Languages, dialects, armies, navies

Occasional reader SM emailed last night to report on the new novel by Robert Littell, The Stalin Epigram:

It is a fictional account of the time of the Russian purges in the 1930s, and it focuses on what happened to Osip Emilievich Mandelstam. Littell says: "The publication of his first book of poetry in 1913, entitled Stone, established him in the eyes of many as "the" great Russian poet of the twentieth century, a view that Stalin clearly shared." Of course, Mandelstam dies in a prison camp. He is on a train, taking him to Siberia. Also in the cattle car with Mandelstam is a professor who organizes their car and thus gets its passengers to the first major stop without any loss of life. Then on p. 265:

"I overheard a lady mention what the professor was a professor of. It turned out to be something called linguistics. The lady said that he was famous for figuring out the difference between languages and dialects -- languages were spoken by people with armies, dialects by people without."

For those not familiar with the history of this quip, you can start here.

The image is of Mandelstam.

Reader Poll!

A poll on what Voinovich meant with his remarks about Southerners going 'errrr, errrr' on the teevee is now up. (See earlier post, here.)

Of course I've posted this poll at the moment when our readership appears to have slipped to a long-time low, but, hey, we're just in it for the yucks.

Correction! Safire did not endorse singular 'they'!

Well, you should never blog in haste. Ever-alert reader and lexicographical superstar Ben Zimmer points out:

The "On Language" column about singular "they" was by Patricia T. O'Conner and Stewart Kellerman, guesting for a vacationing Safire.

(I'll be guesting in the Aug. 9 edition, by the way.)

Finding an error on the internet obviously warrants an immediate post, but the bigger message is that Ben will be subbing for Safire.

Image, of course, from here.

And what sound does a Southerner make?

Maybe I'm no longer up on how Americans talk and think others talk, but this piece from the Columbus Dispatch with U.S. Sen. George V. Voinovich is unsettling. Under "other tidbits from the session with the two-term Republican senator", we read this:

The GOP’s biggest problem? “We got too many Jim DeMints (R-S.C.) and Tom Coburns (R-Ok.). It’s the southerners. They get on TV and go 'errrr, errrrr.' People hear them and say, ‘These people, they’re southerners. The party’s being taken over by southerners. What they [sic] hell they got to do with Ohio?’”

They 'go errrr, errrr'? Time for a reader poll, methinks.

Image from here, of the senator cuddling with a Texan, not a Southerner, I guess.

Verbal potpourri … catch-up post

Been kinda busy during the 60º summer here … fish are biting and the Brewers are too, in a less fortunate sense. A few things to note quickly, each of which really warrants a full post unto itself. Let's just number them …

(1) The NYT has spoken on "To Be 'Verbed' or Not 'Verbed', re the new (commercial) to bing. Not noticed about this in the blogosphere that I've seen is that they give a paradigm:

• I bing
• she bings
• he bang
• you had bung
• they are binging
• let's bing!

Even though CVN, where 'N' = velar nasal, is probably the ideal shape for a new strong verb, I'm guessing the homophony with 'to bang' and with non-verbal 'bung' would likely block this. More importantly, I hope the notion of binging never gets this far. Maybe the author, Noam C.*, was playing with language here.

(2) Science is doing swearing. The piece is pretty funny, but I'm seriously skeptical that they're onto anything here. This is what Science spends its space on?

(3) Safire has spoken up for singular they.

(4) Palin's speech has finally been decoded:



Come on: it makes more sense than any other view out there.

* No, not that Noam C., Noam Cohen in this case.

I am the walrus

I just learned a new word in Menominee from Bloomfield's Lexicon:  kookookechoo (rendered to be readable to Mr. Verb's non-linguist fans), meaning 'fat person'.  Funny thing is, I checked around the internets for lyrics and several sites give "goo goo ga joob" or something similar.  I sure always heard those initial consonants as voiceless!  But here it's "coo-coo-ca-choo."

On learning the alphabet …

The Onion is so smart …

Potato-Faced Youngster Lauded For Memorizing Primitive 26-Character Alphabet

Christopher Pierson, a glassy-eyed, slothful lump of a child who still watches cartoons despite being tall enough to reach a polymer-injection molding station, was endlessly praised Monday for recalling the scant 26 letters in the American alphabet.

Pierson reportedly rattled off the short series of guttural vowels and lumbering, artless consonants after 10 minutes of prompting, a feat that—judging from his overly indulgent teacher's reaction—must rival the great triumph of launching a satellite into orbit. Though witnesses said the unremarkable 4-year-old may also have slurred the letters "L" through "O" into one continuous stream of nonsense, he somehow avoided immediate expulsion and reassignment to a rural millet farm. …

Warner then gave the boy a star-shaped sticker, explaining that he had learned the unsophisticated system of characters containing no ideogrammic compounds or transformed cognates more quickly than she'd expected.

I'm just sorry that they didn't riff a little on how badly the alphabet represents the sounds of English.

Checking in with Safire: Models

Safire's column this past weekend touched on a couple of interesting points. He talks about the rise of 'associate' for pretty menial employees — like people mopping up after pet 'accidents' in a pet store in his example. And he lays out the logic of why we have a definite article in phrases like "the architect Frank Lloyd Wright". (It's NYT style to avoid 'false titles', but you can click through and read for yourself.)

But check out this:

THE MODEL MUDDLE

Time was (excuse me — “Back in the day”) the noun model meant “a three-dimensional representation of the design of a large structure; a small form of a planned artistic work.” As the 20th century dawned, it gained a symbolic meaning as mathematicians used model as a representation of a concept or system. Then another sense emerged: “an exemplar, a person to be imitated.” That led to “a pattern to be followed, an approach to be emulated,” as in this use in a front-page headline in The Times this month: “Health Co-op Offers Model for Overhaul.”

In The Washington Post, the political columnist Michael Kinsley reviewed several solutions to “the burgeoning field of fretting about the future of newspapers.” He then posed a question: “But which of these ‘models’ (to use the modish term) is best?” (That was a subtle touch by the writer, parenthetically using modish, meaning “fashionable,” to describe today’s lemminglike fascination with the word model in economics and politics.)

Is model in this sense really modish? Regular readers of this blog know that I'm no word guy, but isn't this a virtually inevitable figurative extension of what OED has as the core meaning? To wit:

I. A representation of structure, and related senses.

In fact, it looks like similar usages go way back. If we stretch a little, we can even put the Bard in here, again from an OED example:

1600 SHAKESPEARE Much Ado about Nothing I. iii. 42 Wil it serue for any model to build mischiefe on?

Clearer, I guess, is this:

1611 C. TOURNEUR Atheists Trag. II. sig. D4, My plot still rises, According to the modell of mine owne desires.

Interestingly, OED lists this figurative sense as 'obsolete'.

Maybe the bigger question here is why people like Safire obsess over relatively minor (in the grand scheme of things, at least) extensions in meaning. With all the richness of language and language change, this gets a page of the NYT Sunday Magazine?

Body language weird-out

I almost passed by this piece in the Globe & Mail as yet another example of somebody using 'linguistics' for 'language', and to mean just 'words'. It's about the importance of body language in business.

But the guy being interviewed makes a clear, presumably testable claim:

The meaning is tending to come from the gesture, not necessarily from the linguistics. And if you see a difference between the gesture and the linguistics, you will tend to go with what the body was saying.

Anybody know of any evidence for this? I know that forensic linguists and others have invested a lot of effort in figuring out when people are lying, etc. Sounds like expensive snake oil being peddled to businesses to me.

If that's not got you reading the article yet, check out this exchange:

KM: So you are saying that, at times, body language actually trumps the words that I am actually saying.

MB: Oh, for sure; for sure it trumps it. The words, the linguistics, are the spaghetti sauce. The spaghetti is what is happening with the body.

Huh?

Ironically, the Google news feed to your right also contained this piece from the Chicago Reader, about David McNeill, an actual psycholinguist working on gesture.

Does saying random stuff to business execs pays better than the scientific study of human behavior?

Image from here.

Prosody matters!

I mean it really matters … the Onion reports that:

Nation Descends Into Chaos As Throat Infection Throws Off Obama's Cadence

Key quote:

Many say they fear that without Obama's strong, yet compassionate, vocal cadence, the entire country will crumble into dust—leaving only the ashy remains of a once powerful Western empire.

And oh yeah, experimentalists may want to compare notes with these researchers.

