Learning Linguist

Psycholinguistics - Crash Course Linguistics #11

We couldn’t have language without the brain, but our brains are a bit harder to study than other parts of the body that we use to make languages like our mouths and hands. In this episode of Crash Course Linguistics, we’ll learn about the field that studies where and how language happens in the brain, called psycholinguistics. We’ll cover old and new research in the field, classic studies, and the methods psycholinguists use to uncover the connections between language and the brain.

Crash Course Linguistics #9 - Vowels

In English, we have 5 (well, sometimes 6) vowel letters, but way more vowel sounds. That’s where the IPA can help us! In this episode of Crash Course Linguistics, we’ll learn about vowels, those sounds you can sing with your mouth open, and how we can represent them clearly using the IPA.

These tweets are from 2017. Now in 2020, I went to test out how google translate would translate similar sentences in Finnish, as Finnish also only has a gender neutral “hän” for he/she. Here’s what I got for results:

Both feminine and masculine translation options. Even for firefighter, which still directly translates as “fireman”. Similarly, I got both masculine and feminine results when I searched for a sentence in Turkish to English, but as I don’t know Turkish I didn’t try more than once as I cannot tell how correct it is otherwise. According to my quick googling, this feature was added in late 2018.

More interestingly, when I translated from Finnish to French, I was no longer offered two options as translations. Google translate also offered a general info page on this phenomenon, explaining how the software offers both masculine and feminine translations for some gender neutral words and sentences in some languages, and that more are in development, which is what I’m assuming is why the search between Finnish and French only supplied one version at this time. It takes time to work through all possible language pairs.

If I translated several sentences in one go it lost the second translation like so:

This type of a translation is more complex for a machine translating software to understand as there is much more info to translate than a single, simple sentence. The actual translation would also become more difficult to use if all the senteces were offered twice as masculine and feminine as the text would become repetitive and more difficult to read. Translations made by humans also don’t offer all possible gender options but rely on the larger context on what translation solutions are made. In these simple out-of-context sentences the machine picks the option that is statistically the most common. The machine would likely use wrong pronouns even in cases where there is enough context for a human translator to figure out the gendered pronouns as translation software at this time is far from perfect.

Softwares have limitations, far beyond simply gendered vs non-gendered pronouns because all languages have complex features that don’t have a perfect match in the target language.

Could google translate be coded to offer consistently only masculine or only feminine translation options? Possibly. That would not be ideal either. Could it be coded to only use gender neutral pronouns for languages where gendered pronouns are used? Who knows. It definitely would not reflect how the language is actually used. Some languages simply use gendered language, and the software functions in that context and with that corpus material. Would that change in the future if the language in question moves towarda gender neutral pronouns? Definitely. Because statistics.

A human translator would have the same issue of not knowing which gendered pronoun to use in a translation if there is no context and the source language is gender neutral. However a human translator is much more free to choose a gender neutral singular they or include a he/she (in the case of English) or consistently use one gendered pronoun for a translation, although the commussioner may affect this. A software that relies on corpus matches and statistics can’t make a conscious choice.

These matches based on statistics don’t simply come down to tech industry being predominantly male. The people who code the software do not write the texts of the corpus. The corpus is collected from existing texts. Google translate uses a corpus that consists of millions of documents, which include documents from the United Nations and the European Parliament. Google translate is currently based on a neural machine translation principle, which means it translates by predicting the most likely sequence of words based on the massive corpus.

English has gendered pronouns. There are fields where majority of work force is male or female, which is more likely to show in the texts the software uses. It makes a guess on what pronouns to use based on that context. The software itself isn’t inherently sexist in this case. It just works with the existing material.

Quite frankly I’m amazed that google translate even offers the simple sentences with both masculine and feminine translations. I’m not surprised it offers only one option if more things are translated at once. Google translate is an useful tool if you need a quick translation that doesn’t have to be that good. It shouldn’t be relied on as anything more than that, especially in languages that have less material it can use as a corpus.

Most importantly, we need human translators, the machine translators cannot do what human translators can.

Source: a human translator.

An excellent article in Slate by linguist Lisa Davidson addressing the important question on how Baby Yoda might talk. Excerpt:  

When we hear characters in the Star Wars universe speaking English, they’re really speaking Galactic Basic. There are various accents and dialects, but the most famous variant may be Yoda’s, which changes the word order of Galactic Basic Standard. In terms of English grammar (since that’s how we hear Basic anyway), this means that while most characters speak with subject-verb-object order (“You must have patience”), Yoda often, but not exclusively, produces object-subject-verb order (“Patience you must have!”). This is a simplification of Yoda’s syntax, but for the sake of simplicity we’ll use that label to describe his word order. […]

As for Baby Yoda, at least in the current moment, he’s living with speakers of Galactic Basic Standard who use subject-verb-object order. We do not know, however, what he experienced in the past. Perhaps he lived with other members of Yoda’s species for a part of his life, which might mean that he received language input from adult speakers of this species. Could that be enough to justify speaking like Yoda when he finally talks? Considering that he doesn’t speak now (and barring the “he just doesn’t want to talk out loud yet” option), even if he lived with other Yoda-style speakers in the past, it’s still doubtful that he would have typical Yoda syntax. Between whatever language was spoken around him when he lived with the Nikto mercenaries and the Galactic Basic spoken by the Mandalorian, Dr. Pershing, and the Sorgan villagers, his exposure to Yoda’s variant of Basic would become less salient over time. If Baby Yoda is like a human, his first words should reflect the language environment he’s in once he begins to talk. This would track with cases of young adopted children, from preschool through early elementary school, who rapidly lose access to the first language they were exposed to, even within three to six months of being adopted.

On the other hand, since so little is known about Yoda’s species, there’s a possibility that the members of this species actually speak a different language. Because Yoda traveled throughout the galaxy so much, perhaps he learned Galactic Basic as an adult. This might mean that Yoda’s object-subject-verb word order is a result of what linguists call “transfer”: As Queen Mary University of London professor David Adger pointed out in 2017, Yoda could be applying the word order from a hypothetical native language “Yodish” to his command of Basic. If this were the situation, then it would be even less likely that Baby Yoda would have been exposed to the object-subject-verb variant of Basic, presumably because the first adults he lived with would have been speaking Yodish around him. The end result of this situation would be the same as above: If Baby Yoda did not yet reach the critical period for language before he left his Yodish home, then his access to Yodish would quickly decline now that he’s surrounded by Basic speakers.

A last option to consider is that the Yoda species is in some way hard-wired for object-subject-verb word order. This possibility would mean that Yoda is much less humanlike than we have been considering. One of the goals of the field of linguistics is to understand all of the variations found in human language, from the possible sounds of language, to how words are built, to possible word orders and more. Languages can differ greatly from one another on these dimensions, but one of the hallmarks of human language acquisition is that no one is hard-wired for any specific language. Instead we acquire whatever language or languages are spoken by the people around us and with whom we want to communicate. We could envision a scenario in which Yoda and others of his species are somehow neurologically committed to object-subject-verb word order, but it would be curious and rather arbitrary that Yoda then learned to speak the same Basic as all of the other speakers in the galaxy in every way except for word order.

And, as an example, he gave us this monstrosity:

And, what’s even worse— I fucking UNDERSTOOD IT. I had to EXPLAIN this to my fucking sociology class.

Looking for pop linguistics books or linguistics-related fiction to read, find in a library, ask for as a gift, or give to a language nerd in your life? Here’s an extensive list of books you might be interested in. 

New nonfiction books! 

Because Internet by Gretchen McCulloch (my book about internet language, 2019)

Language Unlimited by David Adger, 2019 

Don’t Believe A Word by David Shariatmadari, 2019

Babel: Around the World in 20 Languages by Gaston Dorren, 2018

The Prodigal Tongue by Lynne Murphy (my livetweet), 2018

Recent general books 

John McWhorter has many pop linguistics books, including notably: The Language Hoax, The Power of Babel, Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue, What Language Is, Word on the Street

David Crystal also has many pop linguistics books, including more recently: the history of English spelling, A Little Book of Language (note that Crystal also writes “interesting facts about words” books, so check the description if this is a relevant factor for you)

The Sense of Style by Steven Pinker (the one style book on this entire list, because he approaches it from a genuinely linguistic perspective: see my review here). 

The Riddle of the Labyrinth by Margalit Fox (about cracking Linear B)

You Are What You Speak by RL Greene  

The Unfolding of Language by Guy Deutscher (about the history of language) 

How Babies Talk by Roberta Michnick Golinkoff and Kathy Hirsh-Pasek

In The Land of Invented Languages by Arika Okrent (my review)

The Art of Language Invention by David J. Peterson (my livetweet)

Word by Word by Kory Stamper, who also has a second book coming out! (my livetweet) 

You’re The Only One I Can Tell by Deborah Tannen

Older general books 

(Most of these I read when I was getting into linguistics so I can vouch for them being interesting enough when I read them such that they’ve stuck in my mind many years later, but I’m not sure how they’d stack up on re-reading. Just so you know.)

Steven Pinker’s pop linguistics books have gotten older but are still classics: The Language Instinct, Words and Rules, The Stuff of Thought

Older David Crystal books: How Language Works, The Stories of English

Verbatim (a collection of essays on pop linguistics, edited by Erin McKean - my comments)

Talk, Talk, Talk by Jay Ingram 

A Mouthful of Air by Anthony Burgess 

Alpha Beta by John Man (about the history of the alphabet) 

The Articulate Mammal by Jean Aitchison

Deborah Tannen has several older highly readable books on conversation, including You Just Don’t Understand, That’s Not What I Meant!, You’re Wearing That?

Specific Topics

Hearing Gesture by Susan Goldin-Meadow

Talking Hands by Margalit Fox (my comments)

The Language of Food by Dan Jurafsky

Babel No More by Michael Erard

Latin Alive: The Survival of Latin in English and the Romance Languages by Joseph Solodow (my review) 

Predicting New Words by Allan Metcalf 

Shady Characters by Keith Houston (about punctuation marks - my comments)

Speculative Grammarian’s satirical linguistics book (my review - you should probably already know some linguistics before reading it though) 

How We Talk by Nick Enfield (review on Superlinguo)

An ABC for Baby Linguists (great for linguist parents!) 

The Language Construction Kit by Mark Rosenfelder (conlangs, older)

How to Keep Your Language Alive and Language Revitalization for Families, both by Leanne Hinton (see also Ola!, and my thoughts on it)

The Signs of Language by Bellugi/Klima (a sign language classic, but readable)

Beginner-friendly textbooks

Comprehensive but more friendly than actual textbooks: 

Linguistics for Dummies

Linguistics for Everyone

Introducing Linguistics: An Illustrated Guide 

Actual textbooks, still at an introductory level:

Language Files

Contemporary Linguistics (the fifth edition is also fine, and cheaper)

iLanguage (previous edition is cheaper)

Describing Morphosyntax is popular among budding conlangers 

LingFic

Fiction that contains a significant linguistic element, enjoyable for both practising linguists and language enthusiasts: 

Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn (my comments)

The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt (my livetweet)

Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie (my comments) and Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin, both of which do interesting things with language & gender

Carry On by Rainbow Rowell (my livetweet)

Eunoia by Christian Bök (my comments). It’s entirely online here.

Bel Canto by Ann Patchett 

New Finnish Grammar by Diego Marani (review from @superlinguo​)

Native Tongue trilogy by Suzette Haden Elgin 

“The Story of Your Life” (short story) by Ted Chiang (the movie based on it is called Arrival and stars a linguist)

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

Embassytown by China Miéville 

The Lord of the Rings books

See also more recommendations on the #lingfic hashtag and this list at conlang.org 

Anyone else have pop linguistics books (or #lingfic) to recommend, or reviews to link to? I’ll try to keep this list updated as I hear of and review other books, old and new, so make sure to check out the source post and my books tag if you’re viewing it as a reblog. There are some great additions in the extensive reblogs by Stan Carey and Superlinguo.

Fiction Updates: 

Too Like The Lightning by Ada Palmer (my livetweet)

The Fifth Season and The Obelisk Gate by N.K. Jemisin (my two livetweets)

Pygmalion and My Fair Lady are classics, although real linguists aren’t nearly as keen on “proper” English as Henry Higgins

The Space Trilogy by C.S. Lewis features a philologist

The Raven Tower by Ann Leckie (my livetweet) 

I also keep a list of linguistically interesting fiction (lingfic) on Goodreads. 

Get =/= Jet

Gift =/= Jift

Give =/= Jive

In English, words with a ‘G’ followed by an ‘e’ or an ‘i’ can be pronounced with either a hard ‘G’ or a soft ‘G’.

Words with Germanic roots such as ‘gear’, ‘get’, ‘gift’, ‘give’ (see above) are pronounced with a hard ‘g’ while words with Latin or Greek roots such as ‘gem’, ‘general’, ‘giraffe’, ‘giant’, are pronounced with a soft ‘g’.

So no, it’s not exactly a “general rule” that ‘g’ followed by an ‘e’ or an ‘i’ makes a soft ‘g’ sound. 

An interesting survey to take about strategies for getting better at using non-binary singular they. The linguists involved have been especially encouraging people who are currently learning or did recently to take the survey. From the description: 

As an output of the 2019 They, Hirself, Em, and You (THEY) conference held at Queen’s University, the course focuses on the use of non-binary singular they specifically – that is, singular they as the personal pronoun of reference to refer to a known non-binary person (i.e., the pronoun that a person would like others to use to refer to them in the third person). As part of the process of our design of the MOOC, this informal survey is intended to gather feedback on what types of resources and practices would be useful to speakers who may be acquiring non-binary singular they for the first time, or who have recently made the decision to dedicate time to acquiring it with intention. 

—

Gretchen McCulloch, How Can You Appreciate 23rd-Century English? Look Back 200 Years