m. c. de marco

The new anglophone film of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo directed by David Fincher is really superb. I don't know when I've seen such a gripping and well-told suspense mystery. And there's a wonderful piece of less-is-more (compare with the impressive example of absence of language that I described in my post about The Ides of March) when Lisbeth says she is reading Mikael's notes on his computer. "They're encrypted!" says Mikael indignantly. And Lisbeth raises her eyes for a half-second withering look and says, "Please." That syllable transmits a whole paragraph of exposition about her skill in the hacking arts. You can see in the way she says that single word that she is so skilled she thinks standard encryption is for babies and that Mikael is one.

Lisbeth Salander is a fabulous part, and Rooney Mara really lives it. ("I've never done this before, and there will be blood," she tells the tethered rapist, and it's so menacing that the director doesn't need to show the operation or the blood at all.) It takes some real charisma to make Daniel Craig look like a wimpy second string on the screen, and Rooney Mara does that. Stunning performance.

So I have two problems now. One is that I now want to back both Michelle Williams's performance as Marilyn Monroe and Rooney Mara's performance as Lisbeth Salander for the Oscar for best actress, and that's a contradiction, I have to get off the fence. And the other is whether I have enough about language in this post to convince the people in accounting here at Language Log Plaza, as I usually manage to do, that my cinema ticket was a justifiable business expense.

[Will I open comments? Please.]

A couple of days ago, Victor Mair wrote about some provocative behavior on the part of "K?ng Qìngd?ng ???, associate professor in the Chinese Department at Peking University, who also just happens to be the 73rd generation descendant of Confucius (K?ng F?z? ??? ; K?ng Qi? ??), or at least he claims to be a descendant of Confucius."

In the comments, Victor names someone else who he believes to be a true descendant of Confucius, and notes that there is some doubt about K?ng Qìngd?ng's claim to this status.

Well, I'd like to come to K?ng Qìngd?ng's defense, at least on the specific and limited question of whether he is descended from Confucius. My standing to make this argument is based on the fact that I also am descended from Confucius. And I can prove it mathematically.

The basic argument was first made by Joseph Chang, in his 1999 paper  "Recent  common  ancestors  of all present-day individuals", Advances in Applied Probability, 1999:

Previous study of the time to a common ancestor of all present-day individuals has focused on models in which each individual has just one parent in the previous generation. For example, 'mitochondrial Eve' is the most recent common ancestor (MRCA) when ancestryi s defined only through maternall ines. In the standard Wright-Fisher model with population size n, the expected number of generations to the MRCA is about 2n, and the standard deviation of this time is also of order n. Here we study a two-parent analog of the Wright-Fisher model that defines ancestry using both parents. In this model, if the population size n is large, the number of generations, Tn, back to a MRCA has a distribution that is concentrated around lg n (where Ig denotes base-2 logarithm), in the sense that the ratio Tn / (lg n) converges in probability to 1 as n ? ?. Also, continuing to trace back further into the past, at about 1.77 lg n generations before the present, all partial ancestry of the current population ends, in the following sense: with high probability for large n, in each generation at least 1.77 Ig n generations before the present, all individuals who have any descendants among the present-day individuals are actually ancestors of all present-day individuals.

In other words, there is a date in the past such that at that time and before, the human population can be divided into two groups: those who have no current descendants and those who have all currently-living people as descendants. For people living at or before that time, if they are the ancestor of any modern humans, then they are the ancestor of all of us.

How long ago is that threshold time? Well, Chang's 1999 paper shows that in a model with random mating,

in each generation at least 1.77 lg n generations before the present, all individuals who have any descendants among the present-day individuals are actually ancestors of all present-day individuals.

where n is the effective population size.

And according to Jack Fenner, "Cross-cultural estimation of the human generation interval for use in genetics-based population divergence studies", American Journal of Physical Anthropology 128(2) 2005, tells us that

… absent of other information regarding ancient reproductive behavior, values of 25, 28, and 31 years should be used for the female, overall, and male generation intervals, respectively, for those studies in which a speci?c generation interval value (rather than a range of years) is appropriate.

Wikipedia tells us that Confucius lived between 551 and 479 B.C., and that his first child was born when he was 20, in 531. 2012+531 = 2543 years ago. And 2543/28 = 91 generations ago.

According to Chang's formula, 91 generations would guarantee full mixing in a population of 2^(91/1.77) = 2^54.4 = 1.93*10^16 = 19.3 quadrillion, which is many times the current population of the world, much less its population over the past 2500 years. Specifically, it's about 2.8 million times the current world population — this seems like plenty of headroom to allow for geographical and cultural barriers to mating.

But is it? I have to confess that Confucius and I are a slightly marginal case for a more realistic version of this argument. A more elaborate and realistic version is exactly the goal of Douglas Rohde, Steve Olson & Joseph Chang, "Modelling the recent common ancestry of all living humans", Nature 431, 2004. They did a variety of calculations or simulations based on models with a simplified but realistic geographic distribution of population over time, with conservative assumptions about migration, exogamy, and so on; they explicitly modeled overlapping generations and the production of offspring at different times in the life cycle; and in general they tried hard to construct a concrete and realistic model of the statistics of human descent on earth over the past few millennia.

These elaborations don't affect the main point — it remains true that

… there was a threshold, let us say Un generations ago, before which ancestry of the present-day population was an all or nothing affair. That is, each individual living at least Un generations ago was either a common ancestor of all of today's humans or an ancestor of no human alive today. Thus, among all individuals living at least Un generations ago, each present-day human has exactly the same set of ancestors. We refer to this point in time as the identical ancestors (IA) point.

And more quantitatively:

With 5% of individuals migrating out of their home town, 0.05% migrating out of their home country, and 95% of port users born in the country from which the port emanates, the simulations produce a mean MRCA [Most Recent Common Ancester] date of 1,415 bc and a mean IA date of 5,353 bc. Interestingly, the MRCAs are nearly always found in eastern Asia. This is due to the proximity of this region to both Eurasia and either the remote Pacific islands or the Americas, allowing the MRCA's descendants to reach a few major world regions in a relatively short time.

Arguably, this simulation is far too conservative, especially given its prediction that, even in densely populated Eurasia, only 55.3 people will leave each country per generation in ad 1500. If the migration rate among towns is increased to 20%, the local port users are reduced to 80%, and the migration rates between countries and continents are scaled up by factors of 5 and 10, respectively, the mean MRCA date is as recent as ad 55 and the mean IA date is 2,158 bc.

Even under the second of these scenarios, Confucius lived about 1500 years too recently to be a Universal Ancestor of all contemporary humans. But I would submit that he's more rather likely to be among MY ancestors, since some of them lived in Anatolia and in the Crimea, much more accessible to East Asia than (say) the Amazon basin is. And as for Prof. K?ng Qìngd?ng, his case is surely an easy one. Within China, there's been more than enough mixing to ensure that by now, if anyone is a descendent of Confucius, everyone is.

When Chang's result was first published, I explained it to an anthropologist friend, who refused to believe it, raising the obvious objections about assortative mating, geographical barriers, and so on. So I coded up a simulation, much simpler and less realistic than the ones done by Rohde et al., but still having a hierarchy of population groups, with parameters to control the probabilities of mating outside one's native group at each level, the probability of migrations of different sizes and distances, etc. I got my skeptical friend to suggest numbers for these parameters. Like Rohde et al., we found that such additions had no effect on the qualitative conclusion, and remarkably little effect on the quantitative results.

On the basis of that experience, I'd be willing to bet a substantial sum that a realistic simulation of Chinese mating behavior over the past couple of millennia would prove the result that if anyone within that population is now descended from Confucius, then everyone is.

For those of you who still find these results hard to believe, it may help to keep in mind two things:

(1) This is about two-parent lines of descent. Single-sex lines of descent (as in the Mitochondrial Eve scenario and so on) work differently.

(2) This is about genealogy, not about genetics. For autosomal genes, each individual gets half at random from each parent, and so you can expect to inherit G/(2^n) genes with an ancestor n generations ago, where G is the total number of genes. The current best guess for G seems to be about 25,000. Thus someone who is a 73rd-generation descendent of Confucius can expect to inherit 25000/2^73 of the sage's genes.

25000/2^73 = 2.646978e-18

So such a person has about 3 chances in a quintillion of having inherited a single gene from their illustrious ancestor.

An entertaining summary of similar work for a popular audience can be found in Susanna C. Manrubia, Bernard H. Derrida and Damián H. Zanette, "Genealogy in the Era of Genomics: Models of cultural and family traits reveal human homogeneity and stand conventional beliefs about ancestry on their head", American Scientist 91(2) 2003. Their conclusion:

The next time you hear someone boasting of being descended from royalty, take heart: There is a very good probability that you have noble ancestors too. The rapid mixing of genealogical branches, within only a few tens of generations, almost guarantees it. The real doubt is how much "royal blood" your friend (or you) still carry in your genes. Genealogy does not mean genes.

"The pit in Thomas Friedman's stomach" (5/23/2011) is back:

To observe the democratic awakenings happening in places like Egypt, Syria and Russia is to travel with a glow in your heart and a pit in your stomach. […]

But that pit in the stomach comes from knowing that while the protests are propelled by deep aspirations for dignity, justice and self-determination, such heroic emotions have to compete with other less noble impulses and embedded interests in these societies.
[Thomas Friedman, "Freedom at 4 Below", NYT 2/7/2012]

See last year's post for discussion. Being pressed for time, I'll just note that this one is on its way to becoming skunked, along the lines of beg the question.  In that spirit, I'll offer a prize for the best joke based on armpit, ashpit, moshpit, cockpit, etc. (The easy road is to start from Mr. Friedman's template, "a smile on my face and a pit in my stomach" / "a glow in your heart and a pit in your stomach", but I hope for better. Also, please keep it clean…)

That was the headline on the front page of the Saturday, January 21 D?ngf?ng rìbào ???? (Oriental Daily): "Xi?ngg?ng rén shì g?u" ????? (Hong Kong people are dogs). See here and here (with video).

So, who is this person that is calling Hong Kongers "dogs"? It is none other than K?ng Qìngd?ng ???, associate professor in the Chinese Department at Peking University, who also just happens to be the 73rd generation descendant of Confucius (K?ng F?z? ??? ; K?ng Qi? ??), or at least he claims to be a descendant of Confucius. We might, then, interpret his name, K?ng Qìngd?ng ???, as "Scion of Confucius who Celebrates the East". He also goes by the moniker K?ng héshàng ??? ("Monk Kong"), which is laughably ironic.

K?ng Qìngd?ng was also in the news recently as one of the judges for the Confucius Peace Prize that was awarded to Vladimir Putin and for representing the First Sage at the ceremony.

K?ng Qìngd?ng is notorious for using foul language and for inciting violence, so much so that last November Peking University students circulated a petition requesting that school officials dismiss him for being a danger to the public and an embarrassment to the University.

This is certainly not the first time that K?ng Qìngd?ng has uttered profanities and made threats.

Aside from being a bully and party hack, Kong Qingdong has a checkered past, having participated in the Tiananmen Square demonstrations on behalf of democracy, but then switching over to become an ultra-nationalist and anti-Western polemicist.

The problem with K?ng Qìngd?ng's outrageous antics in the present instance is that they come at a time when relations between Hong Kong and China are strained to the breaking point, and Kong's vitriolic abuse was directed solely and squarely at the people of Hong Kong.

First I shall analyze exactly what he said about the people of Hong Kong that is so insulting, then I shall explain that there is a vital linguistic issue at the basis of his hatred for the people of Hong Kong. I should note that Kong's rant is so inflammatory that many of the websites that carried video recordings of it later took them down because what he said is considered hate speech. The Shanghaiist website has a good video (with English supertitles) of the web news interview in which Kong excoriates Hong Kongers, although sometimes I have not been able to access it.

A few newspapers in the West have reported Kong's incredible stream of abuse against the people of Hong Kong, but the growing friction between the PRC and Hong Kong has gone largely unnoticed by the public at large.

The part of Kong's diatribe that so infuriated practically every citizen of Hong Kong is where he called them "dogs". After Hong Kong erupted with outraged demonstrations against him and China (there are also many other festering issues, some of which I shall touch upon later in this post), Kong backtracked and complained that the media were distorting what he really said, that he never really said "Hong Kong people are dogs" (more on that below). I should mention that Kong's tirade against Hong Kong was prompted by viral videos of a conflict between local passengers on a Hong Kong Metro train and mainlanders who contravened regulations by eating noodles on the subway.

So, let us see what Kong actually said.

At 0:42-43 of the video that appears above, Kong states that Hong Kong people who do not recognize themselves as Chinese are used to serving as the "running dogs" of the British imperialists: "d?ng z?ug?u d?ng guànle ??????".

This is immediately followed at 0:45 by the accusation that still to this day "they're all dogs" and "you're not human": "dào xiànzài d?u shì g?u ??????" (N.B. the subtitles on this video are not entirely accurate, hence my transcription may vary slightly from what is in the subtitles) "n?men bùshì rén ?????".

Immediately on the heels of that last accusation comes another rephrasing of the assertion that Hong Kong people are dogs: "W? zh?dào Xi?ngg?ng y?u h?ndu? rén shì h?orén, dànshì y?u h?ndu? Xi?ngg?ng rén zhìj?n háishì g?u ???????????????? ???????????" ("I know that there are many good people in Hong Kong, but there are many Hong Kong people who still today are dogs").

Kong then at 1:12 reiterates with extraordinary vehemence that many Hong Kong people are dogs: "W? zàicì shu?, Xi?ngg?ng rén h?ndu? shì g?u ????????????!" ("I repeat, as for Hong Kong people, many of them are dogs"). The form of this topic-comment denunciation is irregular and is calculated to put maximum emphasis on the word g?u ? ("dog") at the end of the exclamation. Even someone who does not know Chinese can hear the angry stress that Kong applies to the word g?u ? ("dog") at the end of the sentence. He achieves this not only through the unusual syntax of the sentence, but also by altering the third tone so that it rises higher than it normally would, and by his finger-pointing gesture and bobbing head.

Putting Xi?ngg?ng ?? at the beginning of the sentence also follows the rhythms of the previous clauses, several of which begin with Xi?ngg?ng ??.

The normal word order of the blast at 1:12 would be "W? zàicì shu?, h?ndu? Xi?ngg?ng rén shì g?u ????????????!" ("I repeat, many Hong Kong people are dogs").

In a follow-up program, Kong claims that he never said "Xi?ngg?ng rén shì g?u ?????" ("Hong Kong people are dogs"), which is true. He actually said, "Xi?ngg?ng rén h?ndu? shì g?u ???????!" ("As for Hong Kong people, many of them are dogs!"), and other variations on that theme.

In Western society, where dogs are man's best friend, it might not be a terrible insult to call someone a "dog", but in China, where dogs are eaten and kicked around (except by pet owners and lovers), calling someone a "dog" and saying that they are not "human" is about as vicious an insult as one can imagine. Many people who have watched this video of Kong's fulminations — both Chinese and Westerners alike — feel that Kong is more despicable than any dog, except perhaps for the meanest pit bulls, to which he bears a remarkable resemblance.

Let us move on to the linguistic issue that lies at the heart of Kong's denunciation of Hong Kongers. Before he gets to the part about Hong Kong people being dogs, he decries their unwillingness to speak Mandarin and insistence upon speaking Cantonese. Here I shall give only a rough English translation-summary of the relevant portion, but — to save labor and space — will forego transcription of the Mandarin.

"Two different kinds of language; this detail that you mention is very important. One is Mandarin, the other is a topolect. Right, huh? Mandarin speakers don't have any responsibility or necessity for mastering any of the topolects. Right, huh? Chinese people have a responsibility to speak Mandarin, but they don't have any responsibility to speak any of the topolects, such as Northeastern topolect, Sichuanese, Pekingese, Tianjinese. Right, huh? Maybe you can only master the topolect of the area where you grew up, the mother tongue of your homeland. You have no responsibility to speak the topolect of some other area. But every person, huh, has a responsibility to speak Mandarin. Huh? But what do you do when you meet someone who speaks a topolect that is different from yours? Both sides should speak Mandarin. Huh! What sort of person stubbornly refuses to speak Mandarin? Bastard! [wángb?dàn ???] They certainly must have some other purpose in mind. For example, Hong Kong people, do you accept that they are Chinese? But according to what I know, many Hong Kong people don't consider themselves to be Chinese. When they open their mouths, they say, 'We Hong Kongers, you Chinese.' They are bastards!"

From here, Kong starts to lambast the Hong Kong people for being "running dogs" of the British imperialists, and so forth, which I have already covered above.

These sentiments, the anger and indignation over the alleged stubborn resistance of topolect speakers to speak Mandarin, are directed not just at Cantonese, but also against Shanghainese and anyone else who allegedly refuses to speak Mandarin. Having visited Hong Kong scores of times and having lived there for longer periods up to a year, I can verify that there are many people in Hong Kong who don't speak any Mandarin or speak it very poorly. Kong Qingdong must be extraordinarily obtuse if he thinks that everybody in Hong Kong or elsewhere in China can speak Mandarin.

The conflicts over language and eating in subway cars are just two of a multitude of frictional issues that exist between Mainlanders and Hong Kongers. The causes of tension between the two groups are endless: Mainlanders coming in droves to have their babies in Hong Kong hospitals and buying up safe milk powder for their children, soaring real estate, favoritism toward mainlanders at Dolce & Gabbana, the rule of law (which Kong Qingdong scoffs at and says that only an uncivilized people like Hong Kongers needed to have imposed upon them by the British imperialists), and so on.

The atmosphere in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, as expressed by one of my most thoughtful and sensitive friends there, does not bode well for the future:

The suffocating feeling I get, both literally and figuratively, when having to wait four trains at the Admiralty Station just to cross over to Tsim Sha Tsui, or doing a breast-stroke walk through a sea of sneaker-shopping teenagers in Mong Kok at eleven in the evening, is of 1.3 billion Chinese desperately trying to squeeze themselves onto Hong Kong territory for the freedom, decency, opportunity and prosperity it still has to offer, while, at the same time, this freedom, decency, opportunity and prosperity is gradually being eroded and curtailed with each passing day. I think the conflict and resentment between Mainlanders and Hong Kong people can be traced back to this untenable situation.

Whatever happens in the coming years, we can be sure that language issues will be at the center of the controversies between Mainlanders and Hong Kongers.

[Thanks to Joel Martinsen, Bob Bauer, Arif Dirlik, Perry Link, Haitao Tang, Mandy Chan, Genevieve Leung, Nelson Ching, Erling Hoh, Leander Seah, Bonlap Chan, Bin Qing Zheng, Maiheng Dietrich, Zhou Ying, Gianni Wan, Jing Wen, Rebecca Fu, Jiajia Wang, Zhao Lu, Sijie Ren, Denis Mair, and Brendan O'Kane]

Last week, my old friend Hopkinson Smith gave a concert here in Philadelphia. This reminded me that one of the entries in the Quadrangle at the University of Pennsylvania is named for his great6-grandfather Francis Hopkinson, a signer of the Declaration of Independence who was also the author of the first secular song in the European tradition known to have been composed in America. (And right next to the Hopkinson entry, by chance, is an entry named for William Smith, the university's first provost, so that the standard map of the Quad happens to have Hoppy's full name in the middle of its upper right-hand border.

So I looked on line for a copy of Francis Hopkinson's first song, and found a facsimile of the manuscript on the web site of the Library of Congress. The lyrics are a ballad by Thomas Parnell (1679-1718), and Francis Hopkinson apparently wrote his setting in 1759, when he was 22 years old, although it was not published until 1788.

Parnell's poem begins

My Days have been so wondrous Free,
__The little Birds that flie
With careless Ease from Tree to Tree,
__Were but as bless'd as I.

Before long, the poet contemplates abandoning his freedom for the bondage of a romantic relationship:

But now my former Days retire,
__And I'm by Beauty caught,
The tender Chains of sweet Desire
__Are fix'd upon my Thought.

According to an 1880 Dictionary of English Literature, Parnell's poem was "addressed to his lady-love, a Miss Anne Minchin, whom he afterwards married."

Anyhow, I thought it was nice to see that America's first secular song was about freedom and commitment. And I was also struck by the fact that the first line exemplifies the old-fashioned adverbial usage of adjectival forms.

For those for whom the hand-written sheet music is not enough of a clue, here's a performance in modern dress and style of "My Days":

And if you haven't had enough of Francis Hopkinson, you may enjoy The Old Farm and the New Farm: A Political Allegory, which he published in 1774 under the pen name of "Peter Grievous, Esq., A.B.C.D.E."

Three linguistic offenses in the UK to report on this week: an injudicious noun choice, a highly illegal false assertion, and an obscene racist epithet. The latter two have led to criminal charges.

Alex Salmond, the First Minister in the Scottish government, is in hot water for the choice of a noun. He had been scheduled to appear on BBC TV to give his predictions about the likely winners of three upcoming rugby football matches, but a BBC adviser decided against this appearance. An irritated Salmond told the press: "the political Gauleiter, we should call him now, intervened to say this shouldn't happen and, really, he's lost the plot."

Shock horror scandal probe! You see, Gauleiter is the term that was used for the provincial governors in Germany when Hitler was chancellor, so now Salmond is being accused of comparing BBC officials to Nazi ones. The Scottish Labour party called it an "ugly smear"; the Scottish Conservative party called it "bully-boy tactics"; and the Scottish Liberal Democrat leader Willie Rennie called on Mr Salmond to "retract this slur on the integrity of the BBC." The BBC may have advisers and executives and a head honcho, but don't called them Gauleiters.

It's just another storm in the teacup of political language furores. It'll die down. If Madonna kisses another female pop star, or more snow falls on Heathrow, or a showbiz separation is announced, or a man bites a dog, the story will vanish like morning mist. It probably has already: there are two much more juicy stories that also involve basically linguistic offenses.

One is about a cabinet minister who may have lied to defeat the ends of justice (the most serious of linguistic crimes involve direct lying to the judicial system).

Chris Huhne was an effective and active UK environment minister, noted for his robust attacks on Conservative policy and his faith in the merits of wind turbines, until his very recent resignation. It has been alleged that he escaped a speeding prosecution a few years ago by getting his wife of more than 25 years, the economist Vicky Pryce, to say that she had been driving the car at the time. But unknown to her, he was having a sexual affair with a bisexual staff member, and eventually a tabloid newspaper discovered that (when will these randy male politicians ever learn). He promptly told Pryce about it and moved out, taking up with said staff member full time.

Bad move. Ba-a-a-ad. His angry scorned wife leaked the speeding ticket dishonesty story to a newspaper. The police investigated, and have now decided to put both of them on trial for perverting the course of justice (maximum possible penalty: life imprisonment). And of course the rational thing for her to do is to admit the offense, plead guilty with apologies, and give evidence against her ex-husband. The obvious move for the defense will be to insist that she is making things up out of petty jealousy and bitterness over her failed marriage. Think about it: politics, global warming, fast cars, bisexuality, infidelity, lies, divorce, rage, treachery, revenge… That should be a trial to watch!

The other linguistic story is about soccer player John Terry, captain of the England soccer team, who is alleged to have shouted racial abuse at a black player, Anton Ferdinand of Queens Park Rangers, a few weeks ago. He seems to have forgotten about the existence of television, which he was appearing on at the time. The UK's very modest protections for linguistic freedom of expression do not extend to snarling "Fucking black cunt!" at an opposing team member, whether on TV or not (and you can see the words being mouthed in this video; not much doubt about it). Terry is being prosecuted for the criminal offense of racial hate speech. He hasn't gone on trial yet, but he has been stripped of his captaincy on the grounds that it would embarrass England if he led the team in the upcoming Euro 2012 tournament and was then found guilty of a racist speech offense straight afterwards. [Update: After the Football Association said Terry could not captain England, the England team manage, Fabio Capello, immediately resigned his post. Big ripples through the sport from this incident.]

That's our roundup of criminal and/or inadvisable speech acts in the UK newspapers this week. If anyone else says anything shocking, illegal, immoral, offensive, or linguistically noteworthy, Language Log will try to cover it. Though you should keep in mind that we have just one linguistic reporter (moi) covering the entire UK. I do what I can, but the foul-mouthed players and fans in the game of soccer alone are likely to outstrip my ability to keep up with the reporting.

[The UK's very modest protections for linguistic freedom of expression do not extend to opening comments on this post.]

Judging from many comments on this post, "Annals of airport Chinglish, part 3", there is both tremendous interest in and massive confusion about how Chinese characters are constructed.

Jeremy Goldkorn sent me this clever complaint about the characters from Weibo (China's imitation of Twitter) which is circulating widely on the web; it seems to be relevant to our present discussion:

???????? ??????yáo???????b?n???????pá???????l?i???????bi?o???????sh?n?????? ?bi?o?? ?????c????????xi?n???????bì???????cuì???????h?ng??????!

I'll provide a rough translation:

With tears streaming down, I've finally learned how to read:

three t? ? ("earth") are pronounced yáo ? ("high, lofty")

three niú ? ("bovine") are pronounced b?n ? ("rush")

three sh?u ? ("hand") are pronounced pá ? ("pickpocket"); the same morpheme may also much more easily be written as ?, although the latter character also has many other meanings under two different pronunciations, b?: "hold on to; cling to; rake; dig up; push lightly; strip / take off; peel", and pá "rake up; gather together; stew, braise"

three ? ("field") are pronounced l?i ? ("fields divided by dikes")

three m? ? ("horse") are pronounced bi?o ? ("the aspect / appearance of a galloping herd of horses"); a Chinese woman who had this character as her surname was forbidden to use it because it was not found in standard fonts

three yáng ? ("sheep-goat; ovicaprid") are pronounced sh?n ? ("the rank smell of ovicaprids / mutton; a flock / herd of ovicaprids")

three qu?n ? ("canine, dog") are pronounced bi?o ? ("appearance / aspect of dogs running; swift; whirlwind" — the latter meaning is usually written with the "wind" radical either on the left or the right side, and the wind radical may, of course, be either simplified ? or traditional ?, and the 3 dogs may be replaced by 3 fires (hu? ?) yet retain the same meaning of "whirlwind", and so forth and so on

three lù ? ("deer") are pronounced c? ?  ("coarse; crude"), and the same morpheme is written a number of different ways, e.g., ?, ?, ?, etc.

three yú ? ("fish") are pronounced xi?n ? ("fresh; new; delicious; rare, few"), another way of writing xi?n ? ("fresh", etc.)

three bèi ? ("cowry; shell[fish]; valuable; conch") are pronounced bì ? ("straining hard; a legendary animal like a tortoise [the bases of many heavy steles in premodern times were often carved in the presumed shape of a bì ?]")

three máo ? ("hair; fur; feather; wool") are pronounced cuì ? ("fine animal hair or feathers")

three ch? ? ("cart; car; chariot; vehicle") are pronounced h?ng ? ("boom; bang; rumble; noise of an explosion")

If there are characters you don't know how to read, forward them [on Weibo].

Most of these characters are of relatively low frequency and, except for a few of them, neither their meanings nor their pronunciations are known by persons of average literacy.

Many more such characters consisting or two, three, or four repetitions of the same character exist, and their sounds and meanings are in most cases equally or more opaque.

Since it is the year of the dragon, let us examine a couple of characters that consist solely of repetitions of the character for dragon, lóng (simplified ? traditional / complicated ?).  To show the full complement of strokes, I will use only the traditional forms:

dá

?? [that is meant to be one character consisting of 32 strokes] ("the appearance of a flying dragon; a pair of dragons")

zhé

??

?? [that is meant to be one character consisting of 64 strokes]  ("garrulous; verbose; talkative")

All of the characters referred to above are real (neither I nor anyone else now alive made them up).

The ultimate sendup of Chinese character formation is Xu Bing's famous Ti?nsh? ?? (A Book from the Sky), which consists entirely of characters that look like real characters, but are in fact all fake.  When A Book from the Sky was first exhibited in Beijing in 1988, it caused enormous consternation, because those who came to view it felt that the characters were familiar, but no matter how hard they strained, they could not make sound or sense of a single character in the entire lot.  Sounds and meanings could arbitrarily or imaginatively be assigned to each and every one of Xu Bing's 4,000 characters from the sky.  All of the strokes and all of the components are "legal" in the sense that they occur in officially authorized characters, but they have been combined in "illegal" ways.  That is to say, they don't add up to any characters that occur in historical texts or dictionaries.  Once they realized that they had been "had", conservative viewers were outraged because they thought that Xu Bing was making fun / light of them and their revered writing system.  It wasn't long before the exhibition closed and Xu fled to the United States in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square Massacre.

I have met Xu Bing several times, e.g., once in his studio in New York and once at a lecture in Hong Kong, and I've gone to three or four of his exhibitions in the United States and have read his autobiograpical and theoretical / critical writings (I included his substantial "The Living Word" [translated by Ann L. Huss and Victor H. Mair] in the Hawai'i Reader in Traditional Chinese Culture).  Yet I have not been able to determine precisely what his intentions were in creating A Book from the Sky (though I certainly have my theories about what prompted him to spend so many years of exacting labor to produce such a monumental work of completely impenetrable "literary" art).  To tell the truth, I do not think that Xu Bing himself knows exactly why he felt driven to produce this mind-boggling / jarring multivolume book that makes no sense whatsoever.

Lest learners and lovers of the Chinese script feel as though they have been cast adrift after reading this blog, I want to reassure them that approximately 85% of all Chinese characters do give some hints about how they are to be pronounced and / or what they mean, but these are vague and imprecise hints only.  For instance, it is easy for me to think of two dozen characters that include f?ng ? ("place; region; square; regular; upright; honest; side, party; easy; rule; means; comparison; method, way; prescription; only when; then; just, still") as a phonophore having the following pronunciations:  f?ng, fáng, f?ng, fàng, páng.  In most of these cases, the basic meaning of f?ng ? has no perceivable bearing on the meaning of the character, but is being used strictly for its sound, which — although spread across all four tones and a fifth related pronunciation — is actually more regular than many other phonophores.  I can also easily think of two dozen other characters in which f?ng ? is the radical (Kangxi no. 70).  In these cases, f?ng ? occasionally has vague semantic significance (though it is usually so hidden as to be essentially useless for figuring out the actual meaning of a character in which it appears), and often it is only considered the radical for the purpose of looking up the character by the shape of f?ng ?, without regard to its meaning.  I can, moreover, identify nearly another two dozen characters in which f?ng ?, as incorporated in the derived phonophore páng ? ("side"), serves as the secondary phonophore, where ? has the following pronunciations p?ng, páng, p?ng, b?ng, bàng.  In a couple of these characters where páng ? is the phonophore, one may with effort detect the secondary semantic notion of "side", but the overall meaning is more often than not vaguely related to the various radicals under which these characters fall.

In the final analysis, one must still rely on brute memorization to master the sounds and the meanings of the characters, though in some cases the radical may provide a slightly useful jog to the memory in recalling roughly what the character means.  Similarly, probably in over half the cases the phonophore may provide a somewhat useful, yet often dim, hint about the pronunciation of the character.  To conclude, we may say that, if one studies very, very hard, one can can master upwards of three thousand out of the 80,000+ total characters.  If one does not apply oneself extremely diligently, tears will stream from one's eyes when faced with trying to remember the sounds and the meanings of characters like those in the lament at the beginning of this post (and they are relatively easy when it comes to monsters like ?? [that is intended to be one character consisting of 35 strokes] and ?? [that is intended to be one character consisting of 34 strokes].

[Thanks to Zhao Lu for help in figuring out the meaning of the final character in the Weibo doggerel at the beginning of this post and to Maiheng Dietrich for making some sense of the context]

"Radical theory explains the origin, evolution, and nature of life, challenges conventional wisdom: Case Western Reserve theorist develops incomparable model that unifies physics, chemistry, and biology", Case Western Reserve press release 1/26/2012:

The earth is alive, asserts a revolutionary scientific theory of life emerging from Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine. The trans-disciplinary theory demonstrates that purportedly inanimate, non-living objects—for example, planets, water, proteins, and DNA—are animate, that is, alive. With its broad explanatory power, applicable to all areas of science and medicine, this novel paradigm aims to catalyze a veritable renaissance.

Erik Andrulis, PhD, assistant professor of molecular biology and microbiology, advanced his controversial framework in his manuscript "Theory of the Origin, Evolution, and Nature of Life," published in the peer-reviewed journal, Life. His theory explains not only the evolutionary emergence of life on earth and in the universe but also the structure and function of existing cells and biospheres.

In addition to resolving long-standing paradoxes and puzzles in chemistry and biology, Dr. Andrulis' theory unifies quantum and celestial mechanics. His unorthodox solution to this quintessential problem in physics differs from mainstream approaches, like string theory, as it is simple, non-mathematical, and experimentally and experientially verifiable. As such, the new portrait of quantum gravity is radical.

John Timmer, "How the craziest f#@!ing "theory of everything" got published and promoted", Ars Technica 1/28/2012.

A paper like this can put a university's Press Information Officer (PIO) in a tough position. According to a PIO at a major university (who asked to speak without attribution because he works in the field), a PIO can typically recognize when something is off on the fringes of science, and they don't want to promote a story that will damage their institution's credibility.

"We do try to avoid doing stories that we feel could backfire on the institution, but it's not always up to the PIO to say no to a paper that is appearing in a peer-reviewed journal," the PIO told Ars. "Note that she [the Case Western PIO] made the point about peer-review explicitly in the release—that’s a pretty telling detail." […]

If the responsibility of press officers can be a bit complicated, the responsibility of news sites isn't. PhysOrg and Science Daily both did what they always do and ran the press release, unedited, as if it were their own original news content. ScienceDaily even added itself as the dateline source.

This wouldn't necessarily be a problem if it weren't for the fact that, in a large number of contexts, these two sites are treated as credible sources of scientific information. Items posted there make frequent appearances on social news sites, and a number of people I've talked to have been shocked to discover that the majority of the sites' content is nothing more than rebranded press releases.

What does this have to do with language?  Well, I was going to say that linguistics is one of the few subjects that Dr. Andrulis doesn't promise to revolutionize, until I checked the paper:

The theory outlined in this manuscript is limited in scope. I did not provide gyrosystems to model much of the scientific evidence related to astrophysics, particle physics, and cosmology before the electrogyre, nor did I integrate organismal, ecological, and ethological data after the cellulogyre. I predict that further gyromodel application will reveal its explanatory breadth and power. For example, given that complexity theorists find there to be a unifying organization in ecosystems, language, and economics, I predict the gyromodel will find applications in these subject matters.

But linguistic applications of the gyromodel aside, this episode offers an unusually pure example of (the first steps in) the ecosystem of flacks and hacks.  I've written about this in a number of posts over the years, including these:

"Enhance breast size by 80%", 4/9/2005
"Another day, another reprinted press release", 4/24/2005
"It's always silly season in the (BBC) science section", 8/26/2006
"Flacks and hacks and Hitchens", 12/14/2006
"Flacks and hacks and brainscans", 11232007
"Why don't we have a better press corps?", 9/11/2008
"Debasing the coinage of rational inquiry: a case study", 4/22/2009
"Study: Hacks often bamboozled by flacks", 5/30/2009

The general problem of credulous passing-on of press releases is especially acute in the case of language-related topics, because the countervailing forces (knowledge of the subject on the part of journalists and editors, and fear of reputational damage from public ridicule) are so weak in those areas.

In the case of the Andrulis paper, the claims were so bizarre, and covered such a wide range of fields, and came from such an unlikely source, that there was no journalistic uptake at all. But the paper's publication in an allegedly peer-reviewed journal, the issuing of an enthusiastic press release from an apparently authoritative source, and the re-publishing of that press release at Science Daily, illustrate how little those steps actually mean.

P.Z. Myers offers the explanations that have probably also occurred to you:

This paper is so weird and out there that it is either an attempt to Sokal the field of origins of life research, or the man is seriously mentally ill.

It's also a case where I feel that the bar bet model has a certain explanatory potential.

Update — it may also be relevant that W.B. Yeats was heavily into gyre theory, back in the 1920s. Whether the system of A Vision is connected to the current explorations of Erik Andrulis is unclear — it's not in his bibliography — but the rules are different for poets.

Update #2 — an anonymous commenter on Derek Lowe's post on this topic says:

It is no joke. He's a colleague of mine and I know him quite well. His mental state has been deteriorating for several years and this theory has become an obsession. It is very sad for him and his family. It is deplorable and inexcusable that our PR department participated and promoted his mania.

One of the earliest and best photographers in China was called John Zumbrun, but I have also seen his surname spelled various different ways, including Zumbrum.  Some of his pictures may be seen here (this site is run by Thomas H. Hahn, digital archivist of old photographs).

As soon as I saw his surname, I suspected that it might be a variant of the Zumbrunnen among my own maternal relatives who were of Swiss German extraction.  When I mentioned to my sister Heidi (who does intense genealogical research on our family) that I thought Zumbrun might be a variant of Zumbrunnen, she replied, "Oh man, the variant spellings of Zumbrunnen are driving me batty.  I have even seen Zum Pwunnen.  Have you heard of the soundex?  It is a way to index names & deal with all of the variant spellings."

Upon looking up Soundex, I found that it was developed around 1918 and was a method for indexing names in the 1880, 1900, 1910, and 1920 US Censuses.

Soundex is still very much in use today and there is a neat Soundex converter that enables one to easily and quickly obtain the one letter + three digit alphanumeric code for any surname that one enters into the system.

Essentially a phonetic algorithm for indexing names by sound, Soundex encodes homophonous names with the same alphanumeric representation so that they can be correlated despite differences in spelling.

Metaphone is an improved version of Soundex that was invented in 1990 and that takes into account irregularities in English spelling and pronunciation.  The latest version, Metaphone 3, was brought out in 2009 and "achieves an accuracy of approximately 99% for English words, non-English words familiar to Americans, and first names and family names commonly found in the United States, having been developed according to modern engineering standards against a test harness of prepared correct encodings." (Wikipedia)

I thought that I'd give Soundex a try on a controlled body of material.  I've long been aware that there are numerous different ways to spell the name Shakespeare.  In an article entitled "The Spelling and Pronunciation of Shakespeare's Name", David Kathman brings together many of these variants.  Here are the Soundex results I obtained when I entered the variants into the software:

non-literary references

Shakespeare             S221
Shakespere              S221
Shakespear              S221
Shakspeare              S216
Shackspeare             S216
Shakspere                S216
Shackespeare           S221
Shackspere              S216
Shackespere            S221
Shaxspere               S216
Shexpere                 S216
Shakspe~                 S210
Shaxpere                 S216
Shagspere                S216
Shaksper                 S216
Shaxpeare               S216
Shaxper                  S216
Shake-speare           S221
Shakespe                 S221
Shakp                      S210

literary references

Shakespeare            S221
Shake-speare           S221
Shakspeare              S216
Shaxberd                 S216
Shakespere               S221
Shakespear               S221
Shak-speare              S216
Shakspear                S216
Shakspere                S216
Shaksper                 S216
Schaksp.                 S210
Shakespheare          S221
Shakespe                 S221
Shakspe                   S210

Since all of these spellings refer to the same name, ideally they should all have yielded the same alphanumeric code.  It is encouraging, though, that most of the variants come out as S221 or S216, while there are only 4 occurrences of S210.  I have not run all of the variants through Metaphone, though I presume that it would do an even better job than Soundex.

