Language Log

Mark Swofford recently encountered a variation of the "no word for" trope in a footnote in an 1831 work, History of the Pirates Who Infested the China Sea from 1807 to 1810 (Jìng hǎi fēn jì 靖海氛記), translated by Karl Friedrich Neumann.

Here's the passage:

Chang paou was a native of Sin hwy, near the mouth of the river, and the son of a fisherman. Being fifteen years of age, he went with his father a fishing in the sea, and they were consequently taken prisoners by Ching yĭh, who roamed about the mouth of the river, ravaging and plundering. Ching yĭh saw Paou, and liked him so much, that he could not depart from him. Paou was indeed a clever fellow—he managed all business very well; being also a fine young man, he became a favourite of Ching yĭh,[39] and was made a head-man or captain.

The note reads: "39. The word pe (8335) cannot be translated in any European language. It means a vice common in Asia."

From the printed "Guide du promeneur" of the Parc Jean-Jacques-Rousseau, near the site of the workshop where I spent the past couple of days, I learned a new French word, or more exactly a new meaning for a common French word:

De petites fabriques dédiées aux vertus de la nature humaine et disséminées ici ou là, illustrent ce project révolutionnaire d'un nouvel espace social où l'homme vit en harmonie avec le milieu naturel.

My small mental lexicon of French glosses fabrique as "factory", but this is clearly not what the word means here:

Little factories (?!) dedicated to the virtues of human nature, and scattered here and there, illustrate this revolutionary plan for a new social space where man lives in harmony with the natural environment.

Following up on yesterday's "No word for rape" post, several readers have pointed me to another recent addition for the "No word for X" archive, namely Isagani R. Cruz, "Lingual misunderstanding to blame for refusal to apologize?", China Daily 11/12/2013:

The refusal so far of Philippine President Benigno Aquino III to issue a formal apology for the hostage-taking incident in Manila in August, 2010, in which eight Hong Kong tourists were killed, may be blamed partly on a lingual misunderstanding.

Aquino's mother tongue is Tagalog, once the national language of the Philippines, now replaced by Filipino, which is based on it. […]

There is something peculiar about the Tagalog and even the Filipino language. There is no word for "sorry" or "apology." When Filipinos are at fault, they say in Tagalog or Filipino, "Pasensiya na." That literally translates into, "Please forget your anger" or "Please let it go". It's important to note that the personal pronoun used is in second person, not the first. […]

Needless to say, there may be political or lingual reasons for Aquino's reticence when it comes to apologizing to Hong Kong. But it is important for the people in Hong Kong to understand that it is lingually impossible for a Filipino to apologize in the British or American sense, because the words for admitting fault do not exist in Tagalog or Filipino.

Several people have sent me this entry for the "No word for X" files — "When is it rape?", The Economist 11/15/2013:

In Urdu there is no word for rape. The closest direct translation is "looting my honour".

At the expense of English and of other Chinese topolects and languages?

We have seen that, in recent weeks and months, there has been considerable agitation against the increasing role of English in Chinese education and life in general. Supposedly, overemphasis on English is leading to the deterioration of Chinese language skills. Consequently, the amount of time devoted to English in schools is to be reduced, the weight placed upon English in college entrance examinations is to be decreased, and there are calls for children to begin to study English later than first grade of elementary school, which is the case now.

On the Variationist List, Benjamin Torbert (11/6) made the following request, and I gave (11/8) the reply below it, which I'd now like to  share with Language Log folks in the hope that someone may be able to add more. Torbert's query:

I have [at least] two grad students who teach in majority (read, 100%) AfAm classrooms in StL, and they bring up things about AA(V)E, and they're seldom able to stump me, but this time, I wasn't able to give a complete answer.  They were asking me about what is apparently known as deictic go.

1) There go your pencil.
2) Here go your permission slip.

These more or less paraphrase in mainstream American English (ugh, the label, I know) with a form of be, namely is, probably contracted most likely.

Is there any scholarly work on this feature, beyond a basic description of the feature?  I was vaguely aware of it, but I don't remember anyone talking about it in six years of gradskool, when we were talking about AAE more or less nonstop.  The only thing I could find was a 1975 article (Clark/Garnica), and it seems to address different issues.

Athanasia Chalari, "Greeks are ready to change", The Economist (Prospero) 10/24/2013:

Another interesting point about the difficulty in reaching a consensus has to do with social linguistics, how Greeks talk. […]

Greeks are very loud and they interrupt each other very often. The reason for that is the Greek grammar and syntax. When Greeks talk they begin their sentences with verbs and the form of the verb includes a lot of information so you already know what they are talking about after the first word and can interrupt more easily.

The reader who sent in this link noted:

Seems wrong to me–a quick look at WALS finds verb-first languages pretty even scattered over the world, plus many languages that pack more into the average word than Greek does its verbs, but I didn't have the time to test the claim thoroughly. But maybe you could do it, since you have a lot more information about turn-taking than I do.  I was just skeptical that Greek is really that unusual in being 1) verb first and 2) relatively synthetic, so that one gets a lot of information out of the way in the first word of a sentence.  (And all those verb-first, synthetic languages could just as easily lead to nice, harmonious exchanges of short sentences. I can imagine being more likely to interrupt if the crucial bits were at the end, since I would be inclined to say "get on with it!" or "You're wrong!" out of impatience.)

I'm surprised that, until today, I had never heard of the novel entitled Yīnggélìshì 英格力士 (English) by Wáng Gāng 王刚, which was published in 2004.  Now, thanks to Bruce Humes's article, "The 2013 Istanbul Book Fair, Xinjiang Connections and 'English'", posted November 3 on his blog called "Altaic Storytelling:  Tales from Istanbul to Heilongjiang", I'm delighted to learn about this fascinating book.

Together with his "greetings from small-town Japan", Chris Pickel sent in this photograph of a sign, which was put up in his neighborhood for the aki-matsuri 秋祭り ("autumn festival").

Sufjan Stevens has posted an interesting comment on Miley Cyrus's "Get It Right". You should go read it on his blog, but since I've noticed that LL commenters often don't follow links, here's the text:

Dear Miley. I can’t stop listening to #GetItRight (great song, great message, great body), but maybe you need a quick grammar lesson. One particular line causes concern: “I been laying in this bed all night long.” Miley, technically speaking, you’ve been LYING, not LAYING, an irregular verb form that should only be used when there’s an object, i.e. “I been laying my tired booty on this bed all night long.” Whatever. I’m not the best lyricist, but you know what I mean. #Get It Right The Next Time. But don’t worry, even Faulkner messed it up. We all make mistakes, and surely this isn’t your worst misdemeanor. But also, Miley, did you know the tense here is also totally wrong. Surely you’ve heard of Present Perfect Continuous Tense (I HAVE BEEN LYING in this bed all night long [hopefully getting some beauty sleep?]). It’s a weird, equivocal, almost purgatorial tense, not quite present, not quite past, not quite here, not quite there. Somewhere in between. I feel that way all the time. It kind of sucks. But I have a feeling your “present perfect continuous” involves a lot more excitement than mine. Anyway, doesn’t that also sum up your career right now? Present. Perfect. Continuous. And Tense. Intense? Girl, you work it like Mike Tyson. Miley, I love you because you’re the Queen, grammatically and anatomically speaking. And you’re the hottest cake in the pan. Don’t ever grow old. Live brightly before your fire fades into total darkness. XXOO Sufjan

Suppose you heard about a study "showing" that Ivy League students are more socially sensitive than students at public universities or students at private colleges not among the Ancient Eight. You'd be skeptical, I hope.

So you take a look at the study, and discover that the authors — themselves Ivy League grads — did five experiments.

In the first experiment, they chose three Harvard students who exemplify, in their opinion, the best characteristics of that fine institution, and three students from the University of Michigan, again selected to represent the authors' idea of what such students should be like. They then subjected these six students to a battery of tests of empathy and social intelligence, and found that the three Harvard students scored a bit better than the three Michigan students.

The other four experiments were similar. In the second experiment, the authors selected three Princeton students from among a few dozen student-government leaders, and compared them to three selected representatives of the University of Oregon football team, and three (in their opinion characteristic) young people who did not attend college at all. Experiment 3 tested six new students, three from Yale and three from the University of Arizona, again selected to represent the authors' opinion of what such students should be like. Experiment 4 re-used four of the students from Experiment 3, but substituted two new choices from the same pools. And Experiment 5 re-used five of the six students from Experiment 4, substituting for one participant who seemed on reflection not to be quite of the Right Kind.

At this point, you should be saying to yourself, Wait a minute, this is a total crock! Where was it published, in one of those fake take-the-money-and-run open-access journals?

Next Tuesday, David Skinner's The Story of Ain't is coming out in a new paperback edition, with a new epilog. I'm happy to have this occasion to post an enthusiastic recommendation: You should immediately run out (virtually or physically) and buy this book, in any of its editions.

This year's Penn Reading Project book is Adam Bradley's Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip Hop.  In my discussion group yesterday afternoon, several participants complained that some important things about the "poetics" of rap are lost in a purely textual presentation of the lyrics. One student observed that in pieces he knows, the rhythm is there in the written form — but the lyrics for pieces that he doesn't know seem flat and lifeless in comparison.

There are good reasons that this is more true for the works of Melle Mel or Jay Z than for Elizabeth Barrett Browning or W.H. Auden, I think.

One of the advantages of the weblog format is the combination of text, images, and audio or video clips, so for this morning's Breakfast Experiment™ I decided to present a small exploration of the "poetics of hip hop" in a multimedia — and somewhat quantitative — framework.

This exercise will clarify why transcriptions of the lyrics, even with bold-face indications of stress, are missing an important dimension. The lines' scansion depends not only on the syllable sequence and on where the performer puts phrasal stresses, but also on the alignment of the syllables with the musical meter. This alignment is not automatic or always obvious — it has artistically-relevant degrees of freedom beyond those available in most other genres of text setting.

For those whose appraisal of Bradley's book was (interpreting freely) "not enough vampires and car chases", this will probably make things worse — you have been warned.