{"id":39618,"date":"2018-08-14T04:19:20","date_gmt":"2018-08-14T09:19:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=39618"},"modified":"2018-08-15T05:59:03","modified_gmt":"2018-08-15T10:59:03","slug":"joos-jokes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=39618","title":{"rendered":"Joos jokes"},"content":{"rendered":"

While looking for something else, I recently stumbled on the November 1950 issue of the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America<\/em><\/a>, which\u00a0published the \"Proceedings of the Speech Communication Conference at M.I.T.\":<\/p>\n

The following twenty-four papers constitute a report of the Speech Communication Conference held at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, May 31-June 3, 1950, under the joint auspices of the Acoustical Society of America, the Carnegie Project on Scientific Aids to Learning at M.I.T., and the Psycho-Acoustic Laboratory at Harvard University.<\/span><\/p>\n

Among those twenty-four papers was one by Martin Joos, \"Description of Language Design<\/a>\", that included this passage:<\/p>\n

We can allow other people — telephone engineers or sociologists, for example — to speak artistically, imprecisely, about language. But as linguists we lay upon ourselves the condition that we must speak precisely about language or not at all. <\/span><\/p>\n

It's hard to tell whether this is deadpan humor or arid crankiness.\u00a0But given that the author was Martin Joos<\/a>, I'm voting for humor.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I never met him, but the epigraph for his 1961 book The Five Clocks: A Linguistic Excursion Into the Five Styles of English Usage<\/a><\/em> is evidence of an appreciation for sly jests:<\/p>\n

Ballyhough railway station has two clocks which disagree by some six minutes. When one helpful Englishman pointed the fact out to a porter, his reply was \"Faith, sir, if they was to tell the same time, why would we be having two of them?\"<\/span><\/p>\n

And like the Ballyhough clock joke, his quip about artistic engineers also invokes a theory, laid out in the abstract for that\u00a01950 JASA paper<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Physicists describe speech with continuous mathematics, such as Fourier analysis or the autocorrelation function. Linguists describe-language instead, using a discontinuous or discrete mathematics called \"linguistics.\" The nature of this odd calculus is outlined and justified here. It <\/span>treats speech communication as having a telegraphic structure. (Non-linguists normally fail <\/span>to orient themselves in this field because they treat speech as analogous to telephony.) The telegraph-code structure of language is examined from top to bottom, and at each of its several levels af complexity (compared to the two levels of Morse code) its structure is shown to be defined by possibilities and impossibilities of combination among the units of that level. Above the highest level we find, instead of such absolute restrictions, conditional probabilities of occurrence: this is the semantic field, outside linguistics, where sociologists can work. Below the lowest level we find, instead of such absolute restrictions, conditional probabilities of phonetic quality: this is the phonetic field, outside linguistics, where physicists can work. Thus linguistics is peculiar among mathematical systems in that it abuts upon reality in two places instead of one. This statement is equivalent to defining a language as a symbolic system; that is, as a code.<\/span><\/p>\n

Martin Joos got an undergrad degree in electrical engineering before spending WWII as a cryptographer and then turning to linguistics, so the joke (and the theory) must have had some personal resonance for him. And I also appreciate both the humor and the idea, having spent some time myself as the only linguist in a lab full of telephone engineers.<\/p>\n

His assignment of semantics to sociology will come as a surprise to the practitioners of\u00a0 both disciplines. There are many other curious ideas in that paper, and some even odder ones in the other 23 contributions to that 1950 special issue — more later on this window into a bygone age.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

While looking for something else, I recently stumbled on the November 1950 issue of the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, which\u00a0published the \"Proceedings of the Speech Communication Conference at M.I.T.\": The following twenty-four papers constitute a report of the Speech Communication Conference held at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, May 31-June 3, 1950, under […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[235],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-39618","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-linguistics-as-a-discipline"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39618","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=39618"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39618\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":39649,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39618\/revisions\/39649"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=39618"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=39618"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=39618"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}