Fuddland

Entries concerning language and linguistics.

Here’s the question I’ve recently been asking whoever will listen: as an English speaker, I can — if I’m feeling mildly offensive — imitate the sounds of other languages to give a caricature of somebody from that part of the world. For example, I can make certain noises, peppered with one or two words I’ve picked up over the years, that could be identified as “French”, “Italian”, “German” or “Chinese”, without actually knowing how to speak the language.

But what are the words and/or noises that correspond to somebody speaking English? I suppose there’s a fair chunk of accent involved, so let’s narrow it down and ask what would you do to imitate an English-speaker from a certain part of the world, without using more than a handful of genuine words? I think this is very difficult to imagine if you already speak English fluently, but perhaps bilingual folks have more of an insight.

[If it helps, I’ve found that saying “ears” is a good way to imitate an extremely upper-class person saying, “Yes.”]

“Wài guó rén!”

“Lǎo wài!”

I hear them whisper it everywhere I go: “Foreigner!”

Běnxī is a city of a million and a half people, of which fewer than a hundred are non-Chinese, so as you might imagine, despite our best efforts to blend in, we are noticed wherever we go. It’s initially quite disconcerting to have people stop and stare at you as you walk past, but I’ve almost gotten used to it now, and have even started to smile at children as they point in wonder at me [until their parents tell them to stop]. Every now and then, though, I want to shout, “What are you looking at?!?” at the sweet old granny across the street.

Slightly more [consistently] annoying are the people, usually youngsters, who mumble or shout “Hello!” at me, then run off giggling with their friends when I return the greeting [in English or Chinese, depending on my mood], although admittedly sometimes it’s somewhat like being a [very] minor celebrity — the sort that people tend to recognise but aren’t quite sure what their name is or even why they might be famous. I sometimes wonder if, should I listen more carefully to what they mutter as I walk past, I might learn the Mandarin for, “Hey look, it’s the one with the curly hair!”

Read the rest of “Contesting stares”…

It’s the tones that kill me.

I can handle the fact that, early on, there are simply a lot of words to memorise. It’s to be expected — in all languages, to get any kind of grip on the basics, you just need to commit words and phrases to memory. But in Chinese [specifically, it’s Mandarin that I’m learning], it’s not just what word you say, it’s how you say it: applying different tones to the same word changes its meaning.

For example, take the word ma, pronounced so that the a is like the a in art. For it to mean mother, you say it flatly [that is, your voice neither rises nor falls] but slightly higher than your normal pitch, which we write as mā.

But say it with the tone rising towards the end — written má — and it means hemp. Or start high, let your voice duck down but then rise up again to your normal pitch — mǎ — and you’ve said horse. Go from high to low — mà — and you’re saying scold.

These are each referred to as the first, second, third and fourth [or last] tone, respectively. There is also a fifth tone [the “half tone”] which is neutral; saying a short, flat ma at the end of a sentence turns it into a question [when it makes sense to do so].

At the moment it’s bewildering me how you can possibly speak with the correct tones and also add emphasis to your sentences, but I’m trying to focus on the pronunciations before I even try to get more sophisticated.

This is just the tip of the iceberg; in fact, it’s not even that: it’s the snowflake that has just landed on the tip of a particularly pointy iceberg the size of Belgium, and I’ve not even really looked at the characters yet. It’s both a fascinating and frustrating language, which I’m determined to get to grips with over my twelve or so months here.

When it’s “trepidatious”. It’s not a word.

Trepidation is a word. Trepidatory too. Even trepidant, trepidity and trepid are proper words.

But not trepidatious. Because it’s not in any dictionary yet. [Except the increasingly-unreliable dictionary.com, who prove they’re just making it up by spelling it with a c even though the root word ends -tion.]

It should be a word though. People know what it means. People use it. I even used it earlier on today. If we all use it more often, it’ll find its way into the OED faster, and we’ll all be happy. Or, at least, I will.

[What’s the word for words that aren’t yet words?]

I received a letter from the Royal Mail today, which opened like this:

Dear Sir/Madam:

I have been contacted by Online Rentals Ltd about an item of mail containing mail order goods, which are described as a postman the, which was sent to you on 31 August 2004.

As I read this, a number of things crossed my mind, such as:

• Erm, who are Online Rentals Ltd? I’ve never heard of them, so them thinking I’ve ordered some goods is a tad worrying.

• If I did order from them and the goods were sent at the end of August last year, isn’t eight months a rather long time to wait to investigate their disappearance?

• What the heck is that middle part of the sentence really trying to say? “…described as a postman the…”? Surely that’s got to be some kind of mega-typo?

Thankfully Google shed some light on the matter. Online Rentals Ltd is an umbrella company which incorporates LOVEFiLM, of which I am a member, so at least I know someone hasn’t ordered goods on my behalf. Checking back through my old emails, I did indeed report that a DVD they’d sent me hadn’t arrived way back in August last year. And the name of the film was The Postman! Aah, the irony… [I know it’s not really ironic. It’s more like 10,000 spoons when all you need is a knife.] If only the letter had said,

I have been contacted by Online Rentals Ltd about an item of mail containing mail order goods, which are described as a “Postman, The”, which was sent to you on 31 August 2004.

The addition of a couple of quotation marks and a comma might have meant I was a little less confused and could have made the right connections straight away, once I’d realised I hadn’t ordered an actual postman, but a DVD entitled with that entitle. It still doesn’t explain the eight-month gap between reporting the disc missing and the beginning of the investigation, but I can’t know for sure who’s been slow, LOVEFiLM or the Royal Mail [but if I had to guess, I’d say it was the latter].

