"Quirks of language melt away like butter on a stove"

That's the assessment of regional diversity in American English thanks to the homogenizing force of television and now the internet. You read it here first. Or second, maybe.

Christopher Caldwell attacks* the Dictionary of American Regional English in a piece called "Words that fail the test of time" in yesterday's Financial Times. (He's a senior editor at the Weekly Standard.)

The article is wrong or misleading on a whole host of points and it's not worth the hours it would take to lay those all out. Just consider one little chunk:

[DARE's] backward focus is an implicit admission that, in the television age (and even more so in the internet age), quirks of language melt away like butter on a stove. Dare might more accurately be called a historical dictionary. Its main use will be for clarifying obscure references in old oral histories.

In part, DARE is a historical dictionary. It records tons of old farming vocabulary, for instance, words that are not known or used today. Vocabulary, like the rest of language, is constantly changing. I say: Deal with it.

Throughout the piece, Caldwell seems to be striving to make DARE sound useless. As many stories in the press about DARE — including the recent set — have noted, it is being used in forensic linguistics (yup, to track down criminals) and in medicine (where doctors actually need to know folk terms used by patients).

But surely anyone with any interest in language has by now picked up on the discussions about how dialectal diversity is increasing rather than decreasing in the United States today.

Sigh. 2009 is still young, but this may be the worst piece of language-related journalism I've read so far this year.

* Who the heck attacks dictionaries?

Image from here, in reference to Caldwell's claim — which will be met with hoots of derision here in the Upper Midwest — about lutefisk: "This is a word that will either disappear or be thoroughly integrated into mainstream English." By the way, the word is not 'from Swedish', but both Norwegian and Swedish.

WiSCO bumper stickers and t-shirts!

The Phonetics Lab crew at UW–Madison, led by Tom Purnell, has developed a software package called WiSCO – Wisconsin Speech Chain Online. It gets students plotting their vowels with minimal training, and allows them to compare their vowel system, or parts thereof, to those of others. So, you can see how raised your /æ/ in bag is compared to folks from Minnesota or Illinois, or how fronted your /a/ is. I know they're looking to go public with the program once they get a couple of details worked out.

In the meantime, this week, bumper stickers (basically like the image below) started popping up around campus.


And just this morning, I heard that you can order t-shirts from CafePress, with no markup, from here. Woohoo.

Is the Times shot? Or was that Schott?

I've been more or less flooded with emails for days about the new NYT blog, Schott's Vocab. I don't mean to be snarky, but here's my take:

Downsides: (1) More lite stuff on the op-ed page. (2) Still no actual responsible discussion of language in the whole operation. (Not his fault. Hint: Hire Jan Freeman or Nathan Bierma.) (3) Could take Schott away from work he does extremely well (see below and to the right.)

Silver linings: (1) He's at least billing himself as a word guy, not a language guy. (2) Maybe he'll replace Safire.

In short, I'm disappointed that the Times isn't doing something exciting on human speech in all its glory. I own and tremendously appreciate some of Schott's Miscellany volumes – just love'm. But this deal looks inane by comparison and by comparison to what they could be doing about language.

So, which phonologist ARE you?

There's a new facebook (can I safely start writing 'FB' at this point?) application called "Which phonologist are you?" developed by Dániel Szeredi. Here's a direct link. When I saw the first question (see image above), I yelled out 'Run screaming from the room!', which confirms that I'm no phonologist.

Now I know for sure all that the local sound people (well, maybe not ALL) are taking it. Results I know of are the following, in alphabetical order: Ricardo Bermúdez-Otero, Juliette Blevins, Paul Boersma, Joan Bybee, Jonathan Kaye, and Paul Kiparsky.*

If you're a theoretical linguist, you can probably match those to the answers for one of the questions:

After you chuckle at the questions and answers, you can't read anything into such a creation. Still, that's a pretty interesting snapshot of the current landscape in phonological theory. No McCarthy or Hayes or Steriade? Maybe that's yesterday? Does Kaye count as a Toronto School connection? I know, I know, it's just another FB quiz, but ...

* With six answers and the template of a FB quiz, this should be exhaustive, in fact. But four B's and two K's? Now, that's an odd distribution.

Billion is the new million

I'm not a math peevologist, or whatever you'd call such a person, but I've been noticing the looseness in the gap between the BILLIONS of the bailout of AIG and the MILLIONS in bonuses to their execs. I'm noticing pretty regular speech errors in talking about the amounts from people who clearly know the amounts involved. In private conversations, I've been worried once or twice that some folks aren't clear on the numbers.

Good old xkcd is on the case (click through to see the rollover):

As a serious numbers guy, xkcd is taking it much more seriously than I had — I find it clunky to have to do that little transformation in my head during these discussions, but it doesn't set me off. Still, I appreciate the approach illustrated on the right; some folks find it confusing, though. I just caught a tiny bit of radio yesterday where someone (no idea who it was) actually used 'thousands of millions' and the person he was talking to — a politician, I think — didn't get it until the first speaker put it in 'billions'. What would it take to change how we talk about these numbers? Now that a billion is the new million and a trillion is the new billion, we probably need to get this right.

I won't even comment on the politics and spin on this topic.

Hurrah!!! Simpsons' linguistics humor

Heidi Harley has posted her fifth annual survey of the last year's Simpsons' linguistics humor. I can't begin to decide what's the funniest.

University funding, bottom of the bucket edition?

For years, public colleges and universities have been suffering from stagnant and declining funding, driven in part at least by our national case of Tax Cut Fever and then Bush's War on Science. It's safe to say that a lot of our best universities are on the brink or even a step beyond it — certainly in terms of access and affordability, but even in terms of carrying out missions in education, research and outreach for those who can afford to attend.

Today's news has two big stories about one state's struggles, the NYT on Arizona State University and the Chronicle of Higher Education on the University of Arizona (behind a pay wall). The University of Arizona is an international powerhouse in linguistics, and ASU has a set of major figures in the field too.

The latter piece is by Eric Kelderman gives an indication of how bleak it looks right now:

So far, the state’s universities have taken more than their share of budgetary pain. At the beginning of this fiscal year, lawmakers trimmed nearly 5 percent from the higher-education budget. Then, facing a midyear gap of $1.6-billion in January, legislators cut an additional 13 percent, or $141-million, from the state’s three public universities, the largest dollar amount cut from any single area in the state budget. The estimated budget gap for the next fiscal year, which begins July 1, is $3-billion.

He also lays out some of the financing that has led to this situation — like heavy reliance on sales taxes — but also points to a stream of basic anti-intellectualism in Arizona politics.

The Chronicle also has a commentary piece by John Simpson, president of the University of Buffalo, called "In a Crisis, Our Nation Must Have an Ambitious Education Strategy". Here's the conclusion:

Across its history, America has proved remarkably resourceful at times of national crisis. The present crisis is, perhaps, harder to understand and diagnose than past ones. But that makes it no less threatening. If we can harness our nation's collective will, put it toward the purpose of shoring up the educational foundation of our national prosperity, and include all Americans in the results regardless of station, we will have shown that resourcefulness once again.

Amen. Let's hope that the new administration's commitment to higher education is coming in time to save most of us.

And to our friends and colleagues in Arizona: Hang in there, guys.

Birther

You've probably picked up on birther by now, the term for those pursuing the Obama-wasn't-born-in-America-so-he-can't-be-president conspiracy theory. The birthers are pretty clear tinfoil hat folks, as reviewed briefly by The Skeptical Teacher and snarkily by Wonkette (yes, that's redundant).

The term hasn't been talked about on linguistics blogs that I know of (Mr V says, without doing a careful search), but Ben Zimmer never misses anything and he's dealt with it briefly at Double-Tongued, here. He points out the derivational connection to truther, the term for those who doubt the generally accepted view of the 9/11 attacks. In "Among the new words" (2008, vol. 83.3, p. 355), American Speech dealt with truther at some length. Here's their intro:

truther, Truther n [from truth + -er; perhaps influenced semantically by liar] Person who believes that he or she knows the truth behind some event, especially in contrast to the generally accepted explanation (compare conspiracy theorist [OEDas 1964])

Anyway, a tiny question: truther clearly has to be pronounced with a voiceless [θ], parallel to the name Luther. But with birther, we have the noun birth with [θ] and the verb to birth with [ð]. (There's a set of alternations like that, including tooth/teeth vs. to teethe. A story for another day.) I think I've only heard birther pronounced with [θ], but it doesn't actually sound all that bad to me with [ð]. Surely that form's not possible, is it?


Image from TPM.

NYT Immigration explorer

Just another short post with a link to something interesting, namely this project from the NYT. The slider allows you to easily track the patterns of immigrant presence over time, and you can select immigrant groups to display. Very slick.

Native languages in the news!

Two recent pieces in the news about Wisconsin's indigenous languages, this very nice article called "Weight of the Words" from the UW's alumni magazine, On Wisconsin, and this from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Mascots: Wisconsin Senate Bill 25/ Assembly Bill 35

There's new movement in the ongoing efforts to rid Wisconsin of race-based school logos, mascots and names, with this bill in the Assembly and a parallel effort in the Senate. This bill doesn't directly ban Indian mascots, but will push further toward eliminating them. Like our state superintendent of schools, Elizabeth Burmaster, puts it, those districts that still have such mascots and logos and team names need to “find appropriate alternatives.”

The American Sociological Association, American Psychological Association, National Association of Social Workers all favor elimination of such holdovers from a bygone era. Common sense should point you in the same direction in this issue: Who out there actually thinks it's a good idea to represent your school with racist stereotypes?

There will be an Assembly Education Committee hearing on March 17. The chair of that committee is Representative Sondy Pope-Roberts, and you can email her at Rep.Pope-Roberts@legis.wisconsin.gov.

poor, sad be- prefix

OMG I heard something today I hadn't heard before: ditransitive 'friend'! Someone said about a mutual acquaintance: "I'll friend ya him!" Whew!

(Does this image mean I'm a Google?)

"The inflection is near?"

The NYT this morning has an op-ed by Thomas Friedman with the above title. Finally, a major question in the Times that I can answer confidently:

Nearer than clitics but not as near as derivational affixes.

OK, Friedman's not thinking about how complex word forms and longer strings of speech are put together. But what exactly does the headline mean?

As illustrated (image from here), I'm guessing it must be about a point of inflection, as defined here from the Oxford Dictionary of Economics (just an excerpt):

point of inflection A point where a function changes its curvature. This means that its second derivative changes sign. For example, consider the function y  =  ax ³  +  bx , for which dy/dx  = 3 ax ²  +  b and d ² y / dx ²  = 6 ax . ...

In this kind of journalist setting, it's got to be a much more informal meaning, maybe more or less 'turning point'. So, it would be playing on "the end is near". That seems like a long and pretty tortured path for some headline writer to have hacked through.

What am I missing here?

Philology wars and 'phreeping'?

The Chronicle of Higher Ed has a piece about the longstanding and remarkably bitter scholarly fights over the Dead Sea Scrolls. Here's a long quote to orient you:

The Manhattan district attorney's office alleged in a statement released on Thursday that Raphael Haim Golb, 49, son of Norman Golb, a professor of Jewish history and civilization at the University of Chicago, used dozens of Internet aliases to "influence and affect debate on the Dead Sea Scrolls" and "harass Dead Sea Scrolls scholars who disagree with his viewpoint. …

The office contends that Mr. Golb impersonated and harassed Lawrence H. Schiffman, a professor of Hebrew and Judaic studies at New York University and a leading Dead Sea Scrolls scholar, by creating an e-mail account in Mr. Schiffman's name and using it to send e-mail messages in which the sender admitted to plagiarism.

Mr. Golb also allegedly supplemented that campaign to discredit Mr. Schiffman by sending letters to university personnel accusing Mr. Schiffman of plagiarism, and by creating blogs that made similar accusations. Two blogs, each with a single entry, accuse Mr. Schiffman of plagiarizing articles written by Norman Golb in the 1980s.

You may know the heart of the dispute because it shows up occasionally in the popular press ('MSM' seems wrong here): Whether the scrolls were written by residents of Qumran, where they were found, or written in Jerusalem and brought there.

An alarming example of Sayre's Law, I suppose:

In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the stakes at issue. That is why academic politics are so bitter.

And I guess if a philologist starting freeping, we should spell it phreeping?

Image from here, which happens to be an announcement for a talk by Norman Golb at Columbia.

Horses (and Indo-European)

Science has a new piece on the domestication of horses, here (for those who can access it). You may recall that this plays a key role in David Anthony's book The Horse, the Wheel and Language, about the Indo-European homeland. The new article presents evidence dating domestication to around 3,500 BCE, in line with what I think Anthony argues.

National Grammar Day: Not so bad after all!

Well, leave it to Jan Freeman to show that everything works out OK in the end, even with National Grammar Day. I confess that I didn't know who John McIntyre was, or about his blog, You Don't Say. His short mystery about NGD is must-read.

Yawn: National Grammar Day

From the Dead Horse Beating Department, we're informed that it's National Grammar Day. CNN radio reports that the founder, Martha Brockenbrough, says that using text abbreviations like lol outside of texting is "like wearing a speedo on the sidewalk."

She says that people don't understand grammar because it's "poorly explained". Not really. More because 'grammar' in her sense is mostly arbitrary junk.

Sigh.

The end of the dongle

This only deepens the mystery ... a regular reader of this blog has passed along the picture included here, which makes clear that our Tech Store in fact uses the term. (Note that it doesn't seem to be the precise KIND of dongle under discussion yesterday.)

Enough with the words, I say, on to structure!

Dongle update

Well, now, not long ago, Mr. Verb (over?)confidently described the noun dongle as 'now-common'. I sauntered into our tech store today and told the young woman at the desk that I needed a dongle. She pointed to her colleague and said 'can you help this gentleman?' I repeated the question to him and he clearly did not understand, even after I repeated it. I described the object, he asked about the computer it was for and handed me one (they were directly behind his and the young woman's desks). I followed up by asking if he really didn't know the word, and he confirmed that he did not. I asked what they called them and the reply was "video display adapter". I would figure that dongle is really the class is all such attachment dealies and not just this particular one, but he clearly didn't know the word. Hmmmmm.

It's about We the People

Here's a wrap-up note from C-PAC posted at Wonkette, along with the picture they ran …

So, the question is, which sounds better to you with the fixed phrase here?

It's about we the people …
It's about us the people …

Please discuss.

"Dead" languages and elected officials

One of UW's student newspapers, the Badger Herald, posted this story (and see this at indianz.com) quoting State Rep. Scott Suder as saying:

“The governor should concentrate more on using our tax money to preserve jobs rather than preserving dead languages.”

Of course, most Native languages of Wisconsin are definitely alive, with some L1 speakers and many semi-speakers and learners. And the money is 250,000 out of a 20+ billion dollar budget. Not offended yet?

Rep. Scott Suder, R-Abbotsford, called the program “goofy and crazy” given the state’s current financial atmosphere and the loss of so many jobs throughout Wisconsin.

…

Suder also said the taxpayers should not be forced to pay for this program because most tribes make enough revenue from their casinos to pay for it. He added he is sorry for the situation but jobs are definitely more important than dead language preservation.

As indicated, Suder represents Abbotsford in northern Wisconsin, pretty close to a number of reservations, and surely a district with some number of Indians in it.

Say, I wonder how many dollars go to teaching Latin in this state, at the high school and university levels? Classical Greek? Biblical Hebrew? Vastly more than 250K.