Language Log

Powerset is a search engine that allows users to express their queries as phrases, rather than a few keywords.  It uses natural language processing (NLP) technologies to analyze the verb-argument structure of a query and deliver more focused search results, initially just from Wikipedia.  Powerset has attracted interest from the NLP community, as its services promise to demonstrate the value of NLP – and of language analysis more generally – in extracting information from the trillion or more words of text on the web.  On Tuesday, Microsoft announced it has acquired Powerset, and that Powerset will become part of Microsoft's Search Relevance team.  I hope this takeover means that natural language search will become mainstream, scaled up to the entire web, and used far more widely than before [Powerset blog|Microsoft Live Search blog].

According to this BBC Report, the US Ambassador to Paraguay, James Cason, has released an album of songs in Guarani, the indigenous language. The BBC story has a clip if you'd like to hear him. He says that he began to study Guarani in Cuba before taking up his post in Paraguay. When he got off the plane he immediately gave a speech in Guarani, to the surprise not only of the Paraguayans but of the US mission, who were unaware that he had been studying the language. The US does not have a good reputation for diplomats who speak the local language, so this is really unusual. Part of the story here is no doubt the fact that Ambassador Cason is a career foreign service officer with long experience in Latin America, not a political hack. In any case, kudos to Ambassador Cason.

Although most Paraguayans are reported to be pleased with Ambassador Cason's album, Senator Domingo Laino, once a distinguished opponent of the Stroessner dictatorship, is not. In his opinion: "[Cason] sings horribly and his pronunciation of Guarani words is stammering. It is an offense to the Paraguayan people." I'm in no position to judge, but my suggestion to Senator Laino is: don't look a gift horse in the mouth. An ambassador who sings in Guarani is like a talking dog: it isn't how well he does it, it's that he does it at all.

According to reports by the Associated Press and Fox News, at Ellender High School in Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana, co-valedictorians and cousins Cindy and Hue Vo each briefly addressed their immigrant parents, who are not fluent in English, in Vietnamese during their valedictory speeches. Why is this in the news? Because school board member Ricky Pitre objects. For reasons that are not reported, he thinks that there is something wrong with speaking a little bit of another language and proposes to institute a rule that graduation speeches be entirely in English.

English-only advocates like to claim that immigrants refuse to learn English. Here are two kids of immigrant parents who have learned English well enough to be valedictorians and this jackass wants to rain on their parade? For shame! Why is it that school boards attract idiots like shit attracts flies?

Xin anh hãy nhận những lời chúc mừng của tôi Cindy Vo và Hue Vo!

(I hope I've go this right. Regrettably, my Vietnamese is no doubt much poorer than their English.)

Here's an article in yesterday's New Scientist: "Charades reveals a universal sentence structure." The ever eagle-eyed Ben Zimmer thrust it under our noses as we hung around the LL water-cooler this morning. My interest was piqued. It would be much easier to learn about language by playing charades than by using the extraordinarily laborious standard method, i.e. studying language.

The article reports on a new paper in the prestigious journal PNAS, "The natural order of events: How speakers of different languages represent events nonverbally", by Susan Goldin-Meadow, Wing Chee So, Aslı Özyürek, and Carolyn Mylander. I've taken a look at the PNAS paper, but for now I just want to give you my immediate reactions to the New Scientist article. I'll follow up with some comments on the PNAS paper later.

In the study the New Scientist article reports on, subjects with various native languages look at pictures involving characters doing things to other characters, and then they mime what they saw. And the main finding the New Scientist article reports is that:

"Regardless of the order used in their native spoken language, most of the volunteers communicated with a subject-object-verb construction."

Cute! But now it gets a little weird:

"Goldin-Meadow argues that this kind of sentence syntax might therefore be etched into our brains. Languages that veer away from this form, such as English, must have been influenced by cultural forces."

From Victor Mair:

The Chinese characters are CAN1TING1 餐厅 ("dining hall")

[Source of photograph: Facebook; uploaded by Samuel Osouf; taken on the Beijing-Taiyuan expressway in June, 2008. Link sent to Victor by Ori Tavor.]

In the Palais des Congrès at Porte Maillot in Paris, the virtual placards for Acoustics 2008 are — oddly — sharing the announcement screens with Les Journées Francophones de Pathologie Digestive 2009 ("The French-Speaking Days of Digestive Pathology"). This struck me as odd for several reasons, starting with the name. It's the annual meeting of the Société Française de Gastroentérologie (SNFGE); and (for example) the Linguistic Society of America just calls its annual meeting its annual meeting, not "The English-Speaking Days of Language Analysis", or even just "The Days of Language Analysis" or whatever. Second, the SNFGE meets every year in March, and surely the Palais des Congrès, creaky as it is, must still have many events scheduled before next March. But finally, the 2009 meeting will actually have a different name, according to the SNFGE's web site:

Les JFPD deviennent les JFHOD !
Les Journées Francophones de Pathologie Digestive changent de nom en 2009 pour devenir les JFHOD (prononcer 'jifod') pour Journées Francophones d'Hépato-gastroentérologie et d'Oncologie Digestive.

The JFPD becomes the JFHOD!
The French-Speaking Days of Digestive Pathology will change its name in 2009 to become the JFHOD (pronounced 'jifod') for French-Speaking Days of Hepato-gastroenterology and Digestive Oncology.

Mark's post about linguistic celebrities reminds me of a conversation I had quite some years ago with David Perlmutter, whom linguists will know for his work on syntax and sign language. We asked each other who was the most famous person we had met. After running through candidates well known in academia but perhaps less so in the wider world, such as Noam Chomsky, chemist Konrad Bloch, and neurologist Norman Geschwind, I guessed that the most famous person I had met was Senator Patrick Leahy, who was our district attorney before he ran for the Senate and was the speaker at my high school graduation. David's answer was President Eisenhower. When I asked him how he had met President Eisenhower, he told me the following story.

This is a nice illustration of the phenomenon I talked about in a previous post.

A bit of spam that somehow got past all my filters this morning suggests that Barnes & Noble is generating its unsolicited commercial emails by means of a process that 1) involves some fairly dumb rewriting rules (here turning "++" into "andand") and 2) does not involve any sentient editorial oversight:

(As usual, click for a larger image.)

As has already been the subject of much blogospheric mirth, news about sprinter Tyson Gay's record time in the U.S. Olympic track and field trials was reported in peculiar fashion by the American Family Association's OneNewsNow site. Here's a screenshot from BoingBoing:

And here's one from Outsports showing a series of Google News headlines:

Regret The Error picks its favorite quote:

Asked how he felt, Homosexual said: ‘A little fatigued.’

For those of you who plan to be in Vancouver at the end of July (and who wouldn't want to?), the 43d International Conference on Salishan and Neighbouring Languages will be hosted by the Squamish Nation and Capilano College in North Vancouver, Friday July 25th and Saturday July 26th. Further information is available at http://icsnl.org.

The conference's odd name is due to the fact that it has historically focussed on Salishan languages but is intended to include the various other languages of the greater Pacific Northwest region. Talks on Athabascan languages nominally fall within its purview but are relatively rare since we Athabascanists have our own conference.
The Dene Languages Conference meets in Cold Lake, Alberta next Friday and Saturday.

With respect to the choice between singular and plural in phrases like "ostriches when frightened bury their head(s) in the sand", Richard A. Posner wrote:

I don't think there's actually a rule, in English at any rate, or at least a simple either-or rule, to govern the choice between the singular and the plural. The choice depends on the mental picture that it evokes. That in turn depends on whether the subject of the sentence, though plural, is viewed aggregatively or distributively. The "virgins of Jerusalem hang down their heads" sounds fine, but so does "In prosperous days They swarm, but in adverse withdraw their head." The difference is that the virgins are acting collectively, in unison; the swarmers are not–nor are the ostriches when they bury their heads. Each ostrich does that separately, individually. So the reader thinks of an individual ostrich, and he (or she) has one head. But the virgins are thought of as moving their heads in unison–a bunch of heads moving at once.

This is an interesting analysis, but as a description of general usage, I don't believe that it's accurate.

Sridhar Srinivasan asks about an amazon.com review (emphasis added):

"…After seeing the reviews, I bought this book in new condition at a really cheap price. I couldn't be less satisfied. The book explains all details in clear detail, so that even talented high school students could understand the text. The images that accompany the text greatly reinforce the main ideas…. "

Sridhar observes that the author seems to mean "I couldn't be more satisfied", and wondered whether there's any connection between this and the idiom "I could care less", used to mean "I couldn't care less".