Language Log

In "Unknown Language #7", I described the case of a woman in a refugee center in Kathmandu, Nepal who spoke in an unidentifiable tongue and who wrote in an odd mixture of languages and scripts.  The post generated a large number of comments (173 at last count), with a tremendous amount of helpful information and analysis being shared by Language Log readers.

Now I have just heard from Son Ha Dinh, who first brought this case to my attention, that — with the help of Language Log readers and the diligent efforts of his colleagues — the identity of the woman has been determined.

Yesterday afternoon, I got this interesting email message:

The departure time for US Airways flight # 3314, from Detroit to Philadelphia on May 11 at 6:05 PM has changed. The flight is delayed due to air traffic at the destination airport. Your estimated time of Departure is 6:05 PM.

Just now I was washing breakfast dishes and mentally composing a Facebook post, which started out “Last night was not a good night for Orioles – Red Sox – anti-Yankees fans! The three way tie for first place got broken in the worst direction! Us and our Red Sox buddies …” and I forget how that sentence was going to end, because I was caught up short noticing how it began. I’ve known about the ongoing spread of the ‘accusative’ pronouns forever – Sapir wrote about it (as a case of “language drift”), and Ed Klima, one of my favorite grad school professors, had worked on it and talked with us about it (we tried to figure out what kinds of rules would make ‘us’ and ‘me’ not get nominative in conjoined subjects while "I" and "we" as simple subjects are obligatorily marked nominative, and discussed similarities with French ‘disjunctive’ pronoun ‘moi’ vs. clitic subject 'je'). And it was the source of my oft-repeated anecdote about my son Morriss in 4^th grade asking me to proofread a composition he had just written – it started out ‘Seth and I went to the mall’ and he pointed to ‘Seth and I’, and said to me “That’s how you spell “me and Seth”, right?”.

But none of that had prepared me for having it emerge in my own dialect. But there it was. And when I think about putting “We and our Red Sox buddies” instead, it sounds over-formal, doesn’t fit in the context of baseball buddies. So it looks like “us and …” has made the move from passive recognition to becoming an active part of my (most?) colloquial register, at least the baseball buddies register.

A topic which I have raised here and elsewhere a number of times is that of Sinitic topolects and languages (www.sino-platonic.org/complete/spp029_chinese_dialect.pdf), and I have also called attention to the increasing domination of Mandarin in education and the media.  Even native speakers within China sometimes don't appreciate quite how varied the Sinitic group of languages can be.  People often say that someone can move from one valley to the next, or one village to the next, and just not be able to make themselves understood.  But until you've been in that situation yourself, it doesn't really hit home.  Before long, I'll post on Shanghainese and will provide audio recordings that will demonstrate clearly just how different it is from Modern Standard Mandarin (MSM).  There are countless other varieties of "Chinese" that are just as different from each other as Shanghainese (or Cantonese or Taiwanese, for that matter) are from MSM.

This marvelous device is the pride of Hang Fung Industrial Co. Ltd of Shantou / Swatow, Guangdong Province, PRC.  Here's a basic introduction to the tool:

Useful assistant tool Can helps some arthritis, the waist, the knee, the pregnant woman and also The luo river to solve the question. Multifunctional tool Multifunction tool for the accident situation security, reliable for the Escapes from the broken glass window and the safety belt cut off.

This information is provided under "Product Details" at this website.

Looking at the picture of this enigmatic tool and carefully reading over the explanation of its supposed uses only left me deeply perplexed, so I had no choice but to go in pursuit of yet one more Chinglish snark.

A month ago, I posted an "SOS for DARE," detailing the impending financial threat faced by the Dictionary of American Regional English, a national treasure of lexicography. At the time it appeared that the College of Letters and Sciences at the University of Wisconsin, where DARE is based, would be unable to provide support to offset the loss of federal and private grant money. But now there's finally some good news out of Madison, in the form of new funds from the University and external gifts.

On the web site of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, in the "Early Edition" section, is an article by Mark Pagel, Quentin D. Atkinson, Andreea S. Calude, and Andrew Meade: "Ultraconserved words point to deep language ancestry across Eurasia". The authors claim that a set of 23 especially frequent words can be used to establish genetic relationships of languages that go way, way back — too far back for successful application of the standard historical linguistics methodology for establishing language families, the Comparative Method.  The idea is that, once you've determined that these 23 words are super-stable (because they're used so often), you don't need systematic sound/meaning correspondences at all; finding resemblances among these words across several language families is enough to prove that the languages are related, descended with modification from a single parent language (a.k.a. proto-language).

This is the latest of many attempts to get around the unfortunate fact that systematic sound/meaning correspondences in related languages decay so much over time that even if the words survive, they are unrecognizable as cognates (sets of words descended from the same word in the parent language).   This means that word sets that have similar meanings and also sound similar after 15,000 years are unlikely to share those similar sounds as the result of inheritance from a common ancestor; if they were really such ancient cognates, they would almost surely not look much alike at all. (See "Scrabble tips for time travelers", 2/26/2009, for a discussion of some earlier work.)

I'm not qualified to judge Pagel et al.'s statistics, although I remain skeptical of their basic claim that words that haven't been replaced often in a handful of language families with vastly different time depths can be predicted to be super-stable in all language families. But there are problems with their premises in this article, in which their goal is to compare words from seven different language families and to show that, according to their statistics, all seven should be grouped together into a single super-family. I think they have a serious garbage in, garbage out problem.

"Disney files to trademark Mexican holiday, Dia de Los Muertos", Stitchkingdom 5/6/2013; "Disney files to trademark 'Dia de Los Muertos' for movie-themed products", 89.3 KPCC 5/7/2013.

Once you've written down your responses to the dozen audio clips in yesterday's perception experiment, you can check them against the truth, and also against the transcripts generated by Google's automatic captioning system, both given below.

Here are a dozen short audio clips from a lecture, stripped from YouTube, and re-encoded after editing as mp3 files. Despite being handicapped by this marginal sound quality, and even more by the lack of context, you will probably be able to transcribe them fairly well. Please do so, and retain your results for discussion tomorrow morning (where "tomorrow" = Wednesday 5/8/2013).

Steve Kleinedler spotted this crash blossom on the home page of the New York Times today: "G.O.P. Critics of Immigration Bill Plan Offensive." Screenshotted for posterity:

The article itself has the less interesting headline, "G.O.P. Opponents Plan Immigration Bill Attack."

David W. Donnell has brought this signage from Chinatown, NYC to my attention:

"From Forsythe Street." (VHM: that should be "Forsyth Street.")

Allison Flood, "Academics chastised for bad grammar in letter attacking Michael Gove", The Guardian 5/3/2013:

It was a blistering attack on Michael Gove for eroding educational standards and "dumbing down" teaching. But now the 100 academics who wrote an open letter in March criticising the education secretary's revised national curriculum have had their own accuracy questioned. Their letter has been dubbed "simply illiterate" by the judges of the inaugural Bad Grammar awards.

The professors, from universities including Nottingham Trent, Leeds Metropolitan, Oxford and Bristol, had warned that Gove's national curriculum proposal meant children would be forced to learn "mountains of detail" for English, maths and science without understanding it. But according to the Idler Academy Bad Grammar awards, they made a string of grammatical blunders including using adjectives as adverbs and mixing singulars with plurals.