Open attack on academic freedom and free speech

Look at this clip of an interview with Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald. The host, Mike Gousha, asks specifically about tenure, "why do changes need to be made?" Starting around 2:00, Fitzgerald responds with this:

The idea that anybody should be protected from any kind of criticism when they make public comments or even the way they handle themselves on campus is just not sitting well with many of us. 

He shortly thereafter comes back around to talk about professors being "completely protected", in case you found "anybody" ambiguous.

Now, tenure is not about criticism that I can see and faculty are hardly protected from criticism (see below or, my god, read a newspaper). What we are protected from is being fired for doing legitimate research or speaking our minds. That's surely what he means.

And you do know that there's already political consequences for people doing normal research, including firing and public calls for firing: (1) firing a bunch of scientists from the Department of Natural Resources who had worked on politically charged issues and (2) a sitting state senator making scathing attacks on a professor because of his research.

The house is on fire, folks.


Image in recognition of Donald Trump announcement that he's running for president. In case the news wasn't insane enough for you yet.

The real misperception about the politics surrounding the University of Wisconsin

This blog has been silent about recent developments aimed at destroying the University of Wisconsin by more rapid defunding, by dismantling tenure and by forbidding shared governance.

We've seen the Board of Regents decline to step up and urge the state not to do these things. We've seen the System president and Madison chancellor reassure us repeatedly that there's really no problem here and then that it's not as bad as it seems and now that they're doing all they can to lessen the damage.

The latest message from our chancellor (here) is intended, among other things, to "help clarify some misperceptions".

The only real misperception here is any failure to understand and to say clearly and directly that the state government — the governor and the assembly and the senate — intends to defund UW, dismantle tenure and destroy shared governance and this is a huge step toward accomplishing those goals. They have been very open about this (e.g. here) and to pretend like things aren't heading that way is maddening.

What do we do? Well, you can run or you can stand and fight. If you choose the latter or have no choice but to stay, there's only one way to go: Organized action. A member of Team Verb posted this list on fb last week; consider it a suggestion to join and be active in the relevant groups:

• TAA
• AAUP
• PROFS 
• WUU
• UFAS

The TAA has fought more effectively than anybody for UW in a broad sense, and even if you can't join, you should support them. AAUP is our big national ally and word on the street is that the long moribund local chapter is getting going again. PROFS is the key group working with state government (to the extent that is possible at present) and their website is a good source of information about what's happening. There are two small unions on campus for faculty and academic staff, the Wisconsin University Union and United Faculty and Academic Staff. My real hope is that these groups will now all work together ... the stakes could not be higher. 

David Brooks: English draws immigrants

I do not read David Brooks. Bad for my health. But when I saw the headline "Talent loves English" this morning, I hadn't had much coffee and didn't do what I knew was the right thing. I actually read the piece. Big mistake.

Wherever the headline comes from, here's the reference to language [emphasis added]:

Across the English-speaking world, immigrants are drawn by the same things: relatively strong economies, good universities, open cultures and the world’s lingua franca.

Wait, what? People immigrate to the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States because English is the dominant language in those places? I know a ton of immigrants, from many walks of life and from literally all over the world. Aside from a couple who came to work as English professors or something, I cannot imagine that a single one of them was motivated in any way by the dominant language spoken here.

Does anybody know of any evidence of any kind, even anecdotal, that English motivates immigration to English-speaking countries? 

Image from here.*

*Answer to question: Lingua franca is English / in English. Wasn't always English, but is now. 

The apostrophic War on the Holidays

I was fighting the urge to post about this piece on Slate, about how to pluralize your last name, and now officially give up. Anything that has this line is hard to resist reacting to:

It’s Christmas! Celebrate by not doing violence to the laws of pluralization.

Wow, I think, how do you do violence to the laws of pluralization? Wait ARE there laws of pluralization? Turns out there's outrage about 'stray apostrophes'. "Every year they assault me." Oh, about spelling. Got it. I won't review the green grocer's apostrophe here (but knock yourself out: here, for one.)

But plurals do get into the picture. (Say cheese.) Apparently there's deep worry about the Wolf family signing as 'The Wolves'. A card from the wolves? I'm cutting back on the eggnog at that point. They usually barely knock when they come to your house here in Wisconsin. That's what I call 'assault'.

Merry Thanksgiving and wishing you all lots of apostrophes for the holidays,
The Verb's

Found the image at a Walk in the Words. They have a nice little post on the topic.

Big announcement from Mr. Verb -- Career change

Dear readers,
You should be the first to know. After literally decades of studying how language works and changes and what it tells us about the mind, I'm moving on. From this day forward, I'll be studying ancient mating habits.

Yes, linguistics has allowed me tremendous opportunities to help understand our state's and nation's past and present and to serve communities around the state. And our students often go on to work for businesses outside of the academy that help grow the economy.

But from this day forward, it's ancient mating habits. Mating habits of what, you ask? Whatever, I say.

Yours verbally,

Mr. V

PS: Read this.

You blame Chomsky for WHAT?!?!?!?

OK, this is a pretty weird piece. It starts with this title + comment:

It's time to challenge the notion that there is only one way to speak English. Why do we persist in thinking that standard English is right, when it is spoken by only 15% of the British population? Linguistics-loving Harry Ritchie blames Noam Chomsky.

Wait, what? It's Chomsky's fault that there's linguistic bias? Here's the start of the article:

Did you see that great documentary on linguistics the other night? What about that terrific series on Radio 4 about the Indo-European language family tree? Or that news report on language extinction? It is strange that none of those programmes happened, or has ever happened: it's not as if language is an arcane subject. Just as puzzling is the conspicuous lack of a properly informed book about language – either our own or language in general.

Oh.  So, who gets the blame? After some meandering commentary on Pinker's Language Instinct, among other things, we eventually learn:

I put it down to the strange way that the discipline developed under the aegis of the man who has dominated and defined it since the late 50s, the father of modern linguistics, Chomsky.

And this is no vague blame, just about the popular impact or perception of linguistics:

the wholesale acceptance of Chomsky's rationalist assumptions has meant that the discipline has been hunting for unicorns while neglecting many key areas of language. There is still little research being carried out on, for example, environmental influences on children's language acquisition. 

Most pressingly of all, too little work is being done to record the languages currently facing extinction. By one estimate, 95% of the 7,000 languages now spoken in the world are in danger of dying out. Recording these should have been a priority.

I just googled 'endangered languages' and got over 2,000,000 hits. Google 'generative grammar' and you get over 500,000. That probably roughly reflects the current levels of activity on those two fronts. I would add something on 'environmental influences on children's language acquisition', but I'm not entirely sure what it means.

Ultimately, Chomsky "turned grammar into a technical subject full of jargon and algebra studied on whiteboards by men with beards". Yeah, that's certainly killed physics and cognitive science and whatnot. 

I eventually realized I was reading science fiction. 

Image from here.

Academic freedom isn't in Kansas anymore

This story started floating here overnight about the Kansas Board of Regents new policy about social media. The link is from the WaPo blog The Monkey Cage and it's worth reading.

Here's the key passage (emphasis added):

The chief executive officer of a state university has the authority to suspend, dismiss or terminate from employment any faculty or staff member who makes improper use of social media. “Social media” means any facility for online publication and commentary, including but not limited to blogs, wikis, and social networking sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube. “Improper use of social media” means making a communication through social media that:

i. directly incites violence or other immediate breach of the peace;

ii. when made pursuant to (i.e. in furtherance of) the employee’s official duties, is contrary to the best interests of the University;

iii. discloses without authority any confidential student information, protected health care information, personnel records, personal financial information, or confidential research data; or

iv. subject to the balancing analysis required by the following paragraph, impairs discipline by superiors or harmony among co-workers, has a detrimental impact on close working relationships for which personal loyalty and confidence are necessary, impedes the performance of the speaker’s official duties, interferes with the regular operation of the university, or otherwise adversely affects the university’s ability to efficiently provide services.

 In determining whether the employee’s communication constitutes an improper use of social media under paragraph (iv), the chief executive officer shall balance the interest of the university in promoting the efficiency of the public services it performs through its employees against the employee’s right as a citizen to speak on matters of public concern, and may consider the employee’s position within the university and whether the employee used or publicized the university name, brands, website, official title or school / department / college or otherwise created the appearance of the communication being endorsed, approved or connected to the university in a manner that discredits the university. The chief executive officer may also consider whether the communication was made during the employee’s working hours or the communication was transmitted utilizing university systems or equipment. This policy on improper use of social media shall apply prospectively from its date of adoption by the Kansas Board of Regents. 

A lot of faculty I know see their proper role as specifically trying to push their institutions in ways that many administrators instantly interpret as 'contrary to the best interests' of those institutions. And it seems like interfering with the institution's 'ability to effectively provide services' surely includes working for higher wages and better conditions for workers, for instance.

Now, if they actually try to enforce this, there'll surely be long legal battles over it. But this is not a good moment.

I am kingpin and so can you. Academics are like drug gangs

This piece, "Academe as a Drug Gang", is getting a lot of play … like being republished on Slate. It was posted on Inside Higher Ed by Scott Jaschik and builds on a blog post by Alexandre Afonso, here. It's a basic line of argument you hear pretty often in various forms, that young scholars will endure impossible hours, wretched pay and low odds of success for the potential payoff down the road if you do make it. Certainly the risks and rewards are virtually identical to those of large-scale organized drug dealing.

As the ruthless kingpin of a mighty cartel dealing straight, uncut truth on street corners all around Wisconsin and rapidly expanding beyond, I can only say 'yup, you got me pegged'. It's not all a bowl of cherries, though, even at the top of the food chain. Had a little problem with the distribution network and it looks like we have some entry-level openings to move some product, in fact, new batch with the street name Phonetic Enhancement. But we're offing the whole effin' crew that hit our people, some gang goes by 'Dispersion Theory' or something. Beyond that, I'm running out of things to do with my cash. I mean, how many Caribbean islands am I supposed to own? It's not easy. Like my role model, Scarface, said way back when: I always tell the truth. Even when I lie.

Seriously, the commenters on Inside Higher Ed in particular have nailed the key points already: Getting a PhD is about much more than ending up with tenure or any academic job; the pool of brilliant young PhDs (and grad students) is hardly expanding dramatically, etc., etc., etc.

Don't get me wrong … I get the joke and love the snark. But you gotta have some caveats for the uninitiated … some young person out there is reading this stuff and thinking that they should get an MBA instead of a PhD in some social science.

World's Weirdest Language Update

Uh-oh.  I was all amused by this whole thing until I saw this:

(Click to embiggen.)  You can access the full blog post here, but you have to register to view the site.  I'm generally unwilling to do that with unknown websites, but I went ahead and did it this time.  The article isn't that bad, but what the HELL is that picture supposed to be of?  Last time I was in Chalcatongo (which is in OAXACA, MEXICO!) people didn't exactly dress like that.  This looks a lot like they said, "hey, let's get a picture of some weird people to go along with the weird language!  (And all weird people are the same, right?)".

Part of the problem is that this was a linguist inside joke - "weird" is a positive attribute to us!  We revel in unusual structures.  But now it's escaped to the outside world, and I think there may be bad repercussions.

So, I'm starting to think this isn't so amusing.  I suppose I should respond, pointing out that the combination of the picture and the caption is not okay...  And I'm also starting to think I owe an apology to the speakers of Chalcatongo Mixtec.  Crap.

"Evidence for Direct Geographic Influences on Linguistic Sounds: The Case of Ejectives"

We've been quiet here about linguistics in the big science media lately in part because a lot of the stuff just seems problematic in ways that would take a serious academic paper to react to seriously. But here is a new one, and a single point needs to be made about it. PLOS One has published "Evidence for Direct Geographic Influences on Linguistic Sounds: The Case of Ejectives". To save you having to click and scroll, here's the abstract:

We present evidence that the geographic context in which a language is spoken may directly impact its phonological form. We examined the geographic coordinates and elevations of 567 language locations represented in a worldwide phonetic database. Languages with phonemic ejective consonants were found to occur closer to inhabitable regions of high elevation, when contrasted to languages without this class of sounds. In addition, the mean and median elevations of the locations of languages with ejectives were found to be comparatively high. The patterns uncovered surface on all major world landmasses, and are not the result of the influence of particular language families. They reflect a significant and positive worldwide correlation between elevation and the likelihood that a language employs ejective phonemes. In addition to documenting this correlation in detail, we offer two plausible motivations for its existence. We suggest that ejective sounds might be facilitated at higher elevations due to the associated decrease in ambient air pressure, which reduces the physiological effort required for the compression of air in the pharyngeal cavity–a unique articulatory component of ejective sounds. In addition, we hypothesize that ejective sounds may help to mitigate rates of water vapor loss through exhaled air. These explications demonstrate how a reduction of ambient air density could promote the usage of ejective phonemes in a given language. Our results reveal the direct influence of a geographic factor on the basic sound inventories of human languages.

The language given as having ejectives match the source data in WALS (which is not to say it's all correct ... Korean is listed as having ejectives and that's not the standard analysis) and eyeballing the maps (see a sample below) suggests that they may well indeed cluster at higher elevations. If so, then, we may have a correlation. But the abstract does not bear out the claim made explicitly in the title: Nothing in there, as far as I see, can reasonably count as 'evidence for direct geographic influences on linguistic sounds'. The article, as the abstract makes clear, establishes a correlation and argues for motivations for that correlation. I don't think the motivations are as plausible as the author does, and I suspect there are other ways to account for this, but we're back into 'serious academic paper' territory there.

Department of Facepalm

Ow.  It hurts:

Things I like:  I love language.  I love reading, the sound of words and foreign languages.  I regard myself as fortunate to be a native English speaker because the language allows us to use different sentences to describe the same thought but convey entirely different meanings.

I'll be kind and not tell you who said that. (Nobody you know.)

Weird. Just plain weird.

As a linguist who works on Menominee, this stopped me in my tracks:  "It may be semantics, but linguistics can be a team event."  Um, how did the author (Jewel Topsfield!) come up with Menominee as the language she gave an example of right off the bat?  And did she know anything about it, or was it just random?  Oh - there's a clew, Miss Marple, a clew!  The examples she gives would just not be that interesting in an Algonquian language:  "I begin to eat"; "He digs a hole"; "He walks out".  At least not as interesting as "She sees him" and "She sees it" would be...  Well, I guess they'd have to have a preverb for "begin", and they'd have to know that "dig a hole" is a single verb.  And then, they'd have to avoid trying to find a word for "out" that would come after "walk".  So I guess it's an okay test.

But now my question is, where would the students find this information?  Bloomfield's Lexicon would give some help, but it's notoriously user-unfriendly (and the fact that it is only Menominee-English might be a deal-breaker).  His grammar is, well, "user-unfriendly" doesn't begin to describe it.  So...  I am just so totally baffled by this.

Not to mention the headline.  Oh, not to mention the fact that the article is in the "Stock and Land" section of the Australian farmonline website!  Wow.  I am truly confused.

Edenics, yet again

We've talked here about Edenics before (e.g. in a post called Origins of the Specious, here), a kind of armchair 'mass comparison' approach to comparative linguistics that traces all human languages back to something close to Hebrew. It's in the news again, here.

 Back on an earlier post, Mr. Happy commented ...

So, is this the craziest single language-related deal out there?

Yes. And I nominate it for the craziest piece -- on the web or anywhere else -- about language in the still-young millennium. Maybe talk to somebody who's had a linguistics course before publishing on the topic?

But I have a question: Has anybody seen any kind of effort to rebut this particular one? I guess I wouldn't know quite where to start ...

Calling formal semanticists! I sort of semi-know for a fact …

Donald Trump opened one of his rants about Obama and birtherism this way:

 I sort of semi-know for a fact …

 The audio is here, at about 6:30.

What?  What the hell does that mean? I mean really, what. does. that. mean.? I can't do it in a truth table.

The mega-hedge of all hedges?

A linguistic plague. Yup.

Five Thirty Eight has a new post on "The most powerful special interest in Washington: The acronym". A post that starts with this is terrifying, at least to linguists:

A linguistic plague is creeping through the nation’s capital.  ... In Washington, there is nowhere to hide from … the acronym. And the English language may not survive the scourge.

But the post is by Micah Cohen and  I trust him to make that worthwhile. And I'm way more terrified:

There’s Representative Michele Bachmann’s Many Individual Conservatives Helping Elect Leaders Everywhere PAC (MICHELE PAC).

There’s Senator Rand Paul’s mind-boggling Reinventing a New Direction PAC (RAND PAC). Mr. Paul, if a direction has already been invented, how can it be new?

Seriously? I don't even have the heart to post a lame pic with this. Sigh. Doesn't matter what it meant, it's just forcing some acronym. Seems Hardly Inspirational, This.

Update, Sunday morning: Catching up on the Twitter feed, I see that Ben Zimmer had this topic covered ... here. I confess to not having know the term backronym.

Walker's weak but brazen spin

I've been following Governor Scott Walker on Twitter for a good while now and there are two clear trends. First, most stuff is unspeakably trivial (as discussed here). Second, when there is a tweet of any substance, it's often a sign that there's bad news on exactly the same topic that's just broken.

This has been his game on jobs. As Wisconsin has been to losing more jobs than any other state, every report is met by a 'look over there, not over here' tweet, like 'Our unemployment rate is lower than Illinois's rate'. In fact, now, when I see a tweet from the twit on economic news, I instantly check to see what bad news has come out about Wisconsin's continuing slide. Today, the tweet you see here came through and I went to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel to see the headline pasted in below (screenshot from a later update, but text unchanged, I think).

15,600 jobs added in 2012 is not exactly impressive, but in fact, we've lost 23,900 jobs over the past year, so he had to pick a little uptick in the overall downward trend.

Are there Walker supporters who feel good about this approach to things?

"Korean language scientifically superior"

The press seems to endlessly repeat stuff people believe about language. The Google news feed for 'linguistics' just handed over a big forkful of this:

Korean language scientifically superior
Dec 16, 2011 (The Korea Herald - McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX) -- SEOUL (THE KOREA HERALD/ANN) -- As a scholar who has spent the past four decades studying his mother-tongue and language in general, professor Sohn Ho-min should know what he's talking about when he says Korean is the world's most superior language.

"When we say Korean is superior, we are basing this on scientific examination. The Korean language's method of making sound through a combination of vowels and consonants is very scientific and economical, even," professor Sohn of the University of Hawaii told a news conference in Seoul, Thursday.

Sohn just received the Korean Foundation Award for promoting Korean in the United States. Looks like he deserves it. Not sure, though, exactly how the combination of vowels and consonants in Korean is unique or superior.

There is a major meme about how Korean is a structurally unique and even 'superior' language, and it's not hard to get into conversations about why it is or isn't. Just search a string like "Korean language superior" and you'll get a sense of how widespread it is.

I suppose, given the subject line, that this post is one that will get hits from Google from people actually seeking an evaluation of the claim of Korean as "the world's most superior language". Here's an answer: No language is structurally superior to others in any scientific sense. Evidence to the contrary most welcome!

That said, the Korean alphabet is a thing of wonder and beauty. Celebrated, rightly, with a national holiday.

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.

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.

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!