Language Log

Reader MP writes:

A question came up at work about the syntax of something that struck some of us as odd.

The context is fairly technical – it’s one of a series of captions for a diagram. The full set of captions is (approximately) this:

1. System admin creates role
2. System admin sets role permissions
3. Developer requests to assume role
4. [ProductX] returns role session credentials
5. Developer updates folder using role credentials

Reader JTB writes:

Our daughter Sophia just started kindergarten. Last week I asked her to tell me about school. Our conversation went like this:

Me: Tell me something interesting about kindergarten today, honey.
Sophia: Well, there's the pleasant legions.
Me: The pleasant legions?
Sophia: Yeah, it's like a prayer to the flag.

Randall Munroe's latest xkcd strip:

Alex Koppelman, "The Unheralded", The New Yorker 9/12/2012:

For the past three years, Brendon Ayanbadejo, a backup linebacker and standout special-teams player for the [Baltimore] Ravens, has been advocating for same-sex marriage—writing about it, talking about it, appearing as one of the stars of a video campaign launched by backers of a measure to legalize it in Maryland. It’s not his day job, but he’s gotten enough attention for it that an anti-gay-marriage Maryland state legislator wrote to the owner of the Ravens and demanded that he shut Ayanbadejo up.

The legislator was Emmert C. Burns Jr., and his 8/29/2012 letter, on the letterhead of the Maryland House of Delegates, stated that

As a Delegate to the Maryland General Assembly and a Baltimore Ravens Football fan, I find it inconceivable that one of your players, Mr. Brendon Ayanbadejo, would publicly endorse Same-Sex marriage […] Many of your fans are opposed to such a view and feel it has no place in a sport that is strictly for pride, entertainment and excitement. […]

I am requesting that you take the necessary action, as a National Football Franchise Owner, to inhibit such expressions from your employee and that he be ordered to cease and desist such injurious actions. I know of no other NFL player who has done what Mr. Ayambadejo is doing.

The two mutually reinforcing ulterior motives that we Language Log writers share are (i) to have a bit of fun writing about language in ways that are not necessarily all that serious, and (ii) to slide in little bits of genuine public education about the cognitive and linguistic sciences to which we devote our time when we're at our day jobs. I have the same twin motives in the writing I do for Lingua Franca on the website of The Chronicle of Higher Education. Often, being me, I let the fun side predominate, and there's a lot more of humorous hyperbole and (let's face it) outright fantasy than there is of the cognitive and linguistic sciences. While Victor Mair sweats over sheets of Chinese characters and Mark Liberman generates graphs to see if the results of refereed papers can be replicated from reprocessed raw data, I just play. There's no linguistics at all in a piece like "I Wish I'd Said That", though it is sort of basically about language; and something similar is true for quite a few other posts listed on my reference page of Lingua Franca posts. But in today's piece, for once, everything I say is completely true, and I actually try to teach a tiny bit about syntactic ambiguity. And my reward was swift and cold: the compilers of the daily email newsletter through which The Chronicle points its subscribers to what they can find today on the web refused to include a pointer to my piece.

A few days ago, I wrote a post called "The Westernization of Chinese", in which I linked to a virtuoso video performance by "Miss Lin".  Steve Kass asked, "Has anyone transcribed this whole thing?"  I don't think so, but with the help of Sophie Wei and Chia-hui Lu, who always wish me a good day / evening / morning / weekend / mood, I am pleased to present the complete transcription (in pinyin and Chinese characters) and English translation of Miss Lin's performance.  Even those who do not read Chinese will immediately apprehend the extraordinary degree to which English is mixed in with Mandarin.

Preparing this transcription and translation was a long and arduous task, and I'm sure that there are still some imperfections, for which I ask the forgiveness of Language Log readers.  At least the transcription and translation will provide a good idea of the nature of the language employed by Miss Hold.

Each segment of the monologue consists of three parts:

a. characters plus English

b. pinyin transcription

c. English translation

When she speaks English, all three components are identical.

