Language Log

We discovered in the Linguistics and English Language department at the University of Edinburgh today that the draft handbook for our honours students was stuffed with occurrences of the nonexistent words programmeme and programmemes. The secretarial staff were baffled. Can you figure out the origin of this strange and unwelcome neologism? (A hint: Dawkins's invented term meme appears to have no relevance whatsoever.)

Does and/or mean "and and or", or "and or or"? That is, if I say I am interested in A and/or B, do I mean I'm interested in A and B and I'm interested in A or B, or do I mean that I'm interested in A and B or I'm interested in A or B? (You may want to say that it means I'm interested in A and B and/or I'm interested in A or B; but in that case I repeat my question.)

Alex Boulton writes to draw our attention to a curious case of misplaced bowdlerization on the French-language web page of the English Writing Lab of the Hanyang University Center for Teaching and Learning:

The text on the Writing Lab's web page remains in English, regardless of which of the 10 language options the viewer chooses. But the navigational text changes — and apparently something else changes as well.

My post "The discovery of Dr. Syntax" (4/11/2008) ended like this:

No one today would think of calling a schoolteacher “Dr. Syntax”, even in areas where primary schools are still called “grammar schools”. I’m inclined to see this as a loss, though an ambiguous one. The image of Syntax in the 18th century may have been largely a negative one, but at least the name recognition was high.

Several readers wrote to set me straight: "grammar schools", they explained, are secondary schools, not primary schools.

But the school where I started first grade, one of two public elementary schools in the town of Mansfield, Connecticut, was called "Storrs Grammar School"!

Recently the news has been full of horrible and terrible things — or, to be more precise, horribles and terribles. In last week's Senate hearings on Iraq, General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker outlined what might happen following a hasty withdrawal of U.S. forces, testimony that Barack Obama described as a "parade of horribles." Meanwhile, the actor Rob Lowe went public with an extortion attempt from a former nanny who he said was threatening to accuse him and his wife of "a vicious laundry list of false terribles." The entertainment blog Defamer sarcastically applauded Lowe's "keen ability to turn an adjective into a noun." Neither horrible or terrible are particularly new as nouns, but their latest appearances still merit a closer look.

Our new content-management software, WordPress 2.5, has generally been a pleasure to install, administer and use. But I have a complaint. The solution is probably covered somewhere on the helpful WordPress forums, but the problem is annoying enough to document here.

Henry Kenrick wrote:

I read your posts on Google translations with interest, as just a few days ago I came across a similar example when translating Russian to English.

Below I have copied the text and the Google translation. It's clear there's still some way to go, but some phrases aren't bad. The most interesting artefact was the translation of свердловских (genitive case plural of the adjective for Sverdlovsk region) into Heilongjiang.

Maria Brumm, "Giving the Lie: Blogs and Scientific Criticism", Green Gabbro, 4/6/2008. My favorite paragraph:

This cultural conflict been making the rounds of the geoblogosphere thanks to a pair of editorials in Nature Geoscience on the pros and cons of blogging. See RealClimate and Highly Allochthonous for summaries, Kim (who talks about fact-checking before teaching undergraduates), Chris again (with diagrams!), and James Annan for further discussion. (Incidentally: I am sure the various editors of the Nature Publishing Group are too dignified and professional to dance around their offices going "Oh yeah, baby, who controls the discourse? We control the discourse! UNGH!"… but when was the last time a blog post sparked a rambling article in the pages of EOS or Geology?)

Also worth the price of admission: the pointer to Steven Shapin's A Social History of Truth.

A page at www.justice.gc.ca recommends that people drafting legislation should "consider using the third-person pronouns 'they', 'their', 'them', 'themselves' or 'theirs' to refer to a singular indefinite noun, to avoid the unnatural language that results from repeating the noun".

The page closes with an excellent set of references and quotations — the sources include the Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage and the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Language Log is not cited (nor should it have been), but we may have had some indirect influence, perhaps by providing a theological argument that retains some force even in a secular society like Canada's, or perhaps by offering protection against the intemperate irrationality that these issues sometimes provoke.

