Morphology FAIL

I was on the train today (yes, a train, here in America!) and caught sight of this billboard.  It was for a car, maybe a Buick???  Well, I was so riveted by the bizarreness of the morphology that I didn't really register the product (one of the many ways the billboard failed, I guess), but here's what I did catch:

flexible nimble luxurious-ble 

 I mean, I mean, wait, nooooooooooooooooo!!!  That just does not work, in so many ways!

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.

#What10kbuys at UW–Madison

You have heard, I imagine, about Romney offering to bet Perry $10,000 last night during the Republican debates, as TPM describes it:

without skipping a beat at the Saturday night debate here, Mitt Romney held out his hand and offered to bet Rick Perry $10,000 that he didn’t change the health care text in his book.

It's getting quick political play (again, for TPM, see here). The hashtag in the subject line of this post has taken off ... a guy who's worth an estimated $200,000,000* (here) can throw away 10k without blinking but for us real people, it's more than a casual bet.

In our world, the answer to #What10kbuys is quick and easy: it would pay the salary of an experienced Teaching Assistant or Project Assistant, working over 15 hours a week for the full academic year.

I'll bet you $10,000 this haunts Mittens for a while.**


* At a 5% return on investment that would be an annual income of 10 million a year without touching the principal.


** No, I won't actually bet you that. A dollar, maybe.

Where do you put your energy? Franz Kafka

The neverending and increasingly weird and famous story of Kafka's Nachlass gets the cover story in this week's NYT Magazine, and Elif Batuman tells a great story. One of the odder points, for me at least, was this:

Kafka studies now proliferate at a rate inversely proportional to that of Kafka’s own production: according to a recent estimate, a new book on his work has been published every 10 days for the past 14 years.

That's over 36 books per year, plus however many articles (and dissertations?), if it's true. And according to the article, Kafka published under 450 pages during his lifetime.

It's a luxury in the academic world that we can choose what we work on to a remarkable extent and we can get rewarded for a remarkable range of things. Kafka's one of my favorite authors, I guess, but I cannot quite understand how there's any call for this much published research on the relatively few works he published.

So many cool topics have not been touched or haven't been touched with current tools and methods, that it's mind-boggling. The number of languages and dialects that haven't been described, the number of basic historical situations we don't understand, and so on, all call out for research. Surely it's the same in literary studies. Or even practically: If you're figuring where you can make a real contribution, are the odds better with throwing another tome on that heap of Kafka studies or with staking out some new territory? Looking through some entries returned for 'Kafka' on GoogleBooks, much of what's there looks monotonous to me — I was expecting more exotic stuff.

But the bigger question is how many published books we actually need … shouldn't this stuff just be posted somewhere instead of printed on paper? I mean, come on, the Franz Kafka Blog doesn't even seem to be active. (Somebody will doubtless weigh in with more exciting electronic outlets on the topic ... .)

World Cup: DE vs NL?

You probably know, even if you're American, the above information. Some nice surprises in there, of course, and a real surprise for me at least about how heavily European the final four turned out to be. I'm looking forward to some good soccer. You should never look ahead in these things, of course, but being a faculty member in a "German Dept" where the Netherlandic Studies part of the department has long since been large and important enough that it's a true embarrassment that the department isn't AT LEAST called "German and Dutch" or "German and Netherlandic", one possible scenario for the final obviously gets and holds my attention: What if it's a German-Dutch final, or even third place match? Talk about a loaded situation, historically and otherwise.

But consider this tidbit. One of the big Dutch soccer chants is:

 wie niet springt is een mof

That is, 'whoever doesn't jump is a mof.' Sounds a little like Wisconsin's big football chant/song/dance 'Jump around'. OK, but what's a mof? Well, Dutch has a long string of very negative words for, guess who, the Germans. This is one of them. This isn't cutesy negative, but negative negative.  For the scholarly lit on these terms, check out:

Daan, Jo. 2000. Poepen, moffen en kaaskoppen. Den Schaorpaol,21, nr. 1,blz. 21.

 Of course, there's also a dialect atlas with the regional distributions!

Keep an eye and an ear out for this one if they face each other! (I've just learned that there are more negative versions of the chant, but let's save that for later ... .)

Eurovision, Lena Meyer-Landrut, English, and accents

This came in yesterday:

Hi Mr. Verb,
Love the blog. I just wanted to point out something interesting that you might want to discuss on the blog. The Eurovision contest winner from Germany, Lena Meyer-Landrut, has an incredibly strange accent when she sings. Perhaps someone could look into it. It sounds partly Australian, partly American, but she never sounds like a German singing English. Whatever it is, I think alot of people (including myself) find it really annoying. Perhaps this is something for the blog....

Here is a clip of her famous song that won the Eurovision thing.

Enjoy!
Larry Linguist

Well, first off, thanks Larry. Yup, that sounds pretty much unlike any dialect of English I know. Sounds very affected, and plenty of singers do that. Of course she's a German high schooler and who knows what coaching she's had and how this got created. I haven't heard her interviewed in any language. How does she talk?

Second, it turns out that her language is a whole nother issue for some people in Germany. One of our contributors tells me that the Verein Deutsche Sprache is complaining bitterly about her 'embarrassing' Germany by singing in English. This link gives their argument, pretty lame I think, that singing in German leads to better results.

Sure, and language is a virus

Building on the last post, if anybody is concerned about the language change/biological evolution thing, let's go for language = virus:

The full cartoon is here and highly worth reading, if not about linguistics. Or viruses.

The Brain's language

From here:

The Brain's Language and Its Politics - An Afternoon with George Lakoff

Friday, Oct 30 3:00p at MLK Jr. Library, San Jose,CA
"We now have a detailed theory of how ideas and language arise from the physical brain. That theory, applied to American politics, explains a great deal about contemporary political disputes."
This lecture will explore the new Neural Linguistics & how it applies to our political life.

Price: Free Age Suitability: Teens and up

Tags: politics,linguistics, brain, lakoff

"We now have a detailed theory of how ideas and language arise from the physical brain. That theory, applied to American politics, explains a great deal about contemporary political disputes."
This lecture will explore the new Neural Linguistics & how it applies to our political life.
Lecture & discussion followed by book signing.
Sponsored by Linguistic & Language Development Student Association. Funded in part by SJSU Associated Students.

I'd be plenty happy with a 'detailed theory of how ideas and language raise from the physical brain'. Application to politics is all gravy. In case anybody is in SF and happens to make this, we'd really appreciate a report. (Just to be clear: No snark intended, I would be very curious what Lakoff's current big picture looks like … these are dizzyingly big claims.)

Image from here.

Furlough update: Optimality Theorists singled out

That was a page 1 headline in the Wisconsin State Journal print edition this morning. (The online version of course would have to have a different title.)

Bad phonology jokes aside, it shows again the absurdity of the way furloughs are being handled in Wisconsin: People are furloughed as a kind of temporary pay cut, then the same people are paid time and a half to cover the necessary shifts.

The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms

After one of our contributors kind of ripped on the world of 'humanities' scholarship (here), maybe it's time for a Big Tent Moment.

But first, a story. This blog remains a little shack out in the woods, where an occasional visitor might wander by, and stop for a drink of water or stronger stuff, but few come here by design. Still, peddlers and traveling salesmen will show up anywhere, and I get a surprising number of offers for links and guest posts and whatnot. I do read and consider all of them, but have gotten pretty selective about even when to respond to such emails. (That just reflects a lack of time.)

A while back, Oxford University Press started sending occasional emails to me, offering books for review. I was, of course, stunned and alarmed that such a serious operation would consider anything on this blog as potentially useful for them in any way whatsoever. After pondering the offer for an undue amount of time, I decided that it might be interesting to post about some books that I might not otherwise read and certainly wouldn't write a word about. So, I said yes to a couple, and had a minion get them sent.

The first to arrive was, I think, a mistake: The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms by Chris Baldick. (You can read a lot about the book here.) I keep two books from this series on my desk — The Oxford Dictionary of Science (which I use constantly) and The Oxford Dictionary of Psychology (which I use rarely).

Well, I figured, that is not something to blog about. At most maybe a big snark attack post in a weak moment. Alas, it's actually a pretty interesting read. Yeah, 'trauma theory' and 'docusoap' are potential joke fodder. And I'm not much wiser about 'phonocentrism' OR 'logocentrism', but that may reflect the simple fact that they are basically bullshit. Still, the page on 'cultural studies' was useful. (I'll keep this volume around and post on this stuff eventually, I hope.)

Striking is how much linguistics is in there … lots of basic terms from 'syntax' and 'phonology' to 'metathesis' and 'illocutionary act'. The definitions aren't written for linguists, but they seem to get things basically close enough to get a student started. And we get reminders that linguists and literary folks have some common ground — 'slave narrative' is a significant subject for both. The definition of 'rune' is aimed at a lit audience, with a focus on 'magic', and philological eyebrows will go up at the simple statement that the alphabet is "thought to have been used since the 2nd. century CE". (From discussion with somebody who knows much more about this than I do, this may reflect the view on wikipedia and elsewhere, with the dating of the Negau helmet inscription to then, which is apparently pretty controversial.)

Speaking of philology, eventually, I came to p. 255, where, just below entries for 'phenomenology' and 'philistine', there's an entry for 'philology'. That entry never quite says directly that this is now often seen as the study of earlier texts, but instead says that since the early 20th century:

'philology' has tended to refer to the 19th-century tradition of historical and comparative linguistic studies.

I know a lot of historical and comparative linguists, and a fair number of philologists, and suspect they will all disagree with equal vehemence at that characterization. I would have just gone with the old definition that it's "the art of reading slowly", attributed to Nietzsche and various others.

Over time, members of Team Verb will probably post more from this volume (one contributor has expressed interest, in fact) and I've got a super cool volume from OUP that I can't wait to write about: Michael Adams' new book Slang. Yes, it's the Michael Adams of truthiness AND Slayer Slang fame.

"Dead" languages and elected officials

One of UW's student newspapers, the Badger Herald, posted this story (and see this at indianz.com) quoting State Rep. Scott Suder as saying:

“The governor should concentrate more on using our tax money to preserve jobs rather than preserving dead languages.”

Of course, most Native languages of Wisconsin are definitely alive, with some L1 speakers and many semi-speakers and learners. And the money is 250,000 out of a 20+ billion dollar budget. Not offended yet?

Rep. Scott Suder, R-Abbotsford, called the program “goofy and crazy” given the state’s current financial atmosphere and the loss of so many jobs throughout Wisconsin.

…

Suder also said the taxpayers should not be forced to pay for this program because most tribes make enough revenue from their casinos to pay for it. He added he is sorry for the situation but jobs are definitely more important than dead language preservation.

As indicated, Suder represents Abbotsford in northern Wisconsin, pretty close to a number of reservations, and surely a district with some number of Indians in it.

Say, I wonder how many dollars go to teaching Latin in this state, at the high school and university levels? Classical Greek? Biblical Hebrew? Vastly more than 250K.

"During I arrived in President"?

Bushisms are almost as yesterday as Palinisms, I suppose, but one from Bush's interview with Charlie Gibson keeps rolling around in my head, an answer about the economy:

GIBSON: Do you feel in any way responsible for what's happening?

BUSH: You know, I'm the President during this period of time, but I think when the history of this period is written, people will realize a lot of the decisions that were made on Wall Street took place over a decade or so, before I arrived in President, during I arrived in President.

In hearing it, I had corrected 'in' to 'as' somehow (assuming the transcript is right -- I don't see this in the video chunks online), but I can't get the 'during'. I don't know this as a dialect feature and it's an odd-sounding speech error somehow. But I do know it as a feature of non-native English. A Google search for "during I was" yields some results, but a lot clearly non-native English speakers.

What's going on here?

The hippest post-it ever

Quip of the week

From a colleague:

Every year the kool aid tastes better.

Here's to you!

Odd accents in advertising

Weird accents are in the news (here), it seems, and Madison's not escaping the trend …

A new(ish) local Mexican restaurant, La Mestiza, advertises on the radio. They plug very distinctly southern Mexican dishes, like cochinita pibil. But the announcer has a bad Spanish accent.

I don't mean that he's doing a bad job at sounding Mexican, which would be unsettling. No, it's like he's trying very hard to sound like he's from the Iberian Peninsula and failing. Given the name of the place, is this some really odd bit of humor or what?

Limelight, quip of the morning

A racing story in this morning's NYT Sports section had this:

Tony Eury Jr., Earnhardt’s crew chief and cousin, said … “We know Dale Jr. is at the center of Nascar”. … “There’s a lot of limelight that goes on him."

I like the image … just the right hint of that Gatorade on the winning coach thing. The missus asks whether they use vinegar to get it off.

Blogal* trivia …reading level

Well, when the hip kids start doing it, eventually the stodgy folks like old man Verb will join in. (OK, not always ... piercing's pretty much out.) I'm a little worried to count as 'postgrad' here. Sounds way too high-falutin'. Time to lower the bar?


* I've been feeling the need for a real, usable adjective for 'blog-related'. For now, it's blogal. It gets a ton of g-hits, of course, and some in this basic meaning.