Noncompositional

Until today, I was very confused about the pronunciation of this character: 癌. It is used in Chinese and Japanese to mean ‘(malignant) cancer,’ or ‘carcinoma’ (though, like English cancer, it technically could also be applied to the wider category of either benign or malignant tumors). However, in Japanese it is pronounced gan, and in Mandarin it is pronounced ai. Now, there are certainly cases where Japanese has undergone a lot of sound changes since borrowing a Chinese word, and Mandarin is probably one of the least representative of the sort of Chinese language that the Japanese borrowed from. But at least there is a semi-regular correspondence. gan and ai are not only very different, but they don’t represent any correspondence between Japanese and Mandarin that I’d ever seen before.

Then, today, in Chinese class, I learned that the character 癌 actually used to have another pronunciation in Mandarin: yan. Oh ho! This made perfect sense, as yan/gan is a perfect Mandarin/Japanese pair. But another obvious question presented itself: why the heck did it change?

Apparently, in order to avoid confusion in spoken language between 癌症 ‘cancer(ous symptoms)’ and 炎症 ‘inflammation,’ which were homophonous, ‘cancer’ was changed to ai. This was effective only for Putonghua; other Chinese languages seem not to have altered the character’s reading, likely because the two characters 癌 and 炎 are distinct in those languages. For instance, in Cantonese, 炎 is jim and 癌 is ngaam. And the final question: why ai? Well, I’m not entirely sure, but it seems that in some Chinese languages, 癌 is pronounced ngai. Perhaps whichever organization decided to change the character’s reading took their cue from those languages, and just chopped off the initial velar nasal, which Mandarin did who knows how many centuries ago anyway.

There are many pitfalls that await a learner of Chinese, if that learner also speaks Japanese or Korean. The reverse is also true. One of those pitfalls has to do with two-character compounds. There are several dozen two-character words in Chinese XY which are present in Japanese (or Korean) as YX. Off the top of my head:

I used to have access to a book that contained a page’s worth of such compounds, but at the moment I don’t even remember what it was called, or if a copy of it is housed in my local library. I’m also not exactly sure why these reversals took place. As far as I can tell, Korean and Japanese share the same order, and some comments I found on various forums seemed to indicate that Vietnamese has the same order as Chinese, at least for some words (like ‘peace’). There are also no cases I’m aware of where the pronunciation doesn’t match the orthography, e.g., writing the compound XY but pronouncing it YX. That would be interesting, though.

That reminds me of a review I recently read of the CGEL in Language (80:1), by Peter Cullicover:

Accepting for the moment that what CGEL says about some phenomenon is all that there is to say, it is somewhat puzzling that as scientists we would have a serious notion of what would be more interesting than the truth. For instance, it would definitely be more interesting to discover that the moon is made almost entirely of green cheese than that it is made of rock and dust, especially given that it looks like it is made of rocks and dust, and the samples that have been brought back are—rocks and dust! It would be more interesting to learn that pigs cannot fly because their wings are made of an invisible substance that is too insubstantial to support their weight, rather than that they simply lack the anatomical and physiological wherewithal in the first place. It would be far more interesting to discover that chimps appear to lack human language because their religious beliefs prohibit the expression of personal thoughts (as opposed to feelings) to other creatures, rather than whatever the true answer is, which is probably some mundane story about neural organization, computational capacity, conceptual structure, and the like. But granting that the less interesting explanations are the right ones, scientists do not give up the good fight and turn to other pursuits. Why should linguists?

I was disappointed that the possibility of data fabrication was not brought up. Surely it would help increase young people’s interest in science if the scientific world engaged on a crusade to find pigs’ invisible wings.

Unable to think of original content, let’s consider the latest two The Good Word entries over at Slate.

The first, Suck it up (hat tip: Lindsay), is an essay on the verb suck in its meaning of ‘lame’…uh, I mean, ‘undesirable.’ Apparantly some people frown upon its use, because it’s vulgar/faddish/lewd/etc. Seth Stephenson argues against this position, and the basic point is one that any good student of semantic change (and sociolinguistics, which of course is a part of any curriculum on semantic change) could make: “You don’t like semantic change? Sucks to be you” (as the author puts it). The various arguments should be familiar: does the word evoke the supposed lewd act? (no, especially not in people who’ve never even heard of said act [though, a combination of the sort of linguistic stick-in-the-mud who doesn't like the word along with connectionist and/or exemplar-based models of the lexicon, I might be able to see how a snowball effect could result]); is the etymology of the word even related to fellatio? (origins are unclear, but other sources present themselves); can you change the trend? (no).

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Well, my apologies to anyone who tried to access this blog’s feed over the past couple of days and found nothing. I forgot to update a couple of settings after upgrading to the latest version of Wordpress. Anyway, everything should be fixed now.

