Language Log

Several people have drawn my attention to a harmonic convergence of LL topics on CNN.com today: social media, gender-neutral pronouns, and linguistic time machines. The article is Elizabeth Landau, "On Twitter, is it 'he or she' or 'they' or 'ip'?", and Ms. Landau is worried that English will be unable to reach the epicene ideal, due to fundamental principles of linguistics:

Consider the sentence "Everyone loves his mother." The word "his" may be seen as both sexist and inaccurate, but replacing it with "his or her" seems cumbersome, and "they" is grammatically incorrect. […]

It turns out that an English speaker's mind can't instantly adopt an imposed new gender-neutral system of pronouns, linguists say. A sudden change in the system of pronouns or other auxiliary words in any language is very difficult to achieve.

Last night, Li-ching asked me to correct an English story that she had written.  When I got to the part about "a hunter and his laifor," I was stumped.  Did Li-ching know some obscure English word that I had never heard of?

After thinking about "laifor" for a brief moment, I had a vague recollection that she had used the same expression many years ago, so she was at least being consistent.  But I still couldn't figure out what she meant by "laifor."  His "wife"?  His "life(r)"?

Before you turn the page and I tell you what "laifor" means, please try to guess.  Mind you, you actually have a bit of context — "the hunter."

Fev at Headsup: The Blog has followed up his post on Britosphere headline culture ("Hed noun pileup of the morning", 2/24/2009), and my comments ("UK death crash fetish?", 3/1/2009), with "Nude pic row vicar resigns", which features great noun strings like "Blast Kelly" (a girl named Kelly involved in an explosion), "George row doc" (a brain surgeon who tried to get the dying George Harrison to sign a guitar), and "Kid porn shame councillor".

My current trip to the Far East has now brought me to… well, the question is how to name the country for you and preserve strict political correctness. We could perhaps call it the SCTTPKMCT for short. I pointed out once before on Language Log that one of the many versions of its name is the longest official country name in the world. Since I've already identified the general region of the world that I'm in, you should be able to guess it without even clicking that link.

Tim Footman in the Guardian offers us a routine of standard-issue over-the-top retching about pronunciations other than his own. He pretends to get so overwrought on hearing someone saying mis-chiev-i-ous on BBC Radio 4 that he shouts at the radio (while temporarily so deranged that he is unable to tell that he was the person shouting), and needs a cup of orange verbena tea to calm him down. He purports to go to the toilet and retch into the bowl when he hears someone say schedule with initial [sk-]. It's interesting that he is so linguistically unsophisticated that he doesn't know the difference between what is standard American (as opposed to British) and what is non-standard. It's the same with his commenters. It applies both to pronunciations (like schedule with [sk-]) and spellings (a commenter objects to program). The mis-chiev-i-ous pronunciation is non-standard (see the Merriam-Webster dictionary). So is somethink for "something", which he also objects to. But that is not the case with schedule (or the spelling program). Tim Footman would have us believe that he experiences actual nausea when listening to someone who does not have shed as the first syllable of the word schedule. He doesn't seem to realize that it's not just an idiosyncrasy of a class of people who don't talk right (which I suppose you could say about mis-chiev-i-ous, if you are feeling uppity and intolerant). The [sk-] is standard for American pronunciations of schedule, and common among Canadians; it's only British speakers who mostly favour the shed version of that first syllable. The [sk-] speakers must number in the hundreds of millions. Tim Footman is going to spend a lot of time on the floor of the bathroom talking to Ralph on the big white phone.

The New York Times is maintaining the policy criticized a few months ago by Clark Hoyt ("Separating the Terror and the Terrorists", 12/13/2008). Hoyt, the NYT's  "Public Editor", said that

My own broad guideline: If it looks as if it was intended to sow terror and it shocks the conscience, whether it is planes flying into the World Trade Center, gunmen shooting up Mumbai, or a political killer in a little girl’s bedroom, I’d call it terrorism — by terrorists.

His paper, he says, is "more conservative in their use [of these terms] than I would be".  This  conservatism continues in the coverage of Tuesday's attack in Lahore on the Sri Lankan cricket team — the NYT story ("8 Die as Gunmen in Pakistan Attack Cricket Team", 3/3/2009) uses "gunmen", "attackers", and "assailants", and refers to the November attackers in Mumbai as "militants".

