Jun 28th 2012, 16:15 by R.L.G. | NEW YORK
I'LL leave analysis of whether the American Supreme Court's opinion this morning was a good thing or a bad thing to others. But as so often in law, the court's ruling on America's 2010 health-care reform law turned on many points of language. Indeed all law does, to some degree: statues are written in language, and courts' job (in common-law countries) is to interpret that language and their own predecessors' precedents.
Can America's federal government require people to carry health insurance or pay a "penalty"? That was the core question. The government claimed that right under its constitutional authority to "regulate" "commerce".
Continue reading "When is a mandate not a mandate and a penalty not a penalty?" »
Jun 27th 2012, 17:49 by R.L.G. | NEW YORK
TODAY'S Wall Street Journal offers a useful update to the annual "Americans are rushing to teach their kids Mandarin" story. The reporters have found several families that have gone to unusual lengths. One Californian lawyer took a year's leave of absence from work and moved the clan to Chengdu, for the sole purpose of immersion in the language. Another family moved to Singapore in 2007, again only so the kids could grow up speaking Mandarin. Other parents are not quite so committed, but nonetheless,
families are enrolling their children in Mandarin-immersion programs that are springing up from California to Maine.
Jun 26th 2012, 20:34 by R.L.G. | NEW YORK
AT the Macmillan Dictionary Blog, Stan Carey has a nice post on commas. For the life of me I've never understood why some people think that their personal comma preference is linguistic law. There are those who think the "Oxford comma" is the last barricade protecting civilisation from the barbarians, and those who are equally convinced of the opposite. I, for one, have always been with Vampire Weekend on the subject, though I omit the Oxford comma as per The Economist's style (a work habit that has become a personal one).
Marty Peretz, a former editor and owner of the New Republic, insists that commas must always come in pairs.
Jun 22nd 2012, 14:17 by R.L.G. | NEW YORK
CHECK out the great post on our sister blog Analects on the use—and non-use—of China's regional and historical languages in period television dramas. The gist: these shows have the Manchus (and Mao and others) speaking nothing but fluent modern Mandarin, when they did no such thing.
The erasure of Manchu language from period dramas is of course a matter of artistic expedience, but it is also one of the many small and subtle ways the educational and media environment in the People’s Republic of China reinforces an orthodox interpretation of Chinese history, one which emphasises continuity and unity.
Jun 21st 2012, 15:07 by R.L.G. | NEW YORK
YESTERDAY's Wall Street Journal offered a "grammar quiz", along with a summery piece about declining standards of grammar at the workplace. It's the young people, you will be surprised to discover, and their Twitter and their text-messaging.
I say "summery" because this is the kind of no-news piece that runs in the hot months when there's a dearth of fresh news. A colleague of mine recently wrote that the coffee-house was the social network of the 17th century, both in the good aspects (information, political debate, entertainment) and the bad (time-wasting, triviality). Well, here's one more parallel: in 1712, Jonathan Swift, in his famous proposal for stabilising and improving the English language, blamed the decline in language standards on the youth and—you guessed it:
Jun 21st 2012, 14:13 by R.L.G. | NEW YORK
A BIT of cheer in the endangered-languages sphere. We've written about the topic many times, and done an Economist multimedia feature on it as well (below). Today Google announces that it will put its name and resources into the oft-starved effort:
Today we’re introducing something we hope will help: the Endangered Languages Project, a website for people to find and share the most up-to-date and comprehensive information about endangered languages. Documenting the 3,000+ languages that are on the verge of extinction (about half of all languages in the world) is an important step in preserving cultural diversity, honoring the knowledge of our elders and empowering our youth.
Jun 20th 2012, 18:21 by R.L.G. | NEW YORK
AN OLD friend emigrated from Russia to New Jersey when he was small. When asked if he spoke Russian, he would say he speaks "kitchen Russian": the kind of things your mum says to you around the house. It's a good phrase to describe the competence of a lot of immigrants in their "heritage language". They can argue fluently with their parents about how late they can stay out, but if asked to write a short essay on their three favourite scientific discoveries, they'd be completely lost. First, they may not ever have learned to write their heritage language. If they haven't read a lot, they also won't master the kind of formulations used in writing generally.
Continue reading "Kitchen Russian, baby Danish and the two-state solution" »
Jun 19th 2012, 15:45 by R.L.G. | NEW YORK
I'VE been wanting to link to the wonderfully named blog Stæfcræft & Vyākaraṇa for a while now. (The name means something like "linguistics and grammar" in Old English and Sanskrit, respectively, which tells you a bit about the blogger.) Today's post is a good excuse:
An oddly persistent feature of Hindi-language film English subtitling is the bowdlerisation of cursing. A particularly amusing instance of this occurs in the film Murder 2, a somewhat gruesome thriller. The main character, a hard-boiled ex-cop, is verbally abusing another character, and calls him मादरचोद (mādarchod).
Jun 18th 2012, 19:20 by R.L.G. | NEW YORK
NO TIME for much of an original post today, but the most eye-catching thing I've seen recently comes from Victor Mair: a joke going around China about how to transliterate the country's name into Chinese characters.
the poor person reads it as qiánnǎ 钱哪 = where is my money?
the doctor reads it as qiènǎ 切哪 = where to cut?
the official reads it as quánnǎ 权哪 = where is my power?
the real estate developer reads it as quānnǎ 圈哪 = where can I encircle?
the dispossessed reads it as qiānnǎ 迁哪 = where should I move to?
the government reads it as chāinǎ 拆哪 = where should we demolish?
Shades of the Grass Mud Horse.
Jun 14th 2012, 16:11 by R.L.G. | NEW YORK
THE comments on this post on Language Log got me thinking about Lil Jon, an American hip-hop producer and rapper. He's famous for hollering "What!" "Yeah!" and "O-Kayyyyy!" in the backing tracks to the songs he's involved with, but he also raps on his own.
Mark Liberman's link to this YouTube [note: about a million swear-words, as there will be in the rest of this post] of Lil Jon's track "What You Gonna Do" got me thinking, of all things, the progressive grammaticalisation of the word shit. Grammaticalisation is when an ordinary non-grammatical word begins to become a grammatical one bleached of its original meaning.
Jun 12th 2012, 18:34 by R.L.G. | NEW YORK
A WEEK ago, Language Log posted the picture shown here. The reader who e-mailed it to the blog apparently "had several moments of wondering whether the whole world had gone mad, before realizing that this sign did not warn passers-by to beware of a cone dispenser, but instead labelled the dispenser as a source of 'caution cones'."
I can understand his confusion on two levels. On the surface level, many signs read something like "CAUTION: FALLING ROCKS", and so it's natural at first blush to read CAUTION CONE DISPENSER this way.
But more than that, I'm afraid that the world—well, America at least—has indeed gone mad with warning labels.
Jun 12th 2012, 13:47 by R.L.G. | NEW YORK
WELL, perhaps not. The morning began with a bit of excitement in my inbox.
Michael G. Wooldridge Solicitors
21 Shirley Road,
Acocks Green, Birmingham B27 7XU
United Kingdom
Hello [R.L.G.]
I am Michael Wooldridge, Sole executor of late Mr Joel [ my last name]'s estate. Joel was an independent oil dealer who lived and died in the UK but had businesses in Pakistan and the Middle East. He left a total of £3.8 million in deposit and bonds, held in a Pakistani bank (Bank Alfalah). Since his death in 1998, I have tried to locate his extended relatives whom shall be claimants/beneficiaries of his abandoned personal estate and all such efforts have been to no avail.
Jun 11th 2012, 19:18 by C.S.W. | HAY-ON-WYE
EVER since God confounded the people of Babel, we have been left with imperfect solutions to communicating across borders. One of those has been the lingua franca, a commonly known second language in which different nationalities converse. That trick sufficed for millennia, but it could be reaching the end of its lifespan, according to Nicholas Ostler, author of "The Last Lingua Franca" (which The Economist reviewed in 2010). Machine translation software may become so advanced as to render second-language learning useless.
Mr Ostler renewed his claims that machine translation does away with the need for a lingua franca at the Hay Literary Festival last week.
Jun 7th 2012, 20:57 by R.L.G. | NEW YORK
THE Queen's English Society was the subject of one of our first posts on Johnson, almost exactly two years ago today. It is now shutting its doors (metaphorically speaking; I don't believe there were ever physical facilities. The Académie française this was not.) Since I'm back home for paternity leave again this week, I'll refer you to Geoff Pullum's eulogy (dyslogy, really). The QES's website was sloppily put together, and the writing would often make the average classy prescriptivist hold his nose.
There will be one more Quest then all activity will cease and the society will be wound up.
Jun 6th 2012, 15:31 by G.L. | NEW YORK
YOU might wonder what the point of choosing a safe password is. After all, whether your password is 12345 or k3^&gHi]0%"N£l@2!Bc9, a would-be hacker still has to go through all the possible permutations to find it, right?
Well, no. Hackers don't work at random; they use "cracking dictionaries" of the likeliest passwords. These dictionaries include real words, common password combinations, and perhaps databases of real passwords that have been leaked or stolen.
In this blog, named after the dictionary-maker Samuel Johnson, our correspondents write about the effects that the use (and sometimes abuse) of language have on politics, society and culture around the world
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