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Posted by Mark Liberman

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=70070&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=a-dashing-wizard

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=70070

From Jesse Sheidlower:

I hereby offer to supervise an MA thesis focused entirely on this one passage.

#linguistics

[image or embed]

— Jesse Sheidlower (@jessesword.com) July 17, 2025 at 2:02 PM

The cited passage is from Terry Prachett's 1987 novel Mort.

Here's the context:

    Three men had appeared behind him, as though extruded from the stonework. They had the heavy, stolid look of those thugs whose appearance in any narrative means that it’s time for the hero to be menaced a bit, although not too much, because it’s also obvious that they’re going to be horribly surprised.
     They were leering. They were good at it.
     One of them had drawn a knife, which he waved in little circles in the air. He advanced slowly towards Mort, while the other two hung back to provide immoral support.
     “Give us the money,” he rasped.

After some back-and-forth:

     “I think we kill you and take a chance on the money,” he said. “We don’t want this sort of thing to spread.”
     The other two drew their knives.
     Mort swallowed. “This could be unwise,” he said.
     “Why?”
     “Well, I won’t like it, for one.”
     “You’re not supposed to like it, you’re supposed to—die,” said the thief, advancing.
     “I don’t think I’m due to die,” said Mort, backing away. “I’m sure I would have been told.”
     “Yeah,” said the thief, who was getting fed up with this. “Yeah, well, you have been, haven’t you? Great steaming elephant turds!”
     Mort had just stepped backwards again. Through a wall.
     The leading thief glared at the solid stone that had swallowed Mort, and then threw down his knife.
     “Well, —- me,” he said. “A —-ing wizard. I hate —-ing wizards!”
     “You shouldn’t —- them, then,” muttered one of his henchmen, effortlessly pronouncing a row of dashes.
     The third member of the trio, who was a little slow of thinking, said, “Here, he walked through the wall!”

One quasi-linguistic note, for anyone who takes Jesse up on his offer: I presume that the image in Jesse's skeet comes from a printed book, because the Kindle version (inappropriately) eliminates the spaces corresponding to the boundaries of the bleeped words:

That's a typographical convention that annoys me when it eliminates spaces next to punctuational dashes. In Jesse's image, there are spaces on both sides of all of the dashes, except after the ones preceding "ing". That also strikes me as inappropriate to context — in the text reproduced above, I've added spaces around each bleeped word, but not between the intra-word letter-bleeping dashes.

Another linguistic question is how the readers of the Audible audiobook version render the dashes. However, I'm not willing to spend $23.24 to learn the answer (or even the special Audible-member price of $10.49), since my master's thesis days are long past.

In related news, there's a new-ish edition of The F-Word ….

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Posted by Victor Mair

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=70024&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-impact-of-different-languages-on-our-thinking-and-doing

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=70024

The Weird Way Language Affects Our Sense of Time and Space
The languages we speak can have a surprising impact on the way we think about the world and even how we move through it.
Matt Warren and Miriam Frankel
This post originally appeared on BBC Future and was published November 4, 2022. This article is republished here (getpocket, Solo) with permission.

When I first scanned this article, I thought it was so lackluster, especially on contentious waters that we had successfully navigated just a few weeks ago (see "Selected readings"), I decided not to write about it on Language Log.  However, several colleagues called the article to my attention and said that it raised interesting questions, so I have gone ahead and posted on it despite my reservations.

Cognitive scientist Lera Boroditsky, one of the pioneers of research into how language manipulates our thoughts, has shown that English speakers typically view time as a horizontal line. They might move meetings forward or push deadlines back. They also tend to view time as travelling from left to right, most likely in line with how you are reading the text on this page or the way the English language is written.

This relationship to the direction text is written and time appears to apply in other languages too. Hebrew speakers, for example, who read and write from right to left, picture time as following the same path as their text. If you asked a Hebrew speaker to place photos on a timeline, they would most likely start from the right with the oldest images and then locate more recent ones to the left. 

Mandarin speakers, meanwhile, often envision time as a vertical line, where up represents the past and down the future. For example, they use the word xia ("down") when talking about future events, so that "next week" literally becomes "down week". As with English and Hebrew, this is also in line with how Mandarin traditionally was written and read – with lines running vertically, from the top of the page to the bottom.

So much for monolinguals.

Things start to get really strange, however, when looking at what happens in the minds of people who speak more than one language fluently. "With bilinguals, you are literally looking at two different languages in the same mind," explains Panos Athanasopoulos, a linguist at Lancaster University in the UK. "This means that you can establish a causal role of language on cognition, if you find that the same individual changes their behaviour when the language context changes."

Bilingual Mandarin and English speakers living in Singapore also showed a preference for left to right mental time mapping over right to left mental mapping. But amazingly, this group was also quicker to react to future oriented pictures if the future button was located below the past button – in line with Mandarin. Indeed, this also suggests that bilinguals may have two different views of time's direction – particularly if they learn both languages from an early age. 

One of the most discussed Whorfian topics on Language Log has to do with grammar and economics.

In 2013, Keith Chen, a behavioural economist at the University of California, Los Angeles, set out to test whether people who speak languages that are "futureless" might feel closer to the future than those who speak other languages. For example, German, Chinese, Japanese, Dutch and the Scandinavian languages have no linguistic barrier between the present and the future, while "futured languages", such as English, French, Italian, Spanish and Greek, encourage speakers to view the future as something separate from the present.

