Language Log

I only just today happened to come into possession of one of the 50-pence coins issued in 2005 to commemorate a man we have to recognize as an early linguist: Dr Samuel Johnson, who published the first really successful monolingual dictionary of the English language, 250 years earlier, in 1755. I got the coin in change from the 7th-floor common room coffee vending machine in the School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences here in Edinburgh. I was amazed to look down and see a tail side with text where there is usually a picture, and a fragment of an etymology ("Saxon"), and a part of speech annotation ("n."), and a gloss ("plural of penny"), and the name of a lexicographer.

I'd be interested to know if any clever net-wranglers who read Language Log could provide a link (I haven't found one) to non-overdubbed audio of the official broadcast announcement of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea's recent nuclear test. The BBC played a little bit of it, and it was truly astonishing. High pitched, over-the-top emotional, and bombastic in a kind of frantic way that sounded utterly ludicrous. Not just like a squeaky and histrionic Korean voice bragging in a deranged kind of way, but like a Saturday Night Live sketch depicting a squeaky and histrionic Korean voice bragging in a deranged kind of way. It was creepy, but I'd sort of love to hear it again. No I wouldn't… Perhaps I would. I don't know. Give the link in the comments area if you can find one, and I'll think about whether it's too creepy to listen to.

You'd think it was the end of the world. Apparently, the Nuance Communications-powered text-to-speech system on the new Amazon Kindle mispronounces Barack Obama's name, saying something like "buh-RACK oh-BAM-uh" instead of "buh-ROCK oh-BAH-muh". Why is this little tidbit worth a piece in the business/media section of The New York Times? The answer is, it's not. It could have been an OK lead-in to a technology piece about how text-to-speech systems work, and how they can fail — often spectacularly — on unknown words, especially names. Granted, adding the (pronunciation of the) name of a political figure such as Barack Obama to the system's dictionary is a simple enough thing to do (which is how Nuance will in fact fix the problem, if it hasn't already), and it was clearly an oversight worth pointing out to the company. But then again, the version of Firefox I'm using right now (3.0.4 for the Mac) has been underlining both of the President's names in what I have been typing thus far, incorrectly guessing that I'm misspelling something, and I'll bet you won't see some NYT reporter wasting their time on such a triviality.

OK, so Geoff Nunberg plugged his new book here on Language Log. Shamelessly. But in fact he is shy, very shy. He is one of the quiet National Public Radio superstars who move among us invisibly, dynamic and brilliant and yet never recognized in the streets. He could have plugged the fact that he is teaching a course on Language and Public Discourse this summer at Berkeley, in the Linguistic Institute sponsored by the Linguistic Society of America. You could register, and take that course at an amazingly low fee. But you simply didn't know about it, because he is too shy to mention it. It's 10:30 to 12:15 Mondays and Wednesdays between July 6 and 23. Of course, you would need a course for the afternoon as well; but then (I point this out with all due modesty) you could have a bite of lunch and then take my course on English Grammar from 1:30 to 3:15 on those days. There is a staggering list of heartbreakingly tempting courses by towering geniuses from all subfields of linguistics, in fact. Nearly all of them too shy to tell you how great they are (though I think George Lakoff would hint at it if you pressed him). Shy linguists teaching brilliant courses all summer at low rates in gorgeous northern California. Language Log personalities you could meet in the flesh. This could be the ultimate most fantastic summer of your life, if you just thought to yourself "Carpe diem!," and signed up. Or you could just hang out at home and watch summer reruns on TV of course.

Irving John "Jack" Good, who died on April 5 at the age of 92, is best known to linguists as the author of a paper on mathematical ecology. The paper is I.J. Good, "The Population Frequencies of Species and the Estimation of Population Parameters", Biometrika 40(3-4) 237-264 (1953), and its abstract reads as follows:

A random sample is drawn from a population of animals of various species. (The theory may also be applied to studies of literary vocabulary, for example.) If a particular species is represented r times in the sample of size N, then r/N is not a good estimate of the population frequency, p, when r is small. Methods are given for estimating p, assuming virtually nothing about the underlying population. The estimates are expressed in terms of smoothed values of the numbers n_r (r = 1, 2, 3, …), where n_r is the number of distinct species that are each represented r times in the sample. (n_r may be described as `the frequency of the frequency r'.) Turing is acknowledged for the most interesting formula in this part of the work. An estimate of the proportion of the population represented by the species occurring in the sample is an immediate corollary. Estimates are made of measures of heterogeneity of the population, including Yule's 'characteristic' and Shannon's 'entropy'. Methods are then discussed that do depend on assumptions about the underlying population. It is here that most work has been done by other writers. It is pointed out that a hypothesis can give a good fit to the numbers n_r but can give quite the wrong value for Yule's characteristic. An example of this is Fisher's fit to some data of Williams's on Macrolepidoptera.

As I announced on Thursday, David Harrison was just here in the San Diego wing of Language Log Plaza to screen and discuss the film The Linguists, at UC San Diego on Thursday and at San Diego State University on Friday. Both events were hugely successful — a fantastic turnout of around 150 people at each screening. David then headed to Rutgers University (my graduate school alma mater, as it happens) for a similar event during Rutgers Day on Saturday, where I'm sure the turnout was also great.

In case you missed all of these screenings, or if your PBS station didn't air it (or you don't get even have a PBS station!), or if you just want to see it again, the film is streaming for a limited time at Babelgum. Click and watch!

On Language Log you get new, fresh language, not just recycled phrases and repetitions of earlier prose. A search of the web suggests nobody had ever written down the phrase "epic paroxysm of poppycock" in the previous history of the world until Mark used it in the foregoing post. (It has some other very striking phraseology too. Mark is angry at this latest piece of junk science journalism! Check it out.)

[ A dispatch from the Youth and Popular Culture Desk here at Language Log Plaza, where things have been kinda slow lately. Hat-tip to Jim Wilson. ]

It's been just over two days since Comedy Central aired the Fishsticks episode of South Park. (See the full episode here.) The basic premise: the fact that "fish sticks" kinda sounds like "fish dicks", and the assertion that this is "quite possibly the funniest joke ever conceived".

A: Do you like fishsticks?
B: Yes.
A: Do you like putting fishsticks in your mouth?
B: Yes.
A: What are you, a gay fish?

In Athens for the EACL (European chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics). Weather lovely, wish you were here. Athens more beautiful than I had expected. And for me, a grammarian married to a philosopher and interested in logic and mathematics, being in Greece is utterly awe-inspiring. The Greeks invented alphabets (writing systems that separate the consonants from the vowels) and the Western tradition of grammars (which basically start with Dionysius Thrax; yes, Panini in India was much earlier, but that is not where today's grammatical tradition comes from, because no one in Europe knew about it until late in the 18th century). They founded modern Western philosophy, linguistics, mathematics, and logic. Barbara and I walked across a patch of ground called the Ancient Agora and realized that this was where Socrates taught. It is unbelievable. And then you climb up to the Acropolis and see the Parthenon and you realize it's unbelievably more unbelievable than you ever believed.

So, did I identify anything linguistic enough to justify putting this postcard on Language Log? Not really. But Barbara and I did have a giggle each day as we flipped the Do Not Disturb card on our door handle to signal that our hotel room was ready for cleaning. The hotel had not appreciated the vital nature of the little particle up, and they had printed on the card the words Make My Room. Somehow, since Clint Eastwood's Sudden Impact (filmed in Santa Cruz), that seemed very funny ("Go ahead!"). I have no idea why make up the bed and make the bed are basically equivalent but make up the room and make the room are not. Not everything about English syntax and semantics is regular and logically explicable. Some of it is as messy and lawless and unpredictable as Athens traffic or Dirty Harry's policing methods.

I'm back, for the first time since August 2001, in Helsinki, Finland. I love this city, for all sorts of reasons. Intelligent and interesting academic friends; big, beautiful public buildings in brilliant white and yellow; the views across the harbor (hardly any of the sea is frozen today, so the big car ferries are moving with no trouble and the icebreakers are mainly up north); the comfort of the Hotel Arthur; but above all (for yes, this is Language Log, not Baltic Tourism Log) the coolest language in the world. Finnish seems wonderful to me. Delicious. Speaking the little bits of it that I can manage, or even just reading out signs, actually gives me a tingling feeling on the tongue. (Yliopistokirjakauppa: it tastes like iced champagne.) And I learned a tiny bit more about Finnish pronunciation within minutes of arrival. I thanked the taxi driver by saying kiitos ("Thank you") as I got out, carefully making the i twice as long as the o, which is what I thought was correct. But I clearly heard my friend Hanna, who had kindly come to the airport to meet me, say to the driver what sounded to my ear more like kitos. As soon as we got inside the hotel I asked her, what's up? Why was her first-syllable vowel shorter than mine? And like a solid linguist she was able to answer me instantly and authoritatively.

What? You haven't heard of the Pomegranate phone? It's "[t]he ultimate all-in-one device", going "where no phone has gone before". It's amazing. I want one, even more than I want an iPhone (and I want one of those pretty bad, so you can just imagine).

The Pomegranate's niftiest feature is probably the Global Voice Translator, illustrated here:

(I say "probably" because the niftiest feature is really the coffee brewer, but this is Language Log, so I had to go with the GVT.)

[ Hat-tip: Andy Kehler. ]

The Linguistics, Language, and the Public Award, presented last night in San Francisco to Language Log, is quite a big deal. Contributions through any kind of medium between December 2003 and December 2007 were eligible to be nominated: books, documentary films, magazine articles, software, lecture series, or any other kinds of work that could reach the public at large. The group science blog you're now reading is the first winner to come from the blogosphere. And we're in good company. The previous awardees are so famous that (shy and retiring though we linguists are) you may have actually heard of some of them.

As Arnold reported late last year, Language Log received the LSA's Linguistics, Language and the Public Award at the LSA Annual Meeting this weekend. I was there, but, sadly, only with a poor cell-phone camera. Ah well — for posterity, some photos below the fold.