Asking questions to share knowledge on twitter

Anyway, back to linguistics after all the disquisitions on the state of HE. Susie Dent posted a nice fun fact about the word two on twitter.

Wordy fact of the day for kids: the number ‘two’ may have a silent ‘w’, but it’s part of the same ancient family that gave us ‘twin’, ‘twice’, ‘between’, ‘tweezers’, ‘twenty’, and ‘twelve’: all of them have something to do with that number 2. #homeschooling

— Susie Dent (@susie_dent) April 20, 2020

The first reply was best: it said simply 'Twix'. But the other replies were really interesting to someone who has recent experience of doing linguistics in public and aspirations to do more of it.

There are lots that are comments, reactions, unrelated replies, of course. The ones I'm interested in fall into two groups: questions, and related facts. Both of them fulfil the same locutionary role: to show that the tweeter has some knowledge of language, to convey enthusiasm, and something else slightly undefinable about interacting with celebrities that you don't know personally on twitter.

The related facts, first. Let's give these gentlemen the benefit of the doubt and assume that they were not mansplaining Susie (i.e. assuming that they, as non-experts in this field, can educate her about her literal field of expertise). So they're doing something else – the fact is to add to the original one, give more detail, add more context, and it's for the benefit of other readers of the original tweet. This is not how 'replying' works in normal conversations, but it's how it often works on twitter.

German has the same root but the "w" is still pronounced in Zwei (Two) and we also get Zwilling (Twin), zweimal (Twice), zwischen (between), zwanzig (twenty) and zwölf (twelve) although tweezers are usually "Pinzetten" which shares a root with pincers.

— Rod Maxwell (@RodericMaxwell) April 20, 2020

And in Dutch ‘twee’ with the W pronounced and the ‘ee’ pronounced as ‘ay’. All the same root. Love how the histories of different languages are intertwined.

— Xander Mol (@Xander_Mol) April 20, 2020

My wife who speaks Scots pronounces it tway.

— James Beaton (@jjb3621) April 20, 2020

Then there's the questions. Some of them are simply information seeking – the fact prompted the asker to seek more information about something that occurred to them. But many of them also have a secondary purpose of showing off a bit, being a bit clever, making an observation and wanting to share it but also doing that in a deferential, face-saving way, to indicate that they are aware that Susie Dent is an expert and already knows this (a question implies that the asker believes the answerer knows the answer).

Does that mean the 'tw' would have had a twə sound originally, rather than pronounced to? So literally two (twoo).

— Zoe Defoe (@ZoeDefoe1) April 20, 2020

(This one is also cute and interesting because they don't mean that the /tw/ would be pronounced /twə/ in the word two, but to say the sound /tw/ on its own you would say /twə/, with an unstressed vowel at the end to make it pronounceable, and I like this a lot.)

This one is a perfect example of the 'question as knowledge-sharing' tactic (though I think in this case the answer is no):

Is the 'in' from 'twin' related to the 'en' plural ending, like in children or brethren or eyen a few hundred years ago?

— John Moynes (@JohnMoynes) April 20, 2020

Upstarting

We were in Brussels just before Christmas for a little holiday, and we visited a couple of lambic breweries while we were there. One of the brewers at Verzet was great and took the time to show us all round it and tell us loads about the process and their beers.

Some of the barrels at the Verzet brewery
(named after their music heroes)

He was talking about the background of the guys who work there, and he said at one point that one of them helped upstarting a brewery, meaning 'helped to start up' a brewery.

In Flemish, there are what's called 'separable verbs'. These correspond to English verbs that have a preposition-like particle as part of it, so in this case start up. The Dutch version is opstarten. You can see that the 'up' part is a prefix, so it's literally 'upstart'. Flemish does have the option of separating that prefix from the main bit of the verb, more like the English equivalent, but it doesn't always separate (based on some rules of what kind of sentence it is). You can see that he basically just anglicised the word (it's called a 'calque' when this happens).

An interesting aside: I say Dutch in the paragraph above because that's what Google Translate has, and I think that the Dutch of Flanders is not different in this respect. Where there is a difference, according to this site,* is exactly when you separate the verb. The verb remains joined together when it's the only verb in the clause, it seems. When there's another verb, as in our sentence (He helped to start up a brewery), it's more likely to be separated in the Netherlands (he helped to start a brewery up) and more likely to remain intact in Flanders (he helped to upstart a brewery).

*If you, like me, like reading about grammar, this seems to be a really comprehensive grammar of Dutch that you can download as a PDF. 

Ne translatez pas les languages

A friend posted this photo on facebook the other day:



A number of highly intelligent people then missed the point of the joke and began to comment on how bad the translations are. I think they're pretty good imitations of the languages in question, with one big error: the 'German' looks (unmistakably) more like Dutch in the second half of the sentence.

These are not intended to be translations, of course, or rather they're deliberately not accurate. They're just meant to amuse the English-speaking audience by including funny words to compound the humour of the warning in English ('avoid pouring on crotch area'). After all, we love nothing more than when a foreign language does something in a funny way (cf. Welsh popty-ping for 'microwave' or German Handy for 'mobile phone') so it's nice to imagine that these might be for real.

Let's begin with the French. The grammar is fine, as far as I know: you'd make an imperative in French with the negative and the 2nd person plural inflection, just as it's done there. The phrase dans l'area seems OK to me, too. The vocabulary used just isn't French, that's all. The verb for 'pour' should, I think (Google Translate helped) be verser so you'd have ne versez pas. I don't know if you'd also need a pronoun in there (don't pour it) or not. And, of course, no French person ever says ooh-la-la, but it's stereotypically French and referring to ones' crotch that way goes nicely with the French reputation for romance.

Next, the 'German'. This one caused a bit more controversy in the comment thread, because it very obviously isn't German. My German is less good than my French, but I'm pretty certain the word order here is wrong as well as the vocabulary and morphology. I think you would say literally 'drop you not...' rather than 'not drop...', which is what we appear to have here: nein is German for 'no'. Then the verb is obviously just English again, with droppen instead of pourez. I think they've simply selected words that have a combination of letters that resemble the language in question (so French has a word pour, for instance, but it doesn't look very Germanic).

Next, though, I think we've got a nice case of representing an accent in words that look like (or indeed exist in) the language. So ze haut kaffe does not mean 'the hot coffee' in German (haut apparently means 'skin', for instance, and the German for 'coffee' is in fact kaffee, which they could have used instead), but it looks German-ish and sounds like someone saying the hot coffee in (some kind of representation of) a German accent. It reminds me of this a bit. Notice also that the 'German' has an overt object with article, while the French has nothing at all ('don't drop _ on the crotch area' vs 'don't drop the hot coffee on the crotch area').

Then it most definitely switches to Dutch-looking words, if we hadn't already. Dutch word order is a little bit more familiar to English speakers as well, I think, although I know even less Dutch than I do German. Anyway, here we've got a dead giveaway for Dutch: that word oont. It just has a Dutch-like feel to it, though I don't know why (double 'o'? final 't'?). And then finally the lovely phrase, ze knakkers. Again, this is definitely Germanic and in fact Google Translate does give 'knackers' as the translation of this as a German word (it gives 'frankfurter cherry' if you tell it knakkers is Dutch!).

Good work, coffee-cup-humour-producing-person!

Gezellig

The Morris group that I dance with did some workshops for some Dutch children this week. One of the girls said that the evening was gezellig - and she asked me did we have this word? Well, we don't, of course. I tried to kind of mutate it into English and got this far:

1. -ig is an adjective suffix, meaning -y or equivalent. 
2. ge- is a kind of verbal past tense thing, I believe, so this is an adjective formed from a verb

But then I got stuck (it also turns out I was wrong about the ge- bit anyway).

Just from the way it sounded, I suggested 'cosy', even though it didn't seem right in context. I looked it up when I got home and 'cosy' is one of the things it can mean, but the internet also tells me that this is an 'untranslatable' word.

Untranslatable words, it seems to me, come in two or three flavours. There's one kind where a language happens to have a word for a very specific concept. This is not untranslatable; it's just that language X encodes something in one single word that language Y does with a phrase. See, for example, German schadenfreude or Japanese origami (I have no idea how much Germans or Japanese people actually use these words). In this case, as with many others, the way we get round not having a word for this concept is to just borrow it. We also do this with foreign things like food (risotto, wasabi, pak choi, tea...).

There's also words where the translation isn't exact, although there's a bunch of words with similar meanings. See the Language Log entry on 'accountability', for instance. Prepositions are also a problem - they never seem to translate quite right from one language to another, partly because they don't have 'meaning', as such, but rather a grammatical function. These must be annoying for translators and make learning languages a little bit harder/more interesting, but we can learn what the nuances are.

Then there's the kind that seem somehow exotic because they refer to some concept that we hadn't thought about before. These have a great appeal on the internet. I suspect this is because they tend to refer to highly emotional states of mind. Nostalgia would be a good example of this in English, and saudade in Portuguese. They are often claimed to say something about the temperament of the nation that uses that word, so Portuguese or Brazilians are typically melancholic or nostalgic. We know the fallacy of attributing a characteristic to a whole nation, but nevertheless we like to do it because it helps us to label people.

Gezellig is said on Wikipedia to 'encompass the heart of Dutch culture', so it's a good example of one of these 'untranslatable words'. Wiktionary says it means 'companionable, having company with a pleasant, friendly atmosphere, cosy atmosphere or an upbeat feeling about the surroundings'.

It also says it comes from gezel, which means 'companion'. So much for my etymological analysis.

The the style style

Ages ago, I wrote about centre-embedding. I saw a different, much less common, example of it when I went to the excellent Mondria(a)n exhibition currently on at Turner Contemporary in Margate. The exhibition shows a thematically/chronologically-organised selection of his works, and in his later period, he was an important part of the movement known as 'de stijl'. In describing how this group worked, a display board used the phrase the 'de stijl' style. De stijl is of course Dutch for 'the style', meaning that the translation of this is the the style style!

One of Mondriaan's red and blue paintings

This kind of centre-embedding could only happen in a very particular context like this, where one phrase is in another language, because double articles, even when there's a legitimate reason for them, are really really ungood in English grammar. For example, I always have trouble with the Philip Pullman series The 'His Dark Materials' trilogy because the his is not a well-formed English string. The de stijl example even sounded wrong to me - that's why I remembered it.

Footnote: I bracketed the a in Mondria(a)n's name because it was originally Mondriaan, but sometime in around 1905-7 he dropped an a, perhaps to sound more French. One website suggests it was to sound more Armenian, which doesn't seem very likely to me. However, this 'names end in -ian' characteristic of Armenian is something that's really part of public awareness of Armenia - perhaps the only thing. It might be to do with Kardashians, though two other Armenians spring readily to mind: Cher was born Cherilyn Sarkisian, and Principal Skinner is of course really Armin Tamzarian. An acquaintance of mine actually told me, when we were discussing the exhibition, that Mondrian's name was Armenian, on account of ending in -ian.

Code-switching contrastive emphasis

I'm watching Salamander. It's a kind of political thriller, lots of running about, photocopying and suchlike. It's also Belgian, and the dialogue is mostly in Flemish. It's a bit complicated to explain the situation, because 'Flemish' is Dutch as spoken in Flanders, but then some varieties (eg West Flemish) can be considered separate languages, and Flemish is a cultural label as well, and... well. Anyway. They're speaking Flemish for most of the time. Every now and then, though, they switch into French, either for a single word, a few words, or some of the characters seem to use French as their preferred language so you get a whole conversation in it. You also sometimes get 'parallel talk', where one person in a dialogue uses Flemish and another uses French.

One such scene took place, in which a dialogue took place between about five people, one of whom was using French. He said 'We have to know who our enemy is', and a Flemish speaker replied 'enemIES', stressing the fact that there are more than one single enemy. This is contrastive stress, and is a nifty way of indicating that you're contrasting something you've said with something the other person either said or implied. The contrast can be lexical/semantic: I want BEANS (not cheese), or it can be grammatical, as you can see here, where singular is contrasted with plural. Normally you need to contrast two things that are similar in some way, like two nouns/foodstuffs/potato fillings.

What's special about this is that the two languages do plural in different ways. French adds an -s in the written language, going from ennemi to ennemis. But in fact, in speech, you won't usually hear that -s, and the only thing to tell you the difference is the 'determiner', an article, demonstrative, etc. In this case it was 'our', which in French is notre for singular and nos for plural. I didn't catch the exact word in Flemish but in Dutch it's vijand for 'enemy' and the plural is marked with an -en: vijanden. The possessive determiner stays the same, and in any case the Flemish speaker didn't repeat 'our'. So we had this:

A: (We have to know who is) notre ennemi. 

B: vijandEN.

The Flemish speaker contrasted a possessive determiner with a totally different morphosyntactic category, a plural inflection, because he was contrasting the feature [number], which is encoded on the determiner in French and the noun suffix in Flemish.

Footballers' Foreign Accent Syndrome?

You might have seen that Joey Barton has been filmed speaking English in what sounds very much like a French accent (he's playing for a French team at the moment). It's hilarious, obvs, and gives us all another chance to snigger at Steve McLaren, who spoke English with a Dutch accent when he went to the Netherlands.

We can ask why they might do this. It's likely to be at least partly because they're surrounded by other people speaking English with a French or Dutch accent. This is especially true for McLaren, living in a country where everyone speaks English, but also for Barton, because in the football world there are so many players from all over the world I imagine English is something of a lingua franca in the dressing room. They're bound to be a little bit affected by this and pick up something of the accent.

Another factor is probably that they both have fairly strong regional accents (Merseyside for Barton, and something that sounds like Yorkshire for McLaren), and they will have made an effort to speak more slowly and clearly to non-native speakers. They are therefore not speaking in a completely natural way, and might pick up different mannerisms accordingly.

You know what else we might ask? Are they really speaking in French/Dutch accents at all, that's what. There's a condition called 'foreign accent syndrome', usually a result of brain damage, which causes a person to speak in what sounds like a foreign accent. Family members may be convinced that the sufferer has a New York, Eastern European or Chinese accent, and this can cause problems: one woman in Norway had great difficulties when she began speaking in a German accent in the 1940s. However, it's not actually a specific foreign accent, but simply difficulty in speaking. The accent is never one that listeners are very familiar with, and this is crucial. The brain damage can cause particular problems with speech, which the listener hears as some or other accent. Wikipedia suggests that an American who normally has a rhotic accent (pronounces the 'r' sounds in car park) might have difficulty pronouncing 'r' and therefore omit it. This might sound like a Boston accent to a listener because non-rhoticity is a very salient feature of a stereotypical Boston accent. So is there some other feature of their speech that we're hearing as a foreign accent?

I've had a listen to both, and what follows is entirely unscientific speculation and waffle. You can very definitely hear their original accents in both cases. What is noticeable to me is that they both use very few contractions, saying we are instead of we're, for instance. They also speak slowly, perhaps as a result of the afore-mentioned concession to non-native speakers or possibly even interpreters, in the case of Barton's press conference. I think that some of the filler sounds Barton uses do seem a bit French, but that's because the vowel sounds used in er and similar noises are different from the standard southern English er, and it might well be the same as is used in Merseyside er. Likewise for some of the vowels in his words. His intonation and prosody sound quite Frenchified too: his fairly constant stress placement, for instance, differentiates French from English quite markedly. But it could also be a result of slower speech than he's used to. The frequent final rising intonation he uses is a feature of a Merseyside accent but might well sound French if one was listening in the expectation of hearing one.

I'm just not convinced there's much in it. I think that a combination of some minor changes in their accent and a bit of pareidolia on the listeners' part has made this into something more than it is. One case of foreign accent syndrome involved a woman who went from Geordie to Jamaican, French Canadian, Italian or Slovak. Those are not similar to each other, and there is known (among Geordies, at least) to be some similarity between Geordie and Jamaican. As further evidence, this video is of McLaren supposedly speaking with a Dutch accent, and many of the commenters hear only unremarkable 'northern English'. You make your own mind up.

Wikipedia has this to say on Barton's case, though probably not for much longer:

Barton is now currently under examination by medical professionals and although they are uncertain, the cause of Barton's condition is believed to have been caused when he used both Heads and Shoulders and Aussie Hair Shine Shampoo at the same time. However, this is only an early prognosis.

Prepositions in Prague

I've been in Prague, because my lovely parents took me (and my sister) there for my 30th birthday. It was beautiful and interesting and relaxing (though also tiring because there are a lot of steps and hills). 

When I go to other countries where they speak not-English I generally try to learn a few phrases so as not to be a total rudeperson. This goes down well in France, where they either don't speak English that well or just generally prefer it if you speak French (can't blame them) and luckily my French is passable enough that that works OK. In other countries they seem to have decided it's just easier if we all speak English and it's quite hard to get them to talk not-English to you. 

In Amsterdam, they can spot an English person at twenty paces and get in their English greeting before you even have a chance to say 'hallo' (which is basically English anyway, because a lot of Dutch is English with a funny accent). In Prague they aren't quite as sure, because you might be Italian or Spanish or French or German instead, so they're sometimes a bit more tentative with the English opener, so you do have a chance to go in with the Czech (and from your poor pronunciation they obviously realise that you're English). 

There's a different type of problem though. In Amsterdam, I quite happily parallel-talked, doing my best Dutch beer-ordering and thanking, and they replied in English so that I could actually understand. This worked quite well. But in Prague, it didn't go so well. If I tried to thank them in Czech, they didn't always seem to understand. This is partly because three phrasebooks gave me three different ways of saying it, so I wasn't quite as sure of myself. I'd specifically learnt some phrases, and discovered that my ten weeks of basic Russian would be quite handy (I successfully rustled up the words for 'four tickets'). 

But I think the biggest problem is that they're making it up. Those three ways of saying thank you, for instance. And look at these signs. They all show what appear to be the words 'from' and 'to' (the first one may not, but the second two definitely do), and there are THREE different ones. The second two, especially, are a dead giveaway that they're making it up, because they're saying the exact same thing. There's no way a difference in the length of time you're allowed to park changes what preposition you use with the times you're allowed to park between. 

Reminds me of Welsh, which is definitely doing a similar thing. On one weekend visit not long ago I counted at least three different way of writing 'car park' on signs in just Pembroke Dock.

[08/08/12 Update! 366daysinthelife has informed me that Po - Pa and Po - Ne mean Mon-Fri and Mon-Sun. Of course! It's so obvious once you know. Come back Czech, all is forgiven.]