Language Log

My current trip to the Far East has now brought me to… well, the question is how to name the country for you and preserve strict political correctness. We could perhaps call it the SCTTPKMCT for short. I pointed out once before on Language Log that one of the many versions of its name is the longest official country name in the world. Since I've already identified the general region of the world that I'm in, you should be able to guess it without even clicking that link.

The New York Times is maintaining the policy criticized a few months ago by Clark Hoyt ("Separating the Terror and the Terrorists", 12/13/2008). Hoyt, the NYT's  "Public Editor", said that

My own broad guideline: If it looks as if it was intended to sow terror and it shocks the conscience, whether it is planes flying into the World Trade Center, gunmen shooting up Mumbai, or a political killer in a little girl’s bedroom, I’d call it terrorism — by terrorists.

His paper, he says, is "more conservative in their use [of these terms] than I would be".  This  conservatism continues in the coverage of Tuesday's attack in Lahore on the Sri Lankan cricket team — the NYT story ("8 Die as Gunmen in Pakistan Attack Cricket Team", 3/3/2009) uses "gunmen", "attackers", and "assailants", and refers to the November attackers in Mumbai as "militants".

In the sentence of Obama’s speech to congress that starts at 40:12 in the NY Times video-with-transcript, he says “Afghanistan and Pakistan”, and what caught my ear was that he pronounces all three a’s in Afghanistan like the a in cat, and both of the a’s in Pakistan like the a in father.  I know there was a lot of discussion of his pronunciation of Pakistan last October (some on the right accused him of elitism or unamericansim over it, and then there was the usual blog-battle, e.g. here), but it’s just interesting that it doesn’t carry over to Afghanistan, and that in each word all the vowels are identical, showing that he doesn't have a single suffix –stan with fixed pronunciation (nor do most Americans, probably). Now I wonder how he will pronounce all the other Stans in the region. (I think in my own dialect I pronounce Kazakhstan with all three a’s as in father, but Afghanistan the way Obama did. But Pakistan that way too. Presumably depends on how old one was, and in what environment, when one learned them.)

The latest Partially Clips (click on the image for a larger version):

They don't get onto the news broadcasts much either.

Ancient Rome played a prominent role, in two different ways, in the comments on yesterday's post "Progress and its enemies". This was unexpected, since the post was about the rhetoric of names in political philosophy. In any case, my comments on the comments are too long to fit gracefully in a comment, so I'm posting them here separately.

Nate Silver at fivethirtyeight.com specializes in quantitative modeling of political trends, but yesterday he posted a terminological discussion of political philosophy, "The Two Progressivisms", distinguishing what he calls Rational Progessivism from what he calls Radical Progressivism. This reminded me of something that I noticed recently in reading Mark Halpern's book Language and Human Nature, namely Halpern's surprising level of interest in the word progressive and its derivatives, discussed on 15 different pages.

Fidel Castro is evidently alive and well — and writing rambling, incoherent columns on political onomastics. As Julia Ioffe of the New Republic blog The Plank reports, Castro's latest editorial for Granma Internacional is a "deliciously confusing" excursus on White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and his name. Here are the opening lines in Spanish and English:

¡Qué apellido tan extraño! Parece español, fácil de pronunciar y no lo es. Nunca en mi vida conocí o leí el nombre de alumno o compatriota entre decenas de miles, que llevara ese nombre.
¿De dónde proviene?, pensé.

What a strange surname! It appears Spanish, easy to pronounce, but it’s not. Never in my life have I heard or read about any student or compatriot with that name, among tens of thousands.
Where does it come from? I wondered.

President Obama's ability to exchange basic Indonesian pleasantries may render him more bi-courteous than bilingual, but New York's new junior senator appears to have significantly more proficiency in another Asian language: Mandarin Chinese. David Chen of the New York Times reports:

The UK is not the only secular democracy where freedom of speech is now under attack.

Johann Hari's essay, "Why should I respect these oppressive religions?", originally published in The Independent on 1/28/2009, was republished on 2/5/2009 by The Statesman, a leading English-language periodical based in in Kolkata.

This led to several days of protests, eventually violent, by Muslims who felt that the essay insulted their religion; and on Wednesday, 2/11/2009, Ravindra Kumar and Anand Sinha, the editor and publisher of The Statesman, were arrested and charged under section 295A of the Indian Penal Code which forbids "deliberate and malicious acts intended to outrage religious feelings". (See Jerome Taylor, "Editor arrested for 'outraging Muslims'", The Independent, 2/12/2009.)

