You are currently browsing the tag archive for the 'language' tag.
Mamihlapinatapai (sometimes spelled mamihlapinatapei) is a word from the Yaghan language of Tierra del Fuego, listed in The Guinness Book of World Records as the “most succinct word”, and is considered one of the hardest words to translate.[1] It describes “a look shared by two people with each wishing that the other will initiate something that both desire but which neither one wants to start.”
In a much-discussed post at one of my favorite blogs, Language Log, Mark Liberman christens a new game:
We might call this the Pundit’s Dilemma — a game, like the Prisoner’s Dilemma, in which the player’s best move always seems to be to take the low road, and in which the aggregate welfare of the community always seems fated to fall. And this isn’t just a game for pundits. Scientists face similar choices every day, in deciding whether to over-sell their results, or for that matter to manufacture results for optimal appeal.
(Aside on the game name game: when I was a first-year PhD student at Berkeley, Matthew Rabin taught us game theory. As if to remove all illusion that what we were studying was connected to reality, every game we analyzed in class was given a name according to his system of “stochastic lexicography.” Stochastic lexicography means randomly picking two words out of the dictionary and using them as the name of the game under study. So, for example, instead of studying “job market signaling” we studied something like “rusty succotash.” I wonder if any of our readers remember some of the game names from that class.)
(Stay tuned for my next Matthew Rabin story which will involve a hackey sack and a bodily fluid.)
There is indeed a strong incentive for pundits to distort what they say, and it has the flavor of contrarianism. Its based on an old paper by Prendergast and Stole (requires JSTOR sorry. Support Open Access publishing.) Suppose that what pundits want is to convince the world that they are smart. (Perhaps they want to influence policy. They will be influential later only if they can prove they are smart today. So today the details of what they are saying matters less than whether what they are saying is perceived to be smart.)
The thing about being really smart is that it means you are talking to people who aren’t as smart as you. (Sandeep faces this problem all the time.) So they can’t verify whether what you are saying is really true (especially when we are talking about climate change policies where if we ever do find out who was right, it will be well past the time that punditry is a profitable enterprise.) But one thing the audience knows is that smart pundits can figure out things that lesser pundits cannot. That means that the only way a smart pundit can demonstrate to his not-so-smart audience that he is smart is by saying things different than what his lesser colleagues are saying, i.e. to be a contrarian.
From Not Exactly Rocket Science:
In the Old English of Beowulf, seven different rules competed for governance of English verbs, and only about 75% followed the “-ed” rule. As the centuries ticked by, the irregular verbs became fewer and far between. With new additions to the lexicon taking on the standard regular form (‘googled’ and ‘emailed’), the irregulars face massive pressure to regularise and conform.
Today, less than 3% of verbs are irregular but they wield a disproportionate power. The ten most commonly used English verbs – be, have, do, go say, can, will, see, take and get – are all irregular. Lieberman found that this is because irregular verbs are weeded out much more slowly if they are commonly used.
To get by, speakers have to use common verbs correctly. More obscure irregular verbs, however, are less readily learned and more easily forgotten, and their misuse is less frequently corrected. That creates a situation where ‘mutant’ versions that obey the regular “-ed” rule can creep in and start taking over.
When animals move, forage or generally go about their lives, they provide inadvertent cues that can signal information to other individuals. If that creates a conflict of interest, natural selection will favour individuals that can suppress or tweak that information, be it through stealth, camouflage, jamming or flat-out lies. As in the robot experiment, these processes could help to explain the huge variety of deceptive strategies in the natural world.
The article at Not Exactly Rocket Science, describes an experiment in which robots competed for food at a hidden location and controlled a visible signal that could be used to reveal their location. The robots adapted their signaling strategy by a process that simulates natural selection. Eventually, the robots learned not to pay attention to others’ signals and the signals become essentially uninformative.
kwik, serv, kleen, EZ, FasTrak, thru, etc.
There are certain words in certain contexts that Americans purposefully misspell in a way that is half ingratiating, half condescending. I am not talking about txting where the purpose of the misspelling is to economize on characters. Instead these words are usually associated with low-end commercial products and the misspellings predate the internet.
Here’s what you get when you search google maps for the word “kwik” (and you happen to be in Stony Brook, NY.) My favorite: Kwik Ezee.
It has always fascinated me. There seems to be a common theme. It is not a movement toward phonetic spelling. Is it an attempt to be kool? Is it a way of saying “Come to KwikiMart and get your Cheezits. And don’t worry we won’t judge you for it, hey, we can’t even spell!!” The letter k apparently has a special attraction.
Sandeep says that this doesn’t happen in Britain and I believe him, but here is a google maps search that says otherwise.
Does this happen in your language? Is your language phonetically challenged like English? What’s your theory of kwaint misspellings? Any good examples (English or otherwise)?
Apparently the price you are quoted when you search for fares on Spain’s high-speed railway depends on whether you search in English or Spanish:
When I searched the site earlier that day from my office, I searched in Spanish. A one-way ticket from Barcelona to Madrid could be had for around 44 euros on a “tarifa Web,” their Internet special fare with 30 day advance purchase.
When I was at home, ready to finalize my purchase, I opted to search with the site language set to English. The price was nearly 110 euros.
The economic logic is standard: language is a way to segment the market and this segmentation is profitable if the two markets have a large difference in price-sensitivity. Presumably if you are searching in English then you are a tourist and you have fewer alternative modes of transportation. This makes you less price-sensitive.
I thank the well-travelled and multi-lingual Mallesh Pai for the pointer.
From Language Log:
The opening sentence of George F. Will’s latest column (“Have We Got a Deal for You“, 6/7/2009):
“I,” said the president, who is inordinately fond of the first-person singular pronoun, “want to disabuse people of this notion that somehow we enjoy meddling in the private sector.”
This echoes J.B.S. Haldane’s quip that the creator, if he exists, must be inordinately fond of beetles; and Will, like Haldane, is presumably proposing an inference about someone’s preferences from his actions, not reporting a direct emotional revelation.
So, since I’m one of those narrow-minded fundamentalists who believe that statements can be true or false, and that we should care about the difference, I decided to check. (On Will, not Haldane.)
Based on a few press conferences, it turns out that Obama uses “I” less often than both G.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. By the way it looks like I have found a good resource for searching Presidential cheap talk: The American Presidency Project.
But I am somebody who is very anxious to have the Afghan government and the Pakistani government have the capacity to ensure that those safe havens don’t exist. And so it, I think, will be an important reminder that we have no territorial ambitions in Afghanistan; we don’t have an interest in exploiting the resources of Afghanistan. What we want is simply that people aren’t hanging out in Afghanistan who are plotting to bomb the United States.
Obama said this in an interview with NPR (transcript.) He actually says “hangin’ out” but the transcriber apparently wanted to maintain an air of formality and wrote “hanging.” You can hear it here, around the 12:30 mark. He chuckles a bit when he says it.
These are conspicuoulsy different ways for a President to talk, especially about something as serious as terrorism. It says something about the man himself and it also draws a sharp contrast with Bush, whose standard catch phrase at these moments would be “rout out the terrorists.”
Previous installment in the series.
Here is an article (via MindHacks) profiling the types of people who are attracted to conspiracy theories.
It is the domain of psychology to study the specific conspiracy theories that appear and the people who advocate them, but to a game theorist the prevalence of conspiracy theories is not surprising. They fill a credibility gap. Like nature, the truth abhors a vacuum. It cannot be an equilibrium that only the truth is told and retold. Because then we would learn to believe everything we hear. That would be exploited by people trying to take advantage.
Conspiracy theories are just one example of noise that must be present in equilibrium to ensure that we don’t believe everything we hear. And arguably conspiracy theories about events that have already happened or are beyond our control are the cost-minimizing way of moderating credibility. Nobody really gets harmed.
Let’s try a little (thought) experiment in verbal short-term memory. First, find a friend. Then, find a reasonably complex sentence about 45 words long …Now call your friend up on the phone, and have a discussion about the topic of the article. In the course of this conversation, slip in a verbatim performance of the selected sentence. Then ask your friend to write an essay on the topic of the discussion. … How likely is it that the selected sentence will find its way, word for word, into your friend’s essay?
In case you haven’t guessed, the question is rhetorical and the article (from LanguageLog, a great blog) is referring to Maureen Dowd’s plagiarism. It is a fallacy though to focus only on the probability of the scenario you are trying to reject. What matters is the relative probability of that scenario with the alternative scenario, namely that Maureen Dowd would bother (intentionally) lifting word for word a paragraph which is not particularly insightful or cleverly written from a popular blog at the risk of being called a plagiarizer.
When something happens that has two very unlikely explanations, picking one of those explanations is mostly driven by your priors.
