Language Log

I was surprised, yesterday, to get a thoughtful letter of resignation from a LLOG commenter. To preserve the anonymity of his pseudonymity, I'll call him 'X'. Mr. X's stated reason for leaving was that

LL is becoming far too centered on my babblings.  Defending my own crudity is becoming tiresome, time-consuming, and harmful to others – notably yourself and whoever else's good names are behind the board.  I prefer to do whatever is most helpful and appropriate – in this case I've missed that target pretty goddamned impressively.

People — especially Americans — are ignorant. This is something that Everyone Knows, because we read or hear about it from time to time in the mass media. Thus we can listen to Robin Young tell us on NPR's Here and Now that

A new survey conducted by Chicago's McCormick Tribune Freedom Museum, which has yet to open, finds that only 28 percent of Americans are able to name one of the constitutional freedoms, yet 52 percent are able to name at least two Simpsons family members.

Or we can read in the New York Times that

Diane Ravitch, an education historian […], said she was particularly disturbed by the fact that only 2 percent of 12th graders correctly answered a question concerning Brown v. Board of Education, which she called “very likely the most important decision” of the United States Supreme Court in the past seven decades.

In previous posts, I chronicled the bizarre story of how the Hangeul alphabet was chosen to be the "official" script for a language called Cia-Cia spoken by an obscure tribe in Indonesia:

• "The Hangeul Alphabet Moves beyond the Korean Peninsula"
• "Hangeul for Cia-Cia, part II"
• "Hangeul for Cia-Cia, part III"

Because the whole proposition was so iffy (a lost cause from the very beginning), I think I gave up after that.

Today's Dilbert:

Reader PH feels that the meaning of entitlement has changed from "a legitimate claim" to "an illegitimate claim", and wonders when and how and why this happened. As an example of currrent usage, he points to Philip Rucker, “Romney sees choice between ‘entitlement society’ and ‘opportunity society’”, Washington Post 12/20/2011:

Mitt Romney framed the 2012 presidential election in a speech here Tuesday night as a choice between an “entitlement society” dependent on government welfare and an “opportunity society” that enables businesses to flourish.

As I followed last month's big educational scandal in Britain, the story of the teacher who ran away with a young schoolgirl, a song was going round in my head. The obvious one (what else?): Sting's "Don't Stand So Close to Me," the last big hit by The Police back in 1980 (they recorded a moodier reprise of it in 1986). Sting's lyrics ("Young teacher, the subject // Of schoolgirl fantasy…”) are a remarkable piece of writing, telling their story in spare yet evocative phrases. But I've noticed something else: The grammar of the song's chord structure also contributes to the storytelling.

When I went to the Einstein Bros Bagels shop in Houston Hall at 7:39 a.m. this morning to get my usual sausage, egg, and cheese on a ciabatta loaf, I noticed this sign taped to the cash register:

English speakers have been verbing nouns and nouning verbs since before English was called English. Still, this kind of zero derivation (also known as "conversion") is only quasi-regular, like most other kinds of derivational morphology: it spreads word by word. And new conversions are sometimes surprising, like this one from "Red Sox Act Swiftly, Fire Valentine After One Season", AP 10/4/2012:

“This season was by far the worst we have experienced in over ten years here. Ultimately, we are all collectively responsible for the team’s performance,” Red Sox chairman Tom Werner said. “We are going to be working tirelessly to reconstruct the ballclub for 2013. We’ll be back."

“We thank Bobby for the many contributions he made and for the energy he brought each day. He is a baseball man through and through.”  [General manager Ben] Cherington, who replaced Theo Epstein last offseason, will headman the search for a replacement.

Brian Mahoney, "NBA Sets Flopping Penalties; Players May Be Fined", AP 10/3/1012:

Stop the flop.

The NBA will penalize floppers this season, fining players for repeated violations of an act a league official said Wednesday has "no place in our game."

Those exaggerated falls to the floor may fool the referees and fans during the game, but officials at league headquarters plan to take a look for themselves afterward.

Allan Metcalf has done a remarkable thing over on Lingua Franca, in the post you can see here: he has announced a contest in which readers have to think up new fake prescriptive rules ("The rule has to be a brand new one, not announced in any previous usage manual, but—and this is the hard part—it has to look venerable… a rule that appears to have been followed by careful writers all along, while being misused or ignored by careless writers"), and he's actually got his commenters doing it, and some of them are brilliant. They are actually thinking up fake prescriptive poppycock that you might almost actually believe if you didn't know better. Check it out.

There is a movement called Vietnamese2020 that aims to substantially reform the writing system by the year 2020.  The main change would be to group syllables into words.  As the advocates of this change point out, most words in Vietnamese are disyllabic (the same is true of Mandarin).  The proponents of the reform believe that, among others, it would reap the following benefits:

1. achieve greater compatibility with the needs of information processing systems

2. comport better with the findings of cognitive science

3. put the kibosh on the false notion of monosyllabism, which they say is unnatural and does not exist in real languages

Today's SMBC:

David Levary Jean-Pierre Eckmann, Elisha Moses, and Tsvi Tlusty, "Loops and Self-Reference in the Construction of Dictionaries", Phys. Rev. X 2, 031018 (2012):

ABSTRACT: Dictionaries link a given word to a set of alternative words (the definition) which in turn point to further descendants. Iterating through definitions in this way, one typically finds that definitions loop back upon themselves. We demonstrate that such definitional loops are created in order to introduce new concepts into a language. In contrast to the expectations for a random lexical network, in graphs of the dictionary, meaningful loops are quite short, although they are often linked to form larger, strongly connected components. These components are found to represent distinct semantic ideas. This observation can be quantified by a singular value decomposition, which uncovers a set of conceptual relationships arising in the global structure of the dictionary. Finally, we use etymological data to show that elements of loops tend to be added to the English lexicon simultaneously and incorporate our results into a simple model for language evolution that falls within the “rich-get-richer” class of network growth.