Language Log

Languagehat has a fascinating posting about a new book by Tomasz Kamusella on how language, ethnicity, and nationality have come to be so tightly aligned in Central Europe. It's a great big, expensive book, so if you're interested in the topic you might want to start by checking out the quotes and links languagehat provides.

More news from the Linguistic Society of America meetings, this time about the Language Log presence in the official doings of the society. In addition to the blog's receiving the Linguistics, Language and the Public Award (no doubt there will be photos), there were three elevations of our bloggers:

Roger Shuy was elected a fellow of the society (for his achievements in linguistics; Geoff Pullum was similarly elected last year);

Chris Potts was elected an at-large member of the Executive Committee of the society, to take office tomorrow; and

Sally Thomason was elected president of the society, also to take office tomorrow.

Roger's achievement is entirely an honor, without any accompanying responsibilities. Chris and Sally, in contrast, have real work to do.

The bloggers will gather around the award tomorrow in the rotunda at Language Log Plaza and perform the arcane Elevation Ritual.

One of the most interesting talks that I've heard so far, here at the Linguistic Society of America's annual meeting, was Uri Tadmor and Martin Haspelmath, "Measuring the borrowability of word meanings". I haven't yet been able to get a copy of the slides for their presentation here, but web search turned up the abstract for a talk of the same title at the upcoming Swadesh Centenary Conference, and the slides from a talk entitled "Loanword Typology: Investigating lexical borrowability in the world's languages", given at a recent workshop "New Directions in Historical Linguistics"(Université de Lyons, May 12-14 2008).

[Update: the slides from their LSA talk are now here, and additional information is available on the project website. I'll update the rest of this post to match when I have a chance. Meanwhile, Uri emphasizes that the LSA results are preliminary, and the Lyons report even more so.]

[Update #2: Uri answers questions in a guest post here.]

As you can learn from those links, their project investigated the words for 1460 "meanings" in 30 languages, allowing for a many-to-many relationship between words and meanings. They recruited an expert for each language to find the relevant words and to determine various properties for each one, including whether it had been borrowed from another language. The resulting database will be posted on the web at some point in the not-too-distant future.

Google Suggest is an fun new tool for probing the textual Zeitgeist. Using it on "Language Log" yields:

Bare "Language Log" gets 36,900,000 results (as we can see by getting suggested continuations for "language lo", though I'll spare you the picture). It's clear that lots of regular readers use Google to find us, rather than typing in the URL or using a browser bookmark or an RSS feed.

In response to Don Ringe's recent post on "The Linguistic Diversity of Aboriginal Europe", David Marjanović asked

… is there a way to estimate how much time was available between the initial breakup of PIE and the establishment of sound changes that would make a Wanderwort traceable? I'd expect words like "horse" and "wheel" to potentially spread very quickly; indeed, there have been attempts to connect the East Asian Wanderwort for "horse" to the IE word (via Tocharian of course), similar attempts for Sino-Tibetan words for "cart/wheel", and others have found forms similar to the PIE */kʷekʷlo/- in both Northwest and Northeast Caucasian languages.

I forwarded this question to Don, who quickly answered:

Here are two documents toward a reply to the question you forwarded.  The first is a short exploration of the principles involved and a sketch of what the methodology has to look like.  It promises further postings that go into detail about IE words of interest.  The longer post is installment one of that, digging into 'wheel' and 'horse'.  I don't know whether it's suitable for the blog; it's long and technical, and unfortunately it can't be cogent *without* being long and technical.

If you're interested in the methods of historical-comparative reconstruction and their application to the relative and absolute chronology of the Indo-European languages, I believe that Don's answer will be well worth reading.  Much of the information in it is the fruit of recent research (as you can see from the references), and most of the rest is not available in one place, organized so as to address the sort of question that David asked. If these things don't interest you, you're welcome to pass on to some of our other fine posts — and of course, our famous double-your-money-back guarantee continues to apply.

Orwell's Politics and the English Language is a beautifully written language crime, though it pretends to lay down the law. Furthermore I just noticed that its final law is rather curious. We'll get to that shortly.

Orwell begins with the unjustified premise that language is in decline – unjustified because while he viciously attacks contemporary cases of poor writing, he provides no evidence that earlier times had been perennially populated by paragons of literary virtue. He proceeds to shore up the declining language with style suggestions that, regrettably enough, have never turned a Dan Brown into a George Orwell.  

