Language Log

Through a curious concatenation of sociolinguistic forces, the word jīdì 基地 ("base") has brought such disparate entities as militant Islamic fundamentalism, homosexuality, and Sinology together.

Brendan O'Kane sent in the following photograph from Beijing, "snapped on the smaller, slightly more raucous bar street that runs parallel to the main Sanlitun drag. (I've always called it 'Skid Row,' but I assume it has a proper name.)"

With respect to the recent discussion of "Ornery", there's a relevant passage in George Lippard's 1848 novel Paul Ardenheim, the Monk of Wissahikon:

The broom, that peculiar weapon of all lonely and afflicted women, from the trembling virgin who grasps it to immolate a spider to the injured wife who rears it to admonish a drunken husband — the Broom!  It was the sight of this formidable missile that made the pot-companions tremble. Their retreat became a route. With one brilliant attack, Betsy worried them over the grass plot and charged them through the gate.

"Now ye ornery fystes ever say tat house is hanted agin if ye dare!"

Yesterday, I posted on Speakout/Truthout about Rachel Jeantel's African American Vernacular English use in the Zimmerman trial/verdict: "Race, Credibility, Communication and Evidence in the Zimmerman Trial, and Beyond", 7/30/2013.

Readers of my Language Log post of July 10 — written before the verdict was announced — may recall that I felt that despite its vernacular character, Jeantel's testimony would be understood by the jury, but that they might not relate to her. Turns out I was both right and wrong. They didn't relate to her, didn't even find her credible, but they (at least Juror B37) also found her difficult to understand.

Ian Preston wrote to draw my attention to this new item for our No Word for X archive — Thomas Brewer, "Giving Childhood Diarrhea a Name", Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, 7/20/2013:

Over the course of my career I’ve spent over thirty years working in various developing countries trying to better understand and fight infectious diseases. One of the things that alarmed me most was that in many places, parents and caretakers didn’t even have a word for diarrhea. Sadly, this wasn’t because diarrhea was rare. On the contrary, diarrhea was so common that it was seen as a normal part of early childhood, and thus didn’t need a name.

John Darwin, After Tamerlane:

For all its drama, the Occidental ‘breakout’ of the long sixteenth century (1480–1620) had for long a limited impact.

I've read about these "long centuries" from time to time — it's a convenient way to refer to time-periods that sprawl somewhat beyond the boundaries of years ending in double zeros — but when I came upon this phrase the other day, on a long airplane ride from the Netherlands back to the U.S., some questions occurred to me. Why "long" as opposed to "wide", "broad",  "extended", or whatever? Who started this usage, and when? What are the corresponding terms, if any, in other languages?

On Friday of last week, Pieter Muysken and I organized a party in the Northwood housing area at the University of Michigan. We were in Ann Arbor to teach at the 2013 LSA Institute, and because Noam Chomsky's Forum Lecture had been the evening before, the get-together was advertised as the "Epi-Chomskyan Block Party". We chose epi- because its wide range of senses (above, on, over, nearby, upon; outer; besides, in addition to; among; attached to; or toward) seemed appropriate.

Anyhow, a good time was had by all. The thing that I want to focus on is the cherry wine that Marianne Mithun brought. Michigan cherry wine is apparently a thing, which I didn't know — but I already had a strong association, in the wrong direction, from Buddy Guy's 1968 song about leaving Chicago, A man and the blues:

I think I'll move on back down south,
where the water tastes just like cherry wine.
I think I'll  back down south, people,
where the water tastes to me like cherry wine —
uh this Lake Michigan water tastes to me just like turpentine.

But when I looked into it, I discovered that the connections among blues music, cherry wine, and the upper midwest are older and more complex than I thought.

[Below is a guest post by John Rickford.]

The defense plans to rest in the Florida trial of George Zimmerman today, and arguments are raging about whether he will be found guilty of murdering Trayvon Martin or not.

In the case of Rachel Jeantel, however, the 19-year old prosecution witness whose testimony on June 26 and 27 went on longer (5 to 6 hours) and generated more commentary in the media than any other witness, the GUILTY verdict is already in.

Michael Newman writes:

This was posted by Daniel Ezra Johnson on Facebook, who says he's skeptical about the authenticity: Maria Popova, "Walt Whitman Reads 'America': The Only Surviving Recording of the Beloved Poet’s Voice", brain pickings 7/4/2013.

I'm a bit more positive about it. This is my comment on facebook in response to his skepticism:

He's r-less, and there's the distinct but not raised THOUGHT, which is what we'd expect. If there was a short-a split sample, I'd have more confidence either way. But there are some odd pronunciations that sound old-fashioned, such as "earth." The "endeared" I didn't understand, like there's no in-glide. I doubt a faker would have done that. So, I'm tentatively on-board.

I wonder if people on language log might have a clue about it.

Here's the audio:

Another Turkish term is entering the international lexicon: "duran adam", or "standing man".  Andy Carvin, "The 'Standing Man' of Turkey: Act of Quiet Protest Goes Viral", the two-way (NPR) 6/18/2013:

As protests against the Turkish government enter their third week, activists are taking increasingly creative measures to maintain their momentum.

Over the weekend, police removed their tent city and re-opened Istanbul's Taksim Square to traffic, while maintaining a strong presence in the area. This might have seemed like the end of it for many protesters, until a lone man decided to take a stand, literally, against the government. For more than six hours Monday night, Erdem Gunduz stood motionless in Taksim Square, passively ignoring any prodding or harassment from police and people passing by.

His unusual form of protest has inspired activists in Turkey and around the world to assume the same pose. He's even become his own meme, as "standing man" (duran adam, in Turkish) supporters upload their own protest photos to Facebook, Twitter and elsewhere.

Caleb Everett, "Evidence for Direct Geographic Influences on Linguistic Sounds: The Case of Ejectives", PLoS ONE, 2013:

We examined the geographic coordinates and elevations of 567 language locations represented in a worldwide phonetic database. Languages with phonemic ejective consonants were found to occur closer to inhabitable regions of high elevation, when contrasted to languages without this class of sounds. In addition, the mean and median elevations of the locations of languages with ejectives were found to be comparatively high.

John Pareles, "His Life Was a Country Song", NYT 4/26/2013:

George Jones, the definitive country singer of the last half-century, whose songs about heartbreak and hard drinking echoed his own turbulent life, died on Friday in Nashville. He was 81.

His publicists, Webster & Associates, said he died at a hospital after being admitted there on April 18 with fever and irregular blood pressure.

Mr. Jones’s singing was universally respected and just as widely imitated. With a baritone voice that was as elastic as a steel-guitar string, he found vulnerability and doubt behind the cheerful drive of honky-tonk and brought suspense to every syllable, merging bluesy slides with the tight, quivering ornaments of Appalachian singing.

In his most memorable songs, all the pleasures of a down-home Saturday night couldn’t free him from private pain. His up-tempo songs had undercurrents of solitude, and the ballads that became his specialty were suffused with stoic desolation.

NPR has launched an engaging new blog called Code Switch. From the inaugural post, "How Code-Switching Explains The World," by Gene Demby:

You're looking at the launch of a new team covering race, ethnicity and culture at NPR. We decided to call this team Code Switch because much of what we'll be exploring are the different spaces we each inhabit and the tensions of trying to navigate between them. In one sense, code-switching is about dialogue that spans cultures. It evokes the conversation we want to have here.

Linguists would probably quibble with our definition. (The term arose in linguistics specifically to refer to mixing languages and speech patterns in conversation.) But we're looking at code-switching a little more broadly: many of us subtly, reflexively change the way we express ourselves all the time. We're hop-scotching between different cultural and linguistic spaces and different parts of our own identities — sometimes within a single interaction.

When you're attuned to the phenomenon of code-switching, you start to see it everywhere, and you begin to see the way race, ethnicity and culture plays out all over the place.

Hiroshi Kumamoto (a specialist in Middle Iranian, especially Khotanese) sent in the following photograph of the sign on a water boiler in the Department of Linguistics at Tokyo University: