William Labov

I had the great opportunity last night to hear a talk by the sociolinguist William Labov, "The Growing Divergence of English Dialects in North America." Labov's thesis is that North American English is becoming more not less heterogeneous, that regional dialects are becoming increasingly different from each other. The "action," as he called it, is almost all in the vowels. He offered numerous examples (with audio clips) of chain shifts (vowel sounds trading places: for instance, busses pronounced bosses) and mergers (different vowel sounds pronounced in the same way: for instance, Dawn pronounced Don). Both trends lead to greater possibilities of misunderstanding in speech. One sample exchange:

"I started sneezing in Greek Meter -- that's a class. Dawn's dog must have heard it."

"Don's dog?"

I loved the fleeting thought of someone sneezing in, say, dactylic hexameter. Epic sneezes! Kchaou!

Here's a observation Labov made on language and its relation to matters of communication and truthfulness:

A parrot can say "I will meet you downtown at 8:00" -- but he won't be there.

Labov's words reminded me of the motto of the London Stock Exchange, "Dictum meum pactum," "My word is my bond." I know nothing of the London Stock Exchange, but the philosopher J.L. Austin and the poet Geoffrey Hill both make use of this motto in their work (misquoted, it would seem, as "Our word is our bond").

A few links if you'd like to know more about William Labov:

William Labov's homepage (University of Pennsylvania)

How I got into linguistics, and what I got out of it Essay by William Labov

A Linguist's Journey (PBS) The above essay and other materials

American Accent Undergoing Great Vowel Shift (NPR)

Talking the Tawk (New Yorker) On Labov and Brooklynese

The Atlas of North American English: Phonetics, Phonology, and Sound Change (Mouton de Gruyter) Demo of the online resource

The Atlas of North American English: Phonetics, Phonology, and Sound Change (Amazon) The print version ($749)

(Thanks, Elaine and Rachel!)

Multitaskers, take note

Elaine pointed me to this photograph at Dark Roasted Blend. The sign isn't real signage: it appears only on this poster, from Peterborough, England, made for display in businesses and workplaces.

Think! Switch it off when you drive (Peterborough City Council)

Related post
The bottleneck in the brain

(Thanks, Elaine!)

The oldest song

The oldest known song, "The Prayer of an Infertile Woman," received its North American premiere last week:

Inscribed in cuneiform symbols on a clay tablet, this tune is, in fact, 1,200 years older than Jesus.

The singer was Dr. Theo J. H. Krispijn, an accomplished vocalist who has appeared on Dutch television. He also is a professor in Assyriology at Leiden University in the Netherlands, and, in that role, brought back -- after 3,200 years of silence -- the plaintive cry of the infertile woman beseeching the moon goddess, Nikkal, for a solution to her problem.

The performance took place at the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute. A film clip accompanies the article.

New voice for the oldest song ever (Chicago Tribune)

Another Mesopotamian post: Gilgamesh travesty

(Thanks, Stefan!)

Alabama changes the value of pi

Wikipedia has a fine list of April Fools' Day hoaxes:

April Fools' Day

Soy milk, New York Times, and Wikipedia

The New York Times ran an article earlier this week on beverages and health. It turns out to have contained wildly inaccurate statements about soy milk, as volunteers at the Wikipedia Reference Desks have established. Did the Times acknowledge its errors? No. Instead, the article was silently amended.

Before:

"Fortified soy milk is a good alternative for individuals who prefer not to consume cow milk,” the panel said, but cautioned that soy milk cannot be legally fortified with vitamin D and provides only 75 percent of the calcium the body obtains from cow’s milk.

After:

"Fortified soy milk is a good alternative for individuals who prefer not to consume cow milk," the panel said.

I remember reading the original sentence and thinking "That can't be right." Sure enough: the soy milk and "cow milk" in my fridge, as I just discovered, have the same amount of calcium, and the soy milk has more vitamin D. (And who, aside from "the panel," calls it "cow milk"?)

It's difficult to disagree with Wikipedia contributor Jfarber, who brought these errors to the attention of the Times (and has received no acknowledgement from the paper): "for all the bad press about Wikipedia, there are some ways in which it works very well indeed."

Soy milk + Vitamin D? (Wikipedia Reference Desk)
NYT changes, back-dates article (Boing Boing)
You Are Also What You Drink (New York Times)

Related posts

I've spotted two significant errors in the Times, both about recording technology:

Correction
VINYL GAFFE, LEDDY CHARGES

Barfs

When my wife Elaine added the URL of her latest blog post to Google, here's what she was asked to type:



Elaine doesn't think this item is appropriate for her blog (the relation to music is at best tenuous), so she gave it to me. Thanks, Elaine!

Related posts
Beret
Doped
Fermi
Oveness

The SAT is broken

Les Perelman, director of MIT's director of the Writing Across the Curriculum program, continues to call attention to the absurd premises that underlie the recently-added essay section of the College Board's SAT. The high scores of a student who prepared for the test with Professor Perelman's guidance suggest what the College Board values in writing: big words ("myriad" and "plethora" are said to be favorites), weighty examples (whether or not they're relevant or accurately stated), and the magical five-paragraph formula.

Which is to say: the standards for the SAT essay run counter to everything a competent college teacher tries to make clear to students: that big words are not the key to good writing, that details and examples need to carefully chosen and relevant and grounded in fact, and that the number of paragraphs in an essay must be dictated by the writer's ideas and purpose. (There is no magic number.)

Here's an excerpt from the essay that Perelman's student wrote to test the test. I'm assuming that all the errors are intentional:

American president Franklin Delenor Roosevelt advocated for civil unity despite the communist threat of success by quoting 'the only thing we need to fear is itself,' which desdained competition as an alternative to cooperation for success. In the end, the American economy pulled out of the depression and succeeded communism.

Two College Board scorers gave the essay a 5, the second highest score possible.

Fooling the College Board (Inside Higher Ed)
Essay by Perelman's student (Download, 26 KB .doc file)
Words, words, words (Previous blog post on Professor Perelman's criticism of the College Board)

Unnecessary repetition

Spotted on a package of dried mangoes:



Taste and flavor: a winning combination!

As my daughter Rachel pointed out, the nouns taste and flavor do not have complete synonymy. We say that tap water has a bad taste, not a bad flavor. And ice cream comes in different flavors, not tastes. Safe to say though that the copywriter responsible for the above wasn't making such distinctions.

[Thanks for the photo, Rachel!]

Related post
Unnecessary repetition

The bottleneck in the brain

The New York Times brings us more evidence that multitasking doesn't work well:

"Multitasking is going to slow you down, increasing the chances of mistakes," said David E. Meyer, a cognitive scientist and director of the Brain, Cognition and Action Laboratory at the University of Michigan. "Disruptions and interruptions are a bad deal from the standpoint of our ability to process information."

The human brain, with its hundred billion neurons and hundreds of trillions of synaptic connections, is a cognitive powerhouse in many ways. "But a core limitation is an inability to concentrate on two things at once," said René Marois, a neuroscientist and director of the Human Information Processing Laboratory at Vanderbilt University.

Mr. Marois and three other Vanderbilt researchers reported in an article last December in the journal Neuron that they used magnetic resonance imaging to pinpoint the bottleneck in the brain and to measure how much efficiency is lost when trying to handle two tasks at once.

Study participants were given two tasks and were asked to respond to sounds and images. The first was to press the correct key on a computer keyboard after hearing one of eight sounds. The other task was to speak the correct vowel after seeing one of eight images.

The researchers said that they did not see a delay if the participants were given the tasks one at a time. But the researchers found that response to the second task was delayed by up to a second when the study participants were given the two tasks at about the same time.

In many daily tasks, of course, a lost second is unimportant. But one implication of the Vanderbilt research, Mr. Marois said, is that talking on a cellphone while driving a car is dangerous. A one-second delay in response time at 60 miles an hour could be fatal, he noted.

"We are under the impression that we have this brain that can do more than it often can," observed Mr. Marois, who said he turns off his cellphone when driving.

A slideshow accompanies the article, with images of New Yorkers talking and texting while biking, skateboarding, and walking.

Slow Down, Multitaskers; Don’t Read in Traffic (New York Times)

Related posts
Multitaskers, take note
Multitasking makes you stupid
On the advantages of writing by hand
On continuous partial attention
On continuous partial attention and reading habits
On wireless connections in classrooms

"If the gods want to drive you mad"

“If the gods want to drive you mad, first they tell you your future."

Dr. Milton Wexler, founder of the Hereditary Disease Foundation and sponsor of research on Huntington's disease, advising his daughters not to take the test that would determine if they have Huntington's. Their mother Leonore, Dr. Wexler's ex-wife, died from the disease. Research made possible by Dr. Wexler's foundation led to the test.

Milton Wexler, Groundbreaker on Huntington's, Dies at 98 (New York Times)