Language Log

There's a fact-and-graph-packed post over at Pinyin News on "US post-secondary enrollments in foreign languages and the position of Mandarin". The post's "basic points up front":

• Spanish has more enrollments than all other foreign languages put together.
• By far the biggest enrollment boom since 1990 has not been for Mandarin but for American Sign Language.
• The boom in enrollments in Arabic also surpasses that for Mandarin.
• Mandarin is indeed growing in popularity — but in recent years only at the undergraduate level.
• Japanese continues to be more popular than Mandarin, though by an ever-smaller margin.
• Mandarin is the seventh most studied foreign language in U.S. post-secondary schools, behind Spanish (which leads Mandarin by a ratio of 16:1), French, German, American Sign Language, Italian, and Japanese.
• Relatively speaking, enrollments in foreign languages are much lower than they were 30 years ago.

From composer Nico Muhly's blog, about responses to his music:

Anyway, I like the crotch on the idea that people I don’t know are behaving in a non-cynical, almost linear way with music (“I saw this thing that I liked, I want to go see more of that thing that I liked, even though I don’t know much about what-all is going to happen”) rather than in a jaded, non-exploratory way (“new music is bullshit, whatever”). If you like something, find a path through it and then follow the path outwards, to other pieces, other composers, other musics. If you don’t like it, close your eyes and think about Brahms; it soothes the mind and calms the bowels.

The source of the expression is R. Kelly's song "I Like the Crotch on You", from the album 12 Play, where it's pretty much literal. Maybe Muhly's extension takes the crotch to be the central or essential aspect of something, in particular of the woman the song is addressed to. (Googling doesn't seem to pull up any other such extensions; it looks like all R. Kelly and various literal senses of crotch, mostly having with the crotches of pieces of clothing.)

(Hat tip: Ned Deily)

This is a brief follow-up to what Mark just said to "Robert", one of our commenters who thinks there is "massive literary authority" for the avoidance of split infinitives. Robert is going to be really disappointed by this. The eminent (and fairly conservative) early 20th-century American grammarian George O. Curme made a detailed study of the literary history of the split infinitive, and amassed a collection of hundreds and hundreds of examples. Some of his findings (and many though not all of his examples) are set forth in his book Syntax (1931), which forms Part III of his 3-volume work A Grammar of the English Language. Look at what he says on page 461:

[The split infinitive] has long been used in literary and colloquial language. In general, it is more characteristic of our more prominent authors than of the minor writers, who avoid it as they fear criticism.

Poor Robert. And poor Deb at Punctuality Rules, and poor Karen Elizabeth Gordon (see the book pictured there). They have all been suckered by a piece of fake-rule invention out of the late 19th century, and have joined the ranks of the "minor writers, who avoid [the split infinitive] as they fear criticism." While "prominent authors" have the courage and judgment to place their adjuncts just where those adjuncts work best syntactically and semantically, whether just after infinitival to or elsewhere in the clause, the timid little minor writers daren't follow them. Isn't that sad? A nation's minor writers in thrall to a rule that doesn't have any justification or factual basis and never did have any. Break out, minor writers! Revolt! You have nothing to lose, and an extra possibility of stylistically appropriate adjunct positioning to gain!

This morning, "Robert" added a comment to a Language Log post from April 30, "Books more loved than looked in". He began:

Just found your website, after hearing one of you discuss it on BBC Radio 4. I'm very glad to have discovered it, because it looks like good fun.

I tend to avoid split infinitives in formal prose, because most, if not all, of my models from the last 200 years avoid them. It's a stylistic preference, based on good authority; but I was happy to find on your site confirmation of my suspicion that there wasn't an actual *rule* against the split infinitive.

We're glad to be of service. Perhaps I can help even more, by raising some doubts in your mind about the quality of the "authority" behind your stylistic preference.

While we're on the subject of English spelling: the 25 August New Yorker has a cartoon by Ariel Molvig on the subject:

And here's a related Rhymes With Orange cartoon from a while back:

From Andy Bull's interview with Acer Nethercott, cox for Britain's Olympic eight ("The little guy with big brains and Olympic ambition", The Guardian, 8/7/2008):

Likeable, and clearly happy to be in Beijing, Nethercott is indecently intelligent. Two months ago he completed a DPhil in the Philosophy of Language. "What exactly?" I ask with all the confidence of a man who has a 2:1 in English Lit.

"Linguistics. The semantics of complex demonstratives."

"Uh-huh".

In between qualifications (he has a BA in Physics and Philosophy and a Masters as well), Acer says he "fell into" international rowing.

A very tiny thing, but I was entertained by Natalie Angier's morphological inventiveness in a piece "Life Is Short…" (NYT Science Times 8/19/08, front page) about the Furcifer labordi chameleon of Madagascar:

… the chameleon spends some two-thirds of its abbreviated existence as an egg buried in sand, with a mere 16 to 20 weeks allocated to all post-shellular affairs.

Post-shellular is a morphological hybrid, built on the native English shell, with the Latin-derived prefix post- and suffix -ul-ar.

English has many hybrid words that combine Greek and Latin elements (automobile, homosexual, television); though these are sometimes objected to by sticklers who insist on etymological purity, they can be seen simply as combinations of English elements from the learnèd portion of the lexicon, and most people find them unremarkable.

Combinations of native English bases with learnèd affixes, however, usually stand out, and often have a playful character (playful morphology is a topic we've returned to a number of times on Language Log, for instance here). Angier could have said "allocated to all affairs outside the shell" or "for life after hatching" or something similar, but "allocated to all post-shellular affairs" is more fun. And science writers are always looking for ways to lighten up their material.

In a comment about yesterday's post "Geoff and the Language Guardians", Stephen Jones listed some of "the usual collection of nutters" who were featured on BBC Radio 4's Word of Mouth program, including "one who pretends there's a difference between 'disinterested' and 'uninterested'". Some other commenters politely expressed surprise and concern, including the suggestion that "the difference is still observed by many people who are not 'nutters'".

Outeast observed that this is yet another a case, like imply and infer, where the segregation of meanings between the two words is emergent and incomplete, rather than traditional and under siege. This is an interesting and curious feature of the ecology of peevology. In most areas, what is fashionable is seen as new, and out-groups are censured for being behind the times. But there are some things, English usage among them, where disdain must by convention be directed at innovators. This convention is so strong that it overrides mere fact. When a word's meaning is becoming more specialized, with an older sense being abandoned, those who hold to the old ways must be castigated for failing to maintain a traditional distinction.

The website for BBC Radio 4's Word of Mouth describes today's program this way:

Peggy Reynolds is sitting in for Michael Rosen on Word of Mouth, the programme about language and the way we use it.

This week, Peggy investigates the world of language guardians.

Once, they wrote to the letters pages of newspapers. Now they have the internet. Peggy looks at the battles raging on the language blogs.

One of the guests on the program was Geoff Pullum.

At the moment, at least, the audio is available at http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/b00d0hw7. Geoff's segment starts around 3:10.

Christine Ohuruogu, who Benjamin Zimmer described as "the world's fastest linguist", just won a gold in the Olympics 400m final, hence becoming the first British woman with a linguistics degree to win Olympic gold at this distance. Or any other, we assume. Ohuruogu commented "Take the word 'shit'. Does it mean a pile of faeces, or something is rubbish?" But that was a while ago. This is a great day for the linguistics of taboo vocabulary!

From 17 March, Tom Brazelton's Theaterhopper cartoon, entitled "Horton Hears a Swear":

Two points of linguistic interest: the noun swear and the undernegated could give a shit, parallel to the famous could care less. Plus the misspelling of Dr. Seuss.

In response to my post on the relative difficulty of learning to read in English ("Ghoti and choughs again", 8/16/2008), Mark Seidenberg sent a note raising an interesting question about the relationship between writing systems and the morphology of the languages they represent:

It is my informal observation that the shallow orthographies are associated with languages that have relatively complex morphology (inflectional and/or derivational). Classic examples would be Serbo-Croatian, Russian, Finnish and German (though of course these languages aren't all morphologically complex in the same way). I mean complex relative to other languages like English. The deep orthographies are associated with languages such as English and Chinese, which have relatively simple morphological systems. Perhaps this observation is correct (though mixed systems such as Japanese present a potential challenge); perhaps your readers would be able to generate counterexamples. Still, if the general trend holds, the question would then be why properties of the writing system trade off against properties of the language.

I understood that it was a

(1) [big penis] [book] 'book [about big penises]'

but it was only when it arrived that I realized it was also a

(2) [big] [penis book] 'big [book about penises]'

It's big, in both size (12.2 x 11.8 x 1.5 inches) and weight (7.1 pounds). (There's some scholarly joke to be made here about iconicity.)

The ambiguity of big penis book is a familiar one in English linguistics; little girls' school is a much more decorous textbook example. And the parsing of it in (1) illustrates some nice little facts about English morphology/syntax.