Nunavut language law

It sounds like Nunavut is aiming to be more assertive about language policy, according to this: A bill has been introduced that would enforce the use of Inuktitut in public places.

I happened across that while pondering whether to add a Google News feed for material on language to this blog. It would have a fair bit of extraneous material, but it might be fun to try for a while.

Passivizing (?) or adjectivizing (?) REALLY weirds language

The missus caught this last night on the PBS News Hour:

Schools feel somewhat behooved to do a better job.

The speaker was a sports writer, she reports, named Kevin Blackistone. I first thought this was the stylistic overreaching of a sports writer, but the construction gets over 59,000 g-hits, or "using the google" as Mrs. Verb (not her real name) likes to put it. In those hits, it's often used to set up a reply or response to incorrect information, so the typical meaning looks like 'feel compelled' or something: "I feel behooved to let your readers know … ." But Blackistone's example would have to mean 'be encouraged, feel more inclined' or something. To feel behooved shows up in lots of formal contexts, including an article in the journal College English.

I don't find comments on this particular construction in a quick look around, but the Oxford English Dictionary gives this:

5. a. Used, owing to confusion between the accusative and nominative (see first two quots.), as a personal verb: To be under obligation (to do); = must needs, ought, have. Of northern origin, and since 1500 only Scotch.

[c1340 HAMPOLE Prose Tr. (1866) 5 e nam of Ihesu es helefull and nedys by-houys be lufed of all. c1386 CHAUCER Pars. T. 557 A servaunt of God bihoveth nought to chide.] c1400 Apol. Loll. 31 Swelk men be howuen tak hede. 1475 CAXTON Jason 76 The..craft that he behoueth to obserue and kepe. 1549 Compl. Scot. xv. 131 We behufit fyrst to reueil it. 1637 GILLESPIE Eng. Pop. Cerem. II. ix. 52 He behooved to offend the Iewes. 1759 ROBERTSON Hist. Scot. II. VIII. 45 They behoved to esteem them traitors. 1832 SIR W. HAMILTON Disc. (1853) 101 He behoved ... clearly to determine the value of the principal terms

From there, I suppose you could get to the feel + past participle construction. But I'm not sure how to think about the resulting construction — seems like a stretch to call that behooved an adjective and semantically it seems almost like a passive. I guess syntax folks have stories about to feel disappointed and such, and if my insurance covered the drugs to control syntax allergies, I would ponder the point.

Whatever it is, it's completely impossible for me, and the missus was downright taken aback by it.

Upper Midwestern speech in the news, the bad way

We spend a fair bit of time here in Verbville talking about journalists and others who write professionally about language — with more focus on the bumblings of the likes of Safire than on the good work that people like Jan Freeman and Nathan Bierma do. Another source of news on language in the media are the occasional wire stories that pop up and then run through an often odd life cycle, ending up with badly failed humor or bizarre 'opinion' pieces.

A recent story illustrates this. Kathryn Remlinger of Grand Valley State University in Michigan is well known in dialectology and sociolinguistics for her work on English spoken in Michigan's Upper Penninsula. That region is known as the UP, the people from there as Yoopers and their dialect as Yooper. There's a small industry of Yooper humor (including dialect, see picture) and the band Da Yoopers are a riot. ("Songs for Fart Lovers" may or may not be your cup of tea, but they are brilliant.)

We're pretty far from the UP down here in Madison, but news does get around and a story about her work recently showed up in a few Wisconsin papers, with versions of this one running in places like Beaver Dam (east and a little north of Madison). So far, so good. But eventually this story hit the 'opinion' sections, and we have the Wisconsin State Journal's contribution on it here. Before reading on, follow that link and check the piece out.

So, back after reading it now? The wildly overdone eye dialect (trying to represent accents in spelling) doesn't do much for me, and the raft of lame jokes wears on you. (And my brother Phil is hardly dumb as a post and we all do trust him to bring the Leinie's to our Stanley Cup parties.) But do you get a real idea of what Remlinger is doing from this story? Using the Up Nort' pseudo-dialect to call "da perfesser's" grant to study historical speech patterns "a waste of money" (and calling her "dis gal") is a step too far. (Let's not even comment on the crassest insult.) Yeah, this is 'humor' or 'parody', he doesn't really mean it, blah blah freakin' blah. Bromley should be banned from the UP for making Yoopers look bad: I've never met anybody from up there nearly as dumb or as mean as this guy. You're not funny, man, certainly not like Da Yoopers. And not even as funny as this:

A little ol' lady with fading eyesight decides to go ice fishing after she heard how good ice fishing was that winter. She heads out to the edge of town very early one dark morning, finds an ice covered pond and starts drilling through the ice. A voice from above thunders out: " You won't find any fish there". So she moves to the other side , and again the voice booms out "There aren't aren't any fish there either "In desperation she says " Okay God, there aren't any fish here, and not on the other side. So tell me where are the fish". "I'm not God", says the voice, "I'm just the guy who runs the hockey rink."

Big doffs of the tuque to Eric Raimy and (second-hand) to Greg Smith. And a wag of the finger to Ben Bromley.

Clark, the Canadian hockey goalie, plays baseball

This is off topic for this blog, but if you know anything at all about hockey, this video is hilarious. I didn't figure you could keep that gag going for so long.

The value of variation

In his testimony yesterday, Kyle Sampson is reported to have said "I don't remember" 122 times (WaPo here). And keep in mind that his testimony was cut off in the fourth hour by Republican objections to the hearings continuing ... who knows how many times he would have said it if the hearing had run its course.

The segments I heard contained those exact words a few times and the Post has the string in quotes, but let's assume he did not utter that same phrase that many times. Still, even in media excerpts, you got a sense of worn repetition, of monotony. I can't imagine what the real thing felt like.

Under these circumstances, it surely would have been better to have a little stylistic variation: "I simply cannot recall", "Sorry, Senator, but my memory fails me", "The answer to that isn't coming to me right now", "My recollection on that point is not clear", "Oh for heck, my pants are on fire". (Even when he wasn't saying "I don't remember" about really major stuff, he seemed to be saying things that were surely lies.)

Makes you wonder what he was thinking strategically: "I'm badly burned toast and I can feel the flames of hell already. What does this matter?" "Well, everybody knows I'm lying sack of crap here, but the lawyers say I've got to keep up the charade." Note to self: Variation is good; a sound memory and avoiding dishonest activities much, much better.

Note: Image from a pretty amazing website: Mothers from Hell.

"Teachery"

Just heard a presentation where people were warned about being "too teachery" in instructional web stuff. Seemed like a word that would lean heavily to the negative (like in this example). Poking around by google, it does look like it appears really often with "too", but I'm surprised by things like Amazon's "teachery stuff".

Prescriptivist pratfalls

It always strikes me in reading prescriptivists in the media how often they have to apologize. Take this excerpt, paraphrased from today's Word Court in the local paper:

Q: You have often said X. So, to do Y, as you recently did, is invalid.

A: Thanks for holding me to my standards. But ...

Don't get me wrong, I apologize often for mistakes I make, and the reader in this case was not entirely getting the point. But if your work products are such that you're doing this all the time, maybe something is off somewhere.

The problem at hand is constantly making sweeping generalizations about usage without any kind of sound understanding of language structure and usage, language history, and related issues.

Défense: "An assault on the ear"

NPR has regular sports commentary by Frank Deford. Most readers probably know his shtick: He's the literate (downright literary), articulate (in the old, non-racist sense of that word) sports guy. He likes to poke fun at sports clichés*, like most of us, except that he does it for big money. This morning he had a decent rip going about how words like 'momentum' and 'focus' and so on should be considered taboo enough to become X-words (see near the end of this post), so the m-word and f-word respectively. (Have to take a number on the latter, literally: we've got the old Anglo-Saxon f-word and the 'other f-word' that was used to impugn John Edwards' manhood recently. So, focus is f-word number 3.) OK, that's funny. Not really, but it was over pretty fast and didn't cause any particular pain.

Then he veers away from a suddenly cliche process of word formation (yup, he's using a cliche to gripe about cliches) to complain about other things, including the use of initial stress on the noun défense, rather than defénse. He called it "an assault on the ear" (maybe plural — I wasn't close to the radio and my hearing aid battery is getting weak). I've always assumed this was a dialect borrowing: The southern pattern of initial stress presumably found its way into general sports talk via the strong southern presence in football (maybe basketball too). At some point, for whatever sociolinguistic reason, northern players, coaches, and announcers picked this up and it has lost its regional character in the context of sports. The result is an interesting little footnote about contemporary American English: A lot of non-southerners now have a split between national defénse and red zone défense. (For the historical linguists out there, it reminds us again that stress and other prosodic properties often don't show Neogrammarian regularity, but instead can change word-by-word.) Get with the program, Frank: Literate, articulate guys are more aware of this stuff.

Still, I have to agree with Deford that the time is past for laughing about the two guys with a big 'D' and a piece of picket fence standing up at football game to urge the home team to stop the visiting team's óffense (*offénse).

*Wow, speaking of high tone: The spellchecker in blogger doesn't like 'cliche' but 'cliché' is good.

Woe unto English case marking!

Constructions like woe is me (beyond predicate nominatives like answering the phone with it's me) have been beaten like a rented mule by prescriptivists and pseudo-mavens, including Bill "Misfire" Safire, Ben "Adjective Killer" Yagoda and Woeful Patricia O'Conner. (Sorry, maybe I'm ready to go see some pro wrestling or something.)

In the blog connected with her Boston Globe column, "The Word", Jan Freeman has recently taken this one apart, here. She's not a linguist and she's not pursuing any big program, any kind of syntactic argument or anything else fancy. She's just laying out the evidence, like a good journalist should, I figure. It's hardly a lack of analysis, but it's a fact-based, low key treatment of the topic. A breath of fresh air.

I've been pretty critical of media treatment of language (including those standing on the wrong, and I do mean wrong, side of this issue), so it's really nice to see basic facts laid out cleanly and clearly.

When student-adviser tensions erupt ...

The NYT's Science Times reviews the sad set of cases where grad students have killed their advisers -- Theodore Streleski (math, Stanford, ball-peen hammer), Jens Hansen (pathology, Florida School of Medecine, gun), Frederick Davidson (engineering, San Diego State, gun), Gang Lu (physics, Iowa, gun).

Maybe things are not really so bad around here ....

True? Bush day 666 to go and counting?

Keith Olberman just reported – I missed the context, so maybe it was an obvious joke – that Bush has 666 days left in office. Can it be true?

The end is near! The end is near!

PS: The image is from here. Mrs. Verb (not her real name) suggests that it might be photoshopped.

And you really should type in something like 'Bush 666' to your favorite search engine. Even try an image search. You might enjoy the results.

Safire's mavenhood on 'go figure'

Today's Safire column swerves from the relatively positive course of recent weeks: Instead of quoting anybody with expertise on the origins of go figure, today's topic, he turns to his mavenhood.

First, there's an interesting little semantic development there. Merriam-Webster defines maven this way:

one who is experienced or knowledgeable, EXPERT; also FREAK 4a

This definition (I think) stays very close to the Yiddish/Hebrew origins of the word, but 'language maven' has come to mean something very different: It's a self-appointed expert, a person dedicated to upholding rules that in part never existed. But the last part of the definition fits — the M-W reference to 'freak' is to the meaning 'ardent enthusiastic', which they give with a part b: 'a person who is obsessed with something a control freak'. Yeah, that gets closer.

His mavens aren't actual experts, like etymologists, lexicographers, linguists, specialists in lexical semantics. They are people who mostly have a college/university affiliation and/or a PhD. And they bring homey chit-chat to the topic, pleasant enough, but no new facts, arguments or insights.

It's time to pour a little whine: A free Mr. Verb t-shirt to the person who can provide a convincing interpretation of this key sentence from his column:

Amid the elitist Language Snobs and the anarchic Language Slobs, among mediacrities and hip-hopocratic jargonauts shooting the Utubes and pretending to be Serius, there stands the fastest-growing crowd of all: un-self-aware writers and speakers, lovers of the language fascinated by its roots and user-judges of its flowering.

Say whuuuuuuuut? Which pieces are typos? Failed clever turns of phrase? What the hell does it mean? Are those last three descriptions the characteristics of a maven? He'd say "Go and figure it out yourself."

Undoing final devoicing

Over on Phonoloblog, Bruce Hayes has posted an interesting query about patterns of final voicing among Russian speakers. His data comes from Russian-Americans, native speakers now bilingual in English, and they seem to sometimes produce final voiced obstruents, contrary to expectation, so that the word for 'city' comes out as [’gorəd], rather than with a final [t].

I can't speak to all of his issues, but here are a couple of relevant points:

First, Tom Purnell and some of us (see the Journal of English Linguistics, 2005, along with other papers) have observed what is probably a related pattern among Wisconsin English spoken by people who grew up in what were then heavily German-speaking communities: The phonetic literature reports little (or no) actual glottal pulsing in coda obstruents for 'American English', but we found that these folks used voicing as the primary cue. Overall, they had no difference in vowel duration (longer before 'voiced'), which is usually thought to be a (or the) major cue — that's been claimed to be a universal pattern even. I don't know about their German, but they probably did this in English for sociolinguistic reasons: They were working to overcome one of the most salient aspects of a German accent. It's not hard to imagine that an earlier generation could have produced Bad with [d] under those kind of circumstances — at least those who got good enough in English to produce the distinction. (Remarkably, the youngest generation today looks like they are coming around to something that sounds like final devoicing in English.)

Second, Polish is reported to have the same basic pattern as Russian with regard to final devoicing. But the 1997 University of Wisconsin dissertation by Božena Tieszen, Final stop devoicing in Polish: An acoustic and historical account for incomplete neutralization, shows tremendous variation across Polish dialects.

Update, Sunday noon (by Mr. Verb): If you're interested in this topic, you should definitely look at the followup comments on that Phonoloblog post.

Metathesis humor

The comedian Zach Galifianakis was in town last night at the Barrymore Theater. He made this joke (the same basic line is found in his essay "Drinking myself into a Corner"):

I use a lot of AXE body spray. But I live in a black neighborhood, so it's called ASK.

Now, that pretty much stops me cold ... First, there's the automatic reaction: Wait, is he making fun of African-American speech? He's from the foothills of North Carolina, according to his website, and so he's presumably heard 'aks a question' enough from white people. From reading his stuff, he's clearly politically progressive (he has a prominent link to a Darfur aid group, for example), so he presumably doesn't intend to mock here.

From what I can tell about the readers of this blog, most everybody already knows that the variation goes back to Old English (ascian, acsian, with spelling variants), and that it's only pretty ([pɝrti]?) recently become so strongly associated with African-American speech, to the exclusion of white dialects, in the minds of Americans. DARE has tons of documentation on usage in New England earlier on and across the south and midlands, even specifically noting Zach's western North Carolina as having a lot of the process.

But stripping away the social baggage of the joke (right, like that could be done), it's a really odd joke. Metathesis is changing the order of the sounds in a word, and it is a notably sporadic process most of the time (although the link just given shows that it can be a 'regular' phonological process). But the notion of two dialects where in one some string XY is regularly produced in the other as YX is pretty far out there, and that this means that YX in the first is XY in the second even weirder. So, maybe this joke will kill them at the next NWAV, LabPhon or MCWOP.

Thanks to Jake for the tip on this. (Yes, the use of 'tip' there is gently distancing myself from the blogging trend of offering a 'hat tip' in these circumstances. It's the Upper Midwest and you don't/can't tip your tuque.)

The de-regionalization of country music?

Country music is powerfully associated with the American south, and the southwest. You probably don't think 'northern Wisconsin' when you think 'country'. Ahhh, if so, you err, my friend. C&W has long had a big presence in the north, northeast, even Canada. (Post a query, I'd be happy to give details.)

Today, I was listening to some alt.country. (if you don't know this stuff, check out Boot Liquor and Bloodshot Records.) So this song comes on with this line:

I first met her drinking from a bubbler in the park.

Whoa. That ain't country, that's Wisconsin. So, I check it out. It's a band called The Blind Robins, a song called "Miss Limestone County". (See here for lyrics.) Great band, by the way.

You know about blind robins? It's a bar snack (see here), and if I love anything more than bar snacks, it's smoked herring. But to the point: That's a seriously Upper Midwestern item.

Need to buy this album; will try to report on it. Anyway, it's nice confirmation of the presence of this kind of sound in the region.

Higher ed news, continued

Just got this link from a reader, apparently a Cal State grad, with the comment "Go Cal State (faculty)!" This reader is encouraging a continuation of the recent threat on higher ed, obviously. Here's the punchline:

Professors are angry about recent executive pay hikes and have said instructor compensation is too small.

People in Madison should be looking at executive compensation, even though it's hard to be sure that we're seeing all the compensation the fat cats actually get.

But they should consider another issue: One of the real problems at the level of a department or institute on campus is support staff. There are far too few, and they are overworked and underpaid, and their numbers have been cut. Compare that to deans' offices and the central administration, and you'll see that while our staffs are being starved, these folks are promoting people and giving them massive raises. There are pretty low-level paper pushers in some colleges earning very close to six digits, far more than what a fair number of internationally known full professors earn.

5th grade standards: linguistics

An AP story by David Bauder reviews Jeff Foxworthy's "Are you smarter than a 5th grader?", with the obvious focus on how the show is dedicated to humiliating people (the adults, I mean ... sounds like the kids are the heroes). I mentioned way back when that an ad showed "what's a pronoun?" as a real stumper. Bauder's list of questions from the show includes:

Which of the following words is an adverb: lovely, lonely, lazily?

That just seems kind of, I don't know, lame, compared to the other questions (which aren't obviously visible in the on-line version):

True or false? A bat is a mammal.
What planet is closest to the sun?
What is the largest artery in the human body?
A polygon has a minimum of how many sides?

And so on. I'm worried that those are somehow more engaging questions. The grammar questions both have a dusty old smell about them, compared to a flying mammal, 'My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas', and how blood flows through the body. Maybe I'm just being paranoid about how language is taught before, say, undergraduate introduction to linguistics, or maybe it's just from my own experience, as somebody who really disliked 'grammar' classes, until I got took a class that was expressly dedicated to answering questions about how language worked.

The legislature and salaries

Yesterday's CapTimes had a guest column by David Olien, former UW System senior vice president for administration. Olien argues that the legislature reveals "hypocrisy": They have kept themselves "among the best-paid in the nation", while they have driven down state support for universities and now turn their aim to the tech college system. "In short, in a peer comparison with other legislatures, they rank far ahead of UW faculty and staff compared to their peers." Remember, this is a guy who knows.

Of course, these people keep the actual 'salary' low, and pump it up with per diem, sick leave, retirement benefits, and so on. We see the same on campuses, of course. Faculty and staff salaries are being strangled, but if you check out administrative salaries, they have often skyrocketed. Seldom, of course, by a 'raise', but often by a 'reclassification', where staff people are given grander titles, with sometimes vast raises.

Bird 'language' and foreign-language learning

NPR just ran a little piece on how red-breasted nuthatches can understand pretty subtle differences in the warning calls of chickadees. That's very useful information if you're a nuthatch and there's a sparrowhawk flying overhead. Pretty metaphorical, but it does speak to the value of learning foreign languages.

But why do they have to call this "language"?

Wisconsin women's hockey and regional English

Yesterday, the Badger women's ice hockey team crushed the University of Minnesota – Duluth 4-1 to win their second national title in a row. Over the whole season, as defending national champs, they lost only one game (to Duluth, as it happens).

I appreciate hockey on a number of levels, but I'd rank this way up there: the dialect and sociolinguistic aspects of hearing serious players and coaches talk. Like stock car announcers or rodeo people, they really exemplify the region where their sport is rooted.

Mark Johnson, a hero of the Miracle on Ice and a god around here (you should see people stop cold when he walks through the rink on campus), exemplified this beautifully at the ceremony welcoming the team home today. (Hey, I'm retired — I get to do stuff like that.) He had some Northern Cities fronting in his low vowels for sure, but retains the very back and very rounded long /o:/ (both) and /u:/ (opportunity) and pretty monophthongal long vowels generally.

On Wisconsin!

The ubermeat attacks, or not

Just noticed that my earlier post on ubermeat (from the Quizno's ad, referring to prime rib) continues to draw searches and hits ... to my surprise. As a comment on that post pointed out, the term was only drawing about 12 g-hits when that post went up. It's now up to 56, without much real substantive discussion of the term that I see. Most of the interest is surely in the use of the prefix uber-, a topic of a very early post on this blog, here, and then its German equivalent in connection with English here, but just widely discussed everywhere.

I guess what strikes me as oddest about the word (to the extent that anything in ad language can surprise me) is that an intensifier like uber- seems an bad fit with meat. Supermeat? Overmeat? Just unappealing, too close to a goosestepping sandwich. Like a comment on the earlier post says, you kind of wonder whether you order the ubermeat or the ubermeat orders you.

Seems doomed as an ad, too, although I'm not exactly the target demographic for them. But I can't quite believe that there is not a punk band called The Ubermeat showing up on google yet.

Linguistica Simpsonia, vol. 3

Hurrah! HeiDeas has just posted her annual Simpsons linguistic roundup, here. But if you're talking about the Simpsons, can you really count as 'geeky'?

Safire watch: Some promising data

In a recent post, I reported an email from a reader who suggests that Safire might be reacting to criticism by quoting lexicographers and linguists regularly. His new On Language column, on woman versus female as an adjective (or 'apposite noun'), looks like striking support for that hypothesis: He quotes both Deborah Tannen and Robin Lakoff, and the words 'linguist', 'linguistic' and 'linguistics' are sprinkled in pretty heavily.*

All seem to agree that forms like woman speaker are popping up more often. He even quotes Robin Lakoff on the notion of markedness, with the illustration of the increasing rarity of female professor as the demographics of the academy have changed.

Kudos, anonymous reader; even if he backslides in the future, I think you've nailed a trend here! On a cold sunny morning, I'm looking forward to the trees turning green and seeing Safire talk to Elly van Gelderen and Jan Terje Faarlund for insights into historical Germanic syntax, Eric Baković and Adam Ussishkin on OT phonology and morphology, Dennis Preston and Kirk Hazen for the latest on American dialects. Yeah, right.

*Obligatory note on errors:

• When gender was on the rise in phrases like 'gender gap', "I stood up for the plain old Anglo-Saxon word sex." Even many not familiar with the history of English will suspect that this is wrong. It's from Latin sexus, and appears first in the Middle English period, upwards of a millennium after the Angles and Saxons arrived (for those of us who still tend to accept that story over a newer one). Gender came into English at about the same time, it looks like.
• Robin Lakoff's The Language War was surely a notable scholarly contribution, but her true classic was Language and Woman's Place.
• He really blows the punch line at the end: "feminists everywhere have begun to turn on the word female. What's next? Womanism." Perhaps those committed to femalism will make that switch. (Google it — it's a small world, it looks like.) Feminism is pretty distant from female.

I guess quoting linguists doesn't instantly improve the overall quality!

MILC 9, the invitation

With the permission of the "conference organizers" (said permission obtained using methods that the Vice President and Attorney General of the United States would endorse, if hesitantly and not in public), I am passing along an invitation to attend MILC 9. But I have been warned that there will be hockey players present, possibly in large numbers.

Ingressive airstream mechanism

That's what linguists call it when you inhale while producing speech sounds. It's often said that the only real speech sound that involves really drawing air into the lungs (as opposed to creating lower pressure inside the mouth so that a little air comes in when you release a closure), is the back-channel way of agreeing with somebody in various languages and dialects around the North Sea and Baltic Sea. It sounds like a kind of whispered 'yeah' but you do it while breathing in.

Now, DQ (that's now their official name, right?) has introduced a line of "flamethrower" sandwiches, and when people eating these hamburgers (or chicken sandwiches or whatever) talk, flames shoot out for several feet.* But in one of the DQ ads, to avoid the flames, they talk while inhaling, which is more difficult than you might think for longer stretches. That ad is on YouTube, here, but the owners don't allow it to be posted on elsewhere.

*Just for the record: I only saw this on the television ads for this product, but of course assume it must be true in real life. I'm not willing to actually eat at DQ to test or even observe this effect.

Urgent: MILC abstract deadline extended

Word on the grapevine is that the call for abstracts for the 9th Madison Informal Linguistics Conference (MILC) has been extended. The organizers may accept them into this coming week. They should be submitted to Monica Macaulay.

