Language Log

Tyler Schnoebelen, "The Weirdest Languages", Idibon blog 6/21/2013:

The World Atlas of Language Structures evaluates 2,676 different languages in terms of a bunch of different language features. These features include word order, types of sounds, ways of doing negation, and a lot of other things—192 different language features in total. […]

The data in WALS is fairly sparse, so we restrict ourselves to the 165 features that have at least 100 languages in them (at this stage we also knock out languages that have fewer than 10 of these—dropping us down to 1,693 languages).

Now, one problem is that if you just stop there you have a huge amount of collinearity. Part of this is just the nature of the features listed in WALS—there’s one for overall subject/object/verb order and then separate ones for object/verb and subject/verb. Ideally, we’d like to judge weirdness based on unrelated features. We can focus in on features that aren’t strongly correlated with each other (between two correlated features, we pick the one that has more languages coded for it). We end up with 21 features in total.

A rare seven word BBC News headline noun pile sighting: "Emma West Croydon tram race rant woman sentenced", BBC News 7/1/2013:

A woman who was filmed shouting racist abuse on a London tram in a video watched by 11 million people has been given a community sentence.

Emma West, 36, of New Addington, admitted racially-aggravated disorderly behaviour likely to cause harassment or distress at Croydon Crown Court.

The Taipei Times for June 27 carried the following article: "Debate rages over currency ‘misprint'".

It is a question of whether the upper part of the long form of the character for the word yī ("one"), i.e., 壹, should be written as 士 ("scholar"), the "correct" configuration, with the ends of the upper horizontal stroke extending beyond those of the lower horizontal stroke, or 土 ("land; earth"), as it appears on certain banknotes, with the ends of the upper horizontal stroke being shorter than those of the lower horizontal stroke. Fortunately, yī ("one") is usually written as 一, the simplest of all Chinese characters, consisting of only a single horizontal stroke. The complicated form 壹, with twelve strokes, is used in banking, business, and so forth, to avoid mistakes and forgery.

Today Wikileaks posted a statement from Edward Snowden, time-stamped Monday July 1, 21:40 UTC. As originally posted, the first sentence of the fourth paragraph reads as follows:

For decades the United States of America have been one of the strongest defenders of the human right to seek asylum.

Screenshot (click to embiggen):

But mysteriously, at around 22:30 UTC (6:30 pm Eastern Time), the sentence was edited to read:

For decades the United States of America has been one of the strongest defenders of the human right to seek asylum.

Screenshot:

In response to James Forsyth, "The Gove guide to composition", The Spectator 6/30/2013, Tom Chivers notes that "Michael Gove doesn't know what the passive voice is", The Telegraph 7/1/2013. If you read the exchange, you'll see that Tom Chivers is right: Michael Gove advises against use of the "passive voice", citing an example that is in fact not passive at all — while using the passive voice frequently, correctly, and appropriately, including in the first sentence of the letter introducing his guide to composing letters.

This example certainly belongs in Geoff Pullum's collection. And someone should recommend Geoff's tutorial on "The passive in English" to Mr. Gove.

Tim Requarth and Meehan Crist, "From the mouth of babes and birds", NYT 6/29/2013:

Researchers who focus on infant language and those who specialize in birdsong have teamed up in a new study suggesting that learning the transitions between syllables — from “da” to “do” and “do” to “da” — is the crucial bottleneck between babbling and speaking.

“We’ve discovered a previously unidentified component of vocal development,” said the lead author, Dina Lipkind, a psychology researcher at Hunter College in Manhattan. “What we’re showing is that babbling is not only to learn sounds, but also to learn transitions between sounds.”

Continuing in another connection with the exploration of real-estate listings that I discussed earlier ("Long is good, good is bad, nice is worse, and ! is questionable", 6/12/2013; "Significant (?) relationships everywhere", 6/14/2013), I stumbled on this curious factoid about the use of and and or in trulia.com's listings for the ten cities I've harvested so far:

For the past couple of years I've been writing a language column for The Boston Globe (and before that for The New York Times Magazine). Now I'm starting a new language column for The Wall Street Journal, called "Word on the Street." Each week I'll be focusing on a word in the news and examining its history. First up, cyber, which is showing up with increasing frequency as a noun.

Justice Antonin Scalia's dissent in the DOMA decision had some harsh words, to say the least, for the majority opinion. But the word everyone has been fixated on is rather light-hearted: argle-bargle.

As I have said, the real rationale of today’s opinion, whatever disappearing trail of its legalistic argle-bargle one chooses to follow, is that DOMA is motivated by '"bare . . . desire to harm"' couples in same-sex marriages.

From reader V.D.:

Justice Kennedy got himself tangled in a quasi-double negative in today's DOMA decision:

Windsor suffered a redressable injury when she was required to pay a tax from which, in her view, she was exempt but for the alleged invalidity of § 3 of DOMA.

Either "but for" or "invalidity" is wrong.  If DOMA is invalid, she is exempt from the tax.

I'm in Ann Arbor for the 2013 LSA Institute, where I'm teaching a course on Corpus-Based Linguistic Research, and this evening the Institute organizers showed "If These Knishes Could Talk: A Film About the New York Accent". It was quite a lot of fun, and I certainly recommend it to all LL readers — though unfortunately it has not previously been shown outside of the NYC area, and the only way to buy a DVD is apparently to contact the filmmaker Heather Quinlan directly.

Recently we've had several discussions about how tones in Sinitic languages aren't as uncomplicated or inflexible as one might imagine or as is often claimed:

"When intonation overrides tone"

"Mandarin by the numbers"

In these posts and in the comments to them, we have seen how stress and musical tune / melody often override or distort the canonical tones for given morphosyllables in sung or spoken context.  This is a completely different matter than tone sandhi, where tones are modified according to their position within a sequence of syllables (I believe that most instances of tone sandhi occur for simple physiological reasons, e.g., in normal speech it is virtually impossible to pronounce two full third tones in a row because they both dip so low in an individual's register that one needs a means for readying oneself for the onset of the utterance of the second third tone and does this by changing the first third tone utterance to a rising second tone).

[From here via David Morris, who adds that we should not doubt the seriousness of the doctor's situation]