Two little notes about Obama’s name and morphology:

1). In an article in the NYT yesterday I came across the verb form ‘Obama-tizing’ (hyphen in the original), and realized that because his name ends with a vowel, you can’t just add –ize. But why the choice of ‘t’ as epenthetic consonant? It doesn’t sound totally natural to me, but I don’t know any other consonant that would sound better. Is it just because there are various Latinate groups of words with a ‘t’ in some of their forms like ‘sane – sanity – sanitize’? I found the neologism overcommatize on this fun page from Rice University, so maybe –tize is the accepted allomorph of –ize for vowel-final words?

2).  What happens you decline the name “Barack Obama” in Russian?
My ears perked up when they put “Barack Obama” in the instrumental case (as object of ‘with’) on the radio in Moscow yesterday: Barakom Obamoj – and I realized that morphologically, Barak becomes a first-declension noun – native Russian nouns that end in a hard consonant are all first-declension masculine –, while Obama, ending as it does in –a, becomes a second-declension noun, and the great majority of those are feminine. And I wasn’t sure whether that was “peculiar” or not – I noticed it, but would a Russian? The situation with prototypical Russian names is that for men both names are first-declension consonant-final masculine (Mikhail Gorbachev), and for women both are second-declension –a final feminine (Raisa Gorbacheva).

John McIntyre's grammatical noir, serialized in his Baltimore Sun blog You Don't Say in preparation for National Grammar Day tomorrow, is now complete:

"Down these mean sentences I walk alone", 2/14/2009
"'What are we going to do now?' she asked", 2/18/2009
"The Fat Man chuckles", 2/23/2009
"The rule you don't break", 3/2/2009

Yesterday I got this note from a reader:

I seem to remember a Language Log post about the construction "I appreciate you coming over to help me" as opposed to the prescriptively approved "I appreciate your coming over to help me." I am in a discussion with a prescriptivist about the validity of the former but I can't find the relevant post on LL. Can you help?

There have been a couple of relevant posts over the years, but what this reader really needed was a reminder to check his copy of the Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage (or the concise edition of the same work).

OK, the whole time machine thing is over (for now), but along the way, I unaccountably neglected to link to a lovely explanation by Carl Pyrdum at Got Medieval of why Mark Pagel's choice of historical examples was unwise, and why the BBC's elaboration and illustration raised unwisdom to levels of hilarious incongruity rarely seen outside of The Onion: "Tips for Time Traveling William the Conqueror Fanboys". Carl discusses the rest of the British media's response in a later post, "Further Thoughts on Time Traveling".

Saturday's Cathy:

Mark Pagel can take comfort in the fact that his remarks about phrase-books for time-travelers were far from the dumbest stuff from a famous scientist to be featured in the mass media last week. As Ben Goldacre explained on badscience.net:

Professor Susan Greenfield is the head of the Royal Institution and the person behind the Daily Mail headline "Social websites harm children’s brains: Chilling warning to parents from top neuroscientist”, which has spread around the world (like the last time she said it, and the time before that).

It is my view that Professor Greenfield has been abusing her position as a professor, and head of the Royal Institution, for many years now, using these roles to give weight to her speculations and prejudices in a way that is entirely inappropriate. […]

We are all free to have fanciful ideas. Professor Greenfield’s stated aim, however, is to improve the public’s understanding of science: and yet repeatedly she appears in the media making wild headline-grabbing claims, without evidence, all the while telling us repeatedly that she is a scientist. By doing this, the head of the RI grossly misrepresents what it is that scientists do, and indeed the whole notion of what it means to have empirical evidence for a claim. It makes me quite sad, when the public’s understanding of science is in such a terrible state, that this is one of our most prominent and well funded champions.

I read the headline

William J. Jorden, Reporter and Envoy, Dies at 85

(NYT, 28 February, p. A20) and paused a moment: why was this name so familiar?

Then, later in the obit, came

Mr. Jorden's first marriage, to Eleanor Harz, a professor of Japanese at Cornell University and elsewhere, ended in divorce.

Ah! Eleanor Harz Jorden, author of the very influential textbooks Reading Japanese and Japanese: The Spoken Language (and a member of the Linguistic Society of America). And there she was in a photo (with her husband and son) from 1956.

Sadly, it turns out that she too died recently, on 11 February (William J. Jorden died on 20 February). A brief obituary (reprinted from the Cornell Chronicle), citing her as "a linguist and world leader in language pedagogy and language teacher training", appeared yesterday on the Linguist List.