Language Log

Farhad Manjoo, "Apple Doesn’t Need To Make the TV of the Future: The revolution is already here—and it’s called the Xbox", Slate 3/27/2012.

If the rumors are true, Apple will release a television set later this year that it will tout as the most amazing boob tube ever invented.

The biggest selling point will be Apple’s promise to make navigating our viewing choices easier. Say you want to watch Tower Heist on a Saturday night. You’d first check Netflix, because if it’s there, it’ll be streamed free for members. If it’s not, and if you subscribe to Amazon’s Prime service, you ought to check there, because you might get a discount. If that fails, you’ll look for the movie on iTunes, Hulu Plus, or Comcast in whatever order is most convenient for you. The whole process is a frustrating mess, one that Apple will likely try to solve by building a cross-platform search engine into its TV. Instead of going to every service separately, you’ll just say, “Hey TV, I’d like to watch Tower Heist!” and the screen will show you where the flick is playing, and for how much. You’ll just have to choose one and press Play.

When CEO Tim Cook shows off Apple’s TV set this fall, I bet he’ll call voice-activated universal search a revolutionary way to interact with your television. What Cook probably won’t mention is that it already exists. Indeed, much of what Apple is likely to build into its TV is available today on a gadget whose interface is just as easy to use as anything Apple will cook up. The device is called the Xbox 360.

Over the last few months, Microsoft has turned its video-game console into your TV’s best friend.

Recently, a disagreement about the syntactic analysis of certain aspects of an obscure language has achieved an unusual degree of public interest: Tom Bartlett, "Angry words", The Chronicle of Higher Education, 3/20/2012; Jenny Schuessler, "How do you say 'disagreement' in Pirahã?", NYT, 3/21/2012; etc.  Of course, as those articles explain, this is all part of a broader controversy about the nature of language, whose latest round was kicked off by  the publication of Dan Everett's new book, Language: The Cultural Tool.

Geoff Pullum's latest Lingua Franca column, "The Rise and Fall of a Venomous Dispute", puts this dispute into historical and intellectual perspective. If what you've learned of the squabble's linguistic, philosophical, or political aspects interests you at all, Geoff's essay is the thing to read.  In case you want more, I've collected a list of links below.

From California, Julie Wei sends me "tidbits:  curious words":

An interesting Op-Ed in the NYT today by Kitty Burns Florey — "A Picture of Language", about the history of sentence diagramming:

The curious art of diagramming sentences was invented 165 years ago by S.W. Clark, a schoolmaster in Homer, N.Y.  His book, published in 1847, was called “A Practical Grammar: In which Words, Phrases, and Sentences Are Classified According to Their Offices and Their Various Relations to One Another.” His goal was to simplify the teaching of English grammar. It was more than 300 pages long, contained information on such things as unipersonal verbs and “rhetorico-grammatical figures,” and provided a long section on Prosody, which he defined as “that part of the Science of Language which treats of utterance.”

Indiana's News Center reports that a student, Austin Carroll, has been expelled from Garrett High School for posting this tweet on his own Twitter account:

Fuck is one of those fucking words you can fucking put anywhere in a fucking sentence and it still fucking makes sense.

The school says he posted from a school computer; he says he did it from home and it's none of their business.

What saddens me is that Austin was making a linguistic observation, and it's basically almost true. This may be a budding linguist, and he's been kicked out of his high school for a syntactic observation.

Those familiar with our history of "No word for X" posts will appreciate Haider Ala Hamoudi's essay "The Dangers of Pop Linguistics: Arab Bluffs and Arab Compromise", posted at Islamic Law in Our Times, 3/6/2012. Some useful background is provided by Geoff Nunberg's Fresh Air commentary "Meetings of the minds", 5/29/2003, which discusses the original claim that Arabic has no word for compromise.  Prof. Hamoudi muses:

I wouldn't spend time on something so silly except in reading the Arabic papers today I saw a rather striking set of translations of Barack Obama's interview in the Atlantic monthly with I think Jeffrey Goldberg, the substance of which I had already read in English. But Obama says in it something to the effect of "as President, I don't bluff" and in Arabic media reports I read and heard, two verbs were used.  One was خدع which means to deceive, and one was مزح which means to joke around.  So "I'm not deceiving you" or "I'm not joking."

