Language Log

Transcription practices are in the news (Patricia Cohen, "John Dean's Role at Issue in Nixon Tapes Feud". NYT 1/31/2009):

Scholarly feuds seldom end amicably, and nearly 35 years after President Richard M. Nixon resigned, a dispute involving his Watergate tapes would seem to be no exception.

A handful of historians and authors maintain that the most authoritative transcripts of those recordings include significant omissions and misrepresentations that could influence interpretations of the cover-up.

At the center of the quarrel is “Abuse of Power: The New Nixon Tapes,” a 1997 collection of transcripts edited by Stanley I. Kutler, a pre-eminent historian of the Watergate era, that has become the standard reference. Mr. Kutler has been a hero to many people because of a lawsuit he brought with the nonprofit group Public Citizen that led to the release of 201 hours of recordings related to unethical or illegal activity in the Nixon White House.

But longtime critics of his transcripts say Mr. Kutler deliberately edited the tapes in ways that painted a more benign portrait of a central figure in the drama, the conspirator-turned-star-witness, John W. Dean III, the White House counsel who told Nixon that Watergate had become a “cancer” on his presidency.

To Mr. Kutler’s scholarly critics, though, the most serious failing is that excerpts from two separate conversations that took place on March 16 — one made during a face-to-face meeting in the morning, and a second over the telephone in the evening — were reversed in order and presented as part of one continuous meeting. Most of the evening conversation between Mr. Dean and Nixon was eliminated, as were any references to it.

The most famous of all Finnish composers is surely Sibelius. His Latin name is that of his originally Swedish-speaking family, though he was born in Finland when it was a Grand Duchy within Russia, and his parents educated him in a Finnish-language school. In Latin (and in Swedish) the name Sibelius would have stress on the second syllable: Si.bé.li.us. But in Finnish there is an invariant rule that all words are stressed on the first syllable. So how on earth do the Finns say the name of this celebrated composer and Finnish nationalist?

In the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine, Billy Baker has an article exploring the cultural significance of the local expression salted, a popular put-down among Boston's schoolkids. Baker explains:

Salted is typically delivered by a third party as a way to get into someone else's fight — person one insults person two, and person three informs person one that he or she has just been salted. It's an exclamation point on someone else's insult….

Salted, in this usage, appears to be exclusive to the region, and its demographic reaches from late grammar school into high school. The etymology of salted, however, is the subject of much debate. One camp says it's an abbreviation of insulted, and the word is actually "sulted." Others say it's short for assaulted. The third school, and the one that is most convinced that it's right, says it simply comes from the idea of throwing salt into a wound. But when it is used, and how, is not up for debate; and in this case, the particular word may be new but the role it plays is not. Depending on where you grew up and when, you may have heard other terms perform similar duty: "Burned." "Busted." "Faced." "Dissed." "Sauced."

What comes next should be utterly predictable to Language Log readers.

Paul Armstrong has reminded me of the Authors@Google videos (available on YouTube) — videos of authors talking at Google on their recent books. At least five are of interest to linguists:

Noam Chomsky (4/25/08)

Erin McKean (3/29/06)

Geoffrey Nunberg (10/12/06)

Steven Pinker (9/24/07)

John Searle (10/30/07)

[Added 2/2:

Ray Jackendoff (8/30/07)

George Lakoff (7/12/07)

George Lakoff (6/4/08)

(Of the eight videos listed here, some are more directly related to linguistics than others.)]

[Added 2/7: from Ben Zimmer, three more talks at Google:

Tom Dalzell
Christine Kenneally
David Harrison and Gregory Anderson ]

I'm a fan of Ian M. Banks' Culture novels, but I'd like to suggest, respectfully, that they might be improved in their approach to matters linguistic. As an example, on p. 470 of his recently-released novel Matter, we learn that "Marain, the Culture's language, had a phoneme to denote upper case".

Linguists would usually call a unit that denotes something a morpheme (or perhaps a word), not a phoneme, even if it was only one phoneme long. (In fact, we sometimes find meaningful units whose effect on pronunciation is just a single feature.)

In addition, it's odd to find a morpheme that signals something essentially in the realm of writing, like alphabetic case; and also to find that Marain still uses upper case in (some of) the same ways that English does.

Outrage reigns in Britain over the decision by the Birmingham city council to stop using apostrophes on its street signs; the AP story, by Meera Selva, is here.

I don't know about the languages that Montaigne was thinking of, but the claim that some languages lack a word for lying is one that has continued to crop up. A few months ago Steven Point, who is currently the Lieutenant Governor of British Columbia, asserted that there is no word for "lying" in his language, Halkomelem. It appears, however, that he is mistaken: my sources say that in his language smétnqən means "to lie, speak falsely" and that q̓íq̓əl̓stéxʷ means "to lie, deceive".

An earlier example of the same theme is due to no other than John Wayne, who in the classic western Hondo asserts that "The Apaches have no word for 'lie'." That is sort of true: the Western Apache dictionary that I own lists not one but two different expressions for lying. There is a verb meaning specifically "to lie", e.g. ɬeíɬchoo "he lies", as well as an expression meaning "to lie, deceive", e.g. bich'ii' nashch'aa "I lie to him".

It may well be true that these cultures have a particularly negative view of lying, but tall tales about the lack of a word for it aren't a good way of making this point.

As we've recently seen, people love the idea that a culture is revealed by its lexicon. The earliest example of this trope that I can think of is in Michel de Montaigne's 1580 essay "Of Cannibals". This is one of the founding documents of the "noble savage" tradition, and presents the alleged lack of certain words for certain bad things as evidence of the essential goodness of humanity in the state of nature:

These nations then seem to me to be so far barbarous, as having received but very little form and fashion from art and human invention, and consequently to be not much remote from their original simplicity. The laws of nature, however, govern them still, not as yet much vitiated with any mixture of ours: but 'tis in such purity, that I am sometimes troubled we were not sooner acquainted with these people, and that they were not discovered in those better times, when there were men much more able to judge of them than we are. I am sorry that Lycurgus and Plato had no knowledge of them: for to my apprehension, what we now see in those nations, does not only surpass all the pictures with which the poets have adorned the golden age, and all their inventions in feigning a happy state of man, but, moreover, the fancy and even the wish and desire of philosophy itself; so native and so pure a simplicity, as we by experience see to be in them, could never enter into their imagination, nor could they ever believe that human society could have been maintained with so little artifice and human patchwork. I should tell Plato, that it is a nation wherein there is no manner of traffic, no knowledge of letters, no science of numbers, no name of magistrate or political superiority; no use of service, riches or poverty, no contracts, no successions, no dividends, no properties, no employments, but those of leisure, no respect of kindred, but common, no clothing, no agriculture, no metal, no use of corn or wine; the very words that signify lying, treachery, dissimulation, avarice, envy, detraction, pardon, never heard of. How much would he find his imaginary republic short of his perfection? [emphasis added]

I'd be curious to know whether it's now possible to determine which New World language (or language-family) the "cannibal" that Montaigne interviewed in Rouen in 1562 spoke, so that the truth of his assertions about the lack (for example) of a word for lying could be checked. [Update: it was Tupinambá.] I'd lay my money against him, if there were any chance to settle the bet one way or the other.

Mark has just supplied new Language Log readers with a reference archive of Language Log posts about languages with lots of words for certain things, and languages with no words for certain things. It is a theme that intrigues ordinary folk; it almost mesmerises them. It is clear that nothing Language Log can do will ever discredit the twin notions that (1) lexical abundance correlates with conceptual or environmental or perceptual richness, and (2) that lexical thrift betokens a poorer and meaner experiential world.

Victor Mair recently told me about someone who began a letter to him in a way that struck him as odd:

"I actually have a pseudo linguistics question for you about the title of the Manchu emperor."

Victor was surprised by this use of actually. He added:

The next day, my sister from Seattle, who was visiting us in Swarthmore after attending the inauguration in DC, happened to complain about this very usage of "actually" among our nieces and nephews and their friends (when they are expressing an opinion).

Actually, these two senses of actually are worth distinguishing. And this is not just my opinion — I'm relying on the analysis in Uta Lenk's 1998 dissertation, Marking Discourse Coherence: Functions of Discourse Markers in Spoken English.

I'm back, for the first time since August 2001, in Helsinki, Finland. I love this city, for all sorts of reasons. Intelligent and interesting academic friends; big, beautiful public buildings in brilliant white and yellow; the views across the harbor (hardly any of the sea is frozen today, so the big car ferries are moving with no trouble and the icebreakers are mainly up north); the comfort of the Hotel Arthur; but above all (for yes, this is Language Log, not Baltic Tourism Log) the coolest language in the world. Finnish seems wonderful to me. Delicious. Speaking the little bits of it that I can manage, or even just reading out signs, actually gives me a tingling feeling on the tongue. (Yliopistokirjakauppa: it tastes like iced champagne.) And I learned a tiny bit more about Finnish pronunciation within minutes of arrival. I thanked the taxi driver by saying kiitos ("Thank you") as I got out, carefully making the i twice as long as the o, which is what I thought was correct. But I clearly heard my friend Hanna, who had kindly come to the airport to meet me, say to the driver what sounded to my ear more like kitos. As soon as we got inside the hotel I asked her, what's up? Why was her first-syllable vowel shorter than mine? And like a solid linguist she was able to answer me instantly and authoritatively.

Heidi and I both posted recently about the job market in linguistics (my post, and her collaborative post with Shannon Bischoff). There was some discussion in the comments about whether the numbers were truly comparable and whether we should base conclusions on just one year of data. This post attempts to make amends, as it were, by setting Linguist List job data from the last five years alongside the Proquest dissertation data that Shannon collected:

Update (2009-06-09): See this post for arguably more accurate counts for dissertations.

Responding to the popularity of this morning's post on the politico-lexical economy of fair, here's a list of some earlier LL posts on aspects of the No Word for X meme and its rhetorical deployment [updated for some later ones as well…]:

"No word for 'runoff'?", 12/23/2020
"'No words for mental health'", 9/8/2020
"Two few words to describe emotions", 2/12/2019
"No word for rape", 5/29/2018
"Candidate for careless Whorfian nonsense of the year", 3/11/2018
"Failing words in Myanmar", 7/20/2015
"No word for 'fetch'", 11/25/2014
"No word for 'father'", 10/22/2014
"When there's no Hebrew word for something, it's a bad idea", 4/4/2014
"No word for rape" (11/20/2013)
"No word for normal parts of early childhood?" (7/23/2013)
"Wade Davis has no word for 'dubious linguistic claim'" (1/14/2013)
"No word for 'privacy' in Russian?" (1/15/2012)
"It's baaack . . . and upside-down!" (1/2/2012)
"No word for Rapture" (5/20/2011)
"No word for 'mess'" (4/21/2011)
"We have not the word because we have so much of the thing" (4/19/2011)
"No word for dyslexia in languages with good spelling systems" (2/28/2011)
"Annals of 'No Word for X'" (1/23/2011)
"No word for 'retroactive loss of modifier redundancy'?" (10/9/2010
"No word for journalistic indolence" (10/6/2010)
"No virgins on Danger Island" (10/6/2010)
"Whorfian tourism" (9/23/2010)
"There is No Word in Japanese for 'Compliance'" (7/15/2010)
"Icelandic: no word for 'please', 45 words for 'green'?" (4/18/2010)
"40 words for 'next'" (4/2/2010)
"Pop-Whorfianism in the comics again" (7/29/2009)
"Hay foot straw foot" (7/29/2009)
"No word for bribery" (7/3/2009)
"From the 'words for X' annals" (5/31/2009)
"No concept of X in Y" (3/29/2009)
"Rainbow sparkling air sequins" (2/2/2009)
"No word for lying?" (1/31/2009)
"No words, or too many" (1/30/2009)
"No word for fair?" (1/28/2009)
"Another 'words for X' competition" (1/1/2009)
"No word for integrity?" (12/31/2008)
"Reverse Whorfianism and the value of SHAs" (12/23/2008)
"Burger King Whopper Virgins" (12/4/2008)
"Journalistic dreamtime" (3/8/2007)
"Solving the world's problems with linguistics" (12/17/2006)
"Does anybody have a word for this? Probably not." (11/2/2006)
"Parts of a fish head: Let me count the ways" (10/4/2006)
"Ineffability" (9/21/2006)
"No concept of the future, no yuccas either" (5/11/2006)
"No Word for Thank You" (5/6/2006)
"New ideas and new words" (4/23/2006)
"Whorf in a bottle" (5/5/2006)
"Ayn Rand psychologizes a trope" (3/19/2006)
"Ayn Rand, linguist?" (3/15/2006)
"'60 Minutes' doomed to repeat itself" (12/24/2005)
"Snowclone blindness" (11/19/2005)
"The miserable French language and its inadequacies" (9/30/2005)
"Football in Navajo, anyone?" (9/23/2005)
"Crisis ≠ Danger + Opportunity" (4/29/2005)
"No word for 'lazy hack parroting drivel'" (4/1/2005)
"No word for sex" (3/12/2005)
"It's like a glimmer on the horizon" (12/3/2004)
"Arctic folk at loss for words again" (11/23/2004)
"No word for robins" (11/16/2004)
"46 Somali words for camel" (2/15/2004)
"Somali words for camel spit" (2/11/2004)