Language Log

The old oppositions between girls and boys — sugar and spice vs. snips and snails — continue to be reinforced and extended in the popular press by sexual pseudoscience. For example, Leonard Sax's false claims about boys' inferior hearing are front and center again in Paula Spencer, "Is it harder to raise boys or girls?", CNN.com/health, 6/17/2008:

Why don't boys seem to listen? Turns out their hearing is not as good as girls' right from birth, and this difference only gets greater as kids get older. Girls' hearing is more sensitive in the frequency range critical to speech discrimination, and the verbal centers in their brains develop more quickly. That means a girl is likely to respond better to discipline strategies such as praise or warnings like "Don't do that" or "Use your words."

I was kinda hoping that nobody would notice my recent lack of productivity here at Language Log Plaza but nay, not so. Arnold Zwicky must have observed how much time I've been spending playing ping-pong with Eric Backovic in the Plaza's well-equipped recreation and weigh-training room. So he sent me an interesting article from Law.com to prime my pump, I suppose. 

The article shows something that most of us already knew anyway–that language is central to the field of law. The latest development is that a number of courts in the US are now forbidding lawyers and witnesses to use certain words during trials. Words like "rape," "victim," "crime scene," "killer," "murder," "drunk," "homicide," "embezzle," "fraud," and "robbery" are now not allowed in some courtrooms.

There's been a lot of discussion, both in the mainstream media and on the intertubes, of a study that came out a couple of days ago in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: Ivanka Savic and Per Lindström, "PET and MRI show differences in cerebral asymmetry and functional connectivity between homo- and heterosexual subjects", PNAS, 6/16/2008.

And in this case, the study's rhetorical reception is more interesting than the study itself.

In the case of D. C. v Heller shortly to be decided by the US Supreme Court, the central issue is the meaning of the Second Amendment to the US Constitution:

A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.

One of the issues is whether the Second Amendment guarantees a private right, that is, a right of individuals to own and carry arms, or a public right, that is, a right of militias to own and carry arms, or both. Many advocates of restrictions on the right of individuals to own and carry arms promote the interpretation that the Second Amendment is meant only to protect the organized militia units, which, they typically argue, are now subsumed under the National Guard. For advocates of this interpretation, there is no individual right to own and carry weapons.

Reuters' report on the trial of British mercenary Simon Mann in Equatorial Guinea for his role in a 2004 attempted coup indicates that:

Tuesday's trial was conducted in Spanish without translation… Mann… does not speak Spanish…Asked by reporters if he thought he was getting a fair trial he replied "No comment".

I'm not worried about offending the court or what passes for a government in Equatorial Guinea so I'll take the liberty of answering for him: No. A trial conducted in a language that the defendant does not understand without an interpreter cannot possibly be fair. You'd think even a tinpot dictatorship would be ashamed not to provide at least the pretense of a fair trial.

I'm nearly sure that the people who submit comments on this and other weblogs are all intelligent, knowledgeable and thoughtful. Often, this is plain in what they write. But sometimes, in order to maintain my commitment to this belief, I'm driven to conclude that a commenter has recently tunneled through the barrier separating us from some parallel — and fairly distant — universe. Yesterday, one such transdimensional pilgrim contributed this observation:

Transformational grammar hasn't been accepted as plausible for decades, except, for some reason, in English departments.

Now, I know several of the inhabitants of several English departments in American colleges and universities. And if these organizations are full of partisans of transformational grammar, they're keeping a very low profile. In fact, in my (admittedly limited) experience, English departments are among the last places on campus where you're likely to find any indication of interest in any form of linguistic analysis whatever.

We just got the acceptance notice from Interspeech 2008, so it's OK for me to inform you that Associate Justice Antonin Scalia has joined Queen Elizabeth II in the elite ranks of those international celebrities who have served as subjects for experiments in instrumental phonetics. The paper accepted at IS2008 is Jiahong Yuan, Stephen Isard and Mark Liberman, "Different Roles of Pitch and Duration in Distinguishing Word Stress in English".

In fact, not only Justice Scalia, but also seven of the eight other justices on the 2001 Rehnquist court were (unwitting) subjects in our experiment. (Associate Justice Clarence Thomas didn't speak often enough to be included in the analyzed data.) We applied automated measurement techniques to recordings of 78 hours of oral arguments from the 2001 term of the U.S. Supreme court, in order to look at the (average) effects on pitch and time of primary word stress (e.g. the third syllable in jurisdiction), secondary stress (e.g. the first syllable in jurisdiction), and lack of stress (e.g. the second and fourth syllables in jurisdiction).

Most well-informed linguists will probably not find our two main conclusions very surprising — at least, not the content of our conclusions. But there's a methodological suprise, I believe, in the fact that such clear-cut results emerged from automated measurements of medium-quality recordings of natural interactions.

An invitation from Mark Dingmanse:

I just posted a piece on Many Eyes, a nice text visualization tool which I have fed some Siwu texts.

Now this is an open access tool with an interesting philosophy: "Many Eyes is a bet on the power of human visual intelligence to find patterns. Our goal is to "democratize" visualization and to enable a new social kind of data analysis."

I would like to test this philosophy in a peculiar way: by seeing if readers can come up with some kind of account of the functions of the Siwu word 'ne' *only by looking at the patterns* here.

Would you like to join all my eye and Betty Martin in some pattern hunting?

For more discussion, see Mark's post at The Ideophone, "Visual corpus linguistics with Many Eyes", 6/14/2008.

Yesterday I gave a brief "melodized" audio clip, and invited readers to guess the language. I'm happy to report that Bob Ladd and Sarah E. nailed it — the passage was  indeed in French, from an RFI news report. Here's the original.

From the 12 June issue of the Bay Area Reporter (all the LGBT news that's fit to print, and more), a fascinating story (with photo) headed "Naked men meet cop". In its entirety:

Two naked men, Rusty Mills, left, and Lloyd Fisher, were walking in front of LGBT Community Center Saturday, June 7 when a San Francisco Police Department cruiser pulled over and Officer Lorenzo Adamson got out. Photographer Jane Cleland captured this exchange:

Adamson: "You can't walk around naked! That's indecent exposure!"

Mills: "It's only 'indecent exposure' if you engage in lewd behavior, and we're not being lewd."

Adamson: "I don't care about all that legal mumbo-jumbo. It's not normal to be walking around naked!"

Mills: "We're supporting World Naked Bicycle Day."

Adamson: "I don't care what you say, it's not healthy and no other police officers would disagree with me. And besides, you don't seem to have any supporters here."

Mills and Fisher were not cited and soon were on their way.

Adamson was clearly affronted. What interests me in this is the shifting grounds that he offers for his objection to the men's nakedness: first, it's against the law; then, it's "not normal"; then, it's "not healthy" (suggesting, I suppose, that exposed naughty bits are a threat to public health); finally, the men have no supporters for it.  But, finding no grounds for issuing a citation (even though rejecting "all that legal mumbo-jumbo", not the best position for a cop to take), he has to let them go on their way.

World Naked Bicycle Day is a genuine event, by the way, and it was indeed on June 7 (which was also the kickoff day at the LGBT Community Center for Pride Month in San Francisco). No bicycles are visible in the photo, nor are any people other than Adamson and the two naked men. (I would have thought there'd be more people on Market Street in the middle of the day.) Also no word about where the men came from or where they went to.

(The photo shows the men from the rear, of course. Naked buttocks don't count as naughty bits.)

At scienceblogs.com's Evolving Thoughts, the philosopher of biology John S. Wilkins recently referenced a couple of Language Log posts ("Queensland grammar brouhaha", 6/13/2008; "How the Romans invented grammar", 6/14/2008), and added his own ruminations ("Grammar wars in Queensland", 10/14/2008):

Now grammar wars and grammar nazis go back a long time, and the fight seems to this outsider to be between those who follow Chomskyian transformational grammars and those who follow traditional grammars.

To this insider, John's comment seems to be yet another indictment of my profession, which has evidently failed to provide, to one of the more intellectually accomplished members of the general public, even the faintest hint of a clue. Closer to home, in this case, even reading two Language Log posts didn't make a dent. So let me try again.

I believe — without much evidence — that I can recognize many more languages than I can understand. This ability depends to some extent on recognizing an occasional common word, and on a sort of textural appreciation of syllable structures and certain characteristic sounds. But some of it, I've always believed, is prosodic: perception of time patterns of pitch and amplitude.

Do you think you can recognize a language from its pitch and amplitude pattern? Here's an example, created according to the recipe that I described in an earlier post. I'll give the answer (and the original recording) tomorrow.

The reason I was in York last night was to attend the 40th birthday celebrations for University Radio York, the UK's oldest student radio station, which began against great odds, only semi-legally, at a time when the government flatly refused to license any broadcasting that would break the BBC's monopoly, and physicists wouldn't assent to the idea that the induction loop technology the students were proposing would restrict the signal to the campus. I had a small role in the founding of the station four decades ago when I was a freshman undergraduate in the Department of Language at the University of York. At last night's reunion dinner I sat with a bunch of guys who started at URY and spent their whole lives in the broadcasting industry. People like and Robin Valk, who worked as a rock DJ in Buffalo, NY, for a few years before returning to Britain to work on software for computer management of radio programming, and Phil Harding, who has spent his career in a succession of different posts at the BBC. Phil taught me a new word that he learned at a seminar on new developments in the cellphone industry: glanceability.