Tags and Languages

My first topic for this post is more blog-related, basically that I've started implementing tags. I've seen them used in several other language/linguistics-related blogs, but some of them were so narrowly defined, I found it was ridiculous to even bother using them. So, I've decided to use some relatively broad categories, which will probably get narrower as I continue my study in linguistics. (I think my current working categories are: Typography, Orthography, SLA, Linguistics, Languages, Grammar ...?) In case you're wondering, typography refers to the design of type, while orthography refers to the writing system in general. (So, the difference between writing in English and Japanese is a question of orthography; the difference between Baskerville Old Face and Garamond is a matter of typography).

...and on to languages. the SLA tag will probably appear more and more, now that I'm in this new Applied Language Studies option in school. It's only an option; not even counted as a minor. But I already have one of those, so I guess it's okay... Anyway. From my studies and readings, I've been learning more and more about language development and bilingualism, which invariably leads me to recall past conversations with other non-professional linguists. More of my friends either speak a second language, or have studied at least two other languages apart from the official national language (English), which I suppose is considered pretty extraordinary, given that I don't live in Europe. Well, I suppose it could also say something about the number of friends I have, but... So, most of the people I end up talking to about language will invariably and almost definitely have their own experiences, memories, and opinions about language learning and bilingualism. Things like what it means to be "truly" bilingual, or what "fluency" means. Optimal age of learning a second language, and effects on cognitive development. And for the most part, these are lively and engaging discussions.

But as we know from psych 101 and courthouses, anecdotal evidence is the worst kind of evidence. Everybody's experiences will be unique, and particularly more so because of the perceptual bias in interpreting one's own experiences. And that's fine. That in itself is an eye-opener, to see how others in similar situations would interpret things differently. But sometimes, I wish that some of the people I talk to would be more willing to go beyond their own experiences and just accept mine look to some researched authority for a better understanding of the general phenomena of, say, bilingualism.

So, having personally been raising in a multilingual environment, I would class myself as a simultaneous bilingual. And on the whole, I'm fairly confident that my language development wasn't hindered or retarded by the presence of "contesting" languages vying for brain space. And, thankfully, the research seems to agree with me. Some of my former peers, however, labour under the misapprehension that the opposite is true. I suppose such myths must exist for all disciplines, but since the one I'm interested in is language, I tend to focus on that. So, popular myths relating to language include things like the CPH (Critical Period Hypothesis), which basically states that beyond a certain age (puberty, by most counts), individuals will be unable to master a second language. Others are the previously hinted bilingualism myth, that raising a child in a multilingual environment will slow that child's development or otherwise impair its cognitive skills. Yet another popular one is that there is such a thing as "perfection" in language, and therefore, that there also exists "corruption" of language, even though language is always in a fluid and dynamic state of change.

The Adventure for Amazingly August Adjectives

Also, amorous assonance. *heart* Although I actually do enjoy the majuscule A from a typographical point of view (and therefore from a calligraphic view as well), it's strangely not my favourite letter of the alphabet. (Naturally, of course, this worldview changes when I'm getting letter grades on my essays and assignments. Then I want all A's, baby!) Anyway. I'm sitting in the reading room (or quiet study room) in the Student Life Centre on campus, trying to think up a slightly less homophilic title for a friend's photo album (working title: "Boys of Summer"), and this naturally led to the desire to form an adjective for "summer". Summery? summerly? summerian? The first two are actually words that pertain to summer, but it's still not what I wanted. And here is where OED fails again. I've mentioned it before, so I don't see the need to expand on it again. But basically, I needed to look elsewhere for a list of season-related adjectives. And thus, I chanced upon a site that offered them. And so, the four adjectives for the four seasons!

• Spring = Vernal
• Summer = Estival
• Autumn = Autumnal
• Winter = Hibernal

"autumnal" is perhaps the most transparent of the four, and also the best known for its collocation "equinox," whence one might also find "vernal." However, given the relative obscurity of both terms, I suppose they're still only known by about 5% of the English-speaking population. (NB: "5%" is not a statistically researched number; it is based on the extremely volatile intuition of the former honours mathematics student) As for "Æstival" and "Hibernal," I think the salience is even weaker.
Yay! As any good poet or wordsmith knows, there are also adjectives that describe colours (which are already adjectives). That's why we have crimson, scarlet, vermilion and sanguine to describe 'red' without having to resort to fruits (unlike, say, "pomegranate red," or "lemon yellow," etc...) Personally, I think that resorting to precious gems is sorta pushing it as well (ie emerald green, ruby red, sapphire blue, etc.)
Just a quick post for now; more serious post to come soon! :D

Vexels

This would technically go under typography, but between my two blogs, this one needed updating more. Anywhoo...

About a month ago, I decided to watch the documentary Helvetica, which was made in 2007. It was made to celebrate the 50th birthday of the font. Having already a steady interest in typography, the documentary for me was informative, but not exactly revolutionary. It certainly attuned me to the prevalence of Helvetica and Arial in regular signs though.

Fastforwarding to the present, I was wandering around one of the buildings on campus to look for an office. I'm on the third floor, where there's a large printed directory listing the more key offices (eg. Dean's office, janatorial staff, Deparment Chairs, etc.). This is already a step up from the conservative letter bits that are pushed into rows of black cushions, but there was one major problem with this printed directory -- it was rasterised!

Anyone who knows anything about type knows that you'd have to be pretty ignorant or stupid to rasterise text. I would be willing to guess that the person who did it made it in photoshop, in the depressingly mistaken impression that it was inherently better than MS Word. (Which, in the realm of pixel graphics is pretty true, but not when it comes to type-setting and word-processing.)

Well, I suppose it's possible that they made it in too low a resolution, which would have produced the same result. Basically, if you have to print in non-vector mode, make it a high-enough resolution for the reading to be comfortable. I similarly recently received a script/work report from one of my students in the Japanese course I TA, and the first thing I noticed wasn't the gaudy use of colour, but the fact that all the text was in a hideously rasterised low-resolution. Also, the pagination was done in Arial, which I also tend to be unimpressed with.

So kids, two things to remember when you're printing media that have both graphics and text: Either keep the text elements as text (ie vector-friendly), or have the entire thing a reasonably high resolution to prevent poor print quality. If I can see that the miniscule [o] is 8x8 pixels, there's a problem with your resolution.

Dictionary Usability II

More beef with electronic dictionaries. Well, more accurately, more features that I think would benefit its users.

So, traditionally, dictionaries are sorted alphabetically, which works because it's an order that doesn't discriminate words. But with the advent of the computer and cross-listing, it's so easy to create different types of indexing. Say, for example, that I knew that "octogenarian" meant "someone in their eighties". How would I look up the word that meant "someone in their nineties"? Well, there is a wildcard search, so I could look for {*genarian}, and click through the resulting list:

nonagenarian
octogenarian
quadragenarian
quinquagenarian
quintagenarian
septuagenarian
sexagenarian
super-septuagenarian

And that could be great, if you have some Latin training, 'cause then it'd be a quick inspection of the prefixes to figure out which one you want.

But what if I wanted to know the adjective for "liver" and only knew that "renal" was an adj. that pertained to the organ "kidney"? Well, there is a round-about way under "advanced search", where you can look for words in the definition, as well as specifying the part of speech (in this case, to narrow searches for adjectives only). But that's still a bit clumsy.

Now, say I knew that the adj. for hedgehog was "erinaceous", only because I saw a lexicographical online lecture on the TED website. how would I look up the adjectives of other animals? OED doesn't really offer anything, and of course you could do the backward "advanced" search, but it still doesn't organise your searches in an intelligent manner.

So, I think that with the definitions should be a list of related terms that aren't lexically similar, for easy clicking. So under liver would be its definitions, and then "related terms: renal, "

I.T XX

On facebook, I saw a photo labeled as "[male cousin] with girlfriend!" Having been made aware that the cousin in question had been single for a long time, I was quite curious, so I decided to check out the 60-photo album. Apparently my cousin decided to go to a party in HK called "I.T XX" (20 yrs of I.T), and apparently a lot of the HK celebs were there. From the photos, the theme/caption was "is a season of celebration for twentieth birthday [sic]".


Is it just me, or does that read somewhat awkwardly? At first, knowing absolutely nothing about the event, I assumed that it was some sort of party for 20-yr olds. But that wouldn't make sense, since most of my HK cousins are well over 30 by now. (But from what I've read online, the organisation of the party was a rough equivalent to that expected from a 20-yr old. But the "1988/2008" tag was a clue, and so I assumed that it was a 20th anniversary

Anyway, from the other photos, I couldn't find any evidence of Chinese text, which suggests that the awkwardly phrased slogan was intended to refer to the company (I.T) anniversary. Sure, they could have been trying to be artistic with the birthday/anniversary thing, but there are still two places in the phrase that strike me as being particularly problematic.

1. "... of celebration for ..."
My first immediate instinct was to change it into a gerund: "is a season of celebrating for twentieth birthday"

2. "...for twentieth birthday"
Normally, the noun phrase that follows a preposition is complete with its determiner. For example:

(1) Around the time he was sick
(2) *Around time he was sick

So it should either be

(3) "...for a twentieth birthday," or
(4) "...for twentieth birthdays."

