Limning Language

Pejoratively...

Following the death of Eunice Kennedy Shriver, founder of the Special Olympics, Slate this week discussed the use of mentally retarded. This term has apparently been deemed unacceptable, and is being replaced by intellectual disability.

The process by which a term designating a sensitive concept becomes considered increasingly taboo, and is eventually superseded by a more politically correct expression, is known among linguists as ‘pejoration’. Thus coloured and negro, once standard, gave way to black. Moreover, many speakers nowadays have becomes uneasy with black; So much so, that when my 9th grade English class studied a book about apartheid, students consistently referred to South African characters as ‘African-American’. Often, pejoration occurs not because the original terms were intrinsically offensive (though sometime they are), but rather because they have been tainted by use in offensive contexts.

What particularly caught my eye in the Slate article was that several organisations had changed their names to reflect the switch to intellectual disability. Clearly it is a problem if a group’s name becomes offensive. On the other hand, changing that name might lead to confusion about whether it is the same organisation. In fact, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People has opted to retain its title, even though colored has long been of dubious acceptability. Ultimately, I think it comes down to group membership: Sometimes it’s okay to use a term for yourself that you wouldn’t find acceptable coming from an outsider.

Homophonically...

I recently received an invitation to my brother’s wedding. Included in the information about travel, hotel arrangements, dress, etc. was this statement:

According to my brother, this is a fairly standard way of saying ‘We’re not asking for any gifts’. A common alternative, eschewed by my brother and his fiancée as a bit hokey, is:

It seems a shame, though, not to take advantage of the homophony of presence and present. When said out loud, the following is nicely ambiguous:

But I suppose that’s a bit risky if one’s goal is actually to end up with guests, not gifts.

Simultaneously...

There are various ways that languages can come to have the same or similar words. Sometimes it’s merely a case of coincidence: Given the finite number of possible speech sounds, and the limited number of combinations of those sounds, completely unconnected languages occasionally end up with approximately the same word for approximately the same thing.

More often, true cognates arise when languages have a common ancestor. For instance, the Germanic languages German and Dutch have gut and goed, which are clearly related to the English equivalent, good.

Languages also ‘borrow’ loan words from each other. That’s why French has le pullover, German der Pulli, and Russian пуловер (pronounced ‘pullover’), all from English pullover (which, funnily enough, isn’t used all that much in English any more). Such words are eventually adapted and integrated into the languages that borrow them. In Russian, for example, jeans, already plural in English, has acquired the Russian plural ending -ы (-i) ending, making джи́нсы (‘jeansi’) the Russian for jeans, rather than джи́нс (‘jeans’).

This week I came across another way languages may come to share words. A friend had been on a trip to Ireland, where he’d learned that the official plurals of Euro and cent (of the Euro variety) are Euro and cent, not Euros and cents, as would be expected in English. Why, I wondered, would they have irregular plurals? As my friend pointed out, Euro and cent were introduced into a large number of languages simultaneously, so having zero morpheme plurals (i.e. ones that have exactly the same form as the singular, as in sheep), makes them consistent crosslinguistically. Of course, that doesn’t stop English speakers adding the plural -s automatically (as, I imagine, speakers of other languages do with their own plural endings).

Obviously, having a number of languages all adopt these terms at once was quite artificial. I am not sure that there could ever be a instance where it would not be. On the other hand, as communication continues to grow faster and connect speakers of different languages, neologisms will likely get borrowed more and more quickly, such that they arise cross-linguistically at almost exactly the same time.

Diachronically...

Much linguistic study is synchronic, looking at language at a particular point in time. Diachronic linguistics, in contrast, involves the study of language over time. Both are important: While we can learn a lot about a language just by looking at how it is now, we must also acknowledge that language is never static, and continues to evolve even as we try to pin it down.

Enter the recently published Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary, apparently a cross between a thesaurus and an etymological dictionary. Produced in Glasgow over four and a half decades, it gives not only current synonyms, but also their historical antecedents.

What makes this thesaurus special? Typically, linguistic reference works such as dictionaries, thesauri, and style guides are primarily synchronic. Sure, many dictionaries contain at least basic etymological information, but for the layperson it is usually enough to know what a word means (or what it’s current synonyms are, or whether or not to use that Oxford comma). For this reason, such reference works must continuously be updated to reflect current usage, not just by adding new information, but also by pruning the obsolete. In essence, language has already moved on even as a dictionary or thesaurus gets published, potentially making such references outdated as soon as they hit print (though, depending on the frequency with which new editions come out, the language change may not be quick or dramatic enough to cause a real problem). The Historical Thesaurus itself won’t provide absolutely up-to-the-minute information, as it only goes up to 2003.

I imagine, then, that, interesting as everyone may find it, the ‘first historical thesaurus in any language’ will, like the Oxford English Dictionary, primarily be of use to academics, pedants, and perhaps occasionally people trying to settle random linguistic disputes (or write blogs). Which is not to say that compiling such a reference tome wasn’t an extremely worthy endeavour, but only that Roget can probably rest easy, as the average writer will still reach for a non-historical thesaurus.

Innately...?

The BBC had an article last week about the Human Speechome Project, an endeavour in which a large proportion of the speech heard and produced by a single child during the first couple of years of his life were recorded and meticulously transcribed. This undertaking has the potential to tell us a great deal about how children acquire language (though it may be quite ethically dubious).

Slightly muddled, however, is the BBC’s characterisation of the debate over Universal Grammar.

‘The question of how infants learn to speak is hotly debated. At its simplest level the argument comes down to “nature versus nurture”.

On one side, scientists argue that children have an innate hard-wired ability to learn language, while on the other side, researchers argue that language is learned through interactions with the people and environment around them.

Between the two extremes is a spectrum of opinion.’

While environmental factors likely partially determine traits such as IQ and personality, other features have, as far as I know, very little (height) or virtually nothing (eye colour) to do with ‘nurture’. Linguists who argue that the language capacity is innate do not think a child will develop language regardless of environment. In fact, children not exposed to external linguistic stimulus clearly do not acquire language.

Thus, the idea that ‘language is learned through interactions with the people and environment around them’ does not contradict even the staunchest interpretation of Universal Grammar. Instead, proponents of Universal Grammar see it as a sort of inborn linguistic framework which requires external input to determine aspects such as the lexicon (the vocabulary of a language) and ‘parameter settings’ (the grammatical variations that differ from one language to another).

[In other linguistic news, scientists have supposedly shown that ‘Monkeys recognise “bad grammar”’. I wonder how human babies compare on this sort of task.]

Poetically...

A linguistics appropriate poem:

A word is dead
When it is said,
Some say.
I say it just
Begins to live
That day.

-Emily Dickinson

Adverbially...

Astute readers might have noticed that, fitting with the ‘iloveadverbs’ URL (chosen by my sister), every post on this blog is titled with an adverb. I must admit that I got this idea from the book Adverbs by Daniel Handler (also the author of the vocabulary enriching children’s books A Series of Unfortunate Events). Disappointingly, Adverbs is actually not about adverbs at all, but the chapters are called ‘Immediately’, ‘Obviously’, ‘Arguably’, etc.

There is also a chapter called ‘Often’, which I imagine has caused confusion for some readers. Many people believe that all adverbs end in -ly. Indeed, the -ly morpheme (the smallest meaningful part of a word) is extremely productive, turning just about any adjective into an adverb, as seen in this excellent video from The Electric Company.

No other morpheme specifically denotes adverbhood besides the ‘very useful’ -ly. There are, in contrast, lots of morphemes that indicate nounhood: -hood, -ment, -ity, -ness, etc. Such is the association between -ly and adverbs, that words such as contumely, which ends in -ly but is a noun, can sound a bit odd. That said, adverbs don’t have to end in -ly. In this Schoolhuse Rock video, for instance, there and now and the intensifiers very and rather are correctly identified as adverbs, though otherwise it’s relatively -ly heavy.

Other non -ly adverbs include always, soon, well, and fast. But how to identify an adverb if it doesn’t end in -ly? Figuring out whether words ‘deal with manner, place, time, condition, reason, comparison, contrast’ gets confusing. A more reliable way to determine that a word lacking an -ly ending is an adverb is to try replacing it with a known adverb. Thus poorly can grammatically be substituted for well.

Of course, in many dialects people do not pronounce the -ly ending at all, using the same forms for adjectives and adverbs. But that’s a different story altogetherly.

Inadvertently...

Not only do neologisms arise all the time in everyday language, but words are also consciously created for marketing or branding reasons. Many of these have even become popular enough to gain an equal footing with more generic terms: Americans Xerox instead of photocopying, while Britons Hoover instead of vacuuming (though Hoover was actually someone’s name, not an arbitrary advertising coinage).

Of course, not any haphazard combination of sounds will do. Brand names have to conform to the phonetic requirements of a given language. Thus, calling something a Vrelo would be okay in French, and Tlag might be acceptable in Tlingit. However, despite being perfectly pronounceable, these names won’t cut it for English-speakers, as their initial consonant clusters aren’t permitted in the phonetics of English.

There’s also the question of how much neologisms evoke words that already exist. Often brand names intentionally incorporate words or sounds meant to give the customer a particular impression: Kleenex echoes clean, and Jell-O, gelatine. French Connection U.K. also had great success with their cheeky anagram acronym.

Sometimes, though, similarity to other terms has clearly not been considered thoroughly. The other day a friend showed a group of people a car racing simulation computer game he’d recently bought. An enthusiastic slogan was printed in a red circle on the back of the package.

And yes, we all misread it. Even pronounced out loud it doesn’t fare much better. What a shame no one came up with RacingSims instead; They could have avoided inadvertently implying that the game might be about bigotry.

Howlingly...

A friend sent me an etymological question last week.

‘I was wondering today. If you blend hoot with owl, you have howl. This almost seems like a blend to me, except that non-owl animals also howl, like wolves. What do you make of this phenomena?’

In linguistics, the term ‘blend’ refers to a word that is formed from (incomplete) bits of other words. Smog, from smoke and fog is a classic example, particularly evocative because smog actually consists of smoke and fog blended together.

Howl could phonetically be a blend of hoot and owl. My initial instinct, though, was that howl had no relation to owl, as I do not think that owls howl. According to the OED, though, howling was once associated with owls.

howl, v.
1. intr. To utter a prolonged, loud, and doleful cry, in which the sound of u prevails. Said of dogs, wolves, and various wild animals; formerly also of the owl (now said to screech or hoot).

According to the etymological information, however, howl is not a blend.

ME. ?hulen, houlen = MDu. hûlen, Du. huilen, MHG. hûlen, hiulen, Ger. heulen: of echoic origin.

I then wondered whether the two words could have influenced each other by analogy. It turned out, though, that I was simply looking at things the wrong way around; Howl doesn’t come from owl, but owl comes from howl. Again, from the OED.

owl, n.
a Germanic base of imitative origin, derived from the typical hooting call of many species (compare HOWL n.)

Even better, an alternative term for owl is howlet. Thus, the relationship between howl and owl shows how a term can shift semantically (howling no longer means the sound an owl makes, at least not to me), but leave residue of its former meaning.

Orthographically Again...

Apparently, quite a lot of people heard about the recommended discontinuation of the ‘i before e’ rule I wrote about yesterday. Language Log now has a post about it (there’s even a link to where the original governmental report can be downloaded).

Also, it came up at a birthday gathering I was at last night. One person commented that a teacher had once told him that all rules have exceptions; Otherwise, the rule is not really a rule, but simply the way things are. Hence the concept, I suppose, of ‘the exception that proves the rule’.

This idea speaks, I think, to the difference between acquisition (language) and learning (orthography). One could argue that language does have rules, and the concurrent exceptions (e.g. the English past tense, as I mentioned yesterday). Indeed, the study of linguistics involves investigating and explaining what these rules are. On another level, though, for the child learner the language simply is the way it is. Consequently, the typical native speaker of a language often can’t explain even the simplest things about how it works. Orthography, on the other hand, has a sense of artificiality. It doesn’t come naturally to children in the same way as language. And yet, even with its irregularities, spelling is much less complex than grammar.

Perhaps this characterisation of language and orthography is an oversimplification, but I found the question of what makes a rule a rule an interesting one.