Nevertheless, we should not be so naive as to believe that Soundex and Metaphone can do our genealogical research for us, since they are only meant to recognize patterns that we might otherwise overlook.  For example, the alphanumeric Soundex code for "Mair" is M600, but the same code is also applied to the following long list of names:   MAHAR | MAHER | MAHR | MAIER | MAIR | MARIA | MARIE | MARR | MARROW | MARY | MAURY | MAYER | MAYOR | MEIER | MERRIHEW | MERRY | MEYER | MIR | MOHR | MOIR | MOOR | MOORE | MORA | MORE | MOREAU | MOREY | MORR | MORROW | MOWER | MOWERY | MOWRY | MOYER | MUIR | MURIE | MURR | MURRAH | MURRAY | MURRIE | MURROW | MURRY | MYER | MYHRE | ; I'm certain that these are not all variants of the same name.

On the other hand, although "Mair" and "Maier" are variants of the same surname, that is not the end of the story either.  Before I went to my ancestral village of Pfaffenhofen, Austria in 1967, I had always assumed that "Mair" was an Anglicization of "Maier" or some other spelling of the German surname (e.g., Meyer, Meier, Mayer, Maier, Mier, Meir).  Indeed, many people used to ask me if I were related to Lucy Mair, the British anthropologist, but I knew that could not be so because her name was of Scots or English origin, while mine was of German derivation.  It is interesting that I am listed in Wikipedia as being a person with the surname Mair in a Scots context, though I'm sure that it won't be long after this post goes up that the Wikipedia editors shift me to the much smaller group of people named Mair in a German context.  In any event, when I went to Pfaffenhofen, I discovered that there were many individuals whose surname in the church record books and on tombstones was given as "Mair", and in the Innsbruck phonebook there were scores of people surnamed "Mair".  Even more surprising to me was that it was not uncommon for families to change their name from "Maier" (or some other spelling) to "Mair" and vice versa, depending upon fashion or personal preference.

For those who might be curious, the German surname "Mair" derives from Middle High German meiger, meaning "higher or superior", often used for stewards of landholders or great farmers or leaseholders; today a Meier is generally a dairy farmer. Meier and Meyer are used more often in Northern Germany, while Maier and Mayer are found more frequently in Southern Germany.  (This note is based upon this entry in genealogy.about.com.)

The main purpose of this post, however, is not to engage in genealogical investigations of the surname "Mair", but to bring the Soundex and Metaphone  algorithms to the attention of Language Log readers and to suggest that they might have useful purposes for linguistic research quite apart from genealogical investigations.

"Does Donald Trump support matter?", Special Report w/ Bret Baier, Fox News 2/2/2012. John Crowley's reponse:

Well what's the alternative, thought I.  Denouncing matter?  Indifference to matter?   The Gnostics used to argue over it…

Obligatory screen shot:

"Remarks by the President at the National Prayer Breakfast", 1/2/2012:

And when I talk about shared responsibility, it’s because I genuinely believe that in a time when many folks are struggling, at a time when we have enormous deficits, it’s hard for me to ask seniors on a fixed income, or young people with student loans, or middle-class families who can barely pay the bills to shoulder the burden alone.  And I think to myself, if I’m willing to give something up as somebody who’s been extraordinarily blessed, and give up some of the tax breaks that I enjoy, I actually think that’s going to make economic sense.

But for me as a Christian, it also coincides with Jesus’s teaching that “for unto whom much is given, much shall be required.”

The quote is from Luke 12:48, and the Greek original is

????? ?? ? ????? ????, ???? ??????????? ???' ?????
"but to each one to whom much has been given, much will be required from him"

The Latin Vulgate has

omni autem cui multum datum est multum quaeretur ab eo
"but to whomsoever much has been given, much will be asked of him"

The KJV is

For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required

The English Standard Version is

Everyone to whom much was given, of him much will be required

Unlike all of these, President Obama's version leaves out the "of him" or "from him" associated with required.  The omission is more obvious if we put the relative clause in its usual place:

Much shall be required of him unto whom much is given.

If we chop out "of him", the result is ungrammatical.

*Much shall be required unto whom much is given.

If we swap the order of the clauses in the unchopped version, we get an awkward but (marginally) grammatical English sentence:

Unto whom much is given, much shall be required of him.

Chopping out the prepositional phrase from the second clause of the swapped version makes it smoother, but also makes it ungrammatical and semantically incoherent:

*Unto whom much is given, much shall be required.

President Obama is far from the first person to garble this quotation in an analogous way. The Gates Foundation did it on their web site, announced as one of their two founding principles ("To whom much has been given, much is expected"); President George W. Bush did it in a State of the Union message ("Our work in the world is also based on a timeless truth: To whom much is given, much is required") — and many others have done it over the centuries, starting with JC Bingham, "Report Respecting the Religious State of Spanish America", The Missionary Herald, Nov. 1826 ("Unto whom much is given, much will be required"). There's even a version in verse (George Henry Boker, "The Lesson of Life", 1848):

517 "But woe to you who love the gilded cage,
518 Who pander basely to the present hour,
519 Who build not on that firm foundation, Truth!
[…]
526 Who seek, with untaught power of mighty verse,
527 To lure their weaker brothers far astray;
528 Or praise their blinded errings. Each one knows,
529 Within his heart, himself a hypocrite;
530 Sees the sad tears the ravished muses shed
531 O'er their undoing; hears a potent voice
532 Thunder within his hollow soul—"Thou Traitor!
533 Unto whom much is given, much is required."
534 How back in horror draws the shuddering mind
535 When pondering the fate of erring genius!

For more analytic and historical background, see "Ungrammatical timeless truths", 1/24/2007; "The tangled history of a mangled maxim", 1/26/2007.

Crash blossom of the week: "Don't help old, blind council tells parking officers", The Age 2/1/2012.

Screen shot:

[Hat tip to Eric TF Bat, Freelance Antipodean Crash Blossom Correspondent]

Last spring, I took a look ("Phonemic diversity decays 'out of Africa'?", 4/16/2011) at an interesting paper by Quentin Atkinson ("Phonemic Diversity Supports a Serial Founder Effect Model of Language Expansion from Africa", Science 4/15/2011). Atkinson argued that a survey of sound systems around the world supports the so-called serial founder effect (SFE) "in which successive population bottlenecks during range expansion progressively reduce diversity", just as a similar survey of human genetic and phenotypic diversity does. He also argued that the phonemic-diversity evidence points to an origin in Africa, again just like the genetic evidence.

I expressed some skepticism about this argument, mainly based on some of the choices that Atkinson made in quantifying "phonemic diversity". One choice that I considered in detail was the critical role played by a few features such as tone, which (on the time scale of human global migration) are at least as likely to result from innovation and areal spread as from survival.

Now Keith Hunley, Claire Bowern, and Meghan Healy ("Rejection of a serial founder effects model of genetic and linguistic coevolution", Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 2/1/2012) have taken another look at the genomic and phonemic predictions of the SFE.  They chose a very different way of coding the distribution of phonemes — formally analogous to the way that they coded genetic variation — and this time, the phonemic data gave very different results.

Their abstract:

Recent genetic studies attribute the negative correlation between population genetic diversity and distance from Africa to a serial founder effects (SFE) evolutionary process. A recent linguistic study concluded that a similar decay in phoneme inventories in human languages was also the product of the SFE process. However, the SFE process makes additional predictions for patterns of neutral genetic diversity, both within and between groups, that have not yet been tested on phonemic data. In this study, we describe these predictions and test them on linguistic and genetic samples. The linguistic sample consists of 725 widespread languages, which together contain 908 distinct phonemes. The genetic sample consists of 614 autosomal microsatellite loci in 100 widespread populations. All aspects of the genetic pattern are consistent with the predictions of SFE. In contrast, most of the predictions of SFE are violated for the phonemic data. We show that phoneme inventories provide information about recent contacts between languages. However, because phonemes change rapidly, they cannot provide information about more ancient evolutionary processes.

Here's their graph of between-population heretozygosity versus geographic distance, for their genetic data:

They note that

The top, grey-coloured points show the heterozygosity between the African San and the other 99 populations […]. The level of heterozygosity is roughly uniform whether populations are located nearby in Africa, or thousands of kilometres away. This uniformity reflects (i) a single African origin for all humans, (ii) a split between the population that would become the San and the founder of the remaining 99 populations, and (iii) relative subsequent isolation between these two groups.

The next tier of dark blue points shows the heterozygosity between the remaining 19 African populations and the 80 non-African populations. The level of heterozygosity is again uniform over thousands of kilometres. This uniformity reflects common ancestry for all non-African populations associated with an ancient out-of-Africa founder event. The remaining tiers are the product of subsequent splits and founder effects associated with the peopling of major geographical regions[…].

The corresponding rooted neighbor-joining tree:

They comment that

The test of treeness […] indicates that the tree is a good representation of the pattern of genetic variation, and that geographical distance explains little of the pattern of among-population genetic distance independent of the tree. All trees rooted on an African branch of the tree fit better than all trees rooted on a non-African branch of the tree. The best-fitting of all possible rooted trees separates the African San from the remaining 99 populations, and the level of variation within populations decreases steadily away from this node (signified by ever-increasing terminal branch lengths).

Here's their graph of between-language phonemic difference versus geographical distance:

They observe that

… the among-region pattern of phonemic variation is not tiered, but there is some evidence of a correlation between phonemic difference and the geographical distance in the plot. The correlation could be a by-product of SFE (i.e. it could reflect the tendency of phylogenetically related languages to be located near to one another). Alternatively, it could reflect sustained phonemic exchange (borrowing) between geographical neighbours, in which case it is inconsistent with SFE.

This pattern is not very consistent with any particular tree-structured hypothesis:

Several methods were used to construct a phoneme tree. Each produced a different topology; none were similar in topology to the microsatellite NJ tree and diagnostic output from each method strongly implies that phonemic variation is not tree-like. Figure 4c shows a midpoint-rooted phoneme tree produced using a Bayesian approach. Though there is some regional clustering, it contains considerably less geographical structure than the microsatellite NJ tree in figure 4a. Though the midpoint root does separate an African language from the remaining languages, African languages are dispersed throughout the tree.

In order to distinguish geographical patterns due to SFE from geographical patterns due to areal borrowing, they

… examined (i) the correlation between phonemic difference and geographical distance within the five best-sampled language families in our sample and within each geographical region, and (ii) partial correlations between phonemic difference and geographical distance within each region controlling language family membership.

Their overall conclusion is that "phonemic diversity has not been moulded at the global level by the same evolutionary processes that shaped neutral genetic diversity", and they note that these results are expected on common-sense grounds:

The genetic signature of founder effects persists in human populations in part because they accumulate variation slowly. In language, however, even if founder effects initially eliminated phonemes, rates of phonemic change are so high that the signal of loss would quickly disappear. While we reject the SFE process for phonemic data on both empirical and theoretical grounds, these data do provide information about recent contacts between languages.

And although their method of comparing phoneme inventories is arguably more appropriate than Atkinson's method of using a single numerical "diversity index", they argue that a comparison of allophones would be even better:

Phonemes are the sound categories that signal a difference in meaning between two words. For example, /d/ and /t/ are distinct phonemes in English because they contrast in the words <bad> and <bat>. But both /d/ and /t/ have a range of sub-phonemic allophones that are conditioned by both location within the word and non-linguistic demographic factors such as social class. For example, /d/ has voicing when it occurs between vowels, but it is partially or fully devoiced for most English speakers in word-final position. Variation in allophones is found in all languages and is a major driver of language change. In contrast, the level of phonemic variation within a language is small. Thus, if an SFE model does apply to language, it is more likely to affect allophonic variation. A daughter population would contain a subset of the allophonic diversity found in the parent, and the daughter would then be subject to processes of allophonic change, drift and selection that lead to sound change. Crucially, such changes are largely neutral with respect to phoneme inventory size. Unfortunately, there currently exist no databases of allophonic variation that would allow this hypothesis to be tested. In contrast, borrowing effects would be expected to be revealed in phonemic inventories as neighbouring languages converge on similar inventories due to contact.

I'm not entirely convinced by this argument. Genomic variation remains digital down to the level of single-nucleotide polymorphisms, but (as their phrase "partially or fully" hints) much allophonic variation doesn't naturally fall into qualitatively-distinct classes. Instead, we often need to describe such variation in terms of quantitative changes in complexly-conditioned distributions of continuously-valued measurements. As a result, the question of how to quantify comparisons becomes a complex one.

In the genomic case, we can count substitutions, deletions, translocations, etc. There may sometimes be questions about what "edit distance" to use, but I think (perhaps out of ignorance) that plausible, useful, and consensual answers are available. In the phonetic ("phonomic"?) case, we'd have to decide (for example) how to weigh X milliseconds of change in average aspiration duration in context A, against Y Hz of formant change in average vowel height in context B. (And after we settled that one, it would start to get really complicated…)

One plausible approach would be to define a metric in terms of the variances and covariances of the measurements involved, the relative frequency of the contexts, etc. But this would rely on a body of cross-language data that's REALLY different from anything that now exists.

Kira Simon-Kennedy took this photograph at a 7-Eleven in Beijing:

(Click to embiggen.)

More proof that there's really no one checking, because if they can get it right once…, unless they originally spelled it as "bango", somebody spotted the error, and they changed the new packaging to "mango", but are continuing to sell off the old "bango" packages. The only way to know for sure is for Language Log readers in China to keep an eye open for which packages continue to show up during the coming months: bango, mango, or both bango and mango — or maybe pango.

The fine text on both Bango & Mango packages reads:

Real traditional flavor
Return the traditional taste
The nice food nonce
From nature, pure taste

These fruits come from Mánggu? zhu?ngyuán ???? ("Mango Manor / Estate").

The word for "mango" in Mandarin, mánggu? ??, ultimately derives from a South Indian language. The English word for the fruit similarly comes from Tamil m?nk?y (m?n ["mango tree"] + k?y ["fruit"]), entering the language in the 1580s (< Portuguese manga < Malay mangga). The Taiwanese (Minnan) word for the fruit is quite different: s?ai?-á ??.

Thank goodness that they didn't attempt to translate the product type, ??? ("dried mango"), which is written in Chinese beneath Bango & Mango, for if they had, the result may very well have been something naughty.

From reader AH:

I know I'm a little slow, but during the State of the Union, President Obama said something along the lines of the following (I'm not 100% certain that the noun was "soldier" and I don't remember the verb, but those aren't the relevant parts): "every soldier respects each other."

As soon as he'd said it, my dad and I exchanged a look of disconcertedness — Barack Obama shamelessly putting forth such a blatantly ungrammatical statement? However, when I analyzed it a moment later, I came to the conclusion that the structure "every X Ys each other" is equivalent to the structure "every X Ys each other X," which is correct, and that the more usual structure "all the Xs Y each other" is equivalent to the structure "all the Xs Y each other X," which to me seems at best ambiguous. If my reasoning is incorrect, where did I go wrong? And if my reasoning is correct, what accounts for the little jolt my dad and I (and probably other listeners) experienced as a reaction to Obama's sentence — and what accounts for the fact that we wouldn't even have noticed if he'd said "all the soldiers respect each other"?

The Fox News transcript and the whitehouse.gov transcript agree that there are three uses of each other in the 2012 SOTU, only one of which is connected with a subject noun phrase involving every:

They know that this generation’s success is only possible because past generations felt a responsibility to each other, and to the future of their country, and they know our way of life will only endure if we feel that same sense of shared responsibility.

More than that, the mission only succeeded because every member of that unit trusted each other — because you can’t charge up those stairs, into darkness and danger, unless you know that there’s somebody behind you, watching your back.

This nation is great because we get each other’s backs.

So what about "every member of that unit trusted each other"? Is it "a blatantly ungrammatical statement", as AH and her dad first thought? Or is it OK, as she later decided?

I believe that there are several different issues here. First, there's the idea that each other must be restricted to two, with one another used for more than two. The entry on "each other, one another" in the M-W Dictionary of English Usage refutes this:

Bardeen 1883 indicates that the use of each other for one another is legitimate, though carped at by some critics […]. Actually the prescriptive rule is that each other is to be restricted to two and one another to more than two goes back even further […]. Goold Brown 1851 cites the rule with approbation, and quote it from an even earlier grammarian […]. Sundby et al. 1991 have found it in a 1785 grammar by a George N. Ussher. But Goold Brown also notes that "misapplication of the foregoing reciprocal terms are very frequent in books" and goes on to cite Samuel Johnson and Noah Webster in error. He further notes that "it is strange that phrases so very common should not be rightly understood." It is perhaps easier now that it was in 1851 to see why: evidence in the OED shows that the restriction has never existed in practice; the interchangeability of each other and one another had been established centuries before Ussher or somebody even earlier thought up the rule.

Fowler 1926 notes that some writers follow the rule but goes on to state that "the differentiation is neither of present utility nor based on historical usage […]". Even Fowler's high reputation among usage commentators has not convinced those to whom the rule is dear; many still prescribe it. A few examples may illustrate the rule's baselessness:

Sixteen ministers who meet weekly at each other's houses — Samuel Johnson, Life of Swift

Most whom live remote from each other — Noah Webster, Essays

[…]

Two negatives in English destroy one another — Lowth 1763

It is a bad thing that men should hate each other; but it is far worse that they should contract the habit of cutting one another's throats without hatred — T.B. Macaulay

[…]

We conclude that the rule restricting each other to two and one another to more than two was cut out of the whole cloth. There is no sin in its violation. It is, however, easy and painless to observe if you so wish.

But I don't think that the imaginary "restricted to two" rule is what was bothering AH and her father, since the other two examples of each other in the SOTU, which didn't evoke any reaction, also had greater-than-two antecedents.

And I agree with AH in not trusting her attempt to settle the matter by thinking through the compositional logic of the construction from first principles. The entry in the OED explains why a fully compositional account of each other (in terms of the separate meanings of each and other) is misguided. Given that each other has been a lexicalized compound for many centuries, we can't expect to predict its usage from its etymological decomposition:

Originally this was a phrase construed as in 4 ['each to each'], each being the subject, and other (inflected in Old English óðerne, óðres, óðrum, etc.) being governed in acc., genit., or dat. by a verb, prep., or n. This use still occurs arch. or poet. (each to other, etc.). The words have however long become a compound (cf. Dutch elkander), so that we can say to each other, of each other, etc.

But the phrase  "every member of that unit trusted each other" has another possible flaw, not engaged by MWDEU's examples. Every member is grammatically singular, and may seem to focus semantically on the members one at a time, which would lead to an absurd enumeration: "Member 1 trusted each other, and member 2 trusted each other, and …"

This seems to be the factor that took AH and her father aback — and when I think of it that way, it seems odd to me as well.

