Language Log

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:

I'm trying to imagine a novel such as Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting being written in Chinese.  Trainspotting consists of a number of voices, all of them Scottish-accented in one way or another.  It's difficult enough to write in unalloyed Pekingese, for example, much less several varieties of Pekingese or of other Sinitic topolects.

Emilio Servidio wrote to me about the things-people-don't-have-words-for trope, but continued with some ruminations on a different topic that I thought might interest you. I supply his reflections here with his permission as a guest post.

It worries me that linguistic prejudice can distort reality in the eyes of otherwise smart and sensitive people. It even happens to some linguists I know. I witnessed an especially disturbing episode recently.

From a Globe and Mail story about the census in India (hat tip to Michael Kaan):

India concluded its national census this week, having tallied up some 1.2 billion souls, and the last night of counting focused on homeless people – of whom there are an estimated 150,000 in Delhi alone. Getting them into the count was just one in an array of staggering challenges: how to enumerate in the dozen areas under control of various armed rebel movements, and in the 572 tiny islands that make up Andaman and Nicobar; how to train 2.5 million enumerators and handle answers in 6,661 languages.

Whoa! 6,661 languages? The Ethnologue site says it has information about the 6,909 "known living languages" in the world, and lists only 438 living languages for India (for comparison: it lists 176 living languages for the United States, 86 for Canada, and 12 for the United Kingdom).

But if you look at the entries in the Ethnologue, you'll see that most languages have alternative names (sometimes a lot of them) and most languages have recognized dialects listed (sometimes a lot of them). That's probably enough to inflate the language count by more than one order of magnitude. (It's also true that "immigrant languages" — for India, the site mentions Armenian, Burushaski, Judeo-Iraqi Arabic, Northern Pashto, Uighur, Walungge, and Western Farsi — aren't included in the count, but they're probably a small contribution to the problems of the national census of India.)

So it all depends on how you count.

Earlier today, Mark Liberman discussed the abortive attempt by Tunisian president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali to phase in Tunisian Arabic.

Now, in a report circulated by China Daily / ANN and carried in The Straits Times, we learn:  "Dialects to be phased out of China's prime time TV"

Via The Economist's Johnson blog comes this entertaining video of the young stars of the "Harry Potter" movie franchise trying to sound American.

As pointed out by the Johnson blogger (Lane Greene), Rupert Grint goes overboard with his pronunciation of "mozzarella sticks" as "mozzareller sticks." That's a hyper-rhotic extension of "intrusive /r/," since the inserted /r/ is followed by a consonant rather than a vowel as in "law[r] and order" or "draw[r]ing." This over-/r/-fulness, what Ben Sadock calls "intrusive intrusive /r/," is frequently heard when non-rhotics try to go rhotic. For more on hyper-rhoticity and how it plagues British attempts at imitating American accents, see my Language Log post from 2008, "Botswaner and Louisianer."

[This is a guest post by Brendan O'Kane.]

My new favorite thing is Brian Holton's ongoing translation of Shuǐhǔ zhuàn 水滸傳 (Water Margin; All Men Are Brothers) into Scots, part of which is available online. Example:

Nà shí Xiyuè Huàshān yǒu gè Chén Tuán chǔshì, shì gè dào gāo yǒu dé zhī rén, néng biàn fēngyún qìsè. Yī rì qí lǘ xiàshān, xiàng nà Huáyīn dào zhōng zhèngxíng zhī jiān, tīng dé lùshàng kèrén chuánshuō:" Rújīn Dōngjīng Chái Shìzōng ràng wèi yǔ Zhào jiǎndiǎn dēngjī."

那时西岳华山有个陈抟处士，是个道高有德之人，能辨风云气色。一日骑驴下山，向那华阴道中正行之间，听得路上客人传说：" 如今东京柴世宗让位与赵检点登基。"

In thae days there wis a hermit hecht Chen Tuan bydin on the Wastlin Tap o Mount Glore: he wis a kennin an gracie sowl at bi glamourie cud guide the wind an wather. Ae day whan he wis striddlin his cuddie doun the brae ti the Gloresheddae Road he heard an outlan bodie sayin “Richt nou in the Eastren Capital Chai Shizong hes reteirit an Gaird-Marischal Zhao hes taen the throne”.