Language Log

Quoting from the new blog The Translation and Interpretation Intitiative for Iranian Protesters:

The Translation and Interpretation Initiative for Iranian Protesters (TIIIP) is an ad hoc initiative to produce free, publication-ready translations and high-quality interpretations of the written and spoken communication streaming out of Iran in the Farsi (Persian) language in the form of e-mails, YouTube videos, Facebook entries, press releases, etc.

The work is being done at the translate4iran wiki. The biggest need is for people who can translate from Persian into English, but they add that

Please recall that you don’t have to be a Farsi translator or even a Farsi bilingual to help! We desperately need help from English writers, editors, proofreaders, publication relations professionals, techies, geeks, and administrative personnel. There is a role for everyone!

From a conference on the theme "Building the New Majority", sponsored by Pat Buchanan's organization The American Cause, and featuring a panel discussion on English-only initiatives:

Usarufa is a language of Papua New Guinea with just 1200 speakers (ISO-639 code "usa").  There's no fluent speakers under the age of 25, so the language must be considered moribund.  Before posting recordings of this language online, I needed to get informed consent, so I introduced some speakers to the World Wide Web.  We poked around for a while, finding useful sites about about insecticides for dealing with the taro beetle.  Then we turned our attention to audio.

I played them a recording of the "last words" of the Jiwarli language of Western Australia.  After some questioning looks I explained that this language is now dead, and we were listening to its last speaker before he died.  As one they all looked down, shaking their heads in disbelief and saying sorry, sorry, sorry….  It was as if I told them a mutual friend had died.  They urged me to put that recording on a cassette tape so they could take it back to their village.  That way, everyone would surely understand what will happen to the Usarufa language unless there are serious attempts to revitalize it.

I wasn't prepared for the intensity of their response.  Now I'm wondering if a collection of such recordings might be a useful tool in promoting language revitalization, and also in explaining the concept of language archiving.  (Thanks to Ima'o Ta'asata, James Warebu, Sivini Ikilele, and Waks Mark for their dedication to the preservation of Usarufa oral culture, and to Aaron Willems and SIL-PNG for facilitating this work.)

We've noted, more than once, that the grammatical meaning of "passive voice" is pretty much dead in popular usage, while the ordinary-language meaning, struggling to be born, remains inchoate, a sludgy mixture of dessicated grammatical residues and vaguely sexualized associative goo. Sometimes passive voice is used to mean "vague about who's at fault", which seems to be the grammatical sense gone adrift; sometimes it means "listless, energyless, lacking in vigor", which is one of the more general, non-grammatical senses of passive; sometimes it seems to mean "on the fence, not taking sides", which is a sort of transmuted combination of the two.

Recently, I've come across several additional pieces for the collection.

A political reporter remarked on BBC Radio 4 this morning that the 157th speaker of the House of Commons, John Bercow, elected last night, is much hated by many members of his own party (the Conservatives). Among other things, when they are giving speeches he sometimes mutters under his breath and "corrects their grammar." Not a good sign. Nobody likes a grumpy grammar pedant.

(Except that just about all American intellectuals all seem to be in love with Strunk and White, of course; but set that aside — I believe I may have mentioned them in one or two previous Language Log posts.)

[Update: Bercow's grammatical interventions have in fact not been merely sotto voce mutterings. An excellent post at Joel Segal Books gives evidence that he has been recorded in Hansard as taking up the time of the House with grammatical peevery. More public money being wasted as paid members pontificate about supposed grammatical slips in the speeches of other paid members. Parliament is in a worse state than I thought.]

There are a bunch of insulting sk- words — scummy, scurvy, scruffy, scuzzy, sketchy come to mind. And everybody, even a snoot, seems to like negative-vibe phonetic symbolism. So if you try to make up a new word on this general pattern, say "skudgy", you'll probably find that many others have been there before you: "…by the next time we drag them out for bath-time play, we find that a skudgy sort of water is dispelled from the interior"; "The poet noted that the garage had a 'skudgy down-to-earth-ness'". Maybe skudgy is just a portmanteau of scummy and sludgy, or maybe we need to recognize the resonance with other words like scuzzy and dingy; but in any case, it's out there, waiting to be re-invented.

And that's how I reacted to the last word in today's Tank McNamara:

The governor of South Carolina, Mark Sanford, has been missing since Thursday ("SC governor's whereabouts unknown, even to wife", Associated Press, 6/22/2008).   The linguistic hook here is the way that his spokesman, Joel Sawyer, described his status ("Have you see [sic] this man? SC GOV, MIA", MSNC, 6/22/2009):

The governor put in a lot of time during this last legislative session, and after the session winds down it's not uncommon for him to go out of pocket for a few days at a time to clear his head. Obviously, that's going to be somewhat out of the question this time given the attention this particular absence has gotten. [emphasis added]

