Ignorance, appropriation, and exoticization

... all wrapped up in one nice package in this morning's New York Times!

It's a little hard to know where to start. Well, let's start with ignorance. The media never gets stuff about language right, so that's no surprise. And in some places it's hard to tell whether it's the journalist or the musician who's saying something stupid (it'd be nice to live in a world where journalists were smart about language but alas). Here's a nice quote:

The last vestiges of some minority languages are preserved as song, and a musical ear can be an advantage in studying the kind of tonal languages prevalent in parts of Asia.

Non sequitur much?

Appropriation just runs through everything these musicians say. The most explicit is a quote from Vivian Fung (who the journalist helpfully tells us is a Canadian):

"It's about finding the parts of the research [on minority languages in China] that speak to me ... and filtering it so that it becomes mine."

Oh Ms. Fung, please take Anthropology 101.

And taking a recording of Ishi and setting it to piano?  Maybe read up on Ishi's story. Maybe read up on what happened to his brain. When I teach about Ishi, all the students are horrified at how he was made into a living museum exhibit. Now, about a century later, he continues to be exploited.

I'm also just so tired of reading things like "these enigmatic utterances" - enigmatic? Oooh, enigmatic and mysterious and inscrutable.

"A work like Mr. James's 'Counting in Quileute' ... is like a time capsule shot into space - except the meaning was already opaque at the time of its sealing." 

I wonder what the Quileutes would have to say about that?

They do give about a paragraph and a half to Greg Anderson's concerns about the ethics of all this, but the composers' responses are supposed to put our minds at ease.

Maybe this is all sour grapes because of the opening paragraph that says:

For the most part, ethnographers and linguists are helpless in the face of the gradual erasure of collective memory that goes along with this loss of linguistic diversity.

That actually raises some complex issues. Calling us helpless implies that we think (or someone thinks) we should have some control but we don't. The reality is that many of us have learned the humbling lesson that language loss or language retention is not up to us; it's up to the people who really do have a claim to these languages - the communities where they're spoken. And I'm not saying we're perfect. I know I've made my share of blunders along these lines. But at least I'm trying to learn to be respectful.

The NRA on language

I disagree with the National Rifle Association. There, I said it.

Seriously. I think that Wayne LaPierre made a very imprecise statement, specifically in saying that (hear on NPR):

Absolutes do exist, words do have specific meaning, in language and in law. It's the basis of all civilization.

I won't contest the existence of absolutes, and depending on what 'specific meaning' means you could start a big bar fight with either linguists or law profs. But the basis of all civilization?  Really?

Somebody who says that might not be a totally credible voice.

"The charm of a real voice": "Good Old Boy usages"

Today's NYT Book Review covers Gregg Allman's new autobiography. The book was co-authored with Alan Light, and the review addresses some of the issues that come with that particular kind of collaboration:

“My Cross to Bear” has all the earmarks of a text dictated by its subject and cleaned up by someone else, meaning it has too many ho-hum moments but also the charm of a real voice. In Allman’s case, that’s a lot of correct Good Old Boy usages (“you didn’t want to wear no pair of wool pants without no drawers on”) that may challenge readers not conversant with that tongue. 

Now,  it's not my place to judge whether "you didn’t want to wear no pair of wool pants without no drawers on" is 'correct' Good Old Boy. I'm not even sure exactly what parameters define Good Old Boy as a tongue. I'm thinking 'tongue' means sociolect, and I've got some hunches about its characteristics.

But does that sentence actually challenge any native speaker of American English?  I think that 'drawers' is still widely known as a term for 'underwear', right? And the negative concord has got to be easily interpretable by native speakers of any kind of English. Colorful, yeah, but challenging to understand? Now that I think about it, I'm not even sure the sentence is all that charming. And be that as it may, I sure ain't wearing no wool pants without no drawers on. 

A kiwi at the spelling bee ...

Last night, Rachel Maddow's "Best New Thing in the World" segment was about the Scripps National Spelling Bee, specifically the participation of a young fellow from New Zealand. The whole segment is worth a watch but the key stuff starts around 2:10.

 

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So, the word in question, taupe, is easy even by the standards of the early rounds, I imagine -- it's one that even I could have spelled (a low bar!), though I  cannot identify the color. (It's joke color vocab for me, like mauve stuff.)

Rachel Maddow and the judges seem pretty baffled by his pronunciation of the word, and she at least hears it as having an 'r' in there. (Mrs. Verb definitely heard it too.) I don't really quite get that, but without having this in connected speech, it was not instantly clear what he was saying. The kid seemed like the only one who wasn't bothered by the situation, at least until everybody wigged out when he pronounced the word. And he eventually  spelled it fine, suggesting that he got the deal immediately. But the Americans had real trouble understanding his pronunciation of the word.

It happens that there was a piece on New Zealand English pronunciation not long ago (Bauer, L. et al. 2007. "New Zealand English". Journal of the International Phonetic Association 37.97–102.) and they give [ɐʉ] for the GOAT vowel, along with this wicked figure (click to embiggen):

Anyway, all's well that ends well, at least in that round. (I don't see him among the finalists.)

"Utter Bullshit"

The NYT Magazine has a very interesting article today about current research on depression.  But of course it has to include some linguistic observations:

We "grow sorrowful," but we rarely describe ourselves as "growing joyful."  Imprinted in our language is an instinct that suggests that happiness is a state, while grief is a process.

Sigh.  I called up Mr. Verb (despite the staggering cost of the long-distance call), and his response was, well, "utter bullshit!"

Hopefully this is the end of THIS bit of peevology

Lo and be-freakin-hold, the Associated Press has flipped on hopefully. Here's the WaPo story on it, and the key quote is:

the venerated AP Stylebook publicly affirmed (via tweet, no less) what it had already told the American Copy Editors Society: It, too, had succumbed. “We now support the modern usage of hopefully,” the tweet said. “It is hoped, we hope.”

German[y's] Anglicism of the Year: Shitstorm

Thanks to a tweet from akustyk, I just learned this year's Anglicism of the Year. 'Occupy' came in second to … shitstorm. Nice choice.

Here's their word cloud (German Wörterwolke, maybe a candidate for next year if they include loan translations?)

 The German story is here, and TheLocal.de has an English version here.

"If proper usage gets in the way, it may have to go."

That's Elmore Leonard, quoted here in Olen Steinhauer's piece about Leonard's new novel, Raylan. Here's the fuller quote:

Or, if proper usage gets in the way, it may have to go. I can’t allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the ­narrative.

I like it.  Steinhauer, though, doesn't. Or at least he's torn by it:

Jazzy prose that occasionally lets go of “proper usage” is Leonard’s trademark. He’s a stylist of forward motion, placing narrative acceleration above inconveniences like pronouns and helping verbs. While this creates in most readers a heightened sense of excitement, newcomers may find the transition from complete sentences daunting; it may take a little time to accept Leonard’s prose before you allow it to do its work on you. I’ll admit to having to make such an adjustment when beginning “Raylan.” At the same time, I’m also a novelist who lives in fear of my copy editor; being such a coward, I can’t help respecting Leonard’s grammatical bravery. 

It's been a long time since I read him, so help me out here Elmore Leonard fans: I think I get the notion of 'narrative acceleration' and that sounds like a good description of Leonard's writing. But does he somehow omit pronouns and helping verbs in ways that English speakers don't?

May just have to read that book …

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.

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 …

Israeli slang from the Forward

I've been enjoying working my way through the Forward's set of posts about Hebrew slang in Israel. Judith Shulevitz, a journalist (among other things), guest edited their op-ed page for a week and solicited a set of pieces on the topic, collected here. Pretty cool topic, given the rich sociolinguistic situation that contemporary Israel provides, and the articles cover a wide range of material. This piece notes something that looks a little like medieval peevology, and this one covers the story of an English loanword.

HT to SR.

How to ban Spanish?

According to the Onion's National News Highlights:

AUSTIN, TX —After Texas Board of Education members were told many Spanish words come from the Muslim conquest of Spain, they finally gained the support they needed to ban the language forever.

Seriously, can't you imagine people making the argument?

I don't see it on their website, but maybe it's been pulled for newer stories, like:

"My Opponent Knows Where Washington Is On A Map; I Don't, And I Never Will" by Ron Johnson.

"Language ‘found’, doubt creeps in"

You've read the reports by now about the recent discovery in northeast India of a previously unknown Tibeto-Burman language, Koro, by David Harrison and Gregory D.S. Anderson. (If not, here's one of the stories.) I didn't post about it because, I guess, I didn't have anything to say on the subject. But I noticed something that kept bugging me a little: It's somehow weird to talk about the "discovery" of a language. These folks certainly have long known that they talk very differently than others around them. And it doesn't sound like this is a secret language in any sense, so that neighboring groups must have been aware of this too. Koro was really unknown to, say, the compilers of Ethnologue, making this a more limited discovery than news stories seem to imply. (As a curiosity, Ethnologue lists three languages called Koro, from the Ivory Coast, Vanuatu and Papua New Guinea. I wonder if there are other names that could refer to four completely different languages.)

The Telegraph of Calcutta is running this article, including this bit:

the Assam chapter of Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (Intach) has disagreed with the report, saying Koro was not an unknown language in the region and linguistic experts were aware of existence of the language, adds our Guwahati Bureau.

Dinesh Baishya, the convener of the state chapter of Intach, told The Telegraph that an international conference on endangered languages of India last year discussed the language.

I have no idea what the facts are here, and it doesn't change the actual situation in substance, but it seems plausible that local organizations in Assam would have known about the language. Happily, at least we can be pretty sure that this won't become a Tasaday-like story.

Update, 6:00 pm: According to this AP story, Koro is a "hidden" language, and David Harrison says that "Even the speakers of the tongue, called Koro, did not realize they had a distinct language". I'm curious to hear how that works … extremely little contact with speakers of the (apparently distantly) related language?

haangina-lix! Aleut in the news!

Picked up the NYT this morning and started reading political news like this. Lisa Murkowski is apparently making a strong run now as a write-in, and she got a crowd roaring as described early on:

… invoking Native Alaskan culture, she told the crowd that the ancient Aleut language contained no word for “impossible.” It was a deft play to the state’s strong sense of identity and a direct appeal to native communities, whose support could prove crucial.

I had barely started to spew coffee from my mouth before I read the continuation:

It was also inaccurate. The word in Aleut is haangina-lix.

“It’s very clear that you can say ‘impossible,’ ” said Gary Holton, the director of the Alaska Native Language Archive. “Clearly, she wasn’t checking her facts.”

Hurrah! A random language myth (created on the fly or known cliche?) dismantled in the press. I guess the 'ancient' part was gratuitous bonus stupidity.

Map from here, the website of the Alaska Native Language Center (where Holton ultimately works).

Language Insanity week in the media?

Maybe I'm the crazy one here, but the language-in-the-news stuff seems a little weird this week. Check out these links:

Exhibit A: A new grammar book aims to draw up joint rules for Spanish, spoken by some 500 million people around the globe. (OK, BBC, so maybe doesn't count.)

Exhibit B: Linguists Unite Against English Invasion (this report from Turkey).

Exhibit C is a different animal, not insanity, but rather some responses by a linguist to some somewhat offbeat questions about language.

I could write pages about each of these but I'd rather read reader comments on them: What do you make of these stories?

Image from despair.com.

Terps

The NYT has an editorial today about the vital role and sometimes crappy treatment that many interpreters in the military get, "Maladies of Interpreters" by Joshua Foust. The subject line comes not from any connection to the University of Maryland Terrapins (aka the Terps), but from the cropping of the word in military usage. Kind of nice example, where you delete material before and after the stressed syllable.

I can't speak to the details presented, but it sounds too plausible. Of course it comes at a time when language programs and language study in general are under attack, especially the study of 'obscure' languages (see here for local examples).

Image from here.

A bit of good language reporting: NYT on 'millioneth word'

Having Joan Hall starring on Whad'ya know? and being featured on NPR's Weekend Edition within 24 hours was great, but it's an even better weekend in language coverage for the American media: This piece in today's NYT, appropriately called "Keeping It Real on Dictionary Row", gut pseudo-issue of English getting its millioneth word. Despite a couple of emails from readers, I've steadfastly ignored the issue, mostly because the Log has had the issue nailed from the get-go. In fact, Jennifer Schuessler, the author, gives a lot of ink to familiar figures like the Log's Geoff Nunberg and John McWhorter, as well as Grant Barrett, a leading lexicographer.

By contrast, CNN is running a comparatively weak item on the topic — it leads with the myth and takes a while to debunk it, though they do go to serious people for commentary.

You go, Gray Lady. Or however the kids would say that these days.

Literary analysis and Stanley Fish

The Log seems to be headed toward a series on quantifying presidential pronominal patterns. This post is just a footnote to the latest …

It started with Fact-checking George Will, where Mark Liberman shows pretty clearly that Will is making up crap about Obama, namely that the Prez likes the first person singular pronoun, pretty clearly intended as a swipe at Our Nation's Leader. Now Stanley Fish has gone down the same path and been nailed by Liberman for the same claim. But Fish isn't taking a quick swipe at Obama in "Yes I can", he's developing (as Liberman suggests) a literary/cultural studies analysis of Obama as "uppity" and "arrogant".* Fish makes a set of references to rhetoric and writes in a style familiar from literary and cultural critics, i.e. contemporary humanities scholars. And Fish is willing to draw bold conclusions based on his analysis:

No doubt this pattern of pronouns reflects a reality.

The first problem is that the supposed empirical foundation for the analysis is flawed or missing. This, as a commenter on the Log hints, may not bother Fish, given his relationship to 'facts'. But can somebody explain what it does tell us about a speaker's attitude, intention, etc., if they use lots of first-person singular pronouns?

By the way, what's Fish, of all people, doing telling us about reality?

* Those are what strike me as Liberman's very apt terms, but you can read Fish for yourself. He talks about Obama's "self-promotion", "naked I", and compares him to "Michael Corleone, who begins the film as a young idealistic patriot, ends it by striking the pose of a Roman emperor as subordinates kiss his ring".

Image from here.

PBS on Cherokee language education

Nice article here from the Tahlequah Daily Press serving as a heads-up to a coming PBS piece on Cherokee immersion schools. The picture in the story shows the syllabary being used in the classroom, of course. More importantly, it's nice to see something about Native languages that sounds so positive.

Image from here.

Eunoia

This link was passed along from A.M. via a contributor, about Christian Bök's new book which uses only one (orthographic) vowel per chapter. Of course, much like on this blog, the comments are often better than the story. The exercise calls to mind Gadsby, the novel written without using the letter 'e' and other efforts.

Much more interesting would be prose restricted to single vowel sounds over long stretches. There's plenty of that in poetry, but is there prose like that?