Babel

 

With  unusual speed I have just finished reading a Father's Day present (don't judge; < 3 months is good going for me). When I first received it I initially feared (as did MrsK) that I'd done my usual trick of not updating my wishlist  and being given a duplicate of something I'd already read. But no; the two books had crucial similarities and jacket designs

:

<anal-observation> 

Babel is neater, as the colours repeat at regular offsets (down 2 rows to get the next column:  

B > A > B... etc [restarting at the top row when you reach the bottom, natch]. The letter colours for LINGO are ALL OVER THE SHOP. What was the designer thinking? 

) 

</anal-observation>

Lingo was a book of which I once wrote here   '(a book that I'm deferring judgement on, as it refers to much that I don't know about but is not totally sound on the few things I do know about).'

Well, I feel the same about Babel only more so, at least as regards the extent of my ignorance; natural language really is quite extraordinary.

The Introduction sets the scene

The figure of 6,000 struck me as rather ungenerous. 7,000 is an estimate I've met – I'm not sure where.. But anyway, it's dwindling at an alarming rate, though maybe  not as fast as some would have us believe: a recent edition  of More or Less discussed this.

The Introduction to Babel goes on

As preparation for work on the book, Dorren began to study Vietnamese:

The '1-15' attempt  at gleaning a meaning reminds ne of an image I once used when speaking to a student, to refer to the opacity of another language: You're in  the dark, with only a pencil beam of light  occasionally, with Strobe-like flashes, giving you a partial view of what's next.

More to come, but guitar practice is overdue. An update will have to wait.

b

Update: 2024.09.03.17:14  –  Added PS

PS 

In the treatment of Spanish (English and Spanish are, argues Dorren, 'almost  uncannily similar' in one respect ...

<parenthesis>
(read the book to find out which – paraphrasing in this case is beyond me [without seriously oversimplifying])
</parenthesis>

...Babel divides ways of handling the idea of pssession into five 'types':

1. possessor possesses possession
   25% of all languages
2. possession is with possessor
   another 25%
3. (with respect to) the possessor there exists the possesssion
   20%
4. the possession is at/on/with the possessor
   20%
5. the possessor's possession exists
   10%

And this is typical (and editorially impressive) of the book: general observations about language are  made when they arise in language-specific cases. So each of the 20(-ish) chapters deals with one(-ish)...

<for.further-study>
Everywhere you turn in this world there's an-ish. I imagine some of these have provoked  no end of trollery on xitter ( Urdu vs Hindi...one or two? calling it 'Hindustani' worked before the Partition), but this sort of identity jiggery-pokery is par for the course when dealing with language.
</for.further-study>

...language, but ends up dealing with some general point about language and/or scripts. I found it hard work, but fascinating.

As usual with this author I occasinally had my doubts: why, for example, is the Spanish ñ only 'considered a separate letter'? It is one in my book (and is alpabetized as one in any Spanish book)...

<come-to-that>
And, on the subject of alphabetization, I wonder if elle (like enye [the IPA transcriptions /εljε/  and /εnjε/ underline the point]) shouldn't be 'considered a separate letter'': calle falls alphabetically after calzo, not after caliente.

<clincher type="aperçu not available to bookish research">
A fellow student on an Open University course pointed out that Spanish children (he had been one) have  alphabet blocks with separate 'l' and 'll'.  I wonder whether Spanish typesetters have a separate glyph for elle, rather than just a pair of ls (which might seem a bit loose).
</clincher> 

</come-to-that>

But I'm glad I read it, although it made me all too aware of just how un-understandable this stuff is.

 

The third envelope

 The newly-appointed CEO found that her...

<not-making-THAT-rookie-mistake>
Didn't expect me to assume the default CEO was male, did you?
</not-making-THAT-rookie-mistake>

... predecessor had left three numbered envelopes, marked

Mentally editing the instruction...

<criticisms>

To be opened: Why not just 'Open'?

In order: What else would you do with numbered envelopes?

In case of emergency: Errm.... isn't that just an emergency?
</criticisms>

... she gave them to her PA to file.

After the usual honeymoon period, the company got into difficulties. She epoened the first envelope. A note inside read

BLAME YOUR PREDECESSOR 

She did, and eventually the share price recovered. 

In the fullness of time the the company  fell on hard times again, and she opened the second envelope. A note inside read:

BLAME ADVERSE MARKET CONDITIONS

As you might expect...

<Storytelling-101>
I didn't just fall out of the coconut tree; what else was going to happen?
</Storytelling-101>

... eventually the company got into trouble a third time. Not knowing what else to do...

<Storytelling-101>
(but knowing how these things work)
</Storytelling-101>

....she opened the third envelope. The note inside read:

PREPARE THREE ENVELOPES

Call me Æsop.

b

N or M

Last Saturday's The Times mentioned...

<tangent>
(or perhaps homed in on [Self-referential, moi? ])
</tangent>

a point that I wrote about here) – the variation between 'home in on' and 'hone in on'. Rose Wild observed in the Feedback column  that the N-version was more common in American English than in British English, agreeing with the observation I made in that post, starting with a visit to the British National Corpus:

<pre-script>

'That's right' I thought; 'Only one instance. A solitary ignoramus got it wrong.'

<parenthesis>
Oh dear. Me and Cnut...

<HD24>
As usual with stuff I've written, I couldn't make sense of this at first . What I meant was that there was a tide in the usage, and my feelings about it didn't signify.
</HD24>

</parenthesis>

On the other hand there were many of the M-version ('hoMe in on') :

 

...[HD 2024: whereas in American English]

'Home in on' is the commoner of the two, but only by a whisker.

Finally, I used my favourite newly discovered language-related software tool to compare the two.

The expression 'home in on' took off about the same time as computers and related technologies used in guided weaponry, and for twenty years it had the field to itself. Then 'hone in on' appeared, but until the mid-'80s it never represented more than a quarter of its soundalike. Then, from the mid-'80s to the mid-'90s something strange happened: 'home in on' marked time, and 'hone in on' took advantage. It is as if a significant number of M-users tried the N-version as an experiment, and stuck with it; and this infected...

<parenthesis>
(is my prejudice showing?)
</parenthesis>

... the people who had not yet adopted either expression, with the result that for the next two decades the N-version rose in popularity more steeply than the original. Since then, shares have remained roughly stable, with the MEANINGFUL version outnumbering the NONSENSICAL one, but not by much.

</pre-script>

She wrote...

<parenthesis>
(in fact she attributed it to a correspondent, but she was sparing with quotation marks, so it's hard to tell who supplied the bit about  'making sense', which rather stuck in my craw.)
</parenthesis>

... that the substitution of 'hone in on' for home in on' was "an eggcorn – a phrase based on a mishearing that sounds like the original and catches on because it makes sense (sic: my emphasis)" . A hearer can make sense of it; I'm not convinced that is the same as making sense. Or perhaps it is. Discuss.

Interestingly (for me at least thinking, about unjustified Ns cropping up in popular usage) the previous week's Feedback column had referred to the tendency  in American English for 'careened' to occur when right-thinking people would have expected 'careered'.

<autobiographical-note>
(I first noticed this while listening to the Mud Slime Slim album, and assumed that James Taylor was the prime culprit.)
</autobiographical-note>

  But N seems to be a repeat offender here.

<brickbat-dodging>
And 'offender' is the wrong word of course.'He only does it to annoy/Because he knows it teases'
</brickbat-dodging>

In another case,...

<covering-his-back>
(not the same case – this is not a matter of N replacing another letter in the course of ongoing language use, but rather a matter of N spontaneously occurring in the course of language development – but still, it is a case of an N appearing where it's not expected)
</covering-his-back>

...'message'  has spawned 'messeNger', 'passage'=>'passeNger'... There must be others...

But I have promises to keep, etc.

b

A pigeon come home to roost

I was smugly glad to be proved right last week when a BBC newreader ascribed to the  Vice President an undeserved punctuation mark for a name. In May 2021 The Times published  a profile of Kamala Harris, originally published in a US journal. An American English speaker said something like 'It's pronounced  'Comma-la'. I wrote about this at the time.

Long-time readers of this blog will be accustomed to my banging on about how misleading 'sounds-like' pronunciation guides can be, especially in a teaching context. For the full pro-IPA rant see here,  but my point is simple: 'sounds-like' pronunciaton guides are useful only when they refer – and are understood to refer – to a particular speech event. In the case of that article, the speech event was between users of American English. For a user of British English Kamala is NOT pronounced 'Comma-la'. Here's the letter I wrote to The Times back in 2021:

<prescript> 
As a retired teacher of English as a foreign language I was disappointed to read Dana Goodyear's misleading and unhelpful pronunciation advice ('it's Comma-la'). 'Sounds-like' pronunciation aids, as I was always telling my fellow teachers, are no better than the memory of  a speech event. This speech event involved two people who were both speakers of American English. So 'comma-la' tells us about the stress but nothing about the vowels. A speaker of British English will be misled by this memory aid:

• there is no /ɒ/ in the first syllable
  

  <HD24 type="afterthought>
  /ɒ/ is the vowel sound in 'bot', 'cot', 'dot' etc. I realize I am hoist by my own petard here but I've got to allow for the lack of IPA-fluency in my readers
  </HD24>

• the schwa at the end of  'comma' is more-or-less the same in British English and in American English
• even a speaker of American English would have no idea about the last syllable (/ɑ/, /ɑ:/, or /ə/)
  

  <HD24 type="afterthought>
  It doesn't much matter what these represent, as I now realize there are many more possibilities. 

  </HD24> 

When I first read the Goodyear article I wronged the writer, assuming she was British and had  misled her readers by slavishly regurgitating her notes of what Harris had said. But what she wrote turns out to have been true for her speech community, and just misleading for speakers of British English (as I presume most of your readers are).

</prescript>

The 'Sounds like "Comma-la"' guide works only for stress, not vowel sounds. But some BBC Newsreaders (not all), presumably having read that article, insist on the /ɒ/.

<tangent subject="word-stress">
And while I'm on the subject of word-stress, Wimbledon is a regular source of linguistic entertainment: foreign names that Radio Five Live commentators have been blithely mispronouncing for the rest of the year suddently get the Radio Four treatment. Their newsreaders turn to the Pronunciation Unit on, for example, Medvedev:

In the case of Medvedev, we have had to compromise: we cannot expect non-Russians to pronounce this name in a perfectly Russian way because this would require broadcasters to have detailed knowledge of Russian pronunciation, which is not feasible.

Having carried out detailed research and consulted with Russian speakers, including a Russian phonetician, we concluded that correct stress placement and reflection of the soft (palatalised) 'v' in the stressed syllable were the most important aspects to highlight in our anglicised pronunciation.

The surname Medvedev stems from the Russian word for 'bear' medved' (with stress on the second syllable), so that it is important to retain this stress in the surname, hence our recommendation muhd-VYED-uhff.

Source 

For years tennis commentators have been using this name. For all I know, Medvedev himself may have abandoned all hope of getting Anglophone commentators to stress the second syllable. But when Wimbledon comes around the Pronunciation Unit comes to the fore; and BBC radio reports on different programmes often have headlines that seem to refer to two different people.
</tangent>

Returning to Kamala. Trump, of course, gets it wrong. This may be intentional, as a Harris campaign video deals expressly with the name's pronunciiation; or it may just be the old political trick of deliberately mispronouncing an opponents name, as Churchill did with the Nazis and Thatcher did with Gal-ti-e-ri.

<tangent>
(which ...

<whatExactly>
[the sound /eə/]
</whatExactly>

... reminds me of the 'Spanish' speaker in a recent radio play I heard, who in the course of his espeech used the uniquely English /eə/ sound when saying the third syllable of 'Buenos Aires'; it's a diphthong all right, but the spelling is a clue to which one. I wish soi-disant foreigners in plays put a bit of effort into getting it right. Perhaps they could ask the Pronunciation Unit...
</tangent>

'Nuff said.

b

PS

My translations have gone off. Now I just have to wait by the phone for a few months

 

 

Ne plus(-size) ultra

 

On 8 July Medsape published a piece on Ultra-Processed Food

What Is Ultraprocessed Food, and What Are Its Effects? 

with this intriguing note:

This story was translated from the Medscape Portuguese edition using several editorial tools, including AI, as part of the process. Human editors reviewed this content before publication.

Seldom  missing an opportunity to be intrigued, especially where Portuguese is concerned, I followed the link to the original, published  nearly a week earlier:

Alimentos ultraprocessados: Uma ameaça tão evidente quanto a crise climática?

