I hope they don't ban "linguistics nazi"

In today's online version of The New York Times, there is an essay by Etgar Keret titled "Sometimes 'Nazi' is the Right Word."  Keret explores the pros and cons of officially banning a word like "Nazi" from public usage in Israel.  I have opinions about that, but I don't live in Israel, and in any case that's not what I want to talk about right now.

The very first sentence in the essay is:

“NAZI” is a short word. It has only two syllables, like “rac-ist” or “kill-er.” 

I love it when people do things like this, because it lets me be a linguistics nazi by pointing out where someone has mistaken the folk model of language for the scientific model.  This is not the way linguists would divide these words into syllables. The correct way would be "ra-cist"  and "ki-ller."  Or, more properly, using phonetic symbols from the International Phonetic Alphabet (the little line ˈ is placed in front the stressed syllable):

[ˈre.səst]   [ˈkɪ.lər]

Notice that we can use a period, rather than a hyphen, to separate syllables.  Notice also that there's only one "l" in the phonetic rendition of "killer"; that's because there's only one "l" sound in that word, and in linguistics we don't put two sounds in there unless they really belong in there. 

Now, I don't expect Keret to write like a linguist in The New York Times.  But, then again, maybe I should.  This kind of thing perpetuates misconceptions about language that I have to correct every semester in my classes.

UPDATE (Jan 19).  A friend reminds me that Keret's division of "rac-ist" and "kill-er" does reflect the morphological divisions in these words.  So, "racist" is race + -ist, and "killer" is kill + -er.  These are derivational suffixes, as opposed to inflectional suffixes like the -s in cats and dogs. 

Perhaps taking divisions between morphemes to reflect syllable divisions is further evidence of the lack of phonological awareness among many otherwise educated people, especially English speakers. 

Bilbo's cold

Nerd alert! As many of you know, JRR Tolkien, author of 'The Hobbit' and 'Lord of the Rings,' was a historical linguist. I was just re-reading a bit of The Hobbit and noticed his linguistics coming out in his description of Bilbo's cold (caught riding those barrels down the river) at Laketown (near the end of the chapter 'A Warm Welcome'). He notes that for a time, Bilbo's public speeches were limited to "Thag you very buch." This happens when you're congested and have difficulty producing nasal consonants, which then revert to the homorganic non-nasal. 

Or, as I tell my students, 'a cold in my nose' becomes 'a cold id by dose.'

A (post-) modern problem

I think postmodernism has created a generation of people who are afraid to commit themselves to an answer to a question, even when the question involves empirical data to be examined.  For example, my final exam in linguistics, just given, contained the following problem:

Review. Examine the data from Tongan (Polynesia). Then answer the questions. Assume that this data set is representative. (3 points)

[tauhi]   'to take care of'       [sino]   'body' 

[sisi] 'garland'                     [totonu] 'correct'
[motu] 'island                     [pasi] 'to clap'
[mosimosi] 'to drizzle'          [fata] 'shelf'
[motomoto] 'unripe'             [movete] 'to come apart'

Based on the evidence, the sounds [t] and [s] are: ___ Contrastive?  ___ Predictable?
Defend your choice.

Now, the correct answer is obtained by noticing that [s] always occurs before [i], and that [t] occurs before other vowels.  Thus [t] and [s] are predictable. In linguistic terms, we can rite a phonological rule:

/t/  ➔ [s] / __ [i];  [t] elsewhere.

However, I didn't require them to write the rule out.  As long as they noticed the distribution of these two sounds, they got credit.  The problem comes when, despite the admonition to take the data set as representative, stuff like this shows up (my emphasis):

[t] is predictable because it is used the same way in the middle of the text and usually following or followed by by a vowel. [s] is also following/followed by a vowel which seems to always be [i].

No, it doesn't seem as though [s] is always followed by [i]; in this data set it is the case that [s] is always followed by [i], and [t] is followed by vowels other than [i].  And then there's this:

[s] is always followed by [i] in Tongan, and [i] can't follow [t]. We don't know if they are phonemes or allophones though, it could be a coincidence that they don't follow [t]'s with high front vowels, maybe [ti] is [di] and we just don't have that data, or

I should point out that we've been working these kinds of problems all semester, and all semester I've stressed that the data sets used in the problems are to be taken as representative of the languages as a whole.  I really do think that postmodernism, despite the good things it's done for us, has damaged students' ability to commit to the solution of a data-based problem.

End of semester: The good

This is Kiersten Bradley and me, after our reception Friday for our anthropology graduates. Kiersten is our Outstanding Anthropology Graduate for 2012-13, and after doing way more linguistics-related credit hours (12) with me than anyone probably should, she's off to graduate school at the University of Colorado/Boulder in.... Linguistics!

In addition to our standard introduction to Linguistic Anthropology, Kiersten took a course on American English dialects, and also two independent studies.  In one she explored the evolution of the concept of  linguistic relativity (aka the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis).

In the second she began getting a handle on phonological analysis by collecting data from Korean speakers, transcribing, and looking for the sound patterns.  Although she may not know it yet, the most valuable lesson she might have taken away from this exercise is that analyzing a language is hard, and almost never goes smoothly. 

Anyway, over the years I've managed to send a small handful of students to graduate school, and it's always gratifying to be a tiny part of the stream of linguistic anthropology that began with Franz Boas, ran through my mentor, MJ Hardman, and, modestly, on through me.  So, MJ, meet Kiersten, your newest grand-student.

What is a linguist?

So you know a linguist

View more presentations from Jodie Martin

New link: Linguistics in the Classroom

I have added a link to a blog titled "Linguistics in the Classroom," written by Ann Evans at Montclair State University.  Ann's description of the site follows:

This blog is meant to help teachers show their students how language is constructed, how meaning is made, and what the role of language is in our lives.  It contains information and exercises to illustrate linguistic ideas and principles at the word, sentence, and paragraph level, and within language communities.  Each point and exercise is introduced simply, with examples, and is usually meant to take ten minutes or less.

This  blog is the continuation of an article published in the Spring 2011 issue of the Duke University journal Pedagogy.
Ann Evans is an Adjunct Professor of Writing at Montclair State University.  She has an M.A. in Applied Linguistics from Montclair State, and an M.A. in English from New York University.  Besides English, she speaks French, Spanish, Italian, German, and Greek.

If you are looking for exercises and linguistics-oriented explanations to share, especially with writing-troubled students, check it out.

Linguistics at the center of Everything

Actually, so is anthropology, but this makes the point nicely that linguistics is not a marginal subject area.