Month: September 2022

Stop being weird about the Russian language

As you know, Russia is waging an unprovoked war on Ukraine. It should go without saying that my sympathies are with Ukraine, but of course both states are undemocratic, one-party kleptocracies and I have little hope for anything good coming from the conflict.

That’s all besides the point. Since the start of the war, I have had several conversations with linguists who suggested that the study of the Russian language—one of the most important languages in linguistic theorizing over the years—is now “cringe”. This is nonsense. First, official statistics show that a majority of Ukrainian citizens identify as ethnically Russian, and that a substantial minority speak Russian as a first language (and this is probably skewed by social-desirability bias). Secondly, it is wrong to identify a language with any one nation. (It is “cringe” to use flag emojis to label languages; just use the ISO codes.) Third, it is foolish to equate the state with the people who live underneath them, particularly after the end of the kind of mass political movements that in earlier times could stop this kind of state violence. It is a basic corollary of the i-language view that children learn whatever languages they’re sufficiently exposed to, regardless of their location or of their caretakers’ politics. The iniquity of war does not travel from nation to language to its speakers. Stop being weird about it.

The end of defectivity

As of yesterday I have completed my series of defectivity case studies, at least for the time being. From these I propose the following tentative taxonomy:

It is not clear to me whether three categories are really needed. In both of the latter two, here seems to be some tight phonotactic constraint on inflectional variants which results in ungrammaticality and defectivity if not satisfied. In the two cases from Africa, these constraints are of a metrical nature and impact many lexemes; in the cases from Scandinavia, they concern stem-final consonant clusters and possible mutations to them. And this looks a lot like the case of Russian verbs. This just leaves Tagalog, which I think has simply been misanalyzed, and Turkish, where the only defective lexemes are a handful of subminimal borrowings.

I am aware of two other cases of interest: (various stages of) Sanskrit (Stump 2010) and Latvian. These are phenomenologically quite different from the ones I’ve discussed so far: both involve gaps in the paradigms of inflected pronouns. I do not find gaps in the distribution of functional elements to be nearly as shocking as the failure of, say, an otherwise unobjectionable Russian or Spanish verb to have a 1sg. form. I should mention that the constraint against contracting n’t to am in standard English (see Yang 2017:§3 and references therein) is also possibly an example of this form; I suppose it depends on whether or not n’t is really an inflectional affix or not.

References

Stump, G. 2010. Interactions between defectiveness and syncretism. In M. Baerman, G. G. Corbett, and D. Brown (ed.), Defective Paradigms: Missing Forms and What They Tell Us, pages 181-210. Oxford University Press.
Yang, C. 2017. How to wake up irregular (and speechless). In C. Bowern, L. Horn, and R. Zanuttini (ed.), On Looking into Words (and Beyond), pages 211-233. Language Science Press.

Defectivity in Hungarian

[This is part of a series of defectivity case studies.]

Hungarian verbs exhibit one of better-documented cases of defectivity, discussed first in English by Hetzron (1975). In particular, the study by Rebrus & Törkenczy (2009), henceforth RT, is a wealth of information, though this information is presented in so many different forms that it has taken me some effort to extract the basic generalizations. Furthermore, they seem to have deliberately avoided putting forth an actual analysis. Rather than trying to explain the data RT’s way I’ve tried to put matters into my own words. Note that below I often give multiple allomorphs for a suffix or epenthetic segment; these are conditioned by Hungarian’s well-known process of vowel harmony (see, e.g., Siptár & Törkenczy 2000 for description).

Hungarian has a class of verbs, mostly intransitive, which form a 3sg. indefinite present indicative in -ik rather than the ordinary null ending. Of these, some such verb stems end in surface consonant clusters. When consonant-initial suffixes (e.g., the imperative -j, the imperative subjunctive -d, the potential -hat/-het) are added to verb stems of this form, a fleeting vowel (o, ӧ, or e) normal breaks up the stem cluster (e.g., ugrik ‘s/he jumps’,  ugorhat ‘s/he may jump’). It is not clear to me whether this fleeting vowel is underlying or epenthetic, though it seems to be standard in Hungarian philology to assume the latter. However, for certain verbs, this does not occur and the verb is simply defective (e.g., csuklik ‘s/he hiccups’ but *csuklhat, *csukolhat). According to Hetzron  (ibid., 864f.)  all the defective verbs have stems of the form /…Cl/ or /…Cz/, though it is not the case that all verbs of this form are defective (e.g., vérzik ‘s/he bleeds’, vérezhet ‘s/he may bleed’; hajlik ‘s/he bends’, hajolhat ‘s/he may bend’). A study by Lukács, Rebrus, and Törkenczy (2010), conducted detailed grammaticality judgment tasks and appears to largely have confirmed the description given by Hetzron and RT.

What is the source of these patterns?  It may be that whatever causes the fleeting vowel to be epenthesized is less than fully productive; but then it is also necessary to also appeal to absolute phonotactic illformedness to derive the defectivity. It is not obvious that this will work either, because at least some of these clusters ought to simplify according to RT.

References

Hetzron, R. 1975. Where the grammar fails. Language 51: 859-872.
Lukács, Á., Rebrus, P., and Törkenczy, M. 2010. Defective verbal paradigms in Hungarian: description and experimental study. In M. Baerman, G. C. Corbett, and D. Brown (ed.), Defective Paradigms: Missing Forms and What They Tell Us, pages 85-102. Oxford University Press.
Rebrus, P., and Törkenczy, M. 2009. Covert and overt defectiveness in paradigms. In C. Rice and S. Blaho (ed)., When Nothing Wins: Modeling Ungrammaticality in OT, pages 195-234. Equinox.
Siptár, P., and Törkenczy, M. 2000. The Phonology of Hungarian. Oxford University Press.

Defectivity in Spanish

[This is part of a series of defectivity case studies.]

Harris (1969:114) observes that the Spanish verbs agredir ‘to attack’ and aguerrir ‘to harden’ are defective in certain inflectional forms. Gorman & Yang (2019:180), consulting various Spanish dictionaries, expand this list to include abolir ‘to abolish’, arrecir(se) ‘to freeze’, aterir(se) ‘to freeze’, colorir ‘to color/dye’, descolorir ‘to discolor/bleach’, despavorir ‘to fear’, empedernir ‘to harden’, preterir ‘to ignore’, and tra(n)sgredir ‘to transgress’.

All of the defective Spanish verbs appeear to belong to the 3rd (-ir) conjugation, which is the smallest of the three and characterized by extensive irregularity. including raising and/or diphthongization of mid e, o to i, u and to ie, ue, respectively. For instance, the verb dormir ‘to sleep’ (along with the minimally different morir ‘to die’) undergoes diphthongization to ue when stress falls on the stem (e.g., duermo ‘I sleep’) and raising in various desinence-stressed forms (e.g., durmamos ‘we would sleep’). According to  Maiden & O’Neill (2010), it is exactly these forms which would show stem vowel changes which are defective (e.g., in the paradigm of abolir), though this claim ought to be verified with native speakers.

Harris has long argued that these stem changes are limited to stems bearing abstract phonemes. In his 1969 book, stems which undergo diphthongization bear an abstract feature +D; in his 1985 paper, a similar distinction between diphthongizing and non-alternating stem mid vowels is marked using moraic prespecification. The apparent raising of stem mid vowels is analyzed as a dissimilatory lowering of an underlying [+high] vowel, but since there are some stems which do not lower (e.g., vivir/vivo ‘to live/I live’), similar magic (i.e., abstract specifications) is likely called for. In contrast, I understand Bybee & Pardo (1981) and Albright et al. (2001) as arguing that these stem changes are locally predictable, conditioned by nearby segments.1 Albright (2003) suggests that competition between these locally predictable conditioning factors is responsible for defectivity.

Gorman & Yang (2019) argue that, on the basis of a Tolerance Principle analysis, that there are no productive generalizations for 3rd conjugation mid vowel stem verbs in Spanish, if diphthongization and raising are viewed as competitors to a “no change” analysis.2 In support of this, they note that children acquiring Spanish as their first language only very rarely produce incorrect stem changes in the 3rd conjugation. This suggests that during production, they may be “picking and choosing” verbs for which they have already acquired the relevant inflectional patterns.

Endnotes

  1. Of course their arguments are largely limited to adult nonce word studies. I consider this inherently dubious for reasons discussed by Schütze (2005).
  2. They claim “no change” is productive in both the 1st and 2nd conjugations. In support of this they note that diphthongization is commonly underapplied in these conjugations by children acquiring Spanish as their first language.

References

Albright, A., Andrade, A., and Hayes, B. 2001. Segmental environments of Spanish diphthongization. UCLA Working Papers in Linguistics 7: 117-151.
Albright, A. 2003. A quantitative study of Spanish paradigm gaps. In Proceedings of the 22th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, pages 1-14.
Bybee, J. L. and Pardo, E. 1981. On lexical and morphological conditioning of alternations: a nonce-prob e experiment with Spanish verbs. Linguistics 19: 937-968.
Gorman, K. and Yang, C. 2019. When nobody wins. In F. Rainer, F. Gardani, H. C. Luschützky and W. U. Dressler (ed.). Competition in Inflection and Word Formation, pages 169-193. Springer.
Harris, J. W. 1969. Spanish Phonology. MIT Press.
Harris, J. W. 1985. Spanish diphthongisation and stress: a paradox resolved. Phonology 2: 31-45.
Maiden, M. and O’Neill, P. 2010. On morphomic defectiveness: evidence from the Romance languages of the Iberian peninsula. In M. Baerman, G. G. Corbett, and D. Brown (ed)., Defective Paradigms: Missing Forms and What They Tell Us, pages 103-124. Oxford University Press.
Schütze, C. 2005. Thinking about what we are asking speakers to do. In S. Kepser and M. Reis (ed.), Linguistic Evidence: Empirical, Theoretical, and Computational Perspectives, pages 457-485. Mouton de Gruyter.

Animal liberation for linguists

I recently read Animal Liberation (Singer 1975), an attempt to develop a consistent ethics of human treatment of animals. Somewhat surprisingly, several parts were interesting to me as a linguist. In the first chapter (and a few other places throughout), Singer ribs Descartes for the speciesism he sees in the Frenchman’s notions of the human soul; Singer prefers the focus on the capacity for suffering rather than anything so ethereal as a soul, and I guess this would be a problem if you think Cartesian duality has something to do with the human language endowment.

But more interesting to me was the second chapter, entitled “Tools for research…”, with the subtitle “your taxes at work”. The subject of this chapter is animals as research subjects. This is not something I think about much: animals are not terribly useful subjects in linguistics. Singer argues that experimentation on animals is not so much cruel as gratituously cruel, and unconnected to any sensible scientific hypotheses. I simply must describe some of these cruelties to make the point; you’re welcome to skip along if you are easily disturbed. 

Singer discusses baroque and sadistic experiments in which apes are first trained to operate primitive flight simulators and then exposed to lethal doses of radiation, presumably to test whether they really are lethal…I’m not sure. He discusses experiments trying to distress and impair monkeys into psychopathololgy, noting that other experts doubt the existence of psychopathic monkeys outside of the lab. He mentions attempts to inflict “learned helplessness” in rats via arbitrary shock, though notes that the authors report that the “implications of these findings for learned helplessness theory are not entirely clear”. I can at this point interject that there does not seem to be any substantive content in “learned helplessness theory” beyond the ideas that helplessness can be induced in animals via arbitrary cruelty, that this state of mind would be similar to depression in humans, and there are numerous reasons to doubt both claims. Singer mentions labs that have run their regimens of cruelty over dozens of animals: Shetland ponies but also “white rats, kangaroo rats, wood rats, hedgehogs, dogs, cats, monkeys, opposums, seals, dolphins, and elephants” (p. 91). Singer concludes (loc. cit.) that “despite the suffering the animals have gone through, the results obtained, even as reported by the experimenters themselves, are trivial, obvious, or meaningless.” Singer describes studies, going back into the 19th century, establishing that dogs do in fact die in hot cars.

Why does this cruelty have so little point? I suspect in part it is due to the theoretical morass of mid-century behaviorist doctrine and its confusion about the ways in which humans are like and unlike other animals, its tendency to see humans as atypical rats.  This is illustrated clearly by a quote from an unnamed psychologist:

When fifteen years ago I applied to do a degree course in
psychology, a steely-eyed interviewer, himself a psychologist, questioned me closely on my motives and asked me what I believed psychology to be and what was its principal subject matter? Poor naive simpleton that I was, I replied that it was the study of the mind and that human  beings were its raw material. With a glad cry at being able to deflate me so effectively, the interviewer declared that psychologists were not interested in the mind, that rats were the golden focus of study, not people, and then he advised me strongly to trot
around to the philosophy department next door… (p. 94)

Certainly the rats don’t benefit from the cruelty, and if the cruelty is not for humans either, what could the point be?

