Language Log

OK, I'm intrigued now. I have always thought Albanian seems like a fascinating language (Indo-European, yet so isolated that it was a hundred years before comparative linguists realized that), and now Arnold Zwicky has discovered that my surname is a word in Albanian. I don't think he's right about it being a given name; here's an instance of it in a poem, apparently on a poetry forum, without an initial capital:

. . .
edlira mi goc e vogel
kur vjen nforum gushen si pullum
i mer temat mare e mare
sle teme dashnie pa e pare
. . .

And it turns up uncapitalized on this page as well (cun cun gush pullum i ka fal zoti cunat, it says). So, lacking an Albanian dictionary, I'm appealing for an Albanian-competent Language Log reader out there in Internetia: Please tell me, what does my name mean in Albanian?

A bit of silliness as the U.S. Revolutionary holiday winds down.

Facebook just suggested to me that I might want to friend Pullum Xhani. I was, of course, intrigued by the name, but found nothing illuminating in what Pullum Xhani was willing to provide on his page — nothing but name, sex, and a photo of anime characters. Pursuing things a bit further, I seem to have discovered that the name is Albanian, with Xhani being a reasonably commonly Albanian family name (well, in the top 100, though just barely) and that Pullum is an Albanian personal name. Geoff take note. (I say "seem to have discovered" because the pages I pulled up were all in Albanian, and though Albanian is an Indo-European language it's about as opaque to me as Mongolian or Aymara. So I could easily have misunderstood things.)

The 6/28/2010 issue of the New Yorker includes an engagingly waspish article by Anthony Lane, "Letter From Oslo, 'Only Mr. God Knows Why'".  Along with its witty observations about global language and culture, Lane's piece also includes some surprisingly elementary errors of fact.  The New Yorker has long (and loudly) cherished a reputation for assiduous fact-checking, and so this sort of thing still surprises me, though it happens often enough that it probably shouldn't.

I have completed a reanalysis of the verbs in President Obama's speech after the BP oil disaster, and can add a further note to Mark's analysis of Kathleen Parker's unbelievably irresponsible prattle about how the frequency of passive constructions chosen by his speechwriters shows that President Obama talks like a girl (is "suffering a rhetorical-testosterone deficit").

I can report that I found a way of counting under which one can vindicate Paul JJ Payack's 13 percent figure, which Mark found inexplicable. But a morass of inexplicable stupidity remains nonetheless.

A (not particularly amusing) cartoon in the July 5 New Yorker has a doctor giving a bedridden patient some food on a tray and saying: "That which doesn't kill you might give you stomach trouble."

The only reason I mention it here is that its oddly stilted wording (why not say "What doesn't kill you"?) provides an example of a case where the much-fetishized but illegitimate rule about never using which to begin an integrated relative clause is obligatorily broken: not even a New Yorker copy editor would "correct" that which doesn't kill you *that that doesn't kill you.

Following up on my post "Rhetorical testosterone and analytical hallucinations" (7/1/2010), Linda Seebach sent a link to a column in which Mark Steyn complained about president Obama's "passivity" ("Obama's lazy tribute to Daniel Pearl", 5/21/2010):

Like a lot of guys who've been told they're brilliant one time too often, President Obama gets a little lazy, and doesn't always choose his words with care. And so it was that he came to say a few words about Daniel Pearl, upon signing the "Daniel Pearl Press Freedom Act." Pearl was decapitated on video by jihadist Muslims in Karachi on Feb. 1, 2002. That's how I'd put it. This is what the president of the United States said:

"Obviously, the loss of Daniel Pearl was one of those moments that captured the world's imagination because it reminded us of how valuable a free press is."

Now Obama's off the prompter, when his silver-tongued rhetoric invariably turns to sludge. But he's talking about a dead man here, a guy murdered in public for all the world to see. Furthermore, the deceased's family is standing all around him. And, even for a busy president, it's the work of moments to come up with a sentence that would be respectful, moving and true. Indeed, for Obama, it's the work of seconds, because he has a taxpayer-funded staff sitting around all day with nothing to do but provide him with that sentence.

