'biddy'

After all the uproar over the "Coastie Song" last year (covered in a string of posts on this blog, leading up to this), the guys who did that released a Valentine Day song for/to our Chancellor, Biddy Martin. "Baby be my Biddy" has been written up for a while (like here), and you can see the video / hear the song here:


You gotta love lines like

I'll answer ya
I'll dance for ya
We can run this city
my chancellor.

And the chancellor's got the sense of humor to appreciate the song. That's good since this seems to be a trend, with an Irish "Biddy Martin's Polka" (here), and rumors of a campus band forming that's considering calling itself the Biddy Martins. All of it, as far as I can tell, in a spirit of real affection. Even if you don't agree with her about everything, you gotta like this atmosphere.

But you know Team Verb … always looking for some little language angle. The story, now familiar on campus, is that Carolyn Martin came to be called 'Biddy' from a childhood nickname that stuck. At the same time, there's a little bit of English word history here too, with OED having three separate entries, leaving aside bitty, which is homophonous for most people. The earliest form seems to be the word for 'chicken, fowl', used by Shakespeare, according to the OED. The origins are uncertain, but one possibility is an imitative source (from calling chickens). OED also notes "Gaelic bîdeach "very small'".

The most common use in American English, I suspect, is in collocations like 'old biddy'. This meaning of 'old woman, gossipy', and so on is reported in OED as an Americanism, reckoned as a diminutive of Bridget and used for Irish maids (see also DARE).

From this, it wouldn't be surprising for folks to think of 'Be my Biddy' as negative, but in fact the word has developed a remarkable range of connotations, as UrbanDictionary makes clear, here. It's now used specifically for young girls as well as old women, used for attractive women and women not regarded as attractive, for 'girlfriend' and for women regarded as obnoxious, etc. Even figuring in the necessary (and wide) margin of error for UrbanDictionary data, it's pretty interesting: The word seems to mean both 'X' and 'not X' depending on speaker along at least a couple of dimensions.

There's an old, minor point about patterns of 'semantic derogation', where certain positive or neutral terms develop negative meanings. This has been remarked on especially about terms for women,* where once parallel pairs of terms have diverged, like mister versus mistress or bachelor versus spinster. This might be the reverse case, where a negative word for women has become positive, if in a restricted way. There are all kinds of caveats and limits there obviously, but I'm figuring that some of these uses are genuinely intended as positive.

In the end, in fact, it parallels the situation with coastie, where the word ranges from utterly innocent ('non-Wisconsinite') to, apparently, directly anti-Semitic. Is Zooniversity specializing in lyrics built around lexical-semantic tofu, that is, words that depend heavily on context for their meaning?

*This is may be the classic work on the topic:

Schulz, Muriel. 1975. The semantic derogation of women. Language and Sex: Difference and Dominance. Edited by B. Thorne & N. Henley. Newbury House.

(on)-ics for language names: More Edenics

As the house historical linguist on Team Verb, I should probably say something about the whole Edenics thing.

One thing that strikes me is the name, since I don't think (n)-ics was used for language names before Ebonics, which was consciously created as a blend of Ebony and Phonics, according to the usual story (including the version in the Oxford English Dictionary Online.)

Since then, the second element, typically expanded from the original blend to -onics but sometimes just -ics, has been used widely in humorous contexts, like Hickonics, for example, or Wisconics. (How these relate to Ebonics socially and politically is a topic for another time.) But I don't recall offhand cases where it's been extended to this kind of situation, i.e. a proposal for a proto-language. -ic is very common (Altaic, Uralic, Tungusic, Germanic, etc.), but That's a different creature.

Our readers will surely correct me if I'm wrong.

A big h.t. to M.O.

PS, just so I'm on the record: Edenics is seriously flawed as an effort to understand the history of human language.

Caveat Emptor: Buying term papers

Spam aimed at academic blogs have been talked about (like here), and blog spam is just a fact of life. Along the way, it's often noted that email and web scams tend to be easily recognized by bad grammar and spelling. It's kind of hilarious when the you get blog spam/web scams where those problems are directly relevant to the service being pushed.

Blogger is actually remarkably good at preventing much of this stuff reaching this blog, but other services aren't, including one I deal with for a website connected to my work (i.e., not linguistics).  Along with the cheap pharmaceuticals and on-line casinos, I've just deleted from that website a whole set advertising (or claiming to advertise – who knows what level of scam they are plying) services that write research papers for sale.* Look at these two samples (from different messages) and ask yourself whether the stupidest undergrad you've ever met would try to buy from these guys:

This is indisputable that the distinguished buy research paper service would compose the smashing essay writer paper for persons which do not have writing skills. It will be the most simple way for such people, I do guess!

