Language Log

Henry Kenrick wrote:

I read your posts on Google translations with interest, as just a few days ago I came across a similar example when translating Russian to English.

Below I have copied the text and the Google translation. It's clear there's still some way to go, but some phrases aren't bad. The most interesting artefact was the translation of свердловских (genitive case plural of the adjective for Sverdlovsk region) into Heilongjiang.

Maria Brumm, "Giving the Lie: Blogs and Scientific Criticism", Green Gabbro, 4/6/2008. My favorite paragraph:

This cultural conflict been making the rounds of the geoblogosphere thanks to a pair of editorials in Nature Geoscience on the pros and cons of blogging. See RealClimate and Highly Allochthonous for summaries, Kim (who talks about fact-checking before teaching undergraduates), Chris again (with diagrams!), and James Annan for further discussion. (Incidentally: I am sure the various editors of the Nature Publishing Group are too dignified and professional to dance around their offices going "Oh yeah, baby, who controls the discourse? We control the discourse! UNGH!"… but when was the last time a blog post sparked a rambling article in the pages of EOS or Geology?)

Also worth the price of admission: the pointer to Steven Shapin's A Social History of Truth.

A page at www.justice.gc.ca recommends that people drafting legislation should "consider using the third-person pronouns 'they', 'their', 'them', 'themselves' or 'theirs' to refer to a singular indefinite noun, to avoid the unnatural language that results from repeating the noun".

The page closes with an excellent set of references and quotations — the sources include the Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage and the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Language Log is not cited (nor should it have been), but we may have had some indirect influence, perhaps by providing a theological argument that retains some force even in a secular society like Canada's, or perhaps by offering protection against the intemperate irrationality that these issues sometimes provoke.

Expressions like ^!real comfortable, with a modifier of adjective form preceding the head of an adjective phrase, adverb phrase, or determinative phrase, are characteristic of non-standard dialects. I take that to be simply a factual claim, not a value judgment. In written Standard English prose on serious subjects, outside of dialog, you do not find ^!real comfortable, ^!real friendly, etc. (the exclamation mark prefix is the notational device used in The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language to mark cited examples that are grammatical in some non-standard dialects but not grammatical in any variety of the Standard English dialect).

Some writers of a prescriptivist bent tend to suggest that the speakers who use such phrases are simply too lazy and ignorant to distinguish an adjective from an adverb: ^!real comfortable is wrong, they say, because adjectives like real do not modify adjectives, so the phrase should be corrected to really comfortable. It's simply a matter of slovenliness and inattention. These people should shape up, and learn the difference between an adjective and an adverb.

However, the other day, I heard someone on BBC Radio 4 say There are precious few, and I realized that it thoroughly undercuts the laziness-and-ignorance diagnosis. Precious few is clearly and definitely grammatical in Standard English. And crucially, preciously few is not.

In the 1951 film version of Gershwin's "An American In Paris", Gene Kelly as Jerry Mulligan explains why he's chosen the life of an expatriate:

Back home everyone said I didn't have any talent. They might be saying the same thing over here, but it sounds better in French.

In fact, "everything sounds better in French", and in particular, "pop music sounds better in French". Or at least, many English speakers have been telling themselves things like this for the past couple of centuries. You could look it up.

But the linguistic worm has turned, at least with respect to rock lyrics.

According to Bertrand Dicale "Pourquoi ces Français chantent en anglais", Le Figaro, 11/26/2007,

Le temps est à l’anglais. Pas l’anglais phonétique et scolaire des yé-yé, auxquels les Anglais ne comprenaient rien. La langue anglaise qui se chante aujourd’hui en France est celle du folk contemporain ou de la pop élégante, une langue qui demande beaucoup plus que des cours d’anglais de terminale, et qui aujourd’hui rencontre son public, en France et à l’étranger.

The time belongs to English. Not the phonetic and academic English of yé-yé [link], which English speakers didn't understand at all. The English language in today's songs in France is that of contemporary folk or of elegant pop, a language which requires a lot more than a high-school English course, and which is now finding its audience, in France and abroad.

I missed this article last fall, but yesterday I heard an interview on the BBC World Service with Julien Garnier, from the band Hey Hey My My, who explained (as I recall) that he prefers to write in English, because simple things sound more meaningful in English than they do in French. It struck me that there may be some sort of reciprocal "the other language's grass is greener" effect here, where the extra effort needed to process a foreign language really does create more of (certain kinds of) meanings. (Or a more obvious and less interesting alternative: simple poetic phrases are hard to translate.)

Last week, back in the Paleo-Language-Log Era, I ended a post on "Comparing communication efficiency across languages" with this teaser:

A topic for another time: how do typical speech rates differ between languages? Do these interact with per-syllable measures of information content so as to equalize the average rate of information transmission?

Since I've done nothing to follow up on this note, Max Bane sent in a .pdf of some relevant PowerPoint slides.

In response to Charles Troster's question about a world map showing the adjectival forms of place names, Stephen Powell wrote:

Here's a map of adjective endings for the countries of the world, as suggested by Charles Troster. It was actually very easy to put together using the country data included in Mathematica 6.0; the full code is below.

The key is:
blue = -ese
green = -ian
red = -an
pink = -ish
purple = -i
brown = -er
yellow = -ic
grey = anything else (or Mathematica doesn't know)

It's just matching strings, so Thailand is purple, when that obviously isn't an -i suffix. And Mathematica hasn't recognized Kosovo yet, so that's in green along with (the rest of) Serbia.

(Click on the map to get a larger version.)

In response to my post earlier today on "Sex-neutral 'he': the constitutional question", David Seidman writes:

This has nothing directly to do with your post on the sex-neutral he, but I thought you might be interested in a concurring opinion by Justice Blackmun in a Supreme Court case involving an old statute dealing with law suits over land transactions between Indians and "white person[s]." Justice Blackmun read the term to include black persons, yellow persons, and anyone else who was not an Indian.

Read the rest of this entry »

I've been getting some mail about tricky cases involving the choice between who(ever) and whom(ever), in particular the question of which form to use in examples like

(1) Whoever/whomever you meet there is bound to be interesting.

  versus

(2) Whoever/Whomever meets you there is bound to be helpful.

There are two factors at work here, one of usage and style and one of syntactic structure, but the big point is that for many speakers and writers. whomever is allowed (or required) in (1), but not allowed in (2).  The Wikipedia page on Who gets this right, and correctly attributes the choice of whomever in (1) to the fact that the pronoun is the direct object of meet there.  But it also says that whomever is the SUBJECT of is in (1), which is downright bizarre — and was absolutely baffling to my correspondent Ethan.  And at first, to me, though now I think I now know what's going on.

In response to my post on the quasi-regular morphology of words like Nepalese vs. Tibetan, Charles Troster writes:

The thought occurred to me – wouldn't it be neat to have a map of the world, coloured in by which ending is used to describe its people? I started trying to make one of these myself, and halfway through I realized I was mixing up the adjectival forms and the demonyms willy-nilly. Maybe if someone a bit more into map-making figured out how to do it :)

Even from the portion I did, though, it's quite amazing to get a visual on how certain endings really only hang out in certain parts of the world. However, "-ian" and "-an" are quite universal and they appear a little bit everywhere.

I agree, it would be neat to see such a map. If you know where this has already been done, or if you do it, let me know and I'll post the map or a link to it.

Geoff Pullum has argued in a number of posts that English he can't be a sex-neutral pronoun (e.g. "Lying feminist ideologues wreck English, says Yale prof", 3/2/2008). This question has recently taken on new practical significance, according to an article in the Reno Gazette-Journal by Anjeanette Damon ("Lawsuit: Woman can't be president", 4/9/2008):

In a lawsuit that legal scholars call "amusing," a Reno man is seeking to keep U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton off the Nevada ballot with the argument that the U.S. Constitution prohibits a woman from holding the office.

Douglas Wallace, 80, contends that because the U.S. Constitution relies on the pronouns "he" and "his" in describing the duties of the president, no woman can hold the office.

Wallace argues the constitution would have to be amended to specifically allow a female president and accused Clinton of trying to make an "end run around the Constitution."

"The use of female gendered pronouns 'she' or 'her' are not present in the document, making it conclusive that the framers never intended that a woman would be president of the United States," Wallace wrote in the lawsuit.

On the wall behind the table where I usually sit to blog, there's a framed print, shown in faded miniature on the right. The title below the picture is "Dr. Syntax Making a Discovery".

But there's not a subjunctive or a preterite in sight. The couple in the foreground, though perhaps engaged in discovery, don't look very intellectual. The old geezer in the background seems to be examining a tree — but it's a willow, not a representation of constituent structure or grammatical relations. What gives?

Yesterday, Mr. Verb asked some questions about morphology and politics:

On News Hour just now, I swear I heard Bush talk about the Tibe[tʃ]an people. I'm puzzled. This is a case of /t/, like the last sound in Tibet, affricating, that is, becoming a 'ch' sound. That is hardly in and or itself striking — actually is regularly pronounced a[ktʃ]ually. But this doesn't usually happen in this environment. Put an -an on Montserrat and see if you get a [t] or an affricate for the adjective form for that place. […]

Is there some pattern here I don't know about? Bush wasn't obviously reading, so that kind of reading-based pronunciation error is probably out. Is Bush treating this (by analogy?) like -tion suffixes? Was he extending the pattern of affrication noted above? Is he really and truly not a competent speaker of English? What's happening?

As it happens, this is a question that I can answer.