Language Log

For a peek at what makes language — and Language Log — possible, consider this. Suppose that you stand up in front of a class of kindergarten or first-grade kids, who haven't learned to read and write yet, and tell them "Today we're going to play a game. I'll tell you a story — and any time I say 'school', the first kid that raises a hand gets a dollar."

If you tell a good story, and manage the interaction right, there'll be many occasions of group glee. (A Jon-Stewart-style hammed-up doubletake, when they miss a keyword instance, should be quite effective.)

But in general, as long as you speak clearly, most of the arguments are going to be about whose hand went up first, not about whether what you said was actually school or something else.

Now, for a peek at what makes the study of intonation difficult, imagine trying the game a different way. Instead of offering a bounty for instances of a word, ask them to raise their hands for instances of a pitch contour.

Pretty much every time I post a Zippy cartoon (most recently, here), someone writes to ask about Bill Griffith's spelling of the definite article the as th', as in

I know th' human being and th' fish can coexist peacefully!

The question was asked in the comments on my posting "Are we snowcloning yet?" back in June and was answered by other commenters there. The purpose of today's posting is to record the answer, with some commentary, so that I can refer future queries here.

The short answer is that Griffith is just representing the ordinary, reduced, pronunciation of the. The spelling th' is an instance of "eye dialect" (in a narrow sense), spellings (like wimmin for women) that represent ordinary pronunciations.

At Stansted Airport near the security checkpoints I saw a closet labeled CONTINGENCY DEPLOYMENT EQUIPMENT. I reflected awhile, as I put my belt and shoes back on after a very thorough body-fondling search, on the meaning of that remarkable sequence of Latinate lexical selections, and I decided that it meant "things to use if stuff happens". But of course that doesn't really distinguish the things in that closet from the things in almost any other closet. I wonder what was in there. Things that are either too heterogeneous to classify or too secret to openly name, evidently.

From the character Morton (played by Robert Wagner) in the 2005 movie The Fallen Ones:

(1) We have a lot of earth to move and maintain structural integrity.

The sentence has have used in two different ways in the conjuncts: with a NP object in the first conjunct, with a VP complement in the second (where it's apparently the obligative have of We have to maintain structural integrity). This is formally similar to the GoToGo construction of

(2) She's going to San Francisco and talk on firewalls.

(which has go used in two different ways in the conjuncts: as a motion verb, with a directional complement, in the first conjunct, but as a prospective quasi-modal, with a VP complement,  in the second conjunct). Because of this parallel, I'll call the configuration in (1) HaveToHave. 

My friend Max Vasilatos, with whom I exchange mail every day (it's a long story), recently started sending me postcards in a series featuring signs in which a word has been replaced by FUCK or FUCKING — for instance,

YOU NEED SPACE
WE NEED TENANT
LET'S FUCK

(with TALK replaced by FUCK). And my favorite so far:

FUCKING IN REAR

(with PARKING replaced by FUCKING).

Nothing especially notable about the cards. Except that Max has been sending these as postcards, not put inside an envelope, and the USPO seems to have no problem with this display of taboo vocabulary. (Max does put cards of naked pornstars in envelopes.)

I haven't inquired about this with the USPO — no point in calling attention to it — and it might just be a local thing (Max is in San Francisco, I'm in Palo Alto, and this is a pretty tolerant part of the world). But for some time now I've been noticing bumper stickers (locally) with FUCK and SHIT on them (FUCK BUSH, rather than the Spoonerized BUCK FUSH, for example), so apparently you can display taboo vocabulary in public (in certain places) without getting in trouble with the law.

At least twice here on Language Log, we've looked at combinations of negation and exclusion that might be seen as overnegation (exclusion being a covert negative).

According to Tim Arango, "I Got the News Instantaneously, Oh Boy", 9/14/2008, some so-far anonymous computational linguist caused United Airlines to lose more than a billion dollars of its market capitalization, over the course of about 12 minutes last Monday.

A nice blend from Get Fuzzy:

(Click on the image for a larger version.)

Well, part of it, anyhow… Michael Y. Chen wrote:

I went to Beijing and studied Chinese in July, and while I was over there I came across an interesting phenomenon.

In English, we talk about shapes that correspond to letters, like an S-curve or a T junction. While asking for directions, I found that there's a similar thing for shapes that correspond to Chinese characters. For example, 十字路口 (shi2zi4lu4kou3), a "十 intersection", refers to a four-way intersection (or just any intersection). The phrase is based entirely on the shape of the character, and not the meaning (十 means ten in Chinese). There's also a 丁字路口 (ding1zi4lu4kou3), a "丁 intersection", which would correspond to our T intersections.

It isn't unusual for a political controversy to turn on the interpretation of what someone on one side said. Indeed, I discussed a couple of cases of this type the other day. What is peculiar about the most recent incident in the Presidential election is that the side whose exegesis is superior appears to have won a Pyrrhic victory.

Mark Liberman's post on a recent xkcd strip unleashed a flurry of comments about jokes that follow the template, "X-er? I hardly know 'er!" (The strip used "supercollider" in the template, an apparent homage to "Futurama.") Commenters were also reminded of a somewhat similar bit of musty British humo(u)r:

A: My wife's gone to the West Indies!
B: Jamaica?
A: No, she went of her own accord!

The success of the joke, such as it is, requires being able to interpret [dʒə ˈmeɪkə] as a clipped form of "Did you make her?" As I discuss in the post "Pinker's almer mater," Led Zeppelin alluded to this joke by titling a reggae-influenced song, "D'yer Mak'er" (recorded in 1972, released the following year). This non-rhotic pronunciation spelling is utterly lost on most (rhotic) American fans, who would likely be puzzled by the original joke anyway.

Well, Spore is out, and a certain 12-year-old of my acquaintance is well into the tribal stage already. But there's an important evolutionary transition, identified in David Malki's latest Wondermark strip, that Will Wright hasn't allowed for:

(Click on the image for a larger version.)

Over on the American Dialect Society mailing list, we've returned to the topic of illeism, the use of third-person expressions to refer to oneself (treated on Language Log last year), in particular, illeism in speech to or from young children, as in:

[mother to child] Mommy has to go now.

[from child named Kim] Can Kim have ice cream?

As Larry Horn noted, such illeism seems to be a way of coping with the difficulty that young language-learners have with first- and second-person pronouns, which famously are "shifters", with reference that shifts from context to context. Ordinary proper names (like Kim) and kin-terms used as proper names (like Mommy) have a reference that doesn't depend on context the way the reference of first- and second-person pronouns does. Horn recollected:

I recall a Sesame Street episode when our own children were at the appropriate tender age that attempted to "teach", or at least play on, such issues involving the proper use of "I"/"you", "my"/"your", etc.

Carrying the Sesame Street theme in a different direction, I added that Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky reported to me some time ago that toddlers' use of their names for self-reference comes up repeatedly on parenting discussion sites, usually in the context of blaming Elmo for it. Elmo refers to himself as "Elmo", and parents reason that their kids picked up their illeism from Elmo. Where else could it have come from?

There's a suppressed premise in that reasoning, and when it's exposed we can see that this way of looking at things is pretty much backwards. And that it ties in with other widespread beliefs about what happens in child language acquisition.