1 “X people have no word for”: From Language Log, www.languagelog.com.
2 “muscatel” and “musk”: Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary, accessible at www.merriam-webster.com. The Oxford Concise Dictionary of English Etymology (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1986) gives a somewhat different explanation for “musk,” saying that the Sanskrit muská, “scrotum,” may have come to cover for “musk” because of the similarity to a deer’s musk bag.
3 “X cannot be translated”: Ibid.
4 “I’m no linguist”: BBC interview of Ronald Reagan by Brian Widlake, October 29, 1985. Full text at the website of the Reagan Library, at www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/speeches/1985/102985d.htm.
5 tongues of preliterate or indigenous societies: In fact, small languages seem to be systematically more complicated than ones spoken by large numbers; see the author’s article “Babelicious,” The Economist online, January 25, 2010, www.economist.com/sciencetechnology/displayStory.cfm?story_id=15384310&source=hptextfeature
6 Tuyuca encodes this information: Daniel Nettle and Suzanne Romaine, Vanishing Voices: The Extinction of the World’s Languages (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 60–61.
1 Thomas Jefferson’s apostrophes: Mark Liberman at Language Log, June 9, 2004, http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001034.html.
2 “For we English men”: David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 57. I have put the text into modern English. Note that “mete” in Caxton’s text, though it is the source of the modern English “meat,” meant simply “food” in his time.
3 Dryden said he liked to compose: Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage (Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster, 1994), p. 764.
4 twenty-one editions in Britain: Rollo Laverne Lyman, quoted in Charlotte Downey’s introduction to English Grammar (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1981).
5 first prohibition against the split infinitive: Jack Lynch, The Lexicographer’s Dilemma: The Evolution of “Proper” English, from Shakespeare to South Park (New York: Walker, 2009), p. 97.
6 one 1931 study: George Curme, A Grammar of the English Language, vol. 2, “Syntax,” cited in Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, p. 867.
7 “If you do not immediately”: Crystal, Cambridge Encyclopedia, p. 195.
8 Henry Watson Fowler: Biographical information from Jenny McMorris, The Warden of English: The Life of H. W. Fowler (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2001).
9 10 million copies: The Letters of E. B. White, ed. Dorothy Lobrano Guth (New York: HarperCollins, 2006), p. 368.
10 “Life as a textbook editor”: Ibid., p. 423.
11 “At some point”: Cicero, Orator 48 [160], available at www.thelatinlibrary.com/cicero/orator.shtml and translated by the blog Sauvage Noble at http://sauvagenoble.blogspot.com/2004/10/scientiam-mihi-reservavi.html.
12 “In reading carefully”: Quoted in Otto Jespersen, Language: Its Nature, Development and Origin (New York: Macmillan, 1922), p. 42. I have rendered Grimm’s altdeutschen as “Teutonic” rather than Jespersen’s “Old Gothonic.”
13 E. B. White was a fine writer: Geoff Pullum was the original source of this point: that White’s excellent writing belies his misguided usage advice.
1 Men talk (on average) slightly more: Liberman’s findings are at http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003607.html.
2 A study published in Science: Matthias Mehl et al., “Are Women Really More Talkative Than Men?,” Science, July 6, 2007.
3 Liberman was at it again: Language Log, http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1495#more-1495
4 “this book is too interesting”: Noam Chomsky, Some Concepts and Consequences of the Theory of Government and Binding (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1982), p. 45.
5 “The Sanskrit language”: Quoted in Pieter A. M. Seuren, Western Linguistics: An Historical Introduction (Oxford, England: Blackwell, 1988), p. 80.
6 “Behavior alters the environment”: B. F. Skinner, Verbal Behavior (Acton, Mass.: Copley, 1957), pp. 1–2.
7 “A typical example”: Noam Chomsky, “A Review of B. F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior,” Language 35 (1959): pp. 26–58.
8 “The very language”: David Foster Wallace, “Tense Present: Democracy, English and the Wars over Usage,” Harper’s, April 2001, pp. 39–58.
9 “The things mentioned above”: Language Log, http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000918.html.
10 Geoffrey Sampson: “Grammar Without Grammaticality,” Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 3 (2007): pp. 1–32.
11 “They set forward, every one”: This example and others from the King James Bible were assembled by Wayne Lehman at http://englishbibles.blogspot.com/2006/09/singular-they-in-english-bibles.html.
12 William Labov: The discussion of New York English that follows is taken from William Labov, The Social Stratification of English in New York City (Washington, D.C.: Center for Applied Linguistics, 1966).
13 “a decade of work”: John Joseph et al., Landmarks in Linguistic Thought, vol. 2 (New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 144.
