Tenser, said the Tensor

Green Smurf and Smurf Green

"In Schtroumpf vert et vert Schtroumpf, published in Belgium in 1972, it was revealed that the village was divided between North and South, and that the Smurfs on either side had different ideas as to whether the term smurf should be used as a verb or as a noun: for instance, the Northern Smurfs call a certain object a bottle smurfer, while the Southern Smurfs call it a smurf opener."  (from here)

Has anybody read this story?  I wonder if the two smurfalects also differed in other ways.  Did the position of nominal modifiers vary, as the title seems to imply?  And what's the structure of the title—is schtroumpf vert a variety of smurf and vert schtroumpf a shade of green?  Is either of the diasmurfs consistently smurf-initial or smurf-final, or do they have relatively free smurf-ordering?

Weygand or de Gaulle?

Over at Byzantium's Shores, blogger Jaquandor recently brought to my attention an apparently long-running controversy  about a line in Casablanca.  In the film, Ugarte (Peter Lorre) tells Rick (Humphrey Bogart) that he has letters of transit signed by General...somebody.  Opinions differ about which general it is that Lorre mentions.  Some hear de Gaulle, which would be a mistake on the part of the filmmakers, since Charles de Gaulle was the leader of the Free French forces, and his signature would be less than worthless in Vichy France.  Others hear Weygand, which makes more sense—Maxime Weygand was an official in the Vichy government and for a time was in charge of the North African colonies.

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Postalveolars According to a Three-year-old

A few weeks ago, a staggeringly cute YouTube video made the rounds of the usual web sites.  It shows a three-year-old girl describing Star Wars.  Here it is, for those of you who somehow missed it:

If you're a Star Wars geek like me, you thought this was very cool and made you want to have kids like right now.  (My favorite comment on the MetaFilter thread about the video was "made me ovulate".)  If you're a linguistics geek like me, though, I'll bet you had a different reaction: "Hmm, what's going on with her postalveolar consonants?"

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Died in a[n] X Accident

Having gotten snowclone.pl working again, it's time to put it to work.  A few weeks ago, the webcomic xkcd ran a strip consisting of a chart of the number of Google hits for variations on the pattern died in a[n] X accident.  I'm resisting the urge to explain the joke, because that's never a good idea, but it's worth noticing that this looks kind of like a snowclone (though it's not, about which more below). You're in my territory now, xkcd!

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Throttling snowclone.pl

As I occasionally do, I recently ran snowclone.pl on a phrasal template to see what sorts of fillers could be found out on the 'net.   To my surprise, I got back zero results, which didn't seem right.  Some investigation revealed that Google has introduced a CAPTCHA to prevent automated queries with wildcards (the * operator), which is just how snowclone.pl works.  Oops!

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Joe Job

Today in a thread on Ask MetaFilter, I learned a new word (well, lexical item): joe job.  That's when someone sends out spam with the return address of another person they want to make look bad.  The AskMeFi poster actually uses it in a slightly broader sense that lacks the malicious intent.

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This I Believe #29

"I have come," [Frodo] said.  "But I do not choose now to do what I came to do.  I will not do this deed.  The Ring is mine!"

EPIC FAIL

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Word Czar for a Day!

This week my local NPR station broadcast a call-in show inspired by Lake Superior State University's annual list of banned words.  The host, Ross Reynolds, opened the show by asking:

Are there certain words or phrases that you hate?  Are there cliches that make you grind your teeth?  Common misusage that sends you around the bend?  If you had the power, what words or phrases would you ban?  On the other hand, what are the new words or phrases or slang you adore?  Words that are perfectly descriptive or just fun to say?

To my utter lack of surprise, and in spite of Reynolds's persistent attempts to poke fun at the concept of an all-powerful "word czar" and to steer his listeners back to talking about their favorite words, the great majority of calls and emails were from frowny-voiced would-be language purifiers.  Quite of few of them used the word hate to describe their feelings about (what they perceive to be) non-standard English usage.  Really?  Hate?

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LSA 2008

It's that time of year again—time to organize the fourth (!) annual language-blogger get-together at the upcoming LSA meeting in Chicago.  In previous years, we've had trouble finding a time that works for everybody, though we do seem to end up with a pretty big group nonetheless.  I think Grant Barrett's suggestion from last year—that we pick a corner of the hotel bar, designate it The Spot, and meet there casually as we're available in the evenings—worked out great, so I'll try to scout out a good spot again this year.

Do we want to get ambitious and try to schedule a dinner?  It'll be hard.  Thursday not everyone will be there, Friday is the business meeting and the grad student social, and Saturday is the conference reception.  Furthermore, the ADS Word of the Year vote is on Friday.  What say you all?

Everything2 You Know is Wrong!

Taking potshots at Wikipedia is a popular sport these days. I've indulged in it myself, and probably will again.  However, in all fairness, Wikipedia's a pretty good first reference for many topics.  It could certainly be much, much worse.  How much worse?  Well, it could be Everything₂.  To see what I mean, consider a sample article about a famous semanticist.

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A Tale of Two Geddies

Names are tricky.  Many of us are assigned them at birth and accept them without much thought.  Others are bolder, taking control of their arbitrary word-handles, shedding unwanted labels for others somehow more agreeable.  This is a common practice in show business, where stage names serve to distinguish performers from each other and from us ordinary folks.  This is a story of two such performers who, in their quest for uniqueness, landed at nearly the same spot in the vast name-space.

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-V̅g

Linguisics often involves finding and explaining patterns in languages, even if speakers of languages aren't consciously aware of the patterns.  Yesterday while reading Robert Sheckley's short story "Protection", I noticed such a pattern in English.  In the story, Sheckley (the same author who wrote "Shall We Have a Little Talk?") makes up a bunch of nonsense words to represent words in an alien language.  One of them is feeg, and it immediately struck me as odd-sounding.  Is feeg a phonetically possible English word?

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Gay is a Verb

Geoff Pullum (after dropping the bombshell that he's moving to Edinburgh) recently wrote about the mayor of West Sacramento's announcement that he "want[s] to start thinking of gay as a verb and not just a noun".  Pullum, himself no slouch in the grammar department, reacts by pointing out:

The linguistic fact, by the way, is that gay is primarily an adjective, though just like the adjective homosexual it has a secondary use as a count noun referring to a person who has the property in question.  If the mayor wants to start thinking of gay as a verb, is it transitive  ("I gayed him")?  Or intransitive ("How often do you gay")?  What meaning does he think of it as having?   When someone gays, what is it that he is doing?  What is gaying?  (Oops, I used a gerund.)

I can, however, pace Pullum, think of at least one usage of gay as a verb.

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No Longer Ictic?

After discussing reading pronunciations in academic talks just a few days ago, I encountered a perfect example today in a talk at a conference.  All through the talk, the speaker used the pronunciation  [di.ˈɪk.tɪk] (roughly dee-IK-tik) for the word deictic.  The two standard pronunciations of deictic are  [ˈdaɪk.tɪk] (DIKE-tik) and the less common [ˈdeɪk.tɪk] (DAKE-tik), but you can hardly be expected to figure that out from the spelling.  I remember being surprised the first time I heard it spoken aloud—I had been pronouncing it [deɪ.ˈɪk.tɪk] in my head.  Apparently today's speaker came to a similar conclusion, although I can't rule out the possibility that she's a faithful reader of this blog and decided to attempt to pull off the prank I proposed in my earlier post.  If that's the case, then I salute you!

Blogging the 2007 Bee

Although we missed the live broadcast, thanks to the miracle of TiVo we were able to catch a late-night repeat of the final rounds of the 2007 Scripps National Spelling Bee.  What follows are some observations about the Bee and a discussion of the particular words the kids had to spell.  Fair warning: lots of spoilers, including most importantly the correct spellings of the words. 

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The Superiority of Generation X

Sign that you might be a big ol' nerd:

You're attending an invited talk by a big-name linguist, and while he's showing an example of a superiority violation found in the wild on the Web, you're thinking, "Hey...I'll bet that's from a piece of Generation X fanfic!"

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next next and previous previous

Some languages, including English, have single words for 'yesterday' and 'tomorrow', but only multi-word phrases for 'the day before yesterday' and 'the day after tomorrow'.  Other languages have single words for those meanings; Japanese, for example, in addition to 昨日 /kinoo/ 'yesterday' and 明日 /ashita/ 'tomorrow', has 一昨日 /ototoi/ 'the day before yesterday' and 明後日 /asatte/ 'the day after tomorrow'.  In fact, it even has a word (which I was reminded of while using Jim Breen's indispensible WWWJDIC) for 'the day after the day after tomorrow', 明明後日 /shiasatte/, though there doesn't seem to be a corresponding term for 'the day before the day before yesterday'.

I'm curious how common lexical items like this are across the world's languages, and not just for temporal sequences.

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Windclone

If you listen to the BBC/PRI radio show "The World", you're familiar with the daily feature called the Geo Quiz (along with its maddeningly catchy theme song).  In it, the audience is teased with the description of some location in the world and asked to guess where it is.  Shortly thereafter, the location is revealed, and a story having something to do with that location follows.  In the show of April 2nd, the answer to the Geo Quiz was Lake Baikal in Siberia.  The story was about a team who trekked across the lake when it was frozen in winter, a 435-mile journey from south to north that they'd originally intended to travel by kite-skiing.  Unfortunately, the winds didn't cooperate and they had to walk the whole way, dragging their sledges.  (Talk about buns of steel!)

At one point in the story, team member Conrad Dickinson made a claim that should sound familiar to readers of linguistics blogs:

Lake Baikal is famous for its winds.  A bit like the Inuit in northern Canada have 18 names for snow, the local people have 30 names for the famous winds.

Aha!  It's another variation on the original snowclone!

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Friendly Milk

"Hold the newsreader's nose squarely, waiter, or friendly milk will countermand my trousers."

This is from a hilarious sketch by Fry and Laurie (via), which you can watch after the jump.

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Notes on Hawaii

The Wife and I spent last week in Maui.  (Capsule review: paradise, plus good restaurants.)  Over the course of our stay, several linguistically interesting things happened, and I figured I should post about them.  What else is a language blog for?

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Pressing the Turd

"They press it, and all the food (in the turd) goes away.  All that remains is the sweat, the shit with the sweat in it.  Then they scratch it."

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A Serious

Many of you, no doubt, are familiar with the profusion of English collective nouns, which includes turns of phrase like a parliament of owls, a murder of crows, and many, many more.  These are also sometimes referred to as terms of venery, apparently the name for them popularized in An Exaltation of Larks by James Lipton.  (Yes, that James Lipton.)  At the moment, I'm catching up on a month of Language Log (a back-Log?), and I noticed the following typo in a post by Mark Liberman about the history of the site:

In October of 2003, we started to get somewhat serious about the enterprise, recruiting Geoff Nunberg and then a serious of other colleagues to join us.

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This I Believe #21

...that when borrowing words into English, especially when their number is unclear and they tend to get used as mass nouns, you should invent singular forms for them as if they followed the high-prestige Latin pattern, regardless of their actual language of origin.  Examples:

(First declension)  The warrior class of ancient Japan were the samurai.  Each samura traditionally carried two swords.

(Second declension masculine)  When my wife dances, she wears decorative bindi.  Sometimes, during a performance, the glue comes loose and she loses a bindus.

(Second declension neuter)  Often for dessert at a Middle Eastern restaurant I will order a plate of baklava.  Generally it comes on a plate containing several pieces, so that each person at the table can have their own baklavum.

If you want to go the extra mile, you can even back-form an irregular third declension singular, as in:

I recommend the tempura. When eating it, be sure to dip every individual tempus in the special sauce provided.  (Extra bonus: round trip Romance-language borrowing!)

Finally, if you're really feeling ambitious, you can even do Latin-style number concord:

Traditionally, an order of nigiri sushi consists of two pieces.  Each nigirus sushus is a ball of rice with fish or some other food laid on top.

New Radiation Symbol

The IAEA and ISO have announced an updated version of the venerable ionizing radiation warning symbol.  The original was easily the coolest of the warning symbols, whose only serious competition was the biohazard symbol (though I have a soft spot for the laser symbol, myself).  However, it suffered from a serious flaw.  As the IAEA press release says, the original symbol "...has no intuitive meaning and little recognition beyond those educated in its significance."  They have therefore designed the following supplemental symbol:

Hmm.  It's not everything it could be.

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More than Meets the Ear

Last week I heard a promo on the local NPR station for a show about the many meanings of the word transformers.  I didn't get a chance to listen to the show, which apparently discussed things like gang defection, personal style, and sexual identity.  What caught my attention was the way the announcer pronounced the word, which struck me as odd.  To my surprise, I seem to have two pronunciations of the word transformer in my mental lexicon with slightly different meanings, and I wonder if your judgments match mine.

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Fold the Exalted Dog

This quarter I'm working on a machine-translation project.  For starters, we're working with a set of seventeen sentences that exercise some simple grammatical phenomena.  I don't speak most of the languages that have landed on my plate, so as a first pass I've been running the sentences through machine translation systems on the web.  I realize it's old news that round-trip translations are funny, but the results for the English-Korean-English loop are especially dreadful.

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What Does the H Stand For?

I'm sure many of you have heard or used the expression Jesus H. Christ or one of its many variants, probably in connection with someone hitting himself in the thumb with a hammer or a similar mishap.  Have you ever wondered what the H stands for?  Cecil Adams wrote a column about this question more than thirty years ago, but he didn't have the Internet at his disposal.  I do, so to find and count all the variants of the expression, I fed it to my trusty snowclone script—though Jesus H. Christ doesn't have much syntax in it, so it probably isn't a phrasal template like a true snowclone, it's still of a form ("jesus X christ") the script can work on.  After the jump, therefore, I present to you: the many middle names of the Son of Man.

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LSA 2007

I'm back from the 2007 meeting of the Linguistic Society of America:

...and it was great.  There's nothing quite like hanging out with a thousand or so colleagues for four days to renew your enthusiasm for linguistics.  After the jump, you'll find my n