Noncompositional

I was recently shopping for a good Chinese-English (and E-C) dictionary, and noticed a difference between character lookup methods between Chinese and Japanese. In all the Chinese dictionaries I looked at (not a lot, admittedly), there were a total of two methods: by radical, and by pronunciation. Japanese dictionaries add a third method: total number of strokes. Now, of course number of strokes is important for Chinese dictionaries as well: the radicals and the characters listed under them are organized by stroke count. But the Japanese dictionaries I have/had allow for total strokes in the character (presumably for cases where it’s unclear what the radical is — at least, that’s usually why I use that method). Maybe some non-foreign-language Chinese dictionaries also have such a list and I didn’t see it…but it would be interesting if they didn’t! (and just to point it out, Japanese has many options in the pronunciation-lookup method, thanks to the ridiculous numbers of pronunciations for characters: the electronic kanji dictionary that I have even allows me to look up the pronunciation of the radical! (which comes in handy if…uh…I don’t feel like inputting digits).

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First, two short tidbits. Starting from booksellers: a recent post from Mark Liberman prompted be to check out You’re Wearing That on Amazon. Turns out that it’s currently ranked #31 in sales, and was at #24 yesterday. That’s pretty cool.

Second, a speech error. The other day we were discussing various types of subjectless sentences in English, and so the topic turned at one point to diary style English (Woke up. Went to School. Got Schooled). One person who was trying, I suppose, to create an adjectival form of “dairy (style)” came up spontaneously with journalistic. Whoops. But if you start with journal as a (sub)type of diary, and then access its (listed) adjectival form, then you’ve got journalistic. Unfortunately, that word means something rather different.

Finally: I recently realized that there’s an interesting use of (pseudo-)transitive talk, and it looks something like this:

A: I’ll be coming over. B: When? A: I don’t know, later. B: Okay, are we talking 9pm here, or are we talking midnight?

Transitive talk has several (rather old) senses, just as old as the intransitive senses. They include ‘to express in speech’ To heare heresyes talked and lette the talkers alone., ‘to speak a particular language, have a manner of speaking’ He speaks French/slang, and ‘to have a discussion about’ Let’s talk business.

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First, sorry for the small feed hiccup that some of you may have experienced. I’m still working out the transition to Wordpress 2.0. (and if anyone out there is getting this weird error message on the draft preview panel about page redirects, and knows why, I’d be glad to hear about it)

As I mentioned last post, I’ve been (re-)reading GRRM’s fantasy series A song of ice and fire. Now, Martin’s books take an interesting format, eschewing traditional chapters, which might normally be around 20 pages each in a comparable novel, in place of somewhat shorter (10 to 15 pages) sections. These are unnumbered and headed simply by the name of the character whose POV the section is written from. This makes for a somewhat faster-paced story, and also leads the reader to consider why each section is important to a particular character, rather than just the next section of plot. (Of course, this does not mean that every section from character X’s POV is primarily about X – there are some characters who seem as though they will never get a POV, so sometimes a section will be from the POV of someone who is near X, but most of the text is devoted to the actions and dialogue of X)

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It’s been a very dreary new year so far – I think the sun’s been out twice over the past two weeks. For those who like to see the sun from time to time, it’s been rather drab. I move that we should celebrate the new year when spring comes around. Then we could make use of the Japanese words 迎春 and 新春, meaning ‘greet (the) spring’ and ‘new spring,’ which they still use over there to talk about the new year, even though most people recognize the turning of the calendar on January 1st.

As for resolutions: I’ve got just the one – use the dictionary more. In case some linguists didn’t know, those lexicographers know a lot about language, and some new discoveries you’ve made might actually be recorded in one of them big books. Amazing! For instance, I’ve recently been reading a series of epic fantasy books by George R. R. Martin called A song of ice and fire. It’s set in a period reminiscent of medieval Europe, and in particular is said to resemble the War of the Roses (though with dragons, demons, and other more modern inventions). This means we get some fun “old-sounding” English throughout the dialogue. One such example is the use of as as a sort of relativizing subordinator, as in The king is like to exact revenge on those lords as allow the rebels to make camp in their own domains.

Curious as to when (and where) this use of as was in use, I checked the OED and lo, all was revealed unto me.

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[update: Sorry! It seems wordpress doesn't like title-less posts, and since I forgot to add a title the first time, links to the post would have gotten 404 errors. That post hase been deleted, and this one has a title. Those reading this by RSS who got the earlier post with no title will also get an error if they use the link included with the feed. My apologies.]

In a half-hearted attempt to at least keep my Japanese reading ability up to snuff, I’ve started reading 69 sixty-nine by MURAKAMI Ryû (村上龍*). Murakami is a prolific Japanese author, famous for his “subculture” writings, with visceral, emotional, and realistic portrayals of characters who are often depressed, nihilistic, or — as is the case with 69 — adventuresome slackers. The story (which is nicely summarized in this Wikipedia/Japan article) centers around Ken (full name YAZAKI Kensuke 矢崎剣介), a high-school student in the country town of Sasebo, Nagasaki (also the birthplace of the author), who, along with his group of friends, get caught up in the counterculture movements in 1969 Japan, and tangle with topics like Marxism, the Vietnam War, and the nearby US army base with about as much wit and wisdom as obscure-town high school students can muster.

What concerns me here is a particular turn of phrase that the narrator (Ken) has. It relies on the fact that in Japanese, the predicator of any clause is always in final position. What this means is that given a rich enough context (and world-knowledge-driven expectations), the head verb can actually be predicted long before it appears (and in many ads and newspaper headlines, it is often omitted). More than a few times Ken uses this fact to play a little joke on the reader. To wit (my translations follow):

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In a recent post at languagehat, entitled The Chinese Babel, an NYT article detailing some of the more extreme cases of linguistic diversity in China is presented. This seems like a good time to mention some of the more interesting points in a book I’ve been reading recently, The Languages of China by S. Robert Ramsey. This is an overview of the many Chinese languages spoken on the mainland (including mini-grammars), as well as the many non-Sinitic languages spoken within the nation’s borders. A history of the Chinese language and its study is also given a large chapter, as well as recent history regarding the rise of 普通话 as a national standard.

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Hanging around linguistics people gets you some interesting tidbits. For example, try searching newsgroups for patterns like “accentuated her” or “accents his.” Go ahead and try it.

That particular bit came up in a discussion regarding the domain of emphasis (highlighting, underscoring, accenting, playing up, stressing, and so on). And in that discussion a term was mentioned that I’ve been hearing a lot lately, but which has been around for a while: semantic prosody. The old example is the verb cause, which likes to appear with (subordinate) events that have some negative evaluation (caused the accident, catastrophe, storm, the disaster, the explosion, a meltdown, a scandal), though positive events are not ruled out by any means. There are many other cases where certain types of complements or modifiers are preferred, something that comes out when doing a collocate search in a corpus. Read more »