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"From irregular verbs, a career"

How's that for a section title? It's from the big flashy piece in Science Times about Steven Pinker, mostly about his new book.

Full-time proofreader sought

Apply in the governor's office or at the state GOP hq, I guess … see 'lastest' tweet below, from the party's official website.

Can't make this stuff up, folks.

'are'/'our' confusion from Scott Walker

Scott Walker may be polishing up his resume, now that the recall signature effort has likely passed the halfway mark (here) less than two weeks after it started. If so, he should use grammar check and have some folks look it over before he sends it out.

He (or somebody on his staff on his behalf) tweets regularly. Most of the stuff is utterly mundane … see the middle one in the picture here, about him being damp from the Badgers game (it was raining). And sometimes they have political barbs ... see the third one, where he refers to the White House holiday tree as a Christmas tree, as he has consistently referred to the Wisconsin one, contrary to now-normal usage.

But whoever wrote today's tweet (top one in the pic) blew it. I've seen 'are'/'our' confusion in spelling before and hear people pronounce 'our' like 'are', basically [aɹ] or [aɻ].

Linguists are always quick to stress how trivial spelling is, even in a prescriptivist/standard context, but this kind of thing can stick and take on a life of its own if it seems to confirm a view people already are inclined to hold about somebody, I guess — remember Dan Quayle and 'potatoe'?

The skewing of the UW budget

At the University of Wisconsin – Madison, we've watched the budget steadily get warped and skewed. For at least two decades, faculty and administrators have been expressing the concern that cuts, often large but more importantly relentless over time, will damage or destroy this institution. With the current cuts, we're now there.

The Faculty Senate will discuss a resolution about this at its next meeting. I want to call your attention to two points from it: Counting the new cuts (both the base cut and the 'lapse' which is now pretty widely understood to be destined to be a permanent cut), from 2001 until the current budget, our General Purpose Revenue from the State (that is, the basic state support for UW) has changed pretty clearly, in 2010 adjusted dollars:

• 2001                         Now
• $370 million            $206.5 million

That is, we're now getting 55.8% of what we were basically a decade ago from the state.

At the same time, tuition has shifted even more dramatically:

• 2001                              Now
• $5,044 per student        $8,987 per student

 That's a 78% increase.

Those two pieces are what cover the basic costs of undergraduate education.

WOTY

Yes, the rusty old WOTY machine has been dragged (drug?) out of the barn, cleaned off and oiled up. Oxford University Press has fired its opening salvo, squeezed middle, described here and defined as:

the section of society regarded as particularly affected by inflation, wage freezes, and cuts in public spending during a time of economic difficulty, consisting principally of those people on low or middle incomes.

The reaction from the American Dialect Society list and other Americans has been surprise, I guess. (Whatevs, my preferred current post on the OUP blog is about giving thanks for beer, here.)

I've heard and seen various suggestions already, aside from the discussions on the Log (like this). In the past, we here at Team Verb have tended to tilt at windmills on this topic (hey, peevologist is a cool word, dammit), but this year, let me play Captain Obvious:

The 2012 Word of the Year should be …

occupy.

Yes, I realize that the Global Language Monitor has made it their WOTY, which no doubt will cost it many votes at the ADS meeting. Still.

By the way, just before the WOTY festivities in Portland in early January, there will be a session about the Dictionary of American Regional English, our beloved DARE. Be there.

Image from everywhere, basically, but taken from here.

What's up with 'uppity'?

I'm guessing you know by now that Rush Limbaugh has called Michelle Obama "uppity" and that he was defended by Glenn Beck. A new piece on the AtlanticWire by Elsbeth Reeve starts with this:

A lot of people have no idea that the word "uppity," when applied to black people, has racist connotations, but it's getting harder and harder to understand how public figures, in particular, are able to maintain their ignorance of the term's history. President Obama has been a well-known public figure for several years and his conservative critics, in particular, keep making the "uppity" mistake. 

Gee, it's hard for me to read this even as ironic. That there might be an American English speaker who doesn't know it's racist. Maybe. I know a lot of clueless people, nobody that clueless. But can you even choke out a joke about Limbaugh and Beck not knowing exactly what they're doing? I didn't think so.

