Language Log

Reader KR asks:

How can I prove to an acquaintance that the word "truck" in English is standardly pronounced with an intial "ch" sound?

KR presupposes a conclusion that's a bit over-simplified. There's some variation here, and I don't think we have very good evidence about the distribution and relative frequency of the variants. But he's basically right: the initial consonant of "truck" in American English is often (usually?) palatal or at least post-alveolar rather than alveolar, and its release is often (usually?) strongly affricated.  And in some pronunciations at least, the /t/ and the /r/ are completely co-articulated as a sort of labialized retroflex affricate.

Now playing at Pier 17 in New York, "Bodies… The Exhibition".

Visitors literate in Chinese were welcomed to the exhibit in a particularly ghoulish way:

It is traditional for readers of The Daily Telegraph to write letters to their editor saying how "appalled" they are by the terrible abuse the English language suffers daily. One little neologism, one split infinitive or other such stupid shibboleth that's easy to spot, and they're on it like wolves, excoriating the usage and protesting that the syntactic sky is falling. Well, earlier browsers of the photo gallery that the Telegraph has put up on its website concerning the riots and looting in Tottenham (north London) over the weekend will be shocked not only by the scenes of masked looters, buildings ablaze, police cars torched, and a double-decker bus going up like a roman candle, but also by the caption under a photo of a trashed and gutted ATM lying on its side round the corner from a bank:

A looted cash machine lays down an alley

(Added a day later: I've been surprised that the Telegraph hasn't yet changed the caption. When CNN wrote that clues to the earth's future may lay in the past, they changed it soon after Language Log commented on it. The Daily Telegraph's people clearly don't read Language Log.)

In advance of the fifth and last season of The Wire, HBO released a documentary-like special called "The Last Word". The very first line is from an interview with series protagonist Dominic West, who says: "What makes The Wire so amazing is its level of authenticity." (Watch the first part of the special here.)

Even now, after having re-watched the entire series several times, I'm floored by the irony of that line, spoken in West's native British dialect (born in Sheffield, but of Irish descent). West plays Detective James "Jimmy" McNulty of the Baltimore Police Department, and McNulty is a very American character: breaking all the rules in a very selfish (but also self-destructive) way, all in the name of some greater good (doing "real police" work and catching the bad guys). So how authentic can the show be, if this very American character is played by a Brit?

Last Sunday, Rebecca Fu went to a Cantonese restaurant called Xǐ yùn lái dà jiǔdiàn 喜運來大酒店 (Happy Fortune Arrives Grand Hotel — actually a modest establisment) in Manhattan's Chinatown.  When she saw the following entry on the menu, she had no idea what it was:  xiāngjiān shìde 香煎士的.  The xiāngjiān 香煎 was not a problem; it means simply "fried" or "pan fried".  But, even though she's a graduate of Peking University, Rebecca drew a complete blank on shìde 士的.  The characters seem to mean "scholar's", but "fried scholar's" just doesn't make sense.  It was only when Rebecca asked the waiter how to pronounce 士的 in Cantonese — whereupon he said "si6 dik1"– that she understood what 士的 meant.

This morning on the radio, I heard this from Therese Madden of FIT:

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"We are Food Justice…"

That's just one of the chants heard on the lawn outside of the Independence Visitor Center on a recent Saturday afternoon. The hot sun did nothing to damper the enthusiasm of the 120 young people, mostly between the ages of 15 and 20.

There's been a fair amount of media interest in a recent study suggesting that dyslexics are worse than controls at (certain kinds of) speaker recognition. This is an interesting study in itself, which is why it made it into Science. But I'm just as interested in its uptake in the popular press, which mostly ranged from "missing the point" to "catastrophic confusion" (and you may not be surprised to learn where on the spectrum the BBC's coverage landed, alas). I'll discuss the study itself here, and then take up the press coverage in another post.

Raymond Zhong writes from Hong Kong:

I'm wondering if I might bother you with a slightly trifling Chinese question.  The name of the fermented tea, 普洱, is pronounced "bo lei" in Cantonese.  (I'm not sure that's a correct romanization.  I'm still just learning Cantonese myself!)  But the character 洱 in every other instance has the same pronunciation as 耳 ("yi"), not 里 ("lei").  Do you know why this might be?

An old argument, in today's Get Fuzzy:

Fans of noun piles will enjoy the recent blog post by Mike Pope, a technical editor at Microsoft, "Fun (or not) with noun stacks." Mike shares a few of the lovely compound noun pileups he's encountered on the job:

• data bound control table row action links
• failed password security question answer attempts limit
• reduced minimum OS partition space available requirement

Mike goes on to explain why he thinks these problematic constructions continue to crop up in technical writing, driven by imperatives of terseness and concision at the expense of comprehensibility. He also gives helpful advice for untangling technical noun piles into something more user-friendly. That's all well and good, but you have to wonder just how deeply enmeshed in nerdview a writer must be to produce a whopper like "failed password security question answer attempts limit."

Kira Simon-Kennedy wrote to me from Beijing that she is chaperoning 30 French high school students on their first trip to China to learn Mandarin.

Yesterday afternoon, the French students were trying to decipher the following banner at a bus stop:  "没有共产党, 没有新中国."  Most of the students have already taken a couple years of lessons, so they could be classed as having reached intermediate level.  They got as far in their interpretation of the sign on the banner as "There is no collective __, there is no new China."  Not bad for intermediate level learners, but the banner remained a mystery to them, if only at the lexical level because they didn't know what 共产党 meant.  However, when Kira told the students that 共产党 meant Communist Party, they were all the more puzzled.  "Are they allowed to say that ('there is no Communist Party')?" one student asked.  "Isn't that really dangerous to deny the existence of the Party in public?"

The students thought that someone had the nerve to buy a public ad to tell the world:  "There is no Communist Party, there is no New China" — superficially that's what the sign on the banner seemed to be saying.  The close grammatical parallelism of the two clauses only made such an interpretation seem all the more certain.

Reader Sarah C pointed out an interesting turn of phrase in Jordan K. Turgeon, "Myths About Memory", The Huffington Post 8/3/2011:

According to previous research, when defendants wrongly committed of a crime were later exonerated by DNA testing, the primary evidence in the original case often came from an eyewitness. [emphasis added]

(Obligatory screenshot here…)

I got a message from a former teacher who said her friend had sent her my article about Strunk and White and it had stimulated her to ask me the following question:

For 31 years, this is the rule I taught to all of my elementary school students: do not put a comma before "because." Since I noticed that you did so at least twice in your article, I am wondering if I taught the students incorrectly (I hope not) or rather if Scots follow another rule (I hope so). I'd really like to know.

Oh, dear. The problem was not how to answer the question; the problem was how to do so kindly and gently. I did not do well enough