Since we can't apply logic to the question until we figure out what the semantic analysis of each other really is, we have no choice but to look at usage. What does Norma Loquendi have to say? Well, there are a large number of classical examples of the form "everybody VERBed each other" or "everyone VERBed each other". Thus Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights, 1847:

I thought, though everybody hated and despised each other, they could not avoid loving me.

"Playfulness in High Life", Punch 1857:

A Lovely Creature had just been warbling, "Drink to me only with thine Eyes." There was a pause. Everybody stared unmeaningly at each other. There was not a sound, save the splash of the gold fish  that, with unwearied fins, were carrying on their swimming-matches round the large glass bowl, when Lord Edgar Swann (the lineal descendant of the united houses of Swann and Edgar) leant forward, and said lovingly to his partner, "I wonder, by the bye, what kind of tipple it is that the Eye does drink?" "Why, Champagne d'Aï, to be sure!", exclaimed the every-ready Agnes, and, tapping his fingers playfully with her fan, she split the coffee over his legs.

The lucubrations of Isaac Bickerstaff, Esquire (The Tatler No. 95), 1711:

I sate with them till it was very late, sometimes in merry, sometimes in serious, Discourse, with this particular Pleasure, which gives the only true Relish to all Conversation, a Sense that every one of us like each other.

Phoebe Allen, Thanksgiving Tabernacle, 1888:

Altogether, she was very glad when the last hymn had been sung, and everyone had finished telling each other what a happy evening it had been, and how gratifying it was to feel themselves all so saintly in this world and so safe in the next, and it was with real relief that Jane found herself once more in the van.

And similarly, phrases like "Every NOUN VERBED each other" have a long and apparently respectable history:

Andrew Henderson, The life of John Earl of Stair, 1748:

Every Officer, and every Soldier, vied with each other in distinguishing himself under the Eye of his August Commander; but none more than the deceas'd Lord: For, being made Colonel of the Royal North British Dragoons, upon the 9th March 1702, he endeavoured to raise the Reputation of that Regisment; and, being sent to support a Battery, he stood at the Head of his Regiment, for several Hours, while the Troops were falling on each Hand of him, without the least Alternation of Countenance, or the last Desire to draw off, notwithstanding a furious Cannonade from that Quarter of the Town.

Charles Rollin, The Roman History, from the foundation of Rome to the battle of Actium. Translated from the French, 1711:

Every thing resembled each other in these two wars: the extraordinary efforts and preparations employed in them; the splendor of arms; the terrible ceremonies used for rendering the gods propitious, and initiating in some measure the soldiers by an oath of ancient form; and lastly the levies made universally throughout the whole extent of Smanium under that form, which devoted to Jupiter, and loaded with curses, all such among the youth, as should not present themselves for the service on the general's order, or should retire from it without his permission.

James Elmes, A general and bibliographical dictionary of the fine arts, 1824:

In defining the styles which prevailed at this period of history, we should consider that the orders are not only Greek and Roman, but Phoenician, Hebrew, Egyptian, and Assyrian; therefore are founded upon the experience of all ages, promoted by the vast treasure of all the great monarchs, and skill of the greatest artists and geometricians, every one emulating each other: experiments in this kind being very expensive, and errors incorrigible, is the reason tha the principle of architecture should be founded more on the study of antiquity than a dependance [sic] on fancy.

"Two Years Lost", in The Argosy, volume 26, 1878:

Another thing; their tastes and pursuits were so dissimilar. These balls and kettledrums and insane gatherings, which made her life, he hated. The social, sober partes ad Candelford, where every lady knew each other, were quite different.

Margaret Winslow, "Easter Eggs: A Russian Story", in The Churchman, 1880:

Everywhere they met other parties, on foot in carts, bound in the same direction, and every group greeted each other with the prescribed words, "Christ is risen," or answered again, "He is risen indeed."

George Jacob Holyoake, "The History of the Rochdale Pioneers", in Cooperation, Volume 1, 1909:

The Store very early began to exercise educational functions. Besides supplying the members with provisions, the Store became a meeting place, where almost every member met each other every evening after working hours.

Journal of the Scientific Laboratories, Denison University, 1943:

It should be noted that every group overlaps each other; that every item is both a "cause" and "effect" of every other single item; that the numerical order does not imply any priority whether causal, etiological, or temporal …

John P. Wilson, "Reversing Cultures: The Wounded Teaching the Healers", in Voices of Trauma: Treating psychological trauma across cultures, 2007:

The ritual of the "Talking Circle" is a most powerful one. […] Eventually, I returned to my "seat" on the log and the next person got up and repeated the process. In this way then, the "Talking Circle" meant that every person encountered each other at least twice.

So I conclude that "every member of that unit trusted each other", though not to everyone's taste, can't be considered ."a blatantly ungrammatical statement".

From a rhetorical point of view, it's obvious that the triple repetition of each other in this year's SOTU relates to the speech's theme of teamwork, associated with the military and also with traditional American values. The "every member of that unit trusted each other" phrase at the end of the speech echoes the speech's beginning:

These achievements are a testament to the courage, selflessness and teamwork of America’s Armed Forces.  At a time when too many of our institutions have let us down, they exceed all expectations.  They’re not consumed with personal ambition.  They don’t obsess over their differences.  They focus on the mission at hand.  They work together.

Imagine what we could accomplish if we followed their example.

FWIW, the 2012 SOTU message is far from the only one to feature each other. Among the 209 previous SOTU messages, James Buchanan used each other six times in 1857; Andrew Jackson used it five times in 1833; James K. Polk in 1848 and William McKinley in 1899 used it four times; and there were eight other messages with three instances of "each other": John Quincy Adams in 1825 and 1826, Andrew Jackson in 1831, James Buchanan in 1860, Teddy Roosevelt in 1904 and 1906,  Harry Truman in 1946, and Bill Clinton in 1995.  There have been 19 SOTU messages with two instances of "each other", from James Monroe in 1820 to Bill Clinton in 1997; 50 SOTU messages with one instance of "each other"; and 128 with none.

Fans of Zipf's Law will be pleased to see that doesn't fail to apply here:

As far as I can tell, though, none of the previous SOTU uses are of the form "Every NOUN VERBed each other".

At some point around lunch time today, our filter nabbed its 2 millionth spam comment:

Since we logged the our millionth spam comment at some point on 9/1/2011, 152 days ago, we've been averaging about 1000000/152 = 6579 spam comments per day.

You'll understand, then, why I need to flush the spam trap periodically, without checking everything that has lodged there, even though I know that some small fraction of the total has been wrongly classified. But I do peek at the scum-covered surface from time to time, and I can tell you that the spamularity seems as far away as ever.

Unless, of course, all the comments like these are simply a smokescreen

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…while the real AI programs succeed in fooling us all. To what nefarious end, we are apparently unable to imagine.

A currently viral video:

There are several different things that "talking backwards" might mean.

You might produce a vocalization BACKWARDS(X) which, when played backwards, would sound like X. That is, your vocalization would be a good imitation of a time-reversed version of some normal utterance X. Ian Catford was especially good at talking backwards in this sense. He practiced by playing audio tapes backwards — and demonstrated the correctness of his performances in the same way. There was a viral video on Youtube a couple of years ago that demonstrated this skill in a very striking way ("Reverse English", 11/1/2009).

Another possible meaning for "talking backwards" would be pronouncing the surface phonemic segments of a word or phrase in reverse order. Thus "clip" [kl?p] would come out as "pilk" [p?lk], or "make" [mejk] would come out as [kjem].

But in fact, reversing the symbols is not at all the same thing as reversing the signal, and so a genuinely reverse-time version of "clip" would not sound anything like "pilk". Instead, the forward and backward versions would sound something like this (audio taken from the Merriam-Webster Online pronunciation of "clip", and reversed using the "Reverse" effect in Audacity):

Forward: Backward:

And what Alyssa is doing is something else again.  She's reversing the order of the letters in the standard English spelling of the word, and then saying something that represents how she thinks that letter sequence might be pronounced.

You can see the difference most clearly with the words that end in "silent e". Thus her reversed version of "garage" (pronounced to her as [g??r?d?]) is [??.g??ræg]:

This is a plausible way to pronounce the English letter sequence

egarag

but it turns the "silent e" into the main stressed vowel of the word, pronounces the immediately preceding 'g' as [g] rather than [d?] or [?d], etc.

If we were actually to reverse the pronunciation she was given, again using the Reverse effect in Audacity, we'd get:

Forward: Backward:

And if we were to reverse the surface phonemic sequence [g??r?d?] we'd get something like [??d?.r?g], or maybe [?d??.r?g] if you believe that the final affricate should be treated as a unit (a sensible view that the powers-that-be in the IPA have apparently never been able to accept…).

But what Alyssa is doing, clearly, is thinking of the spelling, reversing the spelling in her mind's eye, and then pronouncing the string that results. Her facility in doing this is remarkable.

For half a century, the annual Georgetown University Round Table on Language and Linguistics has featured interesting presentations on a topical theme.  GURT 2012, to be held 3/8/2012-3/11/2012, on the theme of "Measured Language",

…will bring together researchers presenting replicable methodologies for quantitatively analyzing different facets of language, with an emphasis on sharing and incorporating perspectives and findings across a diverse range of linguistic inquiry.

Readers who are in the profession will know about this anyhow. But for the rest of you, if you enjoy reading Language Log, you'll probably like GURT as well. And it's cheaper (as well as safer) than a Mediterranean cruise.

Carley De Rosa spotted this sign in the Kunming airport on her way to Laos. Dumbfounded by the Chinglish, not least because what it called an "elevator" was actually an "escalator", on her way back from Laos she made sure to get a photograph of the sign and send it to me for analysis:

The sign actually says:

sh?utu?ch? ??? ("cart; trolley [Brit.]; pushcart")

q?ng z?u duìmiàn diànt?, chéngzuò diànt?, q?ng gùkè l? h?o fú h?o, értóng zuò diànt? x? ji?zh?ng péihù, bùdé zài diànt? shàng d?nào.

????????????????????????????????????????

"Please walk over to the escalator on the opposite side. Upon getting on the escalator, passengers should hold [their cart] tightly and support [themselves] securely. Children who take the escalator must be accompanied by a parent and are not permitted to roughhouse on the escalator."

The substitution of "beard" for "must" is easy to explain, since the simplified character ? is used both for its original meaning of "must" (which was what the Chinese sign intended to say) and for the traditional character ? ("beard"), which the translation software mistakenly invoked here.

As for the mixup of "elevator" and "escalator", that is a much longer story and is the result of the fact that diànt? ?? (lit., "electric ladder / stairs / steps") can mean either and is habitually used for both. When individuals wish to make a distinction between "elevator" and "escalator", there is great variety in the terms that may be used.

N.B.: The following lists are not exhaustive for either "elevator" or "escalator".

Elevator:

diànt? ?? (lit., "electric ladder / stairs / steps") — used as the default term for "elevator" in contrast to some other term for "escalator"

sh?ngjiàngj? ??? ("elevator; dumbwaiter; lift") — usually reserved for construction sites (especially when attached outside a building that is under construction), factories, etc., not for regular passenger elevators

Escalator:

zìdòng fút? ???? (lit., "automatic [i.e., 'self-moving'] support-ladder / stairs / steps") — this is the "correct" term for "escalator", but people tend to avoid it in speech because it seems concocted and insufficiently vernacular

fút? ?? ("support-ladder / stairs / steps")

sh?ufút? ??? ("hand-support-ladder / stairs / steps")

diànfút? ??? ("electric-support-ladder / stairs / steps") — this and the previous term seem to be favored by speakers of Taiwan Mandarin

g?nt? ?? (lit., "rolling ladder / stairs / steps")

diàndòng lóut? ???? ("electric-driven stairs")

zìdòng diànt? ???? ("automatic electric ladder / stairs / steps")

Sample sentences:

Z?u lóut? shàngqù tài lèile, háishì zuò nà bi?n de diànt? shàngqù ba. ?????????????????????("It's too tiring to walk up the steps, so let's take the escalator over there instead.")

D?ng diànt? de rén tài du?le, w?men z?u nà bi?n de zìdòng fút? ba. ?????????????????????("There are too many people waiting for the elevator; let's take the escalator over there instead.")

To recapitulate, in Mandarin, most people strongly prefer to use diànt? ?? (lit., "electric ladder / stairs / steps") for both "escalator" and "elevator", but will only use some other term for "escalator" when forced to make a distinction between the two modes of going up and down in a building.

There are still additional options in Cantonese. In speech the most common word for 'elevator' is lip1 ?+? which is a borrowing of British English "lift". This special Cantonese character (?+?) is sometimes used in writing and is a Hong Kong creation, but the English word "lift" is also written directly or the romanized Cantonese "lip" may also be used. In Cantonese, there is a bewildering variety of terms for "escalator". The Hong Kong Civil Service Bureau's bilingual website lists seven different lexical items with this meaning. Cantonesesheik lists six lexical items.

Based on preliminary Google searches by Bob Bauer, it appears that the most commonly-used items for "escalator'"in HK are haang4 jan4 din6 tai1 ???? ("pedestrian electric ladder / stairs / steps") and fu4 sau2 din6 tai1 ???? ("hand-support electric ladder / stairs / steps")

Abrahman Chan explains the historical reasons for the plethora of terms for "escalator" in Cantonese:

The use of the three terms "?+? (lip1)," "?? (din6tai1)," and "??? (sing1gong3gei1)" in Hong Kong have a rather complicated history.

Between the elevator and the escalator, the former has a much longer use in Hong Kong. The company Otis claims to have erected the first Hong Kong elevator in 1888, but the first escalator only in 1957.

As you know, an elevator is known as a "lift" in Britain, and in Hong Kong we have coined the character "?+?" to represent the loanword "lip1." But a Chinese term "?? (electric ladder)" was also used to represent the elevator. I haven't looked into the primary sources, and have no idea whether "??" was a local term or borrowed elsewhere (say, from Shanghai). There is no doubt, however, that both "?+?" and "??" date from before the Second World War and both were used to represent an elevator.

The introduction of the escalator brought considerable confusion to the use of the term "??," however. For one thing, the staircase is known as "?? (lau4tai1)" in Chinese, and the escalator definitely looks a lot more like a staircase than an elevator does; so for a long time (since the late 1950s) the newer escalators have been competing with the older elevators for use of the term "??". It is not unusual for one person to use "??" to refer to both devices.

The "???" is a latecomer to the game, in direct response to the "??" confusion. The "???" is a translation of the "elevator," and the escalator is often renamed "???? (fu4sau2din6tai1)" to avoid confusing with "??," which even today can still mean either an elevator or an escalator.

I personally almost never say "???," but generally use "?+?" to refer to an elevator. I usually use "??" for escalator, although sometime adding "??" to ensure there is no confusion with an elevator.

But the use of "?+?" is of course a no-no to Chinese purists, who insist on using either "??" or "???" for elevators.

In Japanese there is no confusion between "elevator" and "escalator" because they are directly transliterated from the English words, hence ereb?t? ?????? and esukar?t? ???????. In written Japanese, one may use the technical term h?k?-ki ??? ("rise-descend-device").

Incidentally, there is a special Japanese graph for "elevator girl" (ereb?t? g?ru ?????????), a type of service person that is still common in Japan, namely, the radical ? ("woman / female") on the left and ? ("up") written above ? ("down") on the right, which is pronounced as ereb?t? g?ru. The short form of ereb?t? g?ru is erega ???, and the Sinitic-style term is s?j? or sh?j? ?? ("case / box / chest / trunk girl"). The male counterpart is ereb?t? b?i ????????? ("elevator boy"), but one doesn't often encounter such individuals. The sole task of the "elevator girl" is to welcome customers into the elevator and to push the buttons for the desired floors of the dep?to ("department store"). Such spiffily dressed girls are often hired to do this work as an extra job (arubaito ????? [< German "Arbeit"]). In other industrialized countries the elevator operators were abolished after push button operation was invented to replace the earlier and more complicated switches. The Japanese are so attached to the elevator girls ("lift operators") that it is not uncommon to see in elevators without such personnel a sign politely requesting customers to press the buttons themselves.

And then there was "Ereb?t? akushon" ??????????? ("Elevator Action"), a popular arcade game that debuted in 1983.

Earlier posts on airport Chinglish include "Drawing a line in the noodles" and "Potable and Non-Slip."

[Thanks are due to Robert S. Bauer, Hiroko Sherry, Zhou Yunong, Zhou Ying, Nathan Hopson, Cecilia Segawa Seigle, Grace Wu, Melvin Lee, Gianni Wan, Jing Wen, Wicky Tse, Jiajia Wang, Zhao Lu, Miki Morita, Rebecca Fu, Sophie Wei, and Mandy Chan]

"Sarah Palin talks Florida GOP battle", Justice with Judge Jeanine, Fox News, 1/29/2012:

You gotta rage against the machine at this point in order to defend our republic and save what is-
what is good and secure and prosperous about our nation - we need somebody
who's engaged in sudden and relentless reform and isn't afraid to shake it up, shake up that establishment. So
if for no other reason, rage against the machine, vote for Newt!
Annoy a liberal! Vote Newt!

My first thought was that Gov. Palin must not have been listening to that  rock group's lyrics, back around 1992 when she was first  elected to the Wasilla city council. But then I realized that it would make perfect sense for her to kick off a Gingrich campaign rally with the refrain from Take the Power Back:

That song even has an echo of Gov. Palin's call for "sudden and relentless reform":

Raise up your ear, I'll drop the style and clear
It's the beats and the lyrics they fear
The rage is relentless
We need a movement with a quickness
You are the witness of change
And to counteract
We gotta take the power back

She might have more trouble with some other passages:

So called facts are fraud
They want us to allege and pledge
And bow down to their God
Lost the culture, the culture lost
Spun our minds and through time
Ignorance has taken over
Yo, we gotta take the power back!
Bam! Here's the plan
Motherfuck Uncle Sam

But she could also use the ending of Know Your Enemy, whose anti-elite message is similar to her own, and even similarly expressed — even if the "American dreams" reference needs to be ironically inverted:

Come on!
Yes I know my enemies
They're the teachers who taught me to fight me
Compromise, conformity, assimilation, submission
Ignorance, hypocrisy, brutality, the elite
All of which are American dreams (8 times)

Just for complete fairness, the whole question and answer in context:

Jeanine_Pirro: How can Newt Gingrich
distance himself and say that he's not an you know an insider when it- there are those who would say
he's the consummate Washington insider, I mean
he was speaker of the House and he was in Congress for twenty years Sarah Palin: Yeah and how can he say that he's not a part of the establishment?
Well look at the players in the establishment
who are fighting so hard against him - they want to crucify him because he's tapped into that average everyday American tea party grassroots movement that has said
enough is enough of the establishment
that tries to run the show and
and um tweak rules and laws and regulations for their own good and not for our nation's own g- own good
well when
both party machines and many in the media are trying to crucify Newt Gingrich for ha- for bucking the tide and bucking the establishment
that tells you something
And I say you know and-
you gotta rage against the machine at this point in order to defend our republic and save what is
what is good and secure and prosperous about our nation - we need somebody
who's engaged in sudden and relentless reform and isn't afraid to shake it up, shake up that establishment. So
if for no other reason, rage against the machine, vote for Newt!
Annoy a liberal! Vote Newt!
Keep this vetting process going, keep the debate going.
As more debate happens, judge, we'll hear more from Newt and fr- from the other candidates who will oppose his
position as he claims that he's not part of the establishment - let's hear more about it.