Podcast Linkfest

I’ve been enjoying listening to a couple of language-related podcasts recently. First is one from Slate, called Lexicon Valley, hosted by Mike Vuolo and Bob Garfield. In their six episodes to date, they have talked about:

1. The history of the proscription against ending a sentence with a preposition
2. The development of faggot as a slur against male homosexuals, with commentary by Arnold Zwicky
3. Whether between you and I is a case of hypercorrection, or if another rule can describe its distribution.
4. Black English, with commentary from Walt Wolfram (which they pronounce as “Wolf-Ram”)
5. What a controversy the publication of Webster’s Third caused in 1961
6. What insights Scrabble can and cannot give into the nature of English

The episodes are all about half an hour long, and even the ones I didn’t think I’d be too interested in (the dictionary, Scrabble) have turned out to be quite interesting after all. Furthermore, they’re linguistically sound. With all the complaints at Language Log and other places about how news media just can’t be bothered to fact-check anything related to language, I have yet to hear a piece of bad information here. The only part I don’t care too much for is their “lexiconundrum” puzzlers at the end of each episode.

There are no further episodes of Lexicon Valley yet; apparently, these six episodes were a trial run. So listen to them quick, and if you like them, go say so on iTunes, as I’m about to do now.

The other podcast is Conlangery, “the podcast about constructed languages and the people who create them,” hosted by George Corley, Bianca Richards, and William Anniss (sp?). In each episode, these three talk about some aspect of language — discourse particles, dialects, sound systems — ostensibly with the intent of giving conlangers (i.e. language creators) tips and ideas to use in their conlangs. However, the information and observations they bring in should be interesting to anyone interested in language, even if they have no interest whatsoever in creating one. Each episode also has a featured conlang.

Unlike Lexicon Valley, each episode of Conlangery lasts about a full hour, but unlike Lexicon Valley, Conlangery has more than 40 episodes so far, with no sign of quitting yet. The discussions are unscripted, with George loosely moderating and all three making contributions as the spirit moves them. There are sometimes strange background noises (like a recurring “clac-k-k-k-k-k-k” in one episode), and George’s hesitant speaking style takes a little getting used to, but it’s a fun podcast and I look forward to catching up on the episodes I haven’t listened to yet.

While I’m in a link-loving mood, here are a couple of non-podcast links. First, Jonathon Owen’s two most recent posts. If you thought benefactive datives such as I love me some barbecue brisket sounded strange, you’ll find this construction a little bit stranger. In the other post, he talks about a question I’ve had for a while: If plural -s is pronounced as [z] after a vowel, then why is the plural of die still dice instead of dies?

Lastly, a post from Arnold Zwicky about people who “look their nose down” (not “look down their nose”) at things they disapprove of. It reminded me of my own posts about particles, prepositions, and phrasal verbs.

September Links, and a Contest

Some new linguistics blogs have appeared on the scene, which I’ve liked well enough to put right onto the blogroll. The Chronicle of Higher Education website introduced a blog in August, called Lingua Franca. It’s a group blog, with five listed contributors. The three I recognize are Geoff Pullum, Allan Metcalf, and Ben Yagoda.

Next, there’s The Diacritics, a blog begun by John Stokes and Sandeep Prasanna, two guys who each earned a linguistics degree last year (from Harvard and Duke respectively), and are each now a first-year law student (at Yale and UCLA respectively).

Lastly, Language Hippie came on the scene in June. It’s written by Joe Kessler, a linguistics grad student at the University of Buffalo.

In addition to the new blogs, here‘s one of Grammar Girl’s more linguistically bent podcasts. This one’s on the needs done construction (which I’ve blogged about), and for it Mignon Fogarty did some field research, gathering data from her Facebook and Google+ followers to find out where people used this construction. She created a nice map of the results, a good supplement to the one in the Yale Grammatical Diversity Project that I mentioned last month.

As for the contest, the people at Grammar.net are holding a contest to choose, by votes alone, the Best Grammar Blog of 2011. Today is the halfway point in the 10-day nomination period. You’re thinking I’m going to ask you to nominate me? Wrong! I can nominate myself. But actually, I don’t even need to do that, because they tell me that I’m one of the 50 blogs they’ve personally selected to make it to the actual voting, which takes place from September 26 through October 17. So, thanks, Grammar.net! I’m honored to be in a list that includes blogs such as John Wells’s Phonetic Blog, Gabe Doyle’s Motivated Grammar, and Lynne Murphy’s Separated by a Common Language. Come September 26, I’ll casually mention this contest again, but in the meantime, go and make sure your (other) favorite linguistics blogs are on the list of nominations.

Summer Links

• A thorough investigation of the history of different from/than/to from Stan Carey.
• The hilarious linguistics love song (h/t to Stan Carey)
• Another blog post from Stan Carey, this one linking to no less (uh, fewer?) than four websites that allow you to easily type and display IPA characters. I’ve put all the stuff I got from Stan first to get it out of the way. Seriously, you should just subscribe to his blog. He’s always writing about, or linking to, interesting stuff.
• A post on the African American English blog Word, on black sign language.
• David Crystal on why and how the past tense texed for texted might have arisen.
• The puzzlers from this year’s International Linguistic Olympiad, being held this week in Pittsburgh. (h/t to Language Log)
• The Yale Grammatical Diversity Project, a fledgling database that catalogs regional variation in American English, not in pronunciation, not in lexical items (soda vs. pop), but in syntactic constructions (might could, needs done, etc.), with links to research papers.
• The Idiomizer, another site that was created only recently, but should be a good translation resource as it accumulates more data. The goal: Input an idiom in a source language, find the functionally equivalent one in the target language. I asked it for “a little bird told me” in French, and sure enough, got (in French) “my little finger told me”.
• A video of Michael Erard’s interview with “hyperpolyglot” Alexander Arguelles, who describes his mind-blowingly intense, driven, sustained, and disciplined daily regimen for learning whichever dozen or so languages he’s currently working on.

April Links

Let’s start this collection of links with a couple of new additions to the blogroll. First of all, a big welcome to a Ben Trawick-Smith’s Dialect Blog, which debuted in January and every couple of days (or less) has up a new post on some aspect of some dialect of English. At this writing, the latest post is on the affirmative ayuh, which Stephen King fans may recognize. Next, there’s Benjamin Bruening’s Linguistics Commentary, which geared up last May. He posts about once a month, on syntactic topics. They’re a bit like the syntactic discussions here, but Bruening has a more serious tone, with citations of and responses to academic articles in most posts.

Via Erin Brenner, an article in the Utne Reader on “The Art of the Police Report”. This snippet from the author got me hooked:

Crime reports are written in neutral diction, and in the dispassionate uni-voice that’s testament to the academy’s ability to standardize writing. They feel generated rather than authored, the work of a single law enforcement consciousness rather than a specific human being.

So how can I identify Martinez from a single sentence? Why do his reports make me feel pity, terror, or despair? Make me want to put a bullet in someone’s brain—preferably a wife beater’s or a pedophile’s, but occasionally my own? How does he use words on paper to hammer at my heart? Like all great cops, Sergeant Martinez is a sneaky fucker. He’s also a master of inflection and narrative voice.

On Slate, an article by Coco Krumme on what the hell it means when a wine reviewer says a wine “contains “notes of graphite, black currant liqueur, incense, and camphor.” Quoting Krumme:

Graphite. Black currant. Incense. And camphor? It sounds like something out of a Bollywood take on Hansel and Gretel. Never mind that graphite contains no aromatics, or that incense could mean any of a dozen flavors. Can a simple Bordeaux let loose such a witches’ brew of fragrant notions?

Be sure to follow her link to an article by Richard Quandt called “On Wine Bullshit”.

February Links

OK, that’s it! I’ve got three links accumulated in this draft, and that’s enough to put it out there.

Christopher Phipps has blogged about a talk I didn’t make it to at LSA 2011, so I appreciate his summary here on his Lousy Linguist blog. The talk is about a subconscious but measurable change in language that some researchers did by using video footage from a season of a reality TV show. Phipps also has an interesting analogy to explain voice onset time, so if my analogy of the toll plaza didn’t work for you, definitely read this post.

One of my earliest posts was on the strange negation in the miss not doing construction, and I wrote about it again in 2007. Now Mark Liberman has a post on Language Log on the history of this construction.

In anticipation of National Grammar Day next month, John McIntyre has posted the first of the four installments of “The Wages of Syntax,” this year’s Grammar Noir adventure on his You Don’t Say blog for the Baltimore Sun. As they all do, this one starts with a dame in trouble. She’s working at a … a … I can’t say it. You’ll have to go and read it for yourself.

Links for the New Year

Hey, what’s this post still doing in my drafts folder? I thought I hit Publish on January 17! Well, here it is now…

It’s been quite a while since I’ve had any collections of interesting links to offer you, but a new year seems like a good time to start up again. I’ll start off with a couple that I’ve had sitting in an unfinished links post for months, and which still seem worth passing on.

You know that within the Phonetics and Phonology category, the pronunciation of /l/ has come up enough here to have its own tab. I’ve talked about Doug’s [j]/[w] realization of /l/ during his toddler years; the pronunciation of /l/ as a uvular nasal vowel by me as a child (and others); and the pronunciation of /l/ as an interdental sound, with the tongue tip between the top and bottom front teeth, the same position as for the TH sounds [θ] and [ð]). This Language Log post comments on and links to a YouTube video first noticed by Josef Fruehwald, who noticed Britney Spears’ /l/ articulation in both singing and lip-synching. She goes beyond the interdental articulation and into apico-labial territory — that is, the tongue curls up to touch the upper lip to make the /l/. (Apical is more specific term than lingual; it refers to the tip (of the tongue).) Don’t believe it? Watch the videos! They’re montages, with the relevant snippets shown at normal speed, then slowed down and repeated.

Next, here’s a short one from Phonoloblog on a news-limerick fail: The contestant in the current-events-limerick-completion challenge on Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me! can’t figure out the missing word to put in because it only rhymes in dialects with the low-back merger. If you don’t know what that is, that’s OK; the post makes it clear.

In addition to her Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing podcast, Mignon Fogarty does one called Behind the Grammar, in which she interviews anyone she takes a mind to about some aspect of language or writing. In this August 2010 pisode, she interviews sign interpreter David Peach about sign languages in a number of countries. Take it with a grain of salt when he talks about how it’s more logical to use noun-modifier order than vice versa when praising the logicality of a particular language. Otherwise, it’s an interesting look at how sign languages vary, from language to language and from speaker to speaker of one language.

So much for old business. Now to the newly accumulated items to share. First of all, you may have noticed that I have a link to Ben Zimmer’s “On Language” column, and I recommend checking that every week anyway. (Or better, you can follow @OnLanguage on Twitter, and read the columns a few days before they’re published in the New York Times Magazine.) However, I found this week’s especially interesting, because he answered a question that I didn’t even realized I’d had: What exactly does trove, as in treasure trove, mean? I especially liked this column because (1) I realized that I’d never asked myself this question; (2) I totally should have asked myself this question long ago; (3) the answer was a complete surprise to me, involving calques (see the article), Anglicized pronunciations, and morphological reanalysis.

Now for a couple tangentially involving last weekend’s LSA conference. The Saturday plenary lecture, given by Joan Maling, discussed the development of a new passive-voice construction in Icelandic. I missed it, because Pittsburgh linguist Lauren Collister had convinced me and some other linguists on Twitter that we should go out for lunch at a locally famous place that served sandwiches with fries and coleslaw actually in the sandwich! (Actually, the sandwich was pretty good — once I picked out those french fries. Hey, I tried it!) Oh, well, I’ve read the paper on this topic anyway, and the interesting comparison that Maling made with English has been written up by Mark Liberman at Language Log. There was a time when the present progressive passive voice (e.g. is slowly being eaten by army ants) was considered ugly, irrational, needlessly innovative, nonstandard English. Why say is slowly being eaten by army ants when the perfectly sensibe is slowly eating by army ants already does the job? Liberman via GoogleBooks links to the peeve as described in 1869 by Richard Grant White.

Phoneticians classify vowels according to various articulatory and acoustic properties, and end up with natural classes of vowels according to criteria such as “height,” “roundness” and “tongue root advancement”. These classes often seem to have psychological reality, as phonological rules will affect only some natural class or other. However, you have to know about phonetics to classify vowels this way. One linguist wondered what kind of classes of vowels would shake out if people without linguistic training listened to recordings of a lot of vowels and were told to classify them into two, three, or four classes. He presented the poster during the LSA conference, and I’m hoping he’ll make the research available online. I won’t try to summarize it here, but I’ll be interested to see if some of the new natural classes that emerged turn out to be relevant in phonological processes. The main reason I bring it up is that the linguist is Douglas Bigham, whose big project right now is the rollout of Popular Linguistics Online — or at least, it was until he tweeted about it as PLO and learned that there were associations there he probably didn’t want to burden a new publication with. So instead, today marks the public release of Popular Linguistics Magazine. The title says it all, and I hope the magazine succeeds. I also owe PLM a thank-you for 200 of yesterday’s hits. I didn’t see exactly where they were coming from at first, but eventually figured it out: The left sidebar on the main page is a list of several linguistics blogs that changes with every page refresh, and every now and then, Literal-Minded turns up there, with the last two or three posts listed. In this way I also learned of a couple of llinguistics blogs I had been unaware of, so check it out!

BTW, I think for future linkfests, I won’t try for one a month. When I have at least three interesting links that I haven’t already passed on via Twitter, I’ll put them up and start accumulating the next batch.

May Linkfest

Wow, it’s almost the end of May. If I want to put out a batch of language and linguistics links for this month, I’d better hurry. I missed April entirely. It’s not that there hasn’t been interesting language-related stuff to read (or watch) online. I blame my smartphone.

Back when I did all my Internet surfing at a computer, I could immediately put links to interesting blog posts in a draft post for that month’s link collection. But now that I’ve installed an RSS app on my phone and subscribed to my favorite linguistics blogs that have feeds that way, it’s harder to grab the URLs and put them in a blog draft. There’s actually a WordPress app for the phone, but it’s so buggy and hard to use as to be almost useless. As a result, I have about 20 blog posts that remain undeleted in my RSS reader that I’m going to clear out now.

Another reason I blame my cell phone is that I installed a Twitter app on it, and now many of the language-related things I read, I find because someone tweeted them. What I like, I retweet. I think in my last link collection, I collated these tweets, but that’s a hassle and I’m not going to do it now. If you find that you like reading the stuff I recommend, you can follow me on Twitter, or just glance at the latest tweet, which should appear in the Twitter widget on the left (though I am frustrated to see that it doesn’t always update in a timely manner). Or, follow @StanCarey or @hyperlingo, the source of many of these retweets.

And now for the links. First of all, I was glad to finally find where the New York Times kept their link to the index of On Language columns. Here it is; it’s also now in the blogroll as “Zimmer On Language”. His latest is on the history of the word cool in its non-temperature-related sense.

And while I’m talking about newspaper (or newspaper supplement) language columns, I’ll remind readers that Jan Freeman’s column “The Word,” which is now co-written by Erin McKean, is in the blogroll, too, as “Freeman and McKean’s The Word”. One recent entry was particularly interesting was on the word untracked, which was new to me.

Another word that was new to me, unce, is the subject of a Language Log post by Mark Liberman.

