I'm working to translate "Erdbeben" by Fettes Brot for my German class, and I was having trouble making sense of this line:

"Vom Haus mit Pool in der besten Lage
bis zum sozialen Brennunkt. "

I have tried to look up Brennunkt on some online dictionaries, but i can't find it anywhere. I also checked other versions of the lyrics, and they all have it spelled that way. What does this mean, if anything?

eta: Okay, Brennpunkt makes a lot more sense.

I'm also having issues translating the following line:

"Ich mach dick hier ein auf Player."

Is this another typo in the lyrics, or does this make sense?

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1896

Nicholas Wade is an inveterate gene-for-X enthusiast — he's got 68 stories in the NYT index with "gene" in the headline — and he's had two opportunities to celebrate this idea in the past few days: "Speech Gene Shows Its Bossy Nature", 11/12/2009, and "The Evolution of the God Gene", 11/14/2009. The first of these articles is merely a bit misleading, in the usual way. The second verges on the bizarre.

The "Speech Gene", of course, is FOXP2, and Wade's article covers a paper by Genevieve Konopka et al., "Human-specific transcriptional regulation of CNS development genes by FOXP2", Nature 462: 213-217, 11/12/2009. We've been muttering on this weblog for more than five years about the overselling of FOXP2 as "the Language Gene" or the "the Speech Gene" — for a recent summary of the issues, see "Mice with the 'language gene' stay mum" and "More on FOXP2", 6/5/2009.

The journal Cognition took up the cognitive aspects of the "gene for X" question in an excellent special issue in 2006, ("Genes, Brain and Cognition: A Roadmap for the Cognitive Scientist"). An articles that specifically discusses the FOXP2 evidence, as it existed in 2006, is Simon Fisher ("Tangled webs: Tracing the connections between genes and cognition", Cognition 101(2): 270-297, September 2006):

[T]he deceptive simplicity of finding correlations between genetic and phenotypic variation has led to a common misconception that there exist straightforward linear relationships between specific genes and particular behavioural and/or cognitive outputs. The problem is exacerbated by the adoption of an abstract view of the nature of the gene, without consideration of molecular, developmental or ontogenetic frameworks. […] Genes do not specify behaviours or cognitive processes; they make regulatory factors, signalling molecules, receptors, enzymes, and so on, that interact in highly complex networks, modulated by environmental influences, in order to build and maintain the brain.

(Fisher is the scientist who first identified the role of FOXP2 in speech and language impairment. See also the discussion of FOXP2 in Evan Balaban, "Cognitive Developmental Biology: History, Process, and Fortune's Wheel", in the same issue.)

The Konopka et al. paper is entirely in line with this perspective. Human FOXP2 differs from Chimpanzee FOXP2 in just two amino acids, and so, as Konopka et al. explain,

To test whether the amino acids under positive selection in human FOXP2 have a distinct biological function, which would support the role of these changes in evolution, we expressed either human FOXP2 or the same construct mutated at two sites to yield the chimpanzee amino acid content, FOXP2^chimp, in human neuronal cells without endogenous FOXP2. […] To determine if modifying two amino acids leads to changes in gene expression, we conducted whole-genome microarray analysis. We identified 61 genes significantly upregulated and 55 genes downregulated by FOXP2 compared to FOXP2^chimp […]

To place these gene expression changes within a more systematic context, we applied weighted gene co-expression network analysis […] to examine co-regulation of gene expression across all genes. We uncovered two modules where the module eigengene […] was driven by differences in FOXP2 and FOXP2^chimp, and one module driven by similar gene regulation […] Notably, two of the genes with the most connections, so-called 'hub' genes, in one of the differential networks are DLX5 and SYT4, two genes important for brain development and function.

Here's their figure of "one of the modules containing FOXP2 and FOXP2^chimp differentially expressed genes":

So this research supports the idea that the hominin mutation in FOXP2 has a biological effect, and perhaps an important one, apparently involving the interaction of a large number of genes with a large number of developmental and functional roles. It remains to be seen how this relates to human/chimp differences in anatomy, physiology, and behavior; and especially, what it has to do with speech, language, and communication.

Nicholas Wade's first sentence calls  FOXP2 "a gene that underlies the faculty of human speech", and his second sentence is

All animals have an FOXP2 gene, but the human version’s product differs at just 2 of its 740 units from that of chimpanzees, suggesting that this tiny evolutionary fix may hold the key to why people can speak and chimps cannot.

Having done his best to steer his readers along exactly the mistaken path that Simon Fisher warned against ("any characterisation of this as a 'gene for grammar' (or even as a 'gene for language') clearly becomes untenable once we are able to view it within a more complete biological framework"), Wade is then forced by the facts into a somewhat different narrative:

[T]hey confirmed suspicions that FOXP2 was a maestro of the genome … Like the conductor of an orchestra, the gene quiets the activity of some and summons a crescendo from others.

In other words, it's been known since its discovery that FOXP2, like the rest of the FOX family, is a transcription factor.

Several of the genes under FOXP2’s thumb show signs of having faced recent evolutionary pressure, meaning they were favored by natural selection. This suggests that the whole network of genes has evolved together in making language and speech a human faculty.

And some of the genes in FOXP2’s network have already been implicated in diseases that include disorders of speech, confirming its importance in these faculties.

But the FOXP2 network is certainly not the only set of genes involved in language.

And, he didn't add, language is not the only thing that the FOXP2 network is involved in.

The "God Gene" is a different story altogether. To start with, it doesn't exist.

It's basically nonsense to call FOXP2 the "language gene" or the "speech gene", but at least FOXP2 exists, and is involved in the development of various anatomical structures that play a role in spoken language (as well in eating, breathing, etc.); and a FOXP2 mutation is known to be associated with developmental disorders that are partly linguistic.

But Wade's "God Gene" is entirely hypothetical. No one has discovered a family of atheists whose lack of interest in spiritual transcendence can be linked to a shared genomic variation. So what's the argument that there's a gene-for-belief-in-a-higher-power? Let's let Wade explain:

IN the Oaxaca Valley of Mexico, the archaeologists Joyce Marcus and Kent Flannery have gained a remarkable insight into the origin of religion.

During 15 years of excavation they have uncovered not some monumental temple but evidence of a critical transition in religious behavior. The record begins with a simple dancing floor, the arena for the communal religious dances held by hunter-gatherers in about 7,000 B.C. It moves to the ancestor-cult shrines that appeared after the beginning of corn-based agriculture around 1,500 B.C., and ends in A.D. 30 with the sophisticated, astronomically oriented temples of an early archaic state.

This and other research is pointing to a new perspective on religion, one that seeks to explain why religious behavior has occurred in societies at every stage of development and in every region of the world. Religion has the hallmarks of an evolved behavior, meaning that it exists because it was favored by natural selection. It is universal because it was wired into our neural circuitry before the ancestral human population dispersed from its African homeland.

In other words, the "God gene" a completely hypothetical just-so story, with two components. The first is the theory that religion was culturally advantageous in the circumstances of early human evolution:

The ancestral human population of 50,000 years ago, to judge from living hunter-gatherers, would have lived in small, egalitarian groups without chiefs or headmen. Religion served them as an invisible government. It bound people together, committing them to put their community’s needs ahead of their own self-interest. For fear of divine punishment, people followed rules of self-restraint toward members of the community. Religion also emboldened them to give their lives in battle against outsiders. Groups fortified by religious belief would have prevailed over those that lacked it …

There's no evidence for several aspects of this, but it's a plausible argument in favor of … cultural evolution? No, Wade (and some others) want this lesson to have been learned genetically, not culturally:

[G]enes that prompted the mind toward ritual would eventually have become universal.

The beauty part is the universality of this argument. My current favorite application leads us to postulate the Hat Gene. (OK, the Head-Covering Gene — but Wade should really be writing about "the spirituality gene" or "the transcendence gene", since "God" is hardly a cultural universal. So I'm going to stick with my Hat Gene, since it's catchier.)

Think of the manifold advantages of head-coverings to paleolithic hunter-gatherers, and the near-universality of head coverings among human groups at all subsequent stages of development — the Hat Gene hypothesis is a winner all around. Still, I doubt that I could get funding for a Genome-Wide Association study looking for correlations with preferences in haberdashery.

Coincidentally, there's Wade's new book The Faith Instinct, published Nov. 11, 2009. I'm holding out for The Hat Instinct, myself.

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1895

Ethan Forman broke the Danvers High School meep-ban story in the Salem News on 11/10/2009 (See "Meep: Truth or Onion?").   Over the past few days, the story has been picked up by several wire services and other outlets, none of whom provided any information beyond what was in Forman's original story.

Yesterday, NPR's All Things Considered looked into it, and actually added something to the story by interviewing a student, Mike Spiewak ("Principal Tells Students 'Meep' Is Off-Limits"):

According to Spiewak, the source was neither Beaker nor Road Runner, at least not directly:

RAZ: Well, did you pick it up from Beaker or the Road Runner?

Mr. SPIEWAK: No. Actually, my friend Alex, he picked it up on Xbox LIVE. He was in a party with a couple of kids playing Call of Duty last year. One of the kids that were in the party, you know, he said meep and, you know, Alex picked it up and we started using it.

Kudos to NPR for journalistic initiative.

My French dictionary translates "le libéralisme" unhelpfully as "liberalism", however, according to my professor, the word actually means something closer to "free market". This sounds to me more like what we'd call "classical liberalism" in English, which is actually rather conservative by modern standards.

My question is, does "le libéralisme" have the same dual meaning in French that "liberalism" does in English, or is it used exclusively to refer to classical liberalism? If so, what would one call modern liberalism? Also, could some one who supports a free market be referred to as "libéral"?

So, I just encountered the word "canæt", used seemingly instead of "cannot". Can anybody tell me where this word is used, or anything else about it?

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1893

The Taboo Desk here at Language Log Plaza is piled high with reports about taboo language and offensive language — about the classification of particular expressions as obscene/profane or otherwise offensive, about the open use of such expressions, about ways people avoid them, and so on. Now, on the front page of the New York Times on November 14, a story ("It Turns Out You Can Say That On Television, Over and Over", by Edward Wyatt) about expressions that don't reach the level of obscenity or profanity but are offensive to many people — and have now been appearing with increasing frequency on television (in prime-time network series), where they can serve as approximations to even stronger stuff.

The Times is famously modest in the vocabulary it allows in its pages (though it sometimes slips up), an editorial position that can make some stories hard to report on; see Ben Zimmer's entertaining posting "Times bowdlerizes column on Times bowdlerization", which includes a link to a Slate piece by Jesse Sheidlower on the time SCUMBAG slipped into a Times crossword puzzle.

Wyatt's story mentions the insult douche but skirts douchebag, saying:

Users of the recently popular word "douche" defend its use, noting that it was invoked, usually with the suffix "bag," [not actually a suffix, of course] in the 1990s by the character Andy Sipowicz on "NYPD Blue," an ABC series that frequently pushed the boundaries of network acceptability.

But then in a quote from cursing scholar Timothy Jay, we get the full word: "I would bet most kids today couldn't tell you what a douche bag is."

Besides douche, the article reports on the use of bitch, jackass, and sucks on prime-time network television. Those are things you can print in the Times (though I think the paper is still averse to scumbag).

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1894

In this morning's Stone Soup, another take on that highly efficient language, Dude:

Добрый день, дорогие русскоязычные сообщники!

Появилась насущная необходимость разграничить три термина, которые, на русский в 99% случаев переводятся как "болото"

Вот что говорит Лонгман по этому поводу:

Marsh - area of low flat ground that is always wet and soft
Bog - area of low wet muddy ground, sometimes containing bushes or grasses
Swamp - land that is always very flat or covered with a layer of water

Помогите, пожалуйста, найти адекватные русские эквиваленты!

This man is aggressively articulate. He speaks with authority. For some reason I still think he has a terrible point, though.

Do you guys, like, maybe have any thoughts about it or anything?

while watching the music video for "Inis Mona" song by Eluveitie i noticed an ogham inscription [it's at 2:50]:



( screenshot )

is it "alattocelibac"? at least that's what i've deciphered. :) what does the inscription mean anyway?
thanks in advance!

I am just trying to transcribe a sentence from this clip in Italian (0:34). Is this correct?
"Siate prudente voi, quando verrete a arrestare me."
I'm also curious what the Russian translation for this sentence would be.

Does anyone still call a boy Knabe, or is it only Junge now?

Poll #1485397 About Russian
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 18

How fast can a foreigner learn Russian? (months)

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1892

This morning we're continuing to explore the difference between somebody and someone, which all started on 11/10/2009, when David Landfair wrote to Arnold Zwicky ("Ask Language Log: someone, somebody") to ask for protection against the bizarre idea that someone is nominative (like he/she/who) while somebody is accusative (like him/her/whom).

Arnold offered first aid ("Yes, it is preposterous"), quoted MWDEU ("In the 20th century, … someone has come on strong … But both, of course, are equally standard…"), and suggested checking out corpus studies. I offered some corpus-based evidence that -one remains more formal than -body, and (nevertheless?) is gradually superceding it, even in conversational speech ("Less body in your lexicon", 11/11/2009; "Body loses Supreme Court appeal", 11/13/2009).

In the comments on the second of those posts, Geoff Nunberg suggested that "the forms in -one are marked for closeness to the speaker and individuation, and thus preserve some part of the sense of one", citing Dwight Bolinger, and offered as evidence the Google counts for "some{body|one} special" vs. "some{body|one} or other". Along similar lines, David Cantor quoted his wife's opinion that "Someone is used when referring to a specific and defined group 'Someone in this room committed the murder,' while Somebody fit better with an undefined group: 'Somebody left a mitten on the sidewalk.'" And marie-lucie agreed.

I thought that I'd start by checking Geoff's test in a number of corpora where the counts are more believable than Google counts are. (The numbers in parentheses are rates per 100 million words).

	somebody special	someone special	body%	somebody or other	someone or other	body%
TIME	7 (6.4)	6 (5.5)	54%	6 (5.5)	0 (0)	100%
COCA	18 (4.4)	98 (24)	16%	10 (2.5)	14 (3.4)	42%
BNC	5 (5)	21 (21)	19%	11 (11)	2 (2)	84%
LDC News	33 (1.3)	228 (8.9)	13%	24 (0.94)	24 (0.94)	50%

Although the actual rates are all over the place — probably due to differences in the mixture of registers and time-periods covered — there's a consistent pattern. As Geoff predicts, the proportional use of somebody is greater, in every source, for the context "__ or other" compared to the context "__ special".

However, we're looking at subtle proportional differences rather than categorical ones. And when we look at the hits in detail, the whole enterprise seems to fall apart. Geoff (as I understand him) wants "some{body|one} special" to represent the case where the writer or speaker has a particular individual in mind, and "some{body|one} or other" to represent the case where the reference is open. But when we check, we find that that the facts are almost exactly the opposite of this.

Cases of "some{body|one} special" are almost always either not referential at all, or entirely generic. Here's a representative sample of the COCA cases:

Make you feel like you were somebody special.
You act like you're somebody special.
I knew that it would take somebody special…
it's just a great place to be with somebody special
Got to have a chance to move out, to grow, to be somebody special.

