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.

Them Maths Is Hard

This morning's NYT contained an article on search engines which contained a claim of such discombobulated mathematical incompetence, I just had to share:

It’s no secret that even with their recently-announced alliance, Yahoo and Microsoft will lag well behind Google in the hugely profitable search and search advertising business. How far behind? With a combined 28 percent of the American search market, Yahoo and Microsoft could double their usage and still trail Google, which accounts for 65 percent of the market.

I don't have to get all Mark Liberman on you to explain what's wrong with this claim. If Microsoft/Yahoo! doubled their 28% market share, that's 56%, at which point they would no longer trail Google who could have no more than 44% of the market.

Maybe it's finally time to stop reading the NYT...