Add a Phoneme and Have a Happy New Year

A wonderful quotation by an unknown author:

"A New Year's resolution is something that goes in one Year and out the other."

/hæpi nu ir/... Oops, I meant to say /hæpi nu jir/

Filipino Word of the Year 2010

Jejemon

At a July conference organized by the Filipinas Institute of Translation "jejemon" was chosen as word of the year. The selection was made by a group of academics from the University of the Philippines. Here is an excerpt from an article about the word on GMANEWS.TV:

The etymology of the word “jejemon" is generally presumed to have started from online users' penchant to type in "hehehe" as "jejeje", either because "Jeje" is derived from Spanish, whose speakers denote the interjection as laughter, or because the letters "h" and "j" are beside each other.

The "-mon" appendage, on the other hand, is supposed to come from the Japanese anime Pokémon, with "-mon" denoting "monster," hence "jeje monsters."

Euro-English Fonetics

From an e-mail I received:

The European Commission has just announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of the European Union rather than German, which was the other possibility. As part of the negotiations, the British Government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a 5- year phase-in plan that would become known as "Euro-English".

In the first year, "s" will replace the soft "c".. Sertainly, this will make the sivil servants jump with joy. The hard "c" will be dropped in favour of "k". This should klear up konfusion, and keyboards kan have one less letter.

There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year when the troublesome "ph" will be replaced with "f".. This will make words like fotograf 20% shorter.

In the 3rd year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible. Governments will enkourage the removal of double letters which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling. Also, al wil agre that the horibl mes of the silent "e" in the languag is disgrasful and it should go away.

By the 4th yer people wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing "th" with "z" and "w" with "v".

During ze fifz yer, ze unesesary "o" kan be dropd from vordskontaining "ou" and after ziz fifz yer, ve vil hav a reil sensibl riten styl. Zer vil be no mor trubl or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi TU understand ech oza. Ze drem of a united urop vil finali kum tru. Und efter ze fifz yer, ve vil al be speking German like zey vunted in ze forst plas.

Holiday Homonym Humor

Image from butlerwebs.com

Oh Syntax Tree, Oh Syntax Tree

Merry Christmas Syntax Tree

To all of my wonderful readers,
Hoping you enjoy your family and friends and a little syntax this Christmas.

Unusual Words Defined: A - Z (Part P)

A continuation of the series.

Pogonip

\POG-uh-nip\

noun;1. An ice fog that forms in the mountain valleys of the western U.S.

From: Lovely Little Lexemes

P.S. With time on my hands, I decided to look up the word in the online version of the Oxford English Dictionary (partly because of LLL's post). While the OED did not have a definition for pogonip, here is one of their suggested words and its definition, which I find strangely relevant:

pogonic, adj. 1858
Of or relating to a beard.

Like an ice fog that can form in the valley (bottom) of a mountain, a beard can form on the bottom of a chin.

And that beard can form ice...

Take a Linguistics Fish Boating

I noticed a semantically and syntactically thought-provoking billboard on I-75 North in Michigan this fall and I have been meaning to comment on it. The tagline on the billboard was "Take a fish boating".

My first thought (based on a literal interpretation) was...who the heck would take their pet goldfish out boating with them? Along the lines of "take your son boating".


Syntactically, the sentence is obviously a command with the implied subject "you".

Semantically (and phonetically), I interpreted the tagline as follows: You take a fish when out boating.

This interpretation made me think the ad was created to promote the sport fishing industry and all that goes along with it: boats, bait, lures, rods, bobbers, etc.

It wasn't until I googled the phrase and saw this image of a lure, which by the way, was not on the billboard, that I realized the billboard was advertising a type of lure that resembles a fish.

Linguistics in the News and on Jeopardy

This just in from CNN Tech:

'Jeopardy!' to pit human champs against IBM computer

According to the article linked to above, an IBM computing system named "Watson" will take on two of Jeopardy's most successful contestants ever in a two day match that will be aired in mid-February next year.

The object of the matches is "to see if a machine can compete in a contest that will require it to interpret real-language questions (or, in "Jeopardy!" parlance, answers), research them and answer quicker than the flesh-and-blood champs."

While I do see how the modelling of human language offered by computational linguists has numerous potential benefits, I'm not sure how I feel about the potential of a large-scale decline in person-to-person communication.

Go Brad Rutter!

Go Ken Jennings!

What do you think? Please share comments below.

For a concise look at computational linguistics, check out this link.

A Brief Illustrated Dictionary of Automobile-Related Terms from the Past

Fender Skirts

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:

:

:

Steering Knobs

:

:

:

:

Curb Feelers

::

:

:
:

Continental Kits

Rear bumper extenders and spare tire covers that were designed to make any car as cool as a Lincoln Continental.

:

:

:

And my personal favorite...

:

Foot Feeds

Vehicular vernacular for gas pedals.

*Images from an e-mail I recently received.

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On a separate, but related note, I am currently reading The Detroit Electric Scheme by D.E. Johnson. It tells the story of a murder that takes place in a Detroit automobile factory in the early 1900's. While the novel itself is fictional, much of the story's background is based on historical fact relating to the production of early electric automobiles. Because the settings, the themes and even some of the characters (the Dodge brothers and Edsel Ford) really existed, The Detroit Electric Scheme has been an entertaining and informative read thus far (final review to come).

Unusual Words Defined: A - Z (Part O)

A continuation of the series.

Ob`stu`pe`fac´tive
adj.
1. a. Stupefactive.

b. Producing narcosis or stupor.

From http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Obstupefactive

Facebook and Binding

I recently came across a page on Facebook that I found to be rather chuckle-worthy. Here is the title and a link:

I wish I were an anaphor so I could be bound in your domain

In this basic tree (taken from the Facebook page), Dylan is the antecedent and himself is the anaphor. Dylan and himself are coindexed as can be seen by the subscript indices. Dylan c-commands himself as illustrated by tree position.

An antecedent is a noun phrase that gives its meaning to another noun phrase.

An anaphor is a noun phrase that gets its meaning from another noun phrase in the clause.

Binding Principle A states that an anaphor must be bound in its binding domain.

The binding domain is, loosely stated, the clause in which the anaphor appears.

Binding is a relation between two phrases that involves c-command and coindexing.

More on c-command, coindexing and binding coming soon.

Books That Lay Eggs

Someone (author, editor, publisher, or all of the above) really laid an egg with the title of this book.

The verb lay is a transitive verb. Transitive verbs require two arguments: a subject and a direct object. Which leaves me wondering, what did the dead lay?

And more importantly, how?

In addition to requiring a particular number of arguments, different verb types also maintain different semantic restrictions.

In linguistics, these restrictions are monitored by what are known as theta roles (which equate to the number of arguments required by the verb). Every verb is encoded with a minimum of one theta role and a maximum of three. Theta roles are filled by words or phrases that carry certain thematic relations. Thematic relations being the semantic relation between an argument and its predicate (verb).

The verb lay mandatorily has two theta roles to fill, which are most commonly filled by words or phrases with the thematic relations agent and theme. An agent is an initiator or doer of an action. A theme is an entity that undergoes an action, is experienced or is perceived.

By the thematic role definition, the verb lay requires an animate subject because an inanimate subject cannot initiate an action. So I pose the question again, how can the dead lay? Dead are inanimate by definition; they are not capable of initiating an action.

If, by any chance, the title's use of lay is as the past tense of the verb lie it still doesn't jibe semantically...unless, of course, you believe in the ability of the dead to rise.

Click here for more on the distinction between "lay vs. lie".

Unusual Words Defined: A - Z (Part N)

A continuation of the series.

novaturient

adj. desiring changes or alterations

The tea lady's novaturient wishes went ignored and later that evening, everybody came down with terrible diarrhea.

From: http://savethewords.org/

P.S. The first word I saved was ossifragant in March 2009.

Linguistics Quotation Favorites

"Change your language and you change your thoughts"

-Karl Albrecht

A Wug Defines Efficient Driving

I have long known that Jean Berko Gleason is the linguist who created the Wug Test (pictured and described below); what I didn't know is that she has given an accurate label and definition to my preferred style of driving. Check out this wonderful video clip from The Secret Life of Scientists and Engineers. Jean Berko Gleason is my new idol.



And for those who have not met a wug:

“What’s a wug?” is a question people often ask me when they hear that I developed the Wug Test. A wug is a mythical little creature that looks rather like a bird. It’s included in a series of pictures I drew for a study of kids’ acquisition of English. We wanted to know if children know more about language than just the things they’ve heard from others. For instance, do preschoolers “know” how to make a plural? Adults do: if your friend says he had an “abdominoplasty” and you’ve never heard the word before you still know what two of them are called. Adults know that to make a plural you add some form of -s to the word. Snug as a bug in a rug? No way, it’s a wug!

To find out if kids have the same sort of knowledge we needed to use natural-sounding words that they didn’t already know. If we used real words like “dog,” they might know the plural “dogs,” but this could be an imitation of what they heard from adults. So I invented the little animal called a “wug,” a name that we could be sure they never heard before. We showed them pictures of a wug, and said “This is a wug.” Then we showed them another picture and said, “Now there’s another one. There are two of them. There are two….??” To our delight, even preschoolers could add the plural ending and tell us that there were two “wugs.” We used this invented word method to check kids’ knowledge of plurals, possessives, verb tenses, and a variety of other important features of English and found that by the age of 4 they could provide all the most common forms.

Children learn how to make regular plurals and past tenses before the irregular ones, and sometimes we can see that they have this linguistic knowledge by the kinds of “mistakes” they make. So the next time your 4-year-old friend says “I falled down and hurted myself,” you can be sorry for the booboo, but happy to know that the little guy has knowledge about some basics of the English language.

-Jean Berko Gleason

From PBS The Secret Life of Scientists and Engineers