The universal taxi

I was listening to the radio this morning and they were talking about linguistics. I feel very conflicted about this because I love hearing real, proper linguistics on the radio! It's so rare! but the linguist in question has expressed anti-trans attitudes in the recent past and so I can't call myself a fan. But there we go; they at least weren't discussing such issues so they didn't express them in the course of this conversation.

They were talking about demonstratives, this and that. It was a nice discussion, lots of information, and fun facts about proximal and distal demonstratives (this here vs that there) and how these change in context, and also how many languages have a three-way system with a medium-distance and a far-distance one.

And finally they talked about how pronouns are universal: all languages have them. This is indeed super cool, and basically indicates that they are a Very Important and Useful language feature. Any language that didn't have them for some reason would likely innovate them pretty sharpish, and home signs include them, for instance.

Then someone wrote in to say that 'Interestingly, one word that is universal is 'taxi''. This is interesting, but it's not the same thing. Taxi is 'universal' because it's been borrowed into lots of languages. I'd actually be surprised if it's truly universal in the sense that every single language has this word. There are presumably a few where the concept hasn't been needed and lots more where in fact there's a different word meaning 'private car and driver hired for single journeys', or whatever it is that taxi means. A quick google looks like in quite a lot of languages familiar to English speakers, the word for 'taxi' is something like taxi, which does give an impression of universality from this vantage point. And the 'universal' part is the specific form of the word ('taxi'), with a certain meaning.

Pronouns are universal in a different way. The words are not the same in every language (me, your, we, etc). They haven't been borrowed. There is a lot of historical relatedness, to be sure; it's no coincidence that we looks like German wir. But the very fact that there are pronouns is what's universal. This is fundamentally more interesting than that a particular word has been borrowed a lot. (By the way, here is a study that says that the most universal word is 'huh'.)

Trompe l'oeiling

There's an episode of The Simpsons (Flaming Moe, s22ep11 - a reference to the episode Flaming Moe's) in which Moe, for reasons, reinvents his bar as a gay bar for average-looking men.

It's tremendously successful, and he says this:

Now we can afford real bowls of pretzels instead of trompe l'oeiling them on the bar.

This is a fantastic bit of morphology. It's yer bog-standard noun-to-verb conversion (verbification, if you like), transforming the noun trompe l'oeil to a verb to trompe l'oeil (and notice, of course, that the noun is itself a translation of a French verb-plus-object: 'to fool the eye'). Then we are free to stick the verb suffix -ing on the end, because we can do that with verbs in English.

But it's so cool. For one thing, it means that the normally unpronounced final 'l' gets pronounced (he says it like trompe-loyling) and for another, it reveals how when we borrow a phrase wholesale with an idiomatic meaning like this we can put a verb suffix on a noun no problem at all.

It's the last day of term today! That means no more teaching for this year. Wow. In honour of this, we had a party for our students on Wednesday which was really fun:

I also learnt something interesting. We use the term 'fresher' colloquially to refer to a first year student, particularly when it's the start of the year and they're arriving for the first time (so you have a freshers' fair, etc). I always assumed it was a shortening of the American term 'freshman', which we don't use here but which is totally standard over there. Turns out that maybe it is, but they don't use 'fresher' there - only the full form. So it seems like we somehow borrowed a clipped form which doesn't exist in its original context without ever borrowing the full form.

An hypothesis or a hypothesis?

I stumbled across the phrase an hypothesis in a book yesterday and it gave me pause. Surely, I thought to myself, that can't be right? I never use an with words beginning with the [h] sound myself, but even if you do, I thought, you wouldn't use it with hypothesis. Here's approximately what I assumed was the rule, never having troubled to learn it:

If the word once had a silent h (because it was borrowed from French), use an. Otherwise (f'rinstance if it's borrowed from Greek), use a. Therefore it would be an hotel but a hypothesis.

Not so. I looked it up. Nowadays, of course, the rule is to use a wherever [h] is pronounced (a hotel), and an wherever h is silent (an honour), and very sensible the rule is too. But if one did want to use an, one should properly do so with words longer than 'about three syllables' and which have an unstressed initial syllable. Hypothesis, for instance.

And it turns out not to be a stupid left-over-from-history rule either: it really is easier to say an when the syllable is not stressed, because it takes too much effort to stop after a and start again on the relatively weak [h] sound in an unstressed syllable.