Indus script in the news ...

Anybody know how much is new in this claim of the decipherment of the Indus (Harappan) script?

Asko Parpola (University of Helsinki) has long been identified with efforts to connect this ancient but undeciphered script with Dravidian. Here, he declares that “an opening to the secrets of the Indus script has been achieved."

This is one of those old puzzles that have often been claimed to have been solved, and curious minds want to know ...

Language, immigration and racism

A year and a half ago, we first got to know Arizona politician Russell Pearce when he accused one of our contributors and a co-author of having "fabricated" the results of a study showing that 19th c. immigrants did not instantly learn English, while evidence suggests that new immigrants learn English very quickly. Yup, he did that in print, in the Arizona Republic.

Pearce is now nationally famous as one of the people behind Arizona's anti-immigration law. Now the summer issue of the SPLC Report (that's the Southern Poverty Law Center, here) lays out some background on Pearce and the law. Turns out, old Russell is tight with Nazis. I don't mean 'soup nazi' nazis, but Nazi Nazis — like the National Alliance and the National Socialist Movement. (And when you're photographed hugging one of them, the word 'tight' can be taken pretty literally.) More directly, they report that a lawyer who helped draft the law is ultimately tied to the Federation for American Immigration Reform, another group closely associated with racists.


The language tie here is pretty indirect and this isn't exactly breaking news at this point, but it's important to peek at what's behind the very thin veil of legitimacy and respectability these people try to project. This is of course a small example of a much broader pattern, and this piece underscores from a different perspective.

Image from here, where you can read more about Pearce, if you'd like.

One Great Jean

I've always been amused by the women's-clothing-catalog use of singular "pant" - e.g. "this beautiful pant only costs..." Now I see the following in a Sahalie catalog: "Three washes ... one great jean." And heck, this jean is only $84.95!!

Merit Badges

Check out the Onion's* latest statshot (here). 11% are working on that philology badge!!!

* America's Finest News Source, of course

New language blog: Johnson

The Economist has launched a new language blog, Johnson …

a multi-author blog about language and society in all its variety, high and low, good and not so good, and especially about those intersections between language and other issues covered by The Economist, namely business and politics.

And yes, there's already a post about the name.

Swiss Linguistic Insecurity?

Other readers of Mr. Verb will have noticed the Linguistics and soccer side note about NPR's faux pas (here), but I am wondering if any soccer fans know whether Switzerland is the first team to face an all L1 Spanish group or whether there have been other 3 vs 1 (L1) linguistic group brackets in World Cup history. Have there ever been linguistically hegemonic groups (i.e., all one L1 or dominant language)?

What (some) journalists think of linguists: McCrum

Imagine a journalistic piece about a linguist that starts by describing them as "that rare beast, an academic who talks good sense about linguistics, his chosen field." Sadly, you don't need to imagine it.

Robert McCrum has published it in the Observer, here. If you've forgotten, McCrum is the author of Globish: How the English Language Became the World's Language. I would note that many people actually trained in linguistics are far from convinced that McCrum knows enough about linguistics to talk good sense about it. (For one example, see here.)

The piece is headlined "Language alters how we think" and it's about Guy Deutscher. The opening continues:

In his new book, Through the Language Glass (Heinemann), he fearlessly contradicts the fashionable consensus, espoused by the likes of Steven Pinker, that language is wholly a product of nature, that it does not take colour and value from culture and society.

I have no comment at this time.

New horizons in careers for linguistics majors?

According to this, the new Miss Cheshire and therewith contestant for Miss England, has just completed a linguistics degree. I guess linguistics majors can go on to do anything.

Spanish speakers learning English in the US

We've been through this topic before, but here's more on just how fast Spanish speakers in this country are learning English, based on work from the Pew Hispanic Center. (Note that there's a menu bar across the top, where you can get different sub-stories.) The key info is captured in the graphic:

Even the BBC gets part of a language story right! (If you don't get why that's shocking, click here and search 'BBC'.) But of course I have a quibble:

Very often [Hispanics] switch between languages within a single sentence, or borrow English words and put them into Spanish, making a hybrid known as Spanglish.

Every language borrows from others, and English is vastly more hybrid on that count than most 'Spanglish' I've heard. Codeswitching is another game -- it's real and it's important and striking linguistic behavior. For example, you can only really do it appropriately if you're really solid in both languages. But getting at that behavior is just not something you can usually ask people. Bilinguals are often aware that they codeswitch and may report it, but what the label means varies -- I've heard people who use an occasional English word consider that 'Spanglish', and everybody in this country does that, pretty much. In fact, I'll bet you $20 that there are systematic differences in what people mean by the term across generations.

Anyway, more information in easy-to-present form for how fast immigrants are learning English today.

This is not linguistics

To who it may concern:
This is not linguistics:

when Justice Sonia Sotomayor was having trouble with an Italian word Monday, she turned to Scalia, the court's resident language maven.

Nor is it 'language maven' material. It's pronouncing names in a foreign language, nothing more:

Sotomayor hesitated as she was about to say the name of an Italian cruise line that figured in the opinion she was summarizing involving a woman who broke her leg on a cruise.

"Costa Cruises responded that she should have sued a related company called Costa – I'm going to ask my colleague Justice Scalia to say it right," Sotomayor said. The company's name is Costa Crociere.

"Kroo-chee-ER-ay," said Scalia, the son of a professor of Romance languages at Brooklyn College.

It's nice that he helped her out, don't get me wrong, but don't make too much of it ...


Image, and it's a brilliant and beautiful one, n'est-ce pas?, from here.

