Endelig noget non-sprogrøgteri i de danske medier. Politikens netudgave har netop bragt en lille artikel om børn og unges indlån af leksemer såvel som grammatiske og syntaktiske elementer fra f.eks. tyrkisk, kurdisk og arabisk.

826 Valencia arbejder for at øge børns interesse for at skrive, og for at financiere sig har de åbnet flere forskellige (og mærkværdige) butikker rundt omkring i USA. Blandt andet har de I LA åbnet Echo Park Time Travel Mart, mens de i Brooklyn har åbnet Brooklyn Superhero Supply Co.

Hvad der virkelig fangede min interesse var dette billede — så har man da en ærlig chance for at begå sig, når man pludselig står fanget i fortiden og skal snakke grammatik med Panini.

Currently there’s a conference called Language in Cognition – Cognition in Language going on here in Århus and I had the privilege to hear Paul Kay and Terry Regier speak about the laterelization of categorical perception. In itself a topic that has had my interest for a couple of years now, but the talk Kay and Regier gave was nothing but amazing. I was, at more than one point, tempted to jump up and yell “woohoo!” and start dancing a little happy celebratory dance.

The main point was, of course, about categorical perception, but the talk also delivered a very diplomatic and compelling point about the whole universalist/relativist discussion, that’s been going on ever since the 1950′s or so, namely that both may co-exist – even peacefully – and be perfectly compatible. In itself not a new idea, but Regier’s points about optimal partitioning of the color space, which seems to be near-universal, and the possibility for language specific deviations were really exciting and they definitely support the claim that there’s no ultimate universal or relativist truth within the domain of categorical perception.

Kay’s points about lateralization of categorical perception seem to support my feeling on the subject, namely that if you ask people to categorize something, they’ll do it by the means readily available. So when language already has color categories set up, why not use them when asked to categorize colors? Kay’s data seems to support this idea, which I’m absolutely thrilled about, since until recently I’ve had close to nothing to back up my feeling, but since Mr. Color Categorization himself seems to be on my side, I haven’t got the slightest reason to worry.

Should you want to check out Kay and Regier’s claims, read:

• Regier, T., Kay, P. & Khetarpal, N. (2007), Color naming reflects optimal partitions of color space, PNAS 2007 104: 1436–1441 (PDF)
• Gilbert, A.L., Regier, T., Kay, P. & Ivry, R.B. (2006), Whorf hypethesis is supported in the right visual field but not the left, PNAS 2006 103: 489–494 (PDF)

Having finally gotten wifi working on Ubuntu on my MacBook I wanted to setup input methods for Japanese in Gnome. While doing so, I stumbled upon an IPA input method, which turned out to be quite sexy.

First, make sure you’ve installed SCIM, additional tables for SCIM and of course, the SCIM GTK+2 module. Also, you might want a font that supports all of the Unicode IPA extension, so let’s throw Thryomanes in there too, since it does exactly that.

sudo apt-get install scim scim-tables-additional scim-gtk2-immodule ttf-thryomanes

(The packages can of course be installed with Synaptic or whatever you prefer, as long as you make sure to install ‘scim’, ‘scim-tables-additional’, ‘scim-gtk2-immodule’ and ‘ttf-thryomanes’.)

Open “System > Preferences > SCIM Input Method Setup” and select “IMEngine > Global Setup”. Find “Other > IPA-X-SAMPA” and check it. Hit Apply or OK to save the changes and restart X (hit Ctrl-Alt-Backspace, which will log you out and restart X) for the changes to take effect.

Then (if you want easy access to the IPA input method) right-click on one of your desktop panels and select “Add to Panel…” from the menu. Find “Keyboard Indicator” and add it. Now you can switch between the input methods simply by clicking the keyboard indicator.

Now, to actually use the super-cool input method, you just open any GTK+2 text editor (eg. “Applications > Accessories > Text Editor”, AbiWord or OpenOffice – actually, most applications that can take text input) and select the IPA method from the keyboard indicator (Other > IPA-X-SAMPA). Your keyboard layout will then change quite a bit and you’ll be able to write IPA easily. When you start typing, you might notice that sometimes a letter is highlighted and a little box is showing below it, that’s SCIM showing you the available IPA characters on that particular key – you can select them by using the up and down arrow keys and hitting space or enter. For instance, to write a schwa, type ‘@’ and hit space.

It’s worth noting, that not all IPA symbols are found exactly where you would expect, but it doesn’t take long to get used to and it’s so convenient – especially because it works in all Gnome applications, which includes your favorite web browser, you mail client etc.

I en artikel (samt en tidligere artikel) på politiken.dk skrives, at Dansk Sprognævn har bedt om bud på nye ord (og nye anvendelser), der er på vej ind i det almindelige danske sprog. Nævnet har sågar lavet en fin blanket, der kan findes på deres hjemmeside, som man kan udfylde for at informere om disse nyskabelser.

Er dette nu en god måde at blive bevidst om sprogets status anno 2007? Hvis Dansk Sprognævn er tilpas kritiske overfor de indsendte data og ser på det som en slags folkelingvistik, så er det måske ikke dumt — men nævnet må huske, at det sikkert vil tiltrække en del folk, som finder sig selv usandsynlig kreative og derfor indeberetter ethvert ord, de selv synes har potentiale, selvom det måske kun bruges i en enkelt sociolekt. Det virker umiddelbart til, at det vil være svært at skille skidt fra kanel, men man må jo håbe at Dansk Sprognævn har styr på sagerne. Heldigvis er de i det mindste ikke bange for nyskabelser, ulig visse andre modersmålsfikserede organisationer.

Derudover, finder man i førstnævnte artikel en meget kort redegørelse for ord som “nederen” og “fråderen”, som er hvad dette indlæg i virkeligheden handler om.

»Det er en meget populær orddannelsestype, som faktisk er beskrevet i den første slangordbog fra 1950′erne. Her var et af eksemplerne »børneren«, som betyder børnehave«, siger Pia Jarvad.

Konstruktionen er, at man fjerne det sidste af ordet og sætter »-en« på, og derfor er både »nederen« og »fråderen« – som betyder noget dårligt eller at være meget sulten – altså klassiske slangord.

Jeg må nok stille mig uenig med Pia Jarvad (eller, hvad Politiken har fået ud af hendes udtalelser) her — “nederen” og “børneren” er ikke konstrueret ens. For de gamle slangord som “børneren” og “svømmeren”, mener jeg, at der er tale om såkaldte clippings, fordi det ganske enkelt er lettere (og hurtigere) at sige “børneren” i stedet for “børnehaven” og “svømmeren” i stedet for “svømmehallen”. Dette er substantiver, som forbliver substantiver. Dette kan ses på, at man blandt andet godt kan høre “der ligger en svømmer nede om hjørnet” og forstå det som “der ligger en svømmehal nede om hjørnet” og ikke “der ligger en person i badevinger og svømmefødder nede om hjørnet”. Endelsen -en kommer altså på fordi substantivet er i bestemt form. Det samme er tilfælde med ord som “mayo” for “mayonaise”, “bil” for “automobil” osv. Alle opfører sig grammatisk som det ord de er dannet ud fra.

“Nederen” og “fråderen” derimod, er sværere at bestemme, fordi de efterhånden primært anvendes som adjektiver (eg. “det er fandme nederen” og “det er en fråderen lasagne, det her!”). Her er der ikke tale om clippings på grund af lettere eller hurtigere udtale — ordene de er dannet ud fra er kortere og ikke engang nødvendigvis af samme type som resultaterne. Det giver altså ikke mening at betragte dem som simple forkortelser for lethedens skyld.

For “nederen” kan tilfældet være, at det er dannet ud fra adjektivet “nede”, blevet til substantivet “neder”, derefter “nederen” i bestemt form og slutteligt syntaktisk adjektiviseret, som i eksemplet “det er fandme nederen”. Syntaktisk adjektiviseret fordi adjektiviseringen sker vha. ordstillingen fremfor morfologisk (eg. -lig). Substantivformen kan stadig sagtens anvendes, f.eks. “jeg fik nederen på over det”.

“Fråderen” kunne meget vel være verbet “fråde”, der er blevet bøjet i nutid (“fråder”), substantiveret (“en fråder”) og — ligesom “nederen” — syntaktisk adjektiviseret. Selvfølgelig er der også substantivet “fråde”, som kunne ligge til grund for processen, men jeg har svært ved at finde en logisk forklaring på, hvordan det skulle kunne blive til “fråderen”. Det er vigtigt at bemærke at Pia Jarvad beskriver brugen af den substantiverede form “en fråder”, men den adjektiviserede form bruges, så vidt jeg har bemærket, lige så meget.

Så vidt jeg ved, så kommer disse udtryk fra tjaldrygning, hvor man kan få bl.a. “fråderen”, “æderen”, “nederen”, “noieren” (“paranoia-eren“) og “steneren” på. “Steneren” har forresten også sneget sig med ind sammen med “nederen” og “fråderen”, f.eks. “det var en steneren film” og “han er en steneren fyr”. Jeg er ikke bekendt med lignende udtryk fra andre kilder, men vil da meget gerne høre dem, hvis du — ærede læser — skulle have kendskab til et eller flere.

Både “fråderen” og “nederen” (og “steneren”) kan anvendes — og bliver anvendt — som adjektiver, hvorfor jeg mener det ikke er korrekt at sige, at de er “klassiske slangord” i den forstand, at de er konstrueret ud fra samme princip som “børneren” og “svømmeren”, selvom de morfologisk ser ens ud. Der er tale om vidt forskellige processer i, og grundlag for, konstruktionen af slangordene.

Some years back when I read Paul Kay and Willett Kempton’s article What is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis[1] and they presented the evidence for the naming strategy, which is what they dubbed the phenomenon that people categorize by linguistic criteria instead of physiological criteria in a specific task, one thing hit me.

Let me start by putting this in context. Kay and Kempton were studying 5 native English speakers and 4 native Tarahumara speakers, in itself not exactly a mind-blowing number of subjects, and the subjects were to look at three Munsell color chips of which they were to “pick the odd one out”. These chips would all be close to the linguistic blue-green boundary of English and be arranged such that if chips A and B would be called green in English, chip C would be called blue, but A and C could easily be closest in terms of wavelength while still on each side of the lexical blue-green boundary of English. In Tarahumara, however, there’s no lexical distinction between blue and green. They use one word to cover the entire blue-green spectrum.

What Kay & Kempton found was that the Tarahumara speakers appeared to discriminate in terms of wavelength — i.e. they would pick the physiological “odd one” regardless of what an English speaker would name the color. The English speakers would pick the “odd one” by using the naming strategy — i.e. if two chips would be called blue, then the odd one would be the green one.

While I do think this experiment is very interesting, and definitely one of the better (and simpler) to be caried out in the name of categorization, there’s still one thing that bothers me. How can we be sure that English speakers aren’t simply choosing a logical way to discriminate? Remember, they’re asked to “pick the odd one out”, which necesarrily means that there must be an odd one and language seems to be a pretty logical — and obvious — choice in this situation. What would happen if they were asked to “pick the odd one out” of, say, an F-14 fighter, a can of beans and an elm tree? I’m pretty sure the subjects would find some way to do it. Maybe not uniformly, but they’d definitely be able to.

Now, a later study by Gilbert et al.[2] (involving Kay himself), has shown that the naming strategy in fact primarilly occurs when the “odd one” is in the right visual field, but not the left. This supports a Whorfian interpretation when things are processed in the left hemisphere, but won’t that be exactly where the processing is taking place if you conduct the experiment as Kay & Kempton did back in 1984?

Maybe someone has already raised these issues, maybe they’re already dealt with or maybe “zere iz no zpöön” and I’m just looking at this wrong. Either way, I urge anyone with a little knowledge of this to comment and maybe drop a reference so I may be enlightened.

—–
[1]: Kay, P. & Kempton, W. (1984), What is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, American Anthropologist 86:65–79
[2]: Gilbert, A.L. et al. (2006), Whorf hypothesis is supported in the right visual field but not the left. PNAS 2006 103:489-494

[Note: In spite of the heated debate on Danish language policy, I'm choosing to publish this in English in the hope that it'll reach a larger amount of readers, thus contributing further to the development of linguistics as a science than it would if published in Danish.]