Language Log

In today's Boston Globe it's my honor to pinch-hit for a vacationing Jan Freeman, who writes a fantastic weekly column called "The Word." I took the opportunity to write about a word popularized by the new movie "Kung Fu Panda": skadoosh. Or is it skidoosh? Or maybe skedoosh?

Apparently Mark and I overlapped in Paris! Who knew. I was there for une journée d'études for the CNRS project Temptypac, which was fun and interesting, plus of course being in Paris is always superbe…

My French is up to most basic communication needs, but my husband's isn't, so we shopped around a bit for a phrasebook to help him maximize touristic enjoyment while I linguistified. We found four suitable candidate pocket phrasebooks. One cost 5 euros rather than 7. It also happened to be the one that included the all-important phrase, "Je voudrais cinq tranches de jambon, s'il vous plaît", without which phrase one cannot navigate Paris at all. But the main deciding factor for us, besides the extremely valuable euros, was the pronunciation guides.

We just got the acceptance notice from Interspeech 2008, so it's OK for me to inform you that Associate Justice Antonin Scalia has joined Queen Elizabeth II in the elite ranks of those international celebrities who have served as subjects for experiments in instrumental phonetics. The paper accepted at IS2008 is Jiahong Yuan, Stephen Isard and Mark Liberman, "Different Roles of Pitch and Duration in Distinguishing Word Stress in English".

In fact, not only Justice Scalia, but also seven of the eight other justices on the 2001 Rehnquist court were (unwitting) subjects in our experiment. (Associate Justice Clarence Thomas didn't speak often enough to be included in the analyzed data.) We applied automated measurement techniques to recordings of 78 hours of oral arguments from the 2001 term of the U.S. Supreme court, in order to look at the (average) effects on pitch and time of primary word stress (e.g. the third syllable in jurisdiction), secondary stress (e.g. the first syllable in jurisdiction), and lack of stress (e.g. the second and fourth syllables in jurisdiction).

Most well-informed linguists will probably not find our two main conclusions very surprising — at least, not the content of our conclusions. But there's a methodological suprise, I believe, in the fact that such clear-cut results emerged from automated measurements of medium-quality recordings of natural interactions.

Yesterday I gave a brief "melodized" audio clip, and invited readers to guess the language. I'm happy to report that Bob Ladd and Sarah E. nailed it — the passage was  indeed in French, from an RFI news report. Here's the original.

I believe — without much evidence — that I can recognize many more languages than I can understand. This ability depends to some extent on recognizing an occasional common word, and on a sort of textural appreciation of syllable structures and certain characteristic sounds. But some of it, I've always believed, is prosodic: perception of time patterns of pitch and amplitude.

Do you think you can recognize a language from its pitch and amplitude pattern? Here's an example, created according to the recipe that I described in an earlier post. I'll give the answer (and the original recording) tomorrow.

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).

In my new capacity as executive producer for the Visual Thesaurus (a job title Mark Liberman had some fun with), I'm responsible for editing the content of the website's online magazine and also for creating some of it. I've just launched a new column called "Word Routes," which I'll be posting a couple of times a week. (The column is freely available, but to leave comments or to take advantage of all the other Visual Thesaurus goodness you need to sign up for a subscription.) The first installment of Word Routes is on the word procrastination, which is also the subject of an article I wrote for today's issue of Slate. But rather than just toot my own horn, I wanted to draw attention to some great work that was recently done for the Visual Thesaurus, harnessing the unexpected prowess of opera singers to read the International Phonetic Alphabet.

This all started when John Cowan defended the New Yorker's account of a long-past Republican debate, by proposing that Rudy Giuliani retains the syllable-timed speech rhythm of his Italian ancestors, in contrast to Mitt Romney's standard American stress-timed speech. I didn't share the intuition, and did a little experiment to show that Rudy's syllables, far from being a "constant rate … dadadadadadada", were actually more variable in duration than Mitt's were ("Slicing the syllabic bologna", 5/5/2008).

Then Jonathan Mayhew asked whether "there’s a psychological perception of syllable-timed language that is not visible in the objective data". I responded with a little experiment to illustrate the fact that syllables in (say) Spanish really are closer to being constant in duration than syllables in English are, even though this is mostly if not entirely because of the intrinsic durations of the syllable inventories in the two languages ("Another slice of prosodic sausage" 5/6/2008).

But this leaves the "stress-timed" side of the traditional distinction unexamined. So today's little Breakfast Experiment™ takes a look at the idea that speakers of languages like English arrange stressed syllables (as opposed to all syllables) equally in time.

Like I said yesterday, the whole stress-timed-vs.-syllable-timed business is "a gigantic tangled intellectual thicket that’s easy to get into and hard to get out of". And one of the comments on my post asked a question that tempts me in further:

So then there’s a psychological perception of syllable-timed language that is not visible in the objective data?

Yes and no.

Yesterday afternoon, I got this note from John Cowan, that indefatigable correspondent:

You linked to the piece on Romney vs. Giuliani speaking styles today,
so I checked back to see if you ever added my comment on it, but I
think I probably sent it during the period when my mail to you was being mysteriously blackholed. So here it is again.

In fact, I recall getting John's comments the first time. But they brought up a problematic point that deserves a post of its own — the vexed question of "stress-timed" vs. "syllable-timed" languages — and so I put John's note on my to-blog list, where it languished until now. I still don't have time for a proper answer, but I'll respond briefly (hah!) under the rubric of fact-checking.

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?