Language Log

Around the water cooler at Language Log Plaza yesterday, David Beaver noted a HuffPo headline "With Pitfalls Abound For Prosecutors, Could Edwards Case Fall Apart?", where abound is used like aplenty. He also reported that a quick web search turns up many examples where abound is used like afoot: "speculation is abound", "excitement is abound".

If you followed my advice (in "Norvig channels Shannon contra Chomsky", 5/31/2011) and read all of Peter Norvig's essay "On Chomsky and the Two Cultures of Statistical Learning", you may have detected a certain restrained testiness in Norvig's response. The goal of this post is to give a bit of explanatory background, and to suggest why, on the whole,  I share Norvig's reaction.

Reader KH asks:

I currently have a number of people trying to convince me that the phrase "that's mighty white of you" originated in the American South in the ~1920s, deriving from racial ideas of whiteness and white supremacy.  It was my understanding that "white" in this phrase derived from completely non-racial ideas correlating whiteness with purity or goodness.  Do you know of any source that might settle this?  I have not been able to find anything reliable on my own and thought you might have more extensive resources at your disposal.

Mike Powell, "The Unfairly Maligned Coca Leaf", Bolivia for 91 Days, 5/24/2011:

Consider a distinctly US American product. Let’s say hot dogs: invented in 1870 on Coney Island and enjoyed in our great nation ever since. But in 2015, Korean scientists learn how to distill the noble hot dog into a lethal drug. Hotdogaine. International hot dog trafficking becomes a lucrative business and, over decades, people across Asia become addicted to hotdogaine, even while aw-shucks, overall-wearin’ Americans continue to enjoy the hot dog in its “natural” form.

You see where I’m going with this? In 2030, the world’s sole superpower (China) pushes a hot dog ban through the UN. As part of its war on hotdogaine, it supplies the US Government with planes to fire bomb hot dog factories. A quintessential part of American life has come under attack; do you think we’d be pissed off?

I think that we all know people like this:

Apparently the international branch of the Bèn School of Translation has landed a contract with a certain cruise line to translate their menus. Here is the first of six buffet items, which begins innocently enough in English as "Chicken and Mushroom Tart":

Back in February, I posted about a terrific symposium on bilingualism at the AAAS meeting ("What bilinguals tell us about Mind and Brain", 2/19/2011). Along with the symposium's abstract and a list of the participants, and some complaints about the AAAS's failure to make it symposiums accessible to a broader public by putting them on  line, I promised that "If I have time, I'll summarize some of this work in a later post" — which never happened.

One of the most striking topics covered in that symposium was the fact that bilingualism offers, on average, about five years of protection against the symptoms of Alzheimer's, apparently by creating a "cognitive reserve" in executive function that allows people to continue performing at a higher mental level for a given degree of brain degeneration. This research was the focus of a recent New York Times article: Claudia Dreifus, "The Bilingual advantage", 5/30/2011.

The article is in the form of a Q&A between the reporter, Claudia Dreifus, and the researcher, Ellen Bialystok. The content is excellent — clear, to the point, not hyped or spun for effect — and there are links to the research papers!

This use of "very not appreciative" caught my eye on Sunday:

“I’m very not appreciative of the way she came in here,” Ted Shpak, the national legislative director for Rolling Thunder, told the Washington Post.

This construction is not in my own dialect; it reminds me of the recent broader uses of "so". ("I'm so not ready for this", which I had perhaps mistakenly been mentally lumping together with "That's so Dick Cheney" or "That's so 1960's".)

I'm not sure what's changing, "very" or "not" or both. I suspect that "not" may be moving into uses previously reserved for "un-".

Ian Preston reports this British headline word pile construction noun phrase length gem: "Ben Douglas Bafta race row hairdresser James Brown 'sorry'".

Ian's construal:

I usually have no trouble decoding these but this latest BBC example challenged me: Ben Douglas Bafta race row hairdresser James Brown 'sorry'. That's eight nouns in a row, four of them coming in the names of  two people's I'd not previously heard of.  It's intelligible once you know the story: a hairdresser called James Brown caused a controversy by using racial insults to Ben Douglas at the Bafta awards ceremony and has apologised.    I didn't know the story and, thinking someone called Ben Douglas must have provoked a controversy about race by winning a Bafta, struggled on first reading to incorporate hairdressing or the Godfather of Soul into the train of associations.  I think I'd have read it correctly without the names.

According to Stephen Cass, "Unthinking Machines", Technology Review 5/4/2011:

Some of the founders and leading lights in the fields of artificial intelligence and cognitive science gave a harsh assessment last night of the lack of progress in AI over the last few decades.

During a panel discussion—moderated by linguist and cognitive scientist Steven Pinker—that kicked off MIT's Brains, Minds, and Machines symposium, panelists called for a return to the style of research that marked the early years of the field, one driven more by curiosity rather than narrow applications.

The panelists were Marvin Minsky, Patrick Winston, Emilio Bizzi, Noam Chomsky, Barbara Partee, and Sydney Brenner. Based on Cass's short summaries, it sounds like an interesting discussion. I hope that recordings and/or transcripts will be available at some point — all that I've found so far is the symposium's advertisement on the MIT150 web site,  another write-up at MIT News, and a few other notes here and there. (Video for one of the other MIT150 symposiums is available here, so perhaps this will appear in time.)

But Cass's brief sketch of what Chomsky said was enough to provoke a lengthy and interesting response from Peter Norvig: "On Chomsky and the Two Cultures of Statistical Learning".

Chengde (formerly Jehol), which lies 109 miles / 176 kilometers to the northeast of Beijing, was the old Manchu summer retreat, and is now a popular tourist destination. One its most notable attractions is the Putuo Zongcheng Temple, built by the Qianlong emperor (r. 1735-1796) as a copy of the Potala Palace in Lhasa. Here is a photograph of the Chinese part of the sign describing a gate within the temple compound:

Regular readers of Language Log will have guessed that the punch line is in the English translation:

It isn't exactly linguistics, but on the theory that some of our readers are interested in acoustics, here is what is reported to be the first video of the shock wave generated by a trombone. It is pretty faint so I suggest going to full screen.

Gil Scott-Heron died yesterday at the age of 62 — a remarkable performer whose politically charged combination of music and poetry had an enormous influence on the development of hip-hop culture. One of my favorite spoken-word performances by Scott-Heron appeared on the 1978 compilation, The Mind of Gil Scott-Heron: " The Ghetto Code (Dot Dot Dit Dot Dot Dit Dot Dot Dash)." It's full of linguistic play, including an explanation of "old-fashioned ghetto code" used to mask phone conversations from snooping authorities.

The code involved infixation of "ee-iz" [i:ɪz] between the onset and nucleus of stressed syllables. So-called "[IZ]-infixation" would later become popular in rap music (particularly as used by Snoop Dogg), though OED editor at large Jesse Sheidlower has found examples back to a 1972 glossary on New York drug slang. There was also a predecessor in the talk of carnival workers (carnies), with the word carn(e)y represented in the code as kizarney. (See Joshua Viau's "Introducing English [IZ]-Infixation: Snoop Dogg and bey-[IZ]-ond" for some background.)

You can hear the whole performance on YouTube here. The relevant part starts at about 6:28: