Language Log

Most translators only have to worry about being criticized for errors, but in Afghanistan the mere act of translation can get you twenty years in prison. An appellate court has upheld 20 year prison sentences for Ahmad Ghaws Zalmai, who translated the Qur'an into Dari, one of the two major languages of Afghanistan, and Mushtaq Ahmad, a cleric who endorsed Zalmai's translation. It appears that no errors have been found in Zalmai's translation: the objection of Muslim clerics is that the Dari translation does not appear alongside the original Arabic text. The prosecutor had asked for the death penalty. Although the court did not impose the death penalty, Chief Judge Abdul Salam Azizadah agreed that it might be appropriate.

Lucky for Zalmai and Ahmad that Afghanistan now has a democratic government controlled by moderate Muslims rather than the Taliban and other members of the tiny minority of intolerant extremists, hunh?

Woody Allen's Vicky Cristina Barcelona has now reached Edinburgh, and made a wonderful movie for a Valentine's Day date yesterday. (A wonderful film, too; the whole script is interesting and intelligent as well as funny and appealing, and Penelope Cruz's electric, chew-up-the-scenery portrayal of a deranged artist is incredible — near Oscar level.) But what a strange syntactic move Woody made in naming the picture. The three names are just concatenated: Vicky is one of the girls, Cristina is the other, and Barcelona is the city where most of the the action is located. There's absolutely no grammatical warrant for that at all. For example, although you can interpret Celery, apples, walnuts, grapes as an asyndetic coordination (a conjunction without an overt and), the commas are obligatory in written English: *Celery apples walnuts grapes is not grammatical at all. And similarly, it would be possible to interpret Vicky, Cristina, Barcelona as a coordination with three coordinates; but the string Vicky Cristina Barcelona doesn't have that privilege. It's got the written-English syntax of a single personal name. (Dougal Stanton, here in Edinburgh, noticed
today that the people running the Cameo on Home Street were confused enough to abbreviate it to "Vicky C. Barcelona" on their large signs — exactly as if it were somebody's name.) Woody is thinking right outside of the syntactic box. (Which is OK, of course, for an artist. This is an observation about innovative syntax, not a correction or a criticism.)

Recently I discovered that there's a fish named after my mother, Marion Grey, who was an ichthyologist specializing in the taxonomy of deep-sea fishes: it's called Bathylagus greyae, a.k.a. Grey's deepsea smelt. While looking around the relevant website (Hans G. Hansen's Biographical Etymology of Marine Organisms), I noticed something oddish. The Latinized name greyae didn't surprise me much, because -ae is the genitive singular suffix of the Latin first declension, the major declension for feminine nouns in Latin. It's maybe a bit strange from a Latin perspective, because Latin nouns in this class have a nominative singular ending in -a, and like most English family names Grey ends in a consonant; and Latin third-declension nouns end in a consonant, so they could've provided a model for scientific names. Still, using the Latin first-declension ending for the possessive of a non-Latin woman's name seems like a reasonable decision, given the much greater productivity of the dominant noun class. No, it was the genitive formation of organism names honoring men that struck me as peculiar.

In response to W. Tecumseh Fitch's post "Musical protolanguage: Darwin's theory of language evolution revisited"  (2/12/2009), Derek Bickerton sent the commentary presented below.

I came across an interesting innovation in English morphology while reading this article on "Inukpasuit, Inuit and Viking contact in ancient times". Recounting an Inuit legend, the author says:

Angered by her reluctance, the rich shaman called upon other equally strong shamuses to punish her.

The usual plural of shaman is shamans. shamuses is the plural of shamus, American slang for "private detective", apparently from Yiddish shammes "sexton", due to an equation of the duties of the sexton of a synagogue with those of store security.

President Obama's ability to exchange basic Indonesian pleasantries may render him more bi-courteous than bilingual, but New York's new junior senator appears to have significantly more proficiency in another Asian language: Mandarin Chinese. David Chen of the New York Times reports:

Languagehat has posted about an oddity in the New Yorker:

My wife was reading John McPhee's New Yorker article about fact checking … when she asked me what I thought about this sentence: "One technician who slipped up and used the 'R' word [radiation] was called to an office and chewed." "Chewed?" I said. "Not 'chewed out'?" She confirmed the reading. I said it must be a typo.

