Language Log

[Below is a guest post by Gabriel Dupre]

Sentences of the form “No X is too Y to Z” are, in many cases, nightmares to process. The interaction of multiple negations (explicit and implicit), scalar adjectives and modals makes correctly interpreting such sentences very difficult. This has long been noted by linguists and psychologists. However, all of the accounts we can find of these types of sentences not only note the difficulty of a first-pass parse of the sentence, but also misinterpret the literal meaning.

Toshitaka N. Suzuki, David Wheatcroft & Michael Griesser, "Experimental evidence for compositional syntax in bird calls", Nature Communications 2016:

Human language can express limitless meanings from a finite set of words based on combinatorial rules (i.e., compositional syntax). Although animal vocalizations may be comprised of different basic elements (notes), it remains unknown whether compositional syntax has also evolved in animals. Here we report the first experimental evidence for compositional syntax in a wild animal species, the Japanese great tit (Parus minor). Tits have over ten different notes in their vocal repertoire and use them either solely or in combination with other notes. Experiments reveal that receivers extract different meanings from ‘ABC’ (scan for danger) and ‘D’ notes (approach the caller), and a compound meaning from ‘ABC–D’ combinations. However, receivers rarely scan and approach when note ordering is artificially reversed (‘D–ABC’). Thus, compositional syntax is not unique to human language but may have evolved independently in animals as one of the basic mechanisms of information transmission.

In "The hand of god" (3/4/16), I cited a Chinese text in which the term Mòyé 鏌鋣 (the name of a famous sword in antiquity) came up.  The translation I provided rendered that term as "Excalibur", which caught the attention of a couple of commenters who wondered how one could get from Mòyé 鏌鋣 to "Excalibur", when all that Google Translate could offer is "ROBOT 鋣".

Mary Norris, "Comma Queen: The Singular 'Their'", The New Yorker 3/4/2016:

Last year, at the convention of the American Copy Editors Society (ACES), in Pittsburgh, everyone was talking about “the singular ‘their.’ ” It is the people’s choice for the gender-neutral third-person-singular pronoun that the English language sadly lacks.  

Many ACES stalwarts—copy editors, journalists, grammarians, lexicographers, and linguists—stand ready to embrace the singular “their.” But not us. We avoid it whenever we can.

A correspondent from Singapore saw the following photograph in his Facebook feed:

Today's xkcd:

Mouseover title: "'If you're done being pedantic, we should get dinner.' 'You did it again!' 'No, I didn't.'"

… radiating stupidity isotropically.  Today's SMBC presents a variation on the traditional "perfectly spherical cow" joke:

Yesterday I linked to a couple of Lindsey Graham's jokes at celebratory dinner ("Fecal compounds", 3/5/2016). But the journalists and politicians who spoke at last night's annual Gridiron Club dinner outdid him.

Today's Tank McNamara:

"How an eight-year-old boy invented a new word", BBC Trending 2/24/2016

A few weeks back, primary school teacher Margherita Aurora, in the small town of Copparo in central Italy, was intrigued when one of her students, Matteo, used an unfamiliar word in a written assignment.

Matteo described a flower as "petaloso" ("full of petals"). The word doesn't officially exist in the Italian dictionary, but grammatically it makes sense as a combination of "petalo" ("petal") and the suffix "-oso" ("full of").

The assignment got Aurora thinking – could the eight-year-old Matteo have invented a new word? With his teacher's help, the student wrote to the Accademia della Crusca – the institution that oversees the use of the Italian language – to ask for their opinion.

To their surprise, the pair got an encouraging reply. "The word you invented is well formed and could be used in the Italian language," one of the Crusca's top linguistic experts wrote. "It is beautiful and clear."

But, the linguist added, for a word to officially be part of the Italian language, a large number of people need to use it and understand its meaning. "If you manage to spread your word among many people who start saying 'What a petaloso flower this is!', then petaloso will have become a word in Italian."

Matteo's teacher was touched by the reply – "this is worth more than a thousand Italian lessons" she wrote on her Facebook account on Monday – and shared pictures of the letter. Inadvertently, she triggered a movement to do exactly what the Crusca had asked: make "petaloso" a widely known and used word.

Joseph Manning kindly called my attention to this post by Kathleen Coleman on the blog of the Society for Classical Studies (SCS):  "Nondum Arabes Seresque rogant: Classics Looks East" (2/2/16).  The Latin quotation is from a poem written by Statius to mark the inauguration of Domitian’s seventeenth consulship in AD 95.  It means "nor yet do the Arabs and Chinese file petitions", something that the Romans hoped they would one day submit.

Donna Cassata, "Lindsey Graham: 'My Party Has Gone Batshit Crazy'", USN 2/26/2016:

Sen. Lindsey Graham is disgusted with the GOP's embrace of Donald Trump: "My party has gone batshit crazy."

In no-holds-barred remarks at a celebratory dinner Thursday night, the South Carolina senator and unsuccessful presidential candidate said the GOP has lost all semblance of sanity and predicted the party will suffer irrevocable losses in November if it backs Trump.

A set of video clips can be found here. The critical passage — which includes a dig at Hillary Clinton:

Well look how far you've come.
The most dishonest person in America's a woman.
Who's about to be president.
How could that be?
My party has gone batshit crazy.

Article in ScienceAlert today (3/4/16):

The article in ScienceAlert begins:

Twitter exploded today with the news that a peer-reviewed scientific paper about the human hand credits its design to "the Creator", and scientists around the world are so furious, they called for an official retraction.

The paper, which mentions a "Creator" several times throughout, was published by the journal PLOS ONE back in January, but went largely unnoticed until James McInerney, a researcher in computational molecular evolution at the University of Manchester in UK, used twitter to call the journal "a joke".

To say that the paper has generated an enormous amount of controversy would be an understatement.