I’ve seen a lot of handwringing about how young people don’t talk prop’ly these days, and it’s all the fault of SMS and the Internet.

From a linguistic perspective, this is silly. Language is always changing. Our ‘proper’ English would have hurt Shakespeare’s ears, and his English, in turn, would have pained Chaucer. And so on. I’m sure that Old English folk must have grumbled as they saw their beloved case system slipping away. “Bloody foreigners!” they would have said. “Coming in here with their arsy relexification!”

Parents worry about the negative influence of email and IM on language. But they don’t seem to have considered that kids are writing to each other! Has any generation in history corresponded by writing this much? All our parents ever did was talk on the phone.

Link:

Researchers at the University of Toronto found that more than three-quarters of Canadian teens use IM on a regular basis, but that the writing is surprisingly sophisticated. Though they often use informal diction and bizarre acronyms, the research found that students also use more formal phrasing than expected, and turn out to be talented at switching between different registers. “Everybody thinks kids are ruining their language by using instant messaging,” says Sali Tagliamonte, one of the study’s authors, “but these teens’ messaging shows them expressing themselves flexibly through all registers. They actually show an extremely lucid command of the language. We shouldn’t worry.”

Indeed.

Zut alors! French fries and French toast are French again!

Neither Reps. Bob Ney of Ohio nor Walter B. Jones of North Carolina, the authors of the culinary rebuke, were willing this week to say who led the retreat, as it were, from the frying pan. But retreat there has been, as a casual observer can see for himself in the House’s basement cafeterias.
“We don’t have a comment for your story,” said a spokeswoman for Mr. Ney.

Is that the same Bob Ney who got into such trouble over political corruption in the Abramoff scandal? I’d like to draw a connection between language mangulation and corruption, but I’m afraid that’s a bit tenuous even for me.

Never mind. The purge is over. Celebrate with a glass of Evian.

There’s currently some discussion on Retrospectacle about an African Grey Parrot named N’Kisi. (I’m the ever-controversial ‘fontor’ in comments.) His owner Aimee is claiming that he can understand language and have conversations.

Now African Grays are intelligent little buggers, I’ll give ’em that. And they are very good at remembering and repeating sounds, including speech sounds. Wouldn’t it be tempting to think that the bird was thinking of stuff to say and then saying it to you? Unfortunately, yes. All you need is one believing owner, an uncritical news media, and a credulous public, and voila! Bird conversation.

I’ve mentioned before that there’s a distinction between communication and language. My beloved big dumb cat is great at communicating. (It’s always about food for him, it seems.) But there’s no indication that he’s using a kind of language. That would involve a knowledge of syntax, the system of language. He’d have to be able to take sentences, and break them into their constituent words. Then he’d have to understand that certain words can be used in place of other words to make new sentences. I’m afraid Cattums is not up to it, though it’s something every human child can do. Kids have the brains for it.

Is a parrot’s brain big enough to process language in the way Aimee is claiming? I know very little about neurology, but Shelley at Retrospectacle does work in that area. She seems to think that it’s not out of reach for an African Gray. (Does it matter that she’s a bird fancier?)

I’m still not sure. Let’s take a closer look at some of the things that are going on when you carry on a conversation.

• You have plans and goals, which helps you decide who to talk to for what reasons.
• You have intentions, which you use to decide where the conversation is going to go at any given moment.
• You are able to use real-world knowledge, which comes into play when you hear and evaluate the information in the dialogue.
• You have a knowledge of context, and that will help you if someone refers to something that you can’t immediately determine.
• You can remember what’s happened so far in the conversation, so you can tell if (for instance) the questions you had when you came into the conversation have been answered.
• You are able to interpret what other people are saying and fit that into your plans.
• You can figure out the meanings of ambiguous words.
• Most amazingly, you can make guesses about other people’s beliefs, knowledge, feelings, and intentions.
• All in real time.

Aimee, the owner, is claiming that N’Kisi is doing all this AND engaging in wordplay, joking, and inventing new words.

What’s more likely — that a parrot is walking around with that kind of hardware crammed into such a small headspace, or that the bird is saying items from a repertoire and the owner is doing all the conversational work? If Koko, with a much larger brain, is going through the motions, no way is N’Kisi going to do any better.

But that’s just a guess based on my limited knowledge. Maybe brain size isn’t the sine qua non. Maybe we don’t really need these huge brains of ours, and we could do language with a brain the size of a cashew. Maybe the rest of our brains are just heat regulation and untapped potential. In an amazing world like ours, perhaps the parrot understands us and is capable of response. However, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. So let’s see if N’Kisi’s output is sufficiently compelling to warrant a closer look.

There’s one example here.

Aimee: Ok, ya ready? (Aimee pushes button, toy says ‘square’ and makes music.)

N’Kisi: (Enthusiastic tone) That’s so cool!

Aimee: Isn’t it?

N’Kisi: Can ya hear(music is playing)There’s a square.

(Aimee pushes button again; toy says ‘square’)

N’Kisi: Lemme try (? illegible). Look, there’s a square!

(Aimee pushes button again; toy says ‘square’)

N’Kisi: Can you see that?

Aimee: Yeah!

N’Kisi: Look!

Aimee: Isn’t it cool?

In attempts to teach human language to primates, linguists found that animals tend to repeat words provided by their trainers. One thing I’m noticing is that Aimee says “cool” a lot. So does N’Kisi. I wonder how many times N’Kisi has heard Aimee say that.

Aimee: Wow!

(Aimee pushes the button; toy says ‘square’)

N’Kisi: Wow! there’s a me…

There’s the prompting again — N’Kisi says ‘wow’ right after Aimee does.

N’Kisi: You could try-angle. (word play, due to grammatical context)

Aimee: OK. (Aimee pushes another button, toy says ‘triangle’.) See? (pushes it again, ‘triangle’).

N’Kisi: Look at the square.

(Aimee pushes the button that says ‘square’.)

N’Kisi: There’s a square.

Notice how Aimee is cueing off of N’Kisi, pushing the buttons he suggests. This gives the impression that there’s a real back-and-forth conversation going on. Or it could be that the parrot is training the owner.

The word ‘square’ is also used a lot. The parrot is likely running through its list of items involving the word ‘square’ (which is good word recognition), but to a caring owner it could look like it’s making new utterances that build on previous ones.

Here’s my bit: I think N’Kisi’s ability to remember Aimee’s utterances and play them back with such fidelity is remarkable. (I think the same thing about the lyrebird, who can imitate other birds’ calls — and even chainsaws — with startling accuracy.) But I see no evidence that the parrot is understanding and using language as humans do. I don’t even know what words and sentences N’Kisi’s been exposed to, so I can’t tell whether any of these utterances are novel. What I see here is similar to primate studies: the animal makes a sign, the human carer interprets the mung out of it, and everyone remembers the hits and not the misses. The only difference here is that the subject is speaking with a clear human-like voice, which makes it even more tempting to jump to the conclusion that N’Kisi is using language. But it ain’t necessarily so.

I’d also like to address Aimee’s claims that N’Kisi is psychic. That’s for another day, though.

I was on the phone to my sister in Seattle. You have to understand; at several points in the last couple of years, I’ve asked her, “So, any regrets about voting for Bush?” And so far the answer has always been no.

“Did you hear?” she said. “Washington just said no to gay marriage.”

“Washington, really? Of all places! That’s too bad.”

“Too bad?” she said. “You don’t think gay people should be able to get married, do you?”

“Yeah, I think gay people should be allowed to get married.”

She was incredulous. “Why?”

Well, it was a teaching moment as pure as any I get offered. And wouldn’t you know, I was stumped for what to say.

I don’t know that gay marriage is one of my big important issues, and yet it sort of is. It’s one manifestation of freedom, which is a big deal for me. Letting people have the kind of relationships they want, with social sanction and wedding cake, just seems to me like the way it should be.

It wouldn’t sound right to say that there’s no reason not to have gay marriage, and that it won’t affect straight marriage at all, even though I think that’s the case. What right does a society have to deny a certain group of people the right to engage in a contract?

Should I argue, as Dan Savage did, that gay marriage will bring familial stability to children of gay parents?

But my answer was, “I think gay people should be able to get married because I believe in equality for all Americans, period.”

I think for a moment my sister might have compared that to her reason for banning gay marriage, which was “Gayness is icky.”

Oh yeah, that’ll work.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has ordered government and cultural bodies to use modified Persian words to replace foreign words that have crept into the language, such as “pizzas” which will now be known as “elastic loaves,” state media reported Saturday.

This is the kind of thing that governments try to do with language all the time, and it never works. They tried to purge all the English words out of French, but people still say ‘le weekend’. They tried to purge all the French words out of English, but we still say ‘remorse’ instead of ‘againbitement’.

It may work in the official print, but people will say what they like. Why is that so hard for authoritarians to grasp? They always want to control the language. Remember ‘freedom fries’?

Of course, one great ultra-nationalist deserves another:

If you can’t say Pizza in Iran then this IS WAR as far as I am concerned!

Witness the birth of the Pizza Rationale. Sadly, it’s not the flimsiest pretext I’ve ever seen. Maybe if Bill Kristol hears about this, he can add it to the pile they’ve been working on for the last 10 years.

Knowing it’s Red State, I am strongly convinced that the author is not joking.

I’ve mentioned the Mirror Hypothesis before: the idea that when we see someone else doing something (like moving their hand), we show neural activity in the hand-moving part of our own brain. Michael Arbib (among others) thinks this was an important step in language because it meant we were then capable of recognising the actions of others and forming joint plans, which is what conversation is all about.

Now a new article about primates and language. They gave macaques PET scans and found that when they hear recordings of other macaques’ calls,

a) they show brain activity in their own calling centres, and

b) the areas correspond to Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas, two important speech and hearing centres for humans.

Macaque monkeys have a strangely human way of listening to the sounds of their mates, a study has found. When the primates call out to each other they make use of the brain regions used by humans for language processing, the research revealed.
…
Dr James Battey, director of the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders in the US, said: ‘This finding brings us closer to understanding the point at which the building blocks of language appeared on the evolutionary timeline.

‘While the fossil record cannot answer this question for us, we can turn to the here and now – through brain imaging of living non-human primates – for a glimpse into how language, or at least the neural circuitry required for language, came to be.’

Now why is this article filed under ‘weird’? Is it because it has ‘monkey brains’ in the title?

How many times have I heard Mormon conservatives (but I repeat myself) sound off against the ACLU? Apparently, they’re getting in the way of America being Jesusy enough, trying to keep government out of the religion business.

I can never figure out why conservatives, who think government doesn’t work, suddenly think that government would do a super job promoting religion, and they’d do it just the way you’d want. Anyway.

I have said to a few people, “If the ACLU had existed during the Missouri period, they would have gone to bat for the Mormons.” But they have trouble with this because to them the ACLU is something Bad. Maybe they just don’t like the civil rights movement. Ol’ Uncle Ezra never did, and look where he ended up.

So now the ACLU has decided to defend perhaps the most odious sect of Christianity currently in existence — though it’s close — the Westboro Baptist Church.

A Kansas church group that protests at military funerals nationwide filed suit in federal court, saying a Missouri law banning such picketing infringes on religious freedom and free speech.

The American Civil Liberties Union filed the lawsuit Friday in the U.S. District Court in Jefferson City, Mo., on behalf of the fundamentalist Westboro Baptist Church, which has outraged mourning communities by picketing service members’ funerals with signs condemning homosexuality.

Why do I like this so much? It’s not because I like the Westboro folks, the sort of people who get attention by becoming serial pests.

Is it because I sort of like it when Christians (soi-disant) get the chance to reveal their ugliest doctrines as a turn-off to others? Or that they get the chance to promote their hatred of homosexuality openly in public, instead of secretly within the walls of the church, as Mormons do?

I think this case sounds right because it shows the consistency of the ACLU. Even though the WBC is repellent, the Missouri state government is out of line. Free speech is already endangered enough in the USA without blocking protests, even misguided ones. Any time government is promoting a religion or persecuting a religion, there’s a problem, and that’s what the ACLU is trying to straighten out.

Where was the government when WBC was celebrating the funerals of homosexuals, anyway?

An interesting article about whale songs: Apparently whales in one group can learn the songs of whales in other groups. From student Libby Eyre:

“In 1985, the whales off the east coast of Australia were swimming up singing their old song, while the whales in Tonga were singing half of that song and half of their own song, which had some quite unique elements,” Eyre explains. “Then the east coast whales came back down singing a slightly upgraded version of their song.

“On the way up in 1986 each group was singing their own song of the previous year as usual, but by the time the guys on the east coast came back down in ’86, some of them were singing the old east coast song, some were singing the Tongan song and some were singing a mixture of the two. So perhaps some whales had come across from the Tonga group to the east coast group, or some east coast whales had gone across to the Tonga group and come back again, which is a long distance. In 1987 all the east coast whales that I recorded were singing the Tongan song.”

One thing I appreciate about the article is that the author mostly avoids specious claims about whale songs being a kind of ‘language’. It’s a mistake not avoided by this article in New Scientist, which follows a familiar pattern: make bold and outrageous claims in the first part of the article, and then abandon them bit by bit as the article progresses.

There may be repeating elements and sequences in whale songs, but no sign of actual syntax or recursion, which every human language shows.