So maybe (ironically) "a flagrant typo in an article about fact checking", or maybe some creativity on McPhee's part, a vivid metaphor bringing the chew of chew out back to life.

It turns out that you can find other occurrences of chew conveying something very close to chew out 'reprimand' (an idiom the OED describes as colloquial and chiefly U.S.). And other pairs of plain V in alternation with V plus a "particle" (Prt); the phenomenon is related to, but distinct from, the direct/oblique alternations I posted on yesterday.

As Arnold Zwicky has reported (here) the movement to get rid of possessive apostrophes has reached a crescendo among place-name language planners like the Birmingham city council, who have stopped using them on street signs. Feeding the fire a bit, Michael Quinion’s World Wide Words, also cited by Arnold (here), then reported how other language planners, including the US Board on Geographic Names and the Committee for Geographic Names in Australia, are also making the world safe from possessive apostrophes.

These actions leave many wondering whether this forebodes an impending egalitarian march against not only the possessive apostrophe, but also against other possessive indicators and perhaps even against the human frailty of unbridled possessiveness.

The UK is not the only secular democracy where freedom of speech is now under attack.

Johann Hari's essay, "Why should I respect these oppressive religions?", originally published in The Independent on 1/28/2009, was republished on 2/5/2009 by The Statesman, a leading English-language periodical based in in Kolkata.

This led to several days of protests, eventually violent, by Muslims who felt that the essay insulted their religion; and on Wednesday, 2/11/2009, Ravindra Kumar and Anand Sinha, the editor and publisher of The Statesman, were arrested and charged under section 295A of the Indian Penal Code which forbids "deliberate and malicious acts intended to outrage religious feelings". (See Jerome Taylor, "Editor arrested for 'outraging Muslims'", The Independent, 2/12/2009.)

Janet Maslin's New York Times review of Death by Leisure by Chris Ayres, a British journalist who reported on Hollywood for the (UK) Times, contains this puzzling passage:

The book also conveys his efforts to get in the Californian spirit (i.e., buying a plasma television he can't afford) or to trade on Anglophilia when it suits him. The snobbish pronunciation of his name may sound like a British synonym for derrière, but it helps him finagle his way into the gala opening of the Frank Gehry-designed Walt Disney Concert Hall. On the other hand, he makes sure to Americanize the R in “Ayres” and go native when crashing a movie-business party.

There's really no way to figure out what Maslin means here without consulting the book itself, and even then things are a bit murky.

March approaches, and just before the Ides of March (on the 13th and 14th, specifically) comes the Stanford Semantics Festival. This is the 10th; a program, with abstracts, will soon be up on the Stanford Linguistics site.  As usual, I'm giving a paper (I'm not actually a semanticist, but I play one annually at SemFest), this year on verbs taking either direct or oblique objects — with extensive references to postings on Language Log and ADS-L. The paper is a follow-up to my paper from last year's SemFest, on "diathesis alternations".

The abstract is below. (Remember that this is just an abstract, not the whole paper. It's much compressed and also lacks most of the references.)

A police spokesperson from Buffalo speaking about yesterday's plane crash on BBC Radio 4 this morning said that in addition to all the people on the plane (no one survived) there was "one subject in the residence". The baffled Radio 4 presenter had to repeat back a translation into normal English. What on earth is the function of this police jargon? Are we supposed to be comforted or protected by this talk of subjects suffering fatal incidents in residences? We know that people often die when planes crash right into their houses. Why does the police style of speaking to the media not allow us to be told about it in such simple terms? I'm not just pretending to be puzzled here; I truly do not understand this linguistic phenomenon.

MSNBC headline: "Songbirds migrate faster than thought".

In case some alert editor modifies it:

(Click on the image for a larger version.)