One thing I am acutely aware of is that students need something to do. Each scientific paradigm vying for hegemony must have an answer to this question. For behaviorism, the answer is to torture and manipulate animals. One of the virtues of the so-called cognitive turn has been the development of cruelty-free ways to penetrate the mind.

References

Singer, P. 1975. Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals. HarperCollins.

The next toolkit 2: electric boogaloo

I just got back from the excellent Workshop on Model Theoretic Representations in Phonology. While I am not exactly a member of the “Delaware school”, i.e., the model-theoretic phonology (MTP) crowd, I am a big fan. In my talk, I contrasted the model-theoretic approach to an approach I called the black box approach, using neural networks and program synthesis solvers as examples of the latter. I likened the two styles to neat vs. scruffy, better is better vs. worse is better, rationalists vs. empiricists, and cowboys vs. aliens.

One lesson I drew from this comparison is the need for MTPists to develop high-quality software—the next toolkit 2. I didn’t say much during my talk about what I imagine this to be like, so I thought I’d leave my thoughts here. Several people—Alëna Aksënova, Hossep Dolatian, and Dakotah Lambert, for example—have developed interesting MTP-oriented libraries. While I do not want to give short schrift to their work, I think there are two useful models for the the next next toolkit: (my own) Pynini and PyTorch. Here is what I see as the key features:

  1. They are ordinary Python on the front-end. Of course, both have a C++ back-end, and PyTorch has a rarely used C++  API, but that’s purely a matter of performance; both have been slowly moving Python code into the C++ layer over the course of their development.The fact of the matter is that in 2022, just about anyone who can code at all can do so in Python.
  2. While both are devilishly complex, their design follows the principle of least suprise; there is only a bit of what Pythonistas call exhuberant syntax (Pynini’s use of the @ operator, PyTorch’s use of _ to denote in-place methods).
  3. They have extensive documentation (both in-module and up to book length).
  4. They have extensive test suites.
  5. They are properly packaged and can be installed via PyPi (i.e., via pip) or Conda-Forge (via conda).
  6. They have corporate backing.

I understand that many in the MTP community are naturally—constitutionally, even—drawn to functional languages and literate programming. I think this should not be the initial focus. It should be ease of use, and for that it is hard to beat ordinary Python in 2022. Jupyter/Colab support is a great idea, though, and might satisfy the literate programming itch too.

Dialectical vs. dialectal

The adjective dialectical describes ideas reasoned about through dialectic, or the interaction of opposing or contradictory ideas. However, it is often used to in a rather different sense: ‘pertaining to dialects’. For that sense, the more natural word—and here I am being moderately prescriptivist, or at least distinctivist—is dialectal. Dialectical used for this latter sense is, in my opinion, a solecism. This essentially preserves a nice distinction, like the ones between classic and classical and between economic and economical. And certainly there are linguists who have good reason to write about both dialects and dialectics, perhaps even in the same study.

Defectivity in Greek

[This is part of a series of defectivity case studies.]

Sims (2006: ch. 4, henceforth just S) documents gaps in the genitive plural (gen.pl.) forms of modern Greek nouns. These gaps appear to be reasonably well known and quite common: S’s primary data comes from two Greek dictionaries published in the 1990s. The LNEG dictionary contains over 1,600 nouns defective in the gen.pl.; the LKN over 1,300.1 If this is even remotely close to correct, this is still probably the most extensive  case of defectivity, in terms of affected lexemes, documented in any language. Interestingly, S notes that there is “surprisingly little agreement between the two dictionaries about which lexemes are defective in the genitive plural” (S: 81, fn. 54), with the two dictionaries agreeing on 470 nouns.

Modern Greek declines nouns for four cases and two numbers. The primary gen.pl. marker, written -ων (-on) may or many not trigger rightward shift of primary stress, depending on the noun. Pappús ‘grandfather’ has no gen.pl. stress shift (pappúdon), whereas náftis ‘sailor’ and ónoma ‘name’ do (naftón, onomáton).2 There does not seem to be much—except etymology—which predicts whether or not a noun will shift. S suggests that there is an important distinction between nouns which already have final stress in the nom.sg., and others which have stress on earlier syllables in the nom.sg., as the former, represented by pappús and referred to by S as “type 1” and “columnar stress” nouns, never have stress shift in the gen.pl., and do not exhibit gen.pl. gaps.3 Assuming this is correct, all that remains is to understand why there is no productive default in the non-“type 1” declensional classes.

