languagehat.com

Two more language-related Wondermark cartoons by David Malki ! (previous Wondermark here, previous begging the question here and here):
BBB…eing wrong.
Containing multitudes.
As always, be sure to read the mouseover text. (Thanks, Sven!)

Don Jaucian has a nice piece on Penguin Classics publisher Elda Rotor (what a wonderful name: Elda Rotor!) that starts by pointing out that she took the job in 2006, the same year Jose Rizal’s novel Noli Me Tangere was published under the Penguin Classics banner; she has been promoting the literature of her native country ever since:

After Rizal’s “Noli” and its sequel, “El Filibusterismo,” and Jose Garcia Villa’s poetry collection “Doveglion” (introduced by the New York-based Filipino author Luis Francia), Nick Joaquin will soon be published under Penguin Classics, which recently acquired rights to his short story collection “The Woman With Two Navels and Tales of the Tropical Gothic” and his play “A Portrait of the Artist as Filipino,” in time for the author’s birth centennial in May 2017.

The interview that follows is interesting, as are the accompanying photos, which include a graphic showing “the evolution of the penguin” and “a vintage refrigerator reworked as a bookshelf.” Also, I learned about new series like Penguin Drop Caps, Civic Classics, “and soon the Penguin Orange Collection and Penguin Galaxy.” Thanks, Trevor!

I report with sadness that the great French poet Yves Bonnefoy died July 1; the only English-language source to cover the event appears to be BBC News, though I trust the NY Times, Guardian, and other big guns are preparing substantial obits. (In French, Libé gives its piece the nice title “Yves Bonnefoy disparaît en son arrière-pays.”) I have posted about him in connection with brambles here and here; as I said to Siganus Sutor, who commiserated on his dying on my birthday, they should have given him the damn Nobel before it was too late.

Update. William Grimes has done an excellent obituary for The NY Times. Also, it occurred to me that I should honor Bonnefoy by posting one of his poems (from Hier régnant désert, 1958):

Le sable est au début comme il sera
L’horrible fin sous la poussée de ce vent froid.
Où est le bout, dis-tu, de tant d’étoiles,
Pourquoi avançons-nous dans ce lieu froid ?

Et pourquoi disons-nous d’aussi vaines paroles,
Allant et comme si la nuit n’existait pas ?
Mieux vaut marcher plus près de la ligne d’écume
Et nous aventurer au seuil d’un autre froid.

Nous venions de toujours. De hâtives lumières
Portaient au loin pour nous la majesté du froid
— Peu à peu grandissait la côte longtemps vue
Et dite par des mots que nous ne savions pas.

Frank’s Compulsive Guide to Country Addresses isn’t directly language-related, but of course different countries have different languages and writing systems, and this maniacally detailed guide to addressing international mail deals with them, quoting recommendations like “Addresses in Russian, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, Cyrillic, Japanese, or Chinese characters must bear an interline translation in English of the names of the post office and country of destination. If the English translation is not known, the foreign language words must be spelled in roman characters (print or script).” Really, though, I’m bringing it to your attention because it’s jam-packed with fun facts, like “Another piece of Russia, the villages of Sankova and Medvezhe, lies inside Belarus.” Or this:

IRAN: Iranian addresses are written in “major to minor” order, town at the top, followed by street address, then addressee. The postal code is important because there are many cases of duplicate street names in the same city, even a few duplicate building numbers in the same street. 10 digit postcodes are needed to identify the correct location in such cases.

Duplicate building numbers in the same street! Why?? Or this:

Falkland Islands inhabitants often find that their letters have transited the postal systems of places such as the Faroe Islands, Iceland or the most popular destination for lost Falklands mail, Falkirk in Scotland.

Or the whole UK mess:

What should be the name of this section? THE UNITED KINGDOM AND IRELAND (as it was once labeled), while technically correct if IRELAND is taken as the name of the country and not the island, can easily be misconstrued. THE UNITED KINGDOM AND THE REPUBLIC OF IRELAND would not be correct since there is no country whose name is REPUBLIC OF IRELAND. THE UNITED KINGDOM AND ÉIRE is correct (two non-overlapping countries) but it contains a mixture of languages. Hence BRITAIN AND IRELAND (two non-overlapping islands) – perhaps not quite adequate either since it might not encompass the various associated outlying islands. […]

GREAT BRITAIN is a term that means different things to different people. Canada Post uses it as their only recognized name for the United Kingdom. Webster’s dictionary defines “Britain” as “the island of Great Britain”, and defines Great Britain as “(a) island comprising England, Scotland, and Wales, or (b) United Kingdom” (which in turn is defined to include Northern Ireland). The Encyclopedia Britannica says “Technically, Great Britain is one of the two main islands that make up the British Isles. By this definition it includes the countries of England, Scotland, and Wales. Popularly, Great Britain is the shortened name for the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.” The OED says that Great Britain is “the whole island containing England, Wales, and Scotland, with their dependencies”. William Wallace says, however, that the term “is actually a remnant of the Norman Conquest times, and was used to distinguish between Large Britain (Grande Bretagne) and Little Britain (Petite Bretagne, Brittany). It has nothing to do with Empire or world domination and simply refers to the time when the island was administered and fought over by the French.” In any case, the ambiguity of the term Great Britain – is it a country, an island, or a group of islands? – suggests it is best avoided.

Or, from this linked subsite:

Shropshire came into existence as a unit of government in the early 10th century. The oldest known form of the name of the county is SCROBBESCIRE, the shire belonging to SCROBBESBYRIG, the Saxon name for Shrewsbury. After the Norman Conquest the county’s new rulers adopted the forms SALOPESCIRE and SALOPESBIRY. The word SALOP, applying both to the county and the county town, survived from the middle ages as an alternative English form, having originally been abbreviated from the Norman French. A Latin form, SALOPIA, was commonly used in documents in the 16th century, and in subsequent centuries legal records refer to the County of Salop rather than to Shropshire. The new authority established in 1974 under the Local Government Act of 1972 was officially named Salop, but this was altered to Shropshire with effect from 1st March 1980.

And I will note that in my editorial capacity I noticed a typo in this Russian address (“Междунродный” should be Международный):

Чичикову П.И.
Междунродный Центр Научной и Технической Информации
ул.Куусинена 21-Б
125252 г.Москва
MOSCOW
RUSSIA

Via MetaFilter.

Bryant Rousseau has a NY Times piece on the history of Maltese:

Maltese is very much a living language. More than 90 percent of the nation’s 425,000 citizens speak it at home. Authors writing in Maltese won the European Prize for Literature in 2011 and 2014.

Over the centuries, other languages and dialects have been layered on top of Maltese’s Arabic core, to the point that Sicilian and Italian words account for about half the vocabulary today, and English, Malta’s other official language, around 10 percent. […]

“For me,” said Michael D. Cooperson, a professor of Arabic language and literature at the University of California, Los Angeles, “the fascination of it is that every sentence seems to sum up the history of the Mediterranean.”

The link was sent to me by Slavomír “bulbul” Čéplö, who knows this stuff, and it gets his seal of approval.

I confess myself somewhat thrown for a loop by Randy J. LaPolla’s short paper “On categorization: Stick to the facts of the languages” (to appear in Linguistic Typology); he says sensible things about labeling linguistic categories based on resemblances, then continues thus:

My own view (LaPolla 1997, 2003, 2015, 2016), developed from my experiences with languages and communication over many years, departs radically from the Structuralist paradigm: I argue that there is no coding-decoding in communication, and no shared code among speakers of the same language; communication is achieved simply by ostension and abductive inference, regardless of whether linguistic forms are involved or not. The communicator does something (the ostensive act) with the purpose of the addressee inferring the intention to communicate and the reason for the ostensive act. By doing this, the addressee creates a meaning in their mind, which the communicator hopes will be similar to the meaning the communicator intended the addressee to create. That is, there is no meaning in the ostensive act (be it linguistic or not); the addressee creates a meaning based on the communicator’s use of the particular ostensive act in the particular context by creating a context of interpretation, out of the overall context of assumptions available to him or her at that moment, in which the ostensive act “makes sense”. As it is based on abductive inference, though, the outcome is non-deterministic.

Language use is one type of ostensive act.

Obviously I’d have a better idea what he’s talking about if I read his other work, but just in bare outline, it sounds reductive and hard to apply in practice; at any rate, I’ll be glad to hear other people’s thoughts on it. I certainly have no quarrel when he says in his conclusion that “combing hundreds of grammars (of varying quality) and extracting forms that one thinks might fit one’s comparative categories (regardless of what the author of the grammar might have said) is very problematic. It is much better to concentrate on languages one has a good knowledge of and contribute to typology by expanding our understanding of what is found and how we might understand it, including its historical origins.” (Thanks to John Cowan for sending me the link.)

Anne Curzan has a nice discussion of a vexed problem: when and how to correct people’s language. She opens with an anecdote:

Last month I was recording a lecture and had to say the word pyramidal. The passage, about bats in pyramidal cages, was an example of how the passive voice is deployed in scientific writing. I’d never before had occasion to say that word out loud.

I went with what seemed like a perfectly reasonable guess: pyramid (pronounced as usual) + –al, so the primary stress remained on the first syllable.

I got stopped. And corrected. “Py-RA-midal,” I was told. I had to practice a few times in my head before I could get it right on the videotape. (I now know that those of you in medicine have a leg up on me here, because you talk about the extrapyramidal system.)

Pronunciation is not the point here, though. What has stuck with me is how silly and disconcerted I felt when I got corrected. The insecure part of me felt as if I had just been outed. What kind of academic — let alone a linguist — doesn’t know how to pronounce pyramidal?

I can completely empathize with all that; I happen to know how to say pyramidal, but even at my semi-advanced age (I’m currently in the process of trying to figure out Medicare) and with my decades of obsessing about language, I still discover pronunciations I never learned (let’s not even talk about the simple words whose spelling I still have to look up to be sure), and if I said one of them wrong in such a situation and got corrected, you can bet I’d feel disconcerted. And she has an exemplary recommendation:

Next time you’re about to blurt out a correction of someone else’s language (their pronunciation or grammar or punctuation or something else), pause for a moment and consider what your goal is. Will this person really benefit from having you call out this bit of language, as I did when the producers corrected my pronunciation? And is this a good moment? If so, then go ahead — and do it kindly. If not, if the speech act will make you feel smart but not really help the other person, then consider keeping that correction in your head. Remember how stressful, if not downright silencing, it can be for someone to realize that you are listening to how they talk as much as to what they are saying.

Ed Yong reports for The Atlantic on an interesting finding of research on conversation:

When we talk we take turns, where the “right” to speak flips back and forth between partners. This conversational pitter-patter is so familiar and seemingly unremarkable that we rarely remark on it. But consider the timing: On average, each turn lasts for around 2 seconds, and the typical gap between them is just 200 milliseconds—barely enough time to utter a syllable. That figure is nigh-universal. It exists across cultures, with only slight variations. It’s even there in sign-language conversations.

“It’s the minimum human response time to anything,“ says Stephen Levinson from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. It’s the time that runners take to respond to a starting pistol—and that’s just a simple signal. If you gave them a two-way choice—say, run on green but stay on red—they’d take longer to pick the right response. Conversations have a far greater number of possible responses, which ought to saddle us with lengthy gaps between turns. Those don’t exist because we build our responses during our partner’s turn. We listen to their words while simultaneously crafting our own, so that when our opportunity comes, we seize it as quickly as it’s physically possible to.

“When you take into account the complexity of what’s going into these short turns, you start to realize that this is an elite behavior,” says Levinson. “Dolphins can swim amazingly fast, and eagles can fly as high as a jet, but this is our trick.” […]

The brevity of these silences is doubly astonishing when you consider that it takes at least 600 milliseconds for us to retrieve a single word from memory and get ready to actually say it. For a short clause, that processing time rises to 1500 milliseconds. This means that we have to start planning our responses in the middle of a partner’s turn, using everything from grammatical cues to changes in pitch. We continuously predict what the rest of a sentence will contain, while similarly building our hypothetical rejoinder, all using largely overlapping neural circuits.

“It’s amazing, like juggling with one hand,” says Levinson. “It’s been completely ignored by the cognitive sciences because traditionally, people who studied language comprehension were different to the ones who studied language production. They never stopped to think that, in conversations, these things are happening at the same time.”

Yong goes into the history of the discovery, how the turn-taking system may have evolved, and how it develops from infancy on. Visit the link and read the whole thing, after which you have 200 milliseconds to respond.

Check out the remarkable page from an Ottoman calendar for 1911/1327/1329 that’s Figure 1 on this page (click on the picture to see a larger and annotated version). “The calendar contains six languages: Turkish, Greek, French, Bulgarian, Armenian, and Ladino.” Thanks, Andy!

David Crystal has posted about what sounds like a remarkable museum:

Last week I finally managed to get to see the amazing Mundolingua – the language museum in Paris founded by Mark Oremland a couple of years ago. I don’t use the adjective lightly. He has managed to pack into two floors of a small building a remarkable array of pictures, books, artefacts, and interactive facilities relating to language, languages, and linguistics, all presented in a user-friendly and multingual way. […]

The museum is open every day between 10:00 and 19:00, with a modest entrance fee of just a few euros. Don’t rush the visit. There is so much material that a language buff could spend a whole day here – or even two – exploring the collections in detail. The day I was there a group of visitors was sitting around a sociolinguistic exhibit with headphones, happily listening to usages in various languages. Another couple was by the phonetics chart copying the IPA sounds represented there.

I spent some time trying the braille quiz: a chart in front of you gives you all the braille letter codes, and then you place your hands under a cover and feel the message hidden there. I thought it would be easy and found it really challenging.

I hope it sticks around, and if I ever get to Paris again I will definitely pay it a visit.