Language Log

At some time approximately 30 to 35 years ago — that is, in the 1970s, back when disco had a future — I received a letter from my friend Jim Hurford. We were young lecturers then, me in London and him in Lancaster, though he was later to become Professor of General Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh. Here is what his letter asked me:

"Can you construct a grammatical and meaningful English sentence that ends with the words and vice versa, respectively ?"

Jim is now Professor Emeritus, and I now hold the Chair that he held for so many years, and I still have not succeeded in constructing an example of the mind-twistingly difficult sort he requested.

According to Abigail Norfleet James, Teaching the Male Brain: How Boys Think, Feel, and Learn in School (2007), p 37:

The shape of the inner ear is not the same for boys and girls. As we have seen in the previous chapter, the female cochlea responds more quickly to sound than does the male cochlea (Don et al., 1993) That means that boys are likely to respond to aural information of questions just a bit slower than girls will. Because boys don't hear soft or high sounds very well and because they don't respond to sounds as rapidly as do girls, boys may have trouble with auditory sources of information.

What language is this?

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Hint: it's one that you know.

… or if you prefer, some aspects of relevance theory, the next-to-latest xkcd:

At Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales, an irrepressible (and no doubt true) tale of Prof. Whatmough's Linguistics 120 at Harvard in 1962. If you read to the end, you'll find out about the donkey.

I’m sad to report that phonologist Nick Clements passed away in Chatham, Massachusetts, on August 30. There is an obituary by Beth Hume on LINGUIST List. Beth co-organized a symposium on tones and features in honor of Nick in June; the speaker list was a veritable who’s who of phonology, of which Nick was also of course a prominent member. He will be missed.

Whenever I fly on non-Indian carriers to India or there are Indians (South Asians) on non-Indian carriers flying elsewhere, I often encounter individuals who complain that they cannot eat the special meals that they ordered.

Steward(ess):  But, sir, you ordered a vegetarian meal, didn't you?

Passenger:  Yes, but I cannot eat this kind of vegetarian meal.

Steward(ess):  I can assure you, sir / ma'am, that our vegetarian meals have no meat or meat products in them.

Passenger:  But what you have given me has X, Y, Z in it.  I cannot eat it.  Please get me something else.

Steward(ess):  I am sorry, we do not have any other kinds of vegetarian meals.

Whereupon the passenger pulls out some biscuits from his / her carry-on bag and survives on them and whatever else he / she can scrounge up for the duration of the flight.

Stefan Krasowski recently booked a flight on India's Jet Airways.  Here are the choices he was offered for meals:

Although I share Geoff Nunberg's disappointment in some aspects of Google's metadata for books,  I've noticed a significant — though apparently unheralded — recent improvement.  So I decided to check this out by following up Bill Poser's post yesterday about insect species, which I thought was likely to turn up an example of the right sort. And in fact, the third hit in a search for {hemipteran} is a relevant one: Irene McCulloch, "A comparison of the life cycle of Crithidia with that of Trypanosoma in the invertebrate host", University of California Publications in Zoology, 19(4) 135-190, October 4, 1919.

This paper appears in a volume that is part of a serial publication. And until recently, Google Books  routinely gave all such publications the date of the first in the series, even if the result was a decade or a century out of whack.

In the news today I came across this rather strange report from the Associated Press:

MIAMI — U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials say they have intercepted a rare and dangerous insect found in a shipment of flowers at a Miami airport that could cause significant damage.

Officials said Saturday they were examining a box of flowers last week at Miami International airport when they found Hemiptera. Hemiptera's are typically aphids, cicadas, and leaf hoppers and comprise about 80,000 different species. They feed on the seed heads of grasses and sedges. The insect is found in South America.

Officials believe it is the first time the insect has been found in the U.S.

The latest from Zach Wiener at SMBC:

(There are four more panels — click on the image to see them all.)

Yesterday an applicant from China came to my office and introduced herself to me as Runxiao ("Moist Dawn").  However, in previous correspondence, she had always referred to herself as Layn (a variant of Lane; other variants of the name Lane are:  Laen, Laene, Lain, Laine, Laney, Lanie, Layn, Layne, and Laynne ("living near a lane"; "descendant of Laighean or Luan" in Gaelic) — so say the name books.  When I asked her which name she preferred, she said, "You can call me Runxiao."

"But what about Layn?" I asked.  "Didn't you used to go by the name Layn?"

"Oh, yes!" she replied cheerfully with a gleaming smile.  "When I was in China, I called myself Layn, but now that I'm in America, I call myself Runxiao."

Mark has already extensively blogged the Google Books Settlement Conference at Berkeley yesterday, where he and I both spoke on the panel on "quality" — which is to say, how well is Google Books doing this and what if anything will hold their feet to the fire? This is almost certainly the Last Library, after all. There's no Moore's Law for capture, and nobody is ever going to scan most of these books again. So whoever is in charge of the collection a hundred years from now — Google? UNESCO? Wal-Mart? — these are the files that scholars are going to be using then. All of which lends a particular urgency to the concerns about whether Google is doing this right.

My presentation focussed on GB's metadata — a feature absolutely necessary to doing most serious scholarly work with the corpus. It's well and good to use the corpus just for finding information on a topic — entering some key words and barrelling in sideways. (That's what "googling" means, isn't it?) But for scholars looking for a particular edition of Leaves of Grass, say, it doesn't do a lot of good just to enter "I contain multitudes" in the search box and hope for the best. Ditto for someone who wants to look at early-19th century French editions of Le Contrat Social, or to linguists, historians or literary scholars trying to trace the development of words or constructions: Can we observe the way happiness replaced felicity in the seventeenth century, as Keith Thomas suggests? When did "the United States are" start to lose ground to "the United States is"? How did the use of propaganda rise and fall by decade over the course of the twentieth century? And so on for all the questions that have made Google Books such an exciting prospect for all of us wordinistas and wordastri. But to answer those questions you need good metadata. And Google's are a train wreck: a mish-mash wrapped in a muddle wrapped in a mess.

Today's Dinosaur Comics disposes of the sorites paradox:

(Click image for a larger version.)