Language Log

I think I've gotten this one wrong a few times myself:

(The headline was corrected a few minutes ago…)

Over the years, here at Language Log we've examined countless examples of Chinglish, that inimitable brand of English spewed out by bad translation software and incompetent human translators. The mirror of this phenomenon going in the other direction has been referred to as Zhonglish, which is defined in the Urban Dictionary as "The mangled, garbled, butchered, malapropriated or trashed Chinese spoken by native speakers of English."

I touched upon Zhonglish briefly last year ("Xinhua English and Zhonglish", 2/4/2009), but now (on a Chinese social networking site) I've come across a wonderful example of written Zhonglish that merits more extensive discussion — the multilingual warning sign at the entrance to the world-famous roller coaster known as the Coney Island Cyclone:

It may be time for newsreaders worldwide to start polishing up their pre-stopped laterals again. The automatic earthquake-location system at the Iceland Meteorological Office's Department of Geophysics has been starting to show some small earthquakes under Eyjafjallajökull's bigger neighbor, Mýrdalsjökull:

Did you know Zulu has a word for "annoying three-foot-long one-note plastic trumpet"? Isn't that fascinating?

No. Of course it isn't fascinating. It's a wonderful example of why I tend to think the issue of what things different languages have words for (especially, have nouns for) is stupid and trivial.

In today's Get Fuzzy, Bucky explains why a "universal remote" is hard to operate in the earthly here-and-how:

In the "halfalogues" research that I've discussed in a couple of posts recently ("Halfalogues", 6/9/2010; "Halfalogues onward", 6/11/2010), one of the experimental manipulations was intended to establish that "it is the unpredictable informational content of halfalogues that result [sic] in distraction", and not (for example) that the distraction is simply caused by an acoustic background that comes and goes at irregular intervals like those of conversational turns.

As I suggested in passing, the method that was used for this experimental control has some intrinsic problems, and the paper doesn't give enough information for us to judge how problematic it was. Today I'm going to explain those remarks in a bit more detail. (Nerd Alert: if you don't care about the methodology of psychophysical experimentation, you may want to turn your attention to some of our other fine posts.)

In response to Wednesday's post on the (media response to the) "halfalogues" research, Lauren Emberson sent me a copy of the as-yet-unpublished paper, and so I can tell you a little more about the work. As Lauren agreed in her note to me, it was bad practice for Cornell University to put out a press release on May 19, well before the paper's publication date.

It's apparently normal for journalists to write science stories purely on the basis of press releases, sometimes eked out with a few quotes from an interview. And when the press releases are misleading, this can lead to a spectacular effervescence of nonsense.

However, I'm happy to say that in this case, the press release is an accurate (though brief) description of the research, and as a result, the media coverage is also generally accurate if incomplete. (The earlier post links to a generous sample of it.)

Forwarded to Victor Mair by Jeff DeMarco, two photos of English stream-of-consciousness signage on the window of a jazz bar in Xi'an. Above:

Doonesbury's view, imagining that BP has hired Uncle Duke to handle its PR:

The Onion's take: "Massive flow of bullshit continues to gush from BP headquarters".

Recently in the news, a (not yet published?) study by Lauren Emberson and MIchael Goldstein, on why "halfalogues" are so annoying. Thus "Eavesdropping a waste of energy", ABC Science:

Ever wonder why overhearing a phone conversation is so annoying? American researchers think they have found the answer.

Whether it is the office, on a train or in a car, only hearing half of a conversation drains more attention and concentration than when overhearing two people talking, according to scientists at Cornell University.

"We have less control to move away our attention from half a conversation, or 'halfalogue', than when listening to a dialogue," says Lauren Emberson, a co-author of the study that will be published in the journal Psychological Science.

"Since halfalogues really are more distracting and you can't tune them out, this could explain why people are irritated," she says.

The Economist's article on the Cumbrian shooting rampage opens with this nicely styled and balanced sentence:

"It's like watching something from America," said one resident of Whitehaven, a gentle Georgian town on the north-western English coast. [The Economist 5 June 2010 p.33]

The subject of said has been postposed. This improves intelligibility because the subject is rather long (it has an attached supplement, the noun phrase a gentle Georgian town on the north-western English coast).

Now compare the following glaringly inept piece of style from a recent issue of The New Yorker:

"Galleries and magazines send him things, and he doesn't even open them," Zhao Zhao, a younger artist who works as one of Ai's assistants, said. [The New Yorker 24 May 2010 p.56]

Grossly and unnecessarily clumsy, and hard to process. What on earth is wrong with them?

When Bob LeDrew sent in the headline "Other medical isotope cuts wait in Ottawa", I figured that it really meant something like "earlier attempts to cut spending on medical isotopes may not be enough, and so the Canadian national government has contingency plans to reduce expenditures further", while allowing the humorous misinterpretation that an alternative choice of isotope is reducing delays in the capital city.

But I was wrong, as the article's opening shows:

—Nor the comet that came unannounced out of the north, flaring in heaven; Nor the strange huge meteor procession, dazzling and clear, shooting over our heads, (A moment, a moment long, it sail’d its balls of unearthly light over our heads, Then departed, dropt in the night, and was gone;)

— Exerpt from Walt Whitman's Year of Meteors, 1859