Language Log

There's been a great deal of discussion recently about Senator John McCain's position on Spain. In an interview with Radio Caracol of Miami, he engaged in a puzzling back-and-forth on the question of whether he would be willing to host the leader of the Spanish government at the White House, or perhaps even talk with him. I think that Josh Marshall's analysis is right:

Through some mixture of confusion and inability to understand the interviewer's accent, McCain was confused about who he was talking about and decided to wing it, assuming that the person he was being asked about was some other left-wing strong man from Latin America and answering with the standard boilerplate about standing up to America's enemies.

You can listen and come to your own conclusions — I've put a transcript with an audio link up here.  My contribution to the discussion is to draw your attention to an aspect of Senator McCain's intonation.

The Zippy take on the baleful effects of electronic communication:

Here, Bill Griffith mocks the alarm over what electronic communication is leading to, as discussed in David Crystal's new book Txtng: The Gr8 Db8, which Ben Zimmer has begun posting about here on Language Log.

Back in August, Anatol Stefanowitsch at Bremer Sprachblog extended xkcd's classic research on the nature of regret by adding the dimension of gender, and by comparing English to German ("Je Ne Regrette Rien", 8/17/2008):

(Click on the images for larger versions.)

To help bloggers everywhere celebrate Talk Like a Pirate Day, in keeping with our annual tradition, we present the Corsair Ergonomic Keyboard for Pirates:

In TLAPD posts from earlier years, you can find instructions for the more difficult task of talking (as opposed to typing) like a pirate; the history of piratical r-fulness; and other goodies: 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007.

There's actually some serious historical linguistics (and cultural history) involved here, as discussed in "R!?", 9/19/2005, and "Pirate R as in I-R-ELAND", 9/20/2006. And even a bit of mathematical linguistics.

Yes, it's Talk Like a Pirate Day. Here's David Morgan-Mar's Irregular Webcomic take on the event:

In my capacity as executive producer of the Visual Thesaurus, I recently had the opportunity to interview David Crystal about his new book, Txtng: The Gr8 Db8, a careful demolition of the myths surrounding text messaging. You can read the first part of my interview on the Visual Thesaurus website here, with parts two and three to follow in coming weeks. As Mark Liberman has noted, texting is only now achieving levels of popularity in the US that Europe and parts of Asia saw about five years ago. That also means that the US is also about five years behind the curve on the concomitant hysteria over how texting presages the death of the language.

Time and time again we've seen this strain of "hell in a handbasket" degenerationism pervading attitudes about contemporary language use (e.g., here, here, here, and here). But the furore over texting in the United Kingdom, which Crystal says began with a 2003 Internet myth about a school essay written entirely in textisms, takes this alarmism to new levels. Will the U.S. be whipped up into the same fervor, five years later? Geoff Nunberg gave some indications of this possibility in a "Fresh Air" commentary a few months ago about excessive reactions to a Pew Research Center study on texting. The publication of Crystal's book in the US is therefore remarkably well-timed, since it can serve as a useful antidote to this sort of overheated discourse.

My class on the Chinese script has around 36 students in it. About half of them are native speakers from Taiwan, the Mainland, Singapore, and Hong Kong (most of these are graduate students who already have M.A.'s from overseas universities or are finishing up their Ph.D.'s). About one quarter of the other students are native speakers of Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese. About a quarter are Americans who have studied Mandarin anywhere from two to twelve years.

Today, I made the students close their computers, electronic dictionaries, and all their books and papers, then asked them to write down on a piece of paper the simplified and traditional characters for Taiwan and beneath that what the meaning or origin of the name is. In the top right corner they indicated whether they were native speakers or how many years they had studied Chinese (I also should have asked them to indicate where they were from, but neglected to do so). The results:

• only 2 students could write both forms correctly
• only 4 students could write both forms partially correctly
• only 10 students could write one form correctly
• about 10 students could write one form partially correctly
• the remainder of the students could not write either form correctly, including a couple of the native speakers
• most students who had taken up to 6 years of Chinese couldn't write either form correctly

[If you want to give yourself the same quiz, before reading further, the answer is here.]

So many complaints about science journalism appear here on Language Log that it is only proper that we should occasionally draw attention to a fine piece of popular science writing. One such, I think after one read-through, is Natalie Angier's "Gut instinct's surprising role in math" in The New York Times (hat tip to Barbara Scholz, who pointed me to it). It's reporting on a paper in Nature by Halberda, Feigenson, and Mazzocco, which supports the view that (in Feigenson's words) "your evolutionarily endowed sense of approximation is related to how good you are at formal math." There have been many Language Log posts on related themes, like "The cognitive technology of number" (July 11, 2008) and "The Pirahã and us" (October 6, 2007). There is intrinsic interest in what Angier reports: evidence that how good you are at subitization, the instinctive quantity-assessing ability you share with many animal species, is correlated with, and perhaps even determinative of, the extent to which you will readily develop abilities at linguistically formalized manipulation of mathematical concepts. But Angier's article also represents an instance of really good generally accessible writing about science, in a contemporary American newspaper. It can be done. Some science journalists put out good product. And not all journalism that touches on the cognitive and linguistic sciences gets grumbled about on Language Log.

Annie Wagner, in an unusual tribute to the late David Foster Wallace, asked about "a grammatical quirk the man just couldn’t quit". She quotes from a review she wrote several years ago:

Everything is the first volume in the “Great Discoveries” series, through which the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, intends to “bring new voices to the telling of stories of scientific achievement.” Which goal, as DFW’s habitual syntax would have it, is somewhat suspicious.

It has often been my duty to translate or edit Russian archeological and Sinological works in English. Two things plague such work more than anything else, and both have to do with transliteration.

You might think that it does, from the headlines "Bilingual children stutter more – study", "Stutter risk for bilingual kids", "Study: bilingual kids more likely to stutter", etc. These stories report on a recently-published study: Peter Howell, Stephen Roger Davis, and Roberta Williams, "The effects of bilingualism on stuttering during late childhood", ADC Published Online 9 September 2008.

Howell et al. studied 317 children who stuttered, all of whom started school in the UK at age four or five, first came to a speech clinic between 8 and 10, and lived in the greater London area. For 69 of the 317, "at least one language other than English was spoken in the home". Thus 21.8% of the stutterers were raised in a home where a language other than English is spoken. In comparison, among schoolchildren of comparable age in the greater London area, the London Education Authority reports that 28.4% come from such homes.

But wait a minute: the percentage of stutterers who come from non-English-speaking homes is smaller than the percentage of kids in general who come from such homes? How does this translate into "Bilingual children stutter more", or "Stutter risk for bilingual kids"?

Anyone who has ever tried to use Google Book Search for serious historical research has had to grapple with its highly frustrating limitations. I've griped about the situation on several occasions (here, here, here, here). The problem is twofold: GBS is plagued by inaccurate or misleading dating, particularly for serial publications, and it does not offer full page images even for many works that are clearly in the public domain (namely, pre-1923 US works and noncopyrightable government publications). Many of us have been patiently waiting for Google to ease up on its viewing restrictions, which would simultaneously ameliorate the dating problem: if you can skim through page images, then you can determine if the year that Google gives you in the metadata is actually correct.

Help is on the way — but not from Google, exactly. Rather, several of Google's partners in its library scanning project are stepping up to the plate. Jesse Sheidlower of the Oxford English Dictionary passes on the news that the Hathi Trust has been established by the thirteen university libraries that make up the Committee on Institutional Cooperation. This includes the University of Michigan, which has contributed a major portion of Google's scanned material thus far. The Hathi Trust is not nearly as wary as Google in providing page images and fully searchable text for public domain materials. What this means is that if you find something on GBS that only gives you "snippet view," "limited preview," or "no preview available," you may be able to find the full page images by going to a CIC library site. The University of Michigan has already implemented this as part of its Mirlyn Library Catalog, with links to public domain material provided under the name "HathiTrust Digital Library." (Roy Tennant of Library Journal has also mocked up a prototype search service, but it still needs some work.)

Below the jump, an example of Hathi goodness in action.

Lucy Mangan ("Every little helps", The Guardian, 9/13/2008), is the troubled child of a mixed marriage:

As a family, we have few abstract points of contention. Generally, we like to keep arguments specific and concrete – who ate the last peppermint cream, who lost the door keys, who killed Grandma, that kind of thing. But let a grammatical solecism rear its ugly head and the dinner table is awash with bloodlust. My mother, as you might expect from a woman who used to break my fingers for putting our beige napkins down "the wrong way", believes that the rules of grammar are semi-divine and wholly immutable. A split infinitive, "different to" or "none are": these are the things that try her soul, at least if there aren't any inverted napkins around.

Dad, meanwhile, embraces "mistakes" as part of the natural evolution of language. Presented with an empurpled wife insisting that "to aggravate" means "to make worse", not "to annoy", he will proclaim that "effete" once meant "having given birth". Each seeks my support. Bending my head to my plate, I feel like the trembling victim of a soon-to-be-broken home.