It’s a Word! It’s a Phrase! It’s Grammar Girl!

For a while I’d been noticing a podcast called Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips to Clean Up Your Writing when I browsed through the podcasts at iTunes. I never subscribed to it because first of all, I’m pretty comfortable with my grammar, and second, I figured it would be the same old things grammar and writing guides are always telling you: don’t use the passive voice; don’t use hopefully as a sentential adverb; in fact, avoid adverbs wherever possible. But I finally got curious enough to check out a few episodes, and what a surprise! The podcasts present traditional grammar rules, provide nonjudgmental observations of what’s actually happening in the language when the rules don’t reflect common usage, and give practical advice on what to do when faced with these mismatches. Even better, Grammar Girl will get into linguistic topics when doing so will help explain a grammar point. And just a couple of episodes ago, she talked about a linguistic topic apparently just because it was interesting all by itself.

A Book to Sink Your Teeth Into

A few weeks ago my wife caught me reading a book I wasn’t supposed to have. She was hurt. She had thought that out of consideration for her, I would have refrained from buying this material.

Uh Must

I arrived at the agreed-upon location precisely at 10:30. He was waiting for me.

“You got the stuff?” I asked.

He glanced at his shoulder bag but didn’t open it. “Show me the money.”

I handed over a $20 bill, which he pocketed. He reached into his bag, and drew out the package.

Review: Daily French Pod

Every now and then, I feel like brushing up on the French I had in high school and college. About ten years ago, I subscribed to the French version of Reader’s Digest for a year. Years later, I got a copy of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire in French and I have now read almost to the end of chapter one in it. Ah, who am I kidding, using the present perfect tense that way? Let’s be honest: I read almost to the end of chapter one. Oh, and the table of contents, where I was interested to find out that the French word for magic wand is baguette. My trouble when I read things in French is that I keep vacillating between what I want to accomplish. Do I want to read just for the meaning, getting the gist and passing over the words I can’t get from the context? Or do I want to improve my vocabulary, paying special attention to precisely those words? Only for the shortest texts can you try to accomplish both goals, and I don’t have a nice, convenient set of short French texts.

That wasn’t a hint for a Christmas present. I don’t want a nice, convenient set of short French texts, because for the past couple of months I’ve been listening to archived episodes of Daily French Pod.com, “your daily dose of French language as it’s spoken by native speakers.”

Coffee Break Scottish English

If you’re interested in improving your Scottish accent (”and who isn’t?”, I believe it’s customary to say at this point), then don’t pick it up it secondhand from Shrek or Groundskeeper Willie. Instead, learn from actual Scots in a convenient, free, online resource: the weekly podcast of Coffee Break Spanish, “the show which brings you language with your latte.”

LSA 2007: Book Report

When I wandered through the book exhibit last week, I saw Heidi Harley’s book English Words; on display. She’d plugged it on her blog, but this was the first chance I had to look inside it. I flipped to the section on “accidental words,” since that’s where she talked about backformations. The first thing I found there, though, was some stuff on folk etymology, including this:

For a long time when I was a teenager, I thought the word facetious was related to the word feces — during that time, for me, facetious was a fancy way of saying “full of shit.” I had created a folk etymology. (p. 92-93)

Hah! Love that scatological humor. This one’s almost as good as the widely and falsely held belief in the execrable/excrement connection. BTW, has anyone seen a movie where a teacher hands back some student essays or tests, and says to the class, “Your {papers, tests, whatever} were execrable!” and one surfer-dude-type guy says, “Excellent!” and the teacher tells him, “I was comparing them to excrement!” That was my tipoff that there was some folk etymology going on with that word, but a search for quotation keywords in the IMDB fails to identify the movie. Oh, and before we move on, let’s not forget fallacious and fellatious.

I bought the book but haven’t read anything else in it yet. I’m hoping she’ll clarify the difference between folk etymology and eggcorns. As near as I can tell, when linguists refer to eggcorns, they are talking about folk etymologies that haven’t caught on enough to have gained legitimacy in most speakers’ minds. Hey, wait, what am I sitting here writing this for, when I can find out what she says right now? Let’s see … OK, if I understand her right, her take is that folk etymology is a cover term for eggcorns and mondegreens. Do any of you eggcorn enthusiasts have an opinion on this definition?

I also bought David Wilton’s Word Myths: Debunking Linguistic Urban Legends. Like many books of this type, it’s good, entertaining bathroom/airplane/waiting-for-kids-at-the-bus-stop reading, but unlike many others, the author makes a concerted effort not to spread bullshit, giving numerous OED and other citations in the index, including many from the online archives of the American Dialect Society. After reading some of this book, I was mad at Erik Larson. He wrote The Devil in the White City, and repeated the story that Chicago’s nickname Windy City was a reference to its uppitiness in campaigning for the 1896 Columbian Exposition to take place in Chicago. I believed him, but referring back to the book now, I see that he indeed did not give any citations for this claim, just like David Wilton said people tended not to.

I bought W. Cowan and J. Rakušan’s Source Book for Linguistics, which is an entire book full of linguistic exercises. As a reviewer on the back cover said, “If you’ve been teaching upper-level undergraduate introductions to linguistics with Cowan and Rakušan, then you’ve been scrambling about in search of examples and exercises in phonetics, phonology, morphology and syntax long enough.” Also historical reconstruction problems, with data all nicely selected and cleaned up for you. If you’re not teaching linguistics classes, it’s a nice book of logic puzzles to take on an airplane with you, if you’re tired of (or never liked) crosswords, word searches, logic puzzles, or (these days) sudoku.

The only other title I bought was Robert D. Van Valin’s An Introduction to Syntax, mainly for the chapter at the end with thumbnail sketches of several flavors of syntactic theory, all compared in one place. Haven’t read it yet, but it looked useful enough for me to buy it for that reason alone.

Forbidden Words

In books on historical linguistics, a lot of attention is paid to kinds of phonetic change, processes of analogy and grammaticalization, and language contact. One topic that gets significantly less attention is taboo-induced change. For example, in the second edition of Hock’s Principles of Historical Linguistics (1991), taboo is discussed on nine out of 679 pages of text, whereas phonetic and phonological issues take up six chapters; analogy, three chapters; linguistic contact, three chapters; and the comparative method, two chapters. The five remaining chapters cover various other topics; most of the discussion of taboo occurs in the chapter on semantic change. But what Hock does write leaves the reader (OK, me) wanting more:

[T]aboo can lead to a constant turnover in vocabulary, such as in the English expression for ‘toilet’…. In some societies, the effect may be much more far reaching. For instance, it has been argued that the difficulties in tracing Tahitian vocabulary to its Proto-Polynesian sources are in large measure a consequence of massive taboo: Upon the death of a member of the royal family, every word which was a constituent part of that person’s name, or even any word sounding like it became taboo and had to be replaced by new words. (p. 294-295)

Remembering passages like that one, and having written about taboo language here, here, here, and here, and having read too many Language Log postings on taboo language to try to provide links to (but which are now indexed here), I was eager to read a piece of blog swag called Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language by Keith Allan and Kate Burridge.

Syntactic Gems from Jared Diamond

The Language Guy mentions Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel in this post. Funny he should mention this book. I’ve never read it, but it recently made it onto my mental reading list because I’m finding another book by Jared Diamond so interesting. The book is Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Aside from its compelling and scary content (supported by wide-ranging case histories that Diamond has done an astonishing amount of on-the-ground research for), I’ve found an unusually high number of syntactic or semantic oddities in this book. Enough, in fact, for me to gather them together in a single post here.

Eating Shoots, and Leaving

Arnold Zwicky at Language Log recently wrote about the the kids’ version of Eats, Shoots, and Leaves, but had to base his comments on examples quoted in a review on Amazon, since he hadn’t read the book. Well, now I have. My wife bought it to read to Doug and Adam, and they laughed at the funny pictures illustrating, for example, “Eat here and get gas.” However, I don’t think they’ll learn much about using commas from the book, other than that they can make a big difference in a sentence’s meaning.

The Unfolding of Language and The Power of Babel

I mentioned a couple of posts ago that I’d received a copy of Guy Deutscher’s The Unfolding of Language. A question I kept coming back to as I read it was, “Why was this book written, when John McWhorter’s The Power of Babel is already out there?” Both are books about linguistics, intended for a nonlinguist audience, and appear to cover much of the same ground. Now that I’ve finished the book, I can see the differences more clearly.

PB is a collection of essays on various aspects of language, including language genesis, language death, language contact, and especially language variation. (”Dialects are all there is” approaches the status of a mantra in this book.) Along the way, it also gets into questions such as, How do languages such as Chinese come to use pitch to carry different meanings?, and Why are some languages specially suited for differentiating excruciatingly subtle shades of meaning (e.g., the vs. that), while other languages get along just fine without differentiating them? Although UL gets into many of the same topics, it discusses them always with an eye toward posing or answering one unifying question: How do languages develop into such complex, intricate systems when (first of all) there were no language-designing committees or deities to design them, and (second) throughout history, all we see evidence of is language decay?

Both books are interesting, but PB is the one I’d recommend to someone as their first taste of linguistics. I’d save UL for someone who already had something of an interest in the subject, since there are a few stretches in there that only an already-existing interest will get you through. However, PB’s more engaging tone comes at a price: As one reviewer complained, McWhorter’s frequent use of 1990s-era pop-culture references will have the effect of dating the book rather quickly. For example, McWhorter refers to Monica Lewinsky and episodes of Friends. (I had to get my wife to explain an allusion to Ross and Rachel.) He even refers to “Charlie Brown heads of language”–a reference that makes sense in context, but only for as long as readers are still familiar with Charlie Brown. UL avoids this problem, but at the expense of being a dryer read than PB. Not terribly dry, but definitely not as conversational as what you get in PB. Deutscher seems to realize this problem, but his attempts to fix it sometimes fall flat.

Deutscher presents the main question in the first two chapters, and highlights the aspect of it that intrigued him in his youth: How did all the different inflectional endings in Latin came into being in the first place, especially since they’ve been steadily disappearing during the evolution of Latin into the modern Romance languages? His answer, previewed at the end of chapter 2, is that the same forces (or more specifically, the same three forces) that create the complex and useful structures of language are the forces that destroy them, in an unending cycle.

The first of these forces is erosion, covered in chapter 3, which discusses the discovery of Proto-Indo-European and the history of English. It’s clearly written, and well-suited to an audience of nonspecialists. My only complaint here is two places where Deutscher tries to make the presentation more interesting by putting ideas in the form of parables. Two principal kinds of phonetic change are explained in stories about “The Elders of Idleford” and the villagers of “Santa Siesta,” which I found tiresome, especially when the shorthand terms “Elders of Idleford” and “Santa Siesta” were used throughout the rest of the book to refer to these kinds of changes.

The next force is the desire of speakers to find ever newer and more interesting ways to express ideas, especially those that are used a lot. But gradually, even the most vivid turns of phrase lose their effect. This topic is covered in chapters 4 and 5. In chapter 4, Deutscher argues that all words for abstract concepts in language are created via metaphoric use of words denoting concrete objects or physical actions. As the metaphors die, the language gains not only words for abstract concepts, but also functional words or particles such as tense markers, prepositions (or postpositions), etc. This chapter goes beyond the Indo-European examples of chapter 2, showing how the same kind of metaphors arise in many different languages. The examples from various languages are well chosen, and on the whole the chapter makes a strong case. I’m unconvinced, however, that it would be impossible to create words for abstract concepts without metaphor. Very inconvenient, yes, and maybe enough so that for all practical purposes it’s impossible, but I can still imagine coining a completely new word to refer to the set of all things that have such-and-such a property.

In chapter 5, Deutscher elaborates on the progression from metaphor to ordinary rules of grammar, and it is in this chapter that his attempt to present a lot of material in an informal, reader-friendly way falls its flattest. The entire chapter is presented in the form of a fictional dialogue between an invited speaker and audience members at a conference on the state of the English language. The audience members always ask just the right questions, fail to understand at just the right times so that the speaker can explain further, etc. For example, the speaker talks about a hypothetical language that conjugates the verb for ‘love’ as follows: mwa jem ‘I love,’ twa tem ‘you love’… The cooperative audience member says, “It looks like Turkish to me.” And now the speaker, to the amazement of everyone except the readers of the book, reveals that the language is actually French: moi, j’aime ‘I love,’ toi, tu aimes ‘you love’… This is the chapter that will lose the indifferent reader, as the artificiality of the dialogue becomes more and more obvious. Part of the dialogue is even offloaded into an appendix, but there is still 20+ pages of it to get through.

Things pick up again in chapter 6, which discusses analogy, the third in Deutscher’s triad of language-shaping forces. Analogy is the process by which semi-regular patterns (some of them truly governed by rules, some just accidental) are extended and regularized. (Backformation is one example of analogy.) This is the most interesting chapter in the book: In an extended example, Deutscher shows how the process of analogy could have worked to create as complex a system as the verbal inflections of Semitic verbs, which I haven’t seen done anywhere else. I’m sure the topic of analogy and Semitic verbs has been written about in journals and scholarly books, but it’s not in PB or other popular linguistic works I know of, or even in textbooks that I’ve seen. Minor complaint: choosing a hypothetical Semitic verb root s_n_g and translating it as “to snog.” I don’t think the verb snog will last too long in English, and this choice will only serve to date the book.

The final chapter gives a very speculative overview of how the three processes that have been discussed at length earlier might have interacted to take language from what Deutscher refers to as a “me, Tarzan” stage of prehistory to the much more complex and nuanced stages seen in historically attested languages. This part was interesting, but as one reviewer on Amazon pointed out, it’s hard to tell which ideas are pretty well accepted among linguists, and which are Deutscher’s own opinions.

Overall (out of five stars):

UL: ***1/2
PB: ****1/2