Language Log

Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky writes to me, following up on my Maurice Sendak "half-sentence" posting (which I'll have more to say about in a while):

… if I knew how to encourage sentence fragments, I would go for that. Opal's sentences go on for*ev*er. And if I type them for her, and she's watching, and I try to put a period in, so there's a shorter sentence even though it starts with "And"? She says "No, that's not right, it's part of the same sentence. Didn't you hear the 'and'?" Fortunately she doesn't usually watch me type, allowing me to punctuate things as I see fit.

In a comment on my post "Metapun", John S. Wilkins traced the phrase "missing link" back, conceptually if not literally,  to the  "great chain of being" metaphor featured in Alexander Pope's 1744 Essay on Man:

[…] On superior powers
Were we to press, inferior might on ours;
Or in the full creation leave a void,
Where, one step broken, the great scale's destroyed:
From Nature's chain whatever link you like,
Tenth, or ten thousandth, breaks the chain alike.

In response to my recent posts "The United States as a subject" and "When did the Supreme Court make us an 'is'?", Rich Rostrom sent the following essay, reflecting some research he did a few years ago.

Grace Wu sent me a photograph taken at Taipei Storyland, shown at the right (click on the image for a larger version).

The characters running down the right side of the picture read as follows:

WO3 YAO4 SHUO1 GUO2YU3, BU4 SHUO1 FANG1YAN2
"I want to speak the national language, not the topolects."

In other words, "Let's speak Mandarin, not Taiwanese, Hakka, Cantonese, etc."

Stephen Colbert on Olympia Snowe (Colbert Report, Oct. 14):

We are now one step closer to a nightmare future where everyone has health insurance. And I will tell you who I blame: Maine Senator Olympia Snowe, the only Republican who voted in favor of the bill. And folks, I am angrier than an Eskimo… because I have 300 words for Snowe, and I can't say one of them on TV.

(Hat tip: Greg Howard.) The title for this post is lifted from the Twitter feed of Michael Covarrubias (aka Wishydig):

Susan Collins, R-Maine has hinted at a 'yes' vote. and only linguabloggers have "snowe-clone" in their repertoire of bad puns.

When I tried to read Dilbert this morning, comics.com showed me this instead:

There are many ways NOT to learn Chinese characters, but one that I just found out about today is probably the worst, even worse than T. K. Ann's Cracking the Chinese Puzzles.  It was written by Alison Matthews ("a statistician who has worked in the oil, aviation, tourism, medical and software industries") and Laurence Matthews (author of books that claim to help you find Chinese characters fast) and is called Learning Chinese Characters:  A revolutionary new way to learn and remember the 800 most basic Chinese characters.

In the celebrated libel case brought by the British Chiropractic Association against Simon Singh, Singh has won a round in court. Or rather, he's won the right to appeal a previous loss in court.

In the latest New Yorker (October 12), Tad Friend takes us into the chilling wonderworld of entertainment-business reporting, in a Letter from California, "Call Me: Why Hollywood fears Nikki Finke" (Finke runs the website Deadline Hollywood Daily). Apparently real life in the entertainment business in Hollywood goes beyond the parodies in movies and television shows.

Some of my Language Log colleagues are too modest for their own good, neglecting to mention here relevant things they've published or blogged on in other places.

A little while ago, I learned that Dan Jurafsky has a cool Language of Food blog (here), an outgrowth of a Stanford Introductory Seminar he's taught a few times. I found out about his blog only because, knowing his interest in the topic, I sent him a link to a recent posting on my own blog about nouns denoting food or drink being usable, metonymically, to refer to events ("After pizza, we watched a movie"), and he told me about his LoF blog.

Scott Timberg, "Maurice Sendak rewrote the rules with 'Wild Things' " (Los Angeles Times, October 11):

In "Wild Things," a single sentence can take pages to unfold, its meaning changing slightly with each image. And this book with numerous wordless pages ends with a half-sentence and no accompanying image. Sendak works similarly to the directors of the French New Wave, who used jump cuts and other techniques to dislocate their editing. (link)

Apparently this half-sentence has a dislocating effect. But what is this dislocating half-sentence? This, (1):

and it was still hot.

Back in June of 2002, one of William Safire's On Language columns began this way:

'The South Carolina primary between Mr. Bush and Mr. McCain in 2000," wrote Eleanor Randolph, the New York Times editorialist, referring to Representative Lindsey Graham's current campaign for the Senate, "left Republicans in his state bitter and divided. That said, both President Bush and Senator McCain have already campaigned for his election to the Senate."

In olden times, those two sentences would have been written as one, with the first clause subordinated: "Although the South Carolina primary . . . left Republicans . . . divided, both Bush and McCain . . . campaigned for his election. . . . " Or they could have remained as two sentences, with the second beginning however instead of with the voguism that said.

Counting languages isn't an easy task; in particular, it's hard to say whether two varieties are related languages or dialects of a single language. Making these decisions on linguistic grounds is difficult enough, but political, cultural, and social considerations often intervene, to compound the difficulty. The latest Ethnologue (16th ed., 2009) advertises itself as "an encyclopedic reference work cataloging all of the world's 6,909 known living languages", but the introduction lays out the problems in identifying and counting languages and acknowledges that the methods used in reaching this very exact number are not the only possible ones and that these methods involve judgment calls at several points.