Language Log

Speech researchers at Google have applied speech-to-text to YouTube's Politicians channels, indexed the results, and wrapped the whole thing in a Elections Video Search "gadget" that you can add to your iGoogle page or embed elsewhere. The announcement on the Official Google Blog is here.

That's the title of the cover story (by Hannah Hoag) in the most recent New Scientist (19 July 2008). It begins:

ANYONE in a long-term relationship will tell you that, at times, men are indeed from Mars, and women are almost certainly from Venus. It's common knowledge that the sexes often think very differently, but until recently these differences were explained by the action of adult sex hormones or by social pressures which encouraged males and females to behave in a certain way. For the most part, the basic architecture of the brain, and its fundamental workings, were thought to be the same for both sexes.

Increasingly, though, those assumptions are being challenged. Research is revealing that male and female brains are built from markedly different genetic blueprints, which create numerous anatomical differences. There are also differences in the circuitry that wires them up and the chemicals that transmit messages between neurons. All this is pointing towards the conclusion that there is not just one kind of human brain, but two.

Oh, spit! Here we go again, with reports of previous studies of anatomical and neurological differences (critiqued in a long series of postings here) interpreted as establishing categorical differences between the sexes and so echoing "common knowledge" in a crude way. I haven't the heart to reflect on yet another chapter in this story.

We were recently introduced to the delicacy known as "Braised Enterovirus in Clay Pot", which led to an edifying discussion about the possible role of viruses in food processing. I never would have imagined that, just a few days later, Ori Tavor would send me a photograph of a menu offering "Sautéed Wild Bacteria."

BBC News Online's Magazine recently asked their (British) readers to call in with their best American accents, and all I can say is that I have new respect for British actors like Hugh Laurie of House who can convincingly sound American. (In a recent survey on BBC's Radio Times, voters named Laurie's American accent the best trans-Atlantic imitation on television, with Michelle Ryan of Bionic Woman the worst. However, Laurie was also voted as the fourth-worst accent, which might simply indicate the paucity of British actors on American TV who are prominent enough for people to have an opinion about.)

The article is accompanied by audio selections of Magazine readers trying to pull off American accents, as well as a clip of British voiceover artist Stuart Smith giving some dialectal approximations of the sentence, "Lucky Lily liked to live in Louisiana." You can listen and form your own judgments, but what struck me about both the amateur and professional efforts was a pervasive hyper-rhoticity, or over-/r/-fulness.

The text for the day comes from Paul Brians's Common Errors in English Usage, in the entry Artic/Arctic:

Although some brand names have incorporated this popular error, remember that the Arctic Circle is an arc. By the way, Ralph Vaughan Williams called his suite drawn from the score of the film Scott of the Antarctic, the Sinfonia Antartica, but that’s Italian, not English.

Brians's advice is specifically about spelling, but the spelling Artic is simply a reproduction of a very common pronunciation of the word, and it's the pronunciation that's the root issue.

My interest in this case comes from my interest in fashions in prescriptions: certain usages are widely proscribed, often with extravagant condemnation, while other, similar, usages escape attention. In the case at hand (and another I hope to post about soon), it's "simplified" pronunciation that is at issue. For Arctic/Artic, there's also a complex history (one that Brians might have misunderstood).

Most people know that amphetamines and related drugs have been prescribed over the years to increase alertness and to fight fatigue (although caffeine apparently works about as well and is safer), to improve morale (although during WWII the Germans restricted its use because of addiction problems), as a diet drug, and for medical conditions from "idiopathic anhedonia" in the 1950s to ADHD today. Those who don't know this history can learn about it from Nicholas Rasmussen's "Life in the Fast Lane", The Chronicle Review, 7/4/2008.

Even more people know that amphetamines have long been used for recreational purposes, among subcultures as diverse as beats, hippies, and bikers; and that non-prescription uses have recently been spreading in the U.S. among several paradoxically unrelated groups, including rural whites, homosexuals, and students at elite colleges.

But few people seem to have picked up on the fact that improved alertness, focus and mood may not be the only reasons that amphetamines are popular as a "study drug".

I find Japanese to be YUNIIKU ("unique") in many respects. One of the most fascinating aspects of Japanese (aside from the enormous number of GAIRAIGO 外來語 ["loanwords"]) is the large amount of onomatopoeic expressions that may be drawn upon to add spice to almost anything that one wishes to say.

The immediate cause of my current reflections on Japanese onomatopoeia is a nifty translation aid for Japanese that goes by the name Perapera-kun ("Mr. Perapera"). (There's also a version for Chinese.)

