Language Log

Kieran Healy, who will spending a year at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, is looking forward to research at the "Stanford Superconducting Supersocializer, which will … propel local college sophomores at tremendous speeds into unfamiliar groups of people in an effort to plumb the structure of the elementary particles of social interaction", in order to test "the emerging Standard Model of sociophysics":

Nicholas Widdows writes about a clause he found in Toni Morrison's Beloved (p. 259):

(1a) the well is forbidden to play near

("in the free indirect speech of Bodwin, an elderly white man… not filtered through the thoughts or hearing of any of the black characters", according to Widdows). Every so often we post about some comprehensible examples that strike us and our correspondents as unacceptable — examples like this one — 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.)

So Widdows and I spent some time searching for examples similar to (1a), so far without success. While we're waiting for more data (including judgments from people who find things like (1a) ok, if there are any), here are some remarks on the structure in (1), to make it clear just what would constitute a similar example.

Just a pointer to Dennis Baron's report on his Web of Language that

Manuel Castillo, a California trucker with twenty years experience, was stopped and ticketed [the maximum $500] by an Alabama state trooper for failure to speak English well enough.

… Castillo paid the ticket – tickets are part of the cost of doing business for a trucker – and drove on home.

Then there's the question of why Castillo was stopped in the first place. Baron notes that

17% of the nation’s truck drivers, and 11% of its bus drivers, are Hispanic, and authorities gave them 25,230 tickets for insufficient English last year. While government officials insist that they’re not waging a campaign against Mexican truck drivers, these numbers suggest a concerted effort by the Department of Transportation to criminalize driving while Spanish. 

To reinforce this message, the DOT pamphlet on the offense of insufficient English, with a picture of a happy Hispanic posing in front of a big rig, clearly suggests that the department’s English-only policy has quite a lot to do with “a person’s national origin.”

More details on Baron's blog (and comments are enabled there).

After reading about the evolutionary origins of (some brainstem pathways controlling) social vocalization, you might enjoy seeing what you get from people who get paid for explaining things to you, and have actual editors and stuff:

"Toadfish sex hum stirs boffins"; "Honey? Gurgle, gurgle"; "Researchers report toadfish sing to attract mates"; "When fish talk, scientists listen"; "We all sing like fish"; "Spread the word: Fish talk"; "Grunting fish tell of the origins of human speech"; "Grunting, humming fish joins ancient chorus";  "Study dates origin of vocal sounds"; "Cornell scientists discover how fish 'talk'"; "Talking fish"; "Mud-dwelling Toadfish Give Clues to the Origin of Human Speech"; etc.

The latest xkcd:

Its title tag: "If you think this is too hard on literary criticism, read the Wikipedia article on deconstruction."

One of the oldest and most interesting arguments for evolution is Ernst Haeckel's theory of recapitulation: the idea that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. In the form that Haeckel proposed — that embryological development progresses though a series of fully-developed ancestral forms — this theory has been refuted many times over the past century. What remains is the idea that "one species changes into another by a sequence of small modifications to its developmental program". This is the basis of modern research in evolutionary developmental biology ("evo devo"), and a central theme of Neil Shubin's Your Inner Fish, from which I took that picture of the development of arm bones from fish to humans.

Evo devo is mainly about anatomical development, but sometimes, surprising claims are made in this framework about evolutionary conservation of neurological function. A striking example of this is offered by a paper in the July 18 issue of Science (Andrew H. Bass, Edwin H. Gilland, and Robert Baker, "Evolutionary Origins for Social Vocalization in a Vertebrate Hindbrain–Spinal Compartment", Science 321(5887): 417-421, 2008), which argues that "the vocal basis for acoustic communication among vertebrates evolved from an ancestrally shared developmental compartment already present in the early fishes", namely "a segment-like region that forms a transitional compartment between the caudal hindbrain and rostral spinal cord".

It's a very small point, but it annoys me, this fanaticism on Wikipedia for providing links to every mentioned entity that has a Wikipedia entry of its own. My own Wikipedia page is just a stub of five short sentences, but it has ten links, to:

linguistics, Stanford University, Distinguished University Professor, Ohio State University, Morris Halle, MIT, Edward Sapir, Linguistic Society of America, UIUC, Language Log

(plus an external link to my homepage and a "see also" link to Recency Illusion).

The problem is that these links are visually obtrusive. They scream. And they point you to webpages that you probably don't want to see (because they don't really provide any useful background information about me) and could in any case be accessed by a simple search on an obvious phrase in the text.

Link fanaticism is not some accident. As I discovered some time ago, it is PRESCRIBED Wikipedia style. There are people who view any unlinked reference as a FAULT, and edit pages to insert the (I'm sorry to say this) missing links. What the editors are after is perfect consistency and uniformity. But the point of links is that they should be useful and helpful — which means that the writer of an entry needs to take the readers' likely knowledge and interests into account and use JUDGMENT in inserting links. Skillful linking is, in a way, like the skillful deployment of anaphors in writing or speech.

I'm always happy to learn new things about playground culture. Like language, it's somehow completely consistent and endlessly variable across time and space. And now that my main source for contemporary playground lore (e.g. "Pickle jinx", 12/16/2003; "High jinx", 12/17/2003) has graduated to new sorts of games, I have to rely on internet clues like this:

The phrase "no tagbacks" is familiar from my childhood — and the concept presumably goes back to paleolithic times — but the use of "blackjack" in this context is new to me. And in this particular case, the internet has so far failed to provide the answer. [Update: but Ray Girvan came through].

Each year the United Nations declares that the next year will be an International Year of X, for several Xs; 2008 is the UN Year of Sanitation, the Reef, Planet Earth, the Potato, and… Languages. Heidi Harley reported on Language Log, in May 2007, on the UN declaration of IYL, but we haven't taken up the question of what you might DO for the occasion. (Heidi's posting was mainly taken up with the split focus of the official statements about the occasion — lauding multilingualism and linguistic diversity; and also urging that endangered and minority languages be protected and preserved.*)

Now, in a letter in the most recent issue (June 2008) of Language, David Crystal exhorts members of the Linguistic Society of America to find ways to promote IYL (even though it's more than half over). (Crystal's letter is an abridged version of a paper available here.)

nascardaughter makes an interesting point in the comments section of my Dare to be bilingual post. Taking her lead, I'll divide what were (in my mind) previously two questions into four:

1. Why would making English official be bad?
2. Why would making English official be good?
3. Why is having no official language good?
4. Why is having no official language bad?

Question 1 is what Timothy M asked of me and other Language Loggers, and Question 2 is what I asked readers to ponder in my Language devaluation post. Question 3 is what nascardaughter asks us all to consider, and Question 4 rounds out the logical possibilities.

On BoingBoing, someone sent in this photo of an AT&T store in downtown Manhattan:

"Perhaps it'll be available last year," Mark Frauenfelder wryly notes. Commenters chime in with their own time-travel jokes, and a couple point out the added typo of "out stock" for "out of stock." One commenter wonders if the photo's a fake, but I'm quite sure it isn't. Substituting temporally for temporarily is a common error, perhaps due to the phonological process of haplology (the omission of one of a pair of similar sounding syllables, like saying lib'ry for library). [Or, as Andrea conjectures in the comments, it could be yet another result of the Cupertino effect.] It's so common that a quick search on Google Images and Flickr turned up a dozen more photos of signs with temporally. There are so many that it's probably just a matter of time before there's a whole blog dedicated to such signs, in the style of other peeveblogging we've seen (apostrophe abuse, unnecessary quotation marks, lowercase L, etc.). A gallery follows below.

Sara Scharf sent in a link to a Chinese menu picture from the Bad Translations group on flickr:

Some time ago, we had a discussion on the American Dialect Society mailing list about the Dictionary of the Scots Language (DSL). DSL consists of the Dictionary of the Older Scots Tongue and the Scottish National Dictionary, together making 22 volumes in print (plus a 2005 supplement). These amazing resources are now available on-line, providing searchable electronic versions of the fruits of scholarship on the Scots language. For free, no strings, available to anyone with web access. (DSL is just part of a larger set of resources, the Scottish Language Dictionaries, or SLD.)

I was astounded, and said so to the list. How was this managed, when parallel resources in English (for instance, the Oxford English Dictionary, the Dictionary of American Regional English, and the Historical Dictionary of American Slang) had scant prospect of getting a similar treatment within the foreseeable future? (The monumental English Dialect Dictionary is apparently being digitized — at the University of Innsbruck!) I exchanged e-mail with DSL staff and discovered just how fragile the whole business was: a subvention from the Scottish Arts Council provided the backbone of the support, and private donors supplied some support, but the enterprise seemed to survive on a phalanx of (unpaid) volunteers (and I suspected that the staff was not very well paid).

I intended to post to Language Log at the time, just to alert people that DSL was available on-line, but the posting fell behind other things and I never got back to it. Now, it turns out, the dictionaries are threatened.