Language Log

After reading about the evolutionary origins of (some brainstem pathways controlling) social vocalization, you might enjoy seeing what you get from people who get paid for explaining things to you, and have actual editors and stuff:

"Toadfish sex hum stirs boffins"; "Honey? Gurgle, gurgle"; "Researchers report toadfish sing to attract mates"; "When fish talk, scientists listen"; "We all sing like fish"; "Spread the word: Fish talk"; "Grunting fish tell of the origins of human speech"; "Grunting, humming fish joins ancient chorus";  "Study dates origin of vocal sounds"; "Cornell scientists discover how fish 'talk'"; "Talking fish"; "Mud-dwelling Toadfish Give Clues to the Origin of Human Speech"; etc.

The latest xkcd:

Its title tag: "If you think this is too hard on literary criticism, read the Wikipedia article on deconstruction."

One of the oldest and most interesting arguments for evolution is Ernst Haeckel's theory of recapitulation: the idea that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. In the form that Haeckel proposed — that embryological development progresses though a series of fully-developed ancestral forms — this theory has been refuted many times over the past century. What remains is the idea that "one species changes into another by a sequence of small modifications to its developmental program". This is the basis of modern research in evolutionary developmental biology ("evo devo"), and a central theme of Neil Shubin's Your Inner Fish, from which I took that picture of the development of arm bones from fish to humans.

Evo devo is mainly about anatomical development, but sometimes, surprising claims are made in this framework about evolutionary conservation of neurological function. A striking example of this is offered by a paper in the July 18 issue of Science (Andrew H. Bass, Edwin H. Gilland, and Robert Baker, "Evolutionary Origins for Social Vocalization in a Vertebrate Hindbrain–Spinal Compartment", Science 321(5887): 417-421, 2008), which argues that "the vocal basis for acoustic communication among vertebrates evolved from an ancestrally shared developmental compartment already present in the early fishes", namely "a segment-like region that forms a transitional compartment between the caudal hindbrain and rostral spinal cord".

It's a very small point, but it annoys me, this fanaticism on Wikipedia for providing links to every mentioned entity that has a Wikipedia entry of its own. My own Wikipedia page is just a stub of five short sentences, but it has ten links, to:

linguistics, Stanford University, Distinguished University Professor, Ohio State University, Morris Halle, MIT, Edward Sapir, Linguistic Society of America, UIUC, Language Log

(plus an external link to my homepage and a "see also" link to Recency Illusion).

The problem is that these links are visually obtrusive. They scream. And they point you to webpages that you probably don't want to see (because they don't really provide any useful background information about me) and could in any case be accessed by a simple search on an obvious phrase in the text.

Link fanaticism is not some accident. As I discovered some time ago, it is PRESCRIBED Wikipedia style. There are people who view any unlinked reference as a FAULT, and edit pages to insert the (I'm sorry to say this) missing links. What the editors are after is perfect consistency and uniformity. But the point of links is that they should be useful and helpful — which means that the writer of an entry needs to take the readers' likely knowledge and interests into account and use JUDGMENT in inserting links. Skillful linking is, in a way, like the skillful deployment of anaphors in writing or speech.

I'm always happy to learn new things about playground culture. Like language, it's somehow completely consistent and endlessly variable across time and space. And now that my main source for contemporary playground lore (e.g. "Pickle jinx", 12/16/2003; "High jinx", 12/17/2003) has graduated to new sorts of games, I have to rely on internet clues like this:

The phrase "no tagbacks" is familiar from my childhood — and the concept presumably goes back to paleolithic times — but the use of "blackjack" in this context is new to me. And in this particular case, the internet has so far failed to provide the answer. [Update: but Ray Girvan came through].

Each year the United Nations declares that the next year will be an International Year of X, for several Xs; 2008 is the UN Year of Sanitation, the Reef, Planet Earth, the Potato, and… Languages. Heidi Harley reported on Language Log, in May 2007, on the UN declaration of IYL, but we haven't taken up the question of what you might DO for the occasion. (Heidi's posting was mainly taken up with the split focus of the official statements about the occasion — lauding multilingualism and linguistic diversity; and also urging that endangered and minority languages be protected and preserved.*)

Now, in a letter in the most recent issue (June 2008) of Language, David Crystal exhorts members of the Linguistic Society of America to find ways to promote IYL (even though it's more than half over). (Crystal's letter is an abridged version of a paper available here.)

nascardaughter makes an interesting point in the comments section of my Dare to be bilingual post. Taking her lead, I'll divide what were (in my mind) previously two questions into four:

1. Why would making English official be bad?
2. Why would making English official be good?
3. Why is having no official language good?
4. Why is having no official language bad?

Question 1 is what Timothy M asked of me and other Language Loggers, and Question 2 is what I asked readers to ponder in my Language devaluation post. Question 3 is what nascardaughter asks us all to consider, and Question 4 rounds out the logical possibilities.

On BoingBoing, someone sent in this photo of an AT&T store in downtown Manhattan:

"Perhaps it'll be available last year," Mark Frauenfelder wryly notes. Commenters chime in with their own time-travel jokes, and a couple point out the added typo of "out stock" for "out of stock." One commenter wonders if the photo's a fake, but I'm quite sure it isn't. Substituting temporally for temporarily is a common error, perhaps due to the phonological process of haplology (the omission of one of a pair of similar sounding syllables, like saying lib'ry for library). [Or, as Andrea conjectures in the comments, it could be yet another result of the Cupertino effect.] It's so common that a quick search on Google Images and Flickr turned up a dozen more photos of signs with temporally. There are so many that it's probably just a matter of time before there's a whole blog dedicated to such signs, in the style of other peeveblogging we've seen (apostrophe abuse, unnecessary quotation marks, lowercase L, etc.). A gallery follows below.

Sara Scharf sent in a link to a Chinese menu picture from the Bad Translations group on flickr:

Some time ago, we had a discussion on the American Dialect Society mailing list about the Dictionary of the Scots Language (DSL). DSL consists of the Dictionary of the Older Scots Tongue and the Scottish National Dictionary, together making 22 volumes in print (plus a 2005 supplement). These amazing resources are now available on-line, providing searchable electronic versions of the fruits of scholarship on the Scots language. For free, no strings, available to anyone with web access. (DSL is just part of a larger set of resources, the Scottish Language Dictionaries, or SLD.)

I was astounded, and said so to the list. How was this managed, when parallel resources in English (for instance, the Oxford English Dictionary, the Dictionary of American Regional English, and the Historical Dictionary of American Slang) had scant prospect of getting a similar treatment within the foreseeable future? (The monumental English Dialect Dictionary is apparently being digitized — at the University of Innsbruck!) I exchanged e-mail with DSL staff and discovered just how fragile the whole business was: a subvention from the Scottish Arts Council provided the backbone of the support, and private donors supplied some support, but the enterprise seemed to survive on a phalanx of (unpaid) volunteers (and I suspected that the staff was not very well paid).

I intended to post to Language Log at the time, just to alert people that DSL was available on-line, but the posting fell behind other things and I never got back to it. Now, it turns out, the dictionaries are threatened.

I'm not sure whether David Brooks has changed his mind about nature and nurture, or just has a short attention span. It wasn't long ago that he told us ("David Brooks, Neuroendocrinologist", 9/17/2006) that

Once radicals dreamed of new ways of living, but now happiness seems to consist of living in harmony with the patterns that nature and evolution laid down long, long ago.

But in his most recent column (David Brooks, "The Luxurious Growth", 7/15/2008), he's singing a different song:

It wasn’t long ago that headlines were blaring about the discovery of an aggression gene, a happiness gene or a depression gene. The implication was obvious: We’re beginning to understand the wellsprings of human behavior, and it won’t be long before we can begin to intervene to enhance or transform human life.

Few talk that way now. There seems to be a general feeling, as a Hastings Center working group put it, that “behavioral genetics will never explain as much of human behavior as was once promised.”

Studies designed to link specific genes to behavior have failed to find anything larger than very small associations. It’s now clear that one gene almost never leads to one trait. Instead, a specific trait may be the result of the interplay of hundreds of different genes interacting with an infinitude of environmental factors.

From Phil Ford at Dial M for Musicology:

His analysis:  "Sometimes I think that academics have a kind of mental operating procedure designed to insulate them from having to consider anyone else's ideas at all."

The prime minister of Belgium, Yves Leterme, has tendered his resignation after his government failed in its attempt to grant greater autonomy to the country's Dutch- and French-speaking regions. Belgium's linguistic quandary is an issue of enormous consequence (and one on which Language Log has been peculiarly silent), but I'll let more informed voices chime in on the collapse of the Leterme government. Instead, as is my wont, I'm going to sidestep the weighty geopolitical repercussions and focus on a small but interesting typo in the Associated Press article, "Belgian premier offers resignation amid deadlock":