Language Log

If you read German or Dutch, you may be interested in the recent spate of articles about the newly-compiled Cow/German Dictionary.  I'll wait to comment until after the BBC has scrutinized the story.

No, really, I'll wait until after today's meetings are over, and I've caught up with a few chores after taking the red-eye home last night from Albuquerque via Phoenix. Anyhow, I'm guessing that the dictionary's author, Gerhard Jahns, didn't get a press release into the channels that the BBC reprints…

In fact, Dr. Jahns' research seems to be a serious and long-established project that has reached a new stage, rather than the cheese-company PR stunt behind the BBC's previous cowlingual scoop. At an earlier stage, Jahns' work got extensive coverage back in 2002.

Greg Laden has recently posted an entertaining screed, "Minifalsehood: We can't tell what a word is!?!?", 5/31/2010. I don't have time this morning for a a serious discussion, but I can point to some relevant stuff here, here, here, here, here, here, …

On Saturday, I went to another performance of the Chekhov play that I discussed a couple of days ago. And this time, I was struck by something that was neither in the play's text nor in the performers' interpretation, but rather in the audience's reaction.

"NY man seeking help for stray dog arrested for DWI", AP, 5/30/2010.

A nice nominal-compound crash blossom was spotted by Nicholas Widdows on a BBC News web page:

Missing women police find remains

Like Missing comma, police decide to hire a grammarian, or Missing his mom, Joe called home? No, wait a minute, this isn't about the police missing womanly company — those first two words are not a gerund-participial predicative adjunct. Could missing be a modifier of women police, then? The remains were found in a remote area by some female police officers who had been reported as missing? A bit implausible. What about find? Is that really a tensed verb with plural agreement? Could it be a noun instead (as in a new find), with remains being the main clause verb, as in Paul Simon's line the roots of rhythm remain? No; it's not making any sense at all. You just can't figure out a plausible story.

Last night, I saw an excellent performance of Chekhov's Three Sisters at the Vortex Theater in Albuquerque. I had never seen this play before, and based on descriptions of the plot, I didn't really expect to like it very much, but in fact I thought it was brilliant, in ways that are not captured by a plot summary. It's surprising that this suprised me, since I like Chekhov's short stories very much, and for the same reasons.

Two small linguistic footnotes follow, one intrinsic to the text, and the other related to last night's performance.

From Toothpaste for Dinner, 5/27/2010:

Sex and the City 2 premiered in London last night. Sarah Jessica Parker arrived in a black strapless dress from the house of her favorite British designer, and what she told her fans provided another interesting example of what Mark Liberman noted in a recent post on fashion talk:

There's only one person I could have worn tonight and that was Alexander McQueen.

Ms Parker didn't just say she was wearing Alexander McQueen; she actually used an expression quantifying over persons (only one person) as the understood object of wear (in the sense that she modified person with the relative clause I could have worn ___), and then clarified that the person was Alexander McQueen; and still the metonymic reading survived and was understood by fans and journalists alike.

SMBC from a few weeks ago:

It's bad enough to have to weather a disastrous economic crisis, but now the Greeks are faced with a frog crisis.  Millions of migrating frogs — a veritable carpet of the slippery, slimy fellows — have closed down a major Greek highway near Thessaloniki.

I believe that the usual word for "frog" in modern Greek is batrachos, but all of Greece is referring to the current batrachian horde with the Biblical word tzfardei'a.  In so doing, I suppose they wish to recall the Biblical plague of frogs that God inflicted on Egypt (the second of ten plagues that he sent against the Egyptians).  In fact, the plague of frogs was meant as an attack on the Egyptian frog goddess Heqt, whose job it was to assist women in labor.

From Don Snow:

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This from a sign in a Nanjing subway station directing people to important places:

中共省委党校
Commie Academy of Provinial (sic) Committe of Chinese Communist Party

I can see why they wanted to shorten the English translation a bit, but still….Commie?

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Martin Gardner would have like the mouseover title text on the latest xkcd:

And of course I had to redo this like three times because I kept writing 'UNTIE'; I kept doing 'doing 'doing it wrong' wrong' wrong.

We've often discussed the stylistic choice between hypotaxis, where semantic and pragmatic relations are signaled with explicit connectives and syntactic embedding, and parataxis, which relies more heavily on context and common sense to communicate the same relationships, using phrases strung together like beads on a string.

The paratactic style is more modern, more demotic, and usually shorter. But sometimes, as in the case of this flashing highway sign, it's also harder to interpret: