ish
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Much heard on Language Log.
Selected readings
- "Slang affixation: it's all mystery-y-ish-y" (6/25/09)
- "ish and moreish", Separated by a Common Language (9/6/07)
April 20, 2026 @ 4:51 pm · Filed by Victor Mair under Affixes, Humor, Language and entertainment
« previous post | next post »
Much heard on Language Log.
Selected readings
April 20, 2026 @ 4:51 pm · Filed by Victor Mair under Affixes, Humor, Language and entertainment
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Christian Horn said,
April 20, 2026 @ 5:28 pm
I think Japanese 頃 and 前後 are great replacements for -ish.
One could imagine that "Japanese people are always in time" (which IMHO does apply, to bigger degree than other cultures) and would then not have a concept of "-ish", but that's not the case.
jhh said,
April 20, 2026 @ 6:16 pm
I agree with Christian Horn… this comedian figures her audience doesn't know any better, so she can mischaracterize Japanese language to (try to) create humor :(
JPL said,
April 20, 2026 @ 7:04 pm
There's the bound morpheme '-ish', and then there's the apparently free morpheme 'ish' (as in: A: "Let's meet at one." B:"Ish"; or, A: "Let's meet at one …[pause] … Ish."). The (apparently) free form is the "word "ish", usually uttered with the prosody of a one-word utterance, with a high pitch and loudness level; but it's meant to be attached to the last-uttered word as a suffix after the fact, where it would have low salience. So the one-word "ish" utterance is contrastive. Any other affixes like that?
Martin Schwartz said,
April 20, 2026 @ 7:40 pm
I'm skeptical about JPL's "prosody of a one-word uttererance,
with a high pitch and loudness level", etc., but as for -ish as a bound morpheme vs.apparently free morpheme, I remember George Santos
saying that he didn't mean to claim he's Jewish, but rather that he's Jew-ish.
In accord with the now much completer euphemistic replacement
of "problem" by the fudge-word "issue", one can speak of "the Santos
ishue" or, alternatively, "Santos' hyphen hype".
Martin Schwartz
Martin Schwartz said,
April 20, 2026 @ 7:42 pm
I'm skeptical about JPL's "prosody of a one-word uttererance,
with a high pitch and loudness level", etc., but as for -ish as a bound morpheme vs.apparently free morpheme, I remember George Santos
saying that he didn't mean to claim he's Jewish, but rather that he's Jew-ish.
In accord with the now much completer euphemistic replacement
of "problem" by the fudge-word "issue", one can speak of "the Santos
ishue" or, alternatively, "Santos' hyphen hype".
And no, idiot AI robot, I DID NOT aklready say that.
Martin Schwartz
Chris Button said,
April 20, 2026 @ 7:42 pm
@ Christian Horn
That's fine when talking about time-related matters in Japanese, but what about all the -ish uses in British English that have nothing to do with time?
Martrin Schwartz said,
April 20, 2026 @ 7:47 pm
The 3rd word from the end of what I wrote was a typo,
but I won't write it or its correction lest the galling dumbo machine
again accuse me of repetition.
MS
Martin Schwartz said,
April 20, 2026 @ 7:53 pm
Martin, not -rin, @%*%#@* *%#$6*ing farticial untelligence!!!
Grrrr.
MS
Chris Button said,
April 20, 2026 @ 8:14 pm
Or more generally quantity related rather than just time related, I suppose.
JPL said,
April 20, 2026 @ 9:03 pm
The other uses have more to do with categorical judgements, I expect. The reason the audience laughed so riotously was that they were recognizing their puzzlement at the phenomenon of the (apparent) free form "Ish" as a separate utterance. Does Japanese have a word or affix that is used that way?
Duncan said,
April 20, 2026 @ 9:53 pm
[FWIW my rather strict firefox-anti-tracker plus UBO in strict-third-party-block-by-default-mode blocked what I assume was a third-party embed, and without an alternative link to click on instead I've not seen it… As has been the case for several apparent embeds lately.]
I'm surprised not to have yet seen the sense-mention I guessed the article was discussing on first seeing the title in my feed-reader: the (more modern…ish origin???) sense of the stand-alone "ish"/shit censorship-bypass… as seen in wiktionary's "ish" entry etymology 6:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ish#Etymology_6
>>>>>
Possibly inspired by the sound of the word shit when backmasked in radio edits of hip-hop songs.
Noun
ish (uncountable)
(euphemistic, African-American Vernacular) Shit (in various senses).
<<<<<
I first became personally aware of that usage several years ago hearing/seeing it on youtube, bypassing demonitization there. (…As spoken by a pair of (US-minority-subcultural-but-not-African-American) influencers I've not watched in likely a half-decade or longer now after they lost their family-appropriate audience targeting and a scandal such that I lost interest, tho a quick search suggests they're still-or-again around with recent vlogs.)
ajay said,
April 21, 2026 @ 7:31 am
Alan Bennett: Well, I suppose we are working-class. But I wonder how many of these people have realised that Jonathan Miller's a Jew?
Dudley Moore: I suppose he gets away with it because of his ginger hair, actually.
Alan Bennett: I'd rather be working-class than be a Jew.
Dudley Moore: Oh, any day. But think of the awful situation if you were working-class, and a Jew?
Alan Bennett: There's always somebody worse off than yourself.
Jonathan Miller: In fact, I'm not really a Jew. Just Jew-ish. Not the whole hog, you know.
JPL said,
April 21, 2026 @ 3:59 pm
The element of meaning focused by (apparent) free-form "Ish" was prominent in the affixal source of this form well-exemplified by the expression "sameish-sex marriage". That element of adjustment of a categorical judgment is carried over. (And "same" isn't supposed to get a suffix, and there the suffix could get contrastive stress in the right context.)
Christian Horn said,
April 21, 2026 @ 4:42 pm
@Chris Button
Fair enough, that's also a use case.
To translate a "yellowish" one could go for 黄色っぽい or 黄色いらしい, and set a "feels a bit unnatural, or I do not like it" undertone with the first of the two.
Of [something]のように, meaning "in the style of [something]".
Chris Button said,
April 21, 2026 @ 7:13 pm
How about "nanka" as an almost all-purpose translation of "ish"? That seems to work well to to me in my now very rusty Japanese.
Josh R. said,
April 21, 2026 @ 7:45 pm
Christian Horn said,
"I think Japanese 頃 and 前後 are great replacements for -ish.
One could imagine that "Japanese people are always in time" (which IMHO does apply, to bigger degree than other cultures) and would then not have a concept of "-ish", but that's not the case."
Given that she essentially defines "one-ish" as "between 1:05 and 1:25", neither １時頃 nor １時前後 would apply, since not only do they include precisely one o'clock, they also allow for shortly *before* one o'clock. The joke, such as it is, is not that Japanese does not have qualifiers to indicate impreciseness of time, but that the British use of "-ish" for times presumes that the speaker will be late, perhaps egregiously so.
This particular joke follows a bit about the chronic lateness of the London Underground, compared to the preciseness of Japanese trains, so it's all of a piece about punctuality in Britain compared to Japan. Of course, humor is highly subjective, so I will not attest to the quality of the comedy. But it seems to be missing the point to say, "What about 頃?!"
Josh R. said,
April 21, 2026 @ 7:57 pm
Chris Button said,
"How about "nanka" as an almost all-purpose translation of "ish"? That seems to work well to to me in my now very rusty Japanese."
なんか、違う気がする。
I think the word that maps best to "ish" is indeed っぽい, as Christian suggested. Particularly since, like "ish", it can act as a freestanding lexeme. With the caveat that it can only be used to modify qualities, and so is not *generally* applicable to discrete points of time. (Of course, the same was likely once true of "-ish", so perhaps someday っぽい will get there.)
JPL said,
April 21, 2026 @ 8:43 pm
It's all about a weakening, you might say a slackening, of standards for categorical inclusion. (Not insisting on stricter standards.) It's different from "Get there around one.", which referentially focuses the temporal relation surrounding the point.
Chris Button said,
April 21, 2026 @ 9:55 pm
@ Josh R.
Yeah, I'm with you on っぽい except that I don't think it works for time.