Language Log

You wouldn't think you could get sued over a Bible translation, but one Bradley LaShawn Fowler has filed lawsuits against two publishers demanding a total of $70 million in damages. He claims that their versions of the Bible, which condemn homosexuality, violate his rights as a homosexual man. He is representing himself, and his handwritten complaints (Thomas Nelson and Zondervan) are difficult to understand, but that seems to be the gist of it.

On his "Freakonomics" blog on the New York Times website, Stephen J. Dubner has just learned the perils of the Bierce/Hartman/McKean/Skitt Law of Prescriptivist Retaliation (corrections of linguistic error are themselves prone to error). In a July 8th post entitled "Dept. of Oops," he notes this lead sentence in a recent article in The Economist:

In the hills north east of Mexico City it is not uncommon to find Cornish pasties for sale.

Dubner writes:

They meant to write "pastries" but, considering that miners work really hard, they might also be hoping to encounter the kind of people who go shopping for pasties.

Those who are following the attempts to give English legal status as the official language of the U.S. may be interested in the analogous debate going on about the role of French in France. One difference: French already has a special official status, guaranteed not only by French law but by the French constitution itself, which asserts in Article 2 that "La langue de la République est le français" ("the language of the Republic is French").

Last Sunday's Foxtrot tries to explain the popularity of texting among teens:

It's a cute theory, but it's almost certainly false.

Rudis Muiznieks, a skeptical cartoonist whose work appears at cectic.com, posted this strip on May 30:

The backstory:

"Parrot telepathy at the BBC", 1/28/2004;
"BBC's duplicity stuns Language Loggers", 1/15/2007;
"Invisible telepathic parrots", 6/30/2007.

Not long after posting my "Pushing buttons" post, I turned on NPR to listen to some of All Things Considered. There happened to be a somewhat relevant story on ("N.C. Sees Push To Register Young Latino Voters") — relevant because, as some commenters on my post pointed out (and as I also noted late last year), "It is not language per se, but its power to function as a 'proxy' for wider social issues which fans the flames of public disputes over language." (Sally Johnson, "Who's misunderstanding whom? Sociolinguistics, public debate and the media", Journal of Sociolinguistics 5.4 (2001), p. 599).

Here's the most relevant bit of the ATC story:

Dale Folwell was among several Republican state legislators up for re-election who spoke at a small rally in June, declaring illegal immigration a "major crisis."

"I can tell you that there are two things that civilizations never survive," Folwell says in a campaign ad. "That's a devaluation of their currency or a devaluation of their language. And these are two things that Americans are facing."

Putting aside the debatable presumption that English is the language of American civilization, I'm struggling to see how the use of other languages "devalues" English in any way. What exactly does Folwell mean by "language devaluation", anyway? Interestingly, the current top Google hit for {"language devaluation"} is a 1975 Time Magazine article ("CAN'T ANYONE HERE SPEAK ENGLISH?"), which is all about how English is being corrupted by its own speakers (in the classic but "turgid, self-righteous and philosophically hopeless" Orwellian sense — there's even an Orwell quote toward the end of the article) and makes no particular mention of immigration, languages other than English, and so forth. Thirty-three years later, we appear to be less worried about how language is twisted by our leaders to push people into conformity with certain political ideals (some progressives even think we should follow the lead of conservatives in doing more such "framing") and more concerned with … well, I'm not quite sure what.

While driving somewhere in the North County of San Diego this past holiday weekend, I found myself behind a large Ford Extravaganza (or Excursion, Expedition, Explorer, whatever) with a bumper sticker proclaiming:

BOYCOTT ANY COMPANY

THAT REQUIRES YOU TO

PRESS `1' FOR ENGLISH!!

I couldn't (easily) find an image of this bumper sticker on the Interwebs, but in the brief process of searching for it I found many other images with messages along the same lines. The t-shirt image on the right (from a website selling "John McCain […] Anti-Obama Political Conservative Republican" t-shirts and other such paraphernalia) is by far one of the tamer ones; next in line is this one (WHY SHOULD I HAVE TO PRESS 1 FOR ENGLISH?), then this one (Aren't YOU tired of "PRESS 1 FOR ENGLISH?"), then this one (Why in the hell should I have to press "1" for English?), and it takes a nose-dive into outright offensiveness here (Press #1 for English, Press #2 for Go Home!; part of the sickening "Save California" collection — personally, I'd like to save California from these kinds of ignorant nutjobs).

