Language Log

Geoff Pullum summarizes Keith Chen's view of "The Effect of Language on Economic Behavior" as follows ("Keith Chen, Whorfian economist", 2/9/2012):

Chen […] thinks that if your language has clear grammatical future tense marking […], then you and your fellow native speakers have a dramatically increased likelihood of exhibiting high rates of obesity, smoking, drinking, debt, and poor pension provision. And conversely, if your language uses present-tense forms to express future time reference […], you and your fellow speakers are strikingly more likely to have good financial planning for retirement and sensible health habits. It is as if grammatical marking of the difference between the present and the future insulates you from seeing that the two are coterminous so you should plan ahead. Using present-tense forms for future time reference, on the other hand, encourages you to see that the future is just more of the present, and thus encourages you to put money in a 401(k).

Geoff notes that "Chen's evidence on the lifestyle indicators comes from massive amounts of hard data, and his mathematical analysis is serious". But in addition to expressing some qualms about the linguistic data, Geoff worries that the large number of linguistic traits and the large number of lifestyle and other cultural traits might give rise to spurious connections:

I also worry that it is too easy to find correlations of this kind, and we don't have any idea just how easy until a concerted effort has been made to show that the spurious ones are not supportable. For example, if we took "has (vs. does not have) pharyngeal consonants", or "uses (vs. does not use) close front rounded vowels", would we find correlations there too?

I have similar concerns; but I believe that I can explain and justify my worries without looking at any real data at all. There are two qualitative facts about the world that make it especially easy to fool ourselves about quantitative connections of this kind.

Today's crash blossom likely involves multiple aborted landings:

Romney wins mask lingering questions about his candidacy

Since the word wins occurs much more often as a verb than as a noun, you have a good excuse if you needed to take several runs at this one. Just what exactly did Romney win? A rubber Ronald Reagan mask? A mask-lingering contest? The right to ask or answer questions about lingering masks? It takes some untangling of the parser to get to the intended reading where Romney wins is the compound noun subject of the verb phrase mask lingering questions about his candidacy.

Bad enough as a headline, but CNN's website has a nasty setup. By the time you've finally sorted out the main headline, you then have to contend with the "Breaking News" headline in the embedded video:

News is leaking out about DSM-5, the new edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the central reference book of mental illnesses for the psychiatric profession, due to be published in May 2013. Journalists who have been delving into the details of its proposed new listings (it is up for comment by the medical community at the moment) are finding rich pickings in jargon-encapsulated official names for new mental conditions. I think my vote for new illness name of the week has to go to disruptive mood dysregulation disorder. This would be the new DSM-5 term for temper tantrums. Is your child (or indeed, your domestic partner) sicker than you thought?

Mitt Romney has gotten a certain amount of flak for this phrase in his recent speech at CPAC (alternative video here; prepared text here):

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My- my state was a leading indicator of what liberals will be trying to do across the country and are trying to do right now. And I fought against against long odds in a deep blue state, but I was a severely conservative Republican governor.

Thus Erick Erickson at redstate.com complained:

What the heck is a severe conservative? The man who likes to fire people should probably fire Miriam-Webster, in addition to whoever came up with his strategy for Minnesota, Missouri, and Colorado.

A severe conservative? It sounds more like a critique of conservatives from the left than that of a conservative himself

Today's Zits:

The Simile of the Week award (it's a bit early for Simile of the Year) goes to Matt Taibbi, who in a spectacularly delicious piece of political feature-writing described observing the Republican party's primary process as "like watching a cruel experiment involving baboons, laughing gas and a forklift." As Alice said about the Jabberwocky poem in Through the Looking Glass, "somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas–only I don't exactly know what they are!"

Mediate Metrics ("Objectively Measuring Media Bias") explains that

Based in Wheaton, IL, Mediate Metrics LLC is a privately held start-up founded by technology veteran and entrepreneur Barry Hardek. Our goal is to cultivate knowledgeable consumers of political news by objectively measuring media “slant” — news which contains either an embedded statements of bias (opinion) or an elements of editorial influence (factual content that reflects positively or negatively on U.S. political parties).

