Language Log

Hey, guess what! The cricket story about not having a word for "impossible" wasn't the last "no-word-for-X" story! Matthew Izzi, who writes from Boston, is a new reader of Language Log, and clearly a quick study, because he has already learned to be skeptical of things-people-have-no-words-for stories. His antennae went up when he read the following photo caption (slide 4 of 5) on The New Yorker's "Book Bench" blog this morning:

Pukapuka, also known as Danger Island, was, in the nineteen-twenties, a sanctuary for nudism, a place where "sex is a game, and jealousy has no place." There is no word for "virgin" in the language.

The latest, laziest, and most stupid things-there-are-no-words-for snowclone use I have seen in quite a while (contributed by a Language Log reader who supplies no name other than "Flintoff's Gusset"):

Herein lies a cricket tale of a heady concoction of exceptional talent laced with self-belief to match. Such gargantuan self-belief, in fact, that just as the Piraha tribe of northwest Brazil speak an obscure language in which there is no concept of numbers, so in the lexicon of Ian Botham's cricket existence, there is no word for "impossible". He does not, and never has done, "can't".

Thus Mike Selvey, writing about Ian Botham on the ESPN cricinfo site.

My note yesterday about Cantonese infixation into English words was written while changing planes on the way back from Hong Kong, and was somewhat rushed, not to say incoherent. Thanks to the commenters who helped clear things up! This morning, I'd like to add a few more references and observations about several interesting aspects of this phenomenon and its context.

One of the things that I learned during my recent short stay in Hong Kong is that there are some especially interesting ways of mixing English and Cantonese, including putting Cantonese in the middle of English words. One example (due to Bill Wang via Tan Lee):

so [mat1 je5] ry [aa3]
so 乜野 ry 啊
Why say sorry ? [Usually in an angry and unpleasant mood]

Alice Yan, "Singing the praises of mainland rap", South China Morning Post, 10/3/2010:

Rapper Shou Junchao , 24, has become a celebrity in Shanghai – people ask for his autograph and want him to pose for photos – after his performance on the hit television show China's Got Talent last month. His act captivated millions of fans, mostly young men, who liked his impromptu rap answers to the judges' questions. Men born after 1980 had mountainous burdens, he said, including mortgages and car loans, and he got a standing ovation when he said that if the luxury handbag you bought for your girlfriend was not as good as other girls' you would get a "bye-bye" from her.

His TV show appearance is here, I think:

A couple of days ago in class I was discussing the power and prestige of Chinese characters, even among people who are illiterate.  I mentioned how illiterate villagers in northern Shaanxi (north of Mao's base at Yanan) wanted to participate in literate culture, but didn't even have access to a scribe who could write a New Year's couplet on strips of red paper to paste on the sides and top of their doorframes.   Instead, they merely drew series of circles to substitute for characters, hence LEFT:  OOOOO  TOP:  OOOO   RIGHT:  OOOOO.

I promised in an earlier post to report on some of the many interesting presentations here at InterSpeech 2010. But various other obligations and opportunities have cut into my blogging time, and so for now, I'll just point you to the slides for my own presentation here: Jiahong Yuan and Mark Liberman, "F0 Declination in English and Mandarin Broadcast News Speech".

I still hope to blog about some of the other interesting things I've learned here, but it's already time for me to head out on the next leg of my journey. Worse, I've already got a list of things to blog about from the next conference where I'm co-author on a presentation, EMNLP 2010 — which hasn't even started yet. At the top of that list is Dmitriy Genzel, Jakob Uszkoreit and Franz Och, "'Poetic' Statistical Machine Translation: Rhyme and Meter".

According to the notes passed out at the InterSpeech 2010 banquet last night,

Kagami-biraki (or kagami-wari) means "opening (or cracking) the mirror" where the "mirror" refers physically to the lid of the sake barrel and symbolically to circular mirrors depicting the sun and used as divine instruments in Japanese shinto religion. The kagami-biraki ceremony is performed at auspicious events, particularly at semi-formal and informal festivities commemorating beginnings. Participants often show camaraderie by wearing informal uniforms (happi shirts are common) instead of formal kimono.

Yet Another Self-Referential Rhetorical Critique: Martin Robbins, "This is a news website article about a scientific paper", The Guardian, 9/27/2010.

In the standfirst I will make a fairly obvious pun about the subject matter before posing an inane question I have no intention of really answering: is this an important scientific finding?

I've been telling friends that I'm in Tokyo for InterSpeech 2010, but that's wrong. In fact, I'm in Chiba City, which seems to be roughly to Tokyo what Jersey City is to New York. And I'm sorry to say that the weather changed this afternoon from sunny to overcast to rainy without ever going through the state described in the memorable opening sentence of Neuromancer, describing Chiba City:

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

We've often seen how pop-Whorfian depictions of linguistic difference rely on the facile "no word for X" trope — see our long list of examples here. Frequently the trope imagines a vast cultural gap between Western modernity and various exotic Others. The latest entry comes via Ron Stack, who points us to this television commercial from the Aruba Tourism Authority (reported by MediaPost). In the commercial, Ian Wright, the British host of the adventure tourism show "Globe Trekker," learns from an Aruban fisherman that the local creole language, Papiamento, has no word for "work-related stress."

The "Last Words" segment of the latest issue of Computational Linguistics is by Richard Sproat: "Ancient Symbols, Computational Linguistics, and the Reviewing Practices of the General Science Journals". Richard reviews and extends the analysis (partly contributed by him and by Cosma Shalizi) in "Conditional entropy and the Indus Script" (4/26/2009) and "Pictish writing?" (4/2/2010), and poses the question that I was too polite to ask:

How is it that papers that are so trivially and demonstrably wrong get published in journals such as Science or the Proceedings of the Royal Society?

Yesterday, prompted by a note from Geoff Nunberg, I cited a passage from Heejin Lee and Jonathan Liebenau's essay "Time and the internet" (published in Hassan and Thomas, Eds., The New Media Theory Reader). Their idea seems to be that "speed is contagious", and so the increased speed of modern life — faster cars, planes, computers, and so on — makes people do everything else faster. Their evidence for this included allegedly faster modern tempos for a Beethoven symphony, and a claimed 50% increase between 1945 and 1995 in the speaking rate of Norwegian parliamentarians.

Some helpful commenters pointed to evidence that symphonic tempos have not, in fact, increased in any sort of reliable way over the past century, and that Beethoven's own metronome-markings are very fast by modern standards. Other helpful commenters located the source of the claims about Norwegian parliamentary speeches, which seems to have been based on an analysis of stenotypists' tapes. I thought I'd bring a little English-language data to the table by looking at the inaugural addresses of U.S. presidents from Truman in 1949 to Obama in 2009.