And the winner is ...

My sense is that most of our readers aren't into the Grammar.net grammar blog contest, but just in case, here are the winners.

• 1st place: A Clil To Climb 
• 2nd place: Grammar Girl 
• 3rd place: Arrant Pedantry  

 I know the second and third, but haven't been able to get the winner to open. 

Tense, moody AND irregular ...

Look, I know that the Log has cornered the market on these images, but we GOTTA cover this one.

New Ways of Analyzing Variation, 40

Field report here from Georgetown, where the 40th NWAV is taking place. Yesterday's program included a great panel by a bunch of the founders of the conference and this subfield of linguistics. (See picture of Dennis Preston. Click to embiggen.) That panel and other speakers have stressed points that are key pieces of how most University of Wisconsin – Madison linguists are thinking, especially heavy stress on inclusiveness across theoretical perspectives/subfields and real emphasis on public service and outreach.

By the way, next year will be at Indiana University.

Chomsky on twitter

Say, how come this isn't all over the linguablogs? Nathan Jurgenson at Salon has written a piece called this:

Why Chomsky is wrong about Twitter

When the linguist claims that social media is "shallow," he isn't very deep or convincing

Maybe the uproar is among journalism folks rather than linguists here?

Siri and accents

Just for fun: Siri apparently fails on a Scottish accent. Here.

Cryptography in the news

We've posted a bit in the past (here) about the famous Voynich manuscript. Today, the NY Times' Science Times has a cool story about a piece of notable cryptography, here. Nice example of how new tools help us solve old problems.

Dismantling education in Wisconsin, very quickly

Wisconsin readers of this blog probably almost all know about the new budget cuts the University of Wisconsin System is suddenly facing. After a $250,000,000 cut to the System over the biennium, it was announced last week that this would be upped by over $65,000,000 more. Now, that number has risen to more like $111,000,000. The numbers aren't final and official yet, but we're probably looking at cuts of over $360,000,000 to the System over two years. Here's a clear version of what we know at this point, and as usual Sifting & Winnowing is an excellent place to go for info.

At the same time, yesterday on Wisconsin Public Radio, we heard that the governor of this state is backing a proposal that would eliminate English and math requirements for high school graduation, allowing them to be replaced with vocational training. (Here's a good summary of that.) Many of us have long suspected that Walker's promises of job growth were based on the Texas model — minimum wage jobs without benefits, etc., rather than jobs that would truly move Wisconsin forward as an economic power — and this looks thoroughly consistent with that.

Image from here.

British dialects in the news

Here's a nice piece on contemporary language and dialect issues in Britain, by leading sociolinguist Paul Kerswill and published in the Sun. We've said a little about dialect and the British show EastEnders here in the past (here), but this is about a reality show, The Only Way is Essex, or TOWIE.

I haven't seen the show and don't know enough about British dialects today to have anything to say anyhow, but maybe some readers can comment on Kerswill's analysis? Sure looks to me like a good example of laying out language variation and change stuff for a lay audience.

More English Only in Michigan

See this story. Here's the start of the piece:

Six languages were heard spoken at Spartan Stadium last weekend during the annual football showdown between Michigan State University and the University of Michigan, state Rep. Kenneth Kurtz, R-Coldwater, said.

Those watching at home heard the game in one language — English, Kurtz noted.

"Why? Because that's the language," he said.

"We're a nation of immigrants. We've come together under one system of government, one Constitution, and that Constitution is in English," Kurtz added.

If language use today is determined by the original language of documents (or speakers? cultures?), there may be big changes coming on various fronts, but what I want to know is what six languages were spoken and how the heck Kurtz knows?

Lingua-blog scandal?!?!?!

Grammar.net is holding its 2011 Best Grammar Blog contest now (here), and I just got this email: 

Dear bloggers!

Yesterday, October 17, at 11.59 p.m. PST the contest for the Best Grammar Blog of 2011 was supposed to end. The competition was intense; voters were doing their best to support their favorite blogs. The winners will be announced on Friday, October 21st. Unfortunately, we had to disqualify two blogs. But we would still like to have real winners, so we have extended the voting until Thursday, October 20th, 11.59 p.m. PST.

We will continue to monitor the voting process and hope the competition will be fair (each person can vote only once).

Contact us if you have any questions.

Best regards,

Grammar.net team
contest@grammar.net
It's all about grammar!

Wow, voting rigging on a grammar blog contest?!?!? I had checked in a couple of time out of curiosity ... it's really about grammar blogs and not linguistics blogs, so it's not something that we have promoted here. But a scandal! Linguabloggers cared enough to cheat!

Somebody has to know the inside scoop. Dish please!

Getting worse ... Proto-Human word order

So, USA Today has picked up the Proto-Human word order story and locked in on a part I was really hoping might go unnoticed in the press:

In a paper in a recent edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,[Gell-Mann and Ruhlen] dispute the assertion by some linguistics that the original human language was organized by Subject-Verb-Object, as English is.

