I've been reformatting my bibliography for the work I've written so far and I've realised that I'm only a few letters off having a reference from people with surnames from every letter of the alphabet. The only ones I'm missing so far are:
F, I, Q, R, U, X and Y
The 'F' should be easy. I'll just mention something by Fürer-Haimendorf or Fisher who both wrote a lot about Sherpa, which is closely related to Tam. The 'R' will also be easy; one whole chapter of my thesis is a reflection on Robbins and Rumsey's 2008 collection on the Opacity of Mind doctrine. The others I'm not feeling so sure about. Surely there's a Young that's written something about Tibeto-Burman languages or copula verbs or something? Perhaps a Xaviers or Xenophone? A Quinn or an Unger?
Showing posts with label English. Show all posts
Showing posts with label English. Show all posts
Thursday, June 16, 2011
Saturday, June 11, 2011
Opening line
When not finishing up the sketch grammar, most of my time this week was taken up with fretting about writing the introduction to my thesis. I always leave introductions until the end, but I have to have this one done for a meeting in a few weeks. I know I can always come back to it, but the first crack is never fun.
Given that the thesis is looking at how Tam has all these cool grammatical features that encode social information I decided to start with a truism: 'Humans are a social species.'
I relish the irony that it's past 11pm on a Saturday night and I'm sitting on the sofa in my tracksuit pants, ignoring Handsome (who is, in turn, ignoring me and playing computer games) and indulging in some very anti-social activity.
Given that the thesis is looking at how Tam has all these cool grammatical features that encode social information I decided to start with a truism: 'Humans are a social species.'
I relish the irony that it's past 11pm on a Saturday night and I'm sitting on the sofa in my tracksuit pants, ignoring Handsome (who is, in turn, ignoring me and playing computer games) and indulging in some very anti-social activity.
Monday, May 2, 2011
Meet Superlinguo: new blog project
The other day I mentioned that there was an exciting new project bubbling away in the background, and now I'd like to formally introduce you like you're two friends I've known for ages but who never show up to the same parties - I know you'll like each other.
Superlinguo is a radio segment presented by my good friend and fellow linguistics freak Georgia Webser at RRR fm in Melbourne. We've teamed up and now offer you Superlinguo the blog, over at Tumblr. It's your one stop fun shop for quirkiry from the world of languages and linguistics. You can also catch us @superlinguo over at Twitter.
I'll still be blogging here of course, so don't despair! But Lozguistics will go back to focusing largely on my work, and I guess be a little more technical than Superlinguo. Hopefully I'll see you over at Superlinguo some time!
Superlinguo is a radio segment presented by my good friend and fellow linguistics freak Georgia Webser at RRR fm in Melbourne. We've teamed up and now offer you Superlinguo the blog, over at Tumblr. It's your one stop fun shop for quirkiry from the world of languages and linguistics. You can also catch us @superlinguo over at Twitter.
I'll still be blogging here of course, so don't despair! But Lozguistics will go back to focusing largely on my work, and I guess be a little more technical than Superlinguo. Hopefully I'll see you over at Superlinguo some time!
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
Mother Tongue: Bill Bryson
Ever since Bill Bryson's 1990 love letter to the English language became a snazzy orange Penguin Classic I've been meaning to give it a read. Last weekend, between meeting family and catching up with friends, I had a lot of commuting time to give it a read and finally finished it over the Easter break. Having read it I've written some of my thoughts on it, in what will be the first, and perhaps last, Lozguistics book review.
There are some observations about this book that need to be shared straight up. Firstly, this is not so much a book about English as a global language as it is about English as a British and American language. True, you can't really talk about the history of English or its rise to global popularity without mentioning these guys a lot, but English speakers in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and a score of other places might feel themselves to be somewhat under-represented. Secondly, this book is now the age of a fully licensed driver in Australia (21 years) and occasionally it shows. English in Asia is treated as an amusing curio, and it would be hard to say today that India as trying to distance itself from English these days as it's become the major identifier of the aspirational classes.
If you're looking for an amusing collection of anecdotes held together by Bryson's trademark wit and enthusiasm then Mother Tongue a great casual read. However there are a few things that rankled while I was reading.
The first is that Bryson falls into the trap of equating the different orthographic conventions of other languages with their difficulty. Sure, Gaelic languages have some very different spelling to English, but I'm sure that with five minutes and a conversion list you'd be doing ok. There are a lot more complicated things in life than remembering that for Irish Gaelic speakers 'w' is pronounced more like 'oo.'
Secondly, there are quite a few factual errors. He falls prey to the Eskimo snow hoax (the completely unfacual assertion that there are a zillion words for snow in Eskimo), refers to Tasmaina's indigenous languages as still being spoken when the last speaker died over a century ago. The couple of paragraphs on Australian English in the whole book are riddled with errors, the worst of which being the Bryson claims we prefer the word 'cookie' to 'biscuit' - you only have to ask the average Australian to see that he's wrong (unsurprisingly, his book about Australia 'Down Under' was written a decade later than Mother Tongue).
While the book is still an enjoyable read, once you spot a few errors it's hard to believe everything that's said. If he clearly doesn't know what he's speaking about when it comes to Australians how do I know that he's telling the truth about the Scottish?
Despite what I felt about these things, if you're looking for a fun read about English and don't want to be faced with any linguistic terminology then Mother Tongue is still an excellent read and stands above many of the books out there today. I wish I had a better memory so that I could use all of his excellent anecdotes about word origins, spelling conventions and word-play as my own. It's no surprise that it has become a Penguin Classic and will entertain for years still.
There are some observations about this book that need to be shared straight up. Firstly, this is not so much a book about English as a global language as it is about English as a British and American language. True, you can't really talk about the history of English or its rise to global popularity without mentioning these guys a lot, but English speakers in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and a score of other places might feel themselves to be somewhat under-represented. Secondly, this book is now the age of a fully licensed driver in Australia (21 years) and occasionally it shows. English in Asia is treated as an amusing curio, and it would be hard to say today that India as trying to distance itself from English these days as it's become the major identifier of the aspirational classes.
If you're looking for an amusing collection of anecdotes held together by Bryson's trademark wit and enthusiasm then Mother Tongue a great casual read. However there are a few things that rankled while I was reading.
The first is that Bryson falls into the trap of equating the different orthographic conventions of other languages with their difficulty. Sure, Gaelic languages have some very different spelling to English, but I'm sure that with five minutes and a conversion list you'd be doing ok. There are a lot more complicated things in life than remembering that for Irish Gaelic speakers 'w' is pronounced more like 'oo.'
Secondly, there are quite a few factual errors. He falls prey to the Eskimo snow hoax (the completely unfacual assertion that there are a zillion words for snow in Eskimo), refers to Tasmaina's indigenous languages as still being spoken when the last speaker died over a century ago. The couple of paragraphs on Australian English in the whole book are riddled with errors, the worst of which being the Bryson claims we prefer the word 'cookie' to 'biscuit' - you only have to ask the average Australian to see that he's wrong (unsurprisingly, his book about Australia 'Down Under' was written a decade later than Mother Tongue).
While the book is still an enjoyable read, once you spot a few errors it's hard to believe everything that's said. If he clearly doesn't know what he's speaking about when it comes to Australians how do I know that he's telling the truth about the Scottish?
Despite what I felt about these things, if you're looking for a fun read about English and don't want to be faced with any linguistic terminology then Mother Tongue is still an excellent read and stands above many of the books out there today. I wish I had a better memory so that I could use all of his excellent anecdotes about word origins, spelling conventions and word-play as my own. It's no surprise that it has become a Penguin Classic and will entertain for years still.
Tuesday, April 19, 2011
Friends, and then some
There was no silly Friday post last week as I was enjoying a brief visit up north. The trip was partly to catch up with various family and friends but also partly to attend the 100th birthday celebrations of the Handsome Pen Pal's (HPP) great Aunt.
We escorted the HPP's grandmother to the event - and didn't even get in the door of the venue before running into a crowd of relatives. I was introduced by grandma as the HPP's 'friend', which produced some sniggers from HPP and I as we are rather a bit too friendly to be classed as just friends. I wasn't too offended, I just assume that friend and girlfriend have rather similar meanings for her; my grandmother also occasionally refers to the HPP as my 'little friend', making him sound more like a pet than anything.
During the party the HPP clearly decided to hypercorrect his grandmother's earlier labelling by referring to me as his 'partner', even though he is much more likely to use 'girlfriend' in other situations. 'Partner' is, to my mind, an interesting and useful word. Broadly speaking I would say it has three main uses. 1) is when a de facto or relatively serious couple wish to mark out that they are in more than just a casual relationship - it's the kind of relationship where you love each other enough to happily tag along to great aunt's 100th birthdays. 2) gay couples who wish in certain contexts to sidestep mentioning their beloved's gender in a way that the gender specific boy/girlfriend can't. Although, of course, they can use it for reason 1 as well. Finally 3) more mature members of the dating pool who feel that it is a bit strange to refer to their new squeeze as their 'boyfriend.'
And so, in my geeky linguist way, I found it rather adorable that the HPP decided to talk me up while meeting relatives. In many ways it isn't too dissimilar to the contextually appropriate re-fabrication of truth (which some may call a lie) that I employ in referring to him as my 'husband' while working.
At the end of the day I overheard the HPP's grandmother refer to me as his 'girlfriend' - as I'd assumed, she didn't really see much difference between the two words. So all in one day I was a 'friend', 'girlfriend' and 'partner'; none of them particularly untrue but all with their own value-added nuance.
And how did I refer to the HPP? Well, I sidestepped the issue altogether and when people asked how I fitted in I would just gesture towards the HPP and say 'I'm with him' leaving it up to them to decided if I were his friend, girlfriend, partner, PA or security detail.
We escorted the HPP's grandmother to the event - and didn't even get in the door of the venue before running into a crowd of relatives. I was introduced by grandma as the HPP's 'friend', which produced some sniggers from HPP and I as we are rather a bit too friendly to be classed as just friends. I wasn't too offended, I just assume that friend and girlfriend have rather similar meanings for her; my grandmother also occasionally refers to the HPP as my 'little friend', making him sound more like a pet than anything.
During the party the HPP clearly decided to hypercorrect his grandmother's earlier labelling by referring to me as his 'partner', even though he is much more likely to use 'girlfriend' in other situations. 'Partner' is, to my mind, an interesting and useful word. Broadly speaking I would say it has three main uses. 1) is when a de facto or relatively serious couple wish to mark out that they are in more than just a casual relationship - it's the kind of relationship where you love each other enough to happily tag along to great aunt's 100th birthdays. 2) gay couples who wish in certain contexts to sidestep mentioning their beloved's gender in a way that the gender specific boy/girlfriend can't. Although, of course, they can use it for reason 1 as well. Finally 3) more mature members of the dating pool who feel that it is a bit strange to refer to their new squeeze as their 'boyfriend.'
And so, in my geeky linguist way, I found it rather adorable that the HPP decided to talk me up while meeting relatives. In many ways it isn't too dissimilar to the contextually appropriate re-fabrication of truth (which some may call a lie) that I employ in referring to him as my 'husband' while working.
At the end of the day I overheard the HPP's grandmother refer to me as his 'girlfriend' - as I'd assumed, she didn't really see much difference between the two words. So all in one day I was a 'friend', 'girlfriend' and 'partner'; none of them particularly untrue but all with their own value-added nuance.
And how did I refer to the HPP? Well, I sidestepped the issue altogether and when people asked how I fitted in I would just gesture towards the HPP and say 'I'm with him' leaving it up to them to decided if I were his friend, girlfriend, partner, PA or security detail.
Friday, April 1, 2011
Drag Queen Linguist Names
Today I thought I'd kick off the Friday blog shenanigans again and share with you some linguistics based drag queen names I came up with while killing sometime yesterday. Linguistics is certainly not short on technical terminology to draw upon - and for any terms that might not be familiar I've included a web link, usually to Wikipedia.
Anne Affra (anaphora)
Jenny Tive (genitive)
Alla Tive (allative)
Mera Tive (mirative)
Len Ishon (lenition)
Elle Ipsis (ellipsis)
Al Veola (alveolar)
Cardinal Vowels (cardinal vowels)
Sir Kumfiks (circumfix)
As you can see, there's almost a whole family's worth of Tive. Feel free to add your own in the comments section below!
Anne Affra (anaphora)
Jenny Tive (genitive)
Alla Tive (allative)
Mera Tive (mirative)
Len Ishon (lenition)
Elle Ipsis (ellipsis)
Al Veola (alveolar)
Cardinal Vowels (cardinal vowels)
Sir Kumfiks (circumfix)
As you can see, there's almost a whole family's worth of Tive. Feel free to add your own in the comments section below!
Thursday, March 31, 2011
'to app' - my favourite new verb
Last night I went out with some of my lovely friends to a local brewery that opens the doors to its own bar once or twice a week. It was a great chance to catch up with friends - but it never matters how pleasant the company is, how tasty the food is or how beery the beer is in these situations there's a part of my brain that just never stops thinking linguistics.
And so, at the end of the night when one of my responsible friends pulled out her phone to summons a taxi my ears pricked up when she said:
'I'm going to app a cab'
App a cab! This is excellent and mysterious, I thought. I asked my friend to explain. It transpires that there is a smart phone app that lets you order a cab and check the progress of your order. For the act of summonsing a cab using this app my friend appropriated the word app as a verb. This is not very exiting in itself, English is always taking nouns and making them verbs, it's something that English does very well - think of things like 'to email', 'to fax', 'to kindle' which all started out as nouns.
The linguist in me immediately set about trying to discern the meaning of the verb. It turns out that by checking TramTracker (A staple on any Melburnian's app list) one does not 'app a tram' but if there were an app that let you order pizza one could perhaps be 'apping a pizza' - among my small test group the jury was still out on that one.
I wonder whether 'to app' will make it into wider use. My friend told me that she acquired the verb from the same friend she acquired the app from, so it's not just a one-off coinage. It made me realise just how far 'app' has come from simply being the shortened form of 'application software' - it now has a life of its own. It's a potentially pertinent point given that Microsoft and Apple are currently having a bout of legal fisticuffs over the trademarking of 'App Store.'
And so, at the end of the night when one of my responsible friends pulled out her phone to summons a taxi my ears pricked up when she said:
'I'm going to app a cab'
App a cab! This is excellent and mysterious, I thought. I asked my friend to explain. It transpires that there is a smart phone app that lets you order a cab and check the progress of your order. For the act of summonsing a cab using this app my friend appropriated the word app as a verb. This is not very exiting in itself, English is always taking nouns and making them verbs, it's something that English does very well - think of things like 'to email', 'to fax', 'to kindle' which all started out as nouns.
The linguist in me immediately set about trying to discern the meaning of the verb. It turns out that by checking TramTracker (A staple on any Melburnian's app list) one does not 'app a tram' but if there were an app that let you order pizza one could perhaps be 'apping a pizza' - among my small test group the jury was still out on that one.
I wonder whether 'to app' will make it into wider use. My friend told me that she acquired the verb from the same friend she acquired the app from, so it's not just a one-off coinage. It made me realise just how far 'app' has come from simply being the shortened form of 'application software' - it now has a life of its own. It's a potentially pertinent point given that Microsoft and Apple are currently having a bout of legal fisticuffs over the trademarking of 'App Store.'
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
What a Shocker of a gesture
It looks like it's taken some front page gesture news to shake me out of my lethargy and get back into the swing of posting.
Over on The Age website this afternoon Jarryd Blair made a public apology following a 'hand gesture' that he made while his team were being photographed following their pre-season cup win. You can read the story here. Obviously events in Japan mean that it didn't stay as the main story for long - but longer than any other gesture related events in recent times.
The story centres around whether it was an offensive gesture or not. The offensive gesture in question is colloquially named as the 'shocker' which, if you're not too faint-hearted you can read about the meaning of here. Which, if you read it, gives some idea why people might have found it offensive.
But there are some questions - such as whether he was really making that gesture. Blair's thumb is not curled back and his two fingers aren't quite brought together. His apology conveniently sidesteps mentioning whether he knew the offense caused by his gesture, instead labelling his own actions as merely "careless and inappropriate."