Remember: If you're not mocking how we study language, you're probably not a linguist.

"I hope the public will get very angry about this"

Well, Rep. Suzanne Jeskewitz is getting what she wants about technical college faculty salaries, a very angry public: Just talked to a friend who teaches full-time at the Madison Area Technical College. I asked him what he could get right now, in Madison, by going to a private company (and he's not in a classic tech field with high pay, like the medical profession or anything). His answer: $110,000 easy, staying in town. And he hastened to add that it would be a lower workload, just as I figured.

More to the point, he said, he's preparing 30 people every year for good, high-paying jobs in Wisconsin. "That's what I do for my state", and he continued, the question for the Jeskewitz is (forgive the harsh language, but I promised to quote him precisely):

What the fuck do you do for Wisconsin, you parasite?

Good question. (For the record, before she started earning her money denigrating higher education, here's a sketch of what she did. A fair bit of blood sucking even then.) By the way, man, if you happen to read this: Happy St. Patrick's ... didn't get a chance to wish you that this morning.

More on Wisconsin higher education

A regular reader of this blog* writes to me:

I'm disappointed that a whole 24 hours have gone by since the Wisconsin State Journal reported a Republican's outrage that community college profs (a) actually get paid and (b) can make overtime.

Yes, it's true. They in fact are earning more than many faculty in the University of Wisconsin system, averaging $74,598 for full-time faculty, a solid full professor's salary in many departments in Madison. See the stories here and here. But check the key quote:

This audit is telling us that we've gotten out of control with our benefits and our salaries in the technical college system," said Rep. Suzanne Jeskewitz, a Menomonee Falls Republican who co-chairs the Legislature's audit committee. "I would hope the public will get very angry about this.

Jeskewitz is trying to stir up outrage over a misrepresentation, basically: I'm pretty sure that the MATC faculty I know could all easily earn more money in private industry, and mostly working shorter hours. That's emphatically true of UW – Madison faculty, where even in the arts and humanities a lot of people are bringing in far more than their salaries each year in outside funding. (Keep in mind that something like 18% of Madison's money is from the state and the rest of grants, gifts, patents, and tuition.) Higher education is in a very precarious position right now and the leaders of our institutions need to step up and forcefully lay out the facts.

I guess we're truly not in this for the money. To my friends at MATC, thanks for taking the heat off us for a few minutes. And next time we go out for a beer, you're buying.

* Unlike the Onion (motto: Tu stultus est), we do not discourage any and all correspondence from readers.

'Anymore' confused with 'now'

That's the headline of Word Court from last night. Sigh. "Anymore gas is expensive" is "not good-quality standard English", we learn, not "truly correct". And we get a paragraph on writing it as two words versus one. Otherwise, Barbara Wallraff just makes the basic point about traditional anymore as a negative-polarity item, in contrast to what linguists call 'positive anymore'. (For what it's worth, the positive meaning is usually described as 'these days' or 'nowadays' — 'now' doesn't quite work for me.)

What a shame, what missed opportunities:

• No mention of how just plain famous this feature is: The first discussion of it in American Speech dates to 1931, with a string of article there and elsewhere since and tons of discussions all over the place. There's even a blog called Positive Anymore, although it may no longer be active.
  
• Nor anything on its regional distribution (more or less lower midlands feature) and its current (I gather pretty rapid) spread beyond that.
• No reference to its move to sentence-initial position for many speakers — Anymore we stay home and watch TV.
• No mention of the perceptions of the term — I think it was in Youmans' 1986 American Speech article on it that Missouri speakers said that positive anymore sounded like 'somebody who was drunk' or 'a Hoosier' talking. And he reported other speakers with my initial reaction to it: Simply not understanding what it meant.
• Nothing on its history — surely few readers know that it's British and American.

Here's a perfect case where somebody's 'grammar question could have opened a door to tons of interesting information about language. But it didn't.

And for the record, DARE shows it as widespread among college-educated speakers, even back when their data was (no, not were) collected.

Teethache

A colleague just passed along this link, where Bush complains twice about a teethache. Makes my teeth hurt just to type, if not in a prescriptivist kind of way. (It doesn't actually sound that bad to me, I just hate toothaches.) This gets only 510 g-hits, mostly from what are clearly non-native speakers of English. Seems an unlikely dialect thing — can't be his ultra-rich Yankee background and I lived in Texas for a while and don't recall it from there. (The relevant volume of DARE isn't out yet, so can't easily check there even.)

Update, 5:26 pm: Sorry, folks, I blew this one. The colleague who passed on the link expressly told me that the transcript had corrected the spoken form to toothache, and I utterly failed to note that in my haste to get something up as I raced from one obligation to another all day. So, yeah, Ridger, you got it exactly right. Thanks. (If readers haven't visited The Ridger's blog, The Greenbelt, you should. And I don't say that merely because we're originally from different sides of the same old mountain range.) Mr. Verb, I'm beginning to believe that only a true man of leisure like you can blog ... .

What happens to dysfunctional departments?

Having just posted on Wisconsin's storied German Department, I was surprised to open tonight's Cap Times (our progressive afternoon daily — we still have one), and find this on Comparative Literature. The punch line:

there are no plans to close the 90-year-old department at this time, but [Dean Gary Sandefur] added that no new money will be invested in it. After current faculty members leave or retire, the department will come to an end.

Now, our contributor from German has been sweating profusely since that earlier commentary on his department, but he hasn't been lynched, not unless somebody else has been sending stuff from his account. In the end, this blog is read by linguists and language fans — a gratifying number of them — not by people who do 'literary studies' or whatever the kids call it these days.

Really, this article bears out precisely what I was arguing: Even without a convicted once-tenured felon in your department (I wish that was a joke), CompLit departments are the traditional self-parody when it comes to studied irrelevance and self-important, self-absorbed scholarship.

The brutal part is that UW isn't killing CompLit, they've announced to the local paper that they are going to let it die. Talk about twisting in the wind … and it's a televised, slow-mo public non-execution. Eventually (and it won't be that long really), any faculty in that department who don't/can't flee will be moved into other departments, because there won't be critical mass for administrative purposes. (At UW, that means a minimum number for a department executive committee.) Burn. It doesn't really save much money, but it sends a praise-the-lord-and-pass-the-ammunition signal.

