I’ll also take a moment to sing the praises of the GreatNews RSS reader. It really helps in finding the various new articles in all of the feeds you subscribe to (and it’s enormously helpful if you’ve spent a few days without checking any of your feeds, since you can view short summaries all at once, newspaper-style, rather than guessing from each title whether the short summary is worth reading at all).

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.

And for a small bit of actual content: I was reading through an introductory Mandarin Chinese textbook today (basically to review all that I learned in high school before I start summer classes — I’ll have some things to say about the textbook itself at a later date), and found something interesting. It seems that as of January 18, 2005, the (South) Korean “Committee on the New Chinese Name (‘notation’) for Seoul” decided that the name of its capital city should be written 首爾 (Shǒu’ěr), rather than 漢城 (Hànchéng). This is of course old news in the blogging community, and I recommend this entry on Hunjangûi karûch’im for details and links to earlier progress reports on the matter, and a post on languagehat on a related matter involving the same committee.

I don’t want to comment directly on the political or ideological reasons behind the decision or any potential (or actual) controversy. However, I did find this line in the Japanese Wikipedia entry for Seoul intriguing:

一方、中国側では当初、「漢字表記は中国が決めるもの」として「首爾」の使用に消極的であったが

Which means, ‘On the other hand, China was initially negative regarding the use of 首爾, as “Chinese writing is to be determined by China.”‘ No reference is given to the quote, which may not even be a direct quotation. I’ve been trying to find a Japanese paper that actually has a line like this, or similar to it, but so far no luck. I’m not convinced that Chinese officials would actually say that all uses of Chinese characters must be approved by China, and the quote leaves open the possibility that it just refers to China-internal matters (which would not an unreasonable thing to say, I think).

Another point of interest: the Korean committee did not decide to do what Japan has been doing for a long time: invent kun-yomi for Chinese characters. As far as I know, the only way Chinese characters are/were used in Korean is to write actual Chinese loan words from. In contrast, Japanese makes use of characters for their meanings alone. Thus in Japanese a verb like ‘read’ is written 読む /yomu/, where the character is pronounced /yo/, with no connection to its Chinese-derived reading, /doku/. In Korean the verb for ‘read,’ /ilk-/, is always written with hangul, rather than using 読. That character does exist in borrowed words, though, and it is pronounced /du/. For more details see Hanja on everyone’s favorite site.

But getting back to the committee: it would have been interesting if they decided to take the meaning of “Seoul,” which is ‘capital city,’ and just chose characters that mean that, regardless of their Chinese pronunciations. I’m not sure what would happen if they asked China to start writing 首都 ‘capital city’ for Seoul. It could get confusing. On the other hand, as a (non-native, fluent) speaker of Chinese pointed out to me, if they wanted to go that route they could have chosen a nonexistent compound like 首城 or 首市, both of which clearly mean ‘capital city’ but don’t actually exist as words, AFAIK. It could have been a renaissance of hanja in Korea! Okay, probably not.

I’ll also use this opportunity to plug my sister’s new website, Eyeburst, showcasing her art and writing, which I highly recommend.

Until next time, consider why preposition-deletion should be licenced in the same locations as NPIs are:

Do you have the faintest / any idea who that guy was? I have no idea who that guy was. *I’ve got an idea who that guy was. I’ve got an idea of who that guy was. ?I’ve got some idea who that guy was.

(Before anyone tries to give me counterexamples: don’t worry, I’ve already found about 30 of them in the BNC. This, however, dwarfs the 1000 or so that are under negation or in otherwise nonveridical contexts (or however you like to talk about NPI licensing.))

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)

One of the POV characters, Arya, is 10 years old. In one scene she is speaking with a sort of holy man, who is telling her a story about a miner revolt. He is describing the mine conditions, and the following exchange takes place

“Certain shafts were cut so low that the slaves could not stand upright, but had to crawl or bend. And there were wyrms in that red darkness too.” “Earthworms?” she asked, frowning. “Firewyrms. Some say they are akin to dragons, for wyrms breathe fire too.”

Assuming that worm and wyrm are pronounced the same in this fantasy world, what has happened here is that the character Arya is unsure exactly what the significance of “worms” might be in the story, and so asks for clarification, and also may have done some guessing that some other class of worm (unknown to her) is involved, and so specifies the “earth” variety in her question. The holy man corrects her with “firewyrms.”

What’s interesting is that Arya’s representation of the spelling of firewyrm (she is literate) probably has an “o,” not a “y.” The “y” is there because the holy man knows that these are not ordinary worms, but some large worm-like creature that breathes fire. The reader (and possibly Martin) may assume that the holy man is literate, and this is likely. Unfortunately, this sort of dialogue doesn’t occur with the illiterate POV characters, so it’s hard to know what Martin would have done.

But in any case, what this does is highlight an imperfection (if you will) of single-POV prose–the character we see the world from doesn’t know enough to express everything that the author wants to express. Now, in the non-dialogue parts of prose, this normally isn’t that big of a problem. Because there is no actual speech, the author is mostly free to write as he pleases, using words or constructions in ways that the POV character might not use themselves (though keeping away from anachronisms like neon). However, when the POV character speaks the author is constrained to create dialogue that is realistic for that person. One might also think that when non-POV characters speak, the author is similarly constrained to portray that dialogue is the POV character would hear it. In most cases this is observed (ignoring such conveniences as assuming that people in conversation pay attention throughout the interlocutor’s turn, hearing everything perfectly), but in a case like this some orthography sneaks in.

This is less obvious than the sorts of orthographic oddness seen in the Harry Potter books (observed by Eric Bakovic here), it brings up some interesting questions regarding POV and dialogue. For instance: how much can an author sneak in information (related to the story or related to the author) using spelling, and what is the most “damage” an author can do by subtly altering the words of a speaker? And are illiterate characters/people more susceptible to this sort of intrusion?

• telling someone you know knows the information
• telling someone you know doesn’t know
• telling someone who you aren’t sure if they know

The last two are probably revealing a secret. The first might get you a reprimand (Don’t just go around babbling that to anyone! What if I hadn’t known…, for instance), or it might just be a normal activity. Depends on the secretive group.

Now, what would it mean to accidentally reveal the secret? (hint: see post title) Well, it probably means that you told the secret to someone who didn’t know the information carelessly, by a slip of the tongue, as it were. You may or may not have known that the person knew the information. And, importantly for this discussion, as soon as you realize that you uttered that information, you realize your error.

Ah, but there’s a whole other set of possibilities if we consider the possibility that you don’t realize that some piece of information is a secret. First possibility: your friend tells you some information intended to be a secret, but you figure it’s already common knowledge. Say your friend told you that she was going to join the Navy, and so you figure that this information is widely known, if not among her other friends than at least among her immediate family. But you’re in luck, because your friend hasn’t told anyone else yet (what a good friend you must be, then). So, you bring it up in conversation with her parents (So, now that your daughter is leaving college to join the Navy…), and only then, when the parents are {raging mad / unconscious on the floor / whatever}, do you realize your mistake. Your utterance of the secret was made perfectly intentionally, with specific goals in mind, though importantly you assumed it was common knowledge when you uttered it. The question is: did you do anything accidentally?

Second possibility: your friend Joan told you in confidence that she actually doesn’t like her boyfriend’s red cabbage recipes. You assume that it’s probably not common knowledge among all of your mutual acquaintances, and figure that you can go around telling anyone (like, say, the boyfriend’s buddies). So you do: Hey, Travis, it turns out that Joan actually doesn’t like Mitch’s red cabbage recipes. Wouldn’t believe it to watch her wolf that stuff down, but hey… (for instance). This time, your addressee’s reaction won’t be something that will make you realize you’ve just revealed a secret. It is only later, when the girlfriend is raging mad at you for telling her boyfriend’s buddies her deep, dark secret that you realize you’ve screwed up. But did you accidentally reveal a very important secret?

And more importantly, how do you apologize for making these absolutely horrible mistakes? (and no, she will never tell you anything ever ever again)

First case:

1. Joan, before your parents call, I should let you know… I may have accidentally mentioned your secret about joining the Navy. Sorry!
2. Joan, before your parents call, I should let you know… I may have accidentally mentioned that you’re dropping out to join the Navy. Sorry!

Second case, subcase 1: [just after Joan tells you that the cabbage thing was a secret]

1. Oh [expletive]! You know…I think I accidentally told {that / that secret / your secret (about the red cabbage)} to Travis. Sorry!
2. Oh [expletive]! You know…I think I accidentally told Travis that you don’t like your boyfriend’s red cabbage recipes. Sorry!

Second case, subcase 2: [a day after Joan tells you not to mention the cabbage thing...you didn't tell her about your revealing it right afterwards because you forgot about it, or because you were nervous about letting her know right then]

1. Uh…Joan? You know…I think I accidentally told Travis {that / that secret / your secret (about the red cabbage)}. Sorry!
2. Uh…Joan? You know…I think I accidentally told Travis that you don’t like your boyfriend’s red cabbage recipes. Sorry!

And now the fun part: in each of the above cases, which utterances are felicitous? Let’s call the two versions that-clause apologies and secret apologies. It’s all very wishy-washy for me, but I’d say that in Case 1, the secret apology is out, though mostly because the speaker just doesn’t have definitive proof that the information was a secret, just indirect (though quite strong) evidence that it was, namely the parents’ verbal and nonverbal reactions to finding out the news. However, if you were to use the secret apology, Joan might well think it normal, since it was always a secret to her. For Case 2:1, again I’d have to say that although both seem fine, the that-clause might be preferred, though I’m not sure why. I can think of two possible reasons: use of the word secret in the immediately preceding discourse, extremely recent revelation of the secrecy of the information (territory effects with recently-acquired information). Eh, both are fine, I guess. Finally, for Case 2:2, both versions seem equally fine. The two reasons I outlined above wouldn’t apply, by the way.

Maybe others have different judgements, but this sort of surprised me. Since the actual informing act was not accidental, it would seem that the message-encoding that-clauses would be dispreferred, but other factors seem to outweigh that consideration.

Only thing is, if each of these cases can be described with “someone accidentally revealed a secret” (maybe not all of them can), where does all the meaning come from, exactly? Which of these words is polysemous, and what combinations of senses give you the right meaning. And does it have to do with reveal, which isn’t even in any of the utterances I made up? (yeah, sure, it could have been) The answer’s probably much simpler than I’m making it out to be.

(Oh, and why the Meta tag? Eh, I just added the RDF and Atom feed links to various parts of the page, in case anyone wants them)