Language Log

The Simile of the Week award (it's a bit early for Simile of the Year) goes to Matt Taibbi, who in a spectacularly delicious piece of political feature-writing described observing the Republican party's primary process as "like watching a cruel experiment involving baboons, laughing gas and a forklift." As Alice said about the Jabberwocky poem in Through the Looking Glass, "somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas–only I don't exactly know what they are!"

Mediate Metrics ("Objectively Measuring Media Bias") explains that

Based in Wheaton, IL, Mediate Metrics LLC is a privately held start-up founded by technology veteran and entrepreneur Barry Hardek. Our goal is to cultivate knowledgeable consumers of political news by objectively measuring media “slant” — news which contains either an embedded statements of bias (opinion) or an elements of editorial influence (factual content that reflects positively or negatively on U.S. political parties).

Mediate Metrics’ core technology is based on a custom machine classifier designed specifically for this application, and developed based on social science best practices with recognized leaders in the field of text analysis. Today,  text mining systems are primarily used as general purpose marketing tools for extracting insights from platforms such as like Twitter and Facebook, or from other large electronic databases. In contrast, the Mediate Metrics classifier was specifically devised to identify statements of bias (opinions) and influence (facts that reflects positively or negatively) on U.S. political parties from news program transcripts.

(The links to Wikipedia articles on "social science" and "text mining" are original to their page.)

These days, newly published books often get promoted with video trailers, and there's one that just came out for Michael Erard's Babel No More: The Search for the World's Most Extraordinary Language Learners. In keeping with the book's theme of hyperpolyglottery, Erard rounded up speakers of different languages to create a multilingual reading of a story told in his book. (Direct link here — that's me at 1:05.)

And there's a contest! Here are the details from the trailer description:

How good are you at identifying spoken languages? I asked friends from all over to say one line of a story about Cardinal Giuseppe Mezzofanti, and all the lines are assembled here. Send an email message with 1) the name of each language and 2) in the order in which they appear to info@babelnomore.com, and I'll put your name in a drawing for a signed copy of Babel No More. Deadline is February 23.

I'll keep the comments closed until the deadline to keep anyone from divulging the names of the languages. Good luck!

Language Log has been asked more than once to comment on an unpublished working paper by Yale economist Keith Chen that is discussed in various online sources, e.g. here and here, and most recently David Berreby's post at Big Think. Briefly, Chen's paper alleges that a certain simple grammatical property of languages correlates robustly with indicators of profligacy and lack of prudence, as revealed in the speakers' lack of concern for their financial and medical prospects. Language Log does not really want to comment on an unpublished working paper about language by a non-linguist that is not written for publication and has not had the benefit of serious critical attention from academic referees. But neither does it want to disappoint its readers by clamming up. So I will make a few remarks about Chen's work, and the journalistic reporting that it is beginning to attract. I will not be very rigorous; but as I will explain, it is too early for that.

The new anglophone film of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo directed by David Fincher is really superb. I don't know when I've seen such a gripping and well-told suspense mystery. And there's a wonderful piece of less-is-more (compare with the impressive example of absence of language that I described in my post about The Ides of March) when Lisbeth says she is reading Mikael's notes on his computer. "They're encrypted!" says Mikael indignantly. And Lisbeth raises her eyes for a half-second withering look and says, "Please." That syllable transmits a whole paragraph of exposition about her skill in the hacking arts. You can see in the way she says that single word that she is so skilled she thinks standard encryption is for babies and that Mikael is one.

A couple of days ago, Victor Mair wrote about some provocative behavior on the part of "Kŏng Qìngdōng 孔庆东, associate professor in the Chinese Department at Peking University, who also just happens to be the 73rd generation descendant of Confucius (Kǒng Fūzǐ 孔夫子 ; Kǒng Qiū 孔丘), or at least he claims to be a descendant of Confucius."

In the comments, Victor names someone else who he believes to be a true descendant of Confucius, and notes that there is some doubt about Kŏng Qìngdōng's claim to this status.

Well, I'd like to come to Kŏng Qìngdōng's defense, at least on the specific and limited question of whether he is descended from Confucius. My standing to make this argument is based on the fact that I too am descended from Confucius. And I can prove it mathematically.

