Language Log

David Craig sent in a link to yesterday's Blondie, a strip that I don't normally read. He may have uncovered the secret identity of Geoff Pullum's correspondent — but in any case, the last panel has a nice instance of overnegation, of a kind that I don't think we've discussed before:

I heard from cindy today. She would do well to join Becky in going to night school in grammar. Her message began thus:

Hi there!

It has been long time since we did not meet. I hope everything is okay with you.

She barely needed to continue by saying she had recently "found a great medicine shop on the net…"; I could see that coming. It certainly has been a long time since we did not meet, cindy. And I hope it will be a long time before we do not meet again.

Shovel-ready, Ben Zimmer's victorious nominee for "most likely to succeed" in the ADS WOTY competition, is clearly gaining ground:

Yesterday afternoon, Mark Halpern sent me a response to last week's discussion of his book Language and Human Nature in the post "Progess and its enemies", 2/16/2009.  It's presented below as a guest post, after the usual transformation from MS Word to html.  (I take responsibility for any format or font errors that may have crept in — I've found no better way to create posts from Word files than to cut and paste the material as plain text, and then to  restore the formatting of the original as html mark-up.)

Last Monday's post "Progress and its enemies" resulted in a vigorous exchange of views in the comments section. Reading over the comments, it seems to me that people were to some extent talking past one another. Such misunderstanding seems especially common in discussions of linguistic norms. So in a few paragraphs below, I've tried to explain how I, at least, think about these issues.

Heidi and I posted a few times last month about the job market in linguistics (see Counting linguistics job ads and dissertations for links and data). In the comments, Eric wondered:

Honestly curious here: are numbers of applicants for particular jobs a matter of public record (at least, at public institutions)? It would be good to contrast the numbers above with some numbers that show how many folks are actually competing for individual jobs.

As Scott Simon reminds us on Weekend Edition Saturday this morning, The Linguists will premiere on PBS stations across the nation this Thursday. (Check and double-check your local listings for the exact time (or even the day) of the premiere, which may vary.)

I'm looking forward to finally seeing the film. I'm also looking forward to David Harrison's upcoming visit to my corner of Language Log Plaza on April 23 and 24. If you find yourself in the San Diego area around that time, come on by.

I have to add that I was a bit disappointed with Scott Simon's interview with David Harrison and Greg Anderson this morning. After a fairly good introduction and a good first couple of questions (asking what first brought David and Greg together, and what happens when a language dies), Scott decides to lighten things up a bit and chuckles to himself as he says: "May I ask, each of you in turn: what's the strangest language you think you've ever heard?" Greg (rather wisely) prompts David to go first, and David avoids immediately taking the bait by saying, "Well, they're all strange from a certain point of view, and English is strange, but…" — at which point Scott interjects: "English can be particularly strange." (David: "It can be, indeed.") Things devolve into a discussion of "strange language sounds", the idea that some technical linguistics terms sound obscene, and so on — it gets serious and picks up again towards the end, but Scott can't resist closing with more chuckles and another reference to the language Birhor (sounds like "beer whore"). Sigh.

Scientific writing is full of great noun compounds. My favorite recent example is part of the title of a paper featured in this morning's email from BioMedCentral: "Representations of odor plume flux are accentuated deep within the moth brain".

Odor plume flux turns out to mean just what you'd think: time variation in airborne smells. I look forward to using it in everyday life: "Mm, what's that delicious odor plume flux?"

I know that Language Log has already (e.g. here) mentioned the widespread would of, though I haven’t seen a whole lot about the gradual expansion of that of into uses like hadn’t of where there never would have been a  have (oh! I tried to be funny and write ‘would of been’ but Word automatically turned it into 'would have been' – but at least its little pop-up offered the option of restoring it and even to “stop automatically correcting ‘would of been’” – that’s very open-minded of them!), suggesting that 'of' is becoming a general marker for counterfactual modality, but I just have to report a really beautiful example I heard on my favorite public radio station, WFCR of Amherst, on Feb. 16 during their recent fund drive, out of the mouth of a very literate member of their development staff, K***, –- I’ve even met her and been interviewed by her, and I won’t name her simply because she might be embarrassed and I wouldn’t want to cause that. You know how the announcers have to just keep talking all the time to try to fill the time interestingly enough in between repeating the phone number to call – I’m impressed that they stay as coherent as they do. Anyway, the other announcer, a regular classical music host, had just said something interesting about some composer, and K*** replied, “I didn’t know that, and certainly wouldn’t of have without listening to WFCR.”

The latest Partially Clips (click on the image for a larger version):

They don't get onto the news broadcasts much either.

Don Ringe's guest post back on January 6, "The Linguistic Diversity of Aboriginal Europe", sparked a lively discussion, and Don responded with a series of other posts responding to questions and comments: "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", "Some Wanderwörter in Indo-European languages".

Now, despite his claim that "after this I'm going to have to stop posting for a while", he's sent another essay:

Here is an interim post clearing up some outstanding questions; the last part turned into an in-depth discussion of the "thorn cluster" problem that will probably be published somewhere eventually.  I do mean to get back to the "IE homeland" problem, but that won't be possible till the summer.

Here's hoping that he gets drawn back in again earlier than that!

The self-described "grumpy old coot" who writes the blog  Right Wing Nation has recently put up a generally admirable post ("On An Entirely Different Note", 2/19/2009) on the relations among music, mathematics, physics. Unfortunately, his account of the Pythagorean comma is psychoacoustically, historically and mathematically wrong.

Last week, in honor of Darwin's birthday, we featured a guest post by Tecumseh Fitch: "Musical protolanguage: Darwin's theory of language evolution revisited". A few days later, Derek Bickerton contributed a critical commentary.  Now Tecumseh has sent in a response to Derek — or, perhaps I should say, Prof. Fitch has contributed a response to Prof. Bickerton — which is presented below.