Language Log

The trial of Los Angles private investigator, Anthony Pellicano, took a linguistic twist this week as the Washington Post reports. He is representing himself at his trial and so he has to follow the language rules imposed by the court. This means that any time he wants to refer to himself, he is not allowed to say "I" or "me." He has to say "he" or "Pellicano." This must be hard for him to do and I think it would feel rather strange. Sounds a bit like the royal he, if there is such a thing, or maybe like "your humble servant" that we find in letters from back in the Victorian Age.

Geoff Pullum posted a little while back on the way the language of the imprisoned children in Amstetten, Austria was characterized in the Daily Telegraph, under the outrageous headline Dungeon children speak in animal language. Last year I spent some time trying to track down the facts in another imprisoned-Austrian-children story (this time in Linz). In the first coverage I saw, from The Times on 12 February 2007, the children (three girls) were said to have developed their own language, an "almost unintelligible" form of German, with an astonishing twist: the girls "reportedly finish all sentences with the word "but" [that is, German aber]".

This morning's Get Fuzzy:

According to the default settings of Google Maps for a user in Philadelphia PA, if you're IN HEAVEN, you're just outside of Cincinnati OH, whereas if you're IN HELL, you're a few hundred miles north, a little bit northwest of Ann Arbor MI. IN PURGATORY, it seems, is between Lewiston and Augusta ME.

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According to the Wikipedia,

Abstract nonsense, or general abstract nonsense, is a popular term used by mathematicians to describe certain kinds of arguments and concepts in category theory or applications. The term goes back a long way, and even predates the foundation of category theory as a subject itself. Referring to a joint paper with Samuel Eilenberg that introduced the notion of a "category" in 1942, Saunders Mac Lane wrote the subject was 'then called "general abstract nonsense"'.

The term is believed to have been coined by the mathematician Norman Steenrod, himself one of the developers of the categorical point of view. This term is used by practitioners as an indication of mathematical sophistication or coolness rather than as a derogatory designation.

And it's true!

As part of its efforts to spiff up its image for the Olympics and counter the widespread protests over its occupation of Tibet, the Chinese government is putting out propaganda to the effect that all is well for the Tibetan language and that China is promoting its use. CCTV has just reprinted this article originally published in October in the People's Daily (人民日报), the organ of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China.

In reality, according to Tibetan sources, China is promoting Chinese at the expense of Tibetan as part of its campaign of cultural genocide. Here is a brief news item. The Free Tibet report to which it refers can be downloaded here.

Back in June, we unaccountably failed to cover a linguistic debate that took place in the House Committee on Government Reform of the United States Congress. Lurita Doan, the head of the General Services Administration, testified at length about the number, nature, and interpretation of tenses, aspects, and moods in English. Alternative views were expressed by representatives John Sarbanes (D-MD), John Yarmuth (D-KY), and Henry Waxman (D-CA).

But today, we get another shot at the story, because Ms. Doan is in the news again.

The first report I have seen concerning the language skills of the imprisoned children involved in the horror story coming out of Amstetten, this Daily Telegraph story by Nick Allen [hat tip: Matt Austin], is headlined Dungeon children speak in animal language. I suppose we should have expected it: the usual headline-writers' nonsense. Animals do not have language, and these children do not communicate like animals. The story says:

Stefan Fritzl, 18, and his brother Felix, five, learned to talk by watching a television in the dungeon where they were held with their mother Elisabeth Fritzl, 42. But their form of communication is only partly intelligible to Austrian police officers.

Police chief Leopold Etz, 50, who has met the two boys, said: "It is only half true that they can speak. They communicate with noises that are a mixture of growling and cooing."

"If they want to say something so others understand them as well they have to focus and really concentrate which seems to be extremely exhausting for them."

Being able to say anything at all to other people, however exhausting the process, makes them already quite different from any non-human animal species on earth. And semi-private speech modes used by children with siblings (e.g., identical twins with mostly or only their twin for company) are well known to developmental psycholinguists.

I find the Amstetten story almost unbearably appalling. I am viscerally affected by the story each time I think about it, which is many times each day. A point about reporting on their language seems almost too trivial to make. But perhaps it is worthwhile to say just this much: let us all try to ensure that the terrible psychological damage done to these poor children and their mother by the monster who imprisoned them is not now amplified by the promulgation of sensationalist nonsense likening them to animals.

