German English
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Note to Sinologist colleagues:
For the last few years, I've been noticing that Chinese archeologists
and scientists publishing in English consistently refer to jiǎgǔwén 甲骨文 as
"oracle bone scripts" (note the plural), when I think they mean "oracle
bone inscriptions" or "oracle bone texts".
I'm wondering if I should make an attempt to correct this usage, or
whether it is so well entrenched in Sino-English that nothing can be
done to change it.
Matthias Richter replied:
Not being a native speaker of English, I don’t usually comment, but this belongs to the questions I find difficult to navigate when training Chinese grad students. I suspect “oracle bone scripts” is a mix of (a) confusing ’script’ and ‘inscription’ and hence ’text’ and (b) a lack of clarity regarding cases in which a noun is used in the generic sense and when it is countable. At least my Chinese students struggle with this. I also suspect that the recent tendency to treat nouns as countable that weren’t until recently, such as ‘elites', ‘behaviors' (meaning: members of … / instances of …) in a way that to me makes more sense in the case of ‘fruits' or ‘metals’ (meaning: types of …) — as well as the tendency of (at least American) English to move away from analytic structures to synthetic ones makes this harder to learn.
Not being a very young user of English, I may have got used to ‘to fund-raise’, ‘to outreach', perhaps even to ‘to grocery-shop’, but still find it hard to “make a plan to early-vote” or …
“parents are learning to lesson plan” (2020)
“there are many ways to recreational camp” (2021)
“you can remote-control park the unit” (2022)
The list goes on, of course.
The even more prominent preference for ‘XY’s Z' genitive over ’the Z of XY’ may play a role, too:
“he voted against my rights, my friends’ rights, people-I-know’s rights” (2020)
“I need to bring that up because it affects my life and people I really care about's life” (2021)
“Here’s Emilia-Clarke-who’s-from-London’s incredible impersonation of a Valley Girl”
“solve all of our problems” (meaning not all of our problems but the problems all of us have)
“he said that it is in all of our best interest that…” / “I was a fan of both of their work” / “one day Marcus is going to be all of our teacher in civics class” (2024)
None of these are made up and most are still oral usage, but I am increasingly unsure to what extent I can or should impose my sense of style on students of a younger generation. — None of this makes ‘oracle bone scripts’ better or clear, but I feel these things are connected.
Judging from what Matthias says here, German spontaneously offers many creative solutions to problems that plague us in English.
Selected readings
- "Germanglish" (8/2/16)
- "English is a Dialect of Germanic; or, The Traitors to Our Common Heritage" (9/4/13)
- "Denglish" (9/21/10)
- "The German Language 1, Sally 0" (3/26/09)
- "A German neologism coined in English" (11/26/25)
- "Schadenfreudeful" (4/20/19)
- "German lexicographic richness" (10/11/21)
- "No word for 'mess'" (4/21/11) — must read for anyone interested in smells and scents (in German); order and odor
K said,
March 9, 2026 @ 4:00 am
I'm not entirely clear on the problem here. "Script" *can* mean "document"/"text", as in, the script of a movie/play. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/script
If this is a jargon issue (people using common definitions in contexts where readers expect them to use jargon definitions), then I think this change is good. I have a pet peeve with jargon diverging too far from common language, and think it's good to have some force bringing the two together. When jargon diverges too far, it becomes a barrier or even a tool for gatekeeping, as students both have to learn a whole jargon to communicate in the field, and have to work harder not to appear as "out-group" members by their misuse of the jargon.
Lasius said,
March 9, 2026 @ 4:03 am
I am not sure what any of these English phenomena have to do with German?
Chris Button said,
March 9, 2026 @ 7:34 am
Given that 甲骨文 refers to 甲 and 骨, a bigger issue is that the English only refers to 骨 and ignores 甲.
Ross Presser said,
March 9, 2026 @ 10:47 am
My novice interpretation of the problem here is that to linguists, "script" is more commonly used to mean "way of recording language in written form", so "Oracle bone scripts" seems to describe multiple *ways of inscribing* things on bone, when there is really just one "way" with many instances.
Native English speakers like me and presumably K do not feel the wrongness of this usage because we're used to script as a noun meaning extended textual recording, like the script of a movie/play or the script followed by a telemarketer.
katarina said,
March 9, 2026 @ 11:48 am
Yes, please correct "scripts", Prof. Mair.
