Language Log

David Pesetsky, the Ferrari P. Ward Professor of Modern Languages and Linguistics at MIT, is also the principal second violin in the New Philharmonia Orchestra of Massachusetts. For their 4/1/2009 rehearsal, he provided English translations for the sometimes-confusing performance instructions in Mahler's 1st Symphony.

Dave's sensitive interpretation of Mahler's artistic intent has been received with praise in musical circles. The first page is reproduced below, but any of you who plan to play or listen to this piece should read the whole thing.

Continuing today's snowclone theme… For snowclone collector Mark Peters, the phrasal template "X is the Y of Z" is the gift that just keeps on giving. We noted in December that Mark had launched a blog entirely devoted to the snowclone, aptly titled "The Rosa Parks of Blogs." Since then, Mark has enterprisingly spun off the blog into a regular weekly feature for JamsBio Magazine. In each installment, the Y in "X is the Y of Z" stands for the name of a prominent artist from the world of popular music.

Here's a sampling:

• The Keith Richards of the cat world
• The Barry White of the apocalypse
• The Spice Girls of the ancient world
• The Britney Spears of the planets
• The Ozzy Osbourne of the banking world
• The Courtney Love of yards
• The Chuck Berry of nationalism
• The Johnny Cash of Communism
• The Johnny Rotten of Chinatown food courts

The self-described "grumpy old coot" who writes the blog  Right Wing Nation has recently put up a generally admirable post ("On An Entirely Different Note", 2/19/2009) on the relations among music, mathematics, physics. Unfortunately, his account of the Pythagorean comma is psychoacoustically, historically and mathematically wrong.

Last week, in honor of Darwin's birthday, we featured a guest post by Tecumseh Fitch: "Musical protolanguage: Darwin's theory of language evolution revisited". A few days later, Derek Bickerton contributed a critical commentary.  Now Tecumseh has sent in a response to Derek — or, perhaps I should say, Prof. Fitch has contributed a response to Prof. Bickerton — which is presented below.

In response to W. Tecumseh Fitch's post "Musical protolanguage: Darwin's theory of language evolution revisited"  (2/12/2009), Derek Bickerton sent the commentary presented below.

A guest post by W. Tecumseh Fitch, on the Occasion of Charles Darwin's 200th Birthday.

Today's the 50th anniversary of the plane crash that killed Buddy Holly, and I've commemorated the event in a Word Routes column on the Visual Thesaurus by considering lyrics from four of his most famous songs. As you might have guessed, the four songs are "Oh Boy," "That'll Be the Day," "Rave On," and "Not Fade Away." You can check out the column here. As a postscript, one of those four song titles has an extra syntactic wrinkle that's worth mulling over.

Dick Cavett recently called Sarah Palin "The Wild Wordsmith of Wasilla" and "the serial syntax-killer from Wasilla High". He worries that "ambitious politicos" will learn "that frayed syntax, bungled grammar and run-on sentences that ramble on long after thought has given out completely are a candidate’s valuable traits". Peter Suderman, more specific if less witty, complains ("Sarah Palin speaks!",11/12/2208 ) that "I do not know what this means":

… massive leverage by everyone from consumers who bought houses for nothing down to hedge funds that were betting $30 for every $1 they had in cash a world economy that is so much more intertwined than people realized which is exemplified by British police departments that are financially strapped today because they put their savings in online Icelandic banks to get a little better yield that have gone bust globally intertwined financial instruments that are so complex that most of the C.E.O.'s dealing with them did not and do not understand how they work especially on the downside a financial crisis that started in America with our toxic mortgages …

Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky reports that a if you play the CD entitled (on the cover) "Disco F*cks House" on iTunes, the program inquires, "Do you wish to import 'Disco Fucks House'?" Several things are going on here.

The first thing you need to know is that the CD is German. The second thing you need to know is that the CD is a disco/house mix by the Fabulous Glitterboys (a German group, despite the name). A third thing you might be interested to hear is that the Glitterboys also have a weekly radio show called "Disco F*cks House".