Birders say that when a raptor dives in and takes a bird in some area where tons of song birds were feeding and chirping, away everything gets very, very quiet for a long time. The deans are surely sending that kind of message to the dysfunctional, the irrelevant, the just-plain-stupid: Take care of business or die a very public death. But no quick if botched hanging, or snap of your neck by a sparrow hawk. You have to walk around the halls for decades with everybody thinking 'oh, HE's still here?' and looking away.

Linguistics isn't just an exciting field of study; it matters, in about a million ways. We all know that and we all argue that every day. And, boy, am I glad that's the case.

PS: The spectacular image on this post is from here.

Safire watch

An alert reader (that's redundant for this blog, eh?) sends this along:

I was wondering, after Safire quoted Grant Barrett last week and Fred Shapiro the week before, whether he was finally feeling the sting of criticism, and was planning to armor himself by quoting one reputable linguist/lexicographer per week. Keep your eye on him!

Now, there's a person with human kindness flowing through their veins. I had noticed this recent trend too, if not that it was so systematic, and had first wondered if Safire was aware of the criticism since he presumably doesn't actually read ads-l and such. If so, I glumly reckoned, he was getting worried about his sources cutting him off.

But let's get some data first on this point, then deal with possible motives later ... but never fear, anonymous reader, I'm on it.

Is it really verbing?

Just listening to Wisconsin Public Radio and they're doing a report on the group Soulforce touring colleges that openly discriminate against gays and lesbians. (The bulk of the story is available here, just scroll down some, but not the crucial chunk below, at least not yet.)

WPR talks to folks at a small religious college (I didn't catch which one) and a woman student said, I'm pretty sure, "It's a sin to gay …". There was surely no rapid speech thing going on, and she sure didn't sound like she'd made a mistake. Sounds utterly impossible to me. I mean, *It's not easy greening.

Any idea what's going on here?

"Apple pie" = kind of liquor

Tonight's local evening paper, the Cap Times, has a piece about apple pie, a term for clear booze with an apple taste -- doctored with some kind of apple favor, plus cinnamon and such. In the case at hand, it was grain alcohol ('everclear') that had been flavored and sold to bars, illegally. Hey, it's Wisconsin. As it happens, Mr. V himself recently had a taste of 'apple pie' that was basically the same thing, but privately, not bought. Overly sweet to my palate, but then I was trying to be Wisco-serious about it. The Dictionary of American Regional English doesn't show this term, but maybe it's newer than their first volume?

By the way, I'm delighted (and truly surprised) to be getting such nice emails since finally posting my email address on my profile. Our readership is growing more rapidly than I ever imagined it would and it's a great pleasure to get positive feedback from so many different perspectives.

A cabinet of curiosities ...

Real oddities, realer than those shown on the left, all culled from the day's news. Just lounging in my armchair in our sunroom out in the Madison suburbs, sipping another bloody mary — thanks, daylight savings time, for the permission to get an early start – as the little Verbs chase the doggie around the crusty snow in our sunny backyard. But it is a curious morning in language news.

First, though, I've got little time for Safire. "Vogue words", yeah, whatevs, Saf-man. Three new phrases blah blah, if you don't use them, you're being passed by, yadda yadda ... age-appropriate, to show ankle (in current political usage) and go figure. He does cite Ben Zimmer on the last, noting that it was on ads-l (hint to readers not on that list: it's not the only one of these that's been discussed there.) Hey, honey, can I get another one of these?

Now, let's get to less stale stuff ...

• NPR just did a big segment on Celtic music, featuring a local Madison group, a really good one that sings in "six dialects". The last chunk of the interview is asking these fine Midwestern musicians about the future of these languages. Shame they didn't ask a linguist — calling that whole family, languages from both major branches, a set of 'dialects' tells you all you need to know. (To be clear: Blame goes to NPR, not these revivalist non-native learners/singers of an entire family of tongues, some living, some threatened, some revived.)
  
• Under the title "Speech Crimes", Ben Yagoda's new book, When you catch an adjective, kill it, is reviewed in the NYT Book Review, along with David Crystal's new The fight for English: How language pundits ate, shot, and left. The reviewer, Patricia T. O'Conner, is the author of the wretched Woe is I and she loves Yagoda's treatment of 'parts of speech' as 'artificial' and 'arbitrary'. Yagoda's an English prof (hmmm, perhaps relevant to the last post on the MLA) and it's unclear how much of the ignorance is his versus hers. That he riffs on the use of the ampersand suggests that there's plenty of blame to go around. She blasts Crystal for seeing language punditry as "class war". That many column inches would have been enough to make some actual point about language that was true, informative and even entertaining.
  
• In the Times proper this morning is a really lame piece on x-word taboo avoidance by Peter Applebome, reviewing the recent efforts to ban the n-word, Eve Ensler's use of the v-word, and the 'other' f-word (used recently by that scary anorexic woman with an Adam's apple to slur John Edwards). No apparent awareness of closely related discussions on Language Log (like the amazing efforts of the government to stop scientists from using the p-word, polar bear. (Sorry, phonologists, if you thought we were heading to Steriade's p-map this morning ... the missus is mixing'em strong this morning and I'm not up for sci fi theories of sound.) Nor any reflection of the extensive discussions of this topic (most recently framed around the n-word on ads-l. If you are going to publish in such a big forum, wouldn't you do a little homework?
  

Language, language everywhere and not an expert opinion accurately reflected anywhere.

But let's talk about something less depressing: Last night, the Wisconsin women's hockey team played a stunning NCAA playoff game against Harvard here. The game went halfway through the 7th period (yup, well over two full hours on the ice), with over 100 shots on goal before anybody hit the back of the net. The 'late replay' on local TV had been going for something like an hour and half before the game actually ended ... . Harvard's goalie stopped 67 straight shots, high and low, gloveside and stickside and in the breadbasket, screamers and dribblers, from the high slot and the corner. Then, Wisconsin scored on a short shot to the top right corner by Jinelle Zaugg. Man, what a game.

The future of language departments

Most linguists, and large numbers of academics generally, hold the Modern Language Association in pretty low regard, and many have come to see it as the embodiment of everything wrong with "humanities scholarship" — disconnected theorizing that many maintain is nothing more than 'mental masturbation'. And it's easy to argue that they have fiddled away while language departments have burned. (Some believe they've taken breaks only to pour fuel on the fires.)

Somewhat different winds may be blowing at the MLA, as laid out in this Inside Higher Ed piece, which got passed to me a few days ago. The MLA panel discussed there focuses on the restructuring of language departments as "area studies", and "ending the ‘literature-centered’ Ph.D." Michael Geisler of Middlebury says (and the article continues):

“Why do we insist on specializing” in literature, Geisler asked, when there are so many “urgent tasks” for language Ph.D.’s? He portrayed the ideal mission of these programs as providing new professors (or other professionals) with a deep understanding of culture and current societies that goes far beyond the literary tradition. “Narrative isn’t an end in itself,” he said. …

Specifically, he said that the Ph.D. students who will be future professors (and through retraining, some current professors) need to understand both the “linguistic and metalinguistic” stories of their departments’ countries and regions. Every graduate program should include a course in applied linguistics, he said, focusing on the latest advances in understanding of cognition, identity, bilingualism, and other topics.

Whatever 'metalinguistic stories' means here, this is surely a vastly saner path for language departments than they have recently been on. Geisler and his panel are to be thanked for their work.

What's interesting here is that some top departments have already made this very transition in practice. The University of Wisconsin's Department of German (where our contributor Joe currently works), for example, has more graduate students doing German linguistics than literature (many of them doing expressly sociolinguistic and socio-historical work, dealing with the kinds of cultural issues Geisler seems to argue for), an absolutely outstanding second language acquisition program (and I imagine every student takes at least a course or more in that area), one of the best Dutch language/culture programs in the country, and a remarkably active program of teaching and research in understanding German-speaking immigration to North America in its historical, cultural and linguistic aspects. They don't have a course on 'cognition', but they cover the rest of what Geisler seems to want in even more depth than he seems to ask for.

Classes in these areas are heavily enrolled, at the undergraduate and graduate level, faculty and students are doing outreach, getting grants inside and outside the university (Title IX to support Dutch, I think, and funding enough to support a long string of project assistants in all these areas), and research by faculty and students is pouring forth — much of it in outlets beyond the narrow world of Germanistik. (Joe reminds me that the linguists in the department all publish in places like the Journal of Pragmatics, Linguistic Inquiry, Transactions of the Philological Society, Theoretical Linguistics, Phonology; Diachronica is edited there and the Journal of Germanic Linguistics was for a number of years.) And I've met some of their linguistics grad students — they are a presence at all kinds of conferences, not just around here, but nationally and internationally — and they are smart and engaged, excited about what they're doing.

From what I can see, the only real problem is that this change hasn't yet registered with the literature faculty, nor has it been understood by the deans and others in the College of Letters & Science yet. All the programs noted above (linguistics, SLA, Dutch, German-American studies) are carried by only six faculty (one of whom also teaches undergrad lit). All but one of these people have serious administrative duties — department chair, associate dean, two center directors, and running a large language program/supervising a bevy of teaching assistants.

In sharp contrast, the staff directory lists almost twice as many faculty who do only German literature (aside from basic language teaching), where they offer relatively few courses and with often weak enrollments. Few, if any, are carrying significant administrative roles. In looking through their on-line descriptions and web pages, most of them aren't actively publishing and those who are seem limited to very traditional German-bound stuff and they don't seem to publish in refereed places much, mostly just edited collections (like Peter Lang) and encyclopedias and such. (The main exception is one young colleague, whose work speaks to issues of identity, immigration and other issues relevant to today's world and the proposed new direction, but one senior person does seem professionally active in film studies and other areas.) What's more, if you can get access to the salary numbers (in the Redbook, traditionally freely available to the world but now limited to UW campus computers), many of these literature faculty are earning tens of thousands of dollars a year more than their more productive and active colleagues who aren't in literature. I gather that department-internal resources go almost exclusively to literature-oriented activities.

So, in terms of activity and impact, this department has turned Geisler's corner: It has an absolutely thriving operation that exemplifies how language departments can succeed and be relevant. But that group is burdened with a largely aged, unproductive cadre (in Merriam-Webster's sense 3: "a cell of indoctrinated leaders") soaking up most of the available resources. Surely, no dean in their right mind will replace a retiring literature person in that department for years to come, but an additional hire in any of the active areas would be a sound investment in a highly innovative operation: The non-literature-centered parts of this department look like a model of how language departments can do what the MLA panel argues they should be doing.

The question for people like Geisler and the rest of the panel is how resources can be redirected into the vital parts of a department like this, instead of being squandered on an extravagant early retirement program for the rest.

They Shred Pigs in Germany

Just checking in to report that English is not quite a global language yet, at least not in Germany, at least not in obscure towns that happen to be taken up on their offer to host a linguistics conference, at least not on hotel restaurant menus:


The dish in question consists of a pork cutlet served on a slice of rye bread, topped with a fried egg.

Rock and Runes

"Heavy metal umlaut" has been much discussed among linguists as an orthographic oddity, but little has been said, as far as I know, about the association between rock (mostly heavy metal, guitar-god kind of stuff) and "runes". This week's Onion has a brilliant little riff on that in the graphic accompanying their frontpage piece on (reproduced to the right here, this runs just below the big story — "Florida man beats out heart disease as nation's no. 1 killer"):

Unreleased Jimmy Page Guitar Riff to Be Retrieved From Secret Vault To Save Rock And Roll

The rune thing is a motif that's been around for a long time, as part of the whole medieval imagery in certain circles. (Just scroll through the results of googling 'runes heavy metal'. Of course the Onion has to go over the top on using obviously non-Runic characters — these ain't in ANY futhark I've ever seen. (See here for what looks, on a quick glance, like a reasonable overview.) But don't you love that they have Rockologists (not runologists, specialists in Germanic historical linguistics, etc.) deciphering them. Hard to know whether that one line is intended as the text for the whole translation below, but if so, all the better.

Will Jimmy Buffett have to die to save rock and roll?

Selma style shiftin'

A lot has been made of Hillary's "fake southern accent" last weekend in Selma, at the remembrance of Bloody Sunday. Powerline and other rightwing blogs have posted comparative samples, like here. In fact, things are more complex than they first appeared, as laid out here, where LaShawn Barber reviews some of the political posts. (See also here.)

The same charge of "faking an accent" has been leveled at Obama in various places (including the last link above) and even Al Gore, here. For an upper middle class white girl from northern Illinois, who lived in Arkansas as a member of the real elite, even quoting a passage "in character" (as one blog puts it) like this seems like a bad move at best. But Obama, who worked as a community organizer in Chicago, surely knows the kind of English he was using very well. Even Al Gore is ultimately from Tennessee, although it's a tenuous connection for the son of a US senator. So, can the son of an African father style shift in Alabama? Or a rich white kid officially from Tennessee but mostly from Washington, D.C. when he talks in black churches? (And with Gore, unless I'm just not remembering, it's basically about moving from his normally very standard English to a southern-sounding variety, not using features particularly associated with African-American speech.)

What this calls to mind is not so much anything about linguistics per se, but more the considerable body of work in folklore on "authenticity", where that notion naturally turns out to be slippery. Regina Bendix's important book, In search of authenticity, argues that this search is central to the formation of folklore studies, and the sense of loss that comes with modernity.

Gotta run now, but will return to this issue later ...

'to unscrew' vs 'to screw up'

Haven't seen any mention of this strip yet ... Scott Adams is good with language, and this use of 'to unscrew' for the undoing of a screw up seems striking. You can find a few uses like this via google, but it doesn't look widespread, and you get other (for me, more expected) variants like 'to unscrew up'. I assume the issue for speakers like Alice is that somehow negating a verb + particle construction like 'to screw up' doesn't work because the un- doesn't seem like it can modify the up, so you repair it by dropping the latter? Offhand, I can't think of parallel constructions, though ... Is this a structural innovation or following some patterns that I'm missing?

Long Ranger update ...

People who deal with linguistic prehistory very far over the horizon are known as 'long rangers' — I've often heard it used derisively but they've embraced the term. The NYT article from yesterday gets into that territory with Basque substrates in Britain and such. The long rangers have their own groups and discussion lists of course (see here, for the clearest example) If you join the Yahoo group "Mother Tongue Long Ranger", word is that you'll see a longish letter by Vitaly Shevoroshkin (University of Michigan) sketching some of the history of proposals about pre-IE substrates in Europe. This work posits a (North) Caucasian presence in early Europe and sees Basque as a part of that family. ('Traditional' historical linguists don't buy any genetic relationships with Basque, labeling it an 'isolate'.)

English as a "fourth branch of Germanic"

Sorry for the silence; been away and otherwise occupied for a few days. A nonlinguist colleague of Joe's passed him this story yesterday and the print version of it is now out. It's about the DNA of the population of the British Isles, with some geneticists claiming:

that both Britain and Ireland have been inhabited for thousands of years by a single people that have remained in the majority, with only minor additions from later invaders like Celts, Romans, Angles, Saxons, Vikings and Normans.

That's pretty cool, certainly, but I get a little nervous at hearing that Stephen Oppenheimer, the lead geneticist here, is arguing that these populations are basically Basque. I haven't read the background material this point is based on (yet), but there's no evidence mentioned that shows that connection: It's clear that the area was inhabited by pre-Indo-European populations, but was it this particular group? I'm curious because, as Joe reminds me, Theo Vennemann has written a ton in recent years about pre-IE substrates in European languages, including arguments that languages related to Basque originally stretched across Europe and that important streams of Semitic speakers came to Celtic- and Germanic-speaking areas very early on. Such stuff is fascinating maybe precisely because it's basically impossible to confirm or disconfirm in any really rigorous way. That kind of discussion drives 'traditional' historical linguists utterly mad and DNA support for that position would stir the pot in a big way.

But then things turn to language and it all gets decidedly weird:

Dr. Oppenheimer has relied on work by Peter Forster, a geneticist at Anglia Ruskin University, to argue that Celtic is a much more ancient language than supposed, and that Celtic speakers could have brought knowledge of agriculture to Ireland, where it first appeared. He also adopts Dr. Forster’s argument, based on a statistical analysis of vocabulary, that English is an ancient, fourth branch of the Germanic language tree, and was spoken in England before the Roman invasion.

OK, you're tempted to leave aside the notion of a language being 'more ancient' in this sense, and whether the Celts really brought agriculture a few millennia back and whether their language supplanted the original, Basque-related tongue. That's all so shrouded in the mist of prehistory that it would seem very hard to really shoot down. Alas, Joe Eska (a leading specialist in early Celtic) and Don Ringe (a leading Indo-Europeanist who has done very important work in computational approaches to historical linguists) showed in considerable detail that Forster's approach to Celtic, and to historical linguistics generally, is profoundly and fundamentally flawed in virtually every regard. (See their discussion note, "Recent work in computational linguistic phylogeny", Language 2004, 80.569-582.) Here's a little slice of their conclusion:

We have shown that [Forster & Toth's] selection and analysis of data are full of errors, that their confusion about what kinds of evidence are valuable for research in linguistic phylogeny has compromised their project, and that their rejection of the principles of the comparative method is not only counterproductive, but also completely antithetical to historical linguistics as a science. Most importantly, they have not addressed the crucial computational problems involved in phylogenetic reconstruction from comparative data.

Leaving aside comparative linguistics, I tend to assume that geneticists control quantitative methods and am pretty stunned at what look like basic problems found by Eska and Ringe. Forster's web page lists among his publications a reply in Language, actually a brief letter to the editor. I have to agree with Eska & Ringe's counter-reply that "Forster’s response … fails to address any of our criticisms concerning their methodology." Ouch.

When we get to the history of English, we're playing on turf where we have some clearer data, linguistic and otherwise. Maybe we could get some expert opinions on English as "a fourth branch of Germanic"?

Update, 8:18 a.m.: I've just been informed that the German version of Scientific American, Spektrum der Wissenschaften, has run pieces on the Basque DNA thing, here, and on Basque as the pre-IE language of Europe, here.

The ubermeat

Prime rib is the ubermeat.

So I gather from a TV commercial. Time to get rid of the idiot box, I'm thinking.