Expressions like ^!real comfortable, with a modifier of adjective form preceding the head of an adjective phrase, adverb phrase, or determinative phrase, are characteristic of non-standard dialects. I take that to be simply a factual claim, not a value judgment. In written Standard English prose on serious subjects, outside of dialog, you do not find ^!real comfortable, ^!real friendly, etc. (the exclamation mark prefix is the notational device used in The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language to mark cited examples that are grammatical in some non-standard dialects but not grammatical in any variety of the Standard English dialect).

Some writers of a prescriptivist bent tend to suggest that the speakers who use such phrases are simply too lazy and ignorant to distinguish an adjective from an adverb: ^!real comfortable is wrong, they say, because adjectives like real do not modify adjectives, so the phrase should be corrected to really comfortable. It's simply a matter of slovenliness and inattention. These people should shape up, and learn the difference between an adjective and an adverb.

However, the other day, I heard someone on BBC Radio 4 say There are precious few, and I realized that it thoroughly undercuts the laziness-and-ignorance diagnosis. Precious few is clearly and definitely grammatical in Standard English. And crucially, preciously few is not.

In the 1951 film version of Gershwin's "An American In Paris", Gene Kelly as Jerry Mulligan explains why he's chosen the life of an expatriate:

Back home everyone said I didn't have any talent. They might be saying the same thing over here, but it sounds better in French.

In fact, "everything sounds better in French", and in particular, "pop music sounds better in French". Or at least, many English speakers have been telling themselves things like this for the past couple of centuries. You could look it up.

But the linguistic worm has turned, at least with respect to rock lyrics.

According to Bertrand Dicale "Pourquoi ces Français chantent en anglais", Le Figaro, 11/26/2007,

Le temps est à l’anglais. Pas l’anglais phonétique et scolaire des yé-yé, auxquels les Anglais ne comprenaient rien. La langue anglaise qui se chante aujourd’hui en France est celle du folk contemporain ou de la pop élégante, une langue qui demande beaucoup plus que des cours d’anglais de terminale, et qui aujourd’hui rencontre son public, en France et à l’étranger.

The time belongs to English. Not the phonetic and academic English of yé-yé [link], which English speakers didn't understand at all. The English language in today's songs in France is that of contemporary folk or of elegant pop, a language which requires a lot more than a high-school English course, and which is now finding its audience, in France and abroad.

I missed this article last fall, but yesterday I heard an interview on the BBC World Service with Julien Garnier, from the band Hey Hey My My, who explained (as I recall) that he prefers to write in English, because simple things sound more meaningful in English than they do in French. It struck me that there may be some sort of reciprocal "the other language's grass is greener" effect here, where the extra effort needed to process a foreign language really does create more of (certain kinds of) meanings. (Or a more obvious and less interesting alternative: simple poetic phrases are hard to translate.)

Last week, back in the Paleo-Language-Log Era, I ended a post on "Comparing communication efficiency across languages" with this teaser:

A topic for another time: how do typical speech rates differ between languages? Do these interact with per-syllable measures of information content so as to equalize the average rate of information transmission?

Since I've done nothing to follow up on this note, Max Bane sent in a .pdf of some relevant PowerPoint slides.

In response to Charles Troster's question about a world map showing the adjectival forms of place names, Stephen Powell wrote:

Here's a map of adjective endings for the countries of the world, as suggested by Charles Troster. It was actually very easy to put together using the country data included in Mathematica 6.0; the full code is below.

The key is:
blue = -ese
green = -ian
red = -an
pink = -ish
purple = -i
brown = -er
yellow = -ic
grey = anything else (or Mathematica doesn't know)

It's just matching strings, so Thailand is purple, when that obviously isn't an -i suffix. And Mathematica hasn't recognized Kosovo yet, so that's in green along with (the rest of) Serbia.

(Click on the map to get a larger version.)