iTunes U: Martin Lewis on historical linguistics

This blog seems to reach an unsettlingly hip demographic, so you probably already know about iTunes U (if not, see here), basically 'enhanced podcasts' on educational topics. (These have podcast audio, with some visuals, slides of the PowerPoint sort, no video; see this.) Heck, you're probably listening to one right now on your new iPhone as you read this blog on another iPhone. Well, maybe our audience is more the healthy kind of hip than rich and trendy.

Stanford University has a particular presence on iTunes U, including a course on the Geography of World Cultures, by Martin W. Lewis. I knew about iTunes U but hadn't listened to /watched any of them until a colleague told me that this particular course included a number of lectures on historical linguistics with some nice maps. If you like maps and historical linguistics, you owe it to yourself to check these out.

This series shows the great potential of enhanced podcasts. At the same time, it underscores the need for real expertise in both of the fields at hand here: As far as I can see (= as a non-geographer), he does a great job on the geography, like the spread and areal distribution of languages. Historical and cultural geographers seem to be masters of sketching the broad strokes of history nicely, including here archeology and such, and tying it to space. Needless to say, the maps are great, for the most part (a few are fuzzy, etc.)

While Lewis knows a ton about languages, the thing is shot through with claims that will make historical linguists jump, like this: "Languages don't change as much as they used to." I don't know of any good evidence to back up such a claim and am not sure how you'd get it. Looks like just a naked assertion.

Lewis seems to rely heavily on popular works. In particular, the various references to Nicholas Wade's most recent book, Before the Dawn (2006), will outrage some linguists, given the widespread griping about Wade's reporting on language for the NYT. He draws on John McWhorter's Power of Babel as well. McWhorter is (or was, before he became a conservative think-tank guy) a professional linguist and he knows his stuff, but I'd argue that you need a tremendous amount of background to understand what he's actually doing in his popular and professional work — there's a lot of provocation in his writing that a non-specialist will probably read right past, and agendas that you might not pick up on all the time.

Sadly, there are a few howlers in the lecture. Two examples from pretty early on (with an indication of roughly where they come in the hour and a half lecture):

• around 18:30: "How did English actually become a language?" He says point blank that it was the Norman invasion. He goes on to declare Modern English grammar heavily Romance (as well as heavily Germanic). Ouch.
• around 21:30: Greenberg's take on genetic relationships among languages (basically, the belief in Proto-World) is presented as a minority view but not as utterly insane. There's not even mention at the pervasive and fundamental patterns of errors: students need to know that the most basic data Greenberg presents just can't be trusted at all.
• And you could write a long post on his treatment of clicks (it runs through much of the lecture), but that's something for another day ... .

Anyway, I feel bad saying negative stuff about what's basically a nice piece of work. Again, enhanced podcasts represent a powerful tool, but I really wish he'd done these lectures together with a card-carrying historical linguist, or at least checked the content with one.

Doff of the summerweight tuque to Professor V. (no relation) for alerting me to this series.

More on -t- ~ -ss- alternations

A few months ago, I posted about a joke involving latinate derivational morphology in English, namely -t- ~ -ss-, where a break in the show at Second City was announced this way:

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

The speaker undid the s > ʃ, but didn't reach back all the way to a t, like we have with transmit ~ transmission, remit ~ remission, and many more. I suggested that "Please intermit" would have been an odd, bookish-sounding joke (though that verb exists in a somewhat different meaning) and that the middle road taken here was a good one. (This differs from politics, where "there's nothing in the middle of the road but yellow stripes and dead armadillos", according to the great Texas populist Jim Hightower. See here.)

Well, a somewhat parallel case has come up on the big linguistics blogs, notably on Language Log, here. It starts with this from BoingBoing:

We feed kids gross things, but this reaches new levels of grotitude.

And in email to Mark Liberman of LL, Lynne Murphy of Separated by a Common Language raised, basically, the question of whether this was the latinate pattern. Liberman argues for a role of grody/grotty in prompting the t here. Plausible, for sure, but I don't know if I'm convinced yet. My form of the latter word is grody and I'd automatically spell the -tudiness form groditude. For those who have grotty, wouldn't you go with grottitude?

But he goes on to lay out very nicely how the -tude stuff bubbles around especially in old hacker slang. There's the hook for me: Ordinary humans may seem unlikely to work back from -ss- to -t-, but think about general computer and hacker slang plurals like these:

• sg. ~ pl.
  
• virus ~ virii
• vax ~ vaxen

This is a specialized kind of play with language, obviously, and vaxen is presumably based on ox/oxen, not Latin. Besides, the kids these days hardly seem to know what vax is/was. Still, these examples suggest to me that -tudinous talk could include the -ss- ~ -t- alternation too.

By no means am I arguing that the above is the story and that the grody/grotty story is wrong — this seems like an area of language where multiple pressures pushing in one direction yield a particular outcome.

The last word on 'articulate', almost literally

Spelling reform? I got yur sp3lling ref0rm right h3r3, dood

After writing a little about spelling reform not long ago (here, for example), a contributor just passed along this link about leet speak. Little bits of leet have been appearing here almost since the beginning, of course, although I don't think I've used the term.

The wikipedia entry has some of the expected shortcomings: A cropping of elite to leet is hardly 'degenerative' (though that's not quite the word they wanted), and "technically, an argot" makes the definition of argot way too precise-sounding. But the table is cool, and not all of the morphology has been chewed over on linguistics/language blogs that I read.

Anyway, it keeps occurring to me that leet is some spelling reform I could get behind, or maybe more like free-form spelling. Here's a way to nurture creative use of language (in some sense, anyway), and it's a far more fundamentally positive thing to play with than insulting how wait-staff talk or enforcing the use of new epicene pronouns in scholarly books.

I've been asked to offer a tip of the Mallards cap to Ben Frey for the link. And oh yeah, image from here.

Breaking: New language column

Most regular visitors to Verb City also read Language Log, but for those who don't: Ben Zimmer, whose comments to this blog often offer more insight than the posts he's commenting on, has launched From A to Zimmer, here. Check it out.

Word Court: Impeach the judge

Recently, Barbara Wallraff ("The Judge" of Word Court) asked readers to complain about the language of servers in restaurants. Let's be clear: Maybe she thought this was a cute little chance to air some gripes about usage, but she's inviting those with enough disposable income to go to a place where their every wish is to be delivered by others to bitch about those others, who don't generally earn a living wage, get health care, and depend on anonymous charity from those they're serving. (Bonus points for a complete syntactic tree of that sentence, gentle readers! And you can choose your syntactic framework.) Somebody who hatches this little project has never spent real time on the lower rungs of the socioeconomic ladder, I suspect.

This week, Wallraff published a batch of gripes. First, though, she tries to assuage an angry restaurant worker by promising to publish complaints from staff about patrons. (Yeah, that'll make it right.) Of course even that response to this person is insulting and ill-informed:

But tell me this: If language is so unimportant, how did I manage, using nothing but language, to enrage you?

Bait and switch much? Can you really miss the distinction between usage norms (what the writer found unimportant) and the content of a newspaper column? Remember, Wallraff writes newspaper columns about usage, presumably for a living.

Examples of most "hated" expressions include wilful misunderstanding of intent: "Do you want your change?" (I often leave exact change plus tip.) "How's everything so far?" (This reader assumes the question indicates that things are going to get worse.) Being called "hon" or "honey" annoys some. (Tip: Go to fancier restaurants if this bothers you, or move north.) So, these aren't really 'usage' matters in the normal sense, but rather about routine bits of discourse in a particular setting. We might joke gently about the nurse's use of first person plural or something, but hating these familiar dialogues at Denny's?

Enforcing usage norms is about the exercise of social power. Rosina Lippi-Green wrote a whole book, one often and enthusiastically endorsed here since the beginning of this blog, describing how language is used to subordinate and subjugate. Here's a quote from another source:

The social function of [grammatical rules] is not arbitrary. Like other superficially innocuous ‘customs’, ‘conventions’ and ‘traditions’ (dress codes included), rules of language use often contribute to a circle of exclusion and intimidation.

— Cameron (1995:12)

Compared to housing or job discrimination, this is a trivial example, but Wallraff is encouraging the most ignorant kind of behavior, with a nasty classist stench to it: Where else can you openly encourage people to denigrate the people who are serving them? If you move back to the U.S. from Italy, Barbara Wallraff, I hope you don't go to restaurants where the staff realizes who you are or what you've written. Spitting in your soup is likely to be the least of it.

How ill-informed and how counterproductive can public discussion of language get? Let's take action: Drop the CapTimes a line (here), asking them to replace Word Court with a legitimate language column. Jan Freeman's The Word would keep the journalistic tone but could inform people rather than propagate the crudest misunderstandings about language. In a university town, Nathan Bierma's On Language would be a natural, too.


REFERENCES
Cameron, Deborah. 1995. Verbal Hygiene. London & New York: Routledge.

Lippi-Green, Rosina. 1997. English with an accent: Language, ideology, and discrimination in the United States. London & New York: Routledge.

Epicene pronouns — now even crazier

Late last year, I learned (first from Ben Zimmer on Language Log, here, with a reference there to a post Dennis Baron's Web of Language, here) about a new epicene pronoun (that is, a gender-neutral replacement for he/she), yet another of roughly a bazillion ill-fated proposals along these lines. And apparently once a story hits the wire, it never dies … our CapTimes ran the same basic story yesterday (here's a version from another paper, since the CapTimes doesn't link it).

This proposal is for hu, "pronounced huh", presumably [hʌ], which "trips off the tongue easily". (Granted, that may have doomed my own earlier proposal for epicene [qʉʕi] with a high falling tone and creaky voice, spelled kooky.)

My point is not to revisit the clinical insanity of pushing new epicene pronouns — it's almost as smart as shipping pallets of $100 bills to a war zone. Baron covers this point wonderfully, and he's quoted at length in the article. Besides they/them/their works just fine, as Ben and millions before and after him have noted. Nor do I need to moan about the quality of press coverage about language and how the press loves to roll the same stupid stone up the same stupid hill every day ad infinitum. Language Log does that on an ongoing basis.

No, I just want to consider the heart of this passage:

The latest such pronoun comes from DeAnn DeLuna, who teaches literature at Johns Hopkins University. Her creation, "hu," would replace he, she, him, her and his. Because it's just one word, unlike an entire set of pronouns, DeLuna says it's easier to use than other gender-neutral pronouns.

First, let's assume that her in the list is doing double-duty, indicating oblique and genitive, with hers just left off the list. (And I'll get to reflexives in a minute.) I figure that's legit, since these folks are surely thinking in terms of distinct sound shapes and not in cells in paradigms.

This is a dramatic proposal, not for eliminating gender differences (which it does only partially), but for obliterating case distinctions: Most English personal pronouns come in sets of at least three — let's call them nominative, oblique and genitive, with 'dependent' and 'independent' forms for some genitivies. (Be patient, the fourth set, reflexives, are still coming.) This chart uses '—' to indicate the absence of distinct forms for oblique forms for some pronouns. Finally, let's acknowledge that most North Americans have a second person plural in spoken usage.

• First person, sg. and pl.
  
• I, me, my/mine
  
• we, us, our/ours
• Second person, sg. and pl.
• you, —, your/yours
  
• y'all, —, y'all's / you guys, —, you guys's [among other variants]
  
• Third person, sg. and pl. (with three genders in the sg.)
  
• she, her, her/hers
• he, him, his
• it, —, its
• they, them, their/theirs

DeLuna, if the article has it right and I've understood the article, proposes:

• First person, sg. and pl.
  
• I, me, my/mine
  
• we, us, our/ours
• Second person, sg. and pl.
• you, —, your/yours
  
• y'all, —, y'all's / you guys, —, you guys's [among other regional variants]
  
• Third person, sg. and pl. (with two genders in the sg.)
  
• hu
  
• it, —, its
• they, them, their/theirs

I'm assuming DeLuna wants to keep to the current standard with regard to second person plurals. Otherwise, she'd presumably do what most of us do and use the plural here and avoid the whole freakin' problem. Besides, she's a writing teacher, so I'm guessing that she's generally heavily invested in Standard Language Ideology, trying to change a norm and the article certainly implies that she's eager to enforce her views.

Overall, that is one weird pronominal system. Third singular would actually still keep a gender distinction — let's call it animate versus inanimate — and the animate pronoun would have no inflection at all, less than even English nouns (cf. hu wrote a book; I saw hu yesterday; that's hu car parked in the driveway, but the table vs. the table's size), while the inanimate would have genitive vs. non-genitive distinction. We can't discount the possibility that 's is being regarded as a suffix that attaches to pronouns, so that this last one would be hu's car. (If it's s-less, the genitive use of hu matches her in r-less dialects, by the way.)

Of course, if the exclusion of hers wasn't a mistake in the article, we'd have a feminine form just for the genitive, but sensitive to the dependent/independent distinction.

So now, at last, what about those reflexives? That's an issue in the Epicene Wars and it's not mentioned here, but if you don't use hu for reflexive third singulars, you haven't solved the problem at all. So, I imagine we get:

• A: Hank's head sure is all banged up.
• B: How'd hu hurt hu, anyhow?
  
• A: Hu got hacked in hu hockey game.

Say that five times fast.

But maybe the closing quote from DeLuna gives away something:

I'm interested in people having fun with language," she said. "The idea is just to communicate.

Can I join the fun? Let's add inverse marking, by adding d'oh after a sentence.

Update, 10:35 am: See Ben Zimmer's comment on this post. I considered the interpretation he suggests DeLuna intends for whatever the minimal time is for the human brain to consider something, namely that we keep all of our current pronouns and add hu only for the new epicene slot. In fact, if DeLuna is following her own rules, that is her intent, since she refers to Dennis Baron using 'his'. That means the article got things wrong — hu only replaces he/she, etc. specifically when we need to be gender-neutral. That makes the whole thing far less interesting, but it would create an ever odder paradigm:

• Third person, with four gender/animacy distinctions in the sg., none in the pl.
  
• she, her, her/hers
• he, him, his
• hu
• it, —, its
• they, them, their/theirs

I suppose this works in terms of features: We've got the usual +masc./+anim., +fem./+anim., -anim. in the singular, along with hu as +anim, -masc./-fem.? Does that work?

Since Cassidy mentions Salish in her comment, I'm wondering what language shows anything like this kind of system, in terms of gender/animacy and gaps in the paradigms. Not Klingon, right?

And now, Second Language Phonology in the news!

A pair of UW-Milwaukee linguists, Fred Eckman and Greg Iverson, are getting big press in Cream City*, here, for their work on second language phonology. The article nicely gets across connections up and down the speech chain and how the brain works all the way to practical applications. Check out this quote from Eckman, starting from the the cognitive side of phonology:

there are underlying abstract concepts at play. We're trying to identify these and test them and see just what is it about how the mind is organized for language that makes producing some of these sounds so difficult for some people and not so much for others. After all, we all have the same anatomical structure — lips and tongues and so on. So what's going on there?

This kind of vital research is precisely what our Wisconsin universities should be doing, and the work is laid out clearly in the piece. As state support for our universities collapses, we've got faculty bringing in a massive grant to our state's 'other' doctoral institution (but one which has long been a presence in the field of linguistics). I hope that their deans accompany these guys around campus, spreading rose petals in their path and offering them refreshing beverages.

*Traditional nickname for Milwaukee, according to legend, because of the cream-colored brick used in so many buildings there.

More Yooperese coverage

Nice bit of press coverage on Kate Remlinger's Yooper project, here. The Henry Higgins routine comes up pretty often. Wonder how old that is?

How come there's no snappy name for Wisconsin talk?

The Supremes' brave new world

In an editorial called "Three bad rulings", the NYT sums up how the Supreme Court yesterday managed:

to reopen the political system to a new flood of special-interest money, to weaken protection of student expression and to make it harder for citizens to challenge government violations of the separation of church and state.

God. The criminalization of student speech has already been rolled and smoked on linguistics blogs, by Dennis Baron on Web of Language here and by David Beaver on Language Log here, for example. It's just insane, and damaging to the foundation of the country, as is the dismantling of the separation of church and state.

But it's the corporatist, almost corporate fascist, slant of lots of current news that might hurt us most. Most information we see is already in the control of a few hands, and now Big Money will be back to buying elections. This just had to come at the same time as we find out that our highest 'elected', 'executive branch' officials see themselves as utterly free from any oversight whatsoever.

A mundane but annoying example is the assault on internet radio that's underway (see here). If you want to listen to music not in your personal library that's more interesting than the psuedo-country and bleached out hits of yesterday, you're SOL, by and large, even in a town the size of Madison. We do have the wonderful WORT, but they're covering everything not on 'mainstream' radio.

It's a pretty depressing moment: Even people who voted for Bush have to a remarkable extent realized what a creep they helped foist on us, and it's pretty clear that these guys are simply and literally criminals. But Bush is still in office and we're feeling the bootheel of a judiciary that's going to kick us hard for years to come.

Principle Engineers

Nice follow-up comment on spelling from the person who passed along the usage question this morning:

I actually received … a resume where a man described himself as Principle Engineer.

Now, there's a profession we need more of! There are too many ill-constructed principles out there in the world. I wonder what department in the School of Engineeering he got that degree from? Civil? Ethical?

Topic labels and finding stuff

A regular reader of this blog pointed out in person last week — ever so gently, mind you — that essentially every post here could well carry the topic label 'WTF?'. How true, my man, how very true. But it seems particularly appropriate here ... I happened to see this, here:

Yeah, be careful what you say about Mr. Verb, because he will find you and quote you.

Yup, quod erat demonstrandum, I suppose, in a non-technical kind of way.

But that thread in the link above is pretty funny on 'pompous ass words' and such. (And yes, that was the motivation for the q.e.d. See here, especially on 'non-mathematical contexts'.)

By the way, image from here.

Usage question: comprised (of)

A banner day in Verbville: Our very first, utterly unsolicited usage question. Before turning to the (highly worthy) question, gentle reader, be warned that this is not a forum about contemporary usage, though we comment it on regularly, usually with relish.

Now, to the question:

We are having a disagreement on the use of comprised and comprised of. My position is that comprised means composed of so saying comprised of is like saying "composed of of". What do you think?

This is one of those usage questions that even linguists seem to fret over — where we don't bat an eye at split infinitives and many proudly use literally in its recent, non-literal sense. In fact, I not long ago participated in an editorial decision where one of the best editors in the field of linguistics raised this very point about a paper written by another very senior colleague. The web is pretty well papered over with discussions of this point, like this one, so nothing here is close to original.

Here's what Merriam-Webster's Collegiate (11th ed.) says, starting with their third definition:

3 : COMPOSE, CONSTITUTE

usage Although it has been in use since the late 18th century, sense 3 is still attacked as wrong. Why it has been singled out is not clear, but until comparatively recent times it was found chiefly in scientific or technical writing rather than belles lettres. Our current evidence shows a slight shift in usage: sense 3 is somewhat more frequent in recent literary use than the earlier senses. You should be aware, however, that if you use sense 3 you may be subject to criticism for doing so, and you may want to choose a safer synonym such as compose or make up.

This gets it exactly right, from what I know, except that I have no idea about specifically literary usage. As is often the case, it's easy to avoid the problem, as they suggest. (There's a growing body of work in Second Language Acquisition about avoidance as a strategy among learners, by the way.)

I'd also note that we do see some instances of 'preposition doubling' (see here), including an example pretty close to composed of of:

This league consists of mostly of players …

Lexical gaps and 'fixing' language

Today's The Word column by Jan Freeman treats a little lexical oddity in English, one that's related to something that's been floating on ads-l in related form of late: How should we refer to a person somebody has a romantic relationship with but isn't married to?

Freeman starts with the case of Paul Wolfowitz's "girlfriend". (As Wonkette noted when the story was current, the alarming part is that Wolfowitz wasn't/isn't single.) Saying that the now former "World Bank prez" and still "wrong-about-everything-ever neo-con hero" (to quote Wonkette) has a girlfriend is unsettling, just plain does not work. Let's propose a Wolfowitz test: Is there a term to we could apply to Shaha Riza in reference to her relationship with him that does not make us gag?

The ads-l discussion revolved, in good part, around the term fuck buddy. Can't use that in the papers, I imagine. Partner is widely used, but has gotten so common for gay and lesbian couples that it can cause confusion — I've heard it taken to mean specifically same-sex partner when it wasn't intended to. "Significant other" is just awkward. Freeman cites Safire as proposing a return to sweetheart. Right, we'll get on that. Nothing comes close to passing the test. But maybe that's a test no mere lexical item could be expected to pass. (Remember the guy licking his comb? Remember the insane war he worked so hard to get us into?) Maybe, lacking a term to describe such a relationship, Wolfowitz should be condemned to a life of solitude, maybe as in solitary confinement.

Like Jan Freeman, I'm intrigued by these little oddities, what the best current solution is, and where things are headed but consider the bottom line for folks like Safire: As a culture, we have failed to develop a serviceable term for this extremely common relationship. And words are easy to invent, to pick up, to use. Hey, mavens, if you can't fix this one, maybe you should reconsider the whole "saving the language" enterprise.

Naming blunder?

There is, of course, a small industry devoted to developing business names and such (see here for a good example). I think a local crew might need such services: Yesterday we got one of those mailers for new condos that are springing up all over Madison. This one even comes with a pad of paper printed with their logo and name: Watercrest. It looks like there are other developments with that name, located on water, of course. (And it shows up as a variant of watercress too!)

Around here, being on the water is a luxury but brings risk: We get flooding on the local lakes pretty often. Do you really want to spend a half million (or whatever these condos cost — view of the skyline, on the water, etc., so could be a lot more) on something that evokes the possibility of water cresting there?

Greenwashing

It's just one little word, but sometimes you just get lucky in terms of coinage … at least that's what I was thinking when NPR just did a piece on greenwashing, the creation of an illusion of being ecologically responsible, or how ever you'd define it.

To build on the model of the verb to whitewash, you really had to have a color term being used along the lines of green in that current meaning, and then the manipulation or abuse of that term to get the negative sense of whitewash. This one was just inevitable, but the person who invented it must have found it a satisifying moment.

I'd heard the term before, but it's really widespread, judging fromt the g-hits, and used on Swedish websites and elsewhere.

GLAC 14, Call for abstracts

The 14th Germanic Linguistics Annual Conference will be here next May, in case any interested readers haven't caught wind of that. Details here. Word on the street is that plans are being hatched for a workshop on Netherlandic, maybe sociohistorical.

Art versus error

Many years ago, I knew a (dead-serious professional) artist who did collages. She showed me this piece she'd done one time and I asked her about how and why she'd gotten this one particular effect. She looked at me in disbelief and with some annoyance, and said something like "Look, I don't THINK about this stuff or analyze it." Then a couple years later, a (semi-professional, but really talented) singer and lyricist I knew showed me some lyrics he'd written. I saw a really weird, obscure pattern and asked him if he knew that was there. He looked at me in disbelief and with some annoyance, and said something like "Are you asking whether I control my art?" Since then, I'm not so quick to question creative stuff in that kind of way.

So, when I noted (and quoted via cut-and-paste) the following comment, I saw something but didn't consider changing it, figuring it could well be playing with language, maybe even some kind of allusion to German:

a breath of fresh air in the overly stuffy, crowded, shrill, and cranky world of language-loathing, linguo-ignormauses

Today, I got a message from the author of those words correcting it to ignoramuses. If I'd been copyediting it, I would have sent a query to the author, but, hey, it's the freakin' blogosphere.

"very sibilant s" as social marker?

Yet another little oddity from the Stephanie Miller Show, the other day: They were talking about this gay-hating preacher, Ted Haggard, who got nailed for snorting meth and whatever else with a male prostitute. He of course then got "cured". They ran a piece of an interview or statement he gave and were doubting that he was/is cured. In the course of that, they commented on his speech, asking whether he 'sounded gay'. Any 'gay accent' has proven extremely elusive — impossible to pin down from what I've read. There's a ton on the topic in American Speech, like this piece, and other journals — this one article gives you plenty of recent refs.

One of the guys on the show saidmore or less, "Well, his s'es sounded very sibilant." Hmmm, I hadn't heard anything distinct about the guy's speech, including his sibilants ([s] is by definition a 'sibilant'), and would have answered "no clue" if somebody had asked me if he sounded gay. But I asked the missus last night about this and she immediately responded: "Oh, they're saying the guy was lisping." That makes sense in terms of stereotypes, but I didn't hear it. If you search YouTube for this guy, you can hear plenty samples of his speech. I just can't hear anything lisp-like happening. I don't have time — or enough interest, really — to check and see if he has particular amounts of high energy in his [s], which is what I'd take 'very sibilant' to mean.

Is this a case of people hearing what they want?

Linguistics and Ufology?!?!?

The Google news feed for 'linguistics' continues to astound. This piece is an interview with Mike Heiser, who holds a Wisconsin PhD in Hebrew and Semitic, and it was published under the banner "On The Road To Roswell 2007". The interviewer tells us that Heiser provides …

first time ever, state-of-the-art scientific linguistic testing that has been applied to controversial UFO documentary evidence.

First reaction: gotta stop drinking so heavy in the morning, especially with those pain meds. Call me old-fashioned, but I can only see a train wreck coming immediately after that quote.

This stuff is surreal in different ways from what I expected. As a preface of sorts, Heiser is generally skeptical about UFOs. And it turns out that there is linguistics floating around in this pool … he debunks some accounts of 'ancient astronaut theories' based on faulty readings of Hebrew texts. I didn't really know — but am not terribly surprised to hear — that people have found lots of support for such views in cuneiform texts. Heiser says it's bunk, as you'd expect. Hittite has been used to argue for everything else, why not UFOs? Or whatever language these documents are in.

Then there's apparently a set of materials known as the "Majestic Documents" (sounds like government/military files about UFO claims, and such) and this guy has been trying to determine authorship of these documents (working with these folks). It turns out, the late Roger Wescott, an anthropological linguist who did some historical work, had tried the same thing years ago.

Maybe there are whole sectors full of jobs for linguists out there I never considered ... .

Linguistics t-shirts

OK, I'm probably the last person in the world to figure this out, but Cafe Press has a catalog of roughly one gazillion linguistics t-shirts. OK, mathematically, it's only a few hundred. And not all really that directly 'linguistic'. But lots of them are.

Lots of pretty familiar slogans ("I survived the Great Vowel Shift", "Old linguists don't die … they just leave a trace", "fck vwls"), but there's some neat stuff from the Speculative Grammarian and various other sources (generally unclear). I've taken the liberty of posting a couple of graphics here, for yucks. The IPA eye chart is pretty nice – anybody know where that comes from? (Looks at most vaguely familiar.)

Many of these would make fine Hangul Day presents.

Opinionator

I hadn't even thought to take seriously that the term opinionator was more than a cute old word that hadn't quite gone out of usage entirely. (Yes, for the record, it gets plenty of g-hits, and it was in old dictionaries, but it's not in the current Merriam-Webster's.)

Today's CapTimes has a piece on the editorial page about a formidable figure in local politics who just passed away, at only 36. He's described this way:

Jeff Erlanger, whom readers of the letters to the editor will know as a serial opinionator … .

If he was an opinionator, serial or otherwise, it's a very positive term around here.

Squeezy McFeelpants update …

Stephanie Miller just read a reader letter on her show, complaining about the grammar used on the show (never fear: tongues firmly in cheeks all around). Last week, they apparently formed the plural of the name in the subject line as follows:

Squeezy McFeelpantses

The reader corrects them to this:

Squeezies McFeelpants

Cute, if a little close to the old Onion joke about Safire (here).

Carrying water on the Safire front

Michael Covarrubias over at Wishydig has posted on Safire's column from yesterday. See here. (And a doff of my Madison Mallards baseball cap — it's too warm for a tuque these days — to Ben Zimmer for calling my attention to the post.) I confess that I couldn't really bear to read Safire yesterday beyond the set-up about candidates being arrayed in 'tiers' in current journalistic usage. Tiers have long been a pretty valuable notion in linguistics, but that's another story …

Wishydig makes good points, like about Bad Bill's constant confusion between OED's earliest given attestation and when a word actually arose, and noting that Safire virtually pulls a whole entry from the Oxford English Dictionary without quotes or attribution. In fact, if you strip away the corrections, Covarrubias has written the kind of content that we'd expect somebody being paid to write about the topic would write.

I've made various suggestions (over the months this blog has existed) about who the Times could hire to replace Safire when they finally fire his sorry ass, losing a few subscribers and gaining infinitely in credibility. Maybe the known journalists, lexicographers and linguists I've had in mind are too expensive. Guys, if it's the money, maybe you should hire this kid — I'm betting he carries no Watergate baggage, he can use OED and the web all by himself. Sheesh, he'd probably do the work without an assistant and save you that salary.

Israel Shenker and the history of linguistics

Yesterday's NYT carried a long obit for Israel Shenker, long-time reporter for Time magazine and then the NYT. The piece mentions some of the notable folks he interviewed over the years — Borges, M.C. Escher, Groucho Marx, Picasso, I.B. Singer — and has a few choice quotes, like this from 1976:

Insurance policies may be balm for the afflicted, but they are murder on the English language.

Hard to imagine now that just a third of a century ago, insurance companies actually paid out in the case of disaster, or at least were regarded as reliable enough to to count as a "balm".

But the author, Margalit Fox, gives some play to Shenker's interest in language. By coincidence, I just looked at an old article by Shenker, called "Former Chomsky Disciplines Hurl Harsh Words at the Master" from Sept 10, 1972. It was folded inside a copy of the first edition of John Lyons' book Noam Chomsky, in the Viking series Modern Masters. It provides a contemporary account of the Generative Semantics battles probably most familiar to younger linguists (= those who didn't live through them) from Randy Allen Harris's great Linguistics Wars.

Profession names ...

Looks like language analysts, linguisticians, langlogists, language engineers, and language scientists aren't the only ones worried about the names for their profession. Jan Freeman's The Word today starts with a journalist declaring a preference for the term opinionator (that earns a chuckle, I hope) and declaring journalist 'pompous'. (The image here may support that view, but I'm not quite sure how.)

Just fyi: After that little set-up, the bulk of Freeman's column focuses on the subject of people declaring certain utterly normal pronunciations pompous, ugly or 'straight out of lower Slobbovia'.

Clarence Thomas a Gullah speaker?