There was a brief brouhaha this week over the UK government's guidance to schools in a pamphlet called "Support For Spelling" aimed at elementary schools. The familiar spelling rule that says "i before e except after c", according to the document, "is not worth teaching". The reason is supposed to be that it doesn't account for words like "sufficient", "veil", and "their". The discussion about it on Radio 4 was just about the most stupid I have ever heard on a serious national talk station. There was a man who equated abandonment of the teaching of this rule with the abandonment of rules altogether; there was an outright claim that English has no rules at all; there was a woman (a senior lecturer in education) who appeared to think that believe was a counterexample, when of course it complies; there was an interviewer who seemed to be pushing the interviewees to talk about whether spelling should be taught at all…

I once wrote a Language Log post called This isn't poetry, this is abuse. It was about a poem that had been sent to me by my mortgage company. I don't know why a mortgage company in 2004 was dabbling in poetry instead of inventing new sub-prime mortgage-based securities that could go off like time bombs under the entire banking establishment in 2008, but the results were pretty terrible. About as bad as poetry gets, I thought, except perhaps for Vogon poetry, and the two bodies of poetic art that are claimed in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy to have been even worse — those of the Azgoths of Kria and Paul Neil Milne Johnstone). I was wrong. A company in Perthshire specializing in septic tanks and biowaste macerators (shitgrinders, to put it bluntly) supplies customers with a poem that is considerably worse. Bad enough that you really don't want to see it. Don't read on. Go somewhere else. Read something pleasant and interesting instead. You really do not want to see a poem about excrement disposal technology.

The latest (20 June) New Scientist has an article ("Are orangs our nearest relatives?" by Graham Lawton, pp. 6-7) on an article in a recent Journal of Biogeography (by Jeffrey Schwartz and John Grehan) proposing a family tree for primates in which orangutans rather than chimpanzees are the closest relatives of human beings. (Schwartz has been arguing this position for about 20 years.) The now-orthodox position is based on DNA similarities, which Grehan argues fails to distinguish between "derived novelties" and "primitive retentions". Other evolutionary biologists dispute this.

My purpose here is not to judge the evidence and the arguments, but only to point out that the derived novelty vs. primitive retention distinction is a familiar one from the field of linguistic taxonomy, where it goes under the names "shared innovations" vs. "shared retentions", shared innovations outweighing shared retentions in establishing how closely languages are related to one another.

On ADS-L, Fred Shapiro (following up on a lead from Barry Popik) has posted the following antedating of Father's Day, which the OED currently has from 1943:

1908 Boston Globe 19 May 10 (ProQuest Historical Newspapers)  Why doesn't somebody suggest the idea of having a "Father's day," when everybody in the country shall wear a modest violet in honor of poor Father?

I don't know why the writer suggested a "modest violet", but the idea seems never to have caught on. Instead, as the holiday was commercialized, the celebration came to center on giving "poor Father" characteristically "masculine" gifts: tools, gadgets, golf equipment, grilling equipment, supplies for hunting, fishing, and camping, items associated with sports (especially football), stock car racing, and beer drinking, and so on.

But this is Language Log, not Culture Log. So the main point of interest is the shall in the 1908 quote. First, however, some background on the holiday.

Over the past couple of days, I've continued to use Google's alpha Persian-English translation system as part of an attempt to keep track of what's happening in Iran.

On long passages, the results are still at the fever-dream stage of machine translation, where enough relevant words and phrase-fragments emerge to leave a sort of impressionistic residue of content, but without much overall coherence. For example, I tried it on a bulletin from Mehr News yesterday evening that claimed to be a statement from the Assembly of Experts announcing full support for Kahmenei's speech on Friday. This sentence

به گزارش خبرگزاری مهر ، در این بیانیه آمده است: مجلس خبرگان رهبری ضمن تشکر از حضور شکوهمند و حماسه‌ساز مردم در انتخابات ریاست جمهوری، حمایت قاطع خود را از بیانات روشنگرانه، وحدت‌بخش و داهیانه‌ مقام معظم رهبری در نماز جمعه تهران اعلام می‌دارد و با شکرگزاری به درگاه الهی نسبت به نعمت عظما و بی‌بدیل ولایت فقیه، این رکن رکین حدوث و تداوم انقلاب؛ همگان را به تبعیت از دستورات و رهنمودهای معظم‌‌له فرا می‌خواند.

comes out in the automatic translation as

Mehr News Agency reported, the statement states: the Assembly of Experts also thanked the glorious presence Hmas·hsaz and presidential elections, support their statements Rvshngranh decisive, and Vhdtbkhsh Dahyanh Ayatollah Khamenei Friday Prayers in Tehran and ready Thanksgiving Portal to the Divine favor Zma Bybdyl and velayat-e faqih, the pillars of the revolution and continuity Rkyn Hdvs; everyone to obey the orders and guidelines Mzmlh call girl.

In "Keepin' it real fake, part CCXVII: Not even Obama can sell us on BlockBerry", most of the folks at endgadget seem to think that the following ad is some sort of joke or an invitation to political demagoguery: