Language Log

A month ago, I linked to Lera Boroditsky's WSJ piece "Lost in Translation", and promised to discuss the contents in more detail at some point in the future ("Boroditsky on Whorfian navigation and blame", 7/26/2010). At the time, I noted that there is probably no single linguistic idea that is more prone to exaggeration and mis-application than the "Sapir-Whorf hypothesis" about the relations between language and thought. And the WSJ editors' subhed for Boroditsky's article gives their readers a push down that road:

New cognitive research suggests that language profoundly influences the way people see the world; a different sense of blame in Japanese and Spanish.

Meanwhile, the NYT Sunday magazine has just published a major article by Guy Deutscher, "Does Your Language Shape How You Think?" (8/26/2010), which I hereby promise to discuss in detail at some point in the future. And in order not to let my neo-Whorfianism account fall too many promises in arrears, I'll actually post about Boroditsky's WSJ piece today. (I won't try to discuss both articles at the same time, because in this sort of thing, it's the scientific details that matter.)

Jak King writes:

Are there rules in English for making adjectives from countries, or are the assignments random?  I have found a number of standard adjectival endings (-ese, -(i)an, -ish, -i, -er). There are also some singularities (French, Greek, Monegasque) and some where the adjectival form is the same as the country name (Hong Kong, New Zealand).

How is this worked out, or who decides?

Sign on the wall of a public toilet in China:

Yánjìn yòng dǎngbào dǎngkān dāng shǒuzhǐ yòng" 严禁用党报党刊当手纸用.

Smooth translation: “Use of Party newspapers and magazines as toilet paper is strictly forbidden.”

Ads for the Confucius Institutes show up all over the Web. At times they seem to be virtually ubiquitous, at least on sites that I visit. One that I've been encountering frequently of late shows a sculpture of Confucius, at the bottom of which are written the words "Kongzi Xueyuan" 孔子學院, translated below that as "Confucius Institute," followed by the words "Teach you pure Chinese."

Aside from the fact that "Teach you pure Chinese" as a whole strikes me as an odd locution, the notion of "pure Chinese" by itself gives me pause. If the Confucius Institutes are going to teach you "pure Chinese," they must have in mind one or more kinds of "impure Chinese" that they do not want you to learn. Are there opposing institutions that are out there teaching "impure Chinese"?

Today's Tank McNamara features an idiom with two very different meanings:

There's new information emerging from the slow-motion Marc Hauser train wreck. Carolyn Johnson, "Journal editor questions Harvard researcher's data", Boston Globe 8/27/2010:

The editor of a scientific journal said today the only "plausible" conclusion he can draw, on the basis of access he has been given to an investigation of prominent Harvard psychology professor Marc Hauser's research, is that data were fabricated.

Gerry Altmann, the editor of the journal Cognition, which is retracting a 2002 article in which Hauser is the lead author, said that he had been given access to information from an internal Harvard investigation related to that paper. That investigation found that the paper reported data that was not present in the videotape record that researchers make of the experiment.

“The paper reports data … but there was no such data existing on the videotape. These data are depicted in the paper in a graph,” Altmann said. “The graph is effectively a fiction and the statistic that is supplied in the main text is effectively a fiction.”

Gerry Altmann posted a statement on his weblog with a more detailed account: harvard misconduct: setting the record straight", 8/27/2010). As indicated in Johnson's article, the facts and interpretations that Altmann provides go beyond, to a shocking degree, previously described issues of lost data or disagreement about subjective coding of animal behavior.

Ian Best writes:

Since it was first used by Palin, and then commented upon by the media, I've heard the word [refudiate] used a couple of times in everyday speech. Both times it was used in a playful, ironic way, as if the person knew it was a Palin-invented, non-legitimate word. I.e. "You need to refudiate that comment!"

My question: At what point does a word become a legitimate word, one worth keeping, if it is used often enough in everyday speech, even ironically?

I actually think "refudiate" is a useful invention, whether intended or not by Palin. "Refute" and "repudiate" have distinct meanings, and it is certainly possible to do both simultaneously. Politics and origins aside, what do you think about the word itself, and about the chance that it will catch on?

Brett Reynolds (who writes the blog English, Jack) raised an interesting question of detail about English grammar the other day in an email to me and Rodney Huddleston: What is the syntactic category (part of speech) of slash, as used in There is also a study slash guest bedroom, or We need a corkscrew slash bottle opener? (Brett's email, incidentally, provided what I think is the right answer.)

The syntactic categories of a language are supposed to be grammatically definable natural classes of words that share syntactic properties with each other to an interesting degree — to a degree that clearly makes it easier to describe how sentences are put together. You can assume for present purposes that the categories to choose from are the ones used in The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language: Noun (dog, gratitude, . . .), Verb (walk, instantiate, . . .), Adjective (good, ridiculous, . . .), Adverb (carefully, soon, . . .), Preposition (of, through, . . .), Determinative (the, some, . . .), Subordinator (that, whether, . . .), Coordinator (and, or, . . .), or Interjection (ouch, hey, . . .). Where would you put slash? (In the use exemplified by the sentence given above, that is.) Think about it a little before you read on.

A little over a month ago, I wrote a blog about what I called "Character Amnesia." Today, half a dozen readers have called my attention to an Aug. 25th article by Judith Evans for Agence France-Presse entitled "Wired youth forget how to write in China and Japan" (and other titles) that refers to "character amnesia" and quotes from an interview with me on August 9.  The article is also being sent around on Facebook and other sharing services, so it is getting a lot of coverage.  I cannot guarantee that I coined the expression "character amnesia," but it does seem to be meeting a need.

Unless you're familiar with Australian English and Australian politics, this one is going to baffle you.

In fact, I'm still somewhat baffled, even after reading (what I think is) the associated story. It may help you to know that Shorten is "federal Labor powerbroker Bill Shorten", Brumby is John Brumby, the premier of Victoria,  cops is a verb form  meaning (I think) "receives" and beating is a reference to the political defeat of an MP named Craig Langdon and/or the consequences of his resignation. Or something like that.

[Hat tip to Dave Ripley]

Some Language Log readers have long suspected me of secret prescriptivist sympathies, and I'm about to add fuel to the fire by standing up for John Dryden. Sort of.

It all starts with today's SMBC. A student asks "Can I end my sentence with a preposition?", and the teacher responds "Good question! Let's see what a group of Latin-obsessed 17th century introverts decided!"  The introverts' cartooned answer:

A Zits on modern menaces:

I've been getting reports of texting while bicycling / bicycling while texting, too.

James Somers, on his blog, has a subtle and convincing literary analysis of the mildly dishonest use of a rhetorical device I have often reflected on: the embedding of an assertion in the context "It turns out that _______."

Skilled readers are trained, Somers suggests, to be disarmed by the phrase: over time they learn to trust writers who use it, "in large part because they come to associate it with that feeling of the author’s own dispassionate surprise." So an unscrupulous theorist who tells you his theories by revealing how "it turns out" that they are true is being subtly dishonest, but with very considerable deniability. After all, if P is true, you can hardly deny that "It turns out that P" is also a true assertion, can you?