Language Log

Suppose you had 100 digital recorders and 800 small languages, all in a country the size of California, but in one of the remotest parts of the planet.  What would you do?  What would it take to identify and train a small army of language workers?  How could the recordings they collect be accessible to people who don't speak the language?  My answer to this question is linked below – but spend a moment thinking how you might do this before looking.  One inspiration for this work was Mark Liberman's talk The problems of scale in language documentation at the Texas Linguistics Society meeting in 2006, in a workshop on Computational Linguistics for Less-Studied Languages.  Another inspiration was observing the enthusiasm of the remaining speakers of the Usarufa language to maintain their language (see this earlier post).  About 9 months ago, I decided to ask Olympus if they would give me 100 of their latest model digital voice recorders.  They did, and the BOLD:PNG Project starts next week.  Please sign the guestbook on that site, or post a comment here, if you'd like to encourage the speakers of these languages who are getting involved in this new project.

According to Dave Itzkoff, "Abandon All Poetry, but Enter Hell With Attitude", NYT 1/29/2010:

There’s a new edition of Dante’s "Inferno" that’s recently begun appearing in bookstores. Same words. Different cover. It’s got a big picture of a muscular fellow in a spiky crown and an overline that says, "The literary classic that inspired the epic video game."

It’s true. "Inferno" is now a video game, with a brawny, armor-clad Dante as its protagonist.

The guys at Electronic Arts' Visceral Games studio found it necessary to give Dante a little help:

"If you’re trying to make an action game, it’s thin," Jonathan Knight, the game’s executive producer, said of the original text. "It’s Dante, who’s kind of passive, and he’s a poet and he’s philosophical. We had to take the bold step of saying, ‘How do we make this guy an action hero?’" […]

"It’s a highbrow/lowbrow project by design," Mr. Knight said. "If you know the poem, the game has a lot to offer. If you just want to mash buttons and kill demons, that’s all it has to be for you."

In his latest On Language column, Ben Zimmer examines "Crash Blossoms", and introduces the topic with a literary allusion:

Elizabeth Barrett Browning once gave the poetry of her husband, Robert, a harsh assessment, criticizing his habit of excessively paring down his syntax with opaque results. “You sometimes make a dust, a dark dust,” she wrote him, “by sweeping away your little words.”

Several readers have written to suggest LL coverage of the latest viral site, "Sleep Talkin' Man". So if you're one of the half-dozen netizens who haven't yet browsed this compendium of oneirophonic entertainment, by all means do so now.

I haven't written about this because I don't have much to say, except that it's interesting how interested people are in such things. In some Elysian bistro, André Breton and Philippe Soupault are doubtless kicking themselves for being born too early to publish in the t-shirt and coffee-mug market:

That's the tagline for Banksy's soon to be released film Exit Through the Gift Shop. This is turning out to be a good day for sentences you need to read twice. And it's rare to find one which says nothing and everything (about street art, grammar, movies, you name it) so precisely.

[via the Guardian]

Fans of Conan O'Brien, who announced he wouldn't accept NBC's plan to move "The Tonight Show" to midnight, have flooded Twitter with the #TeamConan hashtag. In my latest Word Routes column on the Visual Thesaurus, I trace the evolution of the "Team X" meme (what Arnold Zwicky would call a snowclonelet composite) — from Team Xerox to Team Aniston to Team Edward. An excerpt:

"Team X" didn't cross over into pop-cultural usage until the summer of 2005, when Brad Pitt began appearing in public with Angelina Jolie, soon after his divorce from Jennifer Aniston. Ah, the mid-aughts, when the "Brangelina" portmanteau was inescapable. This celebrity coupling generated huge amounts of fodder for the tabloids and the budding blogosphere. On June 14, 2005, the New York Daily News reported that T-shirts reading "Team Aniston" or "Team Jolie" were all the rage in Los Angeles. There was even a three-month waiting list for the shirts (with Team Aniston "overwhelmingly" outselling Team Jolie, according to manufacturer White Trash Charms).

Read the rest here. (And compare the similar snowclonelet "X Nation," discussed a few years ago on the American Dialect Society mailing list here and here.)

(Tip of the hat to Rubrick for the title.)