We, of course, live in a scientific age, and modern research pierces hocus-pocus. In the view that is now dominant, even Mozart’s early abilities were not the product of some innate spiritual gift. His early compositions were nothing special. They were pastiches of other people’s work. Mozart was a good musician at an early age, but he would not stand out among today’s top child-performers.
Essays about creativity teach us a lot. Not a whole lot about creativity, mind you, but they teach us a lot about the person writing the essay and also the social and political context. Not that David Brooks is a particularly important person to learn a lot about. Instead, treat this more of as an example of how the way in which we talk about unique people really says something more about the way we see ourselves in relation to unique people. (Similarly, this essay will not teach you much about its main subject matter but it will probably reveal stuff about me.)
People, especially intellectuals, are obsessed with what makes people creative. Mostly what makes other people creative. We are surrounded by amazing people who are always coming up with ideas that seem to come from nowhere. It gets worrisome when every day we hear people say ingenious things that would never have occurred to us in a million years. It is comforting to adopt theories of the origin of creativity that puts us on equal footing with them.
These theories come in two varieties.
- Theories that say that those people who seem to be unique are really just ordinary.
- Theories that say that us ordinary people are in fact unique.
And of course these are two ways of saying the same thing. And that’s why these essays don’t really tell us anything about creativity. But the choice of which way to say it reveals a lot about the person saying it.
Apropos my previous post on simplifying English, a more dramatic example is simplified Chinese:
A clash between traditional and simplified characters comes down to elitism vs. populism. A recent poll conducted by Sohu.com on whether to reinstate the traditional characters shows that more netizens oppose it. Behind the elitism/populism divide is the opposition between an archaistic nostalgia toward the illusory “purer” traditional Chinese literacy and a pragmatic and forward-looking modern drive. (Both Singapore and Malaysia, with sizable Chinese populations, also adopted simplified characters decades ago.)
Read a debate here.
Hau muC tym dew kids wayst lerning tew spel ingliS? Sudent we 3ther standerdeys 0n a simplifeyd speling sistem or just ubandun speling cunvenCins oltewgether? And hau muC tym is lost lerning to r3d? I caym ucross the Spelling Society wiC advocayts speling r3form and 0lso Wyrdplay wiC arcayvs a number of simplifayd speling sistems raynjing frum the totul3 fonetic tew sistems wiC are intended tew bey incrementul steps toword r3form. This wun I am yewsing is just mayd up bayst 0n luking at a few uf them.
- Dont thinc that deveyces will mayk the pr0blem mewt. Yes my iPhone pr3dicts wut I am reyting but onl3 b3cus I spel the furst few letters curectl3.
- The pr0blem with fonetic sistems is that BritiS and Umericun werds wud be speld diferently.
- I expect that informul speling cunvenCuns wil 3merj sewn withaut a t0p-daun iniSitiv. Instunt mesujing is the furst big r3sun for kids to reyt tew 3C uther. Til nau, kids talct to 3c uther but rot onl3 tew thayr t3Cers. Thay develupt informul spocen layngwij ul0ngseyd the formul layngwij. This is hapening nau with reyting. Just as informul spocen layngwij perm3ayts the formul, this wil hapen with the ritin langwij. 3ven morso b3cus uf the 3fiSens3 gayns.
- This wud b3 a thing uf the past.
(C0nversaySin with Wolfgang and Tomek acn0lijd.)
A game-theorists’ term derived from the commonplace admonishment “Talk is Cheap.” To say that “talk is cheap” is to suggest that words have no meaning because they don’t raise the stakes. “Actions speak louder than words.” Or, to quote the game theorist Yogi Berra “A verbal contract isn’t worth the paper it’s written on.” Our casual understanding that the meaning of words derives solely from their ultimate consequences demonstrates that we have deep game-theoretic instincts.
But game theory is useful because with careful study we arrive at insights one or more steps beyond our instincts. And indeed, upon further reflection, just because talk is cheap does not imply by itself that words have no meaning. In fact “cheap talk” can and often does matter because it enables credible exchange of information provided such communication is consistent with self-interested motives. Even though talk is cheap, when upon landing at O’Hare, I phone my taxi dispatcher and tell him I am ready to be picked up at the curbside, he believes me and sends a cab.
Moreover, cheap talk is credible even when there is substantial conflict of interest between the talker and the listener. Despite my claims to the contrary, the dispatcher knows that I am actually calling from inside the airplane and I am not at the curbside yet and he delays the dispatch long enough so that the driver arrives at the curbside after me and not before.
Suprisingly, talk can be credible sometimes only because it is cheap. If instead of me, it is an uninterested third-party who calls the dispatcher to send a cab, the dispatcher knows that she has no reason to say anything other than the truth, and the dispatcher sends the cab immediately.
A final digression on the genesis of the phrase “cheap talk” as a term of art in game theory. It is tempting to suppose that the popularity of the phrase derives from the irony that the logic of incentive-compatible communication turns the idea that “talk is cheap” on its head. But the origin of the phrase is something of a mystery. The first game theorists to demonstrate the role of communication in strategic interactions were Vince Crawford and Joel Sobel in their hugely important paper “Strategic Information Transmission“ Interestingly, a quick search through the text of that paper reveals that neither “cheap” nor “talk” appears anywhere in the paper.
(dinner conversation with Dilip, Tomek, Stephen and Sylvain acknowledged.)
“Even when used as an expletive, the F-word’s power to insult and offend derives from its sexual meaning,” Scalia said.
No, it derives from the fact that they can’t say it on television. Thank you Justice Scalia for preserving its power and reserving it for the little guy.
What’s your favorite crisis euphemism?
In trying to rebrand dodgy financial instruments, treasury secretaries like Paulson and Timothy Geithner are continuing a recent tradition. So much of the finance sector’s innovation in the past 30 years, it turns out, wasn’t developing new stuff, but rather developing new ways of talking about pre-existing stuff. In the 1980s, labeling risky debt offerings as junk bonds was an intentionally ironic feint (pros knew that the instruments possessed real value). But as junk bonds went mainstream in the 1990s, they evolved into “high-yield debt”—their liability became an asset. Frank Partnoy, a reformed derivatives trader who teaches law at the University of San Diego, recalls that at Morgan Stanley in the 1990s, “we were constantly coming up with new acronyms” to describe similar financial instruments. The goal: to present products, some of which had been discredited, in a more favorable light.
I like “distressed assets.” Clearly the poor damsels need to be rescued from those nasty banks. Or is the image rather one of “gently used” furniture?
The article is “Bubblespeak” and it’s at Slate.com. (nod to Language Log.)
Scrabble point revaluation in the works?
“Za,” “qi” and “zzz” were added recently to the game’s official word list for its original English-language edition. Because Z’s and Q’s each have the game’s highest point value of 10, those monosyllabic words can rack up big scores for relatively little effort. So now that those high-scoring letters are more versatile, some Scrabble aficionados would like to see the rules changed — which would be the only change since Alfred Butts popularized the game in 1948.
Let’s kill two birds with one stone. Eliminate the role of chance in scrabble by having players buy their letters rather than draw them at random. Whenever a player needs to replenish his tiles, a tile is turned over and put up for auction. Players bid for the tile with points. A player who already has seven tiles who wins the auction selects one of his tiles to replace and puts that tile up for auction. This continues until all players have seven tiles.
This removes chance from the game and also eliminates the need to revalue the tiles because that will be taken care of endogenously by competitive bidding.
Update: Free Exchange at www.economist.com makes fun of me.
Obama gave an interview yesterday on TV where he was asked about nationalizing banks. His response is an interesting look into the way the administration thinks about things, comparing the US to Japan and Sweden. You can read a transcript here.
What caught my eye was his use of the word “like” in the following excerpt (second sentence.)
So you’d think looking at it, Sweden looks like a good model. Here’s the problem; Sweden had like five banks.
This is the so-cal “like.” It stands for “about” or in this case “not many more than.” It lends an informality to the sentence which adds to its comical and therefore rhetorical punch. On top of that it brings the President further down to Earth even when talking about something esoteric like bank nationalization.
I like it. Is this the first occurence of the so-cal “like” in Presidential prose?
Be wary though, this mild version is the gateway “like” to more serious transgressions such as “We were discussing TARP and Geithner is like, ‘No way Larry, I am the Treasury Secretary and I say no caps on executive pay’ and then, like, Summers is all ‘Whatever.’ “
Suppose you are going to say something that is literally true but you know in advance that your listener will misinterpret you and be led to believe something false. If you say it anyway, are you lying?
Conversely, is it a lie to say a falseshood if you know that, because you will be misinterpreted, this is the only way to get your listener to believe in what is actually true?
Recent Comments