I mentioned recently here on Language Log that the people who live in terror of splitting infinitives appear never to have looked inside the handbooks that they claim to be respecting. I came upon a remarkable instance of this the other day while looking for something else.

Punctuality Rules! is advertised as "A blog devoted to writing, grammar, good manners, and basically trying to save Civilization, one punctuation mark at a time." In this post last year the proprietor, who identifies herself as "Deb", wrote about her beloved copy of Strunk and White's The Elements of Style (of which she actually provides a photo):

Now, Strunk and White (as it's commonly called) is quite strict about some of its rules: don't end sentences with a preposition, never start one with a conjuction [sic], don't split an infinitive. All rules which common usage mostly lets slip these days. (How many non-writers do you know who even know what an infinitive is?) Its reputation is almost stodgy. A long list of rules and commands by two old, old men, you might think . . . and then you open it and start to read.

She loves her copy of S&W's third edition, of course, and she says that she reads it: "the quality of the writing is superb", and it is "possibly the very best place you can learn the rules", she thinks. I think the exact opposite is true. But never mind that. My point here is that as far as I can see, Deb hasn't actually paid attention to what The Elements of Style says.

Just in case you haven't already seen it, you should go check out WALS Online:

The data and the texts from The World Atlas of Language Structures, published as a book with CD-ROM in 2005 by Oxford University Press, are now freely available online.

WALS Online is a joint project of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and the Max Planck Digital Library . It is a separate publication, edited by Martin Haspelmath, Matthew S. Dryer, David Gil and Bernard Comrie (Munich: Max Planck Digital Library, 2008).

I was scanning the staider newspapers this morning looking for items of linguistic interest for our readership when I encountered a story in the Daily Telegraph concerning one Lord Laidlaw, a British peer who was recently discovered by a tabloid newspaper of the British Isles to have been fairly extraordinary quantities of money on flying prostitutes from Britain to a $12,000-a-night presidential suite at a Monte Carlo hotel where the girls "drank champagne and fine wines before taking part in lesbian and bondage sex acts." The puzzling part for me, given my remarkably sparse experience of such champagne-fueled sex acts, was the only linguistically relevant remark in the story:

One recent party was said to have involved a Vogue model, three prostitutes, a male gigolo and a trilingual bisexual.

What on earth, I wondered, was the relevance of the bisexual participant's ability to conduct business in three languages? I would have thought it was rather difficult to speak even one language when one's mouth is full (and I am told that at events of the sort Lord Laidlaw enjoyed, one could hardly be said to be participating fully if one didn't have one's mouth full). Are trilingual bisexuals well known to be in special demand among devotees of the lesbian/bondage scene? Are there perhaps special agencies where peers of the realm go to rent them? Or do they post advertisements in the "Personal Services" section of free newspapers? "Versatile male, trilingual (English/Spanish/German) and bisexual (French/Greek), seeks generous House of Lords member for party work in Monaco area…"

The recent gift of a staggering $100,000,000 by a single person to Harvard University — the largest gift from an alumnus in Harvard's history — has just been announced, in prose that suggests no matter how much money they may raise, the development and public relations staff at Harvard are afflicted by ancient irrational terrors:

David Rockefeller, a member of the Harvard College Class of 1936 and longtime University benefactor, has pledged $100 million to increase dramatically learning opportunities for Harvard undergraduates through international experiences and participation in the arts.

What are "dramatically learning opportunities", you might ask? We'd normally expect an adjectival rather than adverbial modifier on "learning opportunities"; is it a typo for "dramatic learning opportunities"?

No. The writer of this newsletter item (see this link) was in the grip of unreasoning fear, too petrified to consider using a normal and fully grammatical construction of Standard English that is acknowledged as grammatical in even the most conservative reference works, and never was ungrammatical at any time in the entire history of the language. Rather than use this much-dreaded construction, the writer blundered into something that actually is ungrammatical, and put an adverb in a position that actually is syntactically blocked. It truly makes me wonder whether intellectual progress is possible for a tribe as prone to panic and primitive superstition as modern educated Americans.

Um, for whatever my what?

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That picture was taken on a NYC subway car by Aaron Davies. Could it be that America's peanut farmers have outsourced their sign creation to China?