Language Log

As linguistic metaphors go, I thought Surya Prakash chose very well for the title of his op-ed piece in The Daily Pioneer in India, which concerned the way in which bygone sins of American politicians rise up to blight their hopes and make them anxious about their prospects. He called it "Past imperfect, future tense." Nicely suited to its topic. But of course the tempting juxtaposition of grammatical terms with a double meaning is too nice not too have been used before, as I'm sure Surya knew. There are 560 Google hits for the phrase, and they range from a museum exhibit to journal articles to an article about the U.N. to articles about libraries… It seems almost a cliché if you start browsing around looking for it.

But that's the way language use is: we do not constantly create brilliant jewels of originality in every few words we string together in speech or writing. We mouth clichés, we borrow snowclones, we cite famous phrases and sayings intending them to be recognized. George Orwell seemed to think this was disastrous, a terrible sign of corruption in thought. I think Orwell was utterly misguided on almost everything he said about language. But in any case, I would have thought we could agree, whatever our feeling about re-using phrases we've enjoyed before, that it only becomes plagiarism when an unattributed passage of non-trivial length is used with the dishonest intent that the borrowed passage should be incorrectly thought to be original. The conjunction of those boldfaced elements should be regarded as definitional, I think. (See my earlier ruminations on plagiarism here and here and here.) Surya's use (or the headline-writer's use) exhibits only the first element: he doesn't try to attribute the phrase to anyone (you can't, in a headline).

Sure, the line between phrase-borrowing and plagiarism is perhaps subtle and fluid in some cases. But then the boundary of the ocean and the beach at Santa Cruz is likewise subtle and fluid. That doesn't mean you can't still tell when you're walking on the sand and when you're ankle-deep in the Pacific Ocean.

I CAN'T TALK ENGLISH PROPER SAYS PREZZA

Thus trumpeted a headline in last Wednesday's issue of The Sun (the UK's trashiest tabloid; Scottish edition, page 6). Prezza is John Prescott, a burly politician in the UK Parliament (at one time deputy prime minister), much loved for his newsworthiness. He makes amusing gaffes in his public pronouncements, and he had an affair with his secretary, giving him a mockability index something like Bill Clinton and George Bush combined as far as the UK tabloids are concerned. The story begins: Former Deputy PM John Prescott finally admitted it yesterday — he has trouble speaking English. He simply had not mastered the grammar of the English language, for reasons going back to his non-academic public secondary school. Plenty of quotes follow to illustrate what The Sun calls "his often-garbled ramblings".

Well, let's just get an expert diagnosis before we buy the story, shall we? Language Log has examined the evidence. And — perhaps you can guess if you remember such previous posts of mine as Does Julia Gillard know subjects from objects? back in 2006 and Arnold Zwicky's It's all grammar in 2004 — the evidence shows not a single trace of what it is supposed to show.

The sad fact is that when accusations of not being able to speak the language are tossed around, it is common — such is the level of public ignorance about grammar — for neither the accusers nor the accused to know what they are talking about, or to be able to tell whether the accusations are true or not.

I stress again, this is not a defense of bad grammar, or a defense of John Prescott. It is a sociological remark, a metacomment about the degree to which my profession has failed to instill in the typical politician, journalist, or (presumably) newspaper reader any real idea of what the notion "grammatical" might mean.

A few days ago an unusual article appeared in The Hindu. It is about the fragment of a pot shown above, a pot used for collecting toddy (palm sap, modern Tamil கள்ளு) made about 1800 years ago. The writing on the pot is in Tamil Brahmi, a writing system that only fairly recently has come to be well understood. It says: n̪a:kan uɾal, Old Tamil for "Naakan's (pot with) toddy-sap". In modern Tamil writing this would be: நாகன் உறல். As the article points out, the fact that a poor toddy-tapper would write his name on a pot is indicative of mass literacy at the time.

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.

I don't have time for a full post this morning, but here's the bare bones of one. (In fact, I develop most posts from an annotated series of hyperlinks like this is going to be, whereas bones don't develop before flesh does; so a better metaphor would be "the columns and beams of one".)

In my recent exchange with John McIntyre, I matched his jocular aside about the meat grinder of linguistic scholarship with my own little joke about the food processor of copy-editing. By chance, this morning's mail brought a note from Helen Dewitt, mentioning that her Paperpools post "Cormac McCarthy & the semi-colon" (8/17/2007) has just been reprinted at Art Nouveau, "with an illustration, no less". It's great fun to read, with or without the illustration, though it was obviously not at all fun to live.

A couple of weeks ago, John McIntyre took a critical look at Word Rage ("Walsh should be shot!") — from the prescriptivist point of view ("With friends like this", 4/14/2008). John is not only the Baltimore Sun's assistant managing editor for the copy desk, but also a past president of the American Copy Editors Society, so his opinions about usage are authoritative as well as thoughtful and interesting. As a regular reader of his weblog, I spent a few minutes pondering this passage:

Descriptivists, like the doughty linguists at Language Log, range over all written and spoken language, formal and informal, standard and nonstandard, to turn their findings into scholarship. (That’s the grand thing about an academic discipline: Once you own a grinder, you can turn anything into sausage.)

But my doughty descriptive attempts at interpretation didn't converge, as I explained in a blog post ("Scholarship and sausage-making", 4/15/2008).

Now John has explained the meat-grinder metaphor at greater length ("You're not from around here, are you?", 5/2/2008).

Stephen Smith writes:

There's a New Yorker article about a Moldovan woman working for an organization that tries to track down victims of sex trafficking and bring them home, but it includes this weird bit:

"She talks on the phone and knocks out memos and documents and e-mails in four languages and three alphabets—Russian, Romanian, Swedish, and English."

Russian is written in Cyrillic, Romanian is almost always written in Latin characters (though in Moldova, Cyrillic letters were officially used – but that was twenty years ago), and Swedish and English are always in Latin characters. Romanian and Swedish have some non-standard characters, but even if you count each language as having its own alphabet, that should make four alphabets, not three. And of course if you're going to count each language as having its own alphabet, what's the point in writing them both down? The New Yorker is usually such a fastidious publication – am I missing something here?

Stephen's question really ought to be addressed to the Columbia Journalism Review, I guess — the general problem of fact-checking at the New Yorker is not one that I'm professionally competent to investigate. But this is not the first case where we've noted carelessness and confusion about linguistic matters in New Yorker stories.

In response to my posting about the language of three imprisoned children in Linz, Austria, several people have commented on the report that the children finished all their sentences with the word "but" (which I took to mean German aber). Two noted that many German speakers use sentence-final conjunctions (oder 'or', but also aber) as discourse particles, and one supplied a possible parallel from colloquial Italian (with ma 'but'). Then I recalled a discussion on the newsgroup sci.lang in 2006 about sentence-final but in varieties of English and in Hawaiian Pidgin. No doubt there are parallels in other languages; the semantic development is not surprising (more on this below).

So it's likely that the children were just using a feature of colloquial German speech, which was then over-reported by an observer and treated as strange and new by journalists. Certainly we've seen many such cases here on Language Log.

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?

Geoff Pullum posted a little while back on the way the language of the imprisoned children in Amstetten, Austria was characterized in the Daily Telegraph, under the outrageous headline Dungeon children speak in animal language. Last year I spent some time trying to track down the facts in another imprisoned-Austrian-children story (this time in Linz). In the first coverage I saw, from The Times on 12 February 2007, the children (three girls) were said to have developed their own language, an "almost unintelligible" form of German, with an astonishing twist: the girls "reportedly finish all sentences with the word "but" [that is, German aber]".

The first report I have seen concerning the language skills of the imprisoned children involved in the horror story coming out of Amstetten, this Daily Telegraph story by Nick Allen [hat tip: Matt Austin], is headlined Dungeon children speak in animal language. I suppose we should have expected it: the usual headline-writers' nonsense. Animals do not have language, and these children do not communicate like animals. The story says:

Stefan Fritzl, 18, and his brother Felix, five, learned to talk by watching a television in the dungeon where they were held with their mother Elisabeth Fritzl, 42. But their form of communication is only partly intelligible to Austrian police officers.

Police chief Leopold Etz, 50, who has met the two boys, said: "It is only half true that they can speak. They communicate with noises that are a mixture of growling and cooing."

"If they want to say something so others understand them as well they have to focus and really concentrate which seems to be extremely exhausting for them."

Being able to say anything at all to other people, however exhausting the process, makes them already quite different from any non-human animal species on earth. And semi-private speech modes used by children with siblings (e.g., identical twins with mostly or only their twin for company) are well known to developmental psycholinguists.

I find the Amstetten story almost unbearably appalling. I am viscerally affected by the story each time I think about it, which is many times each day. A point about reporting on their language seems almost too trivial to make. But perhaps it is worthwhile to say just this much: let us all try to ensure that the terrible psychological damage done to these poor children and their mother by the monster who imprisoned them is not now amplified by the promulgation of sensationalist nonsense likening them to animals.

I was scanning the staider newspapers this morning looking for items of linguistic interest for our readership when I encountered a story in the Daily Telegraph concerning one Lord Laidlaw, a British peer who was recently discovered by a tabloid newspaper of the British Isles to have been fairly extraordinary quantities of money on flying prostitutes from Britain to a $12,000-a-night presidential suite at a Monte Carlo hotel where the girls "drank champagne and fine wines before taking part in lesbian and bondage sex acts." The puzzling part for me, given my remarkably sparse experience of such champagne-fueled sex acts, was the only linguistically relevant remark in the story:

One recent party was said to have involved a Vogue model, three prostitutes, a male gigolo and a trilingual bisexual.

What on earth, I wondered, was the relevance of the bisexual participant's ability to conduct business in three languages? I would have thought it was rather difficult to speak even one language when one's mouth is full (and I am told that at events of the sort Lord Laidlaw enjoyed, one could hardly be said to be participating fully if one didn't have one's mouth full). Are trilingual bisexuals well known to be in special demand among devotees of the lesbian/bondage scene? Are there perhaps special agencies where peers of the realm go to rent them? Or do they post advertisements in the "Personal Services" section of free newspapers? "Versatile male, trilingual (English/Spanish/German) and bisexual (French/Greek), seeks generous House of Lords member for party work in Monaco area…"