The Nashville English Only amendment whose chief proponent gave as justification for it the un-fact that some California state legislators do not speak English has been voted down by a substantial margin, 41,752 to 32,144. Congratulations to the people of Nashville.

[Thanks to Jon Weinberg for the pointer.]

Unexpectedly, Stanley Fish's most recent NYT essay praises word-counting as a technique of rhetorical analysis ("Barack Obama's Prose Style"):

One day after the occasion, USA Today offered as an analysis of [Obama's inaugural address] a list of the words most frequently used, words like America, common, generation, nation, people, today, world. This is exactly the right kind of analysis to perform, for it identifies the location of the speech’s energy in the repetition of key words and the associations forged among them by virtue of that repetition.

This is odd, since Prof. Fish is known for attacking attempts to base literary analysis on counting things in texts (e.g. "What is stylistics and why are they saying such terrible things about it?", in Essays in Modern Stylistics, 1981). But he returns to type in his own analysis of the inaugural address, which relies on quantitatively unsupported assertions:

There are few transitions and those there are – “for,” “nor,” “as for,” “so,” “and so” – seem just stuck in, providing a pause, not a marker of logical progression. Obama doesn’t deposit us at a location he has in mind from the beginning; he carries us from meditative bead to meditative bead, and invites us to contemplate. […]

There is a technical term for this kind of writing – parataxis, defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “the placing of propositions or clauses one after the other without indicating . . . the relation of co-ordination or subordination between them.”

The opposite of parataxis is hypotaxis, the marking of relations between propositions and clauses by connectives that point backward or forward.

Ironically, this analysis is quantitatively doubtful, as we'll see below: Obama's speech actually uses the relevant sort of connectives at a higher rate than George W. Bush's 2005 inaugural address did.

Opinions were strikingly divided about Obama's inaugural speech, and not necessarily along ideological lines. George Will called it lyrical and Pat Buchanan called it "the work of a mature and serious man"; but in National Review, Yuval Levin said that within a few weeks not a line of it would be remembered, and Rich Lowry spoke of "overwrought clichés and poor writing." At the New Republic, John Judis called it a "disappointing muddle" that "got no style points," while John McWhorter, moonlighting from his Language Log day job, called the speech "worthy of marble" and pointed in particular to Black English influences on Obama's cadences, though he didn't develop the point in detail. And Stanley Fish pronounced the speech a paradigm of paratactic prose, which in its nature "lends itself to leisurely and loving study," and having duly allowed himself to "linger over each alliteration [and] parse each emphasis," predicted that it would be studied in a thousand classrooms: "canonization has already arrived."

Those are the criteria people always bring to this sort of address: Was it memorable? Marmorealizable? Did he stick the landing? It's understandable, a way of flattering ourselves that ritual oratory still matters. But I have the feeling Obama and his writers knew better.

Of course it was a very memorable event, on a historic, make that epochal, occasion. And the speech is sure to be memorialized — in fact Penguin Books is already on it.

But if the speech was well turned, it wasn't memorable. What's more, it didn't need to be memorable. It couldn't have been memorable. And my guess is that nobody tried too hard to make it memorable. As I put the point in a "Fresh Air" piece that aired today [full text here ]:

Obama’s speech made all the required moves: it was grave but not doleful; resolute but not belligerent, eloquent but not grandiloquent. Its acknowledgments were eclectic: Biblical allusions, a nod to Tom Paine, a shout-out to Jerome Kern.

But it wasn’t especially memorable. If we still lived in an age when people compiled collections of great speeches for pupils to memorize and declaim on national holidays, the editor would more likely go with the moving speech that Obama made in Grant Park on the night of the election.

But that isn't necessarily a weakness of the speech.

Just last week I reported on a couple of accounts describing Barack Obama's conversational skills in Indonesian, a language he learned living in Indonesia from age six to ten. In both of the accounts, Obama was said to handle conventional Indonesian greeting routines with aplomb. Now thanks to ABC News we have the video evidence, from an exchange that President Obama had with State Department staffer Charles Silver on Thursday as the president worked the State Department rope-line. Silver has been stationed in Jakarta at various times since 1969 and now works in the State Department's Office of Inspector General.