At a Superbowl party, I met a psychiatrist who asked me (we were talking about Um...) if I believed in the unconscious. If you mean the semiotic detritus of life that's lying around and can be borrowed, deployed, or shanghaied for acts of interpretation, sure, I replied (or something like that -- it was the Superbowl). Here's a perfect example. I sent Misty an email talking about a conversation yesterday, in which I'd been worrying about the social dynamics in various workplaces. But instead of "handwringing" I wrote "handwriting." Ah, beautiful. Dr. Freud?

I can't think of anything that would have led me to write "writing" instead of "wringing," except maybe that I was thinking about the email I had just written to someone else. But since the content of my worrying was about writing, broadly construed (both as an act and as my future doing it), this is an opportunity for some interpretation, some meaning making. That's what I think a Freudian slip is -- not a bald linguistic error, but one with an opportunity for poetry. Or at least self-examination.

Well, we moved. I rewrote a second book proposal. Wrote an article for the New Scientist and two short pieces for Science. Wrote an essay for Seed and the Chicago Tribune. Wrote a book review for the NY Times. Writing another piece for Science. Haven't pitched much lately -- gave it up for Lent, though the lash of no's coming from one direction and the terror of pennilessness on the other would be penance enough and even make a Friday good. Have also consulted on, edited and/or wrote 5 or 6 grants, with others in the pipeline. Let me tell you, there are some weeks when getting paid by the hour, not the word, is the real ticket.

A short piece I did for the Texas Observer is here.

If you think people in America should speak only English, maybe Texas isn’t the state for you. Between 2000 and 2005, the number of people who reported speaking a language that’s not English at home rose by 860,000 to 6.86 million. They now make up 33 percent of the state’s population. (Come to think of it, maybe the U.S. isn’t the country for you: In 2005, 52 million people reported speaking another language, up 5 million since 2000.)

The Modern Language Association has just released colorful charts, based on data from the 2005 U.S. Census American Community Survey, that allow you to pull out data by state for the 30 most frequently spoken languages in the U.S. (All the data and maps are at www.mla.org/map_data.) It’s worth noting that these stats only cover speakers of languages other than English, not their fluency in English, so they capture seventh-generation, bilingual German families in New Braunfels as well as newly arrived Farsi speakers in Houston.

Spanish speakers account for the larger part of the increase in the population of non-English speakers. In Texas, they added about 737,000 non-English speakers. Texas had the second-largest increase, behind California. Even with anti-immigrant sentiment a major concern for the GOP, Spanish speakers gained in 44 states in the same period; only in Mississippi, Wyoming, Alaska, Montana, Maine, and Vermont did their numbers drop. That’s a 4.1 million-person increase nationwide.

The polyglotting of Texas and the nation seems so inevitable that true connoisseurs of xenophobia should rejoice about the boost in Spanish speakers. Spanish, after all, is a European language. It’s the only European language on the rise; the numbers for French, German, Italian, Greek, and Polish, all spoken by older generations of immigrants, are dropping. Spanish is written in the Roman alphabet, so you can sound out written words even if you don’t know what they mean. And the language has thousands of words recognizable in English because of a shared heritage. MALDEF or LULAC aren’t likely to adopt this as a slogan, but we’ll say it here: Compared with Chinese, Thai, or Urdu, Spanish is practically English.

Four years ago, I published a story in Technology Review about the National Virtual Translation Center, an FBI project to use technology to link contract linguists and give them tools to do translation and analysis jobs for the 16 intelligence agencies. I recently discovered that this piece (which to date is the only piece of journalism written about the NVTC) is finally available for free online here. I also looked at the FBI's 2009 budget justification, which contains more info about the NVTC than documents from previous years (even Secrecy News calls the document "remarkably detailed"), which provide a scope of how much the NVTC has grown:

--"Since 2003, the NVTC has accepted over 1,200 requirements in 60 difference languages. In FY 2007 NVTC translated over 350,000 text pages and 350 hours of audio material, a 40% increase over FY 2006. With regard to translations, in 2003 the NVTC performed 20 translation jobs for its customers. In FY 2007 performed approximately 5,500 translation jobs for its customers. A 64 percent increase is expected between FY 2007 and FY 2008 based on the volume of incoming material from active military campaigns and the expansion of incoming Asian- and African-language materials."

--"Over 73 percent of material collected by the IC and stored in the HARMONY database is untranslated. HARMONY is the IC’s centralized database for foreign military, technical
and open-source documents and their translations. Overall, the IC backlog of untranslated material is growing exponentially, with an estimated five petabytes backlogged."

--There are 54 full and part-time independent contract linguists all over the country, connected virtually to the NVTC HQ and working through backlogged material. In 2009 the FBI wants to add 8 more contractors.

--These linguists are linked through TONS (Translator Online Network Support), which is an enterprise-scale computer system that gives them access to A variety of language processing capabilities to language software (automatic optical character recognition, machine translation, named entity extraction, and transliteration) and other language tools for translators. The FBI wants $1.2 million to support TONS.

--Though the NVTC is under the FBI, the director is paid by the NSA, and four other employees are either paid by the NSA or CIA. Five others are FBI employees, which makes for a total management staff of 9, but in 2009 they want to add 2 more. These employees do "outreach, coordination, quality control and...provide agency-unique
expertise in supporting IC clients.

--The NVTC was mandated by Congress to be a "clearinghouse" for language resources for the intelligence community; the portal was built in 2006 but it has no content. the FBI wants $166,000 to support the portal.

All of which is interesting, and more detail than I was able to get four years ago (obviously, since they'd just opened their doors, they had no track record to refer to). In the budget justification, there's no reference to past successes, only to imminent gaps if funding isn't grown. (The 2008 justification is more direct: "Failure to fund this initiative could cause serious harm to national security should actionable intelligence remain un-translated.")

A Google search of TONS turned up a more detailed description of TONS and NVTC vendors from 2004:

The FBI will be acquiring an estimated total of $7,000,000 in language software products, as identified by Lockheed Martin, directly from the following companies. BBN, Basis, Stellent, BlueShoe Technologies and Abbysoft will provide ingest, prioritization and retrieval capabilities, including language identification, audio processing, and optical character recognition; Virage will provide video processing; Trados will provide translation memory, translation tools and collaboration; Global Sight will provide task tracking, quality control tools, and workflow management.

Another tidbit from the budget justification: In 2007, the FBI reported over 21,000 "positive encounters" with suspected terrorists. ""A positive encounter is one in
which an encountered individual is positively matched with an identity
in the Terrorist Screening Data Base."

Publicizing Um on Wordsmith.org's author chat - read the transcript.

Interesting comment from here about how McCain's campaign placed teleprompters so he would look more natural giving a speech:

I wish that once, just once, the cameras would show us what is really going on in these rooms. It would both legitimate and honest to show the candidate making a speech AND the teleprompters AND the cue cards/big screen TVs etc. Why does the media allow politicians to get away this fiction that they have memorized their speeches and are delivering them extemporaneously?

I'm all for breaking down the fourth wall, but does anyone actually believe this fiction anymore? And if they don't, when did they stop? "They" being American audiences, consumers of political theater? If a scholar of political communication were to take this on as a topic, I would bet they'd look at the construction of extemporaneity as a rhetorical choice -- but not at how people perceived said construction/fiction. Perhaps the fiction is not so much rhetorical as it is ritualistic: a summoning of the order of the universe through the repetition of what has been and what will always be. Which is why it would look strange if the fourth wall were broken, not because the interaction would be less persuasive but because it's a threatening departure.

The official count of the world's languages has recently increased by 96 languages. The steward of this figure, SIL International, released an annual report in January that reviewed changes in three-letter codes that are assigned to languages by the International Standards Organization; these codes are metadata used in information organization and software development.

In the 2005 edition of Ethnologue, SIL's language atlas & gazetteer, there were 6912 languages; this represented 103 languages more than Ethnologue counted in 2000.

On the surface, these increases are interesting, since it appears to contradict the notion that languages are disappearing, and the overall count of languages shrinking. But when you dig more deeply, you see it's how languages are lumped and split.

Of the new codes, 47 were assigned because previously assigned codes were rearranged. The remaining 59 were assigned to languages that apparently had never been described before. Twenty of the new codes were proposed by Jamin Pelkey, a linguistics graduate student from La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia, who "discovered" about half of of those languages in a 2006 language survey in southern China for his dissertation. The other half, more or less, had been previously documented by Chinese linguists or by Pelkey's supervisor at La Trobe, named David Bradley. I went through the change requests to count Pelkey's proposals. Pelkey submitted the highest number of proposals to ISO.

Two of the new language codes were given to artificial languages: Kotava, an artificial language invented in 1978 that has approximately 40 fluent speakers in France and Polynesia, and Lingua Franca Nova, spoken by an online community of 180 people. (I'm quoting from the ISO proposals.)

Three were sign languages, all in south Asia.

The remainder of new codes are "new" by virtue of being recategorized in broad "macrolanguage" families. (That is, they weren't the product of two languages merging or two dialects splitting).

A couple of things are significant about this: one, because people are mapping linguistic diversity more thoroughly, more codes are needed to describe linguistic diversity even as that diversity decreases; two, we'll never really know "how many" language there are (or were) on the planet, given varying ways to distinguish "language" from "dialect."

I've got the cover of the new New Scientist:

Would be dumb to call this ironic:

The iPhone kills conversation.

But what a boon for know-it-alls!

Actually, I know I'd use it like this, which is why I've wondered if the touch keyboard would be even more of a social annoyance. On a Blackberry keyboard I could keep eye contact while typing; not so on the touch keyboard.

Why the Times spells "creole language" as "Creole language" is beyond me, using a proper noun to refer to the generic. Will it confuse people? It's not a common spelling. Derek Bickerton (whose memoir I reviewed for the Times) spells it "Creole." Anyway, I pointed it out to the editor. Don't blame me.

I might also add: the Times doesn't allow the word "bullshit," so this charming quote, unfortunately, had to go: "As far as I was concerned, I'd gotten the bullshit out of the way so I could now get on with the serious business of life. Which is, of course, finding out stuff."