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.

How do you describe a cow that’s rather pessimistically chowing down on grass in a meadow?

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It seems as though we have Lewis Carroll to thank for the word chortle. He coined it in his poem Jabberwocky, apparently as a blend of the words snort and chuckle. We also have him to thank for the application of the word portmanteau to linguistic forms that contain multiple parts–though the morphologist’s use of the word usually refers to morphemes with specifications across multiple grammatical categories (number/gender/tense/etc.), while in common (?) parlance a portmanteau word is a blend of multiple words, like chortle.

I participate in a weekly syntax reading group (though my participation is decidedly less frequently than weekly). This semester our desired topics all ended up starting with the letter A: adverbials, argument structure, adjuncts. After several weeks of readings, we were reaching a point where we felt satisfied with our coverage of material, and were thinking about what to read for the next meeting. Someone suggested we should move on to the Bs, which immediately brought up binding, and so we moved on to the Cs (control? case?). Then someone suggested that we instead just go for the Zs, at which point the only possible suggestion was zeugma.

We then got sidetracked into a little discussion of exactly what zeugma was, and an example was brought up that was sited at a campus health facility. It went something like

Please do not place or take away anything in this box

Nice. This might actually be a good argument for undergraduate syntax students for seeing exactly why the structure of this sentence is…well, strange. And of course also an example of the sort of thing that, while unexpected if you’re a syntactician, is basically understandable (maybe we can find out how long the sign has been there, and how often its message is misunderstood).

The next step is, as someone suggested at the meeting, to call of the facility and say, “I’d like to report a very serious case of zeugma.”

[Yes, yes, this is not a typical case of "zeugma" as (I think) most linguists understand it; there isn't any lexical ambiguity with both meanings realized by different conjuncts, nor have two incompatible valences of a single verb been combined into a single clause. But I think we can expand our definitions a bit, can we not?]

The other day in the class I’m TAing, the professor said, “by the end of the semester, there are ten questions that you should be able to answer like that.” That got me thinking, what is up with the phrase “like that” and its meaning, namely ‘with ease’. For one thing, it’s really hard to represent in writing. You could use typographic emphasis: he can do it like that. Or you could add a word to make it clearer: she finished it just like that. Or, you could notice that it’s sometimes (often?) accompanied by a snap of the fingers, so could have: “You should be able to answer it like that,” he said with a quick snap of the fingers.

And on that note: it seems likely to me that what we have here is a phrase that was at some point rather dependent on a concurrent snap (either timed with that, or perhaps, for dramatic effect, just before that) to make any sense, but over time the association became conventional enough that the gesture was no longer needed. And in fact you could say like that along with any appropriate gesture that indicates speed, ease, or some similar idea. It’d be interesting to see if, in the absence of any gesture, it is regularly or obligatorily replaced by some prosodic cue.

Then I checked the OED entry for like, and lo and behold, there was a meaning! But it wasn’t what I was expecting:

[...] of the nature, character, or habit indicated; spec. (usu. accompanying the crossing of the speaker’s fingers) as an indication that two people described are very friendly or intimate

The first written attestation for this use is from The Great Gatsby. For me, if I want to express that meaning, I’d have to use the finger-crossing gesture - no amount of facial or intonational gymnastics seems to get it quite right. Which is interesting, since my first associations with that particular gesture are the “hope” and “nyah nyah I can break my promise” meanings.

(Yes, that was a reference to a recently-released movie that I happened to have seen recently)

This post is part of a probably vain attempt to increase my wakefulness so I can continue to do coursework. I’ve mentioned before strangenesses related to the word say. I noticed another earlier today (or perhaps it was yesterday). Consider these:

I practice acceptance, which is to say: I occasionally acknowledge the obvious. SF Chron

MS. PERINO: What I can tell you is how the President reacted today, which is to say that he does feel terrible for them, he thinks they’re going through a lot right now, they’ve been through a lot. Press Gaggle

There’s a very widely-believed explanation going around that what Hamlet meant by “nunnery” was a “house of ill repute,” which is to say, a brothel. That’s All I’ve Got to Say

Random House/Dictionary.com has an entry for this particular turn of phrase:

that is to say, that is what is meant; in other words: I believe his account of the story, that is to say, I have no reason to doubt it.

This is apparently a rather old construction, with an OED attestation in c1175, and with nearly the same sort of meaning throughout. In informal search of which is to say shows that the relative clause version has been around at least since the 1600s. Also dating from Early Middle English is the shortened version, that is.

Efter schrifte, hit falleth to speken of Penitence, thet is, dedbote

It’s not until much later (the OED gives 1865, so probably a bit earlier) that that is allows itself to be tagged onto the end of the material it goes with (the material it’s glommed onto, that is).

Earlier today I happened upon a question on MetaFilter on skeuomorphs. The submitter gives several examples of what I conceive of as typical skeuomorphs, both linguistic and not. The linguistic ones are spot-on, as is the noticing of changes from icons to symbols. Actually, one case, the use of the shopping cart for online shopping sites, is interesting, as the era of online shopping has always, as far as I recall, involved the trading of items that would not normally go in shopping carts. This despite the fact that, as far as my experience goes, a shopping cart is not the general sign for shopping containers, or for places where you buy items.

There are then dozens of responses, most of which are probably skeuomorphs, though all of which are interesting. One contrast of note is the continued use of the 3.5” floppy disk as an icon (described earlier, and technically nearly a symbol in the semiotic sense, previously an icon in the same sense) for “save,” as opposed an opening-file-folder icon used to indicate “open.” This latter is more a metaphor: we still use file folders to hold various related documents in the non-electronic world, and the folder perhaps remains a reasonable analogy to directory hierarchies, though we don’t really put folders inside folders in the paper world.

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.