Language Log

If ever there is a question about the need to know a few foreign languages these days, see this BBC link about the embarrassed Irish cops who have been stymied in their hunt for a serial traffic violator who went by the name Prawo Jazdy. It seems that Mr. Jazdy is not who the cops thought he was. He wasn’t even a person. In Polish, the words mean, hold your breath, “driver’s license.”

Hat tip to Ruth Morris.

Ancient Rome played a prominent role, in two different ways, in the comments on yesterday's post "Progress and its enemies". This was unexpected, since the post was about the rhetoric of names in political philosophy. In any case, my comments on the comments are too long to fit gracefully in a comment, so I'm posting them here separately.

A few days ago, Geoff Pullum pondered the use of subject to mean "person" in police jargon ("One subject in the residence", 2/13/2009):

A police spokesperson from Buffalo speaking about yesterday's plane crash on BBC Radio 4 this morning said that in addition to all the people on the plane (no one survived) there was "one subject in the residence". The baffled Radio 4 presenter had to repeat back a translation into normal English.

Nate Silver at fivethirtyeight.com specializes in quantitative modeling of political trends, but yesterday he posted a terminological discussion of political philosophy, "The Two Progressivisms", distinguishing what he calls Rational Progessivism from what he calls Radical Progressivism. This reminded me of something that I noticed recently in reading Mark Halpern's book Language and Human Nature, namely Halpern's surprising level of interest in the word progressive and its derivatives, discussed on 15 different pages.

Bill Benzon writes that "This video embodies a pun so wonderfully awful that it deserves mention on the Log."

Fidel Castro is evidently alive and well — and writing rambling, incoherent columns on political onomastics. As Julia Ioffe of the New Republic blog The Plank reports, Castro's latest editorial for Granma Internacional is a "deliciously confusing" excursus on White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and his name. Here are the opening lines in Spanish and English:

¡Qué apellido tan extraño! Parece español, fácil de pronunciar y no lo es. Nunca en mi vida conocí o leí el nombre de alumno o compatriota entre decenas de miles, que llevara ese nombre.
¿De dónde proviene?, pensé.

What a strange surname! It appears Spanish, easy to pronounce, but it’s not. Never in my life have I heard or read about any student or compatriot with that name, among tens of thousands.
Where does it come from? I wondered.

Most translators only have to worry about being criticized for errors, but in Afghanistan the mere act of translation can get you twenty years in prison. An appellate court has upheld 20 year prison sentences for Ahmad Ghaws Zalmai, who translated the Qur'an into Dari, one of the two major languages of Afghanistan, and Mushtaq Ahmad, a cleric who endorsed Zalmai's translation. It appears that no errors have been found in Zalmai's translation: the objection of Muslim clerics is that the Dari translation does not appear alongside the original Arabic text. The prosecutor had asked for the death penalty. Although the court did not impose the death penalty, Chief Judge Abdul Salam Azizadah agreed that it might be appropriate.

Lucky for Zalmai and Ahmad that Afghanistan now has a democratic government controlled by moderate Muslims rather than the Taliban and other members of the tiny minority of intolerant extremists, hunh?

Woody Allen's Vicky Cristina Barcelona has now reached Edinburgh, and made a wonderful movie for a Valentine's Day date yesterday. (A wonderful film, too; the whole script is interesting and intelligent as well as funny and appealing, and Penelope Cruz's electric, chew-up-the-scenery portrayal of a deranged artist is incredible — near Oscar level.) But what a strange syntactic move Woody made in naming the picture. The three names are just concatenated: Vicky is one of the girls, Cristina is the other, and Barcelona is the city where most of the the action is located. There's absolutely no grammatical warrant for that at all. For example, although you can interpret Celery, apples, walnuts, grapes as an asyndetic coordination (a conjunction without an overt and), the commas are obligatory in written English: *Celery apples walnuts grapes is not grammatical at all. And similarly, it would be possible to interpret Vicky, Cristina, Barcelona as a coordination with three coordinates; but the string Vicky Cristina Barcelona doesn't have that privilege. It's got the written-English syntax of a single personal name. (Dougal Stanton, here in Edinburgh, noticed
today that the people running the Cameo on Home Street were confused enough to abbreviate it to "Vicky C. Barcelona" on their large signs — exactly as if it were somebody's name.) Woody is thinking right outside of the syntactic box. (Which is OK, of course, for an artist. This is an observation about innovative syntax, not a correction or a criticism.)

Recently I discovered that there's a fish named after my mother, Marion Grey, who was an ichthyologist specializing in the taxonomy of deep-sea fishes: it's called Bathylagus greyae, a.k.a. Grey's deepsea smelt. While looking around the relevant website (Hans G. Hansen's Biographical Etymology of Marine Organisms), I noticed something oddish. The Latinized name greyae didn't surprise me much, because -ae is the genitive singular suffix of the Latin first declension, the major declension for feminine nouns in Latin. It's maybe a bit strange from a Latin perspective, because Latin nouns in this class have a nominative singular ending in -a, and like most English family names Grey ends in a consonant; and Latin third-declension nouns end in a consonant, so they could've provided a model for scientific names. Still, using the Latin first-declension ending for the possessive of a non-Latin woman's name seems like a reasonable decision, given the much greater productivity of the dominant noun class. No, it was the genitive formation of organism names honoring men that struck me as peculiar.

In response to W. Tecumseh Fitch's post "Musical protolanguage: Darwin's theory of language evolution revisited"  (2/12/2009), Derek Bickerton sent the commentary presented below.

I came across an interesting innovation in English morphology while reading this article on "Inukpasuit, Inuit and Viking contact in ancient times". Recounting an Inuit legend, the author says:

Angered by her reluctance, the rich shaman called upon other equally strong shamuses to punish her.

The usual plural of shaman is shamans. shamuses is the plural of shamus, American slang for "private detective", apparently from Yiddish shammes "sexton", due to an equation of the duties of the sexton of a synagogue with those of store security.

President Obama's ability to exchange basic Indonesian pleasantries may render him more bi-courteous than bilingual, but New York's new junior senator appears to have significantly more proficiency in another Asian language: Mandarin Chinese. David Chen of the New York Times reports:

Languagehat has posted about an oddity in the New Yorker:

My wife was reading John McPhee's New Yorker article about fact checking … when she asked me what I thought about this sentence: "One technician who slipped up and used the 'R' word [radiation] was called to an office and chewed." "Chewed?" I said. "Not 'chewed out'?" She confirmed the reading. I said it must be a typo.

So maybe (ironically) "a flagrant typo in an article about fact checking", or maybe some creativity on McPhee's part, a vivid metaphor bringing the chew of chew out back to life.

It turns out that you can find other occurrences of chew conveying something very close to chew out 'reprimand' (an idiom the OED describes as colloquial and chiefly U.S.). And other pairs of plain V in alternation with V plus a "particle" (Prt); the phenomenon is related to, but distinct from, the direct/oblique alternations I posted on yesterday.