Morris Halle: still in ur field pwning ur theories

To launch a series on their emeritus faculty, MIT News has a piece on Morris Halle, widely regarded as the key figure in the development of modern phonological theory.

University propaganda ministries (as I've heard an employee of one refer to such operations) churn out tons of feel-good stuff about their great faculty, but Halle is vastly beyond that status. I think the article basically does him justice, and it has some real substance. In particular, there's a lot about Donca Steriade in the piece, a former student of Halle's now back at MIT.

Two years ago, a lot of virtual ink was spilled in posts on this blog about 'opacity' (start here and work back). The core issue here is whether phonology is derivational, involving a set of discrete steps, or can be done in a single step. Halle was central to developing the derivational view and Optimality Theory (OT) provided the monostratal challenge. Steriade didn't found OT, but she certainly helped lead the fight against the traditional view. Here's what she is quoted as saying in the article:

We may indeed run though a sequence of computations while turning underlying words into sounds, she suggests, so in this regard, while optimality theorists “hoped they were going to eliminate the view Morris has, it’s become obvious that’s not possible.”

She's hardly the first to concede the point, but this is the most direct admission I've seen. But Steriade …

believes there is still a “fundamental conceptual difference” between the views. While Halle describes words becoming sounds through a more arbitrary, ad-hoc series of conventions that evolve in a given language, Optimality Theory asserts that the conflicting preferences that apply to pronunciation are not arbitrary at all.

I don't have time to unpack that point right now, but will try to get back to it later. But maybe this post (or its title) will provoke some reaction.

American Speech issue on Accommodation

The new issue of American Speech is out, a special issue, co-edited by Wisconsin's own Tom Purnell together with Malcah Yaeger-Dror of Arizona. Below is part of the Table of Contents (the full ToC and abstracts are available from the links in there, obviously). If you count Purnell's work on African-American English in the Upper Midwest, this one issue shows you how rich this region is not only linguistically but now in terms of the research being done here on local varieties.

ACCOMMODATION TO THE LOCALLY DOMINANT NORM: A SPECIAL ISSUE
THOMAS C. PURNELL and MALCAH YAEGER-DROR
American Speech 2010;85 115-120
http://americanspeech.dukejournals.org/cgi/reprint/85/2/115?etoc

ACCOMMODATION TO THE LOCAL MAJORITY NORM BY HMONG AMERICANS IN THE TWIN CITIES, MINNESOTA
RIKA ITO
American Speech 2010;85 141-162
http://americanspeech.dukejournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/85/2/141?etoc

NORTHERN CITIES MEXICAN AMERICAN ENGLISH: VOWEL PRODUCTION AND PERCEPTION
REBECCA V. ROEDER
American Speech 2010;85 163-184
http://americanspeech.dukejournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/85/2/163?etoc

By the way, if you have access to American Speech, you should also check out the "Teaching American Speech" section. Michael Adams, the current editor, has done an exemplary job of building the journal as a scholarly outlet and as something that serves the broader community.

It's a good time to be a linguist working in the Upper Midwest, I think.

Monster of Peevology: Wolf Schneider

Since Mr. Verb posted on a German topic yesterday,* let's have a little topical continuity. The news magazine Spiegel just published this interview:

Wolf Schneider is a famous German journalist, often called, as here, the 'pope of the language' (Sprachpapst). In fact, the interview begins with a set of his nicknames, about him being exacting with language. The best, I think, is "Monster der Sprachkultur". Oxford-Duden defines Sprachkultur as "level of compliance with linguistic norms". That is, Schneider has basically been called the Monster of Peevology. His response to this was more or less: "Monster isn't a nice word, but whatever."

By the way, the title is actually shortened from "Germanistik zu studieren, halte ich für besonders töricht", "I consider it especially stupid to major in German Studies."And he rails against literary studies, along with blogs, twitter and about everything else.

If you read German, the piece might give you a chuckle ... . 

* Nope, I don't know what's going on with her accent either.

Eurovision, Lena Meyer-Landrut, English, and accents

This came in yesterday:

Hi Mr. Verb,
Love the blog. I just wanted to point out something interesting that you might want to discuss on the blog. The Eurovision contest winner from Germany, Lena Meyer-Landrut, has an incredibly strange accent when she sings. Perhaps someone could look into it. It sounds partly Australian, partly American, but she never sounds like a German singing English. Whatever it is, I think alot of people (including myself) find it really annoying. Perhaps this is something for the blog....

Here is a clip of her famous song that won the Eurovision thing.

Enjoy!
Larry Linguist

Well, first off, thanks Larry. Yup, that sounds pretty much unlike any dialect of English I know. Sounds very effected, and plenty of singers do that. Of course she's a German high schooler and who knows what coaching she's had and how this got created. I haven't heard her interviewed in any language. How does she talk?

Second, it turns out that her language is a whole nother issue for some people in Germany. One of our contributors tells me that the Verein Deutsche Sprache is complaining bitterly about her 'embarrassing' Germany by singing in English. This link gives their argument, pretty lame I think, that singing in German leads to better results.

English Only in higher ed: Shekleton's Law

This article from the Chronicle of Higher Education reports that the president of Kaplan College's Chula Vista campus lost his job for trying to enforce English Only. The incident involved a side conversation in class in Spanish.

James F. Shekleton gets it right in a quote at the end of the piece:

If you start legislating language, you're going to end up with a mess.

I hereby dub this Shekleton's Law. It has vast implications for language planning and policy people, obviously. They will need some time to digest it, no doubt.

The image is from here, and you probably should go there to get some further context on this topic ... and to understand the image.