m. c. de marco

A couple of days ago, the Toronto Star completely screwed up its explanation of the IELTS English proficiency test, by presenting as "an example of Part 1 of the writing test" some badly-designed material from a training booklet not even published by the test designers, asking questions of a kind that are apparently never found on the test.

Arnold Zwicky reminds me that the same newspaper did essentially the same thing a little more than two years ago, as Arnold documented in "Do you speak Canadian?", 6/4/2008.

It's shocking how badly some major newspapers sometimes misrepresent basic matters of fact — and how little attempt the editors apparently make to correct these errors and to prevent the same thing from happening all over again a few months later.

There's a weblog associated with Jerry Coyne's book Why Evolution is True. A couple of days ago, Jerry (or whoever writes on the blog under the name "whyevolutionistrue") posted a couple of familiar eggcorns, described as "two solecisms [that] have recently appeared on this site", and invited readers to "Feel free to contribute those mistakes that most irk you, making sure that—for our mutual edification—you give the correct usage as well."

The result, so far, is an outpouring of 251 comments. This is towards the upper end of the distribution for that weblog — the previous half-dozen posts posts are "Gnu atheism" (31 comments), "New York Times to readers: of course you have free will" (174 comments), "Frogmouths!" (14 comments), 'The free will experiment" (94 comments), "Vacation reading from Nature" (31 comments), "Interview with Hitchens" (12 comments), "Space pix" (13 comments) — confirming again that people love to share and discuss their linguistic crotchets and irks.

One of the puzzles of the whole "Plastic Bertrand" drama for Americans is that we don't like plastic. In a famous scene from The Graduate (1967), "plastics" is a one-word symbol for the emptiness of mainstream success:

In Mean Girls (2004), "the Plastics" are "an exclusive group of girls led by queen bee Regina George", who are depicted as shallow, arrogant, and thoughtless.

Allen Ginsberg's Friday the Thirteenth (1984) sums it up:

Slaves of Plastic! Leather-shoe chino-pants prisoners! Haircut junkies! Dacron-sniffers!
Striped tie addicts! short hair monkeys on their backs! Whiskey freaks
bombed out on 530 billion cigarettes a year—
twenty Billion dollar advertising Dealers! lipstick skin-poppers & syndicate
Garbage telex-Heads!
Star-striped scoundrelesque flag-dopers! Car-smog hookers Fiendish on superhighways!
Growth rate trippers hallucinating Everglade real estate!

But in Europe, the connotations of plastic seem to be more positive.

The Plastic People of the Universe were at the center of Prague's intellectual underground from 1968 onwards. When Roger Jouret left the Royal Conservatory of Music in Brussels to launch a pop-music career in 1977, he took the name Plastic Bertrand.

Maybe Europeans are just more ironic. Maybe plastic was associated with America and thereby acquired pop-culture coolness. Maybe European intellectuals are more likely than Americans to think of 20th-century technology as a positive and progressive force.

Anyhow, it's odd.

Here's a case that  I'm hoping will turn out to be an epic example of journalistic misunderstanding.  Because the alternative is that the International English Language Testing System is a really, really bad way to measure English language proficiency.  And that would be a shame, because IELTS, a product of University of Cambridge ESOL Examinations and the British Council, is pretty much the standard English proficiency test outside the U.S.

Commenting on this morning's post "Language tests for immigrants in Canada", IS pointed us to a .pdf of a "sample test" on the web site of The Toronto Star.  It includes four questions — and I bet you can't get more than half of them right without peeking at the answers.  I certainly couldn't. Here's the test, minus the answer key:

Let's try to correct these sentences one at a time. The first one is

1. Tomoko spends an equal amount of money on rent, food, study materials and entertainment.

I thought of several ways to "correct" this sentence, which is ambiguous but false under all available interpretations. One alternative among many would be:

1a. Tomoko spends more money on rent and food than she does on study materials and entertainment.

But according to the answer key, the (only?) right answer is:

1b. Tomoko spends an unequal amount of money on rent, food, study materials and entertainment.

I'm not sure that this is even a grammatical English sentence. I could say "Tomoko spends unequal amounts of money on A, B, C and D", but  "… spends an unequal amount of money on A, B, C(,) and D" just seems wrong to me, with or without the extra comma.  And at best, the "corrected" sentence strikes me as awkward and uninformative.

I got the second sentence right. It simply gives the wrong percentage for "study materials", and so the obvious thing to do is to substitute 25 for 15:

2. Tomoko spends 45 per cent of her money on rent and food, but she only spends 15 25 per cent of her money on study materials.

However, some people might prefer to move only so that it's adjacent to its focus: "… but she spends only 25 per cent of her money on study materials". Apparently this would be marked as a wrong answer, even though some prescriptive authorities would mandate the change.

I also got the third sentence right, though it was a near thing:

3. Tomoko spends more less on clothes than she does on study materials.

I was tempted to leave more and invert the order of the categories compared.  And again, apparently that would have been wrong — though in making that correction, I'd demonstrate that I understand the text and the pie chart, and can compose an English sentence to express my understanding.

4. Tomoko spends as much on rent and food as she does on everything else put together.

I got this one wrong. I decided to add "almost" before "as much". But the right answer, apparently, is to change "as much" to "less". [As a commenter notes below, the necessary accompanying change of "as" to "than" is omitted from the answer key.]  I like my edit better, although it would apparently have been marked wrong.

So my score was 50%. How'd *you* do?

Getting back to the reason that I'm hoping for misleading journalism, it would be nice if the cited answers were simply examples of possible correct answers, rather than the only answers accepted as correct. Then the fact that the Toronto Star presented the answers as shown below would be rather misleading, but the questions and answers could still be part of a plausible evaluation of English proficiency.

I'm hoping that someone who knows how the IELTS is graded — maybe even someone who works as an IELTS grader — will tell me that I would have scored 100%, not 50%. But I'd need some favorable odds to be willing to bet money on that outcome.

According to Nicholas Keung, "All immigrants face mandatory language test", The Star, 7/20/2010:

Born and raised in New York, Dodi Robbins graduated from Harvard University and has been practising law for 13 years.

Her first language is English. Yet like all other skilled immigrants applying to settle in Canada, the American corporate lawyer must now take a language test to prove her English is good enough to settle here.

“I was outraged, insulted and floored,” said Robbins, who obtained her law degree at Benjamin N. Cardozo Law School in New York. A mother of two, she has been working in Toronto on a work permit for four years as compliance and regulations counsel for an international financial services company.

“I almost fell off the chair. I’ve been practising law here for years and I have to prove my proficiency in English?”

Last month Ottawa made its language proficiency test mandatory for all skilled immigrant applicants, including native English and French speakers. The so-called “ministerial instructions” stipulate officials are not to process applications without language test results, starting June 26.

There seems to be some substantive controversy over the way the policy was introduced:

Critics say the government is now trying to use the ministerial instructions to circumvent public scrutiny and consultation, ramming through changes without parliamentary oversight.

But Ms. Robbins' case seems to be an odd one to lead with.  It's legitimate for her to be annoyed at having to spend a half a day and $285 taking the IELTS. But the article describes her as sweating the outcome:

Robbins says she is juggling her full-time job and two kids to prepare for the IELTS test in August.

