The gender of Brexit

A friend of mine recently drew my attention to this article about the gender of the word Brexit in various European languages. It notes that the word is masculine in French and German, but feminine in Italian. The Independent's version of the story points out that it's also masculine in Polish, Flemish, Catalan and Welsh.

Italian has a justification for making it feminine, in that the word it's based on, exit, is feminine when translated into Italian (uscita). This is a terrible justification, in my view, as it isn't the word uscita - it's the borrowed word exit, and there's no reason on earth why they should have the same gender. As someone in the comments noted, you can have two words for the same thing with different genders, and gives the example of das Auto (neuter) and der Wagen (masculine), both meaning 'car' in German. It's word that have genders, and exit is a different word from uscita. However, it's the Accademia della Crusca, Italy's language body, that has decreed this and they have fixed principles on the matter, so they must stick to them.

If a new word is similar to an existing one, then it'll tend to behave like that one. An invented verb like gling might have an irregular past tense glang, on analogy with sing. We might be tempted to pluralise POTUS (President of the United States) to POTI on analogy with other words ending in -us, like cactus.

If there isn't an easy parallel to draw, then I'd expect it to be masculine, as it is in the other languages mentioned. In Spanish and Italian, for instance, nouns end in -o or -a. This doesn't, so we have to just pick a gender. As the article says, most new words get masculine gender. This isn't, however, because 'Spain, being a Latin country, opts for male', as the Guardian lazily jokes. It's because whenever you have sets of things in grammar, there is a marked and an unmarked option. Consider number: we add something (usually -s in English) to show that a noun is plural, and without that, we assume it's singular. Singular is 'unmarked', plural is 'marked'. Consider positive and negative sentences: we have a word to show that the sentence is negative, but nothing to show that it's positive. Negative is 'unmarked', positive is 'unmarked'. The unmarked option is the default option.

When it comes to gender, masculine tends to be the unmarked option. If you have a group of friends in Spanish, then if they're all male, they're amigos. If they're all female, they're amigas. If they're mixed, then they're amigos (masculine). Now, whether this reflects a deeply sexist mindset, whether it has contributed over many generations to sexist thinking, or whether it's totally unrelated, probably remains an unsolved question. But it does mean that new words get masculine gender in most languages.

Welsh appears to be taking a very pragmatic approach to the matter: it's masculine because if it was feminine, it would have to have 'consonant mutation', which is when certain nouns change the sound they begin with under certain conditions. It's just easier to make it masculine.

Poochi!

I re-watched the Minions film last night, and wondered about their language. The Minions are these chaps and their buddies (there are no female Minions, as far as I can tell):

They speak in a language that isn't quite understandable but you get the gist - like Pingu or the Clangers. However, unlike Pingu or the Clangers, there are very definitely words in the Minions' speech, and some of them are definitely recognisable. Some are English but most are Spanish or Italian, or a mix of them all. There's also a little bit of romance language grammar in there too: at one point, one of the Minions says me le due, meaning 'I will do it', and you can see the object clitic le (a clitic is basically a type of pronoun that goes before the verb in romance languages, like the m' in je m'appelle Laura).

When I asked about the Minion language on Twitter, @terminologia directed me to this Arika Okrent article which goes into much more detail, including noting the many aspects of 'baby talk' - in that me le due sentence, for instance, there is the object form me - just like an English toddler might say me do it. The article also points out that some of the language is Indonesian - I hadn't noticed it, but there's a very clear terima kasih 'thank you' at one point. (Actually, I thought terima kasih was Malay, and so it is, but it was borrowed into Indonesian and that's the language the director is familiar with.)

Here's the Minions Dictionary (though I don't think it's quite complete).

Euros and the emergency plural

I'm learning German - I don't think I said. It's quite fun, although you never learn much at an evening class because there are lots of people of mixed ability and you can't ask the teacher important linguistic questions because it's not fair to expect non-linguists to know the answer to such things.

Anyway today, we learnt about currencies and big numbers, among other things. Germany obviously uses the euro as its currency, which is Euro in German. I checked, and it's not pluralised. Languages vary on what they do with the plural, so in Spanish you have 1 euro and 10 euros, but in Italian you have 1 euro and 10 euro, not 10 euri (which just looks weird). I think the most interesting thing about this is the difference between British English, which is spoken in a country where the euro isn't used and pluralises it (10 euros), and Irish English, which is spoken in a country where it is used (so it's a much more frequent word) and doesn't pluralise it (10 euro). I don't know what Northern Ireland does - I'm sure someone will tell me. I remember noticing it when an Irish friend-of-a-friend and thinking it was funny to hear an English speaker do what I'm used to hearing in other languages.

German doesn't pluralise it, as I say. Nevertheless, my teacher today definitely said '10 euros' at one point. A slip of the tongue, no doubt, or perhaps it is pluralised in some non-standard variety that she is not teaching us. But either way, it's interesting for a morphology reason. Steven Pinker published a book in 1999, too early to mention the pluralisation of euro because it had only just been introduced. But he did talk about German plural suffixes. -s is 'by far the least common' of the several possibilities (-e, -er, -en, -s, or nothing), but it is the Notpluralendung, or 'emergency plural' (p.222). It's the one you pick if the word is new, or doesn't normally pluralise. That's why it turns up on foreign words or names, and, in this case, on Euro.

Maximum (of) flavour

I get emails from Carluccio's, for some reason, and today this one arrived.

At the bottom, it says:

These dishes capture Antonio Carluccio's 'MOF MOF' philosophy - 'minimum of fuss and maximum of flavour'

This reminded me of the chapter we read for our Syntax Reading Group yesterday, in which Richie Kayne demonstrated microcomparative syntax for various constructions in English and French, like the following contrast (p.19):

English: something heavy
French: quelque chose de lourd (literally 'some thing of heavy')

In other words, French requires de in this construction (*quelque chose lourd), while English disallows it (*Something of heavy). In the email I got, the phrases minimum of fuss and maximum of flavour are similar, in that English doesn't use of here. You can say with a minimum of fuss and that's OK, but not a maximum of anything. Antonio Carluccio is, obviously, Italian, so without knowing for sure I speculate that perhaps in Italian, the construction with of is grammatical and thus a point of microcomparison between English and Italian.

Reference: Kayne, Richard S. 2008. Some notes on comparative syntax, with special reference to English and French. In Guglielmo Cinque & Richard S. Kayne, The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Syntax. Oxford: OUP. pp. 3-69. 

Iceland in translation is less icy

I read one of Michael Dibdin's Aurelio Zen books, And then you die. Part of the plot (not really a spoiler) involves Zen (an Italian) finding himself unexpectedly in Iceland. The Italian consul, who meets him there, tells him where he is, and they have this exchange (in Italian):

Snæbjörn Guðmundsson: This is Iceland.
Aurelio Zen: I don't see any ice.
Snæbjörn Guðmundsson: No, Greenland's the icy one. 

This is true. Iceland isn't specially icy (not all over it, anyway) and Greenland is very icy. This fact always pleased me.

But Zen is Italian, and does not speak English (he originally believes himself to be in America, where he was bound for, and assumes the people are speaking in some obscure regional dialect of English). The Italian for 'ice' is ghiaccio, though, so the etymology of the Italian name of the country, Islanda, is not obvious as it is in English. It comes as a direct borrowing from the Icelandic name, and the Italian Wikipedia page has to explain this fact, indicating its non-transparency. Similarly, Greenland is Groenlandia in Italian, while 'green' is verde. In Italian, the confusion should never arise.

Two wrongs don't make a right

I saw this cartoon tweeted recently:

Double negatives in court via @CrimeLineLaw pic.twitter.com/b8xSrlny2V
— Roddy Mansfield (@roddymansfield) January 24, 2015

It's the old chestnut that a double negative actually makes a positive, and if you say the non-standard phrase 'I didn't do nothing' you are in fact saying that you did something. It's used to try to shame or humiliate people into using the Standard English single negative: 'I didn't do anything'.

This is quite silly. Generally, linguists point out that lots and lots of other languages have double negatives as the standard form, and so it's ridiculous to suggest that it's somehow illogical. Italian is yer go-to example here, and for some reason it's always about telephoning: 'non ha telefonato nessuno', or 's/he hasn't telephoned nobody'. Jack Chambers has pointed out that as most non-standard English varieties have double negation (more technically called negative concord), perhaps it is in some way more 'natural' than the artificial standard of single negation that is imposed on us.

But even more than this, it's not even true that a double negative will be interpreted as a positive. It can be, if you give it the right intonation. But it's a very specific intonation with a pretty strong emphasis on the 'nothing'. Without that, there's simply no way that it can possibly mean 'I did something'. Anyone at all would interpret it was meaning what it's meant to mean. They might be a pedant about it and pretend not to understand, but they definitely would. And even in a criminal trial, where testimony has to be unambiguous, I don't think that they would try to hang the crime on the guy for using this syntactic construction.

English and American

I happened to be on a site where someone had asked what the difference is between Parmesan and Parmigiano-Reggiano (which are the same thing), and they got this answer:

Parmesan is the English and American translation of the Italian word Parmigiano-Reggiano.

This isn't the first time I've seen something like 'the English and American word for X' or similar, but it is jarring to me.

