Language Log

In a comment on yesterday's "Debate words" post, I noted that Donald Trump's ratio of I-words to we-words was "off the charts" compared the other eight candidates, and several people have asked me to give all the numbers.

There's an idea Out There that such numbers are related to issues of personality and mood. This is true, but the relationships are complicated — see Jamie Pennebaker's 2009 guest post "What is 'I' saying?". So we really should classify first-person singular pronouns into what Pennebaker calls "graceful-I" vs. "sledgehammer-I" categories. And of course, various pronoun-usage rates also depend on details of topic and interactional context, as noted in yesterday's exchange of comments.

Still, let's look at the numbers.

The Transcript Library at rev.com is a great resource — within 24 hours, they had transcripts of Wednesday's Fox News Republican presidential debate, and also of Tucker Carlson's debate night interview with Donald Trump on X.

So this morning I downloaded the transcripts, and ran the code that I've used several times over the years to identify the characteristic word-choices of an individual or of a group.

Shaing tai asked whether I recognized these characters:

This curious Cantonese couplet appeared on Weibo today:

Todd Wilbur shared this menu item on Facebook:

Yesterday, Randoh Sallihall from unscramblerer.com sent this note:

(see in particular the second item)

If this isn't dictator status, I don't know what ishttps://t.co/A4guMzG4m1

— Bumboclott (@Bumboclott) June 29, 2023

Sunday's post on "Listless vessels" opened with this clip:

And in the 30th comment, Yuval wrote

FWIW, both utterances of "principle" sound like 'princible' to me.

He's absolutely right — but what those two words "sound like" leaves an important theoretical (and practical) question open.

In recent weeks and months, Language Log has been quite active in discussions on Tocharian and its relationship to other members of Indo-European.  Today's post takes a different approach from this post made just yesterday and many earlier posts.

"Europe's ancient languages shed light on a great migration and weather vocabulary"

by Ali Jones, Horizon: The EU Research & Innovation Magazine (8/15/23)

Painstaking archaeological exploration is a familiar, often widely admired, method of unearthing history. Less celebrated, but also invaluable, is the piecing together of fragments of ancient languages and analyzing how they changed over thousands of years.

Historical linguists have reconstructed a common ancestral tongue for most of the languages spoken today in Europe and South Asia. English, German, Greek, Hindi and Urdu—among others in the Indo-European family of languages—can all trace their origins to a single spoken one named Proto-Indo-European (PIE).

In an interview on Friday ("DeSantis plans to do what Trump couldn't | Full Interview with Will Witt", The Florida Standard 8/18/2023), Ron DeSantis referred to (some of?) Donald Trump's followers as "listless vessels":

I asked several IEist colleagues:

Of all the IE languages, which one is Tocharian closest to?

Celtic?

Germanic?

Anemona Hartocollis, "Slashing Its Budget, West Virginia University Asks, What Is Essential?", NYT 8/18/2023:

The state’s flagship school will no longer teach world languages or creative writing — a sign, its president says, of the future at many public universities.

Christian Adams wants to be an immigration or labor lawyer, so he planned to major in Chinese studies at West Virginia University, with an emphasis on the Mandarin language.

But as his sophomore year begins, he has learned that, as part of a plan to close a $45 million budget deficit through faculty layoffs and academic program consolidation, the university has proposed eliminating its world languages department, gutting his major.

He will have to pivot to accounting, he says, and probably spend an extra year in college, taking out more student loans.

“A lot of students are really worried,” said Mr. Adams, 18. “Some are considering transferring. But a lot of students are stuck with the hand they’ve been given.”

From M. Paul Shore:

Article that appeared on the Washington Post website this morning (and is therefore likely to appear in tomorrow's print edition) about the recently proposed demise of, among other things, the Department of World Languages, Literatures and Linguistics at West Virginia University's flagship Morgantown campus (note that that department name really should be something like "Department of World Languages and Literatures and of Linguistics", since "World" doesn't really apply to "Linguistics"):

Recently proposed demise of languages, linguistics at WVU (Morgantown)

WVU’s plan to cut foreign languages, other programs draws disbelief

Academic overhaul at West Virginia University, in response to budget deficit, outrages faculty and students

Nick Anderson , WP (8/18/23)

A proposal from West Virginia University would discontinue 32 of the university’s 338 majors on its Morgantown campus and eliminate 7 percent of its faculty.  As of 6:30 PM, the article had attracted more than 900 comments, which I'm fairly sure is well above average for the Post website.  By 11 PM, it had garnered 1,400 comments.