There are several other things going on here that are not yet well understood. First, modern Greek is in some sense diglossic, and more specifically pluricentric, with vernacular and learned registers (known as dimotiki and katharevousa, respectively) existing alongside various divergent dialects. One might be tempted to suggest that this would result in heightened awareness of lexical variation in gen.pl. stress shift. Second, S notes that the genitive itself is in competition with a periphrastic alternative that uses a preposition governing the accusative case (S: 86f.). According to S, the periphrastic accusative is associated with dimotiki and the genitive with katharevousa. Since katharevousa is itself reasonably artificial, colloquial use of the genitive may be increasingly moribund. Third, the LNK dictionary also lists quite a few nouns are defective in other plural forms as well. These have received little attention; some are probably  singularia tantum (see, e.g., Sims 2015: 150) but perhaps something else is going on too.

Most of the points made by S in her 2006 dissertation are echoed in her 2015 monograph. I have little to say about her idea that defectivity is encoded via implicational hierarchies in the morphological paradigms, and I didn’t find the experimental results informative.

Endnotes

  1. See S (ibid.) for these citations. I have briefly consulted both works in print, just to spot check S’s coding. Since I found no major issues, I am instead working from tables in S’s appendices. Thanks to Lucas Ashby for help digitizing these.
  2. I have taken the liberty of standardizing S’s transliterations somewhat.
  3. It is hard to tell whether S thinks this is a synchronic explanation for defectivity. Elsewhere, S (ch. 5) claims that defectivity is grammaticalized (or perhaps lexicalized) by essentially having the morphological module return some kind of “null” for defective combinations, so that there is no need for further synchronic motivation. S seems to consider this a desirable conclusion.

References

Sims, A. 2006. Minding the gap: Inflectional defectiveness in a paradigmatic theory. Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University.
Sims, A. 2015. Inflectional Defectiveness. Cambridge University Press.

Defectivity in Russian; part 2: nouns

[This is part of a series of defectivity case studies.]

Pertsova (2005, henceforth P) describes defectivity in the genitive plural (henceforth, gen.pl.) of Russian nouns. This defectivity is not quite as extensive as in the verbs: Zaliznyak’s (1977) renowned morphological dictionary, Pertsova’s primary source, labels roughly forty noun lexemes as Р.мн. затрудн. ‘gen.pl. difficult’ (P gives this as ‘awkward’), and a smaller number are labeled Р.мн. нет ‘gen.pl. does not exist’. Pre-theoretically, the Russian gen.pl. form has three complexities. First, there are three (surface) gen.pl. suffixes: -ej, -ov, and a null -∅ (though this is often taken to be the surface form of a back yer; e.g., Bailyn & Nevins 2008). Secondly, stress may either fall on the stem or the desinence, depending on a number of factors. First, the fleeting vowels found in many Slavic languages, sometimes surface in the final syllable of the stem of null gen.pl. forms; e.g., kiška ‘gut’ has a gen.pl kišok.

Let us consider the ‘do not exist’ cases first. A few examples are dno ‘bottom’, mgla ‘haze’, and mzda, an archaic word meaning ‘bribe’. All three of these are built from stems consisting solely of consonants—the -o and -a are nom.sg. affixes—and according to P, we would expect them to form a null gen.pl.1 Were they do so, then, the gen.pl. form would be a purely consonantal sequence (*dn, *mgl, *mzd, etc.). While Russian allows quite rich onsets, it does not permit vowel-less prosodic words. So, presumably, these ‘do not exist’ cases are in some sense derived, but are unpronounceable.

The cases labeled by Zaliznyak as ‘difficult’ are perhaps more challenging. These include fata ‘veil’, yula ‘weasel’, and suma ‘bag, pouch’. Many of these (e.g., čalma ‘turban’, taxta ‘ottoman’, mulla ‘mullah’) are borrowings from Tatar or other Turkic languages. All forty ‘difficult’ nouns are all feminines in -a, and all of them have desinential stress (i.e., stress on the case/number suffix) throughout. According to P, these ‘difficult’ nouns would all have a null gen.pl. were it not ineffable. This means that stem stress is the only option (because duh, there’s no way to stress a null desinence). Yet speakers are reluctant to introduce a new, stem-stressed allomorph of the stem that does not otherwise exhibit stem stress, because of a principle known as lexical conservatism.

I follow this basic logic, but I am not sure how to make the lexical conservatism filter into something mechanistic and appropriately parameterized so that it can actually predict the data we observe. P points out that there are other nouns which have exactly the same properties (null gen.pl., desinential stress) but resolve this conflict by retracting stress to the final syllable of the stem. For example, borodá ‘beard’ has a null, stem-stressed, but unobjectionable gen.pl. boród, as does the previously mentioned kišká/kišók.2 After considering and rejecting an appeal to frequency, P suggests that there is something special about monosyllabic stems that makes them more resistent to stem allomorphy. The problems do not end here, because as P gamely points out, the gen.pl. is not the only case/number combination which forces stress retraction; it also happens in the null nom.sg. of masculines like stol ‘table’, but I am aware of any Russian nouns which are defective in the nom.sg.

While I find P’s description clear, I do not think her analysis works. It correctly identifies two interesting explananda—the fact that gaps are localized to monosyllabic stems, and to the genitive plurals—but gives little explanation for these facts. And the invocation of lexical conservatism, never that well-defined in the first place, has done little to help; it could just as well be that the conflict between desinential stress and the selection of a null gen.pl. produces ineffability. Lexical conservatism actually prevents us from uniting the ‘does not exist’ and the ‘difficult’ cases, which after all both involve monosyllabic stems expected to exhibit desinential stress and a null gen.pl.3

Sims (2015) notes that these defective nouns might be an interesting case for studying the interaction between defectivity and syncretism, a topic first discussed by Stump (2010). In Russian there is syncretism between gen.pl. and accusative plural (acc.pl.) forms for all animate nouns. Since twelve of the defective nouns are animates, this  means that either there is an exception to this syncretism (in the case that the acc.pl. is acceptable) or perhaps, the defectivity itself is carried over by the syncretism and nouns are defective in the acc.pl. too. No one seems to have gathered the relevant judgments  about the well-formedness of these animates in their gen.pl. vs. acc.pl. forms yet.

Postscript

As is also the case for Russian verbs, defectivity in Russian nouns has arguably risen to the level of conscious awareness among Russophones. In his short story Kocherga, the Soviet humorist Mikhail Zoshchenko tells of workers who wish to order five more fire pokers for their drafty office. The nom.sg. kocherga ‘fire poker’, is unobjectionable, but no one they talk to is sure what the gen.pl., the case used for five or more of an object in a quantified noun phrase like ‘five fire pokers’, ought to be, and both they and their interlocutors use clever circumlocutions to dodge the question.

Endnotes

  1. I note that Wiktionary gives the gen.pl. of dno as don’ev, with a back stem yer  surfacing (also bearing stress) and the -ev gen.pl. suffix. If this is correct, this is a problem for P’s claim that stems of this class are expected to have a null gen.pl., unless there is some other reason dno to behaves differently than mgla or mzda.
  2. Here I am using acute accents to indicate stress, as is common practice in (anglophone) Russian linguistics.
  3. I am loathe to assign grammatical distinctions to informal gradations of unacceptability, so I see no incentive to distinguish these cases.

References

Bailyn, J. F. and Nevins, A. 2008. Russian genitive plurals are impostors. In A. Bachrach and A. Nevins (ed.), Inflectional Identity, pages 237-270. Oxford University Press.
Pertsova, K. 2005. How lexical conservatism can lead to paradigm gaps. UCLA Working Papers in Linguistics 11: 13-30.
Sims, A. 2015. Inflectional Defectiveness. Cambridge University Press.
Stump, G. 2010. Interactions between defectiveness and syncretism. In M. Baerman, G. G. Corbett, and D. Brown (ed.), Defective Paradigms: Missing Forms and What They Tell Us, pages 181-210. Oxford University Press.
Zaliznyak, A. A. 1977. Grammatičeskij slovar’ russkogo jazyka. Moskva.

Wall clock time

Computers and humans have radically different ways to reckon time. While a computer can tell you how long sometime took it, the computer is constantly switching between tasks, so this number has to be converted to wall clock time, or rather how much time elapsed in the real world while it was working on the job.

I guess I’m a dualist, because I think there’s something special about sentience. I think of humans (and possibly others creatures) are essentially divine but finite beings, whereas to me computers are mere objects. We divine beings can spend some of our finite time on earth to make a program run faster, but at some point it makes more sense to simply wait, and do something else while the program is running. It is hard to draw an equivalence between the opportunity cost for a divine being vs. an object. Learning when to just wait is one of the most important skills a developer can acquire.