on "High Speed"

(screen shot of hotel connection speed)

It has become painfully clear that the meaning of "high speed" with respect to internet connection is being co-opted by hotel franchises as a marketing tool and as a result is fast being cleansed of any valuable meaning. Case in point, I'm in Kansas this weekend for business, but it turns out that Kansas State and U. Kansas both have home football games this weekend and they're both less than an hour's drive of where I am, so the hotels around the area have all been booked solid. Hence, I was forced to take a room at a modest priced hotel (with a poor reputation) but at least they had "high speed internet" so I could get work done, right? This is a business trip, remember.

Not so fast (literally): I'll spare you the rant about the many other issues with this hotel and point you to the screen shot above which shows the speed of my connection (when it actually worked, that is). How does 305kbs download speed count as "high speed"? I hereby call upon the ISO to determine a minimum speed that shall henceforth be the standard for determining whether a connection is "high speed" or not...pretty please?

It will surely embiggen the hearts of my more gentle readers to know that I convinced my company to waive their per diem and find me more suitable lodgings for the remainder of the trip.

NOTE: This is another good example of the commercialization of Google's search engine. Any query with "high speed internet" in it will be riddled with advertisements for service, not discussions about. Yet another reason Google is not a good linguistics research tool. See more discussion here.

Fuck The Bills!!!

A rare (but much deserved) non-linguistics rant:

The Bills suck ass. Deal with it. How can that moron run it back? What's he thinking? Why? What value is there to a run back? This reminds me of the game against Dallas when they led by 8 and all they had to do was position for a field goal and they would have had the greatest upset in NFL history. But no, those fucking morons throw and it and it gets intercepted and they lose the fucking game.

Fuck the Bills. Fuck 'em.

Don't watch their games. Don't buy their merchandise. Let them move to Toronto. They don't deserve fans. Fuck the Bills. Fuck 'em.

The Buffalo Bills are like the worst relationship anyone has ever been in. The one you're totally, blindly in love with but who just keeps fucking you over and you let them because you're so fucking deep you're willing to be shit on just to be in the same room with them and you'll never be the one to cut the chord. Until the day they just stop being interested in toying with you and they just go away, and it's the best thing in the world for you, but you don't get that right away, you’re crushed until years later you get it. They sucked. They sucked ass and they should die, but they’re gone now and that’s good. Fuck ‘em. Fuck the Bills. Go to Toronto and stop fucking us over. We’ll fall in love with the Steelers soon anyway, because they actually win shit! That’s right, I said it. Fuck the Bills because they lose a lot and the Steelers actually win.

Against Prescriptivism

It's all too common for prescriptivists to complain about word usage deviations, as if a word had one fixed meaning forever and ever. This is not true. A couple of good examples popped up on The Daily Dish when guest blogger Conor Clarke, a smart and well educated journalist, used two words (arbitrary and cynical) in ways that deviate from the way I would use them (and from what I would consider traditional usage); yet, his usage conforms to the way both of these words seem to be evolving in general usage in American English:

"We are all born with talents that are equally arbitrary -- strength and intelligence and social grace -- and yet we all compete for prizes under the impression that the outcomes are fair. Perhaps something called free will enters the picture at some point. And perhaps not: The ability to work hard might be doled out just as arbitrarily at a Y Chromosome or a great voice. I don't know how you'd prove it either way. Anyway, the cynical conclusion here is that there's nothing inherently just or fair about these outcomes."

On Arbitrary
For me, something is arbitrary when it is a function of decision making (note its obvious relationship to arbitrate). For example, WordNet's definition:"based on or subject to individual discretion or preference or sometimes impulse or caprice." But Clark uses it to mean something like 'not under our direct control' when he describes genetic traits as arbitrary. I can imagine an historical shift whereby decisions that are arbitrary came to be viewed as being made on the idiosyncratic whim of the decider (rather than based on some sound, objective, logical reasoning). Hence, the word came to mean 'unfair or without sound reason'. Then, quite recently I believe, the word shifted again when users found a salient connection between 'lacking sound reason' and 'out of one's direct control'. And this seems to be how American English speakers of Clarke's generation (I believe he's about 15 years younger than I am) use the word. And this helps explain why it's now commonly used for situations where an outcome is indifferent to fairness.

On Cynical
For me, a person is cynical when they reduce the intentions of others down to one root cause, namely selfishness. For example, WordNet's definition: "believing the worst of human nature and motives; having a sneering disbelief in e.g. selflessness of others." But Clarke uses it to mean something like 'preferring the explanation that is most indifferent to fairness'. The conclusion he predicates as cynical has nothing to do with human motives or intentions. I believe what he's saying in the last sentence of the passage above is that there are two competing beliefs:

Belief A = competition outcomes are fair because all competitors start out equal.
Belief B = competition outcomes are indifferent to fairness because they are rooted in genetic differences (which themselves are indifferent to fairness).

Clarke then says that to prefer Belief B is to be cynical.

Final Thought
As for me, I believe word meanings are arbitrary, but then again, I'm cynical.

PS: For font geeks, that's Bradely Hand ITC.

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...

Immortality?

(pic from Huffington Post)

Headline: Henry Allingham: World's Oldest Man Dies At 113.

Am I wrong, or is it logically impossible for the world's oldest man to die?

Adam's Tongue (pt 3)

(classic depiction of Saussure's arbitrariness of the sign claim)

This is the third in a series of posts detailing my notes and thoughts about the book Adam's Tongue as I prepare to lead a book discussion meeting July 6, 2009 in the DC metro area (see my first post here and second here).

Ch 3 - Thinking Like Engineers

I've spent the last 5 years working in natural language processing and with engineers and I agree that there is something very valuable for a linguist to "think like an engineer" so I was curious from the start about this chapter, but I was also weary because the Chomskyan syntacticians also "think like engineers" and I believe they have led linguistics down a garden path of false starts and flawed theories for 40 years. So I read on cautiously.

• DB notes that he came into linguistics via pidgins and creoles and they bear on his thinking about language evolution. But does this bias him too, like the man who has a hammer and sees everything as a nail? We shall see.

• DB says there's no syntax when we try to speak with people who don't share our language (p 39) because we don't know enough of the language, the foreign words just pop out as we grope for them. Now, I certainly defer to DB's far greater expertise of pidgin & creole formation, but this thought experiment of his does not jive with my own experiences. Like many travelers, I've had this exact experience in places like Guangzhou China and Prague but I don't think the foreign words "just popped out" quite as randomly as he suggests. I'm tending to side with Slobin here.

• He claims that protowords must not have had any internal morphological structure (41) because early language users would have had no rules defining that structure. On it's face, this makes sense, nonetheless this begs the question: which came first, the word or the morphology? Is it not plausible that some neurologically based process for seeking internal structure to sounds developed prior to the advent or words? I just don't know.

• The boom vocalization of the Campbell's monkey occurs 30 seconds before the alarm (42). My first reaction: wow! this is stretching the limits of transitional probabilities, isn't it? Can we plausibly claim that an association between sounds 30 seconds apart is neurologically feasible?
  

• DB claims these booms are not modifiers (p42) because the boom "cancels out" the alarm. I'd have to review the literature on these boom carefully, but my first reaction is: does it really cancel the alarm? If I understand the context, it simply means "not immediate threat (but still a threat)". That's not a cancellation. It's more like epistemic modality: "there MIGHT be danger."
  

• Page 44 -- The gavagai problem restated.

• Confused: I'm confused by DB's claim on page 45 that "words combine as separate units -- they never blend. They're atoms, not mudballs." I'm not sure what he means. Blending and combining are different, in that blending suggests some elements of both previous words/calls are preserved in the new word/call. This happens all the time in contemporary linguistic change (classic example: motel blends motor + hotel, persevering bits of each's morphology as well as semantic blending). But I suspect DB is not referencing that. So what is he referencing?

• He makes a nice distinction between ACSs and Language: ACSs are primarily for manipulation of behavior while language is primarily for information sharing. I have no clue if this is really true, but if yes, it's a good point (p 47).
  

• He writes "language units are symbolic because they're designed to convey information." A nice follow-up point on the difference point above, but it begs the question: what is "information"? Any answer which supports DB would have to couch a definition in abstraction, right? E.g., Information is a conceptualization that is independent from direct reference.

• DB makes a bold claim on page 52 that strikes at the heart of post-Saussurean linguistics: displacement is a more important factor to language evolution than arbitrariness. But it's worth noting that both are functions of abstraction, so perhaps this is just another version of his previous point that the jump to abstract thought is the key.

On to chapter 3 -- Singing Apes....

Adam's Tongue (pt 2)

This is the second in a series of posts detailing my notes and thoughts about the book Adam's Tongue as I prepare to lead a book discussion meeting July 6, 2009 in the DC metro area (see my first post here. UPDATE: My third post is here).

Ch 1 - The size of the problem

• This chapter is designed to walk through what's wrong with other theories of language evolution.

• The basic point of the chapter seems to be this: no animal communication system (ACS) allows itself to refer to things distant in time and space, therefore they are not likely the precursors of language. Everyone who has taken or taught a Language Files course knows these two criteria as Hockett's two communication features unique to human language (Bickerton get's to Hockett in due course).
  

• On the very first page of this chapter, I noted, "Is there a gavagai problem here?" By which I meant, how can we know what one of these ACS references really refers to? Bickerton's index lists nothing for either "Quine" or "gavagai," though he skirts this issue repeated for the next few chapters (and possibly the whole book). This dilemma become particularly critical in chapter 4 Chatting Apes, but I'll come to that later.

As a background, here's a passage from Wikipedia's Indeterminacy of translation page describing Quine's famous example:

Consider Quine's example of the word "gavagai" uttered by a native upon seeing a rabbit[1]. The linguist could do what seems natural and translate this as "Lo, a rabbit." But other translations would be compatible with all the evidence he has: "Lo, food"; "Let's go hunting"; "There will be a storm tonight" (these natives may be superstitious); "Lo, a momentary rabbit-stage"; "Lo, an undetached rabbit-part." Some of these might become less likely – that is, become more unwieldy hypotheses – in the light of subsequent observation. Others can only be ruled out by querying the natives: An affirmative answer to "Is this the same gavagai as that earlier one?" will rule out "momentary rabbit stage," and so forth. But these questions can only be asked once the linguist has mastered much of the natives' grammar and abstract vocabulary; that in turn can only be done on the basis of hypotheses derived from simpler, observation-connected bits of language; and those sentences, on their own, admit of multiple interpretations, as we have seen.

• No gradual move from ACS to human language (17): Since evolution is gradual and slow, there would have to be a "missing link" (my term, not DB's); an ACS that made the jump from referring to the here and now to referring to the distant and far. No such link exists

• Therefore, ACSs grew out of non-communication behaviors

• Uniqueness of language also not relevant because many species have unique features (Pinker's elephant trunk, 20).
  

• Humans suddenly had something else to "talk" about other than the here and now and THAT'S what spurned language.

• The new thing humans had was abstract concepts (22). We can talk about dogs as a category (he makes an important distinction between categories and concepts much later in chapter 4 at the bottom of page 87).

• This new ability to abstract is not associated with evolutionary fitness.

• Critical Point: other species didn't develop language because they didn't need language (p 24).

• Bickerton's 4 tests for any theory of language evolution: 1) uniqueness, 2) ecology, 3) credibility, 4) selfishness (p28). Bolles' blog Babel's Dawn discusses these criteria at length here.