And even then, there are more standard phrases to express similar sentiments in the industry. "Celebrating 20 years of young fashion!" seems to work pretty well.

Another thing I don't get is the use of "season". Anniversaries for corporations and companies don't generally have seasons associated with them, unlike religious/cultural holidays (eg: winter for Christmas, Easter in spring, autumn for halloween and thanksgiving, etc.) So what season, exactly, are they trying to reference? (And especially in a place like HK, which is riight on the border of the Tropic of Cancer, are there really any seasons to speak of?) Moreover, it's usually at the 25-yr mark that they have the huge celebrations. Silver Anniversary and all that.

Normally I wouldn't care so much about the less-than-natural English that gets churned out in East Asia, but having been a British colony for a century (technically 99 years), you'd think they would have a better handle on the language, or at least have better trained translators on hand. Then again, if the organisation of the party was as terrible as people are making it out to be, it shouldn't be surprising that they wouldn't bother with a professional translator.

Dictionary Usability

A few weeks ago, I posted a link to a TED talk by a lexicographer. Now I'll follow up with a tangential response (which is to say, some of the ideas in this post are inspired by her talk).

The definition of a dictionary isn't as simple as people might think. We often think of dictionaries as those books that have an alphabetical list of words, each word (or entry) followed by an explanation. But what about "rhyming dictionaries" that don't define anything at all? Those are merely lists of words grouped by similar sounds. And of course, "translation dictionaries" which usually do little more than list the most likely synonyms in the target language. When you think about it, the term "dictionary" isn't well-defined at all.

But moving on to the classical notion of dictionaries. We're progressing towards a digital era, in which (we hope) the power necessary to support computers and servers are less harmful to the environment than the deforestation necessary to produce physical-book dictionaries. The electronic "search" function is certainly handier than physically having to flip through pages of other words. And the current OED online has a menu on the left that lists lexically similar entries, just like a real dictionary.

One area that it fails in, however, is in its ability to guess the word you intended to search, if you mistyped or misspelt it. Google does this pretty well though. Searching {"fedutiary"} will get you to "the nearest alphabetical match-point is displayed in the side-frame", which in this case was pretty useless. (The side-frame gets set at "fay", which is pretty far from "fedutiary".) Google is equally useless for searches containing "fedutiary", but will give a suggestion if "feduciary" is entered. ("Did you mean fiduciary?") Despite its relatively lower prestige, dictionary.com is even better, suggesting "fiduciary" for both searches {"feduciary"} and {"fedutiary"}.

My knowledge of programming is pretty limited, but even in turing, it'd be pretty easy to at least generate common alternatives to sound clusters. (eg. {"-ciary", "-tiary", "-siary"}, {"-e-", "-i-", "-ei-", etc.}). And yet, OED hasn't bothered. I wonder what's holding them up.

Adverse Adverbials

Saw this title on dA today: "Till the End with You". The title made me reread it several times until I was able to process it properly: "With you till the end". But both "till the end" and "with you" are adverbials, so it's understandable that there should be free variation between the two, right?

(As an aside, it should be noted the the artist who titled her work is not a native English speaker.)

The problem is, in this case, the preposition "till" ('til, until) is orthographically identical to the verb "till" (labour, cultivate, plough). And when the verb is in first position, usually one of two structures follow: questions, and imperatives. As most of us know, classical grammar requires a simple inversion of the subject-verb in the declarative clause in order to form a question. For example:

"He is a man" -> "Is he a man?"
"You think she's beautiful" -> "Think you she's beautiful?"

But of course, our current variety of English normally employs the curious verb "do" (for all verbs except auxilliary/modals): "Do you think she's beautiful?"

The imperative is normally distincted from the elision of the subject, which is seemingly always second-person. Thus, "clean [you] the desk," or "buy [you] the tickets."

In "Till the end with you," there is clearly no subject, since the first word is followed by a noun phrase "the end" (or "the end with you", depending on how you read it!) Thus, the first instinct is that this is an imperative. Moreover, the ending "with you" is commonly seen for emphasis in select imperatives:

"be off with you!"
"fly to Siberia with ye!"
etc.

Thus, my first interpretation of "Till the end with you", was somewhat of a mixture between an emphatic statement to the reader to cultivate the end of something, possibly a field, OR a clumsy statement of the artist, expression her desire to cultivate land together with the reader.

After I realised what was meant, I started considering what could be changed. A dry replacement for the preposition obviously wouldn't be enough: "until the end with you" could mean something like "waiting for your demise". The only solution, really, was to swap the two adverbials into "With you 'til the end". An [uncontextualised] statment that begins with "with", can be taken to have elipsed "I am" at the beginning. Thus, "with you till the end" is really "I am with you until the end [of the world]".

And yet, I still have trouble understanding how or why anybody would have written the line in the opposite order. I suppose there could be a pause between the two: "Till the end, with you", but that slows the pace. Although maybe that's intended. Personally, I prefer the quick and succinct when it comes to titles, and I'm also partial to ones that make you think instead of the dry, literal and unimaginative titles of most research papers. (e.g. "Strategy for Determination of in Vitro Protein Acetylation Sites by Using Isotope-Labeled Acetyl Coenzyme A and Liquid Chromatography−Mass Spectrometry".)

Double Dactyls

Even if you can't define it, if you're able to spell it from hearing it once in conversation, you're doing pretty good.

Found a lexicographical talk on TED, and thought I'd share. Most of the room laughed less than I did. :(

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/erin_mckean_redefines_the_dictionary.html

Imperial Inquisition

This has been floating around in my head for a while, but I didn't bother looking into it until the other day. According to most people (and google search), "Inca Empire" is the preferred term (as opposed to "Incan Empire").

This strikes me as odd because usually, the word that precedes Empire is an adjective of the nation-name. (consider: British, Byzantine, Ottoman, Peruvian, Prussian, Roman, Russian, Turkish, etc.) However, most of these adjectives are also used to describe the inhabitants of the nation. From that point of view, Inca and Aztec are correct, and British and Turkish become the exceptions.

To my ears though, it's the grammatical form rather than the semantic form that's easier to grasp, and thus, {[n.]+"empire"} sounds stranger than {[nationality adj.]+"empire"}.

Maybe they're just exceptions to the "rule". Or maybe English-speakers should switch to using "Incan Empire" and "Aztecan Empire".

What do you do with a BA in English?

The thing that surprises me more is the fact that more people aren't aware of what a BA in English actually achieves. I found it odd that the English department would push so hard to convince its students that they'd have a future after 4~5 years in English, but if they don't promote, nobody else would. But then, I speak to my father, and he seems to echo the sentiment that the English department seemed to address: what can you do with a BA in English?

It seems that a lot of people aren't aware of what exactly is involved in a university education in English. The literature program has an obvious emphasis on literature, but in doing so, it forces a sensitivity to the differing historical and cultural varieties of English used by the different authors.

So, what can a BA in English get you? Here are some of the more interesting jobs available:

• Advertising and Commercial scripting/writing
• Television and Film scripting/writing
• copywriter and documentation editing (esp. in tech companies like Microsoft and RIM)
• Any job that doesn't require a specific degree (e.g. Intelligence Officer)
• Translating/Editing (from free-lance, to technical manuals, to government contracts)
• English/Language pedagogy (and reinforce the cycle of school...)
  

I'm sure there's more, but it shouldn't be too difficult to imagine your own. The thing that most people should realise is that communication (between humans) only occurs with language. And given the currency of English in the modern world, it should serve to show that a BA in English would not be disadvantageous at all.

Shifty Semantics

Usually, people don't question whether the words they know have changed in meaning or usage. This is a good thing, because it would be a tremendous deterrent otherwise -- spending an extraordinary amount of resources, daily verifying whether your vernacular is similar to the world vernacular. But sometimes a generation of individuals are raised with a certain set of words with a certain set of meanings, and are confronted with a different generation of individuals who use the old words in new ways. Thus, it was a great surprise to me when I chanced upon a different usage of the popular Latin phrase, carpe diem.

The traditional translation is "seize the day," with an attached meaning of "don't do tomorrow what you can't do today". Or more basically, "don't waste time". But it appears that the youth have seized this phrase, and turned it into something else: "enjoy the pleasures of now," in a sort of hedonistic philosophy.

While it's unsettling that a phrase that the literati have been using as a motto to get things done now, I suppose it's inevitable that the rambunctious youth would turn that phrase around and pervert it to their own silly pleasures. Then again, the phrase "social intercourse", as used by Jane Austen, would have trouble standing on its own today (unless explicitly contrasted by "sexual intercourse").

No argument for language purity here, just a mere observation on the curiosities of English.

A Quest for Sex

...and by my title I mean the noun, not the verb. Ravi Zacharias once poignantly noted that sex has never been discussed more openly before, but people have never been more confused about it before either. Actually, I'm sure what his verbatim quote was more poignant than what I have in my memory, but it gets the point across. With the rise in sex and gender distinction, individuals don't feel they can all be pigeon-holed into one of two characters anymore.

And science fiction tends to share that view. Large iconic shows like the Star Trek franchise and the UK analogue, Doctor Who, all theorize about sentient alien life that may not as easily be categorized into human terms of "male" and "female". Thus, the age-old address of "ladies and gentlemen" is no longer sufficient. And here we get into the language-related portion of this blog.

In one of the more recent episodes of Doctor Who, the hostess of the ship addresses the passengers as:

"Ladies and Gentlemen, and variations thereupon"

which I think is rather clever. It plays on the idea that similarly sentient life-forms also reproduce sexually, and therefore would in fact be some sort of similar variation between the males and females of human physiology. Still, given the hypothetical number of different aliens out there, it seems a bit biased to lump all those different sexes into a simple two words that basically relate back to the human template. But maybe the alien translation of such a phrase would be equally biased for that species' sexes.

Incidentally, Star Trek: Nemesis also had a go at updating the old address. Near the beginning of the movie, Data asks for attention from the party guests by addressing them as:

"Ladies and Gentlemen, and invited transgendered species"

Sounds a bit harsh, especially compared to the Doctor Who version. Although the Doctor Who version was set much farther in the future, does it really take humanity three millenia to coin a better phrase? Apparently, in the Star Trek universe, the male/female split is pretty universal, and across all species, it's considered different or rare to have one that is "other". So I suppose in their case, the address is kinda excused in a way. If I live long enough to see it, I'd like to know what we actually end up with if we get to that stage in society where "others" are just as normal and plentiful as the traditional males and females.

Reparse and Rephrase

--General Notice from the Author of this Blog-----
Not that I have too many dedicated readers, but those who do read this blog might notice a slight change in the past and future posts over the next year. Apparently, it can raise the general brownie points I earn with the admissions office for studying linguistics at grad school. Which means I'll have to censor some of my past posts to make them less offensive. I mean, I'm pretty confident that my posts are mostly benign, but I know when I can get emotional, decrying silly things like the prototypical grammar nazi.
--End General Notice-----

Some of you may already know, or otherwise infer from my general [inter-related] interests, that I'm an avid crossword puzzler. In fact, I spent about 5 hours in HS designing my own for submission to the school newspaper. It was ultimately rejected though, because they felt the calibre was too high. And that hurt. Somewhat. I suppose I could post it online sometime, if I ever figure out how to work in interface elements in Adobe-Macromedia Flash.

So, now that I'm in university, enjoying and suffering the life with my fellow students, I grabbed the newest release of our university newsletter, and flipped to the crossword [and sudoku] section. Given that my university's commercial strength is in its engineering and science-related fields (being one of two universities in Canada to have Math as a separate faculty), it's also natural that a number of them would also be avid watchers of science-fiction shows, such as the Star Trek series, Babylon 5, Doctor Who, etc. But what's also interesting (which would explain bookstores' shelving logic), is that those who invest a lot in watching science-fiction also enjoy a lot of fantasy. And that seems to teem more into this rising "genre" of anime. (Although strictly speaking, it's more a medium than a genre, given that the common elements are reliant on their drawing style, as opposed to general plot elements.)

So, a university strong in maths and science results in a lot of students who are interested in anime. This in turn means good business for the East Asian Studies department over at one of the affiliated colleges of the university. But it also means that when speaking to a student from my university, you cannot assume total ignorance about East Asia, especially since a sizable proportion of the students are also of East Asian descent.

So, back to the crossword. From all the above, it would therefore be less strange to see a higher number of clues and answers to be related to East Asia. And that, although not strange in and of itself for crosswords, does stand out as something that one would expect only at this university.

The crossword at hand had no less than 5 Japanese-related hints, out of a total of about 100 clues. One that was particularly curious (and again, relating back to the fact that the audience is expected to be anime-watching engineers instead of culturally acclimatised linguists), read as follows: "Japanese opposite of 'seme'".

The answer they were looking for, of course, was "uke". But why might I contest that answer? First, let us look at the semantics and morphology of these words. "Seme" is the gerund form from the verb "semeru", meaning "to thrust; to attack". The connotation is therefore "aggressive". "Uke", on the other hand, is the gerund from the verb "ukeru", meaning "to receive, to accept", and connoting passivity. And from this explanation, it might seem clear why these two form an opposing pair: one does the stabbing, the other suffers the stabbing. But typically, and especially in the context of an anime-watching audience, the most salient associations that surface for "uke" and "seme" are not verbal gerunds, but rather the meanings they represent as Japanese slang.

As it turns out, a male can be described as "seme", if he "wears the pants in the relationship" (to phrase it in an excruciatingly polite way. A quick review of the preceding paragraph should give a better glimpse of what it really entails.) An "uke", therefore, is the partner to the "seme", and does the ahh... other half of the work in a relationship.

So, that's all fine and dandy. It's a set pair of words used in a certain sub-genre of anime, and that's fine. But the problem is, "uke" isn't exactly the Japanese opposite of "seme". Because, you see, to the culturally normalised Japanese national, the opposite of "attack" is "defend".

Aha! But then, perhaps the crossword writer merely meant that the answer was supposed to be in Japanese when she wrote the clue. That is perhaps true, but how many people honestly interpret the opposite of a verb to be the passive form of that verb? Is the opposite of killing "being killed", or "reviving"? But then, the opposite of eating is to be eaten, right? Or is it to starve?

And here, the solution dawns that although the word "opposite" is a linear, one-dimensional transformation (to borrow some terminology from my math days), the actual range of opposites for any given word is in fact, closer to being two-dimensional. The semiotic square is actually a nice way of summarising and articulating this conclusion.

[illustration to be added later].

So, as we can see, oppositions can come in one of two forms: laterally, horizontally, or diagonally. Yay. Applying knowledge to everyday situations.

Hisuterikku

I was reading some scanlations online (which I'm quite prone to do, apparently), when I came across this mysterious word: "hisuterikku". From what I could gather, the scans were from an [official] Chinese translation of the original Japanese comic. But whether the translation was from the Japanese dialogue or not is something else. Anyway. Character A starts describing character B as being "hisuterikku", which for a moment looks a bit foreign. Until I realised that the idiot "translator" (extremely generous use of word there) was phonetically transcribing the Japanese assimilated English word: "hysteric". Doesn't it take about 20 seconds to flip through a physical dictionary to confirm the spelling? And even if the translator was terrible at English, that translator must at least have English-competent collegues. Or maybe not, the translator's idiocy probably alienated herself from linguistically competent beings. Garr.

Rant #2: Scheschuan
Fine, it's a foreign word, and therefore has a spelling that's strange for English-speakers/readers. But still. You KNOW it's Chinese, so why the frell would you think that it'd adopt a germanic spelling of "sch-"!? For the record, there are three official/accepted spellings: Sichuan (Mandarin Pinyin), Szechwan (Cantonese phonetic), and Szechuan (hybrid). Also, German Wikipedia recognises Sichuan, Sechuan, and Sezuan. So none of that sch- business.
Which reminds me: why the heck do English ppl think that a phonetically transcribed Chinese name /ch/ would be pronounced as a /sh/?? Eejits. Sichuan ends up sounding like "shesshuan" in the mouths of foreigners. Yes, it sounds foreign enough from English words, but it sounds equally foreign to Chinese ears. Encountering it almost makes me go hisuterikku!

Millions of Billions

Another nerd post about Doctor Who.

The two most recent episodes of Doctor Who make some remarks about the number of non-human lifeforms. As the doctor says, there are "[over] a million million" entities on the planet.

A million million?

Clearly, he means, over 10¹², or, 1000 000 000 000. And yet, in the previous episode, he refers to 10⁹ as being a "billion", clearly following the American example. As such, why is it that he can't remain consistent and therefore refer to 10¹² as being a trillion?

Or perhaps, the point of contention that Doctor Who is a [British] BBC production, and should therefore use traditional UK English as opposed to American English (also known as reformed British. They've also since ammended certain orthographical conventions like the single/double quotes, and connexion/connection). In which case, 10⁹ should be "a thousand million", and 10¹² should be "one billion".

The geek/mathematician in me demands that the great Doctor Who be at least consistent in his numbers! >.<

As point of reference, the traditional UK system of numbers works as follows:

10⁶ = million
10⁹ = thousand million
10¹² = billion
10¹⁵ = thousand billion
10¹⁸ = trillion
etc.
Therefore, X-illion = 10^6x

For some reason, however, the Americans decided that "a thousand million" didn't sound nice enough, and decided to push up the use of prefixes, thus making there numbers significantly smaller. So in the American version:

10⁶ = million
10⁹ = billion
10¹² = trillion
10¹⁵ = quadrillion
10¹⁸ = quintillion
etc.
So, for America, X-illion = 10^3(x+1)

Incidentally, the number system in East Asia, namely that used in China, Korea and Japan, goes by groups of 4s, or "myriads" (after the archaic Greek number "myriad" for 10000). Unfortunately, like most Chinese innovations, these namings aren't very productive; they don't really generate subsequently large numbers, since their names aren't derived from numbers themselves. But the cool part means that each number is named uniquely, and apparently from Buddhist sutra. Thus:

10⁴ = man (萬)
10⁸ = oku (億)
10¹² = chou (兆)
10¹⁶ = kyou (京)
10²⁰ = gai (垓)
10²⁴ = shi (秭)
10²⁸ = jou (穣)
10³² = kou (溝)
10³⁶ = kan (澗)
10⁴⁰ = sei (正)
10⁴⁴ = sai (載)
10⁴⁸ = goku (極)
10⁵² = kougasha (恒河沙)
10⁵⁶ = asougi (阿僧祇)
10⁶⁰ = nayuta (那由他)
10⁶⁴ = fukashigi (不可思議)
10⁶⁸ = muryou (無量)
10⁷² = taisuu (大数)

Fun stuff, eh? :D

Company Man

WARNING: liberal use of IPA letters in this post. Some computers may not display all characters correctly (although Unicode should be enough). Also, I'm not a professional transcriber, so my IPA guides may be greviously erroneous. //Warning

Anyone who enjoys espionage and prescriptive linguistics would enjoy the movie Company Man. The main character, a high-school English teacher, somehow ends up working for the FBI (or CIA... something) because of his grammatical prowless.

Anyway. That has nothing to do with what I'm planning to blog about today. (Although, if you do get the chance, I highly recommend watching the movie, despite it being rated exceptionally lowly on IMDB.com. I suppose the general audience don't have an appreciation for quasi-linguists-turned-international spies.

So, on the busride home from a shopping spree with my roommate (although I didn't end up purchasing anything, except lunch), I was confronted with the delightful opportunity of making an amateur analysis of the linguistic patterns of a pair of passengers seated directly behind me and my roommate. For the majority of their conversation, the two speakers (one male, one female) spoke in English, but it was fairly evident that both were native Mandarin speakers.

At first, I was slightly unnerved at being forced to listen to someone else's conversation, especially when the conversation is between strangers. But then, the jarring, unnatural patterns of speech became a source of study for me.

It quickly became evident later (confirmed when they eventually switched to speaking Mandarin), that the female was from mainland China who came to Canada much later in life than the male, who although possibly Taiwanese, sought to adapt the Beijing standard of speech (his inability to follow as fluidly in Mandarin betrayed his age of immigration).

My findings were as follows (of the male speaker; I didn't care much for the female):

1. Dropping of medial and final dental/alveolar plosives (and possibly replaced with aspiration)
Of the most commonly used words, these involved "it's" becoming /ʔi^hs/, "that" /tha^h/, "not" /naw^h/. Additionally, words like "considered" became /consi^here^h/. This probably stems from Mandarin lacking any sort of terminal plosives, fricatives or affricates. Indeed, the only real syllable/word-endings that exist in Mandarin are vowel sounds, /n/ and /ŋ/. Curiously, /k, g/ seem to be less affected.

2. Nasalisation of vowels
This occured commonly, especially with the -ing ending of verbs/gerunds. Thus, "voting" became /vo^hĩ/ (instead of /'voutiŋ/), but also for replacing glides and approximants (/w, l, n/), as in /faĩo^h auw^h/ for "filed out".

3. Vowel Approximation
This is probably most common for any ESLer, or any second language speaker for that matter. My Russian friends tell me that I mess up their vowels somehow. (But then again, I haven't tried very hard either.) Most commonly, in native Mandarin speakers, this seems to suggest that they aim for the orthographical letter as opposed to the naturally schwa syllable. Thus, "fulfill" becomes /fo^hfi^w/.

In summary, native Mandarin speakers who seek to speak a more natural variety of English should be especially careful about their schwa vowels, and ending syllables with consonant sounds.

Also, I should probably note that I haven't written this post in an elaborate form of spite towards immigrants or non-native speakers. Rather, I hope that this post makes more native English speakers aware that there isn't just one "Chinese accent". Also, hopefully this proves a semi-funtional guide for native Mandarin speakers to pinpoint and curb their natural habits in order to speak English more effectively.

Hopefully, my next post will be about native Cantonese speakers.

Jeopardy

On Friday fellowship, the organisers decided to try a game they aptly called Bible Jeopardy. Each category corresponded to a book of the New Testament, and the values ranged from 100 to 1000. The questions, however, weren't exactly always worth the number of points they earned; a certain 200-point question was two-part, and seemed worth more like 1500 points.

Through the course of this game, however, it quickly became apparent why the nature of our gameplay was different from that observed on television. The questions themselves, while interesting, failed to conform to an unspoken Jeopardy standard, which would have allowed for the relatively simple formation of the corresponding question. Consider the following [real-life] jeopardy answer/question:

A: This gardening tool is also known as an immoral pleasure seeker.
Contestant X: What is a hoe?
A: ...
Contestant Y: What is a rake?
A: Correct!

Now, contrast that with:

A: Jesus created wine from something, in a certain place. (Identify both the something and the place.)
Most logically correct answer: What did Jesus do with water in Cana of Galilee?
Accepted answer: What is water, and Cana of Galilee?

---!?!??? One wonders how the organisers devised these questions. (Obviously though, none were grammatically knowledgable enough to have devised better questions.) A significantly better-phrased question would have been:

"Jesus turned this into wine at this place."
or
"Here was where Jesus turned this into wine."

Both would have elicited a much more natural "What did Jesus do with water in Cana of Galilee?"

Naturally, being a church-related activity, rigor for rules were not strictly observed (especially in the realm of grammar), although they were curiously adamant about source-citing (which verse did we specifically draw our answers?).

And to close off as I semi-normally do with a random fact or thought of the day: Never travel last-minute to university when you can do it the night before. It decreases sleep, and heightens anxiety.

Transliteration Troubles

Anyone who's ever experienced translating a document has probably encountered this before (unless the document was written in a xenophobic era), where they're forced to make a double transliteration from some (sommetimes unknown) first original language. For example, when I was translating a Japanese literary criticism on the Confucian Analects, it became more appropriate to look up the official English translations of the Analects than to try my own hand at translating the Japanese translation of Medieval Chinese into English.

But entire passages and famous quotes are a bit more bearable. When the issue is a single name, problems can arise. In order to evoke a sense of exoticism, I find that a lot of online aliases are constructed from quasi-Japanese phonetics. Even Raymond E. Feist, a successful fantasy author, uses Japanesque names for some of his aliens/other worlders. (Apparently, one of the ppl he consults for coming up with these names is in fact a person of Japanese ancestry.)

And that in itself is fine. English, being phonetically richer than Japanese, is able to easily transliterate Japanese words without losing too much phonetic information. (The notable exception being the /r/ debate, but since only one such sound exists in Japanese, there is no fear of overlap.) The problem, however, is going the other way around, where a phonetically richer language is forced to be pigeon-holed into a phonetically smaller language. Japanese, in fact, often does the same thing that fantasy writers will on this side of the world: they'll use European-sounding names to add a sense of exoticism for their [native] Japanese audiences.

And so, we come to the cause of this post, the movie The Cat Returns (猫の恩返し). In it, there is an interesting character by the name of Humbert "Baron" von Gikkengen. The weird thing about this phonetic transliteration of the last name is that an accurate transliteration would be "Jikkengen," but in either case, the name looks too Japanese.

Naturally, the first question we should ask is whether a European name exists that might be transliterated into Japanese as ジッケンゲン. Google being the wonderful search engine that it is, quickly turns up Franz von Sickingen, an apparently not-so-nice German Knight in the service of Maximillian I, and Charles V in the Holy Roman Empire (a particularly poorly named nation, as it was none of those things -- holy, roman, or an empire). It also seems to be part of several hyphenated place names in Germany. So a logical (and perhaps more accurate) English version of the Baron's name should be "Humbert von Sickingen, Bn."

But I suppose the producer people felt that the "sick-" in "Sickingen" wasn't particularly pleasant, and rightfully so (nevermind the relatively obscure historical figure that comes attached to it). But what about "Zichingen"? It's apparent from the transliteration that the original Japanese were trying to preserve the voiced quality of that first sound in the German name (ie, the /z/ sound in 「ジッケン」). and the "ch" instead of the "ck" obscures the name even more. But does it then run the risk of sounding too German? (Such a question seems a bit moot, given that the character already has the 'von' part.) And I'd dare venture to say that Zickingen or Sichingen look more naturally Germanic than the Japanesque "Gikkengen". (Incidentally, a google search for "Gikkingen" or "Gikkengen" both only return hits regarding the character from the movie. Which, from a marketing point of view, is pretty advantageous, unlike the title of some shows... *coughHOUSEcough*) And since it's a name of a fictional character, it doesn't seem entirely disadvantageous to stray slightly from the original (and limiting) transliterated Japanese name.

In Summary:
When translating (or as is often the case, back-transliterating) places and names, always first check for historical presidence. Why waste the effort of your [professional] predecessors?

Another fun fact in translation and transliteration: when Pearl S. Buck did her translation of 水滸伝 ("Water Margin" in wikipedia), she translated 花和尚 as "priest Hwa" instead of the more accurate "flowery monk". Despite her extraodinary fluency in the language, I suppose even she had things to learn about Chinese appellations.

Business Banter

The wonderful thing about keeping a language-related blog, is that it's difficult to run out of source material. Aside from the rich pages of research journals in this newer branch of study called Linguistics, language itself surrounds us (or at the very least, surrounds those who're capable of reading this blog).

So, over the weekend (the first of 12 long-weekends I plan to enjoy this term), I dug up some old movies: A Fish Called Wanda (1988), and Fierce Creatures (1997). Initially, it was to appreciate the role of Michael Palin more, being totally unaware of him and the Monty Python group when I first saw these movies as a child. And near the beginning of the second film, Fierce Creatures (which starred many of the same actors), Kevin Kline holds a conference call, and says this curious line:

"if this communiqué is in any way sleep-interruptive, I'll re-telephone you later,"

which, of course, should strike any native speaker of any variety of English as being non-standard. The comedy contained should be self-evident, making fun of the "professional" businessman (is "white collar" the common vernacular?), and his obvious ignorance on language and language use.

I could expand on the actual anomalies of the line, but I think it's brilliant, and beautifully illustrates the general demographic of the "professional" businessman. A businessman who obviously hadn't received a proper/real/decent education.

And the extraordinary thing is, aside from this common joke that seems to become more and more cliché, is that it seems in actual fact to be based on truth. In my relatively short life of a quarter-century, I've had friends who've gone into business, worked for people in business, and met people from other businesses than the one I was at. And despite the obvious individual characteristics, there were certain common traits found among them all: a general ignorance for higher classical education (as science or philosophy), and a general abuse of language.

Admittedly, nobody I've met has ever used language as terribly as to assume a communiqué is equivalent to a telephone call, or that sleep-interruptive is an accepted adjective. But they still create a certain structure of language that goes beyond mere jargon.

In terms of written communication, I find that most of the time, the business/administrative trendy are usually not so technologically updated. At least, that's the best excuse I can come up with to explain the appalling plethora of emails I received at work, completely void of structure and punctuation. And this, of course, makes me even more critical of small word choice.

One of the examples I abhor the most in "professional language" (or in reality, imitation language, spoken and perpetuated by this false rising "middle" class that totally should have been reigned in and subdued decades ago by the peerage), is the use of the two words in succession: "as per". What the frell is it supposed to mean! Does the latinate "per" magically make the businessman an educated individual? The extraordinary thing is that once people hear it for the first time, usually by some ignorant businessman, they assume that it's proper to use in professional speech, and thus a whole new generation regenerates this lingual travesty.

Do I have any acceptable alternatives? the critical reader may ask. And in fact, I do! Such phrases include: "according to," "as to," "following [your request]," and simply "per". Sample sentences:

"I did it as you requested"
"Following your inquiry, please find enclosed a copy of ---"
"The company has fullfilled the criteria, according to your specifications"
"All parties have completed their tasks per the contract"
etc.

So, really, why spread about more nonsense than necessary in the inherently flawed grammar of English? Speaking of which, something which became popular in my workplace was to end tag questions with "or no?" which was rather new to me. I was tempted to use it at first, until I realised that the reason why it sounded so foreign was because it was simply wrong. But I've blogged about that before, so no need to go there again.

So, please don't make any more sleep-interruptive communiqués that will require a later re-telephoning.

Egghead Expressions

Being the extraordinary geek that I am (or, to put it more nicely, being the avid and thorough intellectual), I decided to look up and watch the first few episodes of the original Doctor Who series (1963), with William Hartnell as The Doctor.

Aside from the obvious differences in cinematic freedom and convention, there were some linguistic issues that caught my attention. Watching a science-fiction show half a century afterwards is revealing in the way that science has actually progressed, as well as the vocabulary that it's developed. Things that the scriptwriters hoped would sound "scientific" may end up sounding tautological or empty.

The first of the two lines which caught my attention was the Darlek's use of the verb "explode":

"We will have to explode another neutron bomb"

Very odd phrasing. Why might that sound odd to us today? The verb "explode", which in contemporary experience is used commonly in the passive, is also almost exclusively used in the intransitive. But is there even a historical basis for a transitive "explode"?

According to the OED, there is! But the most recent cited examples extend from the early 1800s, which seems reasonable to then assume it hasn't been in common usage since. Therefore, a sesquicentury later, it would still seem odd to use "explode" in such a way, and of course, two centuries later, it would definitely sound unnatural. In any case, wouldn't "detonate" or "ignite" have sounded more scientific anyway to the scientists of the 'sixties?

The second, which perhaps accesses a more common experience, was (again) the Darlek line:

"Displaying [surveillance video] now on frequency six"

Most people nowadays might have said, "now showing [blah] on screen", or "on channel six". But to say "frequency six" sounds odd, especially when the units of frequency isn't offered.

Sorta makes one wonder how hollow Startrek expressions will sound to our science-minded grandchildren. Or, will they perhaps set the standard for such new technologies in the future?

Slippery Slang

Today I was reunited (to use an antiquated term) with a friend from HS. Having recently graduated from the Musical Theatre program at Sheridan, his linguistic register is significantly different from mine. One might describe it as "theatre speak". The speech regularly employed by those in the performance industry, most often used by actors and singers, but also regularly identified in movie producers, directors, etc.

In the course of our conversations today, I was exposed to various curiosities of English, and several artifacts of slang. Most of the time, I was able to guess the correct polarity of his odd phrases (which usually fell into the polar category of being good or bad). One, however, was particularly bewildering for me. He had described himself as being "the sh*t" for a certain performance, which had me guessing whether he meant that he was an exemplary dancer for that performance, or whether he had failed miserably.

Apparently, it means the former. When someone is described as "the sh*t", apparently it means that they are most excellent. On the other hand, if they are described as being "sh*tty", it doesn't. Similarly, if someone "shat" their exams, it does not mean that they passed with flying colours.

This does, however, remind me of another word now used in common vernacular: "bomb". If someone is described as being "the bomb", it's supposed to be a testament to their excellence or their expertise. If they "bombed" something, on the other hand, it means that they failed it miserably. Incidentally, to describe someone as being "bombastic" isn't exactly a positive thing.

Cinematic Standards and Realily

Speech is a funny thing. I remember in HS, I would either hear these ads on the radio, or read them in the newspaper, that for an easy course of 6 classes, I could expand my vocabulary and earn the respect I deserve.

Yes, it is true that language shouldn't be a mark of social class, but in this modern world it is necessary to know when it's appropriate to maintain a professional tone, and when it's acceptable to speak vulgarly.

The receptionist of the George V hotel in Paris from the movie French Kiss offers a wonderful set of examples of professional language, wherein, despite his obvious discomfort, he does not directly engage in verbal combat with Meg Ryan's character, but rather phrases things as politely as possible. For example:

Concierge: Welcome back, madame, to the George V.
Kate: It's incredible how do you that. The words come out "welcome back", but the meaning is completely different. What's the deal, is that a French thing, or a concierge thing?
C: As madame wishes.
K: [paraphrased] See, you did it again! Do you enjoy being this rude? Because when you do, it makes me REALLY ANGRY!
C: Thank you madame for the fascinating lesson in our cultural differences.

It goes on, but you get the point. Movies on some level try to imitate real life, but on the other hand eliminate some of the things that would actually happen in real life -- slight slips of the tongue, for example. Every native speaker has at some point in their life, corrected themselves in midspeech. And yet, it seems that the image effected by A Few Good Men is shattered (first by Judge Judy), and now by the hearing of Lurita Doan found here.

One would assume that an individual with an MA in renaissance literature, under investigation by a federal agency, could afford to speak a little bit more professionally than Ms. Doan manages to in this video. Perhaps the definition of "candid" needs to be re-examined. Language log already has a nice post on her grammatical blunderings, so I won't talk about that.

But really. What kind of person under investigation would effect a professional air, and then say things like "when it was investigated by you guys..." and "...at the beginning of the proceedings, we got into a little spat".

On a side note, the voice of Congressman Christopher Shays sounds SO much younger than he looks. If I were to draw a cartoon character for him to voice, I totally would have chosen an adolescent skater or surfer. Nothing like the voice of Christopher Ryan, whose voice is soo addicting. I totally want to sound like that when I'm a professor. :)

Beauty

...is in the eye of the beholder, so saith the old saying. And apparently it's in the ears too. Yes, what constitutes "good" or "pleasing" for one person may not necessarily be similar to what it would be for someone else. (Traditional Chinese Opera is an excellent example of this, especially for the modern Western audience.)

And yet, I always cringe whenever I hear someone say something like "Japanese is a beautiful language!" Especially when it's in the context of "despite the fact that this movie is American, I want to watch it in Japanese because ..."

Somehow, I doubt the rabidly obsessed are either objective or educated to actually make such an assessment. Sure, in the West, we tend to say the same thing of the Latinate languages -- of Spanish and French, and conversely we tend to think of German and Russian as being "harsh" and "masculine", perpetuating such jokes that imply that German terms of intimacy still sound like swearing to the rest of Europe.

Pure rubbish. True, there are differences in the phonetic ranges of these languages, some of which may lie well outside one's own native tongue. For English or Cantonese speakers, for example, Mandarin may sound more pleasing because of its lack of glottal stops. Somehow, glottal stops are considered masculine or ugly. Or the regularity of (the five) vowel sounds (and three diphthongs) in Japanese might be refreshing for any speaker of the PIE language family.

But if an individual is a "young adult" male, reclusive and obsessive about Japanese animation, is it more likely that this person is actually finding Japanese to be a beautiful language, or is it more likely that in a case of self-induced hypnotism (or delusion), he's convinced himself that Japanese sounds so much better.

In fact, from personal experience, I've found that not only do such individuals who worship Japanese have minimal linguistic understanding (despite their obsession compelling them to learn the language), they have an even weaker understanding of their own native tongue (which in my case, would have been native English speakers). "Japanese is so much better than English; it's so much richer in vocabulary". Yes, well, maybe if you'd bother to read Chaucer,or Puttenham, or Shakespeare, or James Joyce. Or perhaps the poesy of Edgar Allan Poe and Rainer Maria Rilke. But no, clearly your extremely limited exposure to your native tongue is obviously enough to compare to the best of the literature of another language.

On the other hand, I sometimes wonder if it's even worth the effort to try to show this obvious fallacy in these rabid fans' philosophy. If I'm getting paid to teach, I shouldn't care what they do with the material taught, right?

Hrmm...

CJKE Crazy

[link]

The link above features a nice example of bad translation captured by engrish.com. However, as an amateur typographer with experience with asian fonts, I also recognised a second phenomenon: the seemingly random use of normal/bolded characters at the bottom for the Chinese translation. (And, for the curious, they didn't do a great job translating into Chinese either; apparently they did a second machine-translation, using the shoddy English as the new source.)

So what's the deal with the seemingly random bits of bolded text? Is it placed for emphasis, to help with the visual balance of clutter, given the relative high density of ink per line of text? Sadly, no. These fine toilet chaps, who couldn't bother finding adequate translators, also couldn't be bothered to find an adequate CJK/Unicode font. You see, the characters that are bolded, are in fact consistent with the kanji used at the top for the japanese font. The other characters, however, are some other default font that could accomodate the simplified characters not found in Japanese dictionaries (and therefore, Japanese fonts). In short, they used a simple word processor like MS Word, which, when given a character outside the font in use, would replace it with the default language font instead. For MS Word 2003, this was often MS Mincho, or MS Gothic. As for the new Vista, I have no idea how well it handles such cases.

Most people probably wouldn't care, and the Chinese-capable would probably just raise an eyebrow before proceeding. But the typographers and designers, familiar with the issues and hurdles of asian computing, would weep at such public display of ignorancce and machine abuse.

It makes sense on the one hand -- Why should a Japanese font incorporate all those glyphs from Simplified Chinese when it would rarely be used? But on the other hand, in this age of cliches and the oft-repeated word of globalisation, it might be prudent to create typefaces that are a bit more inclusive than just one language.

For the curious, what the message is *trying* to say is something closer to: "Because the stalls here are not stocked with toilet paper, customers are advised to purchase toilet paper for use [from this machine]". A bit clumsy as a translation, but i think it incorporates enough of the key words for the casual reader to see where they went wrong. Obviously, a natural translation would do a much better job than attempting to remain faithful to the original Japanese text.

Seriously Silly Sinophiles

People have been laughing for years at the shoddy English translations that've been produced from East Asia, namely, from China, Japan, and Korea. However, how much has been said about the Western fluency of asiatic languages?

Not much. Or at least, not much on this side of the world. In Asia, however, the locals constantly laugh, chuckle, chortle and snicker at the grevious mispronunciations and syntactic inaccuracies that the "foreigners" produce. Most people of minimal international awareness have probably heard of, or visited, engrish.com. Wonderful stuff.

But now, there's apparently been another site, called Hanzi Smatter (link on right), that does the flip side -- featuring the blunders that the western world does to asian text. It unfortunately features way more tattoo blunders than I'd like (due to my personal aversion to tattoos, and photographs that reveal more about the skin quality of the individual instead of the subject matter), but still entertaining, and oddly addicting.

There is, in the design world, a certain school of thought wherein the "image" or "aesthetic" overrides the symbolic or the semantic. (The main reason for my contempt for contemporary art critics.) A man, woman and snake in a garden with an apple tree is a bit hard to pass off as original without making the viewer draw SOME allusion to the biblical story of Eden. And Chinese characters, an old and established writing system for some 1/6th of the world's population, isn't exactly source material for "obscure references".

In a slightly related corollary, I recently read on a forum or comment box of a blog, the use of the word "pictogram". It almost made me scream. Except that I was alone, so it'd arouse no attention. (Like a tree that falls in a forest...)

Among the 5'000+ characters that are required for reasonable erudition, and the 60'000+ characters that modern dictionaries admit as being legitimate, only about 8% would be truly pictographic -- visually representing their intended meaning. Such characters include "fish" (魚), "bird" (鳥), "hand" (手), and "tree" (木). An overwhelming majority (~80%) of Chinese characters, on the other hand, are composed of two elements: a phonetic, and semantic half.

The phonetic half (usually on the bottom, or the right half of the character), gives some hint to the pronunciation, normally through rhyme. The semantic component, on the other hand, hints at its meaning or function. (A hand radical on the left, for example, often indicates a verb: 掃 (to sweep), 持 (to hold), 揺 (to wave), 打 (to strike); a water radical indicates a liquid object: 湯 (soup), 海 (ocean), 池 (pond; lake), 油 (oil).)

For this reason, contemporary scholars prefer other terms than the archaic "pictogram" or "ideograph". Instead, the linguist might use "logogram", the educated layman "character", and the typographer "glyph". Wikipedia adequately explains the distinction between "Chinese characters" and "Chinese words", for the more curious.

Majuscule ß

It's finally official!

But first, a preamble:

Back in First Year, I decided to take German 101. In that class, we learned the German alphabet, and its different written forms (upper/lower case. ...maybe cursive). One letter was more special than the rest, it was more than a mere letter with a diacritic: it was the eszett (ß). Deceptively similar to the Greek letter Beta, the Eszett a voiceless /s/ sound, and so named for the supposed historical ligature of S + Z (although you have to think in terms of medieval scripts, so it was more like ſ + 3).

"Why isn't there a capital letter version of the eszett?" I clumsily asked.
"Because it would never begin a word, and therefore there's no use for it," answered the professor.
"But what about when you're writing in allcaps...?"
The professor only smiled in response, either appreciative of my intellect, or disguising her contempt of my germanic ignorance.

But the question persisted in my mind. Surely there were renegade typographers who'd design a majuscule ß for billboards or something.

And back to the main story.

Andreas Stötzner, a German typographer, has been lobbying the Unicode Consortium since 2004 for the official use of a majuscule ß. He reasoned that it was important to have such a character especially to distinct between names (WEISS vs WEIß, for example), which would normally be all pigeon-holed into "SS" for all-caps applications like tombstones or telephone directories. People are, after all, rather sensitive about names.

In 2007, Stötzner resubmitted his proposal, this time appealing on typographical/design grounds rather than grammatical reform. And now, as of 4 April 2008, it appears that the unicode block uni1E9E is now reserved for the magical majuscule ß. Success!

Although Stötzner has spent considerable time and thought on the design of such a glyph, it seems that independent typographers will always have their own methods of creating their own majuscule ß. Finally, German comicbook characters will be able to scream without a compromised eszett!

Also, it means I now have a set unicode spot for this majuscule eszett that I was going to end up designing anyway for my pet project typeface. For a draft preview, see below:


(Click on image to go to site for larger resolution)

Endlich, haben wir Großbuchstabes Eszett!

Isolated Idiomatic Interlocution

Language Log posted about a certain pedocide (made-up word; guess what it means) who spoke in a curious strain of French, the subjunctive imperfect. Apparently it's jarring to the French, and others find it very "weird" (for lack of a better linguistic term). And this first got me thinking about a few other friends of mine who speak in curious strains of English. If English were the realm of microbes, and dialects were specific diseases, then the one friend would speak in E.Coli.

But despite the grammatically correct forms of this Frenchman and two certain friends of mine, why is it that their speech sounds strange? Why do I convulse and cringe everytime I'm forced to edit one of their essays? And what is it that makes me have seisures every time I read a note or email from them?

I think, to a large extent, it all relates to the "norming" of speech, acquired through society and regular social contact. I'd think it's pretty fair to assume that a grown man who goes around baiting and gutting bambinas isn't in regular contact with a network for friends.

Similarly, the two friends of mine can be described as being relatively isolated, especially in a sociolinguistic context. Or maybe they're just dumb men who're deaf to the conventions of English that they're surrounded by everyday. Or maybe, they don't actively seek normal English speakers and instead isolate themselves to Korean Visa students to make themselves feel better for speaking English better than them.

But whatever the cause, the fact remains that the majority of their speech and speech patterns are drawn from written literature, without instruction or convention. "Since Shakespeare said it, it must therefore make my speech superior to the average English speaker" seems to be the sort of sentiment behind my friends' convoluted conversation.

Admittedly, I myself was such an individual when I was significantly younger. The books I read were childrens books from 1960 or earlier, and with strong British flavour. A particularly strong memory is one in which a Griffin was speaking to the protagonist, and used these strange words, like "eejit". It stuck with me for a very long time until I was linguistically mature enough to relate it to the North American "idiot", and further to understand that "eejit" was to reflect a Scottish pronunciation.

Still, I'd like to think that the amount of social contact I have now has normalised my personal vernacular enough to a point where I'm easily communicable to the general [well-educated] individual. It's usually pretty easy to tell whose language is saturated with meaning and education, and whose language is merely inflated with antiquated forms and pretentious phrases.

Speaking generally, everybody speaks a unique variant of English; their own personal dialect. And of course, these dialects can usually be fitted into certain cross-sections: by age, sex, geographical location, socio-economic background, etc. Thus, people from the west end of the city might speak differently from the east end; the elderly would speak differently from the teenagers; men speak differntly from women; the British peers would speak differently from the working class.

Naturally then, the closer one is to your personal cross-section of dialects, the more "normal" their speech would appear. And thus, by extension, if my friends were simply from a far-removed enough dialect region from mine, it would be understandable why I have trouble understanding them.

But even within the realm of dialects, there's a range or normalcy, and those who exist well beyond that range seem equally alien to all natural dialect speakers.

Shrewd Shrew

Today's post is about linguistic registers. Everybody speaks in a register, much in the same way that we all speak a unique dialect. (Anyone who disagrees, or is unfamiliar with this concept, a quick google search on "dialect" should appease the uneasy.) The distinction I would like to make for this post between a register and a dialect is that of regional versus socio-professional. Thus, the difference between a Texan and a Abendonian is a dialect, but the difference between a medical doctor and a philosopher is a register.

I have two profs whose speech patterns couldn't be any more different. Both are consistent with their personalities; the first one is pretty laid back and easy to talk to. He says things like, "Poetry is difficult. Poets intentionally made them difficult. So don't be worried or feel stupid if you find yourself asking simple questions like 'who's Alison?'". The second professor is significantly older, and seemingly a lot more rigid. He would say things like, "Poetry is difficult. I have graduate students who struggle with this stuff, so of course you would too. If you didn't, I don't deserve my pay cheque."

It's convenient that both profs have said similar things for me to compare. The first prof obviously has a better sense of the emotional response of human beings, and more specifically, that of students. The second clearly attempts humour to try to arouse comradery with the students, but who likes being told they're stupid?

But aside from the inherently condescending tone that the second prof dons, he has a second tactic to try to win our favour. He'll sometimes switch out of his professor register, and speak in words that aren't considered appropriate for an academic.

Like when he was lecturing on Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew. "A shrew is, in today's terms, a b*tch," he says, with much emphasis, seemingly deriving pleasure at being able to say such a naughty word in the classroom. "A b*tch," he repeats, for dramatic effect, or for himself?

Of course, there really isn't such a thing as a register police. Although if he starts saying religiously offensive things, I'm sure committees will soon have his head. But personally, I feel that there's a limit to what a professor is able to say, especially in the classroom. If a student were speaking with the professor individually, I don't have any qualms about him breaking things down into such base terms. But a lecture is different. A level of professionalism and decency is expected.

I suppose one good thing about having such profs is that I can learn (by contrast) how to be a good prof, or at the very least, to be an inoffensive one.

Contraction Controvesy

I like alliteration. I don't consider it the high point of fine literature, but it's fun and easy to do.

Anyway. For some reason I was considering contraction pairs. "it is" becomes "it's", and "you will" becomes "you'll". And so on and so forth. But what happens when you get three words that can be contracted? "You will not" can be "you'll not" or "you won't". A quick google search reveals that "you won't" gets 69x more hits than "you'll not". And what about "it is not"? Should it be "it isn't" or "it's not"? Again, our quick google search shows that "it's not" is about 40x more used than "it isn't". Is there a subtle difference, or is it merely a mark of linguistic trend?

As a possible explanation for the first pair, I'd venture to say that the pronoun "you" is of higher ordinance (whatever that means), than the auxilliary verb "will", and therefore the contraction tends toward the lower-order word, resulting in "You won't". One could then argue that "you'll not" puts stronger emphasis on the negation (although I'm sure the latter construction could be easily a regional dialect thing).

So what about "it's not"? "It's not" is two syllables, whereas "it isn't" is three. Does the copular verb to be have a higher ordinance than the neuter pronoun it?

I really doubt my explanation holds any weight (especially since I only spent about 30 seconds coming up with it), but it certainly does make one wonder. Does one happen in a certain context more than another? It's easy to see if there's precedence, the negating parallel structure is easy to do.

Consider:
A: "It's only a matter of time until the men in white coats come to get you"
B: (1) "It's not only a matter of time, it's a matter of how many men!"
(2) "It isn't only a matter of time, it's a matter of how many men!"

Is it this even a legitimate area of study for linguistics? Maybe, but it's not something I'd want to investigate for 8 months or more.

To close off with a fun fact of the day, let's look at some holes in the OED. For the word comparable they only have listed in the pronunciation "COM-pri-bull" instead of "com-PAIR-a-bull". But I've always pronounced it the 2nd way, and most Canadians I speak to also pronounce it that way. Does the OED only consider British and American standards to be worthy of their attention? How cruel.

Form and Formality

Generally, we tend to have this idea that the longer a title, the better it must be. Therefore, an archbishop must be several points holier than bishops, and grand dukes must be higher-born than dukes. However, consider "viscount" and "count" (or, in English, "earl"). Earls rank above viscounts in the peerage hierarchy.

Now, one that really gets me is "sir" and "sirrah". People assume that because "sirrah" is longer than "sir", it must therefore be more formal. Unfortunately, this is NOT so!

Sir is a general title of respect, and formally a title of knights and gentry. Sirrah, on the other hand, is a derogatory title used by the upper classes to address their lower peers or servants.

"You, sir, are a disgrace" - strong
"You, sirrah, are a disgrace" - stronger.

So the next time you want to thank someone for a service, please choose your words carefully. They may not be so forgiving the second time.

(In other news, I'm moving out of this hellhole into a [relative] paradise. Although once women move in as well, that may change...)

Computer Grammar

Sometimes, I seriously wonder about the thought that goes into grammar check in MS Word. Usually the grammar explanations make marginal sense, and the specific sentence in question is only partially corrected by accepting such simplistic generalisations. Today, however, I encountered something totally bizzare.
Original sentence: "What do you think is Chaucer's understanding of masculinity?"
MS Word suggestion: "What do you think is Chaucer understands of masculinity?"
The explanation?

Certain verbs cannot be paired with forms of the verb "to be." Use the simplest form of these verbs (without the "ing") when you write about present or past action.

Instead of: "Eris was preferring the opera to rock music."
Consider: "Eric preferred the opera to rock music."

Instead of: "Jonathan is needing a break in his studies."
Consider: "Jonathan needs a break in his studies."

How the heck does the computer think that "Chaucer's" = "Chaucer is", when it's immediately preceeded by an "is"!? So the computer thinks it's correcting "Chaucer is understanding ..." to "Chaucer understands". And, weirdly enough, when it is corrected to "What do you think is Chaucer understands of masculinity", the computer doesn't complain. Looks like grammar check still has a loooong way to go before it's considered useful.

National Grammar Day

So today is apparently National Grammar Day, where today is the third of the month of March, in the year of our Lord two thousand and eight.

Mixed feelings on the subject. As a university student, it's easy for "my kind" to jump at the chance to condemn others for being less than ourselves, but on the other hand, this is exactly the sort of propaganda that brought the Nazis and Communists to power, and subsequent ruin.

Ultimately, yes, language is an organic thing, and isn't controlled by a ruling committee. But philosophically speaking, it doesn't stand to reason why that fact doesn't mean that it shouldn't be. The Japanese have their little ministry, and their language is still as vibrant as ever.

So, I'll leave you with this humorous comic:

Linguistic Registers

Usually, when people speak to different people, they choose to use different speech patterns. These different patterns usually reflect maturity, respect, familiarity, etc. So the way that I would speak to my grandparents would be greatly different from the way I speak with my classmates in university. These patterns of speech are broadly called Registers.

Now, Chaucer was supposed to be good at writing in different registers, evidenced by his ability to compose the speeches of his characters in the Canterbury Tales, who come from different backgrounds, and therefore different speech patterns.

Apparently, for my Chaucer midterm, it was questioned whether I was doing the same thing by using a sciencey register. I used "scientific" words -- words that I felt were succinct and poignant. What were these words? "fractal", "macroscopic", "entropy". There might have been one or two more, but those were the big ones.

I won't argue that if these three words were given in a row, most people would conclude that these words were drawn from a science vocabulary, instead of a literary one. But the allure of using scientific words is their objectivity. It *fits* what I need to say in a single part of speech without having to resort to adverbial and prepositional phrases. But perhaps that would be preferred for some profs, in order to preserve the illusion of a literary analysis.

Of course, these things rest on a continuum, and I'm pretty sure that my semi-scientific answer to the midterm wasn't far in the extreme. Just, perhaps, a bit more than the average English major. But when a novel or poem addresses things like the nature of time, it's extremely difficult for me to avoid resorting to the rich register developed to describe exactly that -- Time. Physics comes in handy for this, to talk about time dilation, and quantum singularities, etc. Sure, it detracts from the poetic image of that "tumultuous invisible river", but it is still a clean approach.

Which apparently was the second issue -- that the scientific approach was more distant than what most English majors would be(?) I wasn't really sure what he was trying to say. Maybe that the objective perspective isn't always the way to approach literature, or that I wouldn't be fully experiencing literature by maintaining my objectivity. No answers, but I enjoy the criticism; it gives me more things to think about and explore [through my essays which are weighing more and more as the term progresses].

Linguistics and Literature

So, I'm a wannabe English major this term, as I take some more courses in English to prove my worth, and apply for official status as an English major for May 2008. I'm taking six courses, and it's a lot of fun.

As I chatted with my prof this morning before class (Intro to Semiotics), I learn that it's not recommended to take more than 4 English courses a term because of all the reading. And I'm in six. Go me. Still, that I'm achieving an overall average this term of 75 (the minimum for an honours English) should still say something, I hope.

This week is fun, because I get all the midterms and essays back that were due the Thursday and Friday before reading week. So that's four midterms and two essays. Plus the other essays for some other courses that have just taken longer to mark because those classes are larger. More marks for my sample space. Lotsa fun. Apparently for one of my essays, I took too much of a Linguistic approach, versus the Literature approach that was required. Despite the fact that my essay was described as being "clearly structured and well-written". But from the generous amount of comments throughout the essay itself, I suppose it's rather deserved. Lots of holes in my statements. Serves me right for writing things last-minute. The prof continues to write, "I know that you have just transferred into English, and the learning curve might be a steep one." Steep learning curve indeed.

But I'm learning, so I'm happy. And I'm still vaguely confident that I can get my over-75 average for the term. (Relatively effortless compared to the theorems and proofs I've had to learn and acquire for those 3rd-year pmath courses.) Still, essay-writing is the staple of the English department, and I still have a ways to go until I properly master the Essay for Literature (as opposed to my beloved Linguistics).

Regular Irregularity

There's something in linguistics called Folk Etymology. And basically what it is, is the sort of general/popular conception of a word, without the actual historical roots. Such formations include "outrage" being from "out + rage" instead of the Latin "ultra-".

And within this realm of folk etymology, there's a general conception of the regularity of prefixes and suffixes. That "-ness" can be applied to any adjective to denote the essence or ideal quality of that adjective. (deaf => deafness; bright => brightness; etc). Unfortunately, it's "stupidity", not "stupidness". (ref: random eavesdropped conversation on the GO train a while ago.)

And "-ity" has its own set of nouns: stupidity, inebriety, sobriety, sexuality, brutality, etc. However, like all things, even this has its exception. Consider: "university". Now, I have yet to see this word used in the context of describing the essense of the universe -- which would normally be universality. And, interestingly enough, this rule is preserved in German as well: stupidität, sexualität, universität, etc. Unfortunately, I'm too lazy to investigate the consistency of this phenomena in all PIE languages, but I have a feeling that at least in French, it's somewhat true as well ("-aire").

Another one that folk etymology would have us believe is "re-" being a prefix that exclusively means "again", like in repeat, rerun, redraw, readdress, reread, etc. And yet, there's also a set of words that have an oppositional nuance: reject, renounce, recant, repel, etc.

I find it both fascinating and somewhat frustrating to know that English (as well as most other languages) can't be consistent in even these small grammatical devices. But it adds to the languages; gives it character. Or in the case of "university", history.

Words and Wordiness

Looking at the lesson plan I have for later today (rhetoric in English), I found a section on reducing sentence length by use of punctuation and conjunctions. (ie: using periods and but/and/however/since/etc...) In it, the notes say:

"In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, good writers wrote sentences as long as sixty or seventy words. [...] To avoid lack of clarity caused by extraordinary long sentences (more than thirty or forty words), break them up into two or three shorter sentences."

Only seventy words, eh? This of course prompted me to do a search on the historically long sentences found in traditional literature, which led me to Molly's Soliloquy in Ulysses by James Joyce (an attested 4k+ words). Of course, being the semi-obsessive academia nut (cheap pun, I know) that I am, I decided to actually download the full text from Gutenberg -- a very good resource.

And upon reading the relevant section (thankfully not all of it, but enough to get a sense of style), I had two thoughts: (1) It was only "one sentence" because of the physical absence of periods, not any inherent grammatical or semantic cohesion; (2) the soliloquy was written for effect, much like Catcher in the Rye.

What do I mean by the first point? Basically, that if we were to go in and punctuate it as we would normally, we would find that the soliloquy is really a massive tangle of sentences that have been twined together into a knotted ball of polyester (none of that cashmere-literature). But I can understand his conspicuously conscious choice for omitting punctuation, which leads me to the second thought --

Style. Without giving too much of the plot away, the Soliloquy basically traces the emotionally-charged thoughts of Molly. And as we all know, both from ourselves and general experience, people never feel emotions in a logical, structured order. Thoughts come and go in strange ways and the ways that we can be reminded of a specific fact can at times be quite remote. So, what better way to reflect the unstructured, confusing and stream-like quality of thought than an unpunctuated body of text?

To that extent, I acknowledge Catcher in the Rye as an innovation to English literature, but I will never accept it as "fine literature", if only because it's too contemporary. (Well, other reasons too, some of which include the fact that even as a teenaged boy growing up in North America, I could barely relate to the issues raised in that overpriced dime novel.)

But back to the larger issue: do many words in a sentence necessarily mean wordiness? I would argue "no". When we look at better examples (and the legal system is a prime source for this), we find that with adequate thought and structure, it is possible to construct sentences of paragraph length without getting lost in ambiguity. In fact, it is precisely because it's law that it's so long -- to avoid any ambiguities. Likewise, back in the day when literacy and literature was restricted to a small class of people who deserved could afford a real education, writers could afford to write effectively with long and highly structured sentences without losing their audience, because the variation in their audience at the time was considerably smaller. But now, in our frenzied age of information and brevity, we've ironically gone the way of an aesthetic dystopia in lowering the national standard to accommodate the majority. I wonder how much longer we'll have to wait until they force leg weights on ballet dancers so that they all leap with equal clumsiness?

Fun fact of the day: The letter J evolved from the letter I, because the Germans didn't feel like including Y for their alphabet party. ("Ioshua" became "Joshua", even though "Yoshua" would have made more sense, and more accurately reflects the pronunciation across different languages.) English, on the other hand, adopted the French pronunciation, and so, a semi-vowel sound became a fricative.

Bedeviling B-Grammar

Wow, it's been some time since my last post. I've been busy with some school stuff, which still doesn't seem like it'll be sorted out soon, so I'm forced to put it on hold for the weekend. Anyway, on with my grammar rant.

I've been known to frequent "scanlation" sites -- a coined blend between "scans" and "translation", to refer to the not-so-legal translation and editing of foreign comics (which, in North America, predominately means Japanese-to-English). But at least most groups retain a sort of relative morality (in the sense that if it's not licensed in the US for distribution, they'll still treat it as fair game for scanlating online). And of course, given the obsessive and greedy need for development in the storyline, online readers seem to be content with 2nd-generation translations and unnatural phrasing.

Now, I could go on for quite a while about the issues of scanlations, as well as the policies behind their "translator" selection process, but today I just want to narrow in on a specific topic: the scanlation translators' knowledge of English (the target language).

But firstly, a brief introduction to what makes a good translator: In short, the translator should have a thorough knowledge of both source and target languages for the context of the translation. Which means that if you studied Medieval Japanese, you probably aren't the best person to call for a technical manual. Conversely, an engineer wouldn't be first choice for translating prose. (Incidentally, the school recently asked one of the Japanese TA's to check my translation of a short story, whom I know personally, and I've noticed that given her extreme lack of experience with English narratives, she erred on the literal, and not on the communicative, thereby making my original translation sound more "Japanese" and unnatural.)

Anyway, back to the topic at hand. So, if we're reading a light, fluffy teen-romance comic, we'd want a translator who has experience with the casual and contemporary side of both languages. Likewise, if the comic is a historical fiction set in medieval times, a knowledge of the history and culture would be indispensible.

Unfortunately, from what I've seen, scanlation translators seem to be mostly composed of dictionary-dependent beginners who may or may not have taken a first-year course in Japanese. Frightful when the lack of furigana would scare away potential translators (which is sorta like saying how the lack of niqqud would scare off Hebrew translators). -- I'll make a glossary of terms below.

But, not only do these translators lack a sound knowledge of Japanese, they also seem to lack a sound knowlege of English (although, admittedly, this is more common for the Chinese-to-English translators, since C-to-E has more asian immigrants working as N.American translators than J-to-E). So the source text is not clearly understood, and the translation is shoddy and ambiguous.

One such elementary error seems to be the abuse of the be- prefix. From what I can observe, the not-so-educated would use this to replace a more regular verb, thinking it sounds more sophisticated and complex. (Which, doesn't exactly work when you do a blind substitution. Consider: "hey dawg, wassup?" --> "hey thou, wassup?")

"... an accident befell on their old foster parents, ..."

Whenever you replace something as crucial as verb, you always have to check that the constituents aren't affected. "X fell on Y" is most emphatically NOT the same as "X befell on Y".
Remember: be- verbs always take on DIRECT objects! So that means that it should be "X befell Y", assuming that the verb was correctly used.

So that means "X fell on Y" becomes "X befell Y". Also:
"X came to be Y" -> "X became Y"
"X bears/holds a grudge against Y" -> "X begrudges Y"
etc.

And, on the topic of prepositions, just because one verb uses one, doesn't mean a similar verb would use the same one for the same meaning.
e.g. "we talked about the problem"
but "we discussed about the problem"
Also: "I said it was fun"
but:"I spoke, 'it was fun'"
However: "I spoke about the problem"
and: "I said, 'this is the problem ...' "

Mawrr. Let's end with a fun fact: the word "nice" originally meant "fool; ignorant" from "nescienta", lit. "no knowledge". So the next time someone calls you "nice", give them a friendly, piercing glare. =D