Language Log

Ken Auletta, "Changing Times: Jill Abramson takes charge of the Gray Lady", The New Yorker 10/24/2011:

The first thing that people usually notice about Jill Abramson is her voice. The equivalent of a nasal car honk, it’s an odd combination of upper- and working-class. Inside the newsroom, her schoolteacherlike way of elongating words and drawing out the last word of each sentence is a subject of endless conversation and expert mimicry. When she appeared on television after her appointment as executive editor, the blogger Ben Trawick-Smith wrote, “Speech pathologists and phoneticians, knock yourself out: what’s going on with Abramson’s speech?” He was deluged with responses. One speculated that, like a politician, she had trained herself to limit the space between sentences so that it would be hard to interrupt her; another said she had probably acquired the accent in an attempt to not sound too New York while she was an undergraduate at Harvard. The writer Amy Wilentz, a college roommate of Abramson’s, has said that the accent probably has something to do with trying to sound a bit like Bob Dylan.

The cited blog post is  "Jill Abramson’s Accent", The dialect blog 7/28/2011. LLOG readers were apparently all playing beach volleyball that week, and so no one drew my attention to Ben Trawick-Smith's plea for assistance.

The most recent Scenes From a Multiverse:

The Académie française has recently added to its website a feature Dire, Ne pas dire ("Say, Don't Say")

… qui donne le sentiment de l’Académie française sur les fautes, les tics de langage et les ridicules qui s’observent le plus fréquemment dans le français contemporain.

… which gives the feelings of the Académie française on the errors, clichés, and absurdities that are most often seen in contemporary French.

Lee Moran, "Fight against Franglais! French language website creates list of English words it wants to ban" (Daily Mail 10/12/2011) quotes Valérie Lecasble, communication consultant at the TBWA Corporate agency, as saying "if the Académie Française doesn't protect the French language, who will?"  This is a typically statist attitude — in terms of quantity, frequency, and intensity of peeving, Dire, Ne pas dire is far from matching the standard set by the Anglophone free-enterprise peeving system.

In yesterday's post "Deceptively valuable", I made use of counts from the Google Books ngram dataset, as seen through Mark Davies' convenient interface. That was a case where the ngram dataset's flaws (uncertain metadata, lack of ability to look at context, etc.) are more than balanced by its virtues. In thinking about some of the other issues involved, I remembered a case that makes it possible to check the ngram dataset's answers against those given by another historical collection: the trend over the past century for Americans to replace "sneaked" with "snuck".

A couple of weeks ago, Eric Baković posted about phrases of the form deceptively <ADJECTIVE>, and gave the results of an online survey of more than 1500 LL readers ("Watching the deceptive", 10/2/2011), who were each asked to interpret one of two phrases:

Eric suggested that this variability in judgments, and also the asymmetry between easy and hard, might be connected to the phenomenon of misnegation. And there were many other interesting observations and speculations in Eric's post and the 64 comments on it. But a simple tally of collocational frequency for the word deceptively suggests a couple of relevant factors that neither Eric nor any of the commenters noticed.

None of the words in the expression "woe is me" are especially rare or obsolete, but the syntactic structure and semantic interpretation are definitely archaic. If you learned the expression by listening rather than by reading, you might well go for some alternative way of composing similar-sounding words to arrive at the contextually apparent meaning, like "whoa as me".

That's not much closer to being compositional in contemporary English, but it's certainly no further away either. And at least a few people seem to have taken that route, including one that I noticed in a recent weblog comment.

In response to "Strunk and Ptah", 10/6/2011, Reader KD has pointed me to a passage in James P. Allen, "Middle Egyptian: an introduction to the language and culture of hieroglyphs", 2000, which describes a real instance of ancient Egyptian prescriptivism.  Crucial background is provided by the history of demonstratives in Egyptian:

It's been a while since we've rounded up public appearances of the old "Eskimo words for snow" myth. Here are a few recent examples that have been sent in to Language Log Plaza.

Item #1: The singer-songwriter Kate Bush will be releasing a new album on Nov. 21 with the title (sigh) 50 Words for Snow. That's also the name of a song on the album, and some other tracks are similarly snow-themed ("Snowflake," "Snowed in at Wheeler Street"). It's unclear at this point exactly how Eskimos will figure into Bush's songwriting, but it's safe to say they'll be in there somewhere. It's perhaps also a telling sign that the album features a guest appearance from Stephen Fry, he of "Fry's Planet Word."

It's possible that you don't know who Dennis Ritchie was. Even if you do, you should read some of his obituaries, and think about the ways in which he changed the world: Steve Lohr, "Dennis Ritchie, Trailblazer in Digital Era, Dies at 70", NYT; Elizabeth Flock, "Dennis Ritchie, father of C programming language and Unix, dies at 70", Washington Post; Cade Metz, "Dennis Ritchie: The Shoulders Steve Jobs Stood On", Wired News; Mark Memmott, "Dennis Ritchie, C Programmer And Unix Co-Creator, Has Died", NPR.

Johnny Truant, commenting on that last piece, contributed a tribute that Dennis would have appreciated:

#include "stdio.h"
int main(void)
{
printf("goodbye, world\n");
return 0;
}

(Though everyone who knew Dennis, or who knows what he did for the world, would object to that return value.)

Yesterday's Doonesbury joins the parade of praise for Siri:

Psycholinguist Craig Chambers sent me this photo that he snapped recently inside a large pharmacy chain store (you know the kind, where you can avail yourself of all your better-living-through-chemicals products under one roof, whether it's anti-depressant, cough syrup, your favorite crunchy snack of Olestra and yellow dye #6, jet printer ink, or the entire range of household plastics.)

Along with the photo, Craig wrote:

If you ever find yourself rubbing shoulders with an executive from Shoppers Drug Mart, you might tell them that they could use your expertise in

(a) language for in-store advertising
(b) scalar adjectives
(c) both of the above

I just passed through security at the Xi'an airport (in northwest China) and was surprised to have my belongings searched by a young woman on whose snazzy black uniform, instead of an ID number as a regular worker would have, there was a label that said only SHIXI ("in training; practice"), with no trace of the corresponding characters 实习 anywhere about her.  When I read out the pinyin with correct pronunciation and indicated that I knew immediately and exactly what it meant, the young woman and her co-workers were obviously pleased that I could do so.

Even more thought provoking is the fact that many Chinese police cars and uniforms have written on them GONGAN ("public security") rather than "police", and sometimes not even 公安.

Like other regular readers of Andrew Sullivan's web log, I was not surprised that he was happy about Sarah Palin's decision not to run for U.S. president in 2012. However, one aspect of his commentary ("Rejoice!", 10/5/2011) did surprise me. The puzzle is in the second sentence:

Our Three Year National Nightmare Is Over!

Palin talks to Mark Levin here (her voice is the deeper one).

Mark Levin is a radio talk show host, and Sullivan's link goes to a page on Levin's web site that includes not only the text of Palin's statement, but also accesses an mp3 file of a 15-minute segment of his show. My interest here, of course, is not in the politics but in the phonetics. Is it really true that Sarah Palin's voice is deeper (i.e. lower in pitch) than Mark Levin's?