Etymology man

You'll see this everywhere, but still ... today's xkcd. Click to embiggen.

Menominee Language Outrage

Heard a really appalling story when I was up on the Menominee reservation this past week, involving a kid being punished for speaking Menominee in a Catholic school classroom in Shawano. The Shawano Leader published a brief article about it here.  The version I heard was a bit more extreme (I guess the Leader was trying to be fair and balanced...), so I'll be interested to see what else comes out about it.  I'm hoping it hits the news big time.

(HT to JMZ for the link to the article.)

Update 2/1/12: another article here.

Walkergate update

Sorry that we've been on a bit of a hiatus here ... beginning of the semester, etc. People especially from out of state are asking about where things stand with the burgeoning corruption scandal surrounding Governor Scott Walker, now mostly known as Walkergate. Blue Cheddar is generally a good source for grassroots and progressive news from our state and they posted a nice overview earlier today, here. I have no idea what will ultimately come from the investigation, but it certainly seems to be going strong.

Quick update, Jan. 29:  Jason Stein from the MJS has this additional historical context.

For-profits and the gutting of public higher ed

I've been pointing out constantly for the last year that Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is working hard to destroy the University of Wisconsin System, including UW–Madison. An amazing number of people, of various political stripes, have been asking me why he would want to do something so drastic. They think I've gone all lefty paranoid on them.

My answer has been this: Walker and his ilk want the University of Phoenix and Kaplan to replace UW. Every single thing in the world is an opportunity for profit, and there is no pretense of concern for actually educating people and no interest in the broader value of public higher education. Walker does whatever his minders tell him to do and the right-wing think-tank world is heavily invested (pun intended) in for-profit education. Hey, nobody gets rich off UW! No profit = no good.

Most rank-and-file people working in public higher ed aren't, I think, quite yet fully aware of how immediate and pervasive this threat is. The University of Phoenix, for example, had a half million students enrolled in 2010 and got $24,000,000,000 (yes, billion) in federal loans and grants (according to ABC News, here). HuffPo (graphic from here) has done lots of reporting on this and scholars in the field of education have done tons of research on it (most of which I don't know), but long story short, these corporations are expensive for students, don't invest a lot of actually educating students, have low graduation rates and very high default rates.

This morning's NYT has a piece on Mitt Romney's close ties to this industry, with the example being Full Sail University in Florida. He apparently said for-profits:

“hold down the cost of education” and help students get jobs without saddling them with excessive debt.

Nope. The Times says that the 21-month program in video game art costs $80,000, had a 14% on-time graduation rate and only 38% overall, and "students carried a median debt load of nearly $59,000 in federal and private loans in 2008".

There is a systematic and well-funded effort to destroy public higher ed. We're down to the end of the road here if we don't stop them now.

No relation

"He's a quarterback, he's a winner, he's a TV draw, he's a verb." But he's not related.


(Mr. Fiskers image from here.)

Gotta go!

Portland rocks! Plus its residents have a great sense of humor. In case you can't read it, above the figures it says "phlush". But I mostly love the little icons.

Occupy

Votes are being counted, but it's gonna win. Take it to the bank.

Word of the Year

I'll be tweeting WOTY activities. For the moment, a list of nominees has been provided by Ben Zimmer, here.

Right now, listening to incredible presentations about the Dictionary of American Regional English by Michael Paul Adams, Grant Barrett and Tom Purnell. I have now seen a copy of the last volume of DARE, touched it, and looked at it. Wow.

Language policy and the GOP field

Here's a piece by Lesli Maxwell in Education Week noting that current Not Romney candidate Rick Santorum (along with Newt Gingrich) favors English as 'national language'. She had a slightly earlier piece about Romney's (the Not Not Romney's?) opposition to bilingual education, here.

About all of Team Verb is in Portland for the LSA or heading out there today. Lots of good stuff, including a celebration of the Dictionary of American Regional English. We'll have some commentary on the Word of the Year festivities, I'm sure.

Passive voice correctly characterized in the media!

Numerous linguabloggers, especially at the Log, have spent a lot of time on what Geoffrey Pullum (in the link just given) reasonably calls a "campaign to get journalists to stop using the term 'passive' in its grammatical sense when they have no idea what it means." The blunder is so common that I was taken aback this morning to read this in a discussion of the Iowa Caucus results:

Mr. Romney eliminated Rick Perry from the nomination contest. Of course, Mr. Romney got a lot of help from Mr. Perry himself. Maybe we should use the passive voice — Mr. Perry was eliminated from the nomination contest.

YES. That is actually the passive voice. Of course, the passage comes from Nate Silver of FiveThiryEight, who actually seems to know actual stuff, like numbers. If anybody's gonna recognize a passive, it's probably him.

I doubt that this will cheer Pullum, who's in deep on this battle, but I'm encouraged to see that it is not impossible for someone to refer to 'passive voice' in the media in a way that is consistent with how people who actually study things like the passive voice use the term.

Image from here, from the Village Voice.

Awareness of regional dialect: "Wisconsin accent"

A relatively recent topic in regional variation in speech is what's known as 'enregisterment' or 'enregistration'. Johnstone et al. (2006, 78) provide the classic definition:

on the basis of historical research, ethnography, discourse analysis, and sociolinguistic interviews, [to] describe how a set of linguistic features that were once not noticed at all, then used and heard primarily as markers of socioeconomic class, have come to be linked increasingly to place and ‘enregistered’ . . . as a dialect.

The topic has since led to a special issue of American Speech (here, and the quote above was pulled from Michael Paul Adams' intro to the issue). Along with work on Pittburghese and other cool stuff, the issue included work on Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, giving evidence that regional speech patterns have been recognized in Wisconsin increasingly over the last century, especially in recent decades. Instead of features that marked class, in the Upper Midwest it's typically features that were once associated with immigrant populations, like 'stopping' (using a d sound for 'th' sounds, for instance).

One bit of evidence bearing on this question hasn't, to my knowledge, been talked about: We've got ever-better corpora which we can search, like the Google NGram Viewer, which we've played with here in the past. If you search for 'Wisconsin dialect' you don't really get anything to speak of, but 'Wisconsin accent' yields an interesting pattern, shown here compared to 'Minnesota accent' (I start with 1940 because nothing shows for 'Wisconsin accent' before then; as always, click to embiggen):

So, our western neighbor's speech pattern was apparently talked about somewhat earlier and somewhat more in books than ours. But these numbers are all relative, so compare this to a state of roughly similar size (i.e. in population):

If we generalize to 'Southern accent' you see some real presence (and btw, 'Upper Midwest accent' doesn't get you anything really):

It's not surprising that Wisconsin (and Minnesota) lag behind the South in this regard, just given the historical demographics of European settlement.

Oh yeah, just because:

Update, 3:30: Was kinda in a hurry before and didn't check the Library of Congress "Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers". Checking 1836-1922 to see if yielded earlier attestation, I found only a few. A couple had 'Wisconsin' and a form of the verb 'accept' (i.e., these were OCR glitches). The others, it looks like, refer specifically to Wisconsin people with 'foreign', even specifically 'German' accents. That's highly consistent with the association of Wisconsin with immigrants and with immigrants who didn't speak English or, in this case, spoke it with an accent. Here's an early example, from the Omaha Bee:

Gee, there might be a little story in here.

Reference
Johnstone, Barbara, Jennifer Andrus, and Andrew E. Danielson. 2006. “Mobility, Indexicality, and the Enregisterment of ‘Pittsburghese.’” Journal of English Linguistics 34: 77–101.

Syntactic judgment (day)

Found this on Facebook posted by Matt Pearson and attributed to Leston Buell... had to repost for the broader Mr. V audience!

Emmett Bennett and Linear B

I found out yesterday that Emmett Bennett passed away two weeks ago here in Madison. He was an emeritus professor of Classics, where he taught for almost 30 years. As the NYT obit linked above describes, he played a key role in deciphering the early Greek texts in the script called Linear B, one of the amazing stories of philology. Unfortunately, I don't know the story well enough to tell any more than it's told in the obit or the sketch here. (I'll dig a little to see if I can find out more.)

You can see some of his documents here, including tables of symbols he worked out. You may think that a Classics prof working on ancient clay tablets wouldn't be too cutting edge, but he was using punch cards back in the 1940s, held a patent (it looks like), and worked to figure out ancient bookkeeping.

For now, it's another reminder of the Wisconsin tradition, not only in ancient languages but also in the use of new technologies and the value of thinking broadly.

Image from here, the first page of a piece in the American Journal of Archeology from 1950.