Language Log

Recently, a package from Canada arrived at the Penn Linguistics Department — though it was addressed to

Dept. Di Linggwistika
U. Di Pensilvania
Fiiladelfia, Pa
19,104, U.S.Å

It contained multiple copies, on variously-colored paper, of an odd 11-page document.

From Breffni O'Rourke,  another example of the conceptual tangle created by the interaction of scalar comparison and (implicit) negation:

Just another one of these. There's no outright negation, but it seems related – the implied negative of "only" interacting with the scalar comparison "more slowly". The arithmetic comes out with the wrong sign in any case:

"The Tories came back into power in 2010. Over the course of this unbroken period of rule, typical household incomes in Britain have risen more slowly than those in only two other western European countries: Greece and Cyprus."

He means either "…risen more slowly than those in all but two other…" or "risen faster than those in only two other…".

The quotation is from Fintan O'Toole, "Liz Truss will make Johnson seem a political genius, May a mistress of empathy, Cameron a beacon of sincerity", The Irish Times 9/5/2022.

And as usual, it's really hard for our poor monkey brains to process cases like this — I agree with Breffni about this one, but no doubt some commenters will not.

TIL a new word — well, a new compound: sandboy. And an associated collocation, "happy as a sandboy".

The source was today's Bad Machinery, which includes the panel on the right.

The author, John Allison, notes that

I got nervous after making this comic that “happy as a sandboy” is racist, but apparently a sandboy was a youth paid to collect dry sand from coastal caves to spread on saloon bar floors. I know. Dodged a bullet there.

The comments include a link to an attempted explanation in The Guardian, "What is a sandboy and why are they happy?" — but as usual, there's more to the story.

Important breakthrough:

Breaking the Code: Ancient Iran’s Linear Elamite Script Deciphered

By François Desset, Kambiz Tabibzadeh, Matthieu Kervran, Gian Pietro Basello, and Gianni Marchesi

Friends of ASOR 10.8 (August, 2022

With numerous fine illustrations, here omitted, though the captions (in italics) have been retained.

Research in the humanities achieves definitive results in very few cases. The decipherment of an ancient writing system is probably one of them. Successful decipherment efforts in the 20th century include Mycenaean Linear B (by Alice Kober, Michael Ventris, and John Chadwick), Mayan glyphs (by Yuri Knorozov and Tatiana Proskouriakoff), and Luwian/Anatolian hieroglyphs (started by Helmuth Theodor Bossert, Emil Forrer, Ignace J. Gelb, Bedřich Hrozný, and Piero Meriggi; continued by Emmanuel Laroche; and completed by David Hawkins and Anna Morpurgo-Davies). To this list can now be added an important writing system used in southern Iran between 2300 and 1880 BCE, the Linear Elamite script.

Detail of the Marv Dasht vessel, with an example of Linear Elamite writing (21st century BCE; courtesy of the National Museum of Iran).

Aerial view of Susa (courtesy of the Cultural Heritage Base of Susa).

It'sssssssssssss finally out!

✨ The Hanmoji Handbook: Your Guide to the Chinese Language Though Emoji ✨ — by me, An Xiao Mina & @jenny8lee, published by @MITeenPress — appears in bookshops across the US and Canada today! pic.twitter.com/sTkudPAwxb

— Jason Li (@jasonli) August 30, 2022

One conventional view of "disfluencies" in speech is that they're the result of confusions and errors, such as difficulties in deciding what to say or how to say it, or changing ideas about what to say or how to say it, or slips of the tongue that need to be corrected. Another idea is that such interpolations can serve to "hold the floor" across a phrase boundary, or to warn listeners that a pause is coming.

These views are supported by the fact that fluent reading lacks filled pauses, restarts, repeated words, and non-speech vocalizations. And as a result, (human) transcripts of interviews, conversations, narratives, and speeches generally edit out all such interpolations, yielding a text that's more like writing, and is easier to read than an accurate transcript would be. Automated speech-to-text systems also generally omit (or falsely transcribe) such things.

The result is a good choice if the goal is readability, but not if the goal is to analyze the dynamics of speech production, speech perception, and conversational interaction. And in fact, even a brief examination of such interpolations in spontaneous speech is enough to tell us that the conventional views are incomplete at best.

I've noticed recently that automated transcripts from rev.ai do a good job of transcribing ums and uhs in English, though repeated words are still omitted. And in the other direction, I've noticed that the transcripts on the site of the U.S. Department of Defense include (some of the) repeated words, but not the filled pauses.  It's interesting to compare those transcripts to the audio (where available) — I offer a sample below.

With apologies for the glare from the plastic covering, this sign comes from the canteen at Lingnan University in Hong Kong:

Tim Frost found this sign last (southern hemisphere) summer at a lakeside in Argentina, near San Martin de los Andes.

The start of today's 9 Chickweed Lane:

There are many different subfields in Chinese Studies:  religion (Buddhism, Daoism, Islam…), art history, archeology, anthropology, language, literature, linguistics, esthetics, philosophy, economics, ethnology, and so forth.  Each of these subfields requires specialized knowledge and command of the requisite terminology.  One cannot expect a generalist to be adequately equipped to deal with all of them.