Language Log

The latest Subnormality includes this panel:

A new motion is open for debate today in the Economist's online series: "This house believes that the language we speak shapes how we think".  Lera Boroditsky is the designated defender of the motion, and I was recruited to be the designated opponent.

In this format, each side submits an opening statement, a rebuttal, and a closing statement. Readers get to comment, and also to vote on the motion. Our opening statements are now live.

Saturday's Dilbert:

Digital media offer wonderful opportunities for the study of language, communication, and culture. So despite short-term problems, both internal and external, I'm optimistic.

In discussing yesterday's post on the American Anthropological Association's removal of (the word) science from its long-range plan, several commenters were puzzled or skeptical about the foundations of the debate. One wrote:

The depiction of the different sides – both in the NYT article, the earlier Higher Ed article, and by many of the proponents – strike me as utter nonsense. Despite working in the field, I've yet to meet one of these anti-science cultural anthropologists.

And another wrote:

I can't quite grasp an academic yet non-scientific way to study these things.

It may help to recognize that the "anti-science cultural anthropologists" have traditionally framed their views as an opposition to "positivism".

From Nicholas Wade, "Anthropology a Science? Statement Deepens a Rift", NYT 12/9/2010:

Anthropologists have been thrown into turmoil about the nature and future of their profession after a decision by the American Anthropological Association at its recent annual meeting to strip the word “science” from a statement of its long-range plan.

The decision has reopened a long-simmering tension between researchers in science-based anthropological disciplines — including archaeologists, physical anthropologists and some cultural anthropologists — and members of the profession who study race, ethnicity and gender and see themselves as advocates for native peoples or human rights. […]

The association’s president, Virginia Dominguez of the University of Illinois, said in an e-mail that the word had been dropped because the board sought to include anthropologists who do not locate their work within the sciences, as well as those who do. She said the new statement could be modified if the board received any good suggestions for doing so.

A couple of days ago, Language Hat hosted an interesting discussion of the "X much?" construction:

I have been asked about the history of the construction "X much?" as a rhetorical response (e.g., "Bitter much? Overanalzye much? Ad hominem much?").

The abstract of Shijulal Nelson-Sathi et al., "Networks uncover hidden lexical borrowing in Indo-European language evolution", Proc. Roy. Soc. B, published online 11/24/2010:

Language evolution is traditionally described in terms of family trees with ancestral languages splitting into descendent languages. However, it has long been recognized that language evolution also entails horizontal components, most commonly through lexical borrowing. For example, the English language was heavily influenced by Old Norse and Old French; eight per cent of its basic vocabulary is borrowed. Borrowing is a distinctly non-tree-like process—akin to horizontal gene transfer in genome evolution—that cannot be recovered by phylogenetic trees. Here, we infer the frequency of hidden borrowing among 2346 cognates (etymologically related words) of basic vocabulary distributed across 84 Indo-European languages. The dataset includes 124 (5%) known borrowings. Applying the uniformitarian principle to inventory dynamics in past and present basic vocabularies, we find that 1373 (61%) of the cognates have been affected by borrowing during their history. Our approach correctly identified 117 (94%) known borrowings. Reconstructed phylogenetic networks that capture both vertical and horizontal components of evolutionary history reveal that, on average, eight per cent of the words of basic vocabulary in each Indo-European language were involved in borrowing during evolution. Basic vocabulary is often assumed to be relatively resistant to borrowing. Our results indicate that the impact of borrowing is far more widespread than previously thought.

Adding, ironically, to our "words for X" file, Scott Adams at the Dilbert Blog writes:

Here's a list of three things that you are unlikely to do, at least in this order:

1.       Watch a Swedish movie called The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
2.       Read about the Swedish sex charges against Julian Assange
3.       Book a vacation to Sweden

I am always amused by the strange impact of unintended consequences. Julian Assange simply wanted to release some embarrassing information, have hot sex with a Swedish babe then have hot sex with an acquaintance of that same babe one day later. That's just one example of why the Swedish language has 400 words that all mean "and your cute friend is next."

But things didn't turn out as Assange hoped.  The unintended consequence of his actions is that he managed to make Sweden look like a country that's governed by congenital idiots and populated with nothing but crazy sluts and lawyers. And don't get me started about the quality of their condoms.

Rick Rubenstein asks

Has there been any research done on the familiar phenomenon wherein a word which is repeated over and over begins to look misspelled, or even like complete gibberish?

A cute ad:

Mark Twain, from his recently-published Autobiography:

As I have said before, I never had any large respect for good spelling. That is my feeling yet. Before the spelling book came with its arbitrary forms, men unconsciously revealed shades of their characters, and also added enlightening shades of expression to what they wrote by their spelling, and so it is possible that the spelling book has been a doubtful benevolence to us.

Thanks to Sean H, Mike Fourman, Ian Leslie, Eddie, Electric Dragon, Lizzie, Jayarava, KGR, Will Watts, Alex, DW, Sean Case, (and probably many others still typing their comments) who commented on my earlier version of this post, for confirming that around 8 a.m. this morning James Naughtie of the BBC Radio 4 news magazine program "Today" suffered (or very nearly suffered) a catastrophic obscene spoonerism followed by an obliterative ill-muffled giggling fit. What a pity a coughing fit didn't halt the dumb discussion of nouns and verbs elsewhere in the program.

According to Ellie Levitt, "Psychiatry chairman faces ghostwriting accusations", The Daily Pennsylvanian 12/2/2010:

Recently discovered e-mails reveal that a document published in 2003 by Psychiatry Department Chairman Dwight Evans may not have been honest work.

Project on Government Oversight — a nonpartisan watchdog organization that unearths corruption and promotes an ethical federal government — posted on its website Monday that Evans and Dean of Research at New York University’s Mt. Sinai School of Medicine Dennis Charney claimed authorship for an editorial they did not write.

Evans, however, has said that POGO’s accusations are not true. […]

An employee of Scientific Therapeutics Information — the marketing firm that helped promote the drug beginning in the early 1990s — is the suspected actual author of the document, POGO claimed. At the end of the editorial, Evans and Charney acknowledge the writer for “editorial support.”