See how a crack team of ninja linguists brought down the notorious Split-Infinitive Killer !
Learn how clandestine Wonderlinguists cracked the “Dangling-Participle Strangler” case !!
Read about the language superheroes who serve the nation every day !!!
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A typical linguist on the job
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All in a day's work !!
So,
check out the following article. Especially interesting is the
portrait of Rob Leonard, former vocalist for Sha Na Na, and now a "Sam
Spade of semantics".
Words on Trial
Can linguists solve crimes that stump the police?
by Jack Hit
ABSTRACT:
DEPT. OF LINGUISTICS about forensic linguistics. These days, the word
“forensic” conjures an image of a technician on a “C.S.I.” show who
delicately retrieves a hair or a paint chip from a crime scene, surmises
the unlikeliest facts, and presents them to the authorities as
incontrovertible evidence. If “forensic linguist” brings to mind a
verbal specialist who plucks slivers of meaning from old letters and
stray audiotape before announcing that the perpetrator is, say, a
middle-aged insurance salesman from Philadelphia, that’s not far from
the truth. Tells about the testimony of forensic linguist Robert Leonard
in the 2011 murder trial of Chris Coleman. Discusses the work of James
Fitzgerald, a retired F.B.I. forensic linguist who brought the field to
prominence in 1996 with his work in the case of the Unabomber.
Fitzgerald had successfully urged the FBI to publish the Unabomber’s
“manifesto.” Many people called in to say they recognized the writing
style. By analyzing syntax and other linguistic patterns, Fitzgerald
narrowed down the possible authors and finally linked the manifesto to
the writings of Ted Kaczynski, a reclusive former mathematician.
Fitzgerald went on to formalize some of the tools used in forensic
linguistics, including starting the Communicated Threat Assessment
Database. The CTAD is the most comprehensive collection of linguistic
patterns in written threats, containing some four thousand “criminally
oriented communications” and more than a million words. The pioneer of
forensic linguistics is widely considered to be Roger Shuy, a Georgetown
University professor and the author of such fundamental textbooks as
“Language Crimes: The Use and Abuse of Language Evidence in the
Courtroom.” The field’s more recent origins might be traced to an
airplane flight in 1979, when Shuy found himself talking to the lawyer
sitting next to him. By the end of the flight, Shuy had a recommendation
as an expert witness in his first murder case. Since then, he’s been
involved in numerous cases in which forensic analysis revealed how
meaning had been distorted by the process of writing or recording. In
recent years, following Shuy’s lead, a growing number of linguists have
applied their techniques in regular criminal cases, such Chris
Coleman’s, and even certain commercial lawsuits. Mentions a suit between
Apple and Microsoft over the use of the phrase “app store.” Writer
visits Robert Leonard at Hofstra University and describes some of his
cases, including the investigation of the murder of Natalee Holloway in
Aruba. Mentions Carole Chaski, the executive director of the Institute
for Linguistic Evidence and the president of Alias Technology, which
markets linguistic software. Chaski has been working to perfect a
computer algorithm that identifies patterns hidden in syntax.
For true-life stories of heroic Navy linguists -- click here!!
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2013/08/navy-linguists-save-day-updated.html
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| Top-flight cryptolinguists are few and far between |
Note:
Those misrenderings on the part of the Red Rascal might be other than
random; Trudeau may well have
consulted a linguist to guide his choices. Thus, that apparently undesireable “path which is
asphalt”. That is obscure to
our hearing; a paved road beats a
dirt one, and there are plenty in Afghanistan which aren’t paved, or weren’t
until the U.S. came in and had them paved. But in Arabic dialects, the term zift, literally ‘asphalt, pitch’, is used in a metaphorical negative sense. Thus, Egyptian zayy al-zift ‘lousy’, Yemeni azfat
(an elative) ‘worse’. Perhaps
Pashto has something similar.
[Update 3 March 2015] There is more to intel than just connecting the dots. In SIGINT, the individual dots themselves can be problematic:
A Pakistani man used a code in which women's names substituted for bomb materials when he would email with al Qaeda about a plot to kill hundreds of people in England in 2009, a U.S. prosecutor said on Monday.
Abid Naseer sent an al Qaeda operative emails with stilted language about women and a wedding, but the emails were actually about a planned car bombing, prosecutor Zainab Ahmad told jurors at the close of a federal trial in Brooklyn, New York.
The emails contained women's names like Huma and Nadia in place of bomb making materials starting with the same letter, such as hydrogen peroxide and nitrate, she said.
"They're so coded that they're half gibberish," yet they reflected Nasser's intent to carry out an attack on al Qaeda's behalf, Ahmad said in her closing argument.
Naseer, representing himself, insisted in his closing argument that he was innocent, He said he had been "chasing women on the Internet" and planning a wedding.
[Update 5 March 2015]
This just in:
Inside the debate over whether our language choices are as distinctive
as our DNA.
In an episode of the CBS show
“Criminal Minds” that aired last year , an FBI team is on a frantic hunt for a
missing 4-year-old. The team soon realizes that the girl has been given away by
a relative, Sue, and that there’s no way Sue is going to reveal her
whereabouts.
A crucial break comes when FBI
profiler Alex Blake puts her “word wisdom” to work. Blake, who is also a
professor of linguistics at Georgetown University, notices that Sue uses an
unusual turn of phrase during an interview and in a written statement: “I put
the light bug on.”
The FBI team launches an Internet
search and soon discovers the same misuse of “light bug” for “light bulb” in an
underground adoption forum: “I’ll switch the light bug off in the car so no one
will see.”
A groundbreaking murder case in
Britain was decided after a linguistic analysis suggested that text messages
sent from a young woman’s phone after she went missing were more likely to have
been written by her killer than by her. And in Johnson County, Tenn., the
outcome of the April “Facebook murders” trial may well hang, according to
Assistant District Attorney General Dennis D. Brooks, on whether a linguist can
convince jurors of the authorship of a slew of e-mails soliciting murder that
were written, he says, under a fictitious name.
Stacey Castor, now doing time in
Bedford Hills, N.Y., for murdering her husband in 2005 and attempting to murder
her daughter two years later, helped give herself away, according to
Fitzgerald, by misspelling — and mispronouncing — “antifreeze” as “antifree.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/should-texts-e-mail-tweets-and-facebook-posts-the-be-new-fingerprints-in-court/2015/02/19/a5ec2bf6-6f32-11e4-8808-afaa1e3a33ef_story.html
See too the article “The Whole Haystrack” in The New
Yorker for 26 Jan 2015.
Concerning the prosecution of a Somali-American for nefarious acts
related to the terror group al-Shabaab, part of the evidence was “a Somali
proverb repeatedly cited by the prosecution as evidence that he was part of the
conspiracy”.
~
For further true-life linguistic adventures, click here:
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