Language Log

My father (probably not very originally) used to tell me, “If you have to throw a brick at someone, throw it gently.” That sounded pretty stupid to me at the time, but I’ve since learned that it’s actually pretty good advice. What he seemed to have meant was, “if you have to threaten, warn, or otherwise say anything negative, temper it as much as possible.” If he had known anything about the differences among the speech acts of threatening, warning, and advising, he might have elaborated a little more. His words were brought home to me by three recent events: (1) my work trying to make the letters written by the Montana Department of Revenue clearer and more respectful; (2) my emergency landing at the Salt Lake City airport; and (3) the recent “water landing” of the U.S. Airways Flight 1549 in New York’s Hudson River.

Don Ringe's guest post "The Linguistic Diversity of Aboriginal Europe" (1/6/2009) led to a series of additional posts in response to readers' questions: "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". This morning brings another in the series.

As in Don's earlier posts, there's quite a bit of technical detail; but it seems that many readers are happy to follow Don through the historical undergrowth. Even if you find some of the terminology and typography puzzling, these posts may give you a  picture of how historical linguists think and reason.

And as before, because the typographical details are very important in this sort of discussion, and I'm not certain that I've rendered them correctly in html, a pdf of the post is here.

Back in July, Bill Poser noted that "Barack Obama is reported to speak Indonesian as result of the four years, from age six to age ten, that he spent in Indonesia." Bill asked for any evidence about Obama's competence in Indonesian. Since then, we've gotten some anecdotal reports about Obama's Indonesian (including from the President of Indonesia!), but we still don't know if his language skills rise above the basic conversational level.

Yuval Pinter writes:

When an English speaker doesn't understand a word one says, it's "Greek to me". When a Hebrew speaker encounters this difficulty, it "sounds like Chinese". I've been told the Korean equivalent is "sounds like Hebrew".

Has there been a study of this phrase phenomenon, relating different languages on some kind of Directed Graph?

I was struck by a linguistic aspect of the picture accompanying Ellen Barry's NYT article, "Latvia Is Shaken by Riots Over Its Weak Economy", 1/14/2009:

The vehicle visible in the left center of the picture is labelled, in English, "MILITARY POLICE". I wonder about this history of this inscription.

If you've ever found yourself thinking that Language Log writers seem concerned with form rather than function — that they obsess about the details of how things are put, to the exclusion of concern with the core content that really matters, and that they will probably miss the historic excitement of this January 20 grubbing around for prepositions — you need to take a look at the following passage by Jill Lepore of Harvard. It's from her article in the January 12 New Yorker on the language of presidential inaugural addresses. Lepore makes reference to claims in Elvin Lim's book The Anti-Intellectual Presidency that American presidential inaugural addresses have been getting stupider, with stupidity being measured by Flesch Readability Test word- and sentence-length criteria:

The past half century of speechwriters, most of whom trained as journalists, do favor small words and short sentences, as do many people whose English teachers made them read Strunk and White's 1959 "Elements of Style" ("Omit needless words") and Orwell's 1946 essay "Politics and the English language" ("Never use a long word where a short one will do"). Lim gets this, but only sort of. Harding's inaugural comes in at a college reading level, George H. W. Bush's at about a sixth-grade level. Harding's isn't smarter or subtler, it's just more flowery. They are both empty-headed; both suffer from what Orwell called "slovenliness." The problem doesn't lie in the length of their sentences or the number of their syllables. It lies in the absence of precision, the paucity of ideas, and the evasion of every species of argument.

A beautiful expression of a point we have often tried to emphasize. It's not so much that the superficial rules for writing promulgated Orwell and by Strunk and White are toxic and meretricious (though they do poison young minds, and should be condemned for that); it's that if you think they are deep and important and determinative of quality, it is YOU that will get hung up on trivialities of form rather than important aspects of content.

"Whether Ruth Madoff knew of her husband’s scheme or whether she didn’t are two unnerving possibilities."

That's the lead on the front page of the NYTimes this morning pointing to this article.

What a sentence! We can blame it squarely on the front-page-online editors, because it isn't in the article; I found in the article a sentence that has almost exactly the form I was going to suggest as the right way to say what they obviously intended: "In the social circles where the couple once traveled, both possibilities are unnerving — that Ruth Madoff was in on this, or that she wasn’t.", using that instead of whether. I would also have used and instead of or, given that they've spoken of "both possibilities". (I guess I would use or if they had written "either possibility is unnerving". But I know that we tend to be relaxed about and's and or's, so that part doesn't surprise me.)

I know that things like this often happen, but I never saw such an extreme example — the two whether-clauses presented as alternatives are actually, on standard analyses going back to Karttunen's 1977 article in the first issue of Linguistics and Philosophy, synonymous, since each is implicitly disjunctive with its negation and they are negations of each other.

I actually didn't understand what they had in mind until I got to the end of the sentence. Initially I thought it was a much more benign phenomenon of just inserting a second 'whether', and that this was going to be what Zaefferer calls an 'unconditional' — e.g. "Whether Ruth Madoff knew of her husband’s scheme or whether she didn’t, she may still be considered culpable …", equivalent to "Whether she knew or not, she may still …".  So this is not just a matter of stylistics — there's just no way to literally read the first part of the sentence as an itemization of the two unnerving possibilities.

We've often commented on the foolishness of the US policy of discharging badly needed Arabic interpreters and other soldiers who reveal that they are gay. It looks like this won't be coming up again. President-elect Obama has now definitively stated that he will eliminate the current "don't ask, don't tell" policy. It won't happen immediately though as a change in legislation is required.

The latest xkcd:

(Click for a larger version.)

The mouseover title is "Sadly, this is a true story. At least I learned about the OS X 'say' command."

I’ve been attending annual meetings of the Linguistic Society of America for over 50 years now, and this now stands out for me: either linguists are getting younger or most of the linguists I know are no longer around. One of my major reasons for attending these meetings is to visit and hang around with old friends, which is becoming less and less possible. Last year, at the Chicago meeting, I ran into one of the icons of our field, Eric Hamp, and had a great conversation with him. But there weren’t many old-timers at this year’s meeting. Yes, I meet a lot of younger linguists but that’s not quite the same thing for the elderly, like me. Of the 1,500 registered participants there, I knew only a handful, and most of them were a generation younger than me but still near or over the usual retirement age. LSA meetings are geared to young people trying to make their mark in the field, so that should be expected, I suppose.

Quotation marks (typically the single ones ‘ ’) that are used to mark the use of a word as not necessarily one that the present writer would endorse (The so-called ‘universal grammar ’ that linguists talk about) are standardly known as scare quotes. Those used (illiterately, it is often thought) simply to emphasize or call attention to a word (‘FRESH’ TOMATOES!) are sometimes, less standardly, called greengrocer's quotes. I think we need a third and separate name for the increasingly common journalistic use seen in this national science news story taken from a British newspaper today (I quote it in full, so nothing is being suppressed):

Hormone ‘makes women unfaithful’
WOMEN with high levels of one sex hormone are more likely to have affairs — and are considered more attractive by themselves and others. Those with the most oestradiol, a form of oestrogen, are less satisfied with their lovers and more likely to have a roving eye, a study suggests today. ‘Attractive women may not only have more alternatives but also high standards that are difficult to satisfy,’ said US psychologist Dr Katrina Durante, whose study is published by the Royal Society. ‘They may have fewer reasons to be committed to any partner if higher-quality potential mates are available.’

I am not commenting on the fact that the report says not a single word about the hormone causing infidelity. This is Language Log, not Endocrinology Log. What I'm pointing to is that the quoted words are not a quote: they never appear in the article at all.

Over on The Loom, the blogging home of my brother Carl Zimmer, a discussion about bad science writing was sparked by a particularly noxious Esquire article. (The description of cardiologist Hina Chaudhry as "a lab-worn doctor-lady" is just the tip of the iceberg.) In the comments, David Fishman left the cryptic remark, "Consider the armadillo." Carl revealed that this was an in-joke dating back to 1989, when the two of them were budding science reporters at Discover Magazine:

Our editors always warned us against writing openings and transitions with words no sane person would ever utter. Which we epitomized as, "Consider the armadillo."

"Consider the armadillo" does indeed sound like journalistic hackwork, all the more because it's in the form of a snowclone. In one early formulation, Geoff Pullum defined snowclones as "some-assembly-required adaptable cliché frames for lazy journalists." In this case, the crutch for lazy (science) writers goes all the way back to the New Testament.

In connection with my difficult work on Language Log's "Financial Good News" desk, where things have been arduous and slow, I was looking something up in the American Heritage Dictionary earlier today (possibly liberalism, possible lien; to tell you the truth, I have forgotten what — something beginning with L, but I got sidetracked), when I noticed something. In between libretto and lice it has a definition for Libyan Desert. The definition reports (and I just know you are going to get there ahead of me) that it is a desert, and it mainly is in (I know, I know, you are jostling me aside in your eagerness to predict it without having looked) Libya. Parts of it are in Egypt and parts of Sudan, actually; and no doubt there are areas that could be argued to be outlying regions of it that are in Chad (the dictionary did not deny it), but the Libyan Desert really is mostly a Libyan desert. The question that struck me was: wherever the hell it is, what the hell is it doing in a dictionary?