Language Log

At some point, I mean to get back to looking up the research that is said to support Matt Richtel's claims that "the brain is rewired when it is constantly inundated with new information". Right now, though, I'd like to point out that complaints about the distractions of modern life didn't begin when email, texting and hyperlinks started eating our brains.  I wouldn't be surprised to find similar sort of complaints from the 13th century about clock towers, but today I'm just going to take things back to 1924, and an article from the New York Times with the headline "This Machine-Made World Conquers One More Rebel".

Nina Paley's Mimi and Eunice for 8/20/2010:

Nina's comment on the strip: "I love my Libertarian friends! So it is with love I poke gentle fun at them."

[Hat tip to William Benzon.]

Bob Ladd just got a message requesting an academic reference letter for someone who I will refer to as Gerald Black. I am concealing his name, but not his gender: he is male, and his real name couldn't leave you in any doubt about that. Further concealing the identity of the innocent, let me say that he is applying for a job at a university that I will refer to as the University of Penzance (there isn't one), in the Department of Criminology (that isn't the real field; all of this secrecy is beside the point, but you will see the point in a minute). The message begins:

Dr Gerald Black has applied for a position of Lecturer in the Department of Criminology at the University of Penzance. I would be grateful if you could provide a reference on their suitability for this post.

To continue the process of footnoting Matt Richtel, here's a passage from a bit later in the (online description of his) interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air ("Digital Overload: Your Brain On Gadgets", 8/24/2010):

He points to one study [1] conducted at Stanford University, which showed that heavy multimedia users have trouble filtering out irrelevant information — and trouble focusing on tasks. Other research [2], he says, says that heavy video game playing may release dopamine, which is thought to be involved with addictive behaviors.

"When you check your information, when you get a buzz in your pocket, when you get a ring — you get what they call a dopamine squirt. You get a little rush of adrenaline," he says. "Well, guess what happens in its absence? You feel bored. You're conditioned by a neurological response: 'Check me check me check me check me.' "

Richtel says that research is ongoing, particularly into how heavy technology may fundamentally alter the frontal lobe during childhood[3], how addictive behavior can lead to poor decision-making[4] and how the brain is rewired when it is constantly inundated with new information[5].

Chris at The Lousy Linguist has an excellent post — "the largest whorfian study EVER! (and why it matters", 9/1/2010 — describing and discussing Jürgen Bohnemeyer, Sonja Eisenbeiss, and Bhuvana Narasimhan, "Ways to go: Methodological considerations in Whorfian studies on motion events", Essex Research Reports in Linguistics, 2006.

We'll come back to the Bohnemeyer et al. study in discussing the larger issue of neo-Whorfian work on spatial cognition and navigation. But for now, I recommend Chris's summary.

Pakistan is playing England in a series of cricket matches, and on Sunday, August 29, Mike Brearley filed from the famous Lord's cricket ground an unbearably pompous article in The Observer about how things are going. "Cricket is the cruellest game," he began; "It is also, by the same token, the kindest" — I will spare you the rest of the self-contradictory pseudo-literary drivel of his first paragraph. But with his second paragraph he moves into linguistics and theology, and I think Language Log has to comment on the former:

There is no future tense in Urdu; the future is in the hands of Allah, it is not for mortal men to speak as if they presume to know what it holds. But Pakistan's players must at least have feared for their future as the day wore on.

Can you guess what I did on seeing this, Language Log readers? (Apart, that is, from muttering imprecations under my breath, not for the first time, about how I simply do not understand the tendency for people to talk about language as if they can just make stuff up and nothing needs to be fact-checked.) I know a little about the Indic languages, and I do have some of the right books. So I got up, walked across my office, and plucked my rather ancient (1962) copy of Teach Yourself Urdu from the shelf.

[This is a guest post by Roy Peter Clark.  He was indirectly quoted in "Flacks and hacks and brainscans" (11/23/2007), but the "analysis and criticism" that he mentions can be found in "Slippery glamour" (7/4/2008), "Don't tell Sister Catherine William" (7/5/2008), and "Funky a" (7/7/2008). I admire him for being such a good sport about the whole thing, and I urge readers to respond to his invitation to read his new book and to comment "thumbs up, thumbs down, or thumbs sideways". Substantively and politely, of course.]

About two years ago, my work became the subject of analysis and criticism on Language Log. At the time I was not familiar with this community of language experts and students and was not prepared for what was about to happen. Under a category of comments called “Prescriptivist Poppycock” (gotta love the alliteration), I read folks who questioned my scholarship, my credentials, and my writing. I am not complaining about this. I would like to describe what happened and how I responded to it.

Matt Richtel, one of the leading current peddlers of the "technology is eating our brains" meme, is fond of this assertion:

The average person today consumes almost three times as much information as what the typical person consumed in 1960, according to research at the University of California, San Diego.

That version is the lead paragraph of the online site for his appearance on Fresh Air, "Digital Overload: Your Brain On Gadgets", 8/24/2010.  I was curious about what this sentence could mean, and more specifically, I wondered which UCSD researchers did the measurements, and what they they measured. Usually I can track down the source of a factoid from the scant clues typically left by passing journalists, but this one has defeated me, so I'm asking for help.

Following up on "Chinese Lesson for Today," we have another specimen of writing on a wall related to the bodily functions that requires grammatical explanation. Here is a temporary sign at a construction site in Shanghai, taken by Mollie Kirk around '08:

Jìnzhǐ xiǎobiàn, fǒuzé sǐrén 禁止小便,否則死人

Direct translation: "It is prohibited to urinate, otherwise dead man."

I can usually figure out the specific reasons that statistical MT systems come up with peculiar translations.  But this one has me stumped:

Google Translate renders "Montar un vínculo con Israel" into English as ""Build a bond with Israel", which seems accurate. But how did Israel slip into the English-to-Spanish mapping?

A month ago, I linked to Lera Boroditsky's WSJ piece "Lost in Translation", and promised to discuss the contents in more detail at some point in the future ("Boroditsky on Whorfian navigation and blame", 7/26/2010). At the time, I noted that there is probably no single linguistic idea that is more prone to exaggeration and mis-application than the "Sapir-Whorf hypothesis" about the relations between language and thought. And the WSJ editors' subhed for Boroditsky's article gives their readers a push down that road:

New cognitive research suggests that language profoundly influences the way people see the world; a different sense of blame in Japanese and Spanish.

Meanwhile, the NYT Sunday magazine has just published a major article by Guy Deutscher, "Does Your Language Shape How You Think?" (8/26/2010), which I hereby promise to discuss in detail at some point in the future. And in order not to let my neo-Whorfianism account fall too many promises in arrears, I'll actually post about Boroditsky's WSJ piece today. (I won't try to discuss both articles at the same time, because in this sort of thing, it's the scientific details that matter.)

Jak King writes:

Are there rules in English for making adjectives from countries, or are the assignments random?  I have found a number of standard adjectival endings (-ese, -(i)an, -ish, -i, -er). There are also some singularities (French, Greek, Monegasque) and some where the adjectival form is the same as the country name (Hong Kong, New Zealand).

How is this worked out, or who decides?

Sign on the wall of a public toilet in China:

Yánjìn yòng dǎngbào dǎngkān dāng shǒuzhǐ yòng" 严禁用党报党刊当手纸用.

Smooth translation: “Use of Party newspapers and magazines as toilet paper is strictly forbidden.”