Language Log

English is a fine language in most respects, but its morphosyntactic resources for talking about sampled properties of groups are remarkably poor.  (Not that other languages are any better, as far as I know.)  In particular, English speakers have no simple alternative to the use of generic statements about whole groups or typical members, when discussing cases where between-group differences are significant, but small relative to within-group variation — Xs are P-er than Ys, or Xs prefer A to B, or an X prefers A while a Y prefers B.

The result is especially unfortunate when it involves invidious comparisons in socially sensitive areas, but the problem comes up whenever anyone discusses properties of groups.  This morning, Stephen Jones brought a particularly striking example to my attention: an article in today's Independent, "Oodles of noodles: Britain prefers Chinese to curry".

There's a recently-fashionable construction, in which "would be" is used where plain "is" might have been expected. For example, in the imaginary Q&A below, I might respond with B₂ rather than B₁

A: I'm looking for Mark Liberman.
B₁: That's me.
B₂: That would be me.

A couple of weeks ago, our comments section featured a lively discussion of this phenomenon. (As far as I know, there isn't any common-used term for it, so pending a better idea, I'll call it the TWBM construction, for "That Would Be Me"). Opinions differed, as they often do in discussions of matters linguistic, about where to draw the boundaries of the phenomenon, as well as about its meaning, origins, circumstances of use, and so on. In particular, Bloix suggested that "The point of the 'would be' construction is that it implies doubt on the part of the speaker", while I expressed skepticism about the relevance of doubt to the meaning of this construction.

The following sign is posted in a New York City shop window:

Geoff Pullum gave us a really neat lesson on Finnish short vowels a few months ago, pointing out things that nobody but native speakers have ever known — that Finns produce a subtle duration of short /Ih/ vowels that the rest of us don’t even hear. But hey, The Finnish vowel duration distinction doesn’t come close to what’s going on in a remote part of Tanzania.

A really, really short /Ih/ has been discovered by phonetic scientists who study vowel duration. Phoneticians in East Africa recently have stumbled upon the shortest vowel ever known to humankind. They discovered that the duration of the /Ih/ vowel, already known for its very short length in languages like English (to say nothing about it’s tremendous importance in Finnish), is produced in .11 hundredths of a second by a small band of speakers of Kwatnaksa, who live on an otherwise unoccupied island in the Indian Ocean.

Facing a steep drop in revenue, Language Log plans to cut the pay of all employees by 10 percent and will place some writers on unpaid furloughs. There will also be additional budget adjustments, according to executive offices on the penthouse floor.

The reduced pay for non-union employees, including top executives, will become effective April 1. Several writers have been offered early retirement but at the time of this writing, management has not received responses from any of them. Anonymous sources say that the writers instead demand that the executives return all huge bonuses that they received at the end of the past fiscal year.

Today's Zits:

Today's Cathy addresses the topic of ambiguity resolution in speech:

Daniel Gross has a nice article in Slate called “Bubblespeak,” describing the way economists and politicians extend themselves, as Orwell put it, “to make lies sound truthful." Leading the list is “legacy loans,” “legacy securities,” and “legacy costs,” referring to those badly collateralized loans, mortgages, and problems of auto companies that we are hearing so much about in reports of the recent Federal Bank Rescue Plan. Linguist George Lakoff says “legacy” typically means something positive, while positive these financial instruments are not. Other current expressions, such as “troubled assets” (see the Troubled Asset Relief Program), “securitization” (redistribution of bad loans), and “sub-prime” (non-prime loans) come under similar fire.

Ah, semantics.

Strunk and White's Elements of Style, first published in 1959, has now been reissued in a leather-bound, gold-embossed 50th anniversary edition (with testimonials from famous literary figures and an afterword by Charles Osgood of CBS). An AP article by William Kates about the event has been printed in dozens of places; here I'll quote from the version in The Ithaca Journal (hat tip to Marilyn Martin). (Strunk taught at Cornell and White went to college there, so it's no surprise that the Journal has a story. There are stories by other writers in the Cornell Chronicle and the Cornell Daily Sun.)

In today's Get Fuzzy, Bucky's exploration of English compound-noun semantics continues:

We last saw a Zippy with this trope in it ("we have no concept of war or private property") back in January. Here it comes again:

(For an inventory of other Language Log postings on "no word for X" and related figures, look here.)

Bill Walderman asked

Is it possible that the "rule" requiring the placement of "however" as the second element of a sentence (or at least not the first element) … originated as an attempt to impose Latin and Greek syntax or word order on English? In Latin, there are a number of particles such as "autem" that can't be placed at the beginning of a clause and usually appear as the second element. And Ancient Greek is extremely exuberant in particles that must be placed as the second element of a clause and can't stand as the first element.

This is an interesting suggestion, which hadn't occurred to me before. On reflection, it seems quite plausible that the odd grammatical myth forbidding initial however was originally a transfer from the treatment of autem and some other words in Latin, beaten into Will Strunk in his youth.

Bizarro takes on a species of semantic error:

From my 1980 booklet Mistakes (p. 14):

Corresponding to the semantic errors above are PRIVATE MEANINGS … I have one friend who thought for a long time that Indo- meant 'southern, lower' (from its occurrence in Indochina) and another who believed that ritzy meant 'in poor taste' (as a result of her parents' deprecating tone in using the word).

My two examples illustrate two routes to private meanings: a misapprehension about the meanings contributed by parts of a word (Indochina); and a misapprehension of a word's meaning based on its use in context (ritzy). Just yesterday I posted on my blog about another instance of the first sort: spendthrift used, in a Cathy cartoon, for 'penurious person', no doubt because of a connection of the element thrift to the adjective thrifty.