Language Log

The results are in: the American Dialect Society has selected tweet as the Word of the Year for 2009, and google (the verb) as Word of the Decade for 2000-09. I've got a full report on the proceedings over on my Word Routes column for the Visual Thesaurus. An excerpt:

Reactions to the vote are already coming in. On the American Dialect Society mailing list, John Baker pointed out that both tweet and google are proprietary names. Google is obviously a trademark of the powers-that-be at the Googleplex (who are no doubt unhappy about the dilution of the brand name by having it treated as a generic verb). But tweet is also a service mark owned by Twitter, filed with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office on April 16, 2009 and pending registration.

Read the rest here.

Thanks to reader JR, we are able to bring you the harmonic convergence of two recent LL memes, namely singing-dancing figurines and the vagaries of machine translation. The English advertising copy for the Ozaki iMini Pet ("Dock + Radio + Alarm + Speakers + Dancing Pet") is so badly written that it was probably created by a human pretending to be a translator, though it's possible that the human pretended to write a machine-translation program instead:

iMini is built in the rhythm decoding chip MJ1191 of the programming embedded system, and to integrate the HIPS skeleton; No matter you play any kind of music, MJ1191 always make your pet in dancing for you at once.

"Just because you collect them doesn't make them collectibles," says a wife to a dopey-looking husband in the cartoon that Bob Ladd peeled off his New Yorker calendar last December 23. And she's right. There's a difference in meaning between the -ible suffix, which attaches mainly to roots with a Latin origin, and the word possible: what is possible for you to X may not meet the standard for being Xible. As so often, the cartoonist (Barbara Smaller in this case) draws on not just a familiarity with life and relationships but also a pretty good implicit analytical knowledge of semantics and derivational morphology.

Adrian Bailey passes along an interesting bit of editorial excision that appeared in a Washington Post article about Craig "Lazie" Lynch, who recently escaped from a prison outside of in Suffolk, England. Lynch has been leaving taunting messages on his Facebook page. The Post quotes Lynch as follows:

"I had a funny feelin that my door was going to come off this mornin," he wrote in one smug post guaranteed to torque law enforcement officials everywhere. "Then I remembered the [police] are thick as [dung]. And went back to sleep."

Last night, the American Dialect Society (meeting in Baltimore in conjunction with the Linguistics Society of America) selected the final nominees for Word of the Year (2009) and Word of the Decade (2000-09). Here are the WOTY finalists:

-er A suffix used in such words as birther, someone who questions whether Obama was born in the United States; deather, someone who believes the government has death panels in its healthcare reform plan; Tenther, someone who believes the Federal government is mostly illegal because it usurps rights which belong to the States, in violation of the 10th Amendment; and truther, someone who doubts the official account of the 9/11 attacks.
fail A noun or interjection describing something egregiously unsuccessful. Usually used as an interjection: “FAIL!”
H1N1 The virus that causes swine flu.
public option A government-run healthcare program, desired by some to be part of the country’s healthcare reform.

Last month I posted a link to a Schott's Vocab Q&A with Claude Hagège on endangered languages. Some commenters immediately picked up on one of Hagège's statements about translation:

However, there exists an important activity which clearly shows that even though the ways languages grasp the world may vary widely from one language to another, they all build, in fact, the same contents, and equivalent conceptions of the world. This activity is translation. Any text in any language can be translated into a text in another language. These two texts express the same meaning. We can therefore conclude that despite the differences between the ways languages grasp the world, all languages are easily convertible into one another, because humans interpret the world along the same, or comparable, semantic lines.

Barbara Partee contributed this comment:

Emmon Bach has put it nicely: The best argument in favor of the universality of natural language expressive power is the possibility of translation. The best argument against universality is the impossibility of translation (i.e. that we often can't really translate exactly). [link added–EB]

Translation ain't easy, even for skilled humans — and (especially) for machines. Google Translate appears to be among the better tools out there, but as the comments section of what (I believe) was Language Log's first reference to Google's translation tool shows, you can have quite a bit of fun breaking it. Moreover, breaking it is easy and can happen completely inadvertently, a lesson that (from what I hear, anyway) is quite often learned too late by desperate students trying to take shortcuts while doing their homeworks for beginning language classes.

