Language Log

Renowned broadcaster (and part-time word maven) John Humphrys gives a quick summary of the weather forecast just before the 7:30 news summary on the BBC Radio 4 "Today" program in the UK each morning; and what he said this morning was a classic of the genre: "Pretty miserable by and large." A charming example, I thought, of the tradition of extremely vague weather-forecast language in the blustery British Isles.

The latest issue of MaxPlanckForschung, the flagship journal of the Max Planck Institute, has China as its focus. To honor the theme of the issue, the editors asked one of the journalists who worked for the magazine to find an elegant Chinese poem to grace the cover. This was the result:

No sooner had the journal fallen into the hands of Chinese readers than it set off a frenzy of indignation, uproarious laughter, and animated discussion.

The television commercial asks:

What happens if you take remote Chiang Mai villagers who have never seen a burger? Who don’t even have a word for burger?  And ask them to compare a Whopper versus Big Mac?

Imagine that: so isolated and primitive that they don't even have a word for burger! Yet another instance of the "Language L has no word for X" trope.

This site has a description of Burger King's "Whopper virgins will decide" campaign, along with two of the teaser ads (including the one from Chiang Mai in Thailand) and some (negative) responses from viewers. The brief description:

Burger King travels in 13 planes, 2 dog sleds and 1 helicopter over 20,000 miles to find people who have never heard of the WHOPPER and perform the world’s purest taste test. Locations visited include a remote hill village in north Thailand, a rural farming community in Romania and icy tundra of Greenland.

Apparently, Burger King didn't ask the Greenlanders about their words for snow.

I just returned from a linguistics conference in China. I won’t even try to compete with Victor Mair’s reports (here and here and here, for example) about the way English is fractured there, but a taxi ride in Guangzhou provided me with a few bits of interesting language information.

The latest xkcd:

(Click on the image for a larger version.)

On Saturday, I was at a workshop on "Brain Rhythms in Speech Perception and Production". One of the participants was Aniruddh Patel, author of Music, Language and the Brain. His presentation was "Rhythms in Speech and Music", and one of the papers that he discussed was John Iversen, Aniruddh Patel, and Kengo Ohgushi, "Perception of rhythmic grouping depends on auditory experience", JASA 123(4): 2263-2271, 2008.

Unfortunately, I had to leave that workshop early, in order to travel to Düsseldorf for the Berlin 6 Open Access conference, where I am now. As I was leaving, Aniruddh gave me a reprint of the Iversen et al. paper, and asked for comments. So I'll keep up my act as "the Madonna of linguists" (even though the reviews to date have been mixed), and offer my comments in the form of a blog post.

Yesterday afternoon, as I tried to stay warm on the sidelines of a junior-high soccer game, another father and I discussed the upcoming continuation of the fifth World Series game, suspended in a 2-2 tie by a downpour, two days earlier, after the top half of the sixth inning.

"Seems like they ought to win", I said, "with four at-bats versus three for the Rays."

The response: "You're not from here, are you?"

I recently objected to Louis Menand's assertion that "[P]rofessional linguists almost universally, do not believe that any naturally occurring changes in the language can be bad" ("Menand on linguistic morality", 10/22/2008).  And I was quickly taken to task in the comments by Steve Dodson, who is the erudite and broad-minded author of the Language Hat blog. Hat (as he's called in the blogosphere) asserted that

I personally am happy to sign on to the Descriptivist position as "caricatured" and state that there is no such thing as bad language change. […] To say any form of language change is "bad" is to be ipso facto unscientific.

He also suggested that my acquaintances and I belong to "a small sample of linguists who have … weirdly quasi-prescriptivist views about language".

In response to this morning's discussion of 'scriptivism, John Lawler wrote to remind me of a 2001 sci.lang posting by Arnold Zwicky, which John describes as "the best and most judiciously parsed short statement of the problem that I know of".

Below is a list of the hundred most frequent bisyllabic terms in Modern Standard Mandarin. The list is based on a recent frequency study of material from wire feeds taken off several of the main Chinese language news services. Ultimately, I think that the data were provided by LDC.

My purpose in sharing this list is not for purely analytical reasons, but more to give an idea of how, through an examination of relative word frequencies, we can get a sense of what is important for contemporary China. Focusing on bisyllabic terms is more revealing in this regard than if we were to include monosyllabic terms, since the latter tend to be particles or function words of very high frequency (e.g., DE的, DE地, DE得, ZHE4這, NA3/4那, SHI4是, and so forth).

Last night's somewhat tame debate drove Gail Collins into a speculative reverie ("McCain: Bearish on Debates", 9/27/2008). Her ending:

Imagine what would happen if a new beetle infested the Iowa corn crop during the first year of a McCain administration. On Monday, we spray. On Tuesday, we firebomb. On Wednesday, the president marches barefoot through the prairie in a show of support for Iowa farmers. On Thursday, the White House reveals that Wiley Flum, a postal worker from Willimantic, Conn., has been named the new beetle eradication czar. McCain says that Flum had shown “the instincts of a maverick reformer” in personally buying a box of roach motels and scattering them around the post office locker room. “I can’t wait to introduce Wiley to those beetles in Iowa,” the president adds.

On Friday, McCain announces he’s canceling the weekend until Congress makes the beetles go away.

Barack Obama would just round up a whole roomful of experts and come up with a plan. Yawn.

Apparently Ms. Collins thinks of Willimantic as the only place in America more remote and intrinsically funny than Wasilla, Alaska.

Back in August, Anatol Stefanowitsch at Bremer Sprachblog extended xkcd's classic research on the nature of regret by adding the dimension of gender, and by comparing English to German ("Je Ne Regrette Rien", 8/17/2008):

(Click on the images for larger versions.)

Continuing to follow up on the issues raised by David Brooks' column "Harmony and the Dream", I recommend some interesting reviews by Daphna Oyserman and her colleagues. Among her many publications on culture I found two articles that are especially relevant.