Language Log

In the comments to my post Orwell's Liar, Beth posted a link to Joseph William's article The Phenomonology of Error, and Mark reposted the link in a follow-up post here.

Well, I just finished reading the Williams article, and what I want to know is how the fuck an article riddled with errors could ever be published in a respectable journal…

In their new book Sense and Sensitivity, Brady Clark and LL's own David Beaver identify and discuss a class of intensives. The items they name are (most) importantly, significantly, especially, really, truly, fucking, damn, well, and totally. Here's one of their examples:

MTV like totally gave us TWO episodes back to back. It was like so random. The more the merrier, but it's like waay too much for one recap.

I'm intrigued by the classification and independently interested in some of words and phrases involved, so I went looking in a large weblog corpus I recently collected, to see if I could gain some new insights into where and why people use these things. This post describes a first experiment along these lines.

Looking back to our discussion here of all-dude conversations, here's a report of an all-girl exchange. It's all in the prosody and the shared culture.

Eric Crafton, a city councilor in Nashville, is the proponent of a law prohibiting government officials from communicating in any language other than English (with some exceptions for health and safety). Currently, there are no requirements that any particular language be used, a situation which, Mr. Crafton contends, is subject to abuse. To make his point he introduced his resolution in Japanese, which he is reported to speak fluently as the result of time spent in Japan while serving in the Navy.

Among the 39 comments on David Beaver's post "Orwell's Liar",  comments that were often impassioned and mostly long, the best one was calm and short:

Joseph Williams makes related points in his influential article, "The Phenomenology of Error," published in College Composition and Communication in 1981. That essay has an unforgettable surprise ending. You can read it online here.

This was contributed by Beth, and the link to Williams' article is valuable enough to be displayed more prominently.

The Linguistics, Language, and the Public Award, presented last night in San Francisco to Language Log, is quite a big deal. Contributions through any kind of medium between December 2003 and December 2007 were eligible to be nominated: books, documentary films, magazine articles, software, lecture series, or any other kinds of work that could reach the public at large. The group science blog you're now reading is the first winner to come from the blogosphere. And we're in good company. The previous awardees are so famous that (shy and retiring though we linguists are) you may have actually heard of some of them.

As Arnold reported late last year, Language Log received the LSA's Linguistics, Language and the Public Award at the LSA Annual Meeting this weekend. I was there, but, sadly, only with a poor cell-phone camera. Ah well — for posterity, some photos below the fold.

Don Ringe's answer (" Horse and wheel in the early history of Indo-European") to the question that David Marjanović asked about Don's earlier post ("The Linguistic Diversity of Aboriginal Europe") stimulated some further questions, included these from Robert:

What was the Anatolian word for wheel? Given its lack of mention above, I'd assume it isn't cognate with the Indo-European term. Is it thought to be a borrowing from some other language, or is its origin unknown? if it's a borrowing, that would presumably give a handle of when those languages moved into that area.

Are there any other unexplained e to i transitions in Greek? If a dozen other words were affected, with no apparent pattern, I'd guess that would change the relative likelihood of the possible reasons.

Were horses domesticated just once, or many times. While a word for horse can predate domestication, it would seem plausible that it was repeatedly borrowed along with other horse related terminolgy as domestication spread, even into different language families. Conversely, if horses were domesticated independently by two cultures, they're unlikely to have borrowed the word from each other, even if there's a strong resemblance.

I've posted Don's response below — as before, a backup .pdf form is here in case some characters or formating got screwed up.

[Guest post by Don Ringe]

Many thanks to David, Robert, and the other bloggers for the kind words! I’ll certainly keep sending Mark chunks to post. Here are some quick answers to Robert’s questions.

Languagehat has a fascinating posting about a new book by Tomasz Kamusella on how language, ethnicity, and nationality have come to be so tightly aligned in Central Europe. It's a great big, expensive book, so if you're interested in the topic you might want to start by checking out the quotes and links languagehat provides.

More news from the Linguistic Society of America meetings, this time about the Language Log presence in the official doings of the society. In addition to the blog's receiving the Linguistics, Language and the Public Award (no doubt there will be photos), there were three elevations of our bloggers:

Roger Shuy was elected a fellow of the society (for his achievements in linguistics; Geoff Pullum was similarly elected last year);

Chris Potts was elected an at-large member of the Executive Committee of the society, to take office tomorrow; and

Sally Thomason was elected president of the society, also to take office tomorrow.

Roger's achievement is entirely an honor, without any accompanying responsibilities. Chris and Sally, in contrast, have real work to do.

The bloggers will gather around the award tomorrow in the rotunda at Language Log Plaza and perform the arcane Elevation Ritual.

One of the most interesting talks that I've heard so far, here at the Linguistic Society of America's annual meeting, was Uri Tadmor and Martin Haspelmath, "Measuring the borrowability of word meanings". I haven't yet been able to get a copy of the slides for their presentation here, but web search turned up the abstract for a talk of the same title at the upcoming Swadesh Centenary Conference, and the slides from a talk entitled "Loanword Typology: Investigating lexical borrowability in the world's languages", given at a recent workshop "New Directions in Historical Linguistics"(Université de Lyons, May 12-14 2008).

[Update: the slides from their LSA talk are now here, and additional information is available on the project website. I'll update the rest of this post to match when I have a chance. Meanwhile, Uri emphasizes that the LSA results are preliminary, and the Lyons report even more so.]

[Update #2: Uri answers questions in a guest post here.]

As you can learn from those links, their project investigated the words for 1460 "meanings" in 30 languages, allowing for a many-to-many relationship between words and meanings. They recruited an expert for each language to find the relevant words and to determine various properties for each one, including whether it had been borrowed from another language. The resulting database will be posted on the web at some point in the not-too-distant future.

Google Suggest is an fun new tool for probing the textual Zeitgeist. Using it on "Language Log" yields:

Bare "Language Log" gets 36,900,000 results (as we can see by getting suggested continuations for "language lo", though I'll spare you the picture). It's clear that lots of regular readers use Google to find us, rather than typing in the URL or using a browser bookmark or an RSS feed.

In response to Don Ringe's recent post on "The Linguistic Diversity of Aboriginal Europe", David Marjanović asked

… is there a way to estimate how much time was available between the initial breakup of PIE and the establishment of sound changes that would make a Wanderwort traceable? I'd expect words like "horse" and "wheel" to potentially spread very quickly; indeed, there have been attempts to connect the East Asian Wanderwort for "horse" to the IE word (via Tocharian of course), similar attempts for Sino-Tibetan words for "cart/wheel", and others have found forms similar to the PIE */kʷekʷlo/- in both Northwest and Northeast Caucasian languages.

I forwarded this question to Don, who quickly answered:

Here are two documents toward a reply to the question you forwarded.  The first is a short exploration of the principles involved and a sketch of what the methodology has to look like.  It promises further postings that go into detail about IE words of interest.  The longer post is installment one of that, digging into 'wheel' and 'horse'.  I don't know whether it's suitable for the blog; it's long and technical, and unfortunately it can't be cogent *without* being long and technical.

If you're interested in the methods of historical-comparative reconstruction and their application to the relative and absolute chronology of the Indo-European languages, I believe that Don's answer will be well worth reading.  Much of the information in it is the fruit of recent research (as you can see from the references), and most of the rest is not available in one place, organized so as to address the sort of question that David asked. If these things don't interest you, you're welcome to pass on to some of our other fine posts — and of course, our famous double-your-money-back guarantee continues to apply.