Language Log

My wife Karen and I just spent a long weekend with her family in her hometown of Louisville, Kentucky. As I've mentioned before, there are some noteworthy (though not necessarily unique) properties of the local Louisville accent. One of these is a property shared among many Southern dialects of American English in some form or another: the lack of a (clear) distinction between [ɪ] and [ɛ] before [n] (and sometimes other nasal consonants as well), such that e.g. pin and pen are (nearly) homophonous. To my ear, the result of this merger for natives of Louisville sounds closer to the [ɪ] vowel that I myself produce in pin, but I have not done any serious analysis to confirm or disconfirm this impression.

Here is one of the saddest facts about language and culture that I have noticed in quite a while: the search pattern "before turning * gun on himself" gets tens or even hundreds of thousands of hits on Google.

The following photograph was taken by Matt Marcucci in the throne room of the Forbidden City in Beijing. The two large characters on the plaque over the throne constitute the famous dictum of the Taoists: WU2WEI2. This is usually translated as "inaction" or "non-action," but more highly nuanced and fanciful translations such as "nonpurposeful action," "effortless doing," etc. are also to be found.

Reported last week in the NYT: an advertising campaign by the Mars company for its best-selling candy bar, Snickers, centered on a made-up "language" called Snacklish. Yes, it's not an actual language, but just some playful vocabulary.

From Dinosaur Comics, DIRECTION IS A BUCKET THAT PEOPLE KEEP SNEAKING INTO (with no apologies to George Lakoff):

(Hat tip to Bruce Webster.)

The other day on NPR's "Marketplace," Robert Hass tells me, a Wall Street analyst said that Obama "has to show Americans that he is making strident progress toward stabilizing the credit crisis." A new one on me, but Google turns up about 100 hits for strident progress, 50 or so for strident advances, and almost 400 for strident growth, the great majority of them suggesting simply "great" or "impressive," with no intimation of shrillness or unpleasantness:

Today, some of the most strident advances in technology overall have been in the arena of forecasting… (CBS3, Springfield, Mass.)

Sizzler made strident progress throughout the 1980s, blossoming into a vibrant enterprise. (Worldwide Restaurant Concepts, Inc.)

The failure of real gains to trickle down the income scale has been mitigated by… a strident expansion of public sector activities and the public funding of employment within the public and private sectors. (Economic Research Council, UK)

The shares are trading on about 23 times forecast 2007 earnings, but there is no sign that Capita's strident growth is likely to slow. (The Telegraph)

Quite a few of the hits seem to be from Asian English-language  sources, but as the examples above show, the phenomenon is pretty widespread. And it goes back quite a while: a 1922 collection of items by the famous Chicago Tribune columnist Bert Leston Taylor includes the item

"SINCE her tour of the Pacific Coast," declares a Berkeley bulletin, "Miss Case has made strident advances in her art." The lady, it appears, sings.

Is this just the influence of "making strides," or is there some way to get here from the literal meaning of strident?

Today's F-minus:

[Hat tip: Josh Rosenberg]

Part of your first sense of what a country is like comes from what is said to you by the first person you meet as you cross the border and present yourself to passport control. I wonder if immigration officers realize just how large the effects of their speech acts (or lack thereof) can be. When my friend Polly and I crossed from Finland into Russia by train a few years ago, the skinny young men in military uniforms who boarded the train looked fierce and suspicious. They demanded our passports and took them away with unpleasant scowls. Returning them silently twenty minutes later, they wore expressions that seemed to say, "We found nothing, but you look undesirable, and it makes us angry that we have to admit scum like you to defile our great country." Russia seems like a truly unwelcoming place. By contrast, coming back into Finland from Russia a few days later we were met by relaxed and friendly passport officials who took a quick glance at our passports, handed them back with a warm smile, and said: "Welcome to Finland!" A small courtesy, costing nothing, but after Russia it made Finland seem a totally wonderful place. Even Finland, however, was topped by Scotland this morning, when I returned bleary-eyed to the Edinburgh airport having flown straight through from Taiwan via Bangkok and Amsterdam. I handed over my passport, open at the page with the photo and date of birth, and the woman behind the desk glanced at it very quickly and slapped it down on the glass of the scanner. And while she waited a couple of seconds for the machine to read the data, she looked at me with a twinkle in her eye and said, "Happy birthday."