Terry K. said,
March 9, 2026 @ 2:22 pm
I'm also a native English speaker and I do find "oracle bone scripts" a very odd thing to say. These aren't the texts of a play, TV show, or radio show.
Barbara Phillips Long said,
March 9, 2026 @ 2:52 pm
When I first read about oracle bones here at Language Log, I found “oracle bone scripts” confusing. “Oracle bone inscriptions” is immediately clear to me, so I favor that usage for texts in English that are discussing the oracle bones. As a former copy editor, my preference is for language that does not require the reader to puzzle out preventable ambiguities.
Chas Belov said,
March 9, 2026 @ 7:20 pm
I would definitely garden path “there are many ways to recreational camp”.
Chris Button said,
March 9, 2026 @ 9:12 pm
I've mostly seen "oracle bone inscriptions" or more precisely "oracle-bone inscriptions" (with a hyphen). The abbreviation is then OBI.
In Japanese, 甲骨文字 feels more standard than just 甲骨文.
Victor Mair said,
March 9, 2026 @ 9:35 pm
For many years, I translated jiǎgǔwén 甲骨文 as "oracle shell and bone inscriptions" (abbreviated as OSBIs), until specialists in the field talked me out of it by telling me that turtle plastrons are also a kind of bone.
Chris Button said,
March 9, 2026 @ 9:43 pm
@ Victor Mair
That's a good argument (albeit perhaps a little forced)!
I wonder who first coined the term "oracle bone" in English?
Jongseong Park said,
March 10, 2026 @ 2:32 am
In Korean, too, there is preference for 갑골 문자(甲骨文字) gapgol munja over 갑골문(甲骨文) gapgolmun, as the term usually refers to the style of writing rather than the inscriptions themselves. Korean dictionaries consider these to be synonyms and only refer to the script in the definition rather than the inscriptions or texts in this script.
Can jiǎgǔwén 甲骨文 in Chinese also refer to the inscriptions or texts and not just the script itself?
V said,
March 10, 2026 @ 7:23 am
I've noticed the usage of the word "minority" to refer a single person that is perceived as a member of a particular minority population recently, but only online. So I don't know if it's native speakers, and if so, native speakers of what English variety.
Rodger C said,
March 10, 2026 @ 9:06 am
V, "minority" for a single person is a recent addition to spoken English
David Marjanović said,
March 10, 2026 @ 9:15 am
The examples Matthias Richter has provided are all by native speakers of English; German has nothing to do with them, in case there's been a misunderstanding. I've seen some of the same examples and various similar ones, all from native English speakers.
I see three different phenomena in the examples:
1) Noun incorporation in verbs ("to course-correct" and such, usually of course spelled without the hyphen because nobody thinks of the poor readers). German, as it happens, has been doing that for a good long while; it's less conspicuous than in English because nonfinite verb forms already follow their objects. Examples: schifahren "skiing" and autofahren "going by car", for which the reformed spelling actually prefers Schi/Ski fahren and Auto fahren, very much against the trend of the 20th century; notlanden "perform an emergency landing" (Not "dire need" is a noun); nonstandard phenomena like haarewaschen "washing one's hair".
2) Mass nouns becoming count nouns that refer to individual instances of what the mass noun used to mean ("an elite" for a member of an elite, "a minority" for a member of a minority, and the much older "a troop" for one soldier – or at least "20,000 troops" for 20,000 soldiers, not more). This is not happening in German. (…Conversely, some words that are and remain mass nouns in English have always been countable in German: this side of information theory, Information means "one piece of information", and if you have a heap of them, they're Informationen, which is a very common word.)
3) The possessive clitic 's attaching to longer and longer noun phrases ("people I know's rights", "people I really care about's life". This is not happening in German either, where nouns, articles, pronouns and adjectives are all separately* marked for the genitive (die Frau des Königs von Sparta "the king of Sparta's wife", the rules for using "of" instead are different, and the readiness to open a new clause is much higher: die Rechte von Leuten, die ich kenne (with "of" and a relative clause: "the rights of people I know"), das Leben von Leuten, die mir wirklich wichtig sind. Here, English is sharply diverging from German.
* First + last name does get the genitive ending only on the last name, unlike in Slavic languages.
V said,
March 10, 2026 @ 9:41 am
David Marjanović : I think the phenomenon I'm noticing is 2.
V said,
March 11, 2026 @ 12:31 pm
David Marjanović : I think I may have encountered "an elite" for "a member of an elite", rarely, but not "a troop" meaning a single soldier.
"this side of information theory, Information means "one piece of information", and if you have a heap of them, they're Informationen, which is a very common word."
One the other hand, информация being singular I am sort-of comfortable within Bulgarian, and can contrast it with информации, plural. I still find it a bit strange. I can say "тази информация" — as in "this piece of information" but, in general, in Bulgarian it's more of a mass noun, not singular.
Philip Taylor said,
March 11, 2026 @ 2:34 pm
But have you encountered "a number of troops", V ? If so, then I would suggest that the existence of "troops" plural indicates the existence of "troop", singular, with the meaning of a single member of a troop.
V said,
March 11, 2026 @ 3:54 pm
Philip Taylor : You're right — "But have you encountered "a number of troops", V ?" I have, but that's with a counter word — "a number". Interesting.
Michael Watts said,
March 11, 2026 @ 4:23 pm
You missed, or misanalyzed, the one that stood out the most to me. It's a simple case of back-formation of a verb from an existing noun:
There are many ways to recreational camp.
You can remote-control park the unit.
Parents are learning to lesson plan.
Note that this has nothing to do with nouns, because recreational is obviously not a noun. What's happened is that the existing phrases recreational camping, remote-control parking, and lesson planning have been interpreted as inflected forms of an unmodified verb (an originally incorrect analysis), and that verb has then been produced in other forms where the mistaken analysis is required. (Note also that although lesson is the object of plan in lesson planning, remote control is not the object of park in remote-control parking; it is the means.)
"Recreational camp" is an interesting one. The standard way you'd phrase that sentence is of course "there are many ways to camp recreationally". But this runs into the oddity that all camping [likely to be mentioned in a modern context] is recreational. "Recreational camping" must be a specific term of art somewhere.
Re: "troops", the complaint has been made by native speakers in the past. See the Onion pieces "Kuwait Deploys Troop" or "Bush Commits One Additional Troop To Afghanistan". I agree with Philip Taylor that by the time it's possible to refer to "500 troops", "troop" must necessarily be able to refer to 1/500 of whatever "500 troops" refers to — this complaint started being made long, long after it would have made any sense.
Andreas Johansson said,
March 12, 2026 @ 3:29 am
What annoys me with "troops" is that at least for small X, "X troops" can also mean X units each of several soldiers.
Philip Taylor said,
March 12, 2026 @ 10:11 am
But in those circumstances, Andreas, would one not conventionally write "troops of soldiers" ?
"Battalions" and "squadrons" are conventionally used stand-alone, whereas "troops" is (IMHO) not.
David Marjanović said,
March 14, 2026 @ 12:15 pm
Good point: the noun incorporation I mentioned, or the adjective incorporation I did not mention, is not being done here – it is instead assumed to have already happened; then the whole thing is analyzed as a verb form in -ing, and then the other expected verb forms are created from it. The last step is what the examples show.
Michael Watts said,
March 16, 2026 @ 2:50 am
Well… I guess you can model it that way. The model produces the same outcome that we observe. But I find the model unlikely to be accurate in the mechanics, for the simple reason that the noun incorporation you describe isn't valid in English. (There is no path in the language from plan a lesson or park by remote control to lesson plan or remote-control park.) I see no reason to believe that native speakers would assume an ungrammatical transformation has been done. If they consider that possibility at all, it will be to reject it.
In my model, "lesson planning" is just a black box, a word that is entirely syntactically and morphologically opaque except that it is a gerund. There is a path from gerund to verb. But if you look more closely, if you view "lesson planning" as being a syntactic transformation of "the planning of lessons", that analysis will block you from deriving a verb that isn't "plan".
Michael Watts said,
March 16, 2026 @ 2:53 am
(And I don't think the concept of "adjective incorporation" works at all to explain recreational camp. There's no such thing as incorporating a related adjective (of this type) into a verb; recreational can only be present in that form because it's modifying a noun, camping. If it were incorporated into a verb representing the action of camping, it would have to be an adverb, not an adjective.)
Michael Watts said,
March 16, 2026 @ 2:54 am
My record on closing HTML tags isn't good in this thread.
David Marjanović said,
March 19, 2026 @ 12:51 pm
There didn't use to be; maybe there is now, thanks to the reanalysis.
Michael Watts said,
March 23, 2026 @ 4:27 pm
You can say that; are there any examples of going from correctly-modified-verb to malformed verb as opposed to correctly-modified-noun to malformed verb?
And if not, why would we assume an unheard-of mechanism to explain a small subset of a common one?