Language Log

Conversations among linguists may sometimes be interesting to non-linguists for reasons that are not entirely the same as those that appeal to insiders. As an example, I present without further comment a recent back-and-forth on Facebook between Linguist X and Linguist Y, slightly redacted to preserve anonymity.

The 2013 annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science will be held 2/14/2013 to 2/18/2013 at the Hynes Convention Center in Boston. Section Z (Linguistics) is sponsoring or recommending eight of the many symposia featured at the meeting:

Michael Robinson was looking through this Flickr group dedicated to photos of Chinese restaurants outside China, "Chinese Restaurant Worldwide Documentation Project", which includes around 17,000 photographs, when he came upon this photo that was taken on December 23, 2012 in The Lanes, Brighton, England, GB:

Kazunori Takada and Samuel Shen, "China media train fire on U.S. food giants over chicken scare", Chicago Tribune 1/17/2013:

SHANGHAI, Jan 17 (Reuters) – Just weeks after Chinese authorities cleared Yum Brands Inc and McDonald's Corp of charges they had served chicken laced with excessive chemicals, local media are again attacking the iconic American firms, while barely reporting on the chances of Chinese restaurants selling similar meat.

Kevin Zurawel writes:

I assumed at first that this was a catastrophic fire taking place on a train filled with Chinese journalists and TV stars, but then realized it was just about bad chicken.

The first round of the 2013 North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad will take place on January 31, 2013, at 45 sites around the U.S. and Canada. As the NACLO web site explains, this

… is a contest in which high-school students solve linguistic puzzles. In solving the problems, students learn about the diversity and consistency of language, while exercising logic skills. No prior knowledge of linguistics or second languages is necessary. Professionals in linguistics, computational linguistics and language technologies use dozens of languages to create engaging problems that represent cutting edge issues in their fields. The competition has attracted top students to study and work in those same fields. It is truly an opportunity for young people to experience a taste of natural-language processing in the 21st century.

Problems and solutions from the 2012 competition are available here.

Dragomir Radev contributed a LLOG post about the first NACLO, back in 2007; and NACLO veterans have done well in recent International Linguistics Olympiads. Registration at most sites is open through January 30, 2013.

An old favorite for the misnegation files:

In "Postcard language puzzle", Mark Liberman enlisted the aid of Language Log readers in deciphering the writing on two old postcards mailed from Mallorca in 1912-1913. The result was a swift and stunning success, an amazing demonstration of spontaneous online collaboration of linguists spread across the globe.

Now, Bruce Balden has sent in an even older postcard with a most intriguing illustration inspired by the Jamestown Exhibition of 1907:

Today's Frazz:

This beautiful establishment in Amoy (Xiamen) 厦门 (facing Taiwan across the strait that separates the PRC from the ROC) is perhaps the only pro-democracy (private) bookstore in the People's Republic of China — I applaud its moral courage. In this article about Once Bookstore, we find the following photograph of a sign in front of the store and the cover of a book that is most likely sold in it:

You just can't keep a bad idea down. And you just can't lift the level of bad science journalism up. David Robson of New Scientist, in a piece published in that pop science rag a couple of weeks ago (issue of 22/29 December 2012, p. 72; behind a pay wall) and now also published in the Washington Post, reports on a book chapter by Igor Krupnik and Ludger Müller-Wille about anthropologist Franz Boas's travels in the early 20th century with a Canadian Inuit band whose language he learned. Robson says of Boas:

Mentioning his observations in the introduction to his 1911 book "Handbook of American Indian Languages," he ignited the claim that Eskimos have dozens, or even hundreds, of words for snow. Although the idea continues to capture public imagination, most linguists considered it an urban legend, born of sloppy scholarship and journalistic exaggeration. Some have even gone as far as to name it the Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax. The latest evidence, however, suggests that Boas was right all along.

Not a single statement in this passage is correct.

…submitted by Jesse Sheidlower: "China Ferrari sex orgy death crash".

There have been many online remembrances of Aaron Swartz, the brilliant young programmer and Internet activist who killed himself on Friday at the age of 26. (See, for instance, Caleb Crain's piece for The New Yorker's Culture Desk blog and the many tributes linked therein.) It's typically noted that in 2005 Swartz founded the startup Infogami, which then merged with Reddit shortly thereafter. (In obituaries, Swartz has often been identified as a co-founder of Reddit — some dispute that characterization, but it's true that the Infogami wiki platform was a key to Reddit's early success.) I don't have any first-hand reminiscences to share, but with Infogami back in the news I thought it would be a good time to look back on something I wrote in 2006 about the company's name.

Anthony Claden sent in a link to Wade Davis, "The World Until Yesterday by Jared Diamond – review", The Guardian 1/9/2013:

In not one of the hundreds of Aboriginal dialects and languages was there a word for time.

For some comments about time-reference in an Australian language, see "Journalistic dreamtime" (3/8/2007); for some generally relevant discussion, see Stan Carey, "Amondawa has no word for ‘time’?", Sentence First 5/21/2011.

And James Eagle sent in this one — Wade Davis, Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest, 2011:

In Tibetan, there is no word for a mountain summit; the very place the British so avidly sought, their highest goal, did not even exist in the language of their Sherpa porters.