Language Log

My parenthetical remark that Sir William Jones is incorrectly viewed as the discoverer of the Indo-European language family and founder of modern historical linguistics provoked the question in the comments of why I said this.

Continuing to follow up on the issues raised by David Brooks' column "Harmony and the Dream", I recommend some interesting reviews by Daphna Oyserman and her colleagues. Among her many publications on culture I found two articles that are especially relevant.

The op-ed page of today's New York Times celebrates a notable anniversary, in a piece (with title as above) by Leonard Stern, Holly Gressley and Annemieke Beemster Leverenz that begins:

This year marks the 50th anniversary of Mad Libs, the _____ word game that the late Roger Price and I [Stern] accidentally created in 1958.

Under the blank is the label ADJECTIVE, indicating that you're supposed to fill in an adjective; you can fill in a predictable adjective, like wonderful or entertaining, or you can try for something fanciful. Or you can ask someone to supply the words without the context of the passage they're going to be slotted into, and enjoy the bizarre results.

The piece goes on to survey notable events of the past 50 years, with plenty of further blanks for you to fill in. Here's a Candorville cartoon from May (hat tip to Ned Deily) that exploits the format for a bit of social commentary:

I wonder how many of Language Log's tens of thousands of American readers will have done a quick double-take on seeing the sentence that Bill Poser just quoted: "Jones's father had considered attaching him to a chambers to get a legal education". A chambers? Not a chamber? Or a bunch of chambers? Isn't chambers the regularly formed plural of chamber, meaning "room"? And isn't the indefinite article a(n) incompatible with plural nouns? Well, as I write this, the buzz and chatter in the comments below Bill's post does not include anyone asking this question, but I wouldn't be surprised if some found the phrase a chambers odd-looking. Especially since I believe it is almost entirely limited to British English (perhaps someone will correct me on this). A chambers is really just a law practice. A group of lawyers working together would take a suite of rooms in some suitable district of London proximate to the major law courts, e.g. the Temple area or the Grays Inn Road, and that suite of rooms would be referred to as their chambers; and from there, "chambers" seems to have morphed into a singular count noun denoting a law practice. That's how I understand the history to have run, anyway. (Perhaps someone will correct me on this too. But more likely the prattle in the comments area below will digress into talk of chamber pots, and from there to flower pots, and from there to the Chelsea Flower Show, and from there to the Chelsea football club, and so on… Comment warp seems uncontrollable, like the Dark Energy that cosmologists report is forcing the universe to fly apart.)

David Malki's Wondermark takes on grammar peeves:

(Hat tip to Bruce Webster.)

Sir William Jones, the great scholar of "eastern" languages routinely (though incorrectly) credited with discovering the Indo-European language family and founding modern historical linguistics, was by profession a lawyer. He learned Sanskrit as a judge in India. In his book Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and its Discontents, Robert Irwin reports (pp. 123-4) that:

At an early stage in his life, Jones's father had considered attaching him to a chambers to get a legal education, but Jones had resisted this on the understandable grounds that the quality of the Latin used in English law books was so very bad.

I don't think this excuse will work anymore.

My reactions to David Brooks' August 11 column "Harmony and the Dream" led me to look again at three books by prominent psychologists: Richard E. Nisbett's 2003 The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently and Why; and James R. Flynn's 2007 What is Intelligence? Beyond the Flynn Effect; and Alexander Luria's 1976 Cognitive Development: Its Cultural and Social Foundations.

I looked at Nisbett's book because it's the intellectual foundation of Brooks' column; and at the Flynn and Luria books because… well, you'll see.

There's no reference to Flynn in Nisbett's book; and Nisbett is not in Flynn's book either. Yet both are crucially concerned with how people in different places, times and social contexts interpret similarities, especially as judged by certain kinds of psychological test instruments. And both books draw important ideas, with attribution, from the same place: the research of a couple of Soviet psychologists, Lev Vygotsky and Alexander Luria, who studied the cognitive effects of modernization in Uzbekistan and Kirghizia (now the Kyrgyz Republic) in the 1930s.

Given Nisbett and Flynn's well-deserved prominence, and the importance of the various phenomena at issue, and the similarity (and common origin) of their ideas, I'm curious about the mutual lack of reference. But in this post, I'm not going to say anything more about this odd lack of explicit discussion of a strong implicit connection. Instead, I'll limit myself to a sort of catalogue of quotations from various relevant sources.

Caught on-screen in an episode (set in Namibia, a re-run from some years ago) of Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations, a travel-and-food television show:

This program contains indigenous nudity. Parental discretion is advised.

It's a warning that there were to be (female) breasts and (male) penises on display, though surely only fleetingly or out of the main focus of the camera, combined with the reassurance that the people whose bodies are (however negligently) on display are indigenous peoples — "primitives" and not "full people" like you and me, the viewers (or like Janet Jackson). That's the social point, which has been commented on on the net by a fair number of people, and about which there's a gigantic literature having to do with the attitudes and stances of people in dominant, urban, colonializing, modern, Western, literate, largely white, and/or "civilized" cultures towards the Other, the Exotic.

Then there's a linguistic point, about the nominal expression indigenous nudity, which is clearly an adjective modifier plus a noun head, but isn't understood as predicating some property (indigenousness, in this case) of some entity (nudity, in this case), but is understood as relating two entities (nudity and indigenous peoples, in this case). That is, the expression is Adj + N, but it functions semantically (and to some extent syntactically) like N + N, like a noun-noun compound.

Meghan Daum's LA Times column on "nonplussed" came out a few days ago — "I'm nonplussed, maybe: Many people use words outside their original meaning, but does that make them wrong?", 8/9/2008. She's refreshingly up front about her own reaction:

I need to say something. And even though I'm going to refrain from typing in all caps, I urge you to pretend I did.

The word "nonplussed" does not mean unfazed, unperturbed or unconcerned. I know just about everyone uses it that way, but I really wish they'd stop.

Meghan is the journalist whose questions I answered last week in "Nonplussed about nonplussed", 8/6/2008. She was nonplussed, in the sense she prefers, by the fact that instead of setting up a phone interview, I asked her for questions by email, and then posted my answers on Language Log (though I left her role anonymous until now). Her email response:

Thanks, Mark. I must say, I've never received a personal answer in a public forum (you are the Madonna of linguists!)

According to David Brooks, "Harmony and the Dream", NYT, 8/11/2008:

The world can be divided in many ways — rich and poor, democratic and authoritarian — but one of the most striking is the divide between the societies with an individualist mentality and the ones with a collectivist mentality.

This is a divide that goes deeper than economics into the way people perceive the world. If you show an American an image of a fish tank, the American will usually describe the biggest fish in the tank and what it is doing. If you ask a Chinese person to describe a fish tank, the Chinese will usually describe the context in which the fish swim.

These sorts of experiments have been done over and over again, and the results reveal the same underlying pattern. Americans usually see individuals; Chinese and other Asians see contexts.

When the psychologist Richard Nisbett showed Americans individual pictures of a chicken, a cow and hay and asked the subjects to pick out the two that go together, the Americans would usually pick out the chicken and the cow. They’re both animals. Most Asian people, on the other hand, would pick out the cow and the hay, since cows depend on hay. Americans are more likely to see categories. Asians are more likely to see relationships.

Those who've followed our previous discussions of David Brooks' forays into the human sciences ("David Brooks, Cognitive Neuroscientist", 6/12/2006; "David Brooks, Neuroendocrinologist", 9/17/2006) will be able to guess what's coming.

In this case, Mr. Brooks has taken his science from the work of Richard E. Nisbett, as described in his 2003 book The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently and Why, and in many papers, some of which are cited below. I was familiar with some of this work, which has linguistic aspects, and so I traced Brooks' assertions to their sources. And even I, a hardened Brooks-checker, was surprised to find how careless his account of the research is. The relation between Brooks' column and the facts inspired me to model my discussion after the Radio Yerevan jokes that arose in the Soviet Union as a way to mock the pathetically transparent spin of the Soviet media:

Question to Radio Yerevan: Is it correct that Grigori Grigorievich Grigoriev won a luxury car at the All-Union Championship in Moscow?

Answer: In principle, yes. But first of all it was not Grigori Grigorievich Grigoriev, but Vassili Vassilievich Vassiliev; second, it was not at the All-Union Championship in Moscow, but at a Collective Farm Sports Festival in Smolensk; third, it was not a car, but a bicycle; and fourth he didn't win it, but rather it was stolen from him.

Yes, of course, it happens all the time. But not often to two men, and it usually doesn't get reported in the New York Times. Entirely by accident, I came across the announcement (Sunday 10 August, p. 14 of the Style section) of the marriage of Michael Flier and David Trueblood. Flier

is the Oleksandr Potebnja professor of Ukrainian philology in the Slavic languages and literatures department at Harvard and is the director of its Ukrainian Research Institute. He was the chairman of Harvard's linguistics department from 1994 to 1999.

Trueblood

is the director of public relations at the Boston Foundation, which makes grants to nonprofit organizations in the Boston area and …

Some of the political blogs (Marc Ambinder here, for example) are talking about counterfactuals today. A counterfactual conditional adjunct is a conditional adjunct (usually taking the form of a subordinate clause with the word if before it) that makes reference not to this world but to another world, a non-existent one. The phrase if Edwards were honest is unambiguously counterfactual, because were with first or third singular is a special possibility, the irrealis form of the verb, reserved solely for clauses making counterfactual reference. But the phrase if Edwards was honest doesn't necessarily have that meaning.

Yesterday I posted about the history of the English word infer, including the fact that an often-deprecated usage — "evidence E infers conclusion C" — is one of the original meanings, has been used by elite writers since the 16th century, and is hallowed by inclusion in authoritative dictionaries like Webster's 2nd.

Rob Gunningham's comment was: "I'll bet you're not going to start using … infer instead of 'imply' yourself, are you?"

I hadn't thought about it, but on reflection, Rob is right. More broadly, I can't recall ever having changed my speaking or writing habits on the basis of a grammatical analysis or a historical investigation. This isn't a matter of principle for me, but it's a fact; and on reflection, I think that it's a fact worth thinking about.