Instead, he delivered the one above, which in its clumsiness and insipidness is most revealing. First of all, note the passivity: "The loss of Daniel Pearl." He wasn't "lost." He was kidnapped and beheaded. He was murdered on a snuff video. He was specifically targeted, seized as a trophy, a high-value scalp. And the circumstances of his "loss" merit some vigor in the prose. Yet Obama can muster none.

[This is a guest post by Brendan O'Kane.]

My new favorite thing is Brian Holton's ongoing translation of Shuǐhǔ zhuàn 水滸傳 (Water Margin; All Men Are Brothers) into Scots, part of which is available online. Example:

Nà shí Xiyuè Huàshān yǒu gè Chén Tuán chǔshì, shì gè dào gāo yǒu dé zhī rén, néng biàn fēngyún qìsè. Yī rì qí lǘ xiàshān, xiàng nà Huáyīn dào zhōng zhèngxíng zhī jiān, tīng dé lùshàng kèrén chuánshuō:" Rújīn Dōngjīng Chái Shìzōng ràng wèi yǔ Zhào jiǎndiǎn dēngjī."

那时西岳华山有个陈抟处士，是个道高有德之人，能辨风云气色。一日骑驴下山，向那华阴道中正行之间，听得路上客人传说：" 如今东京柴世宗让位与赵检点登基。"

In thae days there wis a hermit hecht Chen Tuan bydin on the Wastlin Tap o Mount Glore: he wis a kennin an gracie sowl at bi glamourie cud guide the wind an wather. Ae day whan he wis striddlin his cuddie doun the brae ti the Gloresheddae Road he heard an outlan bodie sayin “Richt nou in the Eastren Capital Chai Shizong hes reteirit an Gaird-Marischal Zhao hes taen the throne”.

In her most recent column ("Obama: Our first female president", 7/1/2010), Kathleen Parker argues that Barack Obama writes like a girl:

If Bill Clinton was our first black President, as Toni Morrison once proclaimed, then Barack Obama may be our first woman President. […]

No, I'm not calling Obama a girlie President. But … he may be suffering a rhetorical-testosterone deficit when it comes to dealing with crises […]

What's her evidence for this lack of "rhetorical-testosterone"? Along with a lot of vague stuff about how Obama is "a chatterbox" who shares with "Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton" (!) the ability to "assume feminine communication styles effectively", the column includes exactly one relevant fact:

Obama's [oil spill] speech featured 13 percent passive-voice constructions, the highest level measured in any major presidential address this century, according to the Global Language Monitor, which tracks and analyzes language.

If you're not a regular reader, please take a few minutes to scan our last discussion of linguistic "analysis" from Paul Payack's Global Language Monitor ("Language guru runs with the journalistic pack", 6/17/2010). According to Mr. Payack, president Obama's address on the gulf oil spill was excessively "professorial" because its average sentence length was 19.8 words. I checked on president George W. Bush' post-Katrina speech, and found that its average sentence length was 23.5 words, suggesting either that Bush was even more "professorial" than Obama, or that Mr. Payack was full of it.

Reader FM wrote to draw our attention to what he thought might be "another example of poor machine reading, à la Embuggerance and Feisty". FM is referring back to this epic error, where a line in a review listing interesting vocabulary items

embuggerance, elevate, feisty, holistic,

somehow attracted the attention of an algorithm for un-inverting comma-separated lists of author names, resulting in the hypothetical author pair "Elevate Embuggerance and Holistic Feisty", and a striking citation in Google Scholar:

;

Here is Sandy Brindley, of Rape Crisis Scotland, quoted (in the Metro newspaper, 29 June 2010), talking about an advertisement her organization has published:

The advert has been designed to shake out ingrained prejudices many Scots have towards women who have been raped. Even though people believe they wouldn't judge a rape victim by what they wear, how drunk they were, or if they had been flirting, they often do.

Now, you're a Language Log reader; you've probably read about singular they and the prescriptivist prejudice against it. What do we want to say about the use of pronouns in the second sentence in this quotation?