"Grammar Fail!" wrote someone on Facebook beside a picture showing the printed words "Milk it for all it's worth." But Fiona Hanington pointed out to Language Log that it's not necessarily a fail. It's the wrong spelling if worth is the noun meaning "value", so the intended meaning was "Milk it for all the worth (= value) that it has." The genitive pronoun its is not spelled with an apostrophe; the right spelling would be Milk it for all its worth. However, there's another meaning, where worth is an adjective: it could be intended to mean "Milk it for all that it is worth." And there the apostrophe would be correct (indeed, required): Milk it for all it's worth. (English is loaded with little gotcha things of this sort, isn't it?) Since both mean roughly the same thing (they put it in different ways, but it's hard to imagine one of the meanings making a true claim where the other didn't), Fiona is right to note that this is one of the very rare cases where it's and its are both correct in the same context with the same meaning. You won't find many of those.

From the After Deadline blog of Phil Corbett, style guru at the New York Times, comes this 1924 letter to the editor calling for a Congressional investigation into the imperiled state of the English subjunctive:

Reading Geoff Pullum's post about Harold E. Palmer's 1935 Gilbert & Sullivan adaptation, I wondered about the spelling of "vocal chords" in the passage

I wish to call attention to the tactics and the strategy
Exemplified in all the work produced by Dr. Chatterji,
To ascertain what happens at the back of people's pharynxes
And analyse the vocal chords in artificial larynxes.

The "vocal cords" are so named from the resemblance of the vocal ligaments to strings or cords, so I wondered whether the "vocal chords" spelling might be an antique eggcorn. The answer turns out to be "yes", but with a twist: cord and chord participated in a rare reciprocal swap.

Supposing Mitt Romney cancelled all of his appearances and meetings and went missing for a week. Furthermore, neither the Republican National Committee nor the Secret Service would make any statements or answer any questions concerning his whereabouts. Naturally, we would all be alarmed and wondering what had happened to the Republican candidate for the presidency of the United States of America. But imagine, if you can, that it would be illegal to search for Romney's name on the internet. All searches for "Romney" and "Mitt Romney" would be decisively blocked by the United States Government, and one might well be arrested for complaining about this. Out of frustration, citizens would search for "Room Knee eh?", "Glove ROM leg joint", and the like.

I was unaware until today (thanks to Paul Carter for the link) that at the Congress Dinner of the 2nd International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, in London on the 25th of July 1935, the assembled phoneticians heard toasts to the King and to the phonetic sciences, and a recitation, and a phonetic experiment, and Daniel Jones's performance of Chaucer's "Pardoner's Tale" in the original Middle English, and a demonstration of sign language, and finally the distinguished phonetician and linguist Harold E. Palmer took to the floor and performed a spectacular song that began:

I wish to be the pattern of a modern phonetician
To know the sounds of languages, and also in addition
The sum of their varieties, ancestral or collateral
Arranged upon the triangle, the square or quadrilateral . . .

You can read (or sing) the lyrics in full on this page. The tune, of course, is Gilbert and Sullivan's "Modern Major General". I just wish I'd been there. But I was born several decades too late.

Emma Little, "Fish foot spa virus bombshell", The Sun, 10/18/2011.

[h/t John Coleman]

W. Tecumseh Fitch, Angela D. Friederici and Peter Hagoort, Eds., "Pattern perception and computational complexity",  Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, July 2012:

Humans around the world are fascinated by visual and auditory patterns, and the perception of complex iterative, hierarchical and recursive patterns, by humans and animals, has become an important research focus. Current hypotheses highlight key cognitive mechanisms that may underlie unusual human abilities such as language, music, and the visual arts. Research addressing this overarching theme has been hindered by the variety of disciplines involved, and a diversity of theoretical frameworks. Recently, an overarching framework has been sought in formal language theory, a component of the mathematical theory of computation which focuses on abstract patterns of varying complexity, and the computational algorithms that generate or process them. Formal language theory provides a comprehensive and explicit system for describing patterns, and combined with artificial grammar learning, has fueled an explosion of work on the biology and neuroscience of pattern perception in both language and other domains. This special issue combines comprehensive reviews, tutorials and opinion papers with new research on humans and animals, providing a summary of the current state of the art. With a focus on neuroscientific and comparative animal work, it provides a unique overview of this new and exciting area of cognitive science, and a glimpse of things to come.