Language Log

My parents tell me that I could read well before my 4th birthday. As a result, I have virtually no experience of what it would be like to be illiterate. It would be easier for me to imagine blindness than complete inability to read. I did have a glimpse of it when I first spent some time in Japan, and was surrounded by an advanced culture using an utterly alien writing system in which I couldn't even read out the names off the signs (as I can in any of the alphabets of Europe). But I had another glimpse this morning when I heard a word on the radio that I couldn't guess how to spell, not even vaguely. Tracking it down was a terrible job. My dictionary was no help, precisely because dictionaries are organized in such a way as to be helpful only to the literate. The great naturalist Sir David Attenborough, on Radio 4, mentioned a curious-sounding class of animals that he appeared to be calling Sicilians. (Not a class in the technical terminology; technically they are actually a whole separate order of animals.) I listened carefully; it definitely sounded like "Sicilians". But what was this word? These creatures (he made it clear) did not live in Sicily.

Yesterday the six-week faculty and the second-session three-week faculty ended our teaching stints at the 2009 Linguistic Institute sponsored by the Linguistic Society of America and the University of California at Berkeley. The two second-session Language Loggers, Adam Albright and I, were in complementary distribution with the two first-session Language Loggers, Geoffs Nunberg and Pullum: we did not meet in Berkeley. Not all of us have finished our work for our classes — I still have 15 of my 42 papers to grade — but our tight-knit community — living in the same dorm, sorry, residential unit (palatial by my loooong-ago student-era standards) and eating at the same university dining hall (spectacular by my ditto standards) — is history.

… the result is a grammatical bar brawl.  An excellent example is on display over at Ask MetaFilter, where someone innocently asked

So which sentence is proper English grammar: "If you eat like Bob and me, you will be healthy." or "If you eat like Bob and I, you will be healthy."

KA-POW: "it's the second one…" WHAAM: "No, it's the first…" BIFF: "The verb 'do' is implied…" DOINK: "'like' … is indisputably a preposition in this case. It can't even function as a conjunction."

Some interesting posts recently by Brett at English, Jack: "A newly discovered preposition", 8/7/2009; "More evidence for 'compared' as a preposition", 8/11/2009:

I believe that I may be the first person to have realized that compared is a preposition. It is not listed as such in any of the dictionaries that I consulted, and you may very well be wondering how compared could possibly be a preposition. Let me try to explain.

… and tell Lady Gregory the news. According to David Adams, writing in the Irish Times,  "Attacks on the language are rising, basically":

IT’S OFTEN the little things in life that can get to you. Take “basically”, for instance. I cannot be alone in having grown to detest the very sound of this word. It has become so annoyingly pervasive in the spoken language, you sometimes wonder if we are now incapable of relaying even the most mundane information without employing it. As in, “Basically, I was walking down the road”, or, “Basically, he was standing there”.

Only good manners and not wanting to be thought a complete lunatic stop some of us from screaming: “There is no ‘basically’ about it. Either you were walking down the road or you weren’t, or he was standing there or he wasn’t.”

Yesterday Rob S wrote to ask about a sentence from the newspaper ("Women's Work and Japan's Hostess Culture", NYT, 8/11/2009):

"A recent New York Times article described the Japanese profession of hostessing, which involves entertaining men at establishments where customers pay a lot to flirt and drink with young women (services that do not, as a rule, involve prostitution)."

So, does this quote mean that there exists a rule that says it cannot involve prostitution? Or is it rather stating that there is no rule that it must involve prostitution?

Is it forbidden, or just not required?

I responded, somewhat unsympathetically, with the opinion that "as a rule" is just a  quantifier over instances, meaning something like "in general" or "in most cases", and not evoking any concept of a rule in the deontic sense at all. This invalidated Rob's curiosity about "whether there was the absence of some rule mandating it, or the presence of a rule forbidding it".

Rob was a bit disappointed, I think, so I decided to try to do better, first by confirming my impression of how the expression "as a rule" is now used, and second by tracing its history to see if his interpretation has a basis in the past.

It is truly almost beyond belief that the Investor's Business Daily could say in an editorial (which after much ribald mockery on the blogs they have now altered):

People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn't have a chance in the U.K., where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless.

Dogs as intelligent as two-year-old children, says a headline in the Daily Telegraph, a newspaper that is marketed to people of a conservative disposition and their dogs. And in case you did not quite understand the headline, they say it again in the subhead: "Dogs are as intelligent as the average two-year-old child, according to research by animal psychologists." It is bylined "By Richard Gray, Science Correspondent". (Science Correspondent! He almost certainly has a Master's degree, possibly in Science!)

Research conducted at Language Log Plaza has shown a somewhat different result. Dogs are not as bright linguistically as a human two-year-old. But what is true is that dogs have the same general intelligence and ability to detect bullshit as the average Science Correspondent for the Daily Telegraph or BBC News.

A friend in Taiwan sent me the following inquiry:

From an article in the NYTimes:

"Early Thursday, the attackers sent out a wave of spam under the name Cyxymu, which is a Latin transliteration of the Cyrillic name of the capital of Abkhazia, Sukhumi."

By which is meant that Latin Cyxymu is a "transliteration" of Cyrillic  Сухуми (in italics С у х у м u ) .

I think that this is an improper use of the word "transliteration" (to refer to "Sukhumi" as a transliteration of Cyxymu, however, would be correct), but I don't know what to call this rendering of Cyrillic Cyxymu as Latin "Cyxymu".

Stephen Fry — British comedian, quiz show host, and public intellectual — has just started a new series of his BBC Radio 4 program on the English language, "Fry's English Delight." In "So Wrong It's Right," Fry "examines how 'wrong' English can become right English." Our old friend the eggcorn makes an appearance about 11 minutes in. Jeremy Butterfield, author of A Damp Squid: The English Language Laid Bare, explains eggcorns to Fry (damp squid is an eggcornization of damp squib, in case you didn't know). Butterfield also talks about spelling changes, like the back-formation of pea(s) from pease, and how lexicographers use corpora to track changes in language (with specific reference to the Oxford English Corpus, the main subject of A Damp Squid).

You can hear the whole thing online, at least for the next week.

And for more of Fry's linguistic musings, see my post, "Fry on the pleasure of language."

(Hat tip, Damien Hall.)

In response to yesterday's post on "Linguistic analysis in social science", my old Bell Labs colleague Bob Krauss wrote that

There may be more language-related research being done in social psychology than you're aware of.   Attached is a chapter Jen Pardo and I contributed to a book about connections between social psych and other disciplines.

I was glad to see the chapter, which was published a few years ago as Robert M. Krauss and Jennifer S. Pardo, "Speaker Perception and Social Behavior: Bridging Social Psychology and Speech Science", pp. 273-278 in Paul A.M. Van Lange (Ed.), Bridging Social Psychology: Benefits of Transdisciplinary Approaches, 2006. But reading this chapter, and skimming the rest of the book, confirmed my view that at present, there is remarkably little language-based research in the social sciences.

About a week ago, Arthur Laffer said the following on CNN:

I mean, i- i- i- if you like the Post Office and the Department of Motor Vehicles, and you think they're run well, just wait till you see Medicare, Medicaid, and health care, done by the government.

From YouRememberThat.com, a 1905 postcard that may be the oldest extant LOLcat: