I like the part where it goes

There's a Simpsons episode where Marge is 'admiring' a sculpture made by Groundskeeper Willie out of kids' braces. It's hideous, obviously, and she is trying to be nice, so she says "I like this part in here, the way it, um, it goes".

She's struggling to find a word, and none seems right. She can't find anything positive to say. So she reaches for a completely neutral word, one that doesn't mean anything, one that has basically no meaning at all. We see this again when we use go in phrases like How's it going, It goes well with that outfit, It's all going well, and so on. None of these has any sense of go in its full lexical sense, of movement away, as in I'm going to Italy on Monday. It's almost being used as a 'light' verb. These are verbs that are bleached of their meaning and just have a linking function, just making the sentence hold together. Chinese uses hit to make a noun work as a verb - where in English you can say I telephoned him, in Chinese you have to say I hit the telephone to him, or effectively I used the telephone to him. In some languages throw is used a lot - in Georgian you say that you throw a gun at someone rather than shooting them, and in Spanish I think (I overheard this so may be wrong) you'd more likely say that you throw juice at someone rather than squirt juice at them.

Special objects

Sorry for the proliferation of sign-related posts this week, but I keep seeing them. There's this sign in the lavs in the building where I work:

As you can see, it's an instruction to ladies to throw sanitary products in the special sanitary bins, not down the loo (if they really want us to do that they should provide more than one bin and put them inside the cubicles instead of outside). It tells us that in English, Chinese and Arabic, because it's in the school of modern languages and there are lots of Chinese and Arabic students about.

It also tells us the same again in English, with different wording. It's considerably more polite and almost affectionate in the wording ('please dear ladies') than the first English text, and it also differs in using the euphemism 'special objects'. It has one error in it, using singular 'it' to refer back to the plural 'special objects', although this doesn't necessarily mean it was written by a non-native speaker. Otherwise, there is nothing wrong with the English versions that couldn't be fixed with a couple of punctuation marks.

But WHY are there two English versions? My guess is that the second is a translation of the Chinese. I really don't know why this would be the case, but that's how it reads to me. I think the English was written first, then translated into Chinese (and Arabic) and then, for some reason, translated back to English. I'd love someone who reads Chinese to tell me if that's true.

Alternatively, the second English text might have been written first by a Chinese speaker, and then some native English speaker told them it was a bit polite for a sign and rewrote it in a more 'English' way, and somehow both ended up being used.

(By the way, I've assumed Chinese simply because there are a lot more Chinese students in this school than Arabic, so it's just a probability. The above could equally apply to Arabic instead.)

Hong Kong dollar

Here in the Northeast of England (and in some other British dialects), it's common to hear phrases like ten year or twenty pound, with nouns quantified by a numeral lacking the plural morpheme you'd find in Standard English. It's one of the features of the Geordie dialect I quite like, though I don't do it myself. (Although you'll notice that the colloquial terms quid, nicker and so on tend to be singular - you don't ask someone to lend you twenty quids or twenty nickers. In fact, you'd get some decidedly funny looks if you did ask for that, and possibly a bumper pack of underwear.)

Andrew Graham Dixon presented a Culture Show special called Cash in China's Attic on Friday night, about the booming antiques market in China. He kept on telling us the price of various things, and sometimes he said It's thirty thousand Hong Kong dollars, but sometimes he said It's thirty thousand Hong Kong dollar. He seemed to alternate between using the plural and singular forms. He's not a Geordie, or a speaker of any dialect that this is a feature of, as far as I know. And it's not the case that dollar is always used in the singular in this currency, and he was experiencing L1 influence from English: a Chinese man used the plural form. 

What I think was going on is that he had an interesting case of assimilation to the dialect of many of the people he would have met in Hong Kong. Chinese (Cantonese or any of its other varieties) doesn't have much in the way of inflection, and it doesn't have plural morphology. This means that, although people from Hong Kong mostly seem to speak excellent English, they sometimes make mistakes like not using plural forms. So a lot of antiques dealers and shopkeepers probably told Andrew Graham Dixon the price of things by saying It's one thousand dollar. Either he's just got used to it and started saying it the way everyone else does, or he's assumed that that's the way it's meant to be said and done it consciously. I don't know which, but it sounded decidedly odd. 

Chinese 'yellow, gambling, poison' on Language Log

What on earth is the meaning of this sign?

I had no idea, so I asked just that question of Victor Mair over at Language Log, and he obliged by answering it speedily and fully.

Chinese show movement of travel right to left, and email is becoming unmarked

Just two things that I've noticed today, with no real comment added.

First, my attention has just been drawn by Valdemar over at The Door in the Wall to a blog called Ministry of Tofu. It covers all sorts of Chinese issues, and is written in an absolutely adorable style with ever-so-slightly misused metaphors and so on. For instance, in a story about a hitch-hiking student, a driver "let him into the truck with a grain of salt". Lovely.

Anyway, what struck me was this image of the student's journey. Simple enough graphic, but as the text explains, he started on the right and ended on the left. I find that to be the wrong way round, and presume that the difference is due to Chinese writing going the other way from English.


Secondly, I was looking for a contact address (postal) for a company. These things are hard to find on the company's website, so I Googled it. In a forum someone else was asking the same thing, for "an address" for the company, and they were given the postal address. They replied with thanks but said that they would prefer an email. So they meant email address when they said simply address. Normally I've found that to be the case only when the context of online communication is clear, not generally. So this is an interesting new development in what the unmarked sense of the word is. For me, it's still postal (I would use email if I wanted an email address) but for this person, email address has become the unmarked sense of address. The times they are a-changin', as Dylan is probably saying to himself as he reads this.