A couple of days ago, Gail Collins asked ("Just Steele Yourselves", NYT 3/6/2009):

So is Steele the de facto leader of the Republican Party? Anybody who announces “I’m the de facto leader” probably isn’t.

Then who is? Rush Limbaugh? He sure is enjoying the attention. “The administration is enabling me,” he told Politico. Honestly, “enabling” is not the perfect choice of words for a guy with Rush’s background.

Ms. Collins' source for the Rush Limbaugh quote is Jonathan Martin, "Rush Job: Inside Dems' Limbaugh Plan", 3/4/2009:

Limbaugh is embracing the line of attack, suggesting a certain symbiosis between him and his political adversaries.

"The administration is enabling me,” he wrote in an e-mail to POLITICO. “They are expanding my profile, expanding my audience and expanding my influence.

I agree that enabling is an odd word for El Rushbo to choose, given his well-publicized struggles with drug addiction. The new negative sense of enable and its derivatives has so nearly overwhelmed the older positive or neutral meanings, at least in the construction he used,  that Ms. Collins doesn't even need to remind her readers about it.

It's been a while since we've seen our old friend, the crisis-(danger)-opportunity trope. In its canonical form, the trope asserts that the Chinese character for "crisis" is a combination of the characters for "danger" and "opportunity." A simpler variation removes the "danger," suggesting that the Chinese character (or word) for "crisis" is the same as that for "opportunity" (sometimes stated as a proverbial equivalence: "The Chinese say that crisis is opportunity" or "…in crisis lies opportunity").

With or without the "danger" element, the trope is a favored rhetorical gesture by politicians and other public figures looking to pivot from pessimism to optimism. The roster of prominent American trope-users includes John Foster Dulles, John F. Kennedy, Condoleezza Rice, and Al Gore (a repeat offender). Now President Obama joins the list, but thankfully he omits the largely bogus framing device about Chinese hanzi (along with the "danger").

Nearly two decades ago I wrote a paper on terminological difficulties surrounding the classification of Sinitic languages entitled "What Is a Chinese 'Dialect/Topolect'?  Reflections on Some Key Sino-English Linguistic Terms," Sino-Platonic Papers, 29 (September, 1991), 1-31.  (Available online at http://www.sino-platonic.org/)  In that paper, I did not go deeply into the question of the utility of mutual intelligibility for determining the difference between a language and a dialect, mainly because it is a red hot can of worms, but also because people say such nonsensical things as that "A language is a dialect with an army and a navy."  Now, in preparation for updating my 1991 paper, I would like to revisit the matter of mutual intelligibility to see whether it can somehow be salvaged for purposes of taxonomic classification.

Amazingly, the US Secretary of State could not locate anyone on her staff capable of finding out the Russian word that appears on reset buttons. Mrs Clinton offered Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, a gift-wrapped red button bearing the legend "Reset" in English and "Peregruzka" in Russian. Fox News reports it here under a "Clinton Goofs" headline, because peregruzka doesn't mean "reset": it means "overcharged" or "overloaded". The word they were supposed to have printed on the device was "perezagruzka". (Slavicists in Language Log's East European and Eurasian department are checking this out now; I offer this hasty note from my hotel room in the SCTTPKMCT, where I have no Russian reference materials.) Mr Lavrov did not let the slip lie; he pointed it out in public. Even more amazingly, the Clinton adviser Philippe Reines is reported to have protested that the word they printed "is only a couple letters off." Not much of a linguistic story, really, but Mr Lavrov did make one linguistic point out of it, commenting (according to The New York Times) that it illustrated the need to teach Russian in the United States and English in Russia.

Eric Bakovic reports that an obituary for Yuki Kuroda "will soon appear on LINGUIST List, but it is already on our department website along with some remembrances (still being updated), a bibliography, and other things": here.