Language Log

In the spirit of Geoff Pullum's lyrical prescriptive poppycock offering, I can offer some Raymond Chandler in verse and letter. And this being Language Log, I will follow it with a light dessert of cheap science. Here's a small sample of Chandler's 1947 poem Lines to a Lady With an Unsplit Infinitive for your edification:

There ain't no grammar that equals a hammer
To nail down a cut-rate wit.

And the verb 'to be' as employed by me
Is often and lightly split.

A lot of my style (so-called) is vile
For I learned to write in a bar.

The marriage of thought to words was wrought
With many a strong sidecar.

In several recent posts (and in many earlier posts as well), we have discussed some of the ways in which English has had an impact upon Chinese:

• "'Have a good day!' in Mandarin"
• "Creeping Romanization in Chinese"
• "New radicals in an old writing system"

But the Westernization of Chinese reaches far beyond the types of influences and borrowings described in previous Language Log posts.  Testimony of the extent to which this goes comes from a Chinese friend:

My mother, as I've mentioned before, said to me about ten years ago: "I often have difficulty understanding the Chinese in the newspapers," even though Chinese is her mother tongue and her only language, and she is well educated. I find it's because the Chinese newspaper's sentences are now a direct translation from English, with English, not traditional Chinese, grammar and vocabulary. The Chinese language is becoming inexorably westernized.

In a comment on yesterday's post, "Ask Language Log: '… would like to have VERBed'?", John Lawler quoted the phrase "I would of like to of seen it in person", as used in student papers.

Such things are certainly all over the internet, often in the writings of people who are clearly well past their student days:

Would of like to of come, but I'll still be in West Palm Beach.
Just would of like to of seen the World of Tanks and the Museum get a little more exposure.
I would of like to of seen a playmaker in there at least somewhere in midfield,

But the fact is, traditional spelling aside, "I would of like to of seen it" is exactly how I pronounce the phrase myself.

Over at Lingua Franca, where I do weekly blog posts for The Chronicle of Higher Education, I tried to refer to some ongoing research other day, and called it that, and I was slapped down by my editor (she knows the New York Times style manual prohibitions far too well), quoting a remark by the managing editor: "If I see someone using ongoing in The Chronicle, I will be downcoming and he or she will be outgoing."

Lexical fascism! They would fire me for using ongoing as an adjective? Thank goodness for Language Log, I thought, where lexical liberty survives. So I'm back over here today, choosing my own words, ruminating resentfully on this stylistic bullying.

Slate has an article lambasting Sweden's growing enthusiasm for total gender neutrality, and it raises the profile of a move, actually originating in the mid 1960s, to get hen established as a new pronoun meaning "he/she/it", eliminating the forced choice between han "he" and hon "she".

On a billboard advertising an investment firm is a photo of a young-middle-aged guy described by Caroline Sams (on Twitter, 6 Nov 2012) as a "smug George Clooney look-alike" she'd like to punch. The slogan below his handsome twinkly-eyed unpunched face says:

I ask my team for 100%. If they give me more is OK too.

Another Twitter user asked if that second sentence isn't missing some commas or some extra words or something. But I think not. I think we have an incipient new construction here. I think this is an if-phrase used as subject of a clause in a way that isn't quite the same as anything I've seen before (I could be wrong). The semantic interpretation of if they give me more here has to be something like "for them to give me more".

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.

Throughout my whole life it has been the standard British English metaphor for Sisyphean tasks, the jobs that are endless because by the time you get to the end you need to start over: It's like painting the Forth Bridge.

It is legendary that after finishing the magnificent rail bridge over the Firth of Forth north-west of Edinburgh in 1890 they started repainting it, and a hundred years later they were still at it. Every time they painted their way to the far end, which took years, the paint had worn off where they had started, and they had to go back over there and begin again immediately.

But there was a new development this week: they finally finished the job, and stopped. Now the simile's future looks bleak.

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-".

The following is a letter written by Ives Goddard and Bruno Frohlich of the Department of Anthropology at the Smithsonian Institution in response to the paper by Q. D. Atkinson claiming that the distribution of speech sounds in the world's languages demonstrates a single point of origin for human languages in Africa. Mark discussed this paper here. The letter was submitted to Science, which declined to publish it.

Rodney Huddleston points out to me a remarkable development in English that seems to both of us fairly new (though of course we may be in the grip of the Recency Illusion). English adjectives generally don't take noun phrase (NP) complements. (A complement is a phrase that accompanies a word to make up a phrase having that word as head — for example, something appropriate to a particular adjective that you can add after it to make up an adjective phrase.) The number of exceptions is extraordinarily small: one example is worth (notice how we say worth my time, not *worth of my time). Such exceptional adjectives have long been noted; Fowler comments on worth in his Modern English Usage (1926), and points out that it could be called a transitive adjective. But such adjectives are extremely rare in the dictionary. And yet some new ones appear to have been creeping into the language.

The word random is being used with a new meaning by young people in Britain (or in Edinburgh, anyway), as Miriam Meyerhoff first pointed out to me. The new meaning is nothing like "distributed according to chance". Young people will see a surprising thing and say, "Wow, that's random!".

A note in "Random Samples" in the July 9 Science relates how in graduate school, evolutionary biologist James Harriman

wondered whether [quirks of personal taste in drinks] evolve into popular cocktails much as mutations give rise to new species, through a sort of taste-based natural selection.

So Harriman, now a visiting scientist at Cornell University, fired up a computer program for generating phylogenetic trees. Instead of genes, he plugged in the ingredients of 100 cocktails, taking vodka as the tree's common ancestor. The program divided cocktails into several distinct families–drinks based on champagne or Irish cream , for example, or punch bowl drinks … A poster of the tree, which doubles as a mixology guide, is available online [for $20] from ThinkGeek.

Such programs do phylogenetic reconstruction based on the Darwinian assumption of descent with modification from a common ancestor. The trick is in the mathematics, of course, but otherwise this is the program of comparative reconstruction suggested to Darwin by the achievements of 19th-century historical linguistics (and ultimately traceable back to the reasoning used by philologists in studying manuscript descent), though in these other applications there is usually no stipulating the common ancestor (vodka in the cocktail case).