Language Log

A couple of years ago, I wrote about the off-beat placement of song syllables (and other other notes) in popular music of the past century. This can be seen as the displacement of events from an underlyingly regular meter, but often it can also be seen as a basic metrical pattern in which events don't fall at evenly-spaced time intervals  ("Rock syncopation: stress shifts or polyrhythms?", 11/26/2007).  The example that I looked at was a maximally simple one — the 3+3+2=4+4 "habanera" rhythm that rocked America in the late 19th century.

Today's post is about some rhythms that arrange events in a recurring cycle of 12 time-units. And although I'll start with another Afro-Cuban pattern, the Bembé, today's analysis will look at connections in renaissance Italy and ancient Rome, rather than in 20th-century America. (Attention conservation notice: unless you're interested in geeking out on a detailed analysis of metrical patterns, you'll probably want to skip onwards to some of our other fine posts…)

David Pesetsky, the Ferrari P. Ward Professor of Modern Languages and Linguistics at MIT, is also the principal second violin in the New Philharmonia Orchestra of Massachusetts. For their 4/1/2009 rehearsal, he provided English translations for the sometimes-confusing performance instructions in Mahler's 1st Symphony.

Dave's sensitive interpretation of Mahler's artistic intent has been received with praise in musical circles. The first page is reproduced below, but any of you who plan to play or listen to this piece should read the whole thing.

We are painfully aware of the fondness of NBA players for sporting Chinese tattoos that they don't understand. The misuse of Chinese characters in Western culture has long been diligently documented at Hanzi Smatter.

But it wasn't until I read an article in my local newspaper and Benjamin Zimmer called a similar article in the Telegraph to my attention that I realized a similar phenomenon has been occurring in China recently.

Incidentally, Hellenophiles will be delighted to see in the Telegraph article that at least one person has some elegant Greek lettering on his / her derriere.

According to the Telegraph, Zhang Aiping, a tattooist at Tattoo 108 in Shanghai, said: "Around 30 per cent to 40 per cent of our customers are choosing tattoos in English letters now. This has happened really suddenly, since the beginning of this year."

The following poster is circulating among students from Shanghai, both inside and outside of China:

For a complete translation, go to the next page.

Even jezebel.com is getting into the S&W 50th anniversary act (Sadie, "Stylistas", 4/16/2009):

The Elements of Style, Strunk and White's timeless usage and composition handbook, is 50 today. Please place a preposition after the relative pronoun in its honor.

I applaud this attempt to re-purpose words that have otherwise lost their meaning in popular culture, but frankly, the results are a stylistic disappointment.

Geoff Pullum was on the NPR radio program Talk of the Nation yesterday, in a segment entitled "A Half-Century of Stupid Grammar Advice".

For those who want more, lists of past LL posts mentioning Strunk can be found here and here.

What do you call it when each player on a team is responsible for defending against just one specific player on the opposing team? If you're playing in such a system, what do you call the player you're responsible for guarding? OK, now what if the players are female? I asked myself such questions several times last week as I watched the final exciting games in the NCAA women's basketball tournament.

In the April 17th issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education, Geoff Pullum meditates on Strunk & White ("50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice"):

April 16 is the 50th anniversary of the publication of a little book that is loved and admired throughout American academe. Celebrations, readings, and toasts are being held, and a commemorative edition has been released.

I won't be celebrating.

Daniel Gross has a nice article in Slate called “Bubblespeak,” describing the way economists and politicians extend themselves, as Orwell put it, “to make lies sound truthful." Leading the list is “legacy loans,” “legacy securities,” and “legacy costs,” referring to those badly collateralized loans, mortgages, and problems of auto companies that we are hearing so much about in reports of the recent Federal Bank Rescue Plan. Linguist George Lakoff says “legacy” typically means something positive, while positive these financial instruments are not. Other current expressions, such as “troubled assets” (see the Troubled Asset Relief Program), “securitization” (redistribution of bad loans), and “sub-prime” (non-prime loans) come under similar fire.

Ah, semantics.

Once upon a time, specifically back in 1962, I spoke German fluently enough to fool all native speakers some of the time and some native speakers all of the time into thinking I was a native speaker of German. That was then. This is now, and now I couldn't convince a two-year-old German toddler that I'm not just another weird, inarticulate, incompetent foreigner. I haven't been back to Germany often since the year I spent here in Freiburg way back when, and in all this time I've been busily losing the brain cells that contained my knowledge of the language. Now I'm at the end of a month spent at a research institute at the university, and because all my linguist acquaintances speak English so well, I haven't had much luck in reactivating any latent German skills — it'd be cruel to make people puzzle over my inept German when we could instead be chattering away productively in English.

David Alpert ("Excessive passive voice, linguistic detachment observed in Culpeper road fatality", 3/23/2009) complains about Martin Weil's lede in the Washington Post:

Four people ranging in age from 19 to 21 were killed early yesterday in Culpeper County, Va., when their car collided with a vehicle that was going the wrong way, Virginia State Police said.

Police said a Chevy Tahoe sport-utility vehicle was driving on the wrong side of a two-lane stretch of Route 3 when it struck the Toyota Corolla about 2:50 a.m.

Alpert's suggestion:

Just based on the facts in the Post article, we can say, "A 29 year old man was driving his Chevy Tahoe SUV on the wrong side of Route 3 early yesterday when he struck and killed four people in a Toyota Corolla." Why can't the printing press at the Washington Post say that?

Following up on last year's discussion of the local slang of Nonantum, outside Boston, Max Heiman sent in a link to a feature article by Erica Noonan, posted last month on boston.com ("Speaking the language of "the Lake" in Newton's Nonantum", 2/26/2009).

Or was it just mostly chalk? Did he not stray too far from chalk, or did he go with the chalk all the way?

Opinions on this subject were all over the news today. But what did it mean? Were they talking about our president's sometimes-professorial demeanor? Was he pale with rage at the AIG bonuses?