Is true. Or is?

Queen Oona from Disenchantment

In a dramatic departure from blogging about the Simpsons, I'm blogging about Disenchantment, the latest Matt Groening cartoon series. This is Queen Oona, a fairly minor character (the wicked step-mother in this fairytale-inspired set of characters).

Queen Oona is from the neighbouring kingdom of Dankmire, and her accent is... European. Vaguely Russian, maybe? Kind of German? Anyway, whatever it's based on, the Dankmirian language clearly has what we call 'pro-drop', 'null subjects', or 'zero anaphora'. That means that in the right context, you can leave out a subject pronoun (this Spanish example is from Wikipedia):

Está completamente seco.
is completely dry
'It's completely dry.'

In the example above, you can infer that the subject is he/she/it because the verb (está) has 3rd person singular agreement. From there, you have more or less as much information as if we'd just used the word it, and you use your normal contextual knowledge to fill in the referent, as with the English equivalent.

Oona said, in episode 6,

Is true. 

Shortly followed by

Or is? 

Both of these sentences would be totally grammatical in Oona's (let's assume Slavic) first language, where the word it can be left out. I don't know Russian so let's illustrate with Spanish again. This is the exact equivalent, and I think it's good:

Es verdad. O es? 

But the thing is, it made me laugh, and I think it was meant to. I don't know why. I came here thinking I had a good explanation: maybe because is is a clitic (a word that needs another word to lean on) in English, so this literal translation sounds just too unnatural? Maybe lack of familiarity with post-verbal null subjects, like in the question 'is (it)?' in this example? Another one to file under Things Someone Else Should (And Probably Has) Research(ed).

You and your family's best interests

There's been a leaflet sent round lately about the EU referendum happening in the UK. The government has sent this leaflet to all households, setting out the case for remaining in the European Union. Here's how it puts it:

The Government believes it is in you and your family's best interests that the UK remains in the European Union.

A friend mentioned on facebook that he was disappointed that despite the £9m spent on this leaflet, it contained this grammatical error. I begged to differ: this is stylistic variation, not a mistake.

He argued that it should be your and your family's best interests, as both conjuncts should be possessive. This is right, as you should be able to leave either out and it still be grammatical.

But there's two complicating factors here. The first is that the possessive your is kind of already a combination of you plus 's, so perhaps the 's is redundant. I don't actually think this is the case, because I think there's another reason why it's OK to say you. 

It's to do with the nature of 's. This is what we call a clitic, which means that it's phonologically dependent (has to attach to) another word, but is not as tightly linked to the word as a suffix like the plural s. While the plural suffix can only attach to countable nouns, the possessive can attach to a much wider range of things. The only requirement is that the noun it refers to be within the phrase it attaches to. This means that we can have phrases like the following, where the possessive attaches to something other than the possessor, and sometimes not even a noun:

The woman with the long hair's dog
The guy I was talking to's friend
The girl dressed in blue's mother

It's a little more complicated with coordination, of course, as we have to have the 's referring to both conjuncts. But I think that's OK. Language Log have discussed this before, and examples like this are all right:

I and my friend's work (a bit clumsy in my opinion, but not bad)
Me and my friend's work (perfectly well-formed)

So, unusually, I'm with the government on this one, both in terms of their grammar in in staying in the EU.

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).