Language Log

What is the basic unit of discursive, communicative language — word, syllable, morpheme, or phoneme?

This topic came up in the comments to the following posts:

"The concept of word in Sinitic" (10/3/18)

"Words in Vietnamese" (10/2/18)

"Diacriticless Vietnamese on a sign in San Francisco" (9/30/18)

"Words in Mandarin: twin kle twin kle lit tle star" (8/14/12)

Along with Valerie Ross, Brighid Kelly, and Helen Jeoung from Penn's Critical Writing program, I've been looking at material from student writing assignments (as part of an NSF-funded study*). One of the many topics of interest is the extent to which students, collectively and individually, succeed in shifting their writing style to suit different genres and audiences. As a first trivial exploration of this question, I took a quick look at some simple properties of overall word choice, comparing submissions to two different types of assignment. One of these assignments is a "Public Argument", which I believe is something like a newspaper Op-Ed; the other is a "Literature Review", where the appropriate style is more academic.

This morning I'll look at some of the simplest results of two simple explorations of properties that should be related to style shifting — the choice of words, and the length of the words chosen.

On Wednesday, a woman tried to purchase a $5,000 prepaid Visa card at a Safeway store in Washington with 49 of these hundred-dollar bills:

Source: "Woman tried to pass off fake $100 bills with pink Chinese lettering written on them: police", by Greg Norman, Fox News (10/4/18).

It's easy to spot how this $100 bill is fake.

Below I've reprinted a prominent intellectual's Facebook post. The recent upsurge of interest in 1980s-era American slang gives it some relevance to LLOG, but mostly I just admired the sentiment. Since it was not a public post, I asked permission to quote it, and the author responded:

Go ahead. It was briefly a tough decision – I sat there cynically thinking "but I have a reputation". Then I thought, you know what, that's the problem. We don't let people be human, so they lie and cheat and pretend they're angels instead. So yes, go ahead. 

Zeyao Wu sent in this sign on a restaurant:

In the following posts, we've been tackling the thorny, multifaceted question of whether Vietnamese has words and lexemes, as opposed to having syllables and morphemes:

• "Diacriticless Vietnamese on a sign in San Francisco" (9/30/18)
• "Words in Vietnamese" (10/2/18)

During the course of our discussions, the parallel question of whether Sinitic had words or not also came up.  Let me put it this way:  although there was no concept of "word" in Sinitic before the 20th century, there were Sinitic words, going all the way back to the oracle bone inscriptions (the first stage of Chinese writing) more than three thousand years ago, as documented in these posts and dozens of others:

• "Polysyllabic characters in Chinese writing" (8/2/11)
• "Words in Mandarin: twin kle twin kle lit tle star" (8/14/12)
• "Polysyllabic characters revisited " (6/18/15)
• "A new polysyllabic character" (4/3/16)
• "Yet another polysyllabic Chinese character" (10/31/16)

Yesterday while stuck in traffic I listened to Michael Lewis being interviewed about his new book "The Fifth Risk", and I passed the time thinking about other titles of the form Definite Article + Ordinal Number + Noun. There are many of these, but there are clear stand-outs for numbers 1, 2, 3, and 7:

The First Circle
The Second Sex
The Third Man
The Seventh Seal

I couldn't think of any iconic examples for 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, etc., but no doubt readers will be able to supply some.

In "Diacriticless Vietnamese on a sign in San Francisco" (9/30/18), we discussed the advisability of joining syllables into words or separating all syllables.  The ensuing string of comments revealed that there is a correlation between linking syllables and word spacing on the one hand and the necessity for diacritical marks on the other hand.

This prompted me to ask the following questions of several colleagues who are specialists on Vietnamese:

Roughly what percentage of Vietnamese lexemes (words) are monosyllabic? Disyllabic? Any trisyllabic or higher?

The average length of a word in Mandarin is almost exactly two syllables.

Can you think of examples in Vietnamese parsing where it would be clearer or more helpful to have the syllables of words joined together?

Tara Bahrampour, "In 1960, about a half-million teens took a test. Now it could predict the risk of Alzheimer’s disease.", WaPo 9/21/2018:

In 1960, Joan Levin, 15, took a test that turned out to be the largest survey of American teenagers ever conducted. It took two-and-a-half days to administer and included 440,000 students from 1,353 public, private and parochial high schools across the country — including Parkville Senior High School in Parkville, Md., where she was a student. […]

Fifty-eight years later, the answers she and her peers gave are still being used by researchers — most recently in the fight against Alzheimer’s disease. A study released this month found that subjects who did well on test questions as teenagers had a lower incidence of Alzheimer’s and related dementias in their 60s and 70s than those who scored poorly.

Charles Belov sent in this photograph of a sign posted on the Pho 2000 restaurant on Larkin Street in San Francisco:

Seung Min Kim, John Wagner, and Josh Dawsey, "Kavanaugh vote: Senate Republican leaders agree to new FBI background investigation of Kavanaugh", WaPo 9/28/2018 [emphasis added]:

President Trump on Friday ordered the FBI to reopen the investigation of Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh’s background, a stunning turnaround in an emotional battle over sexual assault allegations that has shaken the Senate and reverberated across the country.
[…]
Late Friday, by voice vote, the Senate took an initial step to move ahead on the nomination. Barring no major revelations from the FBI, the Senate could vote on confirming Kavanaugh next weekend, days after the start of the high court’s session.

Penn's School of Arts and Sciences sponsors a series of "60 Second Lectures", where

Penn Arts and Sciences faculty take a minute out by the Ben Franklin statue in front of College Hall to share their perspectives on topics ranging from human history and the knowable universe to fractions and fly-fishing.

This past week, they asked me to do it, and I chose the title

"OK Google/Siri/Alexa/Cortana, What's Next?"

From Adrian Bailey:

Although Google Translate isn't too bad now for the big 8 languages, the results for other languages can still be quite bizarre and/or disappointing. I used to do some Hungarian-English translation 15-20 years ago, and the machine translation available then hardly seems much worse…

Engedjetek meg nekem a tegezést. Angolként bajom van a magázással.

Google's translation: Let me do the trenching. I'm an English guy with shit.

Actual meaning: Let me tegez you (ie. use the informal forms for "you"). As an Englishman, I have trouble with the formal forms.