Infixing in spam

I check my junk folders pretty often — real stuff does end up in there occasionally still. Aside from reminders about how out of touch I am with some aspects of contemporary American culture, I really enjoy the bizarre grammar you find in stuff in various languages: for languages I don't read well, like Portuguese, finding oddities I can confirm is just plain fun. There's surely some babelfishing going on, though I guess we should refer to it as babelphishing, but a lot is bad in other ways.

Anyway, one of those financial scams today had infixing:

Un Friggin Believable

I can understand the use of friggin here instead of the more powerful form, and the so-called g-dropping goes with the level of style. But doesn't it look odd to see it written as three words? Maybe this is supposed to be getting at the oh. my. god kind of intonation? It's filled with typos and non-native structures, so we can't draw any real conclusions. Of course some typos are aimed at avoiding the filter, surely:

To dascontinue subscriptisn reply wzth only …

What a tangled web we weave: The Don Heinrich Tolzmann affair

This weekend, I attended the 31st annual meeting of the Society for German-American Studies, at the University of Kansas. It’s a small field, and a troubled one. The society aims to be a scholarly one, with some limited success, but there’s a thread of ‘heritage society’ running through the deal. (I specifically do not mean outreach to a public interested in learning about immigration history, language, and such, but people proud of having German ancestry.) Sometimes that’s pretty innocent, but it also has an obvious dark side. The former parts are known by some as “Schnitzelbank stuff”, after the old German drinking song (the word means 'shaving horse'), often represented by a poster with pictures like on that link; I’ll get to the latter in a second. I went to this conference a couple of times as a student and early in my career but hadn’t gone in years because I was uncomfortable with both of these groups.

In a story that has unfolded in that special academic slow-mo, Don Heinrich Tolzmann — the president of the Society, who had served since 1981 — was accused in a review of one of his books of plagiarism back in 2003 (here, and here) and will probably soon lose his job at the University of Cincinnati over it. [NOTE: As laid out in the comments on this post below, the review did not specifically use the word 'plagiarism'] Tolzmann didn’t represent the Schnitzelbank crew, but rather the other not-so-scholarly part of the society: To quote Robert Frizzell from the review that started the whole plagiarism affair, Don Heinrich Tolzmann has led German-American efforts to join the “contemporary American culture of competitive victimization”. Crucially, Frizzell continues, in a understatement that deserves an official award all its own:

Most scholars who study German-Americans recognize that Germans in America are not strong players at this game.

The charges against Tolzmann led him to resign as president, under considerable pressure as I understand it. At the same time, a whole set of officers declined to stand for re-election, triggering a big sea change in leadership, with some solid people nominated to come in. So I submitted an abstract, hoping that the SGAS is about to become a normal scholarly group, freer from their earlier baggage. A lot of others seem to have made the same call — a number of prominent immigration and American historians, literary scholars, and other people were there. I saw some good papers, had some good discussions, and so on. Then came the banquet.

The annual dinner is specifically an awards banquet, featuring this year the presentation of an “Outstanding Achievement Award”. It only struck me when I got there that somebody would get this, and it darted across my mind that Tolzmann’s name was surely floated. Well, that thought should have stuck instead of darting out my ear: Tolzmann was given the prize, in absentia of course. Stunned silence, then scattered applause, and then arms reaching for the bottles of wine on every table. Frizzell, of the key book review, was sitting where I could see him, and did a remarkable job of looking stoic. Half the audience looked more like they had food poisoning. When the dust settled, to the extent it did, came the after dinner presentation:

Ei, du schöne Schnitzelbank: A never-ending story

Ooops, rubber-chicken (and breaded eggplant) buffet dinner instantly becomes drug trip gone bad. Again, you could see hands reaching for wine bottles on tables. Now, the actual talk was remarkably informative, and filled with pretty amazing images. Like most people, for example, I had no idea the song went back to at least the 1830s in Europe. (It has been thought by many to be an American song, and it’s certainly not well known today in Europe.) And I didn’t know that Groucho Marx had done the song as part of his early Hans Pumpernickel routine. And the speaker drew attention to the use of anti-Semitic stereotypes in some old Schnitzelbank posters, even pointing to possibly parallel racial stereotyping in some American versions. So there was some real substance involved, even if it wasn't central to the story of how "the Schnitzelbank brings us all together". The evening ended with singing the song, of course.

Wow, precisely as the Society rids itself of a dark side, the Schnitzelbank side rises to the fore, and with an audience containing a lot of serious scholars. I spent the rest of the evening trying to fit those pieces together. I have now seen beyond the initial shock: The speaker meant well, surely, probably trying to lighten things up after what he knew would be a hard moment in the Society's history. However that plays out over time, the society is moving in a better direction, but it's got a ways to go.

Image from here.

Safire

Man, how lame. Safire this week just quotes letters speculating on the history of an idiom or two. Don't even bother if the print issue is sitting in front of you. (He does cite the Historical Dictionary of American Slang, so our Alert Reader — who's earned caps by now — wins.)

Much more worth your time is Jan Freeman's most recent blog post, here, playing with Gender Genie. I too wonder what samples they drew on. The most recent post on this blog (by our contributor Joe) comes out clearly masculine, but my own posts are mixed. Some stuff that probably reads like male prose to a human (like some earlier Safire Watch posts that I thought had an edge to them) get rated as feminine, to my surprise. The last post on Everett counts as the most masculine of the ones I checked.

You have to figure this is going to be very rough and marginally accurate. And looking at how words/forms like are, she, a, the are flagged (run a text through and you'll see), you end up figuring, yup, this is a messy process. It's worth keeping an eye on, though, as they sharpen this tool.

Rock chalk Jayhawk

I'm in Lawrence, Kansas, for the 31st annual Symposium of the Society for German-American Studies. (That's a long story unto itself on various fronts, one I'll tell if time permits later.) KU has a chant, Rock chalk Jayhawk, KU! (Listen to it here.) So, this is a potentially great example of cot/caught merger: For me, the first is an /a/ and the others are /ɔ/. And how salient can an example get: Three words that are used often together in a string around here and either rhyme or don't.

More importantly, the maps of this merger differ considerably, for example with regard to how far it's moved back eastward across the northern tier of the US: Labov et al. have it still out on the Great Plains on at least one map in the Atlas I think (hey, I'm on the road and can't check), while another of theirs shows it sporadic in Minnesota, most other maps put it in Minnesota, while Erica Benson and others are finding it in western Wisconsin today, where it's pretty salient to speakers.

I remembered this area, northeastern Kansas, as a place that should have the merger. So naturally I've been asking students and others what the chant is and I'm getting a real mix, some obviously merged, some in that unnerving gray zone of near-merger, and others clearly distinct, even among people who say they're from this general area (which I haven't defined, working on the fly). The Labov et al. map linked above does indeed show this as clearly within merged territory, while the old Wolfram map (the one with the merged area in crosshatch — it's around on the internet, I think) shows it near the isogloss, where you'd expect variation.

People truly do not seem very attuned to this: When I say 'oh, you say all those vowels the same/not the same?', I haven't gotten any responses like 'what, you think I sound like I'm from out west?' or 'yeah, that's how we talk; man, those Iowa people sound weird, don't they?' A merged speaker who turned out to be from South Dakota seemed to think her merger was somehow distinct (forgive the pun) from local speech. Matthew Gordon has done nice work in this general part of the country (with a recent story floating around many newspapers, see here) and he comments specifically on the low-back merger here, crucially:

Many language changes attract negative attention particularly when they are associated with young people. It is not uncommon, for example, to hear criticisms of the use of ‘like’ as a discourse marker, a feature common among younger speakers (e.g., “He like just came out of like the store.”). The cot/caught merger, however, seems not to attract any such stigmatization. In fact, people are largely unaware of it.

That's how it sure seems to be in Kansas … even when the "internationally famous" school chant exemplifies the pattern.

Joke place names

Pretty much everybody has joke placenames, I imagine, where a name is twisted into a negative. People from Indianapolis call it India-No-Place, and our corespondent formerly from Purdue calls that place Purdon't (or l'université perdue) and the town West Laffalot.

Here in Wisconsin, I've heard people call Mount Horeb Mountain Horrible (which doesn't quite work for it, since it's a very pleasant place, and I'd love to be able to visit the Grumpy Troll, their brew pub, more regularly.) Yesterday I learned LaCrotch for LaCrosse and the marvelous Crappleton for Appleton. The last one is downright Simpsonian, especially given the name of Bart's teacher. Of course these show up all over the web, at least most of them, and there's a real Mount Horrible, in New South Wales I think, though I've never climbed it.

News hours nuggets

Joe Sestak (D-Penn, one of the guys who helped the Dems take the House) just twice used the word province, as in the big political-geographical units within Iraq, and both times came out with providence. Turns out, if you search for, say, Anbar Providence, you actually get a lot of hits. A lot of these look like military families and Sestak is a recent vet, so this pattern may be sociolectal.

That's one really unfortunate reanalysis or confusion ,or whatever it is. Here's the Merriam-Webster definition of that word:

1 a often capitalized : divine guidance or care b capitalized : God conceived as the power sustaining and guiding human destiny
2 : the quality or state of being provident

If the American presence in places like Anbar is anything, it is not divinely guided or much else good.

Sestak's Republican counterpart in the segment, Mike Rogers of Michigan, also produced another interesting item:

ought notta do it

That doesn't sound insanely bad to me, but the missus flinched visibly. She says oughta not do it is fine, and ought not to do it is formal-sounding but grammatical. Maybe the style level rules out the cliticization there?

"Complete stop"

OK, this is well-worn territory and I don't have time to check facts or anything so this is surely a waste of bandwidth, but it just bugged me: This morning on NPR, as I happened to walk by the radio, I heard a woman's voice (no idea who it was and don't care enough to find out beyond searching npr.org to see that the term isn't up for anything from today) complaining about usage. Basically, the point I heard was:

Don't talk about 'complete stops'. What other kind is there?

Actually, as everyone who drives in the US must surely know, we have a vocabulary for incomplete stops. I tend to call them rolling stops, but plenty of people say California stop, and there are other names too, I'm sure. (Google these two and you're flooded with hits.) Despite the claim that rolling stop is an oxymoron, that's what happens when you modify nouns: They no longer mean what they did before. A near collision emphatically does not involve a collision, all-but collapse is not an actual collapse, a no show specifically does not involve showing, and so on.

We might complain about the practice of incomplete stopping (it's dangerous — a bad driving practice) and even that it's so common that we have a whole vocabulary for it. But that's different.

But more generally, is NPR going to contest the NYT for the worst language coverage on this side of the pond? (Sorry, guys, but the BBC has you both beat by a mile once you leave the U.S.) With the real experts they regularly carry, can't somebody get through to them about this?

Mano a something or other … awkwardly

Virtually every reader of this blog knows the mano a mano eggcorn (see here for details, using the mano-on-mano variant, with mention of mano y mano). Spanish "hand-to-hand" becomes "man-to-man" combat.

Tonight, Jon Stewart interviewed John "I am sooo history" McCain and produced an uncomfortable twist: Stewart offered to go mano-a-mano against McCain, surely in the eggcorny meaning. The latter, namely, suffered serious, lasting damage to his right arm in Vietnam when he was tortured as a prisoner of war. (He does have some use of it; for example, he did shake hands with Stewart tonight.) McCain clearly took the joke as intended by Stewart, putting his right arm out for an arm-wrestling match. Ouch.

Update, Wed. night Minor correction: Stewart actually plays off of the mano y mano variant.

Graphic by the famous Déro from here.

Have we been infiltrated?

Oh.my.god. I heard this early in the week but only today confirmed it with my own eyes: In the new Newsletter of the American Dialect Society (and yup, it is known as NADS), William Safire is listed as a member. That's weird. But it gets much worse: Our own contributor Joe is the next name after his in the alphabetical directory.

Listen up, young fellow: Your posting rights are in grave danger here. I have no particular reason to believe that you're actually a mole for "On Language", but I am superstitious. This won't work. Get a Sager or a Sahlman or a Sajak or a Sakic or a Salas to sign up. You can't be next to him in the ADS directory and contribute here. As Colbert would say, you're on notice.

I have spoken.

— Mr. Verb

Bush on the cutting edge ... of grammaticalization?

Just heard sound bites from Bush talking yesterday and he produced "and/or" as what sounded to my ear distinctly like a single foot: án.dor, where the period marks a syllable boundary. For me, this has to be two separate feet, distinct words: ánd ór. Bush's pronunciation was kind of jarring, in fact.

Is this a minor case of grammaticalization? (The wikipedia page on this topic, here, unfortunately doesn't do a very good job on some points of explaining this topic, like the nature of language change. Wikiality isn't perfect yet.) That is, is Bush reinterpreting the two words as a single unit, indicating either conjunction or disjunction? It's not unreasonable to have a single word meaning {[AND|OR] …}, surely.

It's been a long time since I hung out with people who work with this stuff for a living, but I don't recall hearing that pronunciation even among people who use "and/or" as core technical vocab. Or maybe my memory's just failing.

Kelsie Harder: An amazing life in language

Despite what you might think from my rants about Safire, I really like the New York Times. Their political coverage is too conservative (cf. the whole Judith Miller deal), but they run some really good stuff. I'd subscribe for Krugman, Rich, some of the sports stuff and above all Science Times, even though the language stuff there is often junk. (But why always mess up with language?!?!?!?)

One serious strength is the often remarkable obituary section, of all things: You can learn a lot. And no, I don't mean Yeltsin, not even Berto Gonzales (as Bush is said to call him), who is deader than Yeltsin, even if he's still walking around. No, yesterday, they ran an obit for

Kelsie B. Harder, Authority on Proper Names and Their Roots, Dies at 84

Now, I knew that name, but had little idea how much he'd actually done, from working on dictionaries to researching proverbs. Any man who writes a book on The Vocabulary of Hog Killing has got your attention, probably — sounds like it draws on Perrry County, Tennessee, where he was from. I often think that lexicographers and onomastics folks don't get their due among linguists, in part because this is regarded as 'butterfly collecting' by some people. That's a real shame.

But the oddity of the piece is that he …

noted that many baby boomer girls had names like Heather and Tammy, which he said recalled those of Playboy centerfolds.

Can this be right? Those are fine names, and I've known plenty of women with each. Let's even assume that there was a spike in those names among the baby boomer generation. Who in the world would name their baby after a Playboy centerfold? (Oh, honey, at this blessed moment, I say we forget about names familiar in our families and go with "Miss November". Uhhhh, I mean, "Tiffany".) More fundamentally, were these names particularly common among the women who were featured there? Or did they sound like centerfold names back then? How could we establish a clear connection there?

Well, OK, I suppose we could have named one of the girls "Tammy", but it wouldn't be for any centerfolds. (See image above.) "Tammy Verb" … kinda has a ring to it, doesn't it?

Dick Cavett: Hired to make Safire look smart?

Dick Cavett has a still-new kind-of-language-related blog-like thing (sorry, sometimes things are vague) on Times Select (subscription only, and not worth it). Over at Language Log, folks have been swatting him like a J.D. Durbin pitch that's drifted out over the middle of the plate (hint: current ERA = 94.50 for the D-backs). In the latest, Mark Liberman nails him for a whole set of incorrections Cavett clearly never made the vaguest effort to check.

One thing that wasn't strictly 'wrong' was that the plural of attorney general should be attorneys general — this plural and others like it are widely used in the US, although it's just a compound for most of us. Still, if the Onion has dedicated an article to mocking the usage as pedantic (here), it's worse than wrong in some sense.

I've been hoping the Gray Lady would step up and hire somebody smart and informed to write about language … at least to counterbalance Safire if not to replace him.

Major correction: J.D. "Real Deal" Durbin has changed addresses a couple times since the start of the season it turns out ... I should have checked. Went from Arizona to Boston to Phillie and then to AAA Ottawa, I think. Hard to tell when you're moving around that fast. Anyhow, salary this year: 380,000, US.

Safire watch: Not even "On words"

Well, our alert reader's prediction didn't really pan out this morning: Safire's "On Language" contains no language experts of any sort. But like last week, he doesn't really try to say much on language, even "On words" — he once again doesn't step up to the plate. He treats two unappetizing items, varmints and half-breed, but neither with much eye to language structure or history. You're much better off this morning just going to Jan Freeman's The Word, where the topic (mmm, coffee) is more appealing, the prose better and the information much richer.

Let's deal with the reprehensible part first: He refers to a "beautiful half-Indian, half-Anglo" woman from an old western ("Duel in the Sun") and reports a problem "doing some research on the web" (whoa, he was doing this, or his assistant? Oh, sorry). He's bothered, it seems, that he can't use the old term half-breed ("an unprintable slur", good call on that, at least, and it shows implicit understanding of "use versus mention"), but then bemoans the alternatives, with his own choice "just not satisfying", if apparently better than mixed race and such. After Imus, "writers are on guard not to give offense" and he's in a tither about how to talk about racial identity generally. With Barack Obama and Tiger Woods, we assume readers will know something about their backgrounds, so 'of mixed heritage' can work better. Few of us recall Pearl Chavez's 1946 character, so you need a more precise characterization.

In the end, though, most of us are concerned about more than pithiness when it comes to talking about race: He's bothered by the lack of a clear, fixed term when the problem is that we as a society don't currently have a handle on how to deal with the substance. If you're looking for a handy term to let you waltz through this thicket without breaking a sweat, you've really missed the boat.

OK, now to a word: varmint. The hook of course is Romney's gaffe about being a hunter, specifically a "small varmint" hunter. Varmint is native vocabulary for me, but my gun for shooting such things is called a "squirrel rifle". Romney's remark sounds wrong, facts aside: varmints are by definition small. The Oxford English Dictionary on-line gives examples of bigger animals — deer, bear cub, panther, etc., all from the 19th c. — but those aren't modern varmints. Merriam-Webster's definition fits current usage as I know it far better:

1: an animal considered a pest; specifically: one classed as vermin and unprotected by game law
2: a contemptible person: RASCAL; broadly: PERSON, FELLOW

But the word itself is of some interest: Safire brushes it off as "a dialect form of vermin, rooted in the Latin word for 'worm'". Well, vermin has a variant varmin. That kind of vowel lowering before r is hardly uncommon (see eye-dialect clerk/clark, there/thar, etc.). But vermin is a collective (I can't imagine anybody saying *a vermin), while varmint is a count noun. (Freeman's column is in fact about the rise of "a coffee". And if the green looks like the color of a certain chain's logo, the color palette works better than I hoped.)

More striking is the t tacked on, something dealt with here a while back. Together with the t/d-less forms mentioned there from ads-l (she use to do such and such, etc.), I wonder if there's not a little more of a story in there about where this change occurs: Most classic examples, treated earlier, all end in -s or -sh, but I bet there are more with -n, like varmint. Maybe that's out there in the literature.

Finally, a question: Don't lots of people pronounce this word as varmit? I thought the famous user pictured above was in that category, but if you listen to the sound files here, there's a clear n. Dictionaries seem to give it with an n, but I think hear it often without.

Colbert reinvents a wheel

Colbert's "Metaphor off" with Sean Penn last night was brilliant. But Colbert told Penn "Metaphors be with you." I now have it on good authority that George Lakoff used to have that up on his door back in the early 1980s. Turns out, the joke is all over the place — see the image.

Well, Stephen, you lost to Sean, and we just can't rub it in. Just do us a favor: Please crush George Clooney into molecular dust during your upcoming Hyperbole Off. (See here for details, and video from the Penn show.)

Central Time Zone = dialect area?

So, David Pesetsky (MIT) spoke yesterday on campus about "Why nouns and verbs build different kinds of phrases". Can't believe I missed a lecture by a leading formal syntax person when he was talking about the Hatfields and McCoys of lexical categories (damn those Nouns), but I've talked to a couple of folks who were there and did get a handout.

He apparently made a passing remark about the Central Time Zone as a dialect area, maybe tongue in cheek. In this region (or rather, for one Iowa speaker specifically), you apparently don't find "X-trace effects" (where X = that, for, P and tensed verbs). If I understand the point, he was saying that CTZ speakers have sentences like the one in (d), this all from (13) of the handout:

[non-subject wh → optional that]
a. What do you think [Mary read ___ ]?
b. What do you think [that Mary read ___ ]?

[subject wh → no that]
c. Who do you think [ ___ read the book]?
d. *Who do you think [that ___ read the book]?

The last one is definitely out for me, but it does sound like something I've heard, and it's not anything I listen for. I do hear another pattern pretty often, resumptive pronouns (example from a Lingua paper by Cann et al.):

I had some other point which I can't remember what it is.

I'm no syntactician, but these must surely be related at some level of abstraction, since both are about filling gaps. Resumptive pronouns strike me as more age-graded than regional (with young people doing it more), though it probably has a regional aspect to it. Anyway, there's an empirical question: let's get out there and see if these patterns sound good to speakers from our time zone.

OK, enough syntax; let's talk dialects. Let's assume he was being flip about the CTZ as a dialect area, and you may chuckle at the thought that Biloxi and the Rio Grande Valley share significant regional features with International Falls and Fargo. (And did Indiana flipflop between dialects twice a year before they finally accepted daylight saving time?) Let's call it 'Fly-over Talk' or something.

If this has a clear geographical pattern to it, what is that pattern? Iowa is mostly Midlands, and we know from work like Erica Benson's that lots of syntactic stuff (including innovations) is floating around in there, and flowing from there. Is this Midlands? Is it tied to resumptive pronouns more directly, like used by the same speakers?

Finally: Everett on Pirahã

Over a week ago, I noted that NPR had done a piece on Dan Everett and his, ahem, striking claims about the Pirahã language. This stuff has been plowed through repeatedly on blogs and in the news, and even the new (April 16) article in the New Yorker has already been worked over pretty well. I finally got a chance to read that, if only quickly, and for those who won't read this piece and the scholarly papers the controversy has sprung from, let me make a few casual observations.

First, though, I agree with what I've read several times: The reporter, John Colapinto, did a solid job. Like a lot of the best journalistic work, he seems to have a pretty good sense of how to sketch the landscape in linguistic theory — Chomsky, Pinker, Pesetsky (who's in Madison right now), Whorf and Sapir are key players in this story. It's a shame that the Linguistics Wars motif still plays so prominently, though, since most of us have moved beyond the good versus evil view of these particular theoretical differences.

In fact, Everett's personality ends up being directly relevant: He is pictured as he's talked about in the field, as a 'bomb thrower'. The thing is, he's changed sides enough times that you may not be sure exactly who he's out to destroy at any given point: Is he a foot soldier for SIL (the missionary Summer Institute for Linguistics)? Or is he hellbent on destroying their reputation? Is he going to war for Chomsky? Or at war with Chomsky? He's been all those things and more, and a true believer on all counts, it seems. This has led some people to conclude that he's more about slinging crap than moving the field forward. (I don't know him personally, by the way, in any relevant way, and can't judge.)

But the actual papers on this topic are worth looking at — Everett's earlier one in Current Anthropology and responses there, plus now a response by Nevins, Pesetsky & Rodriguez and a counterresponse by Everett (the last two available from LingBuzz). The core principle Everett proposes is this:

IMMEDIACY OF EXPERIENCE PRINCIPLE (IEP) IN PIRAHÃ: Declarative Pirahã utterances contain only assertions related directly to the moment of speech, either experienced (i.e. seen, overheard, deduced, etc. – as per the range of Pirahã evidentials, as in Everett (1986, 289)) by the speaker or as witnessed by someone alive during the lifetime of the speaker).

In a world where most linguists don't believe that culture shapes the fundamental patterns of grammar, that's a big claim, and it makes a lot of predictions, including that Pirahã has no phrase structure and no counting. That these limits are directly cultural is crucial, since Everett's arguing that these people lack things that are widely regarded as reflecting core human capacities: It can sound alarmingly close to saying they aren't 'normal' humans, and he tries to dodge that, obviously. Peter Gordon (author of an earlier paper in Science on the lack of numbers in Pirahã) is quoted in the New Yorker on this …

if there was some kind of Appalachian inbreeding or retardation going on, you'd see it in hairlines, facial features, motor ability. It bleeds over. They [the Pirahã] don't show any of that.

Boy, am I reassured. And I know our friends and colleagues from the Southern highlands will be pleased by this scientist's characterization of them. At any rate, Nevins et al. pit Dan Everett today ("CA", for the piece in Current Anthropology) against the earlier Dan Everett ("Diss", etc.). Here's their punchline:

CA asserts ... that the embedded clauses amply documented and described in the earlier work are not actually embedded clauses, but offers no account or even acknowledgment of the numerous facts that argue in favor of the old view over the new. Similarly, CA offers as an argument for the new view the absence of long-distance wh-movement, but offers no new account of the data that in earlier work motivated the claim that Pirahã has no overt wh-movement of any kind. Likewise, as we have seen, CA asserts that Pirahã lacks quantifiers, but offers no coherent evidence against the proposal that the words described as quantifiers in the earlier work were described wrongly. …

CA simply asserts that Pirahã grammar has properties that, if true, would place it outside the pale of grammar and culture as we know it and would demand a special explanation for Pirahã's seeming uniqueness.

They argue that the structures in the language, as analyzed by Everett himself, are thoroughly consistent with what we find in other languages. Everett's response? From the abstract:

I … argue that the methods traditionally used in the Generative Grammar tradition are flawed and do not meet the scientific standards accepted across different fields in science, thereby making it difficult to assess the validity of the claims made by Nevins et al.

His actual argumentation about language structure looks muddy in many places, in part because the data are complex and unfamiliar to me. My hunch is that some of the material presented would indeed count as showing more 'grammar' than Everett is trying to posit, but I am not sure that the current state of knowledge allows any firm conclusion yet. After all, the basic analysis of a lot of, say, German grammar is still difficult and controversial, there's not exactly such a descriptive tradition for Pirahã.

Everett is definitely right that the "fieldwork in the library" school of linguistics is fatally flawed. And if you don't have firm control of your data, you are very likely to screw up the analysis: garbage in, garbage out. Most of us understand all of this, but he pretty much says that you can't draw any conclusions about a language by reading the published literature on it without doing fieldwork on the language. This gets close to undermining the purpose of publishing a lot of scholarly work, and it looks like a tool for discrediting Nevins et al.'s interpretations of his work — some of those strike me as fair and pretty uncontroversial, others are hard to judge, and he's no doubt right on some points.

But for a guy claiming to be so invested in defending "scientific method" and "standards", parts of this are too much of a rambling rant, with a section on ad hominem attacks by Nevins et al. and a big section on all the people he's gotten to do work on Pirahã language and culture. More to the point, he doesn't lay out clear, explicit arguments about lots of key claims he makes. Let me conclude with one tiny example:

Nevins et al. note that some analyze German as not allowing prenominal possessive structures to embed other possessives, unlike English (Everett, p. 9):

a. [John's car's] motor (English)
b. *[Hans-ens Auto]-s Motor (German)

He quotes an email from Manfred Krifka showing that German does have recursion here, with the familiar restriction of prenominal possessives in German to names and kinship terms. From this, he concludes that:

they get the German facts wrong. More interestingly, the German restriction might in fact be cultural, which would offer further support to the central thesis of Everett (2005b).

He repeats the first assertion a couple of times, giving the impression that Nevins et al. somehow made this up or missed obvious information. In fact, I believe that they are taking a pretty common view, even if it's not the entire story, i.e., that it's possible with certain types of nouns. [See the comment on this post by A.S.] On the second point, that the restriction to names and kinship terms is "cultural", he provides no additional account of how this follows. As I was mulling this over, I told someone about this and their response was: If the German restriction is cultural, it sounds like it means that English speakers somehow believe that inanimate objects can possess other objects. It's a smallish point about German, but highlights how cautious we should be about languages, especially when we have precious little information.

In the end, I'm pretty discouraged to see this as the latest example of linguistics in the media. Everett, in his own paper, gets too close to sounding like a preacher on a street corner, not enough like a scientist.

Update, April 23, 4:54: New piece up at Physorg.com on this.

(Image from here. It's the Maici River where the Pirahã live.)

Wisco dialects rock on ...

Check it out here. Hey, the chair of English at Marquette, a linguist, is agreeing with Tom Purnell.

Some good verbs

Every now and again, I look at traffic patterns for this blog ... especially how people get here. Just a month or two ago, those were largely random searches for strings that happen to appear here — don't even bother asking. Now, to the delight of the residents of Verbtown, it looks like most hits are coming from people who've bookmarked us, or reached us through links on linguistics various blogs. The little street through our neighborhood has some traffic.

Just now, instead of working on one of the several serious ideas for posts that are bubbling in my aged brain, I checked on these referrals and found this google search:

what are some good verbs

Got your answer right here: Mrs. Verb, now she's a great Verb. It's not her real name, of course, and if it was, it'd be her married name. But she's great. And at the Verb family reunion (coming up soon back in Springfield), everybody says "now, she's a good one." And my great uncle, Daniel Webster Verb, he was good too. Served in WWI, like his grandfather, who fought honorably for the Union. Of the kids, well, our youngest daughter is of course the apple of our verbal eye. Not such a big 'doer' (see graphic), but cute as a button.

So, random google searcher, those are some good Verbs. I guess there are some bad Verbs too, but you didn't ask about them.

Bleeping ... kind of

The weekend was pretty intense and the radio in the old pickup isn't that good, especially when you're far from civilization, but I swear I heard this yesterday morning on This American Life: They did a story on a guy who is a screaming jerk. He goes around asking people what they think of him. Turns out, they all agree: He's an "asshole". His mother doesn't use that word, but she confirms the diagnosis.

So, the word asshole is used constantly throughout, with a bleep. But they bleep the second syllable, not the first, so that instead of [bleep]hole, you get ass[bleep] time after time. Many readers who didn't hear the story will probably say "cute" (or "oh for cute", if you're from parts of the Upper Midwest).

But the bigger point here is how slippery perception can be: I think my brain must have 'corrected' that bleep the first five times or so that it ran, before I suddenly noticed that they were bleeping the 'wrong' part.

Now that I've ruined the joke (sorry about that), feel free to go here and listen to the show.

Some good news, seriously

In the short time we've had the news feed for "linguistics" up here, you may have noticed that two universities — Tulane and Carnegie Mellon — have announced new linguistics majors. And we've seen news about a variety of linguists moving into high places of various sorts. Linguistics is not only hot and in, it's getting hotter and inner (in-er?).

University funding

This cartoon was brought back by Joe from yesterday's Center Daily News at State College, Penn. (Reprinted with permission.) It originally ran in April 2003, just so we're reminded that this is hardly anything new ...

Safire: Foul ball? DNP?

Well, our weekly Safire Watch was first delayed by my travels, and then it turns out his "On Language" column isn't really significantly about language: There a lame attempt to connect the early American practice of "bundling" with the bundling of campaign donations today. Then some political commentary — in fact one of those where I agree with him, namely that we need civil liberties.

So, it's hard to say that our alert reader struck out this week — more like Safire didn't step up to the plate.

Note that I'm starting to add subject labels on posts.

Safire: Rain delay

I won't get to Safire's new column until tonight or tomorrow, but thanks to Erin McKean, here's something even better: An old Onion column on Safire.

William Safire Orders Two Whoppers Junior
September 20, 2000 | Issue 36•33

NEW YORK–Stopping for lunch at a Manhattan Burger King, New York Times 'On Language' columnist William Safire ordered two "Whoppers Junior" Monday. "A majority of Burger King patrons operate under the fallacious assumption that the plural is 'Whopper Juniors,'" Safire told a woman standing in line behind him. "This, of course, is a grievous grammatical blunder, akin to saying 'passerbys' or, worse yet, the dreaded 'attorney generals.'" Last week, Safire patronized a midtown Taco Bell, ordering "two Big Beef Burritos Supreme."

In the meantime, we'll fry up the rest of the pan fish with some eggs, finish off those last few cans of Leinie's and be home before you can say "nominal compounding".

TETU: A new interpretation

Joe reports in from a conference (where he has less blogging access than we do here on a fishing trip) that Optimality Theory's famous "TETU", the emergence of the unmarked, has been redefined, in a speech error during a talk:

The Emergency of the Unmarked.

We've got some phonologists readers out there; I want some good examples of how the emergency of the unmarked arises and gets resolved.

Film at 11.

Update 9:51 pm: Joe reports back that the speaker in question was John Scott, a grad student from Indiana who was speaking on Gothic and Sanskrit partial reduplication at the Germanic Linguistics Annual Conference at Penn State. Joe likes the idea of carefully defining the emergency of the unmarked and getting a place for it in the literature. (He also says that trout seasons starts this weekend out there ... maybe I shoulda gone with those Germanic linguists.)

Dick and the war

Mrs. Verb had to watch Jon Stewart all alone last night because Mr. Verb is off on one of his fishing trips with the boys. She thought he would have liked John Oliver's comment on the proposed new "War Czar" - he was talking about Cheney and said "The Vice President mongs a good war. Who knows what he'll mong next?" According to the Oakland News, that's 60's-speak for "war monger," but Mrs. Verb certainly never heard it in the 60's. Of course, she was pretty busy raising the little Verblets.

Meta-comment

By the way, as I read the ongoing stream of comments on old and new posts alike, I've got to say that they have become an extremely important and unexpected payoff for writing the random stuff that gets posted here. Sometimes, the comments are simply amusing, and sometimes they provide some little piece of new information. But a lot of the time, they really bear on bigger issues and current discussions of various sorts. So, thanks.

PS: I really wanted the (generally similar) image from Despair, Inc. for this post, but can't find it.

A gap in linguistica Simpsonia: 'Implosion'

The whole world of linguists and 'language heads'* owes a big debt to HeiDeas for her fundamental work in opening a new frontier in the empirical basis for serious linguistics, "The Simpsons". The value of this material as a tool for public understanding of language structure and for linguistic pedagogy outstrips almost anything out there. It's to the point that if i want to have a good example of something for a public talk about linguistics, I turn to her stuff quickly.

Now the word has slipped out that the person behind most of the Wisconsin Englishes Project, Tom Purnell, has used the speech of the 'slack-jawed yokels' on the show (Cletus and his family) to start unraveling the issue of possible 'implosion' in initial b, d, g in some dialects of American English. (Implosives are produced, it's generally said, by lowering the larynx while you've closed off the airstream, see here; it's different from this.) I don't know the details of Tom's work yet, but stay tuned.

*I've heard 'language head' in Wisconsin linguistics for a while now, couple of years. It's like 'Dead head' or something: 'head' means someone who's really into something. Here, it's mostly people who really like learning languages and learning about them as opposed to linguists. Maybe this is the positive word we need in the place of the badly stained maven.

Babelfish!!!!

In the last post, I commented on some English text that looked pretty puzzling. A comment on that post provides the likely answer ... it was probably an on-line translation, like babelfish. And yeah, I know there are now better services out there than babelfish, but you really want something that's not too good! And not all of the oddities in that particular text look like babelfish stuff.

But think big: I see real party game potential here — a modern form of the old game "telephone". Maybe we need to work out the rules for "Babelfish THIS" or whatever we call it.

News feeds: update

The Google news feeds are turning out to be pretty engaging, in part in unexpected ways. The range from really local to really international is nice, for example: I wouldn't have known about the new linguistics major at Emory otherwise, nor about the new society for Maltese linguistics.

Some other stuff is off the intended mark, like the use of 'linguist' in the DynCorp story (although it's hilarious to read about "a disputed $4.65 billion linguistics contract"!). We are reminded that 'dialect' still means 'language' to lots of folks, e.g. when talking about dubbing Spiderman into Bhojpuri (where it seems to be widely believed among speakers that it's a dialect of Hindi) or singing in Tamashek (an Afroasiatic language, part of the Berber group, from Mali).

But what the heck does this link mean? Here's the key quote:

The film Bobby now on DVD directed by Emilio Estevez captures raw dialect between different ethicists of actual accounts of people who were present during the final hours of the assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy. ... Ironically, the dialect is true today as it was then which spoke volumes regarding current discuss of imagination reform.

OK, 'ethicist' should probably read ethnicities, and maybe 'dialect' should be dialectic? But what is 'imagination reform'? Immigration reform doesn't quite fit (though I haven't seen the movie and there is a possible immigration angle, given the assassin).

(Dysfunctional) departments, brief update

The old post about language departments (see also the various follow-ups) seems to continue generating discussion, in person and by email. Last night, a student posted a long new comment on that original post, in fact. If you care about this issue — the fate of humanities departments or of the University of Wisconsin or even of higher ed generally — you should read that comment.

One notable point is that this student confirms the effectiveness of the non-literature-centered program in German, though it sounds like the traditional lit program is dying on the vine. If you've read the comment, you probably expect the next point to be about the Francophone lit student (writing about 'people without a real language' — hint: they don't mean Genie). You might even expect the old "we linguists have to do a better job of educating non-linguists" argument. But, alas, many of those who do "literary and cultural studies" are not simply folks who haven't been enlightened. I don't think I know the faculty in question here, but the norm in such programs is open and often vehement dismissal of linguistics and other fields. I've had many discussions with such people from universities across the U.S., who revel in their wilful ignorance of what other fields know. The sad result, in this case, is a student who's going to produce worthless material, a paper or more based on fundamental misunderstandings about things that people have worked out pretty carefully. That attitude alone is enough reason to kill such programs. And like Comp Lit here, some are being killed, but the zombie faculty still roam the halls.

What the non-lit-centered program in German brings to the table is precisely the possibility of teaching students in a more crosscutting way. Joe tells me that a major key to their success is that the core linguists in the department are allied in various ways with a group of non-linguists who don't wear tight blinders — they cooperate in Netherlandic, medieval, and German-American studies, pedagogy, and so on — and I know that they and their students are plugged in around campus.

But there's a sobering point in there for linguistics departments too: There are enough linguists who do the same as these literary navel-gazers, assuming that their little frameworks are self-contained, safely insulated worlds. Look around at the best departments in the field and the worst departments in the field and you get pretty good correlations: Good ones are strongly allied with other fields (lots of them); weak ones aren't (some are hostile to related departments). Many of the best ones include a range of approaches and specializations; many of the worst ones have mostly true believers.

Can we fight off the zombies?

Truthiness lives!

Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of The Nation, was on Colbert yesterday — I missed it, sadly. She parries Colbert as well in this show as I've seen anybody do it. At one point (5:17 mark in Raw Story's video here), after he challenges her very directly, she says:

Stephen, you know what I believe in? Truthiness.

I've been missing that word.

Zimmer delivers again: Chomsky qua heavyweight

This just in from the ever reliable Ben Zimmer, under the subject line "So that's why they call him a heavyweight":

Mr. V,
Didn't want you to miss this choice quote in today's New York Times (here) about linguistics heavyweight Noam Chomsky ...

"Listening to Noam Chomsky," said a psychologist in her 50s, "always turns me on."
--Ben

Now, that is brilliant. (In sad contrast, I read straight through that without making this connection at all.)

You'd love to know how Chomsky reacts to the quote, right?

Baseball linguistics: Daisuke > Dice K

Over at the Columnist Manifesto, Oscar Madison, self-described professor of Constitutional Law and New York Mets fans (if not in that order), has a nice post on the new Boston pitcher, Daisuke Matsuzaka.

His name is written 松坂 大輔, according to wikipedia (I can't vouch for that), and they give the IPA as [da̟i̞s-ke̞ ma̟t͡süza̟ka̟], noting that it is "often rendered as "DICE-k" or "DICE-keh"; he's nicknamed "The Monster" (怪物 kaibutsu)". This may look striking to English speakers who don't know Japanese: we have a word spelled in English with a vowel that doesn't get pronounced: Why transliterate his first name as Daisuke but pronounce it without that second vowel? Japanese has "voiceless vowels", as those who've had an intro to linguistics know. Between voiceless consonants like [s] and [k], high vowels (i, u) sound like an [h] or almost like silence, because the vocal folds don't vibrate during the vowel. The IPA given for Matsuzaka's other name shows a hyphen there, which is not an IPA symbol, presumably suggesting silence. Seems a little imprecise given the level of detail in the rest of the transcription.

But the rule is really much slipperier than the textbook account of it, being highly variable and applying sometimes to mid vowels, etc. Like most sources, the Handbook of the IPA calls devoicing a tendency and says (p. 118 in the current edition) that:

As often as not, preceding fricatives replace them altogether.

So, after an s sound, we often get complete loss of the vowel. (If you want to hear the samples discussed in the Handbook, you can download the full set here.) Tim Vance's oldie but goodie (hey, it's from 1987) Introduction to Japanese Phonology devotes a chapter to this phenomenon, with lots of focus on the variability of the process. (There's a big technical lit, some recent on the topic too, but I'm figuring this post is for non-linguists.)

This isn't the first time American English has integrated a Japanese word into our pronunciation while losing a vowel or two along the way. Our word skosh comes from Japanese sukoshi ‘a little bit’. (The meaning has changed for many speakers to be something like 'slightly', so that you hear 'a skosh bit'.) So, how come we lose that last vowel too, instead of saying skoshie? As Vance notes (p. 48), a high vowel after a voiceless consonant and before a pause tends to devoice.

But Daisuke's (nick)name just doesn't sit that well with me: It calls to mind that otherwise forgotten wretch Andrew Dice-Clay. I think I'd call Daisuke "the Monster" or kaibutsu.

Graphic from here.

Chomsky as "linguistics heavyweight"

So, NPR's thing on the Everett controversy (see below if you didn't read it) included this:

His findings are challenging long-held linguistic theories … championed by linguistics heavyweight Noam Chomsky.

The transcript up at NPR was automatically done, I hope: It had "linguistics heavyweight known Chomsky." But something about calling Chomsky a heavyweight strikes me as wrong — it doesn't work. Wouldn't you say intellectual giant or something? Heavyweight has a bad ring to it here. This collocation shows up pretty often, and it looks like often (usually?) in negative contexts.

Blog against theocracy

Having been away, I am behind on my normal blog reading, including Greenbelt, where I only now see that this weekend there has been a Blog against Theocracy. See here. (Check it out just for the graphic ... and there's a ton of great images out there; the one on the right is from there.)

Let's be clear: While my own views are close to those of the great country songwriter Robbie Fulks (see here), or classic Freethinker values if you want a Wisconsin reference (here), you are utterly welcome to your own religious views and values, and I will defend your right to hold them. But the boundary is clear: Religion and particular religious principles are not and cannot become the basis for how our society is run.

