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