Robbie's site now has a blog. It's one of the best artist's sites I've seen - especially interesting to follow his train of thought as he works on his art. Great to see him being so productive just now as well.

B-)

Another message from LINGUIST. I was shown a summary of this in The Economist on the flight back from Ibiza and it did indeed seem to be concluding that 'Whorf was right' which didn't seem to be justified by the brief summary. Not sure exactly how Dan Everett reaches his conclusion, though. Guess I'll ask him (but only if I get time to read the article first, of course).

------------------------

Many readers of this list may have seen today's CNN report on the
Science article which was published yesterday on Piraha:

http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/science/08/19/science.counting.reut/index.html

The Science article reports on research carried out by Peter Gordon,
along with me and my wife, Keren, several years ago to test my view
that Piraha had no counting. Gordon confirmed that indeed Pirahas have
no concept of counting and further refined my original ideas on the
matter.

Gordon's conclusion in Science is that Piraha offers support for the
Whorf hypothesis. While I believe that this is plausible, my own view
is that the lack of counting must be seen in the larger cultural
context and that when thus viewed in conjunction with the lack of
color words, the lack of embedding, the simplest kinship system ever
documented, and various other characteristics, a different,
non-Whorfian picture emerges. The basic conclusion I reach is that
culture constrains grammar in ways many of us have not previously
imagined. I take this to be an argument against, for example,
Universal Grammar, at least the more widely-accepted versions of it.

Anyone interested in reading on this further (and the Piraha case does
seem to be getting a lot of attention from various countries, based on
my email folder this morning), my paper 'Cultural Constraints on
Grammar in Piraha', currently under review, is available from my
University of Manchester website at:

http://ling.man.ac.uk/info/staff/DE/DEHome.html

- Dan Everett

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LINGUIST List: Vol-15-2360

Recent post to LINGUIST from Karen Chung:

There's an online written and audio report from Minnesota Public Radio, dated August 8, 2004, entitled The n-word, by Brandt Williams, at:

http://news.minnesota.publicradio.org/features/2004/06/28_williamsb_nword/

One quote from an interviewee that especially impressed me from a phonetic and sociolinguistic point of view:

You know why at times they don't realize how the word offends Afro American people? Simple reason. They don't say the word pretty as we do!' says Simmons. 'They got to hear that 'r'. That 'r' is what makes us go irate. Instant irate. 'You no-good nigger!' And I say, whoa man! And he turn around and say, well y'all use it. And I say y'all don't say it as pretty as we. That's why. We gotta hear that 'r'. When you hear us call each other 'nigga', you don't hear the 'r'.'

The report includes excerpts from an interview with linguist Robin Lakoff, and quotes from comedian Richard Pryor.

The reporter says at the beginning of the report that he is African-American, but he is not identifiable as such from his accent, which sounds like unmarked Minnesotan to me.

No registration is required to access the report.

Karen Steffen Chung
http://ccms.ntu.edu.tw/~karchung/
http://lists.topica.com/lists/phonetics/

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LINGUIST List: Vol-15-2281

My web presence is about to go through an overhaul. Just got back from holiday to find that Dug has carried out phase one by moving the blog over to Moveable Type

Things will be changing a bit round here when I get time to play with it all.

In the meantime, I need to tell you all to go to www.shatnerhasbeen.com and listen to previews of the new William Shatner album produced by Ben Folds. Excellent version of Common People in the style he made famous on The Transformed Man.

B-)

Trying to justify my existence as a linguablogger, here is a link to obituaries for Robert Burchfield who died last month. I particularly liked the C.T. Onions line that Burchfield used to quote:

Lexicography can be done on the kitchen table

B-)

Michael Erard posted this on LINGUIST

This article in the Washington Post(registration required) describes how Mexican Spanish is becoming 'standard' Spanish, through the power of Mexican television broadcasting giants Telemundo and Univision.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A32693-2004Aug1.html

The article's title is Accent on Higher TV Ratings: Spanish-Language Network Telemundo Coaches Actors to Use Mexican Dialect It may be available via Google news in that format.

Michael Erard
LINGUIST List: Vol-15-2230

Walking up our road recently, we spoke about the paint of various colours that had been splashed around the pavement, the road and on one of the road signs. Apoa said:

I wish there was an election coming up. Then we'd have Barbara Roche and all sorts of people coming round offering to clean it up.

Barbara Roche is our MP and she and some councillors did come and talk to our neighbours about rubbish before our last council elections. They arranged to have rubbish cleared and when Andrew mentioned the grafitti on his wall, she had someone round the next day to clean it up.

B-)

Might have to take a copy of The Da Vinci Code to the beach. We were planning to work through some more of the No.1 Ladies Detective Agency and I've been wondering whether I'll squeeze in one book on the evolution of language, which is work but doesn't feel like it.

B-)