But lets assume that he did intentionally pull that gesture, I'm sure the large majority of people would have been oblivious. This is an emblematic gesture, and like the 'peace sign' or rotating your finger near your temple to indicate 'crazy' the meaning of these gestures is only apparent if you already knew it. As far as the rest of us were concerned he's just doing a bad impression of a heavy metal music fan.
The irony is that the prudish folk who made this an issue by forcing an apology from Blair have made the event into a news item and drawn the attention of people who, like me, were happily ignorant of this little gesture until today.
Over on The Age website this afternoon Jarryd Blair made a public apology following a 'hand gesture' that he made while his team were being photographed following their pre-season cup win. You can read the story here. Obviously events in Japan mean that it didn't stay as the main story for long - but longer than any other gesture related events in recent times.
The story centres around whether it was an offensive gesture or not. The offensive gesture in question is colloquially named as the 'shocker' which, if you're not too faint-hearted you can read about the meaning of here. Which, if you read it, gives some idea why people might have found it offensive.
But there are some questions - such as whether he was really making that gesture. Blair's thumb is not curled back and his two fingers aren't quite brought together. His apology conveniently sidesteps mentioning whether he knew the offense caused by his gesture, instead labelling his own actions as merely "careless and inappropriate."
But lets assume that he did intentionally pull that gesture, I'm sure the large majority of people would have been oblivious. This is an emblematic gesture, and like the 'peace sign' or rotating your finger near your temple to indicate 'crazy' the meaning of these gestures is only apparent if you already knew it. As far as the rest of us were concerned he's just doing a bad impression of a heavy metal music fan.
The irony is that the prudish folk who made this an issue by forcing an apology from Blair have made the event into a news item and drawn the attention of people who, like me, were happily ignorant of this little gesture until today.
Thursday, February 17, 2011
Style Cream
Every time I see these chips in a store I have to giggle - and wonder what 'style cream' is supposed to taste like. I finally got around to buying a packet just for the photograph.
It may look like a very simple type setting error, but there's actually a reason for such an error. There are half a dozen flavours to chose from, and all of them are named for a country. So, off the top of my head, there's also "Italian Tomato" and "Indian Marsala." Only the "American" flavour is "style," that is, "in the manner of." Therefore it's no surprise that a non-native speaker parsing these packets would assume that "style" is modifying "cream" and not "American."
Even understanding the reason for the error doesn't stop me staggering every time. I'm sad to report that the chips do taste like sour cream and onion in American style, and not style cream, which I imagine would be a bit like eating hair styling products.
Saturday, December 18, 2010
N-gram games
Google have announced a new toy to play with - actually, it's not really a toy, but the biggest searchable English language corpus in the world. 360 billion words from around 5 million books are at your disposal. That's over a thousand times larger than any existing corpus.
It's not as well structured as some university-based corpora - for example, they've side-stepped the issue of copyright with newer books by not showing you the context of the word you're searching for. There's also no ability to fine tune for genre, or anything other than "British" or "American" English. But it's still a lot of fun. There's a nice discussion about it here on good ol' Language Log, but if you're more interested in just playing you can head here.
I thought I'd use it on some old lexical friends of ours to see how it goes. First of all, after our recent discussion about "luck out" I plugged in that phrase. These are the frequencies I got:
Given that there wasn't much in the newspaper corpora from earlier than the mid 20th century this chart adds to the theory that "luck out" is a relatively recent phrase. Especially when we look at some of the examples from the 19th century and find things like:
we must not leave " good luck" out of the statement, as we feel assured that ' good luck' is a great point towards a fortune (Pierce Egan's book of sports, and mirror of life, 1832, p. 71)
or
Have yure eyes about you, and luck out for sparks (Thomas Hood, Hood's own, or, laughter from year to year, 1939, p. 352)
The first being a different structure, but still picked up thanks to the OCR not picking up punctuation while the second appears to be an outdated way to spell 'look.'
The same types of mistaken reading occur up until the first reference I've found for the phrase as we know it. In George A. Meyer's 1975 book "The two-word verb: a dictionary of the verb-preposition phrases in American" where we find the entry for "Luck":
Used as a verb only in the expression "luck out", luck out I (9) Slang. John lucked out when his motorcycle crashed into the big truck. (He was not seriously injured.)
This adds weight to the earlier analysis that the 'positive' definition of "luck out" is more of a USA usage than a UK one - and with the earliest usage I could find was a quote from a baseball player in 1971 the time frame for this 1975 book entry is also about right. After that 1975 entry there are more that pop up, and it appears that the sharp upward curve in the frequency count is somewhat attributable to increase in this phrase
Another old friend of ours here is the pejorative term "douche bag." Here we see a spike in usage in the 1920s:
The 1920s peak in usage is from the heyday of the douche bag as a piece of medical equipment, and the search function provides you with a baffling and occasionally scary array of books and journals on the topic. These kind of references occur right into the 2000s, and are still more common than the derogatory usage, but this begins to creep in during the 1970s and 1980s. Still, these references are not nearly as common as to single-handedly explain the rise in usage of "douche bag" since the 1970s.
Strangely enough, our old buddy "awkward turtle" has not made it into a publication in the Google corpus. This is possibly because the corpus stops in 2000 and "awkward turtle" is newer, but also likely to do with the fact that only using published book corpora gives a limited type of language use. A reminder that while book and published material corpora are interesting and useful they're not always the final word on language use!
You too can play at home! The Lousy Linguist has a great little post today about how not to interpret n-grams, but have a play for yourself and if you find anything amusing let us know below!
