible fiber-optic laryngoscope was invented by a group including Osamu Fujimura, my former boss at Bell Labs (Masayuki Sawashima, Hajime Hirose, and Osamu Fujimura, "Observation of the Larynx by a Fiberscope Inserted through the Nose", JASA 1967).  During the past 45 years, this technology has become a routine part of otolaryngology. This 2009 film by John Fink used an Olympus ENF-V2 Video Rhinolaryngoscope:

Dilbert from yesterday:

And today:

A funny ad:

I happened to have the TV going in the background during the press conference where the new Greek bail-out was announced, and it struck me that at an event about Greek sovereign debt, held in Brussels,  Klaus Regling (German), Christine Lagarde (French),  Jean-Claude Juncker (Luxembourgeois) and Olli Rehn (Finnish) were all speaking English. Nor did I notice any native speakers of English among the reporters who asked questions (in English) afterwards. This is is now completely normal, of course.

But sometimes completely normal things seem temporarily strange, and I had this experience while listening to Olli Rehn's remarks, when it occurred to me that international affairs have become a wonderful opportunity to study non-native pronunciation of English.

Here at AAAS 2012 in Vancouver, this morning's 8:00 a.m. Section-Z symposium is "Gesture, Language, and Performance: Aspects of Embodiment", organized by Philip Rubin. The abstract:

Communication, language, performance, and cognition are all shaped in varying ways by our embodiment (our physicality, including brain and body) and our embeddedness (our place in the world: physical, social, and cultural). The real-time production of spoken and signed language involves the dynamic control of speech articulators, limbs, face, and body, and the coordination of movement and gesture, by and between individuals. Increases in computing power and the recent emergence of ubiquitous and flexible sensing and measurement technologies, from inexpensive digital video and other devices to higher end tools, are beginning to make it possible to capture these complex activities more easily and in greater detail than ever before. We are on the cusp of a revolution in sign, gesture, and interactive communication studies. New computational and statistical tools and visualization techniques are also helping us to quantify and characterize these behaviors and, in certain instances, use them to control and synthesize speech, gesture, and musical performance. This symposium brings together experts spanning linguistics, computer science, engineering, and psychology to describe new developments in related areas of inquiry. These include coordination and synchrony during spoken and signed language, gestural control of musical performance, physiologically and acoustically realistic articulatory speech synthesis, and cognitive and linguistic development.

One of the earliest and best photographers in China was called John Zumbrun, but I have also seen his surname spelled various different ways, including Zumbrum.  Some of his pictures may be seen here (this site is run by Thomas H. Hahn, digital archivist of old photographs).

As soon as I saw his surname, I suspected that it might be a variant of the Zumbrunnen among my own maternal relatives who were of Swiss German extraction.  When I mentioned to my sister Heidi (who does intense genealogical research on our family) that I thought Zumbrun might be a variant of Zumbrunnen, she replied, "Oh man, the variant spellings of Zumbrunnen are driving me batty.  I have even seen Zum Pwunnen.  Have you heard of the soundex?  It is a way to index names & deal with all of the variant spellings."

A currently viral video:

For a recent story on the arrest of Kim Dotcom, The World's Lisa Mullins turned to Georgina Ball from Radio New Zealand ("Cyber Tycoon Wanted for Internet Piracy Arrested in New Zealand", 1/26/2012). One of the things Ms. Ball says is this:

they're worried he'll flee to Germany which is where he's from
which doesn't have an extradition treaty with the U.S.

According to Marissa Fessenden, "'Vocal Fry' Creeping into U.S. Speech", Science Now 12/9/2011:

A curious vocal pattern has crept into the speech of young adult women who speak American English: low, creaky vibrations, also called vocal fry. Pop singers, such as Britney Spears, slip vocal fry into their music as a way to reach low notes and add style. Now, a new study of young women in New York state shows that the same guttural vibration—once considered a speech disorder—has become a language fad.

This story has been picked up elsewhere, e.g. Cory Doctorow, "Deep-voiced 'vocal fry' thought to be creeping into American women's speech", BoingBoing 12/11/2011; Ben Flanagan, "Vocal Fry a new language fad mainly among college females", AI.com 12/12/2011; Meredith Engel, "Vocal fry: Your creaky throat noises are now an actual scientific trend", Jezebel 12/12/2011; "‘Vocal Fry’ Is the Hot New Linguistic Fad Among Women", Gawker 12/12/2011; Melissa Dahl, "More college women speak in creaks, thanks to pop stars", MSNBC 12/12/2011.

It's nice to see a piece of phonetics research getting this kind of play. But Fessenden's take on this story will be surprising to those who have looked at a few pitch contours — these "low creaky vibrations" have been  common since forever. And moderate use, especially at the ends of phrases, has never been considered a speech disorder.

Puzzlement increases after reading the cited paper.

The linguist Zellig Harris (he was Noam Chomsky's mentor and doctoral adviser) drew an important distinction between imitation and repetition. You can imitate the sound of anyone saying anything, even in a language you know nothing about, and you might even do it quite well, but you can only repeat something in a language that you know. When you repeat, you use the sound system (or at least, you can use it) in your own usual way. You know the phonemes of the language, and you know what is just linguistically insignificant low-level phonetic detail that you don't need to replicate. You know which utterance in your language you're repeating, and your target is to say that, and you have some license about doing it in your own voice, your own pronunciation of the language. It's not at all clear that Alice, the aggressive engineer in the Dilbert strip, has got this right: