Weekend Wordery: Hoisted from Brad DeLong’s Blog Titles: Why Oh Why Can’t We Have More Grammatico-Mathematical Proofs in the Comments
Did someone say "Ghoughpteighbteau"?
Any sequence of the word “buffalo” of length n>1 is a grammatical sentence of English.
First, let n be odd. We start with n=3: “Buffalo buffalo buffalo”; that is, some buffalo do buffalo buffalo, i.e., some buffalo are buffaloed by buffalo. But of course the buffalo who are buffaloing may themselves be buffaloed by buffalo, so just as some cats that watch mice are chased by dogs, or as we say, cats dogs chase watch mice, buffalo that buffalo buffalo themselves buffalo buffalo, and we can say that buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo. Anytime we have the noun buffalo, we can add the relative clause “who are buffaloed by buffalo”, or better, instead of the noun phrase “buffalo who are buffaloed by buffalo”, we may say simply “buffalo that buffalo buffalo”, then add the rest of the sentence, yielding “Buffalo that buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo”, or even better, “Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo”. To a sentence consisting of n (odd) occurrences of the word, we can produce a sentence of n+2 occurrences.
Thus for any odd n, a sequence of n occurrences is a sentence.
But just as a dog that chases cats is a dog that chases, buffalo that buffalo some buffalo are buffalo that buffalo, so from one of our sequences of an odd number of occurrences, we can lop off the final direct object, producing a sequence of an even number of occurrences that is a grammatical sentence. For any n>1, odd or even, a sequence of n occurrences of “buffalo” is a grammatical English sentence!
Woah. That is simply genius.
- By everyone, I mean everyone except Karl Smith, who prefers the more colloquial “Fish fish fish fish fish….” [↩]
April Foolery
It seems like celebration of April Fool’s Day was particularly robust on the intertubes this year. Gmail motion was pretty good. The blogosphere was rife with fake paywall announcements (though this one was actually from March 20). But my vote for winner goes to Geoffrey Pullum at Language Log, who really had me going for a while with this account of a curious policy about sentence structure at The New Yorker. Pullum played the setup—beautifully—a few days before, reminding readers of his standing invitation to New Yorker staff to come forward with an explanation of the magazine’s odd fidelity to a certain stylistic convention that produces some very awkward constructions. Here’s an illustration from a 2010 Language Log post, citing a 2003 post (establishing this pedigree was part of the effect, distracting readers—me, at least—from their usual April 1 guardedness):
As Chris Potts noted on Language Log way back in 2003 (“A ban on quotative inversion?“), The New Yorker apparently has a house-style prohibition on (if I may use the technical terms employed in The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language) subject postposing in a parenthetical report frame for directly reported speech, even when the quoted speech is preposed.
They ban “said NP” even when the subject NP is long and complex. In fact they ban it even when the subject contains additional parenthetical interruptions and thus cries out to have a place at the end of the clause. Chris cites this sentence:
“He used to have this great, dignified passion to him,” Christopher Hitchens, who, until his own political change of heart, defended Chomsky, says. (Larissa MacFarquhar, “The devil’s accountant”, The New Yorker, March 31, 2003, p.67, column 2.)
[...] [T]he New Yorker‘s fierce and unyielding house style code will not allow the subject to be postposed, to yield what could have been a perfectly acceptable sentence:
“He used to have this great, dignified passion to him,” says Christopher Hitchens, who, until his own political change of heart, defended Chomsky.
[...] It is irritating to waste even this much time confirming something so obvious: there is no such thing as a fluent native speaker and reader of Standard English who rejects such sentences. Someone at The New Yorker is stone crazy.
“That conjectural stone-crazy editor is the subject of Pullum’s wily April 1st post, At last, the truth from The New Yorker, winner of this year’s award for excellence in April foolery,” Jim Hufford, an admirer of Pullum’s work at Language Log, and himself a blogger who writes, though seldomly and at an admittedly very amateur level, about linguistics, wrote.
Weekend Wordery: Is the Google Books Ngram Infinitely Fun, or Just Asymptotically Approaching Infinite Fun?
The Google Ngram Viewer could be a hoax producing random line graphs totally unrelated to user input, for all I know. But according to this paper’s abstract, it draws on 4% of all books ever printed to represent the frequencies of words written between 1800-2000. As linguist Geoffrey Nunberg mentions in his review of the study, the English language corpus contains 360 billion words. Read Nunberg (also at Language Log) for sober consideration of the project and its uses.
Read just about any other blog, and you’ll find that it’s amateur sociolinguistic wonko-Christmas morning! Google supplies the answers (in chart form), and it’s up to you to figure out what the question was.
Consider the graph of truth (blue) v. money (red):
truth v. money
So the question is: when did people start caring more about money than truth? The answer is about 1875, it seems. Though we briefly entertained second thoughts in about 1882. Very briefly.
When did sex eclipse wisdom? The Roaring Twenties, of course:
wisdom v. sex
When was God eclipsed by the electron?
god v. electron
1940? Not so fast! It was a trick question. The Ngram Viewer is case-sensitive. Despite a steady diminution in market share from 1840-1940, God—as opposed to god—continues to outnumber electron, not to mention sex, drugs, music, and money:
God v. sex v. drugs v. music v. money
And lastly: cake or death?
cake v. death
Weekend Wordery
Weekend Wordery: The Plural of ‘Syllabus’
According to the OED, the word syllabus is a Latin corruption of the Greek sittybas, the accusative plural form of sittyba.
Asked to adjudicate between syllabuses and syllabi, Mark Liberman at Language Log goes with syllabuses:
So if we were going to be etymologically exact, the singular should be “sittyba” and the plural should be “sittybes”, or something like that. Why should we invent a fake Latin plural to go with the fake Latin singular? My advice is to stick with plain English syllabuses.
I’ll stick up for the fake Latin syllabi. Two reasons: (a) everyone knows or thinks syllabi is a joke anyway; and (b) syllabuses is harder to say. Also, if double-fake Latin is what it takes to keep real Latin alive—or undead, or whatever—then I’m all for it!
Oh, That? Don’t Worry, It’s Only Puke.
Apparently, this is a brand of chips from China. More examples of unfortunately named foods from abroad here.
Via Language Log.
Weekend Wordery: In Praise of Y’all
I grew up in Northwest Florida, so I am, geographically at least, a southerner. But I don’t have a southern accent—maybe just a touch here and there, but hardly anyone recognizes it. I don’t say “own” for the word on; I do not pronounce my name with two syllables (“gee-um”); and I do not use such phrases as “used to could.”
But I do sometimes stress the initial syllable of umbrella rather than the second. And I do, from time to time, employ the second-person plural pronoun y’all.
Now, English has an official second-person plural pronoun: you. But, on its own, you is not always adequate to the task of providing actionable information. In certain contexts, it must be supplemented, as in: “You two get out of here,” or “You are all invited.” Otherwise, you can’t tell from the context whether, for example, both of you should get out or just one of you; or if you and your whole group are invited, or just you alone. This ambiguity inevitably necessitates a request for clarification, usually including an explanation of the reason for confusion, followed by the requested clarification, and then an apology; obviously, much of that exchange would be optional, but is often socially expected.
No such problem exists in any of the European languages I’m familiar with, where typically both the pronoun and the verb inflection tell you whether the meaning is singular or plural. And it need not be a problem for us, either, because y’all is a perfectly serviceable candidate for a second-person plural pronoun in English—indeed, it already is one, whether “official” or not. So I guess the more relevant point to make is this: y’all isn’t stupid; on the contrary, it is a very useful addition to the language. And it’s time for y’all to embrace it.
Weekend Wordery: Ghoughpteighbteau
Last week I blogged about spelling reform in response to a post Matt Yglesias wrote a while back. I mentioned “Ghoti,” the re-spelling of fish (with the gh from tough, the o from women, and the ti from nation) that illustrates the absurd possibilities of letter combinations in English. Another example is “Ghoughpteighbteau.” Try to work it out, if you’re in a sporting mood. I’ll even drop a hint or two in the comments. Otherwise, go straight to the answer here.
One more thing I wanted to comment on: Yglesias says “we lack an underlying set of rules to determine how letter-strings form phonemes.” But by and large that is not true. English spelling is mostly predictable and follows regular rules. According to Steven Pinker in The Language Instinct, about 84% of English words follow regular, predictable spelling patterns. And the words with the weirdest spellings (like people, women, done) are among the most commonly used words, which makes them relatively easy to memorize.
But the crux of Yglesias’ point still stands: it’s pretty hard for non-native speakers and even native speakers with little educational capital to reach levels of spelling attainment required to succeed in any venture where written communication is important. It is worth mentioning however that the reason isn’t just that English is so loopy. It’s that people who have attained sophisticated written language skills are generally intolerant of and biased against those who have not—even when there are plenty of complementary signals of intelligence and skill available. It would be interesting to explore those biases and find out how deep they run. Pretty deep, I’d guess.
Weekend Wordery: Ghoti out of Water
Matt Yglesias thinks that a language in which spelling bees are possible is a language that needs to simplify and regularize its spelling.
For a long time, of course, English words were spelled irregularly because spelling simply wasn’t regularized. But for the past 150 years or so spelling words “correctly” has been an important class signifier, even as we lack an underlying set of rules to determine how letter-strings form phonemes. Thus it’s possible for “correct” spelling to differ from country to country, and it’s harder than it needs to be for children to learn how to spell. And it’s worth noting that the adverse impact falls especially hard on children from a low socioeconomic background. It would be one thing to teach such kids a finite set of spelling rules, but to ask a child to master a vast set of brute-force memorizations creates a situation wherein whether or not his parents know how to spell “correctly” is going to be a major factor in his own success.
If you look at French or Russian or Spanish (to name some languages I’m familiar with) by contrast, if you know how the language works it’s very easy to relate what a word sounds like to how it’s spelled. English is full of stuff like the “ough” letter combination that’s pronounced all kinds of ways (”thought,” “thorough,” “tough”) words that are pronounced two different ways (”wound,” “bow”) and nutty spellings like “stomach” that have nothing to do with how the word is said.
Yglesias is obviously not the first to wish for more consistency between written symbols and spoken sounds in English. George Bernard Shaw, noted fellow traveller of this cause (and others), illustrated the absurdity of English spelling by suggesting the word fish be spelled “ghoti”—with the gh from tough, the o from women, and the ti from nation.
I don’t disagree with Yglesias’ inclination to help people thrive by making it easier to learn standard written English. Far from it. But, as I suspect everybody intuitively recognizes, broad-based spelling reform is doomed to fail. There are some fairly obvious and boring reasons for this: inertia, absence of a central body with authority to disseminate new standards, too many speakers in too many places, etc. The more interesting reason is that spelling-reform advocates may misjudge the purpose of a system of writing.
Spelling-reform advocates tend to assume that there’s something wrong when graphemes (units of written language) don’t match up neatly with phonemes (units of spoken language). But written language isn’t just about encoding units of sound. As Steven Pinker writes in the Language Instinct (excerpt here):
English spelling is not completely phonemic; sometimes letters encode phonemes, but sometimes a sequence of letters is specific to a morpheme. And a morphemic writing system is more useful than you might think. The goal of reading, after all, is to understand the text, not to pronounce it. A morphemic spelling can help a reader distinguish homophones, like meet and mete. It can also tip off a reader that one word contains another (and not just a phonologically identical impostor). For example, spelling tells us that overcome contains come, so we know that its past tense must be overcame, whereas succumb just contains the sound “kum,” not the morpheme come, so its past tense is not succame but succumbed. Similarly, when something recedes, one has a recession, but when someone re-seeds a lawn, we have a re-seeding.
[...] Of course English spelling could be better than it is. But it is already much better than people think it is. That is because writing systems do not aim to represent the actual sounds of talking, which we do not hear, but the actual abstract units of language underlying them, which we do hear.
If serving as a pronunciation guide is not the sole purpose of written language, then simplifying and regularizing our spelling would interfere with other language functions, namely the morphemic function. I’m not sure what exactly would happen if we tried, but if spelling reform were even possible, it is not at all clear that the outcome would be beneficial to anyone—perhaps least of all to Matt Yglesias and those of us who are enriched by the nuanced contents of his mind as expressed through the sometimes complex and irregular spellings of written English.
More on Singular “They”
Geoffrey K. Pullum at Language Log explains how usage of the singular “they” works and why it is grammatically sound. The discussion was prompted by a statement made by President Obama during the Henry Louis Gates affair in Cambridge last year. Obama said:
. . . the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home.
Pullum explains:
Obama was trying to make a general claim about the stupidity of arresting some person x when there was already proof that x was in x‘s own home. The x in this paraphrase is intended as what a logician would call a bound variable. The issue at hand is which pronoun to use when expressing the same content in English. Now, Obama wasn’t intending to limit himself to the claim that arresting Professor Gates was stupid. Doubtless he would think that arresting Harvard president Drew Faust in her own home, if she got snippy after she had shown her driver’s license, would also be stupid — unless she had clearly committed an arrestable crime. And in contemporary Standard English, with antecedents like somebody or everyone or any citizen, people typically use the pronoun they for “bound variable” meanings in this sort of syntactic situation.
Strunk and White baldly assert that this is an error. They simply say don’t use they with syntactically singular antecedents like somebody. They don’t give a reason; and it is pretty clear they didn’t know anything much about the literary evidence that they has been grammatical and normal with singular antecedents for six or seven centuries. Strunk and White are just wrong about Standard English syntax, here as nearly everywhere else where they deal with grammar in their book The Elements of Style.
Of course, you have a perfect right to hold the opinion that they with a singular antecedent seems distasteful or ugly to you. In that case I would advise you not to use it. But don’t call it a grammatical error, because it clearly isn’t one, and never has been. Don’t say that it betokens a breakdown in our ability to tell singular from plural, because it doesn’t.
(Formatting in original.) So, the next time someone gets snooty about singular “they,” you can tell them that they are out of touch with six or seven hundred years’ worth of accepted usage.
Weekend Wordery: Singular ‘They’
Language Log thinks the singular ‘they’ is “just not that big of a deal.”
Weekend Wordery: Political Dictionary
Want to know who the copperheads were? The mugwumps? Shivercrats? And what about the Blue Dogs, the Yellow Dogs, and dog-whistle politics? Rubber chicken circuits, lame duck sessions, fishing expeditions? Aardvarking? Astroturfing? Franking privileges, sine die, or psephology?
If so, Taegan Goddard’s Political Dictionary may be just the thing for you.
Hat tip: Jonathan Bernstein.
Weekend Wordery: The Sadness of the Minor Third
A recently published study by Meagan Curtis of Tufts University’s Music Cognition Lab suggests that, at least among speakers of American English, the minor third tone interval conveys sadness in speech, just as it does in music. Particularly in D minor (the saddest of all keys), I’d add, though the study does not specifically support that further observation.
Via Scientific American.
Of Citizens, Subjects, and Smudges
A few days ago, just in time for the Fourth of July weekend, a rather gimmicky little story came out about a smudge under the word “citizens” in one of Thomas Jefferson’s early drafts of the Declaration of Independence. Using neat-o technology to analyze the smudge, document-preservation experts at the Library of Congress have revealed vestiges of the word “subjects.” (See the Washington Post graphic below.) Jefferson had first written the phrase “our fellow-subjects” before thinking better of it—presumably apprehending at that moment that the whole point of declaring independence was that we would no longer be the subjects of the English monarchy—and settling on “our fellow-citizens.”
