Language Log

This morning's BBC's News Hour program featured one of the most densely nonsensical three-minute sequences that I can ever recall having heard from a respectable media outlet:

In a comment yesterday, Emily asked:

I tutor the SATs, including the writing section, in addition to helping students with other kinds of writing.

What am I supposed to tell my students about zombie rules? The fact is that some misguided teachers and graders may enforce them. (SAT graders not so much, though–-I think I'm close to getting a handle on what those people are looking out for.)

When I was in school I breezed happily by all this nonsense because I had smart teachers and a strong authorial voice. But not all of my students do. So what to say?

Let me start by quoting Rob Balder's PartiallyClips for 2/17/2009, which celebrates all of us who, like Emily, escaped from school with our souls intact:

(Click on the image for a larger version)

Allow me, if you will, to briefly pervert the general functions of Language Log to send a personal message to the Hong Kong readers of Language Log who have been asking me about my upcoming lectures in their city. The answer is, on Monday (2 March 2009) I will be doing two engagements at different universities in the city, back to back. From 2 to 3:30 p.m., a lecture called "English Grammar: The Lost Twentieth Century" at Hong Kong Baptist University, in room RRS905 in the Sir Run Run Shaw Building on the Ho Sin Hang Campus; and then (after a rapid transfer by limousine; I may arrive looking a bit harried) from 5 to 6:30 p.m. a lecture called "Language Studies: Bridging Science and Humanities", in the Inaugural Series for the new Faculty of Humanities at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, in room N003. Both, I believe, are wide open to the general public with no ticketing.

In the sentence of Obama’s speech to congress that starts at 40:12 in the NY Times video-with-transcript, he says “Afghanistan and Pakistan”, and what caught my ear was that he pronounces all three a’s in Afghanistan like the a in cat, and both of the a’s in Pakistan like the a in father.  I know there was a lot of discussion of his pronunciation of Pakistan last October (some on the right accused him of elitism or unamericansim over it, and then there was the usual blog-battle, e.g. here), but it’s just interesting that it doesn’t carry over to Afghanistan, and that in each word all the vowels are identical, showing that he doesn't have a single suffix –stan with fixed pronunciation (nor do most Americans, probably). Now I wonder how he will pronounce all the other Stans in the region. (I think in my own dialect I pronounce Kazakhstan with all three a’s as in father, but Afghanistan the way Obama did. But Pakistan that way too. Presumably depends on how old one was, and in what environment, when one learned them.)

The following is a guest post by Jason Merchant.

The Supreme Court is scheduled today (25 Feb 2009) to hear arguments (Flores-Figueroa v. U.S., No. 08-108) to decide whether Ignacio Flores-Figueroa should have his conviction for aggravated identity theft reversed. The debate centers on the interpretation of a statute, 18 U.S.C. sec. 1028A(a)(1), which states that:

"Whoever … knowingly transfers, possesses, or uses, without lawful authority, a means of identification of another person shall … be sentenced to a term of imprisonment of 2 years."

Well, I'm as recovered from my cold as I was able to get, and it is time to go. I am setting off for a trip to what everyone (following Europe) calls the Far East. (For Californians it is clearly the far west.) I head first to Hong Kong, for a few days during which I will be giving at least four lectures, and a panel session, and various other meetings (this really is not leisure time). And there is just one thing that really, really scares me about it. Perhaps you can guess.

BioMedCentral continues to be a source of found poetry: today's mail alerts me to John J Wiens, "Estimating rates and patterns of morphological evolution from phylogenies: lessons in limb lability from Australian Lerista lizards", continuing the proud tradition of last week's odor plume flux.

For a taste of Pekingese colloquial and a slice of traditional life in Beijing, I offer this 4 minutes and 24 seconds rap video entitled "běi jīng tǔ zhù  北京土著  (Beijing Natives)":

Here follow a transcription and translation of the entire song. One thing that will be immediately evident is the fondness of Beijingers for adding final retroflex -r to the end of many words. There seems, however, to be some disagreement among individual speakers on when to -r, as it were, and when not to -r. Our transcription distinguishes three categories of -r: bold for when the singer adds an -r that is not in the original lyrics, italics for when he fails to -r but we think he should, and regular -r when the original lyrics have an -r. Sometimes the -r is subtle and sometimes it is very obvious; given the complexities of the phenomenon, we cannot guarantee that we've recorded all of them to the satisfaction of Pekingese aficionados.

Please also note that some of the tones and occasionally the vowel quality differ from what we would normally expect in Modern Standard Mandarin. The fact that it's a song also means that the contours of the melody sometimes are at odds with the tones.

Finally, the singer uses a few English expressions, so those appear both in the column with the Chinese lyrics and in the column with the translation. And there's at least one Pekingese morpheme (DER) in the lyrics for which there's no known character.

According to this morning's After Deadline post, that's what Philip B. Corbett at the New York Times calls "rules that aren't", following the lead of Theodore M. Bernstein:

Another pet peeve of some After Deadline commenters is the use of “but” or “and” to begin a sentence — as in the third sentence of the previous section. Obviously, I don’t share their aversion.

It shouldn’t be overdone, but using coordinating conjunctions this way can provide a handy and very efficient transition. “But” is certainly preferable in many cases to the stilted “however,” and “and” is simpler than “in addition” or similar phrases.

I’d put this objection in the category of “Miss Thistlebottom’s hobgoblins.” That’s how the former Times language guru Theodore M. Bernstein described overly fastidious rules and usage myths a grade-school English teacher might invoke to keep her pupils’ prose on a very narrow path. (Familiar examples include “Never split an infinitive” and “Never end a sentence with a preposition.”)

Over on his You Don't Say blog, John McIntyre has been preparing for National Grammar Day (4 March) by spinning a hard-boiled murder mystery involving an editor protagonist; Martha Brockenbrough (of NGD); a victim stabbed to death by red pencil ("an Eberhard Faber Col-erase number 1277 pencil, carmine red, protruded from his chest, just over the heart"); and the Fat Man. The serial is up to its third installment, in which the Fat Man is introduced:

I’d known him for years. We’d been honor students together — teacher’s pets — and then he started his slide. It began innocently enough, with a little amateur lexicography. But then he fell in with that hard set at Language Log. He was pals with both the Geoffs — Pullum and Nunberg — Arnold Zwicky, the lot. Before you could say lexeme, he was too deep into descriptivism to ever come back. But, maybe because of our old school ties, we had always managed a gingerly balance.

More to come.

[Update: Jan Freeman notes with pleasure the split infinitive in "too deep into descriptivism to ever come back". Not an obligatorily split infinitive, but to my ear certainly preferable to "too deep into descriptivism ever to come back".]

You know, I don't feel so good today (streaming cold, much work to do, no energy, and a foreign trip coming up on Thursday), but the extraordinarily stupid re-subtitled war film video snippet Mark just posted, featuring Hitler going into a wild tirade over having his grammar corrected, made me laugh out loud. Thank you, Mark. It was perfect for me, because (I have to admit this) I mostly don't understand spoken German at speed, especially when shouted in an apoplectic fury. Having a good passive knowledge of spoken German would kill it stone dead, I would guess. My ignorance made it absolute bliss.

Chris Massey wrote to point out that shovel-ready has already been cloned: Gardiner Harris and Kenneth Chang, "Beaker-Ready Projects? Colleges Have Quite a Few", NYT, 1/23/2009.