Mediate Metrics’ core technology is based on a custom machine classifier designed specifically for this application, and developed based on social science best practices with recognized leaders in the field of text analysis. Today,  text mining systems are primarily used as general purpose marketing tools for extracting insights from platforms such as like Twitter and Facebook, or from other large electronic databases. In contrast, the Mediate Metrics classifier was specifically devised to identify statements of bias (opinions) and influence (facts that reflects positively or negatively) on U.S. political parties from news program transcripts.

(The links to Wikipedia articles on "social science" and "text mining" are original to their page.)

These days, newly published books often get promoted with video trailers, and there's one that just came out for Michael Erard's Babel No More: The Search for the World's Most Extraordinary Language Learners. In keeping with the book's theme of hyperpolyglottery, Erard rounded up speakers of different languages to create a multilingual reading of a story told in his book. (Direct link here — that's me at 1:05.)

And there's a contest! Here are the details from the trailer description:

How good are you at identifying spoken languages? I asked friends from all over to say one line of a story about Cardinal Giuseppe Mezzofanti, and all the lines are assembled here. Send an email message with 1) the name of each language and 2) in the order in which they appear to info@babelnomore.com, and I'll put your name in a drawing for a signed copy of Babel No More. Deadline is February 23.

I'll keep the comments closed until the deadline to keep anyone from divulging the names of the languages. Good luck!

Language Log has been asked more than once to comment on an unpublished working paper by Yale economist Keith Chen that is discussed in various online sources, e.g. here and here, and most recently David Berreby's post at Big Think. Briefly, Chen's paper alleges that a certain simple grammatical property of languages correlates robustly with indicators of profligacy and lack of prudence, as revealed in the speakers' lack of concern for their financial and medical prospects. Language Log does not really want to comment on an unpublished working paper about language by a non-linguist that is not written for publication and has not had the benefit of serious critical attention from academic referees. But neither does it want to disappoint its readers by clamming up. So I will make a few remarks about Chen's work, and the journalistic reporting that it is beginning to attract. I will not be very rigorous; but as I will explain, it is too early for that.

The new anglophone film of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo directed by David Fincher is really superb. I don't know when I've seen such a gripping and well-told suspense mystery. And there's a wonderful piece of less-is-more (compare with the impressive example of absence of language that I described in my post about The Ides of March) when Lisbeth says she is reading Mikael's notes on his computer. "They're encrypted!" says Mikael indignantly. And Lisbeth raises her eyes for a half-second withering look and says, "Please." That syllable transmits a whole paragraph of exposition about her skill in the hacking arts. You can see in the way she says that single word that she is so skilled she thinks standard encryption is for babies and that Mikael is one.

A couple of days ago, Victor Mair wrote about some provocative behavior on the part of "Kŏng Qìngdōng 孔庆东, associate professor in the Chinese Department at Peking University, who also just happens to be the 73rd generation descendant of Confucius (Kǒng Fūzǐ 孔夫子 ; Kǒng Qiū 孔丘), or at least he claims to be a descendant of Confucius."

In the comments, Victor names someone else who he believes to be a true descendant of Confucius, and notes that there is some doubt about Kŏng Qìngdōng's claim to this status.

Well, I'd like to come to Kŏng Qìngdōng's defense, at least on the specific and limited question of whether he is descended from Confucius. My standing to make this argument is based on the fact that I too am descended from Confucius. And I can prove it mathematically.

"The pit in Thomas Friedman's stomach" (5/23/2011) is back:

To observe the democratic awakenings happening in places like Egypt, Syria and Russia is to travel with a glow in your heart and a pit in your stomach. […]

But that pit in the stomach comes from knowing that while the protests are propelled by deep aspirations for dignity, justice and self-determination, such heroic emotions have to compete with other less noble impulses and embedded interests in these societies.
[Thomas Friedman, "Freedom at 4 Below", NYT 2/7/2012]

That was the headline on the front page of the Saturday, January 21 Dōngfāng rìbào 東方日報 (Oriental Daily): "Xiānggǎng rén shì gǒu" 香港人是狗 (Hong Kong people are dogs). See here and here (with video).