Language Log

I'm in Baltimore for the secret annual cabal of the Linguistic Society of America. The meeting Handbook is not secret, but it's rather large, so don't click unless you want 6.32 MB of crunchy linguistic goodness. You could start with the program instead.

If I can get a wireless connection, I'll liveblog some of the meeting, starting this afternoon with Walt Wolfram's 4:00 "Symposium: Medialingual: Representing Language in Film and Television".

Here in the Edinburgh office of Language Log we are snowed in this morning. Thick, thick snow. (Though our language has only one word for it, we find that is quite enough.) There have been repeated falls overnight. This is unusual weather for Edinburgh. Part of the major London-to-Edinburgh highway, the A1, is being closed. Travel advisories of the don't-even-think-about-it type are being broadcast on the radio. And yet below the windows of our New Town apartment, cars and trucks and taxis belonging to those unable to understand broadcast warnings are sliding around and getting stuck on the snow-coated cobblestones of our street. People are digging spasmodically and hopelessly with rusty shovels they found in their basements to try and free these cars from their wintry doom. I saw one neighbour come out with an ice axe to try and free a truck that was unable to get up the hill. It was in vain. Linguists are helping too. We have teams out across the city doing comprehension tests: asking the drivers of stuck cars, "Which part of ‘unless absolutely necessary’ did you find hard to understand?"

Bill Poser's book The Carrier Language: A Brief Introduction has just come out. The press release is here, and it was reprinted in the Prince George Citizen, under a strong candidate for the worst pun ever used in a newspaper headline, "Endangered speech(ies)".

Unfortunately, it's not yet known to amazon, nor is it yet listed on its publisher's order form.

For some of Bill's scholarly publications on Carrier, see "Noun Classification in Carrier", Anthropological Linguistics 27(2) 2005; "The Solid Phase of Water in Carrier", 2004; "Dating Velar Palatalization in Carrier", 2004; and his three Carrier dictionaries (Lheidli T'enneh Hubughunek, Nak'albun/Dzinghubun Whut'enne Bughuni, Saik'uz Whut'en Hubughunek) available from the Yinka Dene Language Institute.

On a more general topic, there's Lyle Campbell and William Poser, "Language Classification: History and Method", 2008, which you can buy from amazon, though it'll cost you about fifty cups of Starbucks coffee.

Thanks to Andrew Freer for pointing out to me that the BBC has published an article in connection with its Horizon documentary about "unlocking the mysteries of speech" (they have the usual tendency to confuse talk about language and talk about speech). Simon Kirby remarked to me this morning about the documentary (which I have not seen: Barbara and I do not have TV set):

For Language Log readers able to get BBC television broadcasts, at this BBC page you will find details of a Horizon documentary on BBC 2 TV, scheduled for tomorrow (Tuesday) night, about why humans talk and where linguistic ability came from, with footage not only of the Grand Old Man of linguistics, Noam Chomsky, who thinks it just sort of came about by some sort of genetic miracle, but also of Edinburgh's Simon Kirby (believed to be the only Professor of Language Evolution in the world) and Hannah Cornish, who demonstrate an experiment showing that particular features of language (notably a variety of compositionality) can be experimentally induced to evolve in a single afternoon. No one here in Edinburgh has seen the program or knows whether it will sensibly convey the content of the research that Simon and Hannah have done (they are understandably nervous, knowing that by Wednesday morning their TV careers will have begun, but not knowing whether they are going to be famous for science or comedy or tragedy). All of us await with mingled anticipation and trepidation. But the only way to find out will be to watch.

If I and my friends and colleagues could just have found the strength of will to not talk about Dan Brown's new novel The Lost Symbol, perhaps we could have stopped his march to inevitable victory as the fastest-selling and most renowned novelist in human history, and The Lost Symbol could have just faded away to become his Lost Novel. If only we could just have shut up. And we tried. But we just couldn't resist the temptation to gabble on about the new blockbuster. Sam Anderson at New York Magazine has set up a discussion salon devoted to The Lost Symbol, under the title the Vulture Reading Room, to allow us to tell each other (and you, and the world) what we think about the book. Already Sam's own weakness has become clear: he struggled mightily to avoid doing the obvious — a Dan Brown parody — and of course he failed. His cringingly funny parody is already up on the site (as of about 4 p.m. Eastern time on September 22). Soon my own first post there will be up. I know that Sarah Weinman (the crime reviewer) will not be far behind, and Matt Taibbi (the political journalist) and NYM's own contributing editor Boris Kachka will not be far behind her.

Commenters on this blog and others, and many of my correspondents, have been asking: "Where is Pullum?"

I am on a train in England, using unspeakably slow wireless Internet. And I have a copy of Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol cradled in my palms.

After his NPR interview and MSNBC honor for debunking the Cronkiter myth, Ben Zimmer is subbing for William Safire as this week's NYT's On Language columnist: "How Fail Went From Verb to Interjection", 8/7/2009.

Time was, fail was simply a verb that denoted being unsuccessful or falling short of expectations. It made occasional forays into nounhood, in fixed expressions like without fail and no-fail. That all started to change in certain online subcultures about six years ago. In July 2003, a contributor to Urbandictionary.com noted that fail could be used as an interjection “when one disapproves of something,” giving the example: “You actually bought that? FAIL.” This punchy stand-alone fail most likely originated as a shortened form of “You fail” or, more fully, “You fail it,” the taunting “game over” message in the late-’90s Japanese video game Blazing Star, notorious for its fractured English.

The National Science Foundation put out a press release today under the title "U.S. Students Win Big at the International Linguistics Olympiad", subtitle "Event in Poland highlights significance of emerging field of computational linguistics".

High school students from across the U.S. won individual and team honors last week at the seventh annual International Olympiad in Linguistics held in Wroclaw, Poland. The results reflect U.S. competence in computational linguistics, an emerging field that has applications in computer science, language processing, code breaking and other advanced arenas.

Language Log is loading slowly today, due to heavy traffic from a digg.com link. Our normal weekday load is about 500-600 visits per hour (1,000-1,200 page views); apparently our current server saturates at around 2,000-2,200 visits per hour, which is what it's managing this morning. I expect that the crowds will be gone by tomorrow, and probably sooner.

We usually avoid shop talk here on Language Log. So those of you who are here for the cartoons may want to move along, since I'm about to (mis-?) use this forum to announce a new journal.

Language Log readers in London might be interested to know that I'm speaking to the Philological Society at 4:15 p.m. tomorrow (Friday, May 8). The meeting is in room 116 at the School of Oriental and African Studies, Thornhaugh Street, Russell Square, London WC1H OXG. The details are here.

Google reports about 37,000 hits for "shameless plug of/for my" or "shamelessly plugging my," and the total would be a lot bigger if you allowed for variants like "my shameless self-promotion" and so forth. The phrases are much more common now than they were in the old media, mostly because the new media have dramatically increased the opportunities for self-exposure — Google Blogsearch alone turns up more than 4000 hits for the phrases. The vast majority of these are associated with creative works and activities, in a broad sense of the term: people apologize for shamelessly touting their books, TV appearances, t-shirt designs, videos, high-school band performances, blogs, and new CD's. (Others apologize for shamelessly plugging their hairdresser or a PC they have for sale on Ebay, which seems to me a little unclear on the concept — what's to be ashamed of?)

The modifier accomplishes several things at once: it concedes that the self-promotion is an impropriety, but one venial enough to be joked about; and it averts the reader's censure with preemptive self-reproach. It reminds me of the way H. W. Fowler described the use of apologies like "saving the reader's reverence" and "if we may adopt the current slang":  "A refinement on the institution of the whipping boy, by which [writers] not only have the boy, but do the whipping."

My new collection The Years of Talking Dangerously was published today by PublicAffairs.