linganth

A post at bradshaw of the future investigates the Gloucestershire epicene pronoun ou, which "derives from Middle English a, which in turn derives from Old English he 'he' and heo 'she'":

So was Middle English a really an epicene pronoun? Well, we have examples of it from Trevisa standing for both "he" and "she", as in these cites from the OED [...] It's in Shakespeare too. Here Hamlet is talking about Polonius.

1604 Shakespeare Hamlet iii. iii. 73 Now might I doe it, but now a is a praying, And now Ile doo't, and so a goes to heauen.

Modern versions have

Now might I do it pat, now he is praying; And now I'll do't. And so he goes to heaven;

But there seems to be a difference between a and singular they. In the examples above, the antecedents have known genders. Singular they is usually not used when the gender of the antecedent is known. What I'd like to know is: can Middle English a (or Gloucester ou) be used when the gender of the antecedent is unknown or irrelevant?

I hadn't been aware of this early pronoun; it's no longer usable, alas, having been worn down to a mere schwa (which would probably be interpreted as "I" if heard in a stream of discourse), but it's certainly an interesting phenomenon.

This afternoon I passed by a group of high school kids from China going down the street outside of Williams Hall, the office building in which I work.  One of the girls said merrily, "Bur'ao", by which she meant Modern Standard Mandarin (MSM) bù zhīdào 不知道 ("[I] don't know").

The retroflex final -r is well known for northern varieties of Mandarin, but in Pekingese it seems that the mighty R has the ability to swallow up whole syllables, as in the example quoted in the previous paragraph.

Here are a couple more instances:

"O gao'r ni" for MSM wǒ gàosu nǐ  我告诉你 ("I tell you")

"Mbr'ao" for MSM wǒmen bù zhīdào 我们不知道 ("We don't know")

I suppose that we might call all of these allegro forms, i.e., changes in phrases induced by increased speed in speaking.  Of course, not all such allegro forms involve R:

"Tianmen" for MSM Tiān'ānmén 天安门 ("Gate of Heavenly Peace")

"Dashlar" for MSM Dà Zhàlán 大柵欄 ("Big Paling[s] / Railing[s] / Bars", name of a street in Beijing)

Confronted with some of the more highly elided and distorted forms, all I can do is mutter, "OMG!" and ask "How do they understand each other?"

As if the allegro forms themselves had not boggled my poor mind enough, Jeremy Goldkorn informed me that "OMG" itself has become a popular Internet expression in China:

ǒumàigā 偶麦嘎 (lit. "image / idol / by chance — wheat — creak / squeak / snap")  63,200 ghits

ōmàigā 噢麦嘎 (lit. "oh — wheat — creak / squeak / snap")  368,000 ghits

ǒumǎigā  偶买嘎 (lit. "image / idol / by chance — buy — creak / squeak / snap")  1,510.000 ghits

OMG have mercy upon me!

[Thanks to South Coblin, Cyndy Ning, Liwei Jiao, Jiajia Wang, Gene Buckley, Stephen Dodson, and Julie Wei]

OUP, bless them, keeps sending me review copies of language-related books, and even though I haven't had time to actually read these with the thoroughness they deserve, I can tell from the introductions and from dipping into them that they are well worth it, and I thought I'd provide a timely alert here, with the likelihood of further posts later:

1) Sophocles and the Language of Tragedy, by Simon Goldhill. I suspect the more classics-minded of you are rolling your eyes based on the title alone—Christ, not another book on Sophocles as master tragedian? Well, for one thing, Sophocles is like Shakespeare (even if we don't have nearly as many of his plays): there's always room for another well-written book on him. And for another, this really is (as far as I, a non-expert, can tell) a new approach, an attempt to combine traditional detailed analysis of language and themes with the more modern historical approach, for which "reception theory" is the usual tag, on a more or less equal basis. Goldhill says in his introduction: "Yet to a surprising and remarkably blinkered degree these two strands of work have continued without significant interaction. So—to take two seminal and, to my mind, outstanding studies as my examples—George Steiner's ground-breaking study of how Antigone has been read over time [...] only very rarely actually engages with the Greek of Sophocles' play [...]. From another angle, Charlie Segal's long and detailed investigation of the texts of Sophocles proved to be one of the most influential studies of what has become the dominant contemporary critical tradition; yet for all Segal's extensive and incisive critical reading, his book barely looks forward to see how his understanding relates to—or is influenced by—the long history of criticism that Steiner outlines." He says of his own work, "The book's structure sets out—instantiates—the question of how historical an engagement with Sophocles is or must be. This structure is an attempt to lay out what I believe to be the most pressing question facing classics as a discipline today: the tension between historical self-consciousness and the values invested in classical texts. This is a question which goes to the heart of the status and authority of the field of classics itself[...]." I find this an attractive approach; of course, it would be useless without a close reading of the texts, and I am happy to say his first chapter is a detailed analysis of the word lysis 'release' and its relatives in the context of the much abused notion of "tragic irony," and it left me eager to read the rest of the book.

2) Vernacular Eloquence: What Speech Can Bring to Writing, by Peter Elbow. Elbow is the author of a number of books on writing with which I am not familiar, but I was immediately grabbed by the way his introduction begins: "The obsession that has kept me energized for the many years of writing this book takes the form of both anger and excitement. I've long been angry at how our present culture of 'proper literacy' tells us that we are not supposed to do our serious writing in the mother tongue we know best and possess in our bones—but rather only in the prestige, correct, edited version of standardized English or what I will sometimes call 'correct writing.' This helps explain a lot that we see about serious writing in the world. Many people have learned to manage or handle adequately 'correct English,' but in doing so, they muffle or clog their thoughts into language that's far less clear and interesting than they could have used in the language of their talking. Many other people don't even feel that writing is an option for them and feel excluded—yet they speak smart, eloquent, interesting things." This guy's singing my song, I thought, and read on. No, he's not saying anything so simplistic as "just write the way you talk"; he's suggesting ways in which you can use the sound of your words to improve your writing, at both the composing and revising stages. His index includes multiple page references for linguists like Wallace Chafe, Roy Harris, Nicholas Ostler, and John McWhorter, other scholars like John DeFrancis (LH post), Eric Havelock, and Walter Ong, and just plain interesting writers like Adam Gopnik. And I love this passage from page 7:

Continue reading "TWO MORE FROM OXFORD."

I may or may not throw up some comments, depending on what transpires. .... Gingrich wants English to be "the official language of government." ... Santorum clams that the US supports leftist governments in Central and South America.  What planet is this guy living on?  Paul on the other hand wants to back off supporting governments militarily and instead use "free trade" to develop relationships. Of course this is one of maybe two things a reasonable person might agree with Paul on; otherwise, he's a racist social darwinist sociopath. ... A break.  I don't know if I can keep taking this at all seriously. .... Gingrich wants the Tea Party's "flat tax," maybe at Romney's 15%, to apply to everyone.  Gingrich wants 0% on capital gains.  Paul wants to eliminate all federal tax (get rid of the 16th Amendment). ...

The Australian minister of transport, Anthony Albanese, recently plunged himself into an embarrassing situation that will probably stain his reputation permanently (see the Daily Mail's coverage here). His mistake was to deliver a speech in which one short passage of nicely honed rhetoric about his opponent was lifted, with hardly any alteration, from a speech that Michael Douglas was seen giving when playing a presidential candidate in a 1995 American romantic comedy: The American President (script by Aaron Sorkin). Naturally the two speech segments are now available side by side on YouTube. Albanese had apparently forgotten some important facts about his electorate: millions of Australians have in fact personally visited a movie theater; and some of them remember at least parts of movies that they have seen.

The parts that are verbatim from Sorkin's script total around 45 words. There is no straightforward way to assign a precise score, because it is not clear how to do the accounting when there are small shifts in word position that don't affect the sense, or substitutions of names for names; but 45 is actually a large number in this context, making this an unusually striking case.

Previous analyses of plagiarism on Language Log include the case of Kaavya Viswanathan plagiarizing Megan McCafferty and Mark Steyn plagiarizing me, and those well-established cases did not involve runs of anything like 45 words. In the Viswanathan case, there were multiple plagiarisms, and the longest copied section I know about was 22 words. In the Mark Steyn case a mere dozen words seemed, when set in a wider context, to make a damning case in Mark Liberman's opinion.

In the following chart of the parallel pieces of language I show proper names and pronouns as dashes, because of course substituting as appropriate does not mitigate the plagiarism in any way. The fact that Albanese said "Australians" rather than "you", and named Tony Abbott, the Liberal party opposition leader, rather than the Michael Douglas character's fictional one, does not count in his favor. It does the reverse: it convinces us that he (or whoever his scriptwriter may have been) was not quoting a movie with intent that the quotation be recognized, he was ripping stuff off and re-using it without acknowledgment.

	Albanese	Sorkin/Douglas
1	…we have serious	…we have serious
2	challenges	problems
3	to solve, and we need serious people to solve them.	to solve and we need serious people to solve them.
4	Unfortunately,	And whatever your particular problem is, I promise you
5	_____ is not the least bit interested in fixing	_____ is not the least bit interested in fixing
6	anything.	any of them.
7	He is	He is
8	only	(see line 10)
9	interested in two things	interested in two things
10	(see line 8)	and two things only
11	making _____ afraid of it, and telling _____ who's to blame for it.	making _____ afraid of it, and telling _____ who's to blame for it.

Politicians of the world — and above all, students of the world — beware. Plagiarism may seem like such a harmless sin to you. Iago says (in Shakespeare's Othello) that a thief who merely takes your money "steals trash; 'tis something, nothing; 'twas mine, 'tis his, and has been slave to thousands." It may seem to you that this is even more true of sequences of words: they're free, there are indefinitely many of them, if you take a few it doesn't mean other people can't also use them… Stealing a few choice phrases is a victimless crime, you might feel. It was his phrase, now yours, and has been slave to thousands.

Don't believe it for a moment. The contempt of a public who discovers that your political rhetoric is filched will be considerable; the annoyance of a professor who discovers borrowed phrases in your term paper will probably be great enough to guarantee you an F; and the rage of a writer who finds that you stole his carefully crafted locutions will be extreme.

We writers, in particular, are vain, self-centered, and jealous. If you steal our stuff we will hunt you down and beat you. Or at the very least, mock the hell out of you on Language Log, and make you out to be a dishonest, ridiculous, inarticulate oaf. Our sentences are our babies. Don't steal them and pretend they are yours. Make your own. It's the ethical thing to do. And anyway, it's fun.

Stanley Fish asks  ("Mind Your P’s and B’s: The Digital Humanities and Interpretation", NYT 1/23/2011):

[H]ow do the technologies wielded by digital humanities practitioners either facilitate the work of the humanities, as it has been traditionally understood, or bring about an entirely new conception of what work in the humanities can and should be?

After a couple of lengthy detours, he concludes that neither any facilitation nor any worthwhile new conception is likely: the digital humanities

… will have little place for the likes of me and for the kind of criticism I practice: a criticism that narrows meaning to the significances designed by an author, a criticism that generalizes from a text as small as half a line, a criticism that insists on the distinction between the true and the false, between what is relevant and what is noise, between what is serious and what is mere play.

In other words, he agrees with Noam Chomsky that statistical analysis of the natural world is intellectually empty, though I suspect that they agree on little else.

One of Prof. Fish's detours is this:

Halfway through “Areopagitica” (1644), his celebration of freedom of publication, John Milton observes that the Presbyterian ministers who once complained of being censored by Episcopalian bishops have now become censors themselves. Indeed, he declares, when it comes to exercising a “tyranny over learning,” there is no difference between the two: “Bishops and Presbyters are the same to us both name and thing.” That is, not only are they acting similarly; their names are suspiciously alike.

In both names the prominent consonants are “b” and “p” and they form a chiasmic pattern: the initial consonant in “bishops” is “b”; “p” is the prominent consonant in the second syllable; the initial consonant in “presbyters” is “p” and “b” is strongly voiced at the beginning of the second syllable. The pattern of the consonants is the formal vehicle of the substantive argument, the argument that what is asserted to be different is really, if you look closely, the same. That argument is reinforced by the phonological fact that “b” and “p” are almost identical. Both are “bilabial plosives” (a class of only two members), sounds produced when the flow of air from the vocal tract is stopped by closing the lips.

There is more. (I know that’s not what you want to hear.) In the sentences that follow the declaration of equivalence, “b’s” and “p’s” proliferate in a veritable orgy of alliteration and consonance. Here is a partial list of the words that pile up in a brief space: prelaty, pastor, parish, Archbishop, books, pluralists, bachelor, parishioner, private, protestations, chop, Episcopacy, palace, metropolitan, penance, pusillanimous, breast, politic, presses, open, birthright, privilege, Parliament, abrogated, bud, liberty, printing, Prelatical, people.

Even without the pointing provided by syntax, the dance of the “b’s” and “p’s” carries a message …

The section that Fish cites comprises three paragraphs in the middle of Milton's essay. Upstream against the current of his disdain for counting things, I observe (on the basis of a couple of minutes of programming) that these paragraph  contain 1836 consonant letters, out of 50,433 in the whole work. Within that span, 125 of the consonant letters are p's or b's, or about 6.8%.

Is this "a veritable orgy of consonance and alliteration"? Well, we can recast that question in a way that Fish would doubtless reject: Among the 50,433 consonant letters in the whole Areopagitica, 2,938 are p's and b's, or about 5.8%; is that extra percent in Fish's selected segment meaningful?

Here's a plot of the p/b count in similar spans throughout Milton's essay, with a vertical red line indicating the region that he selected:

As you can see, these paragraphs are definitely a local peak of bilabial plosivity. But there are nine or ten others, some bigger — do those peaks also indicate regions where "the pattern of the consonants is the formal vehicle of the substantive argument"?

Frankly, I doubt it. In the region that Fish chose to make his point, the topic happens to be enriched with religious-hierarchy words containing p's and b's: prelaty, pastor, parish, Archbishop, parishioner, episcopacy, palace, prelatical, etc. If we look at the end of the essay, which is even more p-b-dense, we find that again it's because of a topical area that happens to be enriched in words like press, published, printed, printer, printing, prevention, policy, purpose, prohibiting, power, book, books, bookselling, libellous, liberty, forbid.

Is this kind of various in local consonant density special to p and b in this work? Not at all — here's a plot of the local density, in a similarly-sized region, of counts of the letters 'w' and 'y'. (I chose them because together they occur 3,032 times in the Areopagitica, about as often as p and b do.)

As expected, the number and relative height of local peaks is similar to what we saw for 'p' and 'b'.

And here's the plot for the single letter 'l', occurring 3,069 times in the Areopagitica, which works up a veritable froth of lateral lasciviousness around consonant offset 19,350:

What does this all mean, if anything? I have no idea. Prof. Fish begins with an "insight" about the alleged dance of p's and b's surrounding Milton's assertion that "“Bishops and Presbyters are the same to us both name and thing". Despite the paradoxically  semi-quantitative nature of the idea, he presents it as an example (though clearly not a very interesting one) of the kind of literary analysis to which "digital humanities" methods are not relevant, the kind of "criticism that insists on the distinction between the true and the false, between what is relevant and what is noise, between what is serious and what is mere play". But it seems to me that a trivial application of statistical methods, humanistic or not, suggests that his idea is probably "false", "noise", and "mere play". Have I missed something?

Almost the end of January, and not a single Language Log reader hasn't failed to complain about the lack of over-negation in any of this year's posts. But here's some naughtily nutty negation anyway:

"It's not that I don't doubt the sincerity of their desire to protect the talent. And believe it or not, we have the same ambition," Christian Mann, general manager of Evil Angel Productions who also serves on the porn industry's Free Speech Coalition, said last week after the council's vote. "We just don't believe their way is the best way." (Associated Press, LA mayor signs law requiring condoms in porn films, Jan. 24, 2012; widely syndicated story.)

Hmm. That's a curious lack of non-self-doubt. So does it mean Mann does in fact doubt the sincerity  of "their" desire to protect the talent? I don't think so.

It turns out that the pattern is surprisingly common. Here are a bunch of web examples (from among many more, easily found) all of which appear to me to have a tad more negation than their truth conditions warrant:

It's not that I don't doubt Kevin is low enough to get Britney pregnant for some extra cash, it's just that I don't think he's clever enough.

It’s not that I don’t doubt that little happy crazy girl who’s smile was so big and bounced into a room is gone, it’s just completely dulled with that girl who smiles awkwardly when she’s forced to and walks with feet shuffling. It’s so bad that when I’m with her, even I doubt her capacity for depth of emotion.

It’s not that I don’t doubt color affects us profoundly.  We make choices based on colour on a daily basis – what clothes will we wear? What food will we eat?

It's not that I don't doubt colloidal silver's power, as it was used for centuries to treat wounds.

It’s not that I don’t doubt some of the books are good (or impacted literature or culture at the time); it’s just that there tends to be too much hype surrounding them. War and Peace? Couldn’t even finish. Jane Austen? Not too impressed. That being said, I did enjoy A Handmaid’s Tale (I have a terrible soft spot for dystopia).

You might say that Christian Mann and all these other guys are following a principle of prophylactic over-negation:

To protect your interlocutor from something false, swaddle the offending proposition in as many layers of negativity as possible.

So the idea is that speakers who produce all these negations might be subconsciously operating on the intuition the more layers of protective negativity you wrap around a proposition, the less chance that any contaminating falsity will leak out. Now the standard approach to negation, beloved of logicians and sticklers alike, says that two negations are similar to no negations. But isn't that like saying two wrongs make a right? That belt and braces will combine to make your pants fall down? Or that using two condoms is just like having unprotected sex? Is that not unintuitive? And do you not doubt that the principle of prophylactic over-negation is not more reasonable?

Sometimes you wonder how people get work as translators. A couple of years ago I wrote several posts about the hapless Isidor Schneider and his butchery of Gorky's autobiography (1, 2, 3); now, reading a recent NYRB, I find Ian Buruma complaining (more decorously than I) about what appears to be almost as bad a job of translating Harry Kessler's diaries:

Then, in 1891, the diary suddenly switches from English to German. Kessler was of course as much a master of his native tongue as he was of English. Alas, the translation leaves a different impression. The grammar is often mangled, the sentences creak as though written in a thick German accent, and the mistakes are legion. A Kaserne is a military barracks, not a “casern.” Genial is not genial, but brilliant, literally “of genius.” Schallplatten, or records, is not normally rendered in English as “gramophone platters.” To translate schleppen as to schlepp, as in they “schlepped along little children,” sounds Yiddish, which I’m sure was not intended by the author. Hotel Emperorhof instead of Kaiserhof is eccentric. And the grasp, in translation, of this great cosmopolitan’s European geography seems deficient. It is The Hague, not the Haag, and Antwerp, not Anvers, at least not in an English text.

"Eccentric" is so restrained you can almost hear Buruma's teeth grinding in the effort to maintain the civilized standards of discourse called for at the Review.

Near my hotel on the Plaça Imperial Tarraco in Tarragona, the indicators to tell pedestrians when they can cross the street have a countdown in seconds to the next green: a minute ticks by, the lights go yellow for the vehicular traffic at 6 seconds, then red at 3 seconds, and finally — 3, 2, 1, liftoff — the little green man is displayed and you can walk across. Only in Tarragona the little green man figure does not just pose in a walking sort of shape: he moves. Those little green arms and legs are working away: he seems to be race-walking. And that's not all: when there's only 7 seconds left, he begins to sprint.

The temptation to take this limb movement as iconic is irresistible, I find. I sprint across. Just as well: the vehicular traffic tends to start up and drive through the crossing about three seconds before the countdown for the green sprinting man hits zero.

Iconic representation is powerful. Lots of people describe the Chinese writing system as iconic, or call the characters "pictograms". But they aren't iconic at all, except in a very few cases. The Chinese for "run" is pǎo, and the character is 跑. Now, does that character in any way suggest to you that you should get your legs moving nineteen to the dozen? It does not. Chinese writing is not iconic; the characters are not little pictures. But the running green man of Tarragona pedestrian crossings is.

Six of us were dining in Tarragona on Tuesday night, and the topic of bottled water came up. We all agreed, it is a scandal that diesel fuel is being used to move bottled water around the earth's surface when often it has no chemical advantage whatever over tapwater. What an ecological disaster. What a ripoff. We all insisted we wanted tapwater, and our Spanish-speaking Catalunya-resident host clearly understood us. But three bottles of spa water duly arrived.

Tonight, in a different restaurant, down by the fishing boat harbor, I was firm: tap water, I insisted; not bottled — I pointed to a bottle and made signs of negation. We spoke in a pidgin composed of Catalan, Spanish, and English, my waiter and I; but I thought he understood me well. I even mimed the turning on of the tap to show that I was serious, it should come out of the faucet.

He returned a few minutes later with some bottled water from Caldes de Boí in the Pyrenees. I meekly drank it.

The Catalan phrase I needed but didn't have at my tongue tip is l'aigua de l'aixeta. But it's too late now: my drinking water was trucked in from hundreds of miles away, and I have contributed to the exhausting of fossil fuels and the death of the planet.

Learn how to say "ordinary drinking water from the faucet, not bottled" in the language of the area you're going to. That's my advice. I know I didn't follow it myself, but hey, do as I say, not as I do.

[Comments open only for those who have never tasted bottled water.]

A couple of words that surprised me today:

1) Via Jan Freeman's latest post, an odd bit of obsolete slang: apparently, people used to say "to blue all his savings" and "I blued it all on booze" where we would say "to blow" and "I blew." I asked Jan if there were etymologies that would indicate whether it was an independent verb, and she replied "Both Green and OED present 'blue/blued/blued' as a variation on the (already slang) 'blow/blew/blown,' which makes me think it was probably an intentional language joke that caught on for a while."

2) Via Stan Carey's latest post, a new sense of bemused that would have upset me were I not such a staunch descriptivist; as it is, I am merely bemused that it snuck up on me without my having the faintest idea that it was undergoing semantic development. To quote the AHD, Fifth Edition: "The word bemused is sometimes used to mean 'amused, especially when finding something wryly funny,' as in The stream of jokes from the comedian left the audience bemused, with some breaking out into guffaws." Are you familiar with this sense? Do you use it yourself?

Every year around this time, I write about the relevant Chinese zodiacal animal.  Here are some recent posts:

We inaugurated "The Trent Reznor Prize for Tricky Embedding" back in 2005 to honor this inspired effort:

When I look at people that I would like to feel have been a mentor or an inspiring kind of archetype of what I'd love to see my career eventually be mentioned as a footnote for in the same paragraph, it would be, like, Bowie.

While I don't think that we've actually ever gotten around to awarding the prize again, we've nominated other candidates intermittently over the years. The latest to deserve nomination is Mark Steyn, for his channeling of Mitt Romney in "The Man Who Gave Us Newt", National Review 1/22/2012 (emphasis added):

Why is the stump speech so awful? “I believe in an America where millions of Americans believe in an America that’s the America millions of Americans believe in. That’s the America I love.” Mitt paid some guy to write this insipid pap. And he paid others to approve it. Not only is it bland and generic, it’s lethal to him in a way that it wouldn’t be to Gingrich or Perry or Bachmann or Paul because it plays to his caricature — as a synthetic, stage-managed hollow man of no fixed beliefs. And, when Ron Paul’s going on about “fiat money” and Newt’s brimming with specifics on everything (he was great on the pipeline last night), Mitt’s generalities are awfully condescending: The finely calibrated inoffensiveness is kind of offensive.

This is a far from an exact paraphrase of the passages about believing in America from Gov. Romney's stump speech, much less a direct quote. And based on the description in a New York Times article by  Ashley Parker ("Romney's Stump Speech Evolved Over Time", NYT 1/3/2012), it seems unlikely to approximate earlier versions any more closely. But as a loose caricature, it artfully embodies Steyn's evaluation of Romney's stump speech as a rhetorically complex way to say very little.

Showing only the clausal embedding, here's the tree:

Three levels of clausal embedding is unusual — neither Abraham Lincoln nor George W. Bush achieved it in their inaugural addresses, and even George Washington accomplished less than 1% of the time. And it's especially impressive to accomplish this in only 21 words, which is just about the average length of sentences these days in serious political speeches such as inaugural addresses.

Here are our other earlier TRP posts. "Trent Reznor Prize nomination", 2/23/2006:

I'd hate to make payin' a man an idiotic sum of money to burn my wife into a fine powder and stick her in a $400 bowlin' trophy 'cuz she requested it into somethin' weird.

"Another Trent Reznor Award Nominee", 3/8/2006:

Earlier, already changed into his suit, Lindros had stepped right into the showers, there to have a private word with Tie Domi, who on this evening had been feted for a thousand games in the NHL, his mother, so disapproving of how he played the sport, endlessly worried about her son, finally lured into attending a game, Domi offering his own tender tribute to a father long deceased.

"Trent Reznor Prize, RNR Division", 4/5/2008:

[I]t is nonetheless tempting to speculate about whether there exists — and, if so, what the properties are, of — a universal grammar of combat.

"Two candidates for the Trent Reznor Prize", 6/27/2011:

A penguin chick that was hand-reared by zoo keepers in Devon who used a puppet to impersonate an adult dies.

[H]e callously instructed his lawyers to add to her family's pain by implying the 13-year-old ran away because she was unhappy at home during days of cross examination.

It's hard to know how to describe Faith & Humor: Notes from Muscovy, by Maya Kucherskaya (profile), translated by Alexei Bayer (of which the publisher, Russian Life, was kind enough to send me an advance copy in uncorrected proofs). The Russian title, which translates as A Contemporary Paterikon, is more descriptive, or at least more specific, but since "Paterikon" means nothing to the vast majority of English speakers, I decided "Faith & Humor" was as good an English title as any. The book is sort of a "Lives of the Fathers" crossed with Daniil Kharms; it consists of (often acerbic) little anecdotes that add up to a surprisingly warm and effective collective portrait of modern Orthodoxy in its Russian context. I guess the only thing I can do is quote a few bits so you can see what it's like and decide whether you want to read more; as far as I'm concerned, they're like peanuts, and I can't get enough of them.

1. They were all supping around the refectory table. Suddenly, Father Theoprepus got down under the table. He sat there among the monks' roughly shod feet. The feet remained still. Then Father Theoprepus began to move around and to tug at the monks' cassocks from under the table. The monks were humble and no one dared to reproach him. Only one novice asked him in astonishment, "Father, how would you have us interpret this?"

"I want to be like a child," came the answer.

2. An abbot known for his gift of clairvoyance commanded a novice to cut down a poplar tree growing in the middle of the monastery. The novice, wishing to understand the hidden meaning of this order, inquired, "Father, why should the tree be cut down?"

"I've been laid low with allergies, Sonnie, from the poplar down," the abbot replied, sneezing.

"God bless you," said the novice and ran to fetch an electric saw.

For he had a gift of understanding.

6. Father Yehudiel spilled pea soup all over himself.

"Vasya, why don't you go and wash my cassock," he said to a novice who had recently joined the monastery.

"But I have no idea how to wash clothes," Vasya protested, laughing loudly.

"And so you shall learn," Father Yehudiel replied, laughing louder than ever.

Continue reading "THE BOOKSHELF: FAITH & HUMOR."

Today's xkcd:

The actual numbers from Google Books suggest a sigmoidal pattern with an upper asympote substantially below 100%:

And similarly for sustainability:

As Someone's Law (whose?) says, "Exponential growth can't go on forever". But the small amount of attention that I've given to official corporate and academic communications over the past few years leaves me with the impression that the sustainable lexi-bubble is still expanding, supporting Someone's Corollary (whose?), "But it usually goes on for longer than you would think".

Anyhow, the logical endpoint has been explored in the case of Chicken (the language):

And also Chicken (the scholarly paper), and Chicken (the PowerPoint presentation):

In the Hotel Ciutat Tarragona, the beautiful modern hotel in Tarragona where I am currently staying, I ate breakfast in the 1st-floor restaurant (Americans: that would be the 2nd floor), and then came out to take the elevator back up to my 5th-floor room (Americans: 6 floors up). But I was baffled: there was no button to call the elevator for upward journeys. There was just a button labeled with the Down-Arrow symbol for calling the elevator to go back down to the lobby on level 0. Some sort of security, I assumed, to ensure that random restaurant patrons don't go up in the elevator to wander up and down the halls looking for unlocked doors or stealable items. But then how was I to get back up to my room? I'm ashamed to report just how long it took me to resolve the conundrum here. Perhaps you would like to solve it for yourself before you read on.

Don't cheat. Before I tell you, figure it out. I hope you'll be able to solve the puzzle faster than I did.

It was purely a linguistic problem. The language was a tiny one: a language with two symbols, Up-Arrow and Down-Arrow, and meanings for each. On all other floors there were two buttons, one with each of the two symbols, giving you two choices of what to say. But on the restaurant floor, just one, with Down-Arrow.

My error (I really am far too literal and not nearly intuitive enough in these matters) was to think of the two symbols as conveying propositions, something like "I wish to make an upward journey in this elevator" and "I wish to make a downward journey in this elevator." So it took me a relatively long time to see how I could make an upward journey.

I actually trotted down one flight of stairs and took the elevator from there before I realized my ludicrous error. I would have done better to regard both Up-Arrow and Down-Arrow as both signalling nothing more than a peremptory instruction to make the elevator come to me. Things would have been basically fine then. But with my propositional semantics for the buttons, it seemed to me that I couldn't express what I wanted to say.

Under my construal of the button meanings, I actually needed to lie: I needed to tell the machine I wanted to go down, when really I was planning to go up. That seemed so dishonest that I never considered it. But of course, lying to machines isn't really defined. It's like the way you have to go to the Start button on Windows XP systems in order to shut the machine down: it's not a lie, it's just a use of a stupidly labeled button. Once you summon the elevator and get in, you can go up to level 5 just as easily as you could down to street level like the non-hotel-guest restaurant users would.

I don't really understand why they put only a Down-Arrow button on level 1. Or to put it another way, if the buttons just mean "Bring the elevator to me" then I don't really understand why they have two buttons on any of the floors. But what I do understand is that I was thinking too propositionally (too intelligently is the way I'd like to see it). If I had hit the Down-Arrow button on level 1, when I got in the elevator I could have just pressed the button for level 5, and up I would have gone (unless someone had called it to level 0 and it was intent on going down there first; but that happens occasionally even on floors with there are two buttons, depending on what's happening on other floors and whether there are lights indicating the direction of the elevator's current journey).

The lift, of course, wasn't classifying me as a person who had got on at level 1 and must therefore not be allowed to go up. It would take me wherever I wanted to go. If I had just thought of Down-Arrow not as meaning "I wish to go down" but as meaning "Get me the damn elevator", everything would have been simple.

There is probably a lesson here about design of systems with buttons or about nerdview. But I haven't quite figured out in detail what the lesson is.

[Comments open only for those going down to the lobby.]

At the Barcelona airport, near the parking structure where I was waiting for a Plana bus to Tarragona yesterday (two hours on the flight; two hours waiting for a bus: sigh), is a large and prominent box of what is obviously important equipment of some kind; and it is clearly labeled as being exclusively for the use of bombers.

For a moment I was surprised at this remarkably thoughtful convenience for terrorists who had not brought their own equipment. I stared at the Catalan lettering: ÚS EXCLUSIVIU BOMBERS. No doubt about it. But then I realized that the world would make a lot more sense if I assumed that the Catalan bombers was cognate with (i.e., had the same late Latin ancestor word as) the French pompiers, and meant "firemen". It made more sense to have a box of equipment (or hose access or whatever it was) for firemen, adjacent as it was to a parking structure replete with several tens of thousands of liters of refined petroleum products. Basic historical phonology to the rescue; momentary puzzlement over.

[Comments open only for bombers.]

I'm about halfway through Aksyonov's 1965 novel Пора, мой друг, пора [It's Time, My Friend, It's Time], which is so far set in Tallinn (his earlier fiction moves almost entirely between Estonia, the Far East, and the Crimea, with occasional stopovers in Moscow), and with my usual need for geographical precision I was trying to find out where улица Победы [Victory Street] was. I never did locate it, but I did run across one of those scholarly papers I devour with the greatest of enthusiasm, "Historical Multilingualism of Street Names in Estonia" (pdf, abstract) by Peeter Päll. I wanted to quote chunks from it about the linguistic history of Estonia and its capital, but for some reason the "select text" function isn't working for me, and there doesn't appear to be a Google cache (does Google not do this for pdfs any more? and why are they hiding Google Books, and even more so Advanced Search? but don't get me started), so you'll have to read it for yourself.

And looking for a quotable version of that led me to Simon Hamilton's wonderful site, A Rambling Dictionary of Tallinn Street Names, which lists Päll's article in its extensive bibliography and thanks him for "responding to my interminable questions"—Hamilton clearly put a lot of work into his Rambling Dictionary, and I for one appreciate it.

I know I've been lazy, but it's really just that so many insane things have been flying through the air for a while now that it's been hard to focus on just one. Catching up a little, with a bit of anthropological spin here and there...
Marriage is a 3,000 year-old sacrament Candidate Newt Gingrich said, in the "debate" on January 7:  "The sacrament of marriage is based on a man and woman; has been for 3000 years."
Now, Gingrich likes to present himself as an "intellectual," after all he does have a PhD in history from Tulane.  He even taught history and geography for a while at West Georgia College, but he was denied tenure in 1978.  One wonders how much human history he really learned in his academic wandering, if he thinks that the "sacrament" of marriage, which refers primarily to the Christian/Catholic ceremony, is 3,000 years old, since the religious cult of Christianity is barely 2000 years old.  If he means "sacrament" in a more general, as simply a ceremony in which supernatural beings are presumed to participate, he's still off by at least tens of thousands of years.  Anthropologists regard marriage, i.e. the ritual uniting people and defining their rights of sexual access to each other, as a human cultural universal.  As such it must have existed for at least the last 50-100 thousand years, maybe longer, but the point is made.
Furthermore, even within the last 3,000 years, marriage has not always been stipulated as only between a female and a male.  Gingrich the historian might have read or heard at some point about the berdache or two-spirit people among Native Americans.  These were women or men who elected to play the opposite gender role in their society, including marrying people of the same sex.  They were generally respected, and sometimes revered as having special spiritual powers, among Native Americans, until of course the European Christians came along.
Life begins at conception Back in August candidate Rick Santorum stated in an interview on CNN: "I shouldn’t say I believe it, it’s a biological fact that life begins at conception."