Language Log

As I announced on Thursday, David Harrison was just here in the San Diego wing of Language Log Plaza to screen and discuss the film The Linguists, at UC San Diego on Thursday and at San Diego State University on Friday. Both events were hugely successful — a fantastic turnout of around 150 people at each screening. David then headed to Rutgers University (my graduate school alma mater, as it happens) for a similar event during Rutgers Day on Saturday, where I'm sure the turnout was also great.

In case you missed all of these screenings, or if your PBS station didn't air it (or you don't get even have a PBS station!), or if you just want to see it again, the film is streaming for a limited time at Babelgum. Click and watch!

Two items: a Rubes cartoon (by Leigh Rubin) on avoidance characters in cartoons, and a story from a while back on taboo vocabulary in a Batman comic.

Breffni O'Rourke has contributed a lovely specimen to our growing collection of cases where combinations of negations and scalar predicates leave writers and readers in a state of confusion. This one is from the EB section on the 14th and 15th centuries in Ireland (full path "Ireland:History:First centuries of English rule (1166-1600):The 14th and 15th centuries"):

Although both the Gaels and the Anglo-Irish had supported the Yorkist side in the Wars of the Roses, the Yorkist king Edward IV found them no less easy to subjugate than had his Lancastrian predecessors. Succeeding in 1468 in bringing about the attainder and execution for treason of Thomas, earl of Desmond, Edward was nevertheless obliged to yield to aristocratic power in Ireland. The earls of Kildare, who thereafter bore the title of lords deputy (for the English princes who were lords lieutenant), were in effect the actual rulers of Ireland until well into the 16th century.

A recent publication (Rajesh P. N. Rao, Nisha Yadav, Mayank N. Vahia, Hrishikesh Joglekar, R. Adhikari, and Iravatham Mahadevan, "Entropic Evidence for Linguistic Structure in the Indus Script", Science, published online 23 April 2009; also supporting online material) claims a breakthrough in understanding the nature of the symbols found in inscriptions from the Indus Valley Civilization.

Two major types of nonlinguistic systems are those that do not exhibit much sequential structure (“Type 1” systems) and those that follow rigid sequential order (“Type 2” systems). […] Linguistic systems tend to fall somewhere between these two extremes […] This flexibility can be quantified statistically using conditional entropy, which measures the amount of randomness in the choice of a token given a preceding token. […]

We computed the conditional entropies of five types of known natural linguistic systems […], four types of nonlinguistic systems […], and an artificially-created linguistic system […]. We compared these conditional entropies with the conditional entropy of Indus inscriptions from a well-known concordance of Indus texts.

We found that the conditional entropy of Indus inscriptions closely matches those of linguistic systems and remains far from nonlinguistic systems throughout the entire range of token set sizes.

At first sight the headline suggested a case for the Language Log UK Free Speech Watch Desk and the Abusive Epithets Work Group: Mother fined £250 for 'poof' abuse of gay son. A $370 fine just for using the word 'poof', even within the family? What next? Jail time just for calling one's clumsy husband a stupid bastard? Family life would collapse. Intrafamilial insults are part of a great British tradition.

But no, studying of the fine detail of the article (in the Metro, a free UK newspaper) revealed that it wasn't a matter of word use at all.

So proclaims the cover of Michel Brûlé's "Essai sociologique" Anglaid: Une langue irrémédiablement vouée à l’impérialisme et à l’ethnocentrisme ("English: A language irremediably devoted to imperialism and ethnocentrism"), in a photographed scrawl that reminds me of the shots in the movie A Beautiful Mind of John Nash's study walls during his descent into schizophrenia.

When The New York Times asked me to contribute to the discussion of The Elements of Style on their "Room for Debate" blog, I figured they would dredge up a bunch of aged worthies of the New York literati who would pother on about the virtues of the little book, and I would be alone out there in saying that it did not deserve our respect and could actually be educationally harmful. But it was not as I thought: all of the other four invited commenters (Patricia T. O'Conner of Grammarphobia.com, Stephen Dodson of Language Hat, Ben Yagoda of BenYagoda.com, and Mignon Fogarty the Grammar Girl) are distinctly critical. Elements gets a rough ride. Perhaps not as rough as I would like, but never mind, there is a developing consensus here that I approve of. (And E. B. White himself might even have approved; he thought that no smooth ride is as valuable as a rough ride.) Dodson reminds us that on Language Hat he has called Elements "the mangiest of stuffed owls", a book that has been "undercooked and overpraised" (I knew I liked this guy). Check it out.

Forbes reports that the April 21, 2008 New Yorker article, “Vengeance is Ours,” by Jared Diamond, has recently generated a $10 million dollar lawsuit brought by Daniel Wemp,  a New Guinean who Diamond claimed was pursuing vengeance for his uncle’s death. His efforts are said to have led to six years of warfare that have claimed the lives of 47 people in New Guinea.  Rhonda Roland Shearer’s very long blog at StinkyJournalism.org provides more details. There’s a connection to Language Log because Shearer asked linguist Douglas Biber to assess whether the long, numerous, and allegedly direct quotations in Diamond’s article were actually spoken language or whether they were written language modified to look like direct quotes. Biber is an expert on measuring the differences between written and spoken language, so it was prudent for Shearer to seek his help with corpus linguistics to help resolve the issue.

… as translated by Nancy Friedman from the original MoDonese.

Forbes.com is running a special report on neologisms — a rather peculiar topic for Forbes, I suppose, but they put together a pretty decent lineup of contributors. From the Language Log family there's John McWhorter and me, with good friends of LL Grant Barrett and Mark Peters also pitching in. There really was no news hook for the report, unless you count the claim by Global Language Monitor that English will be adding its millionth word on April 29, 2009. No, make that June 8. Scratch that, June 10.

All right.  Something seems to be afoot.

You will note in the this news story from China that there have lately been calls for a speedy and complete restitution of the complex / traditional (FANTI) characters.  Of course, that won't happen (at least not right away), but if you read between the lines, it does seem that there will be a retrenchment of the simplified (JIANTI) characters.

In the coming weeks, during the leadup to the promulgation of the new list of revised characters, we will see many more articles like this one from today's Economist, "Not as easy as it looks."

For an excellent account of this most contentious issue, I strongly recommend an article entitled "The Chinese Character — no simple matter" from the China Heritage Quarterly of The Australian National University, 17 (March, 2009). Note particularly the link to chinaSmack near the end for netizens' reactions.

If you happen to be in the San Diego / La Jolla area this afternoon at 5pm PDT, why don't you cruise by the beautiful UC San Diego campus to enjoy a screening of The Linguists followed by discussion with one of the linguists featured in the film, David Harrison? It's free and open to the public. Many more details can be found here. (If you miss it today, there's another screening at 5pm tomorrow at San Diego State University.)

In responding to bad publicity about the "Craigslist Killer", Jim Buckmaster has been accused of violating the norms of English grammar. An article in the Boston Globe  ("Craiglist CEO: Our site is not sex-related", 4/22/2009) quotes him as telling CNN that "We feel terribly, and it's quite sad that anyone would lose their life". To which Paul Mulshine, a syndicated columnist for the New Jersey Star-Ledger, responded "No, you feel terrible; you merely speak terribly".

According to Mr. Mulshine, feel in this case is what he calls a "linking verb", which is followed not by an adverb but by a "predicate adjective", describing "not the action of the predicate but the condition of the subject". He calls Mr. Buckmaster's usage a "hypercorrectionism", caused by "some time-server of a teacher" who warned "little Jimmy" against leaving the -ly off of adverbs, but "never got around to explaining the role of a predicate adjective".