Sure, and language is a virus

Building on the last post, if anybody is concerned about the language change/biological evolution thing, let's go for language = virus:

The full cartoon is here and highly worth reading, if not about linguistics. Or viruses.

Language complexity and social structure

A couple of folks have called Team Verb's attention to this article in PLoS, in part due to this piece at sciencedaily.com. The paper, "Language Structure Is Partly Determined by Social Structure", has this abstract:

Background
Languages differ greatly both in their syntactic and morphological systems and in the social environments in which they exist. We challenge the view that language grammars are unrelated to social environments in which they are learned and used.

Methodology/Principal Findings
We conducted a statistical analysis of >2,000 languages using a combination of demographic sources and the World Atlas of Language Structures— a database of structural language properties. We found strong relationships between linguistic factors related to morphological complexity, and demographic/socio-historical factors such as the number of language users, geographic spread, and degree of language contact. The analyses suggest that languages spoken by large groups have simpler inflectional morphology than languages spoken by smaller groups as measured on a variety of factors such as case systems and complexity of conjugations. Additionally, languages spoken by large groups are much more likely to use lexical strategies in place of inflectional morphology to encode evidentiality, negation, aspect, and possession. Our findings indicate that just as biological organisms are shaped by ecological niches, language structures appear to adapt to the environment (niche) in which they are being learned and used. As adults learn a language, features that are difficult for them to acquire, are less likely to be passed on to subsequent learners. Languages used for communication in large groups that include adult learners appear to have been subjected to such selection. Conversely, the morphological complexity common to languages used in small groups increases redundancy which may facilitate language learning by infants.

Conclusions/Significance
We hypothesize that language structures are subjected to different evolutionary pressures in different social environments. Just as biological organisms are shaped by ecological niches, language structures appear to adapt to the environment (niche) in which they are being learned and used. The proposed Linguistic Niche Hypothesis has implications for answering the broad question of why languages differ in the way they do and makes empirical predictions regarding language acquisition capacities of children versus adults.

I'm hardly the person to offer a critique of the paper, but, as noted in some of the coverage, the basic idea has been floating around for a long time. As the local historical linguists regularly remind us, there's a longstanding connection between language contact and loss of certain kinds of 'complexity'. One example is this old paper:

O’Neil, Wayne. 1978. The evolution of the Germanic inflectional systems: A study in the causes of language change. Orbis 27.248-286.

He shows one simple correlation in one family: Germanic languages appear to have lost inflectional morphology in direct proportion to the amount of language contact they've undergone, from relatively isolated Icelandic to languages like English and Afrikaans (not to mention creoles).

I do wonder about how closely parallel their 'linguistic niche' is to biological evolution. I know that claims about language change and biological evolution often trigger major twitching from historical people.

Science Channel takes a stand: For science

Wow, here's some breaking science news I haven't seen covered anywhere yet:

Science Channel president Clark Bunting told reporters Tuesday that his cable network was "completely incapable" of watering down science any further than it already had. "Look, we've tried, we really have, but it's simply not possible to set the bar any lower," said a visibly exhausted Bunting, adding that he "could not in good conscience" make science any more mindless or insultingly juvenile.

Well, here's the word from Team Verb: You go, Science Channel, you go. We've got your back. In some sense: We'll happily keep dumbing down science long after you've stopped. At least for language and related areas. Juvenile? Mindless? It's who we are. It's what we do.

Sure, we can see why you have to keep to the 5% science content minimum, but we do not feel compelled. Trust us. We've got your back.

iPad, the name

Yesterday the American Dialect Society's ads-l list was abuzz with posts about the product name iPad, with how fast the jokes about iTampon and such have spread. As Dennis Baron notes, here:

It's got a name that cries out for parody (that didn't stop the Wii).

Sure, and Apple was certainly thinking about this stuff in deciding on the name. This morning the NYT ran a piece on this topic, here. And it's on the AP and everywhere. AP probably has the best line:

“Will women send their husbands to the Apple store to buy iPads?’’ went one joke on Twitter.

 I'm guessing that the junior high stuff will pass pretty quick. At least I hope so. But there is a little linguistics connection too —see this.

Coming soon: Language as Homeland

 Click to enlarge, or for more details, go here.

"Jersey Shore" is saving regional dialects in the US?!?!?

I normally hold off on posting about stuff in the NYT Sunday Magazine until a hard copy is in my gnarled, wrinkled hands. But this is an "extra, extra, read all about it" case if ever there was one:

OK, once you read it, the story isn't quite that far out there. It does quote (or more likely, paraphrase) Labov, as well as Dominic Watt, and Heffernan gives some good links at the end. You would really want to alter the closing line, though:

Cultivating and stylizing accents in order to stand out as part of a subculture — to represent, in other words — may be as American as the melting pot.

It's actually far more American than the mythical melting pot, surely.

Maybe this kind of headline writing is somehow related to suddenly popular crash blossom? Nah. But still. An actual element of Labov's work over the years has been to argue against the media as a homogenizing force in American speech. Given those arguments, I'm guessing he's equally uncomfortable with the notion that it's now preserving regional accents.

Tizzy, not just in a

Talking Points Memo ran this headline yesterday:

What All the "Tizzy" Is About

It struck me as slightly odd, given that for me at least the only real collocation of tizzy is in a tizzy, and the quotation marks probably aim to convey that.

But I just knew this was going to be one of those "origins unknown/uncertain" words and sure enough, neither Merriam-Webster nor OED Online offer any speculation. It's recent, attested only back to 1935 according to both. (I wonder if it's older as a name or nickname and comes from there?)

But the surprise was seeing that it's used as a plural, the tizzies. MW gives a plural form, and OED has an example in the plural. So now I'm wondering if this is part of the pattern discussed here, including a broad set of disease-like plural-looking forms compiled by Ben Zimmer, such as "the glooms", "the slows" or "the uglies". That is, the extension to a plural form kind of fits a broader pattern in English.

Also a good band name.

PS: Great word play in the Onion obits this week: "Persey Hallman, 61, passed away this weekend in his sleep. He was a family man and a secret-family man."

Breaking UW news: committee reports on restrucuting

Here's something we've been waiting for: the reports on grad school restructuring.

Language teaching

The NYT this morning has a piece with the ominous title "Foreign Languages Fade in Class" and using the reverse-direction-in-the-subtitle move "— Except Chinese", and opens with this line:

Thousands of public schools stopped teaching foreign languages in the last decade, according to a government-financed survey — dismal news for a nation that needs more linguists to conduct its global business and diplomacy.

Yup, that's raw stupidity on our collective part. (I won't try to figure out where it stands compared to having a significant part of the country without health coverage or to invading foreign countries justified by lies, but ... .)

But the article cites work by the Center for Applied Linguistics and this link shows the more interesting broader picture, not in numbers of students but in numbers of schools offering a given language. Big increase in Chinese, tiny increases in Italian and Hebrew, Spanish stable and the rest declining.

The cliche is that Spanish has taken over language education, and this shows that — it can hardly grow at this point by this measure. More striking is the dramatic decrease in French. The decline of German (following the decline of Russian) is old news, to the point that German is now considered a LCTL, 'less commonly taught language' (pronounced /lɪktl/), in some circles.

OK, I guess you might want a word for that ... vagazzle

As I was laughing at Doonesbury's latest on Palin (here — though that's just the general link, not the January 17 strip), I saw this "Say What?" note:

"I have a whole chapter in there on how women should vagazzle their vajayjays."

-- Jennifer Love Hewitt, on her new dating book

If you want to see the video, it's here. If you want to be reassured that Urban Dictionary is all over this topic, it's here. If you want to understand what this means culturally, I have no clue.

Aristide and linguistics

This little news blurb showed up in the google news feed this morning, about Jean-Bertrand Aristide, former prime minister of Haiti now living in South Africa. It includes this:

He has [been] spending time writing on Zulu and Haitian Creole linguistics, as well as on the theology of love.

I didn't remember that he worked on linguistics, actually, but found this little piece on his dissertation.

Peer Review

A group of us did a panel for graduate students at the just-concluded LSA, on getting published in Linguistics. (Here's a link to a summary, and here's a link to a website where our handout is posted.) I wish I would have known about the following video, though - I certainly would have recommended it...

Sconnie in a landslide

Just as I was about to check the City Dictionary's Local WOTY results, Ben Zimmer emailed with the news: Sconnie in a landslide. See here. Madison is also currently listed as their 'top city', and, yes, the website is out of Madison.

More linguistic monkey business: Doolittlery

We've followed some of the animal communication stuff lately, like plans for an elephant dictionary (that still cracks me up) and the old rock star-tamarind connection (that freaks me out). Science Times today has a followup by Nicholas Wade on his earlier story that triggered this piece here. Today's story repeats a chunk of the last one, along these lines:

Some species may be able to produce sounds in ways that are a step or two closer to human language. Dr. Zuberbühler reported last month that Campbell’s monkeys, which live in the forests of the Ivory Coast, can vary individual calls by adding suffixes, just as a speaker of English changes a verb’s present tense to past by adding an “-ed.”

The Campbell’s monkeys give a “krak” alarm call when they see a leopard. But adding an “-oo” changes it to a generic warning of predators. One context for the krak-oo sound is when they hear the leopard alarm calls of another species, the Diana monkey. The Campbell’s monkeys would evidently make good reporters since they distinguish between leopards they have observed directly (krak) and those they have heard others observe (krak-oo).

Sigh. Even if the description is all perfectly correct, the interpretation of what this says about monkey cognition is extremely difficult. Overall, though, it's a lot better than most of this stuff — Wade quotes the right group of specialists, for instance.

But this time, there's no need to say more here, since Mark Liberman over on the Log has posted all that needs to be said on the topic, "Chimps have tons to say but can't say it." Most importantly, Liberman appears to have coined a key new word, "doolittlery". That's one I'll be using.

LSA hangover: Sconnies score big

Wisconsin's own Thomas C. Purnell is now officially famous. Yeah, he is lead author on the Sarah Palin paper published by the Journal of English Linguistics, and yeah, he's been interviewed about regional English and related matters repeatedly. And yeah, he's lead author on this classic and real-world-important paper on how we can often identify the race of a speaker by just the word 'hello' on the phone. But now Tom's made the Log — see Mark Liberman's new post on Drunkenness at the LSA.

He has been looking at the effects of intoxication on speech for a long time and just presented a paper at the LSA on the changes that a BAL of .08 bring on vowel pronunciation.

Way to go, Tom!

Sconnie nomination for City Dictionary WOTY

One of the minions has passed on word from the Linguistic Society of America / American Dialect Society meetings of this on-line vote. They met Ben Zimmer — yes, THE Ben Zimmer — in person, and he told them that the City Dictionary website is holding a contest for the Local Word of the Year for 2009, that is, local words voted for on a national basis Sconnie is in the running. Voting ends on Tuesday.

On Wisconsin!

Word of the Year wrap-up

Well, if you care, you long since know that tweet won the American Dialect Society's WOTY last night and google won Word of the Decade. Ben Zimmer's post on the Log is the obvious place for more, and the ADS list has some discussion too. The event was, obviously, being discussed on freaking twitter during the discussions. Opponents of tweet had good arguments — like Eric Raimy's that all supporting comments were disqualified: over 140 characters. But it was noted that google was a wise choice: They can fund the field. Yeah, out of their petty cash.

Most like to succeed is twenty ten as a pronunciation of this year. As noted, the ADS may have finally picked a word in that category that will succeed. Who knows. Most euphemistic was hiking the Appalachian Trail.

I wasn't terribly disappointed on most counts ... the interjection fail! is useful. It was slightly surprising maybe that the -er of birther and tenther didn't do better. Still when the editor of American Speech starts his comments with "now, I like a good suffix, but ..." you figure it's going down in flames. I did want to see teabagger win something. Oh well.

The session played off of PETA's sea kitten (new name for 'fish') a bunch, but that's kinda thin material for humor.

In other news, quasi-official meme of the conference appears to be "will X for beer". Pass it on.

LSA, ADS and Word of the Year

Many of our minions are hitting the road for Baltimore today and we'll have reports on the Word of the Year competition and maybe some liveblogging of talks.

Wisconsin is well represented in the program and I'll be waiting here in snowy Madison for news.

The WOTY is the last we need to think of 2009 for a while, I hope.

History of Linguistics at Wisconsin: Edward T. Owen

This is quite possibly the weirdest little thread of stuff I've ever seen in the rich history of linguistic science at the University of Wisconsin – Madison: The Yale Daily News reports here (it was just covered on NPR's Marketplace too) that a Skull & Bones artifact is up for auction at Christie's, pictured here. The little flap on top is apparently hinged, possibly used as a ballot box.

It apparently was owned by "Bonesman Edward T. Owen 1872, a French and linguistics professor at the University of Wisconsin." I knew his name but not as a linguist: He donated the land for Hoyt Park, an amazing urban chunk of land on Madison's near west side. There's an Owen Parkway that I think is named for the family and an Owen Street there that may be. Linguistics (and French), it seems, didn't occupy all his time, skull collecting aside as this bit on the Parkway indicates:

Edward T. Owen (1850 - 1931) was an educator and real estate speculator, and was a driving force behind the Madison Park and Pleasure Drive Association, which purchased land for public parks and drives decades before the city saw such need. In 1892 he bought a fourteen-acre tract of what was then wooded land along a commanding height about a mile south of Lake Mendota, parallel to the northern boundary of Resurrection (then Calvary) Cemetery. He donated it to the city as a pleasure drive dedicated to the memory of his daughters.

But I was curious about him as a linguist ... he was here and alive when a lot of the early giants were … must have known Haugen, Twaddell, all those folks. He seems to have written this book:

Linguistic Aberrations in Particular, Differences Between Thought Intended and Thought Express[ed?] by Owens, Edward T., Emeritus Professor Of French And Linguistics, University Of Wisconsin

Off to the library to see this one!

Chomsky's acclaim

I guess even the National Review makes a plausible statement occasionally, even if it's vacuous. They are running a review of Thomas Sowell's new book, Intellectuals and Society, called "The Divine Right of Intellectuals: Too many intellectuals believe they have a duty to make decisions for the rest of us" by David Hogberg. In it, Hogberg writes:

Chances are slim that Noam Chomsky would ever have achieved the acclaim that he did if he had stayed in the field of linguistics instead of venturing into U.S. foreign policy.

I think we can agree on this. If he had stuck to linguistics, he would by definition not be famous as a media critic, critic of US foreign policy, etc. But there's something really wrong about this perspective. First, Chomsky the Public Intellectual, unless I'm seriously missing something, specifically urges people to think for themselves, examine evidence, etc. Definitely has strong opinions, but I wonder how you figure that he wants to make decisions for us. (Seems like the claim is from Hogberg, but maybe Sowell argues this — I've read some of his earlier work, but not this.) Second, there's this odd hint in here that Chomsky's acclaim as a linguist is something less than remarkable. And his influence in a variety of other fields.

By the way, Sowell concludes with a warning that "the intellectuals’ vision is still dominant": “Not since the days of the divine right of kings has there been such a presumption of a right to direct others and constrain their decisions, largely through expanded powers of government.” Really? In fact, this piece suggests once more how deep anti-intellectualism runs in this country.

Elephant dictionary

"Elephants have a sophisticated language." "They speak to each other." And plans are afoot for an" elephant dictionary". "Many of their calls are similar to human speech."

This is all from a chunk of tonight's 60 Minutes. All those quotes are on the fly — not from transcriptions or anything, but the substance is clear. But you can see a preview here, and the transcript will be available later, if I recall how they work. I didn't hear any indication of irony or that this was metaphorical.

Wow. I'm just going to post this and go root for the Bengals.

PS: "Females like to be courted by older experienced males."