Can you buy macarons here?

Google sometimes asks me questions, via my phone, about places I've been to so that it can improve its information about businesses when people search for them. These are very revealing about what people search for, Google's insistence on not Britishising its communication, and the way that search data translates into queries.

Let's take the straightforward non-British terminology first. Google knows that these are places in the UK, and that I am a UK user. I've been annoyed before by how my phone's autocorrect only seems to know US places and spellings, and even the grammar is American (certain contractions that are more used in the UK don't come up in the suggested words, for instance). In its common questions are the following:

Is there a restroom here?
Is this place popular with travelers?
Is there a parking lot or structure?

The last one is specially for my friend and colleague Christina, who is very interested in who uses 'structure' to refer to what we (British people, I guess there might be variation but I don't know about it) would call a multi-storey (or underground) car park. A 'parking lot' is just a 'car park'.

This is lazy. It would be the easiest thing in the world for Google to translate 'restroom' to 'toilet'. It's not like it doesn't know. I included the 'travelers' one here too because I just felt that it struck slightly the wrong note. I think the word 'travellers' is too associated with the Traveller community (Gypsy or Romany people) and I would use 'tourists' in this context.

Some of the questions reveal differences in the kinds of places people might want to go. One of the questions asked me,

Does this place offer an all-you-can-drink option?

I think the last time I was somewhere with an all-you-can-drink option, with the exception of package holiday type places, was the Tuxedo Princess, a nightclub on a boat in Newcastle, where you paid a tenner entry and could drink rubbish alcopops all night. It's not really a thing in normal places. Similarly, another common question is this:

Does this place offer musical entertainment as well as dinner?

Apart from being a difficult question to answer because of the presupposition that it does offer dinner (how do you answer this about a place that offers musical entertainment but not dinner?), I don't think that dinner-plus-music is much of a thing. I certainly have never searched for it nor seen it offered as a tempting prospect anywhere except for a hideously old-fashioned restaurant that has since closed down.

Other questions, like the one above, pose problems because of the way they're asked. Take this one:

Does this place only serve vegetarian food? 

I was asked it about a pub that doesn't do food. So technically, it doesn't only serve vegetarian food, and the answer is 'no'. But that implies that it does do non-vegetarian food, as 'only' implies a sub-set of all kinds of food.

Then, take this one:

Can you drink outside on the street here? 

Well, at this pub that doesn't do food, no, you can't drink outside on the street. But it does have a really nice, big beer garden. Are people that ask this question just interested in drinking on the street, or do they more generally want to know if they can drink outdoors? That's another question, so I've been answering this literally, but I'm not sure it's the most useful thing to ask.

My favourite kind of question is the ones about weirdly specific products at random shops. I was asked of Morrison's (a low-end supermarket):

Can you get carpets here? 

And I was asked of Aldi (a cheap European supermarket):

Can you get macarons here? 

I... don't know. I suppose sometimes people ask where they can buy macarons or carpets and that translates, via algorithm, into a question for me.

Quite Black

I've been meaning to write a post about quite for quite a while. This is as a result of Google announcing a phone. In this country it comes in just two (boring) colours, but elsewhere it comes in three: Quite Black, Very Silver, and Really Blue.

At first, I found Quite Black a funny name - I'm not sure why, but the understatement of it seemed amusing. But! Google is American and there is definitely some difference in the meaning of quite in UK vs US usage. The latter two make me think that Google intends quite in its meaning of very or completely. We can use it like that here, although it sounds a bit old-fashioned or posh:

That's quite enough of your nonsense, young lady! I'm quite sure you wouldn't speak like that to your mother! 

So it isn't an understatement; they mean that it's very black, or completely black. Disappointing.

Lynne Murphy has (of course) written about this difference, here and here. She points out that the difference is 'very much' (AmE) vs 'not so much' (BrE), or that it strengthens the force of an adjective in American English but weakens it in British English.

I don't know know quite how I would characterise it in British English. It does weaken the force, and it does mean 'not so much', but so much, as always, depends on the tone. How you say it can make It's quite black mean that it's waaaaay too black (sort of rise-fall intonation - I'm not a phonetician, sorry) or that it's really a very good level of blackness (rising intonation). Of course, this is what intonation does, and to some extent you get this without quite, but it adds this ambiguity. In both cases, it means that there is a high level of blackness. With yet another intonation (strong emphasis on quite), it can also mean that it's relatively black, but not as black as you would hope.

Either way, even though the 'high level of blackness' meanings are very accessible in British English, we interpret the phrase Quite Black as an understatement, a weakening of the force of black, and not as a strengthener.

If I was Google, I'd have released it in Purest Green:

Some cheeky findings

[This relates to my recent post about 'cheeky Nando's'. If you want to take the survey, do so here. We'd be really grateful!]

Do you call a misbehaving child a cheeky monkey? Do you ever go for a cheeky beer after work? Would you take your Significant Other out for a cheeky Valentine's Day dinner at a nice Italian restaurant? Chances are you said no to the last question, not because you wouldn't make such a romantic gesture, but because cheeky doesn't sound right in that sentence. What's more, if you're from the United States, you probably aren't as keen on the word cheeky in the first place. At least that’s what we thought when the cheeky Nando’s meme went viral a few weeks ago. 

The cheeky Nando’s meme  involved British internet users coming up with ever more incomprehensible (to Americans) explanations of what a cheeky Nando's means. But how come Americans don't know what it means? And, actually, what does it mean? We tried to find out by sciencing.

On being impolite to our smartphones

I'm behaving like an old person and getting disgruntled at new developments in technology. Google and Apple both have a voice-controlled thing in their various devices which allows you to speak your search query. You can activate this with a button, but now there's a way to make it notice that you want it by saying a specific thing. In the case of Google you have to say 'OK Google' and in the case of Apple you have to say 'Hey Siri' (Siri is the name of the pretend person in your iphone).

Both of these are very rude, 'Hey Siri' perhaps less so, but still rude nevertheless. I think it's just about OK to say 'hey' to a real person if, say, you were just talking to them and you're walking away and then you remember something and you want to signal to them that you want their attention again. Or you can say 'hey' instead of 'hi', if you know the person quite well. So perhaps you can say 'Hey Siri' as if you're saying 'hi' to it, but I haven't tested it to find out. From the inflection in the advert, it's much more like you're summoning a minion (which you are, but if they're going to make it sound like a real person, then you ought to treat it like a real person).

'OK Google', on the other hand, is just downright rude. It sounds to me as if Google is consistently messing up and you're resigned to that but giving it yet another chance to get it right. Poor Google. Or perhaps you're challenging it, like 'OK Google, you think you're so clever, try this'.

SAT visitors: sorry

I'm getting a lot of extra page views and a lot of them are for the post on SATs, grammar and British grandmas. I presume that means that SAT time is near and people are googling for advice. If that's how you found me, then I apologise - that post was almost certainly no use whatsoever. I hope it mildly entertained you as compensation.

This post will now also come up in searches and it's even less useful, and not even entertaining. Sorry again.

Homo sapien

The name of the human species is Homo sapiens, which means literally 'thinking man' ('man' obviously used in this case with its meaning of 'person of unspecified gender', rather than 'male human').

It's a bit unsatisfactory that part of the name for the human species is a word that means 'human', and that that same word also refers to all other species in the genus, which most people probably wouldn't consider to be 'humans' but rather closely-related species (Neanderthals and so on). Usually, people mean 'modern human' when they use the word 'human'. Still.

So, thinking man. Homo sapiens. Ever heard the song Homosapien by Pete Shelley? Or the band Del tha Funkee Homo Sapien? Both, you'll notice, use the 'sapien' part without the final s. Why? Well, it's a pretty straightforward case of mistakenly analysing a singular ending in s as a plural. 

The same thing happened to give us peas: we had a substance, which we knew as pease. We made pease pudding out of it. One day, someone started thinking that each of the little individual things was an instance of a pea (spelling not being people's strong point back then). It's as if we'd begun to refer to a grain of rice as a rie. That didn't happen because the final [s] sound is pronounced as [s], whereas in pease it's pronounced [z], which is just how the plural <s> is pronounced after a vowel. 

So we've got some people thinking sapiens is the plural of sapien. Can see how that happened: generally, when you hear the term Homo sapiens, someone's talking about the species as a whole, so it makes sense to assume it's plural (referring to all the members of the species). When you want to talk about just one, you use the singular. Obvs. 

So why am I blogging about it? Doesn't seem that fascinating. Although you have learnt about pease, which is definitely worth knowing. Well, I'm blogging about it because although this is a totally predictable, plausible, not-surprising reanalysis and you would think millions of people would get it wrong, no one does. Seriously. Apart from those two musical references, the google hits are sparse. There are not thousands and thousands of people typing blogs and questions and comments and all the other things you'd expect. Why not? How are they all getting it right all of the time? Are they always using the plural and so getting it right without knowing it? Is it just a term that no one who isn't reasonably well-educated uses? What's happening? I feel like I can no longer rely on real-life language to be messy and complicated.

Here is a link to Wikipedia's list of alternative names for the species. 

Is that a fish in your ear?

There's a new book out which I haven't read yet. However, that never stopped anyone posting an Amazon review, so I'll throw my thoughts into the pot. It's called Is that a fish in your ear?: Translation and the meaning of everything, by David Bellos. His son Alex wrote a book called Numberland, which I also haven't read but is always on Waterstone's featured displays.

I've got another book called The meaning of everything (which is excellent, by the way - by Simon Winchester, about the Oxford English Dictionary), so no points for the sub-title. Points for the title though, which references the Babelfish from Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy.

There was an extract of this book featured in the Independent the other day, describing how Google Translate works. Google Translate is a much-mocked tool, and originally rightly so. It could be relied upon to give you absolute garbage, no matter what you put into it. Hours of fun could be had translating text from one language to another and back again, and sniggering at the Chinese whispers result. Even better fun if you put it through more than one language on the way. These days, however, Google translate is disappointingly good. It gets translations pretty much completely accurate most of the time (NB It still should NOT be used to translate if you don't know the output language - you cannot guarantee it isn't utter nonsense).

The section featured in the Independent describes how it works. Here's an extract from the extract:
  

In fact, at bottom, it doesn't deal with meaning at all. Instead of taking a linguistic expression as something that requires decoding, Google Translate (GT) takes it as something that has probably been said before.

The corpus it can scan includes all the paper put out since 1957 by the EU in two dozen languages, everything the UN and its agencies have ever done in writing in six official languages, and huge amounts of other material, from the records of international tribunals to company reports and all the articles and books in bilingual form that have been put up on the web by individuals, libraries, booksellers, authors and academic departments.

It uses vast computing power to scour the internet in the blink of an eye, looking for the expression in some text that exists alongside its paired translation. Drawing on the already established patterns of matches between these millions of paired documents, Google Translate uses statistical methods to pick out the most probable acceptable version of what's been submitted to it.

This is fascinating, and obviously a good way to do it. After all, people do speak and write in fairly formulaic chunks a lot of the time. It's an efficiency device, so that we don't have to create new expressions from scratch all the time. This is why you get annoying cliches like at the end of the day and in any way, shape or form. It's also why you have standard greetings (how's it going) and ways of expressing yourself like I'm so sick of (X).

And as the author points out, human translators basically work this way too: they can often pre-empt the person they're translating and guess what will come next, based on frequently-used expressions. But this way of translating assumes that everything we say or write (or almost everything) has been said before. One of the first things we tell beginning linguistics students is that we can come up with a completely new sentence, that's never been uttered before, and any speaker of English can understand it. The standard practice is then to come up with some ridiculous sentence, like All of my armadillos have been put through too hot a wash and have shrunk.

I suppose that, faced with this sentence, Translate would take its constituent parts and translate them. So, for instance, it might find the string too hot a wash, or even have been put through too hot a wash, paired with a translation, somewhere in its corpus.

In fact, I just tried it and it didn't fare so well. I put it through an English-French-English process and it came back with this translation:

All my tattoos have been too hot to wash one and have narrowed

If you fiddle with the alternate translations you get there eventually, though I'm not sure how idiomatic it is. Ah well. There's jobs for human translators yet.

If you're waiting for the paperback edition of this book, in the meantime I highly recommend Mouse or rat?: Translation as negotiation by Umberto Eco. I have read that one, and it's utterly engrossing.