Language Log

The common view is that the Scottish English adjective wee means little. Doubtless it often does; but as I slowly make a little headway in learning the ways of Standard Scottish English (and its much more inscrutable sister language, Scots [SCO], which in general I cannot even understand), I have been noticing that (in Edinburgh at least) the word wee is more commonly used in a rather different way, one that couldn't possibly be thought to convey anything about diminutive size or cuteness.

Not long ago I went out to see Cockney comedian Micky Flanagan perform at the Festival Theatre in Edinburgh. (One man alone on stage with one microphone. His two-hour mission: to seek out new laughs and new ways to mock civilization; to boldly zing where no man has zinged before. Standup is the bravest of all the performing arts that don't involve a high wire.) Hearing that East London dialect again (I grew up in the London area) was like slipping into a comfortable old pair of shoes.

Flanagan says he was in a posh Italian restaurant in London and ordered the bruschetta for a starter, and the waiter had the nerve to correct his pronunciation. He had said -sh- for the -sch- part, and of course there were glottal stops where the geminate [t] should have been: [bɹʊˈʃɛʔɐ] is how he said it.

"Bruschetta, said the waiter; "Not broo-SHET-a: [bru&#x02C8sketta]. In our-a language, is pronounced, [bru&#x02C8sketta]."

And in a flash Flanagan retorted: "Yeah? Well in our language it's pronounced 'tomatoes on toast'."

Grammar Girl (aka Mignon Fogarty) has posted a podcast today about the "needs washed" regionalism, which is mostly associated with the North Midland dialect region of the U.S. Though her goal is to provide prescriptive advice about when it's appropriate to use the "need + V-en" construction, she has conducted some nice data collection from her readers and has also consulted such resources as the Yale Grammatical Diversity Project and relevant Language Log posts.

From Kathleen Parker in today's Washington Post:

Scene: An elevator in New York Presbyterian Hospital where several others and I were temporary hostages of a filthy-mouthed woman who was profanely berating her male companion. It wasn’t possible to discern whether he was her mate or her son, but his attire (baggy drawers) and insolent disposition seemed to suggest the latter.

Every other word out of the woman’s mouth was mother——, presumably a coincidental reference to any familial relationship. Finally, she shared with us bystanders her belief that said mother—— would not be welcome in her house (Hark! Good news at last!) and that he could very well seek shelter at his mother—-ing father’s house. Aha, family ties established.

The race and class of the woman and her companion weren't specified, but readers might have been able to divine those attributes from the particular word Parker chose to report (or was that the only vulgarity the woman used?), helped along by the setting at Broadway and 168th Street and the mentions of the separated father and in particular of the young man's "baggy drawers," which presumably were intended to convey some relevant information. (If it had been an upper-middle-class white woman screaming "motherfucker" at a phat-pantsed white preppie, communicative cooperativeness would have obliged Parker to mention that fact lest the reader draw the wrong conclusions.)

I've always found those nudge-nudge allusions to race and ethnicity immeasurably more vulgar than an explicit mention would be, in a sense of "vulgar" that's ought to be a lot more ethically troubling than the one that Parker is focused on — you think of the way people intimate someone's Jewishness by saying they're "very New York." But that's not the kicker…

Yesterday's Bloomberg News (Aug 18, 2011 6:55 PM ET ) carried an article by Adam Minter entitled "New U.S. Ambassador Sparks Emotional Debate in China".

Minter quotes "Wang Xiaosheng", a business columnist with the Guangzhou-based Southern Metropolitan Daily (said to be China’s most important independent newspaper):  "I am afraid that [Locke’s] understanding of China is much less than former ambassador Jon Huntsman, a white man who speaks fluent Chinese, due to the fact that Gary Locke speaks only a little Cantonese and no Chinese at all."

We've had Geoff Pullum's response to "David Starkey on rioting and Jamaican languages" (here): a suitably outraged reaction to Starkey's amazingly ignorant ravings on language, race, and culture in the recent British riots (it's all the fault of Jamaican Creole!). Now, from the ironic wing of the creolist world, the following response by Peter Trudgill (Honorary Professor of Sociolinguistics at the University of East Anglia in Norwich), written as a letter to the Guardian (which might or might not publish it) and reproduced here with his permission:

During the Newsnight interview in which David Starkey complained about "this language which is wholly false, which is this Jamaican patois that has been intruded in England" (13th August), it was shocking to note that he himself used a form of language which was distressingly alien. I estimate that at least 40%, and quite possibly more, of his vocabulary consisted of utterly foreign words forced on us by a wholly other culture – words which were intruded in England from the language of Norman French immigrants to our country, such as "language" and "false". And there were many other alienating aspects to his speech. It was unfortunate, for instance, that he chose to use the term "intruded", employing a word insinuated into our language by sub-cultures in our society who abandoned their true Anglo-Saxon heritage and instead imitated the wholly false language of Roman invaders.

