Mountain Man Linguistics

Been a brutal year here in Wisconsin, as the state and the university are being steadily and intentionally destroyed.

So, some good news is welcome: Paul Reed, one of the rising stars in the fields of American dialectology and sociolinguistics, is back at blogging, here. Check it out and keep an eye on his work ... you'll be glad you did.

Does language really matter?

People are talking today, rightly, about John McWhorter's piece in the NY Times, "Why save a language?".  But a similar question is treated beautifully in a piece by Ewa Czaykowska-Higgins and colleagues (University of Victoria) in the Times Colonist, "Language a strong symbol of cultural identity". It treats revitalization efforts in British Columbia. Here's the punchline:

Supporting the health of these languages is … one way to support and strengthen the well-being of individuals and communities, and to support education and economies.

Language is, in the relevant sense here, very local, and the focused perspective of this piece makes it particularly valuable. But especially relevant for us here in Wisconsin is the partnerships between linguists and communities in revitalization work.

It's important to have good answers when the why-save-a-language stuff comes up (and it does), but the hard work on the ground here is far more important.

Wisconsin Englishes update ...

Word on the street is that Wisconsin Englishes will be on Wisconsin Public Radio in western Wisconsin tomorrow, on Spectrum West with Al Ross.

And the Wisconsin Englishes Project website has been spiffed up a little ... various updates and a bunch of teaching materials, etc. You can check it out here.

The Origins of Yiddish

In keeping with our recent non-news news trend, reader cg passed along this link to a long article by Cherie Woodworth in Tablet on the origins of the Yiddish language yesterday. The piece is new to Tablet, but is a reprint from Kritika 2010. Worth reading.

The controversy that the piece reviews is considerably older … where and how Yiddish came into existence as a language. That whole story is rich and amazing (the briefest and best starting point, I think, is in Neil Jacobs' Yiddish: A linguistic introduction (Oxford, 2005). The focus in this article is much narrower, contrasting Max Weinreich's History of the Yiddish Language with the views of Paul Wexler, with a bit on genetics tossed in. Weinreich is a revered figure in and far beyond Yiddish linguistics, like his son Uriel (who was mentioned in our last post, here.) Wexler seems to have a reputation as a rock thrower, though some hasten to add that he has important ideas and isn't just a crank. So, this makes for a pretty good story line.

But the reason for this post is simpler ... Woodworth, who was a historian, spends an inordinate amount of time talking about the scholarly apparatus of Weinreich's book, pictured here. Our house historical linguist on Team Verb says that Weinreich's book may be his favorite history of a language overall and he reports that it does indeed have something like 750 pages of footnotes. His comment:

Yeah, she gets the feel of the book right ... it's good, solid linguistics, but with this incredible narrative story line.  That one footnote Woodworth focuses on that runs for 20 pages is in ways like an article but with paragraphs of annotated bibliography and such inserted into it. But it's not a footnote in the traditional sense, more like a sidebar commentary on the whole section of the text it references. And, yes, the section of the book it references is considerably shorter than the 'footnote'.

Tablet announces that next week, they're running a profile of "the academic personalities and their battles in the field of linguistics." I'm keeping an eye out for that.

Schwa Fire

Trying to do actual work seems to be a higher priority than blogging these days for the many members of Team Verb, so we're taking a kind of Last Week Tonight approach, I suppose. The news of the launch of Schwa Fire is now old enough that it fits our bill, in fact.

First, the bad news, which you know if you follow language journalism: it's a paid subscription. But it's pretty modest and individual articles are downright cheap.

But the first issue was clearly worth the price, for me at least. Arika Okrent is one of my favorite popular writers in linguistics (up there with Ben Zimmer and Jan Freeman) and her piece on a huge trove of Yiddish sound recordings is great. The treat of the whole issue was actually hearing Uriel Weinreich's voice. I didn't know what linguistics was when he was alive, but have read and learned from his stuff for, well, ever.  There's also an essay by Russell Cobb on the changing dialect landscape in the US, dealing with the opposing trends of convergence versus divergence of American regional speech.

Schwa Fire's a great addition to linguistics in the public realm and I'm looking forward to the coming issues ...

/i:/ in the New York Times

The NY Times Magazine has a little tiny piece this morning (here, just scroll down and see the left column), about an experiment by Ralf Rummer (Erfurt University) and colleagues showing that students looking at comics founds them funnier when they were repeating /i:/ than /o:/ sounds. Here's an actual discussion of the project, in German, saying that German words with /o:/ are 'anxiety inducing' (angsteinflößend). like Tod 'death' and Kot 'crap, muck' and about 50 other English words. Really?  I don't get anxious on hearing Kot and what about rot 'red', Boot 'boat', Brot 'bread', Schlot 'smokestack, chimney'. We don't typically do breakfast experiments here in Verbtown, but a look at the rhymes in German (Reimlexikon) really doesn't show much promise with an association between /o:t/ word endings and scary stuff.

But whatevs. My point is that the NYT used IPA on the (lite entertainment) 'One-page Magazine'. I'm now officially waiting for syntactic trees, maybe in Mario Batali's regular 'What I'm drinking' bit.

Image from here. You can watch the face of a German speaker producing /i:/ and all other sounds of the language. No kidding.

Because questions

You've probably seen the Atlantic piece about because by now. I actually have been wondering about this for a long time, mostly because I read Wonkette, rightly cited as a place where you can find this construction all over the place. And it's been talked about for a while.

What's most striking about it is not that it's a preposition — it has a pretty classic distribution of a preposition (followed by nouns, etc.) and the semantics are not weird for a preposition (German wegen means something pretty similar at some level, 'on account of') — but that it takes these bare nouns. Anyway, here are some things I've wondered about here … any insights would be appreciated.

First, the creation of a new preposition from an old clause-linking element / conjunction doesn't seem so weird intuitively but the direction of such change seems to usually go in the other direction … adpositions become conjunctions. (Harris & Campbell's Historical Syntax talks about several examples, pp. 291-293 and it's pretty common in the grammaticalization lit, I think.) Is this direction — conjunction to preposition — particularly unusual? Isn't a preposition 'more grammatical' in some sense than a conjunction?

Second, the history of because is kinda cool: The usual story (I don't have particular reason to doubt it) is that it comes from a prepositional phrase itself, by cause. There's a lot of work out there on cycles of linguistic change this days and this seems to echo those kinds of patterns, in the sense of Elly van Gelderen's The Linguistic Cycle. Is this a known cycle? (I don't recall it from that book.)

Third, are there other prepositions that can take the pattern of stuff this does?  'For' in a certain sense does only for mass nouns, maybe: She did it for family, Homer did it for beer, they did it for love. But you can't do something for desk or howitzer, etc. There's some semantic thing going on here, surely, right? The Language Log post on this from way back touches on the issue but there's gotta be more.

Hwæt?

New story out this morning from the Independent about George Walkden arguing for a new interpretation of the opening word of Beowulf, hwæt.

Yet for more than two centuries “hwæt” has been misrepresented as an attention-grabbing latter-day “yo!” designed to capture the interest of its intended Anglo-Saxon audience urging them to sit down and listen up to the exploits of the heroic monster-slayer Beowulf.

…

According to the historical linguist, rather than reading: “Listen! We have heard of the might of the kings” the Old English of “Hwæt! We Gar-Dena in gear-dagum, þeod-cyninga,  þrym gefrunon, hu ða æþelingas  ellen fremedon!” should instead be understood as: “How we have heard of the might of the kings.”

I don't know whether this is right in the end, but Walkden is a serious historical linguist and this is in his core research area.

At any rate, the new interpretation certainly fits the kind of opening lines we find in other similar early Germanic texts. It's common, namely to open with a line about something being a story. In Old High German, Hildesbrandslied opens with something that means basically "I've heard it told that ..." and the Middle High German Nibelungenlied opens with "we're told in old stories …". This interpretation would fit that pattern.

Anyway, it's cool to see Old English linguistics in the news, and even cooler that it's
something that's not weird or crazy!

Teaching grammar, or not

Interesting piece here and here about teaching grammar in UK schools. Here's the key quote:

Bas Aarts, Professor of English Linguistics at University College London, has said that new tests introduced by Education Secretary Michael Gove for pupils up to the age of 14 demanded a greater knowledge of grammar than many teachers currently possessed, The Telegraph reports. 

He told The Times: "Many teachers feel uncomfortable with grammar and don't know how to use it formally. We always knew the teaching of grammar was difficult for teachers because they often had no knowledge of English grammar themselves."

This test-mania parallels stuff in the US, of course, but I haven't heard of similar stuff here. (I don't pay particular attention to that world so probably just don't know about it.) But it's certainly part of the UK's obsessive assessment of everything in education. It's downright alarming how often I hear from even the most productive scholars in British universities about how much time and effort they put into their research assessments. 

But I learned something else from those articles: Aarts is the head of the hilariously named Englicious.

Newsday: "New Digital Journal Aims to Transform Linguistics Learning"

Everybody in the field probably knows about the new Journal of Linguistic Geography, edited by William Labov and Dennis Preston and published by Cambridge University Press. High-powered from start to finish and a badly needed journal.

But I was pretty surprised to see it the subject of an article in Newsday yesterday, though the reason makes good sense:

JLG’s digital tools allow readers to interrogate maps and figures using panning and zooming functionality; to listen to sound samples embedded in the text, and to consult large appendices. The journal features scalable maps and figures and searchable and downloadable data sets.

A dedicated Technical Editor will work with authors to decide which graphic and audio tools will most enhance their articles. The journal also comes with a built-in User Guide to help readers get the most from its features. JLG is hosted on the Cambridge Journals Online (CJO) platform, and benefits from its state-of-the-art functionality.

Pretty cool.

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.

Kurdish language policy and standardization

If you haven't seen it yet, the Chronicle this morning has a piece on language policy and standardization issues involving Kurdish, here. If you have read much about standardization issues, most of this will be familiar -- selection of varieties as the basis for a standard, orthographic issues, including what alphabet to use, etc. It reminds me in some ways of the situation of the language once

I started to paste in a map of Kurdish dialects but don't know enough about the topic to know what's reliable, among the various ones that look like public domain. A quick image search will show you the set though.

"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.

Regional diversity in African American English

Thanks to WBEZ for running this piece. It deals with issues of unity and diversity in African American English. They talk to the right people — Baugh, Wolfram, Preston — and the article comes to the right conclusion:

“So is AAE diverse? Is it consistent? Or does it just come down to who's listening?” I ask Baugh.
His response?
“Yes, yes, yes.”

Finally, something in the popular press that gets the point across.

Pirahã and the Grammar of Happiness

Various members of Team Verb have joined in the discipline-wide call for linguists to make a better case to the general public for why what we do matters and why it's exciting intellectually. But I doubt that any of us are in the 'any publicity is good publicity' camp. I'm not sure where the forthcoming Grammar of Happiness about Dan Everett and his work with the Pirahã fits on that scale. I was resisting writing about it until I saw Jennifer Schuessler's piece in the NYT this morning. I have heard little about the movie and learned stuff from her description — e.g. "a forthcoming television documentary that presents an admiring view of his research among the Pirahã along with a darkly conspiratorial view of some of his critics". But Schuessler's review of the controversy is worth a read.

And there's something in there we can all agree on: About his new book, Language: The Cultural Tool,  Everett says:

 I suspect it will be extremely controversial.

Update, 7:55 a.m.:   No sooner do I tweet that this post is up than I get a message linking this article in the Chronicle of Higher Education. The article is more partisan, but more detailed, and the gold is in the comments.

Language = words = spelling, etc.

When you see this headline in the Wall Street Journal, you might get nervous if you're a linguist (the WSJ piece is here and the article it discusses here:

The New Science of the Birth and Death of Words
Have physicists discovered the evolutionary laws of language in Google's library?

The punch line is that words are dying out faster than they're being created. 

The actual research article behind the journalistic story — "Statistical Laws Governing Fluctuations in Word Use from Word Birth to Word Death", by Alexander M. Petersen, Joel Tenenbaum, Shlomo Havlin, H. Eugene Stanley — is  pretty interesting in several ways. They chart stuff like how synonyms for new things get sorted out over time. For example, early on, people tended to say roentgenogram or radiogram more than xray, which eventually won out as the usual term in English. That's useful to know for people looking at language variation and change, among many others.

But the journalistic story may confirm your worries if you've had Ling 101. The title might worry you a little, in that the 'evolutionary laws of language' ≠ birth and death of new words.

But consider this:

Higher death rates for words, the authors say, are largely a matter of homogenization. The explorer William Clark (of Lewis & Clark) spelled "Sioux" 27 different ways in his journals ("Sieoux," "Seaux," "Souixx," etc.), and several of those variants would have made it into 19th-century books. Today spell-checking programs and vigilant copy editors choke off such chaotic variety much more quickly, in effect speeding up the natural selection of words.

Now, if radiogram dies out and xray carries the day, that's an interesting fact. But spelling variants? Has language changed in any meaningful sense if we stop writing Seaux?* That's not about the 'death rate' for 'words' but regularization of orthography. And the whole homogenization thing feeds the language-is-going-to-hell meme. At least it ends on a skeptical note:

In the end, words and sentences aren't atoms and molecules, even if they can be fodder for the same formulas.

True. Would be nice to have a linguist on teams like this ...

 *No.

Image from here.

Linguistics in the media ... a good day

Like most linguists, we've talked here about the relatively low public profile of linguistics (e.g. here) and the negative consequences of it … like the catastrophically bad language-related journalism that seems to pop up so often. Maybe there's some progress.

I was thinking that while reading Paul Krugman's column, which draws on the recent post on the Log about the collocations of severe, and Romney's comment about being a 'severely conservative'. (If you haven't read it, you should fix that.)

Then, boom, Ben Zimmer comes on NPR to talk about anachronisms in Downton Abbey.*

Good start to the week.


*NPR gets bonus points for opening with an Onion reference, this one.

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.

"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.

British dialects in the news

Here's a nice piece on contemporary language and dialect issues in Britain, by leading sociolinguist Paul Kerswill and published in the Sun. We've said a little about dialect and the British show EastEnders here in the past (here), but this is about a reality show, The Only Way is Essex, or TOWIE.

I haven't seen the show and don't know enough about British dialects today to have anything to say anyhow, but maybe some readers can comment on Kerswill's analysis? Sure looks to me like a good example of laying out language variation and change stuff for a lay audience.