Overheard yesterday afternoon, from a woman on the street talking on a cellphone and looking down the street:

Oh, there you are! I'll talk to you when you get here.

Two different senses of talk here. The woman was already talking to her friend, in the sense of talk defined by the OED as 'exercise the faculty of speech', and was meanwhile preparing to talk to her, in the sense 'convey or exchange ideas, thoughts, information, etc. by means of speech'. No actual paradox, but it did catch my ear.

A couple of days ago, I took Roy Peter Clark to task for claiming that phrases like "a million dollars" show that the indefinite article a can be used with a plural head ("Slippery glamour", 7/4/2008). I observed that the structure is clearly [[a million] dollars], not [a [million dollars]]; that expressions like "a million" are just numbers, fitting into the normal syntactic slot where numbers go; and that million in this case is morphosyntactically singular.

In the comments, Russell Lee-Goldman pointed out that

There are, however, a few cases where it really looks like "a" is acting funky:

– He was there for a good seven years.
– An additional three people are required.
– A mere four nations recognize that standard.
– She collected an amazing and heretofore unprecedented forty million dollars.

A couple of days ago I reported on an article in last week's New Scientist, "Charades reveals a universal sentence structure." The New Scientist article reports on some neat experiments in an article in PNAS involving how people represent events non-linguistically, e.g. when miming. The main result, as the New Scientist reporter saw it, is that people mime in the order Subject, Object, then Verb, regardless of the word order of their native language, and that this provides evidence that this word order is "etched into our brains".

The PNAS article is "The natural order of events: How speakers of different languages represent events nonverbally", by Susan Goldin-Meadow, Wing Chee So, Aslı Özyürek, and Carolyn Mylander. Unfortunately you or your institution needs a subscription (or $10) to see it. Fortunately, I've read the PNAS article on your behalf. And here I say "fortunately" only in the sense that I might have saved you money, and not with the intention of discouraging anyone from reading the original article: it's a clearly written and thought provoking scientific paper presenting a couple of clever little studies which garnered some neat results. (Have I mentioned before that there's no good reason why every clearly written and thought provoking  scientific paper presenting a couple of clever little studies which garnered some neat results is not free for everyone?)

So anyway, as I say, I looked at the PNAS article, and, well, I dunno. I'm glad New Scientist covered the story, and they got the main results factually correct, which is a good start, but it still looks to me like misleading reporting in New Scientist, though far from being the most egregious example we've seen here at Language Log.

Did you know that Language Log has a comments policy? Have you read it? If not, go and read it now, and if so, refresh your memory; look at the bar at the top of the main page, where it says

Home   About   Comments policy

and click on "Comments policy". There you will find the instruction

Be relevant. As bloggers, we write about whatever we want to. As a commenter, you should comment on the contents of the post you're commenting on. If you want to write about something else, do it on your own blog.

Commenters have violated this injunction again and again (for reasons I think I understand). The comments policy goes on to say

Comments that violate these guidelines will be deleted. Repeat offenders may be banned.

but in fact we've been extraordinarily tolerant of errant comments, even allowing comments that explicitly introduce topics that have nothing to do with the topic of the original posting. These are the most flagrant violations, but there are more subtle ones.

Last December I commented on the case of Christine Castillo-Comer, the former director of science curriculum for the Texas Education Agency who was forced out of her job for allegedly opposing the teaching of creationism. The basis for her removal was that she had forwarded an email announcement of a talk by an opponent of the teaching of "intelligent design". Texas Education Agency officials claimed that

Ms. Comer's e-mail implies endorsement of the speaker and implies that TEA endorses the speaker's position on a subject on which the agency must remain neutral.

At the recent Acoustics 2008 meeting, I heard a presentation that reminded me of a mystery that I've been wondering about for nearly two decades. The paper presented was Maria Uther et al., "Training of English vowel perception by Finnish speakers to focus on spectral rather than durational cues", JASA 123(5):3566, 2008. And the mystery is why HVPT — a simple, quick, and inexpensive technique for helping adults to learn the sounds of new languages — is not widely used.