Adventures in funny old phrasebooks

Some time ago, back in March, I bought this cute little 'universal phrasebook' in the massive second hand bookshop in Rochester. 

As you can see, it covers 25 European languages (not all, and not only), and each section has the same phrase given in each language across a double page spread. So I can tell you that luggage is les bagages, il bagaglio, el equipaje, a bagagem, and bagajul in French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Romanian (Rumanian, in this book, as it's old) just by running a finger across one of the pages. 

Like me, you might have spotted the anomaly that is Esperanto (an invented language, unlike the others), and being a language nerd I immediately turned to the grammatical description of the language that's helpfully provided at the start of each section (for languages associated with a particular country, it also has useful traveller advice such as what side of the road to drive on and how to address letters). 

There, it informed me that the language has suffixation to indicate many meanings, including -ino for feminine, and -ido for juvenile - I inferred this from the examples: 

hundo - a dog

hundino - a bitch

hundido - a puppy

There's ones for big and small and many and so on:

hundeto - a little dog

hundego - a big dog

hundaro - a pack of dogs

And even one for a kennel, hundujo. Being a language nerd, I was of course immediately infuriated: nowhere does it tell me how to say 'a young female dog'. Is it hundinido or hundidino? Does one indicate gender or age closest to the noun? I just did it in English: gender was closer to the noun, which we normally attribute to it being more 'inherent' (this is a bit of a fuzzy notion sometimes), and I didn't say a female young dog. So if Esperanto follows this rule of more inherent characteristics being closer to the noun, it should be hundinido. But then I found this on a forum which seems to say the opposite: 

For instance, if we want to say "a tiny female kitten," we commence with the root kat-, giving the idea only of "cat"; then add -id- (suffix for "offspring of") kat-id- = kitten; then -in- (female suffix) kat-id-in- = kitten, female; then -et- (diminutive suffix) kat-id-in-et- = kitten female tiny; we have now got the root and all of the suffixes, and we might want a noun, so add O, kat-id-in-et-o = a tiny female kitten. If we place -et- after kat-, we commence by speaking of a "tiny cat", for kateto has that meaning, so katetidino would be the "female offspring of a tiny cat." If we reversed the three suffixes, we should get kat-in-et-id-o = offspring of a tiny female cat. This exaggerated example of building up suffixes will show the importance of placing them in their natural order. The student cannot make a mistake if he commences with the root and forms a word of each suffix in succession; for instance, hund-o = a dog, hund-id-o = a puppy, hundid-in-o = a female puppy, hundidin-eg-o = a huge female puppy.

Notice that the English word kitten has the meaning 'offspring' built into it, so there's no way to express this any other way than with that meaning closest to the noun. I think this might be a case of an English-speaking mindset obscuring the alternative options that are logically possible. 

But also, it's interesting that katetidino ('cat-small-offspring-female') doesn't apparently mean 'a small female kitten' (katidineto) and that presumably katinideto ('cat-female-offspring-small') would mean 'small offspring of a female cat', as there is no possessive marker in this word. Anyway, all this talk of 'natural order' is very reminiscent of the way that Latin grammarians would talk of the parts of the sentence being in the 'natural order' - which, of course, is only natural if that's what you're used to. 

My favourite translation of them all, though, was hundaĉo, translated as 'cur'. Clearly this is another suffix, but what does it mean? It doesn't help that I don't really know what 'cur' means. I've only ever heard it as an insult, not as its literal meaning, so the best I could infer was that it's some kind of dog-negative meaning. I looked up the suffix elsewhere and it means 'of low quality', so you find it in the words for 'scrawl' and 'shack', and now I'm very happy to learn that this useful suffix exists and that a 'cur' is a low-quality dog. 

They're really confusing as well

 I found a new thing on the internet to be annoyed by. 

On twitter, you can share links (of course) and you can write something about those links, and when you do, your comment appears first and then a preview of the link. When the link is an article, this is typically an image, the headline, and the sub-heading stuff. 

The process of you sharing this link is that you read it, you copy it into your tweet or click the share button to make it appear there, and then you write your comment about it before you tweet it. Therefore in your mind you've read the headline first and then your comment. But when someone else sees it, they see your comment first. 

This can be amusing, as in this tweet where the image (not of SpongeBob) doesn't match the comment about SpongeBob, which is just meant to give more information once you've got the main point of the headline below: 

The FUCK happened to SpongeBob?? pic.twitter.com/WrIIL7d0dA

— Zack Fox (@ZackFoxFilm) August 16, 2020

It can also lead to weird linguistic effects when the comment includes something that normally has to refer back to something else in the discourse. In this tweet, the comment refers to the discovery mentioned in the headline, and so tells us more about 'the molecule'. But because it comes first, we think 'what molecule?'. 

The molecule is based on a tiny antibody originally found in llamas, camels, and alpacas. https://t.co/YVMoc4d4PB

— VICE (@VICE) August 17, 2020

That's because the comes with a presupposition of existence and individuality; when you say the you're asking your conversation partner to accept that the thing exists, and that you both know which one you're talking about. If you've read the headline first, no problem - you've just been told it exists. If you haven't, as in the twitter format, you don't yet know it exists (you know some molecules exist, but you don't know the specific one under discussion here). 

Let's see another. This time, if you read the headline and blurb first, you can see they're asking for regular donations, and the comment tells you that you don't have to donate regularly if you can't afford it, you can also make a one-off donation. 

You can donate once too. https://t.co/3Kn4ZGTFQU

— Foolproof (Sylvia Suddes) (@bossproofreader) August 5, 2020

But if you read the comment first, you run up against two things: first it's pragmatically strange to read that you can donate once, as if there's a limit on how many donations you can make. Without the contrast with 'regular', we understand the meaning of once as 'once and once only' (that's some more pragmatics there). Then we get too and that needs to come after the first option, otherwise what's it as well as? 

Anyway, just a little quirk of the way the parts of the text are displayed, on this specific platform.