New UW webpage

The Public Representation Organization of the Faculty Senate (PROFS) has launched a new website with a 'faculty forum' on it. The current post is on the 'smart furlough' legislation. They're promising posts on shared governance and such.
It's good to see these new forums for discussing UW concerns -- Sifting & Winnowing, for example -- and broader educationally-oriented stuff from here -- like the Education Optimists.

Dictionaries and the web

The lingua blogging world has been abuzz about the nice Buzzwords collection in yesterday's NYT by Mark Leibovich and Grant Barrett. We (probably one of the minions) will report live or nearly so from the American Dialect Society meeting when the Word of the Year stuff is boiling.

But I haven't seen anything out there from Erin McKean's fine guest column in "On Language", called Redefining Definition. Part of it plugs her wordnik.com, but I think that her comments on what definitions (in the dictionary sense) are and do, and what they aren't and don't do, will be of interest to many language lovers.

Image from wordnik.

Low Back Merger humor

When Jon Stewart declares something the "most immature montage ever", he's certainly got our attention here in Verbville. So, the president of these United States argued a few days ago that we should support weatherization. Building on 'cash for clunkers', and the fact that much weatherizing is done with a caulk gun, this was labeled 'Cash for Caulkers'. As someone with a robust distinction between /a/ and /ɔ/, I never would have thought to see this as grade school joke material, but lo and behold, if you have the low back merger (pronouncing 'cot' and 'caught' the same, for example), this is the old comedy goldmine …

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
The Most Immature Montage Ever - Cash for Caulkers
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Crisis

H.T. to R.C.

Language Insanity week in the media?

Maybe I'm the crazy one here, but the language-in-the-news stuff seems a little weird this week. Check out these links:

Exhibit A: A new grammar book aims to draw up joint rules for Spanish, spoken by some 500 million people around the globe. (OK, BBC, so maybe doesn't count.)

Exhibit B: Linguists Unite Against English Invasion (this report from Turkey).

Exhibit C is a different animal, not insanity, but rather some responses by a linguist to some somewhat offbeat questions about language.

I could write pages about each of these but I'd rather read reader comments on them: What do you make of these stories?

Image from despair.com.

Missionary linguistics

I've been pondering missionary linguistics lately and just saw this bit of news, about the arrest in the Philippines of someone wanted for the kidnapping of a missionary from the Summer Institute of Linguistics. SIL was just the subject of a set of short contributions to Language (this link should at least show you the list of titles and authors, even if you don't have access to MUSE material.

I'm not going to start the firestorm that would come from any comments about the subject right now — although I have very strong opinions, I don't have the time — but if you read blogs about language, you will want to be informed about the topic.

Reasoning, quantitative and otherwise

We've had serious losses in the world of public intellectuals recently.

Like about half the planet, I used Paul Samuelson's econ textbook way back when. (Not the first edition from 1948, but an early enough one.) NPR interviewed Paul Krugman, a former student of his, tonight. In talking about the role of math in economics, Krugman said that Samuelson wanted mathematical sophistication, but "math in the service of ideas".

That reminded me of Stephen Toulmin, who passed away earlier this month. I certainly didn't agree with him about everything, but I do try to keep in mind his admonition, viewing (to quote the linked obit just above):

formal logic as an overly abstract, inadequate representation of how human beings actually argue. He also challenged its claims to universality, as well as its faith in absolute truth and moral certainty.

Finally ... somebody's making English better

No, it's not language reform. Not even spelling reform. But at least we're getting a nicer alphabet. See here. And yeah, "this ain't your grandfather's alphabet."

I can't wait for the next overhaul.

Thank you, Onion, thank you.

What exactly is syntax? Animal language again

So, maybe science journalism is just there to confuse us about what scientists are actually doing and reporting in publications.

I've been wondering about what syntax really is and how we would show it exists since reading this in the NYT this morning. It reports work by Klaus Zuberbühler and others arguing that Campbell's monkeys (cute critters, see pic) in Ivory Coast not only have some sound-meaning correspondences (boom boom mean 'come here once', krak means 'leopard', etc.), but that they have what they're calling inflectional morphology, a suffix -oo, which sounds like an auditory evidential — indicating you've heard but not seen something.

And they argue that combinations of these calls can be combined to form completely new meanings. Boom boom krak-oo krak-oo krak-oo apparently warns of falling trees, not 'come're, there are leopards'. The piece is being published in PNAS but not available yet (a familiar complaint from the Log about PNAS). I really wonder how many combinations and what kinds one needs to have before we can think about 'proto-syntax', as it's called in the story.

But the bigger question is whether they can confirm these interpretations. Apparently they haven't yet played the recordings to monkeys to check whether they get the same reaction. But surely they did something more than observe a correlation between these calls and some event. And how many times did they observe monkeys calling about falling trees?

I'd probably scream all kinds of stuff if trees started falling around me. And most of it would not be printable in PNAS. But let's see what the actual article says.

Palin and Wisconsin ... yet more!

Slate did a Write-like-Sarah-Palin contest and the winner is … a woman from Wisconsin. She hasn't even read Going Rogue (probably not Going Rouge either), it seems.

And you doubted that there was a really fundamental connection between Palin and the Upper Midwestern?