Noncompositional

On a recent trip to Barnes and Noble (I have a gift card) I happened upon a book in one of the bargain sections called (IIRC) Where’s that word from? I looked inside the front jacket and saw what I expected, namely things like “did you know [word x] actually came from the Old [English/Norse/etc] word [blah] that means [amusing thing]? Find out all about this and many other words in this collection of…” I figured that it would be a series of one- or two-page-long descriptions of maybe a hundred words, with some light commentary and anecdotes, or whatever. So I turned to a random page in the middle, and was slightly surprised to find that a more appropriate description of the book would have been English Etymological Dictionary, because that’s what it was: a list of words with a short definition (the sort helpful only to an already-literate user of English) and a line about the proximal source language (Middle French, Latin, etc.) and word. Then I looked at the front matter, and found a description of the history of the English language, not surprisingly. Only the author talked about “Indo-Germanic (or Indo-European).” Then I turned to the publication information: yep, 1974. And probably the really original publication date was rather earlier. Sweet repackaging, guys.

At the moment I’m trying to recover the exact publication information, including the editor and original title, but for some reason I can’t find it out. Might be another trip to B&N for me.

This is not what I promised in an earlier post, but the topic is basically the same.

Now, I’m not widely read in (epic) fantasy novels, though it is often my preferred genre. Nonetheless, I think I can make a tentative generalization, which is that in any fantasy world where some either exotic or ancient race speaks a language unintelligible to contemporary folk, then there is somehow an inordinate amount of polysemy, connotation, or complexity to the words and sentences involved. Or, alternatively, it is approximately the same amount as in the modern language (usually “English”), but it is highlighted in such a way as to make it seem rather different from anything that might be familiar.

Just to pick a couple examples from Tad William’s book Shadowmarch (which I’m currently in the middle of reading; no spoilers):

The lady’s high house was called Shehen, which meant “Weeping.” Because it was a s’a-Qar word, it meant other things, too–it carried the intimation of an unexpected ending, and a suggestion of the scent of the plant that in the sunlight lands was called myrtle–but more than anything else, it meant “Weeping.”

…all the way down to the thrice-blessed fence that the mortals called Shadowline, and that the Qar themselves called A’shish-Yarrit Sa, which meant “Storm of Silence,” or, with a slightly different intonation of voice or gesture of the hand, “White Thoughts.”

I suppose that the second example is supposed to be significantly different from, say, tonal languages like those found in China and Africa. In this case, we are supposed to understand that the two meanings for A’shish-Yarrit Sa are somehow semantically related (in some deep way incomprehensible to mere humans). Either that, or somehow we’re dealing with a pun, or maybe just some philosophically interesting near-homophony which, perhaps, native speakers of Qar don’t even care about.

Now, this sort of thing is not in and of itself completely horrible. But for me, without an actual system apparent behind the words and their meanings, which could, with time, be discerned by the reader (and yes, this requires many more tokens in the books), it just seems…well, laughable.

Something about language in fantasy novels is bothering me again, though I can’t quite formulate it yet. This is coming from a recent purchase, Shadowmarch, by Tad Williams. It’s sort of an interesting book, publishing-wise. Much (some?) of it was originally published as an online serial (on shadowmarch.com) back in 2002, along with a user forum and other interactive tools. It was a nice experiment, while it lasted.

Just over a year ago I wrote about Anderson Cooper’s description of America’s growing population. Seems it’s about time for me to do sort of the same thing, only with an ad I saw while over in Chicago for the annual meeting of my professional organization. On one of the L trains there was an advertisement for a new book, The Chicago “L”. The ad read something like,

Make a connection to the over 10 billion riders of the Chicago “L”

That was surprising. I thought the current population of the earth was around 6 billion! Anyway, it’s quite clear what is meant, namely that over 10 billion rides have been taken since the opening of the L in 1892, no doubt many involving repeat customers. Fair enough - but do different rides by the same individual require making a new connection with them for each new ride? Sure, some days the trip is special, but whatever connection this book lets me create with, say, Janice Smith going to work on June 3rd, 1985, will probably also work for her going to work on June 4th. Just a guess, of course.

Similarly strange is what is apparently on the blurb (from Amazon):

More than 10 billion people have ridden the “L,” which now carries half a million people a day over 222 miles of track.

Now, I’d like to claim that more than one thousand people read this blog, but somehow I think I would get called on it…

One interesting thing that came out of this was a little research I did into estimations not of the world’s current population, but of the sum total of humans who’ve ever lived. One estimate puts it at just over 100 billion. More than I would have guessed. And according to the same source, about 11 billion people were alive between 1900 and 2002. So hey, theoretically (maybe?) it’s possible that 10 billion individuals have ridden on the L.

Someone asked me the other day which was the normal way to talk about meters in Japanese, as in “the plant is over two meters tall.” He wondered if it was meetaa or meetoru. I knew I’d heard (and possibly used) both before, but I wasn’t sure which was more common, so I guessed meetaa. Should have checked the dictionary first.

Consulting with the Daijirin, a large American Heritage-style dictionary (as opposed to the Koujien, which is sort of OED-ish), I found an interesting difference between the two. Both meetoru and meetaa have two senses. Meetoru’s first sense is the unit of measurement, and all related things: meetoru-hoo is the metric system ‘meter law/rule’. Meetaa’s first sense is “measurement device,” as in gasu meetaa ‘gas meter’ and paakingu meetaa ‘parking meter’. Did this bring me back to an earlier post? Yes it did. But this is rather minor, parallel to the pair sutoraiki ‘labor strike’ and sutoraiku ’strike (baseball/bowling)’.

(In fact, the “strike” pair is rather interesting because the final vowel is devoiced; if the two words had meanings similar enough that appeared in the same contexts, people might have some serious issues telling them apart.)

But remember that each of these words had two senses? Well, the second senses of each meetaa and meetoru says, basically, “see [the other word], sense 1.” Great, I thought. But it’s actually not that, uh, “simple,” because while meetaa indeed has both meanings, meetoru is always the unit of length: there is no gasu meetoru, at least according to one person I spoke with.

At least, that seems to be the majority reaction to a book by Paul Benedict called Japanese / Austro-Tai, which claims that Japanese is genetically part of the Austro-Tai family. Note that Austro-Tai is a proposed macro-family consisting of Austronesian (Formosan, Malayo-Polynesian), Austroasiatic (Mon-Khmer, among others), and Tai-Kadai (Thai, among others). So the book has at least as many presuppositions in it as the infamous Japanese and other Altaic Languages by Roy Miller. And it seems to have taken quite a bashing, at least among stauch defenders of an Altaic connection, like Alexander Vovin.

I came across the book as part of a little research project to see what people out there think about the origins of the Japanese people and language. It turns out that the Altaic theory is still pretty strong among linguists and some anthropologists and geneticists, though the possibility of an Austronesian connection is still pretty strong, especially among Eastern scholars. It seems that many of them believe that the origins of the Japanese are best understood as a mixing between northern (Altaic, perhaps) and southern (Austronesian or Austroasiatic, though usually the former) features, at least culturally. Linguistically, the arguments for either a creole or a southern substratum remain, to my eyes, rather unconvincing. Though, I will admit, there are some interesting lexical correspondences between some Ryukyuan, Okinawan, and Kyushuan words for sea navigation, and some proposed Proto-Austronesian words. Okay, there’s really just one really good one, which was presented not by Benedict but by Osamu Sakiyama in a book with a great title: Prehistoric Mongoloid Dispersals. The word is proto-Austronesian *paRi, which is reflected in various languages with meanings related to south, southern winds, the southern cross, and sting rays (what the southern cross looks like). And, apparently in many of the Japonic languages spoken in southwestern Kyushu and beyond, there are words like pae and pai that mean south/southwestern wind. So, the medial loss of r is supposed to have happened in Japanese (though, I think that is arrived at via comparative Altaic data, so…yeah); but the vowels, I think, are supposed to have merged in various ways. Clearly some more work has to be done on this one, but it’s interesting nonetheless.

Anyway, for me the little research project definitely inspired me to become more aware of the (attested) history of Japanese, so it looks like some learning of classical Japanese should be in my future.

In recent lexicographic work, I had occasion to think about the meaning of words related to tourism, including sightseeing. Now, to a fair number of people, I think, sightseeing is a noun (or verb) that appears only in the -ing form. That is, I want to sightsee or something like that would be bad. But I think for many (perhaps even a larger number of) people, sightsee is a perfectly fine O-V compound, akin to housekeep, globe-trot, hero-worship, and stage-manage, typewrite, hogtie, proofread, brainwash, vacuum clean, and top-dress. Of course, some of these are likely no longer thought of as having this particular structure (like perhaps proofread) and some are mostly obsolete or rather domain-specific (typewrite and top-dress).

Read more »

Just now I went from a librarything blog entry on database (mis)management (by the way, my recorded collection is slowly growing) to a similar entry on slashdot detailing what happens when the number of comment parents (or their ID numbers, I suppose) gets too big. They had gotten up to 2^24 comments, the upper bound for a mySQL “unsigned mediumint” sort of number, and so no more comments could be posted until the database was changed. When it was, one poster remarked,

I for one welcome our 2 to the power of X overlords.

(background)