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.

1. By everyone, I mean everyone except Karl Smith, who prefers the more colloquial “Fish fish fish fish fish….”

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.

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

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!

Apparently, this is a brand of chips from China. More examples of unfortunately named foods from abroad here.

Via Language Log.

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.

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.

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.

. . . 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.