Language Log

These days, newly published books often get promoted with video trailers, and there's one that just came out for Michael Erard's Babel No More: The Search for the World's Most Extraordinary Language Learners. In keeping with the book's theme of hyperpolyglottery, Erard rounded up speakers of different languages to create a multilingual reading of a story told in his book. (Direct link here — that's me at 1:05.)

And there's a contest! Here are the details from the trailer description:

How good are you at identifying spoken languages? I asked friends from all over to say one line of a story about Cardinal Giuseppe Mezzofanti, and all the lines are assembled here. Send an email message with 1) the name of each language and 2) in the order in which they appear to info@babelnomore.com, and I'll put your name in a drawing for a signed copy of Babel No More. Deadline is February 23.

I'll keep the comments closed until the deadline to keep anyone from divulging the names of the languages. Good luck!

Everyone has a private terror—often abetted by a checkered family medical history or having witnessed the torment of a loved one—of being struck with some particular affliction. For some, it's the ravages of a slow and painful cancer. For others, it's being caught in a freak accident that renders them quadriplegic in their prime. For me, it's the fear of surviving a stroke that blasts away tracts of neural tissue in the left hemisphere of my brain, leaving me with profound aphasia.

As usual, the degree of fear is based on a calculus of probability and of loss. In my case, there is the specter of probability: My father suffered a fatal stroke in his sixties. His own father, unluckier, was bedridden after a stroke in his early forties until another one finished him off a few years later. But it's the prospect of the loss that is overwhelming. How could I, ardent worshipper at the altar of language, ever cope with being left unable to talk or write fluently about language or anything else? For that matter, would I even be able to think about language? Or think in any meaningful way at all? It's the afflictions that strip you of who you are that seem most unthinkable.

So it was a sense of morbid attraction that led me to Diane Ackerman's newest book One Hundred Names for Love, in which she documents the stroke and subsequent language deficit suffered by her husband, novelist Paul West.

In the April 3, 2011 issue of the New York Times Book Review, I appraised Jonathon Green's wonderfully comprehensive three-volume reference work, Green's Dictionary of Slang (GDoS to its friends). I concluded the review essay thusly:

It's a never-ending challenge to keep up with the latest developments in the world of slang, but that is the lexicographer’s lot. Green plans to put his dictionary online for continuous revision, which is indeed the direction that many major reference works (including the O.E.D.) are now taking. In the meantime, his monument to the inventiveness of speakers from Auckland to Oakland takes its place as the pièce de résistance of English slang studies. To put it plain, it’s copacetic.

Now, at year's end, it turns out that Green's plan to make GDoS available online has run into some trouble. He asked me to post the following appeal on Language Log, responses to which should be directed to him (email address below).

Congratulations to Oxford University Press (OUP) on a special morning: it is publication day for the newest edition of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary, marking its 100th anniversary. The first edition was in 1911, and this is the 12th. But I also want to thank OUP for a personal kindness to me. Or rather to my dad, who was celebrating a smaller anniversary of his own.

To say the least, I was perplexed when a book that I co-edited with Mark Bender was described thus on Tao Blog:

In The river Anthology of Asiatic Folk and Popular Literature, digit of the world’s directive sinologists, Victor H. Mair and Mark Bender, getting the dimension of China’s oral-based literate heritage. This assemblage presents entireness worn from the super embody of test literature of some of China’s constituted social groups — including the Han, Yi, Miao, Tu, Daur, Tibetan, Uyghur, and Kazak — and the selections allow a difference of genres. Chapters counterbalance sept stories, songs, rituals, and drama, as substantially as poem traditions and professed storytelling, and feature both old and little-known texts, from the news of the blackamoor warrior Hua Mulan to the fuck stories of cityfied storytellers in the Yangtze delta, the priest rituals of the Manchu, and a hoaxer tale of the Daur grouping from the forests of the northeast. The Cannibal Grandmother of the Yi and another strange creatures and characters unsettle acknowledged notions of Asiatic story and literate form. Readers are introduced to phrase songs of the Tai and the Dong, who springy among the strange limestone hills of the Guangxi Tai Autonomous Region; impact and matchmaking songs of the mountain-dwelling She of Fujian province; and water songs of the Cantonese-speaking dish grouping of Hong Kong. The editors feature the Altaic poem poems of Geser Khan and Jangar; the depressing tale of the Qeo kinsfolk girl, from the Tu grouping of state and Qinghai provinces; and topical plays famous as “rice sprouts” from Hopeh province. These fascinating juxtapositions elicit comparisons among cultures, styles, and genres, and proficient translations preserves the individualist case of apiece thrillingly creative work.

