Language Log

"Statement of the Ambassador of the Czech Republic on the Boston terrorist attack", 4/19/2013:

As many I was deeply shocked by the tragedy that occurred in Boston earlier this month. It was a stark reminder of the fact that any of us could be a victim of senseless violence anywhere at any moment.

As more information on the origin of the alleged perpetrators is coming to light, I am concerned to note in the social media a most unfortunate misunderstanding in this respect. The Czech Republic and Chechnya are two very different entities – the Czech Republic is a Central European country; Chechnya is a part of the Russian Federation.

As the President of the Czech Republic Miloš Zeman noted in his message to President Obama, the Czech Republic is an active and reliable partner of the United States in the fight against terrorism. We are determined to stand side by side with our allies in this respect, there is no doubt about that.

Petr Gandalovič
Ambassador of the Czech Republic

Many Language Log readers are no doubt familiar with the Dictionary of American Regional English, which I hailed in a Boston Globe column last year as "a great project on how Americans speak — make that the great project on how Americans speak." At the time, I was previewing DARE's fifth volume, which completed the alphabetical run all the way to zydeco.  Since then, a sixth volume of supplemental materials has also been published, and plans are underway to launch the digital version of DARE, which would serve as an online home for future expansions and revisions. But now DARE editor Joan Hall passes along some troubling news about the dictionary's financial fate.

An announcement at Cambria Press:

Paolo Lucchesi, "AQ’s Matt Semmelhack and Mark Liberman to open Bon Marché in Market Square", Inside Scoop SF 2/22/2013:

Matt Semmelhack and Mark Liberman — the team behind the celebrated AQ in SoMa — are the first restaurant tenants of the big Market Square development (a.k.a. the Twitter building), where they plan to open a street-level, all-day brasserie and bar named Bon Marché.

Thomas Lumley sent in this nice multilingual pun from Sydney, Australia:

One week from tomorrow (Tuesday) night I give my Jesse and John Danz Lecture at the University of Washington in Seattle. And although the summary published on the registration page is entirely accurate, I would still conjecture that as many as half the people planning to attend will think that the scandal is people who write bad. They will assume that I will be dinging ordinary folks for writing (and speaking) ungrammatically. Little will they know what lies in store: that my target is the grammarians. It is the rule-givers and knuckle-rappers and nitpickers that I will be castigating for their ignorance of the content of the principles of English syntax.

Several people have asked me about Alexander M. Petersen et al., "Languages cool as they expand: Allometric scaling and the decreasing need for new words", Nature Scientific Reports 12/10/2012. The abstract (emphasis added):

We analyze the occurrence frequencies of over 15 million words recorded in millions of books published during the past two centuries in seven different languages. For all languages and chronological subsets of the data we confirm that two scaling regimes characterize the word frequency distributions, with only the more common words obeying the classic Zipf law. Using corpora of unprecedented size, we test the allometric scaling relation between the corpus size and the vocabulary size of growing languages to demonstrate a decreasing marginal need for new words, a feature that is likely related to the underlying correlations between words. We calculate the annual growth fluctuations of word use which has a decreasing trend as the corpus size increases, indicating a slowdown in linguistic evolution following language expansion. This “cooling pattern” forms the basis of a third statistical regularity, which unlike the Zipf and the Heaps law, is dynamical in nature.

The paper is thought-provoking, and the conclusions definitely merit further exploration. But I feel that the paper as published is guilty of false advertising. As the emphasized material in the abstract indicates, the paper claims to be about the frequency distributions of words in the vocabulary of English and other natural languages. In fact, I'm afraid, it's actually about the frequency distributions of strings in Google's 2009 OCR of printed books — and this, alas, is not the same thing at all.

It's possible that the paper's conclusions also hold for the distributions of words in English and other languages, but it's far from clear that this is true. At a minimum, the paper's quantitative results clearly will not hold for anything that a linguist, lexicographer, or psychologist would want to call "words". Whether the qualitative results hold or not remains to be seen.

The 2013 annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science will be held 2/14/2013 to 2/18/2013 at the Hynes Convention Center in Boston. Section Z (Linguistics) is sponsoring or recommending eight of the many symposia featured at the meeting:

The first round of the 2013 North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad will take place on January 31, 2013, at 45 sites around the U.S. and Canada. As the NACLO web site explains, this

… is a contest in which high-school students solve linguistic puzzles. In solving the problems, students learn about the diversity and consistency of language, while exercising logic skills. No prior knowledge of linguistics or second languages is necessary. Professionals in linguistics, computational linguistics and language technologies use dozens of languages to create engaging problems that represent cutting edge issues in their fields. The competition has attracted top students to study and work in those same fields. It is truly an opportunity for young people to experience a taste of natural-language processing in the 21st century.

Problems and solutions from the 2012 competition are available here.

Dragomir Radev contributed a LLOG post about the first NACLO, back in 2007; and NACLO veterans have done well in recent International Linguistics Olympiads. Registration at most sites is open through January 30, 2013.

Last week, the Annual Reviews' Board of Directors approved a plan to launch an Annual Review of Linguistics, with Barbara Partee and me as co-editors. According to the Annual Reviews' overview page,

Since 1932, Annual Reviews has offered comprehensive, timely collections of critical reviews written by leading scientists. Annual Reviews volumes are published each year for 41 focused disciplines within the Biomedical, Life, Physical, and Social Sciences including Economics.

Since three other new journals had been approved at an earlier meeting, Linguistics will be one of 45 fields covered by Annual Reviews.

Uh-oh! A friend of mine who recently looked at the websites of the Departments of Linguistics at both the University of Chicago and the University of Pennsylvania just pointed out to me that each of them claims to be the oldest department of linguistics in the USA. This is bad. Language Log is headquartered on a server at Penn. Now we don't know whether our home is the oldest department of linguistics in the USA or not.

Today marks the beginning of Open Access Week, and last week's announcement about changes to the Linguistic Society of America's publications program was like an early OA Week present. Some highlights:

• All content published in Language will be made freely available on the new LSA website after a one-year embargo period.
• Authors who wish to have their content available immediately, either on the Language site or on other websites, may pay a $400 article processing fee to do so.
• The contents of Language will continue to be immediately available to LSA members and to other subscribers of Project MUSE.

Information about more Open Access goodness to come at the LSA's Annual Meeting in January here.

There is a movement called Vietnamese2020 that aims to substantially reform the writing system by the year 2020.  The main change would be to group syllables into words.  As the advocates of this change point out, most words in Vietnamese are disyllabic (the same is true of Mandarin).  The proponents of the reform believe that, among others, it would reap the following benefits:

1. achieve greater compatibility with the needs of information processing systems

2. comport better with the findings of cognitive science

3. put the kibosh on the false notion of monosyllabism, which they say is unnatural and does not exist in real languages