Author: Zwicky Arnold

Following on Barbara Partee’s posting on vwllssnss, here’s today’s Zits:

Nice conceit about dispensing with vowels in speech (as well as vowel letters in writing).

Dateline April 1, 2010, a bulletin from the Association for Psychological Science to its members:

Silent No More:

The Case for Changing Our Pronunciation

At its December 2009 meeting, the APS Board of Directors was unanimous in support of a proposal by the APS Pronunciation Committee to change how we say the words psychology and psychological (and psychologist) to include the initial “p” sound. In keeping with APS bylaws, such a change in pronunciation needs to be decided by a vote of our membership. If approved, members would be required, or at least strongly encouraged, to pronounce the “p” sound in the name of our science.

puh-sy-kol-uh-jee

The word psychology has a long and hallowed tradition, having been coined in the 16th Century by the German theologian Melanchthon based on the Latin psychologia, meaning”study of the breath” – exactly what the word means for today’s researchers. From then until early in the last century, the initial phoneme in psychology was said aloud. Psycholinguists speculate that nonpronunciation of the “p” can be traced to none other than James McKeen Cattell, who idiosyncratically left the sound off, and to his students and colleagues, who imitated his affected way of saying psychology in the hope of posthumously getting a Cattell sabbatical award. Thus the silent “p” has its origins in sycophantism, much like the Castilian lisp. Since Cattell’s time, the “p” has remained silent.

However, increasingly the trend among both professionals in the field and laypeople alike is to once again pronounce the “p,” and the APS initiative represents an attempt to keep our relatively young organization in step with the times. This change would also better distinguish our Association from other organizations whose members continue, anachronistically (and, we think, pretentiously), to leave the “p” silent. In the halls of psychology departments, and at meetings, it will no longer be difficult to tell who is a member of which organization: How you pronounce psychology will be like a badge of loyalty: Are you a scientist or are you … something else?

And there is a final, long-term consideration. The trend in written English is toward simplification of spellings to conform to how words are commonly pronounced. Witness the words plow (formerly plough), catalog (formerly catalogue), and the increasingly common CUL8R (“see you later”). If this trend continues and English speakers continue to leave the “p” silent, the time may soon come when psychology is spelled sykolojy. Our acronym would then become ASS. Nobody wants that.

So, we respectfully submit, let’s look again at the pronunciation of our Association’s middle name. Think it over, members, and decide.

As an added note, the APS Pronunciation Committee is also currently considering a motion to pronounce the first, silent “c” in science as a hard “c” – i.e., “skience.” If approved by the committee, this proposal will also be put to a vote. Stay tuned!

I am a real skientist; I have a degree in skience.

[Addendum: Jonathan Lundell points out that the title of this posting should be: “Psilent no longer”.]

[Further addendum: I originally didn’t open this posting to comments because I feared that comments would branch off in a number of different directions, several of which have been touched on in Language Log. But a number of people have their favorite plays on “silent letters” in English spelling, so I’m opening up comments for people who want to cite some of the vast number of these. I’m kicking this off with a piece of mail from a reader.]

It’s that time of  the year again: the LINGUIST List’s annual fund drive is under way, for the month of March; the drive is about halfway (about $32,000) to its goal of $65,000 (the money goes to support the student staff). From the list’s site:

The LINGUIST List is dedicated to providing information on language and language analysis, and to providing the discipline of linguistics with the infrastructure necessary to function in the digital world.

LINGUIST maintains a website with thousands of pages and runs a mailing list with tens of thousands of subscribers worldwide. LINGUIST also hosts searchable archives of over 100 other linguistic mailing lists and runs research projects to develop tools for the field.

The LINGUIST mailing list provides a space for open discussion, reviews of publications, job listings, information on conferences, and much more. LINGUIST also runs an Ask A Linguist service, where people can get answers to questions about language and linguistics.

The list is an incredible resource for linguistics, deserving of your support. Small donations are welcome, by the way.

(Information for donors is on the site, along with special features like a “linguist of  the day” writing about how they got into the field. This year’s writers are Claire Bowern, Dafydd Gibbon, C. T. James Huang, Pius ten Hacken, Anna Wierzbicka, and Anthony Woodbury. Four Language Loggers have been honored this way in the five years LINGUIST has provided this feature.)

Late-breaking news:

The New York Times Magazine announced today the appointment of linguist and lexicographer Ben Zimmer as the new “On Language” columnist. Mr. Zimmer succeeds William Safire who was the founding and regular columnist until his death last fall. [alas, a non-restrictive relative clause missing its comma] The column is a fixture in The Times Magazine and features commentary on the many facets – from grammar to usage – of our language. “On Language” will appear bi-weekly beginning March 21.

Yes, our very own Ben, who was proud enough to tell the rest of the LLoggers, but too modest to post the announcement himself.

Massive pleasure at Language Log Plaza and on ADS-L.

John McIntyre has once again wandered off into that parodic fantasy land where usage writers and linguists disport themselves as characters in hard-boiled detective fiction. This time, on the occasion of National Grammar Day, it’s “Pulp Diction”; the complete serial is here. The climax of the tale comes in installment 4 (“The dark tower”), when Language Log saves the day:

With the thunder of many boots, a battering ram burst open the door. In strode Mark Liberman of Penn at the head of Language Log’s Modal Auxiliary Corps.

The four installments were posted separately, and you can add comments on McIntyre’s blog.

It’s March 4, or Opal Eleanor Armstrong Zwicky’s birthday (now we are six) — and also National Grammar Day, which I’ve posted about in the past (in 2008 here, in 2009 here). Those of us who think of ourselves as grammarians — studying the syntax and morphology of languages and the accompanying facts of usage — tend to take a dim view of NGD, which has been framed as a festival of peeving and stern mocking of “incorrect” language.

For some views this year, see Dennis Baron here, Gabe Doyle here, and Neal Whitman here. Gabe and Neal go to some lengths to try to reclaim the occasion for some actual celebration of cool facts about English syntax and usage (plus the usual attempts at debunking persistent, and apparently ineradicable, myths about these matters).

I’ve grown deeply pessimistic about NGD as a vehicle for such reclamatory efforts. It seems to me that the day is especially unlikely to provide a receptive audience for what linguists have to say. Instead, I’ll go on talking, every day, about [real] grammar and usage (with excursions into informal, conversational, dialectal, and frankly non-standard usages, plus explorations of innovative usages, plus investigations of actual mistakes of many different kinds).

Jens Fiederer writes with a link to this blog posting, about North Korean ideologies as described in B.R. Myers’s How North Koreans See Themselves — and Why it Matters. The blogger adds:

I also recommend the new book Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea, by Barbara Demick.  Excerpt:

North Koreans have multiple words for prison in much the same way that the Inuit do for snow.

From the cartoon Ham and Wonder (by “lapsed linguist” Joe), an adventure in garden pathing, with a bit of explanation:

From the BBC, as reported by electric halibut here, the headline:

Last Alder Hey hospital child remains buried

which is to be understood not as being about a child continuing to be buried, but as about the remains of a child being buried. The beginning of the story:

The final human remains held by Alder Hey Children’s Hospital after the organ retention scandal are to be buried later.

The Liverpool hospital removed organs from dead babies without permission and held them for medical research.

In the January 25 New York Times, two items that caught my eye:

First, a front-page piece on the Tohono O’odham Nation of southern Arizona: “In Drug War, Tribe Feels Invaded by Both Sides” (by Erik Eckholm). The tribe is pressed by drug smugglers and by federal agents, a combination that has made their lives difficult indeed.

Linguists will recognize the group as the people formerly known as the Papago (a name given them by unfriendly outsiders), whose (Uto-Aztecan) language is familiar to linguists through the work of the late Ken Hale and his student Ofelia Zepeda. Reading about the trials of the Tohono O’oodham is like hearing distressing news about an old friend.

Then, back in the New York section of the paper, “For Transgender People, Name Is a Message” (by William Glaberson), on the work of Manhattan’s Civil Court in managing name changes for transgendered people, a task made easier by two court rulings: one overruling a judge “who had insisted on doctors’ notes giving reasons for name changes in transgender cases” (“no sound basis in law or policy”, the court said) and one making “an exception to a general requirement that name changes and home addresses be advertised in newspapers” (“the safety issues for people in gender transition” are “obvious in a world that can be hostile”). Touching stories about people’s pleasure in getting their new names, plus an (I suppose predictable) warning from an opponent of same-sex marriage that the courts might be “ahead of the public on gender issues” and advancing an agenda.

Over on ADS-L, Larry Horn read his NYT carefully:

One additional highlight of the Virginia Heffernan guido/guidette piece in today’s N. Y. Times Magazine section is a nice example of a plural pronoun with singular sex-known but indefinite antecedent, a phenomenon we’ve discussed in the past. Here’s Sammi Sweetheart, describing the role she plays in the MTV Reality show, “Jersey Shore”, as quoted by Heffernan

“A Guidette takes really good care of themselves, has pretty hair, cakes on makeup, has tan skin, wears the hottest heels.”

Larry went on to cite some further examples of non-epicene singular they (with indefinite antecedent) from his files:

(1) No mother should be forced by federal prosecutors to testify against their child. (Monica Lewinsky’s mother’s attorney)

(2) Someone left their sweater. (note left in Yale classroom next to what was obviously a women’s sweater)

(3) Who knows what crazy idea she’s going to come up with.  She may have met someone in the checkout line at the grocery store and she’ s planning to marry them. (Garrison Keillor monologue, Prairie Home Companion, 3/9/02)

(4) I told the guys this is the team.  But I do have a nucleus of guys who will be on the ice more. I plan to sit down with each individual and line out their role. (John Cunniff, new coach of New Jersey Devils’ (all-men’s) hockey team, on being asked about personnel changes; NYT 11/ 8/89)

(5) I challenge you to find a lesbian who doesn’t want to see themselves portrayed on television. (actress on Showtime’s The L-Word)

(6)  WHO WEARS WHITE DURING THEIR PERIOD? (from a panty-liner commercial on television)

It’s been a while since we looked at such cases on Language Log. Here’s an indefinite-antecedent case:

GP, 1/3/06: Singular they with known sex (link): any girl … they

plus two with definite antecedents of known sex:

GP, 10/21/04: They are a prophet (link): this person [unknown writer of graffiti in a males-only toilet stall] … they

GP, 4/26/07: Virginia, who said they would come (link): Virginia … they etc.

I generally find definite-antecedent examples comprehensible but grammatically bizarre.  But practice might be changing.

Just a pointer to a bit of whimsical language play described by Erin McKean in the Boston Globe‘s “The Word” column: composites of the form X Y Z, created by overlapping a composite X Y with a composite Y Z. So: sweet tooth fairy, from sweet tooth plus tooth fairy. Examples that make “a certain cockeyed sense” (parlor game warden) or those “merging wildly divergent things” (magnetic personality disorder) are especially entertaining.

Post comments to Erin’s column.

That’s the title of a recent book by science fiction writer John Scalzi (hardcover 2008, paperback 2010). The subtitle — A Decade of Whatever, 1998-2008 — refers to the fact that the book is a selection of essays from Scalzi’s blog Whatever, which he’s been writing since 1998, on a wide range of topics, including current affairs, politics, entertainment, parenting, and some goofy stuff. Every so often Scalzi responds to some of the voluminous hate mail his opinionated essays provoke, by critiquing the form and content of the mail (hence the title of this book). (Hat tip to Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky.)

A recent entry was graced by that icon of popular culture Homer Simpson, voicing his famous interjection:

Some Language Log postings on d’oh here, here, here, and here.

(Also from Scalzi, the 2007 book You’re Not Fooling Anyone When You Take Your Laptop to a Coffee Shop: Scalzi on Writing, which is not a manual on writing style, but a book of essays mostly about the practical details of a writer’s life.)