Language Log

This is a brief progress report on "The case of the disappearing determiners", which I've continue to poke at in my spare time.

As the red line in the plot below shows, the proportion of nouns immediately preceded by THE decreased over the course of the 20th century, from an average of 18.9% for books published in 1900-1910 to 13.5% for books published in 1990-2000.  The blue line shows that the proportion of adjective+noun sequences immediately preceded by THE was higher, overall, but followed a remarkably similar falling trajectory, from 29.1% in 1900-1910 to 21.2% in 1990-2000:

At the American Dialect Society annual meeting in Washington, D.C. (held in conjunction with the Linguistic Society of America), the 2015 Word of the Year selection has been made. The winner is they used as a gender-neutral singular pronoun. They was recognized by the society particularly for its emerging use as a pronoun to refer to a known person, often as a conscious choice by someone rejecting the traditional gender binary of he and she.

Check out the press release here and my full writeup for Vocabulary.com here. The WOTY vote also has received coverage from Time, the Washington Post, and Business Insider, among others.

Report of the results of a study that I've been long awaiting:

"Different languages spark same brain activity: study"

by Chen Wei-han Taipei Times (1/6/16)

TOPIC OF DEBATE:  An NTNU [National Taiwan Normal University] psychology professor said the results debunk a myth that Chinese and alphabetic languages are processed by different sides of the brain

One useful way to look at the "The case of the disappearing determiners" is to compare bible translations, because this controls to some extent for variation in the underlying message. So as a first tentative step on that path, I compared the  Song of Solomon in the King James Version, first published in 1611, with the Song of Solomon in the Message Bible, published between 1993 and 2002.

The overall statistics for the Song of Solomon in the two sources show a fall of about 38% relative:

And here are a couple of specific verses to compare:

kjv 2:12: The flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land;
msg 2:12: Spring flowers are in blossom all over. The whole world's a choir – and singing! Spring warblers are filling the forest with sweet arpeggios.

kjv 2:17: Until the day break , and the shadows flee away, turn, my beloved, and be thou like a roe or a young hart upon the mountains of Bether.
msg 2:17: Until dawn breathes its light and night slips away. Turn to me, dear lover. Come like a gazelle. Leap like a wild stag on delectable mountains!

From the Speculative Grammarian:

Lu Xun (1881-1936) is generally regarded as the greatest Chinese writer of the twentieth century.  Despite his tremendous reputation and enormous influence through the 70s and into the 80s, in recent decades Lu Xun had fallen somewhat into disfavor as the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), which transformed itself into what I call the CCCCMMMMPPPP (Chinese Communist Christo-Confucian Marxist Maoist Militant Mercantilist Propagandistic Pugnacious Plutocratic Party), no longer took kindly his radical critique of corrupt, feudalistic society.

The internet has responded with a wave of snarky hashtags to the self-appointed militia occupying the  visitors' center at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon. Many are inappropriately anti-rural (#YokelHaram, #YeeHawdists), or irrelevantly anti-southern (#YallQaeda), but in a case like this, snarky stereotype-based ridicule is a better weapon than gun battles, I guess.

Today's New York Times includes an obituary for the pioneering creolist John Holm, with some remembrances from our own Sally Thomason.

Following up on yesterday's post "The case of the disappearing determiners", Gosse Bouma sent me some data from the CGN ("Corpus Gesproken Nederlands"), about determiner use in spoken Dutch by people born between 1914 and 1987. According to the CGN website,

The Spoken Dutch Corpus project was aimed at the construction of a database of contemporary standard Dutch as spoken by adults in The Netherlands and Flanders. […] In version 1.0, the results are presented that have emerged from the project. The total number of words available here is nearly 9 million (800 hours of speech). Some 3.3 million words were collected in Flanders, well over 5.6 million in The Netherlands.

It's not clear to me exactly when the recordings were made, but the project ran from 1998 to 2004.

Gosse sent data focused on the word de, which is the definite article for masculine and feminine ("common") nouns in Dutch, cognate with English the.  (The definite article for neuter nouns, het, is less frequent and also can be used as a pronoun.)

The results are similar to those that I reported earlier for English: Older people use the definite article more frequently than younger people (at least for people born in the 1950s onwards), and at every age, men use the definite article more than women.

We've already had a look at the candidates for Chinese Word of the Year 2015, but apparently that is too tame and lame, so now we also have to think about the top Chinese phrases of the year.  This photograph illustrates (or perhaps I should say "spawned") one:

Photograph of highway sign from Jinghong (Thai Chiang Rung) in Sibsongbanna / Sipsong Panna / Xishuangbanna Dai Autonomous Prefecture, Yunnan Province, PRC:

Over at China Economic Review, Hudson Lockett has written an interesting piece worthy of the celebrated British sleuth:

"The game is afoot! Why Chinese Sherlock fans are as confused as everyone else" (1/3/16)

It's all about how the Chinese term — mǎtí nèifān zú 马蹄内翻足 — for a congenital deformity referred to in English as "clubfoot" (talipes equinovarus [CTEV]) figures in the "slaveringly awaited"

New Year’s Day special episode of the series starring Martin Freeman and Benedict Cumberbatch.

For the past century or so, the commonest word in English has gradually been getting less common. Depending on data source and counting method, the frequency of the definite article THE has fallen substantially — in some cases at a rate as high as 50% per 100 years.

At every stage, writing that's less formal has fewer THEs, and speech generally has fewer still, so to some extent the decline of THE is part of a more general long-term trend towards greater informality. But THE is apparently getting rarer even in speech, so the change is more than just the (normal) shift of writing style towards the norms of speech.

There appear to be weaker trends in the same direction, at overall lower rates, in German, Italian, Spanish, and French.

I'll lay out some of the evidence for this phenomenon, mostly collected from earlier LLOG posts. And then I'll ask a few questions about what's really going on, and why and how it's happening. [Warning: long and rather wonky.]