Language Log

Power-law distributions seem to be everywhere, and not just in word-counts and whale whistles. Most people know that Vilfredo Pareto  found them in the distribution of wealth, two or three decades before Udny Yule showed that stochastic processes like those in evolution lead to such distributions, and George Kingsley Zipf found his eponymous law in word frequencies. Since then, power-law distributions have been found all over the place — Wikipedia lists

… the sizes of craters on the moon and of solar flares, the foraging pattern of various species, the sizes of activity patterns of neuronal populations, the frequencies of words in most languages, frequencies of family names, the species richness in clades of organisms, the sizes of power outages, criminal charges per convict, volcanic eruptions, human judgements of stimulus intensity …

My personal favorite is the noises it makes when you crumple something up, as discussed by Eric Kramer and Alexander Lobkovsky, "Universal Power Law in the Noise from a Crumpled Elastic Sheet", 1995 ) referenced in "Zipf and the general theory of wrinkling", 11/15/2003).

Contradicting the Central Limit Theorem's implications for what is "normal", power law distributions seem to be everywhere you look.

Or maybe not?

[This is a guest post by Ari-Joonas Pitkänen]

I’m a frequent reader of Language Log, and I’ve been particularly interested in the debate about the usefulness / limitations of the Chinese script in modern society. As the 30^th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre approaches, I remembered an anecdote about the limitations of Chinese characters presented in Louisa Lim’s book The People’s Republic of Amnesia. It describes the way jailed activists communicated in prison after the crackdown on Tiananmen in 1989:

Nick Kaldis asks about the pronunciation of "posthumous":

On NPR this morning, and once a few weeks ago, both announcers pronounced it "pōst-hyooməs"; I can't recall ever hearing this pronunciation before.

A recent radio presentation: "The Law of Languages", Living on Earth 5/31/2019.

Other mass media: "Dolphins, aliens, and the search for intelligent life", Astrobiology 8/29/2011; "Dolphin Studies Could Reveal Secrets of Extraterrestrial Intelligence", 9/2/2011; To talk with aliens, learn to speak with dolphins", Wired 2/15/2011; "SETI Evolution: Searching for Aliens Using Whale Songs and Radios", Space.com 7/2/2013; "Dolphins Are Helping Us Hunt for Aliens", Nautilus 5/28/2018; "The Law all Languages Obey", Nova 9/26/2018; "Humpback Whale Communication and the Search for Alien Intelligence", SETI Institute 11/28/2018; "Humpback whales could hold the key to communicating with alien intelligence, say experts", Metro 12/6/2018; "What humpback whales can teach us about alien languages", Vox 12/6/2018.

I'll let this incredible ESPN (it's a sport, after all) video speak for itself:

No siree!  These Hong Kong students are being taught to emulate Beijing government models:

In the 13rd [sic] Hong Kong Cup Diplomatic Knowledge Contest held on May 12, Hong Kong high school students militantly spoke perfect Putonghua. Their Beijing accent, tone, gestures, facial expressions all reminded one of China's Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Hua Chunying, or even Chairman Mao's wife Jiang Qing. E.g, a schoolgirl indignantly yelled, "Not a single country has fallen into a debt crisis as a result of joining the One Belt One Road!" (The fact, however, remains that due to their inability to repay debts to China, Zambia has lost to China its Kenneth Kaunda Airport and the ZESCO Power Plant; Sri Lanka has handed over its Hambantota Port to China on a 99-year lease; and Kenya is giving up its Mombasa Port to China.) Xie Feng, Commissioner of the Foreign Ministry of PRC in HKSAR, called upon the students to love the State of China and take up positions in international organizations like the UN. Critics suspect that quite a few HK kids are already thoroughly brainwashed by their pro-CCP education and may be used to infiltrate into American & other Western organizations.

Malin Fezehai, "In Turkey, Keeping a Language of Whistles Alive", NYT 5/30/2019:

Muazzez Kocek, 46, is considered one of the best whistlers in Kuşköy, a village tucked away in the picturesque Pontic Mountains in Turkey’s northern Giresun province. Her whistle can be heard over the area’s vast tea fields and hazelnut orchards, several miles farther than a person’s voice. When President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey visited Kuşköy in 2012, she greeted him and proudly whistled, “Welcome to our village!”

She uses kuş dili, or “bird language,” which transforms the full Turkish vocabulary into varied-pitch frequencies and melodic lines. For hundreds of years, this whistled form of communication has been a critical for the farming community in the region, allowing complex conversations over long distances and facilitating animal herding.

The "sǎo hēi chú è 扫黑除恶" ("sweeping away blackness and eliminating evil") campaign in China not only has not waned, but rather is going in a hysterical direction. The local authorities in Wuxi are marching into the kindergartens; below is their conclusion after investigating one of them:

Daniel Deutsch sent in this quotation

“The Attorney General has previously stated that the Special Counsel repeatedly affirmed that he was not saying that, but for the OLC opinion, he would have found the President obstructed justice. The Special Counsel’s report and his statement today made clear that the office concluded it would not reach a determination — one way or the other — about whether the President committed a crime. There is no conflict between these statements," a joint statement from DOJ spokeswoman Kerri Kupec and Mueller spokesman Peter Carr said.

with this comment

I understand that Language Log is not a political site, but this calls for a language expert:

Affirmed that—was not saying—that, but for—would have found. No conflict.

I had to read it 20 times to understand it.

Two days ago, in "Difficult languages and easy languages, part 2" (5/28/19), we listed scores of languages from easiest to hardest to learn.  Spanish came out overall as the easiest widely spoken language for many people to learn, while Arabic and Turkish struck many people as quite difficult to master.

Klaus Nuber writes: "Sometime ago I saw the sign of this 'Asia Palast' with the logo consisting of the two chairs and the round dingus between. Is this logo just cute or has it a hanzi background?"

Betteridge's law of headlines states: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."  The title of this post ends in a question mark, but, as its author, I mean for it to be answered by the word yes.

Early yesterday morning, I posted "Fluent bilingualism in Singapore " (5/28/19).  Less than six hours later, around noon, I posted "Difficult languages and easy languages, part 2 " (5/28/19).  Both posts fortuitously touched upon the real or imagined difficulty of Mandarin, the former allegedly attested in the poor record of getting Singaporean students of Chinese ancestry to attain fluency in the language and the latter in the results of a large scale survey on the perceived difficulty of languages carried out two years ago on Language Log.  In both cases, Mandarin came out looking as though it were a very hard language to learn.