Here’s a survey about emoticons that you can take. I recognised some, but others I had to guess.
I like to see what other linguists are doing, and it’s fun to guess what the work is intended for. I’d say this work is part of sentiment analysis: working out automatically how a writer is feeling about what they’re writing. Or tweeting.
So help a fellow linguist out and take the test. It’s quick, and sort of fun.
So I notice this article about actor Emma Thompson:
Emma Thompson says youngsters’ poor language drive her ‘insane’
And I think: Uh-oh. We may have found the precise moment at which Emma Thompson turned ‘old’. Because there’s no better marker of advanced age than when you start complaining about the language use of younger people.
“We have to reinvest, I think, in the idea of articulacy as a form of personal human freedom and power. I went to give a talk at my old school and the girls were all doing their ‘likes’ and ‘innits?’ and ‘it ain’ts’, which drives me insane. I told them, just don’t do it. Because it makes you sound stupid and you’re not stupid,” the Telegraph quoted her as telling Radio Times.
Sounds like another prescriptivist rant.
But then, because she’s a smart person, she says something smart.
“There is the necessity to have two languages – one that you use with your mates and the other that you need in any official capacity. Or you’re going to sound like a knob,” she added.
Ah, now that puts things in a different light. We can command different styles of talking, and we can switch depending on who we’re talking to. And I myself worry when a young person either doesn’t know how to use a higher register or doesn’t know when to switch into one. So that’s quite on.
But Emma Thompson is still being an old fart because
1) she’s annoyed, so everyone else has to change?
2) complaining about language is something old farts do.
Is there a difference between ‘tomato sauce’ and ‘ketchup’?
When I first arrived in Australia 70 years ago, all you could get was tomato sauce. Ketchup wasn’t available. Never mind, I thought, it’s the same stuff, that’s just what they call it here.
Then I noticed that my local supermarket began to carry both ketchup and tomato sauce. Obeying some primal American instinct, I always buy ketchup. But I feel rather silly, since there’s no difference. Or is there? Tomato sauce: thinner, less spicy? Ketchup: more vinegar?
For some people, it matters.
The term “tomato sauce” could be lost to future Aussies with Heinz, for the first time, advertising ketchup on TV.
In a move Dick Smith labelled “disrespectful” to the Australian culture, Heinz has unveiled a new national ad for Tomato Ketchup, which they say is thicker and has spices and more tomatoes than tomato sauce. “They don’t give a stuff about Australian culture or our way of life,” Mr Smith said.
Who knew the Australian way of life was less spicy, with fewer tomatoes?
Channel 9 star Scott Camm said the term tomato sauce would be lost to future generations.
“What, are we gonna start walking down the sidewalk?” he said.
“They’re infiltrating us – it’s not our way of life.”
It isn’t really about sauce. It’s about language attitudes. Australians like the way they talk, and they don’t like the thought of losing expressions like ‘footpath’, ‘giving a stuff’, or saying ‘zed’ for ‘zee’. Mind you, this is a pretty strange place to draw the line. Other far more iconic expressions have dwindled with nary a peep. (When was the last time you called someone a ‘cobber‘, honestly?) But maybe this item is extra sensitive because it’s being framed as a foreign corporation dictating language change by fiat.
So even if there’s no difference in the actual sauce, there’s a difference in the words. ‘Tomato sauce’ is fair dinkum Aussie, while ‘ketchup’ is an American intrusion to be resisted. Will this become a selling point? We’ll just have to see which way the chips fall.
– – – – – – – – – – – – – –
UPDATE: The ad.
The US Drug Enforcement Agency hires a lot of translators. They’ve announced that they’re looking to hire translators for African-American Vernacular English (AAVE), or as it’s sometimes known, ‘Ebonics’.
I remember the Oakland controversy in 1996, and it’s disappointing the discussion hasn’t advanced since then. I know that people aren’t born linguists, and I’m used to people having strong feelings about standard v. non-standard dialects, but I wasn’t expecting the depth of ignorance and vitriol that I’ve seen on the Net in the wake of this announcement.
Many comments on this issue appear in a variety of English I call ‘Ivorics’. For your convenience, I’ve given a translation, with some relevant facts.
From tooslow4me67
its like blacks are’nt american.they now have a half assed mumble language the dumb pres wants to glorify.learn correct english and excel.don’t take credit for something that makes a joke of you.
Translation: AAVE is just lazy mumbling.
In fact, AAVE shows regular patterns of word-final consonant dropping, like many other varieties of English. A lot of people know about ‘aks’ instead of ‘ask’ — one feature of AAVE. Turns out that speakers of standard English used to say ‘aks’ until about the 1500s. It’s a normal process.
From an African American:
My point is . . . just about any Black person who has been around friends, family or whatever, can “translate” ebonics. It is not a separate language, it is simply people being lazy in speaking and not completing their words. It’s not like it’s Swahili or Ibo or some real dialect.
Translation: I can understand them perfectly well when they use their lazy ghetto slang.
In fact, AAVE, like any sufficiently divergent variety, may not be comprehensible to a speaker of standard English. And generating a sentence is another matter altogether. If you try to fake it, you will sound like a real jive turkey.
A commenter at the Washington Post
Have we all lost our minds? The 1996 introduction of “Ebonics” by some Oakland teachers was an attempt to get additional funding. The teachers believed that African-American students were not given their fair share of the various additional school board special funding. End of story
Translation: They’re after your money.
In fact, the controversy in Oakland was, in part, the result of an attempt to procure funding to teach SE to AAVE speakers.
From the Washington Informer
But what’s sad and ironic here is that while Ebonics continues to be vilified and ridiculed, the drug trade and criminality has forced the DEA to see it as a legitimate language. And I can’t help but think that if more school systems had done that [offered academic help to AAVE speakers] years ago, many of the suspected black drug dealers that the DEA now needs to be able to understand to put in prison might not have chosen that route.
Translation: AAVE is an on-ramp to crime.
While this author has good intentions, and I agree with the education angle, I think we underestimate the extent to which speakers of AAVE are already familiar with standard English. It’s the speakers of SE that are unfamiliar with AAVE. Speakers of AAVE are the bilingual ones, not SE speakers.
From some idiot.
In one corner, we have the ebonics apologist, Stanford linguistics professor H. Samy Alim, who said, “It seems ironic that schools that are serving and educating black children have not recognized the legitimacy of this language, yet the authorities and police are recognizing that this is a language that they don’t understand. It really tells us a lot about where we are socially in terms of recognizing African-American speech.”
Umm … no.
First of all, you, sir, are a proponent of ebonics, yet that quote shows your preferred version of English is pretty much indistinguishable from Winston Churchill’s. In fact, you can communicate complex thoughts to other people BECAUSE THE SCHOOLS YOU ATTENDED DID NOT TEACH YOU TO SPEAK JIVE.
If they had, you’d be screwed. In fact, you might have to be a drug dealer, since no one doing the hiring in the non-criminal world would be able to understand you.
What ignorant twaddle. He thinks AAVE isn’t capable of expressing complex thoughts, which it is. He also doesn’t seem to grasp the idea that different codes are appropriate for different situations. And he doesn’t question the wisdom of lecturing a linguist on linguistics. What a maroon.
The fact is that language changes. Eventually in any language, there will arise some variety that differs from the ‘standard’ variety. People will then consider that variety to be ‘inferior’, ‘lazy’, ‘corrupt’, or a lot of other bad names, depending on how they feel about the people who speak it. But what people don’t usually realise is that the non-standard variety isn’t just cobbled together. It has internally consistent rules of its own. The speakers aren’t trying to speak standard English and failing.
Criticising someone on the basis of their race is seen as less and less acceptable these days. But as we can see, it’s still acceptable to throw up the same old ugly caricatures on the basis of language use.
The Oxford folks are urging, nay, imploring people to adopt a low-frequency word in their Save the Words campaign.
It’s a very attractive website, but it’s all a bit silly, really. Some words just don’t catch on, so there’s no point in trying to rescue them from obsolescence. But admit it — aren’t you glad that you could study ‘siagonology’, move about ‘roomthily’, or just act ‘vappous’ if you wanted to?
It’s bringing out the word nerd in me, I’m afraid to say.
I’m still mesmerised by Antoine Dodson’s incendiary appearance on WAFF news last week. He’s the guy that fought off an attacker who tried to rape his sister. The clip has gone viral. Here it is:
There’s a lot you could learn about AAVE by watching this, but what’s amazing to me is the pragmatic range he evinces in his speech performance. It’s a theatrical display of bravado, anger, indignation, and taunting, all at once. Wow.
Best of all, it’s been Autotuned by the Gregory Brothers.
Gritty.
For this week’s Talk the Talk, the leadership of Homer, Illinois caught my attention. They’ve made English their official language.
Homer Township officials acknowledge illegal Immigration hasn’t been an issue in the municipality of approximately 30,000 people. And documents for the township about 35 miles southwest of Chicago have always been printed in English with no requests for other languages.
But the township’s board passed a resolution without opposition Monday making English its official language.
So why did they do it?
[Steve Balich, the township’s clerk and the resolution’s author] said the opposition to the Arizona law has troubled him and that he believes illegal immigrants burden taxpayers through demands for public services and schools. He hoped the resolution would stimulate more nationwide discussion.
Yes, that’s the Arizona law that
would make the failure to carry immigration documents a crime and give the police broad power to detain anyone suspected of being in the country illegally. Opponents have called it an open invitation for harassment and discrimination against Hispanics regardless of their citizenship status.
Well, you have to admire their honesty. Usually the advocates of ‘English Only’ claim they’re trying to encourage immigrants to learn English (while cutting funds for ESL teaching), or trying to save money by not printing forms in other languages (thus blocking non-English speakers from getting legal or medical help they need). But here, they’re sticking up for the right to harass minorities.
Which is the whole point of English Only in the first place.
On Sarah Palin’s latest: I think ‘refudiate‘ is a perfectly good portmanteau word, like ‘webinar’ or ‘spork’. Palin wasn’t even the first to use it. But it won’t help the perception that she’s a Bush-style mangler of words, and I think comparing herself to Shakespeare was probably a bit over the top.
While I’m on the topic: In American pollstering: Palin’s favourables are now at 76% among people who still choose to identify as Republicans — higher than any other likely candidate. All sensible conservatives were driven out of the party long ago, or fled in horror.
I pasted a longish blog post into I Write Like, and it said:
While I appreciate the compliment, I wish it would be more specific as to how it got that assessment. I can make a few guesses.
It seems obvious that this uses some kind of nearest-neighbour search. Take a corpus of authors, break their works into good-sized chunks, and then find the closest match for whatever the user gives you.
But what constitutes a match? We could use n-grams (words, and strings of words), as we do in many computational language tasks, but just matching the words in a book doesn’t mean you write like the author. Sure, Steinbeck and Faulkner wrote different words in their books just because of the topics they treated, but that’s not what we mean by writing style.
My guess is that writing style is more about patterns of words, especially function words like prepositions and conjunctions. (You may have noticed I start a lot of sentences with conjunctions like ‘but’ and ‘and’.) I’d try running all the words through a part-of-speech tagger, and see what matches that data best. Just a guess though.
I wonder if Orwell writes like Orwell. Here are three adjacent passages from Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, with the computer’s assessment.
Or there was Henri, who worked in the sewers. He was a tall, melancholy man with curly hair, rather romantic-looking in his long, sewer-man’s boots. Henri’s peculiarity was that he did not speak, except for the purposes of work, literally for days together. Only a year before he had been a chauffeur in good employ and saving money. One day he fell in love, and when the girl refused him he lost his temper and kicked her. On being kicked the girl fell desperately in love with Henri, and for a fortnight they lived together and spent a thousand francs of Henri’s money. Then the girl was unfaithful; Henri planted a knife in her upper arm and was sent to prison for six months. As soon as she had been stabbed the girl fell more in love with Henri than ever, and the two made up their quarrel and agreed that when Henri came out of jail he should buy a taxi and they would marry and settle down. But a fortnight later the girl was unfaithful again, and when Henri came out she was with child, Henri did not stab her again. He drew out all his savings and went on a drinking-bout that ended in another month’s imprisonment; after that he went to work in the sewers. Nothing would induce Henri to talk. If you asked him why he worked in the sewers he never answered, but simply crossed his wrists to signify handcuffs, and jerked his head southward, towards the prison. Bad luck seemed to have turned him half-witted in a single day.
Or there was R., an Englishman, who lived six months of the year in Putney with his parents and six months in France. During his time in France he drank four litres of wine a day, and six litres on Saturdays; he had once travelled as far as the Azores, because the wine there is cheaper than anywhere in Europe. He was a gentle, domesticated creature, never rowdy or quarrelsome, and never sober. He would lie in bed till midday, and from then till midnight he was in his comer of the bistro, quietly and methodically soaking. While he soaked he talked, in a refined, womanish voice, about antique furniture. Except myself, R. was the only Englishman in the quarter.
There were plenty of other people who lived lives just as eccentric as these: Monsieur Jules, the Roumanian, who had a glass eye and would not admit it, Furex the Liniousin stonemason, Roucolle the miser — he died before my time, though — old Laurent the rag-merchant, who used to copy his signature from a slip of paper he carried in his pocket. It would be fun to write some of their biographies, if one had time. I am trying to describe the people in our quarter, not for the mere curiosity, but because they are all part of the story. Poverty is what I am writing about, and I had my first contact with poverty in this slum. The slum, with its dirt and its queer lives, was first an object-lesson in poverty, and then the background of my own experiences. It is for that reason that I try to give some idea of what life was like there.
I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!
No wonder Orwell had writer’s block: schizophrenia.
UPDATE: Thanks to Kuri for that link in comments. It seems the author used
vocabulary (use of words), number of words, commas, and semicolons in sentences, number of sentences with quotation marks and dashes (direct speech).
I’d say this could be smartened up considerably. Just including some simple features would help, like the ratio of singletons (words appearing once) to other words, appearance of conjunctions, or ranking all the words by frequency and comparing lists.
This kind of makes me want to try building a better system. I won’t (for lack of time), but I think I will keep in mind that if you can take interesting work in natural language processing and make a simple web implementation, people will think it is interesting. You can also have a lot of English major hotheads sniping at you because you snubbed Toni Morrison. Wouldn’t that be fun!
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