Language Log

Yesterday I gave a brief "melodized" audio clip, and invited readers to guess the language. I'm happy to report that Bob Ladd and Sarah E. nailed it — the passage was  indeed in French, from an RFI news report. Here's the original.

From the 12 June issue of the Bay Area Reporter (all the LGBT news that's fit to print, and more), a fascinating story (with photo) headed "Naked men meet cop". In its entirety:

Two naked men, Rusty Mills, left, and Lloyd Fisher, were walking in front of LGBT Community Center Saturday, June 7 when a San Francisco Police Department cruiser pulled over and Officer Lorenzo Adamson got out. Photographer Jane Cleland captured this exchange:

Adamson: "You can't walk around naked! That's indecent exposure!"

Mills: "It's only 'indecent exposure' if you engage in lewd behavior, and we're not being lewd."

Adamson: "I don't care about all that legal mumbo-jumbo. It's not normal to be walking around naked!"

Mills: "We're supporting World Naked Bicycle Day."

Adamson: "I don't care what you say, it's not healthy and no other police officers would disagree with me. And besides, you don't seem to have any supporters here."

Mills and Fisher were not cited and soon were on their way.

Adamson was clearly affronted. What interests me in this is the shifting grounds that he offers for his objection to the men's nakedness: first, it's against the law; then, it's "not normal"; then, it's "not healthy" (suggesting, I suppose, that exposed naughty bits are a threat to public health); finally, the men have no supporters for it.  But, finding no grounds for issuing a citation (even though rejecting "all that legal mumbo-jumbo", not the best position for a cop to take), he has to let them go on their way.

World Naked Bicycle Day is a genuine event, by the way, and it was indeed on June 7 (which was also the kickoff day at the LGBT Community Center for Pride Month in San Francisco). No bicycles are visible in the photo, nor are any people other than Adamson and the two naked men. (I would have thought there'd be more people on Market Street in the middle of the day.) Also no word about where the men came from or where they went to.

(The photo shows the men from the rear, of course. Naked buttocks don't count as naughty bits.)

At scienceblogs.com's Evolving Thoughts, the philosopher of biology John S. Wilkins recently referenced a couple of Language Log posts ("Queensland grammar brouhaha", 6/13/2008; "How the Romans invented grammar", 6/14/2008), and added his own ruminations ("Grammar wars in Queensland", 10/14/2008):

Now grammar wars and grammar nazis go back a long time, and the fight seems to this outsider to be between those who follow Chomskyian transformational grammars and those who follow traditional grammars.

To this insider, John's comment seems to be yet another indictment of my profession, which has evidently failed to provide, to one of the more intellectually accomplished members of the general public, even the faintest hint of a clue. Closer to home, in this case, even reading two Language Log posts didn't make a dent. So let me try again.

I believe — without much evidence — that I can recognize many more languages than I can understand. This ability depends to some extent on recognizing an occasional common word, and on a sort of textural appreciation of syllable structures and certain characteristic sounds. But some of it, I've always believed, is prosodic: perception of time patterns of pitch and amplitude.

Do you think you can recognize a language from its pitch and amplitude pattern? Here's an example, created according to the recipe that I described in an earlier post. I'll give the answer (and the original recording) tomorrow.

The reason I was in York last night was to attend the 40th birthday celebrations for University Radio York, the UK's oldest student radio station, which began against great odds, only semi-legally, at a time when the government flatly refused to license any broadcasting that would break the BBC's monopoly, and physicists wouldn't assent to the idea that the induction loop technology the students were proposing would restrict the signal to the campus. I had a small role in the founding of the station four decades ago when I was a freshman undergraduate in the Department of Language at the University of York. At last night's reunion dinner I sat with a bunch of guys who started at URY and spent their whole lives in the broadcasting industry. People like and Robin Valk, who worked as a rock DJ in Buffalo, NY, for a few years before returning to Britain to work on software for computer management of radio programming, and Phil Harding, who has spent his career in a succession of different posts at the BBC. Phil taught me a new word that he learned at a seminar on new developments in the cellphone industry: glanceability.

My favorite brand of chili and garlic sauce is 蘭記 (Cantonese: laan⁴ gei³, Mandarin: lan² ji⁴). It's good on just about everything, or straight out of the jar. I've eaten it since I was a child, but I've never figured out the name of the company. It means "annals of orchids" or "annals of elegance". This is not an obvious name to chose for a company that makes sauces. It isn't a family name or the name of a place that I have ever heard of, nor is it descriptive of the product. If it is a literary reference, it isn't one with which either I or my Chinese friends are familiar.

I'm hoping that one of our erudite readers can tell me where the name 蘭記 comes from. Does anybody know?

