Language Log

The Sunday (UK) Times recently revealed that J.K. Rowling wrote the detective novel The Cuckoo's Calling under the pen name Robert Galbraith. The newspaper explained that, as part of their investigation, they sought the assistance of two scholars who have developed software to help with authorship attribution: Peter Millican of Oxford University and Patrick Juola of Duquesne University. Given the public interest in the Rowling revelation, I asked Patrick to write a guest post describing the authorial analysis that he conducted. (For more on the story, see my post on the Wall Street Journal's Speakeasy blog.)

On May 28, 2013, I made the following post: "Vietnamese in Chinese and Nom characters". The discussion that followed, as usual at Language Log, was lively and informative, and raised a lot of very interesting issues concerning the history and nature of Nom and its relationship to Chinese characters and Chinese languages.

John Balaban had wanted to participate in that discussion, but was delayed by heart surgery (he's all right now), and has taken the first opportunity to send in these remarks, which help us to understand why many people, including some of my own students and colleagues, still care passionately about this unique writing system.

Following up on "Rachel Jeantel’s language in the Zimmerman trial", LLOG readers may welcome an opportunity to hear Rachel Jeantel in person, tonight on CNN — "Tonight at 9: Piers Morgan welcomes Rachel Jeantel and a live studio audience":

Less than 48 hours removed from seeing the jury in the George Zimmerman trial return a "not guilty" verdict, this evening "Piers Morgan Live" will welcome Rachel Jeantel – and a live audience – for a live hour dedicated entirely to the case that continues to divide and enthrall the nation.

In her first public comments since testifying, tonight the young woman who was on the phone with Trayvon Martin shortly before his death will join Piers Morgan for a live, exclusive interview as a collection of guests surround her throughout the studio.

J.P. Villanueva writes:

I've been seeing the old "No justice, no peace" chant lately after the Zimmerman trial. It seems like people are lamenting that "there is no justice and there is no peace."

When I first heard the chant (during the Rodney King riots), I had understood quite clearly that "No justice, no peace" was a conditional statement… as in, "if you can't guarantee us justice, we will not let you have peace" in other words, it was a call to riot.

I'm sure the chant has a longer history, right? Has it always meant both things? or did I misinterpret back in the 90s?

This is an illustrative Breakfast Experiment™ for my course at the LSA Institute (on "Corpus-Based Linguistic Research"). It starts from an earlier LL post, "When men were men, and verbs were passive", 8/4/2006, where I observed that Winston Churchill, often cited as a model of forceful eloquence, used the passive voice for 30-50% of his verbs  in various passages from his 1899 memoir The River War — several times the rate noted in statistical usage studies from the 1960s and later.

So I thought I'd do a quick historical survey of passive-voice rates, as a example of what can be done with Mark Davies' COHA corpus.

In case you haven't already seen it, here's a news story that KTVU-TV in San Francisco ran on Friday, purporting to give the names of the four pilots of the Asiana plane that crashed at SFO on July 6:

Cheng Fangyi sent in the following photograph of a sign in China:

My roommate here at the LSA Institute is Pieter Muysken, and one of the many things that I've learned from him is that for 450 years or more, miners in Potosí (in what's now Bolivia) have communicated among themselves in a mixed language spoken only by mine-workers in connection with mining operations. Since the existing scholarly literature seems to contain just a few scattered references to this interesting phenomenon, I asked Pieter some questions about it, and I reproduce his answers below.

In "Chinese loans in English", we have been debating why there are so few recent borrowings from Chinese into English. In contrast, not long ago the headline of a Japan Times article blazoned: "Gifu man, 71, sues NHK for distress over its excess use of foreign words".

Back in June, Sally Thomason noted that Carmel O'Shannessy's paper in the June issue of Language, "The role of multiple sources in the formation of an innovative auxiliary category in Light Warlpiri, a new Australian mixed language", was getting widespread press coverage ("A new mixed language in the news", 6/18/2013). Sally flagged stories by Denise Chow, "Australia's Mixed Language, 'Light Warlpiri,' Discovered In Remote Desert Community", Live Science  6/18/2013, and by Enrico de Lazaro, "Light Warlpiri: New Study Sheds Light on Origins of Recently Discovered Australian Language", sci-news.com 6/18/2013.

We can add Paul Hamaker, "Light Warlpiri is the newest language on earth", The Examiner 6/18/2013; Joanna Egan, "New Aboriginal language born in the NT", Australian Geographic 6/20/2013; and reprints of Denise Chow's piece in the Huffington Post and on Fox News. And an excellent article by Olga Khazan in The Atlantic, "How the World's Newest 'Mixed' Language Was Invented", 6/18/2013.

Update — and now Nicholas Bakalar, "Linguist Finds a Language in its Infancy", NYT 7/14/2013.

In "Why so little Chinese in English?", Robert Lane Greene ponders the paucity of recent Chinese loanwords in English, and there is a further discussion on Language Hat.   English loves to borrow far and wide, yet it is strange how few words of Chinese origin there are in English. This is particularly odd for recent times, when there has been so much contact between Chinese and English speakers, and there have even been campaigns on the part of Chinese officials, journalists, and netizens to promote particular expressions for adoption into English.

[Below is a guest post by John Rickford.]

The defense plans to rest in the Florida trial of George Zimmerman today, and arguments are raging about whether he will be found guilty of murdering Trayvon Martin or not.

In the case of Rachel Jeantel, however, the 19-year old prosecution witness whose testimony on June 26 and 27 went on longer (5 to 6 hours) and generated more commentary in the media than any other witness, the GUILTY verdict is already in.

From Charles Stross, Neptune's Brood. It's 7000 AD, and Krina Alizond-114 has this to say about a not-very-helpful piece of interactive software:

[T]hese things bore only a thin veneer of intelligence: Once you crack the ice and tumble into the howling void of thoughtlessness beneath, the illusion ceases to be comforting and becomes a major source of irritation.