Language Log

In the section on "Theories of Language Development" in Karen Huffman's Psychology in Action, Wiley, 8th edition, 2005 (p. 303), we read that

… Noam Chomsky … suggests that children are born "prewired" to learn language. They possess neurological ability, known as a language acquisition device (LAD), that … enables the child to analyze language and extract the basic rules of grammar.
[…]
Although the nativist position enjoys considerable support, it fails to explain individual differences. Why does one child learn rules for English, whereas another learns rules for Spanish?

David Crystal laments on his blog:

it's going to be difficult to dispel the urban myths about texting. Here’s an example of the problem. Txtng came out on 5th July. On the 6th there was a report in Scotland on Sunday headed ‘Professor spreads the word on joy of text’. That sounds good, and the report did summarize quite well the six main points …

At the end, the reporter asked for a reaction from the Headteachers’ Association of Scotland. This is what the spokesman said: ‘Because of the rate in which text-speak is taking hold I shudder to think what letters will look like in 10 years’ time.’

The spokesman obviously hadn’t paid any attention at all to the report.

Not an uncommon scenario. An expert — someone with detailed knowledge in some domain and with evidence bearing on a question in that domain — speaks authoritatively on that question. Some members of the public who have an opinion on the question then simply disregard the expert's testimony. What's going on here?

More on the evils of texting, with a predictable response by authorities: there oughta be a law (or at least an administrative ban). From the New York Times:

California Bans Texting by Operators of Trains
By JESSE McKINLEY and MATTHEW L. WALD
Published: September 18, 2008

SAN FRANCISCO — A day after federal investigators said an engineer in last week’s deadly train collision outside Los Angeles had been text-messaging on the job, California’s railroad regulators temporarily banned the use of all cellular devices by anyone at the controls of a moving train.

The emergency order was passed unanimously by the five-person California Public Utilities Commission, which noted the lack of federal or state rules regarding the use of such devices by on-duty train personnel.

Michael R. Peevey, the president of the commission, which oversees rail traffic in the state, said in a statement that the prohibition on cellular use was “necessary and reasonable.”

Notice that the ban is on all cellular devices.

Now comes a fresh bulletin on the Texting While Xing front.

When I read this article in the New York Times that is critical about the expert witness system in the US courts, I found a lot to cheer about. I’ve served as an expert in scores of cases in the US state and federal courts, before the US Congress, and at the International Criminal Tribunal, so my agreement may seem surprising.

It’s no secret that serving as an expert witness can be excruciatingly difficult experience. Some say it’s a lot like taking a four-hour doctor’s oral exam. In the US criminal court system, experts are hired either by the prosecution or the defense. No matter which side we’re working for and no matter how objective we may try to be, some people still call us “hired guns.”

There's been a great deal of discussion recently about Senator John McCain's position on Spain. In an interview with Radio Caracol of Miami, he engaged in a puzzling back-and-forth on the question of whether he would be willing to host the leader of the Spanish government at the White House, or perhaps even talk with him. I think that Josh Marshall's analysis is right:

Through some mixture of confusion and inability to understand the interviewer's accent, McCain was confused about who he was talking about and decided to wing it, assuming that the person he was being asked about was some other left-wing strong man from Latin America and answering with the standard boilerplate about standing up to America's enemies.

You can listen and come to your own conclusions — I've put a transcript with an audio link up here.  My contribution to the discussion is to draw your attention to an aspect of Senator McCain's intonation.

The Zippy take on the baleful effects of electronic communication:

Here, Bill Griffith mocks the alarm over what electronic communication is leading to, as discussed in David Crystal's new book Txtng: The Gr8 Db8, which Ben Zimmer has begun posting about here on Language Log.

Back in August, Anatol Stefanowitsch at Bremer Sprachblog extended xkcd's classic research on the nature of regret by adding the dimension of gender, and by comparing English to German ("Je Ne Regrette Rien", 8/17/2008):

(Click on the images for larger versions.)

To help bloggers everywhere celebrate Talk Like a Pirate Day, in keeping with our annual tradition, we present the Corsair Ergonomic Keyboard for Pirates:

In TLAPD posts from earlier years, you can find instructions for the more difficult task of talking (as opposed to typing) like a pirate; the history of piratical r-fulness; and other goodies: 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007.

There's actually some serious historical linguistics (and cultural history) involved here, as discussed in "R!?", 9/19/2005, and "Pirate R as in I-R-ELAND", 9/20/2006. And even a bit of mathematical linguistics.

Yes, it's Talk Like a Pirate Day. Here's David Morgan-Mar's Irregular Webcomic take on the event:

In my capacity as executive producer of the Visual Thesaurus, I recently had the opportunity to interview David Crystal about his new book, Txtng: The Gr8 Db8, a careful demolition of the myths surrounding text messaging. You can read the first part of my interview on the Visual Thesaurus website here, with parts two and three to follow in coming weeks. As Mark Liberman has noted, texting is only now achieving levels of popularity in the US that Europe and parts of Asia saw about five years ago. That also means that the US is also about five years behind the curve on the concomitant hysteria over how texting presages the death of the language.

Time and time again we've seen this strain of "hell in a handbasket" degenerationism pervading attitudes about contemporary language use (e.g., here, here, here, and here). But the furore over texting in the United Kingdom, which Crystal says began with a 2003 Internet myth about a school essay written entirely in textisms, takes this alarmism to new levels. Will the U.S. be whipped up into the same fervor, five years later? Geoff Nunberg gave some indications of this possibility in a "Fresh Air" commentary a few months ago about excessive reactions to a Pew Research Center study on texting. The publication of Crystal's book in the US is therefore remarkably well-timed, since it can serve as a useful antidote to this sort of overheated discourse.

My class on the Chinese script has around 36 students in it. About half of them are native speakers from Taiwan, the Mainland, Singapore, and Hong Kong (most of these are graduate students who already have M.A.'s from overseas universities or are finishing up their Ph.D.'s). About one quarter of the other students are native speakers of Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese. About a quarter are Americans who have studied Mandarin anywhere from two to twelve years.

Today, I made the students close their computers, electronic dictionaries, and all their books and papers, then asked them to write down on a piece of paper the simplified and traditional characters for Taiwan and beneath that what the meaning or origin of the name is. In the top right corner they indicated whether they were native speakers or how many years they had studied Chinese (I also should have asked them to indicate where they were from, but neglected to do so). The results:

• only 2 students could write both forms correctly
• only 4 students could write both forms partially correctly
• only 10 students could write one form correctly
• about 10 students could write one form partially correctly
• the remainder of the students could not write either form correctly, including a couple of the native speakers
• most students who had taken up to 6 years of Chinese couldn't write either form correctly

[If you want to give yourself the same quiz, before reading further, the answer is here.]

So many complaints about science journalism appear here on Language Log that it is only proper that we should occasionally draw attention to a fine piece of popular science writing. One such, I think after one read-through, is Natalie Angier's "Gut instinct's surprising role in math" in The New York Times (hat tip to Barbara Scholz, who pointed me to it). It's reporting on a paper in Nature by Halberda, Feigenson, and Mazzocco, which supports the view that (in Feigenson's words) "your evolutionarily endowed sense of approximation is related to how good you are at formal math." There have been many Language Log posts on related themes, like "The cognitive technology of number" (July 11, 2008) and "The Pirahã and us" (October 6, 2007). There is intrinsic interest in what Angier reports: evidence that how good you are at subitization, the instinctive quantity-assessing ability you share with many animal species, is correlated with, and perhaps even determinative of, the extent to which you will readily develop abilities at linguistically formalized manipulation of mathematical concepts. But Angier's article also represents an instance of really good generally accessible writing about science, in a contemporary American newspaper. It can be done. Some science journalists put out good product. And not all journalism that touches on the cognitive and linguistic sciences gets grumbled about on Language Log.

Annie Wagner, in an unusual tribute to the late David Foster Wallace, asked about "a grammatical quirk the man just couldn’t quit". She quotes from a review she wrote several years ago:

Everything is the first volume in the “Great Discoveries” series, through which the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, intends to “bring new voices to the telling of stories of scientific achievement.” Which goal, as DFW’s habitual syntax would have it, is somewhat suspicious.