OK, I'm in room Key 5 (I guess that's Francis Scott Key) at the Baltimore Hilton, where the LSA symposium "Medialingual: Representing Language in Film and Television", organized by Walt Wolfram, is just getting started.

Jack Lynch's recent book The Lexicographer's Dilemma was featured last week in the New York Times' Books section, in a review by Neil Genzlinger under the headline "This is English, Rules are Optional".  Arnold Zwicky recommended Lynch's book enthusiastically, back in December, and I agree with his opinion. Genzlinger also liked the book, and his review should be worth a well-deserved boost in sales. But there was something about Genzlinger's perspective that struck me as odd.

John Bainbridge's 1961 book The super-Americans: a picture of life in the United States, as Brought into Focus, Bigger than Life, in the Land of the Millionaires — Texas was originally published as a series of articles in the New Yorker. The first installment (March 11, 1961: p. 47) began with this sentence:

It is currently fashionable among the more advanced spirits in this country to look upon Texas with an air of amused condescension.

And a few pages later, Bainbridge underlined the advancement of his own spirit as follows:

At a recent cocktail party in Dallas, a visiting journalist was introduced to a handsome, impeccably groomed young matron with golden hair, velvety eyes the color of wood violets, and a becomingly superbious air. She seemed a sublime specimen of the Super-American until, as so often happens, she elected to open her mouth. "Mistah," she said, "Ah'm sick and tahed of readin' those trashy stories you-all keep writin' ahbowt Texas. They ah just so unfaih they make mah blood boil."

Carol Hills, from The World, wrote to ask about historical and cultural differences in the use of religious names. Why, for example, is Jesus widely used as a personal name in Spanish-speaking countries but not in other traditionally Catholic areas? Among Hindus, Carol observes, some names of gods seem to be widely used as personal names (Vishnu, Krishna) while others are not (Brahma, Shiva).

I don't know anything about this topic — at best I can add some additional questions, like why some of the gods of European paganism have survived as reasonably common modern names (especially Diana and Brigit, but also e.g.  Apollo, Minerva, Thor) while others apparently haven't (Baldur, Hermes, Hera, Mars, Odin, Poseidon,  Zeus, etc.)

So I'm appealing to readers for (pointers to sources of factual) information on this question.

Andrew Gelman is justifiably impressed by Laura Wattenberg's ruminations on rhyme (warning: the second link triggers one of those insufferable ads that starts playing loud sounds as soon as the page comes up, so mute your audio before clicking).  Ms. Wattenberg without the musical background:

Here's a little pet peeve of mine: nothing rhymes with orange. You've heard that before, right? Orange is famous for its rhymelessness. There's even a comic strip called "Rhymes with Orange." Fine then, let me ask you something. What the heck rhymes with purple?

If you stop and think about it, you'll find that English is jam-packed with rhymeless common words. What rhymes with empty, or olive, or silver, or circle? You can even find plenty of one-syllable words like wolf, bulb, and beige. Yet orange somehow became notorious for its rhymelessness, with the curious result that people now assume its status is unique.

Andrew wrote to ask about this, and so I did a bit of looking around for information about the statistics of rhyme.

Readers of Chris Potts' post on "David Foster Wallace Grammar Challenge Challenged" may be interested in a list of previous LL posts that discuss DFW:

"Snoot? Bluck" (11/8/2004)
"Enforcer Syndrome (pre-adolescent phase)" (6/22/2005)
"The Grammar Vandal strikes in Boston" (7/16/2007)
"Are any of those things even things?" (9/18/2008)
"'Descriptivism's five basic edicts'" (7/7/2009)

Chris at The Lousy Linguist takes up an implicit challenge due to Edward Skidelsky, "Words that think for us", Prospect Magazine, 11/18/2009, who wrote:

No words are more typical of our moral culture than “inappropriate” and “unacceptable.” They seem bland, gentle even, yet they carry the full force of official power. When you hear them, you feel that you are being tied up with little pieces of soft string.

Inappropriate and unacceptable began their modern careers in the 1980s as part of the jargon of political correctness. They have more or less replaced a number of older, more exact terms: coarse, tactless, vulgar, lewd. They encompass most of what would formerly have been called “improper” or “indecent.” An affair between a teacher and a pupil that was once improper is now inappropriate; a once indecent joke is now unacceptable.