Language Log

After seven rounds of balloting, the new chairman of the Republican National Committee is Reince Priebus (Jeff Zeleny, "G.O.P. Elects a New Chairman as Steele Drops Out", NYT 1/14/2011). My reaction is a parochial one: as a linguist interested in prosody, I'm looking forward to Mr. Preibus's contributions to the study of English intonation.

Earlier today, Mark Liberman discussed the abortive attempt by Tunisian president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali to phase in Tunisian Arabic.

Now, in a report circulated by China Daily / ANN and carried in The Straits Times, we learn:  "Dialects to be phased out of China's prime time TV"

According to an email from Youssef Gaigi posted by Gillian York:

Today’s speech shows definitely a major shift in Tunisia’s history.
[Tunisian president Zine El Abidine] Ben Ali talked for the third time in the past month to the people. Something unprecedented, we barely knew this guy. Ben Ali talked in the Tunisian dialect instead of Arabic for the first time ever.

A story in today's New York Times will give you some background on the serious and astonishing situation in Tunisia: David Kirkpatrick and Alan Cowell, "Crisis Deepens in Tunisia as President’s Offer Falls Flat", 1/14/2011. [Update — Since I posted this, Ben Ali has resigned and fled the country, as the linked story indicates.]

Today's Zits:

The image on the right reproduces a brief passage from a letter that Robert Southey wrote to his friend Grosvenor C. Bedford, on October 1, 1795. (Click on the image for a larger version, as usual.)

Read it, and see if you can figure out what aspect of it Richard Grant White in 1869 called the worst of "those intruders in language … which, about seventy or eighty years ago, began to affront the eye, torment the ear, and assault the common sense of the speaker of plain and idiomatic English".

There's been quite a bit of discussion about Sarah Palin's commentary on the Tucson shootings, and most of it has been about the segment where she characterizes criticism of her gunsight map as "a blood libel":

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If you don't like their ideas
you're free to propose better ideas
but
especially within hours of a tragedy unfolding
journalists and pundits should not manufacture a blood libel
that serves only to incite
the very hatred and violence that they purport to condemn.
That is reprehensible.

Jeremy Roebuck, "Defendant with no language proves difficult to prosecute", Philadelphia Inquirer 1/11/2011:

As [Juan Jose Gonzalez Luna] has next to no language skills, his case has baffled Montgomery County courts since his arrest on drug trafficking charges late last year. While courts have come a long way in providing access to interpreters in a host of exotic languages, no one is sure how to translate for a man who knows no language at all. […]

Accommodating those with limited access to language is a rare problem in U.S. courts, but one that judges have met with limited success.

Many have avoided the problem, declaring such defendants incompetent to stand trial. Others have relied on a complex and imperfect method of interpretation, one still viewed with skepticism by many in the legal profession.

And while most courts say they do their best, a good effort is not good enough, said Michele LaVigne, a lawyer and scholar at the University of Wisconsin Law School.

It is not, after all, that defendants like Gonzalez are incompetent to stand trial, but that the U.S. court system largely remains ill-suited for trying them.

"The law is a language-based system," she said. "Drop someone in who can't access that immediately, and we still don't know what to do with them."

Today's SMBC imagines the invention of an implantable grammar corrector, the whom-o-matic tooth:

Paul Kay:

The website of a Palo Alto yoga emporium sports the following bit of pricing information:

monthly unlimited automatic with drawl ** $125

The doubly starred footnote explains:

** Requires a 6-month commitment.

Which seems to mean you can have all the yoga lessons you can stand if you sign up for an automatic withdrawal of $125/mo. from your bank account (for at least six months).

From the Ohio State department's memorial page:

Ilse was born on January 31, 1922 in Tallinn, Estonia, but left Estonia as a refugee in 1944, fleeing the Soviet invasion of her homeland. She earned her first Ph.D., in Philology, from the University of Hamburg in 1948 and a second Ph.D., in Linguistics, from the University of Michigan in 1959. In 1963, Ilse joined the faculty at The Ohio State University. Ilse came to OSU from the University of Michigan, after receiving her Ph.D., and spending 1959-63 at the Communication Sciences Laboratory as Research Associate. At Ohio State, she divided her time between phonetics, historical linguistics, and administration, serving as Chair 1965-71, Acting Chair 1984-85, and again Chair 1985-87.  In fact, she was the Department's first Chair (1965-1971) when it was founded in 1965, after having spent two years in the Slavic Department. Professor Emeritus since 1987.

Ilse enjoyed a long and distinguished career.  She was the author, co-author or editor of 20 books, about 200 articles and over 100 reviews. Ilse was honored in many ways for her immense contributions to the field of linguistics. At The Ohio State University, she was awarded the title of Distinguished University Professor and received the University Distinguished Scholar Award, the university's highest recognition for scholarly achievement. She also held four honorary doctorates from Essex University, England (1977), the University of Lund, Sweden (1982), Tartu University, Estonia (1989), and The Ohio State University (1999). She was Foreign Member of the Finnish Academy of Sciences since 1998, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1990, and Foreign Member of the Estonian Academy of Sciences (2008).

I have no idea.

Several people have suggested that the ravings of Jared Lee Loughner ("The government is implying mind control and brainwash on the people by controlling grammar"; "What's government if words don't have meaning?") may have been influenced by the ravings of David Wynn Miller ("I am the judge in 1988 who wrote the mathematical interface on all 5,000 languages proving that language is a linear equation in algebra certifying that all words have 900 definitions through this mathematical algebraic formula and over the course of the past 21 years have developed an accuracy level in the syntaxing of language sentence structure to prove the correct sentence structure communication syntax language is required in a court system"; "FOR THESE TRUTH-COMMUNICATIONS-CITIZEN'S-KNOWLEDGE OF THESE FACTS ARE WITH THESE CLAIMS OF THESE FACTS-AS-FACTS BY THESE SENTENCE-CONTRACTS."), mentioned about a year ago on LL ("All words have 900 definitions?", 1/29/2010).

I'm skeptical about this — so far I haven't seen any connection more specific than the fact that both relate to language and both are ravings; but I don't have a lot of patience for reading this sort of thing.

On January 4, Cornel West was asked on MSNBC to evaluate the state of the country and President Obama's performance. On January 5 and 6, Rush Limbaugh carried on at some length about a speech error in Prof. West's answer. On January 7, Ann Althouse joined the conversation.

My modest contribution today is to describe the cited error in a bit more detail, and to offer a small bit of evidence about its likely causes.

Jean-Baptiste Michel and Erez Lieberman-Aiden have volunteered to come discuss their "Culturomics" paper at the Linguistic Society of America meeting now underway in Pittsburgh.

They'll be in the Duquesne Room of the Wyndham Grand Pittsburgh Downtown on Sunday morning, 1/9/2010, from 10:30 to 12:00, for a half-hour presentation and an hour of discussion. This is not part of the regular LSA program, so if you're in the Pittsburgh area, you can attend without the cost of registering for the conference. (Though goodness knows the LSA could use the money, and its annual meeting is a remarkably cheap conference to attend.)