Language Log

On your feet. No hesitating. This will count toward your overall Language Log grade: Take a glance at the latest xkcd cartoon and tell me Senator Grayton's present approval rating.

It's not just those translating Chinese and Japanese into English who sometimes encounter problems. Today's Doonesbury:

The linguist Zellig Harris (he was Noam Chomsky's mentor and doctoral adviser) drew an important distinction between imitation and repetition. You can imitate the sound of anyone saying anything, even in a language you know nothing about, and you might even do it quite well, but you can only repeat something in a language that you know. When you repeat, you use the sound system (or at least, you can use it) in your own usual way. You know the phonemes of the language, and you know what is just linguistically insignificant low-level phonetic detail that you don't need to replicate. You know which utterance in your language you're repeating, and your target is to say that, and you have some license about doing it in your own voice, your own pronunciation of the language. It's not at all clear that Alice, the aggressive engineer in the Dilbert strip, has got this right:

Today's Zits:

Jeremy expresses indfference, lack of interest, apathy, boredom via the interjection meh, breaking out briefly to use it sarcastically (or cynically) to express enthusiasm.

Those who enjoyed the "semantically unpredictable sentences" in the S3-WG91 Standards Working Group's test of TTS intelligibility will appreciate the latest SMBC:

The latest lesson from Surviving the World:

The most recent xkcd:

The mouseover title: "If you identified with the kids from The Breakfast Club when it came out, you're now much closer to the age of Principal Vernon."

The Breakfast Club, in case you happen to have missed it, was a 1985 movie about high-school detention.^* And the guy who played Principal Vernon was born in 1939 and died in 2006 at the age of 67, so he was 45 or 46 in 1985; and someone who was 15 or 16 then would be 41 or 42 now, so Randall's guess turns out to be quantitatively exact pretty close.

Today's Stone Soup:

In Non Sequitur for 10/26/2011, Danae reveals to Lucy her latest plan for world domination peace:

That's the question on a t-shirt designed by John Allison,  the author of the Bad Machinëry comic series:

Remember that dude? Always poppin' up in the corner? Wonder what he doin' now? Where he at now?

For those who are too young (or too old, or too fortunate in some other way) to have encountered the Microsoft's Office Assistant "Clippit", nicknamed "Clippy", the Wikipedia page may be helpful.

Today's Girls with Slingshots opens with this exchange between Clarice and Tucker:

Clarice's contribution is a nice example of the new (?) negative-polarity emphatic even (discussed in "What does 'even' even mean?", 2/8/2011). Danielle Corsetto, the strip's author, puts this instance of emphatic even in caps to indicate prosodic focus, which emphatic even doesn't always have — perhaps some aspiring even-ologist can figure out why it sometimes does and sometimes doesn't.

The most recent Scenes From a Multiverse:

Yesterday's Doonesbury joins the parade of praise for Siri: