Lip Reading Response

This is a response to Liberman's Saturday morning goofiness here:

Monkey ThreatDown!

Following up on Mr. Verb's coverage of Zuberbühler's mokeys go boom boom in the banana patch story (see here), Stephen Colbert issued a threat down against the primates:

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Monkey ThreatDown - Holes & Banana Too High
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor U.S. Speedskating

However, my own two-year-old war on Colbert continues. I shall not rest!

Boom Boom Syntax

Mr. Verb has a post up about yet another NYT's article on animal language that does a poor job of reporting the facts:

I've been wondering about what syntax really is and how we would show it exists since reading this in the NYT this morning. It reports work by Klaus Zuberbühler and others arguing that Campbell's monkeys (cute critters, see pic) in Ivory Coast not only have some sound-meaning correspondences (boom boom mean 'come here once', krak means 'leopard', etc.), but that they have what they're calling inflectional morphology, a suffix -oo, which sounds like an auditory evidential — indicating you've heard but not seen something.

As Mr. Verb points out, the original scholarly article is not yet available so we are unable to fact check this one...yet.

Scooping Language Log

Looks like I've managed to scoop Language Log authors twice in the last couple weeks.

• Ben Zimmer's Dec 4 NYT's article on the alien language in Avatar here. My Nov 26 post on the same topic here.

• Chris Potts' Dec 5 LL post on David Foster Wallace's grammar test here. My Dec 4 post on the same topic here.

...pats self on back.

ooops, forgot to carry the one

(image from MIT)

MIT has launched a well funded re-think of Artificial Intelligence principles called The Mind Machine Project, what they're calling a "do-over."

"MMP group members span five generations of artificial-intelligence research, Gershenfeld says. Representing the first generation is Marvin Minsky, professor of media arts and sciences and computer science and engineering emeritus, who has been a leader in the field since its inception. Ford Professor of Engineering Patrick Winston of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory is one of the second-generation researchers, and Gershenfeld himself represents the third generation. Ed Boyden, a Media Lab assistant professor and leader of the Synthetic Neurobiology Group, was a student of Gershenfeld and thus represents the fourth generation. And the fifth generation includes David Dalrymple, one of the youngest students ever at MIT, where he started graduate school at the age of 14, and Peter Schmidt-Nielsen, a home-schooled prodigy who, though he never took a computer science class, at 15 is taking a leading role in developing design tools for the new software."

The Noughties

The BBC is sponsoring a contest (with no prize, they had to stop doing that, hehe) to come up with the single word that best sums up the 2000s. Some of their suggestions:

bling
tweets
green

My suggestion: meh

Which One Does Shakira Speak?

I thought I was going to have another Full Liberman on my hands (haven't finished the last one yet) but thankfully the article provocatively titled Do You Know Your 'Love Language'? doesn't really have much at all to do with language, and nothing to do with linguistics. In this case, the word language is used as a metaphor for behaviors associated with personal relationships. It's common to use language in this way, but I'd be happier with, say, the semiotics of love, or something like that.