Wrong.

11 June 2016

Journalists love to write articles on language. Not only, since they make their livings with words, do they have a professional interest in the topic, but language is a popular topic. People, at least those who read newspapers, love to read about it. The problem is that journalists often get it completely wrong.

A case in point is an article by Dan Bilefsky that appeared on the front page of the New York Times on 9 June about how use of the period, that staid and boring punctuation mark, is changing. In some forms of discourse, the period does not simply mark the end of a sentence, it conveys urgency or emotion. He gets the facts right, but Bilefsky utterly miscategorizes what is happening, framing the period as “going out of style” and “being felled.” Nothing could be further from the truth.

What is actually happening that in short, electronic forms of communications, such as texts and tweets, the period is not really needed to mark the end of the sentence—much as it isn’t needed in street signs (“Stop” not “Stop.” Or “Exit” not “Exit.”) or in newspaper headlines. Since the period isn’t needed to signal the end of a complete thought, it is available for other purposes, and that’s what texters and tweeters have done. In short, digital messages the period can convey that the writer is not happy about the statement that was just made. So if you arrange to meet a friend at Starbuck’s and she replies “OK” that signals agreement. If she replies “OK.” you had better find a locally-owned, fair-trade coffee shop in which to meet; she is coming, but she’s not happy about it. This type of change is a natural, and useful, adaptation to changing conditions.

But the period is not disappearing from standard prose. While the linguists that Bilefsky quotes (David Crystal and Geoffrey Nunberg) take pains to note that this shift in orthographic convention is restricted to short, electronic messages, Bilefsky frames it as occurring in all forms of prose, even going so far as to write his entire article without using any sentence-ending periods—a cute device, but not at all an illustration of the phenomenon. Crystal even went so far as to pen a blog post pointing out that Bilefsky misunderstood what he was saying.

Bilefsky is not only wrong, he’s late to the party. He was scooped by his own paper. Jessica Bennett wrote a much more accurate piece on the changing roles of punctuation marks in digital communications in the Times over a year ago. Ben Crair had a piece on the changing role of the period in the New Republic back in 2012. (Mark Liberman wrote a Language Log post about the comments to Crair’s piece that is well worth a read.) A week or two before Crair’s piece, PhD Comics took the subject on. All of these other articles got the subject essentially right.

So late and wrong. I think we can expect better from the New York Times.

How Do You Solve a Problem Like Fututiones?

25 May 2016

The Times Literary Supplement discusses how translating Catullus is fucking hard.

Cunk on Shakespeare

17 May 2016

Philomena Cunk examines the life and work of William Shakespeare:

Cunk, played by comedian Diane Morgan, has this to say about Richard III:

Shakespeare wrote loads of plays about royals, known as his history plays. It was his way of pleasing the king and queen by doing stuff about their families, a bit like when your mum buys the local paper because your brother’s court appearance is in it. Perhaps Shakespeare’s best history play is Richard Three, which is about this sort of elephant man king. He’d be done in computers now by Andy Serkis covered in balls, but in the original he was just a man with a pillow up his jumper. It’s quite modern because it’s a lead part for a disabled actor, provided they don’t mind being depicted as the most evil man ever. ["I am determined to prove a villain."] Richard Three is actually based on the real King Richard of Third, who was in the Wars of the Roses. ["A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse."] At the end he loses his horse and ends up wandering round a car park looking for it, where he eventually dies, because in those days you couldn’t find your horse just by beeping your keys at it and making its arse light up. It’s quite moving and human because we’ve all worried that we might die in a car park, if we like lose the ticket and can’t get the barrier up and just die in there. Shakespeare makes you think about those things.

Internet/Web vs. internet/web

5 April 2016

I like fivethirtyeight.com. Nate Silver and his crew have pioneered a new form of journalism, one based on data rather than punditry, but like anyone else, they get into trouble when they stray outside their wheelhouse. Most recently, a blog post on their website took on the announcement that the Associate Press (AP) has changed their stylebook to use lowercase letters when writing internet and web. Formerly, the news organization had advocated for Internet and Web. In so doing, they not only demonstrated a misunderstanding of how language works, but they also screwed up their analysis of the data.

This past week the AP announced that they will no longer be capitalizing internet or web. The change is significant because many journalistic organizations in the US follow the AP style.

But the AP is hardly on the leading edge of this trend. I discussed the capitalization of internet back in 2004 when Wired magazine made the switch. The fivethirtyeight.com blog post says the AP is a “cultural bellwether for writer types.” Yet as it is on most stylistic points, the AP style is inherently a conservative one, not one that rides the edge of linguistic change. Nor do most “writer-types” give a crap what the AP says. (In fact, AP style is something of a joke among most writer-types, or rather among writers who are aware that it exists at all.) Fivethirtyeight is viewing the situation from the perspective of a journalist, assuming that everyone else is a journalist too. They’ve moved from data analysis to punditry.

And what’s worse, the blog post misrepresents the data. Like any good fivethirtyeight.com story, it presents data, this time from Google Ngrams, but the words in the story don’t match what the data tells us. First, the data is from the wrong source for their purposes. It’s from Google Books. If you want to track journalistic style—this is an article about the AP stylebook after all—then Google Books is the wrong corpus to use. You want a corpus of news stories for that, not one that tracks usage in books.

The article does say that “we passed peak ‘Internet’ and ‘Web’ sometime around 2002.” That is correct, as far as it goes, but it ignores the fact that the capitalized Internet and Web are still far more common in Google Books than their lowercased counterparts. Internet and Web started their rise in the Google Books data around 1989 and 1991 respectively. Both rose at nearly exponential rates until 2002, when their usage declined, although as of 2008 (the latest available year in the data set) Web was over twice as popular as web and Internet some six times as popular as internet. The lower case forms showed growth over the same period, but at a much slower rate, and in 2004 web showed a decrease in usage as well, and internet slowed its steady growth. What the data shows, therefore, is not a switch from the uppercase to the lowercase forms, but rather that people were writing less about the internet and the web. What had happened was the dot-com crash and the switch from the internet being a trending topic of discussion to simply being part of the background noise of our lives. (Again, this is Google Books. Journalistic usage may show something entirely different.)

Twelve years ago I said, “the significance of the Wired News style change should not be underestimated. The practice of capitalizing [internet] is clearly on the way out.” While that statement was not wrong, it was overly optimistic about the pace of that change. The capitalized forms are still very much the preferred form. But it was Wired that was the “cultural bellwether,” not the AP, which is in the middle of the flock.

Etruscan Tablet Found

31 March 2016

Seventy letters and punctuation marks make this find one of the longest surviving examples of the Etruscan language. Little is known about the language, and every single find has the potential to vastly increase our knowledge about the language, the Etruscan people, and their culture. This particular find is not a gravestone, which makes it especially valuable since most of the other examples of the language that we have are from graves; it has the possibility of providing evidence about things other than the dead.

Etruscan is not related to any living language, or so most historical linguists believe.