Body Language: Part 2

(Update to this post)

I consulted a friend who told me that it was more likely that his tattoo said "echad" and means "one." One is written as אחד in Hebrew. I am not sure as to the full accuracy of any of this due to my lack of experience with Hebrew. According to my friend:

Echad can mean unity, but there's also more than one word for it, and Echat ¹ is, literally, one.

And further, he added in response to me saying that I was pretty confident in our discussions of what I saw:

Then it was Echad, which, is a rather stupid tattoo.

Note ¹: This was a relatively informal discussion and spellings were inconsistent at times, but I'm sure it's all on the level.

Less Impessive Coinage

Evidence The New York Times reads Urbandictionary. Right on the first page of google too. Also, what are the Brits supposed to do with this word? I'm not as impressed as I initially was.

New Word World

I'm not a big fan of repeating content from other blogs, but there's always time for an exception. It's an interesting piece by Ben Zimmer, (which I found from Language Log, but I'm sure a couple readers might read this and not that) and it deals with getting new words into the dictionary, somewhat of a back burner hobby of mine. It was actually of signifigant interest to a teacher I had in high school, but I'm not sure how far his efforts would take him, or have taken him. While I have my own ideas, there do seem to be some forums worth investigating in the link. Incidentally, I wonder what it takes to get on a comitte for a dictionary though. Anyway, to sum up another great part of the story:

There are three words in English that end in -gry. Hungy and angry are two. What is the third?

More Chinese Character Troubles

While browsing through a Chinese character dictionary to see how one renders certain names, I came across the name "Dante Alighieri," which was written as 但丁 (Dàn dīng). I thought that perhaps this first character, which means "only; but, however, yet, still," could be the standard for "Dan." The Book Of Daniel uses the same character in 但以理書 (dàn yǐ lǐ shū), suggesting the first three might render Daniel.

Dan Brown, however, has a name written as 丹布朗 (Dān Bù lǎng), using the character 丹 (cinnabar, vermilion). This character is also used for several Den- names in English, Denver 丹佛 (Dān fó), Dennis 丹尼斯 (dān ní si), Denmark 丹麥 (dān mài).

These two characters (但, 丹) seem to be the most common to use for spelling Dan- and Den-, as they seem to be relatively common characters, with a variety of compounds already using them. But why is it that these names seem to split this way, and why is Dan Brown on the e side of this a/e split?

Actually, Mr. Brown isn't the only oddity I found, Tennyson also begins with 但, 但尼生 (Dàn ní shēng). It's probably not the case that there is a semantic meaning involved. It also doesn't look like there is a basis for which one is used by tones, or that much of a guideline based on the vowel sounds. From loanwords listed, 但 has [a, æ, ɛ] and 丹 has [æ, ɛ, ɛ, ɛ].

My best guess? Different standards over different periods of time, or different bodies or persons presiding over the first transliteration. Aside from Dan Brown, most of the other names have been around for some time, and it is likely that Chinese terms have existed for some time. Dan Brown is probably a relatively new innovation, which for some reason gets 丹 instead of 但. If anybody has any insights, let me know.

Tv For The Blind, Deaf

This is strange. I normally have the captions on my television, but they aren't appearing. The reasoning for that might be that, for some reason, there is a narrator on the episode (of Law And Order), presumably there for somebody who is blind or vision impaired to some extent. I guess the captions would be useless, but it's strange for them to be broadcasting this all of a sudden? I'm almost certain that the previous episode did not have this. And now that it is back from the commercial, they seem to be gone, though I can't pull the captions back up. Oh well.

Artistic Capitalization?

It's always bothered me that the standard in English is to capitalize most of the words of titles of works of art, books, songs, but you don't do it for most prepositions, conjunctions, and articles, sometimes. I've always been under the impression that because these are more "function" words, they are less important. But is it the artist who decided that, or were they just adhering to a standard?

It's always so much more obvious that something is intentional when it does not line up with the protocol. Names like bell hooks, when rendered as such, might fire off an alarm in ones head, just the same as when something is written in all majuscules. In those cases, it's pretty clear what the author's intentions were.

So what is one to do with these methods, the ones that coincide with the standard, are they merely the result of an automatic practice, or was it the artists intention? There seems to be a basis for this in the house style of whoever wrote down the name of the work, and I don't see any real reason to adhere to it.

Personally, in my own "house style" I reject complete (or absence of) capitalization of words in most contexts. Even when it's clear of the intention of the author, I find it quite unsightly. There seems to be some precedent for this. Frank Zappa has a song called "five-five-FIVE." There are in fact renderings on different websites with the song listed as Five-Five-Five, Five-five-FIVE, and Five-Five-FIVE. And it wasn't difficult to find those at all, or different examples of each, even moreso than finding renditions as I believe it was intended to be written. For some good information on this song and a bit on the name, go here.

Acceptable Cluster?

Somehow it managed to pass by me, but it seems that there might be some increasing evidence to suggest that the vl- onset cluster might not be so unnatural for English after all¹. With the neologism vlog and it's derivatives gaining wide acceptance (11.4 million hits on google for "vlog"), it might be that time. Though I must admit, it still looks strange to see the vl- combo. I think my automatic processes don't know what to make of it.

There was never a question as to the viability of vl-, names like Vladimir, Vladivostok, and Vlaminck have always been pronounceable, but there was little in the way of innovation with vl. In fact, I can't even think of too many words that have a vl cluster in them anywhere. My short list is souvlaki, gravlax, pavlova, all loan words, and all food (though, there are a lot of food loan words).

Anyway, vlog is kind of an interesting compound, since it comes from VIDEO + BLOG. Now, blog comes from the term WEBLOG, with the we- dropped. Weblog looks like a compound of WEB and LOG. It's a little strange that there is no trace of the "web" aspect any longer in the term vlog. It happens though.

Note ¹: It just occurred to me that people might say /'vi.lɔg/. I've never actually heard this before, but I haven't heard /vlɔg/ either.

Body Language

Recently, I saw a man who had a tattoo on his back in a style of writing that seemed familiar, but I couldn't place. I thought it might've been a poor rendering of Japanese characters (if not differnt Kanji or Hanzi), ろ, then か, then ス, which could be the product of somebody who doesn't know what they are doing, trying to write who knows what ("Lucas" came to mind, but I figured it was unlikely, espcially with the mix of hiragana and katakana).

I asked the man and he said that it was Hebrew for "unity," which, if I am accurate (let me know), is אצד. I wonder if they were written in some kind of cursive for with which I am unfamiliar. Some Hebrew script forms can be found here and here.

Egg Latin

When I was probably 10 or so, me and a friend invented a word game called EGG LATIN. To my surprise, I found a strikingly similar technique called Eggy Peggy on this site.

Scripts Of Heaven And Hell

While doing some research online I stumbled across this site which features lots of strange writing samples from history, a lot of which I haven't heard anything about. The site, and I imagine most scholars, feel that a lot of these are hoaxes or something of the site, but it's still an interesting collection. I personally like the writings by Ludovico Spoletano, said to be Satan's writing. I read a bit of a discussion on it on some forums, but there isn't a whole lot of information on it elsewhere. This is another interesting thing to take a glance at, going with more angelic writing.

It's things like this (the former) that make me wish there was more access to unusual writing samples, that we could pool efforts, and perhaps maybe there could be some breakthroughs (I know the Phaistos Disc hasn't been deciphered, but we have learned a whole bunch about it from what I've read).

Comic Cons

Constructed languages and writing systems are often quite interesting, and I've come across a bunch in comic books and other mediums. I remember the language use throughout the Micronauts comic book, which was for the most part had a 1:1 correspondance to English, and was based on devanagari. There were other symbols later (such as the mark of the makers) on in the series, but it might not've been writing.

In recent years, I noticed a switch from handwritten symbols that quite possibly are the full extent of the language (such as this) to what appears to be a font that can probably be deduced. I remember it being shown for the Skrulls in some Marvel comic not too many years ago. I might not be interpreting this site properly, but it seems that some Skrull text translated to some rather unintersting statements, one of them even comes as "?SKRULLSYMBOLS?" I don't know if it's the same script or not, there seems to be very little on it (them?) that I can find.

I think a lack of foreign scripts has to do with so often alien or foreign language is written inside brackets in the following fashion:

<I am speaking another language>

Sorry for lack of a better example.

Interlac is another language, though it's another 1:1 correspondance to English, and seems pretty unimpessive over all, and has a lot of English influence (not the parallels between the E/F, M/N, paradigms, and S through Z are seem pretty Angloid to me as well.

Another script I liked was the Standard Intergalactic Alphabet from Commander Keen. The link comes with a font. It seems to be based on various characters selected from other scripts, including Japanese, リ and フ, potentially.

Bilingual Success

Where I work there are two six year old girls who are in a bilingual immersion type program. I really don't know the details of what exactly they do, but they understand just about everything I say to them in Spanish, which I found really impressive since I know kids graduating from high school having taken years of Spanish who understand less than these girls. They can say a only little bit, but their comprehension is truly impessive, and they can recall individual words very well on top of that. I do know a few kids who have Spanish speaking parents who don't speak Spanish but understand it very well, (the same for other languages too, of course), but I don't know these two to use it at all in the home.

