You say Myanmar, I say

I've been thinking about saying something about the pronunciation of Burma/Myanmar, since the name has been mentioned in several media reports following Cyclone Nargis. Maybe I should just point.

According to Wikipedia, in Burmese the country's name is (pjìdàunzṵ mjəmà nàinŋàndɔ̀), but contributors disagree on the proper English name.

Phonetician John Wells discussed the British and American pronunciations, and their relationship to Burmese politics, back on 11 October 2007.

In Burmese, this name Myanmar is essentially just a variant of the name Burma. It is transliterated as Myan-ma or Mran-ma, and in the local language pronounced something like [ma(n) ma], as against [ba ma] for the traditional name.

Language Log has an updated discussion today, which quotes a BBC News Magazine piece from last fall.

Bottom line: The government seems to prefer the spelling <Myanmar>, while the opposition prefers <Burma>, but in terms of pronunciation, neither word has an American R sound. It is [mjən ma] or [bə ma], not [mi æn mar] or [bɝ mə].

American Anthropology Association elections

American Anthropology Association and AAA section ballots are now online. You will need your username and password to access the ballot. All ballots must be cast by 5:00pm Eastern time on May 31st.

The Society for Linguistic Anthropology has elections for President-elect and for one Member-at-large. Monica Heller and Kathryn Woolard are on the ballot for President-elect; Paul B. Garrett and Barbara Meek are on the ballot for Member-at-large.

All AAA members may also vote for Executive board members representing Archeology, Biological anthropology, and Linguistic anthropology, as well as an undesignated member of the executive board. There are also three positons on the Nominations Committee, three positions on the Long-range Planning Committee, two on the Committee on Ethics, three on the Committee on the Status of Women in Anthropology, three on the Committee for Human Rights, three on the Committee on Minority Issues, and three on the Committee on Public Policy. Descriptions of each position can be found here.

Candidate statements are embedded within the online ballot (click on the page icon next to each candidate's name). Statements don't seem to be available outside the ballot, so I can't include links to them.

Finally, there is a resolution from the AAA Annual Meeting opposing military action in Iran.

All AAA and SLA members are urged to vote before May 31st.

"Terminology to define the terrorists"

According to the Associated Press, the US Homeland Security department has produced a report entitled "Terminology to define the terrorists: recommendations from American Muslims."

One of those recommendations is to avoid using the word jihad to describe the efforts of al-Qaeda and other declared enemies. Jihad, which translates as either 'holy war' or 'spiritual struggle,' is an important concept in Islam, and as the report points out, calling terrorists jihadis may serve to "unintentionally [legitimize] their actions."

My colleagues Becky Shulties and Aomar Boum point out that the debate over whether it is ever appropriate to call terrorism jihad has been an active one both among Muslim scholars and in the media - particularly at al Jazeera. (Al Jazeera Arabic uses the term al irhab "terrorism".)

While I'm somewhat uneasy with government-academic partnerships such as the Minerva Consortia (see also here), I can recommend that the military and intelligence agencies read published work on the subject. (With apologies to the many scholars whose work I have not linked to.)

Word Rage and Hartman's Law

I seem to add a post to this blog about every other month. I hope some people find my musings interesting and well chosen. I must admit that I don't understand how some of my favorite bloggers, like Mark Liberman or Kerim Friedman, manage to put out more posts in a week - sometimes, in a day - than I do in month, while doing interesting and important work in their "real" jobs at Penn and National Dong Hwa University, respectively.

As is often the case, this musing was sparked by something I read at Language Log.

Liberman notes a piece in the Guardian's Comment is free online version entitled Linguistic pedants of the world unite. In it, Andrew Mueller notes, with approval, the work of the Typo Eradication Advancement League to copy-edit America.

It's all very interesting, and I recommend reading what you'll find by following those links. Go ahead. I'll wait.

OK, here's my two cents. I quote Andrew Mueller:

A person who perpetrates vandalism upon the language, whether they're the signwriters targeted by Teal or the correspondents who pollute Comment is free threads with the barbarous neologisms of text-speak, is not merely inept but actively contemptuous. A language is the crucial asset of any society - it's what binds us, animates us, permits us to accomplish things. It is part of our common space, and perhaps it should be protected as such.

This phenomenon of peevology or word rage fascinates me. People seem to revel in pointing out the the "deplorable" language usage of others, sometimes even to the point of threatening mock violence against the perpetrators. (Mueller allows, "my personal preference for retribution against typographical psychopaths would involve angry mobs with torches.") It seems to me that these peevologists are fulfilling some personal and societal (sorry, Daily Telegraph readers) desire to identify heretics. And, given professed values of religious and political pluralism, linguistic usage is one of the few venues left to heresiology.

That's one cent's worth; here's the second.

Liberman notes several non-standard usages among the comments on Mueller's piece, as well as a couple of non-standard usages in the piece itself. This is an example of Hartman's Law of Prescriptivist Retaliation, coined by Jed Hartman: "any article or statement about correct grammar, punctuation, or spelling is bound to contain at least one eror. [sic]" It's sometimes also called McKean's Law or Skitt's Law, for Verbatim editor Erin McKean or alt.usage.english contributor Skitt, who each seem to have described the process independently.

But note particularly the first sentence I quoted from Mueller:

A person who perpetrates vandalism upon the language, whether they're the signwriters targeted by Teal or the correspondents who pollute Comment is free threads with the barbarous neologisms of text-speak, is not merely inept but actively contemptuous.

Is it just me, or is that really hard to read? I had to read it three times before I could make sense of it. And I don't think it's the use of they with antecedent a person that threw me. No, I think it's the long subordinate clause between the subject and predicate of the main sentence that got me. This sort of non-restrictive relative clause with appositive function is perfectly standard in written English; it's probably nothing TEAL would feel compelled to correct. But given its length, the conjunction of two predicate noun phrases within the relative clause, and the fact that the proper noun Comment is free (which Mueller does not set off with italics or quotation marks) contains a verb, I really struggled with interpretation.

By which I guess I mean, contra those peevologists who argue that non-standard usage impedes understanding, that standard usage is no panacea.

Then again, maybe the plural nouns (they, sign writers, correspondents) in the appositive were a step harder to reconcile with the singular a person.

Or, on the third hand, there's the fact that I am recovering from surgery.

Language Link Between Siberia and North America

Missed this one from a few days ago. This could have important anthropological implications.

Linguists demonstrate Siberian-North American link.

Cross-linguistic back-formation

Today's Doonesbury comic strip includes a curious linguistic artifact. In panel two, a an engineering student describes herself and a partner: "We're engineering honchas, and the thing just sits there mocking us" (emphasis added).

The meaning of honchas is fairly clear. It is a (perhaps jocularly) feminine version of the word honcho, meaning "boss" or "hot shot". The final <-a> is an extension of the grammatical rule relating pairs of words such as Latina/Latino or norteña/norteño, where the first word in each pair is feminine and the second is masculine. All of these words are borrowed from Spanish.^* In Spanish, as in many European languages, nouns and adjectives are categorized into classes commonly called grammatical genders. While Modern English does not have grammatical gender (except, arguably, in the pronoun system), English speakers sometimes use the feminine form of loan words when referring to women or girls - particularly with loans from Spanish.

What makes this particular formation interesting, however, is that honcho is not a Spanish loan word. It comes from the Japanese word 班長 hanchou, meaning group leader or patrol leader, and was probably picked up by US soldiers during or after World War II. The OED's earliest citation (spelled hancho) is from 1947; honcho is mentioned in the journal American Speech in 1955.

1947 J. BERTRAM Shadow of War VII. i. 212 But here comes the hancho. This boat must be finished to-night. 1955 Amer. Speech XXX. 118 Honcho. 1. n. A man in charge. (This is a Japanese word translated roughly as ‘Chief officer’, brought back from Japan by fliers stationed there during the occupation and during the Korean fighting...) 2. v. To direct a detail or operation.

