Language Log

Back in August and December of last year, I wrote about the efforts of Hangeul enthusiasts to get a tribe in Indonesia to adopt Hangeul as their script.

The latest news, in the Korea Times, no less, is that the rumors of the tribe's having chosen Hangeul as their offical script were not only premature, they were downright false.

Hey, guess what! The cricket story about not having a word for "impossible" wasn't the last "no-word-for-X" story! Matthew Izzi, who writes from Boston, is a new reader of Language Log, and clearly a quick study, because he has already learned to be skeptical of things-people-have-no-words-for stories. His antennae went up when he read the following photo caption (slide 4 of 5) on The New Yorker's "Book Bench" blog this morning:

Pukapuka, also known as Danger Island, was, in the nineteen-twenties, a sanctuary for nudism, a place where "sex is a game, and jealousy has no place." There is no word for "virgin" in the language.

The latest, laziest, and most stupid things-there-are-no-words-for snowclone use I have seen in quite a while (contributed by a Language Log reader who supplies no name other than "Flintoff's Gusset"):

Herein lies a cricket tale of a heady concoction of exceptional talent laced with self-belief to match. Such gargantuan self-belief, in fact, that just as the Piraha tribe of northwest Brazil speak an obscure language in which there is no concept of numbers, so in the lexicon of Ian Botham's cricket existence, there is no word for "impossible". He does not, and never has done, "can't".

Thus Mike Selvey, writing about Ian Botham on the ESPN cricinfo site.

The most unsuccessful piece of pseudo-personal spam I received this week must surely be the falsely flattering invitation that began as follows:

Dear Professor [Name][Name1],

We would like to invite you as Invited Speaker on the area of Social Sciences, Law, Finances and Humanities in the Conferences

Vouliagmeni Beach, Athens, Greece, December 29-31, 2010

Organized by the European Society for Environmental Research and Sustainable Development / EUROPMENT, www.europment.org in collaboration with the WSEAS...

Dear Professor [Name][Name1]? Come on, spamsters! Can't you even do a standard mail merge? Isn't that the core of your goddamn lousy trade?

Would it be OK with you if I gave an invited talk entitled "[Title][Subtitle]"?

My note yesterday about Cantonese infixation into English words was written while changing planes on the way back from Hong Kong, and was somewhat rushed, not to say incoherent. Thanks to the commenters who helped clear things up! This morning, I'd like to add a few more references and observations about several interesting aspects of this phenomenon and its context.

One of the things that I learned during my recent short stay in Hong Kong is that there are some especially interesting ways of mixing English and Cantonese, including putting Cantonese in the middle of English words. One example (due to Bill Wang via Tan Lee):

so [mat1 je5] ry [aa3]
so 乜野 ry 啊
Why say sorry ? [Usually in an angry and unpleasant mood]

The BBC is doing a day or two of filming on the roof terrace of the building that houses my department, and the parking lot below our windows is thick with dressing room trailers and wardrobe trailers and generator trucks. Plus there is one other vehicle: parked directly below the windows of the room where the faculty of the country's finest department of Linguistics and English Language hold their staff meetings is a large catering truck to provide lunch for the crew, and it is labeled DeluxDiner's.

The company that owns it is called "DeluxDiners". They have a website at http://www.deluxdiners.co.uk/. As you can see from that page, the company name is a regular plural. There is no trace of an apostrophe in the web page text. But there is a photograph of one of their lunch trucks, with the offending apostrophe up there in red.

Reader A.T. writes:

When I can't sleep, I go onto TED.com. I'm watching a talk by Pinker and he says syllabuses at one point (about 15:36). Not sure if you've blogged about syllabuses versus syllabi in the Language Log, but I think it'd be a pretty cool topic to discuss.

Every time a post or comment on Language Log mentions, in any context, the prescriptive disapproval of preposition stranding (where a preposition is separated from its logically associated complement, as in What are you looking at?), e.g. in this post, we get commenters (who, incidentally, seem never to have read the site before) tussling with each other to be the first to inscribe two routinized types of comment.

One type says "I think a preposition is a fine thing to end a sentence with!", or words very much to that effect (unaware that instances of this lame "look-I'm-violating-the-rule" joke have been going on since at least the 1700s). The other type says, "This is nonsense up with which I shall not put!" (invariably thinking that they are quoting Sir Winston Churchill, though Ben Zimmer definitively refuted that misattribution years ago in a post that Mark and I subsequently included in our book, and it is enormously annoying to us that still no one is aware of Ben's discovery).

Unable to bear any longer the tedious work of seeking out all the instances of these two comment types so I can delete them, I have decided that from now on I will hunt down the relevant commenters and kill them.

John McIntyre notes on his blog You Don't Say that a man named Rod Gelatt, a retired professor of journalism who taught at the Missouri School of Journalism, writes in a letter to the Columbia Missourian newspaper (responding to an article calling for more attention to correcting grammar errors in online content):

in the announcement of the invitation for us to become grammar police, I found two errors: "….who wants to generously point out…" (splitting an infinitive) and "Spell check won't help you when you have the wrong word to start with" (ending sentence with preposition).

I ignore the first point (split infinitives have always been grammatically correct in English; see for example this page). And as for the second, stranded prepositions have also always been grammatical in general, of course; but with respect to Mr Gelatt's example, I wonder what he thought the "correction" would be? The common phrases to start with and to begin with are among the (numerous) cases where stranding the preposition at the end of the phrase is not just permitted in Standard English, it's obligatory.

This one seems not to be in the eggcorn database yet (Bob Cunningham, "Eagles' Andy Reid Making a Huge Mistake Not Starting Reggie Wells", philly.com 10/2/2010):

[Max] Jean-Gilles belongs on a run-first team. He can be a road-grater due to his size, but when it comes to the athleticism needed to play guard on a pass-first team, Jean-Gilles doesn't even come close to passing that test. [emphasis added]

Alice Yan, "Singing the praises of mainland rap", South China Morning Post, 10/3/2010:

Rapper Shou Junchao , 24, has become a celebrity in Shanghai – people ask for his autograph and want him to pose for photos – after his performance on the hit television show China's Got Talent last month. His act captivated millions of fans, mostly young men, who liked his impromptu rap answers to the judges' questions. Men born after 1980 had mountainous burdens, he said, including mortgages and car loans, and he got a standing ovation when he said that if the luxury handbag you bought for your girlfriend was not as good as other girls' you would get a "bye-bye" from her.

His TV show appearance is here, I think:

A couple of days ago in class I was discussing the power and prestige of Chinese characters, even among people who are illiterate.  I mentioned how illiterate villagers in northern Shaanxi (north of Mao's base at Yanan) wanted to participate in literate culture, but didn't even have access to a scribe who could write a New Year's couplet on strips of red paper to paste on the sides and top of their doorframes.   Instead, they merely drew series of circles to substitute for characters, hence LEFT:  OOOOO  TOP:  OOOO   RIGHT:  OOOOO.