He discovered that speakers of futureless languages were more likely to engage in future-focused activities. They were 31% more likely to have put money into savings in any given year and had accumulated 39% more wealth by retirement. They were also 24% less likely to smoke, 29% more likely to be physically active, and 13% less likely to be medically obese. This result held even when controlling for factors such as socioeconomic status and religion. In fact, OECD countries (the group of industrialised nations) with futureless languages save on average 5% more of their GDP per year.

This correlation may sound like a fluke, with complex historical and political reasons perhaps being the real drivers. But Chen has since investigated whether variables such as culture or how languages are related could be influencing the results. When he accounted for these factors, the correlation was weaker – but nevertheless held in most cases. "The hypothesis still seems surprisingly robust to me," argues Chen. 

Despite all of their enthusiastic debates over whether some languages can make us wealthy and healthy and other languages make us poor and perilous, linguists are still arguing over whether the language we speak can leave us successful in business and robust (!) in life.  I wonder, though, whether the question has been properly phrased, and what Benjamin Lee Whorf himself would say of the economic claims that are being made on his behalf.

Selected readings

• "Sapir-Whorf redux" (5/15/25)
• "Linguistic relativity: snow and horses" (4/15/25)
• "Keith Chen, Whorfian economist" (2/9/12)
• "Keith Chen animated" (9/7/2013)
• "Cultural diffusion and the Whorfian hypothesis" (2/12/12)
• "Whorfian Economics" (2/21/12) — guest post by Keith Chen
• "Thought experiments on language and thought" (2/22/12)
• "Keith Chen at TED" (2/20/13)
• "How Your Language Affects Your Wealth and Health:  An international study suggests languages shape how we think about the future, and how we plan for it", by Ozgun Atasoy, Scientific American (March 19, 2013)
• "Why speaking English can make you poor when you retire", Tim Bowler, BBC News (2/23/13)

[Thanks to Mark Metcalf and Richard Warmington]

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Posted by Mark Liberman

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=70056&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=interpersonal-and-socio-cultural-alignment

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=70056

In a comment on "Alignment", Sniffnoy wrote:

At least as far as I'm aware, the application of "alignment" to AI comes from Eliezer Yudkowsky or at least someone in his circles. He used to speak of "friendly AI" and "unfriendly AI". However, the meaning of these terms was fairly different from the plain meaning, which confused people. So at some point he switched to talking about "aligned" or "unaligned" AI.

This is certainly true — see e.g. Yudkowsky's 2016 essay "The AI alignment problem: why it is hard, and where to start".

However, an (almost?) exactly parallel usage was established in the sociological literature, more than half a century earlier, as discussed in Randall Stokes and John Hewitt, "Aligning actions" (1976):

A substantial body of literature has been developed within the symbolic interactionist tradition that focuses upon various tactics, ploys, methods, procedures and techniques found in social interaction under those circumstances where some feature of a situation is problematic. Mills' (1940) concept of motive talk, Scott and Lyman's (1968) discussion of accounts, Hewitt and Hall's (1973) and Hall and Hewitt's (1970) quasi-theorists, and Hewitt and Stokes' (1975) disclaimers are among the contributions to this literature. In addition, some of Goffman's work (1959; 1967; 1971) addresses itself to a similar set of issues, and McHugh's (1968) analysis of the concept of the definition of the situation is pertinent to the question of how people deal with problematic occurrences.

We refer to these phenomena collectively as aligning actions. Largely verbal efforts to restore or assure meaningful interaction in the face of problematic situations of one kind or another, activities such as disclaiming, requesting and giving accounts, constructing quasi-theoretical explanations of problematic situations, offering apologies, formulating the definition of a situation, and talking about motives illustrate a dual process of alignment. First, such activities are crucial to the process in which people create and sustain joint action by aligning individual lines of conduct when obstacles arise in its path. Second, and of particular import for the present analysis, aligning actions can be shown to play a major part in sustaining a relationship between culture and conduct, in maintaining an alignment between the two in the face of actions that depart from cultural expectations or definitions of what is situationally appropriate.

More from later in the paper:

Much, though not all, that is problematic in everyday life can be conceived in terms of a metaphor of alignment, a term that has a double meaning in the present analysis. First, alignment is a central metaphor in the interactionist analysis of conduct formation. Social interaction is con- ceived as a process in which people orient their conduct toward one another and toward a common set of objects. In this mutual orientation of conduct, an effort is made by participants to align their indi- vidual acts, one to another, in the creation of joint or social acts. 

[…]

The second meaning of alignment — and in the present essay the more crucial one  — revolves around the fact that problematic situations often involve misalignment between the actual or intended acts of participants and cultural ideals, expectations, beliefs, knowledge, and the like. "Alignment" in this sense has to do with perceived discrepancies between what is actually taking place in a given situation and what is thought to be typical, normatively expected, probable, desirable or, in other respects, more in accord with what is culturally normal.

That second sense is exactly what is now meant by alignment in the "AI alignment" discussion, or so it seems to me.

Yudkowsky's 2016 essay doesn't cite the sociological usage, and there's no bibliography to check — according to footnote 1 , "This document is a complete transcript of a talk that Eliezer Yudkowsky gave at Stanford University for the 26th Annual Symbolic Systems Distinguished Speaker series". I don't find a reference in a quick scan of his other publications  either, so presumably he perceived the term as just a normal part of the language of intellectual discourse.

Also unclear to me is the connection between the sociologists' alignment and the D&D version.

But anyhow, as the earlier post noted, "alignment, like journey, is an old word that has been finding new meanings and broader uses over the past few decades".

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