Language Log

One of the puzzles of the whole "Plastic Bertrand" drama for Americans is that we don't like plastic. In a famous scene from The Graduate (1967), "plastics" is a one-word symbol for the emptiness of mainstream success:

Here's a case that  I'm hoping will turn out to be an epic example of journalistic misunderstanding.  Because the alternative is that the International English Language Testing System is a really, really bad way to measure English language proficiency.  And that would be a shame, because IELTS, a product of University of Cambridge ESOL Examinations and the British Council, is pretty much the standard English proficiency test outside the U.S.

According to Nicholas Keung, "All immigrants face mandatory language test", The Star, 7/20/2010:

Born and raised in New York, Dodi Robbins graduated from Harvard University and has been practising law for 13 years.

Her first language is English. Yet like all other skilled immigrants applying to settle in Canada, the American corporate lawyer must now take a language test to prove her English is good enough to settle here.

“I was outraged, insulted and floored,” said Robbins, who obtained her law degree at Benjamin N. Cardozo Law School in New York. A mother of two, she has been working in Toronto on a work permit for four years as compliance and regulations counsel for an international financial services company.

“I almost fell off the chair. I’ve been practising law here for years and I have to prove my proficiency in English?”

Last month Ottawa made its language proficiency test mandatory for all skilled immigrant applicants, including native English and French speakers. The so-called “ministerial instructions” stipulate officials are not to process applications without language test results, starting June 26.

According to the Guardian,

The Belgian singer Plastic Bertrand has admitted that the voice that gave the world the 1977 Euro-punk anthem Ça Plane Pour Moi was not his. Roger Jouret, the man behind the Plastic Bertrand persona, had previously denied that he was not the singer on the record. But in an interview with the Belgian newspaper Le Soir, he admitted it had been another singer – and laid the blame at the door of his former producer, Lou Deprijck. His admission came a day after a linguist commissioned by a judge concluded that the singer's accent did not match the voice on the record.

Yesterday here in Prince George I overheard a young woman on her cell phone complaining about the heat: "It's plus 29 here!". [That's 84.2 in Antique American temperature units.] I suspect that this would not be felicitous in, say, Phoenix or Riyadh.

Janet Randall wrote:

I am faced with a query from someone at a pretty high level at Public TV who is objecting to an employee's use of the preposition "acrosst".  I looked for some dialect information about this variant of "across" but haven't been able to find it on language log, or anywhere else, without spending more time than I have, so I thought you might know of a post on the log, or know who might know whether this is regional, etc.

Alexa O writes:

My daughter, who is two, loves corn. She loves it so much that she talks about it all the time. Since she is two and also loves eggs, she calls it "eggcorn."

On a whim, my mother wiki-ed "eggcorn" and, lo and behold, we discovered your term.

I can't tell you how excited I was, because I love saying "eggcorn" (was there ever a more satisfying set of syllables?) and now I have an excuse to do so even after my daugther stops asking to eat it.

I was even more excited when I found the various websites, including the Language Log and The Eggcorn Database, that gave so many delicious examples of said phenomenon.

I'm not at all surprised that Mark's posts on regional variation in American English (here) and (here) have stirred up such reader interest, because speech variability seems to be one of the first things people notice, even if they can't pinpoint exactly what it is. It's not as well understood that there is a long tradition of studying variation in the languages of the world, even in the United States. But there was a time when the study of linguistic geography was an important part of most linguistics departments. In the 1950s and 1960s you could study with nationally prominent linguists at universities in Ann Arbor, Chicago, New York, Washington, Providence, Berkeley, Cleveland, Madison, Seattle, Austin, and other places. The BIG names in linguistics back then included dialectologists such as Hans Kurath, Raven McDavid, Fred Cassidy, Albert Marckwardt, Harold Allen, Carroll Reed, E. Bagby Atwood, W. Nelson Francis, Uriel Weinreich, David Reed, James Sledd, and others. Their papers about regional dialects were prominent features at annual meetings of the Linguistic Society of America.

Although this sign over a children's clothing shop in Hangzhou is fairly simple, it offers much food for thought.

Among the comments on yesterday's pin-pen post, Eric (one of several) asked:

Hey academic linguists, I have a nerdy question. I assume that in phonetics "field research" or whatever, lots of scenarios have several investigators listen to a speaker, make independent IPA transcriptions, and then check their transcriptions against each other. And then when the various transcriptions show some level of convergence, that's taken to be the correct phonetic description of the speech. But are there ever scenarios where the results of the investigator's transcription is checked, not against the transcriptions of other listeners/investigators, but against the speaker's own belief about her pronunciation? As someone who merges like 90% of the pairs mentioned in this thread, I'm interested in pushing a radically skeptical line: that speakers are often subjectively convinced they make a phonetic distinction (like Mary v. marry) which objective investigation would dis-confirm…

Actually, Eric, your skepticism about the relation between how people speak and how they think they speak is not nearly radical enough. And there are actually three things to consider: not only how people speak and how they think they speak — which may be bizarrely different —  but also how they hear.

If you haven't quite yet gotten your fill after last week's refudiate-fest, I return to the Palinism in my latest Word Routes column on the Visual Thesaurus. An excerpt of interest to all you antedaters:

Some have observed that Palin isn't the first to invent the word refudiate. Patrick Galvin of Politico notes a couple of recent uses, such as Sen. Mike DeWine's statement on "Fox & Friends" in 2006: "I think anyone that is associated with him campaigning needs to refudiate these comments." And on Language Log, Mark Liberman points to a playful usage in John Sladek's 1984 collection of science-fiction short stories, The Lunatics of Terra.

Even earlier is this glaring example that I found in the Atlanta Constitution of June 21, 1925: a headline reading "Scandal Taint Refudiated In Teapot Case by Court, Fall Says in Statement."

The headline refers to a court ruling in the Teapot Dome scandal that rejected accusations of fraud against former Secretary of the Interior Albert B. Fall and his cronies in the oil business. A Fall press release interpreted the verdict as "refuting all taint of scandal," and the hurried headline writer must have mashed up refute with repudiate, just as Palin would 85 years later.

Jim T, commenting this morning on a post from back in June:

I currently work in Chicago but I'm from South Texas. My boss seems to get a real kick out of my pronunciation of the word "pen".

We have to go to him for supplies and he always make me repeat myself whenever I ask for one and laughs incessantly. He says that I pronounce the word "pen" is funny. My ignorance must shine through because although I've tried to understand the "sound" difference between "pin" and "pen", I just can't. You write with a "pen", you stick something to the wall with a "pin".

He states that I say "pin" when I should say "pen". When back home in Texas, when asked for a "pen", I've never given someone a "pin" or the other way around. So I don't understand how he hears a difference.

Because of Hong Kong's colonial heritage and topolectal position, students here are forced to juggle three languages (English, Cantonese, and Mandarin) and two scripts (Roman alphabet and Chinese characters), the so-called policy of “biliterate trilingualism (兩文三語)” for schools and the Civil Service since the handover to the People's Republic of China in 1997.  In terms of the best schools to get in, parental expectations, government demands, and entry and exit examinations, the linguistic challenges faced by Hong Kong students are daunting.