The points of interest are: the use of taboo avoidance characters, and the interpretation of "Disco Fucks House".

According to this BBC Report, the US Ambassador to Paraguay, James Cason, has released an album of songs in Guarani, the indigenous language. The BBC story has a clip if you'd like to hear him. He says that he began to study Guarani in Cuba before taking up his post in Paraguay. When he got off the plane he immediately gave a speech in Guarani, to the surprise not only of the Paraguayans but of the US mission, who were unaware that he had been studying the language. The US does not have a good reputation for diplomats who speak the local language, so this is really unusual. Part of the story here is no doubt the fact that Ambassador Cason is a career foreign service officer with long experience in Latin America, not a political hack. In any case, kudos to Ambassador Cason.

Although most Paraguayans are reported to be pleased with Ambassador Cason's album, Senator Domingo Laino, once a distinguished opponent of the Stroessner dictatorship, is not. In his opinion: "[Cason] sings horribly and his pronunciation of Guarani words is stammering. It is an offense to the Paraguayan people." I'm in no position to judge, but my suggestion to Senator Laino is: don't look a gift horse in the mouth. An ambassador who sings in Guarani is like a talking dog: it isn't how well he does it, it's that he does it at all.

A couple of days ago, I posted some audio clips in which bits of political speechifying were reduced to their pitch and amplitude contours alone ("Political melodies", 6/5/2008). Robert Delius Royar asked me to apply the same technique to a passage from a speech that John F. Kennedy gave at Rice University on 9/12/1962. I've done as he asked; and I've also posted the code that I used, so that others can try the same thing at home.

Here's the melodized version of the first two phrases of the passage that Robert recalled, with the Obama clip for comparison:

The links below will allow you to listen to a brief clip from each of Hillary Clinton, John McCain, and Barack Obama. But there's a trick — it's not actually their voices. Instead, I've tracked the pitch and amplitude of a short passage from the speech that each of them gave on Tuesday night, and then "played" that melody on a simple synthetic instrument (just five harmonically-related sinusoids with 1/F amplitudes, not that it matters). It seems to me that you can tell who's who pretty easily — but my opinion doesn't matter, because I've heard the originals. So listen and see what you think:

In the 1951 film version of Gershwin's "An American In Paris", Gene Kelly as Jerry Mulligan explains why he's chosen the life of an expatriate:

Back home everyone said I didn't have any talent. They might be saying the same thing over here, but it sounds better in French.

In fact, "everything sounds better in French", and in particular, "pop music sounds better in French". Or at least, many English speakers have been telling themselves things like this for the past couple of centuries. You could look it up.

But the linguistic worm has turned, at least with respect to rock lyrics.

According to Bertrand Dicale "Pourquoi ces Français chantent en anglais", Le Figaro, 11/26/2007,

Le temps est à l’anglais. Pas l’anglais phonétique et scolaire des yé-yé, auxquels les Anglais ne comprenaient rien. La langue anglaise qui se chante aujourd’hui en France est celle du folk contemporain ou de la pop élégante, une langue qui demande beaucoup plus que des cours d’anglais de terminale, et qui aujourd’hui rencontre son public, en France et à l’étranger.

The time belongs to English. Not the phonetic and academic English of yé-yé [link], which English speakers didn't understand at all. The English language in today's songs in France is that of contemporary folk or of elegant pop, a language which requires a lot more than a high-school English course, and which is now finding its audience, in France and abroad.

I missed this article last fall, but yesterday I heard an interview on the BBC World Service with Julien Garnier, from the band Hey Hey My My, who explained (as I recall) that he prefers to write in English, because simple things sound more meaningful in English than they do in French. It struck me that there may be some sort of reciprocal "the other language's grass is greener" effect here, where the extra effort needed to process a foreign language really does create more of (certain kinds of) meanings. (Or a more obvious and less interesting alternative: simple poetic phrases are hard to translate.)