Find someone special in six months, guaranteed.
… that her baby girl would turn out to be someone special.
Mia was the last of the trio to find someone special in her life.
The itch to travel is strong, but go with someone special …
Sandee had never given up on finding someone special to share her life with

And in contrast, cases of "some{body|one} or other" usually refer to some specific person whose name the speaker doesn't know, or at least to a variable taking on one of a notionally specific series of values:

he remembered somebody or other saying it was simplistic
One by one, somebody or other stopped me and asked with whom I had business
Does a Speed somebody or other got an office in this building?
I was reading somebody or other today who said …
the Senate have now signed a letter saying they'll hold up the nomination of somebody or other
I only speak to my father once or twice a year, and even then it's usually to argue about money that I owe somebody or other

Nearly every week, someone or other from the construction site headed to the emergency room.
…a market in which everything of value should be owned by someone or other.
my mom went visiting someone or other and probably isn't coming back
He has his mother's large eyes and a flat mouth from Someone or other.
what he was telling Dino, about someone or other who refused to fight in Argelia
A man was holding forth. He was introduced as someone or other, art critic, veteran of the War, …

On their face, these observations could be taken to suggest that the Bolinger/Nunberg/Cantor/marie-lucie theory is backwards: perhaps somebody really suggests specificity, given its  greater proportional usage in with specific referential intent in the "__ or other" frame?  But then again, maybe the proportional differences just reflect a difference in the frequencies of the two frames across registers, as Geoff suggested — you could get the same result if "__ or other" is simply commoner in colloquial contexts.

A difference in referential properties between someone and somebody, if it exists, must be a relatively subtle or contextually limited one, since all sorts of referentiality/specificity conditions seem to be associated with both words in the examples given above.

But in any case,  the distribution of "__ special" and "__ or other" doesn't give much leverage on the question.  To explore this question effectively, it seems, we may not be able to find a convenient corpus-count proxy, but instead need to annotate a larger list of examples with a better-specified set of features.

German is my mother tongue, but somehow, this one's a real puzzler for me right now.

I'm looking for the right preposition. I'm not sure which of the following is correct:

1. Wer in einem Trollfaden kommentiert, verlängert unser Leiden.


2. Wer auf einem Trollfaden kommentiert, verlängert unser Leiden.


3. Wer auf einen Trollfaden kommentiert, verlängert unser Leiden.


4. Wer einen Trollfaden kommentiert, verlängert unser Leiden.

I should really know this, but my mind is drawing a blank. Help, anyone?

Foreigners
I would like to know if Russian linguist Michail Zadornov is known to foreigners
He is a popular TV superstar in Russia and recently he invented a very interesting linguistics theory which is liked by many millions of Russian people and according to some rumours his theory is popular in Kremlin also.
He proves that the Russian language is the first language among human languages and all words have sacred meaning which is understandable if you apply his linguistic analysis
For example,

American. Who is American? American is a cowboy. What is a cow? Cow is говядина. ГОВядина is related by common root to ГОВно (shit). So "American" is a "shit-man".

see many other examples here
http://nostradamys.ru/Rus.html

How would you get conversation practice in a language with limited access to other speakers?

I need to have my French evaluated by January for a program I'm applying to, and while I have been practicing my grammar with workbooks and my listening with podcasts, I need to get my skills in shape for actual conversation. I'm sure it'll all come back to me, but my skills are very rusty as I haven't been in a French class in years.

The problem is that I can't find any sort of class or conversation group. I've checked meetup.com, craigslist, google, local university websites, etc. All I have found so far is one Alliance Francaise class that conflicts with my schedule and a tutor that charges $50/hr. My school doesn't have any regular French table or anything, either (I believe there are only a couple of French majors). I don't know any native speakers and we don't have any francophone exchange students. Even on livemocha.com I haven't found many French speakers that want to chat. It shouldn't be that hard to find places where I can practice a very common language but I'm running out of ideas!

Anyone have suggestions for me? I might hire the tutor but I can't afford more than a couple of hours.

In English, the word "play" has several unrelated meanings. For example, you can play a game, or you can play a musical instrument. German also uses the same word for both of those meanings of "play", even though it's not a cognate. Is there a word for this phenomenon?

The post below (from this blog last year) about Basque mythology sounds like it could be a cultural recollection of Neanderthals.

The very last site where Neanderthals are known to have survived is in Spain, although it was in southern Spain rather than the north where the Basques live now.

A genetic analysis done in the past year or so concluded that the Neanderthal individual that the material came from had red hair.

Basque is said to be mysteriously unrelated to any other language. I have long wondered if Basque might carry some remnants of a Neanderthal language. It is an interesting coincidence that the "Basque" called these people "Basajaun."

I'm sure many of you have heard of this before but the specifics were news to me when I ran across them this evening. Thought it was cool in a linguistic sense so I'm posting it here. Anybody know any further details about this and how it might relate to the Basque language?

Below I am quoting the post that I found interesting ...
------------
In Basque mythology, the basajaun (plural: basajaunak) were an ancient human race of stout, hairy wild men who were megalith builders.

Basajaun means "Lord of the Woods", they once dwelled in the mountains of the Basque Pyrenees of northern Spain and southern France and had knowledge of magic. The Basajaun was heavily built and about 2 to 3 meters tall. Dark reddish hair reached their knees. They were very agile, strong, hairy beings with animal characteristics.

The Basajaun watch over the forests and all wild creatures. They are rural genies, also called the Wild Lords, also considered to be the protector of flocks. When comes a storm a Basajaun will shout warnings to the shepherds; and they prevent wolves from approaching flocks. They are the first to have cultivated the earth.

Human beings obtained the right to cultivate the earth when a man won a bet with a Basajaun. He stole the seeds that the Basajun was sowing and he came back to his peoples to teach them how to produce food.

A fascinating article in Danwei.

US President Barack Obama will make his first visit to China from November 15-18. To mark the occasion, he's changing his name.

"Obama" is transliterated in the Chinese press as 奥巴马 (àobāmǎ), but a promotional poster distributed yesterday by the US Embassy uses 欧巴马 (ōubāmǎ)... "according to Susan Stevenson, press spokesperson for the US Embassy, the US government was standardizing the Chinese translation of the president's name to clear up the current confusion between the two transliterations, and from now on it would use ōubāmǎ exclusively."

The Xinhua News Agency keeps an archive of transliterations, and the Mirror confirmed that, like media organizations across the mainland and in Hong Kong, Xinhua has always rendered Obama as àobāmǎ. But a former polling station volunteer told the newspaper that on Chinese versions of last year's presidential ballot in New York, Obama's name was transliterated as ōubāmǎ.

Danwei quotes from a Chinese news article:

A Mirror reporter spoke to noted ambassador and translator Guo Jiading (current vice-president of the Translators Association of China, former director of the foreign ministry's translation office, and a translator who worked with Zhou Enlai and Dengxiaoping). Guo said that Obama's full name, Barack Hussein Obama, should be pronounced bə'rɑ:k hu:'seɪn oʊ'bɑ:mə. If he were to transliterate it, he would render it as bèilākè hóusàiyīn àobāmǎ (贝拉克·侯赛因·奥巴马). "Xinhua is right. There's no problem there," Guo said.

Guo Jiading said that according to standard practice, a name transliteration that has been in use for a while cannot be casually changed; unless Xinhua changes its rendering, the Foreign Ministry will not agree to switch àobāmǎ for ōubāmǎ. He said that the transliteration of Kissinger's name was incorrect — it ought to be 基辛杰 (jīxīnjié) instead of 基辛格 (jīxīngé), but once the mistake was made, it continued to be used.

As a student of Mandarin and native speaker of American English, I find this particularly fascinating, particularly the reasoning of the quoted tranlator Guo Jiading. In Standard Mandarin, the IPA for /ao/ is ɑʊ̯; the IPA for /ou/ is oʊ. Why does he then say he would render oʊ'bɑ:mə as /aobama/? It really makes no sense to me. To me, it's like hearing someone say "Two plus two is four. Therefore, Xinhua is right to write the answer as five. There's no problem there."

Are there other transliteration conventions in languages you study that make no sense to you?

Then again, how much of transliteration is making it sound like the original pronunciation, and how much is making it sound like a word in the receiving language?