Language Log

"What, then, can be done?"

So asks Stanley Fish in "The Crisis of the Humanities Officially Arrives", NYT 10/11/2010, responding to SUNY Albany's decision to close programs in French, Italian, classics, Russian and theater.

There's a Facebook app called "What Geek Are You?"  If you let it digest the contents of your account, and perhaps answer some questions —  I haven't tried it, and don't know the details — it decides what (kind of) geek you are. David C reports that one of his friends, who is fluent or literate in five languages, was classified as "Geek in English/Language", with this description thereby posted to his wall:

Speaking or writing are your expertise. There's nothing you can't say or write that gets your point across in an easy to understand way. You are the master of whatever extra languages you study, whether its a romantic like Spanish or French, or something completly different.

Is this pathetic incompetence, or hip irony, or perhaps both?  I'm not sure.

On October 1, Partha Niyogi died of brain cancer at the age of 43.  He was Louis Block Professor in Computer Science and Statistics at the University of Chicago, and on his web page, he tells us that

My research interests are generally in the field of artificial intelligence and specifically in pattern recognition and machine learning problems that arise in the computational study of human speech and language.

A few weeks after John McWhorter and I participated in a "diavlog" on Bloggingheads, the site is hosting another language-y conversation between Joshua Knobe of Yale and Lera Boroditsky of Stanford. Whereas the previous diavlog touched briefly on neo-Whorfian arguments about the culturally determined relations of language to thought (responding to a New York Times Magazine article by Guy Deutscher), this one is a full-on Whorf-o-rama, delving into Boroditsky's research on language and cognition (see her Wall Street Journal article, "Lost in Translation," for more).

Seth Mydans, "As Hanoi Marks 1,000th Birthday, Some Are Cynical", NYT, 10/8/2010:

Like most of their countrymen, few Hanoians, absorbed in getting and spending, live their lives to the rhythms of the patriotic marching tunes that filled the air last week.

Yesterday, the world rejoiced at the news of Liu Xiaobo's being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 2010.  In China, however, the cyber police and media censors swung into frantic action to prevent word of this important event from being communicated to its 1.4 billion citizens.  They cordoned off the area where Liu's wife, Liu Xia, lives, and then whisked her off to an undisclosed location so that the press and television could not interview her.  Liu himself may still not know that he is the Peace Prize laureate.  And anyone who celebrates the award or mentions Liu's name (certainly not approvingly) is likely to end up in prison just like him.  Even Han Han, China's most formidable blogger, who seems to be able to say more than anyone else about contemporary life in China (but always most subtly and indirectly), was extremely careful about how he broached the subject:  see here and here.  (You must look very carefully to see what Han Han wrote).

In last week's news, there was a fair amount of interest in a study finding that women apologize more than men do. Curiously, there has been no coverage so far, as far as I can tell, by the New York Times, by the Washington Post, by BBC News, or by NPR. I hope that this is not because the reporters, editors, and pundits at these more serious publications collectively decided, contrary to their usual judgment in such cases,  that this was a bit of gender-stereotyping fluff better left to the tabloids.

In my opinion the study was well designed and well done (with the usual caveat that the subjects were all 20-ish undergraduate psychology students), and the paper documenting it was clear, careful, and thought-provoking.  Also, for a change, the press coverage seems to have been fairly accurate so far. I suspect that this is a tribute to the paper's lucidity, and perhaps also to the communication skills of Karina Schumann, who was the first author and the person most often interviewed by reporters.

Ray Dillinger sent a link to the latest Skin Horse strip, in which he observes that

The word "Dude" is used here as an interjection, followed by a (feminine) noun in direct address. The "person" directly addressed is a sentient hive of bees, who is (are? We lack grammatical categories for singular intelligences with plural bodies…) apparently getting divorce papers from a sentient cypress tree.

William Germano, "What are books good for?", The Chronicle Review, 9/26/2010:

Maybe we need to redefine, or undefine, our terms. I'm struck by the fact that the designation "scholarly book," to name one relevant category, is in itself a back formation, like "acoustic guitar." Books began as works of great seriousness, mapping out the religious and legal dimensions of culture. In a sense, books were always scholarly. Who could produce them but serious people? Who had the linguistic training to decode them? [emphasis added]

Barbara Wei told me about a kind of broad / lima bean crisps called "Only Puke."

When I tried to find out more about this unappetizing snack, I learned that it was featured earlier this year in a weblog post by that eminent linguist, Dave Barry ("Yum", 5/20/2010), following up on an article in the Daily Mail ("Fine Foods from Abroad", 5/20/2010). A bit later, Only Puke was the lead item in  an impressive catalogue of other bizarre product names  at the British web site Anorak News ("The World’s Worst Product Names, Presented By Only Puke Chips", 6/21/2010):

We now continue your look at nominative determinism in consumer goods with some more Sexy Foods and products. You will learn that Terror comes in a variety of flavours, an OAP tastes better in sauce, older boys love Oily Boy, Puke is served in bags and a Double Cock is a Keeper.

I'm not quite sure what went wrong with this sentence (Metro [Scottish edition] Wed 6 Oct 2010, page 19; can't find it anywhere online), which is a quote from Erin Arvedlund, the author of Madoff:

‘Madoff was just the human face of this lie that Wall Street told us and that we told one another — that the endless rise in everything we owned was too good to be true.’

It seems to be a kind of undernegation. But I can't quite see what to do to put it right.

Take a look at the use of the underlined verb in this recent story about an incident of boorish locker-room behavior toward a female reporter:

In the locker room, she was subjected to whistles and catcalls, eventually tweeting that she was avoiding eye contact with players.

Tweet is an invented verb, so it provides an interesting little experiment in syntactic change. It takes content clauses with the subordinator that, as the above example shows. Can it take a direct object plus content clause, like tell in She told him that she was leaving? Apparently so: if you Google for tweeted him that she, you get about 3,400 Google hits.

Ryan Y. wrote to ask about words for "the sounds instruments make". He points out that in English, "Drums go 'rat-a-tat' and 'bang,' bells go 'ding dong,' and sad trombones go 'wah wah'", but he notes that there are some gaps that he finds surprising:

Few instruments are as popular in the US as the guitar, but I have no idea what sound a guitar makes. There are gaps even for the standard high school band/orchestra instruments. What sound does a violin make? A flute? For that matter, what sound does an orchestra make? A rock group?

Is there a compelling explanation as to why we have words for the sounds of bells, trombones, and tubas, but not guitars? Why do we lack words for the sounds of groups of instruments? Do, say, Italians have a word for the sound a violin makes? Do the French have a word for the sound of a French Horn?