Help wanted in Srinagar
Kongish, Singlish, Chinglish, Engrish, Konglish — none of them can beat Indian English:
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Kongish, Singlish, Chinglish, Engrish, Konglish — none of them can beat Indian English:
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[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.
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Jim Millward sent in this photograph of a sign at "one of those Korean-run lunch buffet deli places (this in Bethesda MD)":
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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.
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"Spelling bees and character amnesia" (8/7/13)
"Spelling bee champs" (6/1/14)
"Of toads, modernization, and simplified characters" (8/16/13)
"Il ne parle pas français" (7/23/15)
One of the major subthemes of our debates on this topic has been the dominance of individuals of South Asian (Indian) descent in the spelling bees. Many possible explanations for their superior performance were proposed (memorization techniques, tradition, family pressure and support, social and cultural models, etc.), but nothing approaching empirical evidence was adduced.
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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.
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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.
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"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".
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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?
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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.
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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.
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The following word-stream (it cannot be called a sentence) was uttered by Republican presidential contender Donald Trump on July 21 in Sun City, South Carolina. As far as I can detect it has no structure at all: the numerous conditional adjuncts never arrive at consequents, we never encounter a main verb or even an approximation to a claim. The topic seems to be related to nuclear engineering, Trump's uncle, the Wharton School, Trump's intelligence, politics, prisoners, women's intelligence, and Iran. But it's hard to be sure:
Look, having nuclear—my uncle was a great professor and scientist and engineer, Dr. John Trump at MIT; good genes, very good genes, OK, very smart, the Wharton School of Finance, very good, very smart—you know, if you’re a conservative Republican, if I were a liberal, if, like, OK, if I ran as a liberal Democrat, they would say I'm one of the smartest people anywhere in the world—it’s true!—but when you're a conservative Republican they try—oh, do they do a number—that’s why I always start off: Went to Wharton, was a good student, went there, went there, did this, built a fortune—you know I have to give my like credentials all the time, because we're a little disadvantaged—but you look at the nuclear deal, the thing that really bothers me—it would have been so easy, and it's not as important as these lives are (nuclear is powerful; my uncle explained that to me many, many years ago, the power and that was 35 years ago; he would explain the power of what's going to happen and he was right—who would have thought?), but when you look at what's going on with the four prisoners—now it used to be three, now it’s four—but when it was three and even now, I would have said it's all in the messenger; fellas, and it is fellas because, you know, they don't, they haven't figured that the women are smarter right now than the men, so, you know, it's gonna take them about another 150 years—but the Persians are great negotiators, the Iranians are great negotiators, so, and they, they just killed, they just killed us.
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Jeb Bush gave a Spanish-language interview on Sunday with Telemundo's José Díaz-Balart. This is the first time since the launch of his presidential campaign that his functional bilingualism has been on full display.
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