Sigh. This creates the impression that there's actual scholarly debate surrounding reconstructing Proto-Human word order. It's true Bickerton made arguments 30 years ago for SVO as the starting point of human language, but it's hardly the core point of the (very controversial) proposal he makes in The Roots of Language. I don't recall offhand that this particular point provoked much discussion at the time.

PS: The people who pursue the study of language are called linguists and the field linguistics. Us pseudonymous bloggers make typos but we don't have USA Today's staff to comb for typos.

PPS: My personal copy of the book has faded in almost exactly the way shown in the pic here ... the purplish stayed on the jacket where it was protected by books next to it and the spine turned that same weird color with exposure to light. Since when do online photos of books (this one on Amazon) reflect current state of the jacket?

More on evolution, language and gender ...

Just ran across this on Salon:

Why do men and women talk differently? A new book argues that guys argue and girls overshare for a reason: Evolution.

It's about a new book by John Locke, a linguistics professor at Lehman College, and his new book, Duels and Duets. I haven't seen the book and may never read it, so I'll leave it to others to sort out what's what, but here's the barest synopsis:

Men, he argues, use antagonistic speech, or “duels,” to show off their strength and prove themselves to women. Women, meanwhile, use quieter speech patterns to bond with each other — and help protect themselves against aggressive men. And, according to Locke, this is a pattern that has been going on for thousands and thousands of years.

The comments are pretty interesting, and they don't seem inhibited by not having read the book. This one is typical:

Please stop publishing evo-psych bullshit. It's an unverifiable pseudoscience.

Not mutually intelligible dialects of American English in the news

... or at least a classic failure to communicate. No discourse analysis needed, I suppose. Visit here for the real item (and the usual tons of cool stuff that Tom Tomorrow has). And as always, click to embiggen.

Gotta go, late for my bongo session downtown.

Proto-Human and Yodic syntax

I first read earlier this week about new work on the word order of the earliest human speech (first in a footnote to a post on the Log on an entirely different subject, see here). The work is by Murray Gell-Mann and Merritt Ruhlen, two proponents of the notion that many characteristics of the earliest human patterns of speech are well within our reach, and it was published in — wait for it — the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States. The abstract opens with this:

Recent work in comparative linguistics suggests that all, or almost all, attested human languages may derive from a single earlier language.

The blood pressure of almost every trained, working historical linguist in North America skyrockets on reading that. Just ask one. But here's the big take-home from the story:

The word order in the ancestral language was SOV.  Except for cases of diffusion, the direction of syntactic change, when it occurs, has been for the most part SOV > SVO and, beyond that, SVO > VSO/VOS with a subsequent reversion to SVO occurring occasionally. Reversion to SOV occurs only through diffusion.

I had been pondering whether it was worthwhile to write about the story. The evidence for Proto-Human, as it's often called, is insanely controversial, to give it the most positive spin, and whether syntax can be reconstructed in a significant way is also still controversial. (There's reasonable evidence that some elements of it can be, but that gets us as far off the ground as a good high-jumper, while Proto-Human word order is a trip to Mars.) I had decided that it wasn't worth it. But then …

Alert Linguistics major Carla Oppenheimer passed on word of a couple of news stories on this to a member of Team Verb:

• Life's Little Mysteries (again, under the rubric 'Weird'): "The Original Human Language Like Yoda Sounded"
• HuffPost Weird News: "Yoda Language Study: New Research Shows Human Ancestors Spoke Like Star Wars Character"

YES!!!! Finally, a level of seriousness that Proto-Human so richly deserves!

So, I'm thinking, is this how Yoda speaks? I tried entering some simple English SVO sentences into the Yoda-Speak Generator (yup, it's real: here). A bunch came out SVO with 'yes, hmmm' added at the end. But in many cases the object was topicalized: 'Yoda has odd syntax' came out as 'Odd syntax, Yoda has. Yes, hmmm.' That's actually OSV, one of the rarest word order patterns known.

But that's not the key pattern if you put in more complex sentences. Try this:

I will tell you about the earliest human language.

and you get this:

Tell you about the earliest human language, I will.  Yeesssssss.

So, the Yoda generalization here is that he topicalizes like mad, a generalization among many explored years ago on Language Log, like here, in the aptly titled "Unclear of Yoda's syntax the principles are, if any". Certainly, whatever generalizations are possible, Yodic is not SOV.

At the same time, comparing Proto-Human word order to the speech of a Star Wars character seems just right.

I(mage from the Life's Little Mysteries story.)

Discourse Analysis in the news

... from the latest print Onion. (Yeah, where else?)

So, you ask whether Deborah Tannen has started writing for the Onion. Nah.

By the way, I was pretty frustrated by the blog spam attack in September, and it took a while for it to stop (after reporting the attack, etc.) Time to get rolling again ...