I was doing a bit of research looking at some other custom essay service. and this is the fifth link to the search essay about this topic as relayed by Google… so you are conforming that you are administer a free service for them and amplify their traffic. So if you morally support this then you should take the money but if your opinion has carry at all and you’re against it then you should apparently efface them. But it’s still yours to clinch.

You really want to buy an essay written like that! It is indisputable that I do not know students which do not have smashing writing skills, I do guess.

* Isn't this cheating? An answer to that question is given the proverbial college try here, the same site the image is from. I wonder if anybody has ever used the products "as intended"?

The Origins of the Specious: Edenics

Ooops, I meant …

The Origin of Speeches:
Intelligent Design In Language
From The Language Of Eden To Our Babble After Babel

It's the most recent book on Edenics. It's been out for a while (and was dealt with in some detail in the blogosphere, including on the Log, like here), but a reader reminded one of our contributors about this project.

It turns out Edenics is now on twitter and on there's an introduction on YouTube (= extended advertisement for the book), among various other videos:


I was surprised to hear (around 1:33) that "today's linguists finally accept the fact that the whole planet spoke one language; they call it Proto-Earth." Really?

Going back to the website, in the FAQ, we can read that "The Origin of Speeches is an anti-Evolutionary answer to Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species." But check out the introduction to Edenics (a downloadable pdf at edenics.org, I've left out the eight or so different font colors and font changes and such):

EDENIC (Proto-Semitic, best documented in Biblical Hebrew) was HARD-WIRED in the brains of Modern Men (since Eden). Its software design matches the hardware ANATOMY of Lips, Throat, Tooth Ridge, Nose, Tongue, and Whistling Air (to pronounce the letters/sounds). Then, in Shinar (Sumer, referenced as the later Babel) a neuro-linguistic disturbance was the Big Bang of language dispersion.

Wow. And then this:

Hebrew, with its right brain/left brain neurological keyboard demonstrates that Greek and Latin are merely grandparents, while Hebrew is the common ancestor, the original computing language of our biological random access memory, which was scrambled during the output stage by the Master Programmer (Tower of Babel story in Genesis).

Double wow. And I never knew this:

The Continental Congress nearly made Hebrew the language of the new republic, as much to break away from England as to reaffirm America's status as the new Promised Land.

I'm all wowed out. The game of identifying the 'original language' of humankind is remarkably old. Campbell & Poser write in their book Language Classification (pp. 13-14) note that after Johannes Reuchlin's 1506 grammar of Hebrew, it was a major strand of historical work, with Hebrew often the original language:

Historical linguistic interests of the time had as their background the Greek tradition … and the biblically based interpretation of Hebrew as the original language (Lingua Adamica, Lingua Paradisiaca) before the confounding of tongues at Babel. It was common to attempt to fit the European languages into the biblical tradition.

That is, these guys are carrying on a long tradition here, all dressed up in current terminology. It's not merely that languages got changed, but our hardwiring — the 'neuro-linguistic disturbance'. The site hasn't been updated much lately, but even so, this year is a big anniversary of the Origin of Species, of course, so it's worth a quick note.

The material at edenics.org speaks for itself, and loudly, but it's worth one quick point. As Mark Liberman wrote about Isaac Mozeson, the man behind Edenics, in the above-cited post on the Log:

His theory seems to be that God was a sort of weak cryptographer, who didn't actually create any new languages after Babel, but simply mixed up the old ones ("letters that shift in sound and location, and letters that drop in and out") in ways that Mozeson has figured out how to decrypt.

I guess if the purpose was to disrupt communication, the cryptography was good enough. I've been talking to comparative and historical linguists some lately, including about the issue of systematic sound correspondences — the way we can best tell that English and Spanish are genetically related is that sounds differ systematically but consistently. A challenge for long range comparison and especially Proto-World is how to get such matches at this vast time depth. Edenics may be an ingenious attempt to sidestep that: the Intelligent Designer (their term) deliberately shuffled sounds around:

Genesis 11 does not reveal the mechanics of the TOWER OF BABEL’s “confounding,” but global Edenicists are making great strides.

Any labial is interchangeable with any other and likewise any fricative with any other. Plus the Designer metathesized alot. Here are examples of how these three processes give English forms from the Hebrew (from the pdf):

BILABIAL SHIFT aBBa to PAPA אבא
FRICATIVE SHIFT SHaQeL to SCALE שקל
BEAUTY M213 from TZiBHeeY (beautiful) צבי

This purposeful irregularization vitiates any appeal to systematic sound correspondence. All you need is some word in any language that shares some sound with some kind of phonetic similarity to some Hebrew word, place or manner of articulation of a consonant, for instance.

