A recurring series asks, ‘Will you still read me, will you still tweet me, when I’m sixty-four?’ I hope at least that you find a few items of interest in this batch of language-related links from recent weeks.

The story of Ogham.

On holding one’s head.

Oliver Sacks and the OED.

A 17thC irony mark, revived.

A short guide to Hindi profanity.

On the use of mate in Australian English.

A survey of spoken Irish in the Aran Islands.

Who were the first people ever recorded in writing?

Finding new language for ‘unmanned’ space missions.

On the use (and abuse) of machine translation for minority languages.

Both uses of disinterested are perfectly acceptable.

Linguistic inferences from a Turkish typewriter.

How the ellipsis arrived in English literature.

The problem with calling people migrants.

How portability ruined the telephone.

Spiders are using textspeak now.

Emoticons, emoji, and the law.

The history of Wingdings.

Typgnuig like thsi?

Caio Beltrão’s letter faces.

Snapping is the new clapping.

The importance of being native.

The first rule of Linguistics Club.

Mapping variation in Australian English.

Right. OK. Look, let’s talk about asterismos.

Profile of Walt Wolfram, champion of dialects.

The grammar of shipping (in the fictional romance sense).

Nonsense words are funnier when they’re less like real words.

Real Vocabulary – a new descriptive series from Macmillan Dictionary.

‘The best writers I’ve worked with love to get copyedited.’

The importance of chunking in language learning.

The evolution of paragraph styles and marks.

Niche: two pronunciations, two senses.

Playing (the) musical instruments.

Bad linguistics journalism bingo.

Because X was used in 1949.

Anxious is not ambiguous.

How ‘weird’ is English?

What a pronoun is and isn’t.

The many lives of the asterisk.

When books are subway tickets.

Pop linguistics book recommendations.

When and how to correct people’s language.

AP rejects skeptic for climate-change naysayers.

Fraudulent research papers are linguistically more opaque.

Lake Disappointment, Useless Bay, and other sad place names.

How Dracula got his name (it’s not from droch fhola).

Which contractions should you use, and when?

7 questions to a linguist: John McWhorter.

Future tense in headline grammar.

David Lynch’s elusive language.

A selection of Jamaican slang.

How contronyms come to be.

‘The funnies.’

If you’re still with me, here are two videos to finish: one musical, one educational, both very entertaining.

Tweeted Love:

The Zipf mystery:

For more like this, see the language links archive.

It’s almost two months since my last batch of language links: definitely time for another. It’s a smaller pile than usual, and some of them are short. But if you’re still pressed for time, think of it as a lucky dip.

Ootland.

Drownded.

The Water Glossary.

The early history of Ms.

A guide to air punctuation.

Profanity as Weltanschauung.

The rise of non-binary pronouns.

The rules of totesing are totes intch.

Inside the minds of real-time translators.

Where did the Australian accent really come from?

What’s the difference between language and dialect?

The internet is legible to speakers of just a few languages.

There’s a village in Bali where everyone knows sign language.

Seamus Heaney on his early sense of ‘verbal music’.

What do we visualise when we read fiction?

MRI scanner video of a woman singing.

Dictionaries and how we use them.

Of Mice and Men, a found poem.

A bad year for blasphemers.

Pronouncing Diplodocus.

The revival of smeuse.

And cheeseling.

Beware of writing tics.

Shakespeare Confidential.

Why do we say Once upon a time?

Wherefore pleaseth archaic English?

Journal of Language Evolution – a new publication.

How far back in time can we find evidence of deafness?

On the sociolinguistic significance of Martin Luther King Jr.

Murder in 1876 over the pronunciation of Newfoundland.

Irish isn’t ‘compromised’ – it just needs more support.

Monco – a useful new language corpus.

Why designers love the ampersand.

Back to prep(osition) school.

Star Wars style guide.

The smell of Latin.

Compassion fade.

Of Oz the Wizard – The Wizard of Oz in alphabetical order:

Older language links here.

This image has been floating around the internet for a while, but I don’t think I’ve seen it on a language blog. I don’t know who created it, but a search on TinEye suggests it originated on 9gag in 2014 as a two-part visual joke comparing Swedish and German grammar, before being variously (and anonymously) modified and extended.

[click to enlarge]

Tweeting it led to some discussion of its accuracy (which I’m unqualified to assess) and of Finnish being anomalous, since it’s part of a different language family; I guess the set is geographical rather than strictly linguistic.

Finnish has a reputation for being forbidding, but some of those comics misrepresent it, I think: its complexity may be more a subjective thing for people attuned to Germanic-language sounds and structures.

Then there’s the whole idea of representing grammars and languages as animals and monsters. I thought of English as a magpie first, before opting for The Blob given its voracious nature and inexorable spread. Or maybe Larry Cohen’s The Stuff, which is like the Brave New World to The Blob‘s 1984.

What creature, real or not, do you think best represents English, or any other language?

Rather than wait for the next linkfest to share these videos about language – there’s no telling when that would happen – I thought I’d bundle them all together. Most are bite-sized.

First up is Arika Okrent, whose book on conlangs has featured on Sentence first a few times. Her YouTube page has a growing selection of clips on various aspects of language, their charm enhanced by animation from Sean O’Neill. Here’s a recent one on animal sounds in different languages:

At The Ling Space, Moti Lieberman and team are prolific makers of entertaining videos aimed at people learning linguistics or interested in it. The Ling Space Tumblr blog supplements the videos with further discussion. This one is on the anatomy of the human voice:

Tony Zhou’s excellent Every Frame a Painting channel is about film-making. In August 2014 he made one about an emerging convention of presenting text messages in TV and film:

Macmillan Dictionary (for whom I write a regular column) is doing a series called Real Vocabulary that looks at disputed uses of certain words. They’re presented by language-teaching expert Scott Thornbury. In this one he discusses a newish use of the verb grow:

Kory Stamper of Merriam-Webster gave a fine talk last year about what happens when new words spread, why English is like a river, and how dictionaries fit in:

Finally, at the Linguistic Society of America’s recent annual meeting, John Rickford spoke about social attitudes to vernacular speech and linguistic prejudice against minority dialects. It’s comparatively long and detailed, but well worth it if you have the time and interest:

Eschew ‘avoid, shun, refrain from’ is a formal word of Germanic origin that entered English via Old French in the 15thC. It’s not one I use often, still less speak aloud, but a brief exchange on Twitter got me wondering how people pronounce it.

Let’s do a quick poll before I say any more. It simplifies the range of vowel sounds in the unstressed first syllable, so ignore any small difference there for now. I want to focus on the consonant cluster and what we might call the shoe, chew and skew forms.

If you’ve never said eschew or are unsure how to, go with whichever one you think you would say.

[If the poll doesn’t display above this line, try changing your browser or settings.]

When I first encountered eschew I assumed it was pronounced /ɛˈʃu/ ‘eh-SHOO’, or with a schwa: /əˈʃu/ or longer second vowel: /ɛˈʃu:/. Later I heard someone say /ɛsˈtʃuː/ on radio, with the second syllable like chew (or stew, depending on how you break it) instead of shoe.

So I looked it up, and this is the What Happened Next Will Amaze You bit – or not, as the case may be.

A stew – not to be eschewed

Dictionaries note many pronunciations of eschew, all with stress on the second syllable. There’s lots of variation in the first vowel, but most dictionaries don’t mention the ‘eh-SHOO’ form at all, despite its apparent popularity. So a lot of people seem to differ from the recorded norm(s).

Macmillan gives /ɪsˈtʃuː/ for UK English, /esˈtʃu/ for US English. Collins and Cambridge have /ɪsˈtʃuː/, as does Oxford Learner’s Dictionaries for both UK and US. The OED has /ᵻsˈtʃuː/ and /ɛsˈtʃuː/ for UK, /əsˈtʃu/ and /ɛsˈtʃu/ for US. Non-IPA dictionaries more or less concur: American Heritage gives ĕs-cho͞o, Oxford Dictionaries /əsˈCHo͞o/.

The shoe variant is not neglected entirely. Merriam-Webster includes it – along with the rare skew form – beside the more standard ones: \e-ˈshü, i-; es-ˈchü, is-; e-ˈskyü\. Wiktionary notes that /ɛˈʃu/, /ɪˈʃu/ and /ɛˈskju/ are ‘sometimes proscribed’. For example, Garner’s Modern American Usage says:

Many seem to think that the esch- sequence is pronounced /esh/. It is not. The /esh/ sound makes the word resemble a sneeze.

Most usage dictionaries have no comment on the matter.

This consonantal variation is not surprising. Strings of esch aren’t common in English, but they can be pronounced in a few ways. Escher has a ‘sh’ sound and eschatology has ‘k’, while similar schisms occur with other sch words, such as schism and schedule. So it’s natural for people to analyse eschew along either line.

The variation is reflected in the word’s older spellings, which include esshue, etchewe, isschewe, escue, estchue, estewe and exchewe. Etymology, too: the OED says it’s from Old French eschiver, eschever, corresponding to Spanish and Portuguese esquivar and Italian schivare – all from common Romanic *skivāre , < *skivo, and related to modern German scheuen ‘dread, avoid, shun’ and the English verb shy.

All of which multiplicity and uncertainty means you’d be forgiven for shying away from the word, or even eschewing it altogether.

(See also: neologism.)

Guy has followed an improbable path from its origin as an eponym for Guy Fawkes to its common and versatile use today. It’s increasingly popular as a term to address mixed-gender and all-female groups, but not everyone welcomes this development. So how gender-neutral is guys, you guys?

Instead of a simple answer there’s a spectrum that depends heavily on context. But we can draw some general conclusions, as I did in an article at Slate’s Lexicon Valley on guy(s) as a gender-neutral word :

Addresses like Hey guys or just Guys are widely felt to be gender-neutral; set phrases like good guys are less so; usages like those guys shift even more subtly male-ward; singular a guy and the guy are markedly male. Then we have the likes of a guy thing and guys and dolls, which explicitly contrast guys to the female gender (and belie the fact that many people identify as neither).

Even among the more male uses of guy – singular rather than plural, and in reference rather than address – change is occurring. My article shares intriguing examples of this shift, from both children and adults, then ponders the future of gender-neutral guy(s).

Guy is absent from Casey Miller and Kate Swift’s Words and Women, their Handbook of Non-Sexist Writing (except for a passing mention that it’s ‘being debated’), and Jane Mills’s Womanwords: perhaps strangely so, given its profile. In 1980 George Jochnowitz called the shift in the use of guys ‘extraordinary’ and later described it as ‘the only major change in the pronominal system of English . . . since the loss of thou and thee four centuries ago’ (h/t Manu Saunders).

The ‘American’ uses of guys and you guys are prevalent in Ireland but must compete with other options. Irish English lads has a similar pattern to guys, often used to address mixed groups. (There’s also Ah lads as an expression of general discombobulation.) And of course we have ye, youse, yiz and the like. But guys is holding its own.

For more on gender-neutral guys, see Julia Evans’s survey, discussions at Language Log, Language Hat, and language: a feminist guide, and further links in my Slate article.

Joseph Wright’s English Dialect Dictionary (EDD) is a monumental work by any standard. Published in six volumes from 1898–1905, with detailed entries across 4505 double-columned pages, it’s all the more impressive given that its author was largely self-taught and could not read until his mid-teens. (He described himself as ‘an idle man all my life’.)

After studying philology in Germany, Wright began his pioneering work in English dialectology, aiming in the EDD to include ‘the complete vocabulary of dialect words’ in use since 1700. The Oxford Companion to the English Language says ‘nothing of comparable breadth or depth of dialect scholarship has been published in Britain since’.

The EDD is available in various formats at the Internet Archive, but those hefty PDFs can be unwieldy. The good news – great news, for word lovers – is that the book has finally been digitised and is now free and ready to use ‘by all private people, researchers, students and amateurs’. Just accept the terms of use – respect the EDD Online’s special copyright – and away you go.

The director of the five-year project is German/Austrian professor emeritus Manfred Markus of the University of Innsbruck, Austria, which hosts the digitised dictionary. It was financed by the Austrian Research Fund. Markus’s manual (PDF) has background on the work as well as guidance on its use. So if the interface seems a little daunting, consult his instructions.

I haven’t had time yet to explore the EDD Online properly, but I’ve dipped in and it seems to work very well. The use of filters allows for complex and sophisticated searches by type, region, and so on, while the ‘last result’ box enables piggy-back queries: searches within the previous results. Markus gives an example of what you can do:

It will also be possible to combine the class of variants with that of the headwords and thus, by way of a regional filters, generate regional glossaries. This is achieved with the help of the Last-result button. . . . For example, if the combination of headword with dialect, say Yorkshire, produces 7,000 results of headwords – which means that the entries of these headwords somewhere contain the abbreviations for Yorkshire – , then it may occur to the user to start a new query on this subset of entries to find out which of the compounds, combinations and derivations in these entries are affiliated with Scandinavian (Norvegian, Swedish etc.) origin. With the help of this Last-result tool the complexity of queries can be carried to an extreme.

Whether you’re into extreme dialect-digging or just want to scratch the historical surface of local vernacular, the English Dialect Dictionary Online is worth bookmarking and is a laudable public and scholarly resource.

Thanks to Jonathon Green for the tip-off.

Language: Its Nature, Development and Origin by Danish linguist Otto Jespersen appeared almost a century ago, in 1922. It has inevitably dated in some respects – e.g., occasional sexism and ethnocentrism – but in linguistic outlook it feels for the most part thoroughly modern, compared with some commentary on language change and grammar even today.

In March I read the elegant hardback copy (Unwin Brothers, 1959) of Language I picked up in Charlie Byrne’s bookshop last year. A few excerpts follow, more or less in the order they appear in the book.

The first four chapters, comprising Book I, offer an illuminating history of linguistics as a science. They also feature this eloquent diversion on ‘correctness’:

The normative way of viewing language is fraught with some great dangers which can only be avoided through a comprehensive knowledge of the historic development of languages and of the general conditions of linguistic psychology. Otherwise, the tendency everywhere is to draw too narrow limits for what is allowable or correct. In many cases one form, or one construction, only is recognized, even where two or more are found in actual speech; the question which is to be selected as the only good form comes to be decided too often by individual fancy or predilection, where no scientific tests can yet be applied, and thus a form may often be proscribed which from a less narrow point of view might have appeared just as good as, or even better than, the one preferred in the official grammar or dictionary. In other instances, where two forms were recognized, the grammarian wanted to give rules for their discrimination, and sometimes on the basis of a totally inadequate induction he would establish nice distinctions not really warranted by actual usage – distinctions which subsequent generations had to learn at school with the sweat of their brows and which were often considered most important in spite of their intrinsic insignificance.

If you haven’t read Jespersen, the passage gives a fair sense of his style: formal in a lightly scholarly way, but infused with lively vernacular (‘the sweat of their brows’) and altogether accessible. He writes long sentences that build to long paragraphs, but his care for logic means the complexity is noticed chiefly in its appreciation; he has a talent too for the pithy phrase.

Discussing Wilhelm von Humboldt, Jespersen zeroes in on the fundamental dynamism of language, and the related fact that speech is primary:

He [Humboldt] rightly insists on the importance of seeing in language a continued activity. Language is not a substance or a finished work, but action (Sie selbst ist kein werk, ergon, sondern eine tatigkeit, energeia). Language therefore cannot be defined except genetically. It is the ever-repeated labour of the mind to utilize articulated sounds to express thoughts. Strictly speaking, this is a definition of each separate act of speech; but truly and essentially a language must be looked upon as the totality of such acts.

For the words and rules, which according to our ordinary notions make up a language, exist really only in the act of connected speech. The breaking up of language into words and rules is nothing but a dead product of our bungling scientific analysis. Nothing in language is static, everything is dynamic. Language has nowhere any abiding place, not even in writing; its dead part must continually be re-created in the mind; in order to exist it must be spoken or understood, and so pass in its entirety into the subject.

Book II, The Child, has a chapter titled ‘Some Fundamental Problems’. It includes a telling recollection from Jespersen’s own childhood:

The influence of children on children cannot be overestimated. Boys at school make fun of any peculiarities of speech noticed in schoolfellows who come from some other part of the country. Kipling tells us in Stalky and Co. how Stalky and Beetle carefully kicked McTurk out of his Irish dialect. When I read this, I was vividly reminded of the identical method my new friends applied to me when at the age of ten I was transplanted from Jutland to a school in Seeland and excited their merriment through some Jutlandish expressions and intonations. And so we may say that the most important factor in spreading the common or standard language is children themselves.

It often happens that children who are compelled at home to talk without any admixture of dialect talk pure dialect when playing with their schoolfellows out of doors. They can keep the two forms of speech distinct. In the same way they can learn two languages less closely connected. At times this results in very strange blendings, at least for a time; but many children will easily pass from one language to the other without mixing them up, especially if they come in contact with the two languages in different surroundings or on the lips of different people.

This supports my recent article in the Guardian, where I argue that banning slang and regional dialects at school is misguided because children can code-switch between dialects and registers.

The sixth and last chapter in Book II, ‘The Influence of the Child (continued)’, ponders semantic shifts. Some of these are ‘the product of innumerable small extensions and restrictions on the part of the users of the language after they have once acquired it’.

And some are not:

Along with changes of this sort we have others that have come about with a leap, and in which it is impossible to find intermediate stages between two seemingly heterogeneous meanings, as when bead, from meaning a ‘prayer,’ comes to mean ‘a perforated ball of glass or amber.’ In these cases the change is occasioned by certain connexions, where the whole sense can only be taken in one way, but the syntactical construction admits of various interpretations, so that an ambiguity at one point gives occasion for a new conception of the meaning of the word. The phrase to count your beads originally meant ‘to count your prayers,’ but because the prayers were reckoned by little balls, the word beads came to be transferred to these objects, and lost its original sense. It seems clear that this misapprehension could not take place in the brains of those who had already associated the word with the original signification, while it was quite natural on the part of children who heard and understood the phrase as a whole, but unconsciously analyzed it differently from the previous generation.

This history of bead was new to me, and fun to consider. Words more often begin with physical reference and become more abstract over time; bead went in a different direction. It’s related to bid, which has had the sense of ‘offer’ for over a millennium; notice also that its cognate in German, bitte ‘please’, retains prayer’s sense of entreaty.

Another interesting observation – weird might be more accurate – appears in a nearby treatment of what Jespersen calls stump-words (‘violent shortenings’ of existing words, including names): ‘In the beginning of the last century Napoleon Bonaparte was generally called Nap or Boney.’ Nap or Boney!

He also mentions cows more times than I had reason to expect.

Finally, Book IV, Development of Language, opens with a chapter on etymology. Jespersen ponders the aim of this branch of linguistics: ‘What is the object of etymological science?’ He presents a brisk dismissal of the etymological fallacy before concluding with a philosophical reflection:

Many people still believe that an account of the origin of a name throws some light on the essence of the thing it stands for; when they want to define say ‘religion’ or ‘civilization,’ they start by stating the (real or supposed) origin of the name but surely that is superstition, though the first framers of the name ‘etymology’ (from Gr. etumon ‘true’) must have had the same idea in their heads. Etymology tells us nothing about the things, nor even about the present meaning of a word, but only about the way in which a word has come into existence. At best, it tells us not what is true, but what has been true. . . .

It would be wrong to say that language (i.e. speaking man) created first what was strictly necessary, and afterwards what might be considered superfluous; but it would be equally wrong to say that linguistic luxuries were always created before necessaries; yet that view would probably be nearer the truth than the former. Much of what in former ages was felt to be necessary to express thoughts was afterwards felt as pedantic crisscross and gradually eliminated; but at all times many things have been found in language that can never have been anything else but superfluous, exactly as many people use a great many superfluous gestures which are not in the least significant and in no way assist the comprehension of their intentions, but which they somehow feel an impulse to perform. In language, as in life generally, we have too little in some respects, and too much in others.

In a blurb on the jacket, a quote from the Journal of Education rings true: ‘Can be unreservedly recommended. There is not a dull or uninteresting page in it.’

If you want to delve further, you can browse or download Language: Its Nature, Development and Origin at the Internet Archive.

Here is a short clip of Deborah Tannen describing one way boys and girls express themselves differently:

She says boys tend to use language to establish status and negotiate their place in a hierarchy, whereas girls use it to establish rapport and feel the same as each other. Therefore, Tannen says,

they grow up with very different expectations about the place of language and the way we use conversational rituals to get done what we want done. Very often, walking away from the same conversation, women and men will have different interpretations. And often it’s because the women are focusing on the question of connection: Is this way of speaking bringing us closer together or putting us farther apart? And very often men are coming to the same conversation, looking at a different axis, different question: Is this conversation putting one of us in a one-up or a one-down position?

For related discussion, see my earlier post on gender differences in listening signals, which refers to Tannen’s book You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation.

It’s over a year since I blogged about Strong Language. Time to recap.

For the uninitiated, Strong Language is a group blog about swearing – the linguistics and culture of taboo language – set up by James Harbeck and me in 2014. It boasts a great team of writers comprising linguists, lexicographers, historians, editors, and other word adepts.

There are swears in this post, so bail out now if they bother you.

So far I’ve published 29 posts on the blog – some of them guest posts I’ve edited, including one last week by Michael Adams on Donald Trump’s swearing. Our busiest day yet was 1 August last year: over 30,000 people read my post ‘Mapping the United Swears of America’ after it was featured in the Washington Post and other outlets.

I’ve also written about sweary films (visual swears, swear avoidance), sweary songs (Four Femmes; Flight of the Conchords), sweary video games, sweary Sean Bean, sweary abbreviations, bollocking data, fucking ambiguity, and more sweary maps.

Total posts now top 200. There’s Iva Cheung’s sweary oddities, Nancy Friedman’s bawdy brands, John Kelly’s sweary Shakespeare, Gretchen McCulloch’s expletive infixes, Lauren Gawne’s rude gestures, Ben Zimmer’s learnèd lewdness, Rob Chirico’s cultures of cursing, Anne Gilson LaLonde’s scandalous trademarks, Terry O’Hagan’s Irish imprecations, James Harbeck’s obscenaesthetic observations, and many other vulgar delights.

James and I were recently interviewed about Strong Language, and about swearing, on WordPress’s Discover blog, where the comments – like those on our sweary blog – show a general appreciation for and fascination with profanity.

Strong Language is not for everyone, but if you share our interest in taboo vocabulary and such things, take a look. You can also follow @stronglang on Twitter for more regular items of a profane nature.

Cartoon by George Belcher for Punch, 1921. Caption:

Lady: “Is is really necessary to use such dreadful expressions whilst you are at work?”

Plumber: “No, mum, it ain’t exactly necessary, but the quality of the work will suffer if we don’t.”

I’m slowly catching up on the back catalogue of George Pelecanos, who has written about 20 crime fiction novels (and also wrote for The Wire). Recently I read Hell to Pay (2002), which contains several items of linguistic or metalinguistic interest.

The book is one of a handful by Pelecanos that centre on private detectives Derek Strange and Terry Quinn, the first black, the second white, the two ex-cops.

Terry Quinn goes looking for information from sex workers. He bums a cigarette as a way into conversation, but being a non-smoker he has nothing to light it with. Then he encounters Stella, a ‘pale’ girl ‘maybe knocking on the door of seventeen’:

She sat down without invitation. He handed her the cigarette.

‘You got a light?’

‘Sorry.’

‘You need a new rap,’ she said, rooting through her shoulder bag for a match. Finding a book, she struck a flame and put fire to the cigarette. ‘The one you got is lame.’

‘You think so?’

‘You be hittin’ those girls up for a smoke, you don’t ask ’em for a light, you don’t even have a match your own self?’

Quinn took in the girl’s words, the rhythms, the dropping of the g’s, the slang. Like that of most white girls selling it on the street, her speech was an affectation, a strange in-and-out blend of Southern cracker and city black girl.

‘Pretty stupid, huh?’

Meanwhile, Derek Strange meets Eve, who stopped street-walking when she got too old for her pimp, who goes by the remarkable name Worldwide. Their exchange produces a novel verb:

‘Sounds like you’re doin’ all right.’

‘I’m makin’ it.’

‘You just walked away from trickin’, huh?’

‘Worldwide specializes in these young girls. It wasn’t like I went off to another pimp. That’s something he wouldn’t let happen, understand what I’m sayin’? What it was, he couldn’t use me no more. I got old, Strange. So I clean-breaked and came on over here.’

Clean-breaked is presumably formed from the noun phrase clean break. The usual, roundabout way of expressing this as a verb is make a clean break – break clean is not used this way – but instead Eve economically turns clean break itself into a verb: clean-breaked. Note that she clean-breaks from the head’s usual ablaut form broke.

Strange teaches American football to a group of boys. At training one evening one boy, Joe Wilder, makes a skilful touchdown and jogs back with a spring in his step:

‘I be doin’ that on FedEx Field someday, Coach Derek.’

‘It’s I will be doing that,’ said Strange, who then smiled, thinking, I believe you will.

I be doin’ that is an example of habitual be, a feature of Black English (aka African American [Vernacular] English) that I discussed in reference to another Pelecanos book, King Suckerman. In correcting Joe’s dialect to standard English, Strange preserves the habitual aspect: he doesn’t say ‘It’s I will do that.’

Strange keeps up the community-mentor role at his girlfriend’s house, where he tries to lay down some ground rules for her teenage son, Lionel, who protests.

‘I wasn’t even thinkin’ about smokin’ that stuff tonight, you want the truth. This girl I’m seein’, she’s special to me, understand, and I wouldn’t do nothin’, anything, that I thought would get her in any kind of trouble with the law.’

What I like here is the way Lionel expresses negation. The switch of register from non-standard grammar (wouldn’t do nothin’) to standard (wouldn’t do anything), including reinstatement of the word-final g, underscores his resolve – his use of anything is meant not as self-correction but as emphasis.

That g crops up again later when Strange and Quinn are waiting to speak with a man in a department store who, though he is shining a customer’s shoes, also owns the business and several other outlets:

Strange and Quinn waited in an alcove-type area beside the stand. They could hear the white man talking to the shoe-shine man about the Redskins/Ravens game, praising only the black players. They could hear the white man ending his sentences with ‘man’ and they could hear him dropping his g’s, talking in a way that he thought would endear him to the black man kneeling at his feet. Talking in a way he would never talk at work and in a way he would forbid his children from talking at the dinner table at home. Strange looked over at Quinn, and Quinn looked away.

The customer in the store is perhaps overdoing what linguists call accommodation. David Crystal defines it as follows, in his Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics:

A theory in sociolinguistics which aims to explain why people modify their style of speaking to become more like or less like that of their addressee(s). For example, among the reasons why people converge towards the speech pattern of their listener are the desires to identify more closely with the listener, to win social approval, or simply to increase the communicative efficiency of the interaction.

Spelling features in a few other minor ways in Hell to Pay. When I first saw McDonald’s written as MacDonald’s, I wondered if it was a typo. But Pelecanos uses the variant deliberately. Carlton Little, a small-time criminal, ‘loved to eat anything you could take out of somebody’s hand from a drive-through window. Taco Bell, Popeyes, and the king of it all, MacDonald’s.’ (Italics in the original.)

The text in this part of the book is from Little and his tribe’s point of view, and the narration takes on the particular flavours and quirks of their speech. The addition of a vowel and italics for Mac indicate that they stress this syllable. A little later, the same spelling (with the same partial italicisation) recurs in a line from one of Little’s friends:

‘Yeah, well, you keep eatin’ that MacDonald’s, gonna make you worse than sick. Gonna kill you young.’

‘I be dyin’ young anyway.’

‘True.’

Little’s friend may be teasing him through imitation, or this could be how they all say it; probably the latter. The regular spelling McDonald’s occurs twice in running prose in the next paragraph.

Another word I noticed is Pelecanos’s use of y’all in the possessive case: ‘I thought I’d let the weekend pass, didn’t want to disturb your-all’s beauty sleeps.’ I’m not saying it’s rare, but I don’t see it very often. There’s also plenty of y’alls and an all a y’all.

Finally, aiight is used in dialogue throughout. This is a non-standard spelling of all right, which a few dictionaries (including Oxford and Collins) list under aight with one i. The duplicated i-form that Pelecanos uses, aiight, may indicate personal preference or a more gangster style than aight, or it may be an attempt to convey a long diphthong, lest anyone mispronounce it like eight.

My archive has more on language in crime fiction, including Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Walter Mosley, Richard Stark, Ed McBain, Gillian Flynn, Peter Temple, Joe Lansdale, Michael Connelly, and others. For all book posts, go here. For other stuff, try the tag cloud, category menu, or search box.

A selection of items and bite ’ems of linguistic interest found around the internet in recent weeks. Some are short, some long; all are good, or at any rate interesting. Three are from The Toast, because it’s toast <sniff>.

Nifty is a nifty word.

The birth of a book cover.

The linguistics of Black Lives Matter.

On the use – and overuse – of the dash.

How a modern multilingual army works.

Nicknames and gender in medieval England.

Mom and dad as new internet slang.

A short history of swearing.

Emoji aren’t a language – they’re more like gesture.

What what3words (now official in Mongolia) tells us about words.

Language change and prescriptivism in France.

On the use of racist vocabulary in fiction.

Theresa and other sibilant names.

Some countable grey areas.

Germanglish.

Guv as a term of address.

Postal addresses around the world.

How to identify languages at a glance.

Podcast: What does it mean to sound Black?

Capitals out, swearwords in: a journalist’s legacy.

Scots is not just ‘standard English with changed vowels’.

Contrary to reports, the full stop is not dead.

Punctuation peeving and posturing.

The linguistics of band names.

How to style online text.

Playing the [X] card.

Family language.

Why it’s not ‘just a joke’.

Typography in Blade Runner.

Swearing in Early Modern English.

Real vocabulary, not language myths.

The problem with minims in Gothic script.

The parlance of pilots – an ode to Aviation English.

Language-learning and the decolonisation of the mind.

Two linguists explain the pseudo–Old English in The Wake.

There are no certainties in editing, only judgements.

Why the Cornish language should be supported.

The art of translating foreign fiction.

How not to teach grammar.

Your words may predict your future mental health:

[Archive of language linkfests]

Humans are highly prone to cognitive bias. We habitually make bad judgements and draw unreasonable inferences from the available facts. These tendencies lead to many myths that persist in popular culture, and our beliefs about language show the power, prevalence, and persistence of such myths.

We may believe, for instance, that dialects are substandard English, or that texting harms teenagers’ literacy, or that women talk more than men. This last myth gives the name to an excellent new book of popular linguistics by Abby Kaplan, a linguistics professor at University of Utah: Women Talk More than Men: And Other Myths about Language Explained. Cambridge University Press kindly sent me a copy for review.

The book has 11 chapters, one myth per chapter. Each is structured logically, like a textbook, starting with an overview of popular ideas about a topic, comparing them with what linguists have found, and finishing with a conclusion, summary, bibliography, and so on. The bulk comprises a careful case study aiming to resolve a key question: Can animals talk to us? Are some languages more beautiful than others?

The answers to these questions can be complex, often taking the form Yes, but… or No, but… In addressing them, Kaplan reviews key studies on the topic, lucidly explaining their findings and limitations. What does the research show, and what does it not show? Are the results generalisable, and if so, in what ways?

This strategy gives readers a basic grounding in social science research; indeed, this is an explicit goal of the book. So as well as reviewing a broad array of language myths and linguistic experiment, Women Talk More than Men doubles as a mini-course in critical thinking. As Kaplan observes, in a helpful appendix on statistical analysis:

We’re very good at finding patterns, but we are often tempted to conclude that most of the patterns we see are meaningful, even when they’re not. In addition, once we think we’ve discovered a pattern, we tend to look for more evidence that the pattern is real and ignore any evidence to the contrary.

Kaplan’s book serves as a remedy for these tendencies. For example, a chapter on language acquisition explores whether children need to be taught language explicitly. Given the widely socialised convention of talking to infants, it may seem reasonable to suppose this practice is universal, and even necessary for children to develop speech. But some populations, including in the US, seldom address young children like this, and their children grow up speaking just fine. Kaplan notes:

It’s all too easy to study parents and children in our own culture and conclude that we’ve learned something about parents and children everywhere.

Bilingualism is another knotty subject tackled head-on: specifically, whether it helps or harms our intelligence. Perhaps surprisingly, as recently as the mid-20th century the consensus was that bilingualism was bad for you. This has changed completely: ‘most researchers today believe it’s beneficial’. Beneficial how, and what exactly we mean by bilingual, are among the things Kaplan works to resolve.

Along the way, she presents a wealth of fascinating material, for example this ‘spectacular example of widespread individual multilingualism’ in the sparsely populated Vaupés region of the Amazon:

This small region is home to more than 20 languages; some are related to each other (for example, some of the languages are about as similar as Spanish and Italian), but others are from completely different language families. Even though the area is linguistically diverse, the groups that live there share a large number of cultural traditions. One practice shared by most groups is that speakers of the same language are considered close relatives – essentially, brothers and sisters. This means that a man can’t marry a woman with the same native language, because that would be incest. And so, when she marries, a woman moves to her new husband’s community and inevitably brings with her a different language. The couple’s children are socially identified with their ‘father language’, but of course they learn to speak the mother’s language as well, and possibly languages spoken by other in-marrying women in the community (and their children). The result, not surprisingly, is massive multilingualism.

Kaplan notes with interest that no languages in this area are socially privileged over any others, but that great emphasis is placed on learning them properly, and without mixing. It shows, she writes, that ‘although language differences can be associated with social divides and antagonisms, they don’t have to be.’

Other chapters look at sign language, second-language acquisition, and linguistic relativity. Throughout, answers are reached with methodical care based on cautious reading of data. Tables and graphs are plentiful but not excessive, and readers are guided through them. Nor is it all serious, analytical stuff. A reference to the infinite monkey theorem prompts this amusing aside:

This story is meant as a memorable illustration, not a literal claim. ‘Monkeys at keyboards’ are supposed to represent a process that generates random letters; real monkeys, of course, would be unlikely to do this. In 2003, a computer was placed inside a monkey enclosure in a zoo in Great Britain; the monkeys typed several pages of the letter ‘s’ and urinated on the machine.

My only gripes are trivial. With half a dozen or so typos, proofreading could be improved. I don’t care for the cover – though others might – or for the hefty hardback price (UK£59.99, US$94.99). Luckily the paperback is more manageable, at £15.99 or $24.99.

Kaplan’s book is a pleasure from start to finish and is written in a clear, engaging, and persuasive style. It’s an insightful and accessible work that – while aimed at students – will appeal to anyone interested in language and linguistics, especially those who enjoy a good debunking or fancy a primer on what (some) linguists do or what science can be about.

Women Talk More than Men: And Other Myths about Language Explained is available in hardback, paperback, and ebook formats: you can order it from Cambridge University Press, Amazon, or your preferred bookshop. At the Cambridge site you can read the introduction (PDF), browse the contents, and download supplementary resources. You can also hear Prof. Kaplan speak about some of the myths on Irish radio.

An area of language acquisition that has attracted considerable scholarly (and lay) interest is the so-called critical period hypothesis. This proposes a critical period in childhood during which people need to acquire a language in order to become fully proficient in it.

Abby Kaplan’s new book Women Talk More than Men: And Other Myths about Language Explained has a helpful chapter on this, investigating whether the ability to acquire a language falls sharply or gradually after a certain age, whether the progressive difficulty in acquiring a second language is universal or admits exceptions, and so on.

In examining whether early childhood exposure to language is vital for its acquisition, Kaplan writes that one source of evidence is ‘the very sad cases of people who weren’t exposed to a language as children, usually due to extreme abuse or neglect’.

A famous example is Genie, who was found in 1970 aged 13 having spent most of her life until then in isolation.

Image of Genie from the Nova documentary ‘Secret of the Wild Child’

Kaplan writes:

Genie was discovered not long after scholars such as [Eric] Lenneberg and Noam Chomsky had begun publishing claims about the biological nature of language, so her case was of intense interest to linguists. She eventually learned to say a few words but never came close to acquiring a full language; therefore, some linguists argue that the example of Genie supports the critical period hypothesis: because she was too old when she started learning language, she was never able to do so successfully.

But of course it’s not that simple. As Kaplan observes, Genie’s story is consistent with the hypothesis but does not prove it – we can’t establish how much her failure to acquire language is a result of her lack of exposure to it, and how much owes to other factors in her severely deprived and abusive upbringing. Kaplan continues:

Did Genie fail to learn language simply because she never heard it, for example, or did the abuse make her incapable of learning language? Is it possible that she already had language problems at birth? (It seems that one of the reasons Genie’s father neglected her is that he believed she was mentally retarded, although of course today we can’t know whether he was right.)

Genie is still alive, in care, but the details are not publicly known. Books have been written about her, including one by Russ Rymer, who explored the story in the New Yorker a quarter-century ago. On the linguistic side there is Genie: A Psycholinguistic Study of a Modern Day ‘Wild Child’ (1977) by Susan Curtiss, who became close to Genie.

Genie’s story is haunting and desperately sad. I can’t do justice to it here, or to her. Linda Garmon’s Nova documentary Secret of the Wild Child (1994) is a good place to start – but be warned, it’s pretty heartbreaking. There’s a transcript here.

For other films of linguistic interest, see my 2013 post, um, ‘Films of linguistic interest’.

‘Precious Artifact’ is a short story by Philip K. Dick that I read recently in the collection The Golden Man (Methuen, 1981). I won’t get into the story here, or the book, except to lend context to a phrase he coined for it. But if you’re averse to mild spoilers, skip ahead a little.

The phrase is introduced when the protagonist, based on Mars, is preparing to return to Earth, or Terra as it’s called in the story:

Milt Biskle said, “I want you to do something for me. I feel too tired, too—” He gestured. “Or depressed, maybe. Anyhow I’d like you to make arrangements for my gear, including my wug-plant, to be put aboard a transport returning to Terra.”

Milt’s singling out the wug-plant is significant both narratively (for reasons I’ll ignore) and emotionally: he’s attached to it to the point of calling it a pet. Later, on ‘Terra’, he finds it has not prospered in the new climate (‘my wug-plant isn’t thriving’), and soon afterwards ‘he found his Martian wug-plant dead’.

But wug-plant is most significant linguistically. Those of you with a background or interest in linguistics will know why, but for the benefit of other readers I’ll explain briefly.

In 1958 Jean Berko (later Jean Berko Gleason), a psycholinguist researching language acquisition in children, invented an imaginary bird-like creature called a wug, and other nonsense words, to find out more about children’s understanding of grammar. You can see footage of the test here and here.*

The ‘wug test’ proved very influential in linguistic research, and the creature itself has become iconic in the field. Gretchen McCulloch calls the wug an ‘unofficial mascot for linguistics’, and her wugs-tagged posts on All Things Linguistic testify to this. Jean Berko Gleason’s own website has a Wug shop and a photo of her with a large green wug.

For my own contribution to wugnalia I decided to draw a wug-plant – though the result probably isn’t what Philip K. Dick had in mind. At first I pictured a plant with wugs in place of leaves, but that wasn’t nice for the wugs. Then I thought of a wug with leaves, rather like the mutants in Ween’s ‘Transdermal Celebration’ video. But that would be more a plant-wug than a wug-plant.

So I put a wug and a plant together without blending them, to make a ‘wug-plant’ in the ‘butterfly bush‘ sense:

This is the first drawing I’ve put on Sentence first, I think. Forgive its crudeness; it was done quickly. (Long-time readers may remember some old collages: a cosmic postcard in 2009, a jazzy bookmark in 2010, but neither was really language-themed.)

I don’t know whether Philip K. Dick knew about the wug test. His story ‘Precious Artifact’ was first published in Galaxy Magazine in October 1964, not long after Berko’s study but long enough for it to percolate beyond specialist circles (which he may have been exploring anyway).

Note too that wug is very similar to wub, which PKD used in other stories. Both are pleasing words in their own right.

For (vaguely) related reading, see the semantic scope of Martian, a fine distinction from Philip K. Dick, and other posts on language acquisition.

*

* Image from: Berko, Jean (1958). ‘The child’s learning of English morphology.’ Word 14, no. 2–3, pp. 150–177 (PDF).

Before the year runs away from me – it’s about to sprint out of sight – I want to catch up here on the links I’ve been gathering (and in some cases tweeting) over the last few weeks. It’s the usual mix of articles, posts, podcasts, and pictures, all of a linguistic theme. Click at will.

Pseudo-anglicisms.

‘This is not your language.’

The etymology of slang – finally.

The art of editing (podcast, 39 min.).

The race to save Hawaii Sign Language.

What whistled speech tells us about the brain.

People with no language (hat tip to John Cowan).

Mr Slang – of GDoS fame – now has a podcast.

bell hooks and the power of names.

Where did they come from?

The gifts of reading.

How to talk comedy writer.

Some asterisks are audible.

What is the nature of inner speech?

Australia’s linguistic history – and mystery.

Predictive text imitation of The Elements of Style.

What different languages call eggs cooked sunny side up.

Umberto Eco on Irish Gaelic as a response and solution to Babel.

Stuttering songbirds and mice could shed light on how language evolved.

The ’empirical inadequacy’ of Chomsky’s universal grammar.

And: an overview of the Chomsky wars in linguistics.

On ‘nasty women’ and other gendered insults.

An extra-terrestrial view of language.

A magical story about typewriters.

Whoever’s grammar is this?

A linguistic review of 2016.

A note on copronyms.

Is alright all right?

The etymology of stuffing.

Why do things get our goat?

Ellen Seligman’s editing alchemy.

The grammar and semantics of mad.

Information distortion from linguistic isolation.

The delicate art of insults in a post-politeness age.

What do we call people of mixed racial background?

Using corpus linguistics to diagnose Alzheimer’s in authors.

The classic model of how the brain handles language is unfit for purpose.

How has the US accent changed in the last century, and why?

An encounter with one of the rarest sounds in language.

Talking to the linguists who consulted on Arrival.

How to explain linguistics to non-linguists.

The sound of Proto-Indo-European.

Gender in grammar and in biology.

What do emoji sound like?

Creepy-crawly etymology.

Typos in eternal rest.

My latest piece of doggerel in book-spine form has an obvious theme.

*

Language, Language!

Language, language!
The story of language.
Language, slanguage
Spoken here: a history of
Language, a history of
Writing: style, style,
Style in fiction,
Linguistics and style,
Language and linguistics.
What is linguistics?
Understanding language.

*

[click to enlarge]

Thanks to the authors: Daniel Everett, Jonathon Green, C.L. Barber, Leonard Bloomfield, Bernard Share, Mark Abley, Steven Roger Fischer, F.L. Lucas, Joseph M. Williams, Geoffrey N. Leech & Michael H. Short, Nils Erik Enkvist & John Spencer & Michael J. Gregory, John Lyons, David Crystal, and Elizabeth Grace Winkler; and also to Nina Katchadourian. Sorry about the gender imbalance – my language books skew male.

Some of these books and authors have appeared on Sentence first before in one form or another. Language! with an exclamation mark, on the history of slang, is one I reviewed; F.L. Lucas featured in a post on clarity and style; and various others I’ve quoted in passing.

Mark Abley’s book was in a previous bookmash on language, Broken Words; others are The Accidental Grammar, Unlocking the Language, The Name of the World, Evolution: The Difference Engine, Forest of Symbols, Ambient Gestures, and The Web of Words.

If you’re catching up, here’s my full archive of book spine poems. Join in if you like – your bookshelves will never look quite the same again.

Two of my favourite linguabloggers, Lauren Gawne of Superlinguo and Gretchen McCulloch of All Things Linguistic, have teamed up to create a podcast called Lingthusiasm – so named because they’re enthusiastic about linguistics. If you share this enthusiasm and interest, you’re sure to enjoy their new show.

So far there are three episodes: on languages constructed to expedite world peace, and why they’re destined to fail; on the many types and functions of pronouns; and on the fine sci-fi film Arrival (2016), whose protagonist is a linguist encountering an alien language. At 30–35 minutes long, discussions stray into related topics without losing sight of the main current.

All the shows to date have been fun and illuminating, and I’m looking forward to hearing what they talk about next. Lauren and Gretchen know their stuff, have an easy rapport, and are skilled at pitching linguistic concepts to a general audience. I also like the mix of Australian and Canadian dialects.

You can tune in to Lingthusiasm on Tumblr, iTunes, Soundcloud, Facebook, YouTube, and so on, or you can use this RSS feed to download mp3s directly, as I’ve been doing. Happy listening!

It’s often assumed that when babies say mama or papa (or similar) they are addressing or referring to their mother or father explicitly. Not so. In a 2012 post on mama/papa words around the world, I wrote:

Before I knew anything about language acquisition, I assumed that babies making these utterances were referring to their parents. But this interpretation is backwards: mama/papa words just happen to be the easiest word-like sounds for babies to make. The sounds came first – as experiments in vocalization – and parents adopted them as pet names for themselves.

These pet names, or nursery forms, in turn gave rise to our grown-up terms like mother and father – or rather, their ancient predecessors – according to Roman Jakobson’s 1959 paper ‘Why “Mama” and “Papa”?’ (PDF). The striking correspondence of nursery forms cross-lingually can be seen in a table from Larry Trask’s ‘Where do mama/papa words come from?’ (PDF):

The Great Language Muster is a project collecting data from hundreds of languages in an effort to update our knowledge of these and other kinship terms – how we address and refer to parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles. It’s being run by UCL linguistics professor Andrew Nevins, whose research assistant Evan DeFrancesco emailed me about it.

The website introduces and explains the project and then provides a short survey, which you are invited to complete in as much detail as possible. The results of the crowd-sourced study will be available to the public for open-source use and will be of considerable linguistic, anthropological, and general interest. From the site:

We’ve created a simple survey that asks you to list your language’s kinship terms. We’re looking specifically for the “formal” terms for the female and male parents (‘mother’ and ‘father’ in English, for example), as well as the vocative or “nursery” terms for the parents, as well as other family members (‘oma’ and ‘opa’ in German, for example). If you don’t know or are unsure of all the terms in your language, that’s okay, too! Any information that you can provide is tremendously helpful.

We’re also looking for more than just the terms themselves: stress and tone are important for us, too, so if your language makes use of them in its kinship terms, let us know!

You can do so here.

Linguist, professor, and author John McWhorter has featured on Sentence first a few times before, in posts about texting, creoles, dialects, linguistic complexity, and book spine poems. He has written many books and countless articles about language, and has been hosting the excellent Lexicon Valley podcast for the last while.

In the video below, McWhorter talks about the ideas in his recent book The Language Hoax, the hoax being the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, aka linguistic determinism or relativity, depending on how strongly it’s believed to apply.* This is the appealing but mostly unfounded notion that our language shapes the world we experience. There’s a helpful summary of it here, and further discussion in this book review.

The subtitle of McWhorter’s talk, ‘Why the world looks the same in any language’, outlines his position. But he acknowledges there is wiggle room for weak versions of the hypothesis, whereby our perceptions can vary slightly because of our different native languages. It’s a fun and interesting talk, given at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico in 2016. It’s around 50 minutes long, and there’s a lively Q&A to finish.

* Hoax connotes fraudulence, which is misleading; think of it instead as a fallacy, myth, or misapprehension.