Language Log

In response to my post on the relative difficulty of learning to read in English ("Ghoti and choughs again", 8/16/2008), Mark Seidenberg sent a note raising an interesting question about the relationship between writing systems and the morphology of the languages they represent:

It is my informal observation that the shallow orthographies are associated with languages that have relatively complex morphology (inflectional and/or derivational). Classic examples would be Serbo-Croatian, Russian, Finnish and German (though of course these languages aren't all morphologically complex in the same way). I mean complex relative to other languages like English. The deep orthographies are associated with languages such as English and Chinese, which have relatively simple morphological systems. Perhaps this observation is correct (though mixed systems such as Japanese present a potential challenge); perhaps your readers would be able to generate counterexamples. Still, if the general trend holds, the question would then be why properties of the writing system trade off against properties of the language.

I understood that it was a

(1) [big penis] [book] 'book [about big penises]'

but it was only when it arrived that I realized it was also a

(2) [big] [penis book] 'big [book about penises]'

It's big, in both size (12.2 x 11.8 x 1.5 inches) and weight (7.1 pounds). (There's some scholarly joke to be made here about iconicity.)

The ambiguity of big penis book is a familiar one in English linguistics; little girls' school is a much more decorous textbook example. And the parsing of it in (1) illustrates some nice little facts about English morphology/syntax.

A few days ago I got a card from my friend Steven Levine with a clipping on it from a TLA Video catalog (offering videos of gay interest, including gay porn videos):

We love it when really good porns are made into even better sequels!

Steven asked: "porns"?

Yes, porn used as a count noun, meaning 'porn film'. An instance of a specific type of mass-to-count (M>C) conversion, also seen in spam and e-mail, and in a couple of other examples recently discussed on the American Dialect Society mailing list.

Around the virtual water cooler at Language Log Plaza this morning, I asked Victor Mair about how Beijingers actually say the name of their city. I was curious, because I know from earlier experience that people from that part of China often weaken consonants in the middle of two-syllable words. For example, once in an introductory phonetics class where the topic was phonetic transcription and spectrogram reading, we worked on a phrase from a Mandarin news broadcast that included the word 比较 bi3jiao4 "rather" (as in "rather hot"). In that case, the medial 'j' was pronounced as a glide, as if the word had been written as bi3yao4. So I wondered whether the 'j' in Beijing might also sometimes be pronounced as an IPA [j].

It is a great pity that Irish was not included among the modern European languages considered in the Seymour/Aro/Erskine study of literacy acquisition times that Mark referred to on Saturday. Jim McCloskey once showed me the spelling of the word meaning "will get". It is spelled bhfaighidh. The word is a monosyllable, pronounced roughly like English we (or wee or Wii, or French oui). One craves to know how Irish would fare on Seymour et al.'s shallow/deep and simple/complex dimensions, and whether it might force English to settle for the silver in the European awful spelling system championships.

[Added later: Anyone skeptical of the value of comments to blog posts — and I have certainly been among the skeptics some days — might want to glance at the astonishingly erudite and generally very sensible and relevant comments below, from a variety of people who (unlike me) know something about the Goidelic Celtic languages. They are enough to restore your faith in the whole comments genre.]

Congratulations to Hanzhi Zhu, who won an individual gold medal; to the team of Jae-Kyu Lee, Rebecca Jacobs, Morris Alper, and Hanzhi Zhu, who won a gold medal in the team competition; and to the other participants who won individual and team silver and bronze medals, as described in the press release on the NSF web site ("Team USA Brings Home the Gold", 8/15/2008).

We're talking, of course, about the 2008 International Linguistics Olympiad, held in Slanchev Bryag ("Sunny Beach"), Bulgaria.

Two recent Zits strips touching on familiar themes: one on parent-teen communication and the wonderful modern world of communicating in many modes; and one on guy-girl differences in communication (reproducing stereotypes of women as socially sensitive and men as direct and socially inattentive).

Today's Vancouver Sun has an article entitled:

Sasquatch evidence 'extremely compelling,' Idaho academic says.

But the article quotes the "Idaho academic" as saying:

It was not compelling in the least.

We're been writing about taboo avoidance here on Language Log for years. It's an arena in which Faithfulness (reproducing an original faithfully) conflicts with a type of Well-Formedness (cleaving to some rule about what is "right", "correct", "appropriate", etc.). I've posted many times about such conflicts on Language Log (a list, probably incomplete, of my postings about Faith vs. WF can be found at the end of this posting) and will do so again. I mention it here only as a way of connecting taboo avoidance (and, for that matter, taboo use) to larger linguistic issues.

People send me potentially interesting examples all the time; I have many dozens of examples still not blogged on. Today I'm picking just three relatively recent cases, because they tickled me in one way or another.

Nicholas Lemann ("Conflict of interests: Does the wrangling of interest groups corrupt politics — or constitute it?", The New Yorker, 8/11/2008) is promoting an Arthur Bentley revival:

In a year saturated with political conversation, can there be any topic that has not yet been discussed? Well, here’s one: 2008 is the centenary of a curious and mesmerizing book that was long considered the most important study of politics and society ever produced by an American—“The Process of Government: A Study of Social Pressures,” by Arthur Fisher Bentley. The reason its big anniversary hasn’t been celebrated is that “The Process of Government” is an ex-classic, now sunk into obscurity. The reason it should be celebrated is not just that it deserved its former place in the canon but also that it is uncannily relevant to this Presidential election. […]

The University of Chicago Press brought out “The Process of Government” in 1908, to almost no notice. In 1911, Bentley quit Chicago and newspapering and moved to the small town of Paoli, Indiana, where he remained until his death, in 1957. He produced a series of increasingly abstruse books (sample title: “Linguistic Analysis of Mathematics”), and his renown grew steadily. His closest intellectual companion was John Dewey—a published collection of their correspondence runs to more than seven hundred pages—but Bentley’s papers, at Indiana University, also contain letters sent to him over the years by, among many others, Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann, Sidney Hook, Estes Kefauver, and B. F. Skinner.

If any book is more obscure than Bentley's 1908 The Process of Government, it must be his 1932 Linguistic Analysis of Mathematics. At least, I'd never heard of it, and it's not cited in e.g. Paul Benacerraf & Hilary Putnam, Philosophy of Mathematics, 1984; or Dale Jacquette, Philosophy of Mathematics, 2002; or George Lakoff and Rafael Núñez, Where Mathematics Comes From, 2001; etc.  But reading Lemann's article made me wonder about it, and a quick internet search showed that Leonard Bloomfield reviewed this book, along with Bentley's 1935 Behavior, Knowledge, Fact, in Language 12(2): 137-141. (This issue is dated as April 1936 – June 1938, suggesting a more leisurely sense of time than journals generally have today.)

A quick follow-up on this part of Bill Poser's post on the pronunciation of Beijing (and building on Ran Ari-Gur's comment, as I discovered while composing this post):

The article mistakenly asserts that the sound [ʒ] does not occur in English. It is indeed found in English, not only in measure but in such words as azure, pleasure, leisure, and treasure. What is true is that all of the words in which it occurs are loans from French, so the sound apparently has an exotic flavor even though it has existed in English for centuries.

Some readers may be a little puzzled by this. Many if not most English speakers, I think it's fair to say, don't know that the words in question are borrowings from French, and in any event (as Bill points out), these have been English words for a very, very long time. So how is it that [ʒ] retains this 'exotic flavor' to English speakers? I don't have the definitive answer to this question, but I do know one thing that undoubtedly plays a part in that answer.

What with the Olympics being in 北京, reporters are pronouncing it in various ways and the question of how to pronounce it is in the news again. Our local paper has an AP article by David Bauder which, Google reveals, is being carried all over the place. Here's one version.

English is not the worst imaginable choice as a medium of international communication — Chinese would be worse, among a few others. But on the whole, it's seriously bad luck for the human species that English happened to hit the linguistic jackpot. The problem is not the English language itself, which I love dearly and would otherwise be happy to recommend to others. The problem is the way that English is written, which is really, really hard to learn, in comparison to most other languages with an alphabetic writing system.