Speak geek: the world of made-up language

Caleb Cox, in an article in reghardware.com called "Speak geek: the world of made-up language," discusses invented languages and linguist Arika Okrent's recent book, The Land of Invented Languages. Mentioned in the article are languages such as Elvish, Klingon, John Wilkins' Analytical Language, James Cook Brown's Loglan, Esperanto, and Blissymbolics. GR, a friend of IS, says, "BTW, I have a soft spot for Wilkins; his is the only orthography based purely on semantics. Unfortunately the only fluent writer was Robert Hooke. News of his discovery of the universal joint was delayed for many years because he chose to write the original description in Wilkins' script!" Speaking of obscure languages, GR also suggests Complete Babylonian: A Teach Yourself Guide by Martin Worthington, saying "it is truly excellent and remarkably modern both in appearance and conception -- a must have for your bookshelf."

Again with the Recursion!

IS Group meeting

The next IS Group meeting with take place on Saturday, Nov. 17, 2007, at the home of Mark Tiede in Madison, Connecticut. We will gather at 6:00 pm for a pre-meeting dinner.

Theme: Again with the Recursion!

Many issues went unexplored at the last IS group meeting and Elliot Saltzman felt that it would be useful to go over certain of these in greater detail. An example is recursion. Thus, our next meeting will be a more detailed discussion of recursion.

Readings:

Suggested readings include:

• Marc D. Hauser, Noam Chomsky, and W. Tecumseh Fitch. The Faculty of Language: What Is It, Who Has It, and How Did it Evolve? Science, 22 November 2002, Vol. 298, no. 5598, pp. 1569-1579.
  
  
• Steven Pinker and Ray Jackendoff (2005). The Faculty of Language: What's Special about it? (PDF file). Cognition, 95(2), 201-236.
  
  
• W. Tecumseh Fitch, Marc D. Hauser and Noam Chomsky. (2005). The evolution of the language faculty: Clarifications and implications. (PDF file). Cognition, 97, 179-210.
  
  
• An additional unpublished appendix : N. Chomsky, M. D. Hauser and W. T. Fitch. Appendix: The Minimalist Program. (PDF file).
  

Other possibilities include

• A recent paper by Michael Corballis, The Uniqueness of Human Recursive Thinking (subscription required), American Scientist, Volume 95, No. 3, May-June 2007, 240-248.
  
  
• A draft manuscript by Simon Levy on modeling recursion in cognitive neuroscience. Please contact Simon if you'd like a copy.

Supplementary Readings:

This is up to you. Mark Tiede has suggested taking a look at The Unfolding of Language by Guy Deutscher.

Video:

Simon has suggested Tears of the Black Tiger. Mark has suggested Hot Fuzz.

Food:

Pizza

Any bigger and I'd be in the circus

While we're on the topic of obscenity, I want to start an informal contest for most amusing spam subject header. Like a lot of people I get dozens of spams per day, the most recent having to do with increasing the size of my penis, but nearly all of them are by non-English-speaking drones who are just copying and pasting text from phrasebooks and from each other. So when a spammer comes up with something original and funny, I think it's worth posting. If that's not enough justification, consider the phrase Any [comparative-modifier] and [future-or-conditional-sentence] as an example of a grammatical construction of the sort that has regained currency in the linguistics literature.

What the F***?

Steven Pinker, the Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, has an article called "What the F***? Why we curse" in the Oct. 8, 2007 issue of The New Republic (pp. 24-29). This article is adapted from his new book, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature, which was reviewed on Sep. 23, 2007 by William Saletan in an article called "The Double Thinker" in The New York Times Book Review, and on Sep. 27, 2007 by Colin McGinn in an article called "How You Think" in The New York Review of Books.

D(r)iver Boy

For many years I've loved listening to Old Time music and marveled at the myriad names and lyrics used for the "same" song. The oral composition and performance of these songs virtually guarantees variation like this, as happens in the children's game Telephone (a.k.a. Chinese Whispers).

A few years ago I bought an album by Natalie Merchant containing the song "Diver Boy", a classic Appalachian murder ballad whose lyrics describe a girl's family trying to get rich quick by killing her suitor – a diver boy / Who sailed upon the ocean to gather up some gold. (It's close to this recording.) While listening to the incredible Hober internet radio broadcast recently, I heard one of the many variants this song, in which the suitor is a driver boy / Who ploughed the lowlands low. In another version, he drives a stagecoach. In some versions, he ends up buried at sea or "floating down the stream", regardless of whether he's a diver or a driver; in another, it's his blood that "appeared in streams".

So, the point is, not only are the names and lyrics of these songs changed by misperception; the entire premise of the song gets a new back-story based on the changing of one word:
the Kiss this Guy and Eggcorn phenomena run wild. In general, one wonders how much form really does follow function, as opposed to the other way around, in songs, poetry, and other cultural artifacts. Scholarship on non-literate poets like Homer often runs into such questions: was a phrase used because it conveyed the poet's intended meaning, or because it was the first thing that came into the poet's mind that fit the meter? In light of Simon Kirby's Chinese-Whispers-like iterated learning model of language evolution, one wonders how much of grammar might come from this sort of re-analysis, too.