Linguistics

It’s the time of year when I teach Plato’s Meno. As I wisely explain to my students, there are two things that they are going to find off-putting and even incomprehensible about the dialogue. [click to continue…]

Further to earlier posts on this topic, the BBC website “has a short clip of a voice coach training an Englishman to sound American, together with an accompanying article”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7509572.stm . (To my ears his American sounds slightly Irish.) There’s a priceless first comment below the article from a Texan who writes: “It never occurs to us that there is such a thing as an American accent.” Well now you know.

On a friend’s recommendation, I watched the excellent “Now, Voyager”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0035140/ the other night. A very fine performance from Bette Davis, who makes the transition from dumpy and downtrodden to shining society beauty brilliantly. But enough of the plot spoilers. Especially in the opening scenes, everyone sounds upper-class _English_. Perhaps not as cut-glass as “Brief Encounter”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0037558/ , but close. Maybe some of the characters are supposed to be English (Dr Jacquith, played by the English Claude Rains might be), but others, such as the matriarch Mrs Henry Windle Vale (played by the English Gladys Cooper) are definitely supposed to be American (upper-class Bostonian). And Bette Davis herself, is, obviously, an American actor playing an American character (but still sounding _English_). So, did Bostonian aristocrats in the 1940s actually speak with English accents? Or were the dramatic conventions such that English actors (Rains, Cooper) didn’t have to change their voices?

(I’m recalling that Kieran wrote about accent change over time “here”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/10/19/how-the-edwardians-spoke/ , and that Harry wrote about Brits playing Americans “here”:https://crookedtimber.org/2008/05/27/hugh-lauries-accent/ . In the year 2008 I know at least one posh Bostonian and she definitely sounds American, though only as much as Dr Niles Crane.)

Man, if ever there were a time I regretted not saving up the pun in the title of my “I Sought the Serif” post – this would be that time. The time I bought The Serif Fairy for the kids, that is. “The Serif Fairy has lost her wing, keeping her from performing magic. This book follows her through an airy, immaculately designed typographic landscape as she tries to recover her wing. Along the way, she makes friends and has adventures as she wanders through the Garamond Forest, visits Futura City and eventually ends her quest at Shelley Lake …”

It’s cute. Honestly, I was hoping it would be even cuter. But it’ll do. Plus it confirms Belle’s suspicions that I will indoctrinate the kids in my repetitive ways.

And I just finished Letter By Letter, by Laurent Pflughaupt. A history of each letter of the alphabet, plus soapbox from which to broadcast the author’s stern views about the morally improving qualities of calligraphy. “Revealing the fundamental characteristics of writing (rhythm, relation to the body, readability, meaning), the study and practice of calligraphy constitutes an essential basis for this new direction since it encourages the integration of skills and gestures that are indispensable to all future forms of creativity.”

The book is interesting, whether it will do all that for you or not.

I have one significant, non-typographic bargain to report. Amazon has a download of Jelly Roll Morton: The Complete Library of Congress Recordings for only $19.95. It’s out of print and the cheapest used copy I can find is $150. So I consider that a good deal.

In the thread to Harry’s “post”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/12/05/what-are-snubbing-and-shunning/ on academies and Oxbridge, some of us got into a little exchange about “widening participation” and spotting “academic potential” (sorry for the scare quotes, Stuart). Now in the Telegraph there’s “the story of Barry Cox, the world’s only Scouse Cantopop star”:http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/foreign/richardspencer/dec07/cantopop.htm . Having left school with a bunch of poor to mediocre GCSEs and finding himself in a succession of unrewarding jobs, Cox decided, somewhat idiosyncratically, that the road to self-improvement lay via learning Cantonese with the proprietors of his local chippie. He managed in two years and is now a successful singer in Macau. Richard Spencer, author of the Telegraph article asks:

bq. someone, somewhere in Liverpool, particularly in Barry’s old school, should be asking themselves some questions about his achievement. How come a kid can master a truly difficult language, enough to forge a career in a highly competitive place like Hong Kong/Macau, but come out of the school as a “no brainbox, me” holder of five GCSEs just a couple of years before?

Good question. Lots of us have been signed up at some time in our lives to the idea that most people have a lot of unactualized potential and that the social structure of our societies (and institutional components like the education system) hold them back, undermine their sense of the possibilities, depress their confidence, tell them what is for “the likes of them” and so on. But then, when we sit as selectors for university places, we switch into a mind-set where only a few have a mysterious intrinsic quality called “academic potential” that it is our job to discern and then to develop. As for the rest, they must do as they do.

Relatedly (via Loren King) there’s a “Scientific American article”:http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-secret-to-raising-smart-kids&print=true about how damaging it is when parents push a model of achievement according to which you’ve either got “it” or you haven’t. On this view some (how many?) kids acquire a belief about whether they are, or are not, (in Cox’s parlance) “brainboxes”. Children (and other people) with the theory that being a “brainbox” is an instrinsic property react to failure by drawing the conclusion that further study is not for them and that things are hopeless. Fortunately for him, it looks as if Barry Cox didn’t have that damaging mind-set, despite his “no brainbox” comment.

[Thanks to “Blood and Treasure”:http://bloodandtreasure.typepad.com/blood_treasure/2007/12/a-journey-of-10.html , where there’s more on Cox’s idiosyncratic choice of language/dialect.]

A (slightly ponderous) documentary on a set of rare sound recordings of British and Irish POWs from World War I. First recordings are just after 10 minutes in. I liked the way the speed of the shellac recording is calibrated by matching an A note on the last groove to the A from a tuning fork. At 23″ or so there’s a recording of a man telling the parable of the Prodigal Son, where the difference between the ‘a’ in _father_ and the ‘a’ in _man_ is quite striking. At about 35″ there’s an nice example of the problems associated with interpreting material like this: another recording of the Prodigal Son story (a set text for the German academics who were interested in English accents) is played to a woman who knew the solider speaking, with interesting results.

“Dan Drezner”:http://www.danieldrezner.com/archives/003030.html takes an online quiz and finds he has a “midland” accent. His evaluation says:

bq. “You have a Midland accent” is just another way of saying “you don’t have an accent.” You probably are from the Midland (Pennsylvania, southern Ohio, southern Indiana, southern Illinois, and Missouri) but then for all we know you could be from Florida or Charleston or one of those big southern cities like Atlanta or Dallas.

The number of people who sincerely believe they do not have an accent is quite astonishing. Maybe quizzes like this are partly to blame.

The Australian reports on the “infiltration” (or maybe “infiltrazione”) of Italian by English words, quoting Michele Cortelazzo, lecturer in linguistics at the University of Padua, who is quoted as saying

Prime recent examples were flop instead of the Italian fiasco, and trend instead of tendenza.

Does anyone notice un problema here?

Given that concern over Franglais, Spanglish and so on has been around for many decades now, I’d be interested to know whether the influence of English on other European languages goes beyond the importation of a relatively modest number of loan words. My very limited observation suggests not, but lots of readers here are in a much better position than me to comment.

If a book is translated in your mother tongue, but the original was in a language that you understand, would you read the book in translation or in the original language? I (almost) always choose the original, despite that this generally requires greater effort. The reason is simple: many translated works are not able to capture the exact meanings of the original text (especially in the case of non-fiction), or do not breathe the same atmosphere (especially in the case of fiction). Even for single quotes, the original is often better phrased than the translated. But there are exceptions. Take the quote at the top of your screen: as far as I know, it is “Isaiah Berlin’s translation”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0691058385/102-7074207-0531324?v=glance&n=283155 of Immanuel Kant’s original. I’ve always wondered how the original sounds, and since I couldn’t figure out myself, I asked “Pauline Kleingeld”:http://leidsewetenschappers.leidenuniv.nl/show_en.php3?medewerker_id=816, a Kant Scholar. Here it is:

Aus so krummem Holze, als woraus der Mensch gemacht ist, kann nichts ganz Gerades gezimmert werden (Akademische Ausgabe, Band 8, page 23).

For once, the translation beats the original.

First, Stephen Colbert commented on a funny Hungarian story the other day. The entire clip is worth watching, but if you want to jump straight to that segment then forward to 3.44 (or 3.37 if YouTube won’t let you do that). Love the way he pronounces the URL. *

Second, Mark Liberman of LanguageLog has decided to do a speech speed experiment on native Hungarian speakers as a follow-up to this matter (his observations here and here). If you are a native speaker of Hungarian, please send him a note and participate. The original peer-reviewed journal publication’s findings were based on just ten participants. Let’s see if he can get at least as many.

[*] Not as funny, but part of the real story is that the vote is only for recommendations that a committee will then consider when making the final decision.

The NYTimes decided to report on the extent to which Hungarians are better than Americans at recalling store prices. Given that most blogging I do about Hungary seems to result in a discussion of the Hungarian language and given that the authors explain the findings based on language differences, I thought I’d take this opportunity to address the issue head on.

Let’s start with the findings:

Hungarians are far better than Americans at recalling long prices; on average, they can recall 19 to 24 syllables with decent accuracy, while Americans can recall only 13. The authors suggested that this was because Hungarians speak 41 percent faster, both out loud and when repeating sounds to themselves “subvocally.”

The NYTimes piece ends right there. That’s not fair, the author left out the most interesting part: how do we know how fast Hungarians speak in comparison to Americans?

[click to continue…]

Two of my more public-spirited fellow citizens have recently identified looming threats to our own Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

1. Our beloved junior senator, Rick Santorum (via Pharyngula):
   

   Most scientists unfortunately, those that certainly are advocating for this [embryonic stem cell research], and many others feel very little moral compulsion. It’s a utilitarian, materialistic view of doing whatever they can do to pursue their desired goals.

   I, for one, will be happier voting on Mr. Santorum’s re-election in November, knowing that my ballot will play a part in the age-old struggle between utilitarian materialism and deontological idealism, as well as the sagas of human-canine relations and Old Corruption.

2. Our beloved linguistics professor, Mark Liberman:
   

   More than a third of all Pennsylvanians are native speakers of a language other than English — and many of them have not even tried to learn English since immigrating, or at least prefer to carry out their daily lives in another language, living together in neighborhoods where their native language dominates. Some people worry that the majority status of English is critically endangered. 25 years ago, a major political figure warned that these “aliens … will never adopt our language or customs, any more than they can acquire our complexion”, and so far, his prediction seems to be right on the money.

   And let’s not forget what they’ve done to our cooking!

“Steven Poole”:http://www.unspeak.net/ seems to have gone on holiday, so it must fall to others to catalogue the emergence of new unspeak terms. “Rebalancing” seems to be the vogue word with British government ministers at the moment. It is used when the government wants to restrict the rights of people accused of crimes, to promote summary punishment of offenders, to impose harsher sentences, and so on. The open admission that the government wants to restrict civil liberties would cause many people to worry about justice. “Rebalancing”, with its tacit reference to the scales of justice, and its suggestion that this or that measure is merely the tuning of a delicate machine, aims to calm such anxieties. Authoritarian thug Home Secretary John Reid is “a frequent user”:http://society.guardian.co.uk/crimeandpunishment/story/0,,1824989,00.html of the word, and I see that blogger Oliver Kamm “likes it too”:http://oliverkamm.typepad.com/blog/2006/07/justice_means_s.html .

In my dialect of English, shared living arrangements (normally non-familial) can be described by three terms.
A housemate (or flatmate) is someone who shares your house (normally not your room, but this is open)
A roommate is someone who shares your room (normally not your bed, but see above)
A bedmate is self-explanatory.

In US English, “roommate” seems to cover all three, but US English speakers seem able to infer which is intended from the context. Can anyone help me with a usage guide?

[click to continue…]