Language Log

A few days ago, I posted some f0-difference dipole plots to visualize the contrast between Barack Obama's syllable-level pitch dynamics and Donald Trump's ("Tunes, political and geographical", 2/2/2017):

Obama 2009 Inaugural Address	Trump 2017 Inaugural Address

For another take on the same contrast in political prosody, I ran a "Speech Activity Detector" (SAD) on the recordings of the same two speeches, and used the results to create density plots of the relationship between speech-segment durations and immediately following silence-segment durations:

Obama 2009 Inaugural Address	Trump 2017 Inaugural Address

Benjamin Franklin, "Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, etc.", 1751 [emphasis added]:

23.  In fine, A Nation well regulated is like a Polypus; take away a Limb, its Place is soon supply'd; cut it in two, and each deficient Part shall speedily grow out of the Part remaining. Thus if you have Room and Subsistence enough, as you may by dividing, make ten Polypes out of one, you may of one make ten Nations, equally populous and powerful; rather, increase a Nation ten fold in Numbers and Strength.

And since Detachments of English from Britain sent to America, will have their Places at Home so soon supply'd and increase so largely here; why should the Palatine Boors be suffered to swarm into our Settlements, and by herding together establish their Language and Manners to the Exclusion of ours? Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion.

Hu Shih 胡適 (Pinyin Hú Shì [1891-1962]) is widely regarded as one of the most important Chinese intellectuals of the 20th century.  As such, he is known as the "Father of the Chinese Renaissance".  In my estimation, Hu Shih was the single most influential post-imperial thinker and writer in China.  His accomplishments were so numerous and multifarious that it is hard to imagine how one man could have been responsible for all of them.

Before proceeding, I would like to call attention to "Hu Shih:  An Appreciation" by Jerome B. Grieder, which gives a sensitive assessment of the man and his enormous impact on Chinese thought and culture.  Another poignant recollection is Mark Swofford's "Remembering Hu Shih:  1891-1962", which focuses on aspects of Hu's monumental advancement of literary and linguistic transformation in China.  For those who want to learn more about this giant of a thinker and writer, I recommend Grieder's biography, Hu Shih and the Chinese Renaissance: Liberalism in the Chinese Revolution, 1917-1937 (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1970) and A Pragmatist and His Free Spirit:  the half-century romance of Hu Shi & Edith Clifford Williams (Hong Kong:  Chinese University Press, 2009) by Susan Chan Egan and Chih-p'ing Chou.

First it was "The Netherlands Second". Now it's Switzerland making a bid:

[fbvideo link="https://www.facebook.com/srf1/videos/vb.104971002870361/1464882490212532/" width="500" height="400" onlyvideo="1"]

Josh Solomon, "Largest heroin bust in Hernando history comes with image of Donald Trump", Tampa Bay Times, 2/3/2017:

One pile of wax paper envelops that contained individually wrapped doses of heroin bore the name of El Chapo, the infamous Mexican drug lord.

Another pile had envelopes with the name of Colombian cocaine kingpin Pablo Escobar.

Yet another pile had the name and likeness of President Donald Trump — a joke Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi didn't think was funny.

"All I want to say to this drug dealer is, 'Big mistake by putting the president's picture on this,' " Bondi said while holding up one of the little white squares. "Big mistake. Because he is going to be our most fierce advocate in taking this junk off of our streets. Can you believe this? Big mistake."

Jack Maloney sent in a link to a talk at the University of Kansas Biodiversity Institute about "Plant Soil Microbiomes in Perineal Agriculture":

Switching from an annual agriculture system to a perineal agriculture system that most closely resembles natural prairies will include changes to the way we manage soil, the lifespan of the plants, and the diversity of the crops there. KU Assistant Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Ben Sikes will talk about how each of these changes will influence diseases and the beneficial partners that live in the soil.

Presumably "perineal" in this context is a Cupertino for "perennial". Jack's comment:

'Perineal agriculture': not a subject I even want to think about, much less attend a lecture about!

