Book review: 'The language lover's puzzle book' by Alex Bellos (Guardian Faber, 2020)

Full disclosure, as I don't normally do reviews in this blog, so publishing this one might be seen to carry a certain amount of weight: the author sent me a copy of this book with a suggestion that I might possibly write about it if I liked it. I did like it, so I am. 

Alex Bellos, Guardian puzzle-setter, has compiled 100 linguistic puzzles – sets of facts about languages from all over the world, with brain-teasers for the reader to solve – with some context about the languages. All of the puzzles are fully work-out-able from the information presented, so in this sense it's a pretty good approximation of what some of our introductory courses look like. I've even used some of the very same puzzles in this book in first year seminars before. They're mostly taken from previous Linguistic Olympiads. This is why I was looking forward to reading it, because for the last few years I've organised a 'markathon' for the advanced papers for the UK Linguistics Olympiad, and so I was already well aware of the fiendishness of some of the puzzles. Happily, Bellos hasn't included the very hardest ones in the book, so they're all manageable, though some are really tricky and would take you a while to do with pencil and paper. 

The way I approached the book was not to try to solve every puzzle as I read through the book. (You could do that, and it would keep you going a really long time, so it's good value if you're looking for a Christmas stocking filler, which I assume is the intended market.) Instead, I cast an eye over a puzzle to get the idea of it, and then flipped to the answers once I'd spotted the principle (or if I couldn't work it out quickly). For me, the interest was more in the linguistic knowledge rather than in the process of solving the puzzle, although some of them were very satisfying in that regard too. For that reason, I actually found having the answers in the back of the book a bit of a nuisance and would have been happy to have at least the bones of the explanation directly following each puzzle, to provide context and grammar facts with perhaps the full walkthrough in the appendix. But that's me, a linguist, not a puzzle-solver. For the average reader it's probably helpful to have the linguistic details separated out from the cultural context. But is that playing into the unhelpful separation of grammar and its speakers, that formal linguists are sometimes charged with? I don't know. 

It's really hard to write a book like this, where you convey the delight of linguistic variation, without falling into the trap of exoticising or depersonalising the languages you're talking about, detaching them from the people who speak them every day when you talk about them as an object to marvel at. I was well aware of this myself when I was asked to be the linguistic expert on a radio comedy panel show earlier this year. Even though the whole production team was consciously committed to not being racist, and fully aware of the perils of accidentally doing so, I know we didn't fully manage it. We avoided some potential clangers, to be sure, but I know we didn't get it right. Can you ever? I'm not sure. And I also think that it's good for there to be books out there that present this delight in diversity rather than just banging on about how wonderful language is without ever going beyond English, so there must be a trade-off, I suppose. In this book, there are the inevitable untranslatable words, Chinese compound words, and other tropes. There are a few scare quotes that I wouldn't have thought necessary (enclosing 'writing system' or 'texts', when the un-scare-quoted terms would have been accurate). Alexander Graham Bell's contribution to Deaf education is also discussed in a positive light, with no acknowledgement of the eugenicist views he held regarding Deaf people and the negative legacy of the methods he used. There are no signed languages included either, with the one exception of Cistercian sign language. But in the main, the material in the book is presented in the spirit it's intended: fascination with languages and the different ways they can do things. Languages are presented from all over the world, and although Europe is over-represented (especially English, which is a conscious decision on the author's part) and Africa rather under-represented considering the linguistic diversity there, it is a world tour.  

Most of the puzzles don't require you to have any linguistic knowledge at all. Some of them need you to make an educated guess about what a language might be like, but a lot of them are simply pattern-spotting and logical deduction.  Puzzle 10 was a nice example of one where you needed to simply match up the patterns, spot the links, but then make a couple of educated guesses about things that didn't quite fit: it demonstrated very neatly the complications that natural languages can bring. And the twist in that puzzle was a joy. I learnt some language facts from the book, including about counting in Japanese and Danish, and I also learnt other non-language stuff too: things about mathematical symmetry, and botanical notation for describing petal structure, and was reminded of the bizarre language to describe coats of arms. 

There's a strong focus on writing systems, as you might expect, with chapters on alphabets and scripts and invented writing systems and codes of various kinds. There are also chapters on terms for family members, counting systems and dates, which reflect the kinds of things that Linguistic Olympiad puzzles are about (and which you can make a self-contained puzzle about). I was impressed by how coherent the themes are, though occasionally something unexpected popped up - puzzle 45 is a fun puzzle about garden path sentences, in the chapter about kinship terms, linked just by including the phrase the old man. 

I'll be adding this to my department's recommendations for prospective students. It's linguistically accurate, as far as I can tell (bar the definition of parts of speech in the 'technical' chapter on grammatical features that differ most from English), with input from linguists and native speakers. And I'll also be passing my copy on to a teenager who I think will like it, having just taught himself Esperanto. I think it would work for someone who likes logic puzzles just as well as someone who likes language-related trivia, though, and definitely for someone who likes learning languages just for the sake of it. 

Have you eaten Grandma? (review)

Cover of 'Have you eaten Grandma?'
by Gyles Brandreth

I was considering writing a review of this book, Have you eaten Grandma? by Gyles Brandreth, but to be quite honest it's not worth bothering.
[Edit: I ended up writing a review of it anyway so here you go.]

It's neither surprisingly good nor toe-curlingly awful. I got it for professional purposes (I'm teaching a module on 'Grammar for Everyone' this term and want to look at all sorts of books that claim to be about 'grammar') and I'll get something out of it for that, I suppose, but I'm glad I didn't buy it for pleasure.

I had been ready to be cross about it after seeing this little video in which Gyles (known as being a pedant, has done truly awfully smug programmes about language in the past) talks about some of his 'bugbears' including redundant myself, can I get rather than may I get, and so on. In fact, it's exactly what you expect.

The majority of it is punctuation advice. It's fine, with only a few mistakes, but Eats, Shoots and Leaves is better if that's what you want. Then there's lists of words, either just ones he likes or ones that people often get wrong in writing (accept vs except, for instance) and mnemonics (sometimes very weird ones) to help remember them.

He has a bizarre joy in some -- but not all -- neologisms. He seems to have (like Stephen Fry) come around from pure prescriptivism to the joys of what he calls 'slang' some time in the 1990s, and so he loves things from then. He's constantly saying End of, for example, like at the end of the video above. He gives a long list of initialisms like WTF (which he loves) and describes some of them as being of 'the Whatsapp and Snapchat generation', which needless to say were totally unfamiliar to the teenager I asked. And yet he is so rigidly inflexible about some things that he was taught were correct, and so are immutable rules for him (you mustn't ever, ever say bored of, for example, despite the fact that there's no harm in it whatsoever and millions of people do say it).

There's an embarrassing section of the abbreviations part where he talks about labels for gender and sexuality that verge on poking fun at LGBTQIA-type initialisms. He shows a clear support for non-binary, non-straight identification, but still betrays an opinion of 'simply straight' being 'normal' and 'knowing where you are'. The section on American vs British English is terrible, and relies only the books of people like him, not linguists. This is not a book that seeks to promote truth.

This is very evident throughout, when he often refers to 'the Brandreth Rule' on particular points. This means that he knows that there are different ways of doing things, and his arbitrary choice is the one he likes the best. That's what this book is. It's for people aged about 50 or 60, who 'love the English language', and just want someone who agrees with them to reinforce their opinions and tell them the things they already know so that they can be smug about knowing them. I've come to realise that anyone who says they 'love the English language' doesn't really love the English language, not as it really is. They love some idealised version of it, the version they speak, the version they think is 'best', and which is being 'corrupted' by Americans, kids, foreigners, or modern education.

It's a perfectly acceptable, slightly dull book. If you want to learn some stuff about punctuation or commonly confused words, then it's one way of doing that (but not the best way). If you just want an authority to refer to on certain style points, it'll do that (but there are better authorities to refer to). It's not the best of any of the things it does, but it is by Gyles Brandreth, and that is its selling point. End of. (Sorry, that was such a lazy way to end this but I couldn't resist.)

Linguistics of 'Arrival'

In this post I slightly spoil some of the funny bits and a lot of the linguistics in the film, though probably not the crucial bits, I don't think. Stop reading now if you want to play it safe.

Excitingly, I managed to get invited to a screening of Arrival last week, a good six weeks before it's due out on general release. I went with a handful of other linguists, so we enjoyed the complimentary booze with a bunch of (we assume) critics and then settled down to watch a film that we were somewhat trepidatious about. The main character in this film is a linguist, and this doesn't always give a terribly accurate impression of our business. However, some of my companions had read the short story it's based on, The story of your life by Ted Chiang, and were hopeful that the film would do this story justice.

It did, as it happens, and I'd recommend it if you like thoughtful scifi with aliens, stern US military types and a romantic side-plot. Personally I'm not a huge fan of all these things; the romantic side-plots can do one as far as I'm concerned, but in this film it worked well and contributed to a really clever twist to the story.

Right. David Adger has written a nice post about the language of the aliens and how 'alien' it really is. I'm going to focus on a few points where linguistics was a focus of the film and how it was treated.

The language in the film, Heptapod (the aliens have seven tentacle-feet things), is a visual language. There is a spoken language as well, but the linguist protagonist, Dr Louise Banks, decides that the visual language is the one she can work with to communicate with them. I can't remember why she thinks that, now, but it probably would have been harder to synthesise the spoken language to communicate with them (and she certainly couldn't produce it herself). (Note to self: don't try and write film reviews after having seen them and then drunk lots of wine a week previously.)

This language is formed by the heptapods squirting a sort of squid-ink-type substance in circular shapes with irregular edges, like coffee cup rings. These irregular bits are not actually irregular, of course, as they are what conveys the meaning. Each ring is a sentence (I don't know if we found out if they have complex sentences, with more than one clause). These symbols (the Independent calls them a 'complex form of hieroglyphs', though I'm not sure why) are holistic: they're produced as a whole, not made up of obvious parts. This is important to the story, as it is representative (in fact the cause) of the way the heptapods see the world: time is non-linear to them. However, they're not inseparable. In translating the language, with a good deal of computer analysis, the scientists identify tons of nodes in the rings that map onto meaning. When Louise talks to the heptapods, she creates rings from four or five segments. Clearly, there is combinatorial stuff going on here. I think the story talks more about how it works, so I'll know more about that once I've read it.

I liked the way Louise and her job are portrayed, for the most part. She is called a 'linguist', not any other job title, and she really is one. Near the start of the film, we see her giving a lecture on comparative romance linguistics. She employs what are, as far as I'm aware, linguistic fieldwork methods in her efforts to understand the heptapod language (she proceeds very quickly, but maybe that's because she has the US military and its computers behind her). Linguistics is referred to as a science and compared favourably to maths at one point by the theoretical physicists (not sure what he was there for).

***slight spoilers***
At one point, she told the kangaroo story, which Wikipedia relates like this:

Cook and Banks were exploring the area when they happened upon the animal. They asked a nearby local what the creatures were called. The local responded "Kangaroo", meaning "I don't understand you", which Cook took to be the name of the creature.

The row of linguists sat in stony silence at the punchline. However, when she reveals it not to be a true story a moment later, we had the last laugh.
***spoiler over***

Some things were a little bit less accurate. For one thing, her house was amazing. What mid-career female linguist is paid that much money? Perhaps she was well-paid for the work she'd done when seconded to the army previously.

She also speaks all the languages. I mentioned at the start that she was lecturing in comparative romance linguistics. Perhaps this isn't her specialism; heaven knows I lecture in all kinds of things that I don't know an awful lot about. But we do know that she was able to help the military with some Farsi interpreting. When the Colonel turns up on her doorstep and asks 'Do you speak Mandarin?', the answer is apparently 'yes'. There's possibly an explanation of this later in the film, but at that point it feels like a very lucky coincidence and playing into the stereotype of what linguists do (i.e. speak all the languages).

At one point, it seems that she is going to be unsuitable for the work they want her to do. She asks them if they're going to see some other guy next (let's call him Linguist B as I didn't make notes) and says, 'Ask him the Sanskrit word for war and its translation' (which as my colleague noted doesn't make much sense, but I guess I know what they meant). He comes back and says that Linguist B said it means something violent, and what does she say it means? She says 'a desire for more cows'. A quick internet search shows that this is generally known, although I'm afraid I lack the desire to fact-check it. This plays into the Sapir-Whorfianism that runs throughout the film, whereby language shapes the way you think. It doesn't actually make much sense to say the Sanskrit word for 'war' means 'a desire for more cows'. Either it literally means that but is used to mean 'war', in which case it means 'war', or else it isn't the word for 'war'. Sanskrit speakers definitely have the ability to wage war, so it's not that they don't have a concept of it due to the lack of a word for it.

But still. At one point she is explaining why she needs to go through a ton of basic stuff like pronouns when all they want to know is 'What is your purpose on earth' and we get a great linguistic explanation of everything that's involved in understanding and therefore answering that question. We also get a nice 'problem of translation' point when it hinges on whether a certain word means 'weapon' or 'tool' (and the answer to which it is is pretty cool by the way).

I'm happy with it, as a linguist and as a scifi fan. Go and see it. It's good.

Aside: Reviews are less linguistically well-informed. Apart from the aforementioned use of 'hieroglyphs' in the Independent, the Guardian says this:

Why, you ask, did they not approach Noam Chomsky, with his understanding of “deep structure” in language? Perhaps Prof Chomsky did not care to help America’s military-intelligence complex.

I assume they've said this just to make a sort of political joke, but this is such a stupid question it should never have been asked. I also have an understanding of 'deep structure' in language, having studied it for 12 years or so now, and I can assure you it doesn't give you a magical ability to understand unfamiliar languages. If anything, it might make him less able to work with a language that may not conform to this deep structure (see David's post linked earlier). Linguistic fieldwork is a fiendishly difficult task that takes years of training and practice to do well, and it's something that Chomsky has not specialised in. In fact, he's often criticised for doing precisely the opposite.

Misunderstanding

I'm currently reading English for the Natives by Harry Ritchie. I might try and do a proper review sometime, but for now here's a snippet.

I knew that this book was not going to be sympathetic to my linguistic views when I saw Ritchie at the English Grammar Day this year and he went on about how wrong Chomsky was about Universal Grammar. I work within the paradigm of Generative Grammar, which is what people outside GG call 'Chomskyan' grammar. Chomsky himself does not use this term, and I dislike it as it implies uncritical acceptance of all his ideas (and, actually, the worst critics of Chomsky do assume this of his 'followers', as they inevitably call them, as if he is a cult leader).

Generative Grammar has been extremely successful, and is a flourishing research area, but there is an equally flourishing anti-GG crowd as well. Some of these people simply work within different frameworks and don't pay too much attention to us, but others actively attack Chomsky's ideas in particular. A characteristic of these people is that they tend not to engage with very up-to-date work, they tend to look at Chomsky only and no other researchers, and they often misunderstand or misrepresent things. Ritchie is not a linguist, although he has had some training, and so I'm going to put the mistake I'm about to talk about down to misunderstanding rather than deliberate misrepresentation. (One thing that is definitely misrepresentation is when he switches from a reasoned exposition of the ideas of Universal Grammar into using terms like 'magical', which is simply ridiculous when he outlined the non-magical explanation a few pages earlier.)

On page 51, during the 'ah, but it turns out Chomsky was totally wrong' section, he describes Geoffrey Sampson's work refuting Chomsky's claims using the British National Corpus. At one point, he says that he simply 'dusted down his 1947 edition of Teach Yourself Malay' to show that there is no universal distinction between nouns and verbs - apparently this language doesn't have this supposedly universal demarcation. They must think generative grammarians literally never look at other languages. If it was that easy to disprove just by looking in one book, would the theory really have stood up all these years? He even then says that English 'often dispenses with any noun-verb distinction and relies on the speaker to figure out how the word is functioning', with examples like 'cut' which can be either, depending on context.

This is such a basic misunderstanding. English and Malay both do distinguish nouns and verbs. Having them behave differently in the two different contexts precisely is distinguishing them. When cut is a noun, it can take an article, for instance ('make a cut along this line'), while it cannot when it's a verb, but then it can have a subject ('she cut the cake'), which nouns cannot. This is distinguishing nouns and verbs. Malay is even less of a good example: it actually has affixes to indicate if a word is a noun or a verb. This is not even just context: the form of the word itself distinguishes the categories.

The literature, especially popular books like this one, abounds with such fundamental errors. See, for example, the recent book by Vyvyan Evans, criticised here for its many, many misrepresentations. See also the lengthy debate about recursion, admittedly not helped by a fantastically unclear definition of recursion, but which once properly defined ought simply to have ended but trundles on regardless.

Anyway, I'm expecting the book to get much better once we're past the Chomsky-bashing, because Ritchie had a lot of interesting things to say at the English Grammar Day and spoke (and writes) in a very entertaining manner.