I thought of this sentence last night: "Despite appearances, she's quite good-looking."

And now on to the real entry. When you really know a language, you have forged strong links in your mind between the sounds, or sequences of characters (depending on whether your memory likes to work aurally or visually), and the things they represent. One of the hardest parts of language learning is what we awkwardly call prepositions, because as my former lingustics professor said, they 'never quite mean the same way,' and they are extremely abstract concepts. For example, what exactly does it mean to be "on" something, considering all the ways that we use it? It's pretty difficult to come up with anything less than a list of different definitions, each with an explanation of circumstances in which it has that meaning. As a side note, consider the Sunny Day Real Estate song/album title "How it Feels to be Something On." Indeed.

Bear with me as I step into talking-out-of-ass territory, but the correspondence in Japanese is to certain of what they call particles (or rather, what they call what we call particles). Simply put, these are placed after words to signify the word's role in the sentence. Some are pretty simple, like wa, which indicates the subject of a verb. But others are rather strange, such as ni, which tends to be translated as 'to' or 'toward.' Some examples of verbs whose objects use ni:
iku 'to go' (the prototypical one)
kaku 'to write' (the person being written to is the destination of the writing)
au 'to meet' (the person being met is the destination of the action)
noru 'to board' (the vehicle is the destination of the boarding)
oshieru 'to teach' (the student is the destination of the teaching)
kariru 'to borrow' (the lender is the destination of the borrowing action?)

So in most cases some explanation can be arranged for relating it to 'to' or 'toward,' but in a lot of them we can not use 'to' or 'toward' with that verb in English, and some are truly bizarre. Of course, with the large number of homonyms in Japanese there is always the possibility of it being a different particle that happens to look the same, but I don't believe that is the case here, and I don't know if it happens much or at all with particles, since it would be very confusing. There's also the possibility that the Japanese idea of that verb is different from ours, for example that to a Japanese person, the action of borrowing has a 'direction' from the borrower to the lender. It could be that while we look at the trajectory of the thing being borrowed, from lender to borrower, as the direction of the action, the Japanese view the trajectory of the amount owed, which goes the other way, as the direction.

The other possibility is that the true definition of ni includes both what we translate as 'to' when applied to verbs of physical movement, and 'from' when applied to borrowing. This is fine, the only problem is it doesn't really get you to where a native speaker is, because when we say 'on' in English, we don't think of our whole list of meanings and uses. It seems to me that we do have some single coherent concept of what 'on' means, though it may be difficult to verbalize, that includes being on a physical thing, on a topic, on a task, and so on. So perhaps the best thing to do is simply present the verbs that use it and let the learner gradually form their own concept of what ni means.

As a footnote to these types of entries, I know that if a professional linguist were to read this, they would say that I am reinventing the wheel, and this has already been discussed in many books. This is true, though I have a minimal background in linguistics and am starting to acquire and read texts on Japanese linguistics. Of course if I am making my wheel triangular and really missed something here, don't hesitate to correct me. But regardless of the lack of innovation, this can only be beneficial to the language learning process, and perhaps to non-linguists who may realize the field has something more to offer than a sea of opaque terminology.

Douglas Hofstadter is an appreciator of lipograms, the most famous of which is La Disparition by Georges Perec, and its translation, A Void. For years I was periodically reminded of this book (or these books), resolved to get ahold of them, and promptly forgot the title again. Now I've finally read enough about it to remember the title, but still haven't read it. For those unfamiliar, this is the book that does not contain the letter 'e'. Anyway, it got me thinking about what you could perhaps call lipophones, although there's probably something better: songs or tunes that do not contain a certain note. I wonder if these would sound distinctive in any way. If you simply took the note out of chords, it would probably just sound thin. It might only work with certain types of tunes, meandaring scaling ones. Of course would only be meaningful in tonal music if the chosen note were part of the key the tune is in. Perhaps one needs to go to a level lower than the note to find the analogue of a letter. Is there a lower level? Well, maybe there's a good idea in there somewhere.

Does the phrasing "able to be done" sound strange to anyone else? Usually when one talks about an ability, it's a comment about the actor, not the object of the action. But it's right to say "breakable" means "able to be broken." But this is the ability of something out there (what isn't specified) to break it, not an ability of the breakable object...or is it?

Lately I've begun to notice a phenomenon that I also read about in Hofstadter, but was skeptical of at the time. When I'm working on Japanese, specifically when I'm trying to use it to construct original sentences (quite a struggle at this stage), and I can't think of a word, I tend to think of the French word for it before I think of the English. This may be an overstatement now that I think about it, because I still tend to think of the whole sentence in English before trying to put it into Japanese. But the fact that I think of French at all, when I haven't studied it or worked with it for quite a while, suggests that my mind has some kind of general foreign language mode it's going into. Hofstadter weaves a much more complex web with the several languages he's familiar with.

Wow, Elliott Smith has done himself in. This is really upsetting me for some reason. I wouldn't have thought he could make it this far and still be fucked up enough to do this. Perhaps something more detailed will come out about what was going on, if it was anything more than alcohol and drugs.

I read something a while ago, who knows where, about evolutionary qualities of languages. The idea is that languages start with a multitude of competing dialects, and gradually the number is reduced as things get consolidated. Dialects may persist, but moreso in isolated areas--the more communication between groups, the more consolidation (the modern extension of this is that many wholly developed languages are being swallowed up). And the way things get consolidated is to some extent a process of natural selection. Some ideas for a language work well, others don't.

One example of something that might get lost in the shuffle for obvious reasons, would be a 15-syllable word to say that a predator is approaching. And we see this in modern times too; it's reasonable to say that in most emergencies there are a few syllables that will get the idea across. And it could be said that while natural predators are more rare these days, effective communication has become necessary for 'survival.' And even not in emergencies, it seems like the evolution of language is one of more and more contractions like 'gonna' and the elimination of things that are hard to say. It starts to look more like laziness, but it's easy to imagine that at one point it was important. Another example given was that words that must be distinguished frequently should not sound very similar, such as 'yes' and 'no.' These words, especially 'no,' are in reality quite universal, those sounds occur in some approximation in many many languages.