The story is not 'AI-mediated mistranslation misrepresents important research'. As far as I can tell without the sort of fine-tooth-combery which I don't feel like doing at the moment, the two articles are broadly similar. But there is a fairly signficant editorial difference, at least in tone (particularly as far as the headline is concerned). It doesn't take a Portuguese expert to see that 'uma ameaça' (the English cognate is 'menace') is more value-laden than the gentle 'what are its effects? And the comparison in tone is even more stark when the 'menace' is characterized as being 'as evident (obvious? unarguable? urgent? 'real and present"?) as the climate crisis'. 

Another difference is socio-political. Where the English version has the subhead Proof of concept the Portuguese version (Brasilian I imagine, as the 2010 conference was held in São Paolo) has the defensive 

Avaliando a contradição: o canadense que testou a NOVA 

(how can a mere norteamericano put a Brasilian concept to the test? The effrontery!)

<inline_ps>
You may need a little help guessing what this means. Avaliando ≅ 'assessing/the value of/weighing up'; contradição ≅ 'contradiction' {obv}; canadense ≅ 'Canadian' (but I get a hint of the passive-agressive – nationality [identity] is more important than academic qualification); testou  ≅ 'tested' {obv}; NOVA ≅ the Brasilian report that. introduced the concept of UPF

</inline_ps>

But I'm inclined to think that the comparison with the climate crisis may be apposite:

Monteiro ... highlighted a study showing that people with assessing diets rich in ultraprocessed food consume many more calories, often exceeding 5000 per day, thus resulting in weight gain. The post hoc analysis of this study suggests that the hyperpalatability and high caloric density of these foods are the main factors contributing to this excessive consumption. Another point raised was the deterioration of the nutritional quality of foods due to ultraprocessing, which reduces the content of beneficial phytochemicals, such as flavonoids. According to Monteiro, these characteristics are "a recipe for diseases." Processing also "creates chemical contaminants, such as acrylamide and bisphenol, which have proven harmful effects on health," he added. He also addressed the problem of dependence on ultraprocessed food. About 14% of adults and 12% of children in the United States show signs of addiction to these foods, he said. Addiction may be amplified by aggressive marketing.

The issue is summed up in Dr Chris van Tulleken's award-winning book:

Ultra-Processed People: Why Do We All Eat Stuff That Isn’t Food … and Why Can’t We Stop?

 

And the question at the end of the title is not rhetorical: we can't stop because UPF is designed to be addictive.

<paranoia-alert status="query">

This isn't just another right-on hippy conspiracy theory. There aren't evil boffins rubbing their hands like the animated germs in the '50s toothpaste ad, saying 

We'll hurt her teeth and drive her crazy 

It's her fault for being lazy' 

There's no evil conspiracy. It's just good old Adam Smith's 'invisible hand'. UPF sells more, so the behaviour that leads to it is reinforced, putting a gastronomical spin on Gresham's Law: 

Ultraprocessed drives out wholesome

</paranoia-alert>

He goes on:

Worth waiting for. Nuff said (more than enough).

b

Update: 2025.01.11.16:05 – Added <inline_ps /> 

 

 

 

A porte manteau too far

 Oops – deleted in error. This may reappear if I feel it's worth the effort. Sorry (that'll teach you to read these words of wusdom hot off the presses.

b

Sumer came in several weeks ago

In my choir's forthcoming concert we will be singing 

Sumer is icumen in
Lhude sing cuccu
Groweþ sed
and bloweþ med
and springþ þe wde nu
Sing cuccu

Awe bleteþ after lomb
lhouþ after calue cu
Bulluc sterteþ
bucke uerteþ
murie sing cuccu

Cuccu cuccu
Wel singes þu cuccu
ne swik þu nauer nu

 

But this, the first recorded song to be sung in parts, is not – as is sometimes mistakenly thought – ...

<example>
On BBC Radio 3's Breakfast programme on 21 June 2022 this song was presented to mark the summer solstice.

In the days before I had sworn off Twitter (to give it the name that I still insist on using, for reasons given here – in short, the reference to birds makes the expression 'A little bird told me...' pleasingly appropriate) I tweeted thus:

I'm sure this wasn't a unique error, and that it has been, and will be, repeated as long as this delightful song is sung.
</example>

.. a paean to the coming of summer. I've written about this before, here:

<prescript> 

In  The Stories of English David Crystal says

Reading Abbey did not have a scriptorium, so the manuscript was probably copied at Oxford.

