The charge: cliché use under oath. « previous post | next post » A rather extraordinary language story broke in the UK yesterday when a police officer was put on suspension for allegedly peppering his testimony at an inquest with phrases taken from song titles, as a prank. One of the fuller news stories is the one in the tabloid newspaper The Sun (read it here). The question is not, of course, about whether it would be professionally improper to play jokes on a coroner by finding excuses to insert song titles into sworn testimony at an inquest involving the shooting of a civilian by a police marksman; it would be grossly offensive. The question is how an offense of this sort could ever be proved given that song titles are, as everyone must surely know, so frequently taken from everyday phrases and clichés that are extremely frequent in everyone's speech.
It may surprise you that in part I blame George Orwell. Permalink. Tweet this. BBC in diner truck apostrophe scandal. « previous post | next post » The BBC is doing a day or two of filming on the roof terrace of the building that houses my department, and the parking lot below our windows is thick with dressing room trailers and wardrobe trailers and generator trucks. Plus there is one other vehicle: parked directly below the windows of the room where the faculty of the country's finest department of Linguistics and English Language hold their staff meetings is a large catering truck to provide lunch for the crew, and it is labeled DeluxDiner's.
The company that owns it is called "DeluxDiners". They have a website at As you can see from that page, the company name is a regular plural. There is no trace of an apostrophe in the web page text. My department is in an uproar. There is going to be trouble here. The big question for me is, as a responsible head of department should I try to prevent it? Tell me what should I do, commenters.
Permalink. Boring preposition jokes: new termination policy. « previous post | next post » Every time a post or comment on Language Log mentions, in any context, the prescriptive disapproval of preposition stranding (where a preposition is separated from its logically associated complement, as in What are you looking at?) , e.g. in this post, we get commenters (who, incidentally, seem never to have read the site before) tussling with each other to be the first to inscribe two routinized types of comment. One type says "I think a preposition is a fine thing to end a sentence with!
", or words very much to that effect (unaware that instances of this lame "look-I'm-violating-the-rule" joke have been going on since at least the 1700s). The other type says, "This is nonsense up with which I shall not put! " Unable to bear any longer the tedious work of seeking out all the instances of these two comment types so I can delete them, I have decided that from now on I will hunt down the relevant commenters and kill them. Permalink. The rɑɪt sɑʊnz? « previous post | next post » Angus Grieve-Smith writes: I was always taught that the most straightforward way to write American diphthongs is [aj] and [aw], and the "long" mid vowels as [e] and [o].
Recently I've been seeing [ɑɪ ɑʊ ɛɪ] and [ɔʊ] popping up. This seems to reflect at least three different changes: (1) A shift from using [j w ɰ] to represent glides, to representing diphthongs as a series of vowel sounds. (2) A shift to greater detail in these representations. (3) A shift in the standard from somewhere close to my dialect (Hudson Valley) to … someplace else. Angus's point (1) is well taken, and closely related to his point (2). "Rising" diphthongs in English — those that go from a more open mouth position to a more closed one, and therefore end "higher" than they began — aren't generally distinguished from one another in how high they go.
My guess is that there are two reasons: Point (a) first. There's one little wrinkle here. Permalink. R.I.P., Mock Obituaries. Checking on Aleut: kudos to the Times! Homographobia. « previous post | next post » From the pages of Xin Tang, Mark Swofford has resurrected a classic piece by John DeFrancis entitled "Homographobia. " Here's Mark's post. The entire essay may be found here. A pdf of the whole issue of Xin Tang 6, in which John's essay appears, is available here. This is the opening paragraph of John's essay: Homographobia is a disorder characterized by an irrational fear of ambiguity when individual lexical items which are now distinguished graphically lose their distinctive features and become identical if written phonemically.
Since the so-called homograph problem is invariably brought up by opponents of Chinese romanization, John's demolition of this bugaboo in XT 6 is crucial for allaying the irrational fear of romanization that plagues many otherwise reasonable individuals. Permalink. Proofiness. Intermezzo: Without Prejudice - why all the Royal Opera House posts have disappeared. The Royal Opera House have explained that the only images they want taken down are photos of two set designs I used in a recent post. The rights over these may rest with the set designers themselves. I have reinstated the original post, but replaced the photos themselves with a link to their location on the ROH site, where the eagle-eyed will notice that no photographer is credited.
I have also been given official access to their treasure trove of press images. Result! I do hope the Royal Opera House's next move will be to reduce any further confusion by formulating a clear, publicly displayed policy on the use of their copyright images. Social media are here to stay and the ROH need to work out how to handle them.
I don't know of any other UK arts organisation with such a policy, so the ROH has the opportunity to set the standard and become a pioneer. The Royal Opera House have issued a press release (copy below) to apologise for the way in which this matter was handled. Yours sincerely. Apico-labials in English. « previous post | next post » It's not very often that an observation about articulatory phonetics goes viral. Josef Fruehwald points out a rare example ("Britney Spears tongue", 8/19/2010): This is apparently not just a (tongue-and-)lip syncing quirk — Joe notes a live performance where she does the same thing: As Joe observes, there are no apico-labial /l/'s visible in Ms.
Spears' interviews, so this is purely a singing (or pretending-to-sing) feature. John Wells discussed this yesterday ("Linguolabials"), noting that Linguolabials are found in the consonant inventories of very few languages. John also points out that Ms. Permalink. Dialect or Topolect? « previous post | next post » [This is a guest post by Brendan O'Kane.] My new favorite thing is Brian Holton's ongoing translation of Shuǐhǔ zhuàn 水滸傳 (Water Margin; All Men Are Brothers) into Scots, part of which is available online. Example: Nà shí Xiyuè Huàshān yǒu gè Chén Tuán chǔshì, shì gè dào gāo yǒu dé zhī rén, néng biàn fēngyún qìsè. Yī rì qí lǘ xiàshān, xiàng nà Huáyīn dào zhōng zhèngxíng zhī jiān, tīng dé lùshàng kèrén chuánshuō:" Rújīn Dōngjīng Chái Shìzōng ràng wèi yǔ Zhào jiǎndiǎn dēngjī.
" 那时西岳华山有个陈抟处士，是个道高有德之人，能辨风云气色。 一日骑驴下山，向那华阴道中正行之间，听得路上客人传说：" 如今东京柴世宗让位与赵检点登基。 " In thae days there wis a hermit hecht Chen Tuan bydin on the Wastlin Tap o Mount Glore: he wis a kennin an gracie sowl at bi glamourie cud guide the wind an wather. As a standard English translation of that paragraph for the sake of comparison, there's Sidney Shapiro's rendition (Outlaws of the Marsh, Vol.
At that time on Huashan, the West Sacred Mountain, lived a Taoist hermit named Chen Tuan. Permalink. Dictionary daftness, Dan Brown style. Making linguistics relevant (for sports blogs) Gricean bagel rage. « previous post | next post » When Paul Grice drafted his maxims for cooperative conversation, he didn't have in mind that we should get upset when people violate them. On the contrary, the whole idea was to use apparent violations as the basis for reasoning about conversational implicatures, the things that people obviously mean but don't literally say.
Still, people do get upset about all aspects of other people's language use, and it's common to object to redundancy, as in "ATM machine" — though members of what William Safire used to call the Squad Squad rarely get as upset as the anonymous "pilotless drone" man did ("Is it sinking into your thick skull, you high school drop-out?
", 2/7/2007). It's even rarer for usage disputes to escalate to the point where police intervention is required. According to John Doyle, Rebecca Rosenberg and Annie Karni, "Grammar stickler: Starbucks booted me", N.Y. Starbucks' strange vernacular finally drove a customer nuts. "She would not answer. Permalink. Pictish writing? « previous post | next post » According to Jennifer Viegas, "New Written Language of Ancient Scotland Discovered", Discovery News, 3/31/2010: Once thought to be rock art, carved depictions of soldiers, horses and other figures are in fact part of a written language dating back to the Iron Age. The ancestors of modern Scottish people left behind mysterious, carved stones that new research has just determined contain the written language of the Picts, an Iron Age society that existed in Scotland from 300 to 843.
The "new research" is described in Rob Lee, Philip Jonathan, and Pauline Ziman, "Pictish symbols revealed as a written language through application of Shannon entropy", Proceedings of the Royal Society A, in press. The authors use an argument of the same general shape as the one used by Rao et al. in arguing for linguistic structure in inscriptions from the Indus Valley civilization ("Conditional entropy and the Indus Script", 4/26/2009). Permalink. ‘Iron Age’ Picts and their spoken language « A Corner of Tenth-Century Europe. Okay, here’s another thing I wanted to write up before I went to Kalamazoo. You may have seen, if you are following Archaeology in Europe as you all should be, that there was a recent paper in Proceedings of the Royal Society A that apparently decodes the Pictish language or something similar.
I confess to initial scepticism, not least because they inexplicably persist in using the term `Iron Age’ for a people only attested under the name ‘Picts’ from the Roman period onwards, and whose glory days are most definitely early medieval, but I am interested in the Picts, I am in favour of Science! In history and so I thought I’d better have a look. After all, I am developing a blog-tradition of critiquing scientific papers on matters historical, and I’d hate to pass up another opportunity. Now, if those instances have taught me anything, it is these things: The Pictish symbols display signs of a spoken language To have heard of the Picts is almost to have heard of their symbol stones. 1. 2.
The ventious crapests pounted raditally. « previous post | next post » The comments on my recent post, "Making linguistics relevant (for sports blogs)" meandered into a discussion of linguistic example sentences that display morphosyntactic patterning devoid of semantic content. The most famous example is of course Noam Chomsky's Colorless green ideas sleep furiously, though many have argued that it's quite possible to assign meaning to the sentence, given the right context (see Wikipedia for more). But what about sentences that use pure nonsense in place of "open-class" or "lexical" morphemes, joined together by inflectional morphemes and function words?
This characterizes nonsense verse of the "Jabberwocky" variety ('Twas brillig and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe). One commenter recalled a classic of the genre, The ventious crapests pounted raditally, which was introduced by the cognitive scientist Colin Cherry in his 1957 book, On Human Communication: A Review, Survey, and a Criticism. Permalink. JV: Translations. Ask Language Log: Adjectives from country names? « previous post | next post » Jak King writes: Are there rules in English for making adjectives from countries, or are the assignments random? I have found a number of standard adjectival endings (-ese, -(i)an, -ish, -i, -er). There are also some singularities (French, Greek, Monegasque) and some where the adjectival form is the same as the country name (Hong Kong, New Zealand).
How is this worked out, or who decides? Those are excellent questions. The answer to your last question, "Who decides? " How is this worked out? In any case, it's clear that language, like most other aspects of culture, is what Friedrich Hayek called a "grown" or "endogenous" or "spontaneous" order, rather than a "made" or "exogenous" or "artificial" order.
As for the specific question of adjectival forms of place names in English, there's some discussion in "The evolutionary psychology of irregular morphology", 4/10/2008. Permalink. Never mind the conclusions, what’s the evidence? « previous post | next post » A month ago, I linked to Lera Boroditsky's WSJ piece "Lost in Translation", and promised to discuss the contents in more detail at some point in the future ("Boroditsky on Whorfian navigation and blame", 7/26/2010). At the time, I noted that there is probably no single linguistic idea that is more prone to exaggeration and mis-application than the "Sapir-Whorf hypothesis" about the relations between language and thought.
And the WSJ editors' subhed for Boroditsky's article gives their readers a push down that road: New cognitive research suggests that language profoundly influences the way people see the world; a different sense of blame in Japanese and Spanish. Meanwhile, the NYT Sunday magazine has just published a major article by Guy Deutscher, "Does Your Language Shape How You Think? " So what's the evidence that there's "a different sense of blame in Japanese and Spanish"? In Fausey and Boroditsky 2008, the facts come from two experiments. Test phase. It is forbidden to urinate here. The penalty is bang. « previous post | next post » Despite the best efforts of two dozen stellar native and non-native scholars and teachers of Chinese, we still have not reached a consensus about the exact meaning and syntax of the sign at a Shanghai construction site presented in "Next Day's Chinese lesson": Jìnzhǐ xiǎobiàn, fǒuzé sǐrén 禁止小便,否則死人 ("prohibit urine, otherwise die person").
Such is not the case with the sign in this photograph, taken a few years ago in Bohol in the central Philippines. The photographer was Piers Kelly, editor of Fully (sic), and the language is Visayan (also called Cebuano). Transcription: Guinadili ang pag-pangihi dinhi. This can be roughly analyzed as: forbidden TOPIC act.of-urination here. More freely: "It is forbidden to urinate here. One could hardly be more explicit, especially since the "bang" is vividly illustrated with a picture of the tool that will produce the sound. Permalink.
Gerunds vs. participles.