When I read this mystery article I had recently started studying Japanese, and I was baffled by how this language managed to evolve yes and no words. As far as I have learned so far there are three levels of such words for different levels of politeness. At the most polite level there's simply 'hai' for 'yes,' which is used for things like responding to requests from superiors. My quarrel is not with that word, which sounded pretty natural to me right from the start. But here are the other two levels:

less polite: 'ee' - yes / 'iie' - no
least polite: 'un' - yes / 'uun' - no

What the hell is this?! Of course it only makes matters worse that there are many other words in the language with similar sounds, like 'ii' - 'good,' 'ie' - 'house' (also 'love' I think), etc. But leaving that aside, I have to wonder how many discussions these words have inconvenienced or worse. As I've spent a bit more time with them, I can see how it wouldn't be so bad in face-to-face conversation. You can sort of shake your head and knit your brow as you say 'iie' or 'uun' and draw out the vowels, although I can't say if a native speaker would do those things, and technically each sound should always have the same length. But how about over the telephone? Well, that's just another reason the telephone sucks as a conversation medium.
Probably the old isolation thing can function as an explanation of how Japanese kept these confusing words. Then again, it is also known for persisting dialects that are incomprehensible outside small areas, but I don't know if any of these have other yes/no words that might have provided competition.
Maybe part of the reason it seems strange to an English speaker is that consonants tend to contribute more to the way we hear an English word than the vowels. Our vowels tend to all get squished toward the schwa, the 'uh' sound, which is the most relaxed position of the mouth. When words get changed, we tend to keep the consonants more than the vowels. For example, 'gonna' keeps most of the consonants in 'going to,' but changes all the vowels to the schwa (at least the way I say it). In Japanese it seems like vowels are perhaps more important to the sound, so while 'ee' and 'iie' might seem quite confusible to us, they're very different to Japanese ears. Then again, I've also found out that Japanese are known for moving their lips very little while speaking, so it's hard to imagine their vowels don't get squashed a bit as well.

P.S. The pronunciation of those vowels in Japanese is like 'tee' for 'i' and like 'eh' for 'e', and somewhere in between 'ewe' and 'uh' for 'u', but more toward 'uh'

P.P.S. This whole thing is actually pretty hypocritical if you consider 'uh huh' and 'uh-uh' in English. Where did we come up with those?

Consider these things about Japanese phonetics (and forgive me if I am mixing up phonetics with phonology, phonemics, or phonotactics). There are five vowel sounds that combine with 10-odd consonant sounds to form the moras (basically syllables) that the kana represent. Four of those consonants (k, s, t, h) are voiceless (meaning there is no acoustic resonance involved in producing them), and have voiced versions, represented by the kana with two small lines in the upper right corner.

-Two of the vowels become voiceless (they are sort of whispered) when placed between two voiceless consonants, or after a voiceless consonant at the end of an utterance. These vowels are i and u. Hence, desu usually sounding like "dess."

-Out of the four voiceless consonants, three of them have allophones (different sounds) when in front of i and/or u. Instead of si there is shi, instead of ti and tu there is chi and tsu, and instead of hu there is fu (in fact not quite fu, but something close. Instead of the lower lip touching the upper teeth, the lips are brought near, and air is simply blown through them. But close enough.)

For a while I thought the first of these two aspects was simply a result of quick speech, and the second was just one of those weird things in language that you accept and move on. But language is so much more rational than we are often led to believe! I've just realized the clear relationship here. If all the voiceless i and u consonants were the same, it would be difficult to tell them apart when the vowels were devoiced. For example siki and suki sound quite similar when they are compressed to effectively both be ski, but when siki becomes shki there's no problem. The same goes for hi and fu. Chi and tsu provide a small problem if you're being strict, because it isn't necessary to change both of them from ti and tu. I think the answer here is that ti is simply difficult to say and moves naturally toward chi.
Ki and ku are more of a problem, with no allophones. The best explanation I can offer here is that it's simply not as difficult to tell those apart, for example in kiku 'to hear, to ask.' There's just something about the formation of k that requires clearer vowels, and doesn't allow them to be devoiced as much as with the other consonants.
Having done absolutely no research into this, it would be irresponsible to say there must be a direct causal relationship from the devoicing to the allophones, even though it seems like the simplest story. Language isn't that rational! Things get all mixed up, causes and effects are inextricably intertwined.

Meanwhile, I've begun investigations into learning Welsh, as I promised Gruff Rhys I would do starting at the end of the year. It seems that just about every source available, other than a few super-expensive CD sets, is written by a guy named Gareth King. He has produced such wonders as "Basic Welsh", "Modern Welsh", "Colloquial Welsh", "Intermediate Welsh", and "Pocket Modern Welsh" (Dictionary). Colloquial Welsh was co-written by Gary King. The two editorial reviews of it on amazon are from Alan King. There's something suspicious here, I can't quite put my finger on it...

Deciding I needed more real world Japanese practice, I yesterday turned to the Japanese comic books I got many months ago at the Ann Arbor Library bag sale. Up for translation was "Margaret Comics #17," looking by the cover to be some kind of Japanese Archie type thing. The title I later was able to translate as "Romance Catalog."

The first big piece to translate was a half-page block of text facing the title page that, as I was proud to be able to decode on my own, laid out what happened in the first 16 issues. The rest of it took 3 or 4 hours, and would have been a complete loss without finding this site for the first time. Previously I had been stuck with horribly annoying Kanji shareware that, in addition to having bugs even within in its constant registration reminders, had some ridiculous flaws that ensured I would never pay for it. How hard is it to make a popup dialogue large enough be default that the text it is supposed to display is visible? Not that hard, especially when you used Visual goddamn Basic Script to program it. Anyway, with the above-linked wonderful site at my disposal, the effort was only mostly a loss. Here are the results, in ultra-literal translation form because any interpretive attempt on my part would almost surely obscure the real meaning and inflate the appearance of my language prowess. Stuff in parentheses indicates particles that tag the words they follow, stuff in brackets indicates stuff I couldn't translate at all, and the ?! and !? are part of the original text...