Glen put me onto this article on the plateauing of improvement in automatic speech recognition.

And now to clear out the blog posts saved in my RSS reader:

• Bradshaw of the future on the etymological connection of grammar and crayfish
• Brett Reynolds muses on backshifting (what I learned to call “sequence of tenses” in Latin II): They thought the earth {is? was?} flat.
• From Russell Lee-Goldman at Noncompositional: Take a sentence like I didn’t do the job because he told me to. (I did it because it was the right thing to do.) In other words, the negation in the first sentence scopes over the because: “It’s not the case that X because Y…” Now, make X itself a negated clause, and look what happens!
• Also from Lee-Goldman: We know what it means for something to have a long shelf life, but what does it mean to have no shelf life?
• From Ryan’s Linguistics Blog… oh, forget it, I’ve saved too many to talk about conveniently. I’ll do them next month, when I clear out the entries for Sinoglot, Throw Grammar from the Train, and Polysyllabic.

March Links

I’m getting more links these days from some of the linguists on Twitter. Unfortunately, it’s been easy for me to forget to include the name of the person who tweeted the links and brought them to my attention. I know that several in this installment are from @Language_Today.

If you like the occasional stories about Doug and Adam here, you’ll like Thomas Hinkle’s stories about his daughter Grace’s language acquisition at Language Hack. He also writes about his experiences teaching Spanish.

A fascinating look at the grammar/etiquette of creating namesigns (sign-language proper nouns).

The LA Times interviews Franz Josef Ochs, in charge of machine translation for Google Translate.

From the Schott’s Vocab feature in The New York Times, an interview with Arika Okrent (author of In the Land of Invented Languages) and Paul Frommer (creator of the Na’vi language for Avatar) on how to create a language.

From Reuters, an article on China’s minority languages.

Erin McKean takes on guys as a gender-neutral term in her latest Boston Globe column. Here’s an argument for it that I hadn’t heard before: “we’re already used to words in English that have different meanings for the singular and plural: look and looks, arm and arms, manner and manners, and custom and customs all give a wider meaning to the plural without anyone raising a stink — and it’s easy to imagine guy and guys joining the list.”

And lastly, here’s Ben Zimmer’s first column as the new regular “On Language” columnist at The New York Times Magazine, where he explores the nounification of yes and no a bit further.

February Links

If you follow me on Twitter, you may recognize some of these links. I’ve taken to tweeting some of the links instead of waiting to put them in the next month’s collection of links here. But I’m also putting them here for the rest of my readers.

First up: John McIntyre has launched another Grammar Noir serial, and the first installment had me laughing out loud with lines like this one, put in the mouth of Mignon Fogarty as a woman in distress: “I’ve been followed. I think my phone is tapped. My mail is being tampered with. My car is making a funny noise. I think it needs an oil change.” Be sure to follow the link to last year’s story, too. (HT to Editor Mark.)

Next, if someone asks you “Do you mind if…?” and you answer “Yes,” the literal meaning is that you mind; in other words, permission is denied. But even I have come to accept a “Yeah, sure!” as permission if it’s expressed with enthusiasm. From The Volokh Conspiracy, here’s commentary on a legal case where a cop asked, “Do you mind if I look [in the car]?” and the driver said yes.

Grant Barrett wrote today’s “On Language” column in the New York Times Magazine, on a piece of linguistic folklore that I’d heard once or twice, but never realized how enduring it was. It’s on the claim that the semantically unexciting word cellar door is phonetically the most beautiful word in the English language.

Now for a couple of items from blogs on the blogroll. From Dennis Baron, a Web of Language post on how “It’s possible to get on a plane with explosives hidden in your underwear, or even with unconcealed English-language pamphlets advocating “Death to America” … But overt displays of Arabic are no more acceptable to the TSA than water bottles or nail clippers”.

