Language Log

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.

Language Log has been asked more than once to comment on an unpublished working paper by Yale economist Keith Chen that is discussed in various online sources, e.g. here and here, and most recently David Berreby's post at Big Think. Briefly, Chen's paper alleges that a certain simple grammatical property of languages correlates robustly with indicators of profligacy and lack of prudence, as revealed in the speakers' lack of concern for their financial and medical prospects. Language Log does not really want to comment on an unpublished working paper about language by a non-linguist that is not written for publication and has not had the benefit of serious critical attention from academic referees. But neither does it want to disappoint its readers by clamming up. So I will make a few remarks about Chen's work, and the journalistic reporting that it is beginning to attract. I will not be very rigorous; but as I will explain, it is too early for that.

Last week, my old friend Hopkinson Smith gave a concert here in Philadelphia. This reminded me that one of the entries in the Quadrangle at the University of Pennsylvania is named for his great⁶-grandfather Francis Hopkinson, a signer of the Declaration of Independence who was also the author of the first secular song in the European tradition known to have been composed in America. (And right next to the Hopkinson entry, by chance, is an entry named for William Smith, the university's first provost, so that the standard map of the Quad happens to have Hoppy's full name in the middle of its upper right-hand border.

So I looked on line for a copy of Francis Hopkinson's first song, and found a facsimile of the manuscript on the web site of the Library of Congress. The lyrics are a ballad by Thomas Parnell (1679-1718), and Francis Hopkinson apparently wrote his setting in 1759, when he was 22 years old, although it was not published until 1788.

Judging from many comments on this post, "Annals of airport Chinglish, part 3", there is both tremendous interest in and massive confusion about how Chinese characters are constructed.

Jeremy Goldkorn sent me this clever complaint about the characters from Weibo (China's imitation of Twitter) which is circulating widely on the web; it seems to be relevant to our present discussion:

终于会读了，泪奔 三个土念垚（yáo）三个牛念犇（bēn）三个手念掱（pá）三个田念畾（lěi）三个马念骉（biāo）三个羊念羴（shān）三个犬念猋 （biāo）三 个鹿念麤（cū）三个鱼念鱻（xiān）三个贝念赑（bì）三个毛念毳（cuì）三个车念轟（hōng）不会读的转!

In the interview discussed in the previous post, there was one place where some combination of phonetic variation in vowels and cultural variation in measurement units left me puzzled. The context is as follows:

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