Statistics

It's more and more common for linguists of all types to use quantitative methods in their research. This used to be something that only certain people did, because it was the nature of the method/subject matter etc. Now I increasingly get the feeling that those who don't are seen by some people as somehow not doing work that is as valid. I'm still pretty well in the theoretical linguistics camp (which doesn't mean we don't use data, interestingly, but it's not quantitative data). This means that my ability to wrangle statistical packages and interpret complex facts is close to nonexistent, but even I could spot some clangers in a recent episode of More Or Less (a BBC World Service programme).

First, there was an item about the apparent rapid increase in antisemitic attacks. The organisation Campaign Against Antisemitism had carried out a survey which revealed a worryingly high rate of British Jewish people being concerned about their long-term future in this country. It's not in question that there is antisemitism to some extent, but the presenter, Tim, noted that it's hard to sample the Jewish population in a fully representative way in this country. In response to Tim asking the reasonable question 'How do you know your respondents aren't disproportionately worried about antisemitism?', the spokesman for CAA said 'If you look at the results, they represent a range of views'. Well. Maybe so, but I think it's quite obvious that you can't judge how representative your sample is just from the responses of your own sample, if you don't have anything to compare it to.

Then there was an item in which someone (I think a Manchester police spokesperson but I could be wrong) talked about 60 men found in canals over the last few years and put this high number of deaths down to an as yet unidentified killer. The programme's researchers looked into how many deaths from accidental drownings one might expect over a similar period. When this chap was told that one would expect 61 accidental drownings, he said this: 'You can't ignore the statistics - well if you want to ignore the statistics...' and went on to speculate further about these deaths being linked. But it's him who is ignoring the statistics, in this case, and speculating on the basis of misleading numbers.

I find More Or Less and similar 'behind the numbers' things really interesting, because I'm fascinated by how easy it is to confuse ourselves and others with statistics. I remember one particular example from Bang Goes The Theory where Dr Yan demonstrated (with bacon sandwiches) how nearly everyone fails to spot that 'bacon increases your risk of bowel cancer by 20%' and 'bacon increases your risk of bowel cancer from 5% to 6%' are making exactly the same claim. We are apparently very bad at this kind of thing.

Apostrophe is a letter and a sound, sometimes

I've just discovered a note to myself to blog about something that bugged me on Only Connect a while back. Only Connect is a BBC4 quiz programme (now moving to BBC2, which seems a shame for BBC4, but I'm not in charge of the schedules) which asks a variety of questions which all have something to do with making connections. The final round is the 'missing vowels' round, in which the answer is a word or phrase with all the vowels removed and the consonants respaced. To make it possible to answer, the contestants are told what connects the answers.

In the episode I'm thinking of, the connections was 'words that end in ii'. There was a Latin plural in there somewhere, I expect, and also 'Hawaii'. Now, the thing is, there is some controversy over this. When the islands became a state, they were the State of Hawaii in official documentation, and some people still do it this way. Others, however, now spell it with the extra symbol, and this seems (as far as I can tell) to be the way we ought to do it.

The symbol, which looks like a single inverted comma, stands for the glottal stop. We use it in English sometimes, when we write in 'eye-dialect': the word water with a glottal stop rather than /t/ is written as wa'er in lots of texts. In English, we usually don't count the glottal stop as a letter. In phonology it is a sound, so it's given much the same status as the other consonants, but replacing another consonant with it doesn't change the meaning. Wa'er and water mean the same thing. This is not to say that we only have letters for sounds that change the meaning, of course, but it means that it's kind of gone unnoticed for a long time and I suppose we just never got round to representing it, or felt the need to.

In the Hawai'ian language, on the other hand, the glottal stop is really considered to be a consonant in the language, and the letter is part of the alphabet. I realise that it's quite hard to find four words that end in ii, and Hawaii at least used to, but it seems like a programme that prides itself on being intelligent and pedantic ought to get things right.

Gwynne, sexist language and causing offence

He's good value, that Gwynne chap. Two posts out of one little book which I haven't even read.

In his preface, Gwynne explains about his use of pronouns. He notes that 'he' used to be used for 'a member of the human race of either sex', but now is found offensive by 'some people' (here, he implicitly compares these overly sensitive people to those sensible women who used to use 'he' 'without hesitation or objection'). He (rightly) says that 'he or she' is 'disagreeably clumsy', but then irrationally dismisses singular 'they', a perfectly elegant and simple solution with good historical pedigree. His dismissal is based on nothing more than the 'authoritative' opinion of a style guide and Simon Heffer, who is a journalist, and whose work has been called 'staggeringly erroneous' and inconsistent by, you know, actual authorities on language (=linguists). So, he says, he will avoid generic 'he' where it is possible to do so, so as not to potentially annoy those namby pamby sensitive readers. However, avoiding it completely is beyond even Gwynne's considerable writing skills, and so sometimes, he must use it to avoid awkwardness. He says,

Please be assured, therefore, on the few occasions that you see the all-embracing 'he' or equivalent, that it is occurring without any offence being intended.

Oh, well, that's all right then. If he doesn't mean any offence, there won't be any offence. Permit me to make an extreme analogy, which I'll put under a break as it refers to highly offensive language (the 'n-word').

When a word becomes unacceptable

There's been a spate of ableist language in my life this week (that is, language that discriminates against people with disabilities).

Ian McMillan and arse

Ian McMillan, the poet, does a lot of stuff on the radio about language. He's keen on accents, particularly Yorkshire ones, and recently I listened to a programme from August in which he tootled about in search of an isogloss; specifically, the house/arse isogloss.

As the blurb notes, an isogloss is 'a kind of linguistic boundary line where accent and dialect changes'. Of course isoglosses are not fixed and absolute, so McMillan's early desire to hear someone stand on one side and say 'house' and stand on the other side and say 'arse' is doomed to remain unfulfilled.

The main point of the programme is that (according to McMillan) in some parts of South Yorkshire they pronounce 'house' as 'house' and in others they pronounce it 'arse'. That's /haʊs/ versus /a:s/, in the International Phonetic Alphabet that linguists use to represent sounds. (In fact, when McMillan says 'arse', it's more like /ɑ:s/, as it is for most southerners. However, he consistently pronounces it with a long version of the vowel in 'man' when he's imitating the pronunciation. Think Jim in the Royle Family.) You'll note from the symbols used that although the two words seem very different, all that's happening is that the 'standard' version has a diphthong (two sounds) and the 'arse' version simply ditches the second sound of the diphthong. We can call it monophthongisation, if we want to win at Scrabble.

McMillan is off, with a musician friend and a local linguist in tow, to try to find these people with 'one of Britain's strangest linguistic features' (I can assure you, it's not even close to that honour). What follows is a lot of highly unscientific questioning of bemused pensioners outside the post office as they turn up to collect their pensions. One, when McMillan asks him if he says 'arse', says 'no, I wouldn't like to swear'.

Anyway, there's a bit of linguistics in there, as we learn about isogloss maps (though it would have been good to follow up with an explanation of how they're drawn and why the line on the map is an idealisation of reality, and why you can't really find it in the real world). McMillan gets a bit mixed up at times, thinking that at the isogloss he should find people who say 'arse', whereas the isogloss is the border. It's precisely there that he might not find them - if he wants those, he needs to look in the heart of the area enclosed by the isogloss. The linguist says that it's likely to be old people who have this pronunciation, and it would have been nice to have been told why that is. But McMillan is a powerful character and most of the time must necessarily be given over to his impressions of other Yorkshire accents, which he clearly enjoys doing.

Something that struck me was that when McMillan was taking care to say the two different pronunciations properly, he would pronounce the /h/ on the 'house' version, and yet when he said it in his normal speech he very often didn't pronounce the /h/ (as is common all over Yorkshire). Even more interestingly, he sometimes merged the two vowel sounds a bit, and sometimes sounded very much like he was in fact saying 'arse', despite claiming to say 'house'. I'd really like someone with a bit more phonetics ability than me to check that he really does say 'house' when he thinks he does.

In the end (spoiler alert), they end up finding people saying 'arse' much further north than they expected (Hillsborough), and McMillan is happy he's found them and all is well. It's an entertainment programme, not a documentary, and we should take what we can get when it comes to linguistics on the radio. Worth a listen, if you're at all interested in poets from Barnsley saying 'arse' at pensioners, peppered with gobbets of linguistic stuff.

As an aside, I noticed an interesting pronunciation of 'house' the other day. McMillan is a Yorkshireman so he wouldn't set foot in the north-west, of course, but Stuart Maconie happened to say the word in a conversation with Mark Radcliffe on their BBC6Music radio programme. They were discussing the MediaCityUK complex in Salford, from where they broadcast, and mentioned the television building, which Stuart called 'Telly House'. He pronounced 'house' like 'ice' (/ɑɪs/ in IPA). I don't know where that's from. According to Wikipedia, Stuart's from Whiston in Merseyside, hung out in Wigan as a youngster, and now lives in Birmingham, and of course he spends every weekday afternoon with a load of Lancashire folk. It could be any of them. Perhaps if I tweet him this link he'll let me know what he thinks.

No word for wool in Tagalog

I was listening to The unbelievable truth the other day, which is a BBC radio programme in which contestants have to deliver a lecture made up of mostly lies, but with some truths slipped in. The trick is to hide the truths so that your opponents think they are lies (and meanwhile they're trying to spot the truths). It's quite enlightening.

In the episode I was listening to, one 'fact' offered was that there is no word for 'wool' in Tagalog (spoken in the Philippines). The other contestants all twitched, wondering if they should go for their buzzers. No word for wool! It could so easily be true! There's no way of knowing, of course, if you don't speak Tagalog. Do they have sheep in the Philippines? If not, they might not have wool, and therefore no word for it! Or maybe they just don't have one word that just means wool, they might have a word that encompasses wool and cotton! Or maybe it's a phrase, not a word, like sheep's hair!

No, it was a lie, I'm afraid. Tagalog for 'wool' is lana.

Hong Kong dollar

Here in the Northeast of England (and in some other British dialects), it's common to hear phrases like ten year or twenty pound, with nouns quantified by a numeral lacking the plural morpheme you'd find in Standard English. It's one of the features of the Geordie dialect I quite like, though I don't do it myself. (Although you'll notice that the colloquial terms quid, nicker and so on tend to be singular - you don't ask someone to lend you twenty quids or twenty nickers. In fact, you'd get some decidedly funny looks if you did ask for that, and possibly a bumper pack of underwear.)

Andrew Graham Dixon presented a Culture Show special called Cash in China's Attic on Friday night, about the booming antiques market in China. He kept on telling us the price of various things, and sometimes he said It's thirty thousand Hong Kong dollars, but sometimes he said It's thirty thousand Hong Kong dollar. He seemed to alternate between using the plural and singular forms. He's not a Geordie, or a speaker of any dialect that this is a feature of, as far as I know. And it's not the case that dollar is always used in the singular in this currency, and he was experiencing L1 influence from English: a Chinese man used the plural form. 

What I think was going on is that he had an interesting case of assimilation to the dialect of many of the people he would have met in Hong Kong. Chinese (Cantonese or any of its other varieties) doesn't have much in the way of inflection, and it doesn't have plural morphology. This means that, although people from Hong Kong mostly seem to speak excellent English, they sometimes make mistakes like not using plural forms. So a lot of antiques dealers and shopkeepers probably told Andrew Graham Dixon the price of things by saying It's one thousand dollar. Either he's just got used to it and started saying it the way everyone else does, or he's assumed that that's the way it's meant to be said and done it consciously. I don't know which, but it sounded decidedly odd. 

Cairo - not XP

That title doesn't say XP as in 'maximal projection', incidentally - it's the Greek letters chi and rho, which look infuriatingly similar to XP.

I was listening to the excellent A history of the world in 100 objects podcast from the BBC, and there was a programme about a very early representation of Christ, on a floor mosaic in Hinton St Mary.

We know that this is him, even though there weren't many pictures of him yet, because it says his name behind his head. Those are the letters, X and P, or chi and rho, the first letters of Christos.

Chi rho, I said to myself, wondering what the letter chi (pronounced kai) was, and then something occurred to me. I don't think I would have had this thought if I'd seen the words written, but because I was listening to audio, I heard chi rho and thought Cairo.

I wonder, I thought, if Cairo is for some reason named after old Jesus himself. Obviously Egypt is an Arabic country with Islam as its major religion, and so has less reverence for some minor prophet than Christian cities would have, but Cairo's had a long history of being pinched by various European nations on account of it being a nice city with a lot of wealth. Who's to say that we don't have our own name for it which is completely different from the Arabic name? It wouldn't be the first time (after all, we call Egypt Egypt, not Misr. See also Bangkok, Germany, Japan and Finland, among many others. Croatia, which I initially thought was another example, turns out to be from the same root as Hrvatska, which is what the Croatians call it).

So I checked Wikipedia and it's not. It's from the Arabic name for the city, al-Qahira (literally the Vanquisher). Ah well. Another theory quashed.

Linguistics in the news - really!

Normally when I write of linguistics being in the news, what I mean is that there is a news item with a linguistic angle that I can write about, or that some news item is about language and I can discuss the 'proper' linguistics behind it. This time, the BBC has attempted a genuine linguistics item.

Shallow Fry

Heh. The post title is a reference to Stephen Fry, so I will now probably receive hate mail for daring to criticise the sainted National Treasure. In his defence, before we start, he didn't write Fry's Planet Word, but he did put his name to it so he has to answer for it.

The programme mentioned above is a BBC2 series currently running, on language. The second episode is the one linked to above, and the first episode is here. I think the first episode was better, actually, but both have the same good and bad points. I'll begin with what's good about these programmes.

More on the language of the riots

This time, it's about the slang the rioters use (article from the BBC).

They call the police 'feds', obviously borrowed from US TV and films, where it's been used for ages to refer to the FBI. Of course they know the metropolitan police are not the FBI, but the term seems to have been adopted and broadened to refer to police officers.

They talk of defending your 'yard', apparently a West Indian term for your home (presumably after the government yards in trenchtown, as sung about by Bob Marley, and the origin of the term 'yardie'). The BBC attributes this mix of slang to Multicultural London English, a mixture of the cultures that are either found in the city or enter consciousness through the media.

There are two terms cited that I don't know at all:

Another, widely reported in the aftermath of the chaos, urged everyone to "up and roll to Tottenham [expletive] the 5-0". There were myriad references as well to the "po po".

 Is 'the 5-0' a reference to Hawaii 5-0? Seems unlikely somehow, given how long ago that was on TV, but Urban Dictionary tells me this is the correct derivation.

'Po po' I'd never heard, but the BBC article says it's from The Wire. I've never seen The Wire, because I'm an idiot, and because I was busy watching Battlestar Galactica when it was on, so there's a lot of Baltimore street slang that I'm not aware of. This is my own failing, and I freely admit it. Urban dictionary just says it means police, though one entry does suggest that it means 'pissed off police officer'. I'm not sure I'm buying that, though; it smacks of folk etymology.