The movie "Arrival" has been in theaters for three weeks now, and it has already grossed $100 million worldwide. That's an impressive box-office draw, and it can't all be due to linguists and their friends attending. Clearly this contemplative film, with a field linguist as the heroic protagonist, is resonating with audiences. But what does that mean […]
"Arrival" hits the theaters this weekend, and I'd heartily recommend it to all Language Log readers. The film, despite its science-fiction trappings, does a remarkably good job of depicting how a linguist goes about her work. I've posted about the movie a few times before even seeing it, based on the trailers: "'Language is messy,' […]
In "Trump’s Tower of Babble: How the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis explains Donald Trump’s rantings — and why the rest of the world is so confused" (Foreign Policy, 8/30/16), Christopher M. Livaccari and Jeff Wang allege: Questions about the meaning of Trump’s words… may be a type of category mistake. Trump and his supporters seem to be […]
In "Correlated lexicometrical decay", I commented on some unexpectedly strong correlations over time of the ratios of word and phrase frequencies in the Google Books English 1gram dataset: I'm sure that these patterns mean something. But it seems a little weird that OF as a proportion of all prepositions should correlate r=0.953 with the proportion of instances of […]
Ian Maddieson and Christophe Coupé, "Human spoken language diversity and the acoustic adaptation hyothesis", ASA 2015 Bioacousticians have argued that ecological feedback mechanisms contribute to shaping the acoustic signals of a variety of species and anthropogenic changes in soundscapes have been shown to generate modifications to the spectral envelope of bird songs. Several studies posit […]
Several people have sent this in: "Scots 'have 421 words' for snow", BBC News 9/23/2015: Academics have officially logged 421 terms – including "snaw" (snow), "sneesl" (to begin to rain or snow) and "skelf" (a large snowflake). The study by the University of Glasgow is part of a project to compile the first Historical Thesaurus […]
In a comment on "The most Trumpish (and Bushish) words", D.O. wrote "It seems that we are missing (at least I was missing) a key piece about Mr. Trump's and Mr. Bush's speaking style. Mr. Bush is using significantly more words than Mr. Trump". What he means is not that Bush talks more than Trump […]
The philosopher Diogenes of Sinope was eccentric, to say the least — he begged for a living, slept in a large ceramic jar in the marketplace, and discarded the wooden bowl that was his only possession, deciding that it was excess baggage. He refuted the Platonic definition of human as "featherless biped" by exhibiting a plucked […]
From the last year's Foundational Questions Institute conference, a String Theory supporter (Raphael Bousso) is asked to argue against String Theory on behalf of Loop Quantum Gravity, while one of the founders of Loop Quantum Gravity theory (Carlo Rovelli) takes the String Theory side, in opposition to his own point of view: This works out well, making […]
Jason Torchinsky, "A very common word was invented by Dodge", Jalopnik 12/15/2014: Dodge is known for producing many things, most notably cars, minivans, and sometimes large, lingering clouds of tire smoke. Oh, and the K-Car. But one thing I didn't realize was that they're also in the word business, coining an extremely common word way back […]
A visitor from another galaxy, or perhaps just from another century, would notice that civilized people these days are obsessed with the rate of vocabulary display as a symbol of social status. The latest symptom of this obsession is Matt Daniels, "The Largest Vocabulary in Hip Hop", May 2014: Literary elites love to rep Shakespeare’s vocabulary: across […]
Jason Merchant sent me a link to this animation of Keith Chen's ideas about tense marking and future-orientation in financial and health behaviors: