Language Log

Yet another Rhymes With Orange cartoon, mostly silliness, about tongue twisters:

There's tons of stuff on tongue twisters, most of it what I think of as "tongue twister appreciation": collections  of them, sometimes in a number of languages, for the reader's enjoyment.

There's also a certain amount of technical literature about them, in particular some linguistic studies about the patterns that make people prone to the errors (of the substitution/transposition type) in certain expressions. The /s/-/ʃ/ alternations in "She sells seashells …" are somewhat troublesome, but far from the worst there is (as in things like "rubber baby buggy bumpers", which makes grave problems for almost all "normal" speakers, especially when these speakers are asked to repeat the expression).

As far as I know, speech therapists don't use tongue twisters as a teaching tool (though I could be wrong).

According to Peter Bergen, "Winning the good war", Washington Monthly, July/August 2009:

A corollary to the argument that Afghanistan is unconquerable is the argument that it is ungovernable—that the country has never been a functioning nation-state, and that its people, mired in a culture of violence not amenable to Western fixes, have no interest in helping to build a more open and peaceful society. Certainly endemic low-level warfare is embedded in Pashtun society—the words for cousin and enemy in Pashtu, for instance, are the same. [emphasis added]

Ali Soleimani, who sent this link to me, asked:

Naturally, I was somewhat suspicious of the validity of this; and a little looking in online Pashto-English dictionaries indeed failed to turn up any evidence for it. This seems to be fairly comprehensive dictionary, and it contains 8 words whose definitions include "enemy", none of which give "cousin" or anything similar as a meaning. The most common word for 'enemy' (judged by its presence in other dictionaries) seems to be duś̱ẖman (دښمن), glossed as "adversary, enemy, foe." This dictionary does appear to be from the 19th-century, so perhaps the usage has changed since then.

Do you know if the statement is true? And if it isn't, do you have any idea where the author may have gotten the idea?

The discussion following my original post ("A Little Primer of Xinjiang Proper Nouns", 7/13/2009) has proven quite edifying, at least to me.  One thing that I realized from the lively comments is that I forgot to give an indication of how the name Xinjiang itself should be pronounced.  There's also the question of what sort of "pronouncers" or "respellings" to provide for speakers of American English who need to pronounce these names but cannot be expected to render them exactly the way a native speaker of Uyghur would.

I must preface the following remarks by stating that I'm probably not the best person to offer standard American English readings of these names because I'm a fluent speaker of Mandarin and know a bit of Uyghur. Consequently, when I want to say these words as an American would, I'm afraid that my Mandarin and my Uyghur get in the way. Still, I will make an honest effort to separate the three modes and offer useful guides for speakers of American English.

A couple of days ago, I compared the rate of first-person-singular pronoun use in Sarah Palin's July 3 resignation speech to the rates in some other historical speeches, including Richard Nixon's 1962 speech conceding the California governor's race to Pat Brown ("I again", 7/13/2009). That 1962 news conference is  widely known as the "You won't have Nixon to kick around any more" speech, and I referred to it that way. But I also linked to an mp3 file of the speech, and in a comment, Tim pointed out that Nixon actually says "You don't have Nixon to kick around any more".

One of yesterday's guests on Radio Times with Marty Moss-Coane was Arika Okrent, author of In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers, and the Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build A Perfect Language. You can listen (or download the mp3) here.

I don't know very much about the history of invented languages, so I'm looking forward to reading her book.

[Update: a transcript of Okrent's interview with Gelf magazine is here.]

Following the serious unrest in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of the Peoples Republic of China that erupted last week, "Xinjiang," "Uyghur," "Urumchi," and other names pertaining to the region have become household words.  Unfortunately, people around the world have been confused about how to pronounce these words.  This is understandable for several reasons.  In the first place, we have to confront both the original Uyghur terms and their full and truncated versions in Mandarin.  Second, there is often a plethora of variant romanizations for each name.

Ed Wong, the New York Times correspondent who has been keeping us so well informed about the events as they unfold, told me that the NYT had

"received an email from a reader saying the NYT should change its 'pronouncer' on Uighurs.  Right now, in our articles, the editors insert (WEE-gurs) as the pronouncer.  One reader said this is not the correct pronunciation, and sounds strange to the Turkic speaker’s ear."

As I told Ed, it would have been helpful if the person who sent the NYT the e-mail would have indicated the correct pronunciation, not just told them that WEE-gurs sounds wrong.

In an attempt to clarify how the most important  Xinjiang names are actually pronounced in Uyghur and in Mandarin, I here provide various orthographic forms along with audio clips.  As to what sort of "pronouncers" should be developed for the major media, presumably to represent appropriate Americanized pronunciations, I invite suggestions.

[Update: I give "pronouncers" and recordings of suggested American English renditions in a later post, "American English pronunciation of Uyghur proper nouns", 7/15/2009.)

In today's Iran Updates at niacINsight:

According to Tabnak, Mohsen Namjoo an Iranian artist and folk singer was sentenced to 5 years in prison for singing lyrics of the Koran in a modern popular style of Music.

Mohsen Namjoo is very popular in Iran and has made a few concerts around the world including in North American cities.

This is further evidence of the government’s ongoing effort to clamp down on artists and musicians.

Last month, it was Barack Obama whose (allegedly) imperial ego was said to be signaled by (fictitious) overuse of first-person singular pronouns. (Follow the link for discussion of columns on the topic by Terence Jeffrey, George F. Will, Stanley Fish, and Mary Kate Cary.) A few days ago, Peggy Noonan's devastating attack on Sarah Palin ("A Farewell to Harms", WSJ, 7/11/2009) presented a similar argument:

She wasn't thoughtful enough to know she wasn't thoughtful enough. Her presentation up to the end has been scattered, illogical, manipulative and self-referential to the point of self-reverence. "I'm not wired that way," "I'm not a quitter," "I'm standing up for our values." I'm, I'm, I'm.

A few days ago, Michelle Pauli in the Guardian's Books Blog asked "Which words make you wince?":

'What word do you hate and why?' is the intriguing question put to a selection of poets by the Ledbury festival. Philip Wells's reply is the winner for me – 'pulchritude' is certainly up there on my blacklist. He even explains his animosity in suitably poetic terms:

"it violates all the magical impulses of balanced onomatopoeic language – it of course means "beautiful", but its meaning is nothing of the sort, being stuffed to the brim with a brutally latinate cudgel of barbaric consonants. If consonants represent riverbanks and vowels the river's flow, this is the word equivalent of the bottomless abyss of dry bones, where demons gather to spit acid."

For Geraldine Monk, "it's got to be 'redacted' which makes me feel totally sick. It's a brutish sounding word. It doesn't flow, it prods at you in a nasty manner."

Both these poets understand that the key to words that make you feel nauseous is not the meaning – it's easy, after all, to hate the word 'torture' – but something else entirely. Something idiosyncratic, something about the way the word feels in your mouth as you say it. The horrors of 'membrane', for instance. Or the eccentricity of 'gusset'.

For most intellectuals today, grammar is no longer a tool of rational analysis, but rather a source of incoherent metaphor. As a recent example, consider Margaret Carlson's analysis of Sarah Palin's resignation speech (from Countdown on July 9, 2009):

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Sarah Palin is very good at stringing words together
that don't have a subject, a verb and an object, they're just
present participles and prepositions and "I love the people of Alaska"
and "I'm quitting so I can serve them better".
It makes no sense!

A casual inspection of the 59 (true) Google hits on "Oooo, you look", suggests that Dr. Willis Jensen, a recent presenter in the brownbag lunch series at Language Log Plaza, vastly overestimated the correlation between utterance initial "Oooo" and sarcasm: the true rate is less than 50%. However, he is correct to identify "Oooo" as a common marker of sarcasm, e.g. the comment "oooo. you look lovely:)" in the comments here from the above search.

(A video report on Dr. Jensen's groundbreaking work is below the fold.)

In some alternative history, according to the webcomic Teaching Baby Paranoia:

(Click on the image for a larger version. If your screen is too small, this may not work — in that case, try right-click>>view image or your browser/OS equivalent.)

I've observed from time to time, half-seriously, that the ambiguity of plural noun-phrase comparison ("women have better hearing than men") causes — as well as results from — the tendency to interpret small group differences as essential group characteristics (e.g. "The Pirahã and us", 10/6/2007; "Annals of essentialism: sexual orientation and rhetorical assymmetry", 6/18/2008; "Pop platonism and unrepresentative samples", 7/26/2008; 'The happiness gap returns", 7/26/2008;. "Reverse Whorfianism and SHAs", 12/23/2008).

But there are other, more lexically specific, sources of confusion about statistical concepts and statements. One that I noticed for the first time yesterday is an ambiguity in the word chance. Its popular use in the sense of probabilistic odds ("little chance of success"; "his chances are good" , etc.) is relatively recent, and has always overlapped with an older meaning that emphasizes complete unpredictability and the lack of any discernable cause.

This history helps explain the shocking sentence that I read yesterday on the online front page of the New York Times; "A longtime trainer uses an actuarial approach to predict injuries, defying the assumption that what happens to players is a matter of chance".