No more wowing for today.

Image from here – one of the claimed samples of earliest human writing.

How will we pay for public higher education?

You may have seen this in the NYT today about a study suggesting -- to no one's surprise, I imagine -- serious public discontent with higher education. Of course, it's about money and access.

nearly two-thirds of those surveyed said that colleges should use federal stimulus money to hold down tuition, even if it means less money for operations and programs.

We're trapped in a nightmare scenario, really, of increasing  costs and decreasing public funding. And lots of people are screaming about it, rightly.

Several groups at the University of Wisconsin – Madison are working together to begin public discussion about how we as as institution can respond to this. More information is available here, but here's the basic info for the event, from the press release:

How will we pay for education in the years to come?
PROFS, along with CAPE (Coalition for Affordable Public Education) and UFAS (United Faculty and Staff) invites you to a public forum on the financing of higher education at 4 pm on Tuesday, February 23 at the Memorial Union (check TITU).

As you know, the financing of higher education has changed significantly over the past several decades. Shrinking state support and sharply increased costs have forced campuses to chart new courses for survival. Are our only alternatives hyper-inflationary tuition increases and larger classes?

This forum is the first in a series aimed at starting a discussion on these topics. Panelists for this forum are:

• Kevin Reilly, President, UW System
• Andrew Reschovsky, professor, La Follette School of Public Affairs
• Noel Radomski, director, Wisconsin Center for the Advancement of Postsecondary Education.

For more information, please contact Michelle Felber at PROFS, 263-9273 or mfelber@bascom.wisc.edu, or visit the PROFS website, www.profs.wisc.edu. 

Be there or be square.

Image from here.

Montreal English ... the sociolinguistic news flood continues

Nice report here from the Montreal Gazette on Charles Boberg's work on ethnic and neighborhood differences in Montreal English. It's a good picture of variation and change in English in a bilingual city, showing both geographical and social parameters of differences.

On one point, something must have gotten garbled in transmission:

Unlike most North American cities, Boberg says, Montreal is not a linguistic melting pot where everyone ends up sounding more or less the same.

Is the melting pot view of things really still out there?

But in terms of eastern Canada, rumor has it that there's also a lot of work afoot in Toronto, I think including heritage languages and English dialects.

Image from here.

More sociolinguistics in the news … the AAE Vowel Shift

This piece from the Raleigh Public Record reports on work on African-American English in the capitol of North Carolina by Erik Thomas, Robin Dodsworth and others. Thomas is a leading figure in sociophonetics, including important research on the African-American English Vowel Shift. It's striking how little the AAE Shift has been discussed in the media to date. Here's hoping this is the beginning of a wave of journalism to fill that gap.

Verbing in the news: good, bad and ugly

Over the last day, the American Dialect Society's ads-l has had a couple of posts highlighting this euphemistic use, of, of all things, verbing the noun for, well, something that there are only roughly 250,000 euphemisms for. Wow. Let's not even think about vocabulary hoaxes here.

Happily, Ben Zimmer did today's "On Language" in the NYT and he mounts a vigorous defense of to podium and to medal, in Olympic usage, introducing non-linguists nicely to the key bits of how derivation works. Thanks, Ben, for speaking up for verbing.

Image from here.

Snowmadgeddon

This from the WaPo.


I guess it has a nice ring to it here in Wisconsin, but I'm not sure I want to live through it in Washington, where they're not well equipped for it.

OUP blog ... what we owe prescriptivists

Lately, for whatever reason, we haven't been posting on peevology and related matters. Maybe it's the passing of William 'Bill' Safire. Or maybe the flood of serious language science and bizarre dog-bites-person language stuff that we have been posting about. Whatevs.

But this morning I happened to check in on the Oxford University Press blog and read a piece by Alexandra D'Arcy, one of the best young sociolinguists out there, which had me pondering all day. She attributes her becoming a linguist to her seriously prescriptivist grandmother, and draws a nice connection here:

Grandmother’s love for language endures. Its form is different but the substance is the same. Grandmother taught me to revere the spoken word. I do. She taught me to heed not only the content but also the form. I do. She also taught me that not everybody speaks the same way. And it is this fundamental truth that makes me excited to go to work every day.

But what kept me thinking all day was that last line, that something about language makes her excited to go to work every day. I know a lot of people who do a lot of things, but it's almost only the linguists I know who talk about how we are excited to do what we do. And by god, we are.

PS: Read the comments to that post to see a maven shoot themself in the foot.

Image from here.