Customers who buy into Orwell's shit also buy Strunk and White, and further milquetoast simulacra of one or the other, so it's worth looking more closely at what he proposes. Let's start off in time honored Language Log style, by seeing how Orwell breaks his own rules. Showing a lack of imagination that would be worthy of someone who lacked imagination, Orwell suggests the following rule, his fourth rule, a rule that in various forms has been heard many times both before and since. Verily shall I yawn unto you Orwell's unoriginal original (c.f. this discussion of how it predates Orwell):

Reporting live from San Francisco, where the American Dialect Society is holding its annual meeting in conjunction with the Linguistic Society of America… In a year overshadowed by the financial crisis, the ADS has voted for bailout as its Word of the Year for 2008. As usual, it was a standing-room-only event, with ADS-ers, LSA-ers, and members of the public jamming the conference room to take part in the lighthearted selection process.

This just in from Drago Radev: NACLO — the North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad — will have a booth at this week's Linguistic Society of America meeting at the Hilton San Francisco from today until Sunday noon. Language Log readers who visit the meeting should drop by to hear about the North American teams' successes at the international 2007 and 2008 Olympiads, and about plans for the imminent 2009 Olympiad. Those of you who don't yet know about the Olympiad might want to find out: the problems (samples also available on the NACLO website) are fun to solve. They require talent, but no training, in linguistics.

Many (most?) of us Language Loggers are also at the LSA, and some of us, e.g. me, have also been involved in running NACLO test sites, so feel free to accost us at the meetings too if you want to talk about NACLO. But Drago and Lori Levin and their colleagues will have all the answers to your questions at their booth.

Two recent Zippy strips with some linguistic interest. The first seems irrelevant until the last panel, when we get yet another reference to Noam Chomsky in the popular media. (See this posting by Mark Liberman, with links to some of these earlier postings. Zippy throws in a Chomsky reference now and then, as here and here.)

The second also seems to have nothing to do with linguistics until the last panel, where we get a reference to languages with small phonemic inventories and cultures "with no concept of X".

Like Arnold, I'm at the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA). You can see a .pdf copy of the program here.  (The one on the LSA's website seems to be restricted to members only, so I've made a bootleg copy for outsiders, in the spirit of the scriptural injunction "Is a candle brought to be put under a bushel, or under a bed? and not to be set on a candlestick?")

If you see a presentation whose title especially interests you, let me know, and if I have time, I'll see if I can find some additional information about it.  Of course, you could also try Google — thus the very first presentation on the program is Alejandrina Cristià and Amanda Seidl, "Linguistic sources of individual differences in speech processing in infancy"; and searching for the title turns up a one-page abstract.  In other cases, you may be able to find a set of powerpoint slides or even a full paper.

I'm at the Linguistic Society of America meetings (in San Francisco) and spent part of the morning sitting in on the LSA's Executive Committee meeting. The part I attended was mostly about a fairly long document detailing the programs of the society and their objectives. In the midst of this came a digression on linguistic (adjective) vs. linguistics (noun) as a modifier of a noun.

The specific question was: should the text refer to the linguistic community or the linguistics community?

In the end, a vote was taken, and the S version (nominal) won handily over the version without the S (adjectival).

[By Margaret Sharpe and Doris Dyen]

Isidore Dyen, Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at Yale University, died on 14th December 2008, surrounded by family members, after one final bout of cancer. He became known in the 1960s for his seminal work on Austronesian languages, and on Proto-Austronesian, the ancestral language of languages from Indonesia to Madagascar and across the Pacific Ocean. Until a few weeks before his death, he was continuing his research in attempts to subgroup yet another collection of Austronesian languages.

At the bottom of our New Year's greeting letter to friends, I put this picture of a very special Dutch Belted cow:

When I looked at a few of the letters my wife had signed, I noticed that she had added "Happy" on one side of the cow and "Year" on the other side of the cow. I thought that was extremely clever, because she was using the cow as a cross-lingual pun: "Happy 牛 Year!" Upon being read out as "Happy NIU2 Year," any speaker of English will immediately understand the greeting. And, this being the Chinese "Year of the NIU2," which was why I put that animal at the bottom of our New Year's message in the first place, Liqing's formulation is particularly fitting for the beginning of 2009.