Language Log

Yesterday's Frazz:

At the end of Paul Krugman's latest substack post ("This Is Not a Serious Post", 12/24/2024), he gives us a link to a seasonal song, with the note "Some relatives from my parents' generation really did sound like that". The song is "Winter Wonderland", from The Roches' X-mas Show in 1990.

Ximena Conde, "William Labov, ‘father of sociolinguistics’ who studied the Philadelphia accent, dies at 97", Philadelphia Inquirer 12/23/2024:

William Labov, the father of sociolinguistics who spent decades recording how Philadelphians talk, calling the city the “gold standard” for studying language patterns, died Tuesday, Dec. 17, in his Washington Square home at the age of 97. He died of complications from Parkinson’s disease.

Dr. Labov approached language as something that by its nature was variable, not governed by an ideal set of rules of grammar. His work changed whose dialects linguists saw worthy of study and dove into the socioeconomic politics of language. The way he saw it, dialects touched everything, from how you’re viewed to how you learn.

The whole obituary is well worth reading.

New book in the Cambridge University Press Elements (in Phonetics) series:  The Phonetics of Taiwanese, by Janice Fon and Hui-lu Khoo  (12/11/24):

In a comment on "AI counting again" (12/20/2024), Matt F asked "Given the misspelling of ‘When’, I wonder how many ‘h’s the software would find in that sentence."

So I tried it — and the results are even more spectacularly wrong than Grok's pitiful attempt to count instances of 'e', where the correct count is 50 but Grok answered "21".

Benjamin Weissman, Jan Englelen, Lena Thamsen, & Neil Cohn, "Compositional Affordances of Emoji Sequences", 12/19/2024:

Abstract: Emoji have become ubiquitous in digital communication, and while research has explored how emoji communicate meaning, relatively little work has investigated the affordances of such meaning-making processes. We here investigate the constraints of emoji by testing participant preferences for emoji combinations, comparing linearly sequenced, “language-like” emoji strings to more “picture-like” analog representations of the same two emoji. Participants deemed the picture-like combinations more comprehensible and were faster to respond to them compared to the sequential emoji strings. This suggests that while in-line sequences of emoji are on the whole interpretable, combining them in a linear, side-by-side, word-like way may be relatively unnatural for the combinatorial affordances of the graphic modality.

Reading PRC articles, they strike me as mostly propagandistic hype and rhetoric, but very little substance.  Simon Cox recognizes that in his "China’s inscrutable economic policy","Drum Tower", Eonomist:

F.R. Leavis, an English-literature don, used to complain about something he called “adjectival insistence”. He was thinking of Joseph Conrad, who was a bit too fond of words like inscrutable, implacable and unspeakable. The effect, Leavis said, was not to magnify but to muffle.

Leavis’s complaint came to my mind recently when I was parsing the latest official statements on China’s economic policy for an article about the tasks policymakers face in the year ahead. The country’s rulers have woken up to the fact that the economy needs help. Many businesses lack consumers and consumers lack confidence. Prices are flat or falling.

Non Sequitur for 12/19/2024:

Yesterday we had a lot of fun exploring the derivation of Italian "Panettone: augmentative of the diminutive" and beyond.  Another Yuletide cake I'm eating these days is German stollen, but its etymology is not so exciting:

Middle High German stolle < Old High German stollo ("post, support"), documented since the 9th century, from the Indo-European root (*stel- "to set up; standing, stiff; post, trunk") and thus related to stable (compare Greek στήλη (stēlē) ("pillar, post"). From "supporting support, post" the meaning "underground passage" (13th century) developed; the meaning "Christmas biscuits" arose from a comparison with the block-like support (18th century).

'Tis the season to savor panettone, a mildly sweet Italian bread.

It is made during a long process that involves curing the dough, which is acidic, similar to sourdough. The proofing process alone takes several days, giving the cake its distinctive fluffy characteristics.

(source)

It usually contains small amounts of fruit; the variety I'm eating this afternoon has cherries and chocolate pieces — extremely delicious.

Being the irremediable language buff that I am, I could not help but marvel at the construction of the name of this delicious bread:

From the program of the 2025 Linguistic Society of America meeting:

Please join us as we gather to commemorate Bill Labov's life. Bill passed away on December 17 with Gillian Sankoff by his side. His pioneering studies of language change in progress located the vernacular and its speakers at the center of sociolinguistic research, and helped to break down what Kiparsky has called the "firewall" between synchronic and diachronic linguistics. Bill's kindness, generosity, and brilliance have been a profound source of inspiration for generations of linguists, including the many students he trained and sent on to stellar careers of their own. His decades-long presence and enormous positive influence on our field will continue to resonate for a long time to come.

Please, join us to hear an invited selection of stories and tributes from some of Bill's many students and friends.

Date: Thursday, January 9, 2025
Time: 8:30-10pm ET
Location: Salon E-F, fifth floor

Philadelphia Marriott Downtown
1200 Filbert Street, Philadelphia, PA

The Memorial is open to the public and does not require registration to attend.

Frazz for 12/19/2024: