"A new Tower of Babel, but from cheese"

Alexandra Petri has some images at WaPo (here) with some Venn humor. The link is to "Things Newt thinks about" — Newt, food, grandiose ideas — with the intersection of the last two being:

 Let's construct a new Tower of Babel, but from cheese.

Just a little break from all the lingua-blog posts about the piece in Science Times about young women's language, including vocal fry.

more droppin of the g's

Mr. Verb has commented on so-called "g-dropping" by politicians a fair bit, e.g. here and here.  Just caught another reference (from the Isthmus) to our favorite down-home social marker, one which is striking for all the assumptions communicated in just one teensy little sentence:

Thompson was a hard worker and, perhaps because of his unpolished style of speech - dropping his g's and other lapses - people underestimated his intelligence.

The author speaks of course of none other than our former Governor-for-life, Tommy Thompson, now making a run for the Senate (-for-life?).  I think Tommy comes by his "lapses" honestly, though - he was doin' it back before it became trendy durin' the 2008 elections.  Just a hometown boy from Elroy, Wisconsin, doin' what comes nacheral.  It'll be interesting to see if the media picks up on this theme as his campaign gets into high gear.

"I want every professor to enroll in a crash course in Linguistics 101."

Now, there's an idea I can get behind. It's a line from this piece by Susan Behrends in the Chronicle of Higher Ed. She writes this:

The goal: for teachers to better appreciate and deal with all the forms of English that are present in the college population, and aid students as they transition to college study and face a range of academic-literacy demands across subject matter.

The just past American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting had a session on teaching science through linguistics in K12, as reported here on the Log.  Movement in the right direction, at least.

"Texting Can Have A Negative Effect On Linguistics"

The article is here, but this one's all about the headline.

DARE and Z

I don't mean to be the guy who ruins the book by telling you the ending, but I've been wondering forever what the last entry in the Dictionary of American Regional English would be, given Cassidy's motto of 'On to Z!'

The answer is zydeco. And that explains the new motto of 'On beyond zebra!'.  'Beyond zydeco' doesn't work.

But the new volume is a compelling read.

German[y's] Anglicism of the Year: Shitstorm

Thanks to a tweet from akustyk, I just learned this year's Anglicism of the Year. 'Occupy' came in second to … shitstorm. Nice choice.

Here's their word cloud (German Wörterwolke, maybe a candidate for next year if they include loan translations?)

 The German story is here, and TheLocal.de has an English version here.

Linguistics in the media ... a good day

Like most linguists, we've talked here about the relatively low public profile of linguistics (e.g. here) and the negative consequences of it … like the catastrophically bad language-related journalism that seems to pop up so often. Maybe there's some progress.

I was thinking that while reading Paul Krugman's column, which draws on the recent post on the Log about the collocations of severe, and Romney's comment about being a 'severely conservative'. (If you haven't read it, you should fix that.)

Then, boom, Ben Zimmer comes on NPR to talk about anachronisms in Downton Abbey.*

Good start to the week.


*NPR gets bonus points for opening with an Onion reference, this one.

ProEnglish and white nationalism?

We've called attention on this blog before to connections between right-wing extremism and English-only types. Yesterday brought a new example: CPAC featured a panel on "The Failure of Multiculturalism: How the pursuit of diversity is weakening the American Identity." Progressive media people have called attention to the role of Peter Brimelow at CPAC, who has apparently described bilingualism as about "the determination of the elites not to press immigrants to assimilate" (here). But there's more, according to Mother Jones,

Robert Vandervoort, who runs a group called ProEnglish and according to the Institute for Research on Education and Human Rights "was also the organizer of the white nationalist group, Chicagoland Friends of American Renaissance" … .

The ProEnglish website includes a lot on their efforts to eliminate bilingual ballots, etc., and they're pushing the effort to remove an elected official in Arizona over her alleged lack of knowledge of English. They don't seem to play up their ties to the extreme right.

It's worth keeping an eye on what the English-only types do when they're not doing English-only stuff.

Update from TPM, here.

Update on Menominee Language Outrage

A commenter on my earlier post about the girl being punished for using Menominee language in school just told me about a petition you can sign here.  I just talked to the girl's grandmother, who told me that they still have not received the public apology they asked for.  I'm also going to contact the school and offer to come talk to them about the topic, if they would let me.  (So far they have refused to take the Menominees up on such offers; I just thought maybe they'd listen to an outsider.  Well, it's worth a try.)

The development of Linguistics seen through ngram

Linguists have been pretty enthusiastic about the Google ngram viewer, mostly for fun. We've used it some here, in fact. Recently, an image has been circulating of hits for 'phonology' showing a rise in the use of the term over the period of classical generative phonology (from before The Sound Pattern of English into the late 1970s), a period of stability until a decline set in in the early/mid 1990s. I'm not sure who did it, so won't reproduce it here, but here's the search, and you can attach your own dates to the rise and fall of particular frameworks (see also below).

More interesting than the tracking of single terms is comparison. Look, for instance, at the relationship between phonetics and phonology (click to embiggen, as always):

 

Or take the rise of a basic new field, sociolinguistics, compared to a more traditional related area, dialectology:

 

 

Or take a particular principle/law, using neogrammarian and Neogrammarian because ngram is case sensitive, compared to lexical diffusion:

Even more fun are comparisons of particular theories or frameworks ... see for yourself.

On beyond Zebra!

Finally, the answer to a question I've been afraid to ask out loud ...

Congrats to DARE!

Rally for UW, Feb. 14

The anniversary of the event that started it all …

See you there.