UW news: "Language matters for Wisconsin"

Well, nobody keeps me in the loop anymore … I have to read stuff in the paper! Tom Purnell and Eric Raimy of the Wisconsin Englishes project were just awarded one of the extremely competitive grants from the Ira and Ineva Reilly Baldwin Wisconsin Idea Endowment. Their project is for working with groups in a set of communities around the state to deal with, as they've been putting it, "hot-button issues" connected to language in Wisconsin, everything from language and immigration to dialect and phonics. The issues grew out of community questions and concerns that came up during earlier talks all around the state. They're planning a short non-technical book to present key issues briefly.

The bigger point is that these serious young theoretical linguists are investing a huge amount of time and energy in doing work that directly serves the needs and interests of our state. It's another powerful counterexample to the idiocy promoted by certain aging losers that "higher education, properly understood, is distinguished by the absence of a direct and designed relationship between its activities and measurable effects in the world." I think this younger generation is turning out to be OK after all.

Outrageous verbing? to saddleback

Maybe the worst moment of the Obama administration to date has been his invitation to Rick Warren to deliver the invocation* at the inauguration. In case anybody reads this years from now when it's been forgotten: Warren has railed against equal rights for gays and lesbians and said deeply offensive things about them.

Sex advice columnist Dan Savage coined the noun santorum (if you don't know, you probably don't want to ask) after anti-gay ex-Senator Rick Santorum. Recently, he decided that Warren warranted a verb, and chose the name of his mega-church, Saddleback (image from here). And he ran a piece on the topic and polled readers. The results are in:

Saddlebacking: sad•dle•back•ing \ˈsa-dəl-ˈba-kiŋ\ vb [fr. Saddleback Church] (2009): the phenomenon of Christian teens engaging in unprotected anal sex in order to preserve their virginities

After attending the Purity Ball, Heather and Bill saddlebacked all night because she’s saving herself for marriage.

The most outrageous verbing in a while, surely, but nothing next to the meaning. Say, how are things going on getting sex education going again?

By the way, note a glitch: 'citation forms' of verbs in English are usually infinitives not -ing forms and the definition is of a noun, right?

*I'm not the praying type, but it was pretty generic, and the president's inclusion of 'non-believers' in his speech was more memorable.

I Fan Chai

Woke up way too early but found two things that made it all worthwhile:

1. On my box of Tazo decaf chai it says: "DID YOU KNOW? The word 'chai' means both 'tea' in Hindi and 'living' in Hebrew. Mere coincidence or evidence of inscrutable grand design?" Oh, clearly the latter!

2. Everybody knows you can friend somebody on Facebook. But tonight I learned that you can also "fan" someone - i.e. become a fan. Specifically, there's a blurb that says "World's Favorite Novelist - Let us know what you think. Fan his page and post on his wall." (It took me a while to figure it out but the world's favorite novelist is John Grisham. I like his stuff, but not enough to fan him.)

Speech synthesis and the Simpsons

OK, here's the rare case where I'm unwilling to assume that the writers for the Simpsons had full knowledge of just how funny something was. I was talking about speech sounds yesterday in class and paraphrased this opening bit from Nittrouer and Lowenstein's 2008 paper in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America:

Perhaps the trouble all started in 1944 when Frank Cooper and Al Liberman decided to build a reading machine for the blind. At that time they adopted what Liberman would later call the “horizontal view” in his book, Speech: A Special Code 1996 . According to this view separate segments are aligned in the speech signal in a linear fashion, strictly auditory perceptual processes recover the acoustic character of each segment, and cognitive processes then translate those acoustic descriptors into phonemic units, void of physical attributes. Assuming this much about the acoustic speech signal, Cooper and Liberman turned their attention to what they saw as the truly difficult problem: optically isolating the letters on the page that would need to be converted into acoustic segments. But their own experiments soon revealed the intractable problem that listeners are unable to recognize separate acoustic elements presented at a rate replicating typical speech production.

A student started grinning immediately. When we reached an appropriate pause, I asked what was up and he said that there was a Simpsons' episode ("Smart and Smarter", it turns out) where Maggie gets a toy. Here's a key passage (from here):

Homer: Look what they sent over. A talking dealy. His name is Phonics Frog.
(Homer presses A, B, and C)
Phonics Frog: Ah-Buh-Cuh…
(Homer types his name)
Phonics Frog: Huh-Oh-Muh-Eh-Ur
Homer: That's me! Huh-Oh-Muh-Eh-Ur.

Of course, HeiDeas covered this (here), quite reasonably under the rubric of 'hooked on phonics, but the thought of 1940s speech science matches the Simpsons is nice. Just don't let me get started on the South Park "Hooked on Monkey Fonics" episode.

Guest post: Burning down the house

This in, slipped under the door of a young colleague yesterday, signed only "√v".

As a minion of Mr. V, I do not like reading but sometimes I am forced to do it. I was pleasantly surprised to find that people are apparently working on the relationship between language and genes. Specifically, an article in Science Daily about language and genes was forwarded to me (reading email doesn't count). I had to read through the article a few times to fully understand it and have to go with what the article says about the research since the actual article hasn't hit PNAS yet …

The first part of the article makes perfect sense and I really can't imagine anyone who works on language to really disagree with the ideas. A few confusions need to be fixed though and some clarity added. The important summary sentence is:

By modelling the ways in which genes for language might have evolved alongside language itself, the study showed that genetic adaptation to language would be highly unlikely, as cultural conventions change much more rapidly than genes.

This research contains all of the important aspects of genes, language, culture and variation that need to be considered to say something enlightened about this question but unfortunately gets all kinds of things confused.

The main form of the argument as suggested by the SD article is that

(1) we know the time rate of genetic change
(2) we know the time rate of language change
(3) a similarity between the time rates of language change and genetic change would suggest that there could be a causal relationship between them
(4) we know that the time rates for language change and genetic change do not match (language changes too quickly)
(5) therefore, there can not be a causal relationship between language and genes
(6) therefore, culture must determine language

Steps (1)-(3) are rather straightforward and sensible. Its when we start getting to steps (4)-(6) that things begin to get a little strange …

We have to unpack (4) to ask deeper (possible philosophical) questions about language change. Specifically, what do we mean by language change here? More importantly, how tight is the connection between specific language features (e.g. words, rules, word order, etc.) and genes.

Many sensible people I know assume that the particular words of a language (e.g. gato, cat, kuching, chien, etc.) have no genetic basis what-so-ever and instead they are learned. If particular words were genetically encoded then we would expect much less flexibility in infants to learn particular languages when geographically displaced from genetic distribution areas. It would also be very difficult to explain how we continually learn words throughout our entire lifetime. Or, if we flip this around, the cost of genetically encoding specific words would be extraordinarily costly from an evolutionary point of view.

These same sensible people make similar assumptions about having to learn language specific rules, constraints, word orders, pragmatics, sociophonetics, etc. All aspects of language that vary crosslinguistically. This variation must be learned from experience and it appears that any homo sapien child that is cognitively normal can learn any language they are exposed to.

So the question is how to answer the question of whether 'language' has changed or not given a particular example of say Old English to Modern English.

Sure, language has changed in this example and we know this because a speaker of Modern English can not understand Old English. We can get more specific than this and show particular changes in the phonology, morphology and syntax of these two distinct languages. More importantly we can probably say that 'culture' has caused the change from OE to ME if we assume that culture is the accumulation of human behavior that other humans experience from birth. Put in a simpler manner, a baby born in the 10th century got input from a different language than a baby born in the 20th and thus it should not be a surprise that a different language is spoken by both.

The culture has changed and thus the language has changed but have the 'language genes' changed? This is where I think the SD article (and possibly the PNAS article) begins to go horribly wrong.

It would be an unimaginable state of hubris to even suggest that we know even the beginnings of how genes map to higher level behaviors such as specific languages. This is where the Royal Linguistic Society in London may have had it right in banning discussion about the origins of language. This is where the main flaw in the argument outlined by the SD article arrises. In order for the argument to go through, specific languages must be directly coded in the genes. In other words as Old English gradually changed into Modern English there must have been a similar and correlated change in the genetic make-up of speakers of Old English to Modern English. At this point in time, all sane people should rejoice that this hypothesis has been excluded by this line of research. Hooray.

The real question for people who want to investigate the relationship between language and genes is 'who actually believed the above hypothesis in the first place?' No progress in our understanding of language or genes or the mapping between the two is made by burning straw men. Progress is only made when truly informed theories are being compared. Unfortunately, most of the current work on genes and language is embarrassingly devoid of any knowledge of informed theories of language.

An informed theory of language will answer at least the following three questions:

(1) what is unique to each language
(2) what is universal to all languages
(3) how do children learn language

At the current time, we do not have anything beyond a beginning of a sketch of an answer to any of these questions. If these are good questions though, we can see where useful work in paralleling our knowledge about genes and language can occur.

What is universal to all languages should be universally encoded in our genes somehow. Looking at human behavior in an abstract enough manner may unveil the stability that would be required to allow a Baldwin type of effect to encode these abstract schema into the genotype of homo sapiens.

Having an answer to how children learn language is likely to improve our understanding as to what is encoded in the homo sapien genome specific to language. It appears that there is a surprising cross linguistic stability to how children learn language (both spoken and signed) which again suggests a general genotype.

Finally, we have to understand what is specific to each language because this will clearly demarcate what is not part of the homo sapien genotype. This will clearly highlight the role of culture in determining aspects of language.

The most beautiful aspects of these questions (all of them not just the last three) is that I have the strong suspicion that at one point in time most of the answers will be empirically based even if some of the answers suggest a rational basis for some aspects of human nature.

The most frustrating aspects of these questions is that most people are not patient enough to wait for our understanding of language to progress enough to be able to even ask good questions. The most likely cause of this impatitence is an expert's illusion in that since we use language everyday with little thought, it must be a very simple phenomena. Thus, who needs to really nail down the details … let's just fire up the gene sequencer and do some heavy math … that does sound cool though …

√v

PS: I don't know who you are, √v, but you're welcome to join Team Verb.

Last professors, NOT!

I was going to pass over Stanley Fish's latest ramblings in silence, but one of our most steadfast readers has called my attention to this and asked for comment. Here goes. Fish deals with a book called The Last Professors by Frank Donoghue — a former student of his. It's more of the same the-sky-is-falling that has pushed the humanities to the brink of extinction. Especially humanities people are irrelevant and marginalized. The dreams of 'restored stability', where people value 'liberal education' and such, is a delusion. The future is MacEducation run by adjuncts working for minimum wage. Just give up and march to the beat of our corporate overlords. Or flip burgers.

The book title might be an allusion to the 'last of the Mohicans', or rather, that is, a reference to the Mohegans. Guess what? The Mohegans are still here and will continue to be. Professors will be too. In fact, we're fighting for the future of our society, and fighting for the role of higher education. Let me quote a recent speech of note:

For everywhere we look, there is work to be done. … We will restore science to its rightful place, and wield technology's wonders to raise health care's quality and lower its cost. We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories. And we will transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age. All this we can do. And all this we will do.

Now, there are some who question the scale of our ambitions — who suggest that our system cannot tolerate too many big plans. Their memories are short. For they have forgotten what this country has already done; what free men and women can achieve when imagination is joined to common purpose, and necessity to courage.

What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them — that the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply.

Yes we can. And yes we will. The ground has shifted beneath Fish and Donoghue, who question the scale of our ambitions, and their stale political arguments no longer apply. Those are the words of a new president, one who was shaped by reading and learning and who thinks, speaks and acts in a way that shows it.

In fact, some of what I had been planning to write here has been very nicely anticipated by a young member of our vast international conspiracy:

maybe we could also stop thinking about college campuses as little incubators of radical ideas, kooky professors, and privileged students, and start thinking about them for what they are: institutions that can drive real social, economic, infrastructural, cultural, governmental, personal, spiritual, and scientific change.

That's right. We are going to turn things around. We've got work to do. Real work, relevant to the real world.

Later, gentle readers, I've got to do my part.

News Flash from Borowitz: Bush Repeals English Language

Yeah, it's cheap, but it's probably our last shot:

Last Official Act as President

In what he hoped would be the capstone to his eight years as President, George W. Bush today signed an executive order repealing the English language.

Scrawling his name on the official document, Mr. Bush said that in abolishing English he had vanquished his "greaterest enemy."

For Mr. Bush, the executive order represents the realization of a longstanding dream that began in 2001 when he declared an official War on Grammar.

The President followed up that declaration of war in 2003 when he signed an executive order cancelling the agreement between nouns and verbs.

OK, so it's really cheap.

Full story here. Hat tip (almost wrote 'hat trick') to C.R.

Off-topic: Inaugural festivities

One email abbreviation that's taken off is 'OT' for 'off-topic'. It's now common on the American Dialect Society's ads-l, and elsewhere. For most linguists, it's too easily confused with 'Optimality Theory', so I haven't taken it up. At any rate ...

Is there any tradition in the United States of spontaneous, grassroots parties to celebrate the inauguration of a new president? Did Reagan spark such things in 1980? Maybe Kennedy in 1960? I've read some history of the early Roosevelt days and there was certainly a sea change in public sentiment, but I don't remember anything about parties — but then with Prohibition still on, maybe they kept it quiet?

The missus and I have gotten a string of invitations, after trying to figure out something clever to do and then failing eventually. The first part was last night — a blast, with a zillion people watching the HBO replay of the stuff on the Mall, and the last is next weekend. This event is being marked with a kind of enthusiasm I'm pretty sure I've never seen. Is this happening in other places? I've certainly gotten enough emails from outside the U.S. from people who are very pleased with events, so maybe the whole world will be dancing tomorrow?

Image from here, a somewhat different kind of Obama party.

Immigration and schools

I've been laying low lately, maybe too low. Anyway, a regular reader of this blog passed along this piece from the NYT, which I had somehow missed. It covers how immigrant groups are seeing charter schools are a helpful way of negotiating their way and their children's way into American culture. Pretty different from the 19th c. immigrant world in some ways, but closely parallel in others.

Football and language

A notably named reader of this blog write in with this tasty morsel as the football season winds down:

Hi Mr. Verb,
I thought you might like this story on the mayor of Pittsburgh changing his name from Ravenstahl to Steelerstahl for the upcoming Ravens-Steelers matchup in the NFL. Perhaps he missed his high school German lesson on the meaning of "Stahl", in which case he wouldn't have had to change the name so much.

— Larry Linguist

Nice! And it's cool that the mayor of the city has a last name with both team names in it. Of course, maybe he knows what it means and is doubling down.*

I went to find out a little more about the mayor and discovered that his wikipedia entry has been tinkered with in the spirit of the upcoming game:



Thanks, Larry!

*As people seem to be saying often these days, maybe thanks to the big poker craze.

Museum Piece

Joe & I went to the Hearst Museum of Anthropology today, over in Berkeley. Lots of California Indian artifacts, including things made by Ishi, "the last wild Indian." If you haven't heard of Ishi, it's worth using The Google to find out about him. Briefly, he was a Yahi Indian who spent pretty much his whole life in hiding from whites, and finally came out of hiding in 1911 when the rest of his family had died. Of course the officials didn't know what to do with him when he appeared - eventually Alfred Kroeber from what was then the San Francisco Museum of Anthropology took charge of him and he lived in the museum until he died of tuberculosis about 3 or 4 years later. It's a tragic but fascinating story, and when I teach my Survey of North American Indian Languages class I make sure to tell the students about it. (Relevant because Kroeber and Sapir did lots of language work with Ishi.) It always provokes very interesting discussions about ethics and intentions and the norms of the era and such.

Interestingly, and jarringly, the museum today had a living display - a Mayan woman in traditional clothing doing traditional weaving. (They have a large display of Mayan textiles which I guess she was illustrating.) What I found jarring about it was that the Berkeley Anthro department issued an apology for Kroeber's treatment of Ishi in the late 90s - wouldn't you have thought they would be sensitive about displaying a living human being in their museum almost 100 years after the Ishi episode?

We did enjoy it when the Mayan woman pulled her cellphone out of her huipil (the woven shirt they wear) and had a little chat with someone. Ishi didn't get to do that.

WOTY aftermath

Sorry, but I didn't get around to the rest of the WOTY recap. Big news for Wisconsin was that 'recombobulation area' won Most Creative. That's an area at Mitchell International Airport in Milwaukee where "passengers that have just passe through security screening can get their clothers and belongings back in order:"

'Hockey mom', fortunately for Wisconsin, lost under Election-related Words'.

Unsettling interpretation of Chinese characters? 'busy'

We all know the Language Log debunking of the story that in Chinese, the character for crisis is made up of danger + opportunity. (Here's one example.) Yesterday I was talking to somebody who said that they no longer use the word busy, because the Chinese character for busy is made up of heart + kill(ed). If you google this, you get a ton of new-agey sites (many of them christian), many using 'dead' instead of 'kill/killed'. Really?

Whatever the facts and history, Science had an article on mental health in China a couple years ago (Greg Miller, "China: Healing the Metaphorical Heart") and he quotes Dominic Lee (a psychiatrist) as saying "There are more than 100 Chinese characters for emotion that contain the heart symbol in combination with others," so the cliche may have its heart in the right place, at least.