While it is common for languages to borrow words from other languages, borrowing grammatical rules is less common (but certainly not unheard of). That seems to be the case here. The Spanish rule that a masculine noun or adjective ending in -o can be made feminine by changing that ending to -a is borrowed and applied to a non-Spanish word in English.

^* Interestingly, in each case the Oxford English Dictionary cites an earlier date for the masculine version (Latino in 1946, norteño in 1953) than for the feminine (Latina 1972; norteña 1978).

Punctuated Language Evolution

In the past few years, a number of biologists have published studies suggesting various facts about the evolution of languages. This is not terribly surprising, I suppose, since historical linguistics and evolutionary biology share a long lineage. Darwin's (1859) Origin of Species was probably influenced by studies such as Franz Bopp's (1816) Über das Conjugationssystem der Sanskritsprache (On the Conjugation System of Sanskrit) and others in historical linguistics.¹

Some of these studies have been noted with approval; others have been roundly criticized.

A brief report by Atkinson, Meade, Venditti, Greenhill & Pagel published in Science falls into the former category.² The authors looked for evidence of punctuated evolution in three language families: Bantu, Austronesian and Indo-European. As in evolutionary biology, some historical linguists theorize that the development of languages remains relatively stable for a time, punctuated by rapid changes, such as the development of new dialects or languages.

Atkinson et al. compared the apparent rate of lexical change within language families by looking for cognate terms for basic vocabulary items. Using Swadesh lists for each language family, they calculated the number of cognates in various languages within the family.

Atkinson et al. assume that if there is no punctuated evolution, the percentage of cognates should show no relation to the number of branches in the linguistic family tree. On the other hand, if those branches (the development of new languages) cause a burst of new vocabulary, there should be greater lexical diversity and fewer cognates along portions of the family tree with more branching.

The authors find "significantly more lexical change along paths in which more new languages have emerged," which they take to be evidence of punctuated evolution. They conclude,

Our results, representing thousands of years of language evolution, identify a general tendency for newly formed sister languages to diverge in their fundamental vocabulary initially at a rapid pace, followed by longer periods of slower and gradual divergence. Punctuational bursts in phonology, morphology, and syntax, or at later times of language contact, may also occur.

There is (as is always the case in science) room to disagree with Atkinson et al. Some historical linguists, for example, tend to doubt any such broad-brush theories of language change. Atkinson et al. do, however, seem more careful and presumably therefore more reliable than some widely reported work.

Atkinson et al. mention two possible explanations for such rapid change: a founder effect, which might occur when a few speakers of a language move to a new area (see, e.g. Mufwene 1996 for a use of the founder effect in sociolinguistics); or the development of distinction for social reason. For more on this second point, see most of the field of sociolinguistics. The paper's own references to Labov 1994 and Chambers 1995 are not bad places to start.

Atkinson, Quentin D., Andrew Meade, Chris Venditti, Simon J. Greenhill & Mark Pagel. 2008. Languages evolve in punctuational bursts. Science 319(5863), 588.

Chambers, J.K. 1995. Sociolinguistic Theory: Language Variation and its Social Significance. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.

Labov, William. 1994. Principles of Linguistic Change: Internal Factors. Oxford: Blackwell.

Mufwene, Salikoko. 1996. The founder principle in creole genesis. Diachronica 13(1), 83-134.


1. Scholars disagree about how directly Darwin may have been influenced by philology and historical linguistics, but the notion of "descent with modification" emerged in both biology and philology at around the same time. As a linguist, I'm inclined to note that Bopp's work appeared a generation before Darwin's. A biologist, on the other hand, might suggest that Bopp and his contemporaries were in turn influenced by Carl Linneaus.

2. Pagel, Atkinson & Meade are similarly responsible for the letter titled "Frequency of word-use predicts rates of lexical evolution throughout Indo-European history," which I noted last year.