Update: As a commenter pointed out, I somehow wrote the wrong character in my original post. The second character is 記, Cantonese gei³, Mandarin ji⁴, not 紀, Cantonese gei², Mandarin ji⁴. My mind is really going, or at any rate my Unicode lookup and eyesight.

The Phils are having their best start since 1993. The picture on the right, by the AP's Tom Gannam, accompanies a stories in today's Philadelphia Inquirer by Jim Salisbury, "Phillies pack lots of punch in rout: They scored 20 runs for the second time this season".

The caption below the picture:

Pat Burrell (left) congratulates Ryan Howard on his first-inning home run, one batter after Chase Utley's solo blast. Burrell followed Howard with a homer of his own. Howard hit another shot later in the game in St. Louis.

Fox News has apparently let their semiotic guard down on this one, because a search of their site turned up no evidence of concern that the "terrorist fist jab" may have infiltrated the national pastime.

Caught on NPR's Weekend Edition Saturday on 7 June, in a story by Wendy Kaufman on weightlifter Melanie Roach that had a section on the autism of Roach's son Drew:

(1:ex) Roach hopes that by talking about Drew’s autism, it will spur more research and assistance for families affected by it.

I've put the relevant clause in bold face. This clause has the form

(1:form) by VP₁ing, it VP₂

which is characterized by some composition teachers as "wordy". Some would criticize it as "vague" as well, because the anaphoric pronoun it has no noun antecedent (recall our earlier discussion of "vague" pronouns on Language Log, here, here, and here); instead, it refers to the action or event that VP₁ denotes. In any case, using (1:form) to convey this meaning is non-standard.

The usual suggested fix is to compact the clause into a simple subject-predicate clause, of the form

(2:form) VP₁ing VP₂

(with VP₁ing now a "nominal gerund", serving as subject; in (1), it's a predicate in a subjectless predicational adjunct). In the case at hand, the fix for the original would be:

(2:ex) Roach hopes that talking about Drew's autism will spur more research and assistance for families affected by it.

This is entirely standard, but it doesn't, I think, get the effect that people who use the construction in (1) are trying to get with it — which is to mark some discourse referent as topical in the discourse (in the by-adjunct) and then say something about it (in the main clause). That is, this "by-topicalization" construction explicitly separates "discourse topicality" and "sentence topic", while these two statuses are fused in the subject in (2).

Just to make a point about the boundless possibilities of technology, I thought I would publish a Language Log post from a train. I am writing while traveling south by rail from Edinburgh to York. However, I have to admit that the boundless possibilities of technology are being resisted every step of the way by the forces of darkness and entropy. An hour out of Edinburgh we slowed to a crawl because of farm animals on the line. A modern express train can do nothing in the face of an imperturbable heifer, apparently. One minute it was rattle-a-dat, rattle-a-dat, at about ninety miles an hour, and the next minute we were stationary at a herd of cattle like a taxi in rural India. And the other thing is that through some strange interaction of default configurations with the National Express East Coast free wi-fi software, when train passengers call for the Google front page they get the one in Swedish. I am on a train in England looking at Google Sverige, which has buttons labeled Google-sökning and Jag har tur. As a qualified linguist, it shouldn't faze me to use Swedish for once (heck, I once executed an ATM transaction in Hmoob). But I am bit intrigued. I wonder what unintended consequence of what variable setting in which file was responsible for this whole train acting as if it were stuck behind a Swedish cow in Swedish cyberspace.

It's not only in the United States that linguists have failed in their responsibility to educate the public. As Geoff Pullum explained yesterday, the English Teachers Association of Queensland (Australia) recently published a teachers' guide to grammar that was "full of utter howlers". And some of the discussion of the controversy is not much better. For example, Graham Young wrote today in a blog post at the National Forum ("Grammar's taught to grammarians", 6/14/2008):

The Romans, driven I suspect by their infatuation with standardisation (which palls in comparison to ours, but they caught the disease first), invented grammar. It didn't exist before them, people just spoke languages.

This short passage contains several implicit indictments of my profession's educational failures.

A sample of today's biospam:

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And they'll send you ugly plush animals too.  Shockingly, these are apparently popular enough that people try to to merge orders so as to reach the 150€ minimum to get one.

A major grammar brouhaha exploded in Australia today, launched in the country's major newspaper The Australian under the headline Grammar guide for English teachers 'full of basic errors':

A TEACHERS' guide to grammar circulated by the English Teachers Association of Queensland is riddled with basic errors, leading an internationally respected linguistics professor to describe it as "the worst published material on English grammar" he has seen.

A series of articles on grammar published in the ETAQ's journal intended as a teaching resource is striking for its confusion of the parts of speech, incorrectly labelling nouns as adjectives, verbs as adverbs and phrases as verbs.

Here's the rest of the story.

"Purity" at xkcd:

Addendum by Simon Holloway at Davar Akher: "Of course, you can’t see Linguistics because it’s waaaay over to the right."