Language Log

Jonathan Coulton, "Soft Rocked By Me", 11/21/2008:

(The relevant part of the song starts about 1:00 in, or use this link, since time offsets don't work in YouTube embedding. But Coulton's pre-song explanation is also part of the package: "… ladies like a sensitive man — a little bit — but you don't want to go too far…")

Another opinion piece for our passive voice file: Marie Murray, "The passive voice is the penultimate weapon of denial", The Irish Times, 7/31/2009:

The passive voice is especially useful where apologies are required: personal apologies for what people have done personally. Because instead of having to say, “I’m sorry”, the passive voice allows a culprit to say “It is regrettable”. Instead of saying “I made a mistake” the abstract term “mistakes happened” can be evoked.

The photograph below, taken earlier this month in Beijing, shows some of the best English-language bloggers now writing about language and culture in China and Taiwan.

A reader asks why it is (as it seems to him) increasingly common for Americans to say "August seven" instead of "August seventh" or "August the seventh" for 08/07/09 ("Coming August seven to a theater near you!"). I have done no investigation on this (it would need intensive quantitative corpus study over dated corpora that do not have Google's propensity for collapsing common typographical variants). The reader may be wrong to think the practice has been increasing: the Recency Effect has not been repealed. So I offer nothing but the following observation. For some time there has been a trend toward abolishing typographical clutter in print ("Mr Jones" for "Mr. Jones"; even "ie" and "eg" for "i.e." and "e.g."), particularly though not exclusively in published American English; and American English also idiomatically eliminates various prepositions here and there (as in "See you Tuesday" for "See you on Tuesday"). If such abbreviatory practices led to writing "7" for "7th" or "the 7th", spelling pronunciation might be responsible for the resultant habit spreading in spoken American English.

The entry on like as a conjunction in Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage quotes Shakespeare as using "conjunctive like" in this line:

And yet no man like he doth grieve my heart.
Romeo and Juliet, 1595

Commenting on the recent flurry of commentary about the political first person singular, D.G. Myers has some thoughts on "Self-reference and narcissicism":

Person reflects genre. Despite the fact that he is an eighteenth-century author like Sterne and Chesterfield, Franklin uses the first person more often because he is writing an autobiography, a literary kind that, except when it is an exercise in voluble self-concealment, like The Education of Henry Adams, depends helplessly upon the first person. Similarly, to accuse David Copperfield of “ego-involvement”—he uses some form of the first person 6.3% of the time—does not seem quite right. David is as much a “camera” as Christopher in The Berlin Stories; he is at least as interested in the people in his life as in himself.

The discussion following my original post ("A Little Primer of Xinjiang Proper Nouns", 7/13/2009) has proven quite edifying, at least to me.  One thing that I realized from the lively comments is that I forgot to give an indication of how the name Xinjiang itself should be pronounced.  There's also the question of what sort of "pronouncers" or "respellings" to provide for speakers of American English who need to pronounce these names but cannot be expected to render them exactly the way a native speaker of Uyghur would.

I must preface the following remarks by stating that I'm probably not the best person to offer standard American English readings of these names because I'm a fluent speaker of Mandarin and know a bit of Uyghur. Consequently, when I want to say these words as an American would, I'm afraid that my Mandarin and my Uyghur get in the way. Still, I will make an honest effort to separate the three modes and offer useful guides for speakers of American English.

One of yesterday's guests on Radio Times with Marty Moss-Coane was Arika Okrent, author of In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers, and the Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build A Perfect Language. You can listen (or download the mp3) here.

I don't know very much about the history of invented languages, so I'm looking forward to reading her book.

[Update: a transcript of Okrent's interview with Gelf magazine is here.]

Following the serious unrest in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of the Peoples Republic of China that erupted last week, "Xinjiang," "Uyghur," "Urumchi," and other names pertaining to the region have become household words.  Unfortunately, people around the world have been confused about how to pronounce these words.  This is understandable for several reasons.  In the first place, we have to confront both the original Uyghur terms and their full and truncated versions in Mandarin.  Second, there is often a plethora of variant romanizations for each name.

Ed Wong, the New York Times correspondent who has been keeping us so well informed about the events as they unfold, told me that the NYT had

"received an email from a reader saying the NYT should change its 'pronouncer' on Uighurs.  Right now, in our articles, the editors insert (WEE-gurs) as the pronouncer.  One reader said this is not the correct pronunciation, and sounds strange to the Turkic speaker’s ear."

As I told Ed, it would have been helpful if the person who sent the NYT the e-mail would have indicated the correct pronunciation, not just told them that WEE-gurs sounds wrong.

In an attempt to clarify how the most important  Xinjiang names are actually pronounced in Uyghur and in Mandarin, I here provide various orthographic forms along with audio clips.  As to what sort of "pronouncers" should be developed for the major media, presumably to represent appropriate Americanized pronunciations, I invite suggestions.

[Update: I give "pronouncers" and recordings of suggested American English renditions in a later post, "American English pronunciation of Uyghur proper nouns", 7/15/2009.)

A few days ago, Michelle Pauli in the Guardian's Books Blog asked "Which words make you wince?":

'What word do you hate and why?' is the intriguing question put to a selection of poets by the Ledbury festival. Philip Wells's reply is the winner for me – 'pulchritude' is certainly up there on my blacklist. He even explains his animosity in suitably poetic terms:

"it violates all the magical impulses of balanced onomatopoeic language – it of course means "beautiful", but its meaning is nothing of the sort, being stuffed to the brim with a brutally latinate cudgel of barbaric consonants. If consonants represent riverbanks and vowels the river's flow, this is the word equivalent of the bottomless abyss of dry bones, where demons gather to spit acid."

For Geraldine Monk, "it's got to be 'redacted' which makes me feel totally sick. It's a brutish sounding word. It doesn't flow, it prods at you in a nasty manner."

Both these poets understand that the key to words that make you feel nauseous is not the meaning – it's easy, after all, to hate the word 'torture' – but something else entirely. Something idiosyncratic, something about the way the word feels in your mouth as you say it. The horrors of 'membrane', for instance. Or the eccentricity of 'gusset'.

I've observed from time to time, half-seriously, that the ambiguity of plural noun-phrase comparison ("women have better hearing than men") causes — as well as results from — the tendency to interpret small group differences as essential group characteristics (e.g. "The Pirahã and us", 10/6/2007; "Annals of essentialism: sexual orientation and rhetorical assymmetry", 6/18/2008; "Pop platonism and unrepresentative samples", 7/26/2008; 'The happiness gap returns", 7/26/2008;. "Reverse Whorfianism and SHAs", 12/23/2008).

But there are other, more lexically specific, sources of confusion about statistical concepts and statements. One that I noticed for the first time yesterday is an ambiguity in the word chance. Its popular use in the sense of probabilistic odds ("little chance of success"; "his chances are good" , etc.) is relatively recent, and has always overlapped with an older meaning that emphasizes complete unpredictability and the lack of any discernable cause.

This history helps explain the shocking sentence that I read yesterday on the online front page of the New York Times; "A longtime trainer uses an actuarial approach to predict injuries, defying the assumption that what happens to players is a matter of chance".

Near the end of 1801, his first year as president of the United States, Thomas Jefferson got a letter from Robert Patterson, professor of mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania, containing a page encrypted according to a new method. Patterson described his cryptosystem in detail, and boasted that without the key — which he didn't provide — decryption of his message would "defy the united ingenuity of the whole human race".

After more than 200 years, the code was finally broken by Dr. Lawren Smithline, a mathematician at the Center for Communications Research in Princeton, N.J., using a technique originally developed for biological sequence comparison.

This could be the premise for a new Dan Brown novel, if Patterson's message were sufficiently bizarre and consequential.

A note from Bob Ladd:

I just picked up and put away a book I'd bought in a second-hand bookstore before going to Romania in 1978, called "The Balkans in our Time", by Robert Lee Wolff, a mid-century Harvard historian.  I realized that he's yet another example of a generalization that must somehow tell us something about how language works: Anglo-elite American academic historians often use their full middle name.  Samuel Eliot Morrison and Henry Steele Commager come readily to mind, but Robert Lee Wolff fits the pattern, as does another more recent writer, Walter Russell Mead.  And Andrew Dickson White, the first president of Cornell, was a historian. It's hard to search for these on Google, but I'm pretty sure I've noticed others, and I can't think of people who use their middle name and *aren't* American academic historians, except for good ol' boys like Billy Bob Thornton and Jerry Lee Lewis.