Success has many fathers, the old saying has it, and the same goes for a well-turned maxim. We've noted a number of different originators for what Jed Hartman called the Law of Prescriptivist Retaliation: corrections of linguistic error are themselves inevitably prone to error. Around 1999 this truism was hit upon by no less than three independent sources: Hartman, Erin McKean, and alt.usage.english contributor Skitt. And 90 years before that, Ambrose Bierce expressed much the same sentiment. Now it appears that the law has yet another eponymous author: the mythical Mr. Muphry.

In John McCain's interview with Diane Sawyer on Good Morning America this morning, he seemed to want to turn any discussion of "Afghanistan" into a discussion of Iraq, as in this exchange:

DS: Does [Obama] deserve the credit for saying that there should be more troops in Afghanistan, and
now the chairman of the Joint Chiefs is saying just the same thing?

JM: Actually the chairman of the Joint Chiefs uh said yesterday
that it'd be very dangerous to do what Senator Obama wants to do in Iraq.

A bit later in the interview, he took this one substitution too far:

DS: Do you agree the situation in Afghanistan is precarious and urgent?

JM: Well, I think it's very serious. I mean, it's a serious situation.

DS: Not precarious and urgent?

JM: Oh I- I don't- know wha- exactly whether- we can run through the vocabulary, but it's a very-
it's a ((v-)) serious situation,
and- but there's a lot of things we need to do,
we ha- we have a lot of work to do, and I'm afraid-
that it's a very hard struggle, particularly given the situation on the Iraq-Pakistan border

I.B. writes:

I've noticed recently that motivational slogans have a specific sentence syntax that seems to make them more inspirational. A few examples:

In God We Trust.
United We Stand.
In Valor There Is Hope.

Uninverted, these three phrases seem to lack luster:

We Trust In God.
We Stand United.
There Is Hope In Valor.

Do you think you can shed any light on this?

Here at Language Log we've commented a lot about the media's coverage of animal communication (birds, monkeys, cows, etc.) but, as far as I know, none of this has dealt with animals that actually swear oaths of office. So I'll remedy this omission by referring to a few media articles about police dogs that swear.

From Decatur, Georgia we read that a police dog is a "sworn officer." This article doesn't explain how the dog did the swearing, but the police must believe that he raised his front forepaw and did it somehow. 

I wrote in my posting on "forbidden OSR":

Every so often we post about some comprehensible examples that strike us and our correspondents as unacceptable — examples like ["the well is forbidden to play near"] — and then our task is to try to decide whether these examples are all inadvertent errors, or whether at least some of the instances represent a non-standard system different from our own. (Not infrequently, the latter turns out to be the case, to our astonishment.)

Call this the Astonishment Effect. You think that something is just flat-out ungrammatical, and then you find piles of examples.

My posting elicited e-mail from Paul Postal, who reported on a couple of Astonishment experiences of his own, having to do with negation.

Last year I commented on

the tendency of representatives of the U.S. government (GWB especially) and supporters of the government's current policies to refer to timetables for leaving Iraq as artificial timetables or arbitrary timetables, collocations that are presumably to be understood as involving appositive rather than intersective modification.

That is, for these speakers, artificial timetable means 'timetable, which is arbitrary' (all timetables are arbitrary) rather than 'timetable which/that is arbitrary' (only some timetables are arbitrary, and the reference is just to these).

George W. Bush, while continuing to vigorously reject "arbitrary timetables", has now shifted his language a bit to adjust to new realities. As Steven Lee Myers wrote in the lead story in the New York Times yesterday,

HOUSTON — President Bush agreed to "a general time horizon" for withdrawing American troops in Iraq, the White House announced Friday, in a concession that reflected both progress in stabilizing Iraq and and the depth of political opposition to an open-ended military presence in Iraq and at home.

(I would have recast that last bit as "the depth of political opposition, in Iraq and at home, to an open-ended military presence", so as to avoid a parsing in which "in Iraq and at home" modifies "an open-ended military presence", a parsing that is encouraged by how easy it is to take "an open-ended military presence in Iraq" as a constituent.)

… The White House offered no specifics about how far off any "time horizon" would be, with officials saying details remained to be negotiated. Any dates cited in an agreement would be cast as goals for handing responsibility to Iraqis, and not specifically for reducing American troops, said a White House spokesman, Gordon D. Johndroe.

"Time horizon" wouldn't have fit into the headline, so the head-writer went for the shorter "timeline" instead:

BUSH, IN A SHIFT,
ACCEPTS CONCEPT
OF IRAQ TIMELINE

In any case, "timetable" (unmodified) is to be avoided, especially since Barack Obama has been calling for a strict phased timetable for withdrawal. The Obama camp's response to the "time horizon" announcement:

A spokesman for Mr. Obama, Bill Burton, called the announcement "a step in the right direction," but derided what he called the vagueness of the White House commitment.

Of course it's vague. That's the point.