Language Log

In other language news today (Language Log tries to bring you all the important linguistic news of the day), an Australian snack food company has won the right to trademark the name Nuckin Futs for a nutty snack to be sold to adults in bars.

[This is a guest post by Bob Ladd.]

Following the wreck of the Costa Concordia last weekend (one Italian comic suggested it should be renamed Costa Codardia, where codardia means "cowardice"), I've been temporarily taken on as a correspondent by Language Log's Italian desk in order to report on a few linguistic aspects of the already notorious telephone call between the Coast Guard captain De Falco and the ship's much criticized captain Schettino.

A couple of months ago, I pointed out that entertainment industry folks are tracking Justin Bieber's popularity using automated sentiment analysis, and I used that as a leaping-off point for some comments about language technology and social media. Here I am again, but suddenly it's not just Justin's bank account we're talking about, it's the future of the country.

As the Republican primary season marches along, a novel use of technology in politics is evolving even more rapidly, and arguably in a more interesting way, than the race itself: the analysis of social media to take the pulse of public opinion about candidates. In addition to simply tracking mentions about political candidates, people are starting to suggest that volume and sentiment analysis on tweets (and other social media, but Twitter is the poster child here) might produce useful information about people's viewpoints, or even predict the success of political campaigns. Indeed, it's been suggested that numbers derived from Twitter traffic might be better than polls, or at least better than pundits. (Is that much of a bar to set? Never mind.)

Yesterday's Partially Clips:

This bit of social commentary comes from the Latino Rebels website. Like many brilliant ads, its impact is multiplied by the fact that, even after you've had the Aha! instant of "getting it", your mind continues to unspool a series of relevant inferences.

I bet if you sat down and started listing them, you could easily reel off a good dozen or so.

We'd better get used to it; pinyin romanizations will be showing up in English with increasing regularity. For example, someone who catches a glimpse of this sign may think that it has something to do with writing instruments:

I can't say I share Mark and Geoff's agitation about the Jeremiad about the disappearance of the apostrophe in the Daily Mail. True, the tone of these things is enormously tiresome, with the outrage camped up just enough so the writer can deter the charge of taking himself too seriously. (It's like karaoke singers who clown and mug as they sing songs by the Carpenters that they really cherish.) But these complaints actually leave one with a very reassuring sense of complacency about the state of English. If the greatest linguistic threats we're facing are things like the confusion of prone and supine and a deteriorating grasp on the lie/lay distinction, then we'll probably muddle through. It's like hearing someone warn of grave domestic security threats and then learning that he's mostly concerned about Canadian sturgeon-poaching on the US side of Lake Huron.

I have asserted that the weird thing about the 27th letter of the alphabet, the apostrophe, is that it never actually represents a sound (see also here). Eric Smith has pointed out to me that if you take the e of fishes to represent the second vowel phoneme of that word, then you might want to say that in fish's the apostrophe represents that same vowel phoneme. Maybe that would be best. But I had been thinking of 's as being a representation of the whole genitive-suffix morpheme, which shares all its pronunciation with the plural-suffix morpheme, but not as giving a sound-by-sound spelling out of it. Notice that the genitive of cat is cat's, where there is no second vowel sound for the apostrophe to represent. It is possible that Eric's view is better, which would mean that the apostrophe sometimes represents nothing (as in don't or he'll) but sometimes represents a reduced unstressed vowel ([ə] or [ɪ]). But notice (important point!), this isn't a question about what the facts are. Statements about which letters in a spelling symbolized which sounds are theoretical proposals. The issue here is about whether Eric defends a better theory of the sound-spelling relationship than I was assuming. It's not about what the facts of English are, because Eric and I agree on those.

Mark's transatlantic reaction to the linguistic story of the week in the UK — the news that a major bookstore chain has changed its name from Waterstone’s to Waterstones (shock horror scandal probe!) — was simply to mock a ridiculously over-written barbarians-at-the-gates piece from the Daily Mail. Meanwhile, over here in the UK, I was listening to one of the stupidest discussions of language I've ever heard on the radio (and I've heard some beauties), one that stands a very good chance of placing as dumbest of 2012, early in the year though it is.

Aspects of the Finnish language happen to have come up a couple of times in recent weeks on Language Log ("Rare Finnish Crash Blossom", 1/13/2012; "It's baaack . . . and upside-down!", 1/2/2012). Lauri Karttunen, from whom I learned a bit about Finnish when I was a grad student, sent in these comments:

I did not know the technical term "crash blossom."  The equivalent term in Finnish is "kielikukkanen" (language flower). They are not rare in Finnish. The monthly "Suomen Kuvalehti" always has a couple in their column "Jyviä ja akanoita" (Seeds and Chaff).

Or should that be apostrolypse? Anyhow, it's imminent, according to Lindsay Johns, "Waterstones: O apostrophe, where art thou?...", Daily Mail 1/13/2012:

So another one bites the dust. Yesterday the high street bookshop chain Waterstone’s announced that, as part of its re-branding, it has decided to move with the times and officially change its name to Waterstones, sans apostrophe. O tempora, o mores! […]

But it’s only an apostrophe, I hear you say. True, but here’s why we should care. You see, it starts with an apostrophe. Next, people will think that it is perfectly acceptable to omit a full stop at the end of a sentence. Then the comma and the semi colon will be unceremoniously dispatched to the grammatical dustbin.

And with them, meaning will be lost and our ability for articulation of the finer points of thought. Our language will be diminished, not augmented. In short, today the apostrophe, tomorrow the English language as we know it.

Make no mistake. These are dark times for the English language. The barbarians are at the gates. Right now, marauding grammatical Goths are encircling our linguistic Rome. We must act now to prevent disaster. We must valiantly defend the apostrophe against those who seek to attack her. We must don our grammatical armour and man the linguistic barricades, as an onslaught of grammatical philistinism will soon [be] upon us.

This one isn't ambiguous, as far as I can tell — it just doesn't mean what the headline writer wanted it to mean: "Buried Alive Fiance Gets 20 Years in Prison", ABC News 1/13/2012.

MM writes:

I would like to hear your take on the following:

In episode 8/2 of House, he recounts his prison experience to his colleagues: I wasn't raped. Well, perhaps I was raped, but not raped raped. Well, perhaps I was raped raped, but not raped raped raped.

This is not a simple intensifier (as in yes, yes, or really, really), but rather it seems to say: I'm not kidding, this is the real thing. Then the scriptwriter mocks it by embarking on an infinite series.