From back-channel discussion, it appears that pretty much all living linguists with significant knowledge of Jamaican Creole — I don't count, since what I know about the language comes mostly from Beryl Bailey's wonderful Jamaican Creole Syntax (1966) and later descriptions, rather than from personal experience — are appalled by Starkey's incendiary ravings. How could they not be?

A week after the riots that sprang up across a large part of England, pundits are struggling to find smart and profound things to say. One of the least successful has been David Starkey, a historian and veteran broadcaster. Speaking about the results of immigration into Britain since the sixties, he explained on the BBC 2 TV program Newsnight (video clip and story here):

The whites have become black. A particular sort of violent destructive, nihilistic gangster culture has become the fashion, and black and white, boy and girl, operate in this language together, this language which is wholly false, which is this Jamaican patois that has been intruded in England, and that is why so many of us have this sense of literally a foreign country.

So it wasn't not mindless, ignorant, immoral lust for consumer goods that was behind the copycat violence of the August riots across England; it's language what done it! That damned Jamaican patois is responsible! What a moron. My latent prejudices are whispering to me (I will try to resist) that white historians must have an innate intelligence deficit.

In advance of the fifth and last season of The Wire, HBO released a documentary-like special called "The Last Word". The very first line is from an interview with series protagonist Dominic West, who says: "What makes The Wire so amazing is its level of authenticity." (Watch the first part of the special here.)

Even now, after having re-watched the entire series several times, I'm floored by the irony of that line, spoken in West's native British dialect (born in Sheffield, but of Irish descent). West plays Detective James "Jimmy" McNulty of the Baltimore Police Department, and McNulty is a very American character: breaking all the rules in a very selfish (but also self-destructive) way, all in the name of some greater good (doing "real police" work and catching the bad guys). So how authentic can the show be, if this very American character is played by a Brit?

Last Sunday, Rebecca Fu went to a Cantonese restaurant called Xǐ yùn lái dà jiǔdiàn 喜運來大酒店 (Happy Fortune Arrives Grand Hotel — actually a modest establisment) in Manhattan's Chinatown.  When she saw the following entry on the menu, she had no idea what it was:  xiāngjiān shìde 香煎士的.  The xiāngjiān 香煎 was not a problem; it means simply "fried" or "pan fried".  But, even though she's a graduate of Peking University, Rebecca drew a complete blank on shìde 士的.  The characters seem to mean "scholar's", but "fried scholar's" just doesn't make sense.  It was only when Rebecca asked the waiter how to pronounce 士的 in Cantonese — whereupon he said "si6 dik1"– that she understood what 士的 meant.

Raymond Zhong writes from Hong Kong:

I'm wondering if I might bother you with a slightly trifling Chinese question.  The name of the fermented tea, 普洱, is pronounced "bo lei" in Cantonese.  (I'm not sure that's a correct romanization.  I'm still just learning Cantonese myself!)  But the character 洱 in every other instance has the same pronunciation as 耳 ("yi"), not 里 ("lei").  Do you know why this might be?

This use of "very not appreciative" caught my eye on Sunday:

“I’m very not appreciative of the way she came in here,” Ted Shpak, the national legislative director for Rolling Thunder, told the Washington Post.

This construction is not in my own dialect; it reminds me of the recent broader uses of "so". ("I'm so not ready for this", which I had perhaps mistakenly been mentally lumping together with "That's so Dick Cheney" or "That's so 1960's".)

I'm not sure what's changing, "very" or "not" or both. I suspect that "not" may be moving into uses previously reserved for "un-".

Today's political buzz is all about the win by Democrat Kathy Hochul in New York's 26th congressional district, encompassing suburbs northeast of Buffalo and west of Rochester. National issues, particularly the debate over Medicare, played a big part in the race, but local factors were key as well, with the Republican candidate, Jane Corwin, losing votes to Jack Davis, a third-party spoiler running on the Tea Party line. Hochul was helped by squabbles between the Corwin and Davis campaigns, most notably a confrontation between Davis and Corwin's chief of staff outside a veteran's event a couple of weeks ago. The video of the confrontation memorably featured Jack Davis saying, "You want punched out?"

If you stay in Hong Kong for a few days, you're bound to notice the frequent use of Roman letters mixed in with Chinese characters. Of course, one often encounters whole English words or phrases as well. In this post, however, I will concentrate on the use of individual letters, usually standing in for Cantonese morphemes, but occasionally also for English words. Here are a few examples: