Language Log

The first issue of a new journal has just appeared: Linguistic Evidence in Security, Law and Intelligence (LESLI), founded and edited by Dr. Carole Chaski. As a member of the editorial board, I'm pleased with the quality of the first issue, and I feel that Carole deserves a round of applause.

But there's something in the first issue that reminds me of a long-standing puzzle:  why is there so little communication between two research communities who seem to be working on essentially the same problem? The trigger is Harry Hollien's policy paper, "Barriers to Progress in Speaker Identification with Comments on the Trayvon Martin Case". And the two communities — separated by a common problem — are the people who work on what Prof. Hollien calls (forensic) "speaker identification", versus the people involved with what I know as "speaker recognition research".

Kim Sengupta, "Nelson Mandela memorial: ‘Bogus’ interpreter made mockery of Barack Obama’s tribute", The Telegraph 12/11/2013:

The key address in the memorial service for Nelson Mandela was given by Barack Obama, whose words were brought to life for deaf spectators and TV viewers by a “sign language interpreter”, who could be seen gesturing energetically behind the sombre US President.

Yet the man, not only seen by the tens of thousands in Johannesburg’s FNB stadium where the memorial took place on Tuesday, but also by millions across the world on television, was a “fake”, according to Bruno Druchen, the national director of the Deaf Federation of  South Africa.

Mr Duchen told the Associated Press “there was no meaning in what he used his hands for”. He and other language experts pointed out that the man was not signing in South African or American sign languages and could not have been signing in any other known sign language because there was no structure to his arm and hand movements. South African sign language covers all of the country’s 11 official languages.

A question from Roy Peter Clark:

Last week I taught a class for a group of middle school young men and their mentors.  Almost everyone in the room was African-American.  The content of the class was the history of the n-word and its current contexts and uses. It was one of the most lively hours I have ever spent in the classroom, mostly because of the candor and fervor of the participants.

Mark Swofford sent me the following photograph of two snack stands taken on September 8 on a mountain in Tucheng, Taiwan — somewhere around here:

As used by the Chinese air force, according to a post on Twitter that Joel Martinsen sent to Brendan O'Kane, and Brendan relayed to me:

From Larry Getlen, "Conversations with Carlin", 2013:

Larry Getlen: Why are you so fascinated with words?

George Carlin: Because they’re all we have. Nature gave us this magnificent brain, which is so different from any that came before it. And the only way the wonders of this brain are shared and developed is through language – the exchange of ideas and communications and feelings. Words are the conveyors of all that. They’re magic. They’re mysterious and wonderful and magic.

Via twitter:

As Eric Baković recently noted, there's been a lot of buzz about a presentation about "uptalk" by Amanda Ritchart and Amalia Arvaniti at the 2013 Acoustical Society meeting. All we have so far is a sort of press release  ("Do We All Speak Like Valley Girls? Uptalk in Southern Californian English", ASA Lay Language Papers, 12/5/2013), but this is enough to see that Ritchart and Arvaniti have made a valuable contribution.

They based their analysis on systematic analysis of a good-sized recorded dataset (23 "native speakers of SoCal English", who were asked to describe a muted video clip and to participate in a "map task" interaction). They distinguished among different interactional functions ("simple statement", "question", "floor holding", "confirmation request"), they systematically noted aspects of the location and extent of rises, and they based their conclusions on a statistical analysis of the interrelationship of these features.

Jasmine Bailey, "Pennsylvania newlyweds kill for the thrill", 12/7/2013:

Friday night, police arrested 22-year-old Elytte Barbour in the November death of 42-year-old Troy LaFerrara. His 18-year-old wife, Miranda, was arrested for the same crime earlier this week. (Via WBRE)

She says LaFerrara groped her and after convincing her to turn herself into police, Elytte defended his wife’s story. (Via The Daily Item)

“I do not believe that this was malicious once so ever, I believe that she was attacked and that under those circumstances she took the necessary measures to defend herself.” (Via WHP-TV)

Yesterday afternoon, UC San Diego Linguistics grad student Amanda Ritchart presented her research (joint with Amalia Arvaniti) on the use and realization of uptalk in Southern California English at the 166th Acoustical Society of America meeting. This work is profiled in the ASA's press room, and has thus far received a fair amount of attention. You can hear and/or read about it on KPBS (San Diego's public radio station), at WBUR's Here & Now, on BBC News, and in the Washington Post. (See also this shout-out on the Linguistic Society of America website.)

Uptalk has been discussed many times here on Language Log, so regular readers are probably not unfamiliar with it. But one of the most recent Language Log posts on the topic ("Uptalk awakening", 9/29/2013) shows how relatively unaware of this long-standing feature of many varieties of English some folks still are. So the media coverage of Ritchart & Arvaniti's work is welcome — and on the whole pretty good, if a little biased toward a "wow, it's spreading to men!" interpretation of the research results, which kinda misses the point. But of course, if you scroll down to the comments (why oh why do I ever scroll down to the comments???), you'll see that many appear to think that the use of rising intonation at the ends of (some!) statements is the clearest evidence we have of the decline of western civilization. Sigh.

Update — more here.

It is not just the disaster of Chinese-English translation that provides us with source material for the huge fund of hilariously inappropriate texts that we tag with Lost in Translation here on Language Log. Spanish provides them too. And here is one from Italian. What could possibly be the explanation for a failure as gross as translating RIFUGIO ("refuge") by the words "MOUNTAIN DEW"? What did they mean to put? Coca-Cola? Dr. Pepper?

It seems almost a shame to solve the mystery, yet I believe I can. And just as when one explains a conjuring trick, it's a total let-down. But this is Language Log: we aim to inform, not just to titillate. Not that there's anything wrong with that—in a well-balanced life there should be some titillation as well. If you would prefer titillation to information right now, try to work out the source of the error for yourself before you read on.

Al Filreis's Modern and Contemporary American Poetry is one of the most successful MOOCs. In particular, participants' involvement is sustained over time to an unusual extent — here's the daily volume of forum posts and comments for the first two months of ModPo2, which is currently underway:

When the delightfully cute UK Olympic diving star Tom Daley decided to come out as bisexual, he made a statement (see this news report) with a charmingly clever use of singular they:

"In spring this year my life changed massively when I met someone, and they make me feel so happy, so safe and everything just feels great," Daley said. "That someone is a guy."

His use of "they" for the first reference to his new romantic interest has "someone" as its antecedent, and rather than being a bound variable semantically (as in Everyone should look after their own gear), it's just a free pronoun meaning "he or she, as the context may dictate". He could have used he, as typical conservative usage advice books would have insisted. Except that it would have utterly ruined his rhetorical design.