Language Log

Inspired by Geoffrey Pullum's plan to take Barbara her matutinal coffee at exactly 08:08:08 on the morning of 08/08/08, this morning at 08:08:08 a.m. I took 8 photographs of my wife standing next to our favorite orchid, which has had a total of 8 blossoms.

Yes, everything is coming up 8's today. The morning news made a big fuss over how the uniforms of the American Olympians consist of 8 pieces. And everybody (except perhaps Mark Spitz and a billion Chinese) is rooting for Michael Phelps to win 8 gold medals. And today, of course, is very special for New York Times reporter Jennifer 8. Lee who, by the way, wrote an excellent article back in 2001 about the impact of computers on the ability of Chinese to write characters by hand.

The airwaves are full of instant pundits informing us how important 8 is for Chinese because BA1 八 sounds like FA1 发／發 and FA1, among many other things too numerous to list here, can mean "get rich, make a fortune, become wealthy." So as not to sound too crass, those who explain the Chinese attachment to 8 usually say that it signifies "prosper(ity)" — I guess a lot depends upon what one understands "prosper(ity)" to mean! One hears this sort of sentiment most often during Chinese New Year celebrations when people go around saying (and writing endlessly on greeting cards) GONG1XI3 FA1CAI2, Cantonese GONGHAI/HEI FAT CHOI 恭喜发财 ("Congratulations and May You Get Rich!").

Britt Peterson's article on Literary Darwinism in the most recent Chronicle of Higher Education Review ("Darwin to the Rescue") points to the use of numbers as a central doctrinal conflict in literary scholarship:

[Northrup] Frye argued that, while the critic should understand the natural sciences, "he need waste no time in emulating their methods. I understand there is a Ph.D. thesis somewhere which displays a list of Hardy's novels in the order of the percentages of gloom they contain, but one does not feel that that sort of procedure should be encouraged."

Over the last decade or so, however, a cadre of literary scholars has begun to encourage exactly that sort of procedure, and recently they have become very loud about it.

I find Japanese to be YUNIIKU ("unique") in many respects. One of the most fascinating aspects of Japanese (aside from the enormous number of GAIRAIGO 外來語 ["loanwords"]) is the large amount of onomatopoeic expressions that may be drawn upon to add spice to almost anything that one wishes to say.

The immediate cause of my current reflections on Japanese onomatopoeia is a nifty translation aid for Japanese that goes by the name Perapera-kun ("Mr. Perapera"). (There's also a version for Chinese.)

I'm always happy to learn new things about playground culture. Like language, it's somehow completely consistent and endlessly variable across time and space. And now that my main source for contemporary playground lore (e.g. "Pickle jinx", 12/16/2003; "High jinx", 12/17/2003) has graduated to new sorts of games, I have to rely on internet clues like this:

The phrase "no tagbacks" is familiar from my childhood — and the concept presumably goes back to paleolithic times — but the use of "blackjack" in this context is new to me. And in this particular case, the internet has so far failed to provide the answer. [Update: but Ray Girvan came through].

"Are you a different person when you speak a different language?" That's the headline of the press release, released from embargo on June 17, describing David Luna, Torsten Ringberg & Laura Peracchio, "One Individual, Two Identities", Journal of Consumer Research, August 2008.

The press headlines (not many, so far) echo the same idea: "How Switching Language Can Change Your Personality" (Reuters and New Scientist, published at ABC News); "Switching languages could cause you to switch personalities" (Discovery Reports, Canada); "Change in language alters personality" (IT Examiner, India — subhead "Oh, fickle woman"); "People switch personality with language" (Times of India);  "For bilinguals, a distinct personality for each language" (Agence France Presse).

The Times of India took this language = personality concept as the basis for an editorial, "Why not adopt American English?":

Many Indians consider American English infra dig. But it's time we got over this distaste. A recent survey has found that people unconsciously switch their personality when they change languages.

Since American English is by far the most dominant language today, anyone who wants to be a confident player in a globalised world has to speak the American lingo.

But in fact, as the press release and most of the articles explain, it's only bicultural individuals who were found to change their personality when changing languages (where "bicultural" means not identifying strongly with the dominant culture of either language). And it was only certain bilingual individuals who were studied: Hispanic-American women living in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. And it was only certain aspects of their personality that were measured: degree of self-sufficiency vs. other-dependence, along with some related gender-role associations. And (as the press release and the articles don't tell us) those aspects of their personality didn't change all that much.