It's not as well structured as some university-based corpora - for example, they've side-stepped the issue of copyright with newer books by not showing you the context of the word you're searching for. There's also no ability to fine tune for genre, or anything other than "British" or "American" English. But it's still a lot of fun. There's a nice discussion about it here on good ol' Language Log, but if you're more interested in just playing you can head here.
I thought I'd use it on some old lexical friends of ours to see how it goes. First of all, after our recent discussion about "luck out" I plugged in that phrase. These are the frequencies I got:
Given that there wasn't much in the newspaper corpora from earlier than the mid 20th century this chart adds to the theory that "luck out" is a relatively recent phrase. Especially when we look at some of the examples from the 19th century and find things like:
we must not leave " good luck" out of the statement, as we feel assured that ' good luck' is a great point towards a fortune (Pierce Egan's book of sports, and mirror of life, 1832, p. 71)
or
Have yure eyes about you, and luck out for sparks (Thomas Hood, Hood's own, or, laughter from year to year, 1939, p. 352)
The first being a different structure, but still picked up thanks to the OCR not picking up punctuation while the second appears to be an outdated way to spell 'look.'
The same types of mistaken reading occur up until the first reference I've found for the phrase as we know it. In George A. Meyer's 1975 book "The two-word verb: a dictionary of the verb-preposition phrases in American" where we find the entry for "Luck":
Used as a verb only in the expression "luck out", luck out I (9) Slang. John lucked out when his motorcycle crashed into the big truck. (He was not seriously injured.)
This adds weight to the earlier analysis that the 'positive' definition of "luck out" is more of a USA usage than a UK one - and with the earliest usage I could find was a quote from a baseball player in 1971 the time frame for this 1975 book entry is also about right. After that 1975 entry there are more that pop up, and it appears that the sharp upward curve in the frequency count is somewhat attributable to increase in this phrase
Another old friend of ours here is the pejorative term "douche bag." Here we see a spike in usage in the 1920s:
The 1920s peak in usage is from the heyday of the douche bag as a piece of medical equipment, and the search function provides you with a baffling and occasionally scary array of books and journals on the topic. These kind of references occur right into the 2000s, and are still more common than the derogatory usage, but this begins to creep in during the 1970s and 1980s. Still, these references are not nearly as common as to single-handedly explain the rise in usage of "douche bag" since the 1970s.
Strangely enough, our old buddy "awkward turtle" has not made it into a publication in the Google corpus. This is possibly because the corpus stops in 2000 and "awkward turtle" is newer, but also likely to do with the fact that only using published book corpora gives a limited type of language use. A reminder that while book and published material corpora are interesting and useful they're not always the final word on language use!
You too can play at home! The Lousy Linguist has a great little post today about how not to interpret n-grams, but have a play for yourself and if you find anything amusing let us know below!
Friday, December 17, 2010
Going Dutch
I've made friends with another resident-guest at the guest house I'm staying in while back in Kathmandu. He is form Holland and volunteering at the school next door - I shall refer to him as Jan for future reference.
Since hanging out with Jan I've met more Dutch people in Kathmandu that I did when I was in the Netherlands. They are all variously interesting people, I don't think either Kathmandu or Jan tend to attract dull people. Last night when we decided to venture out to a nice Newari place I found myself to be the only non-Dutch person at dinner.
It was a lovely dinner; the food was nice, the conversation interesting and we were in a lovely old building. When it came to the end of the evening, and paying the bill Jan turned to me and said - "we all pay for ourselves, that is how we do it at home".
In Australia the colloquialism for this kind of payment arrangement is "to go Dutch" - and so I went Dutch with a table full of Dutch people, and spent the next 5 minutes telling them how amusing it was that what I had always thought was a bit of a nonsense phrase really did appear to have its etymology in the bill paying practices of the Dutch.
"hmm, you really are a linguist, aren't you" one member of the party concluded, in what he assured me was a complement.
Since hanging out with Jan I've met more Dutch people in Kathmandu that I did when I was in the Netherlands. They are all variously interesting people, I don't think either Kathmandu or Jan tend to attract dull people. Last night when we decided to venture out to a nice Newari place I found myself to be the only non-Dutch person at dinner.
It was a lovely dinner; the food was nice, the conversation interesting and we were in a lovely old building. When it came to the end of the evening, and paying the bill Jan turned to me and said - "we all pay for ourselves, that is how we do it at home".
In Australia the colloquialism for this kind of payment arrangement is "to go Dutch" - and so I went Dutch with a table full of Dutch people, and spent the next 5 minutes telling them how amusing it was that what I had always thought was a bit of a nonsense phrase really did appear to have its etymology in the bill paying practices of the Dutch.
"hmm, you really are a linguist, aren't you" one member of the party concluded, in what he assured me was a complement.
Saturday, November 6, 2010
Lucking out, pt. 2
A few days ago I mentioned a conversation with friends where we had been divided as to whether 'luck out' was a good or bad thing.
The results beyond out little lunch time gathering were just as mixed - so we're definitely not the only people who are likely to have this argument. Urban Dictionary, that most authoritative of lexicographic tools, argues that the 'luck out' divide is one between US and UK English, with it being used positively in the US and negatively in the UK. My pitifully small sample number of approximately 1.5 UK English speakers and 0.5 US English speakers would appear to conform to this analysis, but those numbers are much too low for me to throw my opinion behind.
Looking very quickly at a comparison between newspapers from different countries. Note, I took a wild guess this would be the most common form used in news reports and didn't bother searching variants like 'lucking out.' The New York Times up to 2007 had 326 references for 'lucked out', The Independent (UK) had 19 references since 1994 and for an Australian angle The Age had 44 search items with 'lucked out' since 1995. I'd love to spend all day going through the clippings, and tallying which sense is used where, and the oldest reported uses etc, but work calls . With only a quick flick it looks like the NYT references are all using the positive sense. the Independent also mostly uses the positive sence but the term mostly crops up in American references and quotes, such as this article on US beaknik Sarah Jepp:
but despite having "lucked-out" with an inexpensive room on the Venice Canals, L.A's vacuous side was beginning to grate.
I'm not sure if a more colloquial UK newspaper would have given a different result, but I'm not plunging into an archive of The Sun this early in the morning.
In The Age there are a mixture of usages, much like our small Australian contingent at the lunch table showed mixed attitudes to the meaning of 'luck out.' This rather pointless article about a pampered dog (From Zero to Hero, 22/05/95) uses the positive sense:
MAX, the five-year-old chihuahua, started life as a pet shop boy. For three weeks, his owner-to-be visited the pet shop almost every day, eyeing this sweet little fur ball all alone in a cage. At the end of three weeks, Jean Pierre Heurteau could resist no longer, so he bought Max and home they went. Max didn't realise it then but he had lucked out he was to start a lifestyle to die for.
While this article on seafood (From the deep 01/07/03) uses the other sense:
"I marinated pieces of the squid in seven different marinades for 12 hours and 24 hours to disguise the flavour, yet this made things little better.
"It's safe to say it won't be appearing on our menu," says Kerry.
Munro is mortified and suggests Kerry must have lucked out with the samples he supplied, but if you're a chef, supply-chain failures in the quality of the product cut little mustard.
You won't find lucked on in Merriam-Webster online. But it does occour in the Oxford English, although, interestingly, only the positive sense, which they site as a US term:
e. to luck out (U.S.), to achieve success or advantage by good luck in a difficult, testing, or dangerous situation.
In the last post, I withheld my own opinion on the matter so as to not bias the conversation. In the interest of full disclosure, I only ever use 'luck out' as a negative thing. If you lucked out things certainly didn't go your way.
The results beyond out little lunch time gathering were just as mixed - so we're definitely not the only people who are likely to have this argument. Urban Dictionary, that most authoritative of lexicographic tools, argues that the 'luck out' divide is one between US and UK English, with it being used positively in the US and negatively in the UK. My pitifully small sample number of approximately 1.5 UK English speakers and 0.5 US English speakers would appear to conform to this analysis, but those numbers are much too low for me to throw my opinion behind.
Looking very quickly at a comparison between newspapers from different countries. Note, I took a wild guess this would be the most common form used in news reports and didn't bother searching variants like 'lucking out.' The New York Times up to 2007 had 326 references for 'lucked out', The Independent (UK) had 19 references since 1994 and for an Australian angle The Age had 44 search items with 'lucked out' since 1995. I'd love to spend all day going through the clippings, and tallying which sense is used where, and the oldest reported uses etc, but work calls . With only a quick flick it looks like the NYT references are all using the positive sense. the Independent also mostly uses the positive sence but the term mostly crops up in American references and quotes, such as this article on US beaknik Sarah Jepp:
but despite having "lucked-out" with an inexpensive room on the Venice Canals, L.A's vacuous side was beginning to grate.
I'm not sure if a more colloquial UK newspaper would have given a different result, but I'm not plunging into an archive of The Sun this early in the morning.
In The Age there are a mixture of usages, much like our small Australian contingent at the lunch table showed mixed attitudes to the meaning of 'luck out.' This rather pointless article about a pampered dog (From Zero to Hero, 22/05/95) uses the positive sense:
MAX, the five-year-old chihuahua, started life as a pet shop boy. For three weeks, his owner-to-be visited the pet shop almost every day, eyeing this sweet little fur ball all alone in a cage. At the end of three weeks, Jean Pierre Heurteau could resist no longer, so he bought Max and home they went. Max didn't realise it then but he had lucked out he was to start a lifestyle to die for.
While this article on seafood (From the deep 01/07/03) uses the other sense:
"I marinated pieces of the squid in seven different marinades for 12 hours and 24 hours to disguise the flavour, yet this made things little better.
"It's safe to say it won't be appearing on our menu," says Kerry.
Munro is mortified and suggests Kerry must have lucked out with the samples he supplied, but if you're a chef, supply-chain failures in the quality of the product cut little mustard.
You won't find lucked on in Merriam-Webster online. But it does occour in the Oxford English, although, interestingly, only the positive sense, which they site as a US term:
e. to luck out (U.S.), to achieve success or advantage by good luck in a difficult, testing, or dangerous situation.
In the last post, I withheld my own opinion on the matter so as to not bias the conversation. In the interest of full disclosure, I only ever use 'luck out' as a negative thing. If you lucked out things certainly didn't go your way.
Lucking Out
Tihar continues unabated - I'll give a run-down later, but at the moment I'm stuffed and suffering from sel roti overdose. Also, I have a question I need your help with!
Over lunch with a few friend the other day it transpired there were two very different opinions about the meaning of the term 'lucked out' that divided the group. Half of us firmly believe that it is a good thing to luck out, while the other half thought that it was a very bad thing to luck out.
I won't tell you yet which group I fell into, because I'd like your opinion first. Let me know via email, or in the comments below and I'll do some dictionary digging as well as some scouring of the web and see what I can come up with.
Over lunch with a few friend the other day it transpired there were two very different opinions about the meaning of the term 'lucked out' that divided the group. Half of us firmly believe that it is a good thing to luck out, while the other half thought that it was a very bad thing to luck out.
I won't tell you yet which group I fell into, because I'd like your opinion first. Let me know via email, or in the comments below and I'll do some dictionary digging as well as some scouring of the web and see what I can come up with.
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
Tell Us Where
A group of researchers in Victoria are currently using smart phones in a quirky and fun project called 'tell us where.'
The idea is super simple - log into www.telluswhere.net on your internet enabled phone anywhere in Victoria, Australia, then confirm your location. Once you've done that type in a description of where you are - just how you would normally describe that place to another person.
Simple as that!
Lesley Stirling at the university of Melbourne explains what your input will be used for:
"We will use this information in an academic research project that aims to discover the underlying rules and principles for how people talk about places in Melbourne and Victoria (the game is currently limited to Victoria). By submitting your place descriptions you will be helping generate a large body of knowledge about how humans describe places in Victoria. In turn this will help develop better web searching, mapping and navigation systems, and even emergency services. For more details about the research behind the project, please see http://www.geom.unimelb.edu.au/winter/proj-place/index.htm."
Everytime you log in and submit an answer you'll go into the draw for an iTunes voucher, and you can log in as many times as you like. Sounds like great fun, and a relatively unobtrusive way to gather really interesting data. Just a pity my phone is about 5 years before the smart phone revolution!
The idea is super simple - log into www.telluswhere.net on your internet enabled phone anywhere in Victoria, Australia, then confirm your location. Once you've done that type in a description of where you are - just how you would normally describe that place to another person.
Simple as that!
Lesley Stirling at the university of Melbourne explains what your input will be used for:
"We will use this information in an academic research project that aims to discover the underlying rules and principles for how people talk about places in Melbourne and Victoria (the game is currently limited to Victoria). By submitting your place descriptions you will be helping generate a large body of knowledge about how humans describe places in Victoria. In turn this will help develop better web searching, mapping and navigation systems, and even emergency services. For more details about the research behind the project, please see http://www.geom.unimelb.edu.au/winter/proj-place/index.htm."
Everytime you log in and submit an answer you'll go into the draw for an iTunes voucher, and you can log in as many times as you like. Sounds like great fun, and a relatively unobtrusive way to gather really interesting data. Just a pity my phone is about 5 years before the smart phone revolution!
Monday, August 16, 2010
A choice holiday bro
And so in a blink holidays are over and I'm back on campus as though 10 days in New Zealand were nothing more than a Pinot induced hallucination. It was a very relaxing time. I did take a while to switch off from work; at one point I thought it would be fun to figure out Mauri phonology and phonotactics based only on the bilingual public signage and river names but the handsome penpal who was also chauffeur for the holiday rolled his eyes and I realised that maybe it would be good to not think about linguistics for a few days.
And so the road tripping was punctuated with handsome trying to explain what high octane fuel is (it has eight hydrocarbons, hence the 'oct'- you can get septane too, who knew?) and me trying to explain what backformations are.
Ok, so I didn't do too well at not talking linguistics - but honestly the conversation came up because of something both of us had noticed while chatting with a number of locals. The New Zealand term of affection for Australia is to refer to it as "Aussie" as in:
"Where abouts in Aussie do you live?"
"How long are you over from Aussie."
"I have a friend visiting Aussie at the moment."
This coinage flummoxed us. I don't know anyone in Oz who would refer to the country as Aussie (and my survey of 3 gives highly significant statistical data to back me up with 100% of Australians agreeing).
What's it all about then? Well, my hunch is that it's a backformation. A backformation is where people look at a word and assume (often incorrectly, although that's not really a problem) that there's some kind of analysable structure to it. For example - if a bikini is a two piece bathing suit then in some line of logic you can call a one piece a "monokini".
And so, the only reason I can think of for referring to Australia as "Aussie" is that Australians are referred to as "Aussies" and so to be "Aussies" they must come from "Aussie."
It's not really the most sophisticated example of a backformation - but for a country that is so linguistically similar to ours it was a rather interesting difference.
And so the road tripping was punctuated with handsome trying to explain what high octane fuel is (it has eight hydrocarbons, hence the 'oct'- you can get septane too, who knew?) and me trying to explain what backformations are.
Ok, so I didn't do too well at not talking linguistics - but honestly the conversation came up because of something both of us had noticed while chatting with a number of locals. The New Zealand term of affection for Australia is to refer to it as "Aussie" as in:
"Where abouts in Aussie do you live?"
"How long are you over from Aussie."
"I have a friend visiting Aussie at the moment."
This coinage flummoxed us. I don't know anyone in Oz who would refer to the country as Aussie (and my survey of 3 gives highly significant statistical data to back me up with 100% of Australians agreeing).
What's it all about then? Well, my hunch is that it's a backformation. A backformation is where people look at a word and assume (often incorrectly, although that's not really a problem) that there's some kind of analysable structure to it. For example - if a bikini is a two piece bathing suit then in some line of logic you can call a one piece a "monokini".
And so, the only reason I can think of for referring to Australia as "Aussie" is that Australians are referred to as "Aussies" and so to be "Aussies" they must come from "Aussie."
It's not really the most sophisticated example of a backformation - but for a country that is so linguistically similar to ours it was a rather interesting difference.
Sunday, July 11, 2010
A weekend rant
As a general rule, I do like to try and keep things as up-beat as possible when talking to people about linguistics. It is a topic a lot of people don't come into contact with during their education (which I think is a shame!) - although most people do have personal feelings about thinking pertaining to language. It's fun, it's fascinating, I rarely feel inclined to write a post that makes me sound like a troll.
