Language Log

In response to my post earlier today on "Sex-neutral 'he': the constitutional question", David Seidman writes:

This has nothing directly to do with your post on the sex-neutral he, but I thought you might be interested in a concurring opinion by Justice Blackmun in a Supreme Court case involving an old statute dealing with law suits over land transactions between Indians and "white person[s]." Justice Blackmun read the term to include black persons, yellow persons, and anyone else who was not an Indian.

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I've been getting some mail about tricky cases involving the choice between who(ever) and whom(ever), in particular the question of which form to use in examples like

(1) Whoever/whomever you meet there is bound to be interesting.

  versus

(2) Whoever/Whomever meets you there is bound to be helpful.

There are two factors at work here, one of usage and style and one of syntactic structure, but the big point is that for many speakers and writers. whomever is allowed (or required) in (1), but not allowed in (2).  The Wikipedia page on Who gets this right, and correctly attributes the choice of whomever in (1) to the fact that the pronoun is the direct object of meet there.  But it also says that whomever is the SUBJECT of is in (1), which is downright bizarre — and was absolutely baffling to my correspondent Ethan.  And at first, to me, though now I think I now know what's going on.

In response to my post on the quasi-regular morphology of words like Nepalese vs. Tibetan, Charles Troster writes:

The thought occurred to me – wouldn't it be neat to have a map of the world, coloured in by which ending is used to describe its people? I started trying to make one of these myself, and halfway through I realized I was mixing up the adjectival forms and the demonyms willy-nilly. Maybe if someone a bit more into map-making figured out how to do it :)

Even from the portion I did, though, it's quite amazing to get a visual on how certain endings really only hang out in certain parts of the world. However, "-ian" and "-an" are quite universal and they appear a little bit everywhere.

I agree, it would be neat to see such a map. If you know where this has already been done, or if you do it, let me know and I'll post the map or a link to it.

Geoff Pullum has argued in a number of posts that English he can't be a sex-neutral pronoun (e.g. "Lying feminist ideologues wreck English, says Yale prof", 3/2/2008). This question has recently taken on new practical significance, according to an article in the Reno Gazette-Journal by Anjeanette Damon ("Lawsuit: Woman can't be president", 4/9/2008):

In a lawsuit that legal scholars call "amusing," a Reno man is seeking to keep U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton off the Nevada ballot with the argument that the U.S. Constitution prohibits a woman from holding the office.

Douglas Wallace, 80, contends that because the U.S. Constitution relies on the pronouns "he" and "his" in describing the duties of the president, no woman can hold the office.

Wallace argues the constitution would have to be amended to specifically allow a female president and accused Clinton of trying to make an "end run around the Constitution."

"The use of female gendered pronouns 'she' or 'her' are not present in the document, making it conclusive that the framers never intended that a woman would be president of the United States," Wallace wrote in the lawsuit.

On the wall behind the table where I usually sit to blog, there's a framed print, shown in faded miniature on the right. The title below the picture is "Dr. Syntax Making a Discovery".

But there's not a subjunctive or a preterite in sight. The couple in the foreground, though perhaps engaged in discovery, don't look very intellectual. The old geezer in the background seems to be examining a tree — but it's a willow, not a representation of constituent structure or grammatical relations. What gives?

Yesterday, Mr. Verb asked some questions about morphology and politics:

On News Hour just now, I swear I heard Bush talk about the Tibe[tʃ]an people. I'm puzzled. This is a case of /t/, like the last sound in Tibet, affricating, that is, becoming a 'ch' sound. That is hardly in and or itself striking — actually is regularly pronounced a[ktʃ]ually. But this doesn't usually happen in this environment. Put an -an on Montserrat and see if you get a [t] or an affricate for the adjective form for that place. […]

Is there some pattern here I don't know about? Bush wasn't obviously reading, so that kind of reading-based pronunciation error is probably out. Is Bush treating this (by analogy?) like -tion suffixes? Was he extending the pattern of affrication noted above? Is he really and truly not a competent speaker of English? What's happening?

As it happens, this is a question that I can answer.