I realize this is Language Log, not Gender and Sexuality Blog, but these are topics we've often taken up, under the heading of how science is pursued and reported on. An announcement for a provocative Stanford talk coming up soon:

That's the greatest philosopher in the world speaking, in a little book I'm reading so that I better understand the American spirit – Ayn Rand's Atlas shrugged, Random House, 1957; p. 735 in the 1992 edition.  Perhaps Rand had a really, really dry sense of humor.

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 a recent book by science fiction writer John Scalzi (hardcover 2008, paperback 2010). The subtitle — A Decade of Whatever, 1998-2008 — refers to the fact that the book is a selection of essays from Scalzi's blog Whatever, which he's been writing since 1998, on a wide range of topics, including current affairs, politics, entertainment, parenting, and some goofy stuff. Every so often Scalzi responds to some of the voluminous hate mail his opinionated essays provoke, by critiquing the form and content of the mail (hence the title of this book). (Hat tip to Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky.)

The book Hypothesis A/Hypothesis B: Linguistic Explorations in Honor of David M. Perlmutter, edited by Donna Gerdts, John Moore, and Maria Polinsky, has just been published by MIT Press. According to the book blurb:

Anyone who has studied linguistics in the last half-century has been affected by the work of David Perlmutter. One of the era's most versatile linguists, he is perhaps best known as the founder (with Paul Postal) of Relational Grammar, but he has also made contributions to areas ranging from theoretical morphology to sign language phonology. Hypothesis A/Hypothesis B (the title evokes Perlmutter's characteristic style of linguistic argumentation) offers twenty-three essays by Perlmutter’s colleagues and former students.

Many of the contributions deal with the study of the world's languages (including Indo-European languages, sign language, and languages of the Americas), reflecting the influence of Perlmutter's cross-linguistic research and meticulous analysis of empirical data. Other topics include grammatical relations and their mapping; unaccusatives, impersonals, and the like; complex verbs, complex clauses, and Wh-constructions; and the nature of sign language. Perlmutter, currently Professor Emeritus at the University of California, San Diego, and still actively engaged in the field, opens the volume with the illuminating and entertaining essay, "My Path in Linguistics."

Follow that link at the end — the chapter is available as a free sample. And if you're at the secret cabal, stop by the MIT Press stall at the book exhibit and get yourself a copy.

Over on my blog, I've been coming down hard on Ned Halley's Dictionary of Modern English Grammar, a dreadful volume purporting to be a guide to "grammar, syntax and style for the 21st century" (postings here, here, and here). When I find myself engaging with such a book, I usually try to read something more satisfying along with it. This time it was Jack Lynch's recently published The Lexicographer's Dilemma: The Evolution of "Proper" English, from Shakespeare to South Park, which I recommend enthusiastically.

Oxford University Press has published A Dictionary of Modern English Usage: The Classic First Edition. Nothing especially notable in that, except for bibliophiles and usage scholars. But what sets this publication apart is David Crystal's introduction to the volume, an assessment of Fowler's entries.

Now for another piece of evidence (I gave one here) that even if you have no clue about grammar you can write grammar textbooks or reference handbooks and make good money by doing so. Here is an exercise set in Pupil Book 4 in the Nelson Grammar series (published by Thomas Nelson, now Nelson Thornes Ltd in the UK; ISBN 0-17-424706-0):

Three of the examples below are adjective phrases and three are sentences. Find the three adjective phrases. Add a verb and any other words you need to make each one into a sentence. Find the three sentences and write them with their correct punctuation.

1. thank you said Jim
2. Janet ran home
3. the poor injured duck
4. a shivering and frightened
5. give me that
6. with a heavy bag

Can you do this homework, Language Log readers? It appears to be aimed at children in elementary school, not older than 8 or 9. You will need the definition of "phrase", which is given on the previous page: "A phrase is a group of words that does not contain a verb" [sic; I swear I am not making this up]. I will now leave you to do the exercise (comments are open). Later I will come back to this and discuss it.