Of course there are many horror stories out there for the state of bilingual education in the United States. I remember once bringing up in a small class discussion for a language and pluralism class the situation that my mother had to deal with while teaching, having children from Africa and other places, some who barely had any knowledge of English (or of many details of this side of the world), and I knew it to be quite straining on her, but I did mention that somebody came in (daily?) who spoke the Bantu language of these kids, on top of various problems. Regardless of the finer details, the professor chalked it up as more one of the success stories of bilingual education, which I found a bit surprising, but I guess it can be real bad at times. There are many lucky coincidences though. A friend of mine grew up speaking Ukrainian in the house, and when he first went to school he was struggling with English, but the teacher happened to speak Ukrainian and was able to help him out.

Anyway, back to these two girls, I'm sad to say that at least one of them won't be continuing it since she is transferring to a new school, allegedly that does not have Spanish (but maybe she just meant it didn't have a similar program?) and I'm actually kind of interested in how it will play out for both of them. Did I mention that they go to a public school?

TV Translations Online

This site is a great site for explanations of all of the Chinese used in the Firefly series. And there are plenty of others too; the Lostpedia is a site I use to check my on the fly translations from the show. One thing I haven't found though, is translations for the Chinese used on Futurama. Anybody want to help out there?

Also, I remember once considering it somewhat novel for television shows to contain more than just a snippet of othe languages, but the more I look into it and what, the more I see that it's not that uncommon. It's always a great treat just to try and figure out what it going on all of a sudden when your brain tries to process the sound and fails (or in even better cases, you swtich to a language you know). I remember hearing a commercial for Hostel II and it kept switching languages, so instinctually I focused on the previous language. Incidentally, I think it includes German, French, Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, and at least one other language I don't recognize immediately, which translates to THAT WILL COST YOU. See the whole clip here. If anybody knows what the languages are, or can produce a written version of the whole thing, I'd love to see it.

The New Acronym

Im my last post I mentioned the pronunciations of acronyms and initialisms, and I just wanted to make mention of the pronunciation of DUI¹. My brother was over and happend to say this as ['dui] instead of the form I am more familiar with, [di.ju.aʲ]. My brother keeps his language very up to date, so this might represent a sample of some newspeak. I neglected to ask him about is, as we were sidetracked with other business, but I'll be sure to get on it.

Note ¹: It just occured to me that ['dui] could have been meant as DWI as well, and maybe I misheard him saying something more like [dwi] or possibly [dᵊ'wi]. A full investigation awaits.

The Difference Between Spanish And English Acronyms

Rooting through old papers, I found something I submitted in a class where we were dealing with acronyms and their pronunciation. There was a list several long and we had to write whether they we pronounced letter by letter, or as if they were a word (you-ess-ey for USA, but gooey for GUI, for example). One of the examples was BOAC. Now, bear in mind, we are dealing with Spanish here. According to the wikipedia article on the BOAC (emphasis mine)

Bobby Bloom's song Montego Bay also mentions BOAC in the first line; he pronounces it as an acronym (rather than as an initialism, which was more usual), using it to mean a BOAC aircraft.

This was basically what I gathered from the song Back In The USSR by The Beatles (I had never heard it said anywhere else that I noted). During the discussion though it was made apparent to me that in Spanish, it is not an initialism, but rather an acronym, which is also, to my knowledge, mandatory if the letters seem to roughly fit within the guidelines of Spanish syllables. To phrase a little more neatly: if it could be a word in Spanish, it must be pronounced as such. Thus is all elaborated on here:

Las siglas y sigloides trascienden el lenguaje escrito, es decir, siempre se pueden pronunciar siguiendo su escritura. Por ejemplo podemos leer ovni pronunciando la sigla, [óv-ni], o desarrollándola, [ob-jé-to vo-la-dór no i-den-ti-fi-cá-do].

Sin contar la pronunciación de la expresión desarrollada, que no es sigla, las siglas tienen dos modos de pronunciación: deletreo y silábica. El deletreo es sencillamente pronunciar el nombre de cada letra (o grafema): ONG, [o-e-ne-jé]. La pronunciación silábica es la que lee la sigla como una palabra JASP, [jásp]. Esta última surge automáticamente siempre que el hablante sea capaz de pronunciarla según la fonética de su lengua, lo que produce una "sensación de familiaridad". Por ello, procurando que el hablante se sienta cómodo se crean los sigloides, que integran grafemas con el objetivo de facilitar la pronunciación y evitar el deletreo, deformando el concepto de sigla.

Esta distinción entre pronunciaciones ha llevado a algunos lingüistas a hablar de literación (lectura deletreada, traduciendo el concepto inglés initialism) y acrónimo (pronunciado como una palabra)1. La palabra acrónimo es de significado sorprendentemente equívoco por la importación solapada de conceptos extranjeros.

La pronunciación de la sigla indica su mayor lexicalización, su mayor incorporación al léxico habitual, mayor en las siglas pronunciadas (que la lingüista tradicional llamaba acrónimos), después en las deletreadas. Por ello en bastantes casos la extrañeza del significado de una sigla hace que convenga desarrollarla para que el receptor entienda el mensaje, por ejemplo pocos comprenderían el significado de las siglas PUR, Partido Ucraniano Revolucionario.

If you cannot read Spanish, I'll do a quick translation sometime later. Also, I once wrote something up a while ago about a theory governing the pronunciation of acronyms in English, if it turns up, I'll contribute it here.

Name Branding

A ways back I made a list of jobs that one can pursue as a linguist that maybe they never thought about, as well as some of the more interesting alternatives as well. I know it came up in an older post a little bit, but I am seriously considering investigating some Brand/Identity companies. It seems there is a large demand for faux-foreign names and imagery.

This investigation was spurred on by a Time-Warner commercial which featured a sign that had several (to my knowledge) faux-cyrillic nameplaces on a sign (I cannot find a video online, but it just aired again, and I scribbled what I saw), specifically КАЛИНИ, ЗЕЛЕНО, and АМЕРІКА, possibly with an R instead of a Р, and the K was reversed, something that to my knowledge doesn't occur in any cyrillic language, and I can't even find a way to render here (know how? let me know). Respectively these mean something like Guelder Rose, Green, and America more or less. (Incidentally, apparently I have always been mistakingly calling Cranberries as калини also. Whoops.)

One thing I just have to mention, partically since I just went thorugh the wonderful Hanzi Smatter with a fine tooth comb hoping it contained something I read there years ago, and that it wasn't on Language Log, which doesn't seem to be responding right now. Xu Bing made a book called Tianshu or Book From The Sky filled with nouveau hanzi with no meaning. I think it's a spectacular idea, and I wish it were possible to get a copy in book form. Artistic endeavors aside, it seems that creating ficticious scripts might be a happy medium for the world of people who want some kind of stylism on their clothing or bodies or in their adverts and people who don't want to see butcheries of things we love, or nonsense like in the aforementioned commercial.

Another tale I can recall is that I bought a shirt from the band Moneen which has the text: テチホヤラチノヤヤマモナナルマユトノナ which can be transcribed as techihoyarachinoyayamamonanarumayutonona and as far as I know has no meaning, nor did it to a few Japanese I know. Another Moneen product was alleged to have some sort of "foreign writing" on the sleeve, but was barely legible. Closer analysis just revealed it to be English written in script.

Perhaps I will work on a similar project to the Book From The Sky for cyrillic, or even other scripts, partially for the sake of art, but also potentially as something somebody might be interested in using.

Then again, I can't say I'd prefer new symbols to actual content, but it might be superior to gibberish and inappropriate words, unless we're just looking for fun.

Finally...

As long as I'm on this role, I really hope they stop posting about lolspeak and all that at Language Log (do you really need the link there?). Don't get me wrong, I don't have a big beef with letting language do its thing, but really, isn't there a limit to things? I think they, LL, are wrapped up with it for the moment, but I'm sure some random internet fan-geek is going to submit something and send it all back to hell. Maybe one day we can all move on and learn to spell, just so we don't look like idiots, not because it's necessarily better to do so.

Please comment on this post any and all spelling errors in this or any other post you feel like.

Wikipedia And Linguistics

Did anybody else notice not too long ago a lot of the phonology charts in different articles were changed to have LABIAL, CORONAL, and DORSAL listed on them? I can't seem to find another one at a quick glance, so maybe it was just a coincidence or it has since changed back, but it seemed like a strange thing to do. Especially since other information was removed. So far though, it seems like it's all back to normal, so, unless one turns up, I'll be done on the issue. Oh those crazy wikipedians and their lightning fast changes.

The Downside To Wikipedia

Despite being an amazing resource for information, not to mention a free one, Wikipedia is not without its downsides. I'm not going to get into the nitty-gritty of it, since I don't think beggars should really be choosers, but a close friend and colleague pointed out that

Wikipedia is in need of an expert on linguistics.

I don't necessarily disagree, but I think wikipedia needs fewer dilettantes and crazy moderators. Aside from my personal distate of the people who seem to scour through articles looking for uncited statements, there seem to be people who want to enforce certain rules without fully understanding the scope of it.

During my undergrad years I was told by an advisor to take a class called Spanish Conversation and Composition 2. I didn't have a problem since it was just review for me, but once I got into the class, it was a fiasco. There was almost no conversation to be had, and aside from the terrible method for producing a paper, which had in the style of a news article (well, terrible for me, and I imagine anybody who can write somewhat competently) the instructor said that we had to pick a controversial, or at least debatable, topic and present both sides to the story, evenly and balanced. Bias was absolutely disapproved of, as it was "not journalistic." Aside from that being a crock for the journalistic world, I can think of a few scholars who would disagree as well.

Anyway, whilst perusing the wikipedia articles on many linguistics and linguistics-related articles, I came across a few (sadly I don't recall wherein, or particularly care to rediscover them) articles in which somebody brought up the concern that certain articles or sections were written with a "descriptivist bias" or something to that effect, and requested the inclusion of prescriptivists and their views to sections, to even things out.

Now, I'm not gung-ho on the idea of stringing up all of the alleged prescriptivists out there, but I do remember my first few linguistics classes and the teaches basically denouncing all that is prescriptive, and even one professor who made a whole red scare out of it, and would practically scream across the classroom "you are a prescriptivist!" sounding as if they just called for a pogrom or something. There are probably a few descriptivist-heads out there who never got the full story and took the fight straight to wikipedia. It's a shame they were only met with people who don't even understand the debate.

I.P.A.

While at my cousins' house for their son's birthday party, I noticed a six pack of India Pale Ales on the counter. After careful though, I decided that, frankly speaking, it's the only beer for linguists.

And No, It's Not A Dialect Thing

Actors can be pretty unimpressive sometimes. I don't watch a whole lot of television, but I still here a good amount of pronunciations of words by people where it's absolutely clear that they've never used the word otherwise in their life. Retakes are expensive of course, but when you earn your living saying lines, well, I'm surprised it happens so often.

Incidentally, I do see mentions here and there for linguist-linguists on shows every once in a while. There was one on a rerun of Law and Order: Criminal Intent I just saw, and there was an episode of Criminal Minds (that I can't remember any other content of) in which Dr. Reid talks about linguistics. If I can figure it out, or come up with anything else.

Anyway, the specific example of a mispronunciation that came up in that Criminal Intent episode was the pronouncing of the word JEWESS as /ʤu.ɛs/ with two distinctly and pretty evenly stressed syllables, almost pronounced like it was two different words, whereas I have only heard the word (though admittedly infrequently) more like /ʤu.ɪs/ or /ʤu.əs/, with little to no stress on the second syllable. I've heard worse, but this one was still pretty noticeable.

They Might Be Linguists

The hiatus isn't completely over, but I'm going to see if I can wear it down with some old news, that I'm just hearing now.

One of my favorite bands is They Might Be Giants, and while they are always full of fun and interesting word play, sad to say I've missed out on some interesting language related business that they have been involved in recently. On their newest release, The Else, they put out the song "Contrecoup" which I had heard before, but I never really gave it a listen. In doing some research, I learned that John Linnell, at the behest of Erin McKean, wrote a song using three words that she considered to be endangered: CONTRECOUP, CRANIOSOPHIC, and LIMERENT.

A breif definition for people who aren't up on exotical specialized terms. Contrecoup is an injury occuring opposite of the point of an impact. Craniosophic means having skill at phrenology (though there seems to be no mention of this online I can say with certaintly is unrelated to this song). Limerent was the only word with which I was familiar before learning about all of this, and it means the intense desire of reciprocation of feelings, to a point of infatuation.

Considering their meanings, I'm not surprised they are used more often.

Linnell seems to also been the main impetus behind the language themes, as he also recorded what is called Lesson 16 for their podcast (though I think Fritalian was a Flansburgh song). In the lesson, you hear speaking in another language, and then the English translation. It lacks sufficient evidence to do a full gloss, I feel, but it seems to be pretty consistent in its structure and technique. Lesson 16 can be read here. There was some analysis on the site, but I didn't find it that interesting, or even necessarily accurate (see the Skitt-ish Bad English in TMBG songs). As far as translations and They Might Be Giants go, I'm wondering if anybody knows what the lyrics to Anqui translate to?