Language Log

It has been two weeks now, and so far no one here at Language Log Plaza has commented on the BBC News story entitled "Monkeys recognize bad grammar." I suppose people are assuming that I cover the Stupid Animal Communication Stories desk. And often I have. But I have been procrastinating, because I am getting tired of being the animal grammar killjoy. People are beginning to think I hate monkeys and dogs and parrots and dolphins and such (my previous posts include this one and this one and this one and this one and this one and this one and this one and this one and probably others).

The little animals in question (it's cottontop tamarins again) are cute. I don't have anything against them, or against the experiments on them being done by people like Marc Hauser. In the present case, the team was led by Ansgar Endress. And here is the evidence for these little creatures' ability to "recognize bad grammar". It's quite simple, and I don't think it's going to get them jobs as copy editors.

The recent discussion of how to pronounce "Uyghur", and especially the treatment of the medial consonant, brought up the case of yoghurt/yogurt, which in French is "yaourt" — and today on the Omniglot Blog the Word of the Day is yaourter, "to yoghurt", which is said to be

a French word for the way people attempt to speak or sing in a foreign language that they don’t know very well. Often they mishear and misinterpret the word or lyrics and substitute them with familiar words.

It isn't often that I encounter an English word that I don't know other than names of chemical compounds, but I recently learned a new word for something not all that obscure. In a context in which I expected the word monopoly, I encountered monopsony. At first I thought it was a mistake, but it recurred. It turns out that economists distinguish between monopolies and monopsonies. When there is a single source for a product, that is a monopoly, but when there is only a single buyer for a product, that is a monopsony. Who knew?

The classic example of a monopsony is what I have hitherto known as the Chinese salt monopoly. Throughout most of Chinese history, anybody could produce salt, but they had to sell it to the government, which then sold it to consumers. This is why the classic work of Chinese economics, the proceedings of a conference held in 81 BCE with appended commentary, is entitled 塩鉄論 Discourses on Salt and Iron.

Don Asmussen's Bad Reporter for 5/27/2009:

This reminds me of some of the discussions of California's ballot proposition system — and since the cartoon came out the day after the California Supreme Court ruled on Proposition 8, I guess that it was supposed to.

An editorial by Miranda Robertson in the latest Journal of Biology, "Of primordial genomes and cooperative kittens", discusses the problems that horizontal gene transfers pose for phylogenetic analysis of bacterial genomes:

The extraction of tree structures from the web of gene transfers requires that transferred genes be subtracted by some means from the database of genes used to construct the trees. […]

Whether because of horizontal gene transfer or the compression of branching events early in the evolution of prokaryotes, the lines of vertical descent […] defy resolution, at least for now and perhaps for ever. There is a character in the comic opera The Mikado, by WS Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, who claims: 'I can trace my ancestry to a protoplasmal primordial atomic globule. Consequently my family pride is something inconceivable.' Inconceivable and probably misplaced, it would seem. The character is named, more appropriately even than Gilbert could have imagined, Pooh-Bah.

The xkcd cartoon calls it "qwertial aphasia", but aphasia isn't quite the right term. The phenomenon is by no means unknown, however.

By the way, qwertial is a cute derivative from QWERTY.

(Hat tip to John Riemann Soong.)

A few years ago, before my wife was released from the hospital after hip replacement surgery, her leg began swelling up and she had great pain and discomfort. Quickly she was sent back to surgery to have a previously undetected bleeder repaired. The highly respected surgeon obviously missed it. Next day a huge bouquet of roses appeared in her hospital room, sent by that very doctor. And then, perhaps coincidentally, he retired from practice within the next few weeks. I don’t recall now whether he actually said he was sorry for his error, but the roses gave us every indication that he was. It was a malpractice suit waiting to happen.

It's common practice in the trademark world to never, never, never use your trademarked name as a verb or a noun. If you do this, you'll be committing genericide, because your brand name will surely lose its distinctiveness and pretty soon you'll be losing your market edge. Why else would Xerox try so hard to teach us to say " to photocopy" rather than "to xerox"? Always use your name as an adjective, "Xerox photocopiers." But the New York Times reports that Microsoft's Steve Ballmer doesn't much believe in common practice, and he's now busily ignoring what everyone else is doing. He wants us to say, "he will bing you tomorrow," which more problematically might lead to, "he banged you yesterday."   

Commenting on the recent flurry of commentary about the political first person singular, D.G. Myers has some thoughts on "Self-reference and narcissicism":

Person reflects genre. Despite the fact that he is an eighteenth-century author like Sterne and Chesterfield, Franklin uses the first person more often because he is writing an autobiography, a literary kind that, except when it is an exercise in voluble self-concealment, like The Education of Henry Adams, depends helplessly upon the first person. Similarly, to accuse David Copperfield of “ego-involvement”—he uses some form of the first person 6.3% of the time—does not seem quite right. David is as much a “camera” as Christopher in The Berlin Stories; he is at least as interested in the people in his life as in himself.

When a big news story is breaking, like the passing of Walter Cronkite, it's not surprising that reporters and editors might be a little hasty in getting the word out. Jan Freeman of the Boston Globe spotted a search-and-replace error in the Chicago Tribune's online obituary for Cronkite, where all instances of "Cronkite" got replaced by "Mr. Cronkite." Here's a screenshot of the uncorrected version:

I recently learned from Geoff Nunberg that there's a small-world step beyond the Erdős number — the Erdős–Bacon number. Geoff tells me that mine is 8, or maybe 9.

It's been a couple of years since we looked at Erdős numbers here on Language Log; see the posting by Sally Thomason here and the ones by by Geoff Pullum here and here. A fuller explanation of Erdős numbers can be found in those postings, but here it's enough to say that your Erdős number is is your minimal distance from the incredibly productive and collaborative mathematician Paul Erdős via a chain of joint publications. There are linguists with Erdős numbers of 2 (András Kornai), 3 (Geoff Pullum, via András), and 4 (me, via Geoff).

Now cartoon xkcd gives us (on 19 June) a view of what happens when the Apocalypse is on its way and the news gets to mathematicians:

(Hat tip to Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky.)

… on my blog:

http://arnoldzwicky.wordpress.com/2009/07/14/postings-on-internalexternal-inflection/
(on internal/external inflection)

http://arnoldzwicky.wordpress.com/2009/07/16/835/
postings about or (semantics of)