"Grammar police": law and peevology update

By this point, people regularly pass along their favorite or least favorite examples of peevology. The latest, which has been sitting untouched around the house for a week, is the University of Alabama's Law School publication, Capstone Lawyer 2009 edition. It includes some pretty interesting and very positive stuff, like Bama's programs in Ethiopia. But it also has this:

Meet the Grammar Police

It's your standard peevologist thing, about law student Sharon Eliza Nichols (I use no first name, and she needs two?) ranting about not grammar but spelling errors — misuse of apostrophes and your ≠ you're are the only two examples given. If you're bitching about grammar, you should be able to distinguish it from spelling. This problem has been endlessly pointed out here and on the Log, and elsewhere, of course ... the memo isn't getting around to some folks, I guess.

The piece points out that Nichols founded an fb group called "I judge you when you use poor grammar", which "boasts more than 350,000 members and 7,000 signs". If you search that string on Facebook, you don't get anything nearly that big (maybe my patience wore thin too fast?) but there are lots of groups with that and similar names. She is in fact listed as admin on one such group, with a mere 1,672 members and 1,226 pictures when I checked it. Here's the shpiel:

ASSIGNMENT:
If we are going to win the War on Poor Grammar, we have to seek out the infidels (grammar offenders) and hold them accountable. Under our watch, justice will indeed prevail.

Your assignment is to seek out the infidels and document their acts of terror. Take pictures and post them in this group to serve as examples to all. Our condescension and their humiliation will eventually cause them to change their wicked ways.

Good luck, and God bless you all.

Seems a little over the top to me, with the whole jihad thing. In fact, especially since the image top left above is on the site, I would think it was ironic if I hadn't read the article and some of the surrounding stuff.

More interesting is the proliferation of groups like these:

I judge you when you judge me for using poor grammar.

I will NOT judge you when you use poor grammar

Yes! Role Tied!

Update, 11 am: As was quipped this morning on this topic: This is the kind of stuff that would give grammar a bad name if it had anything to do with grammar.

Image from here.

Language and immigration in Germany: Kiezdeutsch (guest post)

Below is an invited guest post from Flo, who blogs at CounterCloset.

Political placards of the conservative CSU party dotting Bavaria this summer call for integration. Integration through German language ability and more language courses — a public appeal to the apparent German language “deficiency” among some of Germany’s foreign residents. But can the daunting chasm between the German host and the foreign guest(worker) really be resolved through language? It seems here that the conflation of unity and uniformity only masks the larger historical and societal struggles between Germans, Turkish-Germans, Afro-Germans, Roma, Sinti, and others that have yet to be brought into genuine conversation at national, local, and individual levels.

Ischwör, lan, is so.

“I swear, dude, that’s how it is” ... a simple phrase heard in many of Germany’s multiethnic neighborhoods, or perhaps better ‘hoods’ (German Kiez). Walking through the Kiez, a trained ear (or even an open ear) can hear a German that is not only unlike the Standard, but also unlike what was once (very controversially) described as the “pidgin German” of the early guest workers. This Kiezdeutsch, the German of the ‘hood', is a current contact language spoken among Germany’s youth in multiethnic neighborhoods. As these kids come from diverse language backgrounds, so too comes diversity in their language. Indeed lan, in the example above, is a borrowing from Turkish, set within a German frame. And so linguists have their work cut out for them, describing this new contact language structurally, while also informing the populous that it is not simply simplified or broken German, but rich with complexity.

Sociolinguistically, Kiezdeutsch is so much unlike their parents’ “Gastarbeiterdeutsch” affected by social distancing from native German speakers (Meisel, Clahsen, & Piennemann’s ZISA, Klein & Dittmar’s Heidelberg Pidgin-Deutsch, and Gilbert & Pavlou’s Gastarbeiterdeutsch analysis). In fact one of the most intriguing aspects of Kiezdeutsch is its social attraction to native German speakers. While we provide a structural linguistic nod to the contact nature of Kiezdeutsch, we cannot ignore the agentive nature of younger ethnic Germans in learning Kiezdeutsch (similar to Mary Bucholtz’s findings in her cross-racial AAVE studies). In styling their language and separating themselves from older Germans, ethnic German youths are shaping their own social and linguistic territory. How’s that for integration! Indeed “sounding cool” in one’s formative years may provide better future dialogs on mutual respect and acceptance, yet unfortunately for the CSU that may be not via Hochdeutsch, but via Kiezdeutsch.

For more info, including video, audio and teaching materials, go here.

UW furlough update, rabbit hole edition

As everybody in Wisconsin knows, the state budget is done and all state workers, even those not paid a dime from state sources, will be furloughed for 8 days per year the next two years. In practice, this means a pay reduction for everybody, in addition to the rescinded pay raises, and some days off for classified staff, though the same amount of work will need to get done.

People have been asking exactly what our status is on those days — we are required to declare in writing that we are taking our furlough days. One rumor was that we would be forbidden to work, implausible though that is. So, as √v says, "whiskey-foxtrot-tango". A response to one such query from the Office of Human Resources is now floating around:

If you choose to work on a day that you are technically furloughed the University has no compelling financial or legal reason to insert itself between you and that decision. There is a reporting requirement - you must declare the mandated number of furlough days, and sign documentation attesting to that. But again - the exact nature of how you spend your time on those days is a matter of indifference to the legal and financial operations of the University.

Curiouser and curiouser.*

Image from here.

*In context: "Cried Alice (she was so much surprised, that for the moment she quite forgot how to speak good English)." Just don't ask me how you think 'curiouser' is not good English when you write stuff like 'she quite forgot'.

'Monkey language' update (guest post)

Below is an invited guest post from Team Verb undercover operative "√v". — Mr. V

I've been disturbed from my summertime slacking and had my attention directed to a recent study by Ansgar Endress and colleagues which shows that cotton-top tamarins can tell the difference between stimuli that have an affix either as a prefix, i.e. shoy-breast, or as a suffix, i.e. breast-shoy. Yes, those are some of the stimuli that the tamarins got to listen to. This kick in the pants from Mr. Verb reminded me of something else that roused my attention a few weeks ago also on Mr. Verb …

To begin, the study by Endress et al. is very cool although at a certain level we should be more surprised if the tamarins could not do the task. This is because the task they were tested on consisted of being familiarized with a bunch of stimuli of the form shoy-X (prefix version) or X-shoy (suffix version) where the X consisted of a bunch of different monosyllabic syllables. The test then consisted of taking appropriately familiarized tamarins into their little test room at Harvard and listening to tapes of either shoy-Y or Y-shoy where Y is a list of different monosyllables. The tamarins behaved in a way that demonstrated they could differentiate between the prefix and suffix versions of the test. One very interesting thing about this particular experiment is that the tamarins were not trained in this task. The little tamarins just got to hang out and listen to strange sounds and just flipped their head to a side when the stimuli didn't match what they had heard previously.

Endress et al. make the correct claim that this task is not exactly like human language but demonstrates that tamarins are capable of parsing and processing auditory stimuli in a way that has to be done in order for human language to work. Little infant humans very easily pick up on similar type of prefixing or suffixing patterns while they learn whatever language they are exposed to. The real issue that we want to pay attention to is to not conflate specific tasks that occur in human language with the overall complexity of human language. The task that the tamarins did consists of two basic (although controversial for some people out there but I don't know why) skills. One is inducing from experience an abstract equivalence category and the other is using said abstract equivalence category to learn an abstract pattern. The abstract equivalence category that the tamarins learned on the fly is the X in the paragraph above which consisted of an equivalence class of different monosyllables. The abstract pattern that the tamarins learned was either shoy-X or X-shoy where the abstract equivalence class either precedes or follows the syllable shoy.

On the one hand, when we break down this behavior, this task is rather trivial since all you need to do is to be able to create an abstract equivalence class and know how to keep track of the order of two things, one concrete and one abstract. With all of the work on primate intelligence that we have (see Seyfarth and Cheney's and also work by Marc Hauser, who is a coauthor on Endress' paper and let's not forget Randy Gallistel's work that shows ants have abstract representations…) showing that primates have social structure, distinct vocal calls, cheat, steal and group hunt and the like, the surprise that we should have from work like this is that the tamarins got bored enough in the lab to sit down and pay attention to the tapes and produced the behavior needed to convince confused people about whether tamarins are 'smart' or not. Don't get me wrong, I'm very happy that Endress and colleagues invested the time and effort to produce results like this but I would be really, really, really surprised if the tamarins couldn't do this type of task…

The problem with people (all kinds) and studies like this is that human language is involved (Endress et al. are extremely reasonable about the conclusions to be drawn from the study so kudos to them but we'll see what the media and bloggers do with it). For some odd reason, people just go all kinds of crazy when we start asking questions about human language. People also get a huge case of the expert's illusion too. Since we all use human language everyday without thought, we must understand how human language works. Throw in some animals to twist things further and then things really start to go crazy…which leads me to my foggy remembrance from a previous Mr. Verb blog…

Mr. Verb talked about Cherokee graffiti but included a link to a NY Times article about vision and hearing that he suggested everyone read. Since I'm a lackey of Mr. Verb I read it. As usual, it had a whole bunch of really cool information but the journalist didn't really evaluate any of the claims based on the cool information. If you didn't follow the jump link, a very small potentially true claim from the article was that visual sampling frequency and auditory sampling frequency differ with audition having a higher sampling rate. The wicked cool example that showed this was that the McGurk effect shows that vision trumps audition in one case and in another case where vision and audition conflict (7 flashes of a light along with 8 beeps), vision can win out there. Excellent examples which clearly show that we construct reality and thus should always question what kinds of tricks our brain/mind are playing on us continually.

After the bait of the cool illusions has been taken, craziness begins to ensue. One of the claims that drove me bonkers was that human language evolved because of changes in human audition. Now, this sounds like a really good idea because there doesn't have to be anything special about the human brain for language (some people really like that idea for some reason). Our ears got special and this allowed us to have human language. The thing that really blows my mind about this idea is that it completely ignores manual languages and cochlear implants.

The basic idea that was suggested is that we have human language because our auditory system works/samples/does something faster than our visual system does. The first big problem with this is that from what we can tell, manual languages (e.g. sign languages) are just as complex and beautiful as spoken languages. Hearing babies manually babble at the same time vocal babbling commences even if they are not exposed to a signed language. If human language is somehow inherently connected to how our ear works, we would expect there to be drastic differences in the structures in manual languages vs. spoken languages and possibly the non-existence of manual languages. This prediction does not pan out at all.

Another questionable aspect of this view is the existence of cochlear implants. Ignoring the contested cultural questions about cochlear implants , the fact that we can slap a rather poor microphone on the outside of a child head, embed wires from said microphone into the auditory cortex and children can apparently acquire language rather well again calls into question that the main kick to human language was the evolution of a faster auditory sampling rate. To put it another way, we can work around an ear that doesn't work with our new-fangled technology and children can still acquire language. We don't have a better electronic ear but we can make one that will apparently do.

It’s the evolution angle on the 'more speed' idea that really got me going though. My bet is that general primate (and probably mammalian, possibly all animals with two eyes and ears) auditory systems are faster than their visual systems. This is likely the reason that we are this way. A second whiskey-foxtrot-tango moment occurred when the article talked with John Hawks who is investigating 'eight genes involved in shaping the human ear over the last 40,000 years'. Since the genes are somehow shaping the human ear, they must be affecting human language of course and Hawks suggests just this idea. Maybe so, maybe not… maybe those tamarins are a lot smarter than we ever thought and doing studies on them to show homologues of human language processing are just wrongheaded. Maybe we need to sit Mr. Endress and Mr. Hawks in a room together to hash this out because one of them has to be misguided on this front. If human language is being rapidly shaped and changed over the last 40,000 years then tamarins can't tell us anything about human language. If tamarins can tell us something about human language then the processing of human language has to remain rather unchanged for a good deal time longer than 40,000 years… I smell an academic cage match coming on…

In any event I'd love to see actual evidence to back up this claim about ears, genes and China. Figuring out what kind of evidence is necessary to support claims about evolution is where it all goes kinda meshugenah… if you read what people who know what they are doing (i.e. Sean Carroll and other biologists) you can see that the evidence they traffic in usually involves manipulating actual genes in lab animals (flies get the worst of this stuff) to see exactly what happens. This way you can actually see how different regulatory networks affect the expression of a particular gene and then what observable difference (either in morphology or behavior or some other characteristic) happens. There is basically no way we can conduct research on human beings like this so we have to be very careful when thinking about humans, evolution and genes. All I know is that biologists just start shaking their heads at people who do the 'I've found the X gene' shtick. As a good friend once chided me, genes code for proteins which should remind us that no one has a good story for a protein to behavior link yet.

[Don't know the source of the image, but anything that has a member of the Damned is worth posting. — Mr. V]

Linguablogging: The race is on

Here it is:


In reading many of my favorite linguistics blogs, and hearing reports from people who are friends with various of the key bloggers, it looks like many people have put out pleas for votes for their excellent blogs on language and linguistics. If Mr. Verb is actually your favorite linguistics blog, feel free to vote for Team Verb. but it wouldn't be very (Upper) Midwestern of us to ask for your vote.

Besides, as I indicated earlier, I'm mostly just amazed at how big this corner of the internet has gotten. Lexiophiles apparently got 473 nominations, and a lot of them look pretty interesting — many focused on learning particular languages, etc., but there's a lot of good stuff out there.

OK, Sarah Palin's accent ... update

I didn't want to return to the topic. But I'm weak …

Trueslant gives "100 reasons we'll miss Sarah Palin". You don't have to read far to get to this:

6. She uses a fake accent? You Betcha!

• Chicago Tribune: Sarah Palin’s accent explained

And it goes on from there:

12. Tina Fey doesn’t want to play Sarah Palin anymore.

• Huffington Post: Tina Fey On Sarah Palin: “If She Wins…I’m Leaving Earth”

13. She injured the St. Louis Blues goalie, and cursed the team as they lost 8 of 10 games after her appearance.

• CBC: Hip flexor forces Legace from Blues game

15. Doesn’t pronounce the G’s at the end of her words.

• UPenn Language Log: Palin’s tactical g-lessness

OK, not all are language-related, but, hey, we are in Wisconsin.

A layered Cupertino Effect?

You know about the Cupertino Effect, no doubt — the miscorrections introduced by spellcheckers for terms spelled correctly but not in the spelling dictionary. It's been often discussed on the Log and other linguablogs (Click here for their latest post on this.)

A kind of layered Cupertino was just reported by a Team Verb member in proofs of a forthcoming publication: The language family Yeniseian was in the manuscript with a double-typo as Yenesian. Oops. Had that come through as submitted, the authors probably wouldn't have caught it. As luck would have it, though, it appears in the proofs as Keynesian.

Does Microsoft get bonus points for being at least within the social sciences?

Language and immigration in the courts

Kudos to Judge Richard S. Brown, a state appellate judge here in Wisconsin. The NYT last week did a long piece called:

Study Finds Gaps in Aid for Non-English Speakers in State Civil Courts

Here are the key quotes from Brown:

“If a person cannot understand what is happening in the courtroom proceeding, an unfair result might occur. And that is contradictory to what we want our courts to do: administer justice, fairly and impartially.”

“I wonder aloud how many immigrants from the 1840s through the 1920s lost their liberty, lost their property, lost their homes, their livelihood, all because they could not yet understand the English language to the fullest,” he said in an e-mail interview.

Judge Brown, who is deaf, said, “I think we are a better country because we are now acknowledging what we did not acknowledge in the 19th and early 20th centuries.”

A couple of posts on this blog have talked about recent (and apparently ongoing) work by Wilkerson & Salmons showing that German-speaking immigrants did not learn English for generations in many cases. They draw, as it happens, on evidence including Wisconsin Supreme Court decisions involving Yankees who swindled immigrants who didn't speak English. They also tell me that there are newspaper reports on court cases where Wisconsin-born citizens could not respond to simple questions in English.

So, yes, Judge Brown, the historical record bears you out. Thank you.

Blogal: The language blog world has gotten big

Just learned that we've been nominated for Lexiophiles "Top 100 Language Blogs 2009" competition — by Leonard Bloomfield, no less. We all appreciate Professor Bloomfield coming back from the dead to help us out here, and are happy to be in the mix.

But what really got me about this competition was the thought that just how many language blogs there are these days. Lexiophiles has split things into four categories:

• Language Learning
• Language Teaching
• Language Technology
• Language Professionals.

By the way, we're in "Language Teaching" ... maybe we should step up the pedagogy.

PS: Yes, I'm thinking about Palin, and there was some interesting stuff in the speech, but I can't keep staring at this horrible traffic accident that is her career.