... But why Sumer? [And] isn't it the wrong bird? The cuckoo arrives in Britain in April. Crystal gives the answer:

There was no contradiction, because in Middle English sumer was the only word available to describe the period between the vernal and autumnal equinoxes. The word spring to refer to the season is not recorded in English until the mid-sixteenth century.  

The Stories of English

 </prescript>

So the song, the cuckoo, the wude springing nu, the lombs and their bleating mothers, the methane-related bullock action, and all the rest of it, refers ŧo the coming of spring not summer.

AOB

 <autobiographical-note>
The England Women's cricket series against Pakistan fired off a distant memory of a... not exactly playmate I had when I was 10 or 11; he was the youngest son of a tenant in the downstairs flat, with very little English (mostly 'I am', used to mean 'I <any-verb-in-any-tense>.  Heidar taught me the numbers from 1 to 10 in his mother tongue (possibly Farsi, as he was Iraqi).

In this cricket match, Akhtar was bowling, and the commentators always referred to her by her given name, 'Waheeda'. This, except for the final vowel, and allowing for the tricks of memory and L1 interference as we used to say in the language teaching  trade...

<parenthesis>
L1 interference is the influence a mother tongue has on the way a language learner processes information and examples in a second language; for example, an Anglophone speaker of English will hear the French oui as 'we', although both the onset (the rounding of the lips) and the final vowel are very different.
</parenthesis>

 ... was not unlike the word for 'one', as I remember it, in Heidar's language . And while 'One' is not a girl's name, 'Una' is. I wondered, hearing that commentator, whether 'Waheeda' was like that. or whether this was just a coincidence with no relevance in unrelated languages.
</autobiographical-note>

Speaking of coincidences, I stumbled on an extraordinary (but totally inconsequential) one the other day. It started with a crossword clue, whose answer was 'stannic'. Out of idle interest I looked up the etymology of the word, which told me that the first recorded use was in 1790. The dictionary then pointed me to a site that promised to list other words first used in 1790: this site deserves a nomination for this year's TEZZY (Time-wasting Site of the Year Award). Among the words whose first appearance in print was in 1790...

<tangent>
 (think of it: with the French Revolution in full swing,  the appearance in print of the word guillotine is hardly surprising, but what of aside from, laughing hyena, prearrange, scrunch...?) Anyway, the point is (if it can be deemed so consequential as to have a point) that...
</tangent>

... one of the newly printed words was horseweed – a word that had escaped my notice for the last 73¾ years until last week (when I asked PlantNet to identify a newcomer to what MrsK and I, with laughable optimism, refer to as 'the wild garden').

b

Update: 2024.05.28.12:50 – Added PS

At our 15 June concert we'll be singing John Rutter's collection. The Sprig of Thyme. One of the songs in this collection is  Afton Water ...

<tangent>
(which with supreme irrelevance reminded of the old Passing Clouds cigarette packet; I never did: see what justufucation [or even just reasom] there was for quoting the poem on that pink packet.)
</tangent>

... whose tune reminds me of Ye Banks and Braes, which we sang at St  Gregory's Primary School ...

<rant type="potential, nipped in the bud, but still...">
(in the days when primary schools dealt in education rather than the extrusion of an endless supply of potential wage slaves who know the 3Rs but little else)
</rant>

.... And at last, about 65 years after the question formed in my young mind, I realized just why Burns asked the aforementioned topological features How can ye bloom sae fresh and fair?, and then went on to ask the birds How can ye chaunt? He's feeling a close relation of the Pathetic Fallacy (or maybe it just is the Pathetic Fallacy: it depends how you define it.)

<definiton>
An author who uses the Pathetic Fallacy makes nature reflect the feelings of the characters or the narrative: a distant clap of thunder portends a misfortune, when a couple make up after an argument the rain stops and the sun comes out, when the villain enters clouds gather.... Expressions like 'a sunny disposition' , or 'casting a clouid over...' are shorthand versions of the Pathetic Fallacy.
</definiton>

As a poet, Burns knows how to use the Pathetic Fallacy. But, more than that, he feels when it's the right time to use it. So, in Ye Banks and Braes the spurned lover expects nature to reflect his feelings: 'How can you be so lovely and fruitful when I'm so miserable [full o' care]? So this close relation of the Pathetic Fallacy is when the poet expects nature to reflect his mood and nature doesn't play bell – pretty subtle: no wonder I didn't get  it back at St Gregory's.