Language Log

Yesterday, 10 November, was International Human Rights Day, and for the occasion two San Franciscans spearheaded a protest and boycott (across the U.S.) on behalf of gay rights and in opposition to California's Proposition 8 (which banned same-sex marriage).  Two points of linguistic interest: the name of the event is "A Day Without a Gay" (sometimes reported as "A Day Without Gays"), and people are encouraged to "call in gay" to work.

In yesterday's post on "what's will?", I rashly asserted that "the commonest way to express a future-time meaning is indeed to use the auxiliary verb will". This provoked immediate questions and counter-claims. So I promised to devote a Breakfast Experiment™ to quantifying the choice among alternative verb forms used to express future time in English.

In its article on Google's year-end "Zeitgeist" listings of the most searched terms, BBC News reports:

The things people around the globe have in common are a strong interest in socialising and politics, according to Marissa Mayer, vice president of search at Google.

"Social networks compromised four out of the top ten global fastest-rising queries while the US election held everyone's interest around the globe," she wrote on Google's official blog.

I checked back on the Google Blog and what Mayer wrote was:

Social networks comprised four out of the top 10 global fastest-rising queries, while the U.S. election held everyone's interest around the globe.

So the BBC editors, besides changing 10 to ten and removing the comma before while, apparently also changed comprised to compromised. A fascinating miscorrection (or incorrection, if you prefer).

Linguification is still alive and well. In a Morning Edition interview on NPR today Rob Chametzky heard Condoleezza Rice saying, "To mention Robert Mugabe in the same sentence with the President of the United States is an outrage." No it isn't.

In connection with the previous post, and in the spirit of the season, I can't resist adding this:

Yesterday's email brought this sensible question from Judith Parker, a middle-school teacher at The Philadelphia School:

In the grammar text we are perusing, the concept of modals has raised its head.  The words "The nice thing about modern grammarians is that they have reduced the number of TENSES in English to just two, PRESENT and PAST.  Notice even WILL (formerly considered to represent the future tense) is really a PRESENT TENSE MODAL expressing present time intent or will…..)"

The class and I are perplexed.  How wide-spread is this thinking?  Can you explain this, particularly the WHY this change came about, and let us know how widely accepted this concept is?  It has not crept into most grammar books that kids use.  I told them that I would ask a linguist about this since my linguistic studies are in a distant past.

Let me try to give a short answer to start with.

It's convenient to talk about past, present, and future time, and it's convenient to call the commonly-associated English verb forms past, present, and future tense: "we liked it; we like it; we'll like it." But when you look more carefully at the whole pattern of possibilities for English tensed verbs, I think that you (and your class) will see the force of the argument that English doesn't really have a future tense form, even though it has many ways to express a future-time meaning.

it's true that a common way to express a future-time meaning is indeed to use the auxiliary verb will — but from a syntactic point of view, will is used in the same way as the class of words generally called "modal auxiliaries", such as can, may, might, must, should, and would.

Furthermore, a closer look at the meanings of will suggests that it doesn't really express future time, but rather has the same sort of relationship to time-meanings that (for example) may does.

The terminology remains variable, but at least since Otto Jespersen a hundred years ago, many grammarians working on English have taken all this to mean that English has only two basic tenses, present and past. (Well, Jespersen called the past tense by the old-fashioned name "preterit" — but as I said, the terminology varies.)

Watching the new DVD release of the patriotic World War II musical This is the Army recently, when listening to champion boxer Joe Louis in a cameo delivering his one line, I found myself thinking of, of all people, Tina Fey.

Specifically, what came to mind was her movie of earlier this year, Baby Mama, whose title was one of assorted indications of late that baby mama, the black American inner-city term referring to a woman one has had children with but is not married to, has become mainstream. Further evidence was when Fox News used the term in a teaser graphic last summer in reference to Michelle Obama ("Outraged liberals: stop picking on Obama’s baby mama"). Graceless, but in its assumption that viewers were familiar with the term, indicative.

Hunt up the derivation of the term these days and even the OED has fallen for a tasty but mistaken idea that the source is Jamaican Creole ("patois"), in which there is a term "baby-mother". However, the chance that a random locution from Jamaican Creole becomes common coin across all of black America is small—a fluent speaker of Black English could go several years without uttering a single word born in Jamaican Creole. Plus, usually the Jamaican term doesn’t really mean what baby mama does, referring more generally to a pregnant woman.

Anyone following the national news in the US yesterday — and perhaps many of you following international news elsewhere — has undoubtedly heard about the tragic crash of an F/A-18D fighter jet in San Diego yesterday morning. (The pilot managed to eject safely, but the plane crashed into a house, killing "[a] mother, her young child and the child's grandmother".) The fighter was on a training mission over the Pacific Ocean, and according to reports had already lost an engine over the ocean. Nevertheless, the pilot was apparently instructed to fly the jet to the Miramar Marine Corps Air Station, which requires flying over residential and business areas just south of UC San Diego (where my basement office in Language Log Plaza is located). This is where the plane crashed.

Can you translate games, in the sense that you can translate languages? More precisely, can you translate an instance of one game — a match or a round or whatever — into an instance of another game, as you can translate a sentence or a paragraph of Chinese into a sentence or a paragraph of English?

Helen DeWitt sensibly says that you can't. But I think that there's more to the story.

Today I was chatting with three of our visiting graduate students from the PRC.  Thinking that I was being au courant, I mentioned the expression DUI4XIANG4 對象 ("boy/girl friend" < "target; object"); I knew very well that no one would say something so creepy and out-of-date as NAN2PENG2YOU and NÜ3PENG2YOU.  But all three of them (two women and one man) simultaneously laughed and said, "That's so old-fashioned, Professor Mair!"  So I asked them, "What do you say now?"  I was amazed when they told me, "We just say 'BF' and 'GF'."  Of course, I knew right away that they meant "boy friend" and "girl friend," but I thought such usages were confined to short text messaging, chat rooms, bulletin boards, and so forth, where they are indeed extremely widespread.  What struck me is that "BF" and "GF" are part of their spoken Chinese vocabulary as well.

TA1 SHI4 WO3DE BF 他是我的bf ("He's my boy friend") is a perfectly good Mandarin sentence.  I suppose that one could refer to this as a kind of code-switching, but I suspect that BF and similar expressions function as assimilated Chinese terms.  Acronymic loan words?  I'm really not sure what to call them, but they certainly are prevalent in the language as spoken and written today.

In a series of comments on a recent post, Stephen Jones observed that "The Iranians have a detergent called 'Barf'"; and Language Hat explained that "That would be because barf is the Farsi word for 'snow'"; and Merri added this:

Speaking of modified brand names, this is a good place to recall that the washing stuff "Dreft" -a purely arbitrary name- was at first coined as Drek, until somebody at P&G realized that this is the Yiddish word for s**t.

The trouble is, these stories about cross-language branding disasters generally turn out to be urban legends. I dissected one of them a few months ago, dealing with the alleged fate of the Ford Pinto brand in Brazil ("The Factoid Acquisition Device"). And we've discussed a number of other such legends over the years, with the result so that I've come to wonder whether any of the language-related stories that marketing professors tell their students are ever true.

So this morning, purely as an academic exercise, I decided to spend a few minutes looking into the legend of Dreft and Dreck.

Mark Liberman’s post about the phone call that has caused people to try to determine who was responsible for the Mumbai attacks highlights a problem in the current practice of forensic linguists who do authorship analysis these days. His post was about speaker identification (or nationality/ethnicity of speaker), so I’m stretching things a bit here, but whether the evidence is spoken or written, the process of narrowing down a list of suspects, much less finding the right one, has many of the same problems.

Always on the lookout for catch phrases to play with, Zippy looks into the world of electronics, with little success:

Bill Griffith rarely makes things up, and he's mostly on the mark here: "iTunes user interface", "Thrustmaster glow-saber duo pack", "full voice chat", and "open-world gaming" are all attested. Only "branched venue progression" fails — but Griffith clearly meant "BRANCHING venue progression", which is attested.