Language Log

Jocelyn Ireson-Paine came across the Language Log posts which mention blooming: the increase in size of translated texts. She draws, and this made her think that if line drawing is regarded as translation from an original scene to lines, blooming can occur there too. She has written a brief note on this in "Drawing as Translation".

The essay was inspired partly by Jocelyn's thinking about what she does when she draws, and partly by English lecturer Matthew Reynolds talking about his book Translation: A Very Short Introduction.

This is weird, and even slightly creepy — paste a list of countries like

Costa Rica, Argentina, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Ethiopia, France, Germany, England, Guatemala, Honduras, Italy, Israel, Mexico, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Peru, Puerto Rico, Scotland, Switzerland, Spain, Sweden, Uruguay, Venezuela, USA

into Google Translate English-to-Spanish, and a parallel-universe list emerges:

In a long list of LLOG posts over the years, we've observed the widespread (and false) folk-linguistic view that the grammatical term passive means "vague about agency". (You can learn what it really means from Geoff Pullum's 2011 post "The passive in English".)

This confusion arises partly because passive verbs can sometimes be used to sidestep embarrassing questions about agency, as in the famous example "Mistakes were made" — and perhaps also partly because of a broader confusion about "passive" being passive and thus somehow, well, unmanly and generally weak.

But avoiding embarrassing questions about agency is a garden of many paths. And in an interview with Jake Tapper on CNN yesterday,  U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley offered a tour of several of them. For example:

The case of activist Gweon Pyeong 권평 / Pyong Kwon / Quan Ping 權平 is now going to trial in China.  Gweon stands accused of wearing a t-shirt with three Xi-themed slogans printed on it:

"T-shirt slogans" (11/7/16)

In this post, I would like to explore in greater depth one of the three slogans, namely "Xí bāozi 習包子" ("steamed, stuffed / filled bun Xi").

In the earlier post, I explained how Xi Jinping acquired that curious nickname.  It's really not that offensive, and it is by no means vulgar.  But just what does it imply to call Xi Jinping, China's supreme leader, a "steamed, stuffed bun"?

A competent PR counsel would have advised against this wardrobe choice:

The twitterverse immediately pounced, with captions like these:

Reinforcements from the 101st Fighting Ivies Have Arrived.
From the shores of Burberry, the 82nd heir-born has arrived.
Kush Body Armor by J.Crew. "When you don't know where you are or what you are doing."

Frank Bruni, "What Happened to Who?", NYT 4/8/2017:

I first noticed it during the 2016 Republican presidential debates, which were crazy-making for so many reasons that I’m not sure how I zeroed in on this one. “Who” was being exiled from its rightful habitat. It was a linguistic bonobo: endangered, possibly en route to extinction.

Instead of saying “people who,” Donald Trump said “people that.” Marco Rubio followed suit. Even Jeb Bush, putatively the brainy one, was “that”-ing when he should have been “who”-ing, so I was cringing when I should have been oohing.

It’s always a dangerous thing when politicians get near the English language: Run for the exits and cover the children’s ears. But this bit of wreckage particularly bothered me. This was who, a pronoun that acknowledges our humanity, our personhood, separating us from the flotsam and jetsam out there. We’re supposed to refer to “the trash that” we took out or “the table that” we discovered at a flea market. We’re not supposed to refer to “people that call my office” (Rubio) or “people that come with a legal visa and overstay” (Bush).

Or so I always assumed, but this nicety is clearly falling by the wayside, and I can’t shake the feeling that its plunge is part of a larger story, a reflection of so much else that is going wrong in this warped world of ours.

Following up on "Weak t", 4/6/2017, I wouldn't want you to think that Donald Trump's pronunciation of "scientists" is unusually under-articulated. Here's Barack Obama from his 5/2/2009 Weekly Radio Address:

Just the "-tists" syllable:

Sign greeting Xi Jinping in Florida:

(Source)

At several stations on the commute from Swarthmore to University City station, around half of the people who get on the train are Indians.  Usually they are happily conversing with each other in one or another South Asian language.

Today the train was packed, and I was sitting on the aisle seat next to four Indian men who were talking to each other in Tamil.  I asked them, "When you meet other Indians, how do you know which language to speak to them?"

From Ivanka Trump's Instagram account:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Ivanka Trump (@ivankatrump)

Yesterday I claimed that "if you examine a random stretch of English speech closely, within 10 seconds (of speech time, not your analysis time) you'll notice an instance of an interesting general pattern that has never been systematically studied in the linguistic literature." And I promised to test that claim on a clip from the S-Town podcast, which I happened to have at hand because I was adding it to a portfolio of English intonational examples. (To make it a fair test — though of course this is an illustration of my claim, not a proof — I'm looking for an "interesting general pattern" that's not in the area of intonation.)

But first, let's take a look at another sample from the intonation portfolio, President Donald Trump's weekly address for 3/10/2017. Mr. Trump starts this way:

From Chinascope (4/3/17):

Geoff Pullum, "The world's greatest grammarian", Chronicle of Higher Education 4/3/2017 [emphasis added]:

We mostly did 11-hour days, starting as soon after 7 a.m. as we could and working till 6 p.m., breaking for a short lunch at 1 p.m. to discuss the morning’s work. Virtually every day we would find over our sandwiches that we had discovered something new about English syntax that no one had never known before. Far from being a period of tedious recording of well-documented facts about the world’s best-documented language, it was actually the most exciting research period of my life.

In a comment on a post yesterday ("Blasphemous", 4/4/2017), someone remarked:

At the risk of being blasphemous myself, isn't this a misnegation from Geoff Pullum in his Lingua Franca submission today about Rodney Huddleston?

I suspect that it's a typographical or editing error, unless it's an example of Geoff's often-subtle humor.

But my reaction to that passage was to be surprised that it took them until lunch time to come across something new in English syntax. In examining an arbitrary spoken passage, even in well-studied languages like English, the over/under for observing a new (and interesting) linguistic phenomenon is about 10 seconds. Or so I commonly assert to students.