Language Log

Stanley Fish asks  ("Mind Your P’s and B’s: The Digital Humanities and Interpretation", NYT 1/23/2011):

[H]ow do the technologies wielded by digital humanities practitioners either facilitate the work of the humanities, as it has been traditionally understood, or bring about an entirely new conception of what work in the humanities can and should be?

After a couple of lengthy detours, he concludes that neither any facilitation nor any worthwhile new conception is likely: the digital humanities

… will have little place for the likes of me and for the kind of criticism I practice: a criticism that narrows meaning to the significances designed by an author, a criticism that generalizes from a text as small as half a line, a criticism that insists on the distinction between the true and the false, between what is relevant and what is noise, between what is serious and what is mere play.

In other words, he agrees with Noam Chomsky that statistical analysis of the natural (or textual) world is intellectually empty — though I suspect that they agree on little else.

Every year around this time, I write about the relevant Chinese zodiacal animal.  Here are some recent posts:

• 2011: rabbit
• 2010: tiger
• 2009: ox

2012 is the year of the dragon, which in Modern Standard Mandarin is lóng (simplified 龙 traditional / complicated 龍).

Ed McBain, Long Time No See, 1977 (the 32nd of the 87th Precinct novels):

“Mrs. Harris,” Carella said, “there are some questions we’d like to ask about your son and daughter-in-law.”

“Yes, certainly,” she said. “I’ll try to assist you as best I can.”

She was adopting the kind of formal speech many blacks used with whites, especially when the whites were in a position of authority. […]

“Mrs. Harris,” Carella said, “did your son and daughter-in-law have many friends?”

“Some, I believe.” Still the phony speech. Carella guessed she would use the word “quite” within the next several sentences. “Quite” was a sure indication that someone was using language he or she did not ordinarily use.

This bit of social commentary comes from the Latino Rebels website. Like many brilliant ads, its impact is multiplied by the fact that, even after you've had the Aha! instant of "getting it", your mind continues to unspool a series of relevant inferences.

I bet if you sat down and started listing them, you could easily reel off a good dozen or so.

Aspects of the Finnish language happen to have come up a couple of times in recent weeks on Language Log ("Rare Finnish Crash Blossom", 1/13/2012; "It's baaack . . . and upside-down!", 1/2/2012). Lauri Karttunen, from whom I learned a bit about Finnish when I was a grad student, sent in these comments:

I did not know the technical term "crash blossom."  The equivalent term in Finnish is "kielikukkanen" (language flower). They are not rare in Finnish. The monthly "Suomen Kuvalehti" always has a couple in their column "Jyviä ja akanoita" (Seeds and Chaff).

MM writes:

I would like to hear your take on the following:

In episode 8/2 of House, he recounts his prison experience to his colleagues: I wasn't raped. Well, perhaps I was raped, but not raped raped. Well, perhaps I was raped raped, but not raped raped raped.

This is not a simple intensifier (as in yes, yes, or really, really), but rather it seems to say: I'm not kidding, this is the real thing. Then the scriptwriter mocks it by embarking on an infinite series.

"Claude Lalumière: The Word for Yearning", Locus 1/8/2011:

I’ve had some people tell me things about my own writing, and after they’d told me I thought, ‘Oh, you’re right!’ Once I was taking a walk with another writer who had read most of what I’d written, and she said, ‘You know, the biggest emotion in all of your writing, no matter what you do, is yearning.’ She was right. Here’s an interesting thing: there’s no word for yearning in French. You have to use a whole sentence to describe the feeling, and even then you don’t get the whole range. Often, thinking about my characters in a story, I ask myself, ‘What do they want most of all?’ (Though it goes beyond want.) Germanic concepts like awe and yearning are central to my writing, in fact – all these words for a rich inner life!

With these words, Zarina Yamaguchi presents the following photograph, taken at Osaka's Shinsaibashi Shopping Street, on her Facebook page:

My daughter-in-law, Lacey Hammond, is from Willis, Texas, not too far from Houston (46 miles / 74.01 kilometers).  Her family on both sides has been living in that area for generations.  They are mostly Irish, I believe, but with a bit of German and American Indian (Native American) blood too.

Anyway, Lacey calls salad dressing "sauce".  I was gobsmacked when I heard her say this several times, and wondered whether it's dialectal or she herself simply doesn't make a distinction between "sauce" and "salad dressing".  Anybody have any idea about that?

Following up on various recent discussions of how Twitter and other new communications media may be affecting the English language, I'd like to draw your attention to a well-reasoned consideration of this issue from an earier era: Robert Lincoln O'Brien, "Machinery and English Style", The Atlantic Monthly 1904:

In every age since written language began, rhetorical forms have been to a considerable extent influenced by the writing materials and implements which were available for man's use. This is a familiar observation in studies of the past. Is it not, then, time that somebody inquired into the effects upon the form and substance of our present-day language of the veritable maze of devices which have come into widely extended use in recent years, such as the typewriter, with its invitation to the dictation practice; shorthand, and, most important of all, the telegraph? Certainly these agencies of expression cannot be without their marked and significant influences upon English style.

Were the effects of these appliances limited to the persons actually using them such an inquiry would not be worth making. […]

But, unfortunately, no man writes to himself alone. The makers of the popular vocabulary decree to a great extent the words which the recluse of the cloister must select. If the typewriter and the telegraph, for mechanical reasons purely, are encouraging certain words, certain arrangements of phrases, and a different dependence on punctuation, such an influence is a stone whose ripples, once set in motion, wash every shore of the sea of literature.

Sam B. writes:

I've noticed that the hashtag has bled out beyond its origin as a way of grouping similar messages on Twitter by topic (ie #TahrirSquare, #fukushima, #election, etc)

Now, they're sort of being used in a bizarre syntax of their own, as an aside at the end of a statement.

In these cases, the hashtag is just adding some parenthetical meaning, whether it's sarcastic or sincere. But it's being used in places where there's no character limit as there is on Twitter, so it's completely out of place and without function. It seems like a digital tic of sorts. Instead of just saying what we want to say, or saying what we think or feel, people are writing a statement and then adding a hashtag at the end and expecting that to have sufficient meaning.

Minru Li sent me this photograph which appears at the top of the China English blog:

Upon first glance, I was mystified because of the large space between the first three Chinese characters and three English words in red, and the last two Chinese characters and two English words in green. Within two seconds, however, I figured out what had happened to bring about such a hilarious translation, but was still curious what the missing top half of the first character was.

We're waiting eagerly for the English Word of the Year for 2011 (to be announced on January 6, 2012) and have already had the Chinese "Morpheme(s) of the year".  Now arrives the Japanese Kanji of the Year:  kizuna 絆 ("bond").