Meta-linguistics

It's a funny old thing, researching language, because you've got to use your object of study to describe your object of study. You have to talk about language using language. Mostly, this is OK, because we can distinguish between metalinguistic mentions of language and actual use of language.

One thing that often happens (and this one isn't linguistics-specific) is that you find yourself using the non-technical version of a word more when you're talking about the technical term (or maybe you just notice it more). I'm researching questions, and I catch myself using question all the time: 'the question is how this can be applied to X' and so on.

We linguists have a fun extra game to play, however. We can use the very linguistic things that we are talking about in the language we use to talk about them. Sometimes this happens by accident, similarly to the above example. But sometimes, you see the opportunity to slip one in as a little in-joke for your readers who are paying attention. I read this sentence today:

The idea... is supported by the fact that only in embedded finite clauses is it possible to front an XP.*

This is a classic example of its type. It's talking about fronting XPs (moving phrases to the start of the clause) in embedded (subordinate) clauses, and in doing so, does just that itself. that only in embedded finite clauses is an embedded clause - it's the complement of fact (it tells you what the fact is). And within it, we have a fronted phrase, only in embedded clauses - it would normally be at the end:

It is posible to front an XP [only in embedded clauses].

Linguist humour. There are whole blog posts to be written about humorous example sentences, comedy names for new generalisations and the like.

*Reference: Breul, C. 2004. Focus structure in Generative Grammar: An integrated syntactic, semantic and intonational approach. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Cairo - not XP

That title doesn't say XP as in 'maximal projection', incidentally - it's the Greek letters chi and rho, which look infuriatingly similar to XP.

I was listening to the excellent A history of the world in 100 objects podcast from the BBC, and there was a programme about a very early representation of Christ, on a floor mosaic in Hinton St Mary.

We know that this is him, even though there weren't many pictures of him yet, because it says his name behind his head. Those are the letters, X and P, or chi and rho, the first letters of Christos.

Chi rho, I said to myself, wondering what the letter chi (pronounced kai) was, and then something occurred to me. I don't think I would have had this thought if I'd seen the words written, but because I was listening to audio, I heard chi rho and thought Cairo.

I wonder, I thought, if Cairo is for some reason named after old Jesus himself. Obviously Egypt is an Arabic country with Islam as its major religion, and so has less reverence for some minor prophet than Christian cities would have, but Cairo's had a long history of being pinched by various European nations on account of it being a nice city with a lot of wealth. Who's to say that we don't have our own name for it which is completely different from the Arabic name? It wouldn't be the first time (after all, we call Egypt Egypt, not Misr. See also Bangkok, Germany, Japan and Finland, among many others. Croatia, which I initially thought was another example, turns out to be from the same root as Hrvatska, which is what the Croatians call it).

So I checked Wikipedia and it's not. It's from the Arabic name for the city, al-Qahira (literally the Vanquisher). Ah well. Another theory quashed.