Sword out of the stone

The war in South Ossetia reminded me of the disputed Sarmatian connection to the King Arthur legends -- a good story, whether or not it's true. The Wikipedia article on the Ossetians says that "Joseph Stalin's parents are believed to have been ethnic Ossetians albeit assimilated into Georgian culture". I first learned about this in Simon Sebag Montefiore's Young Stalin, which I read not long ago. According to Montefiore, Stalin's paternal great-grandfather "was an Ossetian from the village of Geri, north of Gori". In a footnote on p. 21, Montefiore expands on this:

When Stalin's dying father [Vissarion "Keke" Djugashvili] was admitted to hospital, significantly he was still registered as Ossetian. Stalin's enemies, from Trotsky to the poet Mandelstam in his famous poem, relished calling him an "Ossete" because Georgians regarded Ossetians as barbarous crude and, in the early nineteenth century, non-Christian.

This lecture by Bruce Thompson provides an English translation of Mandelstam's 1933 Stalin poem:

We live, deaf to the land beneath us,
Ten steps away no one hears our speeches,
But where there's so much as half a conversation
The Kremlin's mountaineer will get his mention.

[Original version: All we hear is the Kremlin mountaineer
The murderer and peasant-slayer]

His fingers are fat as grubs
And the words, like lead weights, fall from his lips,
His cockroach whiskers leer
And his boot tops gleam.
Around him a rabble of thin-necked leaders–
Fawning half-men for him to play with.
They whinny, purr or whine
As he prates and points a finger,
One by one forging his laws, to be flung
Like horseshoes at the head, the eye or the groin.
And every killing is a treat
For the broad-chested Ossete.

A translation by W.S. Merwin is here, with the Ossetian connection left implicit:

He rolls the executions on his tongue like berries.
He wishes he could hug them like big friends from home.

In the original Russian, the last couplet is

Что ни казнь у него - то малина
И широкая грудь осетина.

which rhymes малина "raspberry" with осетина "Ossetian".

The Wikipedia article on the Ossetic language asserts that

Ossetic preserves many archaic features of Old Iranian, such as eight cases and verbal prefixes. The eight cases are not, however, the original Indo-Iranian cases, which were eroded due to pronunciation changes. The modern cases, except the nominative, are derived from a single surviving oblique case that was reanalyzed into seven new cases by Ossetic speakers.

thought this assertion is flagged as "citation needed". This sounds like fun -- does anyone know the details?

[Update: Thanks to the pointer supplied by Pekka below, you can read all about the Ossetic case system (and many other topics of interest) in Fredrik Thordarson, "Ossetic", in Rüdiger Schmitt, Ed., Compendium Linguarum Iranicarum, 1989. It seems that the description in the Wikipedia article is misleading -- the current cases are basically clitics that appear at the end of the phrase, roughly like English 's (click on the images below for larger versions):

Apparently the case markers and the plural marker are more or less invariant, and retain their identity in combination:

And these clitic particles are appended to the "nominative" (i.e. uninflected) form:

]

Change by mistake

A couple of days ago, I tried to answer a journalist's questions about nonplussed ("Nonplussed about nonplussed", 8/6/2008). I wasn't entirely satisfied with one of my answers, and so I've tried again today.

The question was

Q: Is it possible for a word to become so commonly misused that the new (wrong) definition becomes acceptable? Has any word like this ever had its new meaning included in a dictionary?

The answer, of course, is that every word in every language has been through many cycles of "misuse" becoming "acceptable" -- this process is otherwise known as language change. (Some English words have not changed a great deal in the few centuries since reliable dictionaries for English have existed -- but that's another matter.) As examples, I cited the journey of silly from "happy, blissful" to "foolish, simple", by way of "pious", "innocent", "helpless", and "insignificant". I also mentioned dirt's shift from excrement to mere soil.

But in the comments, Ann objected:

I'm not sure that "silly" is really a good example of the process that might be happening with "nonplussed." In the former, each subsequent definition represents a slight shading of meaning, an expansion from meaning A to meaning B to meaning C, etc. But with "nonplussed," it seems as though people simply don't know what it means and are getting it wrong, probably from the negation you noted.

I worried about this myself in writing that post. Of course, it's usual to subdivide modes of semantic change more finely than just "an expansion from meaning A to meaning B to meaning C".  Thus Leonard Bloomfield's 1930 taxonomy used the categories of narrowing, widening, metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, hypobole, litotes, degeneration, and elevation. But it's true, the use of nonplussed to mean "unfazed" doesn't really seem to be any of these. And a quick glance at Andreas Blank's 1998 taxonomy -- and the other taxonomies listed in the Wikipedia article -- also fails to find any category that exactly fits. (Though maybe "cohyponymic transfer" is relevant, and perhaps for that matter "metonymy" if you interpret it so loosely as to mean reference to any associated concept.)

In contrast, the standard examples of words whose usage has shifted so far that they turn almost into their own opposites, and perhaps back again -- peruse, fulsome, moot, nice -- fit one or another of the standard categories of semantic change pretty well. So what should we do with cases like nonplussed, or for that matter the use of infer to mean "imply"? Here it seems that people are using a word W that means X to mean Y instead, where the only connection between Y and X is that both are in the same general area of abstract concepts? (There may be some things about the form of W that promote the mistake, but that's another matter.)

There are many examples of historical change where people in some sense "got it wrong" as they did with nonplussed, as opposed to just promoting a connotation or a figurative usage to become part of the core meaning, or regularizing irony, or bleaching out some aspect of the core meaning to allow wider usage. But the obvious examples in the textbooks are folk etymologies (i.e. triumphant eggcorns) like hangnail, or morphological analogies as in the historical developments among abidden, aboden, abode and abided.

So am I missing something in the standard taxonomies of semantic change, or do we need a new category for examples like nonplussed?

(I don't mean to suggest that the phenomenon is new, just that the standard taxonomies don't seem to have a place for it, unless I've missed something. Which I might well have done, since this is not an area that I know very well.)

There are many examples of words that have come to mean so different from their original meaning as to turn almost into their own opposite -- peruse, fulsome, moot, nice -- but these all seem to have progressed by one of the standard cognitive categories of semantic change, which don't seem to have a convenient cubbyhole for nonplussed. The use of nonplussed to mean "unfazed" (and similarly the use of infer to mean "imply") isn't narrowing, widening, metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, hypobole, litotes, degeneration, or elevation (to take Bloomfield's taxonomy). A quick glance at Andreas Blank's taxonomy also fails to find any category that exactly fits.

It seems to me that infer as "imply" and nonplussed as "unfazed" are both

asdf

Wikipedia article on taxonomies of semantic change

"Commonly Confused Words" at AskOxford.com

Ken Wilson on Etymological Fallacy.

Christopher Hutton, "Semantics and the 'etymological fallacy' fallacy", Language Sciences 20(2):189-200 1998.

The key insight that modem semantics celebrates is the liberation of meaning from history. This liberation can be understood as the liberation of the spoken language from the tyranny of writing, and from the history of a language as a history of texts, and as the freeing of the vernacular from the domination of 'dead' or 'sacred' languages. Words are held to have meaning in the synchronic system and in their relationships with other words, not in their diachronic link to one of the languages of the past: 'the meaning is always now'. Community is created by shared meanings, and communication is not only an expression of social order, but is also its foundation.

Eve Sweetser "From etymology to pragmatics", 1991

C. S. Lewis, Studies in Words, 1967.

After hearing one chapter of this book when it was still a lecture, a man remarked to me 'You have made me afraid to say anything at all'. I know what he meant. Prolonged thought about the words which we ordinarily use to think with can produce a momentary aphasia. I think it is to be welcomed. It is well we should become aware of what we are doing when we speak, of the ancient, fragile, and (well used) immensely potent instruments that words are.

This implies that I have an idea of what is good and bad language. I have. Language is an instrument for communication. The language which can with the greatest ease make the finest and most numerous distinctions of meaning is the best. It is better to have like and love than have aimer for both. It was better to have the older English distinction between 'I haven't got indigestion' (l am not suffering from it at the moment) and 'I don't have indigestion' (I am not a dyspeptic) than to level both, as America has now taught most Englishmen to do, under 'I don't have'.

----

Verbicide, the murder of a word, happens in many ways. Inflation is one of the commonest; those who taught us to say awfully for 'very', tremendous for 'great', sadism for 'cruelty', and unthinkable for 'undesirable' were verbicides. Another way is verbiage, b which I here mean the use of a word as a promise to pay which is never going to be kept. The use of significant as if it were an absolute, and with no intention of ever telling us what the thing is significant of, is an example. So is diametrically when it is used merely to put opposite into the superlative. Verbicide was committed when we exchanged Whig and Tory for Liberal and Conservative.

Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, "'Heaveno' has received one heck of a response", 1997

The South China Morning Post (SCMP, 1997a) reported recently that officials in the Texas
County of Kleberg had expressed support for a campaign to replace the greeting hello by
heaveno. The situation was described as follows:
Judge Pete De La Garza said county commissioners had voted unanimously for a resolution urging the
use of 'heaveno' instead of hello. 'Is everybody using it? The answer is of course, no. It is a very new
thing and everybody's a little apprehensive', he said. [ . . . ] The idea came from flea market operator
Leonoso Canales, 56, who said: 'I see hell in hello. It's disguised by the 'o'. but once you see it, it will
slap you in the face.'

Leonso Canales picture and letter (link)

letters between Canales and Rod Stryker (link)

8/8/8

Inspired by Geoffrey Pullum's plan to take Barbara her matutinal coffee at exactly 08:08:08 on the morning of 08/08/08, this morning at 08:08:08 a.m. I took 8 photographs of my wife standing next to our favorite orchid, which has had a total of 8 blossoms.

Yes, everything is coming up 8's today. The morning news made a big fuss over how the uniforms of the American Olympians consist of 8 pieces. And everybody (except perhaps Mark Spitz and a billion Chinese) is rooting for Mark Phelps to win 8 gold medals. And today, of course, is very special for New York Times reporter Jennifer 8. Lee who, by the way, wrote an excellent article back in 2001about the impact of computers on the ability of Chinese to write characters by hand.

The airwaves are full of instant pundits informing us how important 8 is for Chinese because BA1 八 sounds like FA1 发／發 and FA1, among many other things too numerous to list here, can mean "get rich, make a fortune, become wealthy." So as not to sound too crass, those who explain the Chinese attachment to 8 usually say that it signifies "prosper(ity)" -- I guess a lot depends upon what one understands "prosper(ity)" to mean! One hears this sort of sentiment most often during Chinese New Year celebrations when people go around saying (and writing endlessly on greeting cards) GONG1XI3 FA1CAI2, Cantonese GONGHAI/HEI FAT CHOI 恭喜发财 ("Congratulations and May You Get Rich!").

As someone who has been studying and teaching Chinese language and culture for four decades, people often ask me what the connection between BA1 ("eight") and FA1 ("prosper") really is, and I say the standard, "Oh, BA1 sounds like FA1," when I know very well that the homophony is not very close, and it's not really germane to talk about the similarity of labial articulation in such a context of popular culture. So I always lamely, yet professorially, used to add that the resemblance is greater in Cantonese, whose speakers are particularly fond of the number 8 and the ubiquitous, felicitous greeting, GONGHAI/HEI FAT CHOI (I hear it both with HAI and HEI, more often the former).

Unfortunately, when I started to learn Cantonese, I found -- both to my embarrassment and chagrin -- that 八 doesn't sound any more like 发／發 in Cantonese than it does in Mandarin: BAAT3 vs. FAAT3. Now, in all honesty, I can't any longer go around saying that 八 sounds more like 发／發 in Cantonese than it does in Mandarin. Maybe there's some other Sinitic language or dialect in which 八 sounds more like 发／發 than it does in Mandarin. If so, I'd be grateful if someone told me which one it is. In the meantime, just get in the spirit of 8/8/8 and make the most of it.

Let's go to the toilet for dinner tonight

Considering all of the unsavory, scatalogical Chinglish vocabulary that we have been examining lately, I find it particularly amusing that a very successful chain of restaurants in Taiwan has chosen to call itself Modern Toilet. Here is a novel theme restaurant if ever there was one.

