Language Log

I'm a bit tardy in reporting this, but better late than never: the endangered language research team of K. David Harrison and Greg Anderson, in collaboration with National Geographic, have started a YouTube channel for their Enduring Voices mission. (Read more about it here and here.)

The last time I'd mentioned Harrison and Anderson on Language Log, back in July, their documentary The Linguists had just received an Emmy® nomination for "Outstanding Science and Technology Programming". Since then, Harrison's book The Last Speakers: The Quest to Save the World's Most Endangered Languages has been published (in September), and there was an associated splash in the media (in October) concerning Harrison and Anderson's discovery of the 'hidden' Tibeto-Burman language Koro. Sorry, I've been away from my desk. I'll try to do better.

From Ryan North yesterday:

with an explanation, and a plug for LLog:

WHAT ARE THE HAPS MY FRIENDS

November 17th, 2010: This comic and all the eggcorns in it come from the wonderful Language Log and the eggcorn database.

Read the rest of this entry »

I have a piece on "Fresh Air" today on the Was-Jane-Austen-Edited-and-Why-Would-It-Matter-Anyway kerfuffle that Geoff Pullum discussed in a post a couple of weeks ago. After looking over the Austen manuscripts online, I concluded that the whole business was meretricious nonsense. What's most interesting is the extraordinary attention given the claims. It testifies to Austen's Gagaesque (Gagantuan?) celebrity (whose history is recounted in the recent, very readable Jane's Fame by Claire Harman — see below). But it also says something about the common wisdom about punctuation that sends items like Eats Shoots and Leaves to the top of the bestseller list.

In fact the two points are connected.

Today's Dilbert:

This is a different — and I think more interesting — take on the issues discussed here and here.

"The problem with people who want to impose their linguistic tastes on others," says David Crystal, "is that they never do so consistently." I'm not so sure I agree that's the problem. Consistency wouldn't be quite enough to excuse grammar fascism. I'd say the problem with people who want to impose their linguistic tastes on others by writing books on how to write is that they are so bad at it: though often they are good enough at writing (I have never said that E. B. White or George Orwell couldn't write), they actually don't know how they do what they do, and they are clueless about the grammar of the language in which they do it, and they offer recommendations on how you should write that are unfollowed, unfollowable, or utterly insane.

Both Crystal and I have been suffering the same painful experience — reviewing the same ghastly, insufferable, obnoxious, appallingly incompetent book. It is by Simon Heffer, the associate editor of the UK newspaper The Daily Telegraph, who imagined that he could improve the world by offering 350 pages of his thoughts on grammatical usage, uninformed by any work since he was in college thirty years ago — in fact pretty much innocent of acquaintance with any work on English grammar published in more than half a century.

One of the most interesting papers at an interesting conference was Michael Newman, "Identifying native English speaking Pacific Asian Americans by voice".

I have often stressed the point to my students: it is not your ignorance that interferes with your education in this subject; it's the very opposite. It's the fact that you are a highly intelligent human being and you know many things deeply and thoroughly that can prevent your learning. Of the things I teach, it is in phonetics that this comes out most vividly: the reason you can't learn to hear and produce the difference between Hindi dental [t] and retroflex [&#x0288], I tell them, is not that you are no good at this practical phonetics stuff, but that you have had twenty years of training in ignoring this contrast (so as to become an expert speaker of English or some other language), and you have done brilliantly at it. Well, there was an echo of the same line that popped up today in some news about the phishing industry. Dr Emily Finch, a University of Surrey criminologist, said:

The general public is more internet security-aware than it was five years ago. Malicious anti-virus scams are an indication that criminals are now tapping into this.

Rather than exploiting our ignorance – the basic premise of common scams such as phishing – they are actively using our knowledge and fear of online threats to their advantage.

A painfully sad health story in today's news media. For some time now there have been suspicions that isotretinoin (= Roaccutane = Accutane = Amnesteem = Claravis = Clarus = Decutan — drugs have more names than the devil) tended to increase the risk of depression and suicide in its users. But it wasn't the drug. It was the acute acne (and of course the social consequences thereof). For once the familiar cliché is reversed: it turns out the disease was worse than the cure.

This is funny, though unfair:

From a letter to the editor in the Nov. 8 New Yorker:

Such rhetoric then [by left-wing critics of George W. Bush] was hardly less corrosive, or less supported by scholarly reasoning, than the crackpot vitriol now spewed by Beck and his ilk.

As we've noted many times, combinations of negation and scalar predicates are hard for our poor monkey brains to process.

What in the hell motivates the tweeting craze? Twitter seems insane to me. If all my Language Log posts had to be 140 chars I wouldnt be abl

And people wreck their lives tweeting. A UK politician's "joke" suggesting a muslim writer should be stoned to death got him arrested by th

The Linguistic Data Consortium will change its network IP address between 4PM and 6PM EST on Friday, November 12th. During that time, Language Log will be unavailable, since its server is on the LDC network.

It may take up to 72 hours for external networks to propagate the new IP addresses, so Language Log readers may have trouble accessing the site until Monday, November 15th. The new IP address, if you're able to make use of this information, should be 128.91.252.31.

In addition, I'm now in Groningen for ExAPP 2010, and will be traveling back to the U.S. on Saturday, so I may be an even worse correspondent than usual this weekend for independent reasons.

From the AAAS (the American Association for the Advancement of Science), a holiday t-shirt: