Language Log

The department that it is my privilege to lead runs a colloquium series that begins this year on Thursday 30 September with a myth-busting talk by our own Professor John Joseph, about what he calls "the least understood book in the entire history of linguistics". I'll be there, and on the edge of my seat. Because I've never seen anyone try to link Indo-European comparative phonological reconstruction to bisexuality before.

Recent mixtures of English into everyday use in other languages evoke mixed reactions, from amusement through annoyance to alarm.  It's important to recognize that this sort of thing has been going on for a long time — probably just as about as long as there have been languages to mix. And it's likely that reactions towards the negative end of the spectrum have also been around for many thousands of years.

Over the next few weeks, I'll post a few older examples. But I'll start with a relatively recent instance: the role of French in the speech of educated Russians of the 18th and 19th centuries.

The Chinglish that I write about regularly is only one member of a burgeoning brood of English hybrid languages.  Other well-known congeners of Chinglish are Franglais and Spanglish.  Perhaps less well known, but equally colorful, is Denglish, that variety of German (Deutsch) that has absorbed a conspicuous amount of poorly assimilated English elements.  In a discussion of "word rage" entitled "Shooting too Good" (November 05, 2005), Mark Liberman mentioned Denglish, but it seems to me that this quirky brand of Englishy German deserves greater exposure.  To that end, I present here a hitherto unpublished text entitled "Wok and Roll" (real name of a restaurant in Munich) by (Professor) Antony Tatlow of  Hong Kong University / Trinity College Dublin, now retired.

From the first comment on Paul Krugman's blog post "Rat Race America", 9/19/2010, a rare first-person singular their:

I'm a tech entrepreneur who works their brains out and has had some success for myself and my investors. I live among hedge fund guys and VC's who take home $1m/year +.

An adventure in layered possessives, courtesy of Christopher Buckley, "No One Likes a Deficit Bore", The Atlantic, 9/20/2010:

Michael and our fellow commentators seem to go back and forth on the matter of whose deficit is it, anyway? Good arguments are made on both sides. But they're beside the point. The more pressing question is: Whose cliff is it we're driving off? And the answer to that is: ours. All ours.

Several weeks ago, Ian Mair sent me this enigmatic photograph from Hangzhou.

The sign intrigued me as much as it did Ian. I could see what looked like a marijuana leaf and the name HANP, so I assumed that it was a Chinglishy misspelling of "hemp." But tree foliage covered up the bottom of the sign, so I didn't feel confident about trying to figure out if this was an ad for Mary Jane (highly unlikely in the PRC) or something else entirely (e.g., was HANP an acronym?).

Curious to get to the bottom of the sign, Ian took the time to go back to that part of the city and take another photograph from up close and looking up from below.

Once again, our man in Hangzhou, Ian Mair (no relation), has spotted a splendid Chinglish sign:

At first I was puzzled by why the Ramada Hotel Hangzhou would want to put its customers at risk, but it only took a few seconds before I realized what must have happened.  Where the sign has yòu yī jù xiàn 又一巨献 ("another great offering"), the person who was tasked with rendering the sign into English must have entered you yi ju xian, not paying attention to the tones, and what came out was yòu yī jù xiǎn 又一巨险 ("another great danger / risk").  Admittedly, if you drink too much at Oktoberfest, you might put yourself at risk, but I don't think that's what the Ramada management had in mind.

In the recent case of Berghuis v. Thompkins [560 U.S.____(2010) (docket 08-1470)] the U.S. Supreme Court ruled five to four that persons being interviewed by the police are required to articulate their answers to the Miranda warning that they have the right to remain silent. The case originated when Van Chester Thompkins was being questioned about a shooting in which one person was killed. Instead of invoking his Miranda right to remain silent, Thompkins simply remained silent, which is what the warning seemed to be allowing him to do. In fact, he remained silent through two hours and forty-five minutes of questioning, at which point the detective asked him if he believed in God and prayed, to which Thompkins spoke for the first time, saying "yes." The detective then asked him, "Do you pray to God to forgive you for shooting the boy down?" Thompkins again answered "yes," but refused to produce a written statement.

My post on "Possessive with gerund: Tragic loss or good riddance?" (9/18/2010) has gotten me deeper than is probably wise into a field where I know very little. But having splashed on in, I might as well keep wading forwards a little further.  In particular, a bit of poking around on Google Scholar turned up some relevant recent work, especially Liesbet Heyvaert et al., "Pronominal Determiners in Gerundive Nominalization: A 'Case' Study", English Studies 86(1): 71-88, 2005.

Well, my copy of the new English-Chinese Chinese-English (hereafter ECCE) Oxford Chinese Dictionary (hereafter OCD) from Oxford University Press has arrived, and I must admit that it is very big and very impressive.  There has been a lot of buzz about this dictionary in the last couple of weeks, most of it generated by their own publicity department, working with the media.

In some comments on yesterday's "Possessive with gerund" post, the traditional distinction between gerunds and present participles was assumed. Because all English "gerunds" and all English "present participles" have exactly the same form, namely VERB+ing, and because the space of constructions where these forms appear is large and not obviously subject to binary division, my few attempts as a schoolboy to distinguish the two in English were mostly random guesses. I always suspected that the teacher's answer key had no better foundation.

Therefore I was happy when Geoffrey Pullum and Rodney Huddleston, in the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, presented a clear and compelling argument that "A distinction between gerund and present participle can't be sustained" (pp. 80-83 and 1220-1222). They therefore use the merged category "gerund-participle". I hope that most of you will be as happy about this development as I was.

Prescriptive rules are often the result of someone's idiosyncratic attempt to apply logic to a half-understood question of linguistic analysis. In promoting his new book Strictly English, Simon Heffer recently provided us with two examples ("English grammar: Not for debate",  9/11/2010, and "Mr. Heffer huffs again", 9/12/2010).

Such exercises are sometimes motivated by a genuine change in the language, which brings some particular question to the would-be logician's attention.  Thus Ben Zimmer pointed out ("Further 'warning'", 9/12/2010) that Mr. Heffer's worry about intransitive warn correlates with a century-long trend of increasing use, originating in the U.S. and spreading to the U.K.

But in some cases, prescriptive confusion has reigned for centuries on both sides of the Atlantic, because usage is mixed and the idiosyncratic logic of self-appointed experts has pointed in different directions. In this morning's Breakfast Experiment™, I planned to discuss one such example and present some historical evidence. But as often happens, the facts turned out to be more interesting than I expected.

The Colbert Suffix -iness rises again, this time in the title of Charles Seife's latest book, Proofiness, subtitled The Dark Arts of Mathematical Deception (Viking, officially to be released next week). I read a brief review by Janet Maslin in the NYT on Thursday, and now Steven Strogatz has done a more substantial review for tomorrow's Book Review (on-line here). Strogatz (a professor of applied mathematics at Cornell) on the truthiness-proofiness connection:

The numerical cousin of truthiness is proofiness: “the art of using bogus mathematical arguments to prove something that you know in your heart is true — even when it’s not.”