The last several questions afterward had to do with how a linguist’s perspective on communication might differ from that of a psychologists (or a sociologist, etc; no one actually mentioned other fields, though Tannen mentioned psychology). That lead to wondering what the heck linguistics was anyway. After briefly explaining that, Tannen offered something that Robin Lakoff had once said (light paraphrasing on my part):

I know what I do is linguistics, because I’m a linguist, and I do it.

These old school villains (the “Forsaken”) have all adopted for themselves names given them (in scorn) by those they fought so many years ago. For instance, in the prologue of The Eye of the World, we learn that Elan Morin Tedronai is now called Betrayer of Hope. This works out to Ishamael in the old tongue. Based on other words in the OT, we know that mael is ‘hope’ and isha has something to do with ‘destroyer’, but it’s unclear if these are bound or free morphemes, whether this is more like a compound (hope destroyer?) or a name-ified phrase. Anyway, that’s how it goes. In the OT, these baddies have names like “Spider” or “the Envious” or “Daughter of the Night.”

Now, there are some scenes in which these Forsaken talk amongst each other, and one can surmise that they use the old tongue. For instance, in the prologue of Lord of Chaos (p57) we have the point of view of one of the Forsaken

She felt the first spinning of saidar a moment before the glowing line appeared and became a gateway.

Modern day people speak of weaving, not spinning, saidar. There are a couple other things like this, I think. of course it could be that they are actually speaking a modern language, but using lexical items from their own time period. But it’s not clear why they would do so. Maybe to keep up their language skills? But these Forsaken have in general such a poor opinion of modern people that it seems they’d relish any opportunity to abandon the parts of their language, culture, etc that they had to adopt in order to fit in.

Yet, in contrast to the Prologue of the very first book (where a good guy, speaking the OT, says “Betrayer of Hope”), the thought and language of the Forsaken, in every other part of the series, uses the OT names untranslated. The line after the one quoted above reads,

Graendal stepped out, …

where Graendal means something in the OT (though not known to mere mortal readers). This is to be contrasted with the italicized saidar, another OT word, probably complex but no gloss has ever been given. So, the generalization here is that, with the exception of the first prologue of the first book, chapters from the POV of an OT speaker look linguistically just like POVs from modern speakers, with some lexical items switched out to remind us we’re dealing with really old people here.

From a certain point of view this makes sense. It would probably be rather difficult and confusing to make the OT/modern differences more apparent. And while it might satisfy some geeks, it could well take away from the storytelling proper. And for another thing, it might be pretty darned hilarious to read

The Betrayer of Hope wondered what could be keeping Spider. She and the Envious always worked together, but surely they would not openly show their alliance…

Which brings up the next question: do these guys ever feel funny talking to each other with these names? I realize that analyzable names pretty quickly become opaque to casual thought (how often do I wonder about the creek in Walnut Creek? Almost never). They do, from time to time, mull over the suitability of their names, but I guess it’s mostly in the background of their thoughts. So, maybe the rendering of their names as non-italicized old tongue (amidst what we can imagine is translated OT) is a way of representing that.

Final note: in The Eye of the World, on pages 619-20, you can find another example of the whole worm/wyrm/Worm thing. I never noticed it the first time through, but after rereading the book a few weeks ago, I found it chuckle-worthy.

“They were scared off by worms?” Mat said incredulously. [...]

“A Worm” — there was a sharp difference in the way the Warder said it from the way Mat had — “can kill a Fade, if the Fade hasn’t the Dark One’s own luck with it.

What I wouldn’t give to know what that sharp difference was.

First, the sentences:

He was there for a good seven years.

An additional three people are required.

A mere four nations recognize that standard.

She collected an amazing and heretofore unprecedented forty million dollars.

What we have is “a” and then some adjective phrase, and then a quantified nominal. There are some interesting questions to be asked: first, what is the range of adjectives? It seems sort of limited: a grueling 100 miles, but ?an asphalt-paved 100 miles. All the examples given so far involve some sort of “evaluation” (shock, amazement, disappointment, unprecedentedness, etc.). Maybe someone nice will do a corpus study and report the findings (and of no one does it soon, I might just have to).

Next question: does the whole thing act as a singular or plural phrase, for the purposes of subject-verb agreement? The comments seem to show that, depending on the “context” (how the NP is construed semantically, let’s say – either as a divisible group of individuals or as a lump), you might get singular or plural agreement.

A good 100 people have/*has arrived.

