With the passing of George Carlin, the discussion of his famous "7 Words You Can Never Say on Television" came up. It is interesting to see which words have made it on the air (at least on HBO) and which ones are still rarely used in the U.S. market.
And of course, You Tube has several recorded routines from Geoge Carlin on this topic. I like this version from 1978 because he first has a discussion of roots vs. derived words and then follows with notes on alternate vocabulary for the banned terminology.
This is a monologue which most clearly demonstrates the futility of assuming that grammar follows rational logic (a lot is random convention). In any case, I will miss his analytic skills.
One of the nice benefits of the new media outlets on the Internet is the ability to preview non-English language music - both modern and traditional.
If you are in a Russian frame of mind, you may enjoy Far From Moscow, a blog about the Russian Pop music scene. It's from UCLA and written for the American music audience. Entries include clips of sample songs, brief artist bios (with a touch of politics) and links by musical genre (such as reggae and folk). And since it's from UCLA, I'm assuming that most of the clips are legal (they're certainly high quality).
I would recommend listening to some of these tracks...even if you don't know a word of Russian. I'm feeling hipper already
I've been lax in my blogging, so I thought I would add some reviews of books which are written for non-specialists but focus on some aspect of linguistics. I will start with the anthology Language in the USA
Book Product Details (from Amazon.com)
Paperback: 520 pages
Publisher: Cambridge University Press (June 28, 2004)
ISBN-10: 052177747X
ISBN-13: 978-0521777476
Summary
This is a collection of articles covering different aspects of linguistic culture in the United States. The first part covers regional American English including origins, distinctiveness of the general accent, regional varietes, "social varieties" and a chapter on African American English and one on American Sign Language. The second part covers non-English with a focus on Spanish as well as creoles, Native American languages and multilingualism. The third section is an overview of different "sociolinguistic" issues including education, teen slang, gender/sexuality and cyberspace language.
My review
As you can see from the list above the goal of this book is to educate readers about the linguistic facts behind various "hot" policy and cultural topics. As such, the articles are written by discipline experts and include an overview of the field, specific data, a detailed bibliography and recommendations for further research.
Generally speaking, I would say the articles are successful because while they are not technical, they provide important details that clarify the underlying issues. For instance most people are familiar with American Sign Language (ASL) but may not realize it it has a grammar distinct from English, comes in regional varieties and has shown linguistic change over time. Hence ASL does have a unique linguistic heritage which is different from English.
The tone is generally non-preachy, which is good idea when the goal is to explain that commonly held views of language may be ... uh-hmm... dead wrong. More importantly, the academic tone of the articles lends crucial credibility to research fields like the study of hip-hop which might otherwise be considered "frivolous" by the general public. Another valuable factor is that many articles discuss research methods of past history of the discipline. Understanding where the data comes from is crucial for being able to track future debates where language and policy/culture collide.
As with any anthology, the articles vary in quality, but two particularly strong articles are "Spanish in the Northeast" and "Spanish in the Southwest". Although Spanish is the second largest language in the United States, these two articles show that not all Spanish speakers in the U.S. are alike.
For instance, "Spanish in the Northeast" article explains most speakers in the northeast have historically emigrated from the Caribbean and explains some of the history of immigrants from different countries. An example from the article is that in the middle of the 20th century, Anglos tended to regard the Cuban and Dominican communities more sympathetically then the Puerto Rican community because Cubans/Dominican immigrants were considered political refugees while Puerto Ricans were merely considered to be poor citizens from a U.S. colony. The recent situation in the northeast is now more complicated because of immigrants from other parts of Latin America including Mexican immigrants which previously had emigrated primarily to the Southwest
The "Spanish in the Southwest" article includes a discussion of the long contact between Spanish and English speakers in the region - enough so that there are Spanish vocabulary words unique to the region. It also mentions an important point that a significant number of speakers may be of Hispanic or Mexican heritage but are actually monolingual English speakers. Timing of immigration is an important factor.
Although most of the articles are well-written, there are a few glitches. One gap is that there is no key for the special phonetic symbols used in different articles. On the one hand, I don't think you can have a rational discussion of pronunciation for long without understanding how a transcription system works, but then again so few Americans learn it that a key is essential. Some articles do explain the underlying pronunciation mechanisms, but it's a fine line to walk.
Ironically, another weak area is coverage of regional American English. While it does cover the basics, it doesn't really touch on the details that many "mainstream" English speakers are interested in. Then again regional English could cover an entire book and they are available. Some of my favorites in that vein are the The Story of English and Do You Speak American?
One of the ongoing challenges facing the field of linguistics is how to translate important research insights into a format that non-specialists can understand. I think Language in the USA does an admirable job of trying to bridge the gap between researcher and citizen, hopefully without losing too much data in the process.
My Rating
I'll give a 4.5 out of 5
The World Atlas of Language Structures Online (http://wals.info/feature) from the Max Planck Digital Library is a great new resource that maps languages with phonological, morphological or syntactic features.
For instance, someone asked if front-rounded vowels (e.g. German /ü,ö/ or French /œ/) were only found in languages originating from northern Eurasia. The map at http://wals.info/feature/11 actually shows that while most languages with front round vowels are in Northern Eurasia, there are a few further south in tropical regions including a few in the Amazon basin. In case you're wondering the maps are in the Google maps format and can be exported into KML and XML format.
The sources are well cited so the data is trustworthy and lots of features are mapped out. There's also a subsidiary set of language profile pages. A nice academically rich use of Web 2.0 technlogy.
The SIL group is using a new term I think should become more common - the macrolanguage A macrolanguage is basically a set of related languages that share a common "identity" even though speakers can't normally understand each other.
The most famous macrolanguage is probably Chinese. It is fairly well-known that a speaker from Beijing speaking Mandarin Chinese will often have difficulty understanding a Cantonese Chinese speaker from Hong Kong...unless someone has taken a formal class in the other form. Normally, these are called Chinese dialects but the differences are so great that linguists do classify them as separate languages. Interestingly, each of these languages can also have regional variations (many regional variations of Mandarin Chinese are found in Northern China).
Chinese is not alone by the way. Other macrolanguages include Arabic, Cree, Hmong, Quechua (as spoken in the Incan Empire), and Norweigian. I suspect that you could thrown in some other candidates like German and Italian.
As you can imagine, I definitely prefer the term macrolanguage over dialect for Chinese because it removes the confusion of regional dialects where everyone can understand each other (e.g. most English dialects) and those which are really separate languages (e.g. Chinese "dialects"). The term macrolanguage also acknowledges the strong cultural link between the speakers of the related languages.
I really hope this term takes hold...because I really think it will simplify other discussions about language (like language code). After all, it was just this year that a language technology guru claimed that English had no "true dialects." I think he meant to say that English hasn't reached macrolanguage status yet.
Recently, the insurance company Old Mutual has been running a "clever" ad campaign in which they use "old mutual" as a new slang term to mean something else (see video from Youtube). The ads end with the tag line "It may sound strange now...but it won't for long."
But see how I put "clever" in "square quotes"? Something is amiss. I get that the marketers are trying to put a hip spin on insurance, and the original idea IS clever. But something went awry in the execution because they ended up giving the new hip phrase "old mutual" too many meanings.
Believe it or not, my mother and I have both sat there and tried to figure out what the slang term "old mutual" would mean in the real world. But it can't be done. If you watch the various vignettes in just this ad, you will see that "old mutual" has the following meanings.
- Fashionable/Chic/Hot
- Important (especially to teenage girls)
- Nostalgic?? ("we should let it go and just be old mutual")
- Get Through Traffic
- Cool
- The Boss/Company VP
Sorry you can't easily connect the dots between a cabbie trying to bust through traffic and two middle managers commenting that the VP may not understand chai latte. Instead of thinking the marketers as being cutting edge, I'm thinking they're just a bunch of young innocents who really should have squeezed in a Steven Pinker book before trying this stunt. Or maybe it's really common sense, and the writers need to review the importance of precise word choice in their writing. D'uh!
FYI - my recommendation would have been to select just ONE meaning (e.g. "cool") and run with it. I'm pretty sure you would have been able to get the requisite number of vignettes.
Ebola Postscript
There is one skit that got it right. Back in the initial Ebola scare of the mid 90s, Mad TV did a hilarious sketch in which the secret street slang council met and decided to introduce "Ebola" as a new slang term into the population. Sample use - "Girl, those stiletto pumps are ebola!" or "so cool it's lethal." This sentence actually makes sense.
The skit ends with the group discussing an implementation plan to introduce the new street term "ebola" in the following week. "Cool" says member A. "No .... Ebola" corrects member B.
A question the linguistic community is asked is who "decides" on new words. For instance, the recently coined bootylicious has actually made it into the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) with the meaning "sexually attractive, sexy; shapley".
How exactly did this happen you might ask? Here's a short account
Creation
Clearly this is a compound of the slang booty (slang orig. and chiefly among African-Americans meaning sexual intercourse and/or buttocks) and combining form -licious (yummo!) which is also found in words like babelicious and glammalicious. Being a compound was advantageous because it meant that people hearing the word for the first time can quickly figure out the meaning, but it's not essential.
The word wiki (also in the OED) has no obvious English connection to any Web publishing device, but it's still entering the English language pretty quickly at this stage. For the record, wiki is adopted from Hawaiian wikiwiki which was originally borrowed from English quick (repaired to remove the non-native /kw/ cluster and to add a word-final vowel)
Mass Distribution
One might think bootylicious was invented for the 2001 Destiny's Child song "Bootylicious" (as in "my body is too bootylicious for you...baby"), but one would be wrong. The OED helpfully provides some quotes which predate 2001. The song was merely exploiting a trend.
But Beyoncé did play a very important role in terms of distribution. In terms of a major "official" dictionary, the word probably won't be included in the next volume UNLESS usage hits a critical level. There are several ways to hit critical mass. The key is often celebrity endorsement (as in bootylicious Rachael Ray's EEVO for "extra virgin olive oil).
Even jargon terms have to be coined and used by important authorities in your discipline. For instance, when identifying new diseases like Ebola and SARS, we rely on early reports of a newly encountered disease for which a new term is needed (interestingly diseases are often identified first as "syndromes" because the agent virus or bacteris is usually not known yet).
The other factor though is how a word is used beyond the original context. For instance, the image of Ebola as the ultimate plague spread like wildfire into not just popular science but into fiction and eventually parody (see Beach Blanket Ebola). If you lived in the U.S. through the 1990s, it's a pretty good bet you know what Ebola means.
You Use, You Decide
So there you have it - words only become candidates for a dictionary only after it enters into communal usage. The media may make a few decisions for you, but YOU may have more influence than you realize. For instance, the term soccer Mom really sparked the public imagination, but the later counterpart NASCAR Dad wasn't nearly so popular - even though both refer to key U.S. political demographics.
I found a new tool in Facebook - the Friends Wheel and I was fascinated, not just because of the pretty colors, but because it replicates a sociological concept I was teaching about in a linguistics class.
The one time I did a language and society class the concept of "social networks" came up and we distinguished "superdense" from other networks. In superdense network, not only do all members know each other, but each person interacts independently with all members of the group. I compare it to the Friends TV show where Ross and Monica are friends, but Monica is married to Ross's old college roommate and Ross dates Monica's roommate.
But that's nothing in comparison with my very own Facebook friends wheel with Penn State staff. It's so dense it's string art.
Click Image to see larger version
This is a little artificial because I really only joined Facebook because other Penn Staters were in there. On the other hand, it is a good reflection of how Penn State operates - we all have to build mini-relations with each member in the group.
Superdense networks can also be closed if people don't talk to outsiders. Fortunately, I still have a non-Facebook life that's a little more open....I think.
It's high Presidental primary season here in Pennsylvania, 2008 and I can't leave this momentous era without SOME kind of observation on the process. I've been watching a lot of primary night analysis, and one thing that few people touch on is the "Head of State" factor.
That is, one of the major duties of the president is to serve as Head of State. Normally this is seen as a "trivial" duty since I think most people associate it with opening the Olympics, attending important funerals or supervising the Easter Egg roll. And yet, I think it's an important sub-conscious factor in our decision making process.
After all the Head of State also has to comfort us in times on national tragedy and also be able to relate to the average citizens he (or she) has to meet and greet. How do we know if a presidential candidate can relate to average citizen? One way is to challenge them to a fish toss in Seattle. Another is to see if they have a sense of humor about themselves - self-deprecating if possible. Abraham Lincoln is maybe the best -known master of the art.
And if you think about our recent successful two-term presidents, you will see that almost of them had a sense of timing regardless of party boundary. On the Democratic side we have Bill Clinton, and the late John Kennedy (his press conferences still make modern audiences laugh). On the Republican side there has been Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush (really).
Chances are that the list I just named has at least one president you absolutely can't stand - but if you watch their quips or speeches for the National Correspondents Dinner, I bet you will see they had a great sense of comic timing. Some of our recent one-term presidents (Carter and Bush I) had more problems with this of self-deprecating comedy, and, sure enough, they were beaten by candidates with better comedic timing. Oddly enough, Nixon is our only recent anomaly - he was never known for great timing yet won two terms. But look at what happened to him!
And for 2008 - does it still matter? We don't know yet, but I submit that at least one candidate is having problems partly because that person has not completely mastered the art of delivering a good quip (a few have backfired very, very badly). It sounds shallow, but I also sense that it can be a sign of deeper issues with the candidate. When all you really know about a candidate is what you see on TV, it's interesting what cues you may have to use.
I've been following an interesting discussion on whether a "conversational" approach should be used for Latin or not.
For modern language courses, the behavioral objectives are fairly obvious. After 2-3 semesters of a language, you want to be able to walk into a cafe or bar, read the menu and order the beverage you want (or figure out how to get the train to Marseilles, or get the latest scoop from ¡Hola! magazine. That is you want a certain level of listening, reading and speaking proficiency with enough writing thrown in to fill out an application or compose a quick thank you note.
These days a conversational approach is advocated so that students learn to communicate in the target language "on their feet". Exposure to native language speech input is also recommended whenever possible so that leaners can parse audio.
With classical languages like Latin and Greek, the objectives may be different. For instance, Attic Greek (i.e. the language Sophocles spoke) is what you need to read the original Ancient Greek literature. If you're in Greece, Attic Greek is helpful for reading street signs and monument inscriptions. But if you want to order some ouzo in Athens, you probably need to learn Modern Greek. That is, learning classical languages is usually about being able to read in the target language - not being able to speak it.
Can the conversational approach help here? Interestingly many of the Latin teachers said they DID advocate the conversational approach. Apparently learning Latin without using it conversationally was a little be too "abstract" for students. I'll admit that my Latin teacher burned in the supine into my brain with "correctives" like horrible dictu (or "Ugh! Horrible Latin!"). Interestlngly Latin has taken on a life of its own as a living language community. You can even get your news (nuntii) in Latin. Clearly, there's something to this.
It should be noted that traditional Latin pedagogy then focused more on grammar and translation. The idea was that if you understood in detail how the Latin phrase or sentence was bulf, you that you would be able to read Latin by "deconstructing" the combination of words and grammatical endings. In practice though, I would say that the result is that many students can recite a lot of paradigms but end up having troubles reading actual texts from Cicero.
But...even with the conversational approach, I wonder if you hit a wall. I'm glad we have "modernized" Latin, but it can't be the same as what Cicero wrote. It's a form of Latin spoken mostly by speakers of modern European languages - none of which much resemble Latin anymore. Even modern Italian has very different syntax than Classical Latin.
What I found was that even with "conversation" and "grammar", I had great trouble parsing Cicero - I could translate the words, but couldn't string them together so that they meant anything. There's a certain pragmatic logic in Latin that is lost in literal translation. After all Qui/Cui bono doesn't literally mean "Who benefits?" but "Good for whom?"
I would say that I didn't truly understand how to learn Classical languages until I took Middle Welsh. Although we did learn some grammar, the focus wasn't being able to speak or even translate anything. Instead we just picked up an actual text with a glossary in the back and plowed through. I took notes in the text, but it was so small that I learned to only translate the key vocabulary words I didn't get. The more "simple" words I could memorize, the faster the reading went. In other words I was learning to read the syntax directly. I had slight indigestion that I would not be able to order a mead in Middle Welsh, but then again, this is not really possible anyway.
Another benefit to the "learn as you read approach" is that you may not be thrown off by minor inconsistencies. Many medieval languages were "flexible" in terms of grammar and spelling - it really is more important that you be able to recognize a potential irregular past tense rather than that you know exactly what it is.
When I thought about it, I realized this is probably the best approach - after all you are trying to read the language, and sometimes you may need to read an undiscovered document which may contain new verb forms as well as previously unattested vocabulary. Sometimes reading ancient texts is a decoding exercise.
In the end, it's about the reading and neither the speaking or the translation. There's just one remaining problem - by the time I had gotten to Middle Welsh, I had Modern Welsh under my belt. If you're starting from scratch, it really can be an interesting chicken and egg challenge.