The latest xkcd comic though has inspired me to don my grumpy linguist hat. I own a lot of hats, and I have to say this is my least favourite. The comic stars 'the count' from Sesame street using a counting system that only has the values of 'one', 'two' and 'many'.
Now, this isn't as strange as it may seem to speakers of Indo-European languages (that would be you). Lots of languages don't feel the need to be as numerically precise as others. So some only have these values. Others also have the value of 'more than two but less than about eight', which is known as a paucal. This is quite common for languages spoken in Australia, and occurs in South American languages among others.
Which leaves me with two basic problems I have with this comic. The first is the use of the term 'primitive cultures.' Cultures that used these systems aren't 'primitive', they are as complex and sophisticated as any that uses a more specific counting system. Many Australian languages with simple counting systems also have very sophisticated kin-term system. I'm sure most English speakers would take offense if speakers of these languages consider us a 'primitive culture' because we don't have a single word for 'the two of us, where I am your maternal grandmother and you are my granddaughter.'
Secondly, the comic doesn't just insult the speakers of these languages, he insults the people who research them. Obviously, I'm one to take this insult rather personally. The mouse-over text from the comic reads thus:
Cue letters from anthropology majors complaining that this view of numerolinguistic development perpetuates a widespread myth. They get to write letters like that because when you're not getting a real science degree you have a lot of free time.
Actually, it's not a myth, it's fact - and I don't have a problem with that. What I have a problem with is the assumption that only Anthropologists are interesting in this phenomenon, and not linguists, or psychologists, teachers and even mathematicians. I'm not even going to bother walking into the trap of pointing out that linguistics is a real science and that I'm very busy; it is, and I am.
This is all rather disappointing Randal at xkcd is normally rather on topic with matter linguistic. I might just print it out and keep the image, which I find to be rather cute.
The latest xkcd comic though has inspired me to don my grumpy linguist hat. I own a lot of hats, and I have to say this is my least favourite. The comic stars 'the count' from Sesame street using a counting system that only has the values of 'one', 'two' and 'many'.
Now, this isn't as strange as it may seem to speakers of Indo-European languages (that would be you). Lots of languages don't feel the need to be as numerically precise as others. So some only have these values. Others also have the value of 'more than two but less than about eight', which is known as a paucal. This is quite common for languages spoken in Australia, and occurs in South American languages among others.
Which leaves me with two basic problems I have with this comic. The first is the use of the term 'primitive cultures.' Cultures that used these systems aren't 'primitive', they are as complex and sophisticated as any that uses a more specific counting system. Many Australian languages with simple counting systems also have very sophisticated kin-term system. I'm sure most English speakers would take offense if speakers of these languages consider us a 'primitive culture' because we don't have a single word for 'the two of us, where I am your maternal grandmother and you are my granddaughter.'
Secondly, the comic doesn't just insult the speakers of these languages, he insults the people who research them. Obviously, I'm one to take this insult rather personally. The mouse-over text from the comic reads thus:
Cue letters from anthropology majors complaining that this view of numerolinguistic development perpetuates a widespread myth. They get to write letters like that because when you're not getting a real science degree you have a lot of free time.
Actually, it's not a myth, it's fact - and I don't have a problem with that. What I have a problem with is the assumption that only Anthropologists are interesting in this phenomenon, and not linguists, or psychologists, teachers and even mathematicians. I'm not even going to bother walking into the trap of pointing out that linguistics is a real science and that I'm very busy; it is, and I am.
This is all rather disappointing Randal at xkcd is normally rather on topic with matter linguistic. I might just print it out and keep the image, which I find to be rather cute.
Saturday, June 26, 2010
Lol link
Whle I am not normally to be found lurking in the world of facebook, I've been finding the work of lolPhonology sufficiently amusing. If only my undergraduate phonology class was so amusingly instructive!
Thursday, June 24, 2010
Proud to be 'Strine
While I would normally refrain from using this blog as a political forum - I would just like to say that I am happy to have woken up this morning to a country where we now have a leader with one of the most impressive broad Australian accent we've seen in the corridors of power for a long time.
Tuesday, June 1, 2010
More Douche News
Flicking through a copy of Zen magazine at a friend's house over the weekend, I came across a delightful example from Paul Verhoever for my mini-corpus of douche modifiers. This time we have a reference to a pack of "...colossal douche-clerics."
Apparently being a douche is some kind of religious calling.
Apparently being a douche is some kind of religious calling.
Thursday, May 27, 2010
A Weekend at the Beach
I'm getting in early with this week's post, as I'll be away tomorrow and for the rest of the weekend. I'm off to the NSW central coast for a weekend with my project team. It's something like school camp, but much more nerdy, much more fun and no one to tell us to go to bed at 9pm.
I'll be showing the team what I've been up to for the last year, which is somewhat nerve-wracking and exciting. Exciting, because this time last year I had nothing, or less than nothing, to show them, and this year I've got lots of my own data. Nerve-wracking because showing people your analysis - even a tentative one - is always stressful. Fortunately they're all very nice people so I won't be too worried.
And in language news this week, we see that computational manipulation of language can actually have some good.
I'll be showing the team what I've been up to for the last year, which is somewhat nerve-wracking and exciting. Exciting, because this time last year I had nothing, or less than nothing, to show them, and this year I've got lots of my own data. Nerve-wracking because showing people your analysis - even a tentative one - is always stressful. Fortunately they're all very nice people so I won't be too worried.
And in language news this week, we see that computational manipulation of language can actually have some good.
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