Does a native speaker with a college education really need to "prepare for the IELTS test"?  If so, it must not be a very well-designed instrument.

I recognize that "language exams" can be (and sometimes are) designed to test something other than language proficiency. When I was a graduate student, we needed to demonstrate proficiency in two languages other than English. In principle, all that was required was the ability to translate a linguistics article,  with access to a dictionary. Having achieved roughly that level of competence in German, I planned to take the German exam. Then one of my fellow grad students, a native speaker of German who had an undergraduate degree from a well-regarded institution in Austria, told me that she had failed that exam.

Apparently the gentleman who administered the German exam had a chip on his shoulder about all the grad students who didn't take the courses his department offered. In any event, he apparently set my friend to translate a particularly fiendish passage from von Humboldt, which she found so impenetrable that she occasionally got confused about who did what to whom.  Or perhaps she suffered the fate that Mark Twain described in The Awful German Language:

You observe how far that verb is from the reader's base of operations; well, in a German newspaper they put their verb away over on the next page; and I have heard that sometimes after stringing along the exciting preliminaries and parentheses for a column or two, they get in a hurry and have to go to press without getting to the verb at all. Of course, then, the reader is left in a very exhausted and ignorant state.

Anyhow, I abruptly changed course and arranged to take my German exam in Latin.

And then there's the traditional Japanese method of determining English proficiency, which apparently is a version of the cloze test that in effect requires students to commit large numbers of classic works to memory.

But I find it hard to believe that the IELTS is designed in such a way that a highly educated native speaker really needs to study for it. Can someone who's taken it recently comment?

If I understand the situation correctly, this is roughly the Canadian equivalent of a U.S. H-1B visa, for which a language proficiency exam is not required, rather than the Canadian equivalent of the U.S. Naturalization process, which does have a language proficiency requirement, though a rather minimal one:

During your interview, a USCIS officer will test your ability to read, write, and speak English and your knowledge of civics.  You must read one sentence out of three sentences correctly in English, and you must write one sentence out of three sentences correctly in English.  Your ability to speak English is determined during your interview on your naturalization application.  Finally, you must answer 6 out of 10 civics questions correctly to achieve a passing score.

[Update — other stories suggest that Ms. Robbins has had a Canadian work permit for several years, and is now applying for citizenship. But it seems that what she is actually doing is applying for status as a "permanent resident" — like having  "green card" in the U.S. — which may or may not be a step on the way to naturalization. It's not clear to me yet whether similar language tests are required in order to get a work permit.]

[Update #2 — Apparently there is no "passing grade" on the test. According to this page,

You must provide proof of language proficiency by taking a language test from an agency designated by CIC. With your test results, you will be able to see exactly how many points you will receive for the language selection factor.

The "points" are part of the system described here:

Also, this is part of the application for admission as a "permanent resident" under the "skilled workers and professionals category", which is not the same as applying for citizenship, but is a bigger deal than getting a limited-term work permit.]

According to the Guardian,

The Belgian singer Plastic Bertrand has admitted that the voice that gave the world the 1977 Euro-punk anthem Ça Plane Pour Moi was not his. Roger Jouret, the man behind the Plastic Bertrand persona, had previously denied that he was not the singer on the record. But in an interview with the Belgian newspaper Le Soir, he admitted it had been another singer – and laid the blame at the door of his former producer, Lou Deprijck. His admission came a day after a linguist commissioned by a judge concluded that the singer's accent did not match the voice on the record.

To set the stage, here's a YouTube version of the song:

(A slightly less plasticized performance is here.)

Another report has Plastic Bertrand advancing a (fanciful) hypothesis about who the actual singer was, and gives a bit more detail on the dialect issue:

Plastic Bertrand n'est pas l'interprète de Ca plane pour moi selon plusieurs experts mandatés par la justice belge. Ce jugement n'a pas l'air d'avoir ébranlé Plastic plus que ça, qui a réagi hier soir sur RTL. "Tout ce que le rapport dit, c'est que c'est quelqu'un qui a l'accent ch'ti ou picard qui l'a chanté. Alors c'est Dany Boon", a-t-il déclaré.

Plastic Bertrand is not the singer on Ca plane pour moi according to several experts commissioned by a Belgian court. This judgment doesn't seem to have shaken Plastic up very much, as he responded yesterday evening on RTL, "All that the report says is that it's someone who has a ch'ti or picard accent who sang. So it's Dany Boon", he said.

Some other necessary background: the court case in question seems to be based on a lawsuit started by the record producer Lou Deprijck, apparently aimed at establishing that the voice on the hit song belonged to Deprijck himself. (More background on the song is here, including the amazing fact that it was used as background music in National Lampoon's European Vacation, Ferris Bueller's Day off, and an episode of What's New, Scooby Doo?, as well as other far-flung cultural connections including Extreme Championship Wrestling and Australian Mars Bars commercials.)

According to rtbr.be ("Plastic Bertrand reconnaît que ce n'était pas sa voix", 7/28/2010), Plastic was rather out of the loop on the whole recording process, explaining why he might still be in the position of having to guess who the actual singer was:

"Mais c'est moi la victime. Je voulais chanter, mais il (Lou Deprijck, ndlr) m'interdisait l'accès au studio", affirme-t-il. Et d'ajouter : "Le jour où j'ai quitté RKM (la firme de disques qui avait produit les premiers albums à l'époque, ndlr) pour gagner ma liberté, il a gerbé sur moi".

"But I was the victim. I wanted to sing, but he [Lou Deprijck] barred me from the studio", he asserted. And he added: "The day I quit RKM [the record company] in order to free myself, he vomited (?) on me."

However, his remark about Dany Boon was apparently a joke, referencing a comedian who starred in a recent popular movie "Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis".

Wikipedia explains that

Picard is a language closely related to French, … spoken in two regions in the far north of France – Nord-Pas-de-Calais and Picardy – and in parts of the Belgian region Wallonia, district of Tournai (Wallonie Picarde) and a piece of district of Mons (toward Tournai and France frontier).

Picard is known by several different names. Residents of Picardie call it picard; but in Nord-Pas-de-Calais its dialects are more commonly known as chti or chtimi, in and around the towns of Valenciennes and Lille as rouchi; or simply as patois by Northerners in general. Linguists group all of these under the name Picard.

Some questions for our Francophone readers:

What is the etymology of ch'ti(mi)?

What aspects of the singer's performance in Ça plane pour moi identify it as Picard?

What is Plastic Bertrand's own variety of French? What features does he have (or lack) that the singer lacks (or has)?

Who are the "plusieurs experts" who analyzed the accent, and is a copy of their report available?

What does "il a gerbé sur moi" actually mean? Do Belgian record producers really vomit on their musicians to express annoyance, or is this just another of the many pieces of French slang that I don't know?

And finally, why would anyone expect that someone who adopted the stage name "Plastic Bertrand" would sing his own songs?

[Update — in a comment below, fabienne quotes from "Plastic a-t-il les oreilles qui sifflent?", Metro 7/27/2010:

Selon Lou Deprijck, l'auteur compositeur, le rapport d'expertise est formel… "Les bandes 24 pistes de 1977 et de 2006 ont été analysées, piste après piste, minutieusement par les experts. Le rapport (…) révèle qu’avec les terminaisons de phrases relevées sur les bandes, on ne peut attribuer la voix qu’à un Ch’ti ou un picard" a-t-il expliqué au quotidien belge "La Dernière Heure". "Or, Plastic Bertrand est Bruxellois, et moi je suis du Nord"… souligne l'homme qui se revendique comme le vrai chanteur du tube. Paraît même que c'est flagrant sur la prononciation du mot "gouttière", un fait linguistique irréfutable… Faîtes chanter vos amis "ch'tis", comparez… De quoi passer une gentille petite soirée.

According to Lou Deprijck, the producer, the experts' report is categorical… "The 24-track tapes from 1977 and 2006 have been analyzed, track after track, throughly by the experts. The report […] reveals that with the phrase endings revealed on the tapes, the voice can only be attributed to a Ch'ti or a Picard", he explained to the Belgian daily La Derniere Heure. "Now, Plastic Bertrand is from Brussels, whereas I'm from the north [from Nord-Pas-de-Calais]" … emphasizes the man who claims to the real singer. Apparently it's especially clear in the pronunciations of the word "gouttiere" ["gutter"], an irrefutable linguistic fact… Have your ch'ti friends sing it, compare… How to spend a pleasant evening.

You may or may not have any "ami ch'tis" to rely on, and none of us have the 24-track tapes, but here's the relevant segment of the song:

The lyrics are approximated below, in case you can't follow their somewhat Dylanesque thread. The segment reproduced above is in red, and means something like "as for me, worn out, bullied, I had to sleep in the gutter":

Ouam! bam! mon chat splash
git sur mon lit a bouffé
sa langue en buvant tout mon whisky
quant à moi peu dormi, vidé brimé
J'ai du dormir dans la gouttière
Où j'ai eu un flash
Hou hou hou hou
En quatre couleurs

I wouldn't have noticed anything special about "gouttière", but I have no ear for French accents.]

Yesterday here in Prince George I overheard a young woman on her cell phone complaining about the heat: "It's plus 29 here!". [That's 84.2 in Antique American temperature units.] I suspect that this would not be felicitous in, say, Phoenix or Riyadh.

Janet Randall wrote:

I am faced with a query from someone at a pretty high level at Public TV who is objecting to an employee's use of the preposition "acrosst".  I looked for some dialect information about this variant of "across" but haven't been able to find it on language log, or anywhere else, without spending more time than I have, so I thought you might know of a post on the log, or know who might know whether this is regional, etc.

I replied:

The OED has an entry for "acrost", listing as U.S. dial. and colloq., with citations going back to 1759:

1759 in Essex Inst. Hist. Coll. (1882) XIX. 145 Ye enemy fird at our men a Crost ye River.
1779 W. MCKENDRY Jrnl. 6 Sept. in Proc. Mass. Hist. Soc. (1886) II. 467 The Lake..is..about 8 miles acrost.

But I felt this was not really an adequate answer, so I forwarded Janet's query to Bill Kretzschmar, who responded:

I'm in Europe and so don't have access to my paper files in Athens [GA], where I could address the particular findings on this point.

The "st" ending is known, especially in Ireland, to be applied to "while" yielding "whilst", and some usage mavens don't like it. A similar case that I know about is the choice between "toward" and "towards", as when you "turn toward(s) an event." I wrote about our Atlas evidence on that one for a Bill Safire "On Language" column years ago (it turns out that the Mid-Atlantic speakers who don't like "towards" are the only ones not to prefer the final s!).  In Michigan, people who work for the Ford Motor Company often say that they work for "Fords," which might be interpreted as a strange genitive construction but probably isn't. So, the presence of an extra -s or -st is a commonly occurring variant pronunciation in English. No need to get excited about it. It is not substandard, just a bit different, like many other variations that naturally occur in the language of every educated person.  If somebody with enough authority at MPTV doesn't like it, then she can ask the employee not to do it. Now, if somebody then asked me to find such variations in the speech of the MPTV honcho, I suspect it would be easy to find them….  We've all got them. Might be better not to start down the road of correcting every little thing we hear.

After Bill got back to Georgia, he added this:

Back in Athens last night. I've had a look at the paper records, and can tell you that we recorded the -st form of "across" from about 20% of the people we interviewed in Maryland (11/62). The form is found throughout the state, from Eastern Shore to Baltimore to up north near the panhandle. It's used by both men and women, both middle age and older (we didn't interview too many young people), different job types.  I did not see it among the most educated, but did find it regularly among high-school educated people. It is also pretty common in Pennsylvania, less so in Virginia. Kurath and McDavid produce a map (#179) in their *Pronunciation of English in the Atlantic States* of the places that add a -t to the words "once" and "twice" which shows that the pronunciation is widespread in the Midland and South (except the Virginia piedmont), and "widely used by middle-class speakers" in these areas besides by less-educated people. So, what they say about "oncet" and "twicet" matches what we found for "acrosst".

So, the evidence says that this is a historical pronunciation in Maryland and adjoining states, not particularly marked as uneducated. Our interviews are 20th. c., so not contemporary, but these things usually don't disappear.

The OED's entry somehow missed Kipling's Fuzzy Wuzzy:

We've fought with many men acrost the seas,
An' some of 'em was brave an' some was not:
The Paythan an' the Zulu an' Burmese;
But the Fuzzy was the finest o' the lot.

And also Ring Lardner's You Know Me Al, which has dozens of instances of acrost, e.g.

Well Al I and Schaefer was talking to gether and he says Well may be this is the last time we will ever see the good old US and I says What do you mean and he say People that gos acrost the pacific Ocean most generally all ways has there ship recked and then they is not no more never heard from them.

For the peevers' perspective, we can turn to Charles Harrington Elster, The Big Book of Beastly Mispronunciations:

The fact that Elster feels the need to warn "educated speakers" in such dire terms ("lay themselves open to disparagement or ridicule") is good evidence for Bill's suggestion that acrost is "not particularly marked as uneducated", at least in certain regions. On the other hand, Elster's discussion also makes it clear that Janet's Public TV friend is not responding in an idiosyncratic way.

Alexa O writes:

My daughter, who is two, loves corn. She loves it so much that she talks about it all the time. Since she is two and also loves eggs, she calls it "eggcorn."

On a whim, my mother wiki-ed "eggcorn" and, lo and behold, we discovered your term.

I can't tell you how excited I was, because I love saying "eggcorn" (was there ever a more satisfying set of syllables?) and now I have an excuse to do so even after my daugther stops asking to eat it.

I was even more excited when I found the various websites, including the Language Log and The Eggcorn Database, that gave so many delicious examples of said phenomenon.

So Alexa wrote an eggcorn-enriched blog post, "The Word of the Week, or: Eggcorn, Mommy, Eggcorn!", 7/28/2010. Which I recommend, even though she calls us

the famous (in dork circles) Language Log, which is an online blog for linguists. (Not for the feint-hearted.  This is technical writing at its most dense.)

Dense? Please. Don't tempt me.

I'm not at all surprised that Mark's posts on regional variation in American English (here) and (here) have stirred up such reader interest, because speech variability seems to be one of the first things people notice, even if they can't pinpoint exactly what it is. It's not as well understood that there is a long tradition of studying variation in the languages of the world, even in the United States. But there was a time when the study of linguistic geography was an important part of most linguistics departments. In the 1950s and 1960s you could study with nationally prominent linguists at universities in Ann Arbor, Chicago, New York, Washington, Providence, Berkeley, Cleveland, Madison, Seattle, Austin, and other places. The BIG names in linguistics back then included dialectologists such as Hans Kurath, Raven McDavid, Fred Cassidy, Albert Marckwardt, Harold Allen, Carroll Reed, E. Bagby Atwood, W. Nelson Francis, Uriel Weinreich, David Reed, James Sledd, and others. Their papers about regional dialects were prominent features at annual meetings of the Linguistic Society of America.

The impact of these giants (and those in Europe as well) was strongly felt by the entire field of linguistics, which in those days was primarily descriptive. In fact, language variability was what attracted me to linguistics in the first place. I had begun my PhD studies in English literature until I took a grad seminar on Chaucer, during which I got excited (not "interested," but "excited") about the dialects of that period. I am deeply indebted to that professor, Morton Bloomfield, for encouraging me to change the focus of my grad studies to study with McDavid, who also taught me the joys of doing fieldwork, first in Illinois and later in Michigan and Washington DC. In the late 1950s he started me off by doing Linguistic Atlas interviews in all the rural counties of Illinois, an experience that changed my life in many ways.

Thanks primarily to the tremendous and enduring influence of Bill Labov in the 1960s, the older focus on regional dialectology expanded to language variability that went far beyond the older, rural, relatively uneducated white male subjects to the exciting language variation of people of all ages, races, localities, education level, social status, and gender. Labov opened the door to the linguistic reality that individual pronunciations and grammatical features are used variably even by the same speaker, explaining for example, why I, a native North Midland dialect speaker, sometimes use the /ih/ vowel before nasal consonants and sometimes the /eh/ vowel. Today, the field is now called sociolinguistics. The same rigorous descriptive work continues today, but much more broadly than before and with much more useful applications to social issues in the real world.

The multitude of comments to Mark's posts on "pin/pen" variation are illustrative of the deep interest people have on language variability of all types, as well as language change in progress.  We seem to want to talk like each other in order to be understood, but different enough from each other to maintain our individual and social identities.

Although this sign over a children's clothing shop in Hangzhou is fairly simple, it offers much food for thought.

On the left, which we will naturally read first because of the directionality of the writing, we see "les enphants," a clever blend of "les éléphants" ("elephants") and "les enfants" ("children"). The notion of "elephant," of course, makes for a very cute logo, which is situated in the middle of the sign. To the right, we see Lì y?ng fáng ??? ("Beautiful Baby Shop").

It is difficult to say for certain whether "les enfants / enphants" inspired "Lì y?ng fáng" or vice-versa, but I suspect that the proprietors started with "les enfants" and came up with "Lì y?ng fáng" to match it, then playfully embellished "enfants" by substituting -ph- for -f-. My reasoning for making this surmise is that "les enfants" is a common expression in French, whereas "Lì y?ng fáng" is not a fixed expression in Chinese. If you run "Lì y?ng" through Babel Fish, it offers only "Li infant," not knowing what to do with the first syllable. And if you run it through Google Translate, it comes up with "Korea baby," not "beautiful baby." This is not so dumb as it may seem, since GT is thinking of the Lì as short for G?olí ?? ("Korea"). Furthermore, although fáng (usually meaning "house") can be used to convey the idea of a shop or store, there are at least a dozen other terms that are more likely to be used before it. For all of these reasons, it seems to me that the shopkeepers started out with "les enfants" and thought up "Lì y?ng fáng," both to match the sound of the French expression and to convey an appropirate, felicitous meaning in Chinese.

When I first began this post, I thought that I would propose christening the French equivalent of Chinglish as "Chinçais," unless there were already an established term for spoken or written French that is similarly influenced by Chinese. Strictly speaking, however, the relationship between "les enfants" and "Lì y?ng fáng" would appear to be one of French influencing Chinese, rather than the other way around. Might we call it "Zhongçais" or "Franwen"?

[Thanks to Ian Mair for another great photo from Hangzhou.]

Among the comments on yesterday's pin-pen post, Eric (one of several) asked:

Hey academic linguists, I have a nerdy question. I assume that in phonetics "field research" or whatever, lots of scenarios have several investigators listen to a speaker, make independent IPA transcriptions, and then check their transcriptions against each other. And then when the various transcriptions show some level of convergence, that's taken to be the correct phonetic description of the speech. But are there ever scenarios where the results of the investigator's transcription is checked, not against the transcriptions of other listeners/investigators, but against the speaker's own belief about her pronunciation? As someone who merges like 90% of the pairs mentioned in this thread, I'm interested in pushing a radically skeptical line: that speakers are often subjectively convinced they make a phonetic distinction (like Mary v. marry) which objective investigation would dis-confirm…

Actually, Eric, your skepticism about the relation between how people speak and how they think they speak is not nearly radical enough. And there are actually three things to consider: not only how people speak and how they think they speak — which may be bizarrely different –  but also how they hear.

However, I'm not going to discuss all three of these topics. A nerdy question deserves a nerdy answer, and so I need to start by pointing out that your picture of phonetic investigation is incomplete. And it's going to take me long enough to sketch an answer to the first question — how to characterize how someone speaks — that I'll leave the other two parts for later posts.

It's not enough to "listen to a speaker", because the way you talk depends on the role you're playing, your audience, and your psycho-physiological state. Are you giving a speech? Reading out loud to a child? Reading a list of words in an acoustically-isolated laboratory chamber? Telling a joke to a friend? Arguing with a family member?  Giving directions to a foreigner? Are you happy and exuberant, tired and depressed, or somewhere in between?

Linguists use various techniques to get recordings of different sorts of speech — and it's common to compare speech from the same speaker in different settings.  Here's a graph (from Labov, The study of nonstandard speech, 1969) showing the percentage of "g-dropping" in three speech styles from members of four socio-economic classes in New York City:

(For more discussion, see here.)

"G-dropping" is a categorical choice — whether to use a coronal nasal [n] or a velar nasal [?] in the gerund-participle ending -ing.  As common sense tells you, and as the plot above suggests, speakers are variable. They don't always use [n] or always use [?]. Instead, they mix them up in proportions that depend on lots of things, including degree of formality.

This variability takes on a new aspect when we look at a gradient linguistic choice, such as where to place a particular vowel, on a particular occasion, in a continuous articulatory and acoustic space.

For the study of phonetic variation in vowel pronunciation, IPA transcription is not very helpful, partly because it's a subjective description with imperfect inter-transcriber agreement, but mostly because it forces us to assign tokens to one of a small number of distinct categories. Instead, the standard approach is to measure the "formants", or resonance frequencies of the vocal tract, which are a useful quantitative proxy for vowel quality. (Sociolinguists generally characterize an individual vowel in terms of a F1 and F2 at a single point deemed characteristic of its quality. This abstracts away from the vowel's duration and time-varying properties, and from F3 and other spectral characteristics, in a way that is sometimes problematic — but introducing these additional complexities wouldn't change the discussion below in significant ways.)

For an excellent example of such an analysis, see chapter 6 (pp. 132-194) in Keelan Evanini, "The permeability of dialect boundaries: a case study of the region surrounding Erie, Pennsylvania", Publicly accessible Penn Dissertations, Paper 86 (2009).  This chapter is all about the merger of the vowel categories in cot and caught. Here's Keelan's explanation of the background:

The short-o vowel is represented here by the symbol /o/, following the notation in the ANAE, and it corresponds to the LOT vowel class in Wells (1982). It is descended primarily from short o in Middle English, and occurs in nearly all segmental environments. Some examples of words with /o/ include lock, pot, god, and stop.

In most dialects of North American English, /o/ has been unrounded and lowered to [?]. In many of these dialects, /o/ has moved towards the front, and is unrounded. In these dialects, the best phonetic representation would be [a]. This is especially the case in the North where the fronting of /o/ as the second stage of the Northern Cities Shift has caused /o/ to move close to the position formerly occupied by /æ/. In other dialects, /o/ has maintained its roundedness, merging with /oh/ in the low back position. This is the case for the Western Pennsylvania dialect centered around Pittsburgh.

The symbol /oh/ is used to represent the long open-o class, and corresponds to Wells’ THOUGHT lexical set. It is derived primarily from the monophthongization of the Middle English diphthong au, which itself was derived from a variety of sources (such as Old English /aw/, OE /a/ + /x/, as in fought, vocalization of OE coda /g/, as in draw, and Middle French loan words, as in applaud). Another large source for /oh/ words was the lengthening of /o/ to /oh/ before voiceless fricatives, as in lost, and the velar nasal, as in strong. The distribution of /oh/ is severely restricted, and it occurs before only a small number of consonants, mainly before /t/, /d/, /k/, /z/, /n/, /l/, and word-finally. Some examples of words with /oh/ include thought, hawk, caught, and law.

In dialects of North American English where /o/ and /oh/ have not merged, /oh/ has changed in three different directions: 1) In the Mid-Atlantic region and New York City it has raised substantially and developed a central offglide, 2) In many areas of the South, it has developed a back upglide, and 3) In the North, it has lowered and fronted as Stage 3 of the Northern Cities Shift. In dialects where /o/ and /oh/ have merged, /oh/ can become unrounded and rather front, especially in the West.

Here's an F1/F2 scatterplot of 56 /o/ vowels and 24 /oh/ vowels from the speech of someone who maintains a robust distinction:

Figure 6.1: /o/ and /oh/ from Walter K., born 1927 in Buffalo,
Mean(/o/) = (841, 1451), N=56; Mean(/oh/) = (684, 1044), N=24; Dist(/o/, /oh/) = 436

In such plots, the origin is by convention in the upper right-hand corner, which makes the dimensions of vowel quality run the same way that they do in the IPA vowel chart:  front-to-back on the horizontal axis, and low-to-high on the vertical axis. (These scatterplots only show the small area of the vowel space occupied by the collection of vowels being displayed.)

As the plot indicates, Walter K.'s /oh/-vowels are substantially backer and a bit higher than his /o/-vowels, though there's an indication of occasional overlap, perhaps especially for certain words.

Here, in contrast, is a similar plot for someone who pretty thoroughly merges the categories:

Figure 6.4: /o/ and /oh/ from Dan R., born 1912 in Erie,
Mean(/o/) = (704, 1338), N=55; Mean(/oh/) = (707,1283), N=31; Dist(/o/, /oh/) = 55

Keelan's comment:

His means for /o/ and /oh/ are only separated by 10 Hz in the F1 dimension and 78 Hz in F2. The two vowel clouds show considerable overlap throughout their entire ranges. To complement this acoustic evidence, the minimal pair data from Dan R. also point to a complete merger. He produced the pairs cot / caught and Don / dawn identically and judged them both to be the same.

There's a hint in the scatterplot that Dan R. might still have some residual tendency towards a fuzzy distinction — and there are plenty of "transitional" speakers whose distributions are more clearly distinct, though still heavily overlapped. Here's an example:

Figure 6.7: /o/ and /oh/ from H. O. Hirt, born 1887 in Erie,
Mean(/o/) = (745, 1311), N=36; Mean(/oh/) = (664, 1074), N=21; Dist(/o/, /oh/) = 250

So to sum up what we've got so far:

1) Speakers are variable. In the case of categorical choices, individual speakers rarely behave in a consistent way, taking a given alternative 0% of the time or 100% of the time. More often, their behavior is somewhere in the middle, and is modulated by circumstances in a complex way. And in the case of gradient choices like vowel quality, an individual speaker must be characterized as a "cloud" of possible outputs, a multi-dimensional probability distribution that again is modulated by circumstances in a complex way.

2) The "behavior cloud" corresponding to a particular speaker's propensity to pronounce a particular vowel category often overlaps with the same speaker's cloud for a nearby vowel category. This remains true even if we keep the circumstances as constant as we can.

As a result, the question of a whether an individual speaker is "merged" or "unmerged", with respect to a particular pair of vowel categories, may not have a clear, categorical answer. Their productions may overlap to a degree while remaining to some extent distinct; and the degree of cloud overlap will typically vary with style, speaking rate, vocal effort, formality or precision of articulation, and so on.

Next time: how well do speakers know themselves?

If you haven't quite yet gotten your fill after last week's refudiate-fest, I return to the Palinism in my latest Word Routes column on the Visual Thesaurus. An excerpt of interest to all you antedaters:

Some have observed that Palin isn't the first to invent the word refudiate. Patrick Galvin of Politico notes a couple of recent uses, such as Sen. Mike DeWine's statement on "Fox & Friends" in 2006: "I think anyone that is associated with him campaigning needs to refudiate these comments." And on Language Log, Mark Liberman points to a playful usage in John Sladek's 1984 collection of science-fiction short stories, The Lunatics of Terra.

Even earlier is this glaring example that I found in the Atlanta Constitution of June 21, 1925: a headline reading "Scandal Taint Refudiated In Teapot Case by Court, Fall Says in Statement."

The headline refers to a court ruling in the Teapot Dome scandal that rejected accusations of fraud against former Secretary of the Interior Albert B. Fall and his cronies in the oil business. A Fall press release interpreted the verdict as "refuting all taint of scandal," and the hurried headline writer must have mashed up refute with repudiate, just as Palin would 85 years later.

Read the rest here.

[Update, 7/28: On WNYC's "The Leonard Lopate Show," I talked about refudiate and other "invented" words (including some words mentioned by commenters below, such as ginormous and normalcy.)]

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[Update, 7/29: For more on the Hardingisms normalcy and bloviate, see my latest Word Routes column here.]

Jim T, commenting this morning on a post from back in June:

I currently work in Chicago but I'm from South Texas. My boss seems to get a real kick out of my pronunciation of the word "pen".

We have to go to him for supplies and he always make me repeat myself whenever I ask for one and laughs incessantly. He says that I pronounce the word "pen" is funny. My ignorance must shine through because although I've tried to understand the "sound" difference between "pin" and "pen", I just can't. You write with a "pen", you stick something to the wall with a "pin".

He states that I say "pin" when I should say "pen". When back home in Texas, when asked for a "pen", I've never given someone a "pin" or the other way around. So I don't understand how he hears a difference.

Jim already knows the facts here: there are distinctions between vowel categories that he doesn't make, at least in certain contexts, and can't reliably hear. He also knows, I'll bet, that there are distinctions he makes that other people can't make or hear — many native speakers of Spanish who learn English as adults, for example, can't reliably perceive or produce the difference between the vowels in bid and bead or sip and seep.

Mergers of this kind are common, both within languages and in the speech of adult learners. As Jim notes in his own case, such mergers don't generally cause much misunderstanding. Language in context is redundant enough, by cultural evolution if not by design, that misplacing a feature or two rarely results in a plausible lexical subsitution. (Of course there are many stories, and quite a few jokes, that depend on the minority of cases where it works out the other way.)

But Jim seems curious about what's going on here, so what should he do? It might help him to learn the IPA symbols for the pronunciation distinction that his Chicago acquaintances make: [p?n] vs. [p?n].  He already knows that "pin" and "pen" have different standard English spellings, but English orthography is variable and confused, especially in the case of vowel sounds, and so maybe seeing the distinction in a phonologically consistent spelling system would help. Or maybe it would help him to hear and practice the pronunciations of these vowels in the context of the vowel quadrilateral more generally.

He can find plenty of scholarly work on the pin-pen merger itself or on similar phenomena.  I don't know what his work environment is like, but it's possible that a couple of extended dead-pan discussions of the phonetic, historical, geographical, and social extent of other American English vowel mergers — cot-caught and Mary-merry-marry-Murry are probably the best studied — would reduce his boss's enthusiasm for the topic.

If Jim really wants to learn to hear and produce a difference between pin and pen, he has some options.  There's evidence that "high variability phonetic training" (HVPT) works, at least sometimes and to some extent — but I don't know of any suitable free implementations. (N.B. Collecting the needed recordings for HPVT in a couple of common cases, say English vowels and Mandarin tones, and writing a simple web-based interface for such training in general, would be an excellent project…)  He could consult a good dialect coach and learn to style-shift between South Texas and Chicago.

I should note in passing that Jim's description of his experience sounds a little unusual to me.

It's absolutely normal not to be able to reliably hear or pronounce a distinction that not part of your native phonological system. This is an experience that I've had every time I've encountered a new language, or a new variant of English. But usually people can hear that a minimal pair, performed side-by-side in the over-distinct facultative style of such productions, is in fact different; and usually it's fairly easy to learn to identify which member of such a pair is which.

This ability doesn't generalize to identification of unpaired examples across speakers and contexts and styles. Achieving that generalization is the goal of HVPT.  But  Jim seems to having trouble with the first step, before generalization enters the picture at all. Most likely this is because his boss is apparently motivated to be the opposite of cooperative and helpful. But if not, we should look into Jim's perceptions — and those of other Texans — more carefully.

[Update: It's common to find that discrimination is esssentially no better than identification, for a continuum of stimuli representing a consonant distinction. This is the classical "categorical perception" situation, and the classical interpretation is that all you can consciously hear — or at least all you can remember — is the identification returned by an "encapsulated" mechanism for perceiving over-learned phonological categories.

There's some controversy as to whether this is entirely true even in the classical cases; but it's always been recognized that vowel categories generally don't work this way. As with colors, pitches, light or sound intensities, etc., people can generally discriminate vowel sounds much, much more finely than they can assign them to categories.

So if it really were true that Jim T. was entirely unable to discriminate (better than chance, as usual) among stimuli on an articifial continuum from "pin" to "pen", that would be an interesting surprise.]

Because of Hong Kong's colonial heritage and topolectal position, students here are forced to juggle three languages (English, Cantonese, and Mandarin) and two scripts (Roman alphabet and Chinese characters), the so-called policy of “biliterate trilingualism (????)” for schools and the Civil Service since the handover to the People's Republic of China in 1997.  In terms of the best schools to get in, parental expectations, government demands, and entry and exit examinations, the linguistic challenges faced by Hong Kong students are daunting.

One way the students respond to these pressures is to mix languages and scripts in a unique fashion.  Since their mother tongue, after all, is Cantonese, this is the basic matrix of oral expression.  Proper written "Chinese," on the other hand, is fundamentally Mandarin — even for those who do not speak a word of that northern language.   When the students let down their hair, as it were, they naturally will present their thoughts and emotions in Cantonese.

In the past, Cantonese was primarily restricted to the realm of speech, while a rather stilted form of Mandarin (or, before that, Classical Chinese / Literary Sinitic) was used for writing.  Especially in Hong Kong, in part because of the permissive language policies of the British government, a system for writing Cantonese did develop, but it was very much unstandardized and unofficial, relying on a host of special characters not found elsewhere, using standard characters in unique ways, and even using Roman letters for Cantonese morphemes and loan words.  Still, despite the fact that it did become possible to write Cantonese — for those who were determined to do so — the sphere of application was rather limited.

With the advent of swift and easy electronic transmission of written messages (e-mail, STM, etc.), the opportunity for Cantonese speakers to write Cantonese (in contrast to simply speaking that language) expanded vastly.  The ease and speed of electronic communication of written messages encouraged a casual, conversational tone, so the old notion that writing was restricted to Mandarin began to break down much more rapidly than before.  The problem, though, is simply that — even though they may want to write the way they speak — most young people are not adequately equipped with the special script resources necessary for writing the full range of spoken Cantonese.  Consequently, there has arisen a clever style of writing Cantonese in a combination of the 3 languages and 2 scripts mentioned above.

Here is an example of how complex this style of written Cantonese can be (bear in mind that even this is not as "Cantonesey" as one might be if one pullled out all the stops):  ?5???????E+???????D??5?????~~"

I will transcribe and translate this later on.  For the moment, please note that the writing is a combination of Roman letters, Arabic numerals, a mathematical symbol, and simplified characters, all representing Sinitic morphemes.  We may call this "Internet-style Cantonese," where the Roman letters, Arabic numerals, and the mathematical symbol represent particularly Cantonese morphemes.

Since, by and large, simplified characters are roundly despised in Hong Kong, I suspect that the passage may have originated in Guangzhou (Canton).  I will have more to say about the state of Cantonese in Canton at the end of this post (there is breaking news of some consequence).

N.B.:  In Mandarin, "E+" here would be pronounced as yijia (not worrying about the tones).

A translation to more "formal" written Cantonese might be something like this:  ?????????????????????????????.

Translation to Mandarin:  H?o sh?bude dàxué sh?nghuó, xiànzài jiù yào lík?i le, y?udi?n ji?shòu bùli?o zhège shìshí ~~” ?????????????????????????????”

Translation into English of all Cantonese and Mandarin versions:  "It's really hard to give up college life.  Now that I have to leave, it's a bit hard for me to accept the reality…."

Here is a rendering into Hong Kong written Cantonese by Genevieve Leung, followed by her explanatory comments:

?(?)???????(?/?)????????(?)??(?)(?/?)??????.

===

What's in parentheses is what's different than from the version you gave me. I'd definitely use ?, not ? with the day/sun radical. ? is phonetically most similar to E (high level tone), and the sound of ? (dou2) most resembles the way it would be spoken (? is dou3). From "official" transcripts I've seen of Cantonese speech, ? is used over ?, if you want to use that as evidence of "purity." Here's the (Jyutping) romanization:  hou2 m4 se2 dak1 daai6 hok6 sang1 wut6, ji4/ji1 (depending on the character) gaa1 zau6 jiu3 lei6 hoi1 liu5, jau5 di1 zip3 sau6 m4 dou2 ni1 go3 si6 sat6. This is just a stylistic point, but the author's use of ? (more Standard Written Chinese) is in contrast to what is spoken in Cantonese (? is rarely used in spontaneous speech, unless in chunk phrases like ??).  Not that I wouldn't use ? in writing written Cantonese in blogs or instant messaging, but I'd probably use it for resultative effect (e.g., ?????? ["That's truly too unfortunate"]), not because that's how it would come out in speech.  So I guess what I'm trying to say is that it's a blatant stylistic choice for the author to use ?. But that's just my take on it.

====

Another rendering ("transcription") into Hong Kong written Cantonese by Abraham Chan, followed by his explanatory comments:

?????????????????????????????.

====

For "now," some say "ji1 gaa1," others "ji4 gaa1." Judging from the "E+" form, I'd guess it's more like "ji1 gaa1," as the Roman alphabet "E" is typically read with a high tone here. The particle "?" is of course Mandarin derived, and few pronounce it as "liu5," which is the literary reading; it's more likely a borrowing for the Cantonese particle "la3" or "lak3."

A more colloquial version?  That sentence sounds fairly Mandarin/Westernized to me. "??" is Mandarin; "ce2" is a more colloquial term for "leave." "????????" is a translation of "cannot accept this fact," a Westernized construct. I'd leave out the last phrase altogether.

I'd perhaps say something like "???????????????" (zau6 faai3 jiu3 ce2 lak3, hou2 m4 se2 dak1 daai6 hok6 sang1 wut6)."

====

Where does that leave us with regard to the state of Cantonese in mid-2010?  People in Hong Kong certainly know how to speak their Mother Tongue, and they revel in its vibrancy and ability to express their deepest emotions.  However, when it comes to writing down their thoughts and feelings in Cantonese, then they are faced with severe obstacles, and often have to resort to ad hoc arrangements to represent basic Cantonese morphemes, or they bastardize their writing with the injection of Mandarin elements that are easier to write.  Furthermore, as becomes increasingly clearer to me each day I stay in Hong Kong, they mix plenty of English words in their speech and in their writing.  (One Hong Kong friend said to me, "If we really want to, we can type Chinese, but English is a lot easier to type.")  Only specialists in the writing of Cantonese can accurately convey the full range and nuances of relatively pure Cantonese, and even for them it is a challenge to find means to write (and especially to type) all the unique Cantonese morphemes that are regularly used in speech.  Consequently, for those who are not specialists in written Cantonese, but only dabble in it, no matter how fluent and comfortable they may be in speaking Cantonese, they are likely to have to resort to such alphanumericized, Mandarinized hybrids as the one with which we started:  ?5???????E+???????D??5?????~~"

Just as I was about to make this post, I received word that the people of Guangzhou (Canton) in the PRC have mobilized to protect their mother tongue.  These reports show that it is not just older folks who are worried about losing their own language, but younger persons as well.  However, so long as Cantonese speakers refer to their mother tongue as a "dialect" instead of the "language" (actually group of languages) that it is, they are only inviting others to think of it in such patronizing terms as "unique" and "charming," or even "vulgar" and "slang."  All too often, I have heard Cantonese speakers themselves say that their language is "only l?y? ?? [slang]" or "merely a f?ngyán ?? [dialect / topolect]," when it is really just as much a language (y?yán ??) as Putonghua / Mandarin.

[Many thanks to Abraham Chan and Genevieve Leung, and a tip of the hat to Yilise Lin, Bob Bauer, and Don Snow, also to Arthur Waldron, Ed Wong, and Anne Henochowicz.]

Several readers have sent me links to Lera Boroditsky's recent article in the Wall Street Journal, "Lost in Translation" (7/24/2010).  We've mentioned Prof. Boroditsky's work on LL several times, starting back in 2003, and so long-time readers won't be surprised to learn that I think this is an interesting popularization of solid work.  However, most LL readers will also know that there is probably no single linguistic idea that is more prone to exaggeration and mis-application than the "Sapir-Whorf hypothesis" about the relations between language and thought. And the WSJ editors' subhed for Boroditsky's article gives their readers a push down that road:

New cognitive research suggests that language profoundly influences the way people see the world; a different sense of blame in Japanese and Spanish.

That's all I have time for this morning — more later on the WSJ article, the research behind it, and the popular reaction to it. Meanwhile, the comments are open.

As usual, I strongly suggest that you read (at least some of) the research reports before sounding off. Boroditsky's preprints list is here, and much of the work discussed was done by Caitlin Fausey, whose publications would be a good place to start.

Since BP is "refusing to confirm the widespread reports" that CEO Tony Hayward is just about to be fired, I assume he will be out by the end of the day (if you get up in the morning and find your employer is refusing to confirm reports that you are on the way out, start removing passives from your resume, because you're already toast). Hayward is the man who incautiously said to the press that no one wanted the oil spill cleaned up more than he did: "I want my life back", he said, disastrously misjudging America's attitude toward the ecological catastrophe his company had wrought. And from the hour of that incautiously casual and selfish remark onward, he was toast. But I find myself wondering: whose remark was it, originally?

I want my life back feels to me like a recent coinage by somebody. (Of course, I could be wrong; I am reporting a mere intuition, which could be solely due to the recency illusion.) It is not a normal sort of phrase. When you lend something to a neighbour and need to have it under your control again, you can go and ask for its return: "I want my lawnmower back." Everybody uses phrases like that. But they use them about things you can lend or give or buy or steal. Your life doesn't have that property. It's yours in a deeper way: no one else can have it, so there's no serious literal sense in which anyone can give it back to you.

Linguists have a term for this second kind of ownership: inalienable possession. And many languages have a different grammar for expressing inalienable possession as opposed to the ordinary alienable possession that applies to lawnmowers and cups and Dan Brown novels. French is one such language. The French for "to save his life" is pour lui sauver la vie ("for to-him to-save the life"), not (as a beginning Anglophone learner might have thought) *pour sauver sa vie ("for to-save his life"). The French for "costs him his life" is lui coûte la vie ("to-him costs the life"), not *(lui) coûte sa vie ("to-him costs his life"). French doesn't treat having a life like having a lawnmower, grammatically.

That image of having your life just taken away by the swirl of events, as if the general public had come to your house and taken away your lawnmower, is a vivid and original one — or was once, I suspect not too long ago, before it became a bland cliché about events having made things too busy and hectic for you.

So when was "I want my life back" coined? I don't know. Ben Zimmer is the Language Logger who's best at doing these phrase-dating things. John McWhorter and Mark Liberman are pretty good at it too. Perhaps they will chime in. But you readers could get in earlier if you think you have an answer for me. Like my mind, the comments area is open.

The most recent PhD Comics strip by Jorge Cham features real-life material from the scholarly side of the 2010 Comic Arts Conference, and especially the work of Neil Cohn, a psychology grad student at Tufts who "measures people's brain waves while they read comics".

You can read Neil's own account of his presentation on his blog, The Visual Linguist:

My talk seemed to go fairly well (thanks to those who came!), and I greatly enjoyed the discussions with people afterwards. This was the first year I got to present actually experimental brain data on comics, which I'd been looking forward to for awhile.

You can also check out Neil's Visual Language Research Bibliography (which doesn't seem to include any of his neuroscience work yet), or read a PR profile from the "Tufts Office of Web Communication". I also note that the web site for Tufts' Center For Cognitive Studies supplements the usual lists of affiliated faculty, courses, publications, etc., with a list of relevant Zippy cartoons, which may be a symptom of the factors that led Neil to pursue his studies there.

A quick Google Scholar search turned up Kuperberg, Choi, Cohn, Paczynski & Jackendoff, "Electrophysiological Correlates of Complement Coercion", Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 2009, which has "experimental brain data", but unfortunately doesn't have any comics in it. And there's Richards, Finlayson & Winston, "Advancing Computational Models of Narrative", CSAIL Technical Report 2009-063, which reports on a workshop where Neil Cohn talked about narrative structure in comics, but without any of that "experimental brain data". So I guess we'll have to wait for the Comic-Con2010 proceedings to come out…

Meanwhile, here's a clever cover parody from the previous PhDComics strip:

[Update — Neil sent me this citation and link:

Cohn N, Paczynski M, Holcomb P, Jackendoff R, Kuperberg G R., "Impact of structure and meaning on sequential image comprehension", 23nd Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, 2010.

He notes that "Amusingly enough, this poster was also included in the actual DVD proceedings from the Comic Arts Conference".]

[This is a guest posting by Larry [Laurence] Horn (of Yale), taken, with his permission, from a posting he made today on the American Dialect Society mailing list. If you comment on it, remember that these are his words, not mine.]

In the first paragraph of a letter to the editor in this weekend's NYT Magazine, a writer offers the following grammatical argument against the use of transgendered:

We transgender people are not "transgendered," a word that makes it sound like something has happened to us, rather than reflecting something we innately are. You wouldn't say someone was "gayed" or "homosexualed." Only verbs are transformed into participles by adding "-ed," and "transgender" is an adjective, not a verb.

The issue brought up by your questioner is a ticklish one for us: the ignorance of the general population as to what transgender people are like (hint: just like everybody else, with an important difference, much like gay people) makes us hesitant to out ourselves right off the bat (unless the object of the date is a purely sexual one), because it tends to distract others from seeing us as real people, as opposed to god-knows-what sort of stereotype. The idea that we are trying to deceive anyone is as ridiculous as it is offensive: you do not start out trying to fool someone that you have an interest in getting to know better. As you rightly point out, you don't blurt out everything on a first date.

BRIDGET SMITH
San Francisco

The problem is that the claim that "only verbs are transformed into participles by adding -ed" is untenable, as decades of studies on participial formations have shown. There are, for example, "un-passives" where there is no extant corresponding verb (or no relevant one); to say that Antarctica is uninhabited is not to presuppose that someone (maybe penguins?) first managed to uninhabit that continent. There are adjectives like blue-eyed, one-armed, and such with no corresponding verbs.

Even in the case under discussion, it's true that there's no relevant verb to transgender, but then if we speak of someone as "highly sexed", there's no suggestion that someone first (highly?) sexed them; similarly for oversexed, undersexed, differently-abled,… Gendered itself is used in a lot of formations with no obvious verb source: gendered language/space/institutions/media…

I remember an old paper… let's see, yes, it's

Hirtle, W. H. (1970). -ed Adjectives Like 'Verandahed' and 'Blue-eyed'. Journal of Linguistics 6.19-36.

…that treats some of these cases. One interesting property is the need in many cases for modification: blue-eyed, one-eyed, even two-eyed (in a contrastive context) are all fine, but eyed doesn't seem to occur with the same (possessive, non-verbal) sense; similarly legged, haired, breasted,… (These are worse than Gricean pragmatics alone would predict.)

If transgendered is to be ruled out, it may be because it's blocked or pre-empted by adjectival transgender; note that "same-sexed couple" or "opposite-sexed couple" (or "mixed-sexed couple") don't work as well as "highly sexed", presumably because of blocking by adjectival same-sex, opposite-sex, mixed-sex.

The writer's comparison with *gayed and *homosexualed is also misleading because those are formed from adjectives, while transgendered, like blue-eyed or verandahed, does allow the -ed to attach to a noun, which seems to work better. In fact, while "opposite-sexed couple" sounds pretty bad, as noted, I find that "heterosexualed couple" sounds worse.

Well, OK, Ms. Smith probably isn't a linguist, and her point is otherwise well-taken; indeed, transgendered may indeed suggest that someone did something to bring that state of affairs about.

Maybe they should run letters to the Magazine by Ben first.

Last week I posted about the early history of cartoon cursing characters, aka grawlixes, aka obscenicons. I had managed to unearth examples of obscenicons on comics pages going back to 1909, from Rudolph Dirks' "The Katzenjammer Kids." I've had a chance to do some more digging, and I've found that Dirks was getting creative with obscenicons as early as 1902 — and he wasn't the only cartoonist indulging in them.

Barnacle Press is a fantastic repository of early comic art, one that we've drawn on in the past for such wonderfully eccentric strips as "The Outbursts of Everett True" and "The Troubles of Dictionary Jaques." Among the "Katzenjammer Kids" strips collected on the Barnacle Press site is one from Dec. 14, 1902 featuring this final panel:

Here we have the character Uncle Heinie doing the swearing (after the usual hijinks from the Kids, Hans and Fritz, who have disrupted the hanging of a holly wreath). Like the Captain in the 1909 strip, the nautically minded Uncle Heinie incorporates an anchor symbol in his cursing repertoire, so this must have been something of a running joke for Dirks. What better graphic representation could there be for "swearing like a sailor"?

One of Dirks' cartooning contemporaries, Gene Carr, was exploring obscenicons around the same time. Among Carr's early work was "Lady Bountiful," recognized as the first comic strip with a female protagonist. Here is the "Lady Bountiful" strip that appeared in the Atlanta Constitution on Feb. 8, 1903 (again courtesy of Barnacle Press):

Thanks to the Chronicling America newspaper digitization projection by the Library of Congress, I found two more of Carr's daily strips from later in the same month also using obscenicons. The strips below appeared in the New York World on Feb. 10, 1903 and Feb. 20, 1903, respectively:

I note that Carr's strips were published in the Pulitzer-owned New York World, while "The Katzenjammer Kids" appeared in the Hearst-owned New York Journal. Perhaps the escalating use of obscenicons was one manifestation of the famous battle between the two newspaper publishers. After all, we owe the expression "yellow journalism" to the fact that Pulitzer and Hearst fought over the rights to publish the original comic strip, Richard F. Outcault's "The Yellow Kid."