I have ... um ... complicated beliefs about language death. Nonetheless, I thought this was a list worth reading: 10 Modern Cases of Linguistic Genocide.
HT: celiabcn, via twitter #linguistics.
Saturday, March 6, 2010
Thursday, March 4, 2010
Really! Really? Really.
Dear Netflix, is The Importance Of Being Earnest really a "Cerebral Drama"? Really! Really? Really. I'm not sure your recommender system ever actually read Oscar Wilde.
Pssst, for context on The Three "reallys" Construction see my comment on LL and repeated below:
The Three "reallys" Construction is strictly a spoken construction, as far as I can tell, so I can't do much of a search, but it's common in sitcoms and very commonly used in casual setting amongst friends when a person is faced with a situation that is (1) surprising, (2) intractable. The three "reallys" provide a cascaded enunciation of the cline from genuine surprise to complete defeatism (i.e., the person realizes there's nothing they can do about the situation).
really 1 = interjection like wow expressing internal surprise.
really 2 = interrogative, actually questioning the other person wrt the situation.
really 3 = expression of defeat (i.e., I give up).
Pssst, for context on The Three "reallys" Construction see my comment on LL and repeated below:
The Three "reallys" Construction is strictly a spoken construction, as far as I can tell, so I can't do much of a search, but it's common in sitcoms and very commonly used in casual setting amongst friends when a person is faced with a situation that is (1) surprising, (2) intractable. The three "reallys" provide a cascaded enunciation of the cline from genuine surprise to complete defeatism (i.e., the person realizes there's nothing they can do about the situation).
really 1 = interjection like wow expressing internal surprise.
really 2 = interrogative, actually questioning the other person wrt the situation.
really 3 = expression of defeat (i.e., I give up).
Correct All Grammar Errors And Plagiarism!
I was stupid enough to click through to Huffington Post's colossally stupid and fundamentally mistaken Worst Grammar Mistakes Ever post (I refuse to link to it). Of course, the 11 items had virtually nothing to do with grammar (the vast majority were punctuation and spelling errors). I must agree with Zwicky's pessimism regarding National Grammar Day: "It seems to me that the day is especially unlikely to provide a receptive audience for what linguists have to say."
But what prompted this post was the ad at the bottom for Grammarly, a free online "proofreader and grammar coach" which promised to Correct All Grammar Errors And Plagiarism.
A bold claim, indeed. I doubt a team of ten trained linguists could could felicitously make this claim. But the boldness does not stop there (it never does on the innerwebz). Click through to the online tool and wow, the bold claims just start stacking up like flap jacks at a Sunday fundraiser.
Just paste in your test and bam! you get
150+ Grammar Checks
Get detailed error explanations.
Plagiarism Detection
Find unoriginal text.
Text Enhancement
Use better words.
Contextual Spell Check
Spot misused words.
Dang! Them fancy computers, they sure is smart. Just for funnin, I pasted the text of Zwicky's NGD again post into the window and ran the check. Here's his report:
Not bad for a professor at one of the lesser linguistics departments.
(pssst, btw, did ya spot that odd little grey balloon at the top of the second screen shot? Yeah, me too. It says "click allow if presented with a browser security message." Suspect, no doubt. Nonetheless, I trusted Chrome to protect me and plowed ahead).
But what prompted this post was the ad at the bottom for Grammarly, a free online "proofreader and grammar coach" which promised to Correct All Grammar Errors And Plagiarism.
A bold claim, indeed. I doubt a team of ten trained linguists could could felicitously make this claim. But the boldness does not stop there (it never does on the innerwebz). Click through to the online tool and wow, the bold claims just start stacking up like flap jacks at a Sunday fundraiser.
Just paste in your test and bam! you get
150+ Grammar Checks
Get detailed error explanations.
Plagiarism Detection
Find unoriginal text.
Text Enhancement
Use better words.
Contextual Spell Check
Spot misused words.
Dang! Them fancy computers, they sure is smart. Just for funnin, I pasted the text of Zwicky's NGD again post into the window and ran the check. Here's his report:
Not bad for a professor at one of the lesser linguistics departments.
(pssst, btw, did ya spot that odd little grey balloon at the top of the second screen shot? Yeah, me too. It says "click allow if presented with a browser security message." Suspect, no doubt. Nonetheless, I trusted Chrome to protect me and plowed ahead).
Grammar Myths Debunked
Motivated Grammar debunks ten grammar myths in honor of National Grammar Day. Additionally, he honors the better spirit of linguistics by linking to "two papers that really made me fall in love with the field." I thought that was a nice idea so I'll pick up his cue and link to a couple that got my own linguistics juices flowing back-in-the-day.
Cheers!
- Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things by George Lakoff
- Everything that Linguists have Always Wanted to Know about Logic . . . But Were Ashamed to Ask by James D. McCawley
- Constructions: A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure by Adele E. Goldberg
Cheers!
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
Oldest Example of Written English Discovered
No, not quite. The title of this post comes from a Digg link which linked to this article. The writing is dated at around 500 years old, which couldn't possible be "oldest example of written English" could it? The Huntington Library has the Ellesmere Chaucer, a manuscript c. 1405, so that's got it beat by a 100 years already and I haven't even bothered to look for Old English manuscripts. The claim in the title is quite different from the claim in the original article which begins with this:
This just means there's a lot of Latin written in English churches. The cool part is that they're crowdsourcing the interpretation.
