On being a monoglot

I have a Problem with languages. It's rather embarrassing. Especially when I have to field the most common I-don't-know-what-a-linguist-is question. How many languages do I speak? One. English.

I know enough French to understand Eddie Izzard's routines, but no more. I know enough Spanish to eavesdrop on parts of conversations in the waiting room at my doctor's office, but certainly not enough to *participate* in a conversation. I can count to ten and ask for the bus in Basque, construct several (mostly obscene) sentences in Klamath, tell you that I like coffee in Arabic, and refer to the sour smell of very bad molasses in Bengali.

Here is my Problem with languages: I am easily distracted. I took a semester of Arabic in college, and got about as far as "You do WHAT with your pharynx?" and pretty soon I was looking at spectrograms in Praat instead of, you know, learning how to say anything besides "I like coffee". Which is now completely useless, as I can no longer drink coffee.

I have been thinking about this because I recently started watching The West Wing. There is a character on the show who is Deaf (played by Marlee Matlin, who is awesome) and scenes in which she appears include a significant amount of ASL. Occasionally I look up from my knitting and try to follow along, but I only understand maybe every tenth word.

When I was in elementary school, I learned a bit of what I now know to be some combination of ASL and Signed English. I had a classmate who was Deaf, and we all learned quite a bit from her interpreters. Later, when I worked in childcare, we used infant and toddler sign in the classroom --- listen, forget all the unfounded nonsense about "increased language ability": if a 10 month old infant can communicate the difference between "more" and "all done", everyone's life is better.

In college, I took an ASL class. I got about as far as "You do WHAT with your eyebrows?" and it was all over. I can tell from your eyebrows whether you're asking me a wh-question or a yes/no question, whether you're topicalizing something or negating it. But I haven't the faintest idea what you are asking, topicalizing, or negating unless it involves Cookie Monster, common barnyard animals, or the "more"/"all done" distinction.

[Oh, and to the writers of The West Wing: some notes about New Hampshire. Concord is not pronounced like the jet, there is no space in Manchester for a farm, and I would be very impressed if you managed to get to Nashua by train.]

Some moments from The Daily Show

Part I: Non-Contrastive Lexical Contrasts Are Funny

On last night's Daily Show, Wyatt Cenac compared the old Republican party with the exciting new RePUBlican party --- the stressed syllable of RePUBlican has what sounds like a pitch boost and perhaps a bit of lengthening and/or a slight increase in intensity.* This is something that speakers of North American English can hear quite readily, and can manipulate linguistically in e.g. focus marking. Listening to the segment, I was always entirely certain which he was referring to.**

But it's not something that North American English ever uses to mark a contrast between lexical items. Hence the comedy. Whether he knew it or not, Mr. Cenac was using that fact to make the point that, while the RePUBlican party has made some changes in the focus of their message, ultimately the truth values remain unchanged. Clever!

Okay, fine, I know that by analyzing this to death I have made it No Longer Funny. Whatever.


Part II: Yes, Straight Men Use The Word "Butch"

There are a number of lexical items whose meanings are perfectly clear to me, but utterly confusing to many of my colleagues.*** I have strong intuitions about what belongs in the categories delimited by these words, and what doesn't; I know the difference between "camp" and "kitsch" (and that there is some overlap), and I know who counts as a "chicken" (I still do, but only just barely).

Butch. Let's talk about "butch". In conversation recently, two properties of this word were contested: a) it can apply to inanimate objects as well as humans, and b) it can be used by or used to describe straight men.

I insist that both of those statements are true. I swear I am not making this up. On last night's Daily Show, guest Tom Selleck (who is totally butch; just look at that mustache!) informed us that a ranch is more butch than a farm. Look: Mr. Selleck is straight, and using the word to refer to an inanimate object.

I told you so.

The one part of my story that remains unconfirmed is the use of "butch" to refer to straight men. Just believe me on this one, okay?







*I am tempted to extract the audio and look at the relevant parts in Praat. Please don't let me. I have cookies to bake and a paper to revise.

**It was also accompanied by some eyebrow movements, but I didn't look up from my knitting the first time I "watched" it, and still made the distinction without any difficulty.

***Toque is not one of them. I am mystified and intrigued by it; every time I knit a hat, I have to ask my Canadian friends if it is a toque. Maybe if I knit enough hats, I'll finally understand.

On the fallibility of the google corpus

Today's xkcd provides a clever illustration of why google results are not necessarily the most reliable measure of frequency:



I'm glad to see that gardening, knitting, and blogging made the list -- I didn't realize my hobbies were so death-defying (and therefore hip and edgy).

It's unlikely that Mr. Munroe actually based this comic on real google results. But it relates nicely to something Chris Davis pointed out to me a number of months ago: all the internet frenzy over the Miss Teen USA contestant's ungrammatical rambling posed a significant problem for the use of google as a tool for corpus linguistics. The sheer frequency with which the text of her speech was reproduced and discussed might lead to the mistaken impression that "like such as and" was a grammatical string of English.

Quick, let's all scramble to revise our theory of syntax to accommodate the incessant repetition of this unfortunate young woman's disfluency! And while we're at it, don't forget to warn your children of the dangers of horticulture and fiber arts.

(This is not to suggest that google is entirely unhelpful or uninformative as a corpus; it can in fact be useful for certain purposes. But please, let's not take ourselves too seriously.)

Not a Good Year for Talking Animals

From this week's Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me:

Peter Segal: Washoe, the female chimpanzee who knew ______ died in Washington state.
Paula Poundstone: Uh, more than I do?

Alex the parrot died recently, and now Washoe the chimp has also passed away. "Talking" animals are so cute and it's always sad when they die; I hope that Washoe is reincarnated as someone who doesn't have to perform silly linguistic tricks for food. But the real question is: will there be obnoxiously sensationalist news coverage?

Well, the Reuters story is short and to the point. The New York Times does almost as good a job as my keener Linguistics 101 students at discussing the scientific controversy surrounding animals like Washoe. Looks like the newsmedia has finally learned their lesson, and science bloggers can go back to their other hobbies. But wait! The Independent Online called Washoe the "first animal to break the language barrier."

It's like breaking the sound barrier; reporters are writing their stories so hastily that they're traveling faster than fact waves or nuance particles.

Home Remedies and Laryngeal Anatomy

I recently found myself in the position of a) losing my voice, and b) needing my voice to make it through teaching three discussion sections.

I promptly stocked up on slippery elm lozenges, swore off all dairy, drank copious amounts of honey and lemon in my tea, gargled salt water, and attempted to get a good night's sleep (my stepsister has been a professional singer at various points in time, and I learned a few tricks from her when we were younger). The results were minimally sufficient.

I also did a little googling in case there was something I was forgetting, and was amazed at the ridiculous explanations I saw for why these techniques worked. This is, of course, symptomatic of the fact that home remedies are of course not subject to any sort of scientific or medical review. Still, I was amazed.

One of the main myths I saw that totally shocked me was the idea that when consuming things like lozenges and honey, one is actually coating one's vocal folds with those substances. I don't know how you suck on your lozenges or drink your tea, but in the course of normal swallowing these things should not be getting friendly with the vocal folds. Such forwardness on the part of your lozenge should in fact be greeted with a sudden forceful cough, similar to what happens when liquid "goes down the wrong pipe." This helps keep you from dying.

I guess I'm just surprised that most people don't have an intuitive sense that the part of their throat that vibrates when they talk is connected to their lungs and not their stomach. Then again, most people don't have a life-long obsession with speech sounds, so perhaps my surprise is unwarranted.

Those Pesky Rhotics Again

In what little "free" time I have, I've been catching up on Classic Doctor Who. Lately I've been on a Pertwee kick, and I could have sworn that the second doctor's initial companion was named Liz Shore.

So much so that I didn't even think about it. The sound quality of the recordings I have is not the greatest, so it took me the better part of an episode to be certain that her given name was Liz, but her surname was a complete non-issue.

However? I was wikipedia-ing something recently, and discovered that the character's surname is in fact Shaw, not Shore. Eek!

I have to confess that I have always harbored quietly negative feelings towards the intrusive /r/. I grew up essentially bidialectal (surrounded by rampant r-less-ness, rhotic codas intact in the home) and while I certainly acquired r-dropping, I was rather annoyed whenever I heard someone say idear or Amandar. [As a child, I also harbored an irrational hatred for questions formed with how come, but that's another story].

Well, I guess it turns out I do have something of an intrusive /r/ after all. In hearing Miss Shaw's name as Shore, I overcompensated for presumed anti-rhoticity without even realizing it. To be fair, I am also relatively unfamiliar with the RP vowel system, so that may have contributed to my misperception.

Relatedly, many of my students come from Eastern MA, and I've noticed my own r-less-ness creeping back in. This could be due to several factors: a) speaking with r-droppers influences my speech, b) I am more frequently exhausted this semester now that I'm teaching, or c) being around r-droppers causes me to notice it more in my own speech. In any case, it's interesting.

In unrelated news, Dumbledore is... wait, no, sorry. I don't care.

Bathroom Stall Semiotics and Identity Politics

This is old news. So old that blogging about it feels like beating a dead horse, except that it simply refuses to die. The story has totally jumped the shark, but they keep signing contracts for another season.

I've been hearing quite a bit about the recent Larry Craig scandal, which has become such a train wreck that even NPR can't leave it alone. There are a couple things in particular that I've been noticing about the coverage, from a vaguely linguistic angle.

The first thing concerns the use of code. NPR hasn't been reporting on the details, and I was curious, so I looked up some of the relevant facts: Person 1 taps his foot in a manner that is visible to Person 2 in the next stall. Person 2 taps his foot in response, and inches his foot closer to the divider. Person 1 reciprocates by moving his foot a little closer. This process repeats in some manner, until their feet touch. Person 1 swipes his hand under the stall, and Person 2 either a) crouches in such a way as to show his genitals or posterior beneath the divider, or b) swipes his hand in return to indicate that Person 1 should show his first. This concludes the elaborate ritual.

Since this particular code is getting a lot of media attention, it's about to go out of fashion very quickly. Codes like this have been around for ages, especially within the GLBT community, and the entire purpose is to communicate a certain message exclusively to initiated members of a group. Outside of a cruising context, there are terminological hedges -- "I think he's Family" or "He's into musical theater" (which was used in a recent episode of Doctor Who) -- and even covert symbols like the Human Rights Campaign's logo.

I have no idea whether the Hanky Code is used in cruising contexts, but I'm frequently amused to see its accidental use among fashionable hipsters in the college town where I live -- I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure that the young woman I saw at the farmers' market the other weekend was not actually seeking outdoor scat play with a member of the military. My point is that these codes become useless when they are either a) common knowledge among those outside the intended group, or b) overwhelmed by incidental uses brought about by out-of-context fashion trends. They are no longer good ways to covertly communicate a message.

So how will conservative Family Values politicians solicit anonymous sex in airport men's rooms now that foot tapping has been outed? Who knows.

The second thing I want to write about is this: Larry Craig insists he's not gay. It's overwhelmingly obvious to me that he's being dishonest, but I want to at least entertain the possibility that he's not actually lying. This may seem like an underhanded exploitation of semantic ambiguity, but I think it does actually touch on something fairly important about identity labels and how we apply them.

This all hinges on how we define the word 'gay'. Much of the newsmedia and the blogosphere seems to be accepting the word as an objective truth, to be arrived at by applying a set of criteria based on extrinsic behavior. By this definition, any man who has sex with (or even just attempts to solicit sex with) other men is gay.

Homosexual activity is an ancient practice, transcending cultural context and even species (apparently one of New York's gay penguins shares my first name). But the use of homosexuality as a category of identity is arguably a very modern, Western phenomenon. Under this understanding of the word 'gay', a person can only be described as such by intrinsic criteria of self-identification.

If we accept this definition, the ancient Greeks were not gay; their social hierarchy determined their sexual practices, so acceptable consorts for powerful men included women, young boys, and slaves, which meant that they sometimes engaged in homosexual activity. This definition also means that a man who never has sex with another man (a celibate member of a religious order, for example) can be gay regardless of sexual history or practices.

There's a rather apt monologue in Angels in America concerning this distinction, spoken by a fictionalized Roy Cohn:

Like all labels they tell you one thing, and one thing only: Where does an individual so identified fit into the food chain, the pecking order? Not ideology or sexual taste, but something much simpler: clout. Not who I fuck or who fucks me, but who will come to the phone when I call, who owes me favors. This is what a label refers to. Now to someone who does not understand this, a homosexual is what I am because I have sex with men, but really this is wrong. A homosexual is somebody who, in 15 years of trying cannot get a pissant anit-discrimination bill through the city council. A homosexual is somebody who knows nobody and who nobody knows. Who has zero clout. Does this sound like me Henry?

So under the intrinsic, identity-based definition of 'gay', Larry Craig may in fact be technically telling the truth. There are two problems with this. First of all, we don't know how Larry Craig thinks of himself, and he may in fact just be lying about how he identifies. It happens. Secondly, Mr. Craig knows that the commonly accepted definition of 'gay' involves extrinsic sexual practices, and by claiming that he is not gay and never has been, he is making a strong implication that he does not have sex with men and never has. This is probably false.

Finally, to end on a humorous note, one of the best lolX macros I've seen recently (from lolgay.com):

No More Caulk Jokes, Please.

I come from a dialect region that does not distinguish the vowels in words like cot and caught. Unlike several more salient regional features, this one is still consistently present in my speech. Usually it's not an issue. Sometimes it's slightly inconvenient; a few months ago I was recruiting colleagues to record some speech samples for a pilot experiment, and needed them to distinguish those two vowels, and it was mildly amusing to ask them if they distinguished two sounds that I was quite obviously unable to distinguish.

Occasionally, though, it's embarassing. Like when I need to re-caulk my bathtub, and go to the store in search of the required materials. I find that I am totally unable to walk up to a salesperson and say things like "excuse me, I'm looking for some caulk" or "i need to buy some caulk, can you help me?" (that second one has the potential to lead to a misunderstanding reminiscent of the current Larry Craig scandal). I actually left the first hardware store I went to because I couldn't find it on my own (after assuring the salesperson who offered to assist me that I was all set, thanks).

Fortunately, I was able to find what I needed at another store. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to spend the morning squeezing caulk in the bathroom.

3am In The Morning

When the 3-part finale of the latest series of doctor who aired, a friend of mine complained that Russell T. Davies put the phrase '3am in the morning' in the mouth of a fictional American news anchor. The line of argument was this: Americans don't talk that way, so Davies must be poking fun at Americans.

I was sure I'd heard Real Live Americans using this construction, but couldn't provide any actual examples and began to think that maybe my fandom had clouded my judgment. It bugged me a little, but not quite enough to really go looking for it. I noticed it in natural speech while visiting with family yesterday, but don't have a solid recollection of the details.

But now I've found proof: At the opening of this segment of Friday's installment of Talk of the Nation on NPR, host Ira Flatow uses the exact phrase '3am in the morning'. I'm sure that there's some amount of scripting that goes on in preparing radio programs like Talk of the Nation, but I doubt that it's scripted to that level of detail. And even if it is, it's likely that the person responsible for the scripting is a native speaker of some variety of North American English.

Now, it's entirely possible that Davies was still making fun of Americans, singling out a construction sometimes regarded as annoying. But if so, he's doing it with some degree of subtlety and craft. It's also possible that this construction is present in various varieties of British English as well, and Davies wrote the line because the construction is part of his grammar. I could ask him, but I doubt he'd return my email, since he's rather busy writing and producing really excellent television.

First LadyGuy: Update!

When Hillary Clinton announced her candidacy, I wondered what we would call Bill.

We now have word from Mr. Clinton himself: he would like to be called the First Laddie.

[He mentioned this on a visit to Aspen; here's the corresponding article.]

Let them eat cake...

One of the many things I enjoy doing when I'm not working myself to death is baking cakes. This summer I've had occasion to bake two thoroughly geeky cakes.

The first occasion was a small party that I had with a few fellow students, to celebrate the fact that we didn't take incompletes in a notoriously difficult phonetics course:



The cake itself was a chocolate layer cake, and the frostings were: chocolate buttercream, white chocolate buttercream, and a mixture of the two (for the lighter brown).

And yes, that hideous decorating job is an attempt at a spectrogram. I actually recorded myself saying the word "done" (in a frame sentence, no less), looked at the spectrogram in praat, and then tried to replicate that on the cake. All I can say is that I somehow managed to avoid getting frosting on my laptop in the process.

The second cake was in honor of a friend's birthday, and was a lolcake:



The cake itself was a yellow cake, with vanilla buttercream frosting (and a bit of chocolate buttercream from the previous cake, plus a few strawberries).

For the kitty pidgin on the cake, i opened with the classic o hai greeting, followed by the familiar i iz [food] trope, and then the classic can has construction. Finally, the assertion srsly.

Both cakes were very tasty.

Decimate!

I recently watched the three-part finale of the current Doctor Who series; I'll remain spoiler-free, but it was for the most part a really fantastic end to a really fantastic third series, and I'm looking forward to the upcoming fourth series (though not the long wait).

One of my favorite moments in the finale involved some cheerfully malevolent word-play pondering the precise definition of "decimate" -- riffing a bit on the fact that there is one version of the word that means roughly "to cause massive amounts of totally awesome destruction" and another version of the word that means "to destroy 1/10". It's a deliberate manipulation of the interplay between creative, expressive uses of language and precise, literally descriptive uses of language.

Apparently Ryan North over at qwantz.com has been pondering the same thing.

lol-X

Confession: I have some level of proficiency in l33t, and am fluent in geek. As such, I've been following the lolcat phenomenon, which the folks over at Language Log have been blogging about (most notably here and here), for quite a while now. I have yet to go as far as pasting captions to photos of my cat, though now that it's summer it's only a matter of time.

My absolute favorite cat macro is, of course, this version of "The Trouble With Tribbles" done entirely in kitty pidgin. There's even a bit of a reference to "Trials and Tribble-ations" at the end, too.

I'm also very fond of this shirt, which is a fill-in-the-blanks version of the lolcats-related "im in ur X, Ying ur Z" snowclone.

First LadyGuy

Hillary Clinton has officially announced her bid for presidency, which begs the all-important question: what would we call Bill?

We Americans are so backwards that we don't even have a word for a man who is married to the president. So what do we call him? Do we go for parallelism and call him the First Gentleman? That sounds all wrong, especially given Mr. Clinton's history of ungentlemanly scandal. First Husband? Maybe. The consensus among friends at dinner last night seems to be First LadyGuy, but I highly doubt that's indicative of mainstream American linguistic preferences.

One strategy so far seems to be humorously sticking with the title First Lady, complete with funny pictures of Mr. Clinton in pink skirtsuits -- apparently the left is robbing the right of ammunition by making fun of themselves first, a strategy that many of us who survived middle school remember well.

Of course, the serious answer in this case is easy: he's Former President Bill Clinton, and there seems to be a long-standing tradition of still referring to former presidents as Mr. President. [Would that make them Mr. and Mrs. President?] We wouldn't have to invent a new word for "man who is married to the president." At least not yet.

Q: How do you track a Bostonian in the woods?

A: Follow the r-droppings.

There are so many lovely jokes about r-dropping in Boston English, but most of them don't lend themselves well to text. Or to replication by those who are not native speakers of the illustrious dialect.

I didn't grow up in Boston, but New Hampshire (especially Southern NH) is close enough where r-dropping is concerned. I'm pretty good about putting those pesky rhotics back in coda position, especially since neither of my parents dropped them, but sometimes they just don't want to be there.

This mostly happens with place names, like Worcester and Portsmouth (interesting fact: Concord NH and Concord MA are pronounced distinctively, both with initial stress but the former has a syllabic r in the second syllable while the latter has a lax high front vowel), and mostly when I'm tired. But there is one lexical item -- the title of a children's television program -- that I have an extremely difficult time pronouncing r-fully: Dora the Explorer.

Apparently the desire to sound well-educated is completely undone by the awesome power of nice rhyming trochees.

Another language spoken in Malawi

Benjamin Zimmer over at the Language Log has written about Madonna's new adoption. I'm terrible at keeping track of celebrities (or at the very least I stopped keeping track of Madonna after everything she did post-Evita proved to be a terrible disappointment) but I'm vaguely familiar with the foreign baby adoption trend that's currently circulating. Apparently Madonna's new one is from Malawi; the country's national language is Chichewa, which has been receiving some media attention as a result of the adoption.

This is fantastic. I want to encourage the media to pay attention to minority languages, or at least I would if I had any influence over them whatsoever.

But I also want to take the opportunity to mention another language spoken in Malawi: chiTumbuka. I did some fieldwork on Tumbuka a while back (and can still produce a few sentences about cooking vegetables) and discovered that it's really quite interesting. Among other things, there's good evidence for rightward wh-movement (look for a decidedly mediocre paper in the proceedings of ACAL 36 - if you don't feel like waiting, you can download it from my website).

That's really all I had to say. When I saw Malawi mentioned on Language Log my ears pricked up for mention of Tumbuka, and didn't see any, so I wanted to mention it myself.