Catáfora Paratáctica

Russians and Americans

2008-04-09T01:28:00.004-04:00

There's a commercial I just saw, about subtle changes, but oh, now I can't seem to remember what it is for. Anyway, I just noticed that they do an alternation between "Michael" and "Mikhail," but Mikhail is pronounced mikʰeʲəɫ when it should be something more like mikajɫ.

Russian phonology isn't my main area of study though, but this was pretty far different for even me. It's surprising, because the vowel quality, the main sonic concern, isn't foreign to english, and for my ears, the way he said it, although very "american" sounding, doesn't strike me as particularly common. At least for the way I talk, (or think I do, it's kind of late here), the "eʲəɫ"part resembles the word ale but not as much in fluid speech (where it seems to lower some). He was being particularly careful and as such it didn't sound natural as a result.

It's just always striking to my ears when I hear such radical pronunciations, even for more or less English words (think "Chianti"). The fact that it is Russian is countered by the fact that it is one word, and something I feel is relatively well known, enough that somebody could've told this person, who presumably has some speech training, to say it more than slightly differently.

Of course re-filming is a costly process, and nobody really knows these things anyway, so, what's the harm?

Just A Quick Complaint!

2008-04-08T19:05:00.003-04:00

Recently my uncle was telling me that services to find your former classmates are free in Poland, and that it's quite a popular undertaking. Apparently it's not uncommon to find sections of restaurants or other places reserved for sizable get-togethers. To my knowledge, stateside this doesn't really happen. Yes, we have our high school and college reunions, but there's not as much of a student driven approach here (I am not aware of the status of school-driven reunions in Poland).

The complaint I have is not in trying to find former classmates, but rather, I had hoped that the internet would function just a little bit more as a boon to academia and learning. A colleague recommended Google Scholar to me to find articles, and I inserted my topic. I immediately saw several papers that looked like they might be interesting, but I am only shown the abstract when I click on the link. From there, I am asked to pay for the article or a subscription. It seems that several other recommended databases function this way as well.

Most likely I can probably VPN into my university's network, and search for some of the articles through the school's list of subscriptions to journals and electronic archives, but that is a lot of work for what is essentially background reading, and for articles of questionable use at best (not to mention I don't know offhand if we have access to that journal, or if that article is available for what we /do/ have access to).

I support the free trade of such journal articles, though I must admit that I'm not fully aware of the actual consequences of such an action. At the very least, I do not support the cluttering up of the internet with articles I'm not paying for either way hiding the work of the wonderful linguists who do decide to share their work with me for free.

"We Live In The Dark Ages"

2008-04-06T23:57:00.003-04:00

...as a colleague of mine so eloquently put it. We'll get to that eventually, don't worry. To start the story, I was first hoping to find a way to write at all in a colloquial kind of way. The purpose was to convey the pronunciation more like əɾɔɫ or əɾɒɫ which I wasn't really sure how to do, just as I'm not even 100% sure on what vowel goes there. (The purpose is to get something like gonna, coulda, dinna, so on and so forth if it's not transparent.) After a minute of thinking about it, I thought that a'tall seemed to be a decent variant that didn't look hideous to me, so I decided to investigate.

Remember the original title? Google apparently doesn't do search strings that contain punctuation. Well, it does them, but it converts the punctuation to a space. I tried to use google to find a solution, but most people had nothing in terms of a solution for searching with specific punctuation. So, because of this, I get all of the results for "a tall." It seems a viable option for me, but I guess my only method now is some field testing.

It's a shame that google doesn't yet contain even an "advanced search" method for punctuation specific searches. I've had this dilemma come up before, but usually never something I couldn't work around, such as adding some context to the search.

This yielded two result from a few contexts I tried.

This page contained the text

"Thank you, Seiya. For being my friend and for understanding
and...for just being you.""Not a'tall my dear," Seiya said. "Walk me to my car?"

and Google Books yielded two books, both by Johanna Lindsey, but it looks like they are the same story in two books with slightly different titles, one is The Present and the other The Holiday Present, which includes another story. The relevant passage is:

"...you couldn't have been more right."
"Not a'tall m'dear." He grinned at his wife.

So, ol' bootstrapping can still get you a bit of evidence. I don't have any alternatives that sound any better to me, so I'm good with this for now.

Also, the aforementioned Seiya is written as 星野 in Japanese, the first character means something like "Star" which is relevant to the characters name, but I'm not entirely sure about the second part, at least for the name. Further proof I need to practice my Japanese more.

The Curse Of Language Learning Class

2008-04-06T12:31:00.003-04:00

Personally, there are two great secret perils of language class. Most people, I would expect, fear the pressure to be correct or not sound silly, to be put on-the-spot, and even just not getting it. I've always been a decent language learner, but there are two, somewhat-related, things that go on in classes that I just can't seem to deal with.

1. The first situation I have trouble with is when the teacher (or an examination) asks the class to talk or write about something that I know nothing about or have no interest in. For me, I just have nothing to say on the subject, but for the teacher or whoever is reviewing my test, it looks like I struggled through the grammar or can't even come up with something simple to say. Two examples, translated for those monoglots out there:

Sra.: Okay, so, who watched the football game yesterday?
[moment of silence]
Another Student: Uhm, I didn't see it, but I think the Bills won?
[further silence, as nobody has seen the game or knows anything past the previous statement]
Sra.: Well, I guess we're just going to do some writing exercises out of the book since you guys are so reluctant to speak!

I would've love to chat about this, but I had nothing to say. The second situation was an exam I had to take at some point years ago (which really vexed me for reasons we'll not get into right now), where the final essay component was basically me writing both sides of an interview with some tennis player I have never heard of. I don't know very much about tennis culture, and to this day my knowledge of the world of tennis is "I enjoy playing tennis occasionally," so I'm sure I wrote some terrible nonsense.

2. The second situation that usually isn't a problem for me, because I have a decent imagination, but can be bothersome in excess is doing skits. I normally enjoy skits because they are a nice way to be creative and everybody can enjoy some silliness. It also breaks up the monotony of class. My portuguese professor has taken to having us do short skits (dialogues, really), almost every class. He also doesn't give us a whole lot of time to work on this, so it can only be so interesting or creative past getting the main idea down.

If they were less frequent, and at a less generally fatiguing time period, I would probably enjoy this. But, I am also not an actor by training, and at the end of the day, it's not as easy to turn on the clever switch as I might hope. My last skit was enjoyed by all, and probably the only one that had any serious points of humor, while most people resort to minor inanities and more unusual that funny exchanges. The skit before however, was for the most part not humorous, or particularly enjoyable for the writing, but possibly for delivery or acting independent of the writing. This shouldn't really be a main concern, as it's not an acting or writing class, but at the same time it's a little annoying to be expected to do as much.

Then again, I can't claim to particularly have any preferable alternative, it can just be irksome having to worry about being on top of any issue that could come up and making sure I can be clever in Portuguese on the spot.

Writing Sign Language

2008-04-03T18:31:00.004-04:00

I've been reading up on sign language, which has been an interest of mine in recent times. There is a lot of interesting insight to be gained on development of language, especially with the large number of distinctions between many sign languages and their spoken counterpart, as well as humorous or otherwise interesting aspects (a quick list of some intriguing ones on wikipedia, Nicaraguan SL, Kata Kolok, Al-Sayyid Bedouin SL, Martha's Vineyard SL)

That's mostly an aside, I came across this site, which is about writing in sign language. Apparently it's the standard for writing a whole slew of sign languages, Omniglot says 27, and the author boasts usages on all habited continents. I thought it would be nice to find something I could use to read symbols and practice, but it looks pretty unintuitive for people unfamiliar with the nuances of the symbols anyway. The site makes mention in its linguistics section a couple other notational systems, Stokoe Notation, and the rarer HamNoSys, neither of which seem like they would be good from a learner's perspective.

This seems to me to be a rather interesting phenomenon, but not quite as much as I was originally hoping. In a practical sense it's a lovely idea, since photo books, while ever so descriptive, don't really come cheap or seem to be able to contain the breadth of information for the cost. Internet sources (at least the ones I've casually encountered) also don't seem to have interfaces I am thrilled about. The interesting thing I was hoping would be more expansive is where the sign languages have a sort of "full circle" notion, since you can write characters manually, and then you can graphically represent these characters with new symbols.

I'm going to have to be short and cut that off here, but what more is there to say?

So Close

2008-03-25T22:16:00.002-04:00

I am honored to be in the RSS feed of the writer of Polyglot Conspiracy, a quite wonderful linguistics blog I enjoy reading. Here is the story of how I learned that, and one other little fun tidbit getting me just a hint closer to the big dog.

In the most recent Language Log post as I write this, Mark Liberman writes at the end that

[...] we can also learn on the web that PsyBlog is "the Language Log of psychology, maybe"

The thing I noticed here when you hover over "PsyBlog" is that it goes to Polyglot Conspiracy, but the search parameter is "catafora." I noted that this was the spelling I use for my website right here, and the normal English spelling is Cataphora, as it is in my protocol. I clicked the link, and noticed that two posts come up, one I mentioned before, and one I missed (!).

Two other points: First, it was lovely to see the connection again, and maybe some Language Log legionnaires will follow that link... and then the other link. Second, and most importantly, I need to wonder what was the basis for using that as the link? I would like to think that this is a subtle hat tip to my little ruminations here, and that ideally Mark Liberman takes a glance every so often in this direction. It's also possible that he just wanted a search parameter that was (more or less) unique to the page. There's a problem-set with that theory though, one, is that there is no problem just using a regular link to the page, and the second is that the mention of my site is not particularly close to the thing they were trying to reference on Language Log. On top of that, searching Psyblog will yield /only/ the desired result, and seems to be the natural choice. Either way, I should probably class it up here just to be safe.

Also! As of this post I am 2nd on google for a search of "catafora," and am mentioned in the 5th result if you search "paratactica." I'm the first result for "paratactic cataphora" sans quotes, and the first of just three (again, as a reference) for "catafora paratactica." I'm not really sure how proud of this I should be, but hey, it's something!

Phonetic Transcription For The Masses

2008-03-25T20:57:00.002-04:00

The other night I was chatting about work and other business with this fellow I met, and linguistics came up of course, and he seemed to be familiar with several aspects, particularly Phonology. Apparently, he did some acting work, and he had to learn phonetic transcription, so he would be able to imitate dialects, and presumably to pronounce other things he might not be sure of. He gave a few casual names for characters, but sadly I don't remember them. Phonology might not be my favorite area of linguistics, but I guess he found it quite unpleasant.

Unpleasant as it might be, I'm always glad to see people learning about phonetic transcription, because I really do think that it's something useful to know. Especially because English does have such a poor relationship between spelling and pronunciation (well, if you learn a whole lot of rules about etymology and such, it's pretty predictable), I find it to be relatively practical. It's always the worst when I'm trying to figure out a pronunciation for a word and I need to read the dictionary format, or something like gahb-LEE-uh or something that I can't quite figure out the nuances of.

At the university I am at, they have elective seminars on IPA in case students want to brush up or get ahead of the curve, but maybe one day they'll work them into some kind of general classes. It's also a shame that most classes, for undergraduates at least, seem to spend a class or two early (or even more!) on going over IPA. It just seems wasteful; they should spread that joy around.

Spanish Syllable Structure

2008-03-20T13:00:00.003-04:00

I heard that Kenneth Pike denies a possible syllabification of Spanish words like "transcribir" because they cannot subscribe to the necessary rules of syllabification, which are basically:

1. Onset First
2.Consistency with word boundary rules
3. Consistency with sonority scale

Specifically, the word boundary rule, in that worlds like transcribir could be split any of the following ways:

tra.nscribir (i)
tran.scribir (ii)
trans.cribir (iii)
transc.ribir (iv)
transcr.ibir (v)

Alright, (i) (iv) and (v) we can assume are ridiculous, because they have massive or strange clusters, very technical. The argument is that tran.scribir has a viable coda in the first, but not a viable onset in the second, and that trans.cribir has a viable onset in the second, but not a viable coda in the first.

My instinct, and the answer according to Jeff Stokes, is that you go with the latter (iii), because cr is a possible onset, and that scr is not. It's not perfect (if you assume the syllabification rules are truly universal, then this doesn't seem to quite work. I would argue personally that there is possibly some tiering involved, and that rule 2 is actually two rules, where the onset must be viable, and then a secondary rule would be that /if/ you can make the coda there work, great, if not, work with what you have.

I would predict that most Spanish speakers would syllabify it, without particular hesitation, as trans.cribir. It looks to me that the only potential problem words are words that would have -m in the coda, or -ns in the coda, both do not occur at word finals. So, perhaps there is a conventionalized mechanism for resolution, as there is not a widespread amount of this problem.

Catalan Rap

2008-03-06T19:48:00.003-05:00

A Catalan speaker told me that Catalan rap is better than Spanish rap because Catalan tends to have shorter words. I might've missed something about some phonotactic aspects as well, but the gist was mainly for the former statement.

It's probably the case that languages with super long words don't lend themselves well to rap, but I don't know how many people would be rapping in Mohawk, or Chukchi anyway. It's probably different though, either way, because most poetry and such tends to be dependent on the language anyway, for metrical quality, versatility of rhyme, and such.

Old Norse poetry was always interesting because it really did seem reminiscent of modern rap and hip hop to me, weaving repeating sounds into sentences, rather than having ending rhyme. Japanese poetry often works differently as well, being mora-based, rather than having the same type of rhyming that one would expect from English poetry.

Perhaps Catalan rap can more easily resemble the American variety? I doubt that Spanish is so ill suited for the style that it just cannot produce anything worthwhile, they probably just need to change it up a little bit, and that's one of the things that makes vocal stylings so interesting in verse.

Alternatives To IPA Characters

2008-03-06T17:47:00.002-05:00

I have heard complaints about problems with IPA, mainly for on-the-fly transcription, or how to actually produce the characters. In handwriting, several characters can be ambiguous {s} and {ʃ} can look very similar if not made obvious, {m/ʍ} and {r/ɾ} are other examples. There are solutions if you are careful, or make habit of writing characters a certain way. Generating {ɾ} with a serif along the bottom (like in r, but without the upper left hook) is quite common, to the point where a room of about 12-15 linguists looked at me with sideways tilted heads when I insisted that the character actually does not have a line at the bottom. Alternative symbols are quite common also, APA {š} is used for handwriting IPA {ʃ} to prevent confusion.

Sometimes I'll use a shorthand or nonstandard diacritics to redundantly decide characters, but not too often, since I'm usually not in too much of a hurry or likely to confuse what I'm writing. For quick work, I could see why it might be a problem. I just discovered this page on Wikipedia about non-standard characters, and many characters include so-called "secondary" features of articulation. Sinologists, Japanologists, and Koreanologists use a lot of these characters, and the common feature among them is that the symbols they use tend to be much simpler, and probably easier for notating a symbol that has phonemic quality. {ʮ} is supposed to be represented with {z̩ʷ} in IPA, which seems a bit tedious. If secondary articulation is a primary feature, why shouldn't it be represented in a single character? Already, most symbols already represent several qualities abstractly. {p} for example represents three features, a voiceless, bilabial, plosive, sound. If a language has a very productive phonemic distinction of aspiration, it seems useful to perhaps distinct symbols for it, especially if there are many other qualities that are commonly associated with phonemes.

I do feel that for reading purposes, and clarity of transcription, especially for a wider audience, say linguistics classes, or pronunciation guides in books/online, standard IPA is ideal, everybody can figure it out, and probably quicker than referencing all of the (non-)standard characters used by a specific group.

There aren't any languages I work with (that I can think of) where this would particularly help out, but some languages that have high amounts of aspirated, or ejective, or labialized consonants that are distinct phonemes, or they even don't have the "basic" form. If a language has the phonemes {kʲʰ/kʷʰ/kʼʲ/kʼʷ} and not {k}, what sense does it make to keep writing {k} over and over? If the crucial distinctions are aspirated versus ejective and labialized versus palatalized. Perhaps there could be symbols for aspirated and ejective, such as ʞ and ᴋ respectively, and then use the diacritics on them, or some other variation, to keep it visually simple and more representative of the phonemic aspects of the language.

I would like to think that anybody who had this problem has probably worked out there own solutions, but it might be nice to see endorsed versions of such consonants as "notational alternatives," even exclusively. There already plenty of (arguably) redundant diacritics, so I see no reason why a new paradigm could be set up for people to standardize their notes for passing around.

Keyboards, Left-handedness,

2008-03-06T10:59:00.003-05:00

I mentioned recently that I would comment on the frequency of keys typed on my laptop (that was pretty much the whole post, so why bother linking?) and there is a little bit of a story too it, but be forewarned, it's not a very good one.

Regularly I use a whiteboard to do my linguistic analysis, or for whatever things I need to be accomplishing that day, I find it to be a great way to help my thinking and work with data. So much so that I carry a smaller board and markers around with me (not everywhere, or course) but for when I might wind up sitting someplace for a time or know I will be working. Now, the finer nuances of how white boards work escapes me, but basically, when you wipe away the marker, it has to go somewhere, right?

Well, apparently I use my board enough that little bits get on my fingers and usually it is of no consequence to anyone or anything. After a while though, I noticed that my lovely white keyboard and touch pad are turning greenish, and not just the yellowish that is to be expected from MacBooks that were bought during a certain period of time.

The keys that are turning green are {a, s, e, r, t, h, n, u, i, o} and to a lesser extent {y, l} and where my thumb would sit on the space bar and right shift. Those probably seem to be pretty regularly used letters, and I think they coincide roughly where my hand sit on the keyboard. Something like:

LP - on {a}
LR - on {s}
LM - on {e}
LI - on {r, t}
LT - on space bar, near c/v break

RT - on {n}
RI - on u/i break
RM - on i/o break
RR - on o/p break
RP - on right shift

It's not too surprising that it worked out that way, that's right about where your fingers are supposed to line up. My keyboard looks something like:

QWERTYUIOP
ASDFGHJKL
ZXCVBNM

The ergonomic keyboards with the break in the middle always threw me off because I am right handed, but left hand dominant, so (well, I'm not sure if it's causative or not, but) I type much further over with my left hand that is intended, specifically characters {y, h}.

Incidentally, the department I'm in has an unusual amount of left-handed linguists. Less than 10% of the adult population is expected to be left-handed, but it's easily over 20% of faculty, and I don't actually know the orientation of a good number. Weird stuff, eh?

Why I Am Bad At Phonological Analysis

2008-03-06T10:54:00.004-05:00

Just a quick note about phonological analysis, I almost never think to use a sound that doesn't appear in a language as the template for a distribution of different phonemes. I've seen the contexts where it really seems to work well, where there is an unusual gap, but in a lot of cases it feels like drawing a line around the exterior of the maze, and claiming that not only did you figure out the maze, but you have the most efficient method.

Super-Tapping

2008-02-28T12:35:00.002-05:00

Recently I have been noticing that in my natural speech, if there are a series of taps, I will replace them and the surrounding contexts with a trilled consonant. Things I have caught myself saying include:

ʍʌraʲɾu for "what did I do..." normally ʍʌɾɪɾaʲɾu
kʰʌraʊt for "cut it out!" normally kʰʌɾɪɾaʊt

I need to hear some more examples before I can absolutely be sure of the contexts. It's a very... not careful speech; in the second example I was exclaiming for the safety of some children. It's definitely with a rhotic quality as well, a colleague actually caught the first one in my speech when I was telling some story. I'll put any further developments as they come to me.

Lesson Plan Fixing: The Past Tense

2008-02-26T18:17:00.002-05:00

A colleague of mine taught English in Spain some time ago, and pointed out to me and another colleague how strange it is that when we are starting out a language that we are only able to speak in the present tense. This came up while we were discussing how confident we felt about our abilities with Catalan, which the three of us are only beginning relatively. My thought was mainly that I would feel pretty confident, but only with talking about things that are pretty uninteresting.

The solution? Teach the past tense before you learn the present tense. Sure, maybe teach a few irregular verb fixed expressions, but the past tense is much more dynamic, and usually it's not particularly more complicated than the present tense. Impractical perhaps, but who wants to hear about what color the pen on top of the book is?

On a side note, my brother lived in Burgos for a time, and traveled to Barcelona. He wondered how well he would be able to get by, but figured that since everybody spoke Spanish also, he'd be able to do alright. To his surprise, he said, "everybody just spoke English."

Professional Languages

2008-02-26T16:18:00.005-05:00

It has come to my attention that many schools of linguistics demand that their students know one or two other languages in addition to English. Not necessarily the ability to speak, but more the ability to read in the language. This is common in many fields, it's common to hear about texts that are only published or available in certain languages, German and French are the most common to my ear. A friend of mine works in art conservation (not to be confused with art restoration) and she told me that acceptance into most departments, though I can't remember if this is still necessarily the case, demands knowledge of how to read both German and French.

According to the Moscow Lomonosov University Russian Language Centre's official website:

Over a quarter of the world's scientific literature is published in Russian.

and a little further down,

It is applied as language of a science - means of dialogue, means of coding and storage of universal knowledge (60-70% of all world information is published in English and Russian languages).

So, it looks like Russian should be up there with the other two, but I have no idea how the breakdown goes. If all of the Russian scholarly works are about super-science and spacecraft and all sorts of thing that I have nothing more than a passing interest in, it might not be the best thing to invest in. I would hope that there would be lots on languages of Russia, such as Yakut, Chuvash, Ossetic, Tuvan, Chukchi, Tatar, and of course, Russian, as well as languages of Soviet states. Also Yukhagir and Votic are other languages I've had the pleasure of at least dealing with some data for, or reading about for whatever reason that could fall into this category.

Would knowledge of Russian though help with articles and the like for things unrelated to Russia and its geographic neighbors? German and French have long histories as languages of academia and Western Europe's exploration and conquest of the Americas, Africa, Oceania, and South East Asia would suggest that they might be better bets if my work dealt with those regions. In my own experiences at university as well, there are a disproportionate number of texts (on all subjects) in German and French.

I've had to read from an etymological dictionary of Latin written in French and maybe one or two other books, but I have little experience reading academically in German or Russian. Personally though, I own a number of linguistics texts and articles in Spanish. Other languages I've had to read academically include Ukrainian and Catalan, but I honestly couldn't be sure of the absolute limit of what I've read in.

Ultimately it looks like, from my experience, it probably wouldn't open up a wealth of information running the gamut to be able to access this information, but as one professor I know always liked to point out that while having more unique qualities might make certain research harder, and make your work not as widely appealing, it does have a certain "sexiness" to it.

In a related issue, it would be nice if there was a text that compiled various linguistic terminology in different languages, particularly the ones most relevant for linguistic study, presumably.

Forthcoming topics:

2008-02-26T12:51:00.003-05:00

As soon as I get a chance, I have articles to write on the following topics. I tried to write just enough to not give away the whole bag.

1) Stop signs

2) "Alternative" familial terms

3) Keyboard frequency on my laptop

4) Lesson plan fixing - the past tense

5) Professional languages

It'd be a shame if I forgot, as I usually cannot write as soon as an idea comes to me. Too many times these ideas escape me.

Hopefully Linguistics Can Save Me Now

2008-02-19T13:32:00.002-05:00

So, last night I was driving around a campus that I am not very familiar with, especially where I am allowed to park as I have no affiliation with the university. I was told that there was a main road that I would probably be space on. The signs along this road all read something more or less:

Student/Staff Parking 6AM-1AM NO PARKING 1AM-6AM

All of the signs along the road were very clear. So I figured it was best to keep looking around. Apparently there is a visitor lot that I managed to miss because it was late and the sign was not well lit, and was a distance from the road. I arrived at a lot that had the following information on the sign:

Staff Parking 6AM-1PM Student Parking 1PM-4PM

There was no mention of what is going on between the hours of 4PM-6AM. I am familiar with another university that has similar signs, and anyone can park during the unlisted hours, since there is no longer a premium on parking. Apparently, to my dismay, the implication of this sign is that there is not to be any parking in this lot during the unmentioned hours. Of course, now I need to pay the university because they didn't explain to me where I am allowed to park. I probably won't contest it, it's not very much money, but does anybody think I have a case?

Political Super Language Groupings

2008-02-19T13:10:00.002-05:00

Currently I am taking a course that deals with Catalan sociolinguistics, and we regularly refer to Spanish as Castilian, and Catalan, of course, as Catalan. There is not a lot of data in either direction, but the professor frequently refers to "my language," or will refer to both as "varieties." Varieties, yes, can be used to hedge between language and dialect, but I think in this case it is something else. It's odd to call French and Spanish different varieties for example.

So, Despite Catalans general distaste for being associated with Spain, I started getting the impression that there was almost an interpretation of an abstract "Spanish Language" which includes Castilian and Catalan. Very important to say, I am not suggesting that Catalan is a dialect of Spanish or any such thing, but something more akin to the situation in China, where many unrelated languages and "varieties" are united under the moniker of "Chinese" despite lacking mutual intelligibility. Often these share a writing system, but I believe the organization is often more nationalistic. Since the Catalans feel quite the opposite of this, I found it quite strange to see what seemed to be the same general idea.

At this point, I would probably guess that "Spanish language" has a meaning similar to "language of Spain," that perhaps Basque is also a "Spanish language," under the umbrella of that which is Spain if this analysis is accurate. Since, politically speaking (and we all know to what extent this is an accurate statement) Spain has four official languages, Castilian (Spanish), Catalan, Gallego (Galician), and Basque, why couldn't we discuss them as such? To me, I can almost imagine some kind of more or less abstract or arbitrary designation of languages. Personally, I've written several pieces on "Iberian Languages," where my only real concern is there geographic location. There are probably many historical precedents as well of languages being grouped together for less than genetic reasons, why-ever that might be. Though, strange to hear this specific case.

Why Computers Aren't As Helpful As I'd Like Them To Be

2008-02-17T16:41:00.003-05:00

Diacritics have always been a problem on computers, because some fonts just don't want to render them in the right spot. I was trying to add breathy voice marks to some data I was typing up. Most of the time it put the diacritic half under the letter it is supposed to be under, and half under the following. A couple of times it was in its own space (or as one of those mystery boxes).

m̤

It looks pretty good in the window for typing (it's slightly offset), but I think my default font for this site doesn't do it so well. It shouldn't be so hard to generate m̤ when I need it.

My other related problem is not so much with rendering the symbols properly, but with typing them. IPA-fonts aren't really that helpful because even if you could match every symbol to it's own key, or simple key command (say, shift+k), I'd never be able to able to remember which one went with which key command. Also, there's probably thirty thousand different characters if you include diacritics and all that other fun stuff I need to type out regularly. It's inconvenient when I need to type out something like xɬpʼχʷɬtʰɬpʰɬːskʷʰʦʼ and I need to search through several sections of several tables on the character map. I wrote up an Input Method file for key commands to generate all of the necessary characters, by having a combination of basic characters, plus ways to modify them. So, simply put, h, ʜ, ɦ, ħ, ʰ, ɧ, and ʱ, would all be generated by pressing "h" and then another key that normally doesn't generate a letter. I was very content with my setup, but my computer froze when I installed it (and I followed the instructions to a t, and double checked and retested), and wouldn't work until I managed to delete the file. Apparently, it's a common problem, but the solution I cannot find. If there are any ways that people know of to generate Input Methods, I certainly am in need of one.

Etymologies And Phonologies

2008-02-17T16:38:00.001-05:00

Doing phonology problems can actually be quite a bit of fun (especially since Phonology is not something I normally have to deal too much with). Since we always want to see the furthest potential in language and the most complex notions, textbooks will have lots of interesting examples from all sorts of languages, and sometimes I can pull out interesting finds. The other days I noticed the Greek word for money is xrima (χριμα, I would guess), which probably (is, or) has the same root as the Ukrainian грівна.

Wikipedia sez:

The word hryvnia is thought to derive from the Slavic griva; c.f. Russian, Bulgarian and Serbian грива / griva, "mane". Hryvnia may have indicated something valuable worn around the neck, usually made of silver or gold; c.f. Russian grif (гриф , "neck") or c.f. Bulgarian and Serbian grivna (гривна , "bracelet").

Not really sure where to go with this. Historically, griva seems to be a very reasonable root, the h-g change in Ukrainian is standard, but the H-R-I-N-A patter was quite striking to me, that I was all but positive right off of the bat. Now, I'm no slavicist (yet), but it is commonly known that roots of words are cryptic at best in many cases. I'd love to see some evidence of a transitionary form between any of the forms (maybe even for the Greek to have borrowed it from the Ukrainians! Anybody have a good Ancient Greek dictionary?)

One other catch I got was when looking at some Votic data, which is Finno-Ugric and is spoken in Russia by a scant few Votes. One of the words in the data was bočka, meaning "barrel." We have the same word in Ukrainian, and I bet probably in some other slavic languages. I couldn't find any similar words in Finnish or Hungarian, so I bet the Votic just used the local word. It's weird to see one word in a set of data like that. The same thing happened to me when I was going through a passage in Yakut and I believe the only recognizable word to me was the word for "Saturday." It's pretty clear that these are just borrowings from Slavic, but with the Greek example before, maybe it's just a coincidence, but I don't know for sure.

Language Lessons From Music Class

2008-02-17T16:05:00.000-05:00

So, last week I was teaching a music class, and one of the things I had with me was my guitar. We had a few percussion pieces I had to look up the names of, "sand blocks," "cluster bells," and possibly the best named piece, the "clatterpillar," which also might be the most unpleasant of the bunch, at least in its plastic form.

In Japan this instrument is called the 小切子 kokiriko, which I just think is a regular word, but I can't seem to find my dictionary right now to check it out, if anything interesting pans out, I'll be sure to update. (There are also a couple of other ways of writing this name, it seems)

The other thing interesting that came up during the lesson was a girl who speaks Spanish in the house, and English most elsewhere. A couple of times she told me that she wanted to "touch the guitar." As it turns out, she actually wanted to play the guitar, or at least bang on it a bit. By the second time I decided that it probably wasn't the quick-changing nature of children to suddenly want to start playing after fulfilling her desire just to hold the guitar.

Those hispanophones among us might be aware that the Spanish word tocar can be translated as both "to touch" and also "to play (a musical instrument, for instance)."

If I had to guess, it almost looks like she is mapping right off of Spanish and doing more or less a one to one translation and doesn't really sort out some of these finer points. For the most part this doesn't seem to affect her English, and most of her quirks are quite unrelated (she'll say miss instead of mister, and once in a while the other way around) but I'll have to pay more careful attention and see if any other examples show up.

Pop Vs. Soda, A Theory

2008-02-17T15:59:00.001-05:00

It's a long story, and I really can't (nor want to) get into the details, but basically, it goes like this: This guy I met had apparently just moved to the area. I found out from a mutual acquaintance that they apparently offhand remark implying that referring to soda as pop, which is by far the norm for the area, was a "Jewish thing." I'm not really sure what the basis of this claim is, and it'd certainly be an interesting one to hear.

How serious he was, I really don't know. Not that I really thought it would go anywhere, but I decided to compare size and percentage of Jewish populations to usage of pop versus soda, and actually, it looks more the other way, that states with both high raw number and percentages of Jews are overwhelmingly soda-saying. New York is the notable exception, being split down the middle for pop and soda. Another interesting point is that his home state has the 2nd highest percentage of Jews, and the fourth in pure number (that's New Jersey, by the way).

Of course, I doubt that this could possibly be related, and in all likelihood he was trying to get a rise out of somebody or had some other kind of motivation for saying this. Or maybe he just lumped all of the "different" things together. I'm actually a little bit more aware of the circumstances that brought this about, but as I said before, I'm not going to really get into them. It's a curious remark though, isn't it?

Spanish Language(s)

2008-02-01T21:44:00.000-05:00

Today I was talking to a puerto-rican girl, and we were talking in Spanish. She didn't quite believe me at first when I told her that I could speak Spanish. We chatted a little bit, and then she said something that I couldn't recognize at all (I couldn't even remember it, sadly). I told her that I did not understand, and her response was something along the lines of "that's because I'm speaking Puerto Rican."

Polyglot Curricula

2008-02-01T21:15:00.000-05:00

I'm glad to hear that not only are local schools offering Chinese, but at different schools, students can elect to take Arabic, or ASL as their foreign language. Apparently the school offering Arabic as an elective feels that this better reflects the community, but I've only heard this through rumor. Certainly Arabic is a language on par with Chinese and Spanish in terms of their importance in world affairs. ASL seems to be a more academic choice. More and more I hear about how ASL assists with learning, and I also know that education programs at colleges are encouraging taking ASL and many schools highly value ASL (as well as Spanish).

My boss told me today that her son's teacher knows ASL and signs everything during class, and how he asks her to say things to her in "the language." On top of all of the benefits I referred to before, apparently the teacher will only sign certain things, and has the children do the same, keeping them quiet, making sure they are paying attention, as well as making it so they have to wait their turns. Find another language that does that!

Jokes For Polyglots Part 2

2008-01-26T21:15:00.000-05:00

This isn't so much of a joke as a humorous anecdote, but I was picking up my main source of linguistic hilarity from school and on our way down the stairs we walked past the Spanish teacher who said to us ¡adiós, adiós! In response to this he said:

"Hey, my name's not adios!"

Jokes For Polyglots Part 1

2008-01-26T21:07:00.000-05:00

Recently I was learning about the reflexive and how it works in Brazilian Portuguese and I asked if there were any subtleties to the placement and the acceptability of either form. His response was Não me importa...

o não importa me!

I guess you had to be there.

The Mystery Of Abkhaz

2007-08-14T12:27:00.000-04:00

Just last night I met a native speaker of Abkhaz, and I chatted with him about it some, because I'm not very familiar with languages from the Caucasus. When I heard where Abkhazia was exactly (I did have some idea) I figured it was most likely a Caucasian language. He told me that it was in fact Indo-European. Considering he knew such designations, I figured he was at least versed in basic linguistics. I asked if it was a Slavic language or if it was Indo-Iranian, but he insisted that it was in fact Scythian, which he did not seem to know is a sub-branch of Indo-Iranian. He said that one of the closest languages related to it was Ossetic, which is a Scythian language.. I asked him if they wrote in a variant of Cyrillic and he said that they have a system, but since 1991 are trying to switch to Latin, because it better suits the language.

Now, most of my information comes from wikipedia and a few other sources, but it seems first off, that while there is a modified Cyrillic alphabet for Abkhaz, no Latin script seems to be in notable use. As for whether Latin is better suited for the language, there are so many consonants that there would need to be extra characters created there as well. Perhaps it is better suited as it will further distance itself from Russia, as they did with the elimination of the Georgian script years ago. Now, on top of that Abkhaz is not related to Ossetic, and it is not a Scythian language, rather it is a Caucasian language relatively close to Ubykh. So, I am now stuck with a mystery: was he misinformed about his language, did he misinform me intentionally, or is there something else even going on? I can only assume there is some debate somewhere, ideological or otherwise, that has prompted him to produce such answers.

Graffiti Cannon

2007-08-08T17:10:00.000-04:00

My interest in the band They Might Be Giants leads me to try and keep up with their efforts occasionally, and today I was reading a fan recap of a show from four days ago, and noticed a strange error of sorts. The user Writer61 had this to say:

Linnell asked for a do-over of the break in "Bed, Bed, Bed," saying he forgot to do something. The second time around, the graffiti cannon went off.

Now, for everyone who does not know, there is no such thing as a "Graffiti Cannon" (there are two google hits that seem like the words are actually strung together on purpose, and they are both not referring to actual objects, I imagine). TMBG does, in fact, have a confetti cannon.

My only theory is that this writer had a momentary lapse in his mind, and just wrote down a 3 syllable word ending in I, with an F and a T, and one of those has to be in a pair. I can see some vague similiarities in the words, but I really can't imagine ever confusing them or actually substituting one for the other, just for phonological (or spelling) and stress related reasons.

Chinese In Schools

2007-08-08T14:15:00.000-04:00

I was flipping through today's Buffalo News and noticed on the section "Next", the "voice of the next generation" they call it. On the cover they show a student drawing Hanzi and the caption says "China 101." I flip open to the article and read through it to see what was going on. Apparently, City Honors school, a school I am quite familiar with, is mandating all 5th and 6th graders to take Chinese, and offering it as an elective to 8th graders. There are a few other schools with Chinese programs popping up in Buffalo as well.

The article does make the mistake of saying that Chinese is the most spoken language in the world. It does beat the pants off of English for native speakers (Spanish might be ahead too), but if you included second-language speakers, English gets about 700 million more knotches.

I'm glad about the prospect, and I always figured it would catch on, but it seems that it has caught on a little ealier than I thought. It'll be good for kids to learn a non-Indo European language. The article goes on to have a teacher speak in broad terms about how English is more like French and Spanish and not at all like Chinese. They aren't genetically related, but if I remember my typology, Mandarin and English aren't that radically different. The teacher even notes that the main obstacles will be learning the tones, and the basic characters. I say kudos to those who now have the option and are willing to pursue it, students, teachers, and administration alike.

Reduplication Commercial

2007-08-06T22:16:00.000-04:00

I just saw a commercial for Pep Boys where they are advertising buy three tires, get the fourth one free. The commercial has a skeptic ask repeatedly about the true cost of the fourth tire and other possible trickery. The clerk informs him that the fourth tire is in fact "free free." The customer replies "then why does it just say free, jackass?"

Well that's how I remember it happening. He might not've said "jackass," but it was about 10:15 at night or so.

Linguistics, Unmarketable

2007-08-03T10:17:00.000-04:00

Stephen Colbert reported a couple of days ago (8/1, episode 3099, I just got back from a trip with no television) on the value of linguistics, at least as an undergraduate major. The relevant excerpt was taken from The No Fact Zone:

It’s a breakthrough that allows me to achieve a long time dream, arranging all fields of knowledge into a three-tiered pricing system: ‘marketable’, ‘non-marketable’, and ‘you know this is killing your parents’.
Now, ‘marketable’ is the priciest: business, engineering and science. And whatever future professional football players major in.
Then there’s ‘non-marketable’. That’s for majors like history. Why spend a lot for it when you won’t get a high paying job? Plus, if you don’t learn history, evidently you’re doomed to repeat it, and you’ll find out what happened for free.
Finally, the lowest tier, which includes classics, comparative literature, linguistics; basically, anything taught by someone who says he ‘lives to teach’. Of course, if these universities really want to revolutionize education, they should apply monetary values not just to majors, but to individual facts. [emphasis mine]

The acticle linked to from The No Fact Zone doesn't seem to mention any of the third-tier programs that Stephen mentions, so it would seem to be something added by the writers for the show. As it is a satire, I would imagine that it is being based off of common (mis) conceptions. Generally speaking though, the low value applied to the listed majors are "what are you going to use that for?" If the focus is more on the end result of a job that one might gain from a type of degree, it might line up with these opinions better. Personally, I never associated the value so much with direct marketabilitiy, and I wouldn't even go so far as to say that a linguistics degree is unmarketable, there have been some surges in demand that have added quite some value, just maybe not in directly linguistics-related areas.

Remunity

2007-07-25T00:49:00.000-04:00

My parents are having work done at their home and need to have some piping reworked under the driveway. My father knows the guy who is going to do the work, and we were all chatting, and we got on to talking about Led Zeppelin, and a recent show he heard on Howard Stern. I've long been familiar with some of these histories, but I gave the show a listen, and I decided to look into it a little bit more, for the sake of it.

Apparently, Jake Holmes, from whom Zeppelin got Dazed And Confused, sent the band a letter reading:

I understand it's a collaborative effort, but I think you should give me some credit at least and some remunity. [emphasis mine]

What is REMUNITY? I couldn't find it in any dictionary, even the OED. Obviously, it is supposed to eb the same thing as remuneration, from the context, but there's still something fishy. Google gives me 20 hits for "remunity", when you go through them. Of the 20, they break down as follows: 8 are the previous quote. 5 pair the word closely with communion and community. It looks like those pieces have to do with the works of Jacques Derrida. I don't know if he coined the term, or the expression of the two together or what, but he's an interesting common link. I guess Holmes must've read Derrida (or had a friend who read Derrida), becaue there doesn't seem to be much trace of the word existing anywhere else.

For those who are curious about the other occurrences, one was an icelandic page that seemed to want to use the word "immunity," one was a site that indexed tons of expired domains, one was part of a user's blog name with no other context, one page did not actually have remunity on the page or in the cache, and another required a subscription to see the page. If you've been counting carefully, you'll notice that is only 18 pages. One had the word, but I could not establish the context because the page seemed to be malfunctioning, and the source did not elucidate this. As near as I can tell, it occured in a sentence all by itself in some periodical of sorts.

My personal favorite is the last one, which is from Google Books, specifically The Parliamentary Debates from the Year 1803 to the Present Time listed as by Great Britain Parliament, Thomas Curson Hansard. I was worried that my theory would crack with this attestation, but I was relieved when I read the sentence. It came out as:

Public estimation is equally the re-

-munity whilst they are wholly inadequate |

It was seperated by a break, and I quickly realized seeing the line running down the middle of the page, that the book was published with two columns per page. Google Books doesn't seem to be able to figure out that the words are actually re-(ward) and (com)-munity. An interesting little quirk. It also works for stings. Search for "tbe tional," for the same text, and you get the same kind of thing, second result, illustrating yet another weakness of this automation. Still, it's quite impressive technology.

Kusaal Language Efforts

2007-07-20T14:13:00.000-04:00

SIL field linguist Mike Steinborn contacted a colleague of mine about work he and his wife are doing in Burkina Faso with the language of the Kusassi people. They are developing a written form, orthography, lexicon/dictionary and more, and are trying to get individuals to help with analysis over the internet. Anyone who has a small amount of linguistic knowledge and some free time is more than welcome to help.
The link to the central site of the work is here.

The previous text was slightly paraphrased from a message sent to me by a colleague.

It looks interesting, to say the least, and I am a large fan of more open-soucre collaborative efforts. It really does seem like an honest effort more interested in larger than personal goals. Help out if you can.

Extension Of Misplaced Apostrophes

2007-07-20T12:56:00.000-04:00

We're all familiar with the chronic misplacement of apostrophes after individual letters and numbers. It's common among the handful of illiterates who can't tell the difference between as and aa nor is and is by context. I'll admit, I usually capitalize it if it's going to be a single letter like that, the ABCs, for example. Very often we get apostrophes thrown in there, ABC's, a's, b's, when it's intended to signify the plural. This happens all of the time too with numbers, especially decades in my experiences, "the 90's" and so on.

Now, earlier today I was watching tv during a failed attempt to get myself to stay awake. I cannot remember what the commercial was for, since I fell back asleep, but the captions were on, and I distinctly saw the word TWO'S in the context where TWOS would be correct. I guess for some the idea of separating numbers from this s, possibly from inflectional suffixes or whatever, is becoming adapted regardless of whatever graphic form the number is represented by.

Quadralingual Vinyl

2007-07-12T00:04:00.000-04:00

I stumbled across a record by somebody called Sándor Fehér and his Gipsy (sic) band. My taste for such music aside, I was intrigued by the reverse which featured liner notes in four languages. The first I figure to be Hungarian, then English, then it looked like German, and Russian. Such tidbits are always fun to glance through, but there are things that jump out at me, suggesting that the translations were not carefully executed efforts, but rather hastily done to get it done. An obvious example was the second song of side B, is titled "Were Do You Fly Swallow?"

Now, I'll admit, I didn't catch the spelling error the first time around. I was focusing on the fact that it was the only one of the four versions to feature a question mark. I initially thought that maybe this was a pressing done where English was the base of the notes, and they were expanded to the other languages, putting Hungarian first to seem authentic. After all, the obverse of the record does feature the title as it is written in English.

When I saw the spelling error, I was still about to write it off, but then I noticed that there was another title that was a question, but no question marks on any of the versions. I can't really do too in depth of an analysis, but it does seem to be that the translations were done from the Hungarian, but possibly there was a bit of poetic license and or judgement calls on the part of the translators, since there are a few oddball quirks.

Gender Differences In CDS

2007-07-11T23:07:00.000-04:00

While my work with children kept me around kids to hear all sorts of hilarity, it's not that often I'm around real youngins. I was out for an early dinner/late lunch and there was a nice couple seated next to me with two children. The older was probably around 2, and the younger was quite young, but I'm real bad at guessing ages. She couldn't speak, but yelled out nonsense every so often. That in itself wasn't so interesting, but the fact was that the mother kept responding to her. Almost exclusively, she said "oh yeah?" and "that's right" or similar statements.

Even more interesting, at least to me, is that the children were oriented so that the mother would be mainly occupied with the older girl, and the father with the younger. The father was the one feeding the younger child for the most part too, but I remember him conversing much more with the older girl.

The other thing that I noted was that the father called (I'm pretty sure it was) soy sauce "salt water" while talking to the older girl.

Why You Should Hate All Caps, But Don't

2007-07-06T01:54:00.000-04:00

While I agree that it is poor etiquette to write in all caps, I disagree with the reasoning, at least on a matter of principle. Apparently people like to say that it is akin to being shouted at, but that is what I've always used exclamation points to indicate. Any instance of all-caps (while I almost exclusively use it in jest) would be more in the lines of being assertive, or attention seeking. It's just obnoxious. And frankly, even with my distaste for volume, I'd much rather deal with loud intelligent statements than with a reasonably volumed idiot. When people see book titles, or movie titles, or advertisements or anything like that, nobody thinks that that is similar to yelling, it's merely trying to attract the reader. In internet-speak, the use of all caps is also terribly unpleasant to read, much like writing not sectioned into paragraphs, or written with punctuation.

Please everyone, stop says "stop yelling" every time somebody writes in all caps. Just explain to them that they are most likely an idiot.

Speech Perception Problems

2007-07-03T22:21:00.000-04:00

A colleague of mine and I were talking on the phone, and he happened to mention somebody by the name of Sassoon (This guy? The subject quickly changed), but I was unable to understand him. He repeated himself a couple of times, but it wasn't until he spelled it out that I was able to know what he meant. Now, we were on the phone, but I had no other difficulty understanding him, and as he pointed out, 8-bits should be plenty for me to understand. Occasionally there is ther other miscommunication here or there, where it is strong like this, but there's nothing in common from the few examples I can remember. In the interest of discovering why my otherwise excellent speech perception is failing, I'm going to begin to index these. Any theories?

Wordplay

2007-07-03T16:13:00.000-04:00

I don't really know what you call this type of joke, but it is one of my favorites, and I just felt like showing it off. While discussing a not-feasible option for travel, I responded:

No thanks.
I already bought my tickets.
It's be more expansive in cost to change them now

I suppose it's just an offshoot of puns. The basis of the joke also lies in that there is a similarity in contexts. The way we do it, the pun should be executed relatively deadpan. Mildness and moderation in speech have always been things I've been a fan of, so why not also in humor?

[In the unlikely event you didn't get the joke, it's that I said "expansive" where I could've said "expensive" with even less context. I won't explain why it's funny since that never works anyway.]

There aren't too many other places I see this type of joke, but I guess it's because it's not so obvious that it is one, that it's not preferred to use in other media.

Body Language: Part 2

2007-06-28T14:47:00.000-04:00

(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

2007-06-28T14:18:00.001-04:00

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

2007-06-28T13:55:00.000-04:00

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

2007-06-28T12:52:00.001-04:00

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

2007-06-27T15:07:00.000-04:00

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?

2007-06-27T13:37:00.000-04:00

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?

2007-06-25T21:36:00.000-04:00

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

2007-06-25T20:15:00.001-04:00

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

2007-06-25T20:10:00.001-04:00

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

2007-06-25T19:43:00.000-04:00

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

2007-06-25T17:10:00.000-04:00

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

2007-06-22T01:17:00.001-04:00

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

2007-06-17T14:04:00.000-04:00

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

2007-06-16T22:06:00.000-04:00

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

2007-06-15T12:25:00.001-04:00

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

2007-06-15T10:40:00.000-04:00

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...

2007-06-14T22:09:00.000-04:00

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

2007-06-14T21:52:00.000-04:00

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

2007-06-14T21:24:00.001-04:00

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.

2007-06-14T21:20:00.000-04:00

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

2007-06-12T19:54:00.001-04:00

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

2007-06-08T19:56:00.001-04:00

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?

The Answer Has This Too

2007-05-06T16:06:00.000-04:00

What do the words cooperate, ion, iota, oogenesis, going, aorta, iocane, Montreal, and Iowa have in common?

What's In A Name?

2007-04-21T14:28:00.000-04:00

There's been a long interest in my part into the full meaning of my name, and also in those of other people. This sort of thing came up in an episode of Stargate a few years ago, episode [403]. The exchange went as follows:

Anise: You may call me Anise.
Dr. Jackson: Anise?
Anise: It means "Noble Strength".
Dr. Jackson: I'm Daniel. It means, uh, "God is my judge".
Col. O'Neill: I'm Jack. It means... What's in the box?

I didn't want to be like Jack O'Neill and be clueless as to what my name means. Of course I did the research, and I've also always been intrigued when I hear foreign sounding names, and I can guess where they are from, but sometimes it can be really hard to figure out what they mean. Just look at the English names Robert and Kevin. If you didn't know the history, you might never guess. I think Pilar is the only English-uncommon name I've successfully deduced.

Anyway, more along the lines of surnames, I started thinking recently again about the whole "Who was the first person who just randomly made up a last name?" instead of having it be a lineage name (like Michaelson) or related to a family career (Miller), or a locus (Van Vessem), or even in some cases, a seemingly random word is picked, but there is probably some esoteric association. My own surname happens to be the same as a word for a certain type of animal, but I don't know how it got associated with that side of the family. My mother's maiden name is an archaism in another language for the word "monk" (and also similar to that word in a different language). Again, who knows how that caught on? And as near as I can tell, my maternal grandmother's maiden name might be related to a toponym, but I have no way of knowing what came first, or even whence came that name. My last name has 4.6 million results on google, and is the name of at least a dozen notable people. My mother's last name has 1,460 results, and I can recognize immediate relatives somewhat quickly. Her mother's name yields no results for most spellings, but 2,970 for a sepcific variation, but 7,640 if done with the non-latin characters. Most seem to be about the place, however, it's quite possible that's just where it goes back to.

Why I Chose Paratactic Cataphora

2007-04-21T13:52:00.000-04:00

My friend called me up to catch up, and in the course of the conversation, we started talking about how he wants to branch his business off by himself, and he's getting a website set up for himself and how this was all going. He ran into the trouble of picking a domain name for his site. He had wanted to use his name originally, but feared that due to his long, relatively uncommon surname (359,000 hits on Google, I consider mine uncommon and I have 4.6 million), people might not be able to remember it. On top of that, he has an uncommon (in spelling) consonant cluster in his name, an unusual vowel dipthong (also for spelling), and a tap, so I can see it getting mixed up a bit, even if they perfectly remembered his name's pronunciation. We had a discussion about different elements that he might want to incorporate into his name, and while he has several good ideas and bases of names, it shows the reason why you hand over a $50,000 check to a naming firm employee who comes up with a new catchy brand name (it also reminded me of the good old days trying to come up with a good band name). Makes me want to get into the business though.

One point that came up that I found interesting was that a lot of names he came across and produced during his efforts followed a simple format:

simple color/adjective + simple noun + (simple job related word)

Which you can see in names like Bluetooth and Redhat (and a few better ones he found). Several of his suggestions though were already taken, and many others were very similar to names in use for similar services. Maybe we are approaching that top of the curve.

Taking Word Play Too Seriously

2007-04-21T13:24:00.000-04:00

In reading a review of an album while I was searching for lyrics to a specific song, I came across this snippet:

Of course, this couldn’t be a proper punch-in-the-face, Locust look-alike without some wink-wink, nudge-nudge song titles. “A Biggot Is a Spic” and “Awesome Rape” are just two unsettling plays on words to ponder while letting the lyrics spew forth like the wrath of bitter Teletubbies. [emphasis mine]

Aside from slightly with some other curiosities of the review, I was quite caught up with the remark I have bolded. I could not figure out how these were supposed to be plays on words. I thought at first that the former was perhaps the words "biggot" and "spic" mapped onto some reference I was supposed to catch. Awesome Rape didn't strike me the same way, and I thought that maybe there was a word break difference or some sort of pun that I was missing, but I just couldn't grasp it. I found a seperate reviewer who commented that the two aforementioned songs had the best titles, and then I realized that by play on words, I think the author merely meant to say that they are unusual juxtapositions of elements.

[term for a racist; biggot] + [racist term; spic]
[positive word; awesome] + [negative word; rape].

It's probably just me, but I never really considered this type of mismatching to be a form of word play, but rather more along the lines of an oxymoron or an inherent contradiction, which I don't really think of as word play. It goes to show that getting caught up in the terminology can lead to wasting a portion of your day researching the subtle nuances that arguably differ various pieces of language.

A Wordsmith's Way To A Comfortable Seat

2007-04-20T12:27:00.000-04:00

I was over at a friend's house watching a movie, and she got up to adjust something, and I started lying down. She said "don't lay down." I say "okay" and finished lying down, and she said "hey, I said don't lay down!" and I said "don't lay what down?"¹

Of course I knew what she meant, but I took advantage of the fact that for some people, like myself, a distinction is made between LIE and LAY, and for others, like her, the distinction is less clear. And I really wanted to lie down on that couch.

Note ¹: These excerpts might sound like we are being quite hostile, but actually it was all in good fun. It's a shame there is little in way of marking intonation or making a larger context clear. I guess the best summation for the attitude would be "kidding around"

An Apt Subject

2007-04-17T16:05:00.001-04:00

Spam emails often play on the fact that people will see a common name, with a typical email type subject. One of my email accounts just started being spammed, after over 2 1/2 years of keeping it clean. Most of the emails look like they might be related, very often with subjects like Re:, or Sorry for taking so long to respong with the hopes that you might glaze over the fact that the name is unfamiliar, and nowadays, often quite unusual. I remember a Language Log post on this, I'll post a link if I can find it. So, the email I received (which I will not be opening as it is potentially a pandora's box of worms) was authored with a relatively uncommon name, and had no space between the middle initial and the surname. And while these can be mildly interesting, or clues to the fact that it is spam, the real spectacular part was the subject itself:

Edwardo JSalvador Re: multifarious sophism

Next Target: Language Log

2007-04-10T15:34:00.000-04:00

Earlier today, Catáfora Paratáctica was mentioned under Linguablogs in a post by Polyglot Conspiracy titled LinguaYouTube, Linguablogs, Linguablogwants. I've been a fan of Polyglot Conspiracy for some time, and it's an honor to be mentioned there. I recommend anyone else who reads this to check it out.

Pan-Slavic Miscommunication

2007-04-09T21:19:00.000-04:00

In response to a comment that I received, I started thinking about the distinctions between Slavic languages. It's mostly anecdotal, but I've almost had more luck understanding Polish and Croatian than Russian at times. This goes against the logic that more closely related languages are easier to understand. Last time I was in Ukraine, it was terrible sometimes trying to converse and read in Russian, which is East Slavic like Ukrainian, but I seemed to have a lot less difficulty once I was in Poland, even though I don't know any Polish, which is West Slavic. My mother too, I know, has been able to understand a bit from various South Slavic languages, and there is plenty of evidence for high degrees of mutual intelligibility between all, but it seems to not line up quite right.

Just about the only Croatian I can specifically remember hearing was Luka Kovač saying things here or there on the show E.R. years ago and me realizing that I understood perfectly, and then having to remember that the language is actually relatively closely related.

If an actual example would help illustrate, I would probably have to say that East Slavic languages all use variants of собака, while everybody else seems to use пес, or something like that. Interestingly, the Russian variant of пес, пёс, seems to be a bit limited in its usage, while, and maybe this is just for me and some people I know, пес is the default and most common word to use for a dog.

Incidentally, a Ukrainian friend of mine always tells me that I write and talk like a Belarusian. But who knows what that is supposed to mean?

Gender Distinctions No Longer Ill Formed

2007-04-09T19:48:00.000-04:00

Several people I know are soon to be parents. Now, while examples of metonymy are not unheard of when talking about the father of a child (such as he's having a baby), I think I might be stretching a little too far with this. Specifically, the context required is that the person being spoken to is more familiar with the father than the mother, or that the father is more the point of interest in this conversation. So, what I preceded to do the other day was to say that a mutual male friend was "pregnant," I guess meaning that he is an active and relevant participant in the pregnancy, since he cannot occupy the traditional role when describing one as pregnant. The typical form we expect then is with females only, which is why you usually have the question mark, as it ?Harry is pregnant and curious Spanish distinct forms, such as embarazado which don't come up so much .

Everyone seems to understand exactly that when I say Gavin is pregnant, that Gavin is going to be a father, which could be paralleled to me saying Brianna is pregnant which does imply that Brianna is going to be a mother, or parent if we want the parallel to be even closer.

I could've sworn that one of my co-workers used this usage in talking about somebody we all knew, but now I am thinking that it just reminded me of my usage, and I sort of over-wrote my memory of somebody using a more common metonym, most likely the aforementioned Harry is having a baby.

Basic Color Term(s)

2007-04-08T18:42:00.000-04:00

My cousin's youngest child has only one color term, no matter what you are talking about. Ask him his favorite color, what color anything is, which color to choose, (practically anything mentioning "color") and he is always going to give you the same answer: blue.

Junior Comparative Etymology

2007-04-06T21:25:00.000-04:00

My work with children has always been full of all sorts of interesting anecdotes, but often it even delves into my work just a little bit (as can be seen here, here, and here). One great example just happened a few hours ago. The notorious Blake (with his own posts here, and here) asked me to say something in Ukrainian. This happens to be a pet peeve of mine, and one of many people I know who speak Ukrainian, or just about any language really, but it's actually quite duplicitous in that I love the opportunity to show off my stuff, and love it when people take an interest in my language. As such, I asked him what he would like me to say. He said "sun," and after I clarified that he did not mean "son," I told him the word was сонце [sɔnʦɛ], and he gave the following response:

Sontse! It's like sol in Spanish and Italian, and sun in English! Why do they all start with s?

Not Helping

2007-04-06T10:41:00.000-04:00

Fanny Cochrane Smith was a Tasmanian aboriginal, and before her death in 1905, made wax cylinder recordings of the Tasmanian language, in the form of songs. This, placenames, and a few handed down snippets seem to be all that is left. I cannot seem to be able to locate samples of these recordings, or transcripts, or anything to get a peak at these. Even if it is just effectively another Phaistos disc, I think it would be a wonderful thing to have, at least easier, access too, and who knows, maybe it will spur some interest, or even allow some people to take a crack at it, comparatively, or just for the sake of looking at it.

On Chomsky

2007-04-05T15:54:00.000-04:00

I meet for lunch regularly with a few friends who work in other disciplines (denistry, for example) and the last time I made it, only one other person was there. While we were eating, I was asked if I would be able to transfer some files from my computer to his. He pointed out that, as long as we are going to be sending files, and he was doing me a favor, he could perhaps send me something that I would enjoy. He said that knowing I was a linguist, I must be a fan of Noam Chomsky's, and he had some sort of selection of something by him, and he'd be happy to let me have it.

Though it's quite hard to argue against Chomsky in terms of him having some influence and all in the circle of linguistics, I know a lot of people (one of my entire departments, for example) who don't particularly like him or his theories. It's just a sort of stereotypical thing about linguists that I know people can find quite irksome. (Though it's not as bad as "what languages do you speak?" or the old classic from when I tell my relatives and friends what I was getting a degree in "what are you going to do with that?")

This is followed up by a post by Arnold Zwicky, wherein he mentions the description of a gang of linguists/linguist enthusiasts as:

A group for linguists, armchair linguists, would-be linguists, budding linguists, linguists-in-training, linguistic anthropologists, and/or anybody interested in the scientific study of languages. If Noam Chomsky is your hero... you can join, too. :) [emphasis mine]

I guess it's just a prevalent thing. I'm sure many linguists do like Chomsky a lot, but I don't know if he even chalks up to being our mascot, let alone our esteemed champion and exalted leader.

It's All Just Spanish To Me

2007-04-05T15:39:00.000-04:00

My mother called me while I was at work, as she does on occasion, and we spoke to one another in Ukrainian, as is our wont. After we speak for a few minutes, Blake comes up to me and says:

Who were you talking to in Spanish?

Good = Bad

2007-04-04T23:06:00.000-04:00

During a lecture on case/roles I was attending, the speaker mentioned the benefactive case, and then make a distinguishment between that, and what he called the malefactive case. When I originally learned all about this, it was easier just to join the two and use a phrase like dative of interest, but apparently he wanted to avoid using that nomenclature for various reasons. Unless I am mistaken, and I might just be, there is no language that distinguishes between what he seperated into the benefactive and malefactive cases (past the fact that one is good and one is bad). Specifically, the following sentences always operate in the same fashion.

He stole money for her [benefactive]

He stole money from her [malefactive]

A colleague of mine suggested lumping the two into a "factive case," though this term seems to be used a little bit with a different meaning, but I appreciate the enthusiasm. He was half joking with the term anyway. Either way, I still don't see why these aren't placed together. I've seen a few people suggest languages as having this distinction, but I really haven't found any clear examples so far. For all I can tell, they may basically function just the same as the above examples in English, where there is clearly a distinction between when one gains and one is a victim, but there is no real useful distinction between the two past the meaning, they really do seem to be two sides of the same coin.

Code-Switching Cognates

2007-04-02T12:21:00.000-04:00

A friend of mine bought a jacket that had small belts on the shoulders that have very little function to my knowledge outside of holding one's beret. When I first saw it, I said something along the lines of the following:

...and you even have a place to put your beret.
[ænd.ju.ivən.hæv.ə.pʰleʲs.tu.pʰʊt.jɚ.bʌ'ɹɛt]

...oh I mean beret.
[oʷ.aʲ.min.bɚ'eʲ]

Which wasn't an example of my incompetence, but rather one that stems from the fact that I almost never say the word BERET. When I was younger, however, I had a lot of occasion to say баретка [ba'rɛtka], so I guess I just kind of went to the default form in my head, even though I was using English.

Drive-By Hypercorrection

2007-04-01T13:22:00.000-04:00

During the return from an outing with a friend, Alice, we pulled up to a red light, and to our left was another vehilce with two fuzzy dice attached hanging from the rear-view mirror. Alice proceeded to let out the following remark(s):

What a lovely fuzzy die he has hanging from his mirror!

...and the other die is lovely too.

Or something to that effect. It's a spectacular example of hypercorrection, and then a correction of a hypercorrection, all in one turn of speech.

Ok Is Not Okay

2007-03-31T13:58:00.000-04:00

Last night I was playing Scrabble with two friends and I played the word "ok" (commonly spelled entirely with majuscules as OK) and my opponent decided to challenge me on it (I would like to comment that during the game we allowed several ficticious or non-English words such as aled and ozo (from עוזר) respectively, by agreeing not to challenge them; I'm not a crazy Scrabble-guy). It turned out that according to our 1978 Scrabble dictionary, ok is not a word, but the argued as less standard variant okay is. I was quite surprised to find this, but after some thought I decided that the Scrabble dictionary is a bizarre corupus as it is, so I shouldn't be too shocked. I double-checked with the contemporary online Scrabble dictionary, and it is the same in this regard.

It's strange to me that something as solidly lexicalized as ok is not considered a word by anyone, but all sorts of archaisms, non-standard spellings, clearly non-English words, and all sorts of onomatopoeia are allowed. Greek letters and solfège are also usual inclusions. While it's nice to have a clear and easy way to settle disagreements by agreeing on a dictionary beforehand, it's just too easy to want to argue with the source. It's the same with the OED or the Diccionario REAL, that they have such broad inclusion rules, that it's hard for them to be useful as an indicator of a word's validity. I even try to avoid using them sometimes, just so I don't have to deal with all of the archaisms and variants. Anyway, I lost 28 points and my turn from that, and ultimately would up losing the game, with well over 200 points, by 3 points to the guy who challenged me.

Indonesian Rap Son'

2007-03-30T12:44:00.000-04:00

Recently I had the pleasure to listen to some music from Indonesia that is apparently considered to be part of the rap genre. I don't know how much it would fly under that label in this country nowadays, though I'm not sure when the song was made and much of that is neither here nor there. In context, I was able to pull out a few examples of reduplication, which is always fun when dealing with a language that has this phenomenon. What I found specifically interesting was that a lot of words seemed to elide the ultimate consonant, either completely, or partially, by not articulating it particularly. I don't think that it was for the purpose of rhyme or meter, but possibly it could've been for the purpose of being able to spit out the words smoother and quicker.
This happens quite a bit I know in American rap music, but I always had the association as being more cultural, rather than having any foot in the music. Perhaps they do just work well together. I can't say that I've noticed it in the various Ukrainian, Brazilian, and Japanese rap that I've come across, but I can't say that it wasn't ever there either. I'll have to keep my ears and eyes open in the future to observe it. If I can get ahold of the song, maybe I can do some further investigation.

A Raised Question

2007-03-30T12:20:00.000-04:00

In reference to a recent post about my personal speech patterns regarding the words when and went, I commented that I produced these with the vowel [ɪ]. I thought that it had something to do with the pattern of w_n, and maybe it does, but it was recently pointed out to me that I have another alternate pronunciation. The part of the conversation went something like this:

I'll just have to talk to them.
[aɫ.ʤʌst.hæf.tə.tɔk.tʌ.ðɪm]

Them?
[ðɛːm]

This leads me to believe that maybe there is some other reasoning behind it. It comes to some problems, though, since the only similarity is that they both precede a nasal sound, and maybe that they follow a voiced sound, but I don't think that's the case. Even the words whence and then which have very similar contexts, but both have the [ɛ] and not the [ɪ], so it doesn't even look like an automatic change. The only thing I can think of that groups these words is that (1) these words are both quite frequently used "basic words" and (2) not likely to be confused with similar words with a higher vowel, such as then and possibly thin (or whence and wince, but rule one takes care of that). Another possible rule or set of rules is (3) certain phonetic constraints must occur, such as voiced_ or _nasal. I can only say that these might be possible reasons, and I really cannot conclude anything past these as to the mechanism(s) for why these words were chosen. One thing though, about the [ɛ] to [ɪ] switch, is that the latter is relatively shorter vowel, and requires less articulation. It's possible that a large part of this change is merely in order to ease pronunciation, I do also tend to like higher vowels (such as my substituion of [eʲ] for [æ] in front of [ŋ]). I'm going to start keeping track of similar contexts and words and see if there is any more of a pattern.

Handkerchief Of Idioms.

2007-03-29T23:03:00.000-04:00

Mark Liberman just posted about the French expression dans un mouchoir de poche. Basically, he was discussing the meaning that something like an election or sports event is going to be close, that is to say, the competitors are evenly matched. This meaning is extrapolated from the fact that a handkerchief is small, I guess. In Spanish, we have the expression el mundo es un pañuelo, or literally in English the world is a handkerchief, and it is meant to express roughly the same thing as the English expression "small world." I'm curious how far this spreads, and if anybody else has noticed this, or even if the two are directly related. Personally, I never really thought anything particular about a хустка or a handkerchief's size, but it does seem that un pañuelo must be something small.

One of my teachers once told me that you should never translate directly between Spanish and English, because they are deceptively similar. Of course this is true, and one should always translate the semantic notion, but over the years it's been surprising how often parallel idioms come up (though the different ones can be spectacularly fun and difficult to translate). I'll have to keep my eyes peeled from now on and start jotting some of these guys down.

Basic Level Concern

2007-03-29T20:03:00.000-04:00

While browsing the Ukrainian Wikipedia, I made it to the article on Птахи (Birds, you might call them) and I noticed something quite unusual. The picture they used for Birds was of some flamingos. I flipped through some other languages just to see what pictures people had, and many were relatively petite birds that you might consider to be prototypical as an English speaker (Robin is always given as the prototype in English, for Americans, it's effectively the bird-iest of the birds; incidentally, English Wikipedia has a wren) and quite a few had gulls, or birds that I would say were parrot-like. And there were a few other types that I thought might have some kind of basis, like the Cherokee stub for Birds having a picture of a turkey vulture.

As it looks, and I'll admit I haven't checked all of them, only Ukrainian and Russian Wikipedia features a flamingo as the primary picture of a bird (The Occitan article has an Owl though). I remember some time ago I was discussing basic level naming and prototype theory with a colleague and it was pointed out that you are more likely to produce typical members of the group. This makes a lot of sense in general, if one asked me to name a piece of furniture, I am more likely to say "chair" than "ottoman." Maybe this is just the case with animals, but, I tend to know a lot more "atypical" animals than "typical "ones. With the previous example of birds, the first birds that come to mind, and they won't be in any useful order for data since I've been looking at pictures of birds, would be:

sparrow, flamingo, vulture, parrot, hawk, crow, penguin, ostrich, robin, owl

Now, that's not a great sampling, but I bet that I could probably quickly come up with a good number of atypical birds:

flamingo, vulture, parrot, hawk, penguin, ostrich, owl, albatross, turkey, pelican, quail, emu, chicken, eagle, duck, goose, swan, falcon, kiwi, crane, stork, dodo, auk, booby, archaeopteryx

Probably more than typical, and certainly faster, and most of the typical would have at least one very distinct feature:

sparrow, crow, robin, wren, bluejay, cardinal, woodpecker, canary, dove, oriole, ?hummingbird, ?seagull, ?pigeon

It's probably the same for most animals, that the more distinctive they are, the easier they are to produce [I suppose this excludes animals you have reason to be around, which would probably trump this group, but after that, go straight for the most distinct, I asked a friend from Brooklyn and of course the first bird he gave was pigeon]. That seems pretty logical; most of the birds I came up with in the second catergory I consider pretty specific, whereas most of the former group of birds are quite "basic" to me, even if unusual. Regardless of how likely I am to come up with Wren before I get Flamingo in asking people to name a bird, I don't think somebody just picked the first bird they could think of, and I still don't think it's a great exemplar of Bird, but certainly it's a great example of how we index these kinds of things.

You Say じんじん, I Say Тьин Тьин

2007-03-28T21:01:00.000-04:00

In speaking to a native Japanese (and English) speaker, a small dilemma came up. I can speak Japanese, but of course not perfectly. We were discussing restaurants and I mentioned one called Tin Tin which I pronounce as something like [tʲɪn.tʲɪn]. My acquaintance responded with several comments about the restaurant, and it became eventually apparent that we were discussing different restaurants. She had been saying something more like [ʤ̥ɪn.ʤ̥ɪn]¹ for the restaurant (spelled Jin Jin, maybe?). I guess it was just a case off people not being fully enough aware of the subtle nuances that are different beween different phonologies. Both of those are Chinese restaurants anyway, but I guess our assumptions about the pronunciation differs. It's interesting to me though, at least from an orthographic point of view, English /t/ and /j/ are rarely confused.
Incidentlly, most English monolinguals I know call it [tʰɪn.tʰɪn] would call the other [ʤɪn.ʤɪn].

Note ¹: I can never figure out how to insert the partial-devoicing sub-diacritic, pretend there is one under each /ʤ/. The worst part is that it shows up properly in the preview, but it doesn't seem to work ever in the actual post.

Apparently, for at least one other similarly named restaurant, Tin Tin means "fresh made daily." 天天, as seen here could be tiān tiān, meaning "every day," tin1 tin1 in Cantonese. The other restaurant may've also had 填 tián, tin4 in Cantonese, which can mean "make good," it seems.
Also, Jin Jin probably would have one of the characters as 金, jin1 (or jin4), meaning gold or golden, quite common in names of Asian restaurants, brands, and the like, but I can't determine just yet what the name could be.

Cyriggles

2007-03-24T17:57:00.000-04:00

Somewhere I once saw a list of a few words that when written in Ukrainian (or some related language) cursive looked like a bunch of repeating squiggles. Perhaps my non-technical explanation suggests that examples would be better. I can't find it again, or remember any, but the ones I can produce would look something like this:

мили (washed, plural subject)
мити (to wash)
пити (to drink)
пиши (he writes)

You'll have to pretend that the characters are tied together. In that form they really do look just like a bunch of little lines. Basically any sequence that contains only и л м п т ц ш щ, й і ї if you include diacritics. You could probably even have something like *шишкебаб (for shish-kebab) which even not linked looks unusual. Maybe one day the list will make itself apparent.

When Did It Change?

2007-03-24T03:38:00.000-04:00

It has basically always been the case that I have pronounced the word when as [wɪn], homophonous with the word win rather than as [wɛn] (Incidentally, I also say [wɪnt] not [wɛnt]. I considered the two to be distinct completely, unlike say, lie and lye, which I thought had a phonetic similarity. I didn't even realize that I was doing anything unusual or different from anybody else until somebody didn't understand me one time. I realized that it was in fact true that I pronounced the two the same, and decided eventually to take some pride in it. This all came crashing down the yesterday when I caught myself switching to the ɛ form completely naturally. It had always taken effort to produce the ɛ form and often came out as [ʍɛːn], but this time it was almost as if I had always been using that form, probably from all of the practice I get pointing out the thing that I don't say. I haven't seen any instances of [wɛnt] so far, though I wouldn't consider it to be at all unlikely. Hopefully I can keep my usage of [eʲŋ] in place of what is apparently far more common [æŋ], though it looks like the same kind of thing is happening.

And That's How It Works

2007-03-21T21:28:00.000-04:00

I have just finished my watching a child I regularly do, and I wanted to make a quick note about something said earlier. Blake, let's call him, just picked up the food I had just finised preparing for him, french bread pizza cooked in the oven, and was bringing it in to the other room where we were watching some television on the box and quickly dropped one piece onto the floor with a splat, and immediately went:

And that's why you should never let me carry anything

Something I found quite humorous immediately, but also became a bit curious about shortly thereafter when I reflected a bit.
(Sorry for the delay here, if it seems disjointed it's because then I was at the house and now I'm in a lecture on Tzeltal folk taxonomy)
Anyway, the humor probably was immediate because it reminded me a lot of Bender's quote, from episode [2ACV19] of Futurama:

Fry: That was great!
Bender: And no one suspects a thing.

The other characters are scowling at them. Part of a wall collapses nearby.

Bender: And that's how we learned our lesson. [Fry nods]

Now, while Blake added a little something to his version to his, specifically implying that it was effectively my fault that the pizza fell, it's still very interesting to see these usages. The coordinator AND is well known to be able to start off sentences, despite what many "authorities" seem to suggest. R. W. Burchfield, in the a usage guide said that using AND can be useful for writers as the narrative continues. That seems to be the case in the first sequence where Bender starts a sentence with AND, effectively continuing in with what Fry just said. The subsequent AND, as well as Blake's, both don't seem to be continuing any narrative, but are the sole unit. The unifying feature of both is that they follow an action, and it seems that, syntactically, the unit that is being coordinated with is the action istelf. Or perhaps not the action, but rather, a description of the scenery? It's hard to tell in some cases. Either way, an interesting thing that I've noticed in various searches for and that's why and and that's how is that they are not generally used to continue a narrative, but rather are very final. The largely occur either isolated, or at the end of sequences. Another feature that seems to have become ingrained into the why sequences is that the statements are often very...I suppose I would group then as "aggressive." Something like:

And that's why you don't fuck with me!

While the how statements are much more on the solely terminitive side, à la:

And that's how you make pudding!

And that's how I learned all about these types of sentences.

A Book Can Only Show You So Much

2007-03-19T10:28:00.000-04:00

I'm a little bit annoyed that in every lecture I attend or in any book I read where they have cause to mention the triconsonantal roots of Arabic and similar languages, I am always presented with the example of k-t-b, book, (or libro the first time I learned about it). One text I have makes brief mention of a second root x-l-f, Caliph. It's barely used to illustrate anything, but at least they are trying.

A + B = А + Б

2007-03-18T18:18:00.000-04:00

It's always been pretty aparent that in the sequence of the word азбука /alphabet/, it was representing the letters /a/ and /b/ to some extent, just like you can see in the English alphabet. Of course, though, it's actually a sequence of the two first letters of Greek, Alpha + Bet(a), from which our writing system comes. I was reading up on an old form of the Cyrillic alphabet and I noticed that the first two letters were presented as:

Літери	Назва літер
А	азъ
Б	боѵкы

(Pardon my characters, I don't any for old Cyrillic, nor do most people I think. The 3rd chatacter in боѵкы is supposed to be a lower-case Cyrillic upsilon)

It then struck me that the names of the letters are something like [az] and [bukɪ], very similar to [azbuka], the word for alphabet. It seems that things aren't so different after all between languages. Incidentally, in my youth I sometimes inserted a /в/ into азбука creating азбуква. I guess deep down I just wanted it to go one letter further.

Diminutivies

2007-03-14T23:11:00.000-04:00

Can anybody tell that I have to spend a lot of time around kids? Earlier today I noticed that this one young boy, he just turned six, adds the diminutive suffix -y rather frequently. Moreso than one might expect. Words I have noted are socky, booties, undies, and my favorite, booky-bagy. I thought this was an interesting phenomenon, and spent a little time thinking about the basis for his diminutive usage. I can only speculate, and I'm going to have to keep my ears open for more data, but it seems that based on these words here, that he uses this form for some things that have some relation to his person, things he wears. Since he is small (maybe not for a six year old, but certainly compared to say, me), he might use the diminutives to clarify that his possessions reflect his size. He is a small person, and thus has sockies, and not socks. He doesn't exclusively use these forms, that might be part of the basis for his choice. Or maybe he's just like the child in my last post and being adoreable by saying silly things that grown-ups find amusing.

Piggybank Ride

2007-03-12T18:49:00.000-04:00

I love it when little kids just say things that aren't quite in line with what we do. An instance today happened when a girl of 6 or so was being given a piggyback ride, said:

Yay! I'm gettin' a piggy bank ride!

This was more just for fun, and everyone enjoys them, and I'm forever calling them piggy bank rides. Already I didn't know the etymology of piggyback, so this just seals the deal. Conversely, a different child on another occasion was referring to my at-the-time-existent pony-tail as such, but I thought she said pointy-tail, which I just loved the sound of.

A(n) N Problem

2007-03-12T12:47:00.000-04:00

In writing the previous post, I initially wrote (emphasis added):

It's a great example of an MCP aspect of English.

But I paused for a second when using the word "an" instead of "a." It seems that it is still entrenched in my mind that you put "a" in front of words that start with consonants, and "an" in front of words that start with vowels.
This doesn't word for all sorts of words that I've already automated because I know the sound is a vowel sound or a consonant sound, such as: a union, a eulogy, but an honor, etc.

The natural unfamiliarity that arises in acronyms and initialisms might have something to do with my hesitation. To investigate, I googled some various word combinations:

	W/ "a"	W/ "an"	f¹
MBA	688,000	1,310,000	1:3
NBA	271,000	1,090,000	1:5
Honor	309,000	1,470,000	1:6
USA	1,600,000	144,000	11:12
Union	1,250,000	201,000	6:7
Eulogy	420,000	39,200	11:12

(Note¹: f is the likelihood of "a" occuring)
It's clear that some of the results, particularly those with 'a,' are not exact examples of what I was searching for, but, this should still give enough of an indication as to what is happening with people's fingers on the internet. There are some discrepencies; For example: X-Ray is much more common with an, but F-Stop was very close (about 4:9), slight preference for an.

Even more interestingly, I get comparable results for LSAT, but there are about three times as many instances of a SAT over an SAT. This can be explained by some instances of homophony, such as SAT meaning "saturday" or "satisfiability" and quite possibly pronounced [sæt]. To combat this, I did searches for "a SAT score" and "an SAT score" with about five times as many results for "a SAT score." Almost ironic, no?

Yes Sir, Ma'am

2007-03-12T12:27:00.000-04:00

(This is old news, but it's something I've been wondering about and I think is still interesting, even if the basis is provided.)
Ron Moore was asked about why female officers in Battlestar Galactica are all addressed with SIR. His response:

...I liked the way it played and the implication that the honorific had become gender neutral at that point. [...] My personal feeling was that there was something vaguely condescending about "Yes, ma'am" versus "Yes, sir" in context and that by addressing everyone as "sir" it made a point about the egalitarian nature of Starfleet. It's certainly a debatable point [...] When I was writing the miniseries for Galactica, I decided I wanted to use sir for all the female characters and I even toyed briefly with the idea of calling Laura "Mister President" but that seemed like a step too far. Billy does call Laura "ma'am" on occasion, so the term itself does exist in the Galactica universe, but the military invariably calls her "sir."

I think this is an interesting observation. I don't really have any particular evidence, but I do too get the impression that, (thinking of children at least), when one goes "Yes, Sir," they are much more likely to be submissive, if not respectful. "Yes, Ma'am" seems to be rather more inclined to a sort of smarmy response. Perhaps this is just the fact that we're not too far from the very patriarchal male-dominate society, where father runs the family and mom just tends to the house and kids. It seems that everyone in the military could be called "ma'am" for egalitarian reasons, but that just wouldn't fly now, would it? It's a great example of an MCP aspect of English. (One influential, male, professor I had used this term, it's for Male Chauvinist Pig) How egalitarian is that? Regardless, it's still an interesting phenomenon that I embarrassingly actually thought for a few episodes was characteristic of the military.

Interlingual Humor Points

2007-03-12T11:31:00.000-04:00

Mark Liberman just posted about interlingual taboos. The basic idea is that a speaker of one language will avoid using a word because they know it sounds like an inappropriate word in another language. Growing up speaking Ukrainian and English, we had a few of these types of things, but they weren't so much taboos; moreso, they were a point of humor, but then again, I also spent most of my time with males between, say, 16 and 25, so that's not impossible as a contributing factor. And speaking of contributions, here's mine for a short list of words¹ that a funny for people who know both languages.

бубен - drum - compare: boob, or booby
['bubɛn]/[bub] or ['bubi]
(possibly from Polish bęben, maybe?)

підносити - pick up - compare: penis
['piʔnosɪtɪ]/['pʰinɪs]
(from під "under" + носити "carry/bear")

просто тут - straight here - compare: prostitute
['prosto.tut]/['pɹastətʰut]
(as in "Я хочу лінія просто тут" "I want a straight line here")

and of course, the best of the best, and also the most ironic:

важай на мова - watch your language - compare: vagina
[ʋa'ʒaʲ.na.'moʋa]/[və'ʤaʲnə]
(according to my only handy resource, вáжати is "to weigh," no listing of важáти "to watch out (for)." In terms of watching out, though, it can be applied to anything, and is still humorous, just best with мова)

(Note¹: For anyone who can't tell from the examples, this is quite non-standard Ukrainian)

In terms of specific contexts, I had a buddy who when asked his hobbies, stated that he likes to play the drums, and used the aformentioned term, with some stress. I don't know if he normally said this and just added emphasis, or if he actually selected against using the standard term (барабан). Either way, it was meant to elicit a chuckle. Also, a lifeguard at a pool who had a bit of a funny side to her once asked everyone who was taking a lesson to form a straight line in front of her, and it was clear she used this form specifically for it's sound. I'm sure there are others that are escaping me, but that should probably be good for now.

Wordie: A Place For Words

2007-03-09T22:13:00.000-05:00

Now, I'm sure I'm not the first to discover the completely useless, but somewhat spectacular Wordie, but I'd still like to comment on it.
I love the idea and think that it has great potential, but the biggest deterrent to me fooling around with the site that much is that there is no "random" feature, which I think is an essential, for both words and for lists. Possibly asking a little too much, but it'd also be nice if the search feature maybe gave you a google-style "did you mean?" and go for the closest word in alphabetical order, or maybe ever at one point the closest words (a la, word donk comes up for not-work tonk). That can wait though. I'll have to check back periodically for my fix of lexemes.

English Needs A Thneed

2007-03-09T21:15:00.000-05:00

One of the categories I previously suggested for consonant cluster onsets included "ones that seem to be perfectly fine for usage, maybe sound a little foreign, but nobody would have trouble saying them, preferably with some kind of attestation that isn't a loanword"

THNEED doesn't seem to be a loan word, and I can't imagine too many people not being able to handle the sequence. It doesn't even sound particularly foreign to me, but then again, I might not be the best judge. Thneed is also interesting in that it looks as if it is a sort of compound word, of TH(ING) + NEED, or similar elements. In terms of candidacy, I think thneed is pretty good. Dr. Seuss, while being known for making up lots of unique words, usually did not make words that did not fit the constraints of English. In fact, in On Beyond Zebra!, I would say the two most curious new letters would be VROOM, which is homophonous with the onomatopoeia, and THNAD, another [θn] onset cluster. So, we have THNEED, THNAD, and of course THNADNERS. It doesn't seem so bad; maybe a little worse that [sn] in onsets.

I say, we go for it. Everyone needs a thneed, and that includes Funk, Wagnall, Merriam, and Webster.

Ukrainian: A Real Mother Tongue?

2007-03-09T20:27:00.000-05:00

It happens occasionally that I'll have a little slip and Ukrainian will be about to come out of my mouth, but my tongue catches it before I confuse the daylights out of the people around me. It's quite infrequent as my English has dominated, and is considerably better than my Ukrainian at the present time. In fact, I almost never use my Ukrainian except when speaking with my mother these days. So, during a discussion where a friend and colleague was explaining how in a certain context when she only uses Spanish, she reverts to English solely when she is quite angry or frustrated. I thought about this and realized that all of the slips that I can recall are when I am around children (a regular occurence in my current field) and I want to yell at them I have to stop myself from saying it in Ukrainian. When I was a child, Ukrainian was much more common for me, and it was not uncommon at all for me to be commanded in the way I seem to be wanting to do deep down to these kids now. But the real question is, why?

My only theory is that there is a typle of conceptual "slot" for certain grammatical forms that each person has inside. In English, most of the forms just default back to the root, so for example the verb PUSH has the same form for many different tenses (I push, you push, we push, you all push, they push) and the imperative mood (push!), while in Ukrainian, there is a unique form for the imperative mood, пхай¹, and this form seems to occupy the default for the imperative. Of course, for this to be true for this reason alone, I'd probably have to default on other distinctions in form, such as tense, that exist in Ukrainian and not in English. Most likely, this is not the case, but I wouldn't doubt it as being a significant factor.

Incidentally, the reason I chose пхай was because the only instance I know of my mother unknowingly slipping out of English and into Ukrainian was when helping a small child with his shoe and wanting him to push his foot into the shoe.

Maybe Ukrainian is just naturally suited for guiding young ones. I suppose that is just as plausible as anything else here.

Note¹: пхай might not be best translated as push in all contexts (it's also the word for pick as in don't pick your nose!), but it's certainly the one to use for when you are telling somebody to shove their foot into a shoe.

Lost Sans Translation

2007-03-07T22:35:00.000-05:00

There seems to be a trend in some television shows I see where people will speak in a language other than English. This occurs in several forms, all of which I enjoy and find daring. Lost is a great example of this, where lots of conversation occurs in other languages. In today's episode alone, all three of the following were used.

Form 1: Speakers use a foreign language, and subtitles are used to convey the meaning to the audience since there is little to no English in the scene.
Form 2: Speakers use a foreign language without subtitles, and then proceed to explain what was said, usually paraphrased, in English.
Form 3: Speakers use a foreign language without subtitles, and without any clarification afterwards. This one is used quite sparingly.

I couldn't make out all of the Russian, but she said at the end: Ти знаєш що мушеш робити. "You know what you must do." And yes, I know I wrote that in Ukrainian, it was just simpler that way for me.

Post Berriak

2007-03-07T21:13:00.000-05:00

Firstly, I don't actually know anything about Basque grammar or word order or anything really related to Basque. To enlighten myself, I decided to do some guided translations. I had a translation of a work in Basque, sentence by sentence, and I set out to deduce what each word seemed to mean. This would look something like the following, but trust that mine were more complicated (bolded for what I add):

Hau etxea da. (This is a house) [this/house/is]

Nothing technical, this was just to practice and expand my horizons. There were some difficulties in establishing the exact meaning of some function words, but overall it was pretty straightforward. With my confidence high, I took to finding random other Basque phrases, expressions, and the like to play with. I was able even to figure out some grammatical aspects to the language looking at all of these expressions. Then I came across Berri txarrak. I immediately recognized the content value, but was confused when I noticed that the adjective seemed to mark the plural, but the noun didn't. I glossed it as follows

Berri txarrak. (Bad news) [news/bad+plural]

I searched around to see how I managed to foul this one up. Multiple instances of berriak were found meaning news, and I did also find the following:

Txiste berriak (New jokes) [joke/new+plural]

The translation is certain, and the gloss is probably quite on, so here is a parallel where you can substitute those same units and have the meaning parallel. I did discoverd usages of berri occuring by itself, as in Hampshire Berri for New Hampshire. It looks like berri occuring after the noun give it the significance of new. When it occurs first, and before another adjective, it becomes the noun news. I guess you would then have:

Berri berriak (New news) [news/new+plural]

and not

?Berriak berri (New news) [news+plural/new]

Maybe there's some other stuff that has to do with whether something encompasses a phrase or not, especially since it seems to be the last unit. Still though, I love how the plural agreement morpheme seems to fall on the adjective, but not on the noun. I don't think I've seen that anywhere else.

Note: a quick check of a Basque grammar reference tells me that -ak is added to the end of a phrase. That made things simple.