Donald Trump, conducting foreign policy by tweet, announced that "Iran has been formally PUT ON NOTICE for firing a ballistic missile." National Security Advisor Mike Flynn reiterated that point at a news conference, though press secretary Sean Spicer was unable to explain what "on notice" actually means in this context. Could be because in diplomacy, putting a country "on notice" is not actually a thing.

The use of "on notice" did not go unnoticed by Stephen Colbert, who, in his "Late Show" monologue last night, accused Donald Trump of stealing the old "on notice" bit that he used to do on his Comedy Central show, "The Colbert Report." Fans of that show will recall Colbert, in his blustery conservative talk-show persona, would put the names of people and entities on an "On Notice" board for various slights, real or imagined.

Annalee Newitz has a fascinating article on abstract Paleolithic notations in Ars Technica (2/1/2017):

"38,000-year-old carving includes enigmatic 'punctuation' pattern:  New finding suggests that paleolithic Europeans shared a common set of symbols."

reporting on this paper:

R. Bourrillon, R. White, E. Tartar, L. Chiotti, R. Mensan, A. Clark, J.-C. Castel, C. Cretin, T. Higham, A. Morala, S. Ranlett, M. Sisk, T. Devièse, D.J. Comeskey, "A new Aurignacian engraving from Abri Blanchard, France: Implications for understanding Aurignacian graphic expression in Western and Central Europe", Quaternary International (1/24/17).

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.quaint.2016.09.063

This will always be funny to me 😂#newyorkersbelike pic.twitter.com/fd4YFPGWHo

— Kelly (@KellyShahbazian) September 9, 2016

For more, see #newyorkersbelike …

The media (for example here, here) have noticed that there is something strange about Donald Trump’s use of the present perfect in a comment about Frederick Douglass at the start of Black History Month:

Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more, I notice.

Somehow this utterance suggests that Trump believes that Douglass is still alive, raising the question of what aspect of its grammar leads to that inference.

Over the past decade, I've noticed that Barack Obama's speaking style often involves short, definite-sounding phrases with steeply falling pitch. For an example, take this clip from his 2009 inaugural address:

I tried to quantify — or at least visualize — some of the temporal aspects of this pattern in "Political sound and silence", 2/8/2016, comparing Obama with G.W. Bush in terms of the distribution of speech segment and silence segment durations.

We can visualize (some aspects of) the associated pitch patterns by looking at dipole difference statistics of f0 estimates, as discussed e.g. in "More on pitch and time intervals in speech", 10/15/2016; "Carl Kasell: diabolus in musica?", 11/5/2016; "Some visualizations of prosody", 10/23/2016. This analysis yields a two-dimensional density plot, where one axis represents time differences and the other axis represents f0 differences. And a syllable-scale plot of f0 dipole difference statistics, from the whole of Obama's 2009 inaugural, does support the intuition about the preponderance of rapid local f0 falls:

I'm afraid the flaunt/flout distinction may be a lost cause. Yesterday in the UK parliament three Labour Party whips voted against the instructions they were supposed to be enforcing on behalf of the leader of their party, and three times already this morning (the radio has been on since 5:30) I have heard a parliamentary report on the BBC's flagship Radio 4 program Today in which a reporter referred to party whips "who were supposed to impose party discipline, rather than flaunt it."

In the Wall Street Journal article "Supreme Court Nominee Takes Legal Writing to Next Level," Joe Palazzolo writes that Judge Neil Gorsuch, Donald Trump's nominee for the Supreme Court, has elevated legal opinions to "a form of wry nonfiction." Not only that, "his affinity for language reveals itself in other ways. Poorly drafted laws tend to summon his inner grammarian."

"We're all guilty of venial syntactical sins. And our federal government can claim no exception," Judge Gorsuch wrote in a 2012 dissent, which went on to critique a provision of federal sentencing guidelines "only a grammar teacher could love," with its "jumble of prepositional phrases."

In a 2015 opinion, Judge Gorsuch hacked through another "bramble of prepositional phrases" to figure out how to apply a criminal law that heightens penalties for using a gun in the commission of a crime. In what might have been a first, he diagramed the sentence containing the provision in question and illustrated his opinion with it.