Statistics is full of terms that fool people, because they seem intuitively to mean something very simple, while in fact they mean something equally simple, but radically different. And in the rich lexicon of statistical misunderstanding, few terms are more misleading than "false positive rate".

You take a medical test for Condition X and it comes back positive. Bad news — you have Condition X, right? Not so fast — the test is sometimes wrong. How often? Well, there's a "false positive rate" of 10%. OK, so that means that there's a 10% chance that your positive test result is false, and therefore a 90% chance that you have Condition X, right?

No. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

In this situation, your chances of having Condition X are probably not 9 out of 10, but more like 1 in 10 — or maybe 1 in 1,000 or 1 in 100,000 or even less. Without some additional information, we can't tell what the odds are — but they're almost certainly smaller than 9 in 10, and probably a very great deal smaller. Listen up, and I'll explain.

I've often commented upon the deleterious effect of computers on the ability of Chinese to write characters, and the curiously named Jennifer 8. Lee already back in the February 1, 2001 issue of The New York Times wrote a convincing article entitled "Where the PC is mightier than the pen". More recently, I addressed this topic in a January 4, 2007 post on Pinyin News entitled "Chinese Characters as a High-Maintenance Script and the Consequences Thereof". And my friend, David Moser, described to me in a personal communication some years ago that it is nearly impossible to find a Chinese person who can write *both* the second and third characters of the common term DA3 PEN1TI4 ("sneeze") without using pinyin ("spelling") to type them into a computer or looking them up in a dictionary, again usually via pinyin. (I'm intentionally omitting the characters for this and the next term I shall discuss so that individuals who are literate in Chinese and wish to test themselves can do so.)

Now comes further evidence that, whether due to the effect of computers or simply because they would never have known anyway, persons whose main written language is Chinese are unable to write another common expression.

I have no idea why everyone here at Language Log Plaza is so pleased with the new hosting software and editing environment. <i>WYSIWYG</i> web editing indeed! &amp;quot;What You See Is What You Get&amp;quot; is neither what I want to see nor what I want to get. I have always entered my HTML code <b>by hand</b>, not with some fancy show-me editing product for wimps, all decorated with little icons and buttons to press; and I have done it <b>myself</b>. My cited data is properly placed in <i>in italics</i>, my indented quotes are in <blockquote>...</blockquote> environments, and when I want non-breaking spaces I simply insert non-breaking&nbsp;spaces. I intend to continue working as I always have. &quot;Progress&quot; is not always a good thing. In fact it is mostly a bad thing. And if the Language Log editorial staff want to try and cut me off for editorially incorrect formatting they will just find that the

From The Unspeakable Vault (of Doom), a warning about using spellcheckers when summoning Elder Gods…

Victor Mair sent in this picture of a bilingual sign from a public bathroom. The Chinese text means "Please flush after using."

Homework: figure out how the translation came to pass. (Credit will not be given for vague references to Monty Python skits.)

Hint: look up "queen" in the dictionary, and then see what else 后 (hòu) can mean; etc.

A scanned image of a Singaporean identity card has been making the rounds online, recently turning up on the widely read techie blog Gizmodo. The card belongs to a young fellow, born May 13, 1990 in Singapore to Javanese parents, with the regrettable name of Batman bin Suparman. Two superheroes in one name? Well, one superhero and one Javanese name that's coincidentally similar to another superhero. Let's take a look.

Whee! I think I'm the first to post using the swanky new system, which has a wisywig interface and everything! First!

Nodding to the giant posts of yesteryear, I return to the Language Log classic of finding howlers in that horrid little book.

I hadn't looked at the thing since freshman composition, remembering it vaguely only through the scientific and unbiased reminders provided by Language Log posts. But a talk I attended last Friday referred to a S&W rule, purportedly about avoiding ambiguity: "Keep related words together".

I was curious about how Strunk and White would formulate the notion of 'related words', so I went to check it out. And, I kid you not, this is the formulation of the rule:

"The subject of a sentence and the principal verb should not, as a rule, be separated by a phrase or clause that can be transferred to the beginning."

I was afraid someone was playing a joke on me. But no, that's really it!