![]() ![]() On Saturday, in his first response to Charlottesville, Mr. Mark Landler recently published an article in the New York Times under the headline "Where Predecessors Set Moral Standard, Trump Steps Back." Unlike his predecessors, he notes, the current president has rejected the very concept of moral leadership: Nobody (other than maybe Language Log) is going to call you on it. They can do this because when the topic is language, you don't have to maintain any pretense of seriousness. The Daily Mail, a scurrilous Conservative-oriented English tabloid, on its very successful soft-porn-laden website, used the headline " Orca on the blower: Killer whale learns to talk." Hundreds of largely plagiarized stories are springing up around the world under similar headlines (don't make me try to list them). And it will not be a huge surprise to Language Log readers that the world's newspapers immediately lost their minds. The paper is about the conditions under which killer whales can be induced to use their blowholes to imitate sounds that they hear. Abramson, Maria Victoria Hernández-Lloreda, Lino García, Fernando Colmenares, Francisco Aboitiz, and Josep Call. Published today in Proceedings of the Royal Society B you will find (provided you have the necessary institutional credentials or library membership) a paper entitled " Imitation of novel conspecific and human speech sounds in the killer whale ( Orcinus orca), by José Z. At the risk of getting out ahead of myself, I want to respond to Weisberg briefly now, with a more detailed explanation to come. One of Weisberg's arguments concerns a linguistic issue that I'm planning to address, and I think that Weisberg is mistaken. That's an issue that I wrote about yesterday (" The coming corpus-based reexamination of the Second Amendment") and that I'm going to be dealing with in a series of posts over the next several weeks. Heller, Justice Scalia misinterpreted the phrase keep and bear arms. The Originalism Blog has a guest post, by David Weisberg, taking issue with the conclusion in Dennis Baron's Washington Post op-ed that newly available evidence of historical usage shows that in District of Columbia v. Important: Use the "Download" button at the top right of the screen. That link will take you to a shared folder in Dropbox. The corpus data that is discussed can be downloaded here. Families increasingly prefer to enroll children in schools that teach English and other Indian languages better suited for the job market.Īn introduction and guide to my series of posts "Corpora and the Second Amendment" is available here. Urdu is now stigmatized as foreign, the language of India’s archrival, Pakistan. In more recent decades, the language has faced dual threats from communal politics and the quest for economic prosperity. Its literature and journalism - often advanced by writers who rebelled against religious dogma - played important roles in the country’s independence struggle against British colonial rule and in the spread of socialist fervor across the subcontinent later in the 20th century. That more than 300,000 people came to celebrate Urdu poetry during the three-day festival this month in New Delhi was testament to the peculiar reality of the language in India.įor centuries, Urdu was a prominent language of culture and poetry in India, at times promoted by Mughal rulers. For a good recent example, see Mujib Mashal, " Where Romantic Poetry in a Fading Language Draws Stadium Crowds", NYT : People get confused about languages, dialects, registers, and scripts - and when journalists try to help, they often make things worse.
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