"The pit in Thomas Friedman's stomach" (5/23/2011) is back:

To observe the democratic awakenings happening in places like Egypt, Syria and Russia is to travel with a glow in your heart and a pit in your stomach. […]

But that pit in the stomach comes from knowing that while the protests are propelled by deep aspirations for dignity, justice and self-determination, such heroic emotions have to compete with other less noble impulses and embedded interests in these societies.
[Thomas Friedman, "Freedom at 4 Below", NYT 2/7/2012]

That was the headline on the front page of the Saturday, January 21 Dōngfāng rìbào 東方日報 (Oriental Daily): "Xiānggǎng rén shì gǒu" 香港人是狗 (Hong Kong people are dogs). See here and here (with video).

Last week, my old friend Hopkinson Smith gave a concert here in Philadelphia. This reminded me that one of the entries in the Quadrangle at the University of Pennsylvania is named for his great⁶-grandfather Francis Hopkinson, a signer of the Declaration of Independence who was also the author of the first secular song in the European tradition known to have been composed in America. (And right next to the Hopkinson entry, by chance, is an entry named for William Smith, the university's first provost, so that the standard map of the Quad happens to have Hoppy's full name in the middle of its upper right-hand border.

So I looked on line for a copy of Francis Hopkinson's first song, and found a facsimile of the manuscript on the web site of the Library of Congress. The lyrics are a ballad by Thomas Parnell (1679-1718), and Francis Hopkinson apparently wrote his setting in 1759, when he was 22 years old, although it was not published until 1788.

Three linguistic offenses in the UK to report on this week: an injudicious noun choice, a highly illegal false assertion, and an obscene racist epithet. The latter two have led to criminal charges.

Judging from many comments on this post, "Annals of airport Chinglish, part 3", there is both tremendous interest in and massive confusion about how Chinese characters are constructed.

Jeremy Goldkorn sent me this clever complaint about the characters from Weibo (China's imitation of Twitter) which is circulating widely on the web; it seems to be relevant to our present discussion:

终于会读了，泪奔 三个土念垚（yáo）三个牛念犇（bēn）三个手念掱（pá）三个田念畾（lěi）三个马念骉（biāo）三个羊念羴（shān）三个犬念猋 （biāo）三 个鹿念麤（cū）三个鱼念鱻（xiān）三个贝念赑（bì）三个毛念毳（cuì）三个车念轟（hōng）不会读的转!

"Radical theory explains the origin, evolution, and nature of life, challenges conventional wisdom: Case Western Reserve theorist develops incomparable model that unifies physics, chemistry, and biology", Case Western Reserve press release 1/26/2012:

The earth is alive, asserts a revolutionary scientific theory of life emerging from Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine. The trans-disciplinary theory demonstrates that purportedly inanimate, non-living objects—for example, planets, water, proteins, and DNA—are animate, that is, alive. With its broad explanatory power, applicable to all areas of science and medicine, this novel paradigm aims to catalyze a veritable renaissance.

Erik Andrulis, PhD, assistant professor of molecular biology and microbiology, advanced his controversial framework in his manuscript "Theory of the Origin, Evolution, and Nature of Life," published in the peer-reviewed journal, Life. His theory explains not only the evolutionary emergence of life on earth and in the universe but also the structure and function of existing cells and biospheres.

In addition to resolving long-standing paradoxes and puzzles in chemistry and biology, Dr. Andrulis' theory unifies quantum and celestial mechanics. His unorthodox solution to this quintessential problem in physics differs from mainstream approaches, like string theory, as it is simple, non-mathematical, and experimentally and experientially verifiable. As such, the new portrait of quantum gravity is radical.

One of the earliest and best photographers in China was called John Zumbrun, but I have also seen his surname spelled various different ways, including Zumbrum.  Some of his pictures may be seen here (this site is run by Thomas H. Hahn, digital archivist of old photographs).

As soon as I saw his surname, I suspected that it might be a variant of the Zumbrunnen among my own maternal relatives who were of Swiss German extraction.  When I mentioned to my sister Heidi (who does intense genealogical research on our family) that I thought Zumbrun might be a variant of Zumbrunnen, she replied, "Oh man, the variant spellings of Zumbrunnen are driving me batty.  I have even seen Zum Pwunnen.  Have you heard of the soundex?  It is a way to index names & deal with all of the variant spellings."