Language Log

(This post first appeared on 12/30/2004 under the heading "And a Right Guid Willie Waught to You, Too, Pal.")

We like the incantations we recite on ritual occasions to be linguistically opaque, from the unparsable "Star-Spangled Banner" (not many people can tell you what the object of watch is in the first verse) to the Pledge of Allegiance, with its orotund diction and its vague (and historically misanalyzed) "under God." But for sheer unfathomability, "Auld Lang Syne" is in a class by itself. Not that anybody can sing any of it beyond the first verse and the chorus, before the lyrics descend inscrutably into gowans, pint-stowps, willie-waughts and other items that would already have sounded pretty retro to Burns's contemporaries.

A painfully sad health story in today's news media. For some time now there have been suspicions that isotretinoin (= Roaccutane = Accutane = Amnesteem = Claravis = Clarus = Decutan — drugs have more names than the devil) tended to increase the risk of depression and suicide in its users. But it wasn't the drug. It was the acute acne (and of course the social consequences thereof). For once the familiar cliché is reversed: it turns out the disease was worse than the cure.

Donald G. McNeil, Jr., "New Lines of Attack in H.I.V. Prevention", NYT Science Times today:

Because 95 percent of gay men and 40 percent of heterosexual American women have had anal sex at least once during their lifetimes, according to surveys, rectal versions of the [microbocidal] gel are being developed.

Where to start?

Yesterday, a Beijing cabdriver made the following remark to David Moser, who reported it to me:

"A? Ni 50 sui le?  Zao zhidao wo jiu hui 'nin' ni le."

"啊？你50岁了？ 早知道我就会 ‘您’ 你了。“

"Ah?  You're 50 years old?  If I had known I would have 'nin'ed you."

Yesterday, I received this e-mail from a Chinese scholar in the PRC:

I'm very sorry that fax machine can’t receive your fax because of mishandled by pen pusher.

My goodness! How does he know such a colloquial expression as "pen pusher"?

When I asked that question of some friends, Brendan O'Kane wrote back:  "Online dictionaries are responsible for the occasional hypercolloquialism — http://www.nciku.com/search/en/detail/pen+pusher/1300456 . What I want to know is whether an analogous Chinese-Spanish dictionary will give 'cagatintas'."

The Language Log — well, Mark Liberman — tradition of recognizing international Talk Like a Pirate Day (19 September) by posting the Corsair Ergonomic Keyboard for Pirates along with digressions into other matters piratical came to a end in 2008, in a posting with links to earlier celebrations:

In TLAPD posts from earlier years, you can find instructions for the more difficult task of talking (as opposed to typing) like a pirate; the history of piratical r-fulness; and other goodies: 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007.

There's actually some serious historical linguistics (and cultural history) involved here, as discussed in "R!?", 9/19/2005, and "Pirate R as in I-R-ELAND", 9/20/2006. And even a bit of mathematical linguistics.

This year I have a reason for returning to the pirate ship (though I'm a bit late in getting around to it): the delightful children's book Seadogs: An Epic Ocean Operetta ("composed by Lisa Wheeler, staged by Mark Siegel" and published in 2004 in hardback, in 2006 by Aladdin Paperbacks), which is at the moment my grand-daughter Opal's very favorite book in the whole world.

The Chinglish that I write about regularly is only one member of a burgeoning brood of English hybrid languages.  Other well-known congeners of Chinglish are Franglais and Spanglish.  Perhaps less well known, but equally colorful, is Denglish, that variety of German (Deutsch) that has absorbed a conspicuous amount of poorly assimilated English elements.  In a discussion of "word rage" entitled "Shooting too Good" (November 05, 2005), Mark Liberman mentioned Denglish, but it seems to me that this quirky brand of Englishy German deserves greater exposure.  To that end, I present here a hitherto unpublished text entitled "Wok and Roll" (real name of a restaurant in Munich) by (Professor) Antony Tatlow of  Hong Kong University / Trinity College Dublin, now retired.

She hasn't announced her candidacy, and frankly, I doubt that she would accept a draft. But still, a curious chain of associations yesterday led me to wonder.

It all started  when Andrew Sullivan linked to an article by Stephanie Mencimer at Mother Jones on "Why Rick 'Man on Dog' Santorum can't beat his Google troubles":

Santorum's problem got its start back in 2003, when the then-senator from Pennsylvania compared homosexuality to bestiality and pedophilia, saying the "definition of marriage" has never included "man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be." The ensuing controversy prompted syndicated sex columnist Dan Savage, who's gay, to start a contest, soliciting reader suggestions for slang terms to "memorialize the scandal."

And the winning suggestion is currently memorialized in at least four of the top ten Google hits for Santorum.  (This, of course, has nothing whatever to do with Prof. Althouse and her potential bid for the White House. Be patient, the connection is coming.)

An article by Daisuke Wakabayashi entitled "English Gets the Last Word in Japan" in the August 4 issue of The Wall Street Journal describes how English is becoming the language of Rakuten Inc., Japan's biggest online retailer (by sales volume).

I'm not at all surprised that Mark's posts on regional variation in American English (here) and (here) have stirred up such reader interest, because speech variability seems to be one of the first things people notice, even if they can't pinpoint exactly what it is. It's not as well understood that there is a long tradition of studying variation in the languages of the world, even in the United States. But there was a time when the study of linguistic geography was an important part of most linguistics departments. In the 1950s and 1960s you could study with nationally prominent linguists at universities in Ann Arbor, Chicago, New York, Washington, Providence, Berkeley, Cleveland, Madison, Seattle, Austin, and other places. The BIG names in linguistics back then included dialectologists such as Hans Kurath, Raven McDavid, Fred Cassidy, Albert Marckwardt, Harold Allen, Carroll Reed, E. Bagby Atwood, W. Nelson Francis, Uriel Weinreich, David Reed, James Sledd, and others. Their papers about regional dialects were prominent features at annual meetings of the Linguistic Society of America.

"I don't really believe anything any more," said my dad, reflecting on the increasing skepticism to which his old age was leading him.

"Hold on, dad," I said, "you can't be right there."

—Nor the comet that came unannounced out of the north, flaring in heaven; Nor the strange huge meteor procession, dazzling and clear, shooting over our heads, (A moment, a moment long, it sail’d its balls of unearthly light over our heads, Then departed, dropt in the night, and was gone;)

— Exerpt from Walt Whitman's Year of Meteors, 1859

I'm in Malta for LREC 2010, and it's nice to see that Google comes up here in Maltese, the only Semitic language normally written in a Latin alphabet: