Language Log

There's an extraordinary amount of anticipation about Barack Obama's inaugural address, due in a few hours. A small sample of the anticipatory commentary: "The speech"; "'The Speech': An Experts' Guide"; "Inaugural Words: 1789 to the Present"; "Obama's Inaugural Address: Great Expectations"; and literally thousands of other articles. We've contributed our mite, in the form of Geoff Pullum's post "Presidential inaugurals: the form and the content", 1/15/2009 (though this belongs to a somewhat smaller body of work, the meta-anticipatory commentary). No doubt after the event there'll an even greater flood of discussion, meta- and otherwise.

Last night I saw a variant of the following bumper sticker on a car driving around my neighborhood (click image to enlarge; original found here):

The variant I saw had white lettering on a blue background — that is, no flag — and the wording of the second part was "if you're reading it in English, thank a soldier". (Other variations ask that you thank a veteran, the military, a U.S. soldier, …) Both wordings are a little off, if you think about it: if you can read the text of the bumper sticker, then of course you can read it in English (and of course you're reading it in English). But that's not the point of this post, especially given that I've also found a more sensibly-worded variant here ("If you can read this, thank a teacher… and since it is in English, thank a soldier.")

Yesterday's news brings another constructional innovation, courtesy of Agence France Presse ("Americans giving Obama extraordinary support: polls", 1/18/2009):

A survey conducted by The New York Times and CBS News found a US public eager to give the president-elect a wide berth as he attempts to turn around a faltering US economy, tackle global warming, help solve the intractable Middle East peace process, along with a plethora of other mammoth challenges.

Tobin Harshaw, "Weekend Opinionator: The Battle Over the Battle in Gaza", 1/17/2009:

Even natural allies are wan to fully praise anybody who devotes a long article to touching the third rail, witness Gerecht’s letter to Goldberg.

The context makes it clear (I think) that Harshaw means this to mean "… are reluctant to fully praise…".

Last week, there was an interesting Ask MetaFilter thread about how to find "a list of all the English words that can be traced back to a given root word" ("Word histories and dirt lions") , in which Language Hat helpfully linked to the American Heritage Dictionary's "lists of Indo-European and Semitic roots" as a partial answer.

Those interested in such things — and the response to Don Ringe's recent posts here shows that there are many of you — might also want to take a look at some of the explanatory material from the same source: Cal Watkin's article "Indo-European and the Indo-Europeans" and the "Guide to Appendix I", John Huehnergard's "Proto-Semitic Language and Culture" and the "Guide to Appendix II".

If you want a sense of just what a hole the right finds itself in these days, consider the recent press release from the anti-abortion American Life League  headed "KRISPY KREME CELEBRATES OBAMA WITH PRO-ABORTION DOUGHNUTS." It goes on to say:

The next time you stare down a conveyor belt of slow-moving, hot, sugary glazed donuts at your local Krispy Kreme you just might be supporting President-elect Barack Obama's radical support for abortion on demand… The doughnut giant released the following statement yesterday:

Krispy Kreme Doughnuts, Inc. (NYSE: KKD) is honoring American's sense of pride and freedom of choice on Inauguration Day, by offering a free doughnut of choice to every customer on this historic day, Jan. 20. By doing so, participating Krispy Kreme stores nationwide are making an oath to tasty goodies — just another reminder of how oh-so-sweet "free" can be.

…The unfortunate reality of a post Roe v. Wade America is that "choice" is synonymous with abortion access and celebration of 'freedom of choice' is a tacit endorsement of abortion rights on demand…. Celebrating [Obama's] inauguration with "Freedom of Choice" doughnuts – only two days before the anniversary of the Supreme Court decision to decriminalize abortion – is not only extremely tacky, it's disrespectful and insensitive and makes a mockery of a national tragedy.

A number of anti-abortion bloggers have joined the ALL in urging readers to make their indignation known to the company, while others have confined themselves to suggesting that the promotion was at best clueless. "To a majority of Americans," the commenter on one blog wrote, "the words ['freedom of choice'] do not connote liberty, or 'tasty goodies' or patriotism at all.  These words are synonymous with the painful tragedy of abortion."

And conservatives wonder why their movement is in trouble?

Yesterday brought some news about "The Marthambles", a disease mentioned in five of Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin novels (DI 123, RM 164, NC 132, 149, WDS 130, YA 226, for the cognoscenti). The earliest of these (Desolation Island) was published in 1978, and is set in 1811 or 1812. Marthambles is not found in the OED, but according to an interview in The Patrick O'Brian Newsletter (volume 3, issue 1, March 1994), O'Brian explained that "Marthambles is a very fine word that I found in a quack's pamphlet of the late 17th or early 18th century".

However, the word is also used in Dorothy Dunnett's historical novel The Ringed Castle (fifth of the "Lymond Chronicles"), which was published in 1971 and deals with fictional events taking place in the year 1555. This raises a set of questions whose answers must be mildly embarrassing to someone: perhaps the OED missed a world used in English medical practice for three centuries; perhaps Patrick O'Brian learned a word from Dorothy Dunnett but claimed to have found it for himself; perhaps Dorothy Dunnett used a late-18th-century word in a mid-16th-century novel. (Trust me, some people care about these things.)

Beginning with a few sneak previews at smaller film festivals prior to its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival a year ago, The Linguists has been touring around the world — sometimes with David or Greg available for discussion, sometimes without — with exclusive screenings for lucky audiences. There are still a few such screenings left in various places, but soon many more of us in the United States will be able to enjoy the television premiere of The Linguists on PBS: on or after February 26, depending on your local station.

Note: thus far only Alabama Public Television seems to be on the ball about posting the premiere in its online broadcast schedule. I welcome links to other updated PBS station schedules in the comments.

(The PBS premiere is noted at the end of yesterday's Q&A with David and Greg in GOOD Magazine; tip o' the hat to Ben Zimmer.)

My father (probably not very originally) used to tell me, “If you have to throw a brick at someone, throw it gently.” That sounded pretty stupid to me at the time, but I’ve since learned that it’s actually pretty good advice. What he seemed to have meant was, “if you have to threaten, warn, or otherwise say anything negative, temper it as much as possible.” If he had known anything about the differences among the speech acts of threatening, warning, and advising, he might have elaborated a little more. His words were brought home to me by three recent events: (1) my work trying to make the letters written by the Montana Department of Revenue clearer and more respectful; (2) my emergency landing at the Salt Lake City airport; and (3) the recent “water landing” of the U.S. Airways Flight 1549 in New York’s Hudson River.

Don Ringe's guest post "The Linguistic Diversity of Aboriginal Europe" (1/6/2009) led to a series of additional posts in response to readers' questions: "Horse and wheel in the early history of Indo-European", "More on IE wheels and horses", "Inheritance versus lexical borrowing: a case with decisive sound-change evidence", "The linguistic history of horses, gods, and wheeled vehicles". This morning brings another in the series.

As in Don's earlier posts, there's quite a bit of technical detail; but it seems that many readers are happy to follow Don through the historical undergrowth. Even if you find some of the terminology and typography puzzling, these posts may give you a  picture of how historical linguists think and reason.

And as before, because the typographical details are very important in this sort of discussion, and I'm not certain that I've rendered them correctly in html, a pdf of the post is here.

Back in July, Bill Poser noted that "Barack Obama is reported to speak Indonesian as result of the four years, from age six to age ten, that he spent in Indonesia." Bill asked for any evidence about Obama's competence in Indonesian. Since then, we've gotten some anecdotal reports about Obama's Indonesian (including from the President of Indonesia!), but we still don't know if his language skills rise above the basic conversational level.

Yuval Pinter writes:

When an English speaker doesn't understand a word one says, it's "Greek to me". When a Hebrew speaker encounters this difficulty, it "sounds like Chinese". I've been told the Korean equivalent is "sounds like Hebrew".

Has there been a study of this phrase phenomenon, relating different languages on some kind of Directed Graph?

I was struck by a linguistic aspect of the picture accompanying Ellen Barry's NYT article, "Latvia Is Shaken by Riots Over Its Weak Economy", 1/14/2009:

The vehicle visible in the left center of the picture is labelled, in English, "MILITARY POLICE". I wonder about this history of this inscription.