If anyone thinks they can identify any further letters from the enhanced photographs, please contact us via the Salisbury Cathedral website.The basic questions of what exactly the words are and why the text was written on the cathedral wall remain unanswered. It would be wonderful for us to solve the mystery (link added).
Go on, give it a shot.
Looks like the original lyrics to Judas Priest's Better by You Better Than Me to me.
What is believed to be the first ever example of English written in a British church has been discovered. Problem is, no-one can read it.
This just means there's a lot of Latin written in English churches. The cool part is that they're crowdsourcing the interpretation.
If anyone thinks they can identify any further letters from the enhanced photographs, please contact us via the Salisbury Cathedral website.The basic questions of what exactly the words are and why the text was written on the cathedral wall remain unanswered. It would be wonderful for us to solve the mystery (link added).
Go on, give it a shot.
Looks like the original lyrics to Judas Priest's Better by You Better Than Me to me.
Tuesday, March 2, 2010
Qatar, Rhymes With Butter .. or Susan
UPDATE: Fivethirtyeight recently (12.02.2010) tweeted about ESPN broadcasters pronouncing Qatar and linked to this site with variations, neither of which rhyme with butter, hehe: howjsay.com.
I've noticed a lot of Americans pronouncing the country name Qatar as something like kutter* ([kʌɾɚ]). This is particularly true of US military personnel serving in Iraq who are regularly traveling through there, but I also just heard it on teevee by ESPN's Chris Fowler referencing a tennis tournament in Doha, Qatar. As a native speaker of American English, I don't think my default pronunciation assignment of the alphabetic string Q-a-t-a-r would be [kʌɾɚ]. If I were presented with the string of Romanized letters Q-a-t-a-r for the first time, I think my first attempt at a pronunciation would be somewhat closer to American English guitar, something like [kʌt'ɑːʳ]**. So why do so many Americans use this non-standard, may I say, deviant, pronunciation? First, I suspect that the soldiers and sports announcers flowing through the region have little confidence in their own default reading of the Romanized letters, so they willingly mimic whomesoever says the name first, and then, heck, that's how you say it. It's a nice example of follow-the-leader linguistics.
But why is the dominant American pronunciation of Qatar → [kʌɾɚ] to begin with? It's a nice "proximate cause" question. And my answer is???
I've noticed a lot of Americans pronouncing the country name Qatar as something like kutter* ([kʌɾɚ]). This is particularly true of US military personnel serving in Iraq who are regularly traveling through there, but I also just heard it on teevee by ESPN's Chris Fowler referencing a tennis tournament in Doha, Qatar. As a native speaker of American English, I don't think my default pronunciation assignment of the alphabetic string Q-a-t-a-r would be [kʌɾɚ]. If I were presented with the string of Romanized letters Q-a-t-a-r for the first time, I think my first attempt at a pronunciation would be somewhat closer to American English guitar, something like [kʌt'ɑːʳ]**. So why do so many Americans use this non-standard, may I say, deviant, pronunciation? First, I suspect that the soldiers and sports announcers flowing through the region have little confidence in their own default reading of the Romanized letters, so they willingly mimic whomesoever says the name first, and then, heck, that's how you say it. It's a nice example of follow-the-leader linguistics.
But why is the dominant American pronunciation of Qatar → [kʌɾɚ] to begin with? It's a nice "proximate cause" question. And my answer is???
How Many Linguists Are There? 5379.
Previously, I ranted, just a bit, about the suggestion that there are more linguists than languages. I guessed that, in fact, this may not be true. Thanks to the LSA update email that was just sent out, I was able to follow up a bit. That email referenced the results of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ survey of linguistics departments (pdf, it doesn't load every time, so repeated clicking might be warranted). Table LN1 (below) gives an estimated 1630 faculty member in linguistics departments across the United States. That strikes me as a fair base to start a back-of-the-napkin estimation of total linguists worldwide (I noted in my previous rant the problems with defining a linguist, but I'll take this survey as my authority for now).
Let the number games begin. First, let's assume that this initial estimation is conservative. I'll throw in another 10% to make up for that. Let's assume there are about 1793 linguists in the US. I think it's fair to assume there are about as many linguists in Europe (though you'd never know it by the poor rate at which American linguists cite Europeans, but that's another rant). So that's another 1793 for Europe. I'd wager that there are at best an equal number of linguists in the rest of the world as in either the States or Europe, so that's another 1793.
By this estimation, there are approximately 5379 linguists in the world (1793 x 3). That sounds about right to me. And if this is correct, then my original point stands, there are NOT more linguists than languages.
Let the number games begin. First, let's assume that this initial estimation is conservative. I'll throw in another 10% to make up for that. Let's assume there are about 1793 linguists in the US. I think it's fair to assume there are about as many linguists in Europe (though you'd never know it by the poor rate at which American linguists cite Europeans, but that's another rant). So that's another 1793 for Europe. I'd wager that there are at best an equal number of linguists in the rest of the world as in either the States or Europe, so that's another 1793.
By this estimation, there are approximately 5379 linguists in the world (1793 x 3). That sounds about right to me. And if this is correct, then my original point stands, there are NOT more linguists than languages.
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