Still, there's a question in here about language use. My sense is that people don't use the word uppity much anymore except in highly ironic ways. So, I did a quick NgramViewer check on it and a set of words with closely related meanings, namely: haughty, presumptuous, conceited, arrogant. Here's the result (click to embiggen):

If you go to the NgramViewer and play around, say with shortening the time depth to 1950 or so, you'll see that uppity has actually increased in frequency, though it's stayed relatively low, compared to the others. In fact, everything else but 'arrogant' has declined over time. (Why the other words have declined is a whole nother question.)

What would account for the uptick in uppity? A simple google search didn't shed any light but I happened to try an Ngram for uppity women and uppity woman. It was about the only collocation I could come up with that sounded like anything you might hear. The result:

If you google those, you get the goldmine I didn't find with a simple(r) search. It turns out, then, that it's not just an ironic use of the term, but a kind of 'taking back' of a once-negative phrase.

ADS on fb

The American Dialect Society is really moving along, racing past me in the dark, on the tech front ... they're on the Facebook, now, here. I know the kids are all about the fb.

Enjoy, along with all your txting and destroying the language.

Chomsky vs. Pullum: More Linguistics Wars?

The LINGUIST list just posted a discussion note by Geoff Pullum about a talk by Noam Chomsky at University College London, here. To folks in the field, these are familiar themes and of course these are two major figures who've been having this discussion for decades. Still, it's a good update in some ways.

I haven't seen much in the blogosphere yet about this, though Biolingüística has covered it (scroll down below the LINGUIST post to see the real commentary) and Replicated Typo. I suspect there'll be more coming. In the meantime, I'd be curious what our readers think about the substance of this (i.e., let's not belabor the silliness about NSF funding).

Update, Monday 1:30: See now this response.  Maybe we'll get some real discussion going here ...

Fun with Germanic historical linguistics ...

A normal mortal can only respond to that subject line with "fun ≠ Germanic historical linguistics", but Germanic historical linguists are not normal, I suppose. This blog has a tradition of historical linguistic geekery (start here and read from there). Time for an update ...

A crew of people  at the Universität Tübingen in Germany have assembled a pretty remarkable set of Merkverse for learning key bits of historical phonology and morphology of German and Germanic. A Merkvers can be translated as 'mnemonic rhyme' or something, but that doesn't do it justice ... there's a long tradition going back to the earliest writings in German of these little rhymes. (The image here, from here, is of one for the Runic alphabet.)

You really have to know German to get these, but one of the things you have to do with earlier Germanic languages is learn the series of strong verbs, seven classes from ride, rode, ridden and sing, sang, sung, and so on. Here's the one for that for Old High German (there's another one for Middle High German):

Althochdeutsche Merkwörter für die Ablautreihen

rîtan, zîhan, solcherlei —stehen in der ersten Reih'.
liogan und ziohan —schließt die zweite Reihe an.
Willst die Reihe drei du findan, —denk an werfan und an bindan.
neman, stelan, wissen wir, —passen nur in Reihe vier.
geban wird ganz ungeniert —in der Reihe fünf notiert.
graban, slahan, dies Gewaechs —kennen wir in Reihe sechs.
haltan und der Rest, Ihr Lieben, —hat redupliziert in sieben.

(aus Osnabrück?)

 If you're a student of the history of German, your life just got a little more fun.

And a big wag of the monk's habit to pr. (Or whatever you do with a monk's habit.)

eWAVE - electronic World Atlas of Varieties of English

Folks interested in a variety of topics dealing with data from English varieties around the world, especially morphosyntactic features, will want to check out the new electronic World Atlas of Varieties of English (eWAVE). Very cool resource!

Bucky (the deer, not the badger) for President!

Definitely check out this link! It contains the Best. Line. Ever: Meanwhile, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich predicted that his recent rise in the polls is not a fluke: “The American people want an adult, and no one has a stronger record of adultery than I do.”

Boston accents and advertising

An alert reader of this blog, M.O., sends along this pic an an ad for Maker's Mark with a Boston (should that be Bahston?) accent …

Nice. Very nice.

Recall Walker!

United Wisconsin is organizing the recall effort against the Koch Brothers' pawn in Wisconsin, "Governor" Scott Walker. Some of us are eager to take United's class on how to collect sigs for the recall effort, and have been visiting their website trying to get the schedule, etc. Apparently, a lot of us: Their website has been down all afternoon. Here's a screen shot of what they have up now:

If you're in-state, let's get to work. If you're out of state, please lend a hand if you can, say, financially. And if you don't think he should be recalled, wait, what?

Update, 8:30 pm. Looks like this was actually a distributed denial of service attack, see here. Wonder whose money is behind this?

http://www.americandialect.org/

The American Dialect Society has finished a major webpage update, here. Might be worth calling attention to the student membership and there's a nice plug for the Dictionary of American Regional English.

Check it out.

"Tim McGraw hates [lexical] semantic change."

A very perceptive student emailed with a link to the Tim McGraw video "I miss back when", saying:

when I heard the refrain of this song,  all I thought was "wow, Tim Mcgraw really hates semantic change".

Yup.

Linguistics tattoos, etc.

Science Times now has an online slide show about science tattoos, here. The author of the piece, Carl Zimmer, long ago did something on linguistics tattoos, featuring a tiny glottal stop (here). A couple of years ago, a bunch of posts on lingua-blogs and elsewhere mentioned other linguistics tattoos, including an IPA vowel chart on the Log (here).

The slide show reminded me, though, that I occasionally hear people talk about linguistics tattoos and other graphics associated with our field. The image here is of a bowling shirt from a bowling team that some UW–Madison grad students started some years ago, The Gutturals. It's the IPA symbol for an epiglottal plosive, a prototypical guttural. (I don't know if they got a lot of gutteral reactions, though, or even guttural reactions.)

So, a question, gentle readers: Aside from t-shirts, what's your favorite image of linguistics in a non-linguistics context?

“Why do languages decay?"

If you're even an occasional reader of the work (ha) of Team Verb, you know our motto:

Language changes.
Deal with it.
Revel in it.

We've often linked to new issues of  SpecGram, once known as the Speculative Grammarian. But the latest issue includes a contribution that deftly slices away our reason for being. Or maybe jabs at it with a rusty blade.  I mean the "Ask Mr. Language Person" piece answering the question above. It begins:

Hwæt! Languages don’t decay, they change over... okay, I just can’t go on perpetuating this myth that languages don’t decay. They do. They decay because speakers are lazy. The prescriptivist language mavens are right. 

 Hwaet indeed. This may be the most closely argued piece of linguistics since Verner wrote on the voicing of Germanic fricatives, or at least since "Remarks on Nominalization".

We urge you to read the piece. Then come back to us. If we ever gain the courage to tilt at the change windmill again. Or do we change our motto to 'language decays' and go from there?

Yours,
Team Verb

Image from here.

English going to hell. Even in ENGLAND!

John, of Literacy Blog fame, called our attention (see here) to a story from the Telegraph about:

Bright pupils struggling with basic grammar, says top head

Turns out that it's one of the top schools (a 'private' school … now that does mean a 'public' school in U.S. terms, right?).

The move comes after the Government announced earlier this year that pupils would lose marks in GCSE exams for poor spelling, punctuation and grammar amid concerns over falling standards of English. 

Just one little piece of evidence for falling standard, please. Just one?

University of Wisconsin – Madison pay: -25% in 10 years

There's been a ton of talk about how badly state employees, including UW-Madison workers, have fared in recent years. Here's a graphic from the Wisconsin University Union (WUU) showing the basic effects of the pay plan over the last decade. We've lost a quarter of our real income over the last decade. As always, click to embiggen.

This is the current state of affairs, before the huge cuts and lapses kick in.

Grad student workers, classified staff and increasingly academic staff are reaching crisis mode now, and I've heard faculty talk about struggling to cover basic expenses.

Time to stand up and work for the recall. While there's still a University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Google Translate "already speaks 57 languages as well as a 10-year-old"

Wow. That's the claim of a headline of a Slate story by Jeremy Kingsley, here. In the body of the story, they use a somewhat different formulation:

Today, the [Google] algorithm has an understanding of language something like a 10-year-old’s, but its rate of improvement is fast exceeding human language-learning development.

That makes more sense, and I can imagine that a journalist trying to explain how GoogleTranslate works would reach for this kind of comparison. Note that the two claims are different: one about comprehension and one about production.

But whichever claim you take, it's an empirical claim of sorts. So, I tried it with a little chunk of Spanish (from here), figuring that lots of our readers know Spanish and that it's probably one of the better developed languages (compared to Albanian and Azerbaijani, which it also does). This is the original:

La Historia de la lengua espanola, de Rafael Lapesa, es obra de ejemplaridad casi unica en el campo linguistico y literario. Hace medio siglo que llego al publico por primera vez, y desde entonces ha formado, enriquecido y deleitado a muchas generaciones de estudiosos. Esta edicion recoge la ultima reelaboracion que el maestro Lapesa hizo con exigente entusiasmo, aumentando su volumen original en mas de un tercio. Y de nuevo se impone concluir: nadie como Rafael Lapesa ha descrito la historia de nuestra lengua; nadie ha sabido contarla con tanta eficacia, con tanto encanto. Mediante la vision sucesiva de los distintos estados del espanol, Lapesa logro fundir historia, lenguaje, cultura y vida. Su libro alcanza cohesion superior al concebir como inseparables la lengua y la literatura. Los grandes autores y obras aparecen caracterizados en su estilo de forma inolvidable. La belleza de las creaciones individuales se suma asi a la oscura labor del pueblo. En el dominio de los materiales brillan las cualidades relevantes de Lapesa: saber exacto, equilibrio, serena objetividad, talante generoso, claridad pura (casi sin tecnicismos), compenetracion mental y sensitiva con lo tratado, modestia, sacrificio. Memorable Historia la que (desde el pasado y desde el presente) construyo el maestro. Para todo hispanohablante ha sido, es y ha de seguir siendo obra especialmente querida.

Here's what GoogleTranslate spits out:

The History of the Spanish language, Rafael Lapesa is exemplary work almost unique in the field of languages ​​and literature. Half a century ago who came to the public for the first time, and has since formed, enriched and delighted many generations of scholars. This edition includes the latest reworking the teacher did Lapesa demanding enthusiasm, increasing its original volume in more than one third. And again imposed conclude: anyone like Rafael Lapesa has described the history of our language, no one has been able to tell it so effectively with so much charm. Through the vision of successive various states of Spanish, melt achievement Lapesa history, language, culture and life. His book reaches cohesion conceived as inseparable than language and literature. Major authors and works are characterized in an unforgettable style. The beauty of individual creations joins the dark work of the people. In the domain of materials relevant qualities shine Lapesa: exact knowledge, balance, objectivity, calm, generous spirit, pure brightness (almost non-technical), sensory and mental rapport with the treaty, modesty, sacrifice. That Memorable History (from the past and from the present) built the master. For all speaking has been, is and must remain a work especially dear.

I don't talk to 10-year-olds that often, but while this is a really impressive automatic result (to me at least), I wonder how we judge the program's level of 'understanding' of a language?  And if we have a metric, is this 10-year-old-like?

In terms of production, it's not close to the syntactic patterns that a kid of that age would have, right? I'm a little surprised that it's not better on pro-drop and don't get why it seems to have simply skipped some words … I could see using an English possessive instead of 'de', but I don't get why "Para todo hispanohablante" comes out as "For all speaking".

But I'm in favor of anything that involves "the dark work of the people", to which I now return …

English as a Second F*cking Language

The grammar.net grammar blog contest reminded me as how much blogging there is specifically for English L2 learners and teachers. Here at Mr. V, we enjoy language learning and swearing, and this book aims at both audiences. Over the course of the book, it wears a little thin (how many times is the f-word funny?) but I imagine lots of learners learning stuff they don't know from it.

Viewer/reader discretion advised, less for the four-letter words than for gender issues.

How's your viscus feeling today?

I know Mr. Verb is all about, you guessed it, verbs, but here's a cool adjective blend I heard on the radio yesterday: "I had a gutteral reaction to it." Isn't that awesome? "gut reaction" + "visceral reaction" = "gutteral reaction."

Grant proposal advice

Science Times has a nice interview with the famous brain scientist Michael Gazzaniga this morning (here), including this from the bit called "Midnight Labs and Martini Time":

On Grant Proposals
This whole idea that you write up an experiment laying out all methods and questions you’re going to answer beforehand; it’s nonsense. That’s not the way it works. You’re just trying whatever it is you’re trying; you don’t know what’s going to happen, and then whoosh! — the thing pours right out there and generates the next questions, questions you never would have thought of before.