Language Log

The Organization of the Islamic Conference renamed itself "The Organization of the Islamic Cooperation" on June 28th at its meeting in Astana, Kazakhstan according to this press release. As I write, the English version of their web site reflects the new name, but the French version does not, although the French version of the press release gives it the same name in French: "Organisation de la Coopération islamique".

Today's "Candorville," by Darrin Bell:

(As usual, click on the image for a larger version.)

The awful thing about the documentation policy adopted by Amber, who has clearly started a campaign to get Dilbert fired for bullying, is that her idea of taking down what is said at a meeting is to record illocutionary rather than locutionary acts.

The most recent xkcd distills a concentrated essence of word rage and word aversion triggers:

The 2004 remake of The Flight of the Phoenix is on TV here right now. According to the Wikipedia article it wasn't all that well received, with many critics of the opinion that it didn't improve on the original. However, there is one point that they seem to have missed: this version is set in Mongolia, and the unfortunately brief conversation with the bandits is in comprehensible Mongolian! I don't think I've ever encountered Mongolian before in an American film.

The 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics took place last week in Portland OR, and one of the papers presented there has gotten some (well deserved) press coverage: Moshe Koppel, Navot Akiva, Idan Dershowitz and Nachum Dershowitz, "Unsupervised Decomposition of a Document into Authorial Components", ACL2011.

Well, at least the AP covered it: Matti Friedman, "An Israeli algorithm sheds light on the Bible", AP 6/29/2011 (as usual published under different headlines in various publications, e.g. "Algorithm developed by Israeli scholars sheds light on the Bible’s authorship" (WaPo), "Software deciphers authorship of the Bible" (CathNews), etc.).

Luke Yeomans (pictured) had a king cobra sanctuary in Nottingham, England, and planned to open it to the public this weekend, but instead one of his cobras killed him on Wednesday with a single bite, a hefty injection of neurotoxic and cardiotoxic venom that gave him a heart attack. Sadly, the linguistic signs that he would be killed this way were already present in the record, quite clear in something he had said. I wish someone could have warned him.

The Daily Telegraph quotes Yeomans as saying this about why the snakes offered no threat to him:

These king cobras know I provide them with food and fresh water so they're not going to go out of their way to do harm to me when I do no harm to them whatsoever. People say I’m mad but it’s better than saying that you’re bad and everything I do is good. My life is about the conservation of the king cobra.

The reason I've been in Bulgaria this week is to present three tutorial lectures on linguistics at (of all things) a conference on computability. It has been an excellent experience, thanks to the tireless efforts of Alexandra, the chief organizer. Academic conference organizing is a horrible job. Unpaid work that involves being responsible for hundreds of people's lives and dozens of unforeseen circumstances and uncontrollable variables. In the case of this conference, a central problem turned out to be that the spectacular high-ceilinged oval room that is the main conference hall has acoustics ideal for an unamplified concert of vocal music (what I wouldn't give to hear Renée Fleming in this room), but is totally unsuited to delivering amplified human speech on technical topics.

I guess I had not really foreseen how fast the advent of ebooks would lead to a gigantic, unstoppable tsunami of what can only be described as bookspam, available for sale at Amazon.com. Have a look at this article by John Naughton, about the results of Amazon making available an easy conversion to Kindle format and easy uploading for sale.

I write this from Sofia, a delightful city of broad boulevards and amazing churches and friendly people and huge tranquil parks, where I arrived on Sunday afternoon. Within a few minutes I made my first linguistically-deduced hypothesis about the history of Bulgarian technology. I could be wrong, of course, but I have been led to conjecture that the Bulgarians got at least some of their modern architectural, constructional, and engineering technology via the French.

Faye Flam, "‘Belief’ in evolution? It may be the wrong word", Philadelphia Inquirer 6/27/2011:

When the contestants in the Miss USA pageant last week were asked whether evolution should be taught in schools, many volunteered that they either "believed" or "didn't believe" in the concept.

"I don't believe in evolution," said Miss Alabama. "They should teach both sides since some people believe in evolution and some people believe in creation," said Miss Arizona. "It's something people believe in," said Miss Florida. "I believe in evolution … and I like to believe in, like, the big bang theory," said Miss California, who won the crown.

Faye quotes some people who think that talk about believing in things confuses science with faith. She also quotes some people on the other side, including me.

The latest xkcd:

(As usual, click on the image for a larger version.)

In confessing her like-aholism ("My Love Affair With 'Like'", Jezebel 6/26/2011), Erin Gloria Ryan framed the problem in terms of gender roles:

Any girl who's been teased for middle school nerdery has likely developed a long standing aversion for the feeling of being excluded for being too smart or opinionated. This is the way that socially acceptable people talk. This is the way that pretty people talk. Women are taught that it's more important to be pretty and socially accepted than it is to be smart. Ergo, like.

She's talking about the discourse-particle like, as in her example "so, like, my sentences, like, sound like this. And I, like, sound dumber than I actually am".  She reports a student evaluation that also noted the stereotypical association with youth: ""She says 'like' more often than a valley girl".

Are these stereotypes accurate? Is the discourse-particle like really characteristic of younger women? Today's Breakfast Experiment™ looks into the matter, and finds (in a limited and superficial survey of proxy measures) that one part of the stereotype is apparently valid, but the other is not.