When I talk to thoughtful people of faith about religion in public life, most agree on the key point, that religious freedom is crucial for all of us. I fear that a lot of people don't realize how far we have slid in recent years toward theocracy.

Pirahã, or rather Dan Everett, on NPR

No time to write about it, but NPR had a long piece this morning on Dan Everett, linguist and former missionary, and his highly controversial work on Pirahã language. In that work, he denies that the language has recursion. This strikes lots and lot of linguists, me included, as highly unlikely. Check here for details.

Safire watch: "When the going gets weird ...

the weird turn to the pros." (OK, yeah, that's an awkward paraphrase of Hunter S. Thompson.) I got up in a fine mood this morning: Watched a great hockey game on TV last night, where Michigan State played stout hockey and came back from 0-1 in the third period to beat heavily favored Boston College 3-1. (Sorry, BC fans, I'm sure you're stinging after two close losses in the finals in two years, but you gotta admit, it was the kind of game the college season should end with.) Then, I fire up the computer and find this comment from The Ridger on the recent post on wanton to do:

Hey — check Jan Freeman's column today - you're in it! This post! wanton eggcorns!

Now, leaving aside how unnerving it is to see this blog mentioned in the mighty Boston Globe, that column highlights why I think Jan Freeman is a journalist we should be reading: The world needs to understand eggcorns. I don't mean simply that this is an interesting point about language, but it tells us smart about how language changes (in a particularly slippery, indeterministic way) and how what people often think about as 'mistakes' are something much richer and more revealing. Those of us who read Language Log and such things know about this, but there's a vast public out there that doesn't. We need people like Jan Freeman out there bridging that gap.

So, what a coincidence that Safire's "On Language" opens with a paragraph that quotes the very same Jan Freeman. He's treating three very different meanings of existential that are out there today — he starts from phrases like existential threat, touches on existentialist philosophers and closes with a little thing on "existential sentences". (The last one drifts off almost into mavenanity, warning about the overuse of dummy subjects.) And I don't see a lot of actual mistakes — Søren Kierkegaard should have his 'slash o', but that's hardly a felony.

So, on to Safire Watch: In addition to Freeman, Sartre, Nietzsche, he gives a little space to Geoffrey Nunberg, and even mentions Talking Right. Once again, alert reader, you've nailed it: He's cited a linguist, a journalist who write insightfully about language and a set of philosophers.

Ironic closing twist: The print version of On Language today runs on facing a full page ad for Henry Rollins' new show, "WANTED for free expression".

Placename game

Will Shortz just did a thing on NPR where he gave a word and you were supposed to give a name of a major city that rhymed with it. His last clue was Yemen, which he pronounced what I take to be the usual American way, namely Y[ɛ]men. I am familiar with Y[e:]men, but didn't happen to think about that. The answer, he hinted, was "a city in Germany". So, I'm trying to think of major German cities that would be spelled ending in -emmen, that is, with a lax or short vowel (the double consonant spelling signals that). But he quickly said: Br[ɛ]men. In German, and in my experience in English too, it's pronounced Br[e:]men. So I think, is this a dialect thing? But Merriam-Webster gives both, with his version first. I would have really avoided that one — the basic variability really throws you off.

Morphophonology in verbing: How much do you want?

On a quick visit to Chicago, the missus and I went to see Second City. Pretty small club, but when you look at the names of the alums, it's stunning. The first name on the list, literally, was Alan Alda. You have all the Saturday Night Live folks, of course. And they have a few pix around of "Steve" Colbert. The show was "Between Barack and a Hard Place" and it didn't disappoint. What six people can do on a basically empty stage for almost two hours is impressive. (Including a nice Chicago dialect piece ... an audio tour of the Art Institute.)

But of course two hours on stage is hard, and they do take a little break in the middle. At the end of a segment, the voice of one of the players comes over the PA from backstage:

Ladies and gentlemen, it is time for intermission. Please intermiss.

Hurrah! More verbing humor. I live for it. This plays on a really nice piece of English phonology and morphology. The 'sh' sound in words like mission, [ʃ], varies systematically, as linguist readers already know: we have transmission but transmissible (with [s]), but the verb is transmit. (Same basic patterns holds for permit, remit, and so on.) So, they are playing in rich territory.

This guy chose neither a simple cropping, to intermi[ʃ], nor the back-formation, to intermi[t]. None of these is a common English word (I assume few in the audience knew to intermit,'to discontinue'), so any is a potential candidate for playful invention, I figure. Intermish would sound odd, even to me, and you'd avoid that. But intermit would probably be to far removed for most people — a bookish joke at best, and you might have the vague sense that it's a word even if you don't know that word. Undoing the pretty directly phonological piece here ([s] becomes [ʃ]) felt natural, but going all the way to [t] (which seems pretty divorced from sound patterns to me — it feels more like something about word forms) apparently didn't.

Maybe that middle option is like Goldilocks' third bear said: "just right".

What's wrong with Yooper?

Nothing whatsoever, thank you very much.

Discussion continues across the Upper Midwest about the post a while back on a local doofus (Ben Bromley, Wisconsin State Journal) who unloaded on Kate Remlinger and her study of Yooper dialect. In fact, just a while ago, Stef H. posted a long, passionate comment on that topic. In a sense, Bromley's little muddle shows how badly we need work like Remlinger's.

Around here in greater Verbville, a lot of our discussion has been about these kinds of questions: Who was his intended audience? Was he trying to entertain, impress, insult, or what? If we pushed a ping pong ball through his ear, how long would it rattle around?

But actions speak louder than words, and rumor in Madison is that Kate Remlinger may join forces with the merry band known as the Wisconsin Englishes Project. You guys should invite her down, have her talk on Bromley's home turf. Yah hey.

Resu-wrecktion?

Just heard a reference to the coming weekend about the "resu-wrecktion". It was presumably intended to be sacrilegious — it was used in reference to somebody who's emphatically not a Christian. So, I figured, must be a cool new term I don't know. But alas, it gets only a few g-hits, almost all to auto body shops.

English as a fourth branch of Germanic?

After the NYT Science Times piece a month ago about the position of English within Germanic, Mr. Verb did a post on the topic (with a link to the article), and Sally Thomason had a post on "Nutty journalists' (and others') language theories" at Language Log, followed by Mark Liberman's post there on Stephen Oppenheimer's book, The Origins of the British.

At Mr. V's suggestion, I started digging around a little on linguistic angles (get the pun?) of this story, since I'm working on a somewhat related paper. All I want to do here is to address Forster's approach to language and prehistory, drawing on two of his papers, the first on genetics and prehistory from 2004, in a Traces of Ancestry, a book in honor of Colin Renfrew:

"MtDNA Markers for Celtic and Germanic Language Areas in the British Isles",
by Peter Forster, Valentino Romano, Francesco Calì, Arne Röhl & Matthew Hurles

The second paper is from 2006, and directly linguistic:

Evolution of English Basic Vocabulary within the Network of Germanic Languages" by Peter Forster, Tobias Polzin & Arne Röhl. Phylogenetic Methods and the Prehistory of Languages, ed. by Renfrew & Forster.

Unlike Oppenheimer, Forster is a geneticist and on reading the first paper, I come away with a pretty different sense of what his work is about than you get from the NYT piece or Thomason's comments. He provides clear evidence for some patterns we would or could expect from what we know about the early history and prehistory of Europe. For example, they find a big presence of 'Celtic' mtDNA markers among Icelanders: A lot of women who ended up in Iceland came from what's now Scotland. But what's striking is the amount of uncertainty. For instance, the article focuses on Germanic- and Celtic-speaking areas but the Low Countries and northern France haven't been investigated and evidence from Jutland is "scant". Jutland in particular is crucial for this topic, as the graphic of early Germanic territory (above, from wikipedia) underscores. Where they have evidence, things still don't look clear; they date the expansion of J/16231 (a "Germanic" type) in Europe to "5000 years ago, with a high standard error of 3000 years" (p. 107). And the conclusions they draw are hardly dramatic (p. 108):

One could argue with some justification that the genetic data are at present too imprecise to deliver reliable dates and geographic origins for fine-grained linguistic studies, and quite reasonably one could go even further and claim that female migrations are largely irrelevant to language spread.

I would argue the first point given what I see, but the second is too strongly stated (sometimes female migrations do, sometimes they don't figure in a big way.) They continue:

Nevertheless, on the basis of the current limited genetic evidence, a Neolithic timescale for the initial spread of Indo-European languages such as Germanic and Celtic within Europe (Renfrew 1987) appears at least as likely as the traditionally assumed shallower time depth.

For a chapter in a book honoring Renfrew, a nod toward his (controversial) views is hardly out of place, and the bottom line here is inconclusive.

But as we turn to language, allow me to hammer the obvious: DNA tracks genes and not language. Our little neighborhood here in Madison includes people who I can say with confidence carry genes from Europe, the Near East, Africa, the Americas (North and Central, at least) and Southeast Asia. Virtually all these folks, certainly the younger ones, are native speakers of American English, typically local Wisconsin English. And people got around plenty in the old days, even without international flights.

OK, then, to language. The critiques are right: These folks don't understand how historical and comparative linguistics works. They try, for sure, and the opening has some promise:

Within the Germanic languages, English basic vocabulary appears to be an anomaly. The English language is thought, by some, to be closely related to Frisian on the basis of morphological and phonological considerations … . However the postulated English-Frisian relationship is not reflected in shared lexical innovations.

We need to cut "by some", since the fundamental structures of early English are obviously and undeniably what we expect from West Germanic speakers from the North Sea area. Whether there was an 'Anglo-Frisian' subgroup is an old and thorny problem, but that's another game. And specialists are utterly unsurprised and unbothered by the lexical relations: English has borrowed massively from Norse and Romance in ways that dramatically skew any kind of lexicostatistical approach. (de Vries's etymological dictionary of Old Norse is incomplete, I'm pretty sure, but it has upwards of five pages of borrowings between Norse and English, in small type, five columns to the page.)

They then use phylogenetic software (Network 4.106) to produce unrooted networks of 19 languages and dialects, some dead and others living, based on 56 words from the Swadesh 100-word list. These were coded etymologically and 'variable' words were entered as if they were amino-acid sequences. Let me sketch two really basic matters:

First, information about lexical relations is very valuable, but this is trying to saw a board with a ball peen hammer. They concede (p. 132) that "an evolutionary 'tree' of languages is an idealized concept that may not exist in reality." Well, we can get pretty good trees for genetic relationships often enough, but North Sea Germanic clearly evolved in a big messy soup of language contact and that shines through obviously in the vocabulary. That is, how the English lexicon relates to Germanic overall is much more a matter of horizontal than vertical relationships, contact rather than inheritance. The role of horizontal versus vertical relationships is a longstanding problem in genetic linguistics and I gather that it's now a real area of activity in biology.

Second, the range of variation differs tremendously between DNA (very stable, so that changes tell us something pretty big) and words (much more unstable, due to borrowing, lexical replacement, and so on). They seem to uncritically import the notion of 'mutation rate', but that doesn't fit lexical data in such a simple way. When you argue that "'hund' has changed to 'dog'" you've missed a big point: We still have hund in English, cf. hound, but it's not the most common or general word for canines. In fact, the words they identify as setting English apart are striking: you, small, know, dog, black, bird, neck. These in fact still have historical Germanic cognates around in English: thee/thou (archaic), clean, wit, hound, swarthy, fowl. On the other term, they discuss the problems of the semantic field of neck in Germanic and they (reasonably) chose German Hals instead of Nacken. It's hard to argue (though some do) that you can make much out of this small number of words anyway, given the very high level of noise in the signal here. The real point is that these words haven't been 'lost' in the sense that I understand DNA markers are. Their status has changed, with narrowing or shift of meaning. That kind of low-level shuffling in the lexicon is pretty clearly promoted by language contact, although we don't really understand how that stuff works yet.

But even if they are wrong in many ways, both papers do contain material that could help advance our understanding of language history and prehistory. In a forthcoming paper, Michele Loporcaro (Papers from the 17th International Conference on Historical Linguistics, now being printed) talks about the relationship between synchronic and diachronic phonology, concluding with this:

I can think of no better conclusion than the comment Larry Hyman made when I presented part of this research at GLOW 2005 in Geneva: “Well, in a way what you are implying is that historical linguistics should be done by historical linguists”. Yes, this was exactly my point.

I'd argue that it increasingly can and should be done by research groups including other specialists, as long as you have a good core of historical linguists involved. I would urge Forster to collaborate with historical linguists. For example, they rely on Brett Kessler's on-line version of the Hêliand as a lexical source, but don't cite his excellent book, The Significance of Word Lists. That book, written by somebody well known for his command of quantitative methods, could have saved them some problems in understanding how word lists work in practice. (This is a good place to note that Kessler will be the keynote speaker at the Association for Computational Linguistics session in Prague this summer on Computing and Historical Phonology, see here.)

In his original post, Mr. Verb quoted the devastating critique that Ringe & Eska published on some of Forster's work with Alfred Toth (see more of the same, here). Had they brought a historical linguist onto their team, they could have avoided those problems and reached (very different!) conclusions that could have moved the wheel forward part of a turn.

(And thanks to various folks, especially my buddy the former biologist, for discussions on this topic; hope I didn't garble anything.)

Update, Friday, 6:27: As somebody who's not really a blogger, I've already tinkered with this post and will continue to, as things come into focus. Anyhow, I'd welcome comments.

Unwanted correction on 'wanton'?

Well, I suppose it had to happen: I may have made a mistake: A really alert reader emailed this afternoon (There's always the 'comment' option and I'm just a click or two away at misterverb@gmail.com) to say that they were unable to get a google search to show the 138,000 hits I reported. In fact, this person was only getting about 30,000, and those boiled down to a few dozen on closer examination. I've re-run a few different searches and can't get anything close to my original number.

Sheesh, if you can't believe information posted on the internet on an anonymous blog, what CAN you believe? I'll keep tinkering but am worried that I actually made a mistake.

Bubbler!

With the permission of the photog (one of the odder croppings I know of in English), Senior Editor of the Dictionary of American Regional English Luanne von Schneidemesser, here is a picture of the bubbler t-shirt available from the State Historical Society here, modeled by Len, although you can't see him here. For now, just the back view ... I'll post the front later.

Thanks, DARE folks!