Language Log

The National Taxpayers Union has been doing a little content analysis of the House Democrats' Health Care bill, noting the statistical predominance of words like require, limit, enforce, must, obligation, and restrict, and the scarcity of words like choice, options, and freedom. "House Democrats' Health Plan Contains Words of Coercion — not Choice — Text Analysis Shows," the headline on their news release says, as they conclude ominously:

if the language of the "America's Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009" is a guide to its true intent then the bill is really about empowering bureaucracy and limiting freedom, competition, and the marketplace.

Leaving the bill's content aside, the linguistic assumptions here seem a little confused. As vexing as it can be to have laws telling you what you're obliged or required to do, it's probably better than living someplace where the laws tell you what you're permitted or free to do. If we have to have laws, I'd rather have them peppered with must than with may.

[Added 8/7: Nancy Scola and Micah Sifry make a similar point at TechPresident.]

In a report from the Yonhap News Agency out today under the title "Indonesian tribe picks Korean alphabet as official writing system" comes a stunning story that is sure to warm the cockles of all Hangeul devotees everywhere.  I'll let the report speak for itself:

In a comment on a recent LL post, Daniel C. Parmenter wrote:

In my MT days (starting in the early nineties) we used the WSJ corpus a lot. I read recently that the availablity of this corpus was in no small part thanks to you. And so I thank you. In those pre-and-early Google/Altavista days the WSJ corpus was an enormous help. Thanks!

Daniel is referring to an archive of text from the Wall Street Journal, covering 1987-1989, originally published with some other raw material for corpus linguistics by the  Data Collection Initiative of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL/DCI). And the person who most deserves thanks for the availability of the WSJ part of this publication — perhaps its most important part — is Bill Dunn, who was the head of Dow Jones Information Services in the late 1980s.

As far as I know, Bill's role in making this corpus available is not documented anywhere, so I'll take this opportunity to tell some of the story as I remember it. (The rest of this post is a slightly-edited version of an email that I sent on 5/1/2008 to someone at the WSJ who had corresponded with Geoff Pullum about an article on the use of corpus materials in linguistic research.)

Over at The Volokh Conspiracy, Eugene Volokh commented on an odd sentence from the Las Vegas Sun:

He said he was not aware that any of the companies were already engaged in illegal activity at the time that he helped to set up them. [emphasis added]

Eugene's analysis:

The author or the copyeditor was enforcing some (entirely spurious) rule against splitting an idiom such as "set up," and as a result replaced a perfectly normal construction ("set them up") with a weird and jarring one.

The National Science Foundation put out a press release today under the title "U.S. Students Win Big at the International Linguistics Olympiad", subtitle "Event in Poland highlights significance of emerging field of computational linguistics".

High school students from across the U.S. won individual and team honors last week at the seventh annual International Olympiad in Linguistics held in Wroclaw, Poland. The results reflect U.S. competence in computational linguistics, an emerging field that has applications in computer science, language processing, code breaking and other advanced arenas.

It started off, simply enough, as a comment by Language Log reader Lugubert, who questioned a linguafactoid reported in the Associated Press obituary for Walter Cronkite: that in Sweden and Holland, news anchors are (or were) called "Cronkiters." I investigated the claim in my Word Routes column on the Visual Thesaurus, which led to an appearance on the NPR show "On the Media" over the weekend.

Earlier today, in an admirable display of media self-criticism, the Associated Press set the record straight in an article by the very same reporter who filed the Cronkite obituary. (The AP also issued a formal correction.) And from all this, I've somehow ended up as Keith Olbermann's second best person in the world today — just edged out by some entertaining crackpot whose faulty Bible translation "proves" that Obama is the Antichrist. It's been a fun ride, but I think the debunkorama is finally drawing to a close.

Yesterday, in a post about a traffic sign, I momentarily mistook the phonophore YOU3 酉 (calendrical symbol) for QIU2 酋 ("chief") in the character JIU3 酒 ("beer").  It turns out that YOU3 and QIU2 are both semantically, graphically, and phonetically related to JIU3 ("beer, alcohol").

YOU3 酉 is actually the original form of JIU3 酒; it depicted a jar full of beer (imagine the bottom as tapered rather than squared).  YOU3 酉 was subsequently borrowed to indicate the 10th of the 12 Earthly Branches (DI4ZHI1 地支, calendrical symbols), with the bleaching of the original meaning ("jar [full of beer]").  But as late as the Shuihudi manuscripts (late 3rd c. BC), the pictograph YOU3 酉 by itself could still signify JIU3 ("beer").  In these recently discovered manuscripts, which include laws of the Qin Dynasty, there are prohibitions against the brewing of beer by peasants.

From Monday's NYT (Neil Amdur, "Asperger's Syndrome, on Screen and in Life", 8/3/2009):

“I wanted to tell a film about my friend,” Mr. Elliot, now 37 and an award-winning writer and director, said in a phone interview from Australia, where “Mary and Max” has grossed more than $1 million since its opening in April. “Asperger’s is a part of him; it’s the way he’s hot-wired. If I had ignored him, it would have offended him.”

Adam Elliot is Australian, and thus r-less. Neil Amdur is "a native of Wilkes-Barre, Pa.", and thus r-ful. "Strine" also has other phonetic differences from American English. So it's likely that the Australian filmmaker said "hard-wired" into the phone in Melbourne, and the American journalist heard and transcribed "hot-wired" at the other end of the line in New York.

Every so often, here at Language Log Plaza we come across usage advice that's new to us. Today's find comes from Tim Moon, who's working on my OI! project at Stanford this summer. It's from Robert Burchfield's The New Fowler’s Modern English Usage (1998), on the expression by the hundreds and the like:

the unidiomatic with plural; either by the hundred or by hundreds (p. 775)

Notice the usage label: "unidiomatic". Where does this come from? Not from a search of texts, to see which variant is most used, especially by "good writers". Instead, this is an expression of Burchfield's personal taste in the matter (a lot of usage advice is expressions of personal taste). As it happens, this is not Tim Moon's taste, or mine; both of us judge by the hundreds to be the most natural of the three, though all of them are acceptable. We now have some evidence that there are others agree with us, and have so far been unable to find any other handbook that takes a position — any position — on the matter.

"For external use only", it says on many poisonous ointments and other medicinal products that should not be orally consumed. But, the naive patient might ask, external to what? Is it all right to eat the product if I step outside the building? This is another case of nerdview, you know. The person who draws a distinction between internal medicine and external medicine is the doctor, not you or me. If saving the patient from eating menthol crystals or drinking rubbing alcohol is what they have in mind, why on earth don't they simply say "Don't eat this", or "Not for drinking", or "Don't put this in your eyes or your mouth", or whatever they exactly mean? It is because (and I answer my own question here) they have not switched out of the doctor's-eye view and considered what things are like from the patient's perspective. That's nerdview.

A couple of days ago, I posted about a problematic modified rebus, in the form of a heart with a skull and crossbones superimposed ("Love to Die / Death", 7/31/2009).  Now we have yet another complicated graphic combination consisting of a pictograph plus a sinographic semantic key / classifier (or radical) plus a slash over the pictograph.

Today's Strange Brew:

I recently stumbled upon the following sentence (here, for the curious):

After Windows 7 comes out in October, will Microsoft somehow force us XP users to stop using it?

I am able to figure out from context that the "it" at the end of this sentence is supposed to refer to "(Windows) XP", but no matter how many times I read the sentence, I stumble on that intention. The problem, as I see it, is that there's no noun phrase in this sentence that refers solely to "XP", and the pronoun "it" must be coreferent with a noun phrase. I explain a little more below the fold.