Language Log

"Evolution journal editors resign en masse to protest Elsevier changes", Retraction Watch 12/27/2024:

All but one member of the editorial board of the Journal of Human Evolution (JHE), an Elsevier title, have resigned, saying the “sustained actions of Elsevier are fundamentally incompatible with the ethos of the journal and preclude maintaining the quality and integrity fundamental to JHE’s success.” […]

Among other moves, according to the statement, Elsevier “eliminated support for a copy editor and special issues editor,” which they interpreted as saying “editors should not be paying attention to language, grammar, readability, consistency, or accuracy of proper nomenclature or formatting.” The editors say the publisher “frequently introduces errors during production that were not present in the accepted manuscript:”

"In fall of 2023, for example, without consulting or informing the editors, Elsevier initiated the use of AI during production, creating article proofs devoid of capitalization of all proper nouns (e.g., formally recognized epochs, site names, countries, cities, genera, etc.) as well italics for genera and species. These AI changes reversed the accepted versions of papers that had already been properly formatted by the handling editors. This was highly embarrassing for the journal and resolution took six months and was achieved only through the persistent efforts of the editors. AI processing continues to be used and regularly reformats submitted manuscripts to change meaning and formatting and require extensive author and editor oversight during proof stage."

A giant step backward — about a thousand years.  Writing regression.

“'Pseudo-Chinese': New Japanese Social Media App Only Allows Kanji", Jay Allen, Unseen Japan (12/18/24)

Whatever possessed some folks to do this?

Wanna stress-test your Japanese knowledge? A new social media app for Japanese users dares you to ditch kana by allowing only kanji input, a.k.a. "Pseudo-Chinese."

Or is that stress-testing your Chinese knowledge?  What kind of language results?  Natural, normal, native Japanese?  Or some kind of hentai Nihongo kaibutsu 変態日本語怪物 ("abnormal Japanese language monstrosity")?

The winning submission to a high school essay contest, written by Mallory Valis, described as "a 16-year-old from Toronto", starts this way:

Bro, this intro is high-key gonna slap. Just let me cook.

Oh wait, I should be more formal.

Uhh. . . . Henceforth I commence my righteous thesis. Yeah.

In the eyes of older generations, Gen-Z slang besmirches the Sacred English Language™ with its base, loose, and astonishingly convoluted wordplay. By now, you’ve heard it before. Words sprouting like weeds in conversations with friends or wriggling through Instagram comment sections: rizz, fit check, girlboss, slay, simp. . . the list spirals downwards into a pit of sacrilege.

So began the abstract of Bill Labov's 1972 paper "Some principles of linguistic methodology":

Current difficulties in achieving intersubjective agreement in linguistics require attention to principles of methodology which consider sources of error and ways to eliminate them. The methodological assumptions and practices of various branches of linguistics are considered from the standpoint of the types of data gathered: texts, elicitations, intuitions and observations. Observations of the vernacular provide the most systematic basis for linguistic theory, but have been the most difficult kinds of data for linguists to obtain; techniques for solving the problems encountered are outlined. Intersubjective agreement is best reached by convergence of several kinds of data with complementary sources of error.

1972 was when I got out of the U.S. Army, after returning from Vietnam, and started graduate school at MIT. Leaving one war I didn't believe in, I found myself enlisted in another — because what Bill called "current difficulties in achieving intersubjective agreement" was a euphemistic way of describing the religious wars then consuming the field of linguistics. Some of the theological leaders had become established elsewhere (George Lakoff, Jim McCawley, and Paul Postal), but Haj Ross and Dave Perelmutter were starting guerilla campaigns within MIT, where Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle were the intellectual government.

I respected and even admired all of the people just named, and learned meaningful lessons from their work. Focusing on the analysis of prosody helped me to avoid the worst of the intellectual killing fields. But I saw no real way to stay neutral in that period of academic linguistics, any more than I could have in 17th-century central Europe.  Which is why I finished grad school in three years, and spent the next 15 years in an industrial research job.

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: