Freepin' wingers

The future is unknown,* but for the moment, C-PAC is a gathering of fringe crazies, and the subject of near-infinite hilarious posts by snarky bloggers, like here for example. If you follow that kind of stuff, you're seeing a lot of forms of freep these days. That's a blend, from Free Republic, the classic tinfoil hat crowd on-line, as suggested already by this google search result:

Both the Obama 'birth certificate' issue AND the 'homosexual agenda'. Isn't that a scream? Of course it's more than a little scary to think that they could have real power, so I laugh only nervously.

But I knew freep and its derivational family only as negative terms. Most common, in my experience, is freeper, synonym for wingnut, etc. But the verb is out there too, as here:

To slew [skew? V] or cheat an online poll by repeatedly voting (clearing cookies, using proxies) or to make a blog appear to be commented by numerous posters by the same means. (From the practices of the Free Republic or "freepers")

The results of the CNN question of the day were running 70:30 in favor until an hour ago when it got freeped.

What surprised me was seeing that the FreeRepublic website actually uses the term, with the variant spelling FReeper. Somehow, that's worse, because it evokes 'reaper' and thus 'grim' for me.

*That is …

"The oldest words of English"

I need more coffee before I can deal with this in detail, but the BBC has just published a piece saying that Mark Pagel, an evolutionary biologist who's written on language before, has established that words like "I", "we", "two" and "three"are the oldest sound-meaning correlations in English:

"We think some of these words are as ancient as 40,000 years old. The sound used to make those words would have been used by all speakers of the Indo-European languages throughout history," Professor Pagel said.

Oh goodness.

Update, 9:30 am, by Joe: Pagel is a serious scholar, and he works with people who are trying hard to understand comparative linguistics and apply current computational and quantitative models from biology to the topic.

I'm not sure how this goes much beyond their paper in Nature from 2007. What looks new at this point is the stunning claim that there are Indo-European words that are 40,000 years old. That's well over 30,000 years older than any usual time depth for IE and the earliest dates there are controversial. Assuming that the ancestors of the Indo-Europeans had some linguistic continuity back 40,000 is striking.

No need for a big discussion here, but one note: The article doesn't make as clear as it might for non-specialists that we're talking about correspondences that are traceable over time, not really consistent word forms. Reconstructions differ, but let's figure for the sake of argument that Proto-Indo-European was spoken 6,000 years ago. And assume for the moment that the first person nominative singular pronoun was *Heǵ-, where the H might be some kind of fricative, the 'first laryngeal', and the last sound is a voiced palatal stop. For these purposes, that matches English I, Latvian es and Tocharian A ñuk. We might wonder what those forms look like another 30,000 or 35,000 years earlier look like.

Update 12:45, Mr V: The Log's Mark Liberman has linked the BBC audio on this and Pagel really appears to say that we're dealing with a lack of change here — that Indo-European 'cavemen' would have understood [aj] 'I', despite the fact that the IE was surely more like *Heǵ-. Likewise with our [hu:] 'who', which would have been something like *kʷós. Good lord god almighty.

"Humanities" again: Definitional issues

Here's another in the endless stream of declarations* on the state of the humanities. Look at the ways this slippery notion gets defined (loosely speaking) in a single short article:

• critical thinking, civic and historical knowledge and ethical reasoning
• languages, literature, the arts, history, cultural studies, philosophy and religion
• “what it means to be a human being”
• exploring what’s called “a life worth living”
• reading the great literary and philosophical works and …
• coming “to grips with the question of what living is for”.

Wow, let me give that an A+ for sounding ponderous, and an F for a coherent definition.

*As wikipedia puts it, "humanities scholars have decried the dilution of humanities study since Plato and Aristotle debated whether philosophers should or should not receive payment for their teaching services".

Obama's "between you and I": A moment of reason in the media?

When I saw this on the OpEd page of this morning's Times, my blood pressure started to edge up:

The I’s Have It
WHEN President Obama speaks before Congress and the nation tonight, he will be facing some of his toughest critics.
Grammar junkies.

The piece is by Patricia O'Conner and Stewart Kellerman, of grammarphobia.com and books like Woe is I. In fact, it mostly lays out some of the long history of between you and I type constructions and what some people think of as the 'politician's reflexive', as in “a substantive conversation between myself and the president.” So, that isn't so bad. But you might cringe at the tone of the last paragraph:

But an educated speaker is expected to keep his pronouns in line. Here, then, is a tip, Mr. President. Nobody chooses the wrong pronoun when it’s standing on its own. If you’re tempted to say “for Michelle and I” in tonight’s speech, just mentally omit Michelle (sorry, Mrs. Obama), and you’ll get it right. And no one will get on your case.

Do you really think that President Obama doesn't have control of the prescriptive grammar on these points? These are things he does — exactly like millions of us do — occasionally in speaking, but I'll bet you a keg of Wisconsin beer that he doesn't do this in writing. Probably not in his most careful speech either.

Snark, mention NOT use

I've been resisting commenting on David Denby's new book, Snark, because I haven't read it and don't plan to.* But hey, this is the blogosphere, so why not. I do admit to laughing out loud at the powerfully snarky reactions on Wonkette and now by Walter Kirn in the NYT Book Review.

I'm starting to get intrigued by the word's history, though. The noun snark 'imaginary animal' apparently goes back Lewis Carroll's famous "Hunting of the Snark" written and published in the 1870s. This is Denby's story, as described here by Snarkmeister Kirn:

The humor that stirs this wrongful laughter is “snark,” named for a fictional creature from the poem “The Hunting of the Snark,” by Lewis Carroll. As a species of vicious contemporary humor, it is defined by Denby in many ways — so many, in fact, that the creature never materializes as anything more than a shadow on a wall that Denby keeps shooting at yet never hits.

Whether Denby hits the shadows or not, I'm thinking this story is wrong. Here's the OED Online entry for the verb snark:

[Corresponds to MLG. and LG. snarken (NFris. snarke, Sw. and Norw. snarka), MHG. snarchen (G. schnarchen,schnarken), of imitative origin: cf. SNORK v.]

1. intr. To snore; to snort.

1866 N. & Q. 3rd Ser. X. 248/1, I will not quite compare it [a sound] to a certain kind of snarking or gnashing. 1907 Westm. Gaz. 9 Nov. 4/1 All of a sudden she (the mare, I suppose he meant) snarked an' begun to turn round.

2. intr. and trans. To find fault (with), to nag.

1882 Jamieson's Sc. Dict. IV. 314/2 To Snark, .. to fret, grumble, or find fault with one. 1904 E. NESBIT Phnix & Carpet x. 185 He remembered how Anthea had refrained from snarking him about tearing the carpet.

The early meaning is attested before Carroll and it's easy to get from that meaning to the one we're talking about. And the relevant meaning comes not long after, in a source (a Scottish dictionary) that's very unlikely to be listing a then-new coinage in some even newer meaning. OED gives snarky as deverbal, and that seems straightforward to me. The noun used in Denby's title seems more likely to be a cropping from snarky than a development from Carroll's animal. I wonder if Denby just mechanically checked the noun since he's using the noun?

There are other stories out there too. Various sources connect it to nark, narky, meaning irritable. Urban Dictionary has what's surely a folk etymology: a blend of snide + remark. Cute, though.

*OK, I confess: I read the first chapter on the NYT website. It was painful.

Image from here. And a big HT to Monica.

Language in the courts

Thanks to a post on ads-l, I saw this story from the LA Times. It lays out the difficulties of a California court in finding an interpreter for a Mixe speaker who was on trial.

It's worth reading, but note that this is a pervasive problem and one that has been dealt with horribly many times in the past. The most egregious case I know of is this one, of Santiago Ventura, a Mixtec speaker convicted of murder without the benefit of interpreters who spoke his language. He spent years in jail before it was sorted out. As it happens, both these languages are spoken in Oaxaca and a little info on the major languages of the region is here, and it's the source of this map, although as the Times story makes

clear, these labels are in some cases for families rather than languages.

UNESCO's Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger

Thanks to Dennis Baron's post to ads-l yesterday (which you can also read here), many of us have been reminded that it's "International Mother Language Day", so designated by UNESCO. The folks at UNESCO have done a pretty massive Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger, with nice interactive mapping, pretty extensively updated and developed since the earlier versions, if memory serves. These maps are always fraught with problems, even when they're done by really good specialists, and it would be easy to nitpick about how 'unsafe' the status of Welsh is or whether Hawaiian is best counted as 'critically endangered' or not. Personally, I'm not always comfortable with what counts as a language in various cases.

But this isn't a place for a lot of griping: it's a very nice and powerful tool. You can zoom in to places, as you see below for Belgium and surrounding areas (showing the rollover on Walloon here), display languages by estimated numbers of speakers, etc.

So, happy International Mother Tongue Day. I'll be speaking mine some today, if the phone lines to the home country are working.

The Islamic language

You know by now that the tragicomic past and possible future of the Republican Party, Rick Santorum, uttered this yesterday:

The Quran is perfect just the way it is, that’s why it is only written in Islamic.

Most of the justifiable outrage about his truly stunning ignorance has gone to the politics of things, with a few yucks about him thinking 'Islamic' is the name of a language. But I think that he just reads Nature and recalls that Islamic is a branch of Indo-European, as laid out here. And the notion of an 'Islamic language' is out there well beyond the bad editorial and production processes of Nature. This article is freely available over the internet:

Rahman, Tariq. Urdu as an Islamic Language. Annual of Urdu Studies vol. 21 (2006).

Here's a chunk of the conclusion that indicates what Rahman means:

Except for Arabic, there is no special language of Islam. however, a language used by a community of Muslims can become the language of Islam and of Muslim identity in a specific time period and region. With the advent of modernity, Urdu, a language of North Indian origin, became such a language with political, social, educational, economic and cultural consequences. It became part of (ashrāf) Muslim identity replacing Persian which occupied that position earlier. It became a symbol of the Muslim political identity next only to Islam itself during the struggle for the creation of Pakistan out of British India.

OK, you say, that really isn't remotely consistent with what Santorum meant. Sure, but I'm trying to avoid the snark for once.

In a sense more puzzling is the notion here that the Qur'an is "written only" in one language. I've never mastered writing a single text in more than one language. What he means, presumably is this:

According to modern Islamic theology, the Qur'an is a revelation very specifically in Arabic, and so it should only be recited in the Arabic language. Translations into other languages are necessarily the work of humans and so, according to Muslims, no longer possess the uniquely sacred character of the Arabic original.

Maybe he is a man trapped by his own words. In a way, Sarah Palin is a lot funnier.

Image from here.

The Stim

Am I the only one who finds the use of 'the stim' for Obama's economic stimulus proposal a tiny bit odd?





I knew that as a video game term, and now a contributor to this blog points out to me recently that it has a sexual meaning. Both are laid out here, though the latter doesn't get a very positive response from readers. Various progressive media types are using the short form for the economic stimulus, and Olbermann is doing it consistently, it seems like.

Of course, the collocation with 'package' probably exacerbates it.

Image from here.

Word Czar

Colbert had a whole bit the other night about having a "word czar". Sadly, he proposes Michael Steele. That's not change we can believe in, Stephen. Let's go with one of the new generation of superstar lexicographers. Ben Zimmer or Erin McKean would be good, or others, but it's gotta be somebody we see regularly at the American Dialect Society's Word of the Year sessions.

The unpronounceability of Xe

So, Blackwater not long ago changed its name to Xe, pronounced [zi:]. Twice now, as of tonight, I've heard people refer to the new name as 'unpronounceable'. (See here for a written example.) [zi:] is about as easy to pronounce as English syllables get.

Of course, the match to the spelling is a disaster (hey, it's Blackwater, they're specialists), but that's different. Another example of the assumption that language is just spelling?

Parsing Joe Cocker

We've all got our favorite stories about the misparsing of song lyrics (an excellent example is here). And some lyrics are built around playing on that (like the classic example here). But this video is a nice instantiation of the principles ...



We've gotta get back to serious stuff here ... I've been meaning for weeks to post on Darwin's birthday and other things.

lol [cat] phonology update

I'm way too busy for this but have been obsessively going through the Facebook group "lol phonology". It's been around for a while (and widely known since this post on the Log). As the pic on the left shows, they aren't limited to Funology.

As if this wasn't enough, Cafe Press has got tons of pretty hilarious distractions, and gift ideas. See below.








Well, maybe it's time to get back to work …

DARE in the news

Wow, UW looks like a place where people work on language. Nice piece just out in the Wisconsin Week, available here, about the Dictionary of American Regional English.

I had to google williwags to find out that it means the sticks or boonies.

"Nouns that sound like verbs": Dongle

Astute question asked today about the now-common word dongle:*

What's the deal with nouns that sound like verbs?

The connection to dangle seems semantically close, given the nature of the creature named. Maybe there are enough verbs in the lexicon compared to other lexical categories (parts of speech) that we think verb from the sound shape? You don't get good rhymes but with other vowels, there are plenty: Tingle, mingle, wrangle, tangle, etc. versus angle (surely more common in its non-verbal form), single, etc. Check out some patterns for yourself here.

*If you don't know, see here.

Republicans = Taliban?

I've been out of the country so must have missed something, but did I actually read this in the WaPo just now?

Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Tex.) suggested last week that the party is learning from the disruptive tactics of the Taliban, and the GOP these days does have the bravado of an insurgent band that has pulled together after a big defeat to carry off a quick, if not particularly damaging, raid on the powers that be.

Have they kidnapped the Verb? To paraphrase Doonesbury on Senator Kennedy's verb, "A post, Verb, we need a post!"