The originator of the chain apparently got his inspiration from reading Japanese manga, and the Chinese name of Modern Toilet, BIAN4SUO3 便所, is actually a borrowing from Japanese BENJO 便所. That literally means "convenience place," hearkening back to our earlier discussions of the greater and lesser varieties of BIAN4 便.

Consequently, if one wishes to understand fully all of the appurtenances and symbolism of Modern Toilet, it would be best for one first to make a careful study of Japanese toilets. Here are a couple of sites that will help you familiarize yourself with the fixtures and dishware should you ever find yourself in a Modern Toilet restaurant are here and here: the Wikipedia article, and a set of instructions for traditional squat toilets that should be especially useful for female readers.

Before proceeding further, you should take a virtual tour of some of the Modern Toilet restaurants. Feast your eyes...

For those of you who have not travelled much in East Asia (including those who have been to East Asia but haven't ventured outside of Western-style hotels), that fixture they serve their sundaes in is a miniature squat toilet.

Never mind what the ice cream is shaped to resemble.

I haven't yet had the opportunity to eat in a Modern Toilet myself, but a trip to their Home Page affords a good introduction. Note that there are four versions -- Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Japanese, and English.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Modern Toilet, in the context of our ongoing discussions concerning Chinglish, is that the English translation of the menu is virtually error free! (I noted only a couple of minor flaws.)

It is evident that the owners invested a lot time and also probably money in getting their English translations right. It is virtually certain that they asked (or hired) a native speaker of English to look over their menu before going public with it. Despite the dubious decor, this is one classy restaurant!

I suspect that the biggest problem in going to Modern Toilet would be figuring out how to sustain a coprological conversation while maintaining one's appetite. It might be better just to eat in silence and not think too much about the ambiance.

(Though as you can see in this charming Japanese toilet training video, western-style toilets are increasingly common, at an early age, so they would feel right at home in Modern Toilet.

Victor Mair on the Art of War

Yesterday on WHYY's Radio Times, Marty Moss-Coane interviewed Victor Mair about his translation of The Art of War. You can listen to the interview here. (I've created a new URI for the interview, because the one in their archive for the interview has a bad time offset, and starts you off about 8 minutes in.)

52:00

(Well, Arnold Zwicky did once post about an example of Chinese character used as obscenicons, but I don't think that counts.)

______________________________________________________________________________

Asking questions to vs. of

With respect to a piece of political spam from John McCain that included the sentence "You will also have an exclusive opportunity to ... ask questions to one of my top advisors", Graham commented

Is "ask questions TO somebody" good American English? It reads very oddly to this Brit.

Well, "ask questions to somebody" sounds odd to me as well. And this morning's Breakfast Experiment™ will confirm that oddity quantitatively, as well as suggesting some experiments in the population genetics of prepositions.

But first, let's establish that "ask questions to X" is out there, in the U.K. as well the U.S. Thus the Sheffield Wednesday Football Club News that invites you to "Ask Questions to Chris Waddle" seems to be about as British as they come. And a recent article in the Birmingham Post quotes a radio station manager to the effect that “It’s about empowering people and getting them in the position to feel they can ask questions to councillors rather than thinking that they come out of prepackaged boxes.”

This construction is often associated with situations where someone -- typically someone in authority -- is, as the saying goes, "taking questions". Thus the current hits from Google News include these:

...we're being given a unique opportunity to have you, our readers, ask questions to the panelists.
...entertainment shows that allow your members from all over the world to interact live with and ask questions to their favorite celebrities...
...announced that they will enable the public to ask questions to The V Foundation for Cancer Research's prestigious scientific forum...
The first 1000 online viewers to enter the discussion will have the opportunity to ask questions to the speakers...
We went on a tour of the different facilities available at the club and had an opportunity to ask questions to the staff in charge on how they operate...

But it's used in other situations as well:

So, maybe I'll ask questions to my fiction writing friend list members (wow that's a long title).
...it's easy for me to ask questions to my fellow classmates/friends...
Many parents ask questions to kids with an “ideal” answer that parents think children should say.
When we ask questions to ourselves like “What can I do right now that is productive?” ...
You can ask questions to your casino dealer live during the game.
today, my brother and i are going on a road trip up to black canyon city. we will eat pie, ask questions to locals, take video footage, and find jack swilling's house.

OK, here are some numbers from the searchable corpora that Mark Davies has made available at BYU:

Note that we can't just search for "ask questions to" or "ask questions of" and accept the resulting counts as correct, because of things like:

They ask questions to explore each other's perspectives...
...the students may begin to ask questions to which the educator does not know the answers...
...please remember to ask questions of your own.
it does not necessarily mean that he or she will never ask questions of fact.

So I've quickly checked all the hits to see whether X (in "[ask] questions to X" or "[ask] questions of X") is the questionee or not.

In a total of 65 hits for the search string {[ask] questions to}, there were only 8 examples where the object of "to" was in fact the questionee:

...don't have all these nurses and doctors to ask questions to...
We were told we would be able to ask questions to Lisa and Rachael.
All they do is ask questions to these women, where Rilya Wilson is.
We would be willing to, of course, attend the hearing and ask questions to Mr. Estrada...
I was sent to LA on the red carpet for the Emmys to ask questions to all these celebrities.
...36% found the program was MOST beneficial in helping them improve their skills in asking questions to students in class...
...every day she huffed its slope, asking questions to herself.
...one study found that teachers asked questions to males 80% more often than to females...

8 examples in 560 million words means that this pattern is not a very common one. In fact, it's rare enough that I don't think that we can conclude anything for sure from the fact that all the hits were in the COCA ("Corpus of Contemporary American English") section -- nearly all of those were in informal discourse, either in transcripts of speech or in journalistic quotations, and there's just a lot more of all that stuff in COCA than in BNC or in the Time Magazine corpus.

In contrast, out of 243 hits for {[ask] questions of}, 229 had the object of "of" as the questionee.

Probably the most useful way to summarize this is to observe that out of 229+8=237 cases where someone used an expression of the form "[ask] questions <preposition>", 229/237=97% of the prepositions were "of" rather than "to". (I guess there is some small possibility of other prepositions -- "for", "at", etc. -- but never mind that for now...)

So this confirms Graham's intuition that "'ask questions TO somebody' ... reads very oddly".

But this also illustrates an interesting fact about preposition usage, which is that the dominant (and semi-arbitrary) patterns are nearly always speckled by low-frequency pockets of contrarian usage. In a post long ago and far away ("Verbs and prepositions", 3/23/2004), I wrote:

These norms about [verb-preposition] complementation have a lot of interesting practical and theoretical properties. They're syntactically and semantically quasi-regular, for one thing -- a mixture of predictability and idiosyncrasy, and therefore presumably a mixture of "figure it out" and "look it up" strategies. They're somewhat variable across individuals, dialects and times. And they're relatively easy to study by string-search methods -- such searches don't in themselves produce reliable counts, because of the variable structure of the results, but they yield samples that can be humanly checked to produce accurate rates. One of the things that I've come to realize is that there is more low-level variation in the "meme pool" for such constructions than one might think. Actually, anyone who grades student papers will have learned this -- college students, even quite literate ones, often produce unexpected verb/preposition combinations.

For all these reasons, verb/preposition (and noun/preposition) combinations should provide a good domain in which to study what you might call the population memetics of grammar. And having accurate statistics for complementation would be useful for parsing purposes, anyway.

That post observed that the dominant pattern "to be eligible for X" has a sprinkling of contrarian uses "to be eligible of X", and the dominant pattern "to sentence someone to <a term of imprisonment>" competes with lower-frequency "to sentence someone for <a term of imprisonment>".

In earlier posts, I worried about the usage "[worry] of" vs. "[worry] about" ("Don't worry of it", 3/9/2004; "Why worry of it?", 3/14/2004), and "bored of" vs. "bored with" ("Bored of", 3/25/2004). Over the years, we've discussed some other examples of this type as well:

"A stubborn survival", 4/19/2004
"In or under", 10/28/2005
"Pulling (to) within: the paper trail", 5/15/2006
"In or on? Experience the power of splash screens", 12/16/2007
"At that second, on that day, in that year", 12/17/2007
"Dimensions, metaphors, and prepositions", 12/16/2007
"The meaning mining business", 12/18/2007

There are some common threads in this complication business of preposition choice, which is a major issue for language learners. There are complex layers of regularities and sub-regularities in associated meanings and forms; among the plausible alternatives, one tends to win out in each situation, though it's hard to predict how finely the cases will be subdivided (e.g. "At that second, on that day, in that year"); the winner's victory is rarely complete, with the losing choices clinging to life in regional or cultural niches, or springing up occasionally by spontaneous mutation; and every once in a while, one of the minority variants breaks out and takes over, or at least becomes much more common for a while.

It's easy to see this through the lens of population genetics, especially if we add the generalization that interacting populations of "linear learners", in the absence of other constraints, tend to settle naturally on random shared patterns of belief. (See "The 'lexical contract': modeling the emergence of word pronunciations", 9/22/2000; "Rats beat Yalies: doing better by getting less information?", 12/11/2005; "The Invisible Academy: nonlinear effects of linear learning", 5/24/2005.)

Now that large text corpora with decent temporal, geographic, and demographic metadata are increasingly becoming available, we should be able to study the dynamics of the prepositional "meme pool" in considerable detail.

Mark Davies' 360-million-word

__ questions to

ask 5/27

"don't have all these nurses and doctors to ask questions to"
"We were told we would be able to ask questions to Lisa and Rachael."
"All they do is ask questions to these women, where Rilya Wilson is."
"We would be willing to, of course, attend the hearing and ask questions to Mr. Estrada"
"I was sent to LA on the red carpet for the Emmys to ask questions to all these celebrities."

asking 2/12

36% found the program was MOST beneficial in helping them improve their skills in asking questions to students in class"
"every day she huffed its slope, asking questions to herself. "

asked 1/8

one study found that teachers asked questions to males 8O% more often than to females

asks 0/1

total 8/48

"They ask questions to explore each other's perspectives"
"the students may begin to ask questions to which the educator does not know the answers"

__ questions of

ask 93/97

asking 54/57

asked 20/23

asks 4/4

total 171/181

171/(171+8) = 96%

please remember to ask questions of your own.

theology and religious studies, that allowed me to ask questions of ultimate meaning

it does not necessarily mean that he or she will never ask questions of fact.

we rarely asked questions of simple recall.

Although the men knew they would be asked questions of a sexual nature

silencing one of the most frequently asked questions of a generation ago

Students should ask questions of clarification

BNC 100 MW

__ questions to

ask 0/7

asking 1/5

asks 0/1

total 0/13

__ questions of

ask 24/25

asking 6/7

asked 3/4

total 33/36

Paul was singing to himself and asking questions of the type children tend to

that is an immunity against being asked questions of any kind.

Time Magazine 1923-2006 100 MW

__ questions to

ask 0/2

asks 0/1

asked 0/1

0/4

__ questions of

ask 15/16

asked 7/ 7

asking 3/3

25/26

and allow Iranian students to make statements and ask questions of their own.

Wet turban needless wash

James Fallows took this picture on a China Air flight from Chengdu to Beijing, and posted about it on his Olympics blog at The Atlantic (click on the image for a larger version).

Fallows' comment:

I don't think "funny" translations are all that funny, my theory being, I am allowed to make fun of someone's translation of Chinese into English only when I'm ready to have a Chinese person make fun of my translation of English into Chinese. And I will never be ready to do that.

On the other hand: If I were going to translate something into Chinese, for a wide audience of Chinese people to read, I might possibly consider having a native Chinese speaker take a look at it before I gave the final OK. Which is why I continue to marvel at specimens like this: the always-welcome "moist towelette" from yesterday's Air China flight from Chengdu to Beijing ...

免洗湿巾    mian3 xi3 shi1  jin1  exempt/remove/avoid/excuse wash/bathe moist/wet towel/kerchief/turban

mẹ thân yêu

Olympiad

No, not the one in Beijing -- the 6th International Olympiad in Linguistics is underway this week in Sunny Beach, Bulgaria (yes, really).  The Head Coach is Dragomir Radev, and the other coaches are Lori Levin, Amy Troyani, and Adam Hesterberg (who was last year's international winner).

This year, the North American trials had nearly 800 participants, and the two teams that won a trip to compete in Sunny Beach are:

You can see the first-round problems (here) and solutions (here) for this year's North American trials.