Of course I don't quite get how this logic encourages you to change speech or other behavior. To people drinking coffee, maybe you could try saying "In my language, you know, the word for 'coffee' is 'goat piss'."

Whatevs.

Weird-sounding derivation? onboarding

Someone just told me about hearing about a new director being 'onboarded'. I was a little nervous that this might be connected to waterboarding or something, but it's got the obvious meaning: to bring on board. Turns out that this is common usage in business, and it has its own wikipedia entry. It's seems to be more commonly used as a noun, but 'to onboard' is definitely out there. I'm figuring it probably doesn't start from the verb to board, since you can't use that with on. *we can board on now. Instead it seems like it must have gone from to be [etc.] on board > to onboard > onboarding [noun].

It's that first step that is a little odd to me. Speaking as a non-morphologist, I just figure that on board is a prepositional phrase. But there's no determiner and the noun is not referential, if that matters.

I've don't have any smart analysis of this one, but someone suggests to me that the underlying construction mostly involves light verbs or auxiliaries or something: to be on board, to have [someone] on board, to take on board also to bring on board.

Need to ponder this one a little more, but insights would be most welcome.

Bailout, American Dialect Society WOTY

Hey Mr. Verb,
Greetings from San Fran. Word of the Year is 'bailout'. But your fave, 'shovel-ready', was voted Most Likely to Succeed. Many stories to tell, some Wisconsin-connected. More later,
Your minion

More news on the settling of the Americas

Current Biology has just posted a piece by Perego et al.* on the genetics of America, arguing that Paleo-Indians who migrated …

from Beringia to the Americas did so via two routes — one along the Pacific Coast and another by an inland path east of the Rocky Mountains … .

They trace two rare mitochondrial DNA haplotypes (D4h3a and X2a), early migrations that would have been both about the same time. It looks like the former group spread down the west path to South America, while the latter are found in the areas on the map here.

They conclude:

the scenario of a structured and temporally changing Beringian source population makes it most unlikely that only a single language family was carried along with the first Pleistocene groups of migrants. Some of these different languages may have been in close contact for several hundred years in Beringia and on the move into the Americas, rendering a distinction between contact features and inherited traits virtually impossible in retrospect after a few thousand years.

It's nice to see a papper like this noting the likelihood of pre-migration contact in Beringia. In fact, it seems like part of a general argument against simplistic scenarios on this topic.

I'm pretty swamped these days, but we have a couple of minions out in San Francisco for the Linguistic Society of America and American Dialect Society, so we should have some reports from out there.

*I count a total of 16 co-authors.

"The best linguists I've ever seen"

Who said that? And who were they talking about? Was it someone who sat at the elbows of Chomsky and Halle during the writing of Sound Pattern of English? Or a discussion of Ken Hale or Kenneth Pike as field linguists? A fan of the Neogrammarians, or maybe the University of Wisconsin's great structuralists back in the day? Nope:

Frank Luntz, a Republican consultant who wrote a treatise on political linguistics called “Words That Work,” told Politico: “Obama's team are the best linguists I've ever seen. Republicans aren't in his league right now."

Of course this is another meaning of 'linguist' than the most of the ones we've talked about here — people engaged in the scientific study of language, military language experts, people concerned about usage, etc. Luntz is praising the name that Obama and his team are giving to their economic plan: “American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan.” I guess this gets close to the 'framing' stuff that George Lakoff has been doing in recent years.*

*If you have access to the Chronicle of Higher Education, check out the piece by Evan Goldstein in August, called "Who Framed George Lakoff? A noted linguist reflects on his tumultuous foray into politics."

The Chronicle on the Modern Language Association

Jennifer Howard of the Chronicle of Higher Education has been reporting on this year's Modern Language Association, and her post from yesterday (behind a pay wall, unfortunately) is reason for some major good cheer in the new year for linguists.

Maybe it's like sitting in the emergency room in pretty bad shape and being glad you're not the guy sitting next to you, but whatever the shortcoming of our profession, we're way better off than literary studies. Check this out:

Hot research topics: animal studies (file under “posthumanism”), digital editing, Twitter.

I doubt any readers of this blog went to MLA, but on the off chance … Is this the journalist's sly humor or is that where the MLA's at these days?