Campus birds

Recently, many ravens have been circling over the building where I attend most of my classes, and calling from high perches.

Last spring, some ravens were hanging out near the dining halls and would often share students' food, though I haven't encountered them since.

Just like grad students, birds never pass up free food.

Even if it's currently on someone else's plate. The owner of this meal had to keep shooing the cowbirds away:

Cowbirds are brood parasites, and hence they have come up in several lectures and discussions I've attended about issues of language innateness and "nature vs. nurture." (The academics who mentioned these birds weren't aware, I found, that real live ones could be seen right on campus.) The term "parasite," incidentally, comes from a Greek word meaning "one who eats at another's table" or "one who plays the flatterer and buffoon, with a view to getting invited to dinner." 

Starlings

These birds have some odd relevances to my academic life. First, their presence in America has been attributed to an obsessive Shakespeare fan, though the Shakespeare connection may be nothing but a legend. Second, they may be capable of recognizing recursion in sound sequences, an ability generally considered unique to humans and essential to language.

Vowels and vestigial air sacs

Over millions of years, changes to our vocal organs have allowed us to produce a rich mix of sounds. One such change was the loss of the air sac - a balloon-like organ that helps primates to produce booming noises.

All primates have an air sac except humans, in whom it has shrunk to a vestigial organ. ...

To find out how this changed the sounds produced, Bart de Boer of the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands created artificial vocal tracts from shaped plastic tubes. Air forced down them produced different vowel sounds, and half of the models had an extra chamber to mimic an air sac.

De Boer played the sounds to 22 people and asked them to identify the vowel. If they got it right, they were asked to try again, only this time noise was added to make it harder to identify the sound. If they got it wrong, noise was reduced.

He found that those listening to tubes without air sacs could tolerate much more noise before the vowels became unintelligible.

The air sacs acted like bass drums, resonating at low frequencies, and causing vowel sounds to merge...

Observations of soldiers from the first world war corroborate de Boer's findings. Poison gas enlarged the vestigial air sacs of some soldiers, who are said to have had speech problems that made them hard to comprehend.

From New Scientist.

Raven deixis

Ravens are amazingly smart birds, possessing reasoning abilities previously thought to be uniquely human. Now, they have been observed performing a very human-like form of nonverbal communication:

From early childhood on, children frequently use distinct gestures to draw the attention of adults to external objects. So-called deictic gestures such as "pointing" ("look here") and "holding up of objects" ("take this") are used by children for the first time at the age of nine to twelve months, before they produce their first spoken words. Scientists believe that such gestures are based on relatively complex intelligence abilities and represent the starting point for the use of symbols and therefore also human language. Deictic gestures are thus milestones in the development of human speech.
Surprisingly, observations of comparable gestures in our closest living relatives, the great apes, are relatively rare. Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) in the Kibale National Park in Uganda, for example, use so-called directed scratches, to indicate distinct spots on their bodies to be groomed. Deictic gestures thus represent an extremely rare form of communication evolutionarily and have been suggested as confined to primates only.

 Full story at Science Daily.

Parroting a dead language

There’s a story that in 1799 the German naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) was exploring the Orinoco and Amazon rivers and documenting the languages and cultures of the tribes he encountered there. While spending time with one tribe of Carib people, he asked them about their neighbours and rivals, the Maypure, who he was keen to visit. He was told that the Maypure had all been killed recently by the Carib tribe he was visiting, however they did have a couple of the Maypure’s pet parrots who spoke some of their language. Von Humboldt took the parrots back to Europe and transcribed their words – the only record we have of the Maypure language, which is also written Maypure, Maipure, Maypore or Maypore’. There seems to be some doubt whether this story is true: there is no mention of the parrots in von Humboldt’s meticulous journals, but there are phonetic transcriptions of the Maypure words he heard on his travels.

An interesting anecdote from the Omniglot blog. 

Sin-tax

I am currently taking a course on syntax which the professor introduced by defining the subject thus: "...which is, of course, the tax that sinners pay to the church."

Apparently this joke is quite an old one-- while looking up Latin-related references for that same class on Google Books, I came across The Comic Latin Grammar of 1840, which contains the following line:

Q. What part of the grammar resembles the indulgences sold in the middle ages?
A. Sin-tax.

Hwæt! WTF?!

Speculative Grammarian ("the premier scholarly journal featuring research in the neglected field of satirical linguistics") offers a novel interpretation of an old text (in "a very, very conservative dialect of English"):

Hwæt! We Gardena in geardagum,
WTF?! We was gardening in our backyard,

þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon,
when Theo came a-cryin’, “Them’s goofin’ on her,

hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.
them who are the linguists¹ Ellen’s so ‘fraid of!”

... then there was a fair bit more that I haven’t deciphered yet ...

Þæt wæs god cyning.
God! That was a lot of crying!

I suppose this is to writing what mondegreen "translations" are to speech or singing, and BadLipReading is to articulation. It also reminds me of what I called "Latinglish," although in that case an English message is rendered into text that looks like another language, instead of being derived by "translating" an existing text based on superficial phonetic or orthographic resemblances.

The Copiale Cipher

I had never heard of this cipher, but (unlike the more famous Voynich Manuscript) it's now been cracked:

Now a team of Swedish and American linguists has applied statistics-based translation techniques to crack one of the most stubborn of codes: the Copiale Cipher, a hand-lettered 105-page manuscript that appears to date from the late 18th century. They described their work at a meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics in Portland, Ore.
Discovered in an academic archive in the former East Germany, the elaborately bound volume of gold and green brocade paper holds 75,000 characters, a perplexing mix of mysterious symbols and Roman letters. The name comes from one of only two non-coded inscriptions in the document.
Kevin Knight, a computer scientist at the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California, collaborated with Beata Megyesi and Christiane Schaefer of Uppsala University in Sweden to decipher the first 16 pages. They turn out to be a detailed description of a ritual from a secret society that apparently had a fascination with eye surgery and ophthalmology.

Full story at the New York Times. Cosmic Log elaborates on the content:

The manuscript, available in several formats from Uppsala University's website, describes the procedure for initiating new members of the society. At one point, candidates are asked to read the writing on a blank piece of paper. When they can't, they're told to put on eyeglasses, and then they undergo an "operation" that involves plucking a hair from the eyebrow. After the operation, the blank paper is replaced by a document laying out "the entire teaching for the apprentices."

Read my lips: "Save a pretzel for the gas jets."

And from the same channel, a musical Dadaist Obama speech:

It's odd how well this "bad" lip reading maps onto the original footage-- perhaps, as this poster speculates, there's a sort of reverse McGurk effect involved, making the lip movements appear to sync better to the audio than they really do. (Incidentally, I do not seem to experience the McGurk effect, but I find BadLipReading's dubs almost entirely convincing.)

[Update, 10/4: "I whisked like two or three eggs, and then I changed my Facebook pic to boring seagulls."]

Silbo Gomero

On the Spanish island of Gomera, people sometimes encode their speech in whistling to communicate over long distances:

They aren't the only language community to use whistling as an alternate communication channel. Whistled languages have been documented in widely separated parts of the world-- including among the isolated Pirahã tribe of South America (whose language is better known for what it allegedly lacks, namely recursive grammar).

"Together we are robots."

An oddly profound meeting of artificial minds (actually two copies of the same AI), via The Book of Barely Imagined Beings:

A similar experiment has been done at least once before.

"Beware of polysemy"

...according to Pillai 1983:202 [a Malayalam-English dictionary], the Malayalam word kʌkʂʌ means not only ‘girth rope of an elephant’, but also ‘waistband of a woman, a courtyard, a surrounding wall, inner room or harem of a palace, objection or reply in an argument, the orbit of a planet, a boil in the armpit, armpit, flank, river side, forest, dry grass, bull or buffalo, a hiding place, harem, scale of a balance, sin, a tortoise, a treasure of Kubera, a narrow undercloth covering the privities [sic], a dog, a harem supervisor, a poet, a painter, a debauchee’!

From Linguistic Field Methods by Bert Vaux and Justin Cooper. English has some striking polysemous words of its own, such as the answers to these riddles (which can be found in the linked posts):

What do loads, accumulations, obligations, and (idiomatic) kicks have in common with management, custody, people in care, sets of instructions, expenditures, liabilities, prices, loan records, and allegations?

What do support poles, staff positions, battery terminals, army encampments, blog articles, earring stems, trading stations, and snail mail have in common with billboard advertising, accounts recording, making bail, and assigning diplomats?

"I am not sure I understand you fully."

[ELIZA:] I am not sure I understand you fully,
[PARRY:] *It's clear to me if not to you.
Do you think its likely that not to I?
*I went to the races.
Please go on.
*I gamble on horses.
What does that suggest to you?
*I went to the races.
What else would you like to discuss?
*Gambling has been nothing but trouble to me.
Why do you say that just now?
*I've had experience with crooks gambling at the track.
I am not sure I understand you fully.

Part of a conversation between two early chatterbots. They mostly talk past each other and repeat stock phrases, but there are moments where PARRY seems to show some awareness:

What else would you like to discuss?
*I am getting tired of answering the same questions over and over.
...
I am not sure I understand you fully.
*You harp on the same questions too much.
...
*In my opinion you have a one-track mind.
What makes you think I have a one-track mind?
*I used to go to the track every week.
...
*The way you repeat yourself is getting ridiculous.
Suppose you repeat myself is getting ridiculous.

Wonderland logic

I am doing that last proposition just mentioned (metalinguistic comment: Alice swift- answered) (With hesitation, weak certainty, hesitation) I am the saying-desirer of the desired-to-be said thing of me. I know culturally that the referent of the last utterance is the same thing.

Literal English re-translation of a passage from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland translated into Lojban, a constructed language based on logic and designed to be free of ambiguity. The corresponding original text is:

`I do,' Alice hastily replied; `at least--at least I mean what I say--that's the same thing, you know.'

Lewis Carroll might have appreciated this exercise. He did enjoy writing logical syllogisms with perfect form but rather strange content:

(a) No interesting poems are unpopular among people of real taste.
(b) No modern poetry is free from affectation.
(c) All your poems are on the subject of soap-bubbles.
(d) No affected poetry is popular among people of real taste.
(e) No ancient poem is on the subject of soap-bubbles.

Framing and freedom fries

Excerpt from a lecture by linguist Lera Boroditsky, explaining why terms like "freedom fries" actually make no sense as insults against the French-- and suggesting better ways to annoy those cheese-eating surrender monkeys by renaming things:

Of course, the name "French fries" may qualify as this sort of Francophobic insult, albeit accidentally-- the fries originated in Belgium.

Scanning singing

An opera singer and a rapper show off their vocal abilities under the gaze of a real-time MRI scanner, with spooky results: 

the diva and the emcee from Krishna Nayak on Vimeo.

Paper crane

I bought this crane from a fundraiser at my college for the Japanese relief effort. The backdrop is my Syntax classwork-- those trees seemed like an appropriate habitat for a geometric paper bird.

Insulting presuppositions

John called Mary a Republican, and then SHE insulted HIM.

Example sentence from George Lakoff's paper "Presupposition and relative well-formedness". Lakoff says he finds this sentence entirely acceptable, "though those with other beliefs may disagree".

The Infant's Grammar or a Pic-nic Party of the Parts of Speech

Two pages from The Infant's Grammar, published 1824. Source.

Scans of the whole book can be seen here.

Purple (and red and yellow and orange...) prose

Chromatographic writing system used by the Edo people of Nigeria