14 “Por eso cada, you know”: William Labov, “ ‘System’ in Creole Languages,” in Pidginization and Creolization of Languages, ed. Dell Hymes (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1971).
15 Studies of code switching: The classic article on this is Shana Poplack, “Sometimes I’ll Start a Sentence in Spanish y Termino en Español: Towards a Typology of Code Switching,” Linguistics 18 (1980): pp. 581–618.
16 Diglossic pairs include: Ronald Wardaugh, Sociolinguistics, 3rd ed. (Oxford, England: Blackwell, 1998), pp. 87–93, which draws heavily on Charles Ferguson, “Diglossia,” the foundational treatment in Word, 1959, pp. 325–40.
17 Words and phrases from katharévousa: Wardaugh, ibid., and Anna Frangoudaki, “Diglossia and the Present Language Situation in Greece: A Sociological Approach to the Interpretation of Diglossia and Some Hypotheses on Today’s Linguistic Reality,” Language in Society 21 (1992): pp. 365–81.
18 Illiteracy is 40 percent: Mohamed Maamouri, “Literacy,” in Encyclopedia of Arabic Language and Linguistics (Leiden: Brill, 2005–2009).
19 Maamouri relates: Mohamed Maamouri, “Language Education and Human Development: Arabic Diglossia and Its Impact on the Quality of Education in the Arab Region,” paper presented to the World Bank’s Mediterranean Development Forum, 1998.
1 “do” has an idiosyncratic function: John McWhorter explains why this might have arisen in Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue (New York: Gotham, 2008).
2 The New York Times … rejected several op-eds: John Rickford, “The Ebonics Controversy in My Backyard: A Sociolinguist’s Experiences and Reflections” www.stanford.edu/~rickford/papers/EbonicsInMyBackyard.html. The linguists included Rickford himself, Geoff Pullum, Salikoko Mufwene, and Gene Searchinger.
3 bold headlines reading: Geoffrey Nunberg, “Double Standards,” Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 14 (1997), pp. 667–75.
4 it produces apathetic readers: Maamouri, “Language Education and Human Development.”
5 A child cannot be taught: “If Black English Isn’t a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?,” The New York Times, July 29, 1979.
6 One recent study showed: Ann Senghas and Marie Coppola, “Children Creating Language: How Nicaraguan Sign Language Acquired a Spatial Grammar,” Psychological Science 12 (2001), pp. 323–28
7 “When I shout ‘Fire!’ ”: Mark Halpern, Language and Human Nature (Piscataway, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 2008), pp. 20–22.
8 Kwaio: Roger Keesing, Kwaio Grammar (Canberra: Pacific Linguistics, 1985), quoted in John McWhorter, Language Interrupted (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 23.
9 Russia must envy: McWhorter, Language Interrupted, p. 36.
10 English has both: Ibid., p. 23.
11 “Human beings do not live”: Edward Sapir, “The Status of Linguistics as a Science,” Language 5 (1929): pp. 207–14.
12 Russian painters make death female: Lera Boroditsky, “How Does Our Language Shape the Way We Think?,” Edge, June 12, 2009, accessed online. Boroditsky cites her papers “Do English and Mandarin Speakers Think Differently About Time?,” Proceedings of the 48th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society (2007); and “Sex, Syntax and Semantics” in D. Gentner and S. Goldin-Meadow, Language in Mind: Advances in the Study of Language and Cognition (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003).
13 The academic debate over Whorfianism: Nicholas Evans and Stephen Levinson, “The Myth of Language Universals,” was published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (October 2009), reformulating the neo-Whorfian challenge to “universal grammar.” Stephen Pinker and Geoff Pullum were among the writers of twenty-five response articles printed along with it.
14 “becoming sensitive to mere solecisms”: Halpern, Language and Human Nature, p. xxvi.
15 “Not all languages have”: Le Devoir, July 2, 2008.
16 Languages shake off bits and pieces: Gary Lupyan and Rick Dale, “Language Structure Is Partly Determined by Social Structure,” PLoS ONE 5 (2010): e8559. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0008559.
1 You could continue: This discussion of dialect continua in premodern Europe is based on Sue Wright, Language Policy and Language Planning (New York: Palgrave, 2004), p. 21.
2 the 1841 census: John O’Beirne Ranelagh, A Short History of Ireland (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 118.
3 Even tyrannies educate their people: Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1983); “coal face of nature,” p. 33.
4 “even tailors and shoe-makers”: John Lewis Nuelsen, Luther: The Leader (New York: Eaton and Mains, 1906), accessed online at www.archive.org/stream/lutherleader00nuel/lutherleader00nuel_djvu.txt.
5 German’s center of gravity: dtv-Atlas zur deutschen Sprache (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1978), pp. 93–101.
6 2 or 3 percent of newly minted “Italians”: Eric Hobsbawm, “Language, Culture and National Identity,” Social Research 63 (1996), p. 1068.
7 These efforts were sometimes farcical: Jonathan Fishman, Do Not Leave Your Language Alone (Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2006), pp. 48–49.
8 Another purist, an overzealous Czech: George Thomas, Linguistic Purism (London: Longmans, 1995), p. 87.
9 “Then late one night”: From Ben Yehuda’s autobiography A Dream Come True, quoted in George Mandel, “Resistance to the Study of Hebrew,” in Hebrew Study from Ezra to Ben-Yehuda (Edinburgh: Horbury, 1999), p. 296.
10 singing a Russian lullaby: Mark Abley, Spoken Here (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003), p. 231.
11 the party’s sole language: Bernard Spolsky and Robert Cooper, The Languages of Jerusalem (Oxford, England: Clarendon, 1991), p. 59.
12 it now has a distinctive accent: Edward Ullendorff, “Hebrew in Mandatary Palestine,” in Mandel, Hebrew Study from Ezra to Ben-Yehuda, pp. 300–06.
13 The European backgrounds: Ibid., p. 303.
14 Israelis coin mongrel words: Joel M. Hoffman, In The Beginning: A Short History of the Hebrew Language (New York: NYU Press, 2004), p. 201.
15 “Ben Yehuda would be dismayed”: Ilan Stavans, Resurrecting Hebrew (New York: Nextbooks, 2009), p. 96.
16 “Modern oddities”: Ullendorff, “Hebrew in Mandatary Palestine.”
17 demoting Arabic: Forward, June 12, 2008.
18 Franco was a centralizer: Vincent de Melchor Muñoz, El catalán: una lengua de Europa para compartir (Barcelona: Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 2002), pp. 157–69.
19 “Hind[ustani] is that language”: Robert D. King, “The Potency of Script: Hindi and Urdu,” International Journal of the Sociology of Language 150 (2001): pp. 54–56.
20 “I have no doubt whatsoever”: Robert D. King, Nehru and the Language Politics of India (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 86.
21 Many more Pakistanis speak Punjabi: Hamza Alavi, “Pakistan and Islam: Ethnicity and Ideology,” State and Ideology in the Middle East and Pakistan, eds. Fred Halliday and Hamza Alavi (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1998), pp. 64–69.
22 “I was back in Zagreb”: Ibid., Robert Greenberg, Language and Identity in the Balkans: Serbo-Croatian and Its Disintegration (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 2–3.
23 “Having landed at Sarajevo”: Ibid.
24 “Among us young people” Keith Langston and Anita Peti-Stantic, “Attitudes Towards Linguistic Purism in Croatia: Evaluating Efforts at Language Reform,” in At War with Words, eds. Mirjana N. Dedaiç and Daniel Nelson (New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2003), pp. 247–82.
1 An alphabet was now a crime: “Language Reform: From Ottoman to Turkish,” in Helen Metz, Turkey: A Country Study (Washington, D.C.: GPO for the Library of Congress), available at http://countrystudies.us/turkey/25.htm.
2 one of the most concerted assaults: This section draws on Geoffrey Lewis, The Gunnar Jarring Lecture; Istanbul, February 1, 2002, available at www.srii.org/admin/filer/lecture2002.pdf.
3 It remains a crime: www.antenna-tr.org/mevzuat_devam.asp?feox=21&lgg=en
4 Man or woman: “Vive la Révolution,” BBC News, January 9, 1998, available at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/46227.stm.
5 One scholar has counted: Henriette Walter, “French: An Accommodating Language?,” in French: An Accommodating Language?, ed. Sue Wright (Tonawanda, N.Y.: Multilingual Matters, 2000), pp. 31–36.
6 The Academy is thus sometimes: Tyrtée Tastet, Histoire des quarante fauteuils de l’Académie Française depuis la fondation jusqu’à nos jours, 1635–1855, vol. 1, pp. 11–12 (1844), cited in fr.wikipedia.org, “Académie française,” accessed July 11, 2007.
7 the average age of Academy members: “L’Académie Française and Its Cultural Cul-de-Sac,” The Globe and Mail, April 16, 2008, available at www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/article680397.ece.
8 “Well-taught French”: Le Figaro, March 18, 1996, quoted in Dennis Ager, Identity, Insecurity and Image (Philadelphia: Multilingual Matters, 1999), p. 235.
9 In 1794 theater directors: Ferdinand Brunot, Histoire de la langue Française des origines à nos jours (Paris: Colin, 1966), vol. 9, p. 685.
10 “The Citizens of Paris”: Ager, Identity, Insecurity and Image, p. 110.
11 “scandalously poor piece of work”: Robert Hall, External History of the Romance Languages (New York: American Elsevier Publishing, 1974) quoted in Sue Wright, Language Policy and Language Planning (New York: Palgrave, 2004), p. 55.
12 the phrase madame la ministre: This method of research is more serious, and more effective, than it might seem. Professional linguists are using Google to mine the tremendous “corpus” of perhaps 10 trillion words that exists on the Internet. Research has shown that search engines such as Google return results comparable to traditional corpora such as, for example, newspaper databases. See “Corpus Colossal,” The Economist, January 25, 2005, and Frank Keller and Mirella Lapata, “Using the Web to Obtain Frequencies for Unseen Bigrams,” Computational Linguistics 29 (2003), pp. 459–84.
13 another borrowing is far more prominent: Searches performed though Google, using Advanced Search and selecting only pages in French, in October 2009.
14 The Ministry of Culture commissioned: Ager, Identity, Insecurity and Image, p. 154.
15 which is the “real” Norwegian: Kristin Grøntoft, “Brenner nynorsk-bok i tønne,” Dagbladet, available at www.dagbladet.no/nyheter/2005/08/17/440490.html.
16 When not inventing words: George Thomas, Linguistic Purism (London: Longmans, 1995), p. 78.
17 “I cannot help it”: Quoted by E. M. Forster in the introduction to William Barnes: One Hundred Poems (Blandford Forum, England: Dorset Bookshop, 1971), p. xv.
18 He was a Little Englander: Fr. Andrew Phillips, The Rebirth of England and English: The Vision of William Barnes (Swaffham, England: Anglo-Saxon Books, 1996). Phillips is the source of the claim that Barnes knew fourteen languages fluently, was familiar with seventy, and could learn the grammar of a language in two weeks. The latter claims are plausible, but most definitions of “fluent” would require the ability to comfortably have a conversation with a native speaker. Barnes would almost certainly not have had the kind of exposure to native speakers of most of those languages to learn them fluently.
19 differences between American and British English: David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 80–81.
20 Germany, Austria, Switzerland: “Geschlichter Abriß der Reichtschreibung,” available at www.schriftdeutsch.de/orth-his.htm.
21 One experiment asked: Asher Koriat and Ilia Levy, “Figural Symbolism in Chinese Ideographs,” Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 8 (1979): 353–365. Interestingly, the related phenomenon of “phonetic symbolism” also operates; asked which of zhong and qing means “heavy” and which means “light,” more than half of the test subjects correctly guessed that zhong is “heavy.” The low vowel of zhong “feels” heavier. Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct (New York: HarperPerennial, 1995).
22 the Chinese for “crisis”: Citations from Kennedy, Gore, and Rice come from Benjamin Zimmer and Mark Liberman of the Language Log blog.
23 But Victor Mair: www.pinyin.info/chinese/crisis.html. Fortunately, this needed debunking is now the top Google result for “danger crisis opportunity.”
24 Estimates of the number in use: This and the following draw on William Hannas, Asia’s Orthographic Dilemma (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1997), especially pp. 125–152.
25 Some Western linguists: William Hannas, The Writing on the Wall (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003).
26 Hannas, a former academic: Hannas, Asia’s Orthographic Dilemma, pp. 144–147.
27 Modern computers are clever enough: “Writing Chinese on the Windows Platform,” http://newton.uor.edu/Departments&Programs/AsianStudiesDept/Language/chinese_write.htm.
28 Japan’s first notable advocate: Japanese and Chinese names are routinely family name first, personal name second, and this will be followed here.
29 Japan even stopped teaching English: Tessa Carroll, Language Planning and Language Change in Japan (Richmond, England: Curzon Press, 2001), pp. 51–75.
30 Some supported a switch to kana: J. Marshall Unger, Literacy and Script Reform in Occupation Japan (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 60.
31 Japanese proponents fell out: Ibid.
32 Mandarin speakers have a rhyming saying: “Mandarin vs. Cantonese,” www.chinese-lessons.com/cantonese/difficulty.htm cites this saying. This page also discusses the differences between Cantonese and Mandarin in more detail.
33 Romanization nearly succeeded in China: John DeFrancis: Nationalism and Language Reform in China (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1950).
34 Chen Mengjia: A fascinating account of this is Peter Hessler’s “Oracle Bones,” The New Yorker, February 14, 2004. An architect of the pinyin reforms told him that it was Stalin who told Mao not to use the Roman alphabet but to develop “national” forms instead. As this is one reporter’s one-source citation for a conversation the source was not present for, remembered fifty years later, Stalin’s role should be considered possible but not definitive.
35 “Your excellent mandarin”: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004898.html.
36 the government has even objected: Associated Press, December 4, 2004.
37 George Thomas has collected: Thomas, Linguistic Purism, pp. 19–23.
1 “The role of English”: Samuel Huntington, Who Are We? (London: Simon & Schuster, 2005), p. 160.
2 The royal language academies: Shirley Brice Heath, “Why No Official Tongue?” Language Loyalties, ed. James Crawford (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 21–22.
3 Benjamin Rush: Ibid., p. 24. Italics in the original.
4 large German-speaking communities: Carol Schmid, “Historical Introduction,” The Politics of Language (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2001).
5 It was the biggest period: Raymond Tatalovich, Nativism Reborn? (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1995), p. 72.
6 11.7 percent in 2003: Luke Larsen, “The Foreign-Born Population in the United States: 2003,” U.S. Census Bureau, August 2004, available at www.census.gov/prod/2004pubs/p20-551.pdf.
7 Some states and towns forbade German: Schmid, “Historical introduction,” p. 38.
8 Washington McCormick, a congressman: Dennis Baron, “Federal English,” in Crawford, ed., Language Loyalties, p. 39.
9 Exceptions were made for religious teaching: Tatalovich, Nativism Reborn?, p. 52.
10 The arguments were often: Ibid., p. 4.
11 “was to rear them”: Ibid., p. 58.
12 “a desirable end”: Ibid., p. 61.
13 The behavior of the bridge generation: Rubén Rumbaut, Douglas Massey, and Frank Bean, “Linguistic Life Expectancies: Immigrant Language Retention in Southern California,” Population and Development Review 32 (2006): pp. 447–460.
14 Bilinguals show not just: Alejandro Portes and Lingxin Hao, “E Pluribus Unum: Bilingualism and Loss of Language in the Second Generation,” Sociology of Education 71 (1998) reviews the literature on cognitive abilities and bilingualism.
15 warding off old-age dementia: “Bilingualism Has Protective Effect in Delaying Onset of Dementia by Four Years, Canadian Study Shows,” Medical News Today, January 12, 2007, available at www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/60646.php.
16 Shortly after the French Revolution: Sue Wright, Language Planning and Language Policy (New York: Palgrave, 2004).
17 “Provençal” and “Occitan”: Dennis Ager, Identity, Insecurity and Image (Philadelphia: Multilingual Matters, 1999), pp. 55–56.
18 “France cannot retain its rank”: Ibid., p. 109.
19 France Télécom was taken to task: Ibid., p. 133.
20 French law did take a big bite: Philippe Desprès, “Foreign Firms’ In-House and Technical Documents Must Be in French,” International Committee Newsletter, American Bar Association, April 2006, available at www.abanet.org/labor/newsletter/intl/2006/Apr/france3.html.
21 My magazine, The Economist “What’s the French for Cock-up?,” The Economist, August 12, 1995.
22 Some opponents of the Toubon Law: Elizabeth Manera Edelstein, “The Loi Toubon: Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité, but Only on France’s Terms,” Emory International Law Review 17 (2003), pp. 1127–1201.
1 “Human mental identities”: Eric Hobsbawm, “Language, Culture and National Identity,” Social Research 63 (1996): p. 1068.
2 Some linguists even compare: David Nettle and Suzanne Romaine, Vanishing Voices: The Extinction of the World’s Languages (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 60–61.
3 Countries where many languages are spoken: J. Pool, “National Development and Language Diversity,” in Advances in the Sociology of Language, vol. 2, ed. Jonathan Fishman (The Hague: Mouton, 1972), pp. 213–30.
4 A follow-up study in 2000: Daniel Nettle, “Linguistic Fragmentation and the Wealth of Nations: The Fishman-Pool Hypothesis Reexamined,” Economic Development and Cultural Change 48 (2000): pp. 335–48.
5 One 1974 study: Stanley Lieberson and Lynn Hansen, “National Development, Mother Tongue Diversity, and the Comparative Study of Nations,” American Sociological Review 39 (1974): pp. 523–41.
6 “I can’t even talk”: Quoted in the Oakland Tribune, August 8, 2004, available at http://www.snopes.com/politics/soapbox/cosby.asp with a somewhat modified transcription.
7 “I had never been”: Malcolm X, “Coming to an Awareness of Language,” in Language Awareness, 6th ed., eds. Paul Escholz, Alfred Rosa, and Virginia Clark (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), pp. 9–11.