For the "Word for X" (or "No Word for X") file, from Sidsel Overgaard, "Danes May Bring Back Butter As Government Rolls Back Fat Tax", NPR News 11/13/2012: Toothbutter: noun. Butter spread so thickly as to reveal teeth marks upon biting. The fact that this word exists in the Danish language should help to explain […]
"The beautiful white dialect", Les blanches exotiques 8/22/2012: I love how beautiful and simple the exotic white dialect is. Because it has less words and lacks any logical grammar, it just sounds so peaceful, calming, and real. You can just feel the emotion when you listen to them speak. It varies from tribe to tribe, […]
Those familiar with our history of "No word for X" posts will appreciate Haider Ala Hamoudi's essay "The Dangers of Pop Linguistics: Arab Bluffs and Arab Compromise", posted at Islamic Law in Our Times, 3/6/2012. Some useful background is provided by Geoff Nunberg's Fresh Air commentary "Meetings of the minds", 5/29/2003, which discusses the original claim […]
There's a new sighting of the well-worn "There's no word for accountability in X" snowclone, which we first noticed back in 2006 ("Solving the World's Problems with Linguistics"), and picked up again just about a year ago ("Annals of 'No word for X'"). The usual function of this rhetorical trope, as documented in those posts, […]
Non-linguists frequently ask me whether I am avidly watching "Fry's Planet Word", the new five-part BBC television series on language written and presented by Stephen Fry. (A bit of googling will probably find it for those outside the UK who can't access the BBC iPlayer; there are various illicit copies around, including some on YouTube.) […]
Today's Doonesbury: Recently, the media have been bombarding us with stories about Harold Camping's calculations that the end of the world will start tomorrow: Ashley Parker, "Make My Bed? But You Say the World’s Ending", NYT 5/19/2011; Mark Washburn, "With Rapture at hand, why bother flossing?", The Charlotte Observer, 5/20/2011; Abby Sewell, "Entreprenuers offer post-'rapture' […]
We linguists know that the results of armchair reflection about one's own language are not always empirically reliable. In A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder – How Crammed Closets, Cluttered Offices, and on-the-Fly Planning Make the World a Better Place, Eric Abrahamson and David Freeman attribute to Hans Rindisbacher, professor of German at […]
Ardian Vehbiu wrote to draw my attention to a passage in Matthew Arnold's essay on Heinrich Heine: Philistinism! — we have not the expression in English. Perhaps we have not the word because we have so much of the thing. Ardian wrote "I found this quote counter-intuitive and funny. (I like the idea of the […]
Judging by the popular vote, I've done an epically inadequate job of holding up my end of the Economist's debate "This house believes that the language we speak shapes how we think": the Pro side is winning in a landslide, 78% to 22%.
We've often seen how pop-Whorfian depictions of linguistic difference rely on the facile "no word for X" trope — see our long list of examples here. Frequently the trope imagines a vast cultural gap between Western modernity and various exotic Others. The latest entry comes via Ron Stack, who points us to this television commercial […]
Yesterday we discussed this puzzling passage from Ange Mlinko's 9/7/2010 review in The Nation of Guy Deutscher's Through the Language Glass: Edward Sapir, Whorf's teacher, was an armchair linguist influenced by Bertrand Russell and Ludvig [sic] Wittgenstein's work on the limits of language. Where in the world, I wondered, did Ms. Mlinko get the bizarre […]
We've often observed how fond people are of noting (or rather, claiming) that language L has an interesting number N of words for some concept X. N may be zero, which is taken to mean that the L-ians are unable to grasp the concept X, or at least have some special difficulty with it. Alternatively, […]
In today's Doonesbury, Zonker riffs on the "no word for X" meme: