Tenser, said the Tensor

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.

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.

-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?

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.

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. 

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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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.

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!