Language Log

A recent article in Science Daily has the headline `Linguist makes sensational claim: English is a Scandinavian language'. The claim in question is Jan Terje Faarlund's conclusion that `English is in reality a Scandinavian language' — that `Old English quite simply died out while Scandinavian survived, albeit strongly influenced of course by Old English.' The core of Faarlund's argument is that, in addition to many words that originally belonged to Norwegian and/or Danish, English has syntactic structures that are Scandinavian rather than West Germanic in origin. Specifically, Faarlund argues that `wherever English differs syntactically from the other Western Germanic languages — German, Dutch, Frisian — it has the same structure as the Scandinavian languages.' Faarlund then gives a few examples of syntactic parallelism between English and Scandinavian [that is, the Germanic languages of Scandinavia] and concludes that `the only reasonable explanation' for this parallelism `is that English is in fact a Scandinavian language, and a continuation of the Norwegian-Danish language which was used in England during the Middle Ages.'

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, as the saying goes. The evidence cited in the article is nowhere near extraordinary. Assuming that he is quoted accurately, there are some serious problems with Faarlund's claims.

I felt that someone ought to report for you Language Log readers on the latest Bond movie, Skyfall. So after a hard eight hours of academic work in my office last Saturday, I selflessly continued my working day into overtime by walking from Brown University to the Providence Place Mall, there to attend a screening of Skyfall in Imax format. (You will recall that I have reported on movies for Language Log before, e.g. here and here and here and here and here.)

Under the heading "the benefits of paired em dashes, part 57", Mark Swofford sent in the following screen shot from yesterday's New York Times:

Back in 2009, Heidi Harley and I wrote a few inter-related posts looking at the linguistics job market and how it compares with the distribution of new PhD theses. Since then, people have occasionally written to me (and probably Heidi too) about updating the posts with new numbers. I've been reluctant to do that because I've always been worried that my data-gathering methods (scraping Linguist List and ProQuest) were problematic. (It would be great if Linguist List released analyses based on its internal database of jobs ads!)

I'm pleased to report that Stephanie Shih and Rebecca Starr have done the work for me, and they did a careful job indeed. Here's the summary picture; below the fold, I've included their notes on where the data came from. Comments are open so that people can add their own analyses.

Thanks Stephanie and Rebecca!

Why does Sir Paul McCartney's 1979 song "Wonderful Christmastime" (it was playing just now in a store I had to visit) make my teeth itch? It is catchy, and perfectly crafted to sound Christmassy, and I admire Sir Paul's musicianship and taste, and in every way his song should be placed in the upper quartile of the Christmas music you hear in every retail outlet now that December's here in the USA. (Think about it: What it's competing with is "Santa Claus is Coming to Town", and "Jingle Bell Rock", and numerous other songs that make you want to think again about the merits of Vogon poetry.) So what is it that bugs me? I think I've figured it out. Misplaced adverb.

A post by Joe Fruehwald ("To take "Zombie Nouns" seriously, you must've had your brains eaten", Val Systems 11/27/2012) motivated me to take a second look at Helen Sword's ideas about style, which I discussed earlier in "The Redemption of Zombie Nouns", 7/26/2012. In particular, I decided to take her "Writer's Diet Test" out for a spin.

For test material, I choose a few selections from E.B. White, co-author of The Elements of Style. Although we've occasionally expressed skeptical and even negative opinions about The Elements of Style, I have nothing but admiration for E.B. White as a writer. And so I was distressed to learn that Ms. Sword consistently judges his writing to be "Flabby". [Update — In fairness I should note that she gives her own writing the same evaluation…]

I'm about to leave for Hong Kong, and the travel agency that arranged my tickets sent me an email with reservation details that contained various other helpful notes, including this one:

DOT Announcement Regarding Aircraft Disinsection