Language Log

[This is a guest post by Stephan Stiller.]

This post complements Robert Bauer and Victor Mair's previous LL post titled "Spoken Hong Kong Cantonese and written Cantonese" and addresses, among other things, J. Marshall Unger's comment in the corresponding thread. Please have a look.

Searching for a Chinese name in my gmail archive this morning, I was interested to see that Helpful Google is now transliterating between pinyin and hanzi:

I didn't mean 艺轩国, as it happens, but it's nice to know that if that's what I had wanted, gmail would have been ready to help.

From A.G.:

I think I may have found a new eggcorn this weekend. I forget how I came across it but apparently there are a lot of people on the Internet who are writing "sure and hell" instead of "sure as hell" (which is what I believe the saying to be).

Have you encountered this before? It could perhaps be an autocorrect issue so it would be nice to see this in a spoken corpus. I checked the buckeye but didn't find any instances of it.

There certainly are plenty of examples of "sure and hell" as a substitute for "sure as hell", including some in books where autocorrect seems less likely than in short web-forum comments that might have been entered on a smartphone.

Similarly, there are some examples of "plain and day". Like A.G., I'm not sure whether these are typos, autocorrections gone wrong, or wrongly lexicalized idioms, though I suspect that some of them do represent what the writers think is correct rather than what some helpful program does. Commenters may be able to provide relevant arguments or even evidence.

Looking into the background of the idea that modifiers are immoral, I read Richard Lanham's Style: An Anti-Textbook (available as an ebook from amazon and google), and found this description of writing instruction:

What we have now is a tedious, repetitive, unoriginal body of dogma—clarity, sincerity, plainness, duty—tarted up every week in a new, disposable paperback dress. The dogma of clarity, as we shall see, is based on a false theory of knowledge; its scorn of ornament, on a misleading taxonomy of style; the frequent exhortations to sincerity, on a naïve theory of the self; and the unctuous moralizing, on a Boy Scout didacticism.

From "Zits" for August 30, 2013 — the episode just before the one featured in "Earworms and white bears":

Zits for 8/31/2013:

Quincy Lu sent in the following photograph of a menu taken by his wife at a Hunan restaurant in Fremont, California (click to embiggen):

Tom the Dancing Bug for 8/23/2013 starts this way:

Read the whole thing.

Cassandra Gillig mashes up Frank O'Hara's 1957 Ode to Joy (read in 1966?) with Drake's 2009 Best I Ever Had:

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China Digital Times (CDT) Grass-Mud Horse Lexicon is the premier place to go for Chinese netizen language designed to avoid the censors and to poke fun at the political system.

Over the years, CDT has accumulated 273 entries in its Grass-Mud Horse Lexicon.  From these, the CDT editors have selected 71 essential items for inclusion in The Grass-Mud Horse Lexicon: Classic Netizen Language, which has just been published.

Here's the Kindle edition on Amazon.

Paul Jump, "Cut the Clutter", Times Higher Education:

Is there something unforgivably, infuriatingly obfuscatory about the unrestrained use of adjectives and adverbs?

In a word, no.  But Mr. Jump is about to tell us, approvingly, about some "science" on the subject:

Zinsser and Twain are quoted by Adam Okulicz-Kozaryn, assistant professor of public policy at Rutgers University Camden, in support of his view that the greater the number of adjectives and adverbs in academic writing, the harder it is to read.

Okulicz-Kozaryn has published a paper in the journal Scientometrics that analyzes adjectival and adverbial density in about 1,000 papers published between 2000 and 2010 from across the disciplines.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the paper, "Cluttered Writing: Adjectives and Adverbs in academia," finds that social science papers contain the highest density, followed by humanities and history. Natural science and mathematics contain the lowest frequency, followed by medicine and business and economics.

The difference between the social and the natural sciences is about 15 percent. "Is there a reason that a social scientist cannot write as clearly as a natural scientist?" the paper asks.

I'm not going to discuss the neurotic aversion to modification.  Instead, I'm going to explore Paul Jump's apparent ignorance of the norms of scientific communication and of standard English prose, and the much more surprising parallel failures of the editors of the Springer journal Scientometrics.

[This is a guest post by Robert S. Bauer, with some comments on "dialect" vs. "language" by me (VHM) at the bottom.]

1. After 1949 over the last few decades of British colonial rule, Cantonese was regarded as one more desirable/useful barrier separating HK from China.

As a consequence, the British treated Cantonese with benign neglect which allowed it to develop naturally and without interference, and this is why it has been doing as well as it has.

A couple of years ago the fact that only a handful of people showed up at a demonstration in support of Cantonese in HK shows that most HK speakers do not see it as being under imminent threat.

In Guangzhou people are told that "civilized people speak Mandarin" wénmíng rén shuō Pǔtōnghuà 文明人説普通話, which to me implies that uncivilized people speak "dialects" (topolects) such as Cantonese.

One of the concepts that comes up in the Introduction to Phonetics course that I'm teaching this semester — first meeting yesterday — is SNR ("Signal to Noise Ratio"). This is the ratio between the power of the "signal" (defined as the stuff you care about, essentially) and the power of the "noise" (the stuff that you aren't interested in).

And at this point, there are a few things that students need to learn. Since SNR is a ratio of power to power, it's a dimensionless quantity. Similar ratios of physical quantities come up elsewhere in acoustics, like "sound pressure level" (SPL), defined as the ratio of sound pressure to the some reference level, usually taken to be the nominal threshold of human hearing. Because additive scales are more intuitive (and because psychophysical scaling is roughly logarithmic), we generally take the log of such ratios. And because powers of ten are inconveniently far apart, we generally multiply log10(whatever ratio) by 10 to get "decibels".

Now comes the part that I'm interested in this morning: the power of a sound wave is proportional to the square of its amplitude. And I'm looking for a simple and correct way to justify this statement, and to explain why we generally quantify "levels" of physical signals as ratios of powers rather than as ratios of amplitudes.