Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in eternally stressed semanticist's LiveJournal:

[ << Previous 20 ]

Wednesday, May 7th, 2008
4:06 am	Oh, Marilyn My primary use for Parade Magazine is to flip to Marilyn vos Savant's column to get my weekly dose of infuriation (often at the answers; just as often at the questions she chooses to answer). This week: Which is the easiest major language for a child to learn? —John Legere, Lancaster, Pa. Probably Spanish, because the grammar is mostly regular, the spelling is straightforward, and the words are easy to pronounce. But for an adult who just wants to be bilingual—and doesn’t mind not being understood at parties—you could learn Taki-Taki (spoken in Suriname). It has only a few hundred words. By contrast, English has the most words of any language: about 250,000. Oh, Marilyn, Marilyn. Are you ever right? If what Mr. Legere meant was "the easiest major language for an English-speaking child over the age of three or four to learn", then Marilyn is at least answering his question. Mind you, I read it as a question about first language acquisition, in which case what she wrote looks like an answer but is horribly, horribly wrong. And note that even if he did mean "as a second language", the question is extremely relativized to English-speaking children: I don't think a speaker of Serbian will find Spanish especially easy to spell or pronounce. But of course, even though what she wrote was an answer, I'm skeptical of its accuracy. Plenty of college students don't find it so easy to pronounce the rolled "r" in Spanish (to say nothing of the intervocalic fricatives, such as the it's-not-really-a-v third letter of Havana). I'm not really qualified to comment on whether its grammar is mostly regular (except in a technical sense, in which I can assuredly say that no natural language can be generated by a regular grammar), though I'd kind of doubt that Spanish is so much more "regular" than most other languages. Also: Taki-Taki is more accurately called Sranan, and she's an order of magnitude off on its vocabulary size. (It's a creole; its small vocabulary size is, I believe, fairly unremarkable.) Go back to mathematics, Marilyn; you were on more solid ground there. (11 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, May 4th, 2008
2:31 am	Misguided descriptivism People routinely appeal to the arbitrarily determined rules of grammar to justify their dialect as being "right". ("See? Fowler says you can't end a sentence with a preposition. So it's a rule, and you should use it.") Tonight, courtesy of the community linguistics, we have a man who wants to know what the rule of Innate Grammar is that proves his dialect is "right". He's fairly insistent that there simply has to be a right answer: the logical laws of language must be such that the preposition that comes before accident is by, not on. Of course, it's the former and not the latter because that's the dialect he speaks, so it's surely right. He's got all kinds of rationales for why this should be, which sound reasonable unless you, say, read them: The "accident" is the agent of the action. When asked why it's not "on accident", given that it's "on purpose": Because "on" indicates "as a result of" the purpose, in other words, the agent of the action is acting as a result of the purpose, whereas "by" indicates that the agent is outside the performer of the action. Reasonable justifications, except of course that they're utter nonsense. "On" indicates a result? The agent is outside the performer? Ultimately, he's going to have to learn to live with frustration. You're just not going to find any rule of Grammar that can explain why people are wrong to talk the way they do, by the very definition of Grammar. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, March 24th, 2008
8:55 pm	When Austrian Eyes are Smiling Playing with machine translation on the web never stops being fun: song lyrics back and forth, finding the little mistakes the program makes, that sort of thing. Over at Language Log, they've been discussing (here and here) the fact that Google's translation translates "Austria", from German to English, as "Ireland". It's a fascinating pair of posts, the more so because, as bugs go, this one's pretty opaque. Of course, Melvyn Quince thinks he has an answer: Austria is to Germany as Ireland is to Britain, i.e. that nearby, clearly inferior country where they speak the same language but all wrong. Well, great, that's nothing new; it was Ionesco who said "The French for London is Paris." And it doesn't account for the weird inconsistency of translation. But most tellingly, Dr. Quince (or, as Google Translation has him, "Dr. Fifteen") offers the prediction that it'll make the same error for "Belgium/France", but in fact translating Belgium from French to English doesn't introduce that error at all. On the other hand, I think it is fascinating that translating Wikipedia's article on Canada into German does give: ...das Verfassungsgesetz von 1791 gliedert sich in der Provinz französischsprachigen Kanada Niederösterreich und Oberösterreich englisch-sprachigen Kanada... i.e., Quebec was divided into French-speaking Lower-Austria Canada and English-speaking Upper-Austria Canada. (Original: "the Constitutional Act of 1791 divided the province into French-speaking Lower Canada and English-speaking Upper Canada".) Anyway, it's all fairly interesting. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, March 18th, 2008
3:46 pm	Thank god *he* left... When I was an undergrad, my semantics professor—Polly—had a standard example of how easy it is to get a referent for a pronoun from non-linguistic contexts. Imagine you're at a party, and some guy comes in that everyone hates. No one talks to him, no one mentions him, no one points to him, and eventually he takes the hint and goes out again. At that point, you turn to the person next to you and say, "Thank god he left!" It's obvious who "he" refers to, even though there's no linguistic antecdent. (Compare that to the typical difficulty in filling in the gap in an elided verb phrase—"Well, I wouldn't" without a specific overt linguistic referent.) I was using that example in class today; well, rather, I was talking about pronouns, and used "He left" as a basic sentence illustrating the point. What was interesting about it was that around 1pm, a guy,who'd been sitting in the corner the whole time without having introduced himself, and without anyone having referred to him, got up and slipped out. I tilted my head thoughtfully for a moment, wrote "He left" back on the board, and continued lecturing. [Note: it turned out that he was, as I suspected, a prospective student I'd be meeting with at 2:30; he thought class ended at 1, and wanted to come see it. All the same: kind of odd.] (Comment on this)
Wednesday, March 12th, 2008
6:11 am	Thoughts on overloaded words In The Money Coach's Guide to Your First Million, Lynnette Khalfani draws an interesting analogy which she doesn't quite push far enough. She notes that most people see a "budget" like a "diet": a restriction, a list of all the things they can't do with their money. In fact, she explains, a budget is simply a plan, and therefore really sets out the things you can, and will, do with your money. The rest of the analogy, which she doesn't draw, is that a diet is like that too. Just as a many people use "budget" to suggest a set of restrictions on spending, whereas it's simply a plan, people use "diet" to mean a set of restrictions on eating, whereas again the word "really" refers to any description of what a being eats. ("Really" in scare quotes, because both senses of "diet" have been in common sage for the better part of a millennium. "Budget" is a little different, insofar as its primary sense may still be as a simple statement and not a restriction. On the other hand, on a {diet/budget} are both used pretty much exclusively to mean "having curtailments and restrictions", and used attributively both mean "lessened in a way to make them suitable for a person with these restrictions": diet soda, budget vacations.) Anyway, I mention it here not per se because it's a fact about language, but because I was struck that "grammar" has roughly exactly the same pair of meanings: in one sense, it's a mere description of habits, and in another sense, it's a restriction on what is not allowed. (And thus, English students should be said to write their papers "on a grammar", i.e. with a particular set of restrictions. Well, clearly not, but I encourage everyone to pick up the usage.) It's not a perfect analogy, I suppose; but neither is "government and binding", and those've stuck for years. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, March 7th, 2008
3:17 am	Another academic's blog In the interest of Sharing the Academic Blogger Love: one of my friends in the field of children's literature, Rebecca Rabinowitz, has just started a blog. (She's got a personal, more anonymous blog elsewhere, but that one's personal and anonymous.) Anyway, I figured at least some of y'all might be interested. (Comment on this)
Thursday, March 6th, 2008
2:22 pm	Idjit. Dear Professor M, I understand that your three-hour seminar in historical site management is terribly important. And I understand, as you patiently explained to me today around 12:02, that you have your classroom scheduled until noon. Nevertheless, please do try to understand that other classes take place on campus; for instance, mine, which starts at noon in the same psychology classroom your semnar is in. Perhaps you might be able to see that, if you stop lecturing at noon and then start packing up, you force my class to start five minutes late. You might even see the wisdom behind the general policy that "Classes end ten minutes before the scheduled end time". I really hope I don't have to talk to again about this after your next class. Thank you so much for your consideration. --Doc Nathan (Comment on this)
Monday, March 3rd, 2008
3:29 pm	A message to my students "Dear students. I was going to return your homework. Then I read it, and decided to use it as wrapping paper for the Knight Rider DVD I bought my wife. That has the advantage that it can do someone some good, and the pleasant side effect that it'll probably be torn to shreds." No, no, I'm not really going to say that. I don't have the same strength of character tenure as the Carleton professor who famously, if perhaps apocryphally, returned a student's paper after having cut out every quote from the book being discussed, with a note saying "I kept the good parts." I'm not really Dr. House (or Dr. Cox, aka "House without the limp"). And I'm certainly not the young professor whose Wite-Out wasn't sufficient to hide the comment "I don't get paid enough to read this dreck" at the top of a student's paper. But somewhere, bubbling deep in my soul... And that's why I post these things here. Cruelty from authority will always amuse me as long as it's kept entirely fictional. (Also, and let's be clear on this: it is in fact fictional. My students are doing fine. But the fact that it happens not to be true never stops House or Cox from a good abusive rant...) (4 Comments |Comment on this)
1:59 am	"Language rapists" Geoff Pullum, at LanguageLog, does a fine job of taking apart this senseless rant about the destruction of English. And he does so without, for the most part, getting ad hominem. I'm not that polite, so let me point out that: (a) He says that "Shakespeare's most perfect phrases are miraculously simple and terse", in flagrant violation of the old (and of course incorrect) proscription against using comparative/superlative forms of "perfect". (Incidentally: are they? And is John Milton therefore a terrible writer?) (b) His assertion that "The prime rule of writing is to keep it simple, concrete, concise" (and that "firefighter" is worse than "fireman" because of the extra syllables) appears in an issue of The Weekly Standard with William F. Buckley Jr. on the cover. That's the same William F. Buckley Jr. that the New York Times obituary called "sesquipedalian", with "polysyllabic exuberance". Simple, concrete, concise. Right. Ah, well. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, February 28th, 2008
3:46 pm	The Barbara Syllogism Lest I forget, the Barbara Syllogism: All people named Partee are UMass linguists. All UMass linguists are incredibly smart. Therefore, all people named Partee are incredibly smart. (Note: I recognize that the set of people who find this amusing is a subset of the intersection of the set of people who know who Barbara is and the set of people who know what Barbara is. Probably a small subset. Possibly a singleton set. But, hey, it's my LJ.) (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, February 4th, 2008
2:22 pm	Currying favor Because I was looking up "curry" as a verb in Merriam-Webster (answer: no, MW doesn't yet recognize the logic-based sense of the word), I can bring you what may be my favorite eggcorn ever. Language Log introduced the concept of the eggcorn in one of its earliest posts. The idea is that a word or phrase is reanalyzed by speakers to another phrase, typically because the new, reanalyzed phrase makes more logical sense or because the original phrase incorporates a now-archaic word. (Perhaps the most familiar case is "one's just desserts", a reanalysis of "one's just deserts", because who uses "desert" as a noun meaning "what one deserves" any more? The Eggcorn Database suggests that this could be just a misspelling, but to my mind it's unquestionably an eggcorn: speakers reanalyzed the unfamiliar "desert" = "what one gets in the end" to "dessert", a homonym that already meant "what one ges in the end".) (Incidentally: "another thing coming" is probably an eggcorn for "another think coming", i.e. a reanalysis of an unfamiliar word into a familiar one.) Anyway, I'm mostly uninterested in eggcorns; yes, yes, language changes, got it, thanks. But I've just learned that "curry favor" is, to my utter surprise, an eggcorn. The original Middle English phrase was "curry favel"; a favel is a chestnut horse. To "curry the chestnut horse" was to employ deceit; the OED even has a few instances of "curry-favel", one who flatters to win favor. "Curry favor" was thus a reinterpretation of the original phrase, fairly logically given that what one was obtaining by curry-faveling was favor. So yes, language changes, got it, thanks...but still, isn't it cool? [Utterly unrelated fact, brought to memory only because of looking things up in MW: neither the 11th Collegiate nor the Third New International has "tricentennial" as an entry, even though the word outnumbers the MW-accepted "tercentennial" by about 1.4 to 1. ("Tercentenary" and "tercentennial" together outnumber "tricentennial" by about the same ratio.] (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, January 29th, 2008
11:16 pm	Notes from class I must learn to use more carefully my power to make anything sound convincing. I may have squandered it when, using the example sentence "Lincoln snores", I explained that the sentence was, as it happens, true; in fact, Lincoln wasn't allowed to visit the troops in the field after a night when his snoring kept the soldiers awake, leaving them to fight unrested the next day. Far and away the best moment of class on Monday, however, came during a discussion of whether intransitive verbs take, as their arguments, agents in particular (rather than just entities). To stress the point that agenthood isn't an inherent quality of individuals, I suggested, "Take the sentence 'Kyle snores'. Is Kyle himself an agent?" Toni, sitting next to Kyle, said, "Not if I kick him." Unrelatedly, from the pilot of Bones: Goodman: Dr. Brennan, are you playing me? Brennan: You know I'm no good at that. Goodman: Hmm, thus far, but you have a disturbingly steep learning curve. I think Goodman meant, "You learn things quickly". I also think that the sentence he said doesn't in fact mean that at all. Are y'all's intuitions the same? (8 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, December 15th, 2007
3:27 pm	Word of the Year Over at LanguageLog, Mark Liberman noted this blog post at the New York Times about Merriam-Webster's choice of "woot" (or perhaps more traditionally "w00t") as their word of the year. Before I get back to grading final exams, I had a few thoughts that I might as well get down on virtual paper. First, I think Words of the Year are silly. (I think most Things of the Year are silly, usually done as a way to get attention. "Oh my god, Time Magazine chose who as their Person of the Year? Now I have to buy that magazine and see what made them think that!" That sort of thing. The abovelinked Times blog post makes this point as well.) Even the American Dialect Society explains: "The word-of-the-year vote is not a formal induction of words into the American language, but a whimsical affair." They have a semi-decent track record of picking words that capture the times: "WMD", "9-11", "metrosexual", "chad" certainly summarize the zeitgeist of their particular years. And their "most likely to succeed" words are often right, but also often safe picks: starting in 1990, we have "notebook PC", "rollerblade", "snail mail", "quotative"--which have lasted, but the last one's a technical term and the first two lasted because the devices did. (Similarly more recent ones like "SARS".) Beyond that, though, words in their "most unnecessary" and "most creative" categories start to look a little like pet rocks and zip drives: brief fads, only a lot less popular. Second, the quotes they use are a little absurd. For instance: We are, however, crossing our fingers that next year Merriam-Webster’s “word of the year” is actually a word. That doesn’t contain numbers. That isn’t shorthand for something else. "Is actually a word"? As opposed to "truthiness" a few years ago? Or any other coined word? And: what word, exactly, isn't shorthand for something else? (For instance, "shorthand" is shorthand for "an abbreviated form used to express a larger concept".) It’s amusing, but it’s limited to a small community and unlikely to spread and unlikely to last. This from Allan Metcalf, executive secretary of the American Dialect Society. Limited to a small community? Is "online gamers" really a small community compared to, say, people who watch the Colbert Report? A casual websearch suggests that 1.13 million people watched Colbert discuss "truthiness" in his first episode; and that 217 million people play online games; 5 million play World of Warcraft alone. And "unlikely to last"? Given that it's already been around for ten years...last until, say, 2050? Will "metrosexual" or even "truthiness" still be around then? I guess, in the end, the only thing sillier than Words of the Year are people who take them seriously. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Tuesday, December 4th, 2007
3:37 pm	N.J. College Requires GOP Cell Phones Via LanguageLog, a lovely example of the Cupertino effect. (Well, kind of. I suppose there are two variants of the effect: the classic version, in which you mistype a word and the spellchecker corrects it to the wrong word, e.g. "coperation" to "Cupertino"; and ths version, in which the spellchecker corrects a valid spelling that it just didn't recognize.) My reaction to the article, though, is twofold. First, what the heck kind of college requires its students to buy $210 cell phones? Especially when many of them are probably starting there with cell phones already in their possession? Second, and somewhat more linguistically: I know that the typical style guide requires numbers under10 to be spelled out ("Two years ago...") and numbers 10 and over to be represented with numerals ("...in 20 minutes"). But has no style guide writer noticed how absurdly stupid this makes the phrase "about five to 10 times" look? (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, December 3rd, 2007
4:21 pm	A followup As a followup to this post: a programmer over at the registrar's office helpfully downloaded and sent me files of abbreviations, listing the 67 degrees granted by Penn, the 14 schools, the 48 divisions, the 311 departments, and the 487 majors. Well, major codes; they're not all actual majors, since things like UNDC (undeclared) and YALE (Yale University exchange) are also on the list. CDXF turns out to mean "Curriculum Deferred - Transfer". ASCS is "Applied Science - Computer Science", though how "Applied Science" majors differ from the actual majors, I cannot say. There's generally a lot of stuff in here that's impenetrable without a guide--BIBB, CPMG, EALC, FATH, MIDW, PRDT, SECS, WWWQ--and it amazes me that no one over there ever thought, "Hey, people might want to know these things." (Feel free to guess what those four-letter major codes mean. No Googling, not that it would help for a number of them.) (5 Comments |Comment on this)
2:52 pm	atwhay ethay ellhay? When I assigned the most recent homework to my (uniformly North American, native-English-speaking) students, it just plain never occurred to me that some of them might not speak, or even recognize, Pig Latin. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, December 2nd, 2007
1:28 am	Russian phonology Courtesy of a friend of mine: the Wikipedia article on the "soft sign" in Russian (formerly, I guess, the "front yer") claims... Also, it has a function of "separation sign": in Russian, vowels after the soft sign are pronounced separately from the previous consonant and are yotified. If anyone out there knows enough Russian, or enough phonology, or both, to replace the last word there with something more informative, more correct, and less thoroughly made up, I imagine the Wikipedia community would thank you. (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, December 1st, 2007
4:03 pm	"I'm in CDXF." Right now, I'm really irritated at Penn's webpages; specifically, those of the registrar. I mean, bad enough that http://www.upenn.edu/registrar/general/infodesk/index.html, which ought to be their helpdesk, gives me a "302 Found" error. (You found the page, and that's the error? What? Of course, it tells me that the document has moved "here", with a link back to that same error page. Swell.) But what seriously irritates me is a serious lack of documentation. When I list the students in my class, it tells me what they're majoring in, which is really helpful information. However, it lists them in three- or four-letter abbreviations. I know what a NURS major is, and FILM is pretty transparent. I can guess at COML, but why should I guess? And what the heck is NELC, or ASCC, or ASCS? Or, in the extreme case, CDXF? The thing is, I know I could probably websearch for a lot of these—though not, mind you, for CDXF. But the point is that I shouldn't have to; all I want to do is go to the web page, or the PDF, or something, that explains all the abbreviations. Go ahead, find me one. I beg you. Meanwhile, when I needed to mail the advisor of a student about a particular issue, I found that he had three listed: an Academic Advisor, a Major Advisor, and a College Contact. I think I know what a Major Advisor is; I believe it's the department faculty member who oversees the undergrads in general. I think. What I want to know is, is this particular issue something the Academic Advisor should worry about, or the College Contact? If only the registrar's pages would tell me. Or anyone else at Penn. My apologies for the non-linguistic nature of this post. But it's work-related, and it's interfering with my ability to think linguistically. (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, November 27th, 2007
2:49 pm	Sustainability Tony Kroch, having picked up the new Penn telephone directory from the office, has been showing it around the corridor with the question, "What's wrong with this picture?" A picture of the cover can be seen at this web page. Take a moment, squint a little. The text, in case you can't read it, says: "sus•tain-ability adj 1. meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs". Mark Liberman, down the hall, has posted often on Language Log about the "responsibility [of the educational system and of the field of linguistics] to teach the basic terminology and skills of linguistic description", with particular regard to the way in which we've failed to. Clearly, the Penn business office would be a good place to start. (8 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, November 15th, 2007
3:12 am	Ho, ho, ho = Bitch, bitch, bitch Eric Berlin pointed to a news article from Australia with mild linguistic interest: Recruitment firm Westaff - which supplies hundreds of Santas across the country - has told its trainees that the "ho ho ho" phrase could frighten children and could even be derogatory to women. That is to say: someone might interpret Santa's "Ho, ho, ho" as being a use of the noun ho, the sort that got Don Imus in so much trouble when he preceded it with "nappy-headed". But that's not why I'm posting about it; I'm posting because I was somewhat skeptical, and looked for an independent news source on this. I found this article, which suggests that (a) Westaff was indeed concerned that a low, rumbling "ho, ho, ho" might seem threatening to some children, and they encouraged Santas to use other phrases, and (b) the "derogatory to women" aspect was entirely fictitious. (Readers of LanguageLog won't be remotely surprised to learn that some credulous journalist had let a spurious fact, but one that fed into disgust at the risible extremes that über-PCness can go to, slip into a story.) What was so striking about that article, though, was the following sentence: Westaff Australia's national manager Glen Jansz told Adelaide's Sunday Mail claims there were concerns the term "ho" could be offensive were false but confirmed the edict had been issued. That's some sentence. In fact, I thought it was utterly ungrammatical until Tortoise, a commenter at Eric Berlin's blog, parsed it for me:      Westaff Australia's national manager Glen Jansz told Adelaide's Sunday Mail                [that] claims                     [that] there were concerns                          [that] the term "ho" could be offensive                were false           but                confirmed                     that the edict had been issued. Astonishing. Tortoise suggests that "some editor omitted a few 'needless' words" (link supplied by me). That's not unlikely, though even with the extra "that"s in there, it's still amazingly hard to process. (5 Comments |Comment on this)