In return for the error, a small, hopefully amusing item.

Observe this photograph. This is the spine of a book that I found in a local used bookstore which, as you can see, is well-stocked with linguistics books (I’d say there are usually over a hundred different titles there at any given time). As I recall, the actual book is not by the shown author, though the content is lainguistics-related. Unfortunately, it has since been purchased, so I cannot investigate further.

An interesting case of foreign word borrowing by linguists appears in a paper by Emily Bender and Dan Flickinger entitled Peripheral Constructions and Core Phenomena: Agreement in Tag Questions (in the volume Lexical and Constructional Aspects of Linguistic Explanation). In part of the semantic specification for auxiliaries that appear in tag positions (e.g., this won’t suck, will it?), they give the name name ne_rel to the sort of semantics that tags contribute. At first I thought this meant “non-empty relation,” which seemed pretty ridiculous. But then I noticed the footnote:

[ne_rel is] So named because both German and Japanese have particles similar in function to English tag questions spelled ne. As it happens, Potawatomi also has a question particle of the same spelling

Proponents of Proto World, take notice!

And on a related note, Language Hat and Language Log are working on a campaign to rename the ukemi construction in English. Gambatte!

Over the last few years, I’ve had many occasions to test my linguistic intuitions against the intuitions of the internet-as-indexed-by-Google. In particular, internet searches (and corpus searches in general) are very useful whenever confronted with a syntax (or semantics, or maybe even morphology) article that proclaims some bit of language to be ungrammatical. I suggest everyone do it at least once per article.

Now, sometimes you’ll look at a structure marked with a * and wonder, “could anyone ever say (write) something like that?” So you search in (say) Google, and you find about two dozen hits, most of them irrelevant. But a couple are good, and so you either hang your head in dismay or shout a cheer of, “ha! take that, false giver of *s!” And I’ve noticed something that may or may not actually be true overall, but somehow it seems right: more often than any other genres, science-fiction, fantasy, and fanfiction in general contain the aberrant innovative structures.

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In a previous post I discussed some activities of Japan’s national language research institute, which starting in 2003 started publishing lists of loan words in Japanese, most of them recent loans, that they felt should not be used in government and other popular documents (e.g., newspapers) because they contributed to a lack of comprehension on the part of the general public. Some typical examples of words taken wholesale from English into Japanese are informed consent, community, universal service, and soft landing (as in a slow economic quieting-down).

Over at LanguageLog, Mark Liberman wondered how borrowing a foreign word could lead to evasive language, as I had said. Indeed, many of the concepts that the institute singled out originated in various sectors of the American and/or European business and government world, and so no equivalent is immediately available in Japanese. It thus may seem natural to just take the foreign concept and stick it into your language unomi…uh, I mean…sans accommodation. Though this may be bad technique, surely it is not “evasive.” Or is it?

I admit (and this is hard, being a mini-lexicographer) that I did not mean to imply that such users of gairai-go were evasive or using ii-mawashi. In the case of government documents or in newspapers, the Kokken asserts that the use of gairai-go is due to writers putting priority their own ease of writing rather than their audience’s ease of understanding (外来語の使用状況を見ると，読み手の分かりやすさに対する配慮よりも，書き手の使いやすさを優先しているように見えます。). However, from the point of view of the reader the effect, I believe, may be a sort of evasiveness or equivocation [insert some word that means: 'You keep using that word. I do not think you know what it means']. Because many of these words are used without supplementary definitions in Japanese ([this would also alleviate the problem, I suppose]), those people without much exposure to English (and often, specifically business and government terminology) will be left thinking that the wool might have been pulled over their eyes. After all, if you’re not sure what the difference between サーベイランス surveillance and モニタリング monitoring is, you might be a bit confused if you receive a notice that local law enforcement will be stepping one of them up in your area (the latter is about making sure you don’t miss any changes in a situation, while the former is about making sure you don’t let anything evil/bad escape your attention). So while these two words, if understood by everyone in the conversation, could lend a good amount of precision to the discourse, for someone not familiar with the subtleties, it may as well be doublespeak.

Of course in the end, as with most things like the Kokken’s suggestions, it’s basically a moot point, since the Kokken really just makes suggestions to other government agencies (and newspapers, though I don’t think they have to follow the guidelines). The places where you see the most obvious use of katakana-go is in advertisements, television, and other popular media. In those places it has a sort of chic, or so I’m told. So as long as learning (some sort of) English is liu xing, uh, en vogue, there’s no expecting the use of gairai-go to decrease. Thankfully, the American government is well aware that English is superior to other languages, and so we need not fear our kooteki shorui being contaminated.

[edited to fix some markup and minor content]