Language Log

I have begun to accept that air travel across the North Atlantic is a thing of the past, at least for now. Europe is as distant a dream as it was a hundred years ago, a trip accomplishable only by a long sea voyage. I need to accept that I live in Boston now. I have been passing my time learning to pronounce Eyjafjallajökull properly, and rediscovering the pleasures of being back in the USA, and profiting from the kindness of strangers toward the bloggers they read. You Language Log readers in the Boston/Cambridge area and further afield: I really am touched by your generosity, thoughtfulness, and friendship. Elizabeth, Murray, Jan, Kathleen, Michael, Carla, Ryan, James, Steve: this means people like you.

What does a Language Log blogger who currently lives in Edinburgh do when stranded in Boston, the wrong side of a continent-sized plume of volcanic ash? Some would just hang out in bars, sinking beer after beer and boring fellow customers with increasingly self-pitying descriptions of their plight ("D'you know, I'm a famoush Languidsh Log writer; thish shouldn't be happening to me; there should be shpecial arrangementsh; you shee, I have to get back to Ebbingbr… Edimbr… Edingbrg…"). But not me. I like to work. There is no way I can get out of here with the whole of the north Atlantic area and northern Europe in paralysis, so I'm going over to give a lecture on English grammar at Boston College, 3:30 today (Friday). Title: "The Land of the Free and The Elements of Style; location: Lyons Hall, room 202. Be there. The lecturing will give me something safe and socially useful for me to do, and it will enable me to continue the campaign.

NASSLLI 2010 is a week long summer school that offers 15 superlative graduate level courses and workshops on Language, Logic and Information from leading scholars, plus pre-session tutorials to bring you up to speed. And the price is incredibly low, just $150 for the entire week if you're a student and register by May 1.

"Second best"? We'll come to that.

Eyjafjallajoekull: the name says it all, doesn't it? No, of course it doesn't. It looks like a kitten walked across your keyboard. It's the name of the glacier covering the volcano in Iceland that just woke up and remembered that its job description says "Spew hot lava ash across northwestern Europe". I'm at Boston's Logan Airport, where the lights are going out one by one on the board showing international departures to Europe. Airspace is shutting down, flight by flight by flight.

I've simply had it with all the people who keep telling me that they revere The Elements of Style because it's such a nice little book and helped them so much with their writing when they were in college that they carry it everywhere they go and give it to all their students or hand a copy to each new employee that they hire for their company yadda yadda yadda… I have decided that my campaign against Strunk and White's toxic little compendium of unfollowable dumb advice, bungled grammar claims, and outright mendacity must be taken directly to America's colleges, starting with the great universities of the East Coast. For the opening event I have chosen Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. I will speak on the Brown campus at 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday night next week, April 13, in the Metcalf Chemistry Building Auditorium at 190-194 Thayer Street. Admission is free, and Language Log readers get a 30% discount off that. Be there.

The winners in the Fourth Annual North American Computational Linguistics Competition have been announced. The top eight scorers were:

1st- Ben Sklaroff, Palo Alto, CA, Palo Alto High School
2nd- Brian Kong, Milton, MA, Milton Academy
3rd- Allen Yuan, Farmington Hills, MI, Detroit Country Day School
4th- Daniel Li, Fairfax, VA, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology
5th- Alan Chang, San Jose, CA
6th- Alexander Iriza, Astoria, NY, The Dalton School
7th- In-Sung Na, Old Tappan, NJ, Northern Valley Regional HIgh School at Old Tappan
8th- Tian-Yi Damien Jiang, Raleigh, NC, North Carolina School of Science & Mathematics (Durham)

1,118 students participated in the first round of the competition, held on February 4, and the top 100 scorers took part in a second round on March 10.  Squads formed from the best-scoring participants will be eligible to go on to the Eighth International Linguistics Olympiad, to be held in Sweden in July.  NACLO winners have done very well in previous Olympiads.

Sandra Wilde writes:

The National Governors' Association has just published a draft version of new Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts and Literacy in History/Social Sciences, which are open for public comment. I'm an education professor in the area of literacy with a special interest in grammar and related topics, and was wondering if you or other authors of Language Log would be interested in creating a post about them, since I know there have often been comments on the blog about published grammar advice for teachers. These standards are a big deal, since 48 states have agreed to adopt them. They're likely to have a big impact on curriculum for the foreseeable future.

SW suggests that LL readers may want to read the draft and submit comments, and that some discussion in LL posts and comments may be useful. According to the commoncore.org web site, "These standards are now open for public comment until Friday, April 2".

I haven't had a chance to do more than skim the draft, but meanwhile, the comments section on this post is open.

It's that time of  the year again: the LINGUIST List's annual fund drive is under way, for the month of March; the drive is about halfway (about $32,000) to its goal of $65,000 (the money goes to support the student staff). From the list's site:

The LINGUIST List is dedicated to providing information on language and language analysis, and to providing the discipline of linguistics with the infrastructure necessary to function in the digital world.

Late-breaking news:

The New York Times Magazine announced today the appointment of linguist and lexicographer Ben Zimmer as the new "On Language" columnist. Mr. Zimmer succeeds William Safire who was the founding and regular columnist until his death last fall. [alas, a non-restrictive relative clause missing its comma] The column is a fixture in The Times Magazine and features commentary on the many facets – from grammar to usage – of our language. "On Language" will appear bi-weekly beginning March 21.

Yes, our very own Ben, who was proud enough to tell the rest of the LLoggers, but too modest to post the announcement himself.

Massive pleasure at Language Log Plaza and on ADS-L.

The first modern dictionary of Sahaptin has been published. Sahaptin is a language of the Northwestern plateau, spoken in the drainage of the Columbia River in southern Washington, northern Oregon, and southwestern Idaho. There are now no more than 200 speakers. This dictionary is of the Yakima dialect, called by its speakers Ichishkíin Sɨ́nwit.

That's the title of Victor Mair's talk tomorrow [Wednesday 1/27] afternoon, 5:00-6:30, in the Rainey Auditorium at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.  So if you're in the Philadelphia area, and you're a fan of Victor's LL posts, or of his work with the Xinjiang mummies, or of his many books, or you're just interested in Bronze Age Asia, come to 3260 South Street at 5:00 for a treat.

John Coleman was on the BBC Digital Planet program a couple of weeks ago, discussing a recently-awarded grant from the (British/American/Canadian) "Digging into Data" challenge.  The proposal was submitted under the title "Mining a Year of Speech", and also involves the British Library Sound Archive, and some researchers at Penn, including Jiahong Yuan, Chris Cieri, and me.  An Oxford University press release is here.

Massimo Poesio writes:

Phrase Detectives is a game-with-a-purpose designed to gather data about anaphora. We put online about 1.2 million words – half Wikipedia, half fiction from the Project Gutenberg (the plan is to make all the data freely available through LDC and the Anaphoric Bank), and ask our players to tell us what an anaphoric expression refers to, or to check what other 'detectives' have done. The game collects 8 judgments for every anaphoric expression, and each interpretation is validated by 5 other players, so that the data can also be used to study disagreements in anaphoric interpretation. We have collected over 700,000 anaphoric judgments in this first year and around 300,000 validations, and we'd like to complete the annotation of the first 1 million words before moving on to release 2 of the game (as you'll see if you play, there are several limitations), so we started a competition – $500 to whomever gets the most points in January – to double the number of players (we have around 1500, it would be nice to get to at least 3000).