A mere four nations recognize/*recognizes that standard.

A mere four nations is/are not enough

To be clear, it’s not just this funky “a” construction that has this effect: I think 100 people has the power to convince our boss that he’s acting inappropriately. That is to say, “100 people signing the petition” or something similar. The CGEL, unsurprisingly, has discussion of this (pages 501 onward, especially 504 on “measure phrases” as contexts for agreement overrides).

Perhaps, in fact, the idea of “measure phrase” is about right for the funky “a” constructions. That brings us to the next (and very related) question: what do these things mean, anyway? Claire (a commenter on Mark’s more recent post) has the intuition that in

a stunning 19.32 seconds

what we are dealing with is

a stunning record/time of 19.32 seconds

which has an “equative” of, which appears not just in quantified expressions but elsewhere (compare Seven of the 68 took less than 80% of the prescribed dosage over the study period for the reason of lack of response to DJT.). The idea that the “of” is “implicit” would need some further specification, but the idea would potentially be that adjectival modification of a particular type creates a sort of pseudo-measure-phrase out of the quantified nominal. This might then also explain any variability in subject-verb agreement (since there is both the quantified nominal as well as the singular semantics of the implicit measure phrease).

Radek (replying to Claire) gives some more evidence. One bit is something that I also mentioned in my initial comments, about semantic composition. He notes (and I agree) that in a mindboggling 281187 words, which is mindboggling is not the words, but rather “the dummy word ‘amount’.” This is basically what I think, though you don’t necessarily need a “dummy” (unpronounced?) word, but simply a semantic entity — the quantity of words — that can be modified. Whether that meaning has to be represented by some implicit word is a separate question.

Mark, too, I think, was grappling with this when was dealing with the original interesting question, namely what is the constituency structure?

However, I’ll admit that the constituent structure doesn’t feel like

[ [a modifier number] noun]

but rather feels like

[ [a modifier] [number noun] ]

I think this too involves semantic intuitions influencing syntactic ones (but not being a mind-reader, I could be totally off; there are also prosodic factors to consider, and just plain “well, that’s how it looks to me”). The latter structure would capture the idea that what is mindboggling, shocking, amazing, etc. is not the number per se but the quantified expression.

Going further afield, I have the vague feeling that he plays a solid third base and she sings a mean alto are in the same family of slightly-odd modification and determination. Also in this family might be the France of my youth and the always-controversial San Francisco.

[some format editing was done soon after posting...in case you were wondering]

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This particular pattern of compounding is actually rather rare in English. I found a paper by Hans Marchand, Compound and Pseudo-Compound Verbs in Present-Day English (American Speech, 1957), which is a great discussion of the morphology and semantics of various sorts of compounds in English. Most of the words above are from that paper, since, as you might have realized, this is not exactly a very productive process for creating verbs in English. Several of the above words have likely been backformed from nominal compounds: sightseeing, stage manager, and so forth. These sorts of compounds, schematically O-V-er/ing, are basically freely-created in English (blog-writer, biscuit-baking, though ??blog-write and ??biscuit-bake).

In the case of the -ing compounds, like (for some people) sight-seeing, these can of course be used as nouns, but they can also go where verbs are supposed to go, as in I don’t like him sightseeing all the time when we’re here for business (at least, this according to one person I asked, who liked this sentence but is against I like to sightsee). In some cases, I would guess, this sort of syntactic context helps convince people that the other inflectional forms are available. For me, I’m pretty comfortable with the bare form: to sightsee. The 3sg-present form, sightsees should in principle be fine, but actually it seems a little odd to use it. A cursory search of Google reveals that the -s form is far less common (and most of the first pages of results are not actually uses of the word at all). Then comes the plain past and participial forms: sightsaw and sightseen (or is it sightseed?). These, I think we can all agree, are ridiculous.

I was pleased to find that languagehat had alread covered the topic, with all present in agreement that go sightseeing is the expression you want if you feel like adding tense morphology. Nonetheless the horrible horrible forms have made their way into the dictionaries. Maybe some sort of automated wordform-generator accidentally word-generated them. Interestingly, there are some websites written in Chinese and Korean (among others, surely, but those are the ones I found) that have discussions of the bad wordforms, and also what seem to be essays from English classes that make use of them. Just goes to show what you get for trusting a dictionary… uh, not to poke undue fun at dictionaries, which I assume are trustworthy, at least in the realm of spelling and wordforms.