This morning, via Shirley & Spinoza, DX386 (AKA Alexei Shulgin) performing Anarchy in the UK. Also, a 1997 interview with Shulgin at Heise Online.
The shallow cascade of mendacity which attends my refusal of a boring dinner engagement is not the same thing as the un-saying of history and lives in a Stalinist encyclopedia. Gnostic finalities of falsehood are not in common play. But between them these two polarities delimit what is, by all evidence, the larger part of private and social speech.
[George Steiner. 1975. After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation. p. 221]
Languagehat has pointed us towards a nice article by jjoan ttaber, a linguist, on the vexing pseudo-problem of the singular pronoun they. What I want to write about here is something worse than creeping grammatical laxity and linguistic political correctness. I'm sure everybody is aware that there is a spectre haunting the English language and its name is the incorrect plural pronoun they. That's right, you heard me: they is not the correct pronoun to use when speaking or writing anaphorically of two or more third persons. Ye gods! you cry. Tell me it ain't so, Jim Uncle. Well, 'tis so, dammit! Back in the good old pre-PC days of Anglo-Saxon yore—earlier spelling gore—we had a pronominal paradigm that looked like this:
| nom. | he 'he' | héo 'she' | hit 'it' | híe, hí, héo 'they' |
| acc. | hine | híe, hí | hit | híe, hí, héo |
| gen. | his | hire | his | hira, heora |
| dat. | him | hira | him | him |
But then those pesky Vikings, squatting up in the Yorky Danelaw, brought in their they, along with lutefisk and free love, and the English upper classes, hoping to kiss up to some Old Norse hiney, started using the new-fangled they rather than the correct and homegrown híe. Political correctness being what it was in the thirteenth century, soon all the English were doing it. Yeesh! I move that all right-thinking prescriptive grammarians herewith stop using the noxious they and hie themselves over to the pure and beautiful hie. Arguing that we've been using they since at least the 13th century doesn't make it right! The fate of the free world's tongue depends on it. And thank your lucky stars that some true anglophones have been brave enough to use the oblique form of hie all along in the form of 'em. As for the rest of 'em, fuck 'em if they can't take a joke!
Every now and then you come across something on the web that makes you chuckle. I'm still chuckling over my recent discovery of a paper detailing the Hattic language, a lost branch of Indo-European.
I have fond memories of lazy Saturday afternoons in Sonoma's Carnegie library. The filtered sunlight, the polished wood, and the books. The library has since moved to bigger quarters, but the memories linger. In those innocent days I thought all libraries were organized by Dewey Decimal call number. At least the public libraries in Petaluma, Santa Rosa, and Napa were. It wasn't until high school that I ventured into the local community college's library and discovered the Library of Congress Control Number system. (Years later in Bonn, I was delighted to discover at least two different systems in use in the city and university libraries.) Edd Dumbill of Behind the Times has drawn my attention to a NY Times article [free registration required] on a law suit by the owners of the Dewey Decimal system, Online Computer Library Center, against a library-themed hotel in New York.
"The Dewey Decimal System is a product, a trademark, a brand name," said Joseph R. Dreitler, a lawyer for the Online Computer Library Center, a nonprofit library cooperative that filed the suit last week in Federal District Court in Ohio. "The idea here isn't to put the Library Hotel out of business. The idea is to protect Dewey and the Dewey Decimal System trademark."
It is pointed out in the article that Melvil Dewey sometimes gave poorer libraries his system for free. I'm sure the lawyers wouldn't allow such generosity these days. Imagine squandering ones intellectual property on libraries.
[Addendum 09/24/03: As soon as I posted this entry, I knew I'd be regretting it. The story about the OCLC's lawsuit is more complicated than my petty attempts at legalistic humor. There's an interesting thread on the Library & Information Science listserv linked in KGK's comment.]
Until yesterday I'd never heard of Jamska, a West Scandanavian Scandinavian language spoken in Sweden. Here's a small glossary with digitized pronunciations. It's part of a dictionary project. I was surprised that the European Bureau for Lesser Used Languages did not have any information on it, but perhaps it's too moribund to be included.
Carlo Ginzburg, of The Cheese and the Worms fame, gives an online interview about his latest book, Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches Sabbath, to Trygve Riiser Gundersen for Eurozine: original in Norwegian, English available.
It sounds like something from a cheap historical novel: In the spring of 1321, in Easter Week, rumour is rife in the south of France that a conspiracy is on foot to kill all Christians and that wells have been poisoned all over the country. The rumour soon spreads throughout the whole of France and, in time, across its borders to what are now Switzerland and Spain. In some of the chronicles that have come down to us the plot is said to be the work of lepers.
Elsewhere, the poisoning of wells was ascribed to Jews working together with the lepers. In some places blame was laid at the door of Muslim rulers in Granada or Tunis, or of the Sultan of Babylon, who were said to have paid Jews and lepers to kill Christians. The rumours resulted in persecutions and massacres all over France, and before long they were being substantiated by confessions and other evidence. Long and detailed explanations appeared to show how the poison had been introduced into the wells. The conspirators' accomplices were denounced, and contemporary letters and documents tell of the Jews' association with the Saracens and of plans for setting up a government composed of Jews, lepers and Muslims to take over Europe in the aftermath of the calamity.
I do love a good conspiracy history.
While looking for something completely different I ran across Caroline Bowen's fascinating web page, Beyond Lisping: Code Switching and Gay Speech Styles. Dr Bowen is a speech language pathologist, and the page cited is well worth a read. And what was I looking for? The term that describes turning ones els and ars into double-us.
Well, there's a new linguistics blog on the block, and Geoff Pullum is one of the four linguists writing for it. The other three are Steven Bird, Mark Liberman, and Chris Potts. [via Crooked Timber via Kai von Fintel] And, the Frog in the Valley is back in his third avatar.
[Addendum 09/26/03: Anohter linguist Arnold Zwicky has joined the Language Log.]
Maciej Ceglowski at Idle Words has a nice couple of entries on a language policy snafu in Quebec with a happy ending. Seems an official thought somebody's blog was commerical and wanted the blogger to translate his calendar and his extensive English entries into French. It all ended with an apology from the official and blogging as usual north of the border. What a civilized country! Mistakes were made, and then the apologies. Couldn't imagine it happening here in the savage south of the border area.
There's an interesting online tool that Håkan Kjellerstrand has written, and if you have the Swedish you can read his take on the scrambled letters phenomenon with associated links.
An entry over on the 2 Blowhards got me to thinking. No, thinking is too strong a word. Rather it set me to ruminating: chewing the cud, free associating. One of the two, Michael, went and saw Once Upon a Time in Mexico and didn't have a good time. That's OK. Probably lots of reasons for that. (I haven't seen the flicker in question and so I'll refrain from defending or dismantling it.) Are movies shot on DV different than those shot on film? Well, yes, but no, too. You should really just go and read his entry and then the comments. Suffice it to say, I was struck in the same way by the critical apparatus that Rudolf Arnheim erected to explain the aesthetic differences between silent movies and the talkies. You know the drill, expressionism (B&W, silent, montage) versus realism (color, sound, mise-en-scène). I've certainly seen movies that originated on DV that could've been shot on good old-fashioned film: e.g., Italiensk for begyndere. And, I think that the problems of a movie like Attack of the Clones had little to do with its origins in DV; cf. the similar problems in The Phantom Menance. I think that Michael's criticisms have more to do with how the movie was lighted, shot, edited, written, directed, etc., than what medium the images were stored on. One thing that was brought up in the comments, is whether there exists a pattern language (à la Christopher Alexander) for the movies. I think there is, but I've never really cared for most of the patterns you could describe using it. There's a pattern that a friend pointed out to me after Gladiator hit the screens: why are there so many gasoline bomb explosions in movies today that are supposed to take place in antiquity. The answer is because they look neat, and the folks in Hollywood know how to make them. Roger Ebert has been collecting these (anti-)patterns for years. (It's always been a fine line between genre and formula.)
Thinking of Claude Simon this morning, and of standing in line at the Chagall exhibit recently. I still remember the overwhelming joy I felt at devouring The Flanders Road in the early '80s. And later, much later, in Bonn, I finally understood those pigeons outside the palace in Simon's novel, while I watched a pigeon flap against its image in the highly reflective surface of an office building's first story window, next to the McDonald's across the Bertha-von-Suttner-Platz from the Beethoven-Haus.
Leaving aside the complaints that I am a "difficult", "boring", "unreadable" or "confused" writer, and recalling that the same reproaches have always been levelled at any artist who even to the slightest degree upsets acquired habits and the established order of things, let us wonder, instead, at the way in which the grandchildren of those people who in impressionist paintings once saw nothing but shapeless (i.e., illegible) daubs today form endless queues outside exhibitions and museums to admire the works of those very same daubers.
…
I will come back to those who reproach my novels for having "neither a beginning nor an end", which is perfectly correct. Here I would like to dwell on two adjectives regarded as defamatory, and which are always naturally or, one could say, correlatively associated, and which serve precisely to pin-point the nature of this problem; namely those which denounce my works as a product of "labour", and thus necessarily "artificial".
[Claude Simon, 1985, Nobel lecture]
[via wood s lot kinda]
Well, I’ve traded some email with Graham Rawlinson, the man behind the research behind the urban legend of the jumbled letters. Nice chap. He quickly left psychological academia behind and is now an inventor and author. On the other hand I wonder when the bit torrent will be over, and things will go back to normal. Still getting way too many pings from the /. article.
Intrepid reader, Roger Willcocks, has discovered the origin of the first jumbled text that mentions Saberi. A letter to the New Scientist on May 1, 1999, in response to a short item on the Saberi and Perriott Nature article (online at the New Scientist) site. The letter's writer, Mr Graham Rawlinson of Aldershot, Hampshire, also mentions his dissertation, written in 1976 at Nottingham University, where he "showed that randomising letters in the middle of words had little or no effect on the ability of skilled readers to understand the text. Indeed one rapid reader noticed only four or five errors in an A4 page of muddled text". Roger also found this Usenet (alt.2600 group) posting (from June 7, 1999) that mentions the letter but gives no further details. I'm not so sure we'll discover the writer of the second and more recent text, but maybe. Thanks, Roger.
[Addendum 09/17/03: Rawlinson's dissertation is called The significance of letter position in word recognition. Found it in the University of Nottingham online library catalog. I'll try to find a copy on this side of the big pond.]
[Addendum 09/22/03: Snopes has added a newer article on "Sublexical units and the split fovea" by Richard Shillcock & Padraic Monaghan at the Universities of Edinburgh and Coventry respectively. I'm beginning to think that the newer scrambled text arose independently of the earlier one.]
The interesting thing about blog entries is that you never know which one will actually interest people, taking off on a trajectory of its own, and which one will fade silently into the past. As for the whole jumbled letters in the middle of words not stopping the comprehension of a text meme, here's my followup entry with slightly more thought applied and (partially) in response to comments here and abroad in Blogovia.
First, here are the two texts. The first one appeared on September 12.
Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by it slef but the wrod as a wlohe.
The second text appear towards the end of April, and I blogged it on May 1.
Randomising letters in the middle of words [has] little or no effect on the ability of skilled readers to understand the text. This is easy to denmtrasote. In a pubiltacion of New Scnieitst you could ramdinose all the letetrs, keipeng the first two and last two the same, and reibadailty would hadrly be aftcfeed. My ansaylis did not come to much beucase the thoery at the time was for shape and senqeuce retigcionon. Saberi's work sugsegts we may have some pofrweul palrlael prsooscers at work. The resaon for this is suerly that idnetiyfing coentnt by paarllel prseocsing speeds up regnicoiton. We only need the first and last two letetrs to spot chganes in meniang.
David Harris was the starting point for the first text, and he also varied it a little to track how it spread through the net. He had received the original text through email on Friday, September 12.
Unscrambling the letters for the first text we get:
According to a researcher at an English university, it doesn't matter in what order the letters in a word are, the only important thing is that first and last letter is at the right place. The rest can be a total mess and you can still read it without problem. This is because we do not read every letter by it self [sic] but the word as a whole.
And, as I said earlier, and as many have pointed out, this seems like your typical bit of urban folklore. Especially vexing is the vagueness of "an English university" and no attribution for the "researchers". David Harris cleaned up the spelling a little, but left in the two word version of itself.
The reason, I tracked down Saberi and Perrott work as a possible origin is that Saberi is mentioned by name (and unscrambled at that) in the second, but older, text I had blogged back on May 1. Though, as many have pointed out, their paper (which I have yet to read as it isn't online) deals with spoken language and not the reading. Saberi took fragments from the middle of words and reversed them, but people were still able to comprehend them. If you search around with Google on such apt search strings as "cognitive science", "psycholinguistics", "visual word recognition", etc., you quickly find yourself reading a whole slough of psych papers. It seems that a lot of people have been working on all aspects of reading and listening comprehension. Times for word recognition are reduced when subjects have been primed with the semantic fields of the words. What happens to word recognition when the words are distributed in more or less random lists of a sentence? And letters aren't the only thing being scrambled: folks have been scrambling words in word order lax languages. Mark Seidenberg has an interesting paper on visual word recognition briming with saccadic eye movement, dyslexia, lesions, reading comprehension, orthographies, and Hebrew. And here's a paper on how the brain encodes the order of letters in a word that Wesley at Fear Everything pointed out in a followup entry to mine.
The bibliographies alone of these papers will provide hours of interesting lolling around on the web and reading.
[Addendum 09/16/03: I've read the Saberi and Perrott article. It seems that the chunks of speech they reversed came from everywhere in the speech chain and not just the middle of words. It seems then to have more to do with comprehension of the message in a noisy environment.]
[Addendum 09/17/03: See today's entry for a source of the first jumbled text.]
[Addendum 09/19/03: researcher and important are misspelled in the more recent text. I silently (and unconsicously) corrected them when I produced my clear text.]
Well, my fifteen picoseconds of whatever have arrived and are now up. I'm not really sure on the etiquette. Am I supposed to thank the one who did it or what?
Just got back from the Chagall exhibit at the SFMOMA. It was great. A really nice collection of his paintings. I wasn't that familiar with his work, excepting some of his later watercolors and a set of beautiful stained glass windows in the cathedral at Metz. So it was a treat to see so many of his works stretching out over a period of 70 years. Some of his earlier paintings incorporated text in Hebrew and Russian. One of the bulls in one of his murals for the foyer of the Moscow State Yiddish Theater bellows out his name in Yiddish, while he signed himself in Cyrillic. I also got to wondering how his Hassidic family felt about the overt Christian themes in some of his paintings (e.g., White Crucifiction). And some of his goats and cows looked quite pig-like. I'll have to get a biography and read about him.
Languagehat has an entry concerning the decipherability of English texts made up of words that have had their letters scrambled (except for the first and last). [via Avva in Russian] I had written something about this phenomenon back in March with a different scrambled text. (I am always amazed how these unattributed texts can spread like folklore across the Web.) It was hard at the time to find a source for the quoted text, but I think I've traced it back to some work that Kourosh Saberi at UC Irvine and David R. Perrott at Cal State Los Angeles have done, mentioned here in an article by D. W. Massaro at UC Santa Cruz. I sent some email to Professor Saberi, but hadn't heard back from him. They wrote up their results in the 29 April 1999 issue of Nature, but I've been unable to find it online. Here's a press release for that article; see also this editorial in Nature Science Update.
[Addendum 09/15/03: The jumbled letters meme continues to spread. In good folkloric fashion, I've seen two variants: the first with "Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy" and the second with "Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy". Here's another reference to the Saberi and Perrott article on the ABCNEWS dot com site.]
[Addendum 09/16/03: Thanks to Ed Snibble who tracked down the Nature article. I've posted a followup entry today, too.]
[Addendum 09/17/03: Thanks to Roger Willcocks who tracked down the source of the first jumbled text. See today's entry above.]
[Addendum 10/07/03: An actual researcher in cognitive neuroscience; computational modelling, and psycholinguistics at Cambridge has assembled a great page on this urban meme. I've added this link to help those folks who're still wondering into this entry long after it feel off the front of the blog.]
[Addendum 02/08/04: Accidents happen. This entry was accidently deleted. Here’s a backup copy with the original URL.]
This entry over on Phluzein [via varnam in re "It all flowed from Sarasvathi river" by V. Muthukumaran] reminded me of an issue of the Indian journal Frontline that I'd read recently but had forgotten to blog. One of the authors of one of the articles, Steve Farmer, has a page with a plethora of links. There's also a lot of information over on the Electronic Journal of Vedic Studies regarding the Indus valley inscriptions, e.g., "Aryan or Dravidian or Neither? A Study of Recent Attempts to Decipher the Indus Script (1995-2000)" by Iravatham Mahadevan. There's a whole lot of ink being spilled and names being called between folks on both sides of this whole whence Sanskrit (autochthonous or import) issue.
Well, I started teaching my CIS 307 class this evening and it looks like it's a go, despite the doubts of a week ago. Seven people are signed up. Every little bit of wage slavery helps.
Quite the week for shuffling off the mortal coil. Warren Zevon and Edward Teller both died this week. Zevon wrote some great rock songs, like Werewolves of London, Lawyers Guns and Money, and Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner. Teller was the unapologetic father of the hydrogen bomb. Warren had cancer. Edward was 95.
Leni Riefenstahl has died a little past her 101st birthday. The media have been in a frenzy disgorging pull-quotes about Hitler's favorite filmmaker. During the thousand-year Reich's dozen years, she made four films films for the National Socialists: the oft-mentioned Triumph des Willens and Olympia (parts one and two), and the scarcely-mentioned Sieg des Glaubens and Tag der Freiheit—Unsere Wehrmacht. It's debatable whether her films were more popular or successful as propaganda than the works of Veit Harlan (Kubrick's uncle-in-law) or Josef von Báky, but their later effect upon filmmakers the world over is indisputable. I watched Triumph earlier this year and was surprised (again) by the brilliance of the editing and mise-en-scène as well as the tedium of the speechifying. Hitler also enjoyed watching fiction films such as Eisenstein's Potemkin, Lang's Metropolis, and Fleming's Gone with the Wind.
I was reading an article in a book, Commodify Your Dissent, that Ian at Desiderata loaned me the other day, when I ran across a word I'd never seen before: therblig. From its context, I knew it had something to do with Scientific Management, but what struck me was the weird shape to it. A quick spin around Google when I got to the office gave me the term's meaning and its origin. Coined by Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, it was simply their surname spelled backwards, kind of. Therbligs are constituent motions into which tasks can be analyzed. There's about 18 of them, as well as some associated colors and icons. Scientific management was a management fad of the early 20th century. Invented by Frederick W. Taylor, it was enthusiastically adopted by Henry Ford so he could crank out cheaper cars on the assembly line than his competetors. Taylor conducted and filmed some time-motion studies of workers performing tasks and then sought to find quicker and better ways to do the work. If you got some time, read Taylor's book, The Principles of Scientific Management online. Therbligs reminded me of Roger Schank's script theory with its 20 or so semantic primitives like PTRANS. Other famous backwards words are Nacirema (from an anthropological article by Horace Miner) and Erewhon (from the book of the same name by Samuel Butler).
Scott at Pedantry has an entry on a strange article that posits that brand name usage is becoming a new lingua franca.
Brand names have become so abundant that in France they account for two out of every five words an average person knows, according to a study being carried out by French branding company Nomen.
Shocking as that may sound, Nomen Chief Executive Marcel Botton says the trend is creating a new international language that helps people communicate in foreign countries.
"The distinction between brand names and ordinary words is becoming quite blurred," Botton told Reuters.
Scott does more than a good job debunking the weird pseudo-linguistics behind this factoid blown all the way up out of proportion.
So, it seems very silly to suggest that brand names represent 40% of the words people know. I doubt very strongly that more than the tiniest part of people's lexical knowledge is bound up in brand names. Even sillier is the idea that brand names are forming the core of a new Esperanto. I mean, come on! How many brand names are verbs? Or adjectives? Or adverbs? I mitsubishily kleenex the nike coke?
I could only think of xerox, hoover, and windex as verbs off the top of my head. Also, John at Discouraging Word has a nice entry [for September 6, 2003] on the adjective bolshie which came from the name of the Bolshevik political party.
Also, Brian at Universal Language notices the same article.
On my recent visit back east, I finally got to see a steel mill. It was in the West Virginia panhandle town of Weirton which is right across the Ohio River from Steubenville, Ohio. I'd assumed that all the steel mills had gone bust by now, but the Weirton Steel Corporation is busy turning out paint cans and battery casings. Both Weirton and Steubenville had that look of post-industrial malaise with a thin veneer of malled over America that has become associated with the Rust Belt. Of course, all those abondoned mills do make great locations to shoot movies like Robocop et al. Across the river in Dino Crocetti's hometown, we drove around while it rained and looked at the huge brick churches and hotels from another era. And up north, across from Newell, WV, Viki spotted the Homer Laughlin China Co., some of whose Fiesta wares we own, but the mighty Ohio separated us from a quick look-see, and so we headed north towards Youngstown.
Well, the blog logged its first unsolicited commercial ad in the comments section. It was bound to happen, and I see that the product in question is one of the usual suspects. The comment itself was rather innocuous, seemingly agreeing with something I'd written. I suppose it was inevitable. Too much blogging, cross-linking, and search engine indexing going on to have remained pure for too long. I have deleted the offending text. Sigh.
I've missed a large chunk of this blogging week because we were called out of town suddenly to visit my dying father-in-law in Niles, Ohio. I observed an eyeful of a tiny corner of the Midwest and some of Western Pennsylvania, and I'll be writing these up later in the day and on the weekend. I was not without internet connectivity altogether, but 28.8 and 33.2 kbps just doesn't lend itself to much but reading email.