Yet of course as with "compromise" neither is perfect, and as I thought about it, I cannot think of an Arabic equivalent to "bluff" that works particularly well.  To bluster and threaten, that is, without much of an intent or an ability (only need one or the other) to carry forward on the threat.  So, we don't have compromise so we cannot compromise the theory goes, but then again we don't have "bluff" either, so do we not bluff?

James Parker, reviewing Matthew Pearl's new novel The Technologists, has a question ("Science Will Save Us", NYT 2/24/2012):

Bad prose […] is arrestingly weird. It stops the clocks and twists the wires. It knits the brow in perplexity: What the hell is this? What’s going on here?

My reaction to Pearl's first novel, The Dante Club, was similar, although more charitable to the author:

The Dante Club's front matter tells us that "Matthew Pearl graduated from Harvard University summa cum laude in English and American literature in 1997, and in 2000 from Yale Law School". I ask you, is it likely that a person with that background would be so insensitive to the norms of the English language?

No, a much more plausible hypothesis is that Pearl graduated from a slightly different Harvard University, in a universe slightly different from our own, and read a body of English and American literature that is also just a bit different.

When I first posted here in 2006 about the indifferent interjection meh ("Meh-ness to society") I never imagined that this unobtrusive monosyllable would provide such rich linguistic fodder for years to come. I returned to it in 2007 ("Awwa, meh, feh, heh") and 2008 ("Mailbag Friday: 'Meh'" on the Visual Thesaurus; "The 'meh' wars" and "The 'meh' wars, part 2" here). But the meh well has hardly run dry: in today's Boston Globe, I have a column on "The meh generation" that sheds some new light on the exclamation's history and current use.

Keith Chen's recent proposal that the grammar of tense marking in a language has a causal effect on future-oriented financial and health behaviors is too intriguing to resist talking about. In fact, it reminds me of the words of a prominent linguist who once announced during his talk: "The explanation in question is almost certain to be false. However, if it were true, it would be incredibly interesting, so we have no choice but to explore it."

I'm not sure that this is the best argument for, say, how research funding should be allocated. At least, I've never had the guts to put that in a grant proposal. But if Language Log isn't the place to explore almost-certainly-false-but-incredibly-interesting-if-true ideas, then I don't know what is.

[This is a guest post by Keith Chen.]

Mark and Geoffrey were kind enough not only to write thoughtful columns on a recent working paper of mine here and here, but to invite me to write a guest post explaining the work. In the spirit of a non-linguist who’s pleased to be discovering this blog, I wanted to use Mark and Geoffrey’s insightful posts as a springboard to explain my work.

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.

Nekesa Mumbi Moody, "Adele top winner with 6 Grammys", AP (in Boston Globe) 2/12/2012:

"Mom, gold is good!" Adele shouted as she took the album of the year trophy.

The corresponding audio:

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Robert Wright, "The Secret of Jeremy Lin's Success?", The Atlantic 2/14/2012:

One of the most intriguing cultural contrasts between eastern and western ways of viewing the world was documented in experiments by the psychologist Richard Nisbett, some of them in collaboration with Takahiko Masuda. The upshot was that East Asians tend to view scenes more holistically than westerners.

James Fallows, "Jeremy Lin's Secret? It's Not That He's Asian", The Atlantic, 2/15/2012:

Wright asks:

Is it crazy to think that the perceptual tendencies that [these social scientists] documented in East Asians could equip them for this sort of thing?

To answer that question: Yes, it's crazy. More precisely, it's horseshit. I say so in the friendliest possible way, but again: horseshit.

Fallows' argument is based on the facts about how Asians (specifically Chinese) actually play basketball these days. He asks "Overall do they play ball in a way the sociologists might predict?", and answers "Uht-uh" (where I infer that the 't' represents a glottal stop…).

I'd like to intervene in the argument from a different perspective: The psychological research that Wright cites does not support the interpretation he wants to put on it.