Language Log

In the February 9, 2009, broadcast of The Daily Show, Jon Stewart presents a well-argued Optimality Theory analysis of part of Bill O'Reilly's journalistic standards. Stewart and his research team do a good job of gathering and presenting empirical support for a theory involving ranked, violable constraints. Here's a screenshot that links to the full episode:

In the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine, Billy Baker has an article exploring the cultural significance of the local expression salted, a popular put-down among Boston's schoolkids. Baker explains:

Salted is typically delivered by a third party as a way to get into someone else's fight — person one insults person two, and person three informs person one that he or she has just been salted. It's an exclamation point on someone else's insult….

Salted, in this usage, appears to be exclusive to the region, and its demographic reaches from late grammar school into high school. The etymology of salted, however, is the subject of much debate. One camp says it's an abbreviation of insulted, and the word is actually "sulted." Others say it's short for assaulted. The third school, and the one that is most convinced that it's right, says it simply comes from the idea of throwing salt into a wound. But when it is used, and how, is not up for debate; and in this case, the particular word may be new but the role it plays is not. Depending on where you grew up and when, you may have heard other terms perform similar duty: "Burned." "Busted." "Faced." "Dissed." "Sauced."

What comes next should be utterly predictable to Language Log readers.

I'm a fan of Ian M. Banks' Culture novels, but I'd like to suggest, respectfully, that they might be improved in their approach to matters linguistic. As an example, on p. 470 of his recently-released novel Matter, we learn that "Marain, the Culture's language, had a phoneme to denote upper case".

Linguists would usually call a unit that denotes something a morpheme (or perhaps a word), not a phoneme, even if it was only one phoneme long. (In fact, we sometimes find meaningful units whose effect on pronunciation is just a single feature.)

In addition, it's odd to find a morpheme that signals something essentially in the realm of writing, like alphabetic case; and also to find that Marain still uses upper case in (some of) the same ways that English does.

Over the years, we've discussed many cross-cultural comparisons based on the "No Word for X" meme. In the most recent LL post on the subject ("No word for integrity?", 12/31/2008), I asserted that

[W]hen someone makes a sociological point by saying that language L has no word for concept C, you'll rarely lose by betting that they're wrong.

But a recent assertion by Bart Wilson seems more promising — the linguistic part is supported by reference to a chapter in a recent book by an actual (and eminent) linguist, and the socio-cultural part is supported by reference to a large body of empirical research, some of which was done by Wilson himself.

We’ve had more than enough bad news lately about the economy, loss of jobs, fraud in the marketplace, and our various wars, so maybe talking about how to give bad news seems timely. Now CNN.com has published an article about the problems that law enforcement officers experience when it’s their job to give the bad news to relatives about murder victims and other tragedies. Giving the bad news is hard on the police. Some do it well; others don’t. But giving the ultimate bad news is necessary, no matter how hard we stuggle to do it.

Most of us have to communicate bad news to suffering people at some time in our lives, whether it’s the type that police have to announce, the type that financial advisors have to give clients who have just lost their life savings in a stockmarket dive, or the type that physicians sadly have to give their patients. No bad news giving is easy.

It isn't often that I learn a new English word while reading the newspaper, but today's New York Times contains one: snarge. It means "the residue of birds that have struck an airplane" and is used by, and apparently was coined by, the people at the National Museum of Natural History who try to identify the birds that have had fatal encounters with airplanes. I leave to the imagination what future anthropologists will make of the existence of this term. They'll probably decide that 21st century Americans practiced a peculiar high-tech form of divination.

Yuval Pinter writes:

When an English speaker doesn't understand a word one says, it's "Greek to me". When a Hebrew speaker encounters this difficulty, it "sounds like Chinese". I've been told the Korean equivalent is "sounds like Hebrew".

Has there been a study of this phrase phenomenon, relating different languages on some kind of Directed Graph?

The latest xkcd:

(Click for a larger version.)

The mouseover title is "Sadly, this is a true story. At least I learned about the OS X 'say' command."

Arnold's post on linguistic(s) put me in mind of something I never got around to blogging last year. The hook was Richard Zoglin's appreciation of George Carlin in Time:

Most famously, Carlin talked about the "seven words you can never say on television," foisting the verboten few into his audience's face with the glee of a classroom cutup and the scrupulousness of a social linguist.

"Social linguist" — I had an image of Geoff Pullum at a cocktail party, with one hand in his blazer pocket and the other wrapped around a martini glass. But on reflection I figured the phrase was what the writer had made of hearing sociolinguist. In fact social linguist gets 700+ Google hits, most of them almost certainly the products of mishearings:

"Language is never about language," said social linguist Walt Wolfram. (Associated Press)

Barbara Kannapell, a social linguist based in Washington, said the shortage of sign-language interpreters is a national problem. (New York Times)

In a popular book of that name, social linguist Deborah Tannen has documented just how much our culture is dominated by an "adversarial frame of mind." Kenneth Plummer, Intimate Citizenship (U of Washington Press)

You'd have to say, then, that these are eggcorns in the technical sense. But does it really matter? I mean, "social linguist" could have been the standard term, right?

At the bottom of our New Year's greeting letter to friends, I put this picture of a very special Dutch Belted cow:

When I looked at a few of the letters my wife had signed, I noticed that she had added "Happy" on one side of the cow and "Year" on the other side of the cow. I thought that was extremely clever, because she was using the cow as a cross-lingual pun: "Happy 牛 Year!" Upon being read out as "Happy NIU2 Year," any speaker of English will immediately understand the greeting. And, this being the Chinese "Year of the NIU2," which was why I put that animal at the bottom of our New Year's message in the first place, Liqing's formulation is particularly fitting for the beginning of 2009.

In "Burlesque Matinée at the Max Planck Gesellschaft", I detailed the unfortunate appearance of a rather unseemly Chinese text on the cover of the flagship journal (3/2008) of the Max Planck Institut. As evidenced by the enormous outpouring of comments on this subject here at Language Log and across the Internet, people were perplexed, titillated, amused, and outraged that such a strange event could have occurred. All sorts of explanations were proffered, from accusations that somebody was trying to make fun of Chinese to insinuations that nefarious persons wished to make fools of the Germans. After weeks of further investigation, I can now say with confidence that the real cause for what happened was sheer ineptitude.

George McAllister (comment number 75) was right when he said, "Given that the only evidence we have is the cover itself and a generic 'we're sorry' statement, it seems to me we should turn to statistics to solve the 'incompetence v. very clever trick' debate." There was no dirty trick to make fun of Chinese or to deride Germans / Westerners — at least not on the part of the editorial staff of MPF.

I've been reading David Laitin's Politics, Language and Thought: The Somali Experience, which discusses a kind of linguistic determinism that (in my opinion) hasn't gotten the attention it deserves.  So in keeping with my third annual New Year's resolution to emphasize positive blogging about linguistic issues, I'm going to tell you about some fascinating 35-year-old experiments described in Laitin's book,  in the context of some more recent work on related issues.

I'll frame the discussion in terms of a deceptively simple question: do the results of public opinion polling depend on the language of the interview? The answer, it seems, is often "yes", and the effects are sometimes very large. This immediately raises a more difficult question: why?

On Christmas eve we went to Abbraccio with some friends for the festa dei sette pesci. This was our second seven-fish feast of 2008, since some other friends had their traditionally non-traditional big-party version last Saturday.  Over the years, I've heard several different explanations for the fish and for the number, and a quick internet search turns up many other examples of the post hoc explanations that people routinely develop to give meaning to facts. But I've so far failed to find even a speculative answer to the sette pesci question that really interests me.