Language Log

Inspired by "Garfield Lost in Translation", where the text of cartoons is "automatically translated from English to Chinese and back using Yahoo or Google", I decided to try the round-trip translation technique on this morning's Stone Soup:

Putting the first panel's balloon through Google's English to (Simplified) Chinese and back, I get:

Holly, I'm tired of your scowling. Either put on a happy face or walk the rest of the way.

冬青，我已经厌倦了你的任职期间。无论是提上一个愉快的面对或步行其余的方式。

Holly, I'm tired of your career. Both put on a happy face or walk the rest of the way.

The first extended transformational-generative grammatical study of any aspect of a language written by anyone other than Noam Chomsky was the study of nominalizations by Robert B. Lees in his MIT dissertation, published as a monograph in 1960. In it, Lees attempted, among other things, to offer a detailed treatment of noun-noun compounds. Other early studies in generative grammar followed. Part of what they were attempting to do was to give a syntax for nominal compounds that would explain what patterns of meaning were available in noun-noun compounds: tree house means "house in a tree" (a location relation), while lion king means "king who is a lion" (a predication relation), and tax collector means "collector of taxes" (a verb-object relation), and so on. I never thought such research was on the right track. It seemed to me that the semantics of such noun-noun combos was so protean that nothing could ever come of it. And I was reminded on this the other day when I saw this headline in a British newspaper:

Detective attacks jailed canoe wife who lied to sons

What, I hope you are asking yourself, is a canoe wife?

If your experience with an expression has been limited to a particular context, you're likely to assume that the meaning it has in that context is its "true", "real" meaning. If you then come across it in other contexts, you might well assume that its occurrences there are somehow connected to the uses you're familiar with. This belief might have nothing to do with the facts of linguistic history.

Case in point: a recent discussion of uses of the term non-dual (or nondual) on Jerry Katz's Nonduality Blog, which treats nondualism, "the understanding or belief that dualism or dichotomy are illusory phenomena" (as the Wikipedia article puts it). Katz explains:

I monitor in a non-scientific way the appearances of the words nondual, nonduality, nondualism, in blogs and the press. I don’t think there is any question that in the last ten years there has been a significant increase in the use of those words in the mainstream press. I also think there is no question that the increase in the awareness and usage of those terms has occurred within the field of spirituality in general.

But what I have realized is that the term non-dual is being used increasingly in ways unrelated to spirituality, philosophy, expressions of reality, or even science. I’m not going to speculate on what that means or whether what I’m seeing is real phenomenon. I’m only pointing it out.

I found all the following usages of non-dual in the last two months. It seems like an explosion in these findings. I wonder if it presages a greater spiritual explosion.

(Note the probable instance of the Recency Illusion, signaled by "increasingly".)

Britt Peterson's article on Literary Darwinism in the most recent Chronicle of Higher Education Review ("Darwin to the Rescue") points to the use of numbers as a central doctrinal conflict in literary scholarship:

[Northrup] Frye argued that, while the critic should understand the natural sciences, "he need waste no time in emulating their methods. I understand there is a Ph.D. thesis somewhere which displays a list of Hardy's novels in the order of the percentages of gloom they contain, but one does not feel that that sort of procedure should be encouraged."

Over the last decade or so, however, a cadre of literary scholars has begun to encourage exactly that sort of procedure, and recently they have become very loud about it.

It's bad enough that we have to deal with struggles over the use of trademarks that have become generic terms, like "Xerox" and "Coke", and trademarks that were already generic terms among specialists, such as "Windows", but a new low in trademarking has been reached by the joint efforts of Dell and the US Patent and Trademark Office. Cyndy Aleo-Carreira reports that Dell has applied for a trademark on the term "cloud computing". The opposition period has already passed and a notice of allowance has been issued. That means that it is very likely that the application will soon receive final approval.

Rules Grammar Change, from The Onion Radio News.

Everyone knows that Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and "Kubla Khan". But it's less well known that he became one of the great curmudgeons of literary history. I thought of him when I read Motoko Rich's NYT article "Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading?" (7/27/2008). And so for your online reading pleasure, I'll reproduce footnote 1 from Chapter III of his  Biographia Literaria (1817).

For as to the devotees of the circulating libraries, I dare not compliment their pass-time, or rather kill-time, with the name of reading. Call it rather a sort of beggarly day-dreaming, during which the mind of the dreamer furnishes for itself nothing but laziness and a little mawkish sensibility; while the whole materiel and imagery of the doze is supplied ab extra by a sort of mental camera obscura manufactured at the printing office, which pro tempore fixes, reflects and transmits the moving phantasms of one man's delirium, so as to people the barrenness of an hundred other brains afflicted with the same trance or suspension of all common sense and all definite purpose. We should therefore transfer this species of amusement, (if indeed those can be said to retire a musis, who were never in their company, or relaxation be attributable to those, whose bows are never bent) from the genus, reading, to that comprehensive class characterized by the power of reconciling the two contrary yet co-existing propensities of human nature, namely; indulgence of sloth, and hatred of vacancy. In addition to novels and tales of chivalry in prose or rhyme, (by which last I mean neither rhythm nor metre) this genus comprizes as its species, gaming, swinging, or swaying on a chair or gate; spitting over a bridge; smoking; snuff-taking; tete a tete quarrels after dinner between husband and wife; conning word by word all the advertisements of the daily advertizer in a public house on a rainy day, &c. &c. &c.

A graph of the current Google hit counts for "N minutes", 2 ≤ N ≤ 66, expressed as a proportion of the total hits for all 65 searches, looks like this:

(As usual, click on the image for a larger version.)

My posting on glass as a technical term, with both mass and count uses, elicited an off-topic thread on myriad, which I'll reproduce below, after some (more) discussion of the Language Log comments policy.

The thread began with this query from kip on 8/1 at 9:58 a.m. (times are U.S. Eastern Time):

Does anyone else have a mass/collective distinction problem with the word "myriad"? I see uses like "the movie has myriad problems" and in my head I change it to "the movie has a myriad of problems" because that's what sounds right to me. Maybe I'm alone in that though…

So what's the problem with this comment?

We learn from the newspaper that Salk Institute researchers recently have found two new drugs, Aicar and GW1516, that improve muscle tone in mice without requiring them to exercise. And that's exactly what all us couch potatoes have been dreaming about–a pill rather than a treadmill. Okay, it hasn't been applied to humans yet, but just you wait.

Aicar works on a user's own genetics, mimicking the effects of exercise and signaling the cells that it has burned the necessary energy and needs to generate more through a process called pharmacological exercise. They say red wine works almost the same way, but you need to drink gallons of it to get the same effect. So why are we reporting this in Language Log?

Dinosaur Comics for 7/28/2008 featured Gricean inference: