Language Log

For the upcoming 2009 Book Expo in New York, the Perseus Book Group (of which my publisher PublicAffairs is a member), has organized a project to collaboratively create and publish a book in as many formats as possible within 48 hours. The text of the book will consist of submissions from the public of the first sentence of a yet-to-be published sequel of some well known book — A Tale of Three Cities, To Fricassee a Mockingbird; you get the picture. Submissions are welcome.

Since I sort of suggested this idea to them, I got roped into writing the introduction to the book, and also felt obliged to make a contribution. Inasmuch as The Elements of Style has been on the minds of everybody around here recently, I had the idea of imagining how Pope would have dealt with the work in a sequel to the Essay on Criticism. I had intended to write just a few introductory couplets, but at a certain point the whole world started speaking in iambic pentameter, and the thing just growed.

An Essay on Criticism II

By Alexander Pope

'Tis hard to say, which promises more Loot:
Writing, or Telling others how to do’t.
The Author of a Thriller or Romance
Envisions Strings of Noughts in his Advance,
A Shot on Oprah, front-page Times Review,
Three-movie Deal, and Pad in Malibu.

The Language Critick must console himself
With Dreams of lasting Life upon the Shelf;
For Fame, tho’ most inconstant in her Favor
To USAGE BOOKS, routinely grants a Waiver.
Few Men the slightest Memory retain
Of Edna Ferber, Thomas B. Costain,
Ernest K. Gann, or others once the Rage
With Readers in the Eisenhower Age.
Yet Fortune even now bestows her Smile
On Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style,
Still teaching to new Dogs its antique Tricks,
At Amazon.com Rank 206.

A couple of years ago, I wrote about the off-beat placement of song syllables (and other other notes) in popular music of the past century. This can be seen as the displacement of events from an underlyingly regular meter, but often it can also be seen as a basic metrical pattern in which events don't fall at evenly-spaced time intervals  ("Rock syncopation: stress shifts or polyrhythms?", 11/26/2007).  The example that I looked at was a maximally simple one — the 3+3+2=4+4 "habanera" rhythm that rocked America in the late 19th century.

Today's post is about some rhythms that arrange events in a recurring cycle of 12 time-units. And although I'll start with another Afro-Cuban pattern, the Bembé, today's analysis will look at connections in renaissance Italy and ancient Rome, rather than in 20th-century America. (Attention conservation notice: unless you're interested in geeking out on a detailed analysis of metrical patterns, you'll probably want to skip onwards to some of our other fine posts…)

You'd think it was the end of the world. Apparently, the Nuance Communications-powered text-to-speech system on the new Amazon Kindle mispronounces Barack Obama's name, saying something like "buh-RACK oh-BAM-uh" instead of "buh-ROCK oh-BAH-muh". Why is this little tidbit worth a piece in the business/media section of The New York Times? The answer is, it's not. It could have been an OK lead-in to a technology piece about how text-to-speech systems work, and how they can fail — often spectacularly — on unknown words, especially names. Granted, adding the (pronunciation of the) name of a political figure such as Barack Obama to the system's dictionary is a simple enough thing to do (which is how Nuance will in fact fix the problem, if it hasn't already), and it was clearly an oversight worth pointing out to the company. But then again, the version of Firefox I'm using right now (3.0.4 for the Mac) has been underlining both of the President's names in what I have been typing thus far, incorrectly guessing that I'm misspelling something, and I'll bet you won't see some NYT reporter wasting their time on such a triviality.

In spite of President Obama's stated opposition to the military's "Don't ask, don't tell" policy, the Army has fired another gay "linguist", Lieutenant Dan Choi, an openly gay infantry patrol leader fluent in Arabic. No doubt the resulting surge in morale in his unit will overcome the loss of its ability to communicate with the local population. :)

I send daily cards (by snail mail) to a small number of friends. Mostly I just write about what I've been doing, which these days means a kind of log of my postings (Language Log, my blog, ADS-L, mostly). I realized a few weeks ago that I sometimes said

I posted yesterday to X

(where X is the place the posting appeared, not the topic of the posting), sometimes

I posted yesterday on X

and sometimes

I posted yesterday in X

and that my choices seemed essentially whimsical. There were to cards and in cards and on cards, but I was certainly not making some distinction in truth-functional meaning; in my cards I wrote the three variants pretty much interchangeably (though I tended to be consistent on any particular card).

Language Log readers in London might be interested to know that I'm speaking to the Philological Society at 4:15 p.m. tomorrow (Friday, May 8). The meeting is in room 116 at the School of Oriental and African Studies, Thornhaugh Street, Russell Square, London WC1H OXG. The details are here.

According to the BBC News ("Quarantine for lonely Afghan pig", 5/7/2009)

Afghanistan's only known pig has been quarantined because of fears over swine flu, officials from Kabul Zoo say. […]

The director of the zoo, Aziz Gul Saqib, says the pig, whose name is Khanzir, is strong and healthy.

Stephen Jones, who sent in the link, comments:

Well, there's only one of them in the whole country so he's hardly likely to suffer from identity theft, but you'd think the BBC correspondent would have picked up on the fact that 'khanzir' means pig in Arabic (what it is in Pashto I don't have the least idea).

Anya Lunden wrote me yesterday with an instance of "who or whom", from commenter i_am_right on Jon Carroll's San Francisco Chronicle column:

We still don't know who or whom the Zodiac killer is or was … (link)

Lunden wondered whether the writer was using whom to convey some category distinction, like gender (or, in some of the examples below, number), or whether the writer was just wrestling with the problem of choosing who or whom in this context. I'm inclined to the latter idea. But first a little more data.

The following is a guest post by Jason Merchant.

Thought the LangLog would like to hear this week's update on the the Supreme Court case involving adverbial modification argued in February: all nine justices agree with the linguists! The decision is posted, but briefly, the money quote is:

"In ordinary English, where a transitive verb has an object, listeners in most contexts assume that an adverb (such as knowingly) that modifies the transitive verb tells the listener how the subject performed the entire action, including the object as set forth in the sentence."

It is so ordered…

Language Log made the pages of the Seattle Examiner yesterday, in a piece by Benjamin Lukoff, "International District's NP Hotel makes Language Log linguistics blog", about my "The syntacticians' hotel" posting and its follow-up.

Lukoff is no stranger to linguistics: the son of the late distinguished linguist Fred Lukoff (at the University of Washington), he is also an occasional contributor to the American Dialect Society's mailing list.

My waggish friend Steven Levine sent me, a little while back, a page from a grade school workbook on writing (I don't know which one, nor do I much care; this page is a not at all remarkable instance of the workbook genre). Here's the text of exercise 125, "Interesting Sentences":

A good sentence should be interesting.

"I have a dog" is not a good sentence with which to begin a story. [Note the very formal fronted preposition; no stranded prepositions! Possibly the writer of this sentence genuinely believes that "preposition at end" is ungrammatical, or maybe the writer is just trying to model "the best grammar" for the kids.] If you are writing a story about your dog that was lost, it would be better to begin the story, "Last week my dog Shep ran away from home."

Can you change the following sentences into interesting sentences? [Note that this is an instruction to change the sentences, not an actual question.]

The sentences are:

1. I have a bicycle.
2. Charlie has a goat.
3. I have a dress.
4. Brother gave me a wagon.
5. I have a pony.
6. My shoes are new.

(and there's a line at the end labeled: My score……………….)

There's a lot that could be said about this exercise, but here are a few observations.

According to Dan Neil, "Selling coffee becomes diacritical for McDonald's", LA Times, 5/4/2009:

McDonald's — never known for a delicate marketing touch — is about to drop the mother of all campaigns on you, an everywhere-you-look, invade-your-dreams ad campaign in support of its McCafé specialty coffee drinks that will be not so much viral as bubonic. An estimated $100-million mega-buy across TV, Web, radio, print, outdoor and social media, the McCafé push beginning today will be, according to the company, its biggest "menu initiative" since it began serving breakfast in the 1970s.

David Pesetsky, the Ferrari P. Ward Professor of Modern Languages and Linguistics at MIT, is also the principal second violin in the New Philharmonia Orchestra of Massachusetts. For their 4/1/2009 rehearsal, he provided English translations for the sometimes-confusing performance instructions in Mahler's 1st Symphony.

Dave's sensitive interpretation of Mahler's artistic intent has been received with praise in musical circles. The first page is reproduced below, but any of you who plan to play or listen to this piece should read the whole thing.