Language Log

Some time ago, R.I. sent in this quotation from Golf World, 6/3/2013:

Because Irwin is the oldest U.S. Open champion—45 when he defeated Mike Donald in a playoff at Medinah CC in 1990—and won his last PGA Tour event, the 1994 MCI Heritage, when he was 48, there seemed little doubt his skill set wouldn't make him a formidable senior-tour member if he committed to the 50-and-over circuit.

You probably think that this is going to be about misnegation, and the tendency for negative concord to sneak back into standard English after having been chased out a half a millennium ago. That's what I thought too, but along the way to YAMP (Yet Another Misnegation Post) I was waylaid by a curious observation.

J. Eric Butler wrote:

As an academic in a humanities discipline, I read a lot of formal prose concerning historical subjects. I often come across the English future perfect in these contexts, which strikes me as odd, albeit easy enough to understand. So I usually just barely register it and then move on. But at some point it occurred to me that I have no idea what motivates this usage, so I thought LL would probably have some insight.

At the conclusion of "Mystery characters and variant characters", I promised that I would introduce Language Log readers to some truly weird characters. Herewith, I fulfill that pledge by presenting the following five photographs forwarded to me by Don Clarke. They were taken by a friend of his in Shēnkēng 深坑 ("Deep Pit"), Taiwan.

Philip Maughan, "Colum McCann: 'What could be worse that [sic] being called a historical novelist?'", The New Stateman 7/4/2013:

Carl Masthay sent in this transcription of tattoos on the arms of a guy he met in a bar last Saturday:

Michael Newman writes:

This was posted by Daniel Ezra Johnson on Facebook, who says he's skeptical about the authenticity: Maria Popova, "Walt Whitman Reads 'America': The Only Surviving Recording of the Beloved Poet’s Voice", brain pickings 7/4/2013.

I'm a bit more positive about it. This is my comment on facebook in response to his skepticism:

He's r-less, and there's the distinct but not raised THOUGHT, which is what we'd expect. If there was a short-a split sample, I'd have more confidence either way. But there are some odd pronunciations that sound old-fashioned, such as "earth." The "endeared" I didn't understand, like there's no in-glide. I doubt a faker would have done that. So, I'm tentatively on-board.

I wonder if people on language log might have a clue about it.

Here's the audio:

So says Die Welt. But this Teutonic  lexicographical event has gotten an unusual amount of  press coverage in other languages: "English profanity earns place in standard German dictionary", Reuters; "English rude word enters German language", BBC News; "'S***storm' adopted into German equivalent of the Oxford English Dictionary", The Independent;  "Shitstorm. Němčina má nové slovo, kvůli krizi zdomácnělo", iDNES.cz; "Duitsers omarmen Engelse shitstorm", NOS OP 3; "H αγγλική βρισιά shitstorm μπήκε στα λεξικά της γερμανικής γλώσσας -Τη χρησιμοποιεί και η Μέρκελ", iefimerida; "Shitstorm entra no diccionário alemão depois de usada por Merkel na crise", Diário Digital; "La langue allemande officialise l ' anglicisme ' shitstorm '", ActualLitté; etc.

No doubt this is mostly due to the fact that Angela Merkel was a prominent early adopter. As Metro explains (""‘Shitstorm’ enters German dictionary after becoming popular during eurozone crisis", 7/3/2013):

After being used by Angela Merkel to describe the eurozone crisis, the word shitstorm has now made it officially into German dictionaries.

Duden, the German standard lexicon and the country’s equivalent of the Oxford English Dictionary, has now recognised the word.

But in German it has a slightly different meaning and has come to define a controversy on the internet rather than the general calamity it is in English.

Duden defines shitstorm as: ‘Noun, masculine – a storm of protest in a communications medium of the internet, which is associated in part with insulting remarks.’

This is something that you don't see every day. It works pretty well in this case, considering… David Kirkpatrick, Ben Hubbard and Alan Cowell, "Army Ousts Egypt’s President", NYT 7/3/2013:

The general, who had issued a 48-hour ultimatum to Mr. Morsi on Monday to respond to what he called widespread anger over his administration’s troubled one-year-old tenure, said the president’s defiant response in a televised address on Tuesday had failed “to meet the demands of the masses of the people.”

Tyler Schnoebelen, "The Weirdest Languages", Idibon blog 6/21/2013:

The World Atlas of Language Structures evaluates 2,676 different languages in terms of a bunch of different language features. These features include word order, types of sounds, ways of doing negation, and a lot of other things—192 different language features in total. […]

The data in WALS is fairly sparse, so we restrict ourselves to the 165 features that have at least 100 languages in them (at this stage we also knock out languages that have fewer than 10 of these—dropping us down to 1,693 languages).

Now, one problem is that if you just stop there you have a huge amount of collinearity. Part of this is just the nature of the features listed in WALS—there’s one for overall subject/object/verb order and then separate ones for object/verb and subject/verb. Ideally, we’d like to judge weirdness based on unrelated features. We can focus in on features that aren’t strongly correlated with each other (between two correlated features, we pick the one that has more languages coded for it). We end up with 21 features in total.

A rare seven word BBC News headline noun pile sighting: "Emma West Croydon tram race rant woman sentenced", BBC News 7/1/2013:

A woman who was filmed shouting racist abuse on a London tram in a video watched by 11 million people has been given a community sentence.

Emma West, 36, of New Addington, admitted racially-aggravated disorderly behaviour likely to cause harassment or distress at Croydon Crown Court.

The Taipei Times for June 27 carried the following article: "Debate rages over currency ‘misprint'".

It is a question of whether the upper part of the long form of the character for the word yī ("one"), i.e., 壹, should be written as 士 ("scholar"), the "correct" configuration, with the ends of the upper horizontal stroke extending beyond those of the lower horizontal stroke, or 土 ("land; earth"), as it appears on certain banknotes, with the ends of the upper horizontal stroke being shorter than those of the lower horizontal stroke. Fortunately, yī ("one") is usually written as 一, the simplest of all Chinese characters, consisting of only a single horizontal stroke. The complicated form 壹, with twelve strokes, is used in banking, business, and so forth, to avoid mistakes and forgery.

Today Wikileaks posted a statement from Edward Snowden, time-stamped Monday July 1, 21:40 UTC. As originally posted, the first sentence of the fourth paragraph reads as follows:

For decades the United States of America have been one of the strongest defenders of the human right to seek asylum.

Screenshot (click to embiggen):

But mysteriously, at around 22:30 UTC (6:30 pm Eastern Time), the sentence was edited to read:

For decades the United States of America has been one of the strongest defenders of the human right to seek asylum.

Screenshot:

In response to James Forsyth, "The Gove guide to composition", The Spectator 6/30/2013, Tom Chivers notes that "Michael Gove doesn't know what the passive voice is", The Telegraph 7/1/2013. If you read the exchange, you'll see that Tom Chivers is right: Michael Gove advises against use of the "passive voice", citing an example that is in fact not passive at all — while using the passive voice frequently, correctly, and appropriately, including in the first sentence of the letter introducing his guide to composing letters.

This example certainly belongs in Geoff Pullum's collection. And someone should recommend Geoff's tutorial on "The passive in English" to Mr. Gove.