Today's NYT Book Review has a long review by Orlando Patterson of Supreme Discomfort, the new biography of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, by Kevin Merida & Michael Fletcher. It's a pretty depressing read — just like the interviews I've heard with the authors and the other review(s) I've seen — and I won't be reading the book.

But Patterson mentions that Thomas grew up speaking Gullah, "a genuinely Afro-English creole", and was mocked for "his 'Geechee' accent" when he moved to Savannah. I immediately wondered if there was some confusion there between what's sometimes called 'country' or 'backcountry' African-American speech and Gullah, but Thomas at least has claimed that it was the latter, see here (you have to scroll down or search for 'Gullah' to see it).

"Philologist" and other monikers

The last post was of course tongue in cheek — at least about what a 'linguist' is, not about the death of Austria's most notorious Nazi. And the stream of comments was unexpected. But it raises a real question: What should people who study the structure of language (in a broad sense) be called?

First, to philology: Let's leave aside the humorous definitions, like "the art of reading slowly", which has been attributed to Calvert Watkins (for what I've always assumed was the inspiration for that comment, see the quote here) or dismissive ones like Hilfswissenschaft 'helping science', used by some German scholars.

Merriam-Webster has a pretty interesting definition:

1 : the study of literature and of disciplines relevant to literature or to language as used in literature
2 a : LINGUISTICS; especially: historical and comparative linguistics b : the study of human speech especially as the vehicle of literature and as a field of study that sheds light on cultural history.

Neither of these comes very close to how I think most historical linguists and medievalists use the term today, which is often more like "the study of written texts", with some additional sense that there's some kind of focus on language. Mountains have been written about this and I'm not goingg to review it or resolve it, surely. Hans Henrich Hock, in his Principles of Historical Linguistics (2nd edition, 1991:3-5), calls philology "a related branch of inquiry into the history of languages", and writes:

… although philology can be given short shrift in a book like this which is concerned with the linguistics of language change, it should be noted that practicing historical linguistics usually cannot divorce themselves from philological work: Quite frequently new insights can be gained only from a better interpretation of text data.

Certainly if we understand philology as defined above, for many historical linguists it provides the empirical base we work from. Most of us have come to appreciate the need for a better empirical base, so most of us do plenty of philological work — building databases, for example.

Still, the M-W tradition lives on in many places. The Society for Germanic Linguistics was, until a decade or so ago, the Society for Germanic Philology. (The transition was without real controversy that I know of.) Non-linguists in the German Dept here on campus have only recently made the switch away from 'philologist' in talking about their colleagues who study language.

But what should we be called? A couple of weeks ago, a historian (from the southern hemisphere) referred to people in our field as "linguisticians" and you hear that around. Yeah,
tonguewit is clever, but I see bad things lurking.

In a reasonably serious conversation, a colleague has suggested language engineer, since it (1) gets linguists as far as possible from the humanities (= death in the current academy) and (2) sounds like money.

I'll stick with linguist for now.

Linguists' commentary in the media?

Wonkette announced the passing of Kurt Waldheim with this headline and opening:

Nazi Scumbag Finally Dies
Evil Nazi war criminal KurtWaldheim is finally dead at 88.

You might want to check out the reported cause of death at the end of the piece. But there's a linguistic hook too; Wonkette writes:

Experts say having Waldheim lead the UN is about as absurd as Henry Kissinger winning the Nobel Peace Prize. But as both of these things actually happened, linguists suggested the word “absurd” be replaced with “pretty much par for the course.” The CIA, of course, knew all about his Nazi past long before he became secretary general of the UN in 1971.

Man, I haven't ever gotten used to the military use of 'linguist' for 'language specialist' and now we're, what, copy editors?

Pronunciation note: seagull

For obvious reasons (at least if you follow baseball), it's taken a couple days to be able write this:

On Tuesday night, as our Milwaukee Brewers were being no-hit by the Detroit Tigers' Justin Verlander, the great Brewers' radio announcer Bob Uecker (a Wisconsin native) kept talking about the [si:gəls] flying around. (Sometimes, I think there was a schwa, sometimes a syllabic /l/.) Was it some weird mechanical mascot? Something for some promotion? Even with the context of things flying around in Detroit, I only figured out what this was when he used a variant of the word: gull. There was no hint of secondary stress on the second half of this compound. In fact, it was like those sailing terms where the compounds are spelled in pretty transparent ways but pronounced without a hint of their history: starboard, coxswain ([kaksən] in my limited experience, although Merriam-Webster gives two pronunciations) and gunwale (now sometimes spelled like it's said: gunnel). But I don't find this as a variant pronunciation anywhere — DARE has lexical variants for the bird name, but no entry for seagull itself, M-W doesn't give this variant, etc.

Oh god, what a bleak game it turned out to be. But the Brew Crew bounced back last night and took the Tigers, 3-2.

Verbs in the news again! The hortatory subjunctive

Check out this from Talking Points Memo, with the following headline:

When In Trouble, Blame The Hortatory Subjunctive

It follows, of course, on the heels of all the posts on Language Log and elsewhere about 'passive tense' and such. The quote in question was:

Until extensive rehabilitation of their performance occurs, they will not be getting promoted and will not be getting bonuses or special awards or anything of that nature.

The speaker claimed she meant to 'invoke the hortatory subjunctive' here. Rep. John Sarbanes (D-MD) is quoted as calling this "common future tense".

I know that the pros over at Language Log will pick this up, so let's just leave it to them.

Stretching the limits of verbing?

You probably know that Mr. Wizard passed away — a man who did very accessible science for kids on TV for years. A Milwaukee blog comments on the topic:

"Science" isn't a just noun used as the name of a class that some kids dread. Mr. Wizard showed how "science" is a verb. Seeing science done is fun!

So, I imagine the author is seeing verbs as good because we verbs are active, about doing, etc., right? So, it's not intended to say that there's a verb to science, but extolling this great quality of science, I imagine. Sure, there's enough verbiness in there for me. Still ...

*Time to go science me some language.

Image from here.

Auto-exemplification: The linguistic backstory

In the little post from yesterday, the title was a quick and dirty allusion to one of the great, if wellworn, pieces of linguistic humor out there: Lists of linguistic phenomena that exemplify the phenomenon in question. It's stuff like this (with rough and ready definitions added):

metathesis methatesis (change in the sequence of sounds)
haplology haplogy (loss of one of two identical syllables)
apocope apocop (loss of a final vowel)
syncope syncpe (loss of a medial vowel)

These are of course wonderful for students — you can hardly forget these these concepts after you hear these.

I knew this material first from the 1971 book Studies out in Left Field: Defamatory essays presented to James D. McCawley, ed. by Arnold Zwicky et al. It was originally published (as a joke festschrift for McCawley's "33rd or 34th birthday") by Linguistic Research, then reprinted by the good folks at John Benjamins in 1992. There, it's a "Glossary of Linguistic Terminology" by U. Pani Shad et alii and then "A Supplementary Glossary of Linguistic Terminology" by U Bal Shada Zwel et alii. It's rich in historical material (Krimm's Law, and for insiders Holtzmann's Laggus) and very multilingual.

Somehow I thought one or both of those had a title like "Auto-exemplification", but alas it's in the 1978 Lingua Pranca (available here, thanks to the Speculative Grammarian) where we find "The Linguist’s Self-Definer for Humanistic Greek and Latin Lingo—and other terms" by Robert Rankin, et al., followed immediately by "Autodescriptives" by Leonard Talmy. These are graphically much slicker, with IPA fonts and stuff, plus some nice ones like kpoarticulated stop, maybe more morphology (to back formate, pro clitic).

Other versions are here, here, and here and elsewhere. So, given that: how the heck has this stuff floated around without any crossreferences at all?

Auto-exemplification?

There's a farm town northwest of here, just this side of the Wisconsin River, called Roxbury. It consists most of a beautiful old Catholic Church (see photo, from here, where you can learn lots about the town), a restaurant and a couple of classic Wiscosin taverns. The most notable is the Roxbury Tavern, which has managed this really nice balance between staying new and staying traditional — they feature a regular hiaku contest, and high-quality local food, including stuff from maybe my favorite mid-size Wisconsin cheesemaker but they also have a Sunday pancake breakfast, all kinds of local music, and it's really a basic tavern.

Now, they're running a radio ad, basic tavern ad, and it closes with this line:

Studying cognitive dissonance since 19(whatever -- didn't catch it).

OK, the use of that phrase triggers the effect in this context. It's about time to get back out there, though ... . Maybe the missus and me can do some haiku.

I'll fill in the date if I hear the ad again.

Recursion in grammar

OK, the Everett-Chomsky thing has moved too far beyond what I know about the history of our field. A day after I did, Language Log picked up the Tribune story about this, here, with a post by Mark Liberman. Like me, he focuses on the appalling stupidity of the article, but he provides some really crucial background on the debate over recursion, arguing that its centrality to defining human language is very recent:

This began to change with Chomsky's "mimimalist program" in 1995, which jettisoned the idea of any well-defined layer of syntactic structure in between meaning ("logical form") and sound ("phonological form"), and therefore also discarded many of the parametric switches and knobs available in his earlier theories. And the change became important in the early oughts, when he decided that the human language faculty "only includes recursion".

The important piece was that Ken Hale had long ago argued that Walpiri has 'adjoining relative clauses' rather than recursive structures.

That this is the key moment in the "only recursion" stuff I'll buy, but is it really true that recursion wasn't assumed to be a core part of grammar earlier in linguistic theory? I recall recursion being central through lots of early generative grammar in ways that would make it an extraordinary property for any language to lack. And poking around quickly in a few early works on generative syntax, I sure see a lot made of the notion. But I don't know the history here, so consulted Newmeyer's Linguistic Theory in America (the 1st edition, from 1980). He talks about ways of capturing "the recursive property of human language" (p. 27), and then (p. 36, emphasis in original):

By the early 1950s many logicians simply ASSUMED that a natural language was defined by a set of recursive rules.

So, what am I missing here? Hasn't recursion long been central enough to make Everett's claims outrageous even before minimalism? I can see that this is the perfect moment for him to trot out this stuff, in terms of attacking generative theory, but isn't it a broader attack on all modern formal approaches to language? Who has a view of language where recursion is something we can use or not use, like marking an illative case? (These are real questions — this is too far from my ken.)

Gotta run ...

Image from here.

English and immigration ...

in the UK. See here.

Chicago Tribune aiming lower and lower ...

I already had a headache when I caught this link to a Chicago Tribune story about Dan Everett's conference on his highly public pissing match with Chomsky, held recently at Illinois State. I'm sour on the Trib these days, since hearing they may be about to ditch Nathan Bierma's "On Language" column. This certainly does not help.

After a little "Chomsky is Einstein/God/whatever" drivel, the reporter writes:

Everett pitted himself against a giant in the field, and modest ISU against the nation's elite universities. In the process, he drew national attention to this arcane field and enveloped scholars around the world in a battle.

Yes, he went out to slay the giant, alone and virtually unarmed. The Simpsons have a lot more depth to their plots. And Doonesbury. And Dilbert.

I gotta stop reading the freaking media; it's killing me.

Curses that come true, and those that don't

I know a woman who, after being dumped unceremoniously by a boyfriend, cursed the guy: "You'll end up a lonely old man one day." Decades later, she seems saddened at the fact that it's come true.

When, some weeks ago, I broke off things with Safire, I didn't drop a big curse on him, but I did call him "a bug stuck in amber, … never moving for all eternity." Well, maybe he is moving, but if so, it's in the worst possible direction …

Today's Safire column (don't worry we're not going there: no linguistic content to speak of, beyond a definition of hypocoristic) focuses on terms like hottie and stud muffin, after an opening riff on British to hot up. Sorry, but that's just somehow not age-appropriate vocabulary coming from him.

The facing page to the print edition of his column has a Campari ad that looks like it was designed to fit the topic — featuring Salma Hayek in a low-cut black dress. This makes it far worse.

The last thing we need is an image of Safire as leering old man.

Solids

I know the phrase "to do somebody a solid", meaning to do a favor for somebody or do something for somebody. Seems a little like it's peaked and fading as hip slang — I would have figured it for 1990s. Madison's free weekly, the Isthmus, is doing its local favorites content now and when you submit, you get a message with this:

Thanks for doing us a solid and voting for your Favorites.

Have we now reached the era when retro means '1990s'? Is this term more resilient than I realize? I do see a lot of occurrences specifically with voting in contests. Maybe it's developing into one of those things used only in a single collocation?

Oh, and by the way: They do have a "favorite local content blog" category. (The winner will get more votes than this blog has gotten in total page views, probably, but hey ... .)

NC place assimilation

One of the first patterns that's usually talked about in phonology is that nasals often assimilate to the place of articulation of a following stop, fricative. So, un-/in- in English is pronounced with a labial nasal [m] before p (impossible, and unbelievable, unless you really stress the prefix there) and with a velar nasal [ŋ] before k (incredible, uncool). But the process is usually limited to /n/, and we don't have problems saying things like Aamco with [mk].

I just heard people on the Stephanie Miller Show mocking Bush for yet another gaffe on the international stage (don't ask — sounds like it involved overflowing foam on his near-beer during a toast), this time in Heiligendamm, Germany. Stephanie Miller repeatedly called him Dummkopf, and it sure sounded like it was pronounced with [ŋk].

It actually works pretty well, since German has the noun Dung, meaning 'manure' (hey, the languages are related!). For yucks, I checked the term and there is actually a placename Dungkopf. Not changing my vacation travel plans to go there, though.

The Semantics Mystery!

Some readers of this blog probably know who Bill Inmon is (see here, if you don't). This piece by him showed up in the google Linguistics news feed that you see on the right column of this page.

Man, I just plain don't quite know where to start on this ... except to say that the image (from here) is pretty cool.

Integration of placenames in English

We constantly use words that come historically from other languages, of course, and those words have varying degrees of connection to the source language: cartouche screams 'hi, I'm French!' even though it's been around in English since at least 1548 (no doubt longer), while more often with even new borrowings we're not so aware of their foreignness. Aside from not being terribly common vocabulary for a lot of us and maybe being spelled a little funny, cartouche is striking for keeping final stress (we'd expect stress on the first syllable) and having a long or tense vowel followed by the 'sh' sound at the end of the word.

How we integrate loanwords phonologically is an interesting and important question — a burning one in phonological theory these days, in fact — but there's been relatively less attention to partial integration: We've integrated jalapeño into English to a fair extent, and most folks have [a] in taco, but English speakers almost never produce a dental or unaspirated /t/ at the beginning. Lots of people will produce an [x] in the name Bach, a sound foreign to Modern English. And if you're a little on the pedantic side (or wait tables in a trendy restaurant), you can getting away with nasalized vowels (instead of nasalized vowel plus nasal) in French words. But unless you're actually switching into German or French, I imagine you don't use a uvular /r/ in words from either language. But I don't know of rigorous ways of getting at which features are retained or not in particular cases.

This morning on NPR, Linda Gradstein did a report on the West Bank since the Six-Day War. She was reporting from a very famous place (pictured above), called in English Shiloh. This word is extremely well known in American English, from the Bible but also as a famous Civil War battle site, placename, first name, etc. According to Merriam-Webster, the only American pronunciation is with [ai] in the first syllable. And of course they do have an entry for the Middle Eastern placename. Same holds for answers.com.

Linda Gradstein was pronouncing this as [ʃílo] (basically 'SHE lo') repeatedly (but I think stressing both syllables in one instance). I thought, wow, I would have guessed this would have final stress in Hebrew. And if you're going to integrate the vowel ([i] instead of [ai]), I figured surely you'd keep the stress pattern. But then she talked to a settler living there who in fact did pronounce it with final stress. Where is the asymmetry here? Why would you move only half-way to the (apparent) Hebrew pronunciation? Even if this established in English in Israel (where Gradstein has presumably lived for the many years she's been NPR reporter from there), how did this come to be? Is it a general pattern? What am I missing here?

Funding higher education

I'm in a hurry right now, but check out these two links on UW funding:

• Interview with Joe Soss, Political Science, who's leaving UW for Minnesota, on Wisconsin Public Radio (requires RealPlayer).
  
• Post by someone putting UW's funding in its broader context.

Bierma's "On language" in danger?!?!

Let's just call Nathan Bierma's "On Language" column in the Chicago Tribune "the real On Language".

The message is crossposted from ADS-L (with permission). I've praised Nathan Bierma's column on this blog several times as one of the few reliable major media sources dealing with language. Hard to believe that it's threatened. Drop the Tribune a line if you can, and speak up for informed discussion of language in leading newspapers.

Sender: American Dialect Society <ADS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
Poster: Nathan Bierma <nbierm65@CALVIN.EDU>
Subject: future of "On Language"
------------------------------

Dear ADS,
My previously weekly "On Language" column (www.nbierma.com/language) has been appearing erratically in the Chicago Tribune over the last few weeks. Reduced space in the Tempo section has forced the editors to eliminate some content, including a few regular features. The Tribune is now deciding whether to continue to run "On Language" at all.

If you think my column is worth having around as one soldier in the fight against linguistic misinformation and prescriptivist scolding in the public forum, and would like to send a message of support to the Tribune editors, please e-mail ctc-tempo@tribune.com, tbannon@tribune.com, and jcwarren@tribune.com.

Thank you,

Nathan Bierma
"On Language"
www.nbierma.com/language

New "School of Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics", University of Illinois

We've been hearing about this development for a while, but it's now officially signed, sealed and delivered (see here): Illinois has created a school for languages and linguistics in Urbana.

The board … approved a University school of literatures, cultures and linguistics which will offer more than 30 languages associated with literature and cultures … .

The school of literatures, cultures and linguistics will bring together the departments of classics, East Asian languages and cultures, French, Germanic languages and literatures, linguistics, Slavic languages and literatures, and Spanish, Italian and Portuguese.

I'm far from sure of how to interpret this move: Is it a bold step toward restructuring and revitalizing language and linguistics? Is it along the lines of what the MLA report recommends? Will it bring real funding with it to create opportunities? Will it remove linguists farther from their (often very natural) homes in and ties to social and hard sciences, putting them in a humanities ghetto? We'll see.

But this is part of a major national pattern. For example, at Maryland, "language" has been declared one of three major priorities for the university. They've vaulted to the top of the heap in linguistics and their CASL is hiring top people from all over, for massive pay raises. Seems like these places have innovation being supported from the top. It's hard to find any leadership on this campus above the level of the individual department.