Being Human

An editorial by Miranda Robertson in the latest Journal of Biology, "Of primordial genomes and cooperative kittens", discusses the problems that horizontal gene transfers pose for phylogenetic analysis of bacterial genomes:

The extraction of tree structures from the web of gene transfers requires that transferred genes be subtracted by some means from the database of genes used to construct the trees. […]

Whether because of horizontal gene transfer or the compression of branching events early in the evolution of prokaryotes, the lines of vertical descent […] defy resolution, at least for now and perhaps for ever. There is a character in the comic opera The Mikado, by WS Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, who claims: 'I can trace my ancestry to a protoplasmal primordial atomic globule. Consequently my family pride is something inconceivable.' Inconceivable and probably misplaced, it would seem. The character is named, more appropriately even than Gilbert could have imagined, Pooh-Bah.

As you'll see if you read the editorial and the articles it references, the analogies between the evolution of species and of languages are closer than Charles Darwin knew when he first suggested the metaphor. Like languages, species exhibit the borrowing of traits ("horizontal gene transfer"), and also areal features ("false vertical signals reflecting preferential gene transfer between bacterial species from quite separate branches of the phylogenetic tree and that happen to share a habitat").

One difference: horizontal gene transfer, as I understand it, is much less common as you look higher up in the evolutionary tree of species. (Though I guess there are some theories according to which rates and even types of linguistic "horizontal transfer" might have been strikingly different in different historical periods.)

As for the cooperative kittens,

Sleeping kittens are invoked to explain the Monod-Wyman-Changeux model for cooperative binding of oxygen by hemoglobin, in which it is assumed that oxygen binding to one subunit has no effect on the affinity of the other subunits for oxygen, but that the conformational changes that increase or decrease oxygen affinity occur in unison. Readers who find the behavior of kittens easier to understand than the behavior of molecules may be encouraged by the analogy to read the non-kitten paragraphs too.

There are linguistic analogies here as well, but I'll leave those for another day.

Normal 0 0 1 189 1082 9 2 1328 11.1282 0 0 0

A few years ago, before my wife was released from the hospital after hip replacement surgery, her leg began swelling up and she had great pain and discomfort. Quickly she was sent back to surgery to have a previously undetected bleeder repaired. The highly respected surgeon obviously missed it. Next day a huge bouquet of roses appeared in her hospital room, sent by that very doctor. And then, perhaps coincidentally, he retired from practice within the next few weeks. I don’t recall now whether he actually said he was sorry for his error, but the roses gave us every indication that he was. It was a malpractice suit waiting to happen.

We had no intention to sue him and we didn’t, but of course he couldn’t have known that. We were actually pleased that he acknowledged his error (indirectly at least). Contrary to the belief of some surgeons, he was as subject to error-making as any other human being.

These days it looks like saying you’re sorry seems to be catching on in the medical world (see here). According to this article, it not only makes everyone feel better, but saying you’re sorry also actually cuts down on medical malpractice suits. I'd guess that being honest is one way to deal with the current debates about cutting medical costs. As many politicians are learning these days, things get much worse when you try to cover up your mistakes.

It's common practice in the trademark world to never, never, never use your trademarked name as a verb or a noun. If you do this, you'll be committing genericide, because your brand name will surely lose its distinctiveness and pretty soon you'll be losing your market edge. Why else would Xerox try so hard to teach us to say " to photocopy" rather than "to xerox"? Always use your name as an adjective, "Xerox photocopiers." But the New York Times reports that Microsoft's Steve Ballmer doesn't much believe in common practice, and he's now busily ignoring what everyone else is doing. He wants us to say, "he will bing you tomorrow," which more problematically might lead to, "he banged you yesterday."   

Maybe Ballmer recognizes that things change so rapidly in this wonderful electronic age that there's no real benefit to be derived from long-term brand names. But while Google is still holding firm against "googling" and "googled," I wonder if Ballmer is on to something here. He seems to delight in the possibility that  Bing has the potential "to verb up."

Commenting on the recent flurry of commentary about the political first person singular, D.G. Myers has some thoughts on "Self-reference and narcissicism":

Person reflects genre. Despite the fact that he is an eighteenth-century author like Sterne and Chesterfield, Franklin uses the first person more often because he is writing an autobiography, a literary kind that, except when it is an exercise in voluble self-concealment, like The Education of Henry Adams, depends helplessly upon the first person. Similarly, to accuse David Copperfield of “ego-involvement”—he uses some form of the first person 6.3% of the time—does not seem quite right. David is as much a “camera” as Christopher in The Berlin Stories; he is at least as interested in the people in his life as in himself.

Myers quotes David Cooperfield's first encounter with Uriah Heep, and notes

David refers to himself eleven times in this passage—exactly five percent of the words are first-person forms—while referring to Heep just seven times (ten, if the references to Heep’s eyes almost as impersonal objects are included). Yet his entire attention is on Heep, not himself. The narrative strategy is to register Heep’s effect, because that is how—at least for Dickens—a man is to be judged.

There's another possibility as well. One of Jamie Pennebaker's generalizations about the social-psychology literature on pronoun usage is that in conversation, "Usually, the higher status speaker will use fewer 'I' words." This is not, I suppose, because the lower-status speaker is registering the other's effect out loud.  But perhaps in such situations, the higher-status person can afford to focus on the content of the discussion, while someone in a socially inferior role needs to worry more about the  relationship and how they should or can fit into it. And this might be true even even of their interior conversation with themselves, as in the Dickens passage that Myers analyzes.

To learn more about these questions requires counting how pronouns are used, not just how many of which are where.  For a classic non-pronominal example  where looking at function leads to a different conclusion from simply looking at form, see "Gender and tags", 5/9/2004.

Myers continues:

Unless first-person genres and their self-referential purposes are taken into account, complaints like Fish’s and Noonan’s about “self-reverence” and the “imperial possession” are empty moralizing.

Hear, hear.

When a big news story is breaking, like the passing of Walter Cronkite, it's not surprising that reporters and editors might be a little hasty in getting the word out. Jan Freeman of the Boston Globe spotted a search-and-replace error in the Chicago Tribune's online obituary for Cronkite, where all instances of "Cronkite" got replaced by "Mr. Cronkite." Here's a screenshot of the uncorrected version:

Jan writes:

I could get used to this form of address; after all, it's no weirder than "Richard, Cardinal Cushing" or "George Gordon, Lord Byron." But I think a daughter might prefer the feminine form: "Kathy, Ms. Cronkite."

Jan initially called this a Cupertino error, but since there is no spellchecker to blame, I would classify it as a more general search-and-replace error, based on an inaccurately applied style policy. In this case, the style policy is that recently deceased males get called "Mr." by the Tribune.

As I discussed in the post "Incorrections in the newsroom: Cupertino and beyond," the classic example of this is the old canard about a newspaper replacing "back in the black" with "back in the African American." Turns out this story originated as a practical joke by a prankster at the Fresno Bee in 1990, but in that post I provide a couple of real examples of search-and-replace errors — including the fascinating Reuters report that revealed, "Queen Elizabeth has 10 times the lifespan of workers and lays up to 2,000 eggs a day." (Blame that on a search-and-replace of "the queen" with "Queen Elizabeth.") And more recently, a conservative Christian news site managed to change the name of sprinter Tyson Gay to "Tyson Homosexual."

[Update: The Trib has already corrected the article. But the screenshot lives on.]

I recently learned from Geoff Nunberg that there's a small-world step beyond the Erdős number — the Erdős–Bacon number. Geoff tells me that mine is 8, or maybe 9.According to the Wikipedia,

A person's Erdős–Bacon number is [..] the sum of one's Erdős number—which measures the "collaborative distance" in authoring mathematical papers between that individual and Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős—and one's Bacon number—which represents the number of links, through roles in films, by which the individual is separated from American actor Kevin Bacon.

My Erdős number is 3 [J. B. Kruskal and M. Y. Liberman, 1983: "The symmetric time-warping problem: From continuous to discrete", in D. Sankoff and J.B. Kruskal (eds.), Time Warps, String Edits and Macromolecules, Addison-Wesley; A. J. Hoffman and J. B. Kruskal, 1956: "Integral boundary points of convex polyhedra", Annals of Mathematics Study 38:223-241; P. Erdős, S. Fajtlowicz and A. J. Hoffman, 1980: "Maximum degree in graphs of diameter 2″, Networks 10:87-96.] And apparently Geoff's Bacon number is 4, which might entitle me to a Bacon number of 5 or 6,  depending on which activities are counted as the right kind of graph edge.

It's actually possible that my Bacon number is lower, since I've been interviewed on radio (does that count?) and television over the years by personalities whose Bacon number might well be lower than 5. And while it's unlikely that I'll lower my Erdős number in the future, I certainly might lower my Bacon number. Something to look forward to…

It's been a couple of years since we looked at Erdős numbers here on Language Log; see the posting by Sally Thomason here and the ones by by Geoff Pullum here and here. A fuller explanation of Erdős numbers can be found in those postings, but here it's enough to say that your Erdős number is is your minimal distance from the incredibly productive and collaborative mathematician Paul Erdős via a chain of joint publications. There are linguists with Erdős numbers of 2 (András Kornai), 3 (Geoff Pullum, via András), and 4 (me, via Geoff).

Now cartoon xkcd gives us (on 19 June) a view of what happens when the Apocalypse is on its way and the news gets to mathematicians:

(Hat tip to Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky.)

… on my blog:

http://arnoldzwicky.wordpress.com/2009/07/14/postings-on-internalexternal-inflection/
(on internal/external inflection)

http://arnoldzwicky.wordpress.com/2009/07/16/835/
postings about or (semantics of)

Yet another Rhymes With Orange cartoon, mostly silliness, about tongue twisters:

There's tons of stuff on tongue twisters, most of it what I think of as "tongue twister appreciation": collections  of them, sometimes in a number of languages, for the reader's enjoyment.

There's also a certain amount of technical literature about them, in particular some linguistic studies about the patterns that make people prone to the errors (of the substitution/transposition type) in certain expressions. The /s/-/ʃ/ alternations in "She sells seashells …" are somewhat troublesome, but far from the worst there is (as in things like "rubber baby buggy bumpers", which makes grave problems for almost all "normal" speakers, especially when these speakers are asked to repeat the expression).

As far as I know, speech therapists don't use tongue twisters as a teaching tool (though I could be wrong).

According to Peter Bergen, "Winning the good war", Washington Monthly, July/August 2009:

A corollary to the argument that Afghanistan is unconquerable is the argument that it is ungovernable—that the country has never been a functioning nation-state, and that its people, mired in a culture of violence not amenable to Western fixes, have no interest in helping to build a more open and peaceful society. Certainly endemic low-level warfare is embedded in Pashtun society—the words for cousin and enemy in Pashtu, for instance, are the same. [emphasis added]

Ali Soleimani, who sent this link to me, asked:

Naturally, I was somewhat suspicious of the validity of this; and a little looking in online Pashto-English dictionaries indeed failed to turn up any evidence for it. This seems to be fairly comprehensive dictionary, and it contains 8 words whose definitions include "enemy", none of which give "cousin" or anything similar as a meaning. The most common word for 'enemy' (judged by its presence in other dictionaries) seems to be duś̱ẖman (دښمن), glossed as "adversary, enemy, foe." This dictionary does appear to be from the 19th-century, so perhaps the usage has changed since then.

Do you know if the statement is true? And if it isn't, do you have any idea where the author may have gotten the idea?

A version of this claim has been around for a while. The earliest version that I could find is in Sir Denzil Ibbetson, Census Report For the Punjab, 1883, as quoted in H.A. Rose, Glossary of the Tribes and Castes of the Punjab and North West Frontier Province, 1911 (click on the image for a larger version):

But the same dictionary that Ali used (Henry George Raverty, A dictionary of the Puk'hto, Pus'hto, or language of the Afghāns, 1867) gives only the meaning "A father's brother's son, a cousin", for what must be the same word, turbūr.

And the Pashto word for "enemy" that Ali cites is apparently still in use — thus Niloufer Qasim Mahdi, "Pukhtunwali: Ostacism and Honor Among the Pathan Hill Tribes", Ethology and Sociobiology 7: 295-304 (1986): "If a man seeking badal [revenge] is weak vis-a-vis his "dushman" (enemy), he will pass on his obligation to his sons, and they in turn to their sons." But I can't find any evidence that dushman is ever also used as a kinship term.

Readers who know Pashto are invited to comment. Meanwhile, a clue to the source of Ibbetson's (apparently false) claim can be found in Louis Dupree, "Tribal Warfare in Afghanistan and Pakistan", in Akbar Ahmed and David Hart, Eds., Islam in Tribal Societies, 1984:

Language sometimes reveals unarticulated (or downplayed) conflicts in a society. The term for cousin in Pashto is turbur [and] the word for the worst kind of hatred is turburghanay which could be literally translated 'cousin-hatred'. But the non-literate, rural Pushtun deny this interpretation. They say: 'Turbur is turbur and turburghanay is turburghanay. They are separate words. How can they relate? How could I hate my cousin? I would fight to the death with him. I would never leave his body behind in a fight. I would give him my last crust of bread.'

The overwhelming majority of Afghans and Pakistanis cannot read and write, so showing them that the written turbur is a prefix and -ghanay a suffix, which , when combined create a compound word, fails to impress.

So I tentatively conclude that the cousin/enemy meme is another of those linguistic confusions or exaggerations, like Eskimo snow vocabulary and Chinese crisis/opportunity, that are easy to start and hard to stop.

Certainly the cousin/enemy meme has spread widely, and is often reproduced by people who learned about it in Pakistan or Afghanistan, though the people who spread it usually don't tell us what the allegedly singular cousin/enemy word is:

Isabel Hilton, "Letter from Pakistan: Pashtun Code", New Yorker, 2001: Adam Nayyar, a fifty-two-year-old former nuclear chemical engineer, who abandoned his career when Pakistan began trying to build the bomb, in the mid-seventies, is now an ethnomusicologist and an expert on Pashtun culture. I spoke with him at his apartment in Islamabad. “Pashto is the only language I know in which the word for ‘cousin’ is the same as the word for ‘enemy,’ “ he said.

Marcela Gaviria, "In search of Al Qaeda", Frontline (2002): And then there is what I read. For instance, today I learn that in Pashto "cousin" is the same word as "enemy."

"Pakistan Diaries: Darra bazaar": Sarah takes the time to read up on the Afridis and their language, Pashto, and explains that the Star Trek phrase, "Revenge is a dish best served cold" is actually an old Pashto saying. Apparently tribal people have gone as far as Los Angeles to avenge an inter-family quarrel with an honor-killing. Being related to another Afridi appears to offer no protection either, as cousins routinely quarrel over women and money with frightening regularity. Sarah continues to cheerily point out that in Pashto, the words for "cousin" and "enemy" are exactly the same.

The cousin/enemy trope is useful because it highlights a stereotypical characteristic of segmentary lineage systems, which I have often heard illustrated by a proverb that goes something like "I against my brother; my brother and I against our cousin; my cousin and I against a stranger". From a Somali language consultant, I heard a version of this that broke things down into five or six concentric layers of potential inter-segment warfare; and I've heard similar sayings attributed to the Bedouin, to highland Scots — and to the Pashtun.

According to Bernt Glatzer, "The Pashtun Tribal System" (2002):

Pashtuns are said to having developed the world's largest tribal society, and in local thinking the tribal system even encompasses all humanity, as Barakhan, one of my informants, an Atsakzay nomad of Badghis, Northwest Afghanistan, has put it:

"When God created the animals and humans he first created one ant and his spouse, then one buck and his goat, one ram and his sheep … finally one man and his wife, and from these ancestors sprang the tribes (qawm) of the ants, of the goats, of the sheep and finally the tribe of Adam. The offspring of the first ant became the grandfathers (nikagan) of the various tribes (qawm) and subtribes (qawm and khel) of ants …, as Adam's sons became the nikaganqawm), and their sons the nikagan of the tribes (qawm) within these peoples. One of Adam's sons or grandsons was Ibrahim, the nika of all nomads."

An equation of animal and human society is what one might expect from a pastoral nomad, but the main structural elements in this statement are shared by pastoral, agricultural and other Pashtuns: the notion that the divine tribal order unifies and divides all human beings or even all creatures. […]

There is a dilemma in tribal societies: the very tool which enables tribal leaders to establish powerful political entities, the charter of segmentary solidarity, is also instrumental for segmentary division. Once a charismatic leader who masters the instrument of segmentary alliance looses influence or dies the divisive character of the segmentary tribal system will gain the upper hand. Tribal systems do not usually develop institutionalised political power which could tolerate fluctuations in the abilities of individual rulers.

The Pashtun ideal of equality is based on the tribal system. The idea is that all Pashtuns are born equal, and are children of one common ancestor; social and economic inequality, which of course exists, is not given by nature or birth but is achieved individually, and is threatened and open to change at any time.

Whereas the tribal order discourages social hierarchy, it defines social nearness and distance. Pashtuns use their tribal order to mark lines of conflict and solidarity. If I see two men fighting I am supposed to side with the one who is “closer” to me, i.e. the one with whom I share the nearest common patrilineal ancestor.

Going back to the Peter Bergen article that started this off, we find that he follows the cousin/enemy meme with a contrary argument:

But the level of violence in Afghanistan is actually far lower than most Americans believe. In 2008 more than 2,000 Afghan civilians died at the hands of the Taliban or coalition forces; this is too many, but it is also less than a quarter of the deaths last year in Iraq, a country that is both more sparsely populated and often assumed to be easier to govern. (At the height of the violence in Iraq, 3,200 civilians were dying every month, making the country around twenty times more violent than Afghanistan is today.) Not only are Afghan civilians much safer under American occupation than Iraqis, they are also statistically less likely to be killed in the war than anyone living in the United States during the early 1990s, when the U.S. murder rate peaked at more than 24,000 killings a year.

It's worth noting that this is less contrary to the norms of Pukhtunwali than Bergen seems to think. Back to Mahdi:

The most commonly practiced form of punishment, and the cornerstone of Pukhtunwali, is badal. The term is particularly applied to "revenge killing." Badal is an action taken to avenge death, or when the honor of a woman has been involved. When it is a matter to be resolved by badal, the right to avenge by death is the prerogative of the individual immediately concerned, but that right also resides in the family, section, clan, or tribe. Further, badal need not be restricted to action against the culprit, but can be taken against any member of his kinship group.

As a tool of social control, badal is an adaptive punishment and an effective deterrent. […]

Since the obligation of badal devolves upon a kinship group and the target of badal also can be any member of a kinship group, there is pressure on the individual by the group to refrain from letting a situation develop to a point at which it becomes a problem for the other members of the group.

For the above-enumerated reasons, badal acts as a powerful curb on wanton killing. Given the Pathan trait of being quick to anger, the ubiquity of weapons and the facility with which they are resorted to in a quarrel, were it not for the principle of badal, tribal life would degenerate into a Hobbesian state of anarchy and war. It is thus interesting to compare Pukhtunwali to the Social Contract theory of Hobbes and Locke, English political theorists who regarded the state as the inevitable outcome of the desire to end a pre-state condition of anarchy and insecurity.

The discussion following my original post ("A Little Primer of Xinjiang Proper Nouns", 7/13/2009) has proven quite edifying, at least to me.  One thing that I realized from the lively comments is that I forgot to give an indication of how the name Xinjiang itself should be pronounced.  There's also the question of what sort of "pronouncers" or "respellings" to provide for speakers of American English who need to pronounce these names but cannot be expected to render them exactly the way a native speaker of Uyghur would.

I must preface the following remarks by stating that I'm probably not the best person to offer standard American English readings of these names because I'm a fluent speaker of Mandarin and know a bit of Uyghur. Consequently, when I want to say these words as an American would, I'm afraid that my Mandarin and my Uyghur get in the way. Still, I will make an honest effort to separate the three modes and offer useful guides for speakers of American English.

Xin1jiang1 新疆 The Uyghur pronunciation of this Mandarin term is Shinjang شىنجاڭ.   I think that it's all right for an American simply to say the name Xinjiang about the way the Uyghurs do: SHIN-jahng (I put the "h" in there to lengthen the "a"). Being acculturated to Mandarin, I find it hard to avoid saying something like SHIN-jeeahng, even when I'm trying to speak as an American.

Recordings of Xinjiang:

1. Mandarin   

2. American English

a. unmodified

b. modified

"Sinkiang", the Postal Map Romanization of the name, represents a time / place / dialect (Shanghai, 1906) before the palatalization of the velars (compare Peking and Beijing).

As for how the Uyghurs themselves refer to Xinjiang (Eastern Central Asia to me), depending upon what part of it they come from or the circumstances in which they are speaking, they will call it variously Uyghur Eli (country of the Uyghurs), Uyghur Diyari (Uyghur land), Uyghur Rayoni (Uyghur Region), Sherki Türkistan (Eastern Türkistan), or Uyghuristan, and so forth.

We've gone over the variant spellings of Uyghur in my earlier post, so now we have to confront the diverse pronunciations that have been applied to this name. First of all, I don't see how anyone can get "weewer" out of what the Uyghur speaker twice says very clearly in the recording. Due to severe tinnitus, my ears are very bad, but I can distinctly hear a guttural "gh" sound at the beginning of the second syllable. Now, it is very difficult for an American to pronounce this sound the way the Uyghurs do, and I don't think it's necessary for someone speaking English to attempt it. On the other hand, we needn't resort to something like "wigger" either. I think wee-GOOR / WEE-goor and WEE-gur are both fine for American English. Most people I know do say WEE-gur, as the NYT had it, and that seems quite natural, although wee-GOOR / WEE-goor more nearly approximates the Turkic sounds. Now, when I'm in the presence of Turkic speakers, even in America, I usually aspirate the 'g', so it would be something like wee-GHOOR / WEE-ghoor or WEE-ghur, even though I know that's a pretty pathetic approximation of the sound the Uyghurs make at the beginning of the second syllable.

American English pronunciations of Uyghur:

a. unmodified:  or

b. modified: 
Finally, the name of the capital of the region, Urumchi (and numerous other spellings), has a broadly accepted pronunciation in English as oo-ROOM-chee. Again, when I'm in the presence of cognoscenti, I'll put umlauts on the "u's".

American English pronunciations of Urumchi:

a. unmodified: 

b. modified: 

To sum up, for the standard American renderings of these three names, I recommend the unmodified pronunciations: SHIN-jahng, WEE-gur or WEE-goor / wee-GOOR (emphasis on the first syllable is preferred), and oo-ROOM-chee.

A couple of days ago, I compared the rate of first-person-singular pronoun use in Sarah Palin's July 3 resignation speech to the rates in some other historical speeches, including Richard Nixon's 1962 speech conceding the California governor's race to Pat Brown ("I again", 7/13/2009). That 1962 news conference is  widely known as the "You won't have Nixon to kick around any more" speech, and I referred to it that way. But I also linked to an mp3 file of the speech, and in a comment, Tim pointed out that Nixon actually says "You don't have Nixon to kick around any more".

On the web, Google has won't ahead of don't 915 to 393 — Bing scores it 297 to 27. (Either way, Arnold Zwicky's 7/27/2007 LL post on "Illeism and its relatives" is one of those that get it right).

This is not the only mistake in the New York Times' version ("Transcript of Nixon's News Conference on His Defeat by Brown in Race for Governor", NYT, 11/8/1962, p. 18), which describes itself as "the transcript of Richard M. Nixon's news conference yesterday in Los Angeles, as recorded by The New York Times through th efacilities of the A.B.C. radio network". Aside from normal editing, there's another interesting mistake in the same passage:

The audio, and my transcription:

Last point.
I leave you gentlemen now
and uh you will now write it, you will interpret it, that's your right.
but as I leave you
uh I want you to know
just think how much you're going to be missing
you don't have Nixon to kick around any more
because gentlemen this is my last press conference

The NYT transcription (image of passage as printed):

The last play. I leave you gentlemen now and you will now write it. You will interpret it. That's your right. But as I leave you I want you to know- just think how much you're going to be missing.

You won't have Nixon to kick around any more, because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference

[Let me note again, in passing, President Nixon's tendency to end phrases on a rising pitch. More on this in a later post…]

The two omitted uh's are normal editing, and the choices about punctuation and paragraphing are reasonable ones. But turning "The last point" into "the last play" is a more interesting and meaningful emendation. Play is more dramatic than point, and it might have been a better choice for Nixon to make, especially because it follows three other passages that he similarly introduces as "One last thing":

This was a man who was finding it hard to leave the stage.

But there's another, larger, difference between the archival audio and the NYT transcript, one that I find much harder to understand. Here's how the NYT starts out (click for image of passage as printed):

Good morning, gentlemen. Now that Mr. Klein has made his statement, and now that all the members of the press are so delighted that I have lost, I'd like to make a statement of my own.

I appreciate the press coverage in this campaign. I think each of you covered it the way you saw it. You had to write it in the way according to your belief on how it would go. I don't believe publishers should tell reporters to write one way or another. I want them all to be free. I don't believe the F.C.C. [Federal Communications Commission] or anybody else should silence [word lost in transmission].

I have no complaints about the press coverage. I think each of you was writing it as you believed it.

I congratulate Governor Brown, as Herb Klein has already indicated, for his victory.

Compare the audio and my transcript, from the beginning of the mp3 version at American Rhetoric:

I have no complaints about the press coverage
I will never complain about it
I think that each of you were- was writing it as you believed it
and uh I want that always to be the case in America.
Now.
The other thing I want to say is this. I-
I congratulate Governor Brown,
as uh Herb Klein has already indicated, for his victory

[There are those final rises again…]

Here's a side-by-side comparison:

Good morning, gentlemen. Now that Mr. Klein has made his statement, and now that all the members of the press are so delighted that I have lost, I'd like to make a statement of my own.

I appreciate the press coverage in this campaign. I think each of you covered it the way you saw it. You had to write it in the way according to your belief on how it would go. I don't believe publishers should tell reporters to write one way or another. I want them all to be free. I don't believe the F.C.C. [Federal Communications Commission] or anybody else should silence [word lost in transmission]. [Before start of audio recording?] I have no complaints about the press coverage. I have no complaints about the press coverage [Missing from NYT transcript?] I will never complain about it I think each of you was writing it as you believed it. I think that each of you were- was writing it as you believed it [Missing from NYT transcript?] and uh I want that always to be the case in America. [Missing from NYT transcript?] Now. [Missing from NYT transcript?] The other thing I want to say is this. I congratulate Governor Brown, as Herb Klein has already indicated, for his victory. I congratulate Governor Brown, as uh Herb Klein has already indicated, for his victory;

Before the phrase "I have no complaints about the press coverage", a passage is apparently missing from the audio recording — this is too bad, but it's a plausible thing to happen. But of the next seven breath-groups in the recording, numbers one, three, and seven are rendered more-or-less normally in the NYT transcript, while two, four, five, and six are entirely missing.

Did the stenographer drop her pencil? Has the recording at American Rhetoric been edited to interpolate passages from another speech? I'm genuinely puzzled.

Except for the strangeness at the start, the quality of this 1962 transcript is better than what I'm used to seeing in the newspapers recently. And nothing very important depends on the details of this case. But perhaps someone familiar with the methods used to create transcripts in the news business, a half a century ago, can suggest a solution.

[One last thing :-)…

President Nixon closes with a pathetic plea:

unlike some people
I have never cancelled a subscription to a paper
and also
I never will
I believe in reading
what my opponents say
and I hope that
what I have said today
will at least
make television, radio, the press
first
recognize the great responsibility they have
to report all the news
and second
recognize
that they have a right and a responsibility if they're against a candidate
to give him the shaft
but also recognize if they give him the shaft
to put one lonely reporter on the campaign
who will report what the candidate says now and then

So here, 47 years later, is my transcript of his news conference — or at least the only part of it for which I could find a recording. I'm sure that there are some mistakes, since I did it in a hurry, but still, Dick, I tried.]

One of yesterday's guests on Radio Times with Marty Moss-Coane was Arika Okrent, author of In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers, and the Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build A Perfect Language. You can listen (or download the mp3) here.

I don't know very much about the history of invented languages, so I'm looking forward to reading her book.

[Update: a transcript of Okrent's interview with Gelf magazine is here.]

Following the serious unrest in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of the Peoples Republic of China that erupted last week, "Xinjiang," "Uyghur," "Urumchi," and other names pertaining to the region have become household words.  Unfortunately, people around the world have been confused about how to pronounce these words.  This is understandable for several reasons.  In the first place, we have to confront both the original Uyghur terms and their full and truncated versions in Mandarin.  Second, there is often a plethora of variant romanizations for each name.

Ed Wong, the New York Times correspondent who has been keeping us so well informed about the events as they unfold, told me that the NYT had

"received an email from a reader saying the NYT should change its 'pronouncer' on Uighurs.  Right now, in our articles, the editors insert (WEE-gurs) as the pronouncer.  One reader said this is not the correct pronunciation, and sounds strange to the Turkic speaker’s ear."

As I told Ed, it would have been helpful if the person who sent the NYT the e-mail would have indicated the correct pronunciation, not just told them that WEE-gurs sounds wrong.

In an attempt to clarify how the most important  Xinjiang names are actually pronounced in Uyghur and in Mandarin, I here provide various orthographic forms along with audio clips.  As to what sort of "pronouncers" should be developed for the major media, presumably to represent appropriate Americanized pronunciations, I invite suggestions.

[Update: I give "pronouncers" and recordings of suggested American English renditions in a later post, "American English pronunciation of Uyghur proper nouns", 7/15/2009.)

The names are read first in Uyghur and then followed by their Mandarin versions.

1. Uyghur — Wei2wu2′er3     維吾爾 ／维吾尔      ئۇيغۇر
Variant romanizations of the Turkic include Uighur, Uigur, and Uygur.  I prefer Uyghur as being closest to the Perso-Arabic orthography.

2. Ürümchi — Wu1lu3mu4qi2 烏魯木齊／乌鲁木齐   ئۈرۈمچی
Variant romanizations of this Uyghur word for the capital of the region include Urumchi, Urumtsi, and Ürümqi.  The latter is the official cartographic spelling in China; it's a combination of Turkic and pinyin.

3. Täklimakan — Ta3ke4la1ma3gan1 塔克拉瑪干／塔克拉玛干   تەكلىماكان
Variants:  Taklimakan, Taklamakan. This is the huge desert that occupies most of southern Xinjiang; it is one of the largest and most arid deserts in the world.

4. Tarim — Ta3li3mu4 塔里木   تارىم
The name of the basin in which the Täklimakan Desert sits.

5. Tarim River (Daryasi) — Ta3li3mu4 He2 塔里木河   تارىم دەرياسى
The long river flowing along the northern edge of the Täklimakan Desert from which the Tarim Basin derives its name.

6. Kashgar — Ka1shi2ka1′er3  喀什喀爾／喀什喀尔   قەشقەر
Variant:  Qäshqär.  The large oasis city at the far western edge of the region that is famous for its Sunday bazaar, the largest mosque in China, and other important monuments.

7. A shortened Mandarin version of no. 6.

8. Tängri Tagh — Tian1 Shan1 天山   تەڭرىتاغ
Variant:  Tien Shan.  The Celestial / Heavenly Mountains that divide the northern part of the region from the south.

While it cannot be expected that this post will instantaneously clear up all the confusion surrounding the pronunciation of proper nouns related to the situation in Eastern Central Asia (recall how hard it was just to deal with Beijing last year during the Olympics:  "How they say 'Beijing' in Beijing"), I hope that it might serve as a reference for those who strive for accuracy.

Incidentally, Xinjiang (Xin1jiang1 新疆) means "New Borders," "New Territories," or "New Frontier," and is the name that was given to the region after it was subdued by the Manchus in 1884 and incorporated into the empire of the Qing Dynasty.  To avoid using politically sensitive names such as East Turkestan or Uyghurstan, I refer to the region by the purely geographical designation as "Eastern Central Asia."

My thanks to Dolkun Kamberi for providing the Uyghur and Mandarin recordings.

In today's Iran Updates at niacINsight:

According to Tabnak, Mohsen Namjoo an Iranian artist and folk singer was sentenced to 5 years in prison for singing lyrics of the Koran in a modern popular style of Music.

Mohsen Namjoo is very popular in Iran and has made a few concerts around the world including in North American cities.

This is further evidence of the government’s ongoing effort to clamp down on artists and musicians.

See Hamrah Sho Aziz and Zolf Bar Bad for earlier Language Log posts discussing some of Namjoo's songs.

The Google Translate version of the cited news article is not very helpful, unfortunately.

[Apparently Language Log was already banned in Iran as of December of 2007.]

Last month, it was Barack Obama whose (allegedly) imperial ego was said to be signaled by (fictitious) overuse of first-person singular pronouns. (Follow the link for discussion of columns on the topic by Terence Jeffrey, George F. Will, Stanley Fish, and Mary Kate Cary.) A few days ago, Peggy Noonan's devastating attack on Sarah Palin ("A Farewell to Harms", WSJ, 7/11/2009) presented a similar argument:

She wasn't thoughtful enough to know she wasn't thoughtful enough. Her presentation up to the end has been scattered, illogical, manipulative and self-referential to the point of self-reverence. "I'm not wired that way," "I'm not a quitter," "I'm standing up for our values." I'm, I'm, I'm.

This characterization of Gov. Palin as excessively self-oriented is hardly new, as you can discover by searching the web for {Palin diva}. But is her rate of reference to self, at least as crudely quantified by the count of first-person pronouns, evidence of excessive ego-involvement, compared to politicians of the past?

I'd say that the evidence is at best equivocal. Since last month's flurry of pronominal punditry left me with a handy little script for counting things, I compared Gov. Palin's July 3 resignation speech against three somewhat-similar speeches –

• Richard Nixon's 1962 concession in the California governor's context (the famous "You won't have Nixon to kick around any more") speech;
• the 1968 speech in which Lyndon Johnson announced that he wouldn't run again;
• Richard Nixon's 1974 resignation speech.

I looked at two crude measures of ego-involvement: the rate of first-person-singular pronouns, where a higher rate suggests more ego-involvement; and the ratio of first-person-plural pronouns to first-person-singular pronouns, where a higher ratio suggests less ego-involvement.

Speech Total words 1st sing. forms Percent 1st sing. 1st plur. forms Plur/Sing ratio RN 1962 Concession 2480 152 6.1% 26 0.17 LBJ 1968 Won't Run 4129 83 2.0% 114 1.37 RN Resignation 1974 1806 83 4.6% 40 0.48 Palin 2009 Won't Run 3100 124 4.0% 101 0.81

By these measures, Palin is more ego-involved than LBJ, but less than Nixon.

We expect prepared speeches to have a lower rate of first-singular pronouns than extemporaneous speeches — but Nixon's 1974 resignation still weighs in at 4.6%. As discussed here, George H.W. Bush's first press conference exhibited a rate of 5.5%, and George W. Bush's first two press conferences came in at 4.5%. So the rate of 4.0% in Sarah Palin's press conference is actually rather low, given that the topic was in fact her own status and plans.

For a speech that's epically "scattered, illogical, manipulative and self-referential to the point of self-reverence", you should take a look at Richard Nixon's 1962 concession speech. I couldn't find a transcript on the net, so I bought the .pdf from the NYT's archive, and transcribed it into html form here. An .mp3 of the audio — apparently minus a bit at the beginning — is here. [Update: Ben Zimmer, whose Google Fu is strong, points out another html copy here, apparently also derived from the NYT transcript.]

Note that Nixon says in several ways that he's not complaining about the press, while complaining about the press — these days, politicians generally omit the protestations and get right to the complaints. And I found it interesting that it was so important to him to insist that he never attacked his opponent's patriotism or "heart" or other "personal considerations".

(If you listen to the audio while reading the transcript, you'll see the usual editing of disfluencies, but also some puzzling larger divergences, which I'll analyze and comment on in a later post. I also invite you to observe that the Richard Nixon of 1962 was a frequent uptalker — again, I'll discuss this in more detail later.)

A few days ago, Michelle Pauli in the Guardian's Books Blog asked "Which words make you wince?":

'What word do you hate and why?' is the intriguing question put to a selection of poets by the Ledbury festival. Philip Wells's reply is the winner for me - 'pulchritude' is certainly up there on my blacklist. He even explains his animosity in suitably poetic terms:

"it violates all the magical impulses of balanced onomatopoeic language - it of course means "beautiful", but its meaning is nothing of the sort, being stuffed to the brim with a brutally latinate cudgel of barbaric consonants. If consonants represent riverbanks and vowels the river's flow, this is the word equivalent of the bottomless abyss of dry bones, where demons gather to spit acid."

For Geraldine Monk, "it's got to be 'redacted' which makes me feel totally sick. It's a brutish sounding word. It doesn't flow, it prods at you in a nasty manner."

Both these poets understand that the key to words that make you feel nauseous is not the meaning - it's easy, after all, to hate the word 'torture' – but something else entirely. Something idiosyncratic, something about the way the word feels in your mouth as you say it. The horrors of 'membrane', for instance. Or the eccentricity of 'gusset'.

The expression of negative lexical affect, in the form of word rage and word aversion, is a major concern of anglophone intellectual culture; and so I wasn't surprised to see that Ms. Pauli's post got 1108 comments (so far). In comparison, a post about how "The online Codex Sinaiticus changes book scholarship for good" garnered only 4 comments, a post about Dan Brown's new book got 10, and even "Tips for titillating reading", which tells us that "middle-aged women want to read books about sex more than anything else, according to a new survey", got a mere 17.

And despite Ms. Pauli's plain statement that she's talking about cases where "the key is not the meaning", but rather "something about the way the word feels in your mouth as you say it", at least half the comments are focused on senses or usages that are associated with disliked groups or ideas, or that are seen as irritatingly novel or non-literal. In other words, word rage wins, and to hell with the poets:

Leverage - whenever it is used in a situation that does not physically involve a long stick, a fulcrum and shifting a heavy weight.

way forward; national debate

Partner - when used in a non-commercial sense. If you mean wife/husband/girlfriend/boyfriend, then just say that.

"Like" in, like, the way, like, its used nowadays….. please just shoot me now!

On the side of huge lorries: 'logistics' and 'solutions'. Both just mean haulage. Probably.

Context is all, certainly, but I cant stand the word ‘comedic, which seems to have replaced perfectly serviceable words such as ‘funny, ‘comedy and ‘comic to no apparent purpose. Its weirdly jarring in sentences discussing the ‘comedic possibilities of a scene or the ‘comedic talents of a performer. It makes my teeth ache and must be stopped.

"liase" as a verb, also "liasing". ugh. it makes my spine go crunchy. oh, let me add "wicked" - just because I'm a grouchy old git.

'Blogosphere' is one word that makes me wince, and the phrase that has me cringing more than most is "Now, more than ever…"

Medal, when used as a verb by American sports commentators.

My favorite , among the small fraction that I've read, was contributed by greenpaua:

[…] sufficient (why not say enough? ie use one syllable instead of three)

More raw material for someone's (as yet unwritten) study of the social psychology of linguistic naming and shaming.

(The picture at the start of Pauli's post is captioned "Pointing the finger at pulchritude: 'a brutally latinate cudgel of barbaric consonants'", even though the the (stock?) photo actually shows a finger pointing at the word investigate. You'd think that the Guardian could afford a digital camera and a copy of a dictionary — but maybe there's a policy against using real pictures for feature stories?)

For most intellectuals today, grammar is no longer a tool of rational analysis, but rather a source of incoherent metaphor. As a recent example, consider Margaret Carlson's analysis of Sarah Palin's resignation speech (from Countdown on July 9, 2009):

Sarah Palin is very good at stringing words together
that don't have a subject, a verb and an object, they're just
present participles and prepositions and "I love the people of Alaska"
and "I'm quitting so I can serve them better".
It makes no sense!

I believe that Carlson means to claim that Palin speaks in fragments rather than complete sentences. But having "a subject, a verb and an object" is a poor diagnostic for this: for example, the very sentence that Carlson uses to make the claim appears to fail the test. And I don't believe it's true, by any test, that Palin's resignation statement contained an unusual number of sentence fragments, or was particularly rich in present participles and prepositions.

I invite you to count (fragments, present participles, and prepositions) in the transcript of Gov. Palin's statement, and compare their frequency with what you find in Ms. Carlson's commentaries (e.g. here as well as the episode linked above). I don't have the time to do it myself, today. But as a suggestion of what you're likely to find, here are their respective openings in the passages under discussion:

OK, good.
Appreciate you all being here, and I just want to say hi to Alaska.
I appreciate speaking directly to the people that I serve as governor
and I thank you all for coming here today, on the shores of Lake Lucille –
this is a source of inspiration for my family and for me –
and I'm thankful that Todd flew in last night
from commercial fishing grounds in Bristol Bay, to
stand by my side
as always.

Well in- in the statement, in her back yard,
there- the- the- I'm surprised you found,
you know, the heart of it, which uh was
the- the- the legal fees. Because there was the lame duck,
she doesn't want to milk it, she doesn't want to go on junkets,
everybody does it, remember there're countless others,
who've quit, and when there're only two governors who've ever quit,
under pressure,
Eliot Spitzer and Jim McGreevy of- of New Jersey,
uh but you found this one,
and this one then turns out not to be right.

In my opinion, there are legitimate questions about the logical and rhetorical coherence of Gov. Palin's statement. But Ms. Carlson's apparent attempt to characterize this as syntactic incoherence was analytically lazy and linguistically silly.

[For a different take on the psycho-political correlates of sentence structure, see "Decisiveness is SVO: a Hitlerian theory of communication?", 9/30/2004; "Decisiveness and clause structure", 10/6/2004.]

[Update 7/12/2009: fev at Headsup: The Blog considers a range of recent cases where "the commenting class uses linguistic features of political speech to shed light on True Motives and Meaning", and observes ("Unseen Hand Club", 7/11/2009) that

These are very well organized assertions about personal and political character, and they fit neatly into a consistent pattern. […]

Incoherent metaphor? Hardly. I think we're seeing a carefully arranged meta-frame emerge — the sort of metaphor by which a certain part of the population lives.

Read the whole thing. ]

A casual inspection of the 59 (true) Google hits on "Oooo, you look", suggests that Dr. Willis Jensen, a recent presenter in the brownbag lunch series at Language Log Plaza, vastly overestimated the correlation between utterance initial "Oooo" and sarcasm: the true rate is less than 50%. However, he is correct to identify "Oooo" as a common marker of sarcasm, e.g. the comment "oooo. you look lovely:)" in the comments here from the above search.

(A video report on Dr. Jensen's groundbreaking work is below the fold.)

Report: 70 Percent Of All Praise Sarcastic

In some alternative history, according to the webcomic Teaching Baby Paranoia:

(Click on the image for a larger version. If your screen is too small, this may not work — in that case, try right-click>>view image or your browser/OS equivalent.)

David Brooks has so far missed this one.

[Hat tip: Neil Cohn]