"What’s been told so far…
Because Takada (object) “man” (with) doing know first time, hurry (to) is doing awkwardness [kita] Mika’s romance. Such middle, the result is to Takada’s house to stay over especially?! Why the place (in addition) fearful Takada not accepting [ra re] Mika, to Takada how coping with [ii no ka] worrying… One alternative, abortion, to the occasion Asuka and Otsu’s relation/connection (subject) rapid expansion, to talk of marriage (in addition) toward definite [tsu te ki te i ta]. Such a certain day, Mika welcoming the kind at Takada’s house, becomes a misunderstanding, Takada getting into a fight with 2 people. [ki mazuku natte] this because returning to Mika, Takada runs into his own feelings, his efforts are just futile. Takada having reached the limit of patience, forces Mika into the house and… !?"

Almost as good as Babelfish, eh? Some surprisingly adult themes going on here, I guess Archie is not such a good point of comparison. Now, I don't quite understand how abortion came to be an alternative, unless they suggested in some subtle way how the "staying over especially" led to pregnancy, that I didn't pick up on. It's also suspicious that after abortions and marriages and such, now in this issue is when Takada finally runs out of patience to have sex with Mika, which I can tell you is what the last part is referring to. One would think that point had been passed. One of my other comics is issue 16 of the same series, so perhaps that will clear things up a bit. Point in the process at which I felt most stupid: when after translating the Kanji compound "truth/reality fruit/result" 5 times or so and wondering why that was such a focus of this story, I finally realized it was the character Mika's name. How am I supposed to know that if they don't put "-san" after it? And who the hell is Margaret?

On a slightly related subject, I've been unable to stop myself from reading Galvin Chow's extremely thorough JET blog, from the beginning, at the rate of one month per day, so that I can eventually catch up to the current stuff. This is the first time I've been a stranger's-blog-reader, and I think it's because it makes excellent vicarious living after I abandoned being a JET this year, besides being pretty funny. As I read I'm mostly glad I declined, because I doubt I would have been able to handle a lot of the situations he describes. If I were it would be only after a major transformation, possibly accompanied by a nervous breakdown. Also, I have a feeling I wouldn't have been able to study Japanese as diligently/obsessively as I am, because there I would have been doing it because I was supposed to, and you know, screw that.

Time for another language discussion that will probably be interesting to few. Yesterday I came across this brilliant little site, Japanese for the Western Brain. In fact it's a good introduction for any brain, and the first few sections have already given me many insights that no textbook would. The "numbers" section has an interesting bit about the redundancy of saying something like "three cats." The 'three' already tells you that you are talking about more than one, so why bother with the 's' on the end of cat?

To give the full context, Japanese has no equivalent of adding 's', so it's more like always saying 'three cat', except for one minor, yet not minor at all, detail. They have a concept called 'counters,' which are words that you insert whenever you have a number modifying a noun, that tell what kind of noun you are talking about. Most of these counters are for categories of things, the categories being defined in any number of ways, such as shape or size. And there are many, many of them. So to say 'three cats', you would say 'sanbiki neko', 'san' being three, 'neko' being cat, and 'hiki' (ignore the change to b) being the counter for small animals.

The above-linked site concludes that the Japanese system is much more logical and less redundant than the English one. It acknowledges that in English, for the price of redundancy we get the ability to say things like 'my cats' without specifying how many there are. In Japanese you wouldn't use the counter without a specific number, so there's no way to differentiate between 'my cat' and 'my cats', you'd have to infer it from context.

What the site does not acknowledge is that the Japanese system is really just as redundant, in fact one might say it is moreso. First of all, since the counters are only used in the plural, that part is still redundant. But now it's also redundant that we're talking about cats, or at least about small animals! The only logical reason I can come up with that such a thing would come into being, is to alleviate the problem of the ridiculous number of homophones. But if that's the case, it's one tiny freakin' band-aid. There are actually aren't any homophones for 'neko' so I can't give a humorous example of what a sentence about a specific number of them might be mistaken for if not for 'hiki.' And the dramatic sentence I was going to have calling on the reader to imagine if English were equivalent to Japanese in pronunciations didn't turn out so dramatically. But suffice to say, if I were designing a language, and there was a something of a homophone problem, my first idea would not be to create a whole other set of words that must be used together with nouns, when talking about specific numbers of them.

Anyway, just for stirring up such a discussion and actually daring to examine whether or not different grammars make good sense, without writing in the entirely separate language of linguistics terminology, I must heartily commend "Japanese for the Western Brain."

Another interesting bit to conclude, from the linguistics class I took in college. You may have observed that, for some reason, most of the English nouns that have the same plural form as singular are animals: moose, fish, deer, etc. A related observation, which I think goes quite deeply into how the brain thinks about language, is that when a noun that has a specialized plural (other than adding -s or -es) is taken out of its original context, the specialized plural goes away. For example, three instances of the animal 'mouse' are called mice, but what do you say when you see three instances of the computer mouse? 'Mice' in some intangible way, just doesn't seem right, to me at least. It's very strange.

After studying Japanese for a while, I can read text in hiragana, katakana, and a few kanji, but I can't read it in the same way I can English text. When I look at English text, it seems like the transfer from symbols to sound to meaning (not necessarily true understanding, but at least at the word level) is almost instantaneous. When I look at the text, even without trying to read it, it looks like something meaningful. And looking at any individual word of less than insane length, knowing what it means certainly is quite quick.

One mildly frustrating thing about learning Japanese, or probably any language with a different alphabet, is that you don't even have this ground to stand on. Although I've noticed gradual improvement, when I look at a Japanese word I am still going one symbol at a time, except when it's a word I know pretty well and I semiconsciously expect to find it there, like desu at the end of a sentence. When reading kanji, I don't have to sound anything out, although recognition might take a bit, but a very disconcerting phenomenon is that sometimes I can know what it means without even being able to pronounce it! (Each character has anywhere from 1-8 different pronunciations, most have 2 or 3, there are many many homophones, and knowing which to use when is nontrivial.) Surely this is my own limited experience talking, but there's something very wrong about knowing what a word means without being able to say it.

