Language Log

It's March 4, or Opal Eleanor Armstrong Zwicky's birthday (now we are six) — and also National Grammar Day, which I've posted about in the past (in 2008 here, in 2009 here). Those of us who think of ourselves as grammarians — studying the syntax and morphology of languages and the accompanying facts of usage — tend to take a dim view of NGD, which has been framed as a festival of peeving and stern mocking of "incorrect" language.

For some views this year, see Dennis Baron here, Gabe Doyle here, and Neal Whitman here. Gabe and Neal go to some lengths to try to reclaim the occasion for some actual celebration of cool facts about English syntax and usage (plus the usual attempts at debunking persistent, and apparently ineradicable, myths about these matters).

I've grown deeply pessimistic about NGD as a vehicle for such reclamatory efforts. It seems to me that the day is especially unlikely to provide a receptive audience for what linguists have to say. Instead, I'll go on talking, every day, about [real] grammar and usage (with excursions into informal, conversational, dialectal, and frankly non-standard usages, plus explorations of innovative usages, plus investigations of actual mistakes of many different kinds).

The crash blossom of the day, at least here in the part of Scotland known as the Lothians, must surely be "Number of Lothian patients made ill by drinking rockets", in the Edinburgh Evening News today. Would you drink a rocket? I'm sure you would sensibly say it depends what the ingredients are. You wouldn't just down a rocket if I fixed one for you in the cocktail shaker, would you?

Only slowly, as one ploughs through the article looking for more details of these rocket beverages that have wrecked the health of so many in the Lothians, does it dawn on you that you have made a major mistake in syntactic analysis. Try making rocket the main verb instead.

[Hat tip: sharp-eyed Language Log reader Kenneth MacKenzie.]

My preliminary experiments with dictionary searching suggest that English has absolutely no words with roots of forms like *bobbib, *papoop, *tettit, *doded, *keckick, *gaggig, *mimmom, *naneen, *faffiff, *sussis, etc. These are simple CVCVC shapes that do not seem to contain any un-English sequence. They aren't hard to say. In fact there is an example of a verb with the shape dVd that has a regular preterite tense: deed has the preterite deeded (as in The farmer deeded back his farm to the bank [WSJ w7_016]). But the pronounceability of deeded only makes the puzzle more acute: why are there no roots with the phonological form C_iVC_iVC_i (where C_i is some specific consononant sounds and the V positions are filled with vowel sounds). Why? Or is the generalization perhaps wrong? Have I missed some words of the shape in question?

Today's Sally Forth:

See Plethoric Pundigrions¹ for screen shots showing a version of Microsoft Word (I don't know which one) that for levelheaded suggests correcting it to level-headed and for level-headed suggests correcting it to levelheaded. That should give rise to a frustrating morning of trying to finalize the draft, shouldn't it?

¹ Hat tip to Bob Ladd.

I wouldn't have predicted that this would work as well as it does:

According to William Heuslein, "The man who predicts the medals", Forbes Magazine, 1/19/2010

Daniel Johnson makes remarkably accurate Olympic medal predictions. But he doesn't look at individual athletes or their events. The Colorado College economics professor considers just a handful of economic variables to come up with his prognostications.

The result: Over the past five Olympics, from the 2000 Summer Games in Sydney through the 2008 Summer Games in Beijing, Johnson's model demonstrated 94% accuracy between predicted and actual national medal counts.

First question: what do you think it means to "demonstrate 94% accuracy between predicted and actual national medal counts"?

Stefano Bertolo points us to Rob Cottingham's latest Noise To Signal:

Two items in the March 2010 Harper's Index™:

Projected percentage decline in U.S. job listings for tenure-track language and literature professorships this year: 37
Total percentage decline in those disciplines since 2001 this will represent: 51

This is implicitly  contrasted, in Harper's Index style™, with the next two items:

Number of U.S. university presidents who currently earn more than $1 million per year: 24
Number who did in 2002: 0

What do loads, accumulations, obligations, and (idiomatic) kicks have in common with management, custody, people in care, sets of instructions, expenditures, liabilities, prices, loan records, and allegations?

We've previously covered the British Chiropractic Association's libel suit against Simon Singh, and the successful effort by Nemesysco to force a critical article to be withdrawn from the International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law. Both of these cases involved the peculiar situation of English libel law, which (in the opinion of many) makes it too easy for wealthy plaintiffs to bully authors and publishers into silence.

An interesting case now in process involves an even more straightforward threat to intellectual discourse, in that both the plaintiff and the defendent are academics, and the contested writing is a critical book review in an academic journal. And this time the court is in France, not England.

The Miami Herald recently ran a story under the headline "Light runners will get temporary reprieve".  Reader RS was baffled. Arguments at the Winter Olympics over bobsled design rules? A problem with proposed weight classes for marathon contestants? The deck explains:

The first modern dictionary of Sahaptin has been published. Sahaptin is a language of the Northwestern plateau, spoken in the drainage of the Columbia River in southern Washington, northern Oregon, and southwestern Idaho. There are now no more than 200 speakers. This dictionary is of the Yakima dialect, called by its speakers Ichishkíin Sɨ́nwit.