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Category: language (page 7 of 22)

Published papers that are giving me the fits right now

There are a few pieces of research that are giving me a bad case of skeptitis: an inflammation of the part of the brain that makes us skeptical. I’m not saying I have the expertise to refute these, but something about them doesn’t smell right, and that makes me feel twitchy. See if you don’t agree.

Number 1: More Facebook Friends Means Bigger Brain Areas, U.K. Study Finds

A strong correlation was found between the number of Facebook connections and the amount of gray matter, or brain tissue responsible for processing signals, according to research led by Geraint Rees, a senior clinical research fellow at University College London. The results, based on magnetic resonance imaging of 125 college students’ brains, was published today in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

This reminds me of Dunbar’s primate brain size hypothesis: Primates that have bigger brains have larger social networks. But I think this is meant to apply on the species level, not on the individual level. Sounds fishy.

Number 2: BYU study: Hearing profanity may lead to more aggressive acts

BYU researchers found that middle school students who watched TV and played video games with profanity were more likely to use profanity. And dropping swear words was in turn related to being physically violent and aggressive in how they treat others.

The results were published Monday in the American Academy of Pediatrics’ peer-reviewed journal Pediatrics.

“It’s not like you hear profanity in the media and go and punch somebody. I think of it as a trickle-down effect,” said Sarah M. Coyne, a BYU assistant professor of family life and lead author of the study. “It represents a lack of respect for parents or whoever you’re using it towards. It’s like a slippery slope. You start using it, and it becomes associated with other aggression.”

This one sounds like a theory that your mom might make up, and the fact that this study comes out of the BYU doesn’t help the credibility. It’s very easy for someone to accept a conclusion when it’s something they already believe.

Does swearing really represent a lack of respect? Sometimes, but it could also be used to establish solidarity between people in a social setting. Does the study reflect that usage? How did this get past peer review? Is something broken at Pediatrics? What is an “assistant professor of family life”?

I don’t know if swearing leads to aggression, but I do know that junk science makes me want to jack someone in the gut.

Number 3: Origins of human language: They differently talked

“The man killed the bear” may seem like the obvious ‘right’ way to structure a sentence to an English speaker, but a linguistic duo suggests that the original human language did it differently, saying instead “The man the bear killed.” In a paper in a recent edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they dispute the assertion by some linguistics that the original human language was organized by Subject-Verb-Object, as English is.

Many comparative linguists believe that it’s simply not possible to know what languages were like further back than 6,000 or 7,000 years ago. But [Merritt] Ruhlen and [Murray] Gell-Mann believe it’s possible to make inferences about language going back much further, by studying the broad outlines of all the world’s languages.

It is possible to reconstruct past languages by looking at what current languages are like, and if you’re a historical linguist, this is the kind of thing you might do for languages from 1,000 or more years ago. But this gets harder to do the farther you go back, and by about 6,000 or 7,000 years, it’s awfully hard to separate the signal from the noise. Ruhlen and Gell-Mann are trying to go back perhaps 50,000 years, and tell us what the word order of Proto-World is like. This would be very hard to do.

Take a language family like Indo-European. Lots of languages are SVO (or Subject-Object-Verb), lots are SOV, and some have more or less free word order. It would be very difficult to select just one as the indisputably correct word order, and that’s for a language group that’s been well-studied and well-documented. Proto-World? That’s gotta be guesswork.

Am I off-base? Do any of these papers sound fine to you? Put it in comments.

JW apostates “mentally diseased”

No question, Jehovah’s Witnesses play hardball with their ex-members. Ostracism of unbelievers (even if they’re family members) is not just a common practice; it’s official.

As if that weren’t enough, now there’s more. The July 2011 issue of the Watchtower (PDF) describes apostates as “mentally diseased”.

Suppose that a doctor told you to avoid contact with someone who is infected with a contagious, deadly disease. You would know what the doctor means, and you would strictly heed his warning. Well, apostates are “mentally diseased,” and they seek to infect others with their disloyal teachings. (1 Tim. 6:3, 4) Jehovah, the Great Physician, tells us to avoid contact with them. We know what he means, but are we determined to heed his warning in all respects?

Not everyone is happy with this assessment.

“Many like me remain associated with the Witnesses out of fear of being uncovered as an ‘apostate’ and ousted, not just from the organisation, but from their own friends and families,” said the man, who would only give the name John. “I find I am now branded as ‘mentally diseased’ – giving any who discover my true beliefs free licence to treat me with disdain.”

Yep, that shit’s hardcore. But what’s that little Bible verse tucked away in there? Could it be that the Witnesses are simply quoting the Bible, and that’s what describes people as “mentally diseased”?

Off to check 1 Timothy 6:3–4 (KJV).

6:3 If any man teach otherwise, and consent not to wholesome words, even the words of our Lord Jesus Christ, and to the doctrine which is according to godliness;

6:4 He is proud, knowing nothing, but doting about questions and strifes of words, whereof cometh envy, strife, railings, evil surmisings,

The key word here is “doting”, which now means “to be fond of”, but which in King James’ time meant “to be feeble-minded from age“, which is why we speak of an elderly person being “in their dotage”.

But of course, the Witnesses use their own New World Translation. What does it say?

3 If any man teaches other doctrine and does not assent to healthful words, those of our Lord Jesus Christ, nor to the teaching that accords with godly devotion, 4 he is puffed up [with pride], not understanding anything, but being mentally diseased over questionings and debates about words. From these things spring envy, strife, abusive speeches, wicked suspicions,

There it is. It still seems a bit harsh, but at least it’s not just the Witnesses being shitty to people — it’s the Bible being shitty to people. So now the question becomes: Is the JW translation of that verse a good one, or not? We’re going to have to take it to the Greek.

I don’t speak Greek, but fortunately people have made some good resources for Bible nerds. Here’s the relevant verse (PDF).

The key word is ‘νοσέω’ (here ‘νοσων’, or ‘noson’ in Roman letters). It only occurs once in the New Testament. So what’s it mean? Off to Strong’s.

1) to be sick
2) metaph. of any ailment of the mind
a) to be taken with such an interest in a thing as amounts to a disease, to have a morbid fondness for

Well, that’s kind of ambiguous. And herein lies the problem. If you wanted to go for the “mentally diseased” view, you’d certainly have a case. If, however, you wanted to soft-pedal it, you could try a more metaphorical translation like “unhealthily obsessed with questionings” or “morbidly interested in questionings”. Both readings are possible, depending on how much you like apostates, which if you’re Paul, isn’t much.

Still: Wasn’t Paul a shit? Imagine describing an ex-member of your church as someone with a mental illness. That’s just piling on. And even the “nice” version isn’t that nice. How accurate is that, describing someone who’s left the church as unhealthily obsessed with the church, or having a morbid interest in it, not able to stop talking about it, writing… erm.

Well.

Arabic not materialising on airplanes

Is there any language scarier than Arabic? (Unless you understand it, of course.) It doesn’t go in the right direction, and it looks so… foreign! No wonder it’s caused havoc before.

And when Arabic script unexpectedly appears on airplanes, well, it’s enough to make people involuntarily micturate.

Mysterious messages that appeared to be scrawled in Arabic writing on the underbellies of several Southwest Airlines jets were being investigated Wednesday by the airline and the FBI, Los Angeles radio station KNX-1070 reported.
The graffiti, which began appearing in February on 737-model planes, has been found more often in recent weeks, according to the report.
The writing appears to have been etched using a chemical process and is visible only after an auxiliary power unit is turned on.

So how do they know it’s Arabic? Gawker comes to the rescue with photos.

Where’s the Arabic? You mean those cross-looking things that look like someone wiped some dust off the plane? That’s the Arabic? Hey, wait — it looks kind of like a sword! Yeah! That’s Arabic, right? I think they have a sword on their flags.

Well, the markings are so not Arabic that even the Daily Mail has had to admit it.

The airline had suggested the symbols, which only show up with heat and are believed to be vandalism, looked like Arabic writing.

However the Department of Arabic and Islamic Studies at Georgetown University in Washington D.C. looked at the photos for MailOnline and a spokesman concluded they are ‘not Arabic script’.

It’s kind of sad: Muslims are now the most-feared group in society, just as Jews, Freemasons, and Catholics were in times past. As such, nervous people project their fears onto them. Strange markings on airplanes? Concerns over immigration? Mosque down the road? Obviously all part of a takeover attempt by Muslims.

But now, hopefully now people who work in aviation can stop being worried about Arabic script, and worry about something else, like lesbians kissing.

Atheism and agnosticism in LDS General Conference talks

Here’s a great tool that you can use to plow through General Conference talks.

I looked for references to words relating to atheism and agnosticism. I used the wild card, so my search terms were atheis* and agnosti*.

And here is the data, converted into a handy chart. (This chart is additive, so the data for atheis* is stacked on top of agnosti*.)

Click to enlarge.

Wow! Look at that spike in the 1960s! Most of this bump is due to talks by Ezra Taft Benson and Mark E. Petersen, who both liked to warn people against ‘godless communism’. Petersen even invoked what he thought was Lincoln’s prophetic warning against atheism:

Masquerading under the cloak of anthropology with great emphasis upon evolution, atheism is weakening the religious faith of the nation, and thus it also becomes an ally of the adversary. Is it any wonder that Lincoln, almost prophetically, looked into our future and foretold the perils that would confront us?

without realising that Lincoln was basically an atheist himself. Oops.

I suppose part of the 1960s bump could also be because more young Latter-day Saints were attending universities at that time, becoming acquainted with secular education, and horrifying their parents on visits home.

I don’t know why, but I’m rather surprised that Orson and Parley Pratt mentioned atheism, back in the 1850s.

As for recent times, notice the lull in a*ism from the 1980s onward. I guess atheism wasn’t on the radar until, say, The God Delusion came out. (All the mentions from the 2000s are post-2006.) That’s quite a drop-off. And it’s not coming up this decade. So far in the 2010s, nothing. (There’s one reference to ‘atheist’, in a footnote.)

So why the tail-off for a*ism in recent years? Here are some possibilities.

It’s not a concern. The numbers might have to climb a bit more before the alarm bells go off.

They dare not speak its name. Perhaps they’re keeping it positive and avoiding the mention of competitors by name. The term ‘catholi*’ has undergone a similar drop-off.

Give it time. The decade is young. If someone decides to make atheism the focus of a GC talk, it may include eight or nine mentions — a whole 80s worth in one go. Double that if it gets two speakers in the next decade, which seems likely.

I find this last scenario to be the most probable.

‘is’ v ‘has’

Back in the 1600s, people used auxiliary ‘be‘ + some verbs of motion, where today we’d use ‘have‘.

Shakespeare did it with ‘is fled‘.

LENNOX
‘Tis two or three, my lord, that bring you word
Macduff is fled to England.

And ‘is come‘.

LUCILIUS
He is at hand; and Pindarus is come
To do you salutation from his master.

I thought it would be fun to check it in Google Books Ngram Viewer, and see when ‘has X-en’ became more popular than ‘is X-en’. But you can’t do it with any old verb like ‘make’ — it has to be intransitive. Otherwise, you’re scooping up ‘is made’ constructions like ‘That’s how rubber is made.” Those are still okay now. I want the ones where ‘is X-en’ has been replaced by ‘has X-en’. And the pattern seems particularly common with verbs of motion.

Here’s ‘fled‘. Notice that the crossover happens around 1830ish.

And ‘come‘. They cross over at about the same time: 1840ish.

Arrive‘ arrives early — about 1810ish

Here’s ‘depart‘, right on the button — 1830 again.

And we see more or less the same pattern with other verbs like land, and become.

What was happening in English in 1800–1840?

When I raised this to the attention of fellow linguist Mark Ellison, he suggested twiddling the ‘Corpus’ menu between ‘British’ and ‘American’. This revealed that the stodgy conservative British books held onto the old usage longer. Perhaps the Americans were at the head of this ‘is – has’ innovation, and the rise we see in the corpus was partially due to more books being published in the Colonies.

I’ll have to do some looking around to see if anyone knows more about it. Luckily, I have two experts on present perfect in my very own department. Meanwhile, I think it’s cool that I can search centuries of language patterns in seconds.

Prisencolinensinainciusol: Oll raigth!

When I was in high school, I asked an exchange student what American English sounded like to someone who didn’t understand the words. She said, “Sort of like pigs.”

For some reason, I wasn’t completely satisfied with this answer. Fortunately, I found this video instead.

The song is total gibberish, but it’s intended to represent the sound patterns and intonation of US English. Trippy.

Tracking the Skipper, part 1

The inimitable Madge comments:

If we’re allowed to make requests, today I was looking up the word “Skipper” and couldn’t find any dictionaries/wiki pages that mentioned its, in my mind, very common meaning of “person who doesn’t drink so they can drive all their drunk friends home from the pub”. Guess it must be an Australian term but what is its history?

Can you use your linguistic prowess to find this out for your adoring fans?!

I think this is a cool use of ‘Skipper’ — it makes the non-drinking responsible friend seem more authoritative. In the NT, they call this person ‘Sober Bob‘, which is just terrible — who wants to be Sober Bob? Sounds like the one who drew the short straw. But ‘Skipper’ — now you’re running the ship, mate! Maybe ‘Skipper Bob’ would be okay. (Don’t mind me: you’re cool for taking care of your friends, no matter what they call you… Bob.)

Anyway, I remember the use of the term ‘skipper’ from the 90’s, which means it probably goes back earlier. The clearest way to nail down its origin is to find its earliest use in print. Madge is right — for such a common term, it’s remarkably difficult to trace. Oxford (paywall) doesn’t even list it among the senses of ‘skipper’, and neither does Etymonline.

This paper by Watson and Neilsen (2008) names a ‘Skipper’ program from 2006, which seems a bit late. However, this paper by Boots and Midford (1999) (PDF) claims that:

The ‘Pick-a Skipper’ campaign was devised by the Liquor Industry Road Safety Association in 1985 as a mass media promotion encouraging drinkers to choose a non-drinking ‘Skipper’ to drive drinkers home.

If that’s right, that would push back the earliest usage of ‘Skipper’ to 1985. Keep in mind: we haven’t really backdated it to 1985 — I’d want to see the promotional materials from the campaign itself — but it does provide a clue as to where to look. For now, we have to plant the flag at 1999.

And there the trail goes cold. Anyone have any skipper-related documentation lingering around the garage? The work of linguistic history is waiting on you!

Denser is slower

A linguistic tidbit from the ‘Obvious in Retrospect’ file:

A recent study of the speech information rate of seven languages concludes that there is considerable variation in the speed at which languages are spoken, but much less variation in how efficiently languages communicate the same information.

Dr. Pellegrino outlined the major findings of the team’s research: “Languages do need more or less time to tell the same story – for instance in our study, the texts spoken in English are much shorter than their Japanese counterparts. Despite those variations, there is a tendency to regulate the information rate, as shown by a strong negative correlation between the syllabic rate and the information density.” In other words, languages that are spoken faster (i.e., that have a higher syllabic rate) tend to pack less information into each individual syllable (i.e. have a lower information density).

In other other words, the more information packed into each syllable, the slower those syllables have to be delivered. Across languages, those two factors balance each other.

It makes sense because human brains have a cognitive limit, and they’ll only put up with so much throughput. Still, nice to see this result in black and white.

Markov Everything!

Someone on Twitter has created Markov Bible.

We’ve had fun with Markov chains on the blog before. They’re really quite simple: just take a big file full of text, and pick any two adjacent words at random (let’s say it’s ‘in the’). Then, find every occurrence of the words ‘in the’, and make a list of every word that occurs right after them. Pick one of those at random, and that’s word number 3. Now repeat with your word number 2 and 3 to get a word 4, and so on for as long as you want.

It’s fun to mess around with the Bible, but my favourite thing is to do mashups. Here’s the Bible combined with George Orwell’s 1984.

They say unto you, Ye shall worship at his saying, and nipped off to Canada like cattle. They could do nothing against the children of the same: but the one end of three years old when he would have cast upon a pole, and it was too late–no such thought occurred to me, and on the north corner, he made windows of agates, and thy master’s son? And Ziba said unto Onan, Go in this book.

That last part is funnier if you know who Onan is.

And here’s some of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, mixed in with Franz Kafka’s The Penal Colony.

CHAPTER XI Who Stole the Tarts? The King laid his head and, feeling behind him with his face to the Bed. First, I’ll describe the apparatus to you.” The Traveller acted as if a dish or kettle had been asked to attend the execution of a bottle. They all came different!’ the Mock Turtle replied; ‘and then the execution is a very grave voice, ‘until all the players, except the King, who had been sleeping on duty. For his task is to give the prizes?’ quite a chorus of ‘There goes Bill!’ then the other, and making quite a long time together.’ ‘Which is just the case might be, if he had neglected to look down and appeared peaceful. The Soldier showed the Traveller and laid his head sadly. ‘Do I look like one, but it is.’

The longer the sentence, the less likely it is to be coherent, since Markov chaining doesn’t preserve the long-range structure of a sentence. But still, it’s surprising when it works.

Spam spotting

Here’s an interesting application for Natural Language Processing. How do you know if a review for a hotel or a business is real, or just a spammy one written by someone who’s never even seen the place?

Computers can do it. Just get people to write a ton of spammy reviews, then get some reviews that (you suspect) are real, and compare the patterns.

Can’t read the text? Fake reviews were more likely to use “I” and “me”, adverbs like “really”, and explanation points.

Here’s a PDF of the authors’ ACL presentation.

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