Language Log

Orwell's Politics and the English Language is a beautifully written language crime, though it pretends to lay down the law. Furthermore I just noticed that its final law is rather curious. We'll get to that shortly.

Orwell begins with the unjustified premise that language is in decline – unjustified because while he viciously attacks contemporary cases of poor writing, he provides no evidence that earlier times had been perennially populated by paragons of literary virtue. He proceeds to shore up the declining language with style suggestions that, regrettably enough, have never turned a Dan Brown into a George Orwell.  

Customers who buy into Orwell's shit also buy Strunk and White, and further milquetoast simulacra of one or the other, so it's worth looking more closely at what he proposes. Let's start off in time honored Language Log style, by seeing how Orwell breaks his own rules. Showing a lack of imagination that would be worthy of someone who lacked imagination, Orwell suggests the following rule, his fourth rule, a rule that in various forms has been heard many times both before and since. Verily shall I yawn unto you Orwell's unoriginal original (c.f. this discussion of how it predates Orwell):

Reporting live from San Francisco, where the American Dialect Society is holding its annual meeting in conjunction with the Linguistic Society of America… In a year overshadowed by the financial crisis, the ADS has voted for bailout as its Word of the Year for 2008. As usual, it was a standing-room-only event, with ADS-ers, LSA-ers, and members of the public jamming the conference room to take part in the lighthearted selection process.

This just in from Drago Radev: NACLO — the North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad — will have a booth at this week's Linguistic Society of America meeting at the Hilton San Francisco from today until Sunday noon. Language Log readers who visit the meeting should drop by to hear about the North American teams' successes at the international 2007 and 2008 Olympiads, and about plans for the imminent 2009 Olympiad. Those of you who don't yet know about the Olympiad might want to find out: the problems (samples also available on the NACLO website) are fun to solve. They require talent, but no training, in linguistics.

Many (most?) of us Language Loggers are also at the LSA, and some of us, e.g. me, have also been involved in running NACLO test sites, so feel free to accost us at the meetings too if you want to talk about NACLO. But Drago and Lori Levin and their colleagues will have all the answers to your questions at their booth.

Two recent Zippy strips with some linguistic interest. The first seems irrelevant until the last panel, when we get yet another reference to Noam Chomsky in the popular media. (See this posting by Mark Liberman, with links to some of these earlier postings. Zippy throws in a Chomsky reference now and then, as here and here.)

The second also seems to have nothing to do with linguistics until the last panel, where we get a reference to languages with small phonemic inventories and cultures "with no concept of X".

Like Arnold, I'm at the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA). You can see a .pdf copy of the program here.  (The one on the LSA's website seems to be restricted to members only, so I've made a bootleg copy for outsiders, in the spirit of the scriptural injunction "Is a candle brought to be put under a bushel, or under a bed? and not to be set on a candlestick?")

If you see a presentation whose title especially interests you, let me know, and if I have time, I'll see if I can find some additional information about it.  Of course, you could also try Google — thus the very first presentation on the program is Alejandrina Cristià and Amanda Seidl, "Linguistic sources of individual differences in speech processing in infancy"; and searching for the title turns up a one-page abstract.  In other cases, you may be able to find a set of powerpoint slides or even a full paper.

I'm at the Linguistic Society of America meetings (in San Francisco) and spent part of the morning sitting in on the LSA's Executive Committee meeting. The part I attended was mostly about a fairly long document detailing the programs of the society and their objectives. In the midst of this came a digression on linguistic (adjective) vs. linguistics (noun) as a modifier of a noun.

The specific question was: should the text refer to the linguistic community or the linguistics community?

In the end, a vote was taken, and the S version (nominal) won handily over the version without the S (adjectival).

[By Margaret Sharpe and Doris Dyen]

Isidore Dyen, Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at Yale University, died on 14th December 2008, surrounded by family members, after one final bout of cancer. He became known in the 1960s for his seminal work on Austronesian languages, and on Proto-Austronesian, the ancestral language of languages from Indonesia to Madagascar and across the Pacific Ocean. Until a few weeks before his death, he was continuing his research in attempts to subgroup yet another collection of Austronesian languages.

At the bottom of our New Year's greeting letter to friends, I put this picture of a very special Dutch Belted cow:

When I looked at a few of the letters my wife had signed, I noticed that she had added "Happy" on one side of the cow and "Year" on the other side of the cow. I thought that was extremely clever, because she was using the cow as a cross-lingual pun: "Happy 牛 Year!" Upon being read out as "Happy NIU2 Year," any speaker of English will immediately understand the greeting. And, this being the Chinese "Year of the NIU2," which was why I put that animal at the bottom of our New Year's message in the first place, Liqing's formulation is particularly fitting for the beginning of 2009.

Over at the Brainstorm blog ("Psychology Today Editors Flood the Blog Zone"), Matthew Hutson asks "What does Caroline Kennedy know that we don't?" This is about Caroline Kennedy's filled pauses, of course, but what struck me first about Matt's post is the way that the blog format allows a journalist to take a more personal approach to the news:

Using the phrase is a pet peeve of my mom's. She'll interrupt my dad and say, "No, I don't know–you haven't told me yet." I suppose the peeve has latched onto me, as I'm more aware than most people are of its use.

What was Europe like, linguistically speaking, between the end of the last ice age and the coming of the Indo-European languages? This question has been in the background of many Language Log posts over the years. Not long ago, in the hallway between our offices, I asked Don Ringe for a summary of the state of knowledge on this issue. His response was so interesting — as conversations with Don generally are — that I asked him if he'd write something for Language Log on the topic. The result is below.

I was just reading a year-old article in the NYT reporting on Molly Ivins's death, and in discussing her friendship with Ann Richards, they said, "The two shared an irreverence for power and a love of the Texas wilds."

I was surprised that Katherine Q. Seelye could say that, and that the copy-editors didn't mind. I hadn't ever noticed this phenomenon before, but others must have. So while "a reverence for power" is fine, for me "an irreverence for power" is ungrammatical, though cute, and certainly understandable, and maybe it was intentionally tongue in cheek — after all, they had just been discussing the slogan "Molly Ivins can't say that, can she?", which her editors had put on billboards to defend her and which became the title of one of her books.

Similarly, I can say "a passion for politics", but I can't say "a dispassion for politics".

Well, I should check Google. … Hmm, supportive, to some extent, but not conclusive.

My wife's (very scholarly) Forbes Library book club is reading Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn this month. The book seems to be full of wonderfully inventive swearing. Last night, my wife read this one aloud to me (p. 170):

If I wanted a gun, I'd get a gun, you diphthong.

When I jotted off a Language Log post in October 2007 about searching for early occurrences of the expression "You're not the boss of me," little did I know that I'd eventually be supplying fodder for a New York Times article about Google Book Search. In today's Times, Motoko Rich uses my 1883 antedating of "You're not the boss of me" as the anecdotal lead for a piece on how Google Book Search is being used by researchers, and the prospects for even greater access to out-of-print material now that those pesky lawsuits have been settled.