Making News

After a lovely long Christmas lunch that also filled up a couple of the early hours of the evening, the Handsome penpal/fake Husband and I decided to walk around the tourist area of Kathmandu enjoying the festive ambiance.

While trying on silly hats at a roadside store we got chatting to a couple of people also playing with the merchandise. One of them was a reporter for one of the Nepali language newspapers writing about how Christmas is celebrated in Kathmandu.

We chatted for a while, mainly in Nepali, about Christmas here, and how it compares to the warm weather in Australia. He asked if he could quote me, I said sure, he took some notes and we went on our way.

The next morning we picked up a newspaper, and low and behold there was the report! I was rather impressed at getting my name into a Nepali newspaper. As I read on (largely with the help of a dictionary, my written Nepali skills aren't great) I also became highly amused.

There was the usual low-lying Nepali male misogyny to kick off the piece - where I was introduced as the "Australian beauty" - but that was pretty par for the course and not too much of a surprise.

What was more amusing is that, for much of the three or so passages attributed to me as direct quotes I had to look up the words in a dictionary because I didn't know then. According to the article I referred to the "waataawaran" (environment) of festivities and the "jhilimilii" (glittering) lights. These weren't the only words I had to look up before I could understand what I had apparently said.

It's not surprising the quotes aren't word perfect, considering he was scrawling dot points into a notepad. In fact, I'm rather glad he made my Nepali more eloquent for me!

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!

1000th word: It's something good!

Ladies and Gents, it is an auspicious occasion indeed. After 13 months and many sessions, the thousandth word entered into the database is:

lála लाला (n.) - something or someone. N: केहि ; कोहि

Yup! Something was the 1000th word. It certainly won't be the last either.

Dictionary fun!

Today was threatening to be a slow news day - however the day has taken a surprisingly pleasant turn - because I've just made my first dictionary and I'm rather chuffed!

I have mentioned before that I have been using a program called Toolbox to keep track of all the words in Tam and also help analyse some sentence structure. One feature that I haven't been able to get functioning is the dictionary formatting process. The thing about toolbox is that it's nice and simple to use if everything is running well, but it's a bit of a tangle under the hood so if things aren't working well I either end up making a bigger mess, or being left completely flummoxed - occasionally both.

Having called upon the services of a number of people in the department a number of times this week, N. finally has got it working, although I don't know how and I'm not entirely sure he does either.

But the result is that with a few clicks of a mouse I've got myself the bare bones of a Tam-English-Nepali dictionary in the making!

Time to play the name game

For the last couple of months I've enjoyed sharing Friday thoughts on a range of topics beyond my own work. This doesn't mean that I haven't been doing any of my own work, far from it. I'm still tidying up some final transcriptions from the last trip, thinking about what I need to do on the next trip (lots) and reading, reading, reading.

One thing I have been thinking about is that I am tired of referring to the language I'm working with as K. As I mentioned while I Nepal, there was some confusion over which language I was working on, and it eventually transpired that it is a previously undocumented dialect of a larger language. I maintained references to the language as K. until now for the sake of consistency.

The reason for this convention has nothing to do with the fact I'm trying to keep you from finding out who I'm working with and where. I'll happily tell you the name of the language if you email me/come to any presentation I do or read anything I (eventually) publish on this topic. It's more that the internet has a merciless memory, and if, in the future, people do want to find out about this language I don't want this blog to be the first thing that pops up.

I have been pondering a solution for a while and have decided to fabricate a pseudonym instead of continuing to resort to an initial. Therefore, for all future references in this blog to the language I'm working with and the people who speak it I'll use the word "Tam". This is their word for 'language' or 'speech' and is sufficiently short and snappy. For those that care it's a high tone word.

So no more Poe-like references to the language K., from now on all my rantings will be in relation to Tam - as well as whatever other linguistic matters pique my interest.

He is a total douche....

Now I've been home for a while and am no longer living in my very insular little Nepali Linguistics universe, I thought I would try and make an effort to post every Friday-ish on general linguistic topics that tickle my fancy.

This week's has occurred because my sister has taken to using the phrase 'douche canoe' as a term of disparagement, and the other week I was reading a column in the Good Weekend where someone was referred to as a 'douche banjo' (at least I think it was banjo, I'm still trying to track that one down if anyone out there keeps old copies of the paper floating around).

I am more than familiar with the offensive term 'douche bag'. A douche bag is actually an item of medical use - it's the bag on the douche (itself taken from the French for shower) where fluid is kept. The whole get up is to clean out any bodily orifices, although people generally seem fixated on the vagina (as usual).

The Oxford English Dictionary gives its usual useful but dry definition as:

2. (b) U.S. slang, a general term of disparagement, esp. for an unattractive or boring person;


I'm not sure that captures it for me - I tend to use it more for idiots that are trying to punch above their weight and failing miserably, often while drunk. Also, unlike the OED, I'm quite happy to use the word douche in isolation as still mean basically the same thing.

But until a couple of weeks ago, I'd never heard any combination other than douche bag. My unprofessional opinion is that 'douche bag' was picked up as a term of insult, reduced to 'douche', then people forgot that a douche bag was a read piece of medical equipment, and began assuming it was just a random conjunction and added what they felt like.

Does anyone else use douche canoe, or douche banjo? Or are there any other wacky combinations that you use? Also, does your definition of douche differ from mine or the OED?

Count On It

It's nice to have been back for the silly seasons but before I wrap things up from the trip and deliver the all important trip statistics I need to fulfill my old year resolution to blog about numbers in Nepali and K.

While I was pleased with my general progress with Nepali during my time away, one thing I totally sucked at was counting, I only managed to reliably count to twelve so that I could tell the time.

To give you a rough idea why it's so hard, here's a website with numbers to thirty:

http://www.learnnepali.com/numbers.html

There is basically no consistent pattern, which means you basically have to learn a hundred separate vocabulary items. I decided to save the lexical space in my brain for more important words - most of them related to food and shopping...

Kagate numbers are also sufficiently fascinating to warrant mentioning here. Like Nepali, they present a small challenge to the learner-speaker because they have not one counting system, but two. One of these systems is base 20.

As an explanation, English counting has a base 10 system, where things work really well in groups of ten, whereas in one of the K. systems things work really well in groups of 20. So, basically, imagine you start counting at 20, and keep going to 29 - instead of 30, it's more like twenty-eleven, twenty-twelve etc. up to twenty-nineteen, and then you get to 40, because it works nicely as two groups of twenty.

And finally, on the topic of numbers, I'll be putting up those all important trip stats in the next few days. Hope you've all had a great holiday season!

Yummy

It doesn't matter how many times I eat out in Nepal (and trust me, it's quiet a lot) whenever I see 'buff meat' on the menu I instantly think they have a butcher hooking them up with the remains of gym junkies rather than buffalo.

Yaks In The Jungle With Gastric

No language is an island, and every language is constantly borrowing words and constructions from it's neighbours. Well, that is the speakers borrow them, and then they become part of the language.

This is something I have been reminded of time and time again while here. I've had Nepali people ask me what the English words were for 'load shedding'(ie enforced blackouts) and 'gastric'(stomach upset) - they were rather confused when I said they were the English words.

It's happened the other way as well - during sessions one of the words for forest was 'jungle'- a word that, like us, they have borrowed from their Indian neighbours, and, of course, the word for 'yak' is 'yak' - in this case we're the ones that did the borrowing from Tibetan.

Word borrowing can be a useful record of how languages interact and share. It's also fun to see what words get borrowed.