I have two from Robert Beard of Dr. Goodword’s Language Blog. First is a funny story involving regional accents and breakfast in a Pennsylvania Dutch restaurant. In the other one, he offers an explanation for something I’ve wondered about on occasion: When and why did the idiom make love come to mean exclusively “have sex”? I thought it had entered the language that way until I read it in materials and heard it in songs from the first half of the 20th century and didn’t think they would be talking about sex so overtly.

Finally, sociolinguist Alexandra D’Arcy has begun a monthly column at the Oxford University Press blog. D’Arcy talks about her grandmother: “When my History of the English Language professor observed that the distinction between lay and lie was being lost among younger speakers (good luck asking a twenty-year-old to run the paradigms), I had the poor enough judgment to share this insight with Grandmother. … I might as well have told her that going out in public without a bra had become the vogue.” Read the rest of the story here.

January Links

We’ll start off with a really cool video that’s been in the news recently (and will be featured Monday the 18th on Rachael Ray’s show): An Oregon high school rivalry led to some video challenges posted on YouTube. Student Javier Caceres got the cooperation of what seems to be his whole school, along with his video-production teacher and classmates, to do a music video. It’s a lip-sync of Hall & Oates’s “You Make My Dreams (Come True)” (featured in the movie 500 Days of Summer, which is undoubtedly how these teenagers come to be doing a video of a song from the 1980s). The linguistics-related piece is the most interesting part: Even though the song sounds normal, and the lip-syncing is pretty good (different students lip-sync with different levels of proficiency), it gradually becomes clear that this video is playing backwards, with cheerleader pompons jumping from the floor to their hands, etc. Therefore, when these actions were filmed originally, it must have been the lip-syncing that was done backwards. The story I read talked about the hours Caceres sent listening to the song and figuring out what mouth gestures the performers would have to make. This is an amazing phonetic achievement! It would have been even more amazing if they had done it karaoke-style, providing their own vocals. In that case, he’d have had to have the singers:

1. pre-aspirate their stops,
2. post-nasalize (and not pre-nasalize) vowels after nasal consonants,
3. put in [ʒ] before the [d] in the backwards dreams, and make sure not to let the [i] turn into an [I] before the [r]: [zmirʒd] (zmeerzhd), not [smIrd] (smeared). (More on that in a later post.)

But impressive, nonetheless.

Here’s a Wishydig post from 2006, on the unusual powers of coronal sounds (i.e., the ones made with the tongue tip: [t, d, n, s, z] and a few others).

On day I heard on NPR that full-body scanning “may have prevented” Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab from getting on the plane he tried to bomb. “Well, obviously not!” I thought. “Everyone knows he made it onto the plane!” Then I dimly remembered someone writing about how some speakers say may have in situations where people like me would say might have. I tracked it down: It was one of Jan Freeman’s blog posts, and when I found it, I discovered that Jan had imported the posts from her Boston Globe-affiliated blog to a non-Globe-affiliated blog she calls Throw Grammar from the Train.

Lastly for this batch of links is an episode of a web comic called Girls With Slingshots by Danielle Corsetto. (HT to @erthsister, via @GrammarGirl.) I was further interested in this web site because of a couple of interesting words/phrases. One was weekdaily, which describes when new episodes of GWS come out. It took me a few seconds, but it suddenly clicked and I completed the analogy: day:daily::weekday:weekdaily. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t heard such a useful word before. It’s in Urban Dictionary, but not yet in OED. In the FAQ, one question was whether the characters were “based off” people in real life. Corsetto repeats this phrase in her answer: based off (as opposed to based on). I’ve read about this construction before, but can’t remember where (can’t find it in Language Log or the American Dialect Society mailing list archives, though it does come up tangentially in a Linguistic Mystic post). This was the first one I noticed on my own in the wild. CoCA gives 53,590 hits for based on; 14 for based off, with the earliest from 1993. Google News Archive has earlier hits for based off, but a lot of them are examples like based off the coast of Lebanon, so I haven’t got a good fix on how long based off without a coast has been around.