Noncompositional

Earlier today I happened upon a question on MetaFilter on skeuomorphs. The submitter gives several examples of what I conceive of as typical skeuomorphs, both linguistic and not. The linguistic ones are spot-on, as is the noticing of changes from icons to symbols. Actually, one case, the use of the shopping cart for online shopping sites, is interesting, as the era of online shopping has always, as far as I recall, involved the trading of items that would not normally go in shopping carts. This despite the fact that, as far as my experience goes, a shopping cart is not the general sign for shopping containers, or for places where you buy items.

There are then dozens of responses, most of which are probably skeuomorphs, though all of which are interesting. One contrast of note is the continued use of the 3.5” floppy disk as an icon (described earlier, and technically nearly a symbol in the semiotic sense, previously an icon in the same sense) for “save,” as opposed an opening-file-folder icon used to indicate “open.” This latter is more a metaphor: we still use file folders to hold various related documents in the non-electronic world, and the folder perhaps remains a reasonable analogy to directory hierarchies, though we don’t really put folders inside folders in the paper world.

I’m sure you’ve said it before, and probably perfectly reasonably so. Given the nearness of Memorial Day, perhaps you’ve even said it recently. You know the difference between single days and multiple, consecutive days. But somehow, English lets us do things like it. It happens to all well-meaning people.

Next Friday is a holiday weekend in the US of A (link) First Friday of every month unless that Friday is a holiday weekend, then it is on 2nd Friday It is held at the church. (link) Friday is a pay weekend, and I have this feeling in my bones that it is going to be a wild one. (link) Moreover, Monday is a three-day weekend in the United States, and large price movements in the stock typically come immediately before or after such holidays. (link

[afterthought: After some further consideration, there is also: page 290 is a new chapter. Maybe others?]

This past Saturday, thanks to Mark Liberman’s tip, I made my way over to some sort of major California city across the bay from my humble residence, and took in my weekly extracurricular linguistics class (also in attendance was a dubious girlfriend and a few linguist colleagues). Actually, first I heard the slam poetry of D. Blaine, and got exposed to the work of action/romance novelist Liz Maverick. But for me (and seemingly for a fair number of people in the crowd), the spotlight event was none other than some grey-haired professor of…linguistics?.

Geoff Pullum read juicy selections from the Language Log companion book, Far From The Madding Gerund, including a retelling of the classic (?) panda joke, and (what seemed to get the best response), OICTIQ. If Writers With Drinks had existed in the mid 1980s, I’m sure audiences would have been treated to the essentials of GPSG, an equally thrilling book, though probably best enjoyed at a frat party, rather than a Mission-district tavern.

In the following intermission I braved my way through a sea of adoring fans to find the now-very-hip Pullum, and acquired a little something. On the way I learned that GKP’s part-of-speech tagger (which, incidentally, has helped to save the world multiple times, or at least the MC said so) uses an HMM, and also apparently uses a hybrid of Martian and parrot technology. But, curiously enough, it still classes worth as an adjective. Well, you can’t get everything right.

Unfortunately, I missed the rest of the acts; previous engagements and all. But I do feel sorry for them; who (or what), after all, can top linguistics?

At least, that seems to be the majority reaction to a book by Paul Benedict called Japanese / Austro-Tai, which claims that Japanese is genetically part of the Austro-Tai family. Note that Austro-Tai is a proposed macro-family consisting of Austronesian (Formosan, Malayo-Polynesian), Austroasiatic (Mon-Khmer, among others), and Tai-Kadai (Thai, among others). So the book has at least as many presuppositions in it as the infamous Japanese and other Altaic Languages by Roy Miller. And it seems to have taken quite a bashing, at least among stauch defenders of an Altaic connection, like Alexander Vovin.

I came across the book as part of a little research project to see what people out there think about the origins of the Japanese people and language. It turns out that the Altaic theory is still pretty strong among linguists and some anthropologists and geneticists, though the possibility of an Austronesian connection is still pretty strong, especially among Eastern scholars. It seems that many of them believe that the origins of the Japanese are best understood as a mixing between northern (Altaic, perhaps) and southern (Austronesian or Austroasiatic, though usually the former) features, at least culturally. Linguistically, the arguments for either a creole or a southern substratum remain, to my eyes, rather unconvincing. Though, I will admit, there are some interesting lexical correspondences between some Ryukyuan, Okinawan, and Kyushuan words for sea navigation, and some proposed Proto-Austronesian words. Okay, there’s really just one really good one, which was presented not by Benedict but by Osamu Sakiyama in a book with a great title: Prehistoric Mongoloid Dispersals. The word is proto-Austronesian *paRi, which is reflected in various languages with meanings related to south, southern winds, the southern cross, and sting rays (what the southern cross looks like). And, apparently in many of the Japonic languages spoken in southwestern Kyushu and beyond, there are words like pae and pai that mean south/southwestern wind. So, the medial loss of r is supposed to have happened in Japanese (though, I think that is arrived at via comparative Altaic data, so…yeah); but the vowels, I think, are supposed to have merged in various ways. Clearly some more work has to be done on this one, but it’s interesting nonetheless.

Anyway, for me the little research project definitely inspired me to become more aware of the (attested) history of Japanese, so it looks like some learning of classical Japanese should be in my future.