The thing that makes me have to stop and re-read it is of course that I'm interpreting English as the language, while the writer seems to be treating it as the country, and simultaneously conflating England and Britain/the UK. I know that to people in other countries, it doesn't seem very important that England and Britain are not the same thing (in Britain, we do a similar thing with Holland/the Netherlands) and furthermore, there is no adjective relating to the UK (UK-ish?), which would really be the more correct name anyway (to include Northern Ireland). But to me, England and the UK are not at all the same thing, and it is odd to say that something is English when it's clearly also British. This is a pragmatic implicature: you should give as much information as you are able, and here you're withholding some information (namely that the term is also used in other countries). And then what about Canada, Australia, Ireland and so on? Surely it's better to refer to English as a language here than to be unnecessarily specific about countries.

But I think there's more to it. Look at how it says 'English and American translation'. Most Americans are not idiots, contrary to the national stereotype that we like to believe in, and they know that they speak English rather than American. But a mixture of strong patriotism and some genuine confusion (actual people I know have been asked what language they speak when visiting America) means that it's sometimes tempting to write 'and American' to avoid people thinking you're just talking about England. I think many people probably do half-think of American as a language, even if they know that it's English really. And, of course, we might classify it as a separate language, if we so chose: language boundaries are not only determined by mutual intelligibility, as any linguistics student knows.

A lovely instance of involuntary code-switching due to L1 (first language) influence on this LanguageLog post:

Biagio intends to write in English, because LanguageLog is an English-Language-medium blog. They use the Italian conjunction e 'and', presumably because it occurs between two Italian words and the instinct was just too strong to overcome the (conscious?) act of writing in English.

What came upon a midnight clear?

On Thursday, Jeremy Paxman asked this question in the Christmas university challenge: 'according to the carol, what came upon a midnight clear?'. Stephen Bayley, who as my parents noted made a bit of a tit of himself otherwise, correctly said 'it'. This was not accepted as the right answer, however. What Paxman wanted was 'that glorious song of old'. Here's the lyrics:

It came upon a midnight clear,
That glorious song of old

'That glorious song of old' is, in fact, the understood subject of the preceding clause. But it's extraposed (put outside) and the grammatical subject is 'it'. 'It' stands in here for a subject that is too long or (in this case) doesn't scan in the usual subject position.

Harsh, Paxo, very harsh.

UPDATE [23/12/12]: One of the twitterlinguists, @drswissmiss, pointed out the following:

@linguist_laura right dislocations are kind of special though, so the song is the subject in some ways and it is the co-referential pronoun
— Mercedes D (@drswissmiss) December 21, 2012

And she is, of course, correct. As I was typing the post I was thinking about the status of it - and one thing it isn't is an expletive. An expletive subject is something that English (among other languages) does when it just needs to fill in a gap. If you take a suitably seasonal verb like snow, then in Italian you can say nevica, 'snows', whereas in English you need to say 'it snows'. What snows? Nothing snows, and the Italian reflects that by not requiring a subject. English has this thing that it has to have a subject, so it bungs in this meaningless filler it. There does the same job in There's no easy way to say this, and you can check: it's not felicitous to ask 'Where's no easy way to say this?', so you're clearly not referring to a place when you say there.

But in the carol, something did come upon a midnight clear: the glorious song of old. So it is not an expletive it, it's a referential pronoun (i.e. a pronoun that refers to an actual thing rather than being a filler). That's why I called it extraposition in the original post. But that's not the full story. Because it does refer to the noun phrase 'that glorious song of old', we can say that it is co-referential with it (it refers to the same thing in the world). This is right-dislocation (putting some noun to the right of where it would normally be). When you do right-dislocation, you leave behind a pronoun to fulfil the grammatical requirements of the language (English's afore-mentioned need for a subject of some kind) and to point you in the right direction to get to the real subject.

You can also get left dislocation, which is pretty common. In some of the Romance languages it's called clitic left dislocation because the noun is moved to the front and a 'clitic' (a kind of pronoun which has certain special properties) is in the place where the noun 'should' be. Here's Spanish (example from Karlos Arregi's paper here):

Estos libros, Juan los leyó ayer.
These books, Juan read them yesterday (literally 'Juan them read'). 

The object of the verb is estos libros 'these books', but it's fronted. This often has the effect of making the noun into a topic or the focus of the sentence. In English we usually do this to contrast with something else ('these books he read, but those other ones he hasn't started'), but in Romance languages it's used for more purposes. Some languages, known as topic-prominent languages and including many (or all?) sign languages, put the topic of every sentence at the beginning (usually without a clitic though) simply to indicate that it is the topic of the sentence.

Back to the carol. I don't actually know enough about the syntax of dislocation to say whether the dislocated noun phrase is 'really' the subject of the clause. There is some evidence that the pronoun and the noun phrase are connected in this type of construction: for instance, if the language has case inflections on nouns, they may have the same case ending. (Non-linguists, move on to the next sentence; for linguists, here's a thesis chapter arguing that the pronoun in Czech left dislocation is a spelled out copy of the dislocated element.) OK, non-linguists, back in the room.

To settle this question once and for all, I'm going to refer to playground logic:

'Antidisestablishment' is a very long word. How do you spell it?

Answer: I T.