One of my areas of linguistic interest is swearing. That means that if the Prime Minister uses naughty words, I get phone calls. And not only did Kevin Rudd make a (suspiciously calculated) slip-up on TV, but a new book claims that he’s got quite the mouth in private.
So here’s a recent interview I did with Kate from HypeFM, talking to the kids about why Mr Rudd is admired if he swears in public, but they get punished.
Every once in a while, I hear people complain about those rotten kids who are wantonly ruining English with their electronic gizmos and their internets. It’s a myth that’s been taken apart in various ways.
One fact that I don’t see mentioned as frequently in this discussion is that people in this generation are communicating in writing much more than previous generations. Blogs, Facebook, email, Twitter. It all adds up. So it’s nice to see this fact mentioned in this Wired article.
Lunsford is a professor of writing and rhetoric at Stanford University, where she has organized a mammoth project called the Stanford Study of Writing to scrutinize college students’ prose. From 2001 to 2006, she collected 14,672 student writing samples—everything from in-class assignments, formal essays, and journal entries to emails, blog posts, and chat sessions. Her conclusions are stirring.
“I think we’re in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven’t seen since Greek civilization,” she says. For Lunsford, technology isn’t killing our ability to write. It’s reviving it—and pushing our literacy in bold new directions.
The first thing she found is that young people today write far more than any generation before them. That’s because so much socializing takes place online, and it almost always involves text. Of all the writing that the Stanford students did, a stunning 38 percent of it took place out of the classroom—life writing, as Lunsford calls it. Those Twitter updates and lists of 25 things about yourself add up.It’s almost hard to remember how big a paradigm shift this is. Before the Internet came along, most Americans never wrote anything, ever, that wasn’t a school assignment. Unless they got a job that required producing text (like in law, advertising, or media), they’d leave school and virtually never construct a paragraph again.
People used to phone. Now they’re writing. And the writing isn’t half bad, possibly because the entire world is reading, ready to correct you if your logic or your spelling is faulty.
You can listen to me talking more about this on an RTRFM radio interview (about three-quarters through the stream).
Senator Steve Fielding’s fiscal gaffe is in the news.
Gaffe-prone Family First Senator Steve Fielding has made another blunder while trying to clarify his economic position.
Senator Fielding, who previously called a double dissolution election, “double disillusionment”, has frequently spoken about “physical policy” instead of “fiscal policy”.
When questioned about the mispronunciation this morning, he only managed to jam his foot further into his mouth.
“I’ll make it quite clear: fiscal, F-I-S-K-A-L,” he spelt.
The journalist repeated the misspelling, prompting Fielding to correct himself.
“F-I-S-C-A-L. Yeah, fiscal.”
I’m not here to pile on. I don’t think it’s fair to label someone as thick just because they can’t spell. Spelling is a superpower that was thrust upon me at birth, and I don’t know how someone could go about acquiring it.
What I would be more embarrassed about is being a Family First senator. And saying things like divorced people are harming the planet, a piece of claptrap which I covered a couple of years ago. I would also be embarrassed to be a citizen in an electorate that had a Family First MP.
I hope he really does have a genuine learning disability, as he says he does. Using the term ‘learning disability’ as a cover for more general ‘not knowing how to spell words and stuff’ would be really slimy.
I’ve been having fun on Perth radio station RTRFM. For the last few weeks, I’ve been appearing on their show ‘Talk the Talk’, which happens on Tuesdays at about 11:30 am. I get to talk about linguistic things, and people in Perth get to listen.
You can find streaming broadcasts on the RTRFM Morning Magazine site. Here are links to the broadcasts.
11 August: Metaphors of time
18 August: Is your dog as smart as a two-year-old?
25 August: Not about language; this one’s for plugging RTR-FM and getting people to subscribe.
If you want to skip all the other stuff, I’m on pretty close to the end of each broadcast.
If you have a moment, get over to CereProc. They do speech synthesis, and you can try out their voices: British, American, and Scottish. You can even buy them if you’re keen — they work on Mac and Windows.
I’m having a play now. I’m rather fond of Kirsty, whose Scottish accent is a little more broad. The accents are good on numbers: try “twenty thirty forty fifty”. Not so good on disambiguating various senses of words, as in “I knew that that was the right answer.” But great on Belle and Sebastian lyrics, e.g. “I was allergic to so much dairy.”
Now when can we expect the Australian accent?
When political action committees pay to create the semblance of a public groundswell, it’s called ‘astroturfing‘. It looks like a grassroots movement, but it’s fake.
To extend the metaphor, here’s a neologism that surely deserves a place in the political lexicon: astroweeds. It comes to us courtesy of Salon’s Alex Koppelman.
[W]hat we are seeing falls somewhere between, and essentially combines the worst part of both grass-roots activism and astroturfing — that is, it pairs the slick coordination of elites coupled with the raw, unfiltered advocacy of the masses. What happens when a set of elites coordinate, fund and foment public expression, but encourage just about anyone — whether informed or not, whether skilled communicators or not, whether dedicated to the particular issue under discussion or merely dedicated to resistance for “Waterloo”-style resistance’s sake — and send them into the public arena to express their opinions? We get ugly signs, incoherent questions and blood-curdling screams about the coming end of America as we know it.
Astroweed lobbying has been a terrible distraction in the American discussion on health care. Insane people are getting townhall airtime — and in some cases, subsequent TV appearances — despite being poorly informed, unfocused, and incoherent.
It’s almost enough to drive you to Whorfianism; maybe we do need more words to describe right-wing reality distortion, just by virtue of its prevalence.
Great news: Deaf children are getting cochlear implants that can help them hear. But this has an unintended consequence: signed languages, already endangered, are getting pushed closer to extinction.
Until the past five years or so, cochlear implants were considered risky for young children. Some teachers of the deaf recommended that parents wait and let the child decide whether to get implants or use sign language. But such advice comes with a cost: A child who waits too long to hear might never become proficient in oral language. As scientific evidence accrues that children learn spoken language better if implanted before age 3, the recommendation to wait has faded.
Still, some experts advocate learning sign language even if children receive implants. Learning sign language is a safeguard that allows a young child to develop communication skills prior to receiving the implant. And sign language is there if, for any reason, the implants do not help a child sufficiently.
The pragmatist in me thinks that maybe this isn’t that serious. Signed languages, while languages in their own right, are still sort of a solution to a problem. If everyone could suddenly hear, that would be such a great thing that it might be worth the loss of ASL, Auslan, BSL, and other signed languages.
But Linguist Me laments the possible demise of yet another natural language, with all the variety and human ingenuity encoded in it. Keep in mind that Auslan, the main signed language used in Australia, has only about 7,000 speakers, far fewer than has been thought. That means it may already be endangered. And if fewer and fewer people are learning and using it, this has some serious implications for the Deaf community.
I don’t know much about the technology of cochlear implants, but I can’t imagine that they have a 100 percent success rate. If they don’t work for someone, and signed languages die out, will that person just be SOL?
T-Rex from Dinosaur Comics shares with us some linguistic universals.
Of course, he’s talking about absolute universals (like the fact that all human languages use nouns and verbs), but don’t forget that there are lots of implicational universals. If a language has a word for ‘blue’, it will also have a word for ‘red’, but not the reverse. Or if a language has a word for ‘toes’, it’ll have a word for ‘legs’, but not the reverse.
T-Rex would probably like to know that some languages have no word for ‘fingers’, since he’s a bit short in that department.
Language Log has done a much more thorough beatdown of this story than I could, but it’s still worth mentioning.
English contains more words than any other other language on the planet and will add its millionth word early Wednesday, according to the Global Language Monitor, a Web site that uses a math formula to estimate how often words are created.
It is a silly claim, especially when you realise that English already has an infinite number of words right this instant. You can paint a fence, and then you can re-paint the fence, and then if you have any paint left, you can re-re-paint the fence. In fact, you can keep adding re- as many times as you like, on to infinity, and each one of those will be a separate word.
Or you can have a great-grandmother, and a great-great-grandmother, and a great-great-great-grandmother, on and on to infinity.
That’s one of the things about English morphology: it allows some prefixes to be used recursively. Recursion is why English (or any other language, pace Everett) can have an infinite number of sentences. You can walk and walk, or you can walk and and walk and walk, making the sentence longer and longer and longer, on to infinity.
Quibble about hyphens, if you like. I could argue that a hyphen, not being whitespace, does not constitute a word boundary, and thus words containing them are kosher. If you wanted to push it, you could even consider multi-word expressions as words themselves. After all, ‘ice cream’ contains a space, but it represents just one thing. It can be found variously with a space, a hyphen, or all smashed together. Your definition of ‘word’ will influence your count.
FOXP2 has (perhaps a little over-enthusiastically) been called the “speech and language gene”. It exists in non-human animals, and without it, people don’t speak well, zebra finches don’t learn or sing songs well, and mice don’t squeak very well.
FOXP2 is now in the news. A team of researchers has given a human FOXP2 gene to a mouse. (Apparently chimps were a no-go.)
Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, have now genetically engineered a strain of mice whose FOXP2 gene has been swapped out for the human version. Svante Paabo, in whose laboratory the mouse was engineered, promised several years ago that when the project was completed, “We will speak to the mouse.”
He did not promise that the mouse would say anything in reply, doubtless because a great many genes must have undergone evolutionary change to endow people with the faculty of language, and the new mouse was gaining only one of them.
Yep, you’re not going to get talking mice just like that. Human speech has been built up over the years from at least two important factors:
So, to get a mouse to speak, you’re going to need to do more than add a gene here and there. There’s a lot of infrastructure to add.
But the addition of human POXP2 does some interesting things to the mice:
In a region of the brain called the basal ganglia, known in people to be involved in language, the humanized mice grew nerve cells that had a more complex structure and produced less dopamine, a chemical that transmits signals from one neuron to another. Baby mice utter ultrasonic whistles when removed from their mothers. The humanized baby mice, when isolated, made whistles that had a slightly lower pitch, among other differences, Dr. Enard says.
…
Dr. Gary Marcus, who studies language acquisition at New York University, said the mouse study showed lots of small effects from the human FOXP2, which fit with the view that FOXP2 plays a vital role in language, probably along with many other genes that remain to be discovered.“People shouldn’t think of this as the one language gene but as part of broader cascade of genes,” he said. “It would have been truly spectacular if they had wound up with a talking mouse.”
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