The tradeoff for this struggle is being able to appreciate the beauties of another alphabet, in this case the largest one in the world. I doubt I would be saying this if I were studying in school rather than on my own, but I really take joy in learning the curves and balances of the hiragana, and trying to handwrite them well. What I'm finding is that, with textbook printing as my main source, I'm handwriting them the way I see them. But when I see handwritten Japanese, I realize this probably looks as silly as someone handwriting a's and g's the way they appear in print. At some point I should probably try to pick up P.G. O'Neill's "A Reader of Handwritten Japanese," but the hardcover goes for quite a bit.

Another comment on reading as a cognitive process: after noticing that I am sometimes able to read Japanese quickly if I know what's coming, such as that a Japanese McDonald's sign will say "Makudonarudo," I started to wonder if perhaps I am not doing something similar in English sometimes. It is certainly true that one anticipates things both in reading and listening, but do I still read every word and every letter or not? It's exceedingly difficult to tell, and probably varies a lot from person to person. I'm a pretty careful and slow reader, but I have occasionally realized that I mentally inserted a word into something I was reading that turned out not to actually be there, only realizing that upon further inspection. My boss is a very quick and impatient reader and probably relies heavily on anticipation of what will be there to get the full meaning, and does not by his admission look at every word.

Unrelated: I'm working on a memorization method that could be called the distraction method. I read the material I want to memorize, then intentionally distract myself, then see if I can remember it; if not, repeat. This is actually pretty difficult, sort of like Douglas Adams' instructions for flying: throw yourself at the ground and miss.

The other day a coworker told me a great story about translation that I looked into a bit more. It's one that people love to cite as a poignant example of the importance of clear communication. But every telling of it that I found took a slightly different interpretation, and it's very difficult to sort out which is the most accurate, (at least without resorting to, you know, real research).

The basic story goes that the Potsdam Declaration was issued near the end of World War II as an ultimatum to the Japanese, to "surrender or be crushed." It was our last warning before using the bomb. It refused to be specific about the threat, but the Japanese did have some intelligence to tell them the threat was not empty (I'm not sure whether we knew that they knew). As a response the Prime Minister made a statement in which the definitive verb of reaction was 'mokusatsu.' It was interpreted as "we ignore the declaration" and the bomb was dropped nine days later. Everything beyond that changes depending on who's telling the story.

My coworker had seen a movie (not really a documentary, so potentially some elements were fictionalized, although it was supposed to show what really happened) that had a German professor translating the statement for Truman. He knew about the subtleties and ambiguities of the word and tried to explain it to Truman, but Truman chose to intepret it as 'ignore/reject.' The translator also apparently said something about the form of the verb that was used, and how it indicated that the Prime Minister was perhaps trying to subtlely indicate that he was uncomfortable giving a direct answer to such a powerful adversary ("as if you [Truman] asked me to comment on your shoes"), while saving face and his army's morale. There was also something about the motivation for stalling the U.S. being that Japan would have rather surrendered officially to Russia.

This page gives a brief account, and the main feature setting it apart is that it seems to place most of the blame for any translation error within Japan, saying that Tokyo radio said in Japanese 'we will mokusatsu the declaration and fight on' but remaining ambiguous about where exactly the translation to English took place. This scenario in general seems pretty plausible to me.

This page gets more into the definition of the word, and interprets it in a way that makes the outcome seem particularly unfortunate. It is telling the story in the larger context of the Whorfian hypothesis, which states that the language we speak as natives determines how we think and perceive; I can't say I understand the connection they are trying to make. Anyway, they offer as a definition for mokusatsu, "We are going to agree in due time with your demands; you know it and we know it; but let's both pretend that we have not yet agreed, so that we can save face by not seeming to cave in too soon to your demands."

This is a rather more thorough and trustworthy account that I just found, and agrees with another one from a book in saying that there are really two relatively simple definitions of mokusatsu, 'ignore' and 'refrain from comment.' The Prime Minister meant the second, but it was interpreted as the first, and then turned by American media into 'reject,' which is clearly incorrect.

Lastly, this page looks at the word from a business point of view and doesn't even mention the history behind it. I like it for that, since it's probably untainted by opinion about the war or desire to tell a good story. However, it's also possible that the use of the word has changed since 1945. It discusses the word as the name of a strategy in business negotiations that Japanese employ frequently. The negotiators simply stop the talks and sit with their eyes closed, or leave the room. As he says, the idea is one "of 'killing' the other party's case or proposition by letting it die in the vacuum of silence." (As I've been putting off saying, the literal meaning of the characters in the word are 'silence' 'kill'.) One can see the vague continuum of meanings forming, but this is certainly a far different intepretation than the one two paragraphs above, where they are simply putting off agreeing to the demands.

Now let's look at the word itself. As mentioned above, it consists of two Kanji, 'moku' meaning 'silence' and 'satsu' meaning 'kill.' It is technically a noun with the verb form 'mokusatsu suru' - 'to do mokusatsu', but oddly, the Japanese Web Dictionary I've been relying on only gives verbs as meanings: "ignore, shelve, smother, treat with silent contempt." These certainly seem more on the side of the business article.

I was initially a bit sceptical about the "we both know we'll agree eventually" interpretations; it just seemed a bit too perfect and ironic. And the more reliable sources that I found seem to support a slightly harsher meaning, although 'reject' is certainly not what was meant. But on a higher level, I doubt that a more correct translation would have drastically altered our world by preventing the dropping of the bomb. After all, the declaration was an ultimatum; there wasn't supposed to be a third choice for 'we'll take some time to think about it.' Ignoring it, refraining from comment, or anything like that really is tantamount to rejecting it anyway. I'm too ignorant about the rest of the history, however, to speculate about whether or not they really would have been ready to surrender a short time later, or to the Soviets.

It certainly would be nice to get ahold of the actual statement of the Prime Minister, if it exists as a document, to see if anything else sheds light on the intent, and what verb form he used. So far my cursory googling hasn't brought me that, although the Mainichi article linked above talks about something that comes closer.

I've often wondered what logic goes into the romanization of languages that do not use our alphabet. The systems used for Japanese, the only ones I'm really familiar with, are straightforward enough and differ only in minor details that are not terribly confusing. But a lot of other systems seem to make poor choices and confuse us ugly Americans about how to pronounce words.

Of course the big problem is that every language has a different set of sounds, completely separate from the writing system. They share some, but fewer than one might think. Although we express all our vowel sounds with some combination using a, i, e, u, and o and do the same with romanized Japanese, the five Japanese vowel sounds are slightly different from the five English ones we align them with. Of course you don't need to know this to be understood in Japanese by a native, and anyway there are enough differences in how they are said by natives of different parts of Japan to make the truth very complicated.

I've always been puzzled by romanizations of Chinese. If the name of their recently deceased leader is pronounced closest to how we would pronounce 'Dung,' then why is it usually written 'Deng?' The avoidance of embarrassing puns hardly seems a sufficient justification. The question of 't' vs. 'd', as seen in the same name and also in 'Taoism/Daoism', and of 'ts' vs. 'ch' as in the brand name 'Tsingtao,' are also confusing, but in these cases it seems the Chinese sound is quite ambiguously between our two sounds.

Many of the Arabic romanizations I saw in an article this morning confused me quite a bit. How the devil am I supposed to pronounce 'Hajj,' if not the same as 'Haj'? Is 'niqab' any different from 'nikab'?

Certainly there is an idea of having the romanized version somehow look like the language it is representing, even if it is only because we are used to it, for example seeing q's followed by vowels other than 'u' and thinking Arabic. If the transcriptions were more purely phonetic they might tend to all look the same--then again, perhaps this isn't bad if it reminds us that we are only looking at an approximation of the real word.

Any other alternatives? Only ones that require a lot more of people than can typically be expected, like teaching everyone the International Phonetic Alphabet which is supposed to contain every sound used in any language, or having a legend to go with any article that explains pronunciations. In any case, since the answers to a lot of my questions could probably be found pretty quickly in a linguistics text or on the web I won't ramble on any longer about this.

The made-up term with which this entry is attitled is the source of the classic story about eskimos having 20, 47, or any other large number of words for 'snow.'

When building a robot, one tends to say a lot about making minute adjustments. And my coworkers have sprung into action with a plethora of words I don't recall ever hearing before.

The first one I noticed was 'scoche,' pronounced like 'scotia' without the 'uh,' and used as a noun as in "I think we need to move that over juuuust a scoche."

Next came 'cheech,' used more often as a verb, as in "I think later on we can cheech this over a bit," but later showing up occasionally as a noun, synonymous with 'scoche.'

A slightly different usage was selected for 'jot,' as in "It didn't make a jot of difference."

In another category, but impossible not to mention, was 'whopperjaw,' used in the passive to mean broken or messed up, as in "Somehow this got completely whopperjawed." Needless to say this is another topic often needing expression in the process of robot-building.

Recently I saw a sign in the subway listing rules of conduct. One read "no graffiti or scratchiti." I was curious about this strange word, clearly referring to the vandalism of the subway's easily scratched windows with knives, keys, and the like, but later forgot about it. Then yesterday on the way to work someone got on my otherwise empty car and made some scratchiti, while his girlfriend critiqued it ("you made it all ugly"). This time I checked the OED, and didn't find it, though it's an established word elsewhere on the web. What I did find out from the OED is that graffiti, an Italian word, is actually the plural of graffito. This places it with 'data' in that rarefied group of words whose plural is almost always used in place of its singular, and whose singular form can be employed to great pretentious effect. Also, it originally referred to art on walls in ancient Rome and Pompeii that wasn't vandalism at all, and in fact was sometimes specifically stuff scratched on walls to reveal another color below the paint (or whatever they had then). So it was really quite unnecessary to invent 'scratchiti.'

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Sometimes words and phrases pop into one's life in the strangest ways. The other day two people who don't know one another both used the phrase "cockles of your heart" in my presence, which I had heard for the first time a few days before, but I don't even remember where. OED Time: there are actually about 10 completely different words that are all called "cockle:" 8 nouns, 1 adjective and 3 verbs. It's a plant, a bump or pucker in a surface, and a misspelling of "cocke" (now cock) in Samuel Johnson's dictionary that persisted. But for our current purposes, it's the English name of a bivalve mollusc, perhaps more commonly known as the cockle-shell, first citation 1393. In the 1600s it was extended to be other things shaped like the cockle-shell. In the same century, someone decided to say "did inwardly rejoice the cockles of his heart." The OED doesn't bother defining what exactly the cockles of one's heart are, but they are always referred to as the part that is rejoiced or delighted or warmed. It gives two eminently reasonable explanations for the phrase: that the cockle-shell rather resembles the heart in shape, and that the zoological name for the cockle is "Cardium." It seems likely to me that the latter itself was caused by the former.

The Cockle-Shell

Watched Spellbound the other day. No one seemed quite aware of the how silly, at least to many people around the world, the whole concept of a spelling bee is. Two things about our language make it possible: non-phonetic spelling, and a gigantic vocabulary. I'm not sure how many languages fulfill these conditions, but I'd wager it's a small number. Of course, some others have their own sillinesses, such as Japanese and Chinese calligraphy contests, which aren't really silly at all and certainly have much more art in them than a spelling bee. I'm not aware of the estimated size of the Japanese vocabulary, but I know of one dictionary that comes in 20 volumes, so I think it must be more formidable than anyone generally likes to acknowledge.

I also found it funny that they use the system of a pronouncer saying the words, occasionally leading to an exchange in which the contestant keeps saying the word over and over until the judges feel they understand the pronunciation well enough to have a fair shot at spelling it. (There was one child in particular who, though appearing very intelligent in all other respects, had an extraordinarily hard time getting the pronunciation right--sometimes he would mishear an R as a T, and other bizarre combinations. I chalk this up to either nervousness or an obscure disorder.) I wonder if it wouldn't be more pure to let the child see the word written out in the symbols of the International Phonetic Alphabet. This is really no different from the current system except that it eliminates the possibility of the child mishearing the word without it being detected and corrected by the judges. The problem is this would be less dramatic, and no one knows the IPA.

The only experience I had with spelling bees after elementary school was at camp, during the color war. This is a great event to have in such a contest, because it's about the only one where the non-athletes such as myself have a chance to shine, and it takes place with the whole camp population watching. Each age group and the counselors compete in teams of four, with the words growing more difficult as the night wears on. And for 8 years, I was able to claim that I had never been eliminated from the spelling bee. In my ninth year, I was eliminated (on the word "inoculate," somewhat embarassingly), but my team still won, so my record was not entirely tarnished. In my tenth year I was a counselor, and at this level the words are really quite difficult. I did fine until the word "miniscule" came up, and several of us were eliminated, and quite shocked. Soon after that the round ended in favor of the other team, but I was not satisfied, so I went up and asked to look at the dictionary being used as a reference. Sure enough, I had been right about "miniscule." The scottish counselor who has for so many years served as pronouncer, a great friend, was dumbfounded. He had thought it was "minuscule:" it seems this is the original pronunciation, from which "miniscule" has evolved and now become accepted. Looking at the dictionary, he said after a while "that's not right... that's mini-skool... um..." Finally he had to admit defeat, and announced that the round would have to be done over at a later time. Despite the rather small number of points at stake, my teammates were extremely pleased with me for this. Since color war has a very tight schedule, especially for the counselors, we never did repeat the round and simply split the points. I was happy with this, for spelling bee was still my night.

Abuse of pragmatics: I've noticed an evolution in business greetings. When someone from another company comes to meet with us, they almost always say "Nice to see you" when they shake my hand, even if I've never met them before. This is pretty clever; there's nothing spelled out in that phrase that indicates we've met before, so even if we haven't it's not a strong enough contradiction to question them.

My next language learning project is going to be a kind of breadth-first search, learning roughly the same small amount of several languages before choosing one to take further. For each one I aim to learn: phonetics and reasonable pronunciation skills, basic structure and grammar, and a limited vocabulary (<300 words). The focus is on languages with non-Roman alphabets and ones with a lot of words lent to English, and ones that I think are cool. The list: Icelandic, Welsh, Russian, Modern Greek, Arabic, Korean, Italian...and maybe Portuguese. Time for each will be two weeks to one month. The challenge is to retain what I learn about each one and actually get my head into it, to find the place where a language starts to make sense as a way to communicate. Relaxing the stated time periods is probably preferable as a compromise to failing in that goal.

Sneeze Update: I happened to finally start reading The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language yesterday and serendipitously found on page 10 a note about sneeze protocols the world over. In Malagasy, which seems to be the language of Madagascar, one says velona 'alive.' In Mende, of Sierra Leone, one thanks the sneezer with biseh. In Tonga a sneeze is taken as a sign that a loved one is missing you, and the sneezer says Ikai ke nofo noa mua! 'Not to be nothing, alas', meaning it's a shame that the loved one is thinking about the sneezer, when it would be better were they thinking about nothing at all. I can hardly wait to baffle the coworkers with this foisonous pronouncement. Here's a page with an extensive discussion of Islamic opinions of sneezing and yawning. From the page: "The Jews used to intentionally sneeze in the presence of the Messenger of Allah (PBUH) hoping that he would say to them: `Yarhamukum-ullah (may Allah have mercy on you),' but he would respond with: "Yahdikum-ullahu wa yuslihu balakum (may Allah guide you and render sound your state of affairs).'" Scandalous!

An interesting error in an essay called "Blade Runner Brilliance," with the amusing subtitle of "As 60 leading scientists attest, the movie is more relevant and important today than ever":

"To complicate things, the differences between humans and replicants are so minute that a sophisticated procedure called the Voight-Kampf [sic] test is required to flesh out the latter."

Presumably the author meant flush out, but all the talk about humans and replicants put the word "flesh" in his mind instead. Despite my recent near-religious commitment to reading Language Log I can't decide whether this is an eggcorn or a simple malapropism that happened to be motivated by the topic under discussion. By indicating that it may be a common confusion, I think this page contributes to the eggcorn argument.

Yesterday for no good reason I started thinking about the words we use to indigitate (call, indicate by name) servings of food. The first thing I thought about was the fact that we say 'a slice of pizza,' identifying the serving by the way it generally has been separated from a whole, in this case the pie. So of course I then set out to catalogue and categorize the methods of identification for different kinds of consumables. Just so we're clear, I'm talking about words we use to say "a ____ of [consumable]," excluding the containers they're packaged in and fancy restaurant dish names that specify more than just the nature of the main item in the dish. And so:

Method of Separation From Whole:

Slice - of pizza, pie, cake, bread, watermelon, other fruits
Cut - of (usually red) meat

Of course there are plenty of abstract uses of slice. Some quick lexographic googling shows you can also have a slice not only of life, but also of heaven, being, philosophy, infinity, romance, and Bisbee, Arizona. Mmm...Bisbee. Actually it's impressive how much these uses dominate the google results for "slice of."

Type of Container Served In:

Bowl - of soup, salad, cereal, cherries, pasta, ice cream
Plate - of about anything that is served on a plate, but generally less common with specifics
Cup/Glass/Snifter/etc - of coffee, water, juice, wine, etc.
Bottle - mostly of water or alcoholic beverages, and milk in the olden days
(also Terrine, and other fancy kinds of dishes)

Shape or Part of Whole:

Wedge - of lemon or lime, cheese, melon, lettuce, cake
Scoop - of ice cream

Part of Body:

Leg - of lamb
(Of course there are the many parts of chickens eaten, but I don't think I've ever heard "leg/wing/breast of chicken" rather than "chicken leg/wing/breast")

I feel like a 'shot' of liquor deserves some special mention, because it's not exactly clear what it refers to. Intuitively it seems it might be the method by which one is supposed to consume it, but the OED makes no specific mention of this, and calls it a dram of liquor, which is actually an eighth of our shot. Probably this could go in another category called "real units of measure" or something, which could also include Pint of beer.

There are also some interesting cases where we rarely mention a unit. Dessert beverages: one never has a glass of milkshake, it simply is a milkshake. I almost never say I'm having either a can or bottle of soda, unless I'm ordering one from behind the counter in certain food establishments and have to specify which one I want.

So naturally these were my best guesses at classification, and I encourage others to fill the gaps.

Before all the recent airport troubles, I took a trip to Maine using JetBlue's new JFK -> Portland route. For the second time I accidentally brought a leatherman multitool with a knife in it in my carry-on bag and it went undetected on the way out, then was found and had to be confiscated on the way back. The last time I did this was on a business trip to Newport Beach, CA. Both times the security people explained my options to me, although they were more thorough this time--I could put it in a checked bag (but I didn't have another one I was willing to check), I could leave it with someone who wasn't traveling and was still waiting for me (didn't have anyone), I could mail it to myself (but the store at which I can do that was already closed), or I can surrender it to the US Government and it will be "destroyed." They were much nicer this time--at John Wayne airport in CA they told me after measuring the blade that it was "damn near a misdemeanor" and that they "really frown on this sort of thing." They seemed to think I was trying to see what I could get away with for fun. At Portland they simply explained the options, I made no argument since I knew what was coming, and he said "cool."

More remarkably, I managed to bring my Espion S digital camera that's disguised as a Zippo lighter in my pocket on the way out without even thinking about the security implications. In most circumstances this is a device that's suspicious disguised as one that isn't, but at an airport it suddenly becomes an innocent object disguised as contraband. I stupidly walked through the metal detector with it still in my pocket and set it off. When I reached in my pocket I thought, crap, but decided the best thing to do was take the camera and the lighter case apart and put it through the X-ray machine that way. The screener on the other side looked it over for a bit, and said "Originally I thought you had already had a lighter confiscated, because we let people keep the cases and just take the inner parts." He also said "Thanks for taking it out and apart like this, otherwise we would've had to do a bag search. Evidently you've been through this before." Uh, right, yeah, I said.

On the way back I thought about putting the camera in a checked bag, but I didn't want to take the chance that it would be seen as suspicious by an agent at the checked baggage X-rays while I was on my way to the plane, and be confiscated without my knowing until I got home. So I carried it through again. The camera was taken off the X-ray conveyor belt and 5 or 6 screeners gathered around to look at it. Maya couldn't believe what a troublemaker I was. When my leatherman was found, it fortunately didn't seem to create any compounded suspicion in the screeners, but it did distract me so much that I started walking to the gate while they still had the camera, and they had to page me back on the PA. When I went back the screener who had the camera was very nice; he asked me where I got it, and said it was totally fine but that I shouldn't be surprised if it causes delays next time, due to looking like a lighter. Yep.

But now to get to the actual point of this entry, by now a subject of some debate in this household, which debate I will present here. While boarding a plane, I often hear flight attendants on the PA announce "We have a very full flight today..." And other times, such as on the flight back from Portland, they say "We have a full flight today." When they say it in the latter way, I interpret it as meaning that all the seats on the plane are reserved. When they say it with 'very', and this is where you may disagree, it means to me that almost all the seats are taken.

What's happening here, assuming I interpret the 'very' form correctly, is that there are two different meanings of full--one absolute, and one relative. For example, the word 'unique' has the first definition:
1 Being the only one of its kind.
But definition 3b, now much more common in American usage, is:
3b Informal. Unusual; extraordinary.

It's my contention that the same thing is happening to 'full' in this case. My reason for saying so is that clearly 'very' does not make sense as an intensifier if 'full' is being said in the absolute way, because practically speaking, the airline would never intentionally let more passengers on board than there are seats. It is possible that by "very full" they mean the same as "[absolutely] full", that all the seats are taken. But since I sometimes hear them say it as simply "full," it does seem that at least some of the time they just say that to mean all the seats are taken. The only meaning that remains is that not quite all the seats are full. I don't remember looking around on any specific flights when this was said, but I believe this is the meaning usually intended by "very full." If this is true, we can then say that "very full" means the same thing as "not full," even though it's really two different meanings of 'full.' But I do accept the possibility that sometimes they mean "absolutely full" when they say "very full." Does anyone have anecdotal evidence one way or the other? My next air travel is planned for early September, so I'll have my eyes and ears open.

Malcom Gladwell had a short piece recently about the stupidity of zero-tolerance policies. Though it's not the main point of this entry, I can't help commenting on several aspects of the article. The attention-getter that bookends the piece is the story of a young man who tried to poison his tutor at Cambridge, was given what seems today like a light punishment of probation by the University, and grew up to be...Robert Oppenheimer! Now it's a messy argument to get into whether or not it's a good thing for the world that this gentle punishment allowed him to become the father of the atomic bomb, and I'm not going to argue either way. But the images brought to mind by his name, for me at least, take away from the intended effect of thinking 'wow, it's a good thing they let him off!'

Then there's this part:

A Tennessee study found that after zero-tolerance programs were adopted by the state's public schools the frequency of targeted offenses soared: the firm and unambiguous punishments weren't deterring bad behavior at all. Is that really a surprise? If you're a teen-ager, the announcement that an act will be sternly punished doesn't always sink in, and it isn't always obvious when you're doing the thing you aren't supposed to be doing. Why? Because you're a teen-ager.

That doesn't explain why the frequency of offenses rose under the policy. It sounds more like they were rebelling against the policy than ignoring it, though it's hard to know without more details.

But my main point will take fewer words: it's funny to me that 'tolerance' and 'zero tolerance' are simultaneously watchwords in our culture. Everyone agrees that tolerance is a good thing, except when someone has done something wrong, and then zero tolerance is appropriate, because clearly tolerance is not what we need. It's not necessarily a contradiction, but it's surprising that advocates of zero tolerance didn't choose a more inviting name for the approach, like 'Zero Problems' or 'Lots of Justice.'

An example of none-too-careful comma usage in the first paragraph of the Times Magazine's upcoming article on Guantanamo:

"He figured it would mean spending at least a year away from his family, managing the petty insurgencies of hundreds of angry, accused terrorists."

This makes it sound like the prisoners there are terrorists who are both angry and accused, rather than accused terrorists who are angry.

Recently I learned that the word 'surgery' once meant not the process, or the branch of medicine, but the room in which it was performed, like 'nursery'. Some other words with the same set of dual meanings: grocery, perfumery, shrubbery.

In the province of the book "Metaphors We Live By", I was thinking the other night about how we open up, usually close down but sometimes close up, and we can be in lockup or lockdown.

In a recent issue of the New Yorker Adam Gopnik used the word "monition" to mean a warning. I had never seen it before, being more familiar with "admonition", which has just about identical meaning. There are other such pairs: 'mixture' and 'admixture', 'vantage' and 'advantage' (though a different meaning is more common now, or at least familiar to me, vantage can mean the same thing as advantage). What does the 'ad' prefix mean? To, toward, or on top of. 'Address' comes from 'ad-' + 'directus', so it is the thing that directs you to. In many English words the 'ad' becomes simply 'a' (plus a doubled consonant) in the presence of certain following consonants. For example: affix, apply, acclaim. It is still not obvious to me why some of the pairs I mentioned came into being when the 'ad-' version doesn't seem to have added any meaning.

I'm tremendously late on this, but Tokyo Damage Report, the hardest working blog in japan-blog-business, is back. The author still wages war against sane organization of his blog through a content management system. So instead of an index page, it appears you have to go to the archive page, with its mind-blowing layout, and try to figure out where to go from there. Enjoy.

JV asked me to comment on a Washington Post article from December 2006 about educators and students struggling with abbreviated IM and text messaging jargon slipping into schoolwork.

Stanton shared one of his favorite pieces of correspondence: "hi prof how are u culd u tell me my xm grade - tim."

"It bothers me at one level, but I try not to let it get under my
skin," he said. "But I am concerned [students] won't be successful if
they don't know how to communicate on a formal basis. The first time
they send a goofy message to the boss, they're going to be out."

JV asks "is this a problem, or should it be accepted as an evolution of the language?" I think it could be neither. I can't blame teachers for thinking it's their job to mark this, like any nonstandard usage in a piece of writing, as an error. I also can't blame the students for communicating with their friends in a way that makes sense to them, and for sometimes slipping into that mode when writing for school. But it's probably premature to say that this is an evolution of language. It's a jargon created by a new communication technology, like the telegram. Perhaps it will fall by the wayside with changes in the technology. Or maybe it will become widespread and standard when the students of today are teachers.

A few years ago, after several weeks of grading papers filled with IM-speak and other jargon, Goodman took matters into her own hands.

When the students showed up for class the following day, she asked
them to read a paragraph she had written using many of the same
phrases they used in their papers.

"chaucer's the canterbury tales r a scathing attack on the catholic
church of the late 1300s . . . he uses the descriptions of many
pilgrims (including several very sketchy religious dawgs) 2 deliver a
veiled message about the mad corruption he like saw in the church the
greed that some of his characters have 4 money, represents like the
use of church scratch 2 build some pretty tight cathedrals."

I wonder what her point here actually was. I guess the point was just, stop writing this way. But wasn't the meaning still clear to the students, or perhaps even more clear than usual? And let's not forget that other jargons, legal for example, are probably more harmful to understanding than this will ever be.

Speaking of Gruber, he also posted, via John August, a link to a very funny "blog" of "unnecessary" quotation marks. I've always found these funny--they used to be all over the place at the schlocky electronics stores in Midtown.

A few years ago when I was friends with a Japanese couple and we did some language exchange, I once tried to explain scare quotes to them. I said, "it's like sarcasm--if I say someone is my "friend" [using air quotes], it's like saying he isn't really my friend--he might really be my enemy, sort of secretly." They looked at me like I was utterly insane. I tried a few more examples, but each time I could tell it was only taking them further from understanding. Finally I gave up, saying I would try to think of a better explanation.

They then took a turn trying to explain a Japanese concept to me. I don't remember exactly what they said, but the impression was like this: "Say a crow flies over a village, and then a man starts his car, and goes ten feet, but instead of going ten feet in reverse, he says to his son, 'you have disappointed me.' That's kyoukatsu." I looked at them like they were utterly insane. Then I realized that examples like this have to be very carefully thought out, because what may seem to the explainer like a perfectly clear-cut illustration with no extraneous information, will often seem to the explainee like a hopeless fog of twists and turns, in which it's impossible to extract the salient points. These were, however, relatively difficult concepts (at least mine was--I still have no idea what they were talking about), and we should resist the temptation to put it down to a difference between Western and Eastern thinking.

P.S. Don't get mad at me if kyoukatsu is an obscene and incredibly offensive word in Japanese. I just made it up.

P.P.S. I just realized that every time I tried to use the Japanese word omoshiroi in conversation with these friends to describe something as interesting, they chuckled as if I had meant it sarcastically, as if it had scare quotes. Maybe I should have explained it that way! But I never could figure out how to say 'interesting' without it sounding sarcastic, unless I was misinterpreting their reaction.

1. a shock of hair.
2. close cropped or short cropped.

Can I please read a few New Yorker or New York Times Magazine profiles that do not use either of these phrases?

In last week's Talk of the Town, Lauren Collins used the word belletristic:

...the book ["Amo, Amas, Amat...and All That", a primer in Latin] turned out to be the Tickle Me Elmo of the belletristic-stocking-stuffer trade, selling more than ninety thousand copies.

As I kept forgetting to look this up and wondering about its meaning, the only idea I had was something about belle and triste, beautiful and sad, a nice combination. It turns out to mean of or pertaining to belles-lettres, or: "Literary works valued more for their aesthetic qualities rather than for any informative or educational content, " according to Wikipedia.

The week before, Nancy Franklin used the word ginormous in her review of Gossip Girl:

It comes from the kind of stock that makes it a perfect fit for a network geared toward young viewers: it’s based on a best-selling series of novels for teen-age girls which are centered on the juicy extracurricular doings and desires and the brand-name possessions of the most privileged kids in the most privileged part of Manhattan—private-school students on the Upper East Side. Because this is a world open only to the few, it’s of great interest to the many. (And, it goes without saying, of ginormous interest to the few.)

I used to scoff at my roommate Al's indiscriminate use of this word in college. It just made it into the dictionary this year, and I've become more a descriptivist. Still, it's surprising to see it in the New Yorker, especially used to describe something like interest.

The spread and mutation of the double-is, as in the thing is is... or the point is, is..., continues apace. Language Log analyzed the phenomenon in 2004, and I wrote about it later that year.

Yesterday I heard a strange variant at the office: The point that you're missing is is that...

Somehow it sounds especially wrong when the is is is separated from the point.