Anyway, I’ve duly ticked the box which says “No, it hasn’t turned up in the intervening 247 days” and sent it back. And it’s reminded me that I’ve still not seen that film.

As I mentioned, I’m ploughing through the introductory chapters of The Concepts and Practice of Mathematical Finance in order to be slightly less than completely unprepared for a lunch/meeting with a City worker next week.

I’m finding it an okay read, but there’s a lot of jargon to learn and become comfortable with, so the author tries to make this a bit easier on the reader:

An option to buy is called a call option. An option to sell is called a put option. (The easiest way to remember which is which is that C is close to B for buy in the alphabet.)

Eh? What kind of mnemonic is that? Yes, I always remember the date of the Normandy landing by recalling that my rich Aunt June, born in 1944, has 6 bidets in her mansion, it’s a brilliant aide mémoir…

Controversial learning technique though it may be, I’m going to attempt to remember which option is which by recalling that an option to buy is called a call option, whilst an option to sell is called a put option. Let’s see how far my maverick approach gets me.

Yes yes yes, the whole universe is abuzz with the news that “blog” was the most looked-up word last year, according to lexicographers Merrium-Webster, most taking it as a sign that the word has been accepted into modern language and blogging is mainstream.

But me, I’m hoping that the reason that “incumbent” was the second most looked-up word is that, like me, the rest of the world can never remember if it means the guy currently in office or the guy who was in office but has just lost the election. It’s the former which is correct, but the word has this look or feel of misery and dejection about it which always makes me think it means something worse; I can’t quite put my finger on what word it reminds me of though.

Perhaps the explanation, if you can call it that, is that whenever I see the word “incumbent”, I get an image of Mr Snuffleupagus from Sesame Street. Welcome to my brain.

There was an interesting post from The Man in Blue the other day, extending the concept of separating style from content — which is the point and goal of using CSS and structured markup — to investigate the difference between meaning and language.

Essentially when you speak/write you are communicating meaning using a semantic construct, such as the English language. “I’m hungry” has the same meaning whether you say it in English or Chinese, it is merely the way that the writer represents it that differs.

[…]

Just as style sheets allows us to alternately view XML as a graphical web page or as text on a palmtop, if we encoded our communications as pure meaning then we should be able to write “language sheets” that display that meaning in a particular language.

[…]

Could you imagine opening up Opera and visiting a web page with your custom language sheet, being oblivious to what native language the author might arbitrarily communicate in?

I don’t think he’s seriously suggesting this will be possible anytime soon, if ever, and one of the commenters does point out that a lot of meaning relies heavily on cultural references which may not have equivalents in other languages. This is particularly true of proverbs:

• “Je kan nooit weten, hoe een koe een haas vangt.” — literally “You never know how a cow catches a rabbit”. [Dutch]

• “Ordít, mint a fába szorult féreg.” — Shout like a worm stuck in a tree. [Hungarian]

• “Qabda trab, erba’ kaptelli u harja f’wicc kull ma kelli.” — A handful of dust, four capitals [as in the top of a pillar] and shit on all I possessed. [Maltese]

• “Siellä mies kuin pyy ja sääret kuin sääskillä.” — There’s a man who looks like a partridge with legs like a mosquito. [Finnish]

I’d hate to see what Microsoft Language Explorer 1.0 makes of those.

With all this talk about the importance [or non-importance] of punctuation, I was particularly tickled by Openbrackets’s reprinting of an exchange between a former English teacher and the Coca-Cola marketing department.

To The Coca-Cola Company,

The slogan for Dasani mineral water contains an egregious error. The tag line is “Treat yourself well. Everyday.” The word “everyday” is an adjective that is used to describe things that are routine or ordinary. “Everyday concerns” or “everyday life” would be two examples.

Your slogan should read: “Treat yourself well. Every day.” In this case “every” is an adjective modifying the noun “day.” This is a popular construction which is also used in such phrases as “every week,” “every time,” “every breath I take,” etc.

[…]

Have you considered the effect of your nonsensical “Treat yourself well. Everyday” campaign on the nation’s schoolchildren?

[via Daisy]

This is the kind of thing only I would worry about. I could try and blame Richard and his throwaway comment about ordered lists, or mrtn for very kindly buying me Eats, Shoots & Leaves, but if I’m honest I’d been thinking about this anyway.

I’m always interested in discussions about correct and valid HTML or XHTML mark-up, and am getting mildly obsessive about making sure I use the right tags for the right job. Only recently I’ve got into the habit of putting <cite> tags around any book titles I mention, because this helps search engines when they’re indexing your site.

Similarly, using <abbr> and <acronym> tags gives important clues to search engine spiders about the topic of the text it is indexing. For example, if a page referring to “bugs in IE” is actually talking about bugs in Internet Explorer, marking-up the first instance of “IE” as <abbr title="Internet Explorer">IE<abbr> makes all the difference.

This week I are been mostly thinking about lists.

Read the rest of “Punctuating unordered lists”…

Ten Mistakes Writers Don’t See [But Can Easily Fix When They Do] is a very entertaining read — and informative too, listing the top grammatical or stylistic errors that have most editors reaching for their red pen or — worse — their rejection letter template. Most…

Read the rest of “Crutch words”…

Hands down, the best ever Word of the Day email I’ve received from AskOxford: glaistig A Gaelic word for a beautiful fairy, usually seen at the bank of a stream. Also, a hag in the shape of a goat….

Read the rest of “Word of the year”…

Thanks to Daisy, I’ve been thoroughly distracted from my first day back at work by perusing The 100 Most Often Mispelled Misspelled Words in English, which I would like to pedantically rename The 100 Most Often Mispelled Misspelled Words in…

Read the rest of “What you say?”…