Language Log

Emilio Servidio wrote to me about the things-people-don't-have-words-for trope, but continued with some ruminations on a different topic that I thought might interest you. I supply his reflections here with his permission as a guest post.

It worries me that linguistic prejudice can distort reality in the eyes of otherwise smart and sensitive people. It even happens to some linguists I know. I witnessed an especially disturbing episode recently.

From a Globe and Mail story about the census in India (hat tip to Michael Kaan):

India concluded its national census this week, having tallied up some 1.2 billion souls, and the last night of counting focused on homeless people – of whom there are an estimated 150,000 in Delhi alone. Getting them into the count was just one in an array of staggering challenges: how to enumerate in the dozen areas under control of various armed rebel movements, and in the 572 tiny islands that make up Andaman and Nicobar; how to train 2.5 million enumerators and handle answers in 6,661 languages.

Whoa! 6,661 languages? The Ethnologue site says it has information about the 6,909 "known living languages" in the world, and lists only 438 living languages for India (for comparison: it lists 176 living languages for the United States, 86 for Canada, and 12 for the United Kingdom).

But if you look at the entries in the Ethnologue, you'll see that most languages have alternative names (sometimes a lot of them) and most languages have recognized dialects listed (sometimes a lot of them). That's probably enough to inflate the language count by more than one order of magnitude. (It's also true that "immigrant languages" — for India, the site mentions Armenian, Burushaski, Judeo-Iraqi Arabic, Northern Pashto, Uighur, Walungge, and Western Farsi — aren't included in the count, but they're probably a small contribution to the problems of the national census of India.)

So it all depends on how you count.

Michael Moore asks:

I wonder what your opinion is about no fly zones. Totally unambiguous (well, unless you think flies are involved), as succinct as possible, and also very irregular. I can't think of a rephrasing that would deliver the message with the same clarity. It seems that we need to sacrifice conventional rules to make a good point.

Apparently some editors at the New York Times are also worried about convention in this matter, because that publication somewhat erratically deploys "no-flight zone" in place of "no-fly zone". Thus David Sanger and Thom Shankar, "Gates Warns of Risks of a No-Flight Zone", 3/2/2011, where "no-flight zone" occurs nine times, and "no-fly zone" occurs four times. The difference? "No-fly" is in all and only the quotes (from Senator Kerry and Defense Secretary Gates), while "no-flight" occurs in all and only the unquoted text.

This is not a consistent editorial practice, however. We also see things like John Broder, "U.S. and Allies Weigh Libya No-Fly Zone", NYT 2/28/2011, where the score is "no-fly zone" 5 (both quoted and not), "no-flight zone" 0.

Today the U.S. Supreme Court issued its (unanimous) decision in FCC v. AT&T. The key issue was whether  corporations are entitled to a right of personal privacy. Specifically, the Freedom of Information Act exempts “law enforcement records the disclosure of which 'could reasonably be expected to constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.'”

CompTel, a trade association, submitted a FOIA request for documents AT&T had provided to the Federal Communications Commission Enforcement Bureau during an investigation of that company. The Bureau found that Exemption 7(C) applied to individuals identified in AT&T’s submissions but not to the company itself, concluding that corporations do not have “personal privacy” interests as required by the exemption. The FCC agreed with the Bureau, but the Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit did not. It held that Exemption 7(C) extends to the “personal privacy” of corporations, reasoning that “personal” is the adjective form of the term “person,” which Congress has defined, as applicable here, to include corporations.

For some interesting background and discussion, see Neal Goldfarb's post on the decision at LAWnLinguistics. You should also take a look at his post from January 19, "Personal privacy ≠ corporate privacy", in which he discusses the amicus brief that he filed in the case.