Language Log

Calvin Ho sent in the following photograph:

Here's another example of the power of negation to confuse us –Jonathan Capehart, "Marco Rubio’s powerful American story", WaPo 4/14/2015:

Rubio’s up-from-nothing life story is inspiring. “I live in an exceptional country where even the son of a bartender and a maid can have the same dreams and the same future as those who come from power and privilege,” he said. How can you not help but puff out your chest in pride for the promise of this nation?

This seems to be a blend of "How can you help but puff out your chest in pride?" and "How can you not puff out your chest in pride?".

Such expressions are fertile ground for misnegation: Given the combination of explicit or implicit negation with a question and an implicit scalar predicate (here the strength of the chest-puffing motivation), how can you not help but not throw in an extra negation or two?

Kongish, Singlish, Chinglish, Engrish, Konglish — none of them can beat Indian English:

[This is a guest post by Nathan Hopson]

Amazon's App Store for Android features a free daily app. The selection of a few days ago caught my eye not for the content of the app itself, but for the nonsensical (and incorrect) use of Japanese.

Jim Millward sent in this photograph of a sign at "one of those Korean-run lunch buffet deli places (this in Bethesda MD)":

The right wing of American punditry has been attacking Donald Trump vigorously. Thus Ross Kaminsky, "The Third Obama Term", The American Spectator 7/21/2015:

[B]ad policy, bad hair, and a bad attitude aren’t the biggest problem with Donald Trump.

Trump’s political differences with the Barack Obama are, in most cases, stark. But I see a troublesome similarity in their personalities, one which makes both unfit to sit behind the Resolute desk.

Beyond championing one destructive and ill-considered policy after another, Barack Obama has an additional defining characteristic, one that makes him such a terrible leader of a democratic nation: he is a narcissist. He can’t get through a paragraph without multiple uses of first person pronouns […]

Yet when it comes to narcissism, Barack Obama has nothing on Donald Trump.

I don't have anything relevant to say about last night's debates, so instead I'll point readers towards an entertaining contrast in the evolution of debate-like behavior.

From the Hong Kong Free Press:

"Hong Kong Chinglish page wins the internet overnight" (8/8/15)

The article begins:

A Facebook page presenting Hong Kong news in “Chinglish” attracted more than 15,000 likes overnight.

Kongish Daily, the motto of which is “Hong Kong people speak Hong Kong English,” became an instant sensation in the SAR after it published a number of stories that only people fluent in Cantonese and English could understand.

"Important – Please contact us to provide more information."

That's what the letter from Independence Blue Cross said. Dated 7/28/2015, it arrived 8/4/2015, and informed me that I need to "call or respond online within seven business days to ensure that your future claims and those of your family members can be processed in a timely manner." So today is the deadline.

What do I need to contact them about? "We are required to determine if you or your family members have other health insurance coverage to process your claims."

OK, fair enough. And they inform me that "You can choose the most convenient way to provide this information to us". The first option is to "Simply dial 1-866-507-6575 and follow the prompts on our easy-use interactive voice response system"; the second option is "to visit our member website at www.ibxpress.com".

But it turns out that there are a couple of problems. The first problem is that both methods fail at the first step. And the second problem is that there's apparently no other way to contact them to "provide more information … to ensure that your future claims and those of your family members can be processed in a timely manner".

From Barton Swaim, The Speechwriter: A Brief Education in Politics — the author meets Mark Sanford, then governor of South Carolina:

He had seen some articles and reviews I’d written and conceded I must be “erudite” but wondered whether I could write in a way that “the mechanic in Greenwood can understand.” (Greenwood is a small town in the western part of the state.) I was trying to explain that I could when he interrupted me. “Can you start a sentence with a preposition?”

“A preposition?” I asked. Yes, a preposition. Maybe he meant a conjunction?

A little over a year ago, I wrote about "The concept of 'mother' in linguistics " (6/25/14).  In that post, we looked at the use of the notion of "mother" for language studies in Ugaritic, Moabite, South Arabian, Phoenician, Aramaic, Syriac, Arabic, Greek, Latin, and Chinese.

Although I had a nagging recollection to the contrary, I stated:  "So far as I am aware, the notion of 'mother' does not have a similar function in Sanskrit phonology."  Although I wrote that, it bothered me ever since, inasmuch as I did remember from my Sanskrit studies of nearly half a century ago that "mother" did figure in Indian theories of language, but I just couldn't remember exactly what it was.

Geoff Pullum uses terms like "aphasia", and phrases like "I don't think there's any structure in there", in describing a quoted passage from Donald Trump's 7/21/2015 speech in Sun City SC. But in my opinion, he's been misled by a notorious problem: the apparent incoherence of much transcribed extemporized speech, even when the same material is completely comprehensible and even eloquent in audio or audio-visual form.

This apparent incoherence has two main causes: false starts and parentheticals. Both are effectively signaled in speaking — by prosody along with gesture, posture, and gaze — and therefore largely factored out by listeners. But in textual form, the cues are gone, and we lose the thread.

There's another issue in this case as well. The segment in question takes place about 35 minutes into Trump's speech, and the earlier parts of the speech have featured repeated assertions and implications that recent American leaders are bad negotiators, and have therefore made bad deals with other countries, including Mexico, China, and Saudi Arabia. This is relevant to his candidacy because "The Art of the Deal" is part of his persona — and it's relevant to the the quoted segment, which is discussing another example, the nuclear deal with Iran. Because of this background, he can afford to criticize the nuclear deal in an allusive way without confusing his audience.