Now, I don’t want to dampen anyone’s patriotic revelry, but this is really not a matter of great historical import. The revised phrase didn’t even make it into the final Declaration. Frankly, the story illustrates little more than elementary editorial acumen on Jefferson’s part. But all the hype does make this a perfectly reasonable time to draw attention to what is really important about Jefferson’s first draft. There is a much more significant smudge, figuratively speaking, which appears in the very next sentence, as Jefferson launches into a rapturous crescendo of rhetoric against the king’s support of the slave trade, the final grievance adduced in the first draft:
he has incited treasonable insurrections in our fellow-citizens, with the allurements of forfeiture & confiscation of our property:
he has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it’s most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. this piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian king of Great Britain. determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative [i.e., his veto -JH] for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce: and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.
(Bold mine.) The humanitarian force of this epic passage simply dwarfs the rest of the declaration’s bill of particulars. Aside from a few rough patches (e.g., “that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die”?), this is truly spine-tingling prose of Shakespearean dimension. Moreover, the passage would have placed the new nation firmly on the side of universal human rights. Needless to say, it didn’t. No remnant of it survived into the final text. The “execrable commerce” had powerful protectors in the New World just as it had in the Old, and Jefferson’s masterful finale was unceremoniously dumped by the Continental Congress. Some of our fellow citizens were to remain subjects after all.
Kindness in an Unkindness of Ravens
Common Raven, Corvus corax, showing off at Bryce Canyon National Park, USA. Image: United States National Park Service (Public Domain)
You’d think that ravens—looking all black and bedraggled as they do, and croaking their gruff baritone croaks as they do—would be sort of, well, evil. Or at least brutally indifferent to others’ suffering. And they are! But, in a beyond-good-and-evil kind of way, they are also surprisingly sympathetic to other ravens with whom they have formed social bonds.
A new study of the Common Raven, Corvus corax, examines what are called “affiliative behaviors”—various forms of touching and preening—among ravens in the minutes after one of them has been in a fight. Researchers placed 11 ravens (raised in captivity) from four nests in a large outdoor aviary outfitted to be as natural for the birds as possible. GrrlScientist recounts:
Drs. Fraser and Bugnyar began their study by documenting the frequency of affiliative behaviors in these birds, using a standard protocol developed for primate research. They watched the aftermath of 152 fights between these juvenile ravens during the following 23-month period of time, and recorded the identities of the aggressor, the victim and the bystanders (nearby flock members), along with the intensity of the conflict (a chase flight or hitting were rated as “high intensity”, whilst a forced retreat was “low intensity”). All affiliative (“consoling”) behaviors — defined as contact sitting, preening or beak-to-beak or beak-to-body touching between the victim of the conflict and an individual flock member — were recorded during the ten minutes following each conflict. These post-conflict time periods (PC) were then matched to a control period (MC) for the same victim raven on the next possible day and the frequency and nature of the affiliative interactions that occurred in those time periods were compared….
The ravens were two to three times more likely to exhibit affiliative behaviors immediately following a conflict (the PC period) than at other, controlled times not immediately following a conflict (the MC period). And they favored those ravens they were closer to. GrrlScientist:
Basically, affiliative behaviors occurred most often when the flock member had a closer social bond with the victim raven than with the aggressor. Furthermore, the team observed an increasing probability of unsolicited bystander affiliations after more intense conflicts (when the victim was more likely to be distressed)….
“The findings of this study represent an important step towards understanding how ravens manage their social relationships and balance the costs of group-living,” Drs. Fraser and Bugnyar write. “Furthermore, they suggest that ravens may be responsive to the emotional needs of others.”
The function of the post-conflict affiliative behavior is, one must admit, not perfectly clear. But a leading hypothesis (developed in studies of chimps) contends that its function is to console: to alleviate the victim’s distress, and to do so out of empathy.
If that hypothesis is correct, it will give the lie to the (not-exactly-common) English word for an aggregation of Corvus corax, “an unkindness of ravens.” It seems these corvids just don’t want to live according to our labels.
Via GrrlScientist.
Source:
Fraser, O., & Bugnyar, T. (2010). Do Ravens Show Consolation? Responses to Distressed Others. PLoS ONE, 5 (5) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0010605
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