Language Log

You might have thought that the Roman empire was doomed by barbarian invasions, lead poisoning, the loss of masculine values, or climate change. But Jim Bisso at Epea Pteroenta has pointed out that at the very height of the empire's power, in the reign of Trajan, Roman culture had already been compromised by an insidious agent that you probably have never considered, though it's obvious in retrospect.

NYTimes addresses Russian readers

Something new, at least to me . Together with today's article in the New York
Times At Expense of All Others, Putin Picks a Church, there's a sidebar:

I think that's neat.
Of course you'd have to be reading the NYT in English to start with, or be
alerted by a friend. But it's the first case I know of one of the major American
newspapers making an actively non-English-only presence. (But is it really
starting with Russian rather than, say, Spanish, or does this just reflect the
fact that I pay more attention to their news about Russia?)

One of the sturdiest linguistic canards is that George Bernard Shaw facetiously proposed spelling fish as ghoti, with gh pronounced as in laugh, o as in women, and ti as in nation. This respelling, the story goes, was intended by Shaw to highlight the absurdity of English orthography. But ghoti appears nowhere in Shaw's writings, according to devoted Shavians who have thoroughly scoured his works. The earliest attribution of ghoti to Shaw that I've found is from 1946, and the attributor is Mario Pei, not always the most reliable source when it comes to language-related information. By that point, ghoti had been circulating in the popular press for nearly a decade. Previously, the earliest known appearance of ghoti was from a 1937 newspaper article discovered by the redoubtable Fred Shapiro. That still allows for the slight possibility that Shaw was the originator, if unnamed. But now Matthew Gordon of the University of Missouri-Columbia has antedated ghoti — all the way back to 1874. And the 1874 article is quoting a source from 1855, a year before Shaw was born.

I'm relatively sure that Language Log readers have been slavering to get a hunting or fishing license in Montana. So I'll tell you how, sort of. True, this state has been called a hunter's and fisherman's paradise but it an be a bit frustrating when you try to get a license. Locals tell me that this helps keep outsiders outside. But even people who live in Montana have to jump through some confusing linguistic hoops if they want to hunt or fish legally. This problem doesn't affect me personally because I'm a Montana anomaly. I don't hunt or fish at all but I'm amused by the steps people have to take to become legal hunters and fishermen. 

There's an important article on Li Yang's Crazy English that has just come out in this week's New Yorker. I have been following the Li Yang story for over a decade. It is both fascinating and deeply troubling.

Three years ago, Amber Woodward, a student in my "Language, Script, and Society in China" course, wrote a long paper on Li Yang, and I published it as Sino-Platonic Papers no. 170 in February, 2006. This year she wrote her senior thesis on Li Yang's Crazy English, and I will also publish it in SPP. I hope to get both of these papers up on the web very soon. You will be able to find them at http://www.sino-platonic.org. (Meanwhile, see "Crazy English", 11/21/2007, for some background.)

A couple of weeks ago, Ben Zimmer told me that he was leaving Oxford University Press, where he was Editor for American Dictionaries, to become Executive Producer of the Visual Thesaurus online site. I was happy for Ben's career advancement, but I had another reaction that had nothing to do with him. When I talk with undergraduates about the jobs that studies in linguistics might prepare them for, "executive producer" has never been one of them. Before now.

Last year I wrote about citation plagiarism and why there is no such thing. I just discovered a comment on this by Miriam Burstein at The Little Professor which requires some discussion.

If you're among those who worry that the vocabulary and syntax of English are about to collapse under the assaults of whateverist nomads, I suggest a close study of Penny Arcade for 3/12/2008, "The Case of Texas vs. KryoLord":

[For legal background, see Elizabeth Langton, "Rockwall County District Attorney Ray Sumrow used server for personal items, expert says", Dallas Morning News, 3/11/2008, with more here. For WoW background, see e.g. here.]

Jeremy Hawker wrote:

Where it says, at the bottom, Comments are closed, shouldn't that be Comments IS closed?

It's the category "Comments" that is closed, and there is only one.

I'm not sure, myself — but I can guarantee that if it said "Comments is closed", some people would complain about that choice too. I pointed this out to Jeremy, who suggested a punctuational solution: "Comments" is closed. But that one would run afoul of Evan "Funk" Davies  at The Gallery of "Misused" Quotation Marks (or whoever has taken over that franchise).

Appealing to norma loquendi (blogandi?), I see that {"comments are closed"} gets 10.9 million Google hits, whereas {"comments is closed"} gets only 1,030.

Anyhow, comments is open.

The Turkish newspaper Hürriyet reports a tragic consequence of the failure to localize cell phones.

The saga of English or (last discussed on Language Log here) continues in my e-mail, with several pointers to literature (taking us away from traditional logic) and possibly relevant data.

The best part of blogging is the conversation. From the beginning, some of our most interesting content has come from readers' emailed suggestions and reactions, or from online interactions with other bloggers. However, our experience with online comments has generally been a negative one.

Since our new WordPress software makes it easier to keep down spam, and also offers some new options for managing comments and commenters, we'll be trying some new experiments with comments over the next few weeks.

As a result, we can look forward to conversations like this one:

Because of our focus on language, we'll benefit from the added energy that led (for example) to this outpouring of 3,429 deeply-felt and well-informed linguistic opinions. And since language connects with every aspect of human biology, culture and society, we can also expect to be enlightened by lengthy ideological manifestos on topics connected to our posts by gossamer threads of associative thought.

I can't wait.

I've had a few opportunities to overhear (or over-read) some strange example sentences while I've been spending more time here in the west wing basement of Language Log Plaza. Here are a couple of them for our readers to mull over before I comment on them (and invite your comments on them) sometime later this week.

1. I'll never forget how he must have felt. (overheard)
2. Aren't you glad you archived instead of deleted? (over-read)