Language Log

According to Yannis Haralambous, "Grapholinguistics, TEX, and a June 2020 conference in Paris", TUGboat 2020:

Grapholinguistics is the discipline dealing with the study of the written modality of language.

At this point, the reader may ask some very pertinent questions:“Why have I never heard of grapholinguistics?” “If this is a subfield of linguistics, like psycholinguistics or sociolinguistics, why isn’t it taught in Universities?” “And why libraries do not abound of books about it?”

Our recent discussions about syllabicity ("Readings" below) made me wonder whether it's possible to have syllables, words, and whole sentences without vowels.  That led me to this example from Nuxalk on Omniglot:

Sample

clhp'xwlhtlhplhhskwts' / xłp̓χʷłtłpłłskʷc̓

IPA transcription

xɬpʼχʷɬtʰɬpʰɬːskʷʰt͡sʼ

Translation

Then he had had in his possession a bunchberry plant.

This is an example of a word with no vowels, something that is quite common in Nuxalk.

Souce: Nater, Hank F. (1984). The Bella Coola Language. Mercury Series; Canadian Ethnology Service (No. 92). Ottawa: National Museums of Canada.

Joe Farrell wrote in to ask:

Do you know whether the word "handbook" (Gk encheiridion, Lat (liber) manualis) can be found in any other ancient or medieval languages? And, if so, whether it is clearly a loan word or it simply arises spontaneously in different languages from a similar conceptual and material relationship between books and hands.

Listen to this sound, and describe it in the comments below:

You can learn what the sound is, and why I care how you hear it, after the fold.

The old hymn and blues song of that title have been very much on my mind during the last couple of months.

George Hunt Smyttan (1856)

Forty days and forty nights
You were fasting in the wild;
Forty days and forty nights,
Tempted, and yet undefiled….

Muddy Waters (1956)

Forty days and forty nights, since my baby left this town
Sun shinin' all day long, but the rain keep falling down
She's my life I need her so, why she left I just don't know….

These are very different kinds of songs, yet they are both focused on a period of forty days and forty nights.  I've been thinking about these songs a lot in the current climate of far-reaching quarantines against the novel coronavirus epidemic centered on Wuhan, Hubei Province, China.

Changing norms about public display of certain words, as exemplified in the display windows of a local store:

Photograph taken at the Los Angeles International Airport:

At dinner the other night, someone asked whether Cossack and Kazakh are etymological descendants from the same source. The consensus around the table was "probably yes", but no one really knew anything. A bit of internet research supports that conclusion — though no doubt readers will be able to add depth and nuance.

Below is a guest post by Tihomir Rangelov.

The Korean film Parasite’s landslide success at the Oscars this year has been called "a cultural breakthrough". Was it a linguistic breakthrough as well?

In "Syllables" (2/24/2020), I showed that a very simple algorithm finds syllables surprisingly accurately, at least in good quality recordings like a soon-to-published corpus of Mandarin Chinese. Commenters asked about languages like Berber and Salish, which are very far from the simple onset+nucleus pattern typical of languages like Chinese, and even about English, which has more complex syllable onsets and codas as well as many patterns where listeners and speakers disagree (or are uncertain) about the syllable count.

I got a few examples of Berber and Salish, courtesy of Rachid Ridouane and Sally Thomason, and may report on them shortly. But it's easy to run the same program on a well-studied and easily-available English corpus, namely TIMIT, which contains 6300 sentences, 10 from each of 630 speakers. This is small by modern standards, but plenty large enough for test purposes. So for this morning's Breakfast Experiment™, I tested it.

Notice the button on Andy Warhol's jacket:

Source:  The Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné, vol. 4 (Paintings and Sculptures Late 1974-1976).

Allusions to Language Log posts abound:

Tweet from Joshua Wong 黃之鋒, Secretary-General of Demosistō:

Here is Winnie The Flu that we call as #WTF

Credit to Yeahman Tse via Legend Bricks LEGO Forum pic.twitter.com/q04K7QfAku

— Joshua Wong 黃之鋒 😷 (@joshuawongcf) February 24, 2020