Language Log

[This is a guest post by Michael Cannings]

This brief news segment features a poster with a lot of interesting points packed into three short lines of text. The billboard is a traffic safety announcement by police in Kaohsiung, southern Taiwan.

[Screengrab with most of the text visible]

[This is a joint post by Eric Baković and Kai von Fintel. Much of the content of this post is also found in Kai's posts on his own blog, semantics etc.: "Lingua → Glossa" (11/2/2015) and "Lingua Roundup" (11/5/2015).]

As many readers of Language Log know by now, the editors and the entire editorial board of a major linguistics journal, Lingua, have resigned en masse, effective when their contractual obligations to their soon-to-be-erstwhile publisher, Elsevier, are concluded at the end of this calendar year. This same editorial team will re-emerge in 2016 as the editors and editorial board of Glossa, a fair Open Access journal to be published by Ubiquity Press. You can read all about it, if you haven't already, from a variety of sources linked at the end of this post.

In a comment to "An orgy of code-switching" (11/6/15), I wrote:

In connection with the ABC Chinese-English dictionary database which they wanted to buy, I had some dealings with Microsoft in China about 15 years ago. Already then, their internal language in the Beijing and Shanghai offices was English. Around the same time, I also had contact with several other major companies in China where the situation was exactly the same.

Today's SMBC:

Somewhere Leonhard Euler and Kurt Gödel are having a good laugh.

From Doctor Science, posted in a LLOG comment due to email difficulties:

Periodically, someone will write an article about how the Japanese still are inordinately fond of fax machines, such as this one by Michael Fitzpatrick from the BBC News "Technology of Fiction" section:

Not a word about kanji.

Ian Maddieson and Christophe Coupé, "Human spoken language diversity and the acoustic adaptation hyothesis", ASA 2015

Bioacousticians have argued that ecological feedback mechanisms contribute to shaping the acoustic signals of a variety of species and anthropogenic changes in soundscapes have been shown to generate modifications to the spectral envelope of bird songs. Several studies posit that part of the variation in sound structure across spoken human languages could likewise reflect adaptation to the local ecological conditions of their use. Specifically, environments in which higher frequencies are less faithfully transmitted (such as denser vegetation or higher ambient temperatures) may favor greater use of sounds characterized by lower frequencies. Such languages are viewed as “more sonorous”. This paper presents a variety of tests of this hypothesis.  

Data on segment inventories and syllable structure is taken from LAPSyD, a database on phonological patterns of a large worldwide sample of languages. Correlations are examined with measures of temperature, precipitation, vegetation, and geomorphology reflecting the mean values for the area in which each language is traditionally spoken. Major world languages, typically spoken across a range of environments, are excluded. Several comparisons show a correlation between ecological factors and the ratio of sonorant to obstruent segments in the languages examined offering support for the idea that acoustic adaptation applies to human languages.

Mark Mandel was surprised to see "shooting dead" apparently used as a noun phrase in a Guardian headline: "Two officers arrested over shooting dead of six-year-old Louisiana boy",11/7/2015. The obligatory screenshot:

Matt Anderson called my attention to a short (15:49), enigmatic 1959 Chinese film:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKYMO73hLRY

From China Miéville's Embassytown, the start of the relationship between Avice and Scile:

He’d finished the bulk of his research. It was a comparative study of a particular set of phonemes, in several different languages— and not all of one species, or one world, which made little sense to me.

“What are you looking for?” I said.

“Oh, secrets,” he said. “You know. Essences. Inherentnesses.”

“Bravo on that ugly word. And?”

“And there aren’t any.”

“Mmm,” I said. “Awkward.”

“That’s defeatist talk. I’ll cobble something together. A scholar can never let mere wrongness get in the way of the theory.”

“Bravo again.” I toasted him.

From David Moser:

I attended an all-day series of talks today at an academic institution. Some of the panels were in Chinese, some in English.  One that I found particularly interesting was an afternoon panel with the CEOs of several Chinese companies. The panel was supposed to be in Chinese, but I found it hilarious that all of these participants, steeped as they are in American and Western culture and business, seemingly can no longer speak pure Chinese.  It is simply impossible for them.  Some of the panelists could hardly speak even one sentence without throwing in an English word or two.   I started writing down some of their code-switching, but it was so ubiquitous I soon stopped even trying.  Here are some examples:

Since both consist of carefully managed and skillfully manipulated sound, music and language blend into each other.  This is most evident in song, of course, where language and tonality exist simultaneously.  But sometimes the human voice is treated as an instrument, and language recedes into the background.  On the other hand, something else human that is more ostensibly musical, namely whistling, can be used for the communication of ideas and information, tasks that are usually reserved for language.  See the great Wikipedia article on "Whistled language" and the masterful Wikipedia article on "Transcendental whistling", also this YouTube video:

"Whistled language of the island of La Gomera (Canary Islands), the Silbo Gomero". (10:20)