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Category: language (page 11 of 22)

Expletives may now fleet

Some taboo words are becoming more accepted, but it’s rare to find a definite point in time when this occurs. One appeared this week in the USA, as a federal appeals court struck down a rule concerning ‘fleeting expletives‘. Before this, TV networks could be fined if, say, Bono said ‘fuck’ on the air during an awards show (which he did). Now, the FCC will have a harder time making it stick.

The court said that policy on so-called fleeting expletives was “unconstitutionally vague” and created a “chilling effect” on the programming that broadcasters chose to air. The court echoed complaints from network executives that the FCC’s standards were nearly impossible to gauge, noting that the agency allowed the airing of the f-word and s-word in broadcasts of the World War II movie “Saving Private Ryan” but not in the PBS miniseries “The Blues.”

The FCC may appeal, but it looks unlikely; FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski hasn’t yet put profanity on the front burner.

So, for now, free speech: Fuck, yeah.

He loves to count things, he just doesn’t go overboard on it.

Fans of language might get a laugh out of today’s XKCD.

Yes, there are languages where anything over 2 is just considered ‘many’. You could probably save some time going through the names of colours in these languages, too. “Ready, kids? Light! Dark! That was fun!”

‘Primitive cultures’, though? I’m no anthropologist, but that seems a bit old school to my ears. And a hint: if they’re watching Sesame Street on TV, their culture is probably not that primitive.

Missionaries or linguists?

Some linguists are saying that the documentation of every human language should be complete by 2015. That’s good, right?

Erm

Protestant translators expect to have the Bible — or at least some of it — written in every one of the world’s 6,909 spoken languages.

“We’re in the greatest period of acceleration in 20 centuries of Bible translation,” said Morrison resident Paul Edwards, who heads up Wycliffe Bible Translators’ $1 billion Last Languages Campaign.

A lot of work in linguistics has historically been done by Protestant missionaries, including the Wycliffe Bible Translators and SIL International. They take their cue from the scriptural injunction to preach Christianity to all nations.

I’m actually glad that they’re documenting languages. Or rather, they’re translating the Bible into various languages, and hopefully documenting more about the language along the way. It needs to be done. I don’t even mind that their translation efforts are focused on the Bible. It’s a good basic text, a little archaic, but not bad for expressing a good number of concepts. And as a bonus, the Bible has already been translated in many languages, and the texts are already aligned by chapter and verse. It’s like the ultimate cross-lingual parallel corpus! Potentially good for machine translation.

What concerns me about these efforts is that they come into it with what amounts to a Christian agenda. Despite protestations to the contrary.

“Wycliffe missionaries don’t evangelize, teach theology, hold Bible study or start churches. They give (preliterate people) a written language,” Edwards said. “They teach them to read and write in their mother tongue.”

The missionaries develop alphabets. They create reading primers. They translate the Bible.

Distributing bibles is evangelising. The difference between making bibles and more overt conversion efforts is a thin line. (Although in one case, the conversion backfired.)

What’s more, this Bible-driven approach to language documentation misses a key point of language. A language — its vocabulary, kinship terms, lexical categories, and even speech acts — encodes some social ideas that are incomprehensible from outside the system. Coming in to promote a Christian worldview can only hamper the understanding of the language.

Watch the line between linguist and missionary vanish as this volunteer waxes rhapsodic about the effort.

“I am excited to put God’s word in all people’s heart language,” Zartman said. “Until people can read the Bible in their own language, God is a foreign concept.”

You mean the Christian god is a foreign concept. And it ought to stay that way. Help them by documenting their language, but leave the imported religion at home.

Talk the Talk: Artificial languages

Just had a fun interview with Arika Okrent, author of ‘In the Land of Invented Languages‘.

I mentioned in the interview that I had a hard time getting excited about yet another fictional language, when so many natural languages are endangered. Wouldn’t it be great if the people behind Avatar had chosen a suitable sounding natural language, instead of inventing Na’vi? I suppose it does no good to complain though — I also think that kids should be memorising stats about real animals instead of Pokémon, but it’ll never happen because real animals don’t shoot fire out their ass.

That said, it was interesting to hear a bit about Esperanto and Lojban. It was also fun to hear some spoken Klingon — yes, Arika is a certified Klingon speaker.

You can check out the interview by heading to our Talk the Talk page on Facebook. Don’t forget to like us!

North Am dialects reprezzent!

Did you learn to speak English in North America? Your input is required for the North American English Dialect Survey.

It’s easy — you just use your computer’s microphone to record yourself saying various words. They also ask where you went to high school, and where you live now.

They’re going to love me. I still sound like a dang ‘Merkun, but living in Australia for so long has changed my accent in one respect: I have broken free of the cot/caught merger. I say ‘cot’ like I’m British, but my ‘caught’ sounds like Noo Yawk. It might puzzle them for a bit, but they’ll probably understand once they see my current postcode.

Frauds, linguistic and otherwise

It’s a week for Obama-bashing. Nothing new there, but now a pseudo-linguist is trying to linguify the sport. Paul Payack is the guy in charge of the Global Language Monitor, a group which serves mostly to promote bogus claims about language. This time, Payack is carping about Obama’s Oval Office address. He says it’s far too professorial at an impenetrable 9.8 grade level. Also, it’s ‘aloof’ and ‘out of touch’.

Mark Liberman comments:

I think we can all agree that those are shockingly long professor-style sentences for a president to be using, especially in addressing the nation after a disaster. Why, they were almost as long as the ones that President George W. Bush, that notorious pointy-headed intellectual, used in his 9/15/2005 speech to the nation about Hurricane Katrina, where I count 3283 words in 140 sentences, for an average of 23.45 words per sentence! And we all remember how upset the press corps got about the professorial character of that speech!

Payack’s critique appeared in this CNN article.

Though the president used slightly less than four sentences per paragraph, his 19.8 words per sentence “added some difficulty for his target audience,” Payack said.

He singled out this sentence from Obama as unfortunate: “That is why just after the rig sank, I assembled a team of our nation’s best scientists and engineers to tackle this challenge — a team led by Dr. Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and our nation’s secretary of energy.”

Did that sentence stump you? If it did, it’s not your fault — blame Obama.

In fact, why not blame Obama for everything? That’s the strategy employed here by Sarah Palin, whose sentences could never be described as ‘professorial’, though one could say ‘aphasic’.

I get through about 13 seconds of this before I get a strong desire to cram her down an oil pipe (along with her three-legged stool), which may just be worth trying. I’m amazed at her ability to criticise someone who’s actually working on the problem. Remember how she used to say “Drill, baby, drill” not too long ago? For some reason, not so much anymore.

I can only imagine what the extent of the disaster would have been if the GOP clowns had won the election. More drilling, plus even less regulatory oversight.

John Cole takes up the theme:

All I know is that if Obama doesn’t stop the oil leak with his massive Kenyan penis and then give a rousing FDR/Trumanesque speech delivered using a grade 7.5 language level that gives Chris Matthews a blue-vein hard-on and then personally scrubs every drop of oil from the gulf without hurting BP’s profits and making sure every oil worker has a job, I’m out. I mean, come on. That isn’t asking too much, is it? And why don’t we have gay marriage and a cure for cancer? What a loser!

Yeah, because saving the economy and passing health care is so last year.

Spelling bee protesters

I would have liked to compete in the National Spelling Bee as a young scholar. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get a sponsor. Nowadays, though, the event is attended not just by logophiles but by protesters. That’s right.

Four peaceful protesters, some dressed in full-length black and yellow bee costumes, represented the American Literacy Council and the London-based Spelling Society and stood outside the Grand Hyatt on Thursday, where the Scripps National Spelling Bee is being held.

Their message was short: Simplify the way we spell words.

Roberta Mahoney, 81, a former Fairfax County, Va. elementary school principal, said the current language obstructs 40 percent of the population from learning how to read, write and spell.
“Our alphabet has 425-plus ways of putting words together in illogical ways,” Mahoney said.

The protesting cohort distributed pins to willing passers-by with their logo, “Enuf is enuf. Enough is too much.”

Spelling reformers are a quixotic bunch. Their devotion to spelling reform is somehow touching, as though they’re unaware that people have pushed for this — going on two hundred years — to almost no effect.

I will admit that English has some arcane orthography, and there are various reasons for that. For one thing, English spelling got more or less locked down just before the Great English Vowel Shift. Scribes represented words according to their dialect, and sometimes they had some funny preferences.

But English spelling isn’t all that bad. A major problem is vowels. There aren’t enough letters to represent all the vowels we use. But double letters allow us to distinguish between vowel sounds: ‘striping’ v. ‘stripping’. The much-maligned silent ‘e’ does its work, too: ‘wan’ and ‘wane’. The letter ‘c’ has two sounds, true. ‘Athletic’ ends with a /k/ sound, and ‘athleticism’ has a /s/ sound in it, but the ‘c’ preserves the relationship between these words that share the same root.

Spelling everything like it ‘sounds’ becomes more complicated when you realise that words sound different in different dialects. Would speakers of Scottish English be hosed in this new future? Whose dialect would get represented? And how does one distinguish homophones like ‘bow’ and ‘bough’ when they also become homographs?

If you want to see how different sound and spelling can become, have a look at French. Despite some reforms, there’s still quite a difference. Final consonants are often elided. ‘En haut’ is pronounced something like ‘ãõ’ — try saying ‘ah oh’ using only your nose.

I suppose one day the divide between English sound and English spelling will become so serious that we’ll have to sit down and make some tough choices. But it’s going to take a while.

Sunday blasphemy: Get your patriarchal blessing online!

If you never got your patriarchal blessing — maybe you’re ex-Mormon now and it’s too late — well, now you can get it online.

Please note that the validity of the inspired pronouncements in your blessing depend for their self-fulfilment on numerous complex and interacting variables including:
• Your tribal ancestry/heritage;
• Free agency;
• Your adherence to the solemn admonitions within your blessing;
• The changing mind of God;
• Supervening circumstances;
• Your astrological birth/star sign;
• Ongoing evolutionary changes in church doctrine;
Etc.

For the uninitiated, Mormons have a belief that when a certain old man lays his clammy hands on your head and goes into a kind of trance, a supernatural being gives him information about the rest of your life. He says a bunch of vague stock phrases which get typed up and presented to you. It’s called a patriarchal blessing, and you’re meant to consider it as your own personal scripture.

But really, the patriarchal blessing is the Mormon equivalent of a psychic reading. All sincere, I’m sure, but like other psychics, the ‘patriarch’ gleans info about you, and then outputs something that sounds spiritual. People accept the hits, and reinterpret the misses.

The problem comes when people believe this nonsense, and try to guide their lives by bogus oracles. One friend of mine was convinced that she was going to die young because of some vague pronouncement in her PB. (I’m pleased to say she’s still alive and healthy.) The actual phrase in question was rather innocuous, but when you convince someone that random drivel from a stranger is divine revelation, you can’t blame them for being bad interpreters.

I think the site gives an excellent imitation of the writing style that Mormon patriarchs always seem to come up with. About the only thing missing is the bit where they tell you that you’re from the tribe of Ephraim. Well, if you’re Caucasian.

Sarcasm detector

Certain pragmatic jobs in language seem so human that we feel like computers could never begin to approach them. Recognising sarcasm is one of these. How could you get a computer to recognise that a speaker is intending the opposite of what their words are saying, particularly if it’s very subtle?

Well, a paper presented at AAAI last week gives details of a project in sarcasm detection. And they didn’t even use tone of voice as a feature — they just used the text from reviews at Amazon.com.

Of course, words aren’t enough when you’re recognising sarcasm. We also need real-world knowledge, and an idea of what words to expect in a situation. Let’s say the dentist tells Fred he needs a root canal, and Fred says, “Great.” We know it’s sarcasm because we know that root canals aren’t very fun, and Fred isn’t likely to look forward to it.

We can’t tell that to computers (although some have tried), but we can use other information. For this project, they used the number of stars in the Amazon review. If it was a poor review (one to three stars), the appearance of words like ‘great’ are likely to be used sarcastically, especially if the word “can’t” appears first.

This is what I love about Computational Linguistics. We can get a start on even the hardest problems with a well-crafted experiment. The meaning is already there in the words we use. All we need is that little bit of extra information to tell the system that something extra is happening.

Talk the Talk: Universal Grammar

Next week’s Talk the Talk topic comes to us from the pages of New Scientist.

Many linguists are interested in the similarities between languages. Noam Chomsky once claimed that if a Martian visited Earth and looked at all the human languages, they’d be impressed not by the diversity, but by how similar all human languages are. (Falsify that claim.)

Linguists in the Chomskyan mold have postulated the existence of a Universal Grammar — a set of structural principles that undergird human language. It’s an appealing idea — not least because it could explain how children learn language so quickly, from nada to full sentences in about two or three years. Why so fast? The UG is already in there at birth, and kids will pick up the individual quirks of their native language as they go.

The New Scientist article (PDF) highlights the work of linguists who take a different view. For example, Chomsky felt that recursion was one of the fundamental properties of human language. You can repeat elements of English syntax in certain ways: “My mother’s doctor’s boyfriend’s cat.” No non-human animal communication system has this, and every human language has it.

Except Pirahã. Dan Everett, who’s worked among these Amazonian people for years, says there’s no recursion in Pirahã. You can’t say “My brother’s house”. You have to say “I have a brother. My brother has a house.” And so it goes; the more languages we know about, the more we find that violate these seemingly inviolable constraints.

Is the theory of Universal Grammar falling apart? If language isn’t innate in our human brains, then how do we do it? On the next Talk the Talk.

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