Language Log

My reaction to the current controversy over Claudine Gay's alleged plagiarisms is to observe again that the relevant policies are a tangled and incoherent mess. I first wrote about this back in 2006 — and  as it happens, that post compared the work of a different university president with the treatment of a Harvard undergraduate accused of plagiarism:

We tell kids that plagiarism is wrong, but we tell them that a lot of things are wrong that they see successful and respected people doing every day. […] In fact, anyone who pays attention knows that in some cases, like political speeches and celebrity memoirs, it's normal and expected to pass the work of others off as your own.

Here's an example that cuts close to the academic bone. A couple of decades ago, X was a graduate student at Y University, a school that regularly appears in U.S. News and World Report's listing of the top 50 American universities, and not at the bottom of the list either. The school's president, Dr. Z, had a nationally syndicated column. It ran under his byline, but X helped pay her way through school by writing it. I don't mean that she edited it, or did research for it, or drafted it. She came up with the ideas, did whatever research was required, and wrote it exactly as it ran. Dr. Z approved it for publication, or at least was given the opportunity to do so, but he never changed anything. (Or so X told me, and I believe her.)

I'm sure that Y University had a policy against plagiarism, like all similar institutions. It no doubt defined plagiarism in the usual way, as "the act of using the ideas or work of another person or persons as if they were one's own, without giving proper credit to the source" or something of the sort. This definition obviously applies to hiring someone to research and write your papers for you, just as much as it applies to copying passages from a book or cutting and pasting from an online source. (And writing-for-hire is hard to detect unless the hireling squeals. I've heard of one case that was uncovered because the hireling plagiarized a term paper from online sources, and when the copying was detected by the usual means, the accused student tried to absolve herself on the grounds that the guilty party was really the person that she had hired. "I hope you throw the book at the lousy cheater", she is apocryphally supposed to have exclaimed.) In any event, if Ms. X had been caught hiring someone to write her graduate-school term papers for her, she would surely have been unceremoniously dropped from the program.

Shocking (to me) news:

"Japan’s English Proficiency Continues to Drop Among Non-English-Speaking Countries"

nippon.com (Dec 4, 2023)

A survey found that Japan currently ranks eighty-seventh out of 113 non-English-speaking countries and regions for English language abilities. This is a fall of seven places from last year and relatively low among Asian countries.

I'm dubious that English proficiency would be so low in Japan, which overall has such a high level of education and which has such a large number of loanwords from English.  Is this a case of lies, damned lies and [polling-generated] statistics"?

From the Facebook account of Wai-hung Wong:

Those whale vowels are on my to-blog list. But for now, please remember that talking animals can be dangerous — at least, this evening:

"Talking animals: Miracle or curse?", 12/24/2004
"Watch out for those talking animals tonight", 12/24/2013
"Trigger warning: Talking animals", 12/24/2015

Subtitle:  "Thank you, Egg Fried Rice"

You may think that nothing could be more innocuous than mundane egg-fried rice.  Not so in post-Mao China.  As background for the story I'm about to tell, you need to know that eggs were a rarity in the PRC during the days of Mao, and especially during the Korean War (1950-53), in which China was pitted against the USA and the UN.

So you know the vocabulary, it is "dàn chǎo fàn 蛋炒饭" ("egg fried rice"). 

Egg Fried Rice

What is said to have killed Mao Zedong’s oldest son, Mao Anying. The younger Mao, who had studied abroad in Russia, volunteered to fight in the Korean War and was assigned to be Peng Dehuai*’s Russian translator. According to legend, Mao Anying cooked fried rice with eggs in the daytime, against military regulation. The eggs were a rare delicacy at the time and had been just been sent to Peng Dehuai from Kim Il-sung. Spotting the smoke from the fire, an American plane dropped napalm on the site. Unable to escape, Mao perished in the flames.

Regardless of the truth of the story, Mao Anying did in fact die in 1950 when his camp in a Korean cave was napalmed.

Before reading the following article, I didn't even know there was a St. Victor, let alone an Abbey of St. Victor that was established in 1108 near Notre-Dame Cathedral, at the beginning of the "Twelfth-Century Renaissance", in Paris.

The surprising history of architectural drawing in the West

Karl Kinsella, Aeon (12/21/23)

Here's a quick tutorial from the National Design Academy on the architectural language alluded to in the title of this post:

What’s the Difference Between a Plan, Elevation and a Section?

This brief guide uses an ingenious way of looking at an orange from four viewpoints to explain these four main terms of architectural language.  Armed with this fundamental knowledge, let us now join Karl Kinsella in learning about the architectural drawings of the Abbey of St. Victor and other Western religious edifices.  I should preface my overview of Kinsella's article by pointing out the it is accompanied by seven extraordinary period illustrations.

Kinsella begins with Vitruvius' De architectura in the 1st c. BC and moves quickly to the 15th c. when "the artist and architect Leon Battista Alberti, in his brief mention of architectural drawings, assumes that they are done only by architects."  Then comes the real story:

That's the sign on the door of a gas station that I saw in Media, Delaware County, Pennsylvania.  It had pictures of four different packages of pills, but the lettering on them was so blurred that I couldn't see what types or brands of pills they were.

ALL PILLS

$11.95

That was the only sign on the door, and it was very prominent:  right in the center of the door as you entered.  As I stepped inside the store, I was wondering mightily:  why are they selling you pills when they don't tell you what kind of pills they are?

After going inside and paying for my gas, I asked the two female attendants, who were all dressed up in holiday attire, what kind of pills they were, both of them said in unison, "male enhancement", as though they had rehearsed the answer hundreds of times.  I was embarrassed and so were they, so I got out as fast as I could.

Sino-Platonic Papers is pleased to announce the publication of its three-hundred-and-thirty-seventh issue:

“Tocharian Bilingualism, Language Shift, and Language Death in the Old Turkic Context,” by Hakan Aydemir.

pdf

ABSTRACT

The death of a language is a sad and dramatic event. It is, however, a fact that many languages died out in the past and are now dying out as well. However, although we often know the time and causes of present or recent language deaths and have a relatively large amount of information about them, we often do not know the time and causes of past language deaths, or our knowledge of these processes is very limited. In other words, the very limited written sources or linguistic material make it very difficult to study “language shift” or “language death” phenomena in historical periods.

According to Justinas Vainilavičius, "AI-generated science fiction novel wins literary prize in China", Cybernews 12/20/2023:

It only took three hours for Shen Yang, a professor at the Beijing-based university’s School of Journalism and Communication, to generate the award-winning admission.

The Chinese-language work, entitled The Land of Machine Memories, won second prize at the 5th Jiangsu Popular Science and Science Fiction Competition.

According to Chinese media reports, the draft of over 40,000 characters was generated based on 66 prompts, suggesting a “Kafkaesque” writing style.

Shen was encouraged to submit an excerpt of nearly 6000 characters for the competition by one of the judges, the Wuhan Evening News reported.

The judge, Fu Changyi, told the paper that he did not inform the other judges of the true authorship of the text because he wanted to see their judgment.

source:  Taobao 淘寶

Photograph accompanying a New York Times article, with the following caption: "Merle Goldman explaining the Chinese characters for the word China":

(source)

In a recent article in Psychology Today, Nick Morgan proposes a new theory about the psychodynamics of prescriptivist peeving ("Why Bad Grammar Activates Our Fight-or-Flight Response", 12/14/2023):

Does grammar matter? And did you have a teacher in your youth who insisted on drumming the rules of good grammar into you—and was that teacher on the stern and grumpy side of the instructional continuum?

My anecdotal research into these questions over the years has gradually built a composite picture of a somewhat terrifying authority figure, either male or female, who insisted on good grammar as the essential basis of a sound education. They managed to impart enough of it to you so that you cringe when someone uses "among" and "between" interchangeably—or flubs the distinction between 'that" and "which" because of a fatal lack of understanding of the difference between an independent and dependent clause.

Now, a study reveals that your response to those solecisms (and your bad-tempered teacher's response) is indeed physiological: The grammar of language affects us viscerally.

When we hear bad grammar, our pupils dilate, and our heart rate increases, indicating a fight-or-flight response.

Some people call it a "woolly dog", but that's more a description of what it's like.  That's not its name.  And it's not a "sheepdog" or "sheep dog", like a border collie.

Before I go any further into the nomenclature of canines, I want to recognize that they're all the same species:  Canis lupus familiaris.  No matter what their size, shape, coloration, or behavior, from the chihuahua to the great dane, they are all the same species:  Canis lupus familiaris.  It's only their breed that is different.  That is to say, they are bred to enhance different characteristics and to emphasize diverse traits.

Conversely, there are thousands of different species of birds.  It has always puzzled me why there is only one species of dog, but thousands of species of birds (upwards of 10,000), but I'm sure that somebody on Language Log will have the precise answer.  Is it that dogs are selectively bred by humans, whereas birds do their own thing?

The dog I'm talking about here — although extinct now — was raised for thousands of years for its wool!  It was carefully kept apart from other types of dogs to enhance its wool-bearing capability.  Like a sheep.  That's why I like to call it a sheep-dog, albeit somewhat jocularly.  It's a dog, but it has the wool producing characteristics of a sheep.