Being Human

Boko Haram has been in the news recently, e.g. Joe Boyle, "Nigeria's 'Taliban' enigma", BBC News, 7/28/2009:

They have launched co-ordinated attacks across northern Nigeria, threatening to overthrow the government and impose strict Islamic law - but who exactly are the Nigerian Taliban?

Since the group emerged in 2004 they have become known as "Taliban", although they appear to have no links to the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Some analysts believe they took inspiration from the radical Afghans, others say the name is more a term of ridicule used by people in Maiduguri, the area where they were founded.

The group's other name, Boko Haram, means "Western education is a sin" and is another title used by local people to refer to the group.

Isa Sanusi, from the BBC's Hausa service, says the group has no specific name for itself, just many names attributed to it by local people.

If their name is uncertain, however, their mission appears clear enough: to overthrow the Nigerian state, impose an extreme interpretation of Islamic law and abolish what they term "Western-style education".

The "Boko Haram" name combines haram, a borrowed Arabic word meaning "forbidden by Islamic law", with bokò, a Hausa word that according to Paul Newman and Roxana Ma Newman, Modern Hausa-English Dictionary, means

1. Western education. 2. Hausa written in Roman script. 3. Mock arrangment: yaƙin ~ army manoeuvres. 4. Adulteration, fraud, trick.

Talk about framing a debate…

Anyhow, Mohammed Yusuf, the group's leader, seems to be a cult leader in the grand style, though he may now be dead (or perhaps not):

In an interview with the BBC, the group's leader, Mohammed Yusuf, said such education "spoils the belief in one God".

"There are prominent Islamic preachers who have seen and understood that the present Western-style education is mixed with issues that run contrary to our beliefs in Islam," he said.

"Like rain. We believe it is a creation of God rather than an evaporation caused by the sun that condenses and becomes rain.

"Like saying the world is a sphere. If it runs contrary to the teachings of Allah, we reject it. We also reject the theory of Darwinism."

I guess that the argument about rain could be seen as expressing the doctrine of occasionalism, but not even Al-Ghazali was a flat-earther.

Mr Yusuf himself is something of an enigma.

He is believed to be in his mid-thirties, and analysts say he is extremely wealthy and highly educated.

"He is graduate educated and very proficient in English," says Nigerian academic Hussain Zakaria.

"He lives lavishly - people say he drives a Mercedes Benz. And he is very well-educated in a Western context."

[Update: Yusuf is now reported to have been shot in police custody while "trying to escape".]

In "Xinhua English and Zhonglish," I discussed the phenomenon of a peculiar style of English that has developed in China.  Since it is not outrageously incorrect in terms of grammar or grossly unidiomatic, this type of English cannot be labeled Chinglish.  On the other hand, this particular style of English, which we may call Xinhua English or New China News English, is distinctive enough to be recognizable as an emerging dialect.

The latest instance (like the previous one) was brought to my attention by Victor Steinbok, who keeps a keen eye out for pertinent examples.  It is in today's headline from China View, an organ of Xinhuanet:  "China lodges solemn representation over Japan's permission for Rebiya Kadeer's visit."

The expression "lodges solemn representation" calls attention to itself as a rather unusual way of expressing diplomatic discontent.  It was fairly easy for me to track down the original Chinese, which is:  TI2CHU1 YAN2ZHENG4 JIAO1SHE4 提出严正交涉.

TI2CHU1 means "bring / bring forward; raise; pose"

YAN2ZHENG4 means "serious and principled; stern; exacting"

JIAO1SHE4 means "mutual relations / intercourse (as between two nations); negotiation; representation" — this is obviously a difficult term to translate; the constituent morphemes respectively signify "hand over; deliver; cross; join; exchange; associate with; liaise; mutually interact" and "wade; ford; experience; go through; involve; touch upon."

In order to find the distribution of this and closely related expressions, I did a number of Google searches:

"lodges solemn representation"  279  (first two pages all related to China)

"lodged solemn representation"  148  ditto

"lodged a solemn representation"  35,600  ditto

"lodges a solemn representation"  116  ditto

"lodged stern representation"  2,740  ditto

"lodged a stern representation"  141  ditto

"lodged a stern protest" 7,870  (first two pages fairly evenly distributed among Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan, and other countries)

"lodges a stern protest"  7  all except one Japanese (and the Japanese instances are all of the form "lodges a stern protest and expresses regret" — the second clause seems characteristically Japanese when used in combination with the first; actually there are only 4 items from Japan because two are duplicate hits; note that 3 of the items are as reported by official Chinese sources)

"issued a stern protest"  6,060  (only a much smaller number would show)   interestingly, several occurrences have to do with the Catholic Church

"issued a solemn protest" 9,560 (only 12 would show)  similar to the previous entry, many occurrences have to do with the Catholic Church

**Disclaimer:  I checked the numbers of hits for each item repeatedly, but was dismayed to find that they kept changing (especially for the last two items), sometimes radically, even from the first page to the second page of a given item.

I could continue this research indefinitely, but I want to point out — in addition to what I've already mentioned above — that sometimes "solemn representations" are not enough for China, in which case it has "made solemn representations to and lodged a stern protest with…."

Phrases with "complaint" in them are used globally and massively, but they are often referred to a third party (regulatory agency, etc.), whereas phrases with "representation" are generally reserved for state-to-state relations.

Finally, I noticed that a discussion group for Chinese interested in proper English usage had actually engaged this very topic.

Alex Baumans and Eric Lechner independently sent in copies of today's Speed Bump, for our "Words for X" file:

The Irish singer Van Morrison was well into his set at a concert in his native isle before a crowd in high spirits. Enthusiastic applause followed every song. At one point in the excited hubbub as Van tried to signal the band to start a new song, a voice yelled out over the crowd, "We love you, Van!". This moved the dour and laconic performer to make his only remark of the evening to his audience. Said Van emphatically to his adoringly ebullient fan: "Fucking shut the fuck up."

My friend Jim McCloskey, the Irish syntactician (in both senses of that phrase) told me this story. He was present at the concert and reported the event. He is a great Van Morrison fan, and I think he views the incident as just a disarmingly inappropriate verbal symptom of Van the Man's well-known shyness and stage fright. I like the story too, but on a less sympathetic basis: I happen to detest Van Morrison's music. His bare, strained voice appeals to me not at all, and I hate even his most popular recordings. (I once offered to put five dollars in the tips jar at the Stevenson College Coffee House at UC Santa Cruz if they would stop playing the Van Morrison CD they had put on. They did, and I did. So his music has negative cash value for me: I have actually paid money to not hear it.) For me the story is about a foul-mouthed verbal indication that the curmudgeonly Celtic soulster is as gratingly unpleasant to his public as his music is to my ears. But no matter. Never mind the man or his music. We are here to try to learn what we can from the syntax of the interesting expression he used.

The main syntactic problem is to determine whether the fuck is being used as an pleonastic (semantically empty) direct object of shut or as a pre-head modifier of the preposition phrase (PP) headed by up. (Yes, the up of shut up is a one-word PP. It is not an adverb — all the traditional grammars are flat wrong on that. The arguments are given in chapter 7 of The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, or more tersely in A Student's Introduction to English Grammar.) And I think we can do this.

Note first that we also have examples like Get the fuck up those stairs, where again the fuck is after a verb before a PP, and is semantically inert (the utterance means "Get up those stairs"). And in both these cases, the PP is obligatory: neither *Shut the fuck nor *Get the fuck are grammatical with the pleonastic reading of the fuck.

Second, the fuck can co-occur with a direct object NP:

• I don't know how a full-grown Burmese python got into this maternity ward, but get it the fuck out of here before it eats any babies.

Treating the fuck as a direct object would give us two direct objects for one monotransitive verb in such a case.

Third, the expletive in question can also occur with intransitive verbs:

• I was trapped in the crowd at a Van Morrison concert and I was wishing I had wings so that I could just soar the fuck out of there.

The verb soar doesn't allow direct object NPs at all, so the fuck simply can't be a direct object.

I conclude that in colloquial English the NP the fuck (and it does indeed have the form of an NP) can function as a pre-head modifier in a PP, including the light one-word PPs (like up) that are known as particles.

The fact that there can be such a modifier underlines the correctness of treating up as the head of a phrase, of course. Van Morrison's bracingly filthy put-down had the structure shown here in tree form:

The Adverb and the NP are both functioning as modifiers. The Clause is of imperative clause type. Shut is (as usual in the shut up idiomatic construction) intransitive.

I will leave the comments area open below, but fucking try to exhibit some fucking phraseological delicacy.

[By the way, perhaps I should have worked in a citation of a relevant recent paper on the syntax of a similar expletive, the hell, which appeared last year: Jack Hoeksema and Donna Jo Napoli, "Just for the hell of it: A comparison of two taboo-term constructions", Journal of Linguistics 44:2 (2008), 347-378. —GKP]

Can you tell a lie nonlinguistically? That is, is it reasonable that certain actions or even physical objects should be regarded as embodying lies? A couple of clearly somewhat dishonest examples:

• In the Best Western El Rancho Inn on El Camino Real in Millbrae (Millbrae sounds Scottish but it is near the San Francisco International Airport; I am waiting for a flight to take me back to Edinburgh) the Colombian-made cotton towels and facecloths bear a label stating the brand name "Five Star". El Rancho is nice, but it is a standard-grade California motel, not five star. Could the towel company be trying to misinform me about the quality I am enjoying?
  
  
• In the Office Depot store across the street from the El Rancho there is a demo of wireless printing from an HP laptop to an HP All-In-One printer / scanner / fax / copier / toaster. The sign brags about the built-in wireless networking and says you should open WordPad on the laptop and type something and then click "File | Print", and what you typed will magically appear on the nearby printer. But I checked the laptop more closely. Discreetly plugged into the side of it is a USB cable. I traced the cable. It runs to the printer. There is no wireless connection at all. Could they be trying to mislead me about how well wireless printer networking works?

For a clarification I turned to a nice paper by Don Fallis called "What is lying?" in the Journal of Philosophy last January (volume CVI [J Phil is one of the last institutions struggling to keep Roman numerals alive], 29-56, reading version of the manuscript available here). Fallis's view (defended against a large range of alternatives) is that you lie to a person X when, and only when, you assert P to X in a situation where you believe P to be false and you believe you are in a situation where the usual norm of not stating falsehoods is in effect. (The latter part covers all sorts of odd situations like saying "My name is Bond; James Bond" when acting Bond in a movie: during filming, the norm barring falsehoods is not in effect. But if you said the same thing to someone you met in a bar, and were not saying it ironically, and your name is not James Bond, you would be lying. And so on.)

Manufacturers' brand names on towels do not assert (they are merely names). So that lets the towels off the hook (excuse the figure of speech; my towel actually is on the hook, but never mind). And nothing in the Office Depot sign actually asserts "Your document will then be printed wirelessly", or "No cable connects this laptop to the printer beside it". So there is no lying there. (Well, the laptop is lying there, but that's a different verb lexeme; see my post on lie/lied, lie/lay, and lay/laid.)

Fallis's account makes it definitional that a physical object or a hardware demo or a mask or a false license plate or a wolf in sheep's clothing cannot be lying. That, probably rightly, is the standard view: lying is linguistic.

I will leave comments open below, but try to tell the truth.

For the better part of the past two years, I've resisted the temptation to run out and buy a Kindle. (Well, OK, I wouldn't have to "run out" to do it, nor could I; as far as I can tell, the Kindle can only be ordered on Amazon. But whatever, it's still an appropriate figure of speech.) The Kindle just seems made for me. I love books and I love to read, and I'm also a ridiculously huge fan of electronic publishing of all kinds, and (especially) of the idea of carrying a library worth of books with me wherever I go, because hey, you never know when you might want to read any one of them. (This also explains why my iPod touch overfloweth with just-in-case music.) The Kindle seems like it should be the best of both worlds: it's all there but the actual page-turning.

But still, I've resisted. I suppose I've been waiting for a sign, or at the very least for a definitive review of the Kindle — something other than the lap-doggish panting that was all I'd seen thus far. And in the space of the past two weeks, I've had both.

First, the sign: some of you may have heard that recently, Amazon not-so-quietly removed a couple of e-books from some of its customers' Kindle devices. For those looking to catch up, here's David Pogue's NYT blog post and a follow-up NYT technology article; I've been following Peter Kafka's continuing MediaMemo coverage on All Things Digital (here, here, here, and here); see also this section of the Kindle's Wikipedia entry.

A quick summary: a publisher had made Kindle-ready versions of George Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm available on the Kindle Store, and after some copies were sold it was discovered that the publisher didn't have the rights to (those versions of) those books; Amazon responded by remotely deleting the copies that had been sold and refunding the purchase price to the relevant customers, in apparent violation of the Kindle's terms of service:

Upon your payment of the applicable fees set by Amazon, Amazon grants you the non-exclusive right to keep a permanent copy of the applicable Digital Content and to view, use, and display such Digital Content an unlimited number of times, solely on the Device or as authorized by Amazon as part of the Service and solely for your personal, non-commercial use.

Some significant issues that have come up as a result of this action: some customers had annotated their Kindle copies of the books and have lost their annotations along with the books; Amazon (represented by CEO Jeff Bezos) has apologized for its actions and has promised not to remove content from customers' Kindles in the future "in these circumstances", but is being coy about the circumstances under which they may still take such action; customers wonder whether the text of their purchased content may be (silently) changed; and so forth. The irony of the situation has of course not gone unnoticed: the identity of the author and the books involved is just too good to pass up comment on. There are many, many references to "Big Brother" and to "the memory hole" of 1984; the aforementioned NYT technology article explains the latter reference right off the bat (but then ends with the claim that "[o]n the Internet, of course, there is no such thing as a memory hole" — excuse me, but Russ Kick begs to differ).

Second, the review: still following Peter Kafka's MediaMemo, I found out yesterday that the Kindle has just been reviewed in the New Yorker. And it's a pretty damning review, from start to finish, sometimes with faint praise and sometimes with sharp kicks to the knee caps. In my favorite section of the review, the reviewer (Nicholson Baker) indulges in just a little bit of bibliomysticism, which I will here define as the belief that the printed-on-paper word is somehow endowed with power that cannot be replicated otherwise. (See this note.)

The problem was not that the screen was in black-and-white; if it had really been black-and-white, that would have been fine. The problem was that the screen was gray. And it wasn’t just gray; it was a greenish, sickly gray. A postmortem gray. The resizable typeface, Monotype Caecilia, appeared as a darker gray. Dark gray on paler greenish gray was the palette of the Amazon Kindle.

This was what they were calling e-paper? This four-by-five window onto an overcast afternoon? Where was paper white, or paper cream? Forget RGB or CMYK. Where were sharp black letters laid out like lacquered chopsticks on a clean tablecloth?

[…]

[T]he wasp passage in "Do Insects Think?" just wasn't the same in Kindle gray. I did an experiment. I found the Common Reader reprint edition of [Robert Benchley's] "Love Conquers All" and read the very same wasp passage. I laughed: ha-ha. Then I went back to the Kindle 2 and read the wasp passage again. No laugh. Of course, by then I'd read the passage three times, and it wasn't that funny anymore. But the point is that it wasn't funny the first time I came to it, when it was enscreened on the Kindle. Monotype Caecilia was grim and Calvinist; it had a way of reducing everything to arbitrary heaps of words.

I recommend reading the review — the critique of the Kindle is substantive, with the bibliomysticism served up as additional entertainment. Needless to say at this point, I'm not buying a Kindle anytime soon. I'd rather do as Baker suggests and read books on my iPod touch for now (yes, there's still room for some books even with all the music), and eventually on the much-rumored iTablet.

Note: My grad school buddy Ed Keer liked to say that bibliomysticism is responsible for the knee-jerk judgment that the book must always be better than the movie. I thought Ed had coined the term, but a Google search for it turns up (just) these two hits, from 1971 and 1987, respectively:

We cannot, as professional librarians, retreat into biblio-mysticism and ignore information storage media of a non-book nature.

Topics cover […] the challenge of the information society (including the charge that librarians who limit themselves to the book are "bibliomystics") […]

(Go back.)

The entry on like as a conjunction in Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage quotes Shakespeare as using "conjunctive like" in this line:

And yet no man like he doth grieve my heart.
Romeo and Juliet, 1595

The interpretation, apparently, is that "like he doth grieve my heart" is a clause, introduced by like as a subordinating conjunction, roughly "And yet no man [doth grieve my heart] like he doth grieve my heart". But under this analysis, it's puzzling how "And yet no man" fits in — the ellipsis seems to be happening in the wrong clause.

So some of the commenters on my post "Write like me" (7/24/2009) assumed instead that this is an example of prepositional like taking a nominative complement (= "And yet no man doth grieve my heart like him"), with the like-PP inserted between subject "no man" and verb "doth grieve". This makes syntactic sense, but it's morphologically odd (in fact, I think, impossible).

Others took it as conjunctive like allowing ellipsis of everything except the subject ("And yet no man doth grieve my heart like he [doth grieve my heart]), where like would work like than in "He's taller than I [am tall]". There's a problem here with the order of clauses — thus Shakespeare writes things like "Windsor knows more of Anne's mind than I do", or "you owed no more to time than I do now", but never (as far as I can tell) places the than-clause between the subject and verb of the main clause, e.g. "Windsor than I do knows more of Anne's mind", much less "Windsor than I knows more of Anne's mind". And the required full ellipsis with like strikes most if not all modern speakers as weird, and doesn't seem to have been common in Shakespeare's time either, if indeed it ever occurs elsewhere at all. But this seems to be the best of a set of problematic analyses, and it may be what the MWDEU editors had in mind.

I wondered whether the context might help clarify what structure Shakepeare had in mind for this line, and so I took a look at this passage in several of the fascimile editions available at the Internet Shakespeare Editions site.

You may want to remind yourself of the plot. We're at the point in the play where Romeo has killed Juliet's cousin Tybalt and been banished from Verona. Juliet is beside herself crying over Romeo's situation. Her mother tries to comfort her, ignorant of the real reason for her grief.

In the version from (the "bad") Quarto I, 1597, the interaction goes like this:

Moth: I cannot blame thee.
But it greeues thee more that Villaine liues. Iul: What Villaine Madame? Moth: That Villaine Romeo. Iul: Villaine and he are manie miles a sunder. Moth: Content thee Girle, if I could finde a man
I soone would send to Mantua where he is,
That should bestow on him so sure a draught,
As he should soone beare Tybalt companie. Iul: Finde you the meanes, and Ile finde such a man:
For whilest he liues, my heart shall nere be light
Till I behold him, dead is my poore heart.
Thus for a Kinsman vext? Moth: Well let that passe.

This version of the play doesn't have the "like he" sentence, but I want to point something out about it anyhow: Juliet's responses are full of double meanings, both syntactic and semantic. Thus the alternate parses

[For whilest he liues my heart shall nere be light till I behold him dead]
[is my poore heart thus for a Kinsman vext?]

and

[For whilest he liues my heart shall nere be light till I behold him]
[dead is my poore heart thus for a Kinsman vext?]

And "Villaine and he are manie miles a sunder" is open to two interpretations as well, depending on which direction you go in separating "Romeo" from "Villaine".

Oddly, it's even more unclear how to collect her mother's clauses into syntactically coherent sentences:

Content thee Girle, if I could finde a man
I soone would send to Mantua where he is,
That should bestow on him so sure a draught,
As he should soone beare Tybalt companie.

It's obvious what Lady Capulet means (that she would have Romeo poisoned if she could find an agent), but what's the structure? Should we assume an omitted complementizer "if I could finde a man [that] I soone would send", and interpret "that should bestow…" as the main clause, with "that [man]" as the subject, yielding the structure (in paraphrase)

[If I could find a man [whom I could immediately send to Mantua]] [that man would poison Romeo]

Or should we interpret "I soone would send…" as the main clause, with "that should bestow…" as a headless relative acting as the object of send:

[If I could find a man] [I would immediately send to Mantua [someone who would poison Romeo]]

Or is it something else entirely?  None of these are grammatical in modern English. Maybe the structure as well as the meaning was obvious to Shakespeare's audience — but I wonder.

The version of the same interaction from Quarto 2, 1599, is longer, and this time the "like he" phrase appears:

La. Wel gyrle, thou weepst not so much for his death,
As that the villaine liues which slaughterd him. Iu: What villaine Madam? La. That same villaine Romeo. Iu: Villaine and he be many miles a sunder:
God pardon, I do with all my heart:
And yet no man like he, doth greeue my heart. La. That is because the Traytor murderer liues. Iu: I Madam from the reach of these my hands:
Would none but I might venge my Cozens death. La. We will haue vengeance for it, feare thou not.
Then weepe no more, Ile send to one in Mantua,
Where that same bannisht runnagate doth liue,
Shall giue him such an vnaccustomd dram,
That he shall soone keepe Tybalt companie:
And then I hope thou wilt be satisfied. Iu: Indeed I neuer shall be satisfied
With Romeo, till I behold him. Dead
Is my poore heart so for a kinsman vext:
Madam if you could find out but a man
To beare a poyson, I would temper it:
That Romeo should vpon receit thereof,
Soone sleepe in quiet. O how my heart abhors
To heare him namde and cannot come to him,
To wreake the loue I bore my Cozen,
Vpon his body that hath slaughterd him.

Here Juliet's ambiguity (one of many) is repeated in somewhat different words:

[Indeed I neuer shall be satisfied with Romeo till I behold him dead]
[Is my poore heart so for a kinsman vext]

versus

[Indeed I neuer shall be satisfied with Romeo till I behold him]
[Dead is my poore heart so for a kinsman vext]

Lady Capulet's clauses, though different, still seem to be at least one complementizer short of a sentence:

Then weepe no more, Ile send to one in Mantua,
Where that same bannisht runnagate doth liue,
Shall giue him such an vnaccustomd dram,
That he shall soone keepe Tybalt companie:

And now we have Juliet's "like he" phrase in context:

Villaine and he be many miles a sunder:
God pardon, I do with all my heart:
And yet no man like he, doth greeue my heart.

The first two lines might be an aside, not meant for her mother's ears (though the first, again, is  ambiguous, as before). The third line, "And yet no man like he, doth greeve my heart", is pragmatically ambiguous enough to serve her needs — does her heart grieve for Romeo the unpunished murderer or for Romeo the endangered lover? — but the syntactic structure is again unclear, as indicated at the start of this post.

And the context makes it worse, not better. The expression "God pardon __" is fairly common in Shakespeare, but always with an object. In modernized spelling:

… the unhappy king (whose wrongs in us God pardon) …
… as both of you, God pardon it, have done …
… God pardon all oaths that are broke to me …
… God pardon them, that are the cause thereof …
… God pardon sin, wast thou with Rosaline? …

It would make sense (and a ten-syllable line) to add "him" after "pardon" — but the first Folio (1623) doesn't, although it adds a comma and changes the spelling of a couple of  words:

Villaine and he, be many Miles assunder:
God pardon, I doe with all my heart:
And yet no man like he, doth grieue my heart.

Is there another way to fit these lines together? Not that I can see, at least without another cup of coffee. But the whole scene seems to be a collection of clausal shards that fit together in more than one way, or not at all.

I don't know whether this is artistic intent, or scribal unreliability, or just the dislocation of linguistic distance. But in any case, I suggest that we leave Juliet out of the conjunctive like controversy. The poor girl has her own troubles, linguistic as well as romantic.

The "show open topic" for this week's Car Talk, according to the show's web page, is "Tom and Ray translate the grunts of mechanics".

It starts like this:

In fact, Alexandra Sellers' Spoken Cat was published a dozen years ago, and similarly, the Newsweek article about it (Lucy Howard and Carla Koehl, "Talk The Talk"), ran on May 5, 1997. But Tom and Ray are not broadcasting from a parallel space-time continuum. Rather, this is an "encore edition", which apparently means that the jokes — and the automobile repair advice? — are 12 years old.

Luckily, animal communication, like car repair, is an evergreen. And so is Tom and Ray's glossary of car mechanic's noises. (Since they're grease monkeys themselves, they're entitled to make what might seem, if it came from another NPR personality, like a snooty elitist joke about the subhuman nature of the lower orders.)

You can listen to the whole thing in context from the show's web page linked above (at least for the next week), or download it as an mp3 file here (I think that should be a somewhat durable link).

Here's the first one.

As you can hear, the performance is, shall we say, subtly variable.

And the official translation? "Hi, how are you?"

Here's the next one:

Ray (or is it Tom, I've lost track at this point) guesses "I think I know what's wrong with this car", but that's "going too deep" — it turns out to mean "Fine, thanks".

The next guess is wrong too:

But then they get in sync:

And stay that way for a while:

Though another communicative failure comes up at the end:

Tom and Ray get more laughs out of this than most students of non-verbal communication do; but they've hit on the serious essence of the problem: such signals generate a sense of recognition (if not always a belly-laugh) when prcessed in context, but they're very hard to understand in the abstract, because of their almost complete lack of referential anchoring.

[In other inter-species communication news, the Bowlingual is back, and now comes with an answering machine. Like I said, evergreen.

And here's today's Non Sequitur:

…just to remind us that interspecies misunderstanding is not all one-sided.]

It was widely reported in Walter Cronkite's obituaries that "Swedish anchors are known as Kronkiters; In Holland, they are Cronkiters." Or by some accounts it's the Swedes who use "Cronkiters." This too-good-to-check linguafactoid came up in the comments on my post "Walter Leland Mr. Cronkite," and commenter Lugubert swiftly dismissed the Swedish claim:

Google "cronkiter" and you'll find all hits are in English. Smells of myth. I, Swede, 66, multilingual professional translator, have never seen or heard that word in any language. I'm afraid (read: convinced) that Mr. C is totally unknown by an overwhelming majority of Swedes.

If, never the less, a similar word would have been adopted into Swedish by the cognoscenti, I'm at least fairly sure that the for Swedish very odd -er would immediately have been replaced by a more normal nomen agentis ending like -erare.

There's no reason to believe the Dutch part of the story, either. Read all about it in my latest Word Routes column on the Visual Thesaurus.

Emily Finn, "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Linguistics", in the most recent NYT Education News:

My college admissions essay said it all — if only I had stopped and listened to myself at the time. I was more concerned with finding a hook that would set me apart from the tens of thousands of other applicants, who were, of course, trying to do the same thing.

At my affluent public high school, potential pre-meds and Wall Streeters (yes, at age 17) lined the hallways. Foreign languages were a more unlikely passion. So I seized on that, choosing to narrate my journey from middle-school Francophilia to full-blown foreign grammar nerd.

Looking through the brochures accumulated on endless campus visits, I didn’t find many schools that offered bachelor’s degrees to people who studied a random assortment of languages, and wanderlust made me reluctant to choose one. But most offered a major in something called linguistics. Maybe by professing my appetite for such a charmingly obscure course of study, I could win over the admissions officers.

It got her into Yale (though I suspect there were a few other factors). Anyhow, in the end, this self-presentation strategem worked out for her in other ways. She surprised herself by actually majoring in linguistics, and was seduced by her senior thesis:

“You know,” my friend David said, “this research is just about the only thing I’ve ever heard you talk about with any sort of enthusiasm or passion . . . except for, like, partying or the Giants or something. Why don’t you go get a Ph.D.?”

“I — but — ” I stuttered. Graduate school? Me? I’ve never been particularly academic. My parents weren’t academics. As a staunch commitment-phobe, I thought devoting one’s whole life to the study of some minute cluster of phenomena was utterly unfathomable. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized David had a point. There was nothing in college I cared about so deeply as this. I felt indignant; research had sneaked up on me. Who would have thought that I would discover, in February of senior year, that what I was majoring in was actually what I was interested in? I think Professor Piñango saw it coming before I did. The following Monday, I was anxious to share what I had termed my quarter-life crisis. I burst dramatically into her office.

“You know what I realized? I really like this stuff!” I exclaimed. “I can work on it for hours on end and it never feels like a chore.” She was unfazed. “Yeah? So? Go to grad school.”

I think I will.

My own reasons for majoring in linguistics were even more accidental. I entered college with sophomore standing, and so I had to declare a major right away. I wanted to major in math, but this required an interview with the department chair, Prof. Gleason, who was distinctly not encouraging.

"Tell me, young man," he said, peering at me coldly over the top of his glasses, "what new theorems have you proved?"

"Well", I said, taken aback, "just the ones I was assigned for homework, or on tests. But those weren't new, I guess…"

"Exactly," he said. "As a rule, we find that mathematical talent shows itself early. So if you haven't made an original contribution by the time you enter college, the chances are that you won't ever do so. I tell you this for your own good."

I felt somewhat disappointed, since no one had told me before that perfect scores on the SAT mathematics and AP calculus exams were an inadequate qualification for undergraduate study in mathematics. But I could take a hint, and so I decided to seek my fortune elsewhere.

My next idea was "applied mathematics", which was a separate department. But as I recall, you couldn't major in plain "applied mathematics", it had to be "X and applied mathematics", for some value of X. Looking at the alternatives, I stumbled on a magnificent loophole in the general education requirements — the authorities were apparently unsure where linguistics belonged in the Great Chain of Academic Being, and so any linguistics course could be counted against the requirements in natural science, social science, or humanities, at the student's discretion. Even though I fully intended to take courses in all of those areas, the opportunity to do so without compulsion was irrationally irresistible. So I signed up as a major in "linguistics and applied math".

After some twists and turns, this worked out as well for me as it seems to be doing for Ms. Finn. Her description is a pretty good recommendation, don't you think? "I can work on it for hours on end and it never feels like a chore."

I've heard from others that Andrew Gleason's advice to me was his standard speech in those days to would-be math majors. Years later, I found myself on the same conference program with him (it was an event in honor of Nicholas Metropolis), and I teased him a bit about this advice. He explained that he regarded undergraduate majors as an unwelcome distraction, for the most part, and also felt that encouraging less talented students to pursue the subject did them no favor, given the poor job market for professional mathematicians. If I'd come in as a freshman, I probably would have learned enough in my first year to ignore his advice, if I really wanted to. Anyhow, no regrets.

For college-bound high school students, that long-closed general-education loophole still has a useful moral. As a "linguist", you can work in areas that span the disciplinary spectrum: mathematics, natural science, social science, humanities, medicine, public policy, engineering, … So if you like the idea of not having to specialize too narrowly, or you're having a hard time making up your mind, give us a look. (Of course, a positive interest in some aspects of speech, language and communication is also a plus — but most people qualify on that dimension.)

This week's NYT On Language column features Patricia T. O'Conner and Stuart Kellerman defending singular they ("All Purpose Pronoun", 7/26/2009). They lead, topically, with the value of shedding five characters from "he or she" to help stay under the limit of 140 characters per tweet. And they blame the retreat from singular they to sex-neutral he on Anne Fisher:

If any single person is responsible for this male-centric usage, it’s Anne Fisher, an 18th-century British schoolmistress and the first woman to write an English grammar book, according to the sociohistorical linguist Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade. Fisher’s popular guide, “A New Grammar” (1745), ran to more than 30 editions, making it one of the most successful grammars of its time. More important, it’s believed to be the first to say that the pronoun he should apply to both sexes.

Minus the topical lede, much of this material is to be found in their excellent recent book, Origins of the Specious: Myths and Misconceptions of the English Language, which is organized as a collection of bite-sized essays with clever heads. Specifically, this week's column draws on "To He or Not to He" (pp. 137-138), and "Gender Bending" (pp. 141-145).

O'Connor and Kellerman urge the anti-they forces ("atheyists"?) to give up their misguided and hopeless fight:

Meanwhile, many great writers — Byron, Austen, Thackeray, Eliot, Dickens, Trollope and more — continued to use they and company as singulars, never mind the grammarians. In fact, so many people now use they in the old singular way that dictionaries and usage guides are taking a critical look at the prohibition against it. R. W. Burchfield, editor of The New Fowler’s Modern English Usage, has written that it’s only a matter of time before this practice becomes standard English: “The process now seems irreversible.” Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) already finds the singular they acceptable “even in literary and formal contexts,” but the Usage Panel of The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.) isn’t there yet.

It’s a shame that grammarians ever took umbrage at the singular they. After all, they gave you a slide. It began life as a plural object pronoun and evolved into the whole enchilada: subject and object, singular and plural. But umbrage the grammarians took, and like it or not, the universal they isn’t universally accepted — yet. Its fate is now in the hands of the jury, the people who speak the language. Yes, even those who use only 140 characters a pop.

It's a bit disappointing that O'Conner and Kellerman fail to cite scripture.

Still, it would be nice if the Gray Lady's management decided to give this couple Safire's gig when he retires, assuming that Dave Barry continues to hold out. There's a decade's worth of columns in their book, and plenty of evidence that they could spin out more as targets of opportunity arise.

Barbara Phillips Long pointed me to Prof. James Maule's  tax-law blog, Mauled Again, because, she wrote, "he touches on three areas that intrigue me –language, teaching and economics". So I followed the link and read a few pages, and I was struck by a number of implicit connections. For example, his approach to teaching the tax code reminded me of the way I was taught, many years ago, to "construe" Latin texts:

I take the students through an analysis of how Code sections and Treasury regulation sections are constructed, showing them that the secret to parsing the language is … to break the conglomeration of words into phrases and other segments and then to re-connect them, preferably in a manner that resembles English more than what I call "tax-ese."

Prof. Maule goes into the process in considerable additional detail, and it really does seem to be closely analogous to the traditional pedagogical technique described in the OED's sense 3 of construe:

To analyse or trace the grammatical construction of a sentence; to take its words in such an order as to show the meaning of the sentence; spec. to do this in the study of a foreign and especially a classical language, adding a word for word translation; hence, loosely, to translate orally a passage in an ancient or foreign author.

This approach long ago fell out of fashion as a way to teach foreign languages, for mostly good reasons.  But it also gave students a model for understanding complex material in their native language by an analogous process of analysis and re-synthesis. And a more sophisticated version of the same process remains at the heart of everyday linguistic analysis, where the goal is not simply to understand what a sentence means, but also how and why it means.

Prof. Maule's pedagogical notes are full of other implicit law/linguistics connections. For example,

Finally, I try to instill in the students’ minds the difference between what they think they are going to be doing and what they often will need to do. They are accustomed to working from premises (or facts) to conclusions. Though there is opportunity enough in tax, and in other courses, to engage in this consequential analysis, there also is a need to understand the process of working from a desired conclusion to the premises or facts. As an example of how students enhance my teaching, I did not articulate this aspect of the course in this manner until a student, who had come to my office several times to complain that something was wrong with my teaching and grading because she was a top student but was doing poorly in my tax course, returned to exclaim, "I figured out what you are doing. We spent a year being given A and B, with the objective of getting to C, and you’re telling us we have A and want to get to C and are asking us what we need to get there." Bingo.  That’s the essence of transactional work, of tax planning and of planning in many other areas of law.

Being given A, having the objective of getting to C, and trying to figure out "what we need to get there", is an excellent ordinary-language account of the theory of meaning advanced in e.g. Hobbs, Stickel, Martin and Edwards, "Interpretation as Abduction", ACL 26, 1988, which argues that

… the interpretation of a sentence is the least-cost abductive proof of the logical form of the sentence. That is, to interpret a sentence one tries to prove the logical form by using the most salient axioms and other information, exploiting the natural redundancy of discourse to minimize the size of the proof, and allowing the minimal number of consistent and plausible assumptions necessary to make the proof go through. Anaphora are resolved and predications are pragmatically strengthened as a by-product of this process.

(See here and here for some further discussion.)

This is not the first time, or the only reason, that I've wondered whether the right choice for a pre-law major might be an appropriately-designed linguistics program.

Back on June 6, in his post "Drinking the Strunkian Kool-Aid: victims of page 18", Geoff Pullum wrote:

I am not a style doctor or writing adviser, and (unlike Strunk and White) I don't think everyone should write like me. My interest here is solely in the fact that we need an explanation for the fact that educated Americans today have scarcely any clue what "passive clause" means. [emphasis added]

A few days ago, on July 21, (someone going by the name of) David Walker happened on this post and added a comment:

"I don't think everyone should write like me." Me? Is that correct?

The short answer, of course, is "yes". But if you were interested in short answers, you wouldn't be reading Language Log. So after the jump, you'll find a longer one.

Mr. Walker represents (or gives a fine imitation of) the "nervous cluelessness" that modern grammar teaching generates in its victims. He's uneasy about this case, I conjecture, because two shibboleths intersect: "me vs. I" and "like vs. as".

In fact, neither of these prescriptivist bugbears applies here — but the only thing that Walker recalls (or pretends to recall) from his grammatical instruction is that he should be nervous whenever one of these choices arises, and thus doubly nervous when both choices arise at once.

In the quoted phrase ("… everyone should write like me"), like me is a prepositional phrase functioning as a manner adverbial. That is, like takes a noun-phrase complement, as in "walk like an angel", "ran like nobody's business", "handles like a shopping cart with a wobbly wheel"; and the combination  like + NounPhrase serves as an adjunct telling us how someone or something writes, walks, runs,  handles. etc. When the complement happens to be one of the pronouns that still indicates case, it's naturally in the objective case: here "me".

Thus it has been for several hundred years. Shakespeare wrote in Romeo and Juliet "Doting like me, and like me banished". Thomas Campion's My sweetest Lesbia, let us live and love ("Set foorth to be song to the Lute, Orpherian, and Base Violl") attempted to improve on Catullus Carmen 5 with these lines:

If all would lead their lives in love like mee,
Then bloudie swords and armour should not be,
No drum nor trumpet peaceful sleepes should move,
Unles alar'me came from the campe of love.

Swift, in The Lady's Dressing Room:

He soon would learn to think like me,
And bless his ravisht Sight to see
Such Order from Confusion sprung,
Such gaudy Tulips rais'd from Dung.

Southey, To Lycon:

Be mine, in age's drooping hour, to see
The lisping children climb their grandsire's knee,
And train the future race to live and act like me.

Shelley, Julian and Maddolo:

Even the instinctive worm on which we tread
Turns, though it wound not–then with prostrate head
Sinks in the dust and writhes like me–and dies?
No: wears a living death of agonies!

Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop: "… he told me about my mother, and how she once looked and spoke just like me when she was a little child".

And so on.  So why does Walker (pretend to?) worry about whether me is "correct"?

The first reason involves a chain of events something like this:

1. Many people say or write things like "you and me were meant to be".
2. Others complain that this is illogical — "you and me" is the subject, so it should be "you and I". (Grammar is not logic, cf. French "vous et moi" not "vous et je"; but never mind.)
3. Chastened, some people say or write things like "between you and I".
4. Others then complain that "you and I" is the complement of between, so it should be "you and me".
5. Result: people like Mr. Walker, who have never been taught to recognize subject or complements or any other grammatical entities, enter a state of nervous cluelessness about how to choose between I and me in any case where doubt might arise, and even in many cases where there should never have been any doubt at all.

The second reason is the strange prescriptivist animus against conjunctive like, e.g. "Some people prune English roses like they do Hybrid Teas". The description below is summarized from the account in MWDEU:

1. Like has been used conjunctively (i.e. to introduce a subordinate clause) since the 14th century, by Chaucer, Shakespeare, Keats, Dickens, Shaw, etc.
2. At some point, this became controversial. Noah Webster's 1790 list of "improper and vulgar expressions" included "He thinks like you do"; Tennyson corrected Prince Albert for using conjunctive like; Henry Alford said conjunctive like was "quite indefensible"; and Strunk & White scorned it as "widely misused by the illiterate", and "taken up by the knowing … who use it as if they were slumming".
3. This attitude requires banning (what previously were) perfectly standard and commonplace uses (Winston Churchill: "We were overrun by them, like the Australians were by rabbits").
4. No fault is thereby found with like <noun-phrase>; but the prescription against the standard and still-common instances of conjunctive like leaves the Walkers of the world in a state of nervous cluelessness about any use of like at all.

Q.E.D.

Mr. Walker reads "I don't think everyone should write like me", and  thinks (or pretends to think?), "Wait, isn't there something wrong with that?"

We usually avoid shop talk here on Language Log. So those of you who are here for the cartoons may want to move along, since I'm about to (mis-?) use this forum to announce a new journal.

The Journal of Experimental Linguistics is part of the Linguistic Society of America's eLanguage initiative. Like the rest of eLanguage, JEL is an Open Access online journal. Regular publication will begin towards the end of 2009.

JEL is a linguistic "journal of reproducible research", that is, a journal of reproducible computational experiments on topics related to speech and language. These experiments may involve the analysis of previously­ published corpus data, or of experiment­-specific data that is published for the occasion. Other relevant categories include computational simulations, implementations of diagnostic techniques or task scoring methods, methodological tutorials, and reviews of relevant new publications (including new data and software).

In all cases, JEL articles will be accompanied by executable recipes for re­creating all figures, tables, numbers and other results. These recipes will be in the form of source code that runs in some generally-­available computational environment.

Although JEL is centered in linguistics, we aim to publish research from the widest possible range of disciplines that engage speech and language experimentally, from electrical engineering and computer science to education, psychology, biology, and speech pathology. In this interdisciplinary context, "reproducible research" is especially useful in helping experimental and analytical techniques to cross over from one sub­field to another.

Publication is in online digital form only, with articles appearing as they complete the review process. A rigorous but rapid process of peer review, designed to take no more than 4-6 weeks from submission to publication, will be supplemented by a vigorously­-promoted system for adding moderated remarks and replies after publication.

The editorial board, in alphabetical order, is Alan Black, Steven Bird, Harald Baayen, Paul Boersma, Tim Bunnell, Khalid Choukri, Christopher Cieri, John Coleman, Eric Fosler­-Lussier, John Goldsmith, Jen Hay, Stephen Isard, Greg Kochanski, Lori Levin, Mark Liberman, Brian MacWhinney, Ani Nenkova, James Pennebaker, Stuart Shieber, Chilin Shih, David Talkin, Betty Tuller, and Jiahong Yuan. Mark Liberman is the editor in chief.

My involvement with this idea started with a Language Log post: "Executable Articles", 1/3/2007. There was some further discussion, on the blog and off, and Dieter Stein asked me to organize a special session on "Open Data and Reproducible Research" at the Berlin 6 Open Access conference. The JEL eLanguage proposal followed; the LSA executive committee approved it;  after some infrastructure work in the background, we're now ready to start accepting submissions; and JEL should be on the air by the end of the year.

A recent xkcd:

Who knew that the guy in the hat was actually Sasha Baron Cohen?

Of course, almost every conversation is a little bit divergent in this way, or there wouldn't be much point in talking.

It has been two weeks now, and so far no one here at Language Log Plaza has commented on the BBC News story entitled "Monkeys recognize bad grammar." I suppose people are assuming that I cover the Stupid Animal Communication Stories desk. And often I have. But I have been procrastinating, because I am getting tired of being the animal grammar killjoy. People are beginning to think I hate monkeys and dogs and parrots and dolphins and such (my previous posts include this one and this one and this one and this one and this one and this one and this one and this one and probably others).

The little animals in question (it's cottontop tamarins again) are cute. I don't have anything against them, or against the experiments on them being done by people like Marc Hauser. In the present case, the team was led by Ansgar Endress. And here is the evidence for these little creatures' ability to "recognize bad grammar". It's quite simple, and I don't think it's going to get them jobs as copy editors.

It turns out that if you expose a cottontop tamarin to a recording of someone saying shoy-bi, shoy-la, shoy-ro, etc., over and over again for a whole day, they get used to it; and then the next day if you do it some more, but then interrupt the monotony with the sound of someone saying bi-shoy, or la-shoy, they look at the sound source. It's novel to them now, and the novelty surprises them a little bit, so they look at the loudspeaker. That's it.

Clever monkeys: they know the sound sequences of the current ambient environment, and they're alert to what's new in the auditory environment. But really: recognizing bad grammar? I suppose Harvard behavioral scientists have to make their papers sound potentially relevant to cognition, and BBC science reporters have to make stories sound potentially interesting, and a headline like "Monkeys recognize changes in their auditory environment" would not set the world (or the World Service) on fire. But that seems to be what we have here. The researchers have just dressed up the description of the recorded sounds in linguistic terminology ("prefixation", "suffixation"). But it's not clear to me that a monkey's ability to notice the difference between shoybi and bishoy is any more linguistically interesting than an ability to notice the difference between thump-splash and splash-thump, or to notice that your door chime has just gone DONG DING instead of DING DONG or that you just changed the radio station.

The recent discussion of how to pronounce "Uyghur", and especially the treatment of the medial consonant, brought up the case of yoghurt/yogurt, which in French is "yaourt" — and today on the Omniglot Blog the Word of the Day is yaourter, "to yoghurt", which is said to be

a French word for the way people attempt to speak or sing in a foreign language that they don’t know very well. Often they mishear and misinterpret the word or lyrics and substitute them with familiar words.

Some of the comments on the Omniglot post suggest that the English equivalent is the noun mondegreen. I've never heard anyone verbing mondegreen, and a bit of web search doesn't turn up much except for the http://twitter.com/mondegreened (which I'm sorry to say belong to someone named "Julian", not "Ed"), and a post on "The mondegreening of America", and a few other things.

But it seems that the key thing about the French word is the nonsense imitation of another language, which is more like a specialization of doubletalk than a verbal equivalent of mondegreen.

There's nothing available from Gallica,  nor from wordreference.com, nor from the Dictionnaire de l'Académie Française, so (pending asking Francophone friends) I need to fall back on general web search. And that turns up things like this comment:

Just for the story, in France, when we don't speak English and we want to imitate the sound, we call it "yaourter"(to yoghourt), the imitation sounds like a very nasal language, kind of like a baby crying. It mostly imitates the "cowboy" accent.

Or this one:

Prenez une poignée de bons amis, de préférence des amis aimant chanter, chantonner, fredonner ou même yaourter. Et qui n’ont pas spécialement peur, les liquides houblonnés aidant, de se cramer la honte dans des bars où ils sont pourtant connus. Mettez leur entre les pattes une petite boite carrée pleine de cartes, nommée Shabadabada, et laissez agir quelques heures. Observez le résultat : il semblerait qu’ils alternent des phases de faisage de gueule et d’autres de franche rigolade.

Or again this:

… j'ai rajouté de la super musique dans le lecteur sur votre droite… Playlist à chanter, yaourter, meumeumer, hurler, casseroler aussi!…

These examples do make it seem as if yaourter is a mode of vocal production, with any sense of "slip of the ear" being very much secondary. And it's not clear to me whether imitating the sound of another language is central to its meaning, or if it's rather something more like scat-singing, or sung double-talk, or something like that.

English has a lot of words for speaking or singing nonsensically, but I can't think of any word that refers specifically to nonsensical imitations of the speech of foreigners, although there's a long anglophone tradition of producing such imitations for the amusement of others.

It isn't often that I encounter an English word that I don't know other than names of chemical compounds, but I recently learned a new word for something not all that obscure. In a context in which I expected the word monopoly, I encountered monopsony. At first I thought it was a mistake, but it recurred. It turns out that economists distinguish between monopolies and monopsonies. When there is a single source for a product, that is a monopoly, but when there is only a single buyer for a product, that is a monopsony. Who knew?

The classic example of a monopsony is what I have hitherto known as the Chinese salt monopoly. Throughout most of Chinese history, anybody could produce salt, but they had to sell it to the government, which then sold it to consumers. This is why the classic work of Chinese economics, the proceedings of a conference held in 81 BCE with appended commentary, is entitled 塩鉄論 Discourses on Salt and Iron.

Don Asmussen's Bad Reporter for 5/27/2009:

This reminds me of some of the discussions of California's ballot proposition system — and since the cartoon came out the day after the California Supreme Court ruled on Proposition 8, I guess that it was supposed to.

The xkcd cartoon calls it "qwertial aphasia", but aphasia isn't quite the right term. The phenomenon is by no means unknown, however.

By the way, qwertial is a cute derivative from QWERTY.

(Hat tip to John Riemann Soong.)

[Addenda 7/22/09: I now realize that qwertial is also not really appropriate; the intrusive elements aren't single letters, but whole expressions.

Next, a message from Bruce Rusk:

Your post on LL today says of the accidental inclusion of spoken words in writing that “The phenomenon is by no means unknown, however.” Certainly true: a parable recounted by the 3rd-century BCE Chinese thinker Han Fei tells of a man who was writing at night and told the servant holding the light to “raise the lamp.” As he did so he accidentally inserted the words “raise the lamp” into his letter, setting off a chain of events of which Han Fei makes a great deal. So the phenomenon has probably been around as long as writing (or at least easy writing with pen or brush).

Finally, a note on aphasia. Sometimes when I cite ordinary-life examples of glitches of one kind or another, people identify them as aphasic, explaining that they're just the sort of thing you hear (or read) from aphasics. This is true, but in an important sense it has the relationship backwards. There are all sorts of everyday speech errors, and they aren't symptoms of pathology. Instead, in aphasias and other language pathologies, errors occur much more frequently and in greater profusion (making speech and writing often very hard to understand) — but with rare exceptions, the errors in language pathologies are of the same sort as everyday errors.]