Language Log

Dick Cavett recently called Sarah Palin "The Wild Wordsmith of Wasilla" and "the serial syntax-killer from Wasilla High". He worries that "ambitious politicos" will learn "that frayed syntax, bungled grammar and run-on sentences that ramble on long after thought has given out completely are a candidate’s valuable traits". Peter Suderman, more specific if less witty, complains ("Sarah Palin speaks!",11/12/2208 ) that "I do not know what this means":

… massive leverage by everyone from consumers who bought houses for nothing down to hedge funds that were betting $30 for every $1 they had in cash a world economy that is so much more intertwined than people realized which is exemplified by British police departments that are financially strapped today because they put their savings in online Icelandic banks to get a little better yield that have gone bust globally intertwined financial instruments that are so complex that most of the C.E.O.'s dealing with them did not and do not understand how they work especially on the downside a financial crisis that started in America with our toxic mortgages …

Why, for heaven's sake, do journalists simply make stuff up when the science involved in a story is linguistic science? When the photos of those planets orbiting HR 8799 in Pegasus appeared this week, the press reported correctly that the objects in question were gas giants like Jupiter. They didn't say that they were giant balls of feathers. But when writing about the death of the late lamented South African singer Miriam Makeba, The Economist asserted that "she could sing while making the epiglottal clicks of the Xhosa language". Bob Ladd has pointed out to me that actually there are two asinine howlers in this. One, which I didn't immediately notice, is that we don't speak about Edith Piaf as being able to sing while making the uvular trills of the French language, because those sounds are part of the French language: they are perfectly ordinary consonants (r-sounds). She sings words that contain them, and if she didn't, she wouldn't be singing the right words. Well, the clicks of Xhosa are (for Xhosa speakers) perfectly ordinary consonants too. But the other thing is more serious: "epiglottal clicks" are a phonetic impossibility. In brief, clicks are produced with a suction action using the middle of the tongue, and the back of the tongue completely seals off the airway during a click. The epiglottis is way down near the larynx. It is literally impossible for there to be a click (i.e., velaric suction stop) articulated at or with the epiglottis. There are epiglottal sounds in some languages, but they are not clicks; and Xhosa doesn't have any epiglottals. The (anonymous) obituarist was simply slinging around phonetic terminology they had come across but did not understand. Shame on you, Economist. Hire a fact-checker. Or look things up on Wikipedia. Or ask Language Log.

I've recently received an email offering me, for a mere $245, a yearly subscription to Surgical Technology International. As a teaser, the journal's marketing department invites me to view an online copy of "Site-Specific Rectocele Repair with Dermal Graft Augmentation: Comparison of Porcine Dermal Xenograft (Pelvicol®) and Human Dermal Allograft", by a long list of authors whose affiliations include not only the Harvard Medical School but also the Carolina Continence Center.

For the last few days, I've been in Düsseldorf for the Berlin 6 Open Access conference, where I organized a session on "Open Data and Reproducible Research". Here's the abstract:

In many scientific and technical fields, research is increasingly based on published data. Researchers also often publish detailed instructions or even executable recipes for reproducing their results. Combined with inexpensive networked computing and mass storage, these trends can radically accelerate the pace of research, by lowering barriers to entry and decreasing the time required to reproduce and extend innovations. These changes may also modify the balance between data collection and data analysis, and between experimental and theoretical work.

Nevertheless, these potentially revolutionary developments are mostly happening below the surface, with uneven progress across disciplines, and little general discussion of how to guide or react to the process. The goal of this panel is to publicize the experience of several communities who have up to two decades of experience with what Jon Claerbout has termed "reproducible research", and to begin a general discussion of the broader implications for scientific, technical and scholarly publication.

I just returned from a linguistics conference in China. I won’t even try to compete with Victor Mair’s reports (here and here and here, for example) about the way English is fractured there, but a taxi ride in Guangzhou provided me with a few bits of interesting language information.

For your edification and amusement: An articulator-based, rather than acoustic, speech synthesis device.

The original context, here on Botjunkie, says that the ultimate goal is a voice compression system for cellphones. I'm a bit confused about this — I *think* that the idea is that representing speech articulatorily will be less data-intensive than representing it acoustically, but that seems wildly improbable to me.

Here's the description of the system on the Takanishi Labs page. Amazingly, they even have a rubber set of vocal cords at work! (scroll down to see them in action).

Rob Walker's "Consumed" column in the NYT Magazine on Sunday (9 November) looks at prepaid credit cards, in particular the Prepaid Visa RushCard, "the product of a partnership between Unifund (a Cincinnati company best known for buying up and collecting on bad debts) and Russell Simmons, a founder of Def Jam records and the Phat Farm apparel brand." 

“We created the prepaid RushCard,” Simmons says in [an ad], “so everyone will have access to the American dream.” That sounds a little bland for someone with Simmons’s brand-building panache, but recently, in The Economist, Simmons gave his pitch a bit more zing by suggesting (in terms that can only be paraphrased here) that the card has aphrodisiac properties.

The point he was making, however earthily, was that plastic and status are intertwined in contemporary America. 

Ah, the NYT, ever modest (as we've commented on here many times). Just what was it that Simmons said that required paraphrase in the Times?

The latest xkcd:

(Click on the image for a larger version.)

As I read the text of Rob Balder's latest PartiallyClips strip, about whether magic is perhaps secretly taught in universities, I experienced a moment of terror over whether linguistics was going to turn up in the third panel. But our discipline dodged the bullet. Check it out.

A nice little example of "variety individuation" (see here), in which a mass noun N (like wine) has corresponding count uses meaning 'variety of N' (as in three fine wines), from a piece by Andrew Pollack ("The Promise and Power of RNA"), in the 11 November Science Times section of the NYT. It's all about RNA.

RNA is clearly a mass noun for a long part of the article. But then we get to the hard fact that there are lots of different types of RNA, and count uses (referring to varieties of RNA) blossom, often alternating with mass uses.

We've spent a lot of electrons attacking the Bushisms industry — but we've never tried to make the argument that John Hinderaker put forward a couple of days ago, apparently in earnest ("The importance of being careful", 11/9/2008):

In this regard, President Bush is an excellent model; Obama should take a lesson from his example. Bush never gets sloppy when he is speaking publicly. He chooses his words with care and precision, which is why his style sometimes seems halting. In the eight years he has been President, it is remarkable how few gaffes or verbal blunders he has committed. If Obama doesn't raise his standards, he will exceed Bush's total before he is inaugurated.

On Saturday, I was at a workshop on "Brain Rhythms in Speech Perception and Production". One of the participants was Aniruddh Patel, author of Music, Language and the Brain. His presentation was "Rhythms in Speech and Music", and one of the papers that he discussed was John Iversen, Aniruddh Patel, and Kengo Ohgushi, "Perception of rhythmic grouping depends on auditory experience", JASA 123(4): 2263-2271, 2008.

Unfortunately, I had to leave that workshop early, in order to travel to Düsseldorf for the Berlin 6 Open Access conference, where I am now. As I was leaving, Aniruddh gave me a reprint of the Iversen et al. paper, and asked for comments. So I'll keep up my act as "the Madonna of linguists" (even though the reviews to date have been mixed), and offer my comments in the form of a blog post.

The Guardian interviewed Dan Everett while he was in the UK recently for lectures in Edinburgh and London, and has published a piece about Dan and the Pirahã. The Language Log fan who was the first to point it out to us (thanks, Rachele) asks about its example of recursion. It says:

Chomsky … recently refined his theory to argue that recursion — the linguistic practice of inserting phrases inside others – was the cornerstone of all languages. (An example of recursion is extending the sentence "Daniel Everett talked about the story of his life" to read, "Daniel Everett flew to London and talked about the story of his life".)

Is that recursion? Well, unfortunately the matter isn't clear. Let me explain.