Language Log

Whenever I fly on non-Indian carriers to India or there are Indians (South Asians) on non-Indian carriers flying elsewhere, I often encounter individuals who complain that they cannot eat the special meals that they ordered.

Steward(ess):  But, sir, you ordered a vegetarian meal, didn't you?

Passenger:  Yes, but I cannot eat this kind of vegetarian meal.

Steward(ess):  I can assure you, sir / ma'am, that our vegetarian meals have no meat or meat products in them.

Passenger:  But what you have given me has X, Y, Z in it.  I cannot eat it.  Please get me something else.

Steward(ess):  I am sorry, we do not have any other kinds of vegetarian meals.

Whereupon the passenger pulls out some biscuits from his / her carry-on bag and survives on them and whatever else he / she can scrounge up for the duration of the flight.

Stefan Krasowski recently booked a flight on India's Jet Airways.  Here are the choices he was offered for meals:

From yesterday's mail:

An idle question from a big Language Log fan:  Do you have any idea if the nice folks in, say Germany or Italy or Spain, go as nuts as Americans seem to when native speakers make "fundamental" grammar errors?

It appears that the strong form of "going nuts" that we've called word rage is mainly an Anglophone phenomenon, with the British as the originators and still the champions. But the sociolinguistic settings in Germany, Italy, and Spain are very different from the situation in the U.S. — and as a result, they have their own kinds of language wars over there.

Those who enjoyed Penny Arcade's take on ghey may also like Jay Smooth's "Old Person's Guide to 'No Homo'":

It's a strange fact about social scientists that hardly any of them, in recent years, have paid any analytic attention to language, which is the main medium of human social interaction.  At schools of "communication", you'll generally find that neither the curriculum nor the faculty's research publications feature much if any analysis of speech and language. In other disciplines — sociology, social psychology, economics, history — you'll find even less of it. (The main systematic exception, Linguistic Anthropology, deserves a separate discussion — but the conclusion of such a discussion, I believe, would note a steep decline in empirical linguistic analysis. And of course I'm leaving out sociolinguistics, which is healthy enough but largely alienated from the rest of the social sciences.)

There are notable exceptions of several kinds, such as Erving Goffman, Manny Schegloff, or Jamie Pennebaker. But such work emphasizes the paradox, since it shows that we can't blame the effect on a lack of intellectual opportunity.

Jonathan Coulton, "Soft Rocked By Me", 11/21/2008:

(The relevant part of the song starts about 1:00 in, or use this link, since time offsets don't work in YouTube embedding. But Coulton's pre-song explanation is also part of the package: "… ladies like a sensitive man — a little bit — but you don't want to go too far…")

Another opinion piece for our passive voice file: Marie Murray, "The passive voice is the penultimate weapon of denial", The Irish Times, 7/31/2009:

The passive voice is especially useful where apologies are required: personal apologies for what people have done personally. Because instead of having to say, “I’m sorry”, the passive voice allows a culprit to say “It is regrettable”. Instead of saying “I made a mistake” the abstract term “mistakes happened” can be evoked.

The photograph below, taken earlier this month in Beijing, shows some of the best English-language bloggers now writing about language and culture in China and Taiwan.

A reader asks why it is (as it seems to him) increasingly common for Americans to say "August seven" instead of "August seventh" or "August the seventh" for 08/07/09 ("Coming August seven to a theater near you!"). I have done no investigation on this (it would need intensive quantitative corpus study over dated corpora that do not have Google's propensity for collapsing common typographical variants). The reader may be wrong to think the practice has been increasing: the Recency Effect has not been repealed. So I offer nothing but the following observation. For some time there has been a trend toward abolishing typographical clutter in print ("Mr Jones" for "Mr. Jones"; even "ie" and "eg" for "i.e." and "e.g."), particularly though not exclusively in published American English; and American English also idiomatically eliminates various prepositions here and there (as in "See you Tuesday" for "See you on Tuesday"). If such abbreviatory practices led to writing "7" for "7th" or "the 7th", spelling pronunciation might be responsible for the resultant habit spreading in spoken American English.

The entry on like as a conjunction in Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage quotes Shakespeare as using "conjunctive like" in this line:

And yet no man like he doth grieve my heart.
Romeo and Juliet, 1595

Commenting on the recent flurry of commentary about the political first person singular, D.G. Myers has some thoughts on "Self-reference and narcissicism":

Person reflects genre. Despite the fact that he is an eighteenth-century author like Sterne and Chesterfield, Franklin uses the first person more often because he is writing an autobiography, a literary kind that, except when it is an exercise in voluble self-concealment, like The Education of Henry Adams, depends helplessly upon the first person. Similarly, to accuse David Copperfield of “ego-involvement”—he uses some form of the first person 6.3% of the time—does not seem quite right. David is as much a “camera” as Christopher in The Berlin Stories; he is at least as interested in the people in his life as in himself.

The discussion following my original post ("A Little Primer of Xinjiang Proper Nouns", 7/13/2009) has proven quite edifying, at least to me.  One thing that I realized from the lively comments is that I forgot to give an indication of how the name Xinjiang itself should be pronounced.  There's also the question of what sort of "pronouncers" or "respellings" to provide for speakers of American English who need to pronounce these names but cannot be expected to render them exactly the way a native speaker of Uyghur would.

I must preface the following remarks by stating that I'm probably not the best person to offer standard American English readings of these names because I'm a fluent speaker of Mandarin and know a bit of Uyghur. Consequently, when I want to say these words as an American would, I'm afraid that my Mandarin and my Uyghur get in the way. Still, I will make an honest effort to separate the three modes and offer useful guides for speakers of American English.

One of yesterday's guests on Radio Times with Marty Moss-Coane was Arika Okrent, author of In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers, and the Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build A Perfect Language. You can listen (or download the mp3) here.

I don't know very much about the history of invented languages, so I'm looking forward to reading her book.

[Update: a transcript of Okrent's interview with Gelf magazine is here.]

Following the serious unrest in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of the Peoples Republic of China that erupted last week, "Xinjiang," "Uyghur," "Urumchi," and other names pertaining to the region have become household words.  Unfortunately, people around the world have been confused about how to pronounce these words.  This is understandable for several reasons.  In the first place, we have to confront both the original Uyghur terms and their full and truncated versions in Mandarin.  Second, there is often a plethora of variant romanizations for each name.

Ed Wong, the New York Times correspondent who has been keeping us so well informed about the events as they unfold, told me that the NYT had

"received an email from a reader saying the NYT should change its 'pronouncer' on Uighurs.  Right now, in our articles, the editors insert (WEE-gurs) as the pronouncer.  One reader said this is not the correct pronunciation, and sounds strange to the Turkic speaker’s ear."

As I told Ed, it would have been helpful if the person who sent the NYT the e-mail would have indicated the correct pronunciation, not just told them that WEE-gurs sounds wrong.

In an attempt to clarify how the most important  Xinjiang names are actually pronounced in Uyghur and in Mandarin, I here provide various orthographic forms along with audio clips.  As to what sort of "pronouncers" should be developed for the major media, presumably to represent appropriate Americanized pronunciations, I invite suggestions.

[Update: I give "pronouncers" and recordings of suggested American English renditions in a later post, "American English pronunciation of Uyghur proper nouns", 7/15/2009.)