(Tip of the hat to Rubrick for the title.)

OK, I'm in room Key 5 (I guess that's Francis Scott Key) at the Baltimore Hilton, where the LSA symposium "Medialingual: Representing Language in Film and Television", organized by Walt Wolfram, is just getting started.

The book Hypothesis A/Hypothesis B: Linguistic Explorations in Honor of David M. Perlmutter, edited by Donna Gerdts, John Moore, and Maria Polinsky, has just been published by MIT Press. According to the book blurb:

Anyone who has studied linguistics in the last half-century has been affected by the work of David Perlmutter. One of the era's most versatile linguists, he is perhaps best known as the founder (with Paul Postal) of Relational Grammar, but he has also made contributions to areas ranging from theoretical morphology to sign language phonology. Hypothesis A/Hypothesis B (the title evokes Perlmutter's characteristic style of linguistic argumentation) offers twenty-three essays by Perlmutter’s colleagues and former students.

Many of the contributions deal with the study of the world's languages (including Indo-European languages, sign language, and languages of the Americas), reflecting the influence of Perlmutter's cross-linguistic research and meticulous analysis of empirical data. Other topics include grammatical relations and their mapping; unaccusatives, impersonals, and the like; complex verbs, complex clauses, and Wh-constructions; and the nature of sign language. Perlmutter, currently Professor Emeritus at the University of California, San Diego, and still actively engaged in the field, opens the volume with the illuminating and entertaining essay, "My Path in Linguistics."

Follow that link at the end — the chapter is available as a free sample. And if you're at the secret cabal, stop by the MIT Press stall at the book exhibit and get yourself a copy.

I'm in Baltimore for the secret annual cabal of the Linguistic Society of America. The meeting Handbook is not secret, but it's rather large, so don't click unless you want 6.32 MB of crunchy linguistic goodness. You could start with the program instead.

If I can get a wireless connection, I'll liveblog some of the meeting, starting this afternoon with Walt Wolfram's 4:00 "Symposium: Medialingual: Representing Language in Film and Television".

One of the things that I acquired over the holiday was a Talking Obama Figure ("Hear His Historic and Inspirational Words") from Gemmy Industries Corp. of Coppell, TX, "the worlds largest provider of all your favorite seasonal decor, animation entertainment and lighting products". This is one of a large number of other Gemmy talking toys, from the "Animated Talking Head Skeleton" and the "Gemmy Talking Dancing Hamster 97 Kurt Busch", to the "Dora the Explorer Talking Christmas Doll in Santa Outfit" and the "Animated Talking Bouncing Van of Love", and  Gemmy's monster hit from 2000-2001, "Big Mouth Billy Bass".

As you press of the red button on its pedestal, the Talking Obama Figure cycles through nine passages from president Obama's speeches. What struck me first about this collection of inspirational oratory was that it's performed by somebody else.

A Bizarro leap forward in animal abilities:

In the lull between Christmas and New Year's Day, I read the droll news of a special parking lot for women in the city of Shijiazhuang, Hebei Province, with spaces a meter wider than normal and painted in pink and light purple "to appeal to female tastes."

Today, Nathan Hopson sent me an article from Le Monde that shows pictures of this wondrous parking lot, leaving me even more in awe of the lengths to which the proprietors have gone to satisfy their customers:

The little bird..Tweets to its mate a tiny loving note (George Meredith, Pastorals, 1851, as cited in OED2)

In my last posting, I reported on Lake Superior State University's 2010 "List of Words Banished from the Queen's English for Mis-use, Over-use and General Uselessness" (for the year 2009), but reserving tweet (verb or noun) for separate treatment.