Language Log

From Jim Gordon:

My wife and I visited Boston a week ago, and after dian xin at the China Pearl (which is very little changed from 1973-74), we went to the shade across the street to plot our course for touring.  The  photo below is of a sign in the window there:

On John McIntyre's blog You Don't Say, I recently learned about a site where you can search 43 different stylebooks at once.  These run the gamut from the recommendations of the American Anthropological Association to those of the World Health Organization, by way of The Economist Style Guide, Jack Lynch's Guide to Grammar and Style,  the Oregon Department of Human Services, and The Videogame Style Guide and Reference Manual.

The site is OnlineStylebooks.com, and as John notes, "This should help you to learn how to live with inconsistency".  Which is ironic, since the purpose of stylebooks is to help achieve consistency.

James Iry, who ought to know, has written "A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages". I don't believe that there's anything similar for natural languages, although John Cowan's "Essentialist Explanations" offers a wealth of raw material.

Here, with additional context, are the audio clips from yesterday's post "The phonetics of a#n vs. an# juncture":

Back of April 27, I linked to Aspen Swartz's volcano-themed sea chanty ("Eyjafjallajökull FTW"), and in the comments, Ray Girvan suggested that in the tradition of sailor-style anglicization that transformed the Bellerophon into the Billy Ruffian, Eyjafjallajökull should become "Fat Yokel". Ray embodied that suggestion in four sample verses.

Now it seems that Ray's creation has joined William Blake, H.V. Morton, and Rudyard Kipling on a one-page postcard-sized serial publication called The Rambling Urchin ("Dispatches from Adanaland", JSBlog, 5/7/2010).

Geoff Pullum's recent post "An aim or a name?" stimulated a surprisingly lively discussion of juncture in English. This morning, I thought I'd encourage this interest in phonetics by posting a random sample of relevant real-world examples.

The distinction between "a name" and "an aim" turned out to hard to find — the 25 million words of conversational (telephone) speech that I searched had plenty of instances of "a name", but only one instance of "an aim". So I picked a similar case where both sides of the opposition are represented by dozens of tokens: "a nice" vs. "an ice", in contexts like "a nice guy" or "a nice one", vs. "an ice storm" or "an ice cream sundae".

Here are four random selections from this little collection — see if you can identify them:

In a meeting the other day I heard a colleague say something that was either the first of these or the second:

A good test of whether a course is coherent in its content is whether we can give it an aim.
A good test of whether a course is coherent in its content is whether we can give it a name.

A funny thing happened to the abbreviation "PR" overnight. When I went to bed last night "PR" typically meant "public relations". When I woke up it didn't.

Canada's House of Commons has passed bill C-232, which requires that justices of the Supreme Court of Canada understand both English and French without the assistance of an interpreter. This will become law unless vetoed by the Senate or denied royal assent by the Governor General (which is exceedingly unlikely). Amazingly, the bill is a private member's bill introduced by a member of the New Democratic Party, which holds only 36 of 308 seats.

For some reason, the current British election campaign has been mercifully free of empty pontificating about first-person pronouns. But Tom Clark, "Barack Obama's travel rhetoric rubs off on Nick Clegg's general election talk", The Guardian, 5/6/2010, did take a shot at reading aspects of political character from candidates' distributions of sentence lengths:

Like the Conservatives, the Lib Dems are laying emphasis on cutting waste. [The speech-writing consultancy] Bespoke reveals both parties demonstrate a striking economy with words when compared with Labour. The average sentence in a Liberal or Tory speech is just 14 words, which is five shorter than Labour. Among the leaders the gap is even bigger, with Gordon Brown's tally of 22 in the average sentence being positively verbose when compared with David Cameron's 13, never mind Clegg's even pithier 12. [Simon] Lancaster [director of the speech-writing consultancy Bespoke] believes the trappings of office can encourage a taste for "lounging in the luxury of super-size statements" when compared with the breathless demands for change that typically characterise opposition.

The Economist had some letters in the last couple of weeks from people ruminating on terrible experiences of bookstore ignorance they had encountered: someone who asked for Dickens's A Christmas Carol and was sent over to the DVDs; someone who asked for Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and was told "If it's a book, it'll be over there"; and so on. I have encountered unhelpful bookstore assistants too, but I wasn't too ready to pile on with further stories, because I once (briefly) worked as a bookstore assistant. It was my first regular paying job, before I became a rock musician. And I still remember the day a middle-aged woman customer demanded to know if we had "Kreissoppa Tebberley" in stock.

The first Internet domain names using non-Latin characters are being rolled out, a plan put into motion after approval from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). Arabic-speaking nations are the first to reap the orthographic benefits, with new country codes available for Egypt (مصر), Saudi Arabia (السعودية), and the United Arab Emirates (امارات). The Egyptian Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, previously online at <http://www.mcit.gov.eg/>, is blazing the trail with its new URL:

<وزارة-الأتصالات.مصر>

Not everything is fully worked out with the new system, though. Browsers that aren't caught up to speed on the non-Latin domain names will see the addresses rendered as Latinized gobbledygook. The Egyptian Communication Ministry's Arabic-script URL, for instance, currently resolves to <http://xn—-rmckbbajlc6dj7bxne2c.xn--wgbh1c/>. That's not very communicative.

[Update: See the very helpful comments below for an explanation of the Latinized encoding.]

In tonight's playoff game with the San Antonio Spurs, the Phoenix Suns will wear jerseys reading "Los Suns", in protest of Arizona's recently-enacted immigration-enforcement law.

The team didn't need to have new uniforms made up for the occasion — they just unpacked the jerseys that they've been using since 2007 for the NBA's Noche Latina.