Going places in Welsh and English

I'm learning Welsh on Duolingo. Most people in our department are doing a language on it, in some cases for practical purposes but for many of us, for family reasons. In my case, my grandmother was Welsh and spoke it as a first language, so I feel a connection to it for that reason even though I'm not Welsh myself. My other grandparents also lived in Pembrokeshire for a long time, though they weren't Welsh, and so when we visited we'd hear it spoken, especially if we went along the coast a bit to Carmarthenshire. 

I knew a fair amount about Welsh grammar before I began, because I'm a linguist so I happen to know quite a few things about quite a few languages that I don't speak, and Welsh is a language that has been studied and written about reasonably often. It's frequently studied alongside others as well as in its own right because you can compare it to other Celtic languages for within-family comparative work, or with languages from other families where it's useful as an example of a language that has VSO word order. 

Backtrack! VSO? V stands for Verb, S for Subject and O for object, and these three letters are how we talk about the basic or default order of the elements of sentences in a language. English is SVO: [S The British public] [V despise] [O the current government]. This is one of the two most common orders globally, the other being SOV (e.g. Korean). VSO is less common and it can be useful, when examining linguistic theories, to illustrate how they work in languages with this order. The same VSO order is found in languages all over the world, including Berber, the Mayan languages, and Te Reo Māori. 

There are lots of other interesting things about Welsh grammar, obviously, it's just that this is the one I happen to have read most about because word order is the area I've worked in most of all. And of course VSO is an abstraction and there is widespread use of auxiliary verbs (the English equivalent would be something like The British public is despising the government) which is still VSO but it's not quite so straightforward as just classifying languages and being done with it. Luckily, I suppose, or I'd be out of a job. 

So all this is to say that as I begin to work out what the heck is going on with this language, I might write some posts about it. So far I'm floundering in the dark as many things are very different from English. The app starts you off with things where you can make comparisons, but I'm honestly finding some of it baffling. Of course you don't get explicit grammar instruction on Duolingo, so I've got myself a grammar book as well to help me work out the things that aren't easily deducible. 

I assume they deliberately choose constructions to teach you that are similar to your language of instruction (English, in my case), to make things easier at the beginning. For me, a linguist, some of this was actually really surprising to me. For instance, all of the prepositions and articles that I've had to use so far have worked just like in English. Maybe this doesn't sound so strange but I know very well that prepositions and articles are infamously unpredictable and variable across languages. So when I'm getting sentences to translate that include a direct word-for-word equivalent of going to the office or whatever, I'm surprised. The main thing that has been different in this respect is the absence of an indefinite article (a/an in English), so here I felt back on more solid ground as I know this is a feature common to lots of languages and fully expected it. 

Another, more specific, thing that seems weirdly the same is the verb(-type thing) mynd, which apparently means 'going'. English uses go for a travelling or motion event, like going to the office: I'm travelling from one place to another. Welsh also appears to do this: mynd i'r swyddfa is the direct equivalent, and both languages need to use it with a subject and an auxiliary verb: I'm going to the office or Dw i'n mynd i'r swyddfa. Here's the weird bit though: English also uses go for expressing the future, which is not totally bizarre but also not universal by any means, and Welsh seems to do the same. So just as in English you can say I'm going to wait here, you can say Dw i'n mynd i aros yma in Welsh, and they both express future with no motion involved. This use of go for expressing the future isn't unique to English and Welsh (French and Spanish have it, and Jamal Ouhalla describes it for Moroccan Arabic here) but it's also not that common. Perhaps someone can tell me whether this similarity is a result of the very close contact between the languages, a shared familial feature, or simply coincidence that both languages have travelled this grammaticalisation path, just like Moroccan Arabic. 

Book review: 'The language lover's puzzle book' by Alex Bellos (Guardian Faber, 2020)

Full disclosure, as I don't normally do reviews in this blog, so publishing this one might be seen to carry a certain amount of weight: the author sent me a copy of this book with a suggestion that I might possibly write about it if I liked it. I did like it, so I am. 

Alex Bellos, Guardian puzzle-setter, has compiled 100 linguistic puzzles – sets of facts about languages from all over the world, with brain-teasers for the reader to solve – with some context about the languages. All of the puzzles are fully work-out-able from the information presented, so in this sense it's a pretty good approximation of what some of our introductory courses look like. I've even used some of the very same puzzles in this book in first year seminars before. They're mostly taken from previous Linguistic Olympiads. This is why I was looking forward to reading it, because for the last few years I've organised a 'markathon' for the advanced papers for the UK Linguistics Olympiad, and so I was already well aware of the fiendishness of some of the puzzles. Happily, Bellos hasn't included the very hardest ones in the book, so they're all manageable, though some are really tricky and would take you a while to do with pencil and paper. 

The way I approached the book was not to try to solve every puzzle as I read through the book. (You could do that, and it would keep you going a really long time, so it's good value if you're looking for a Christmas stocking filler, which I assume is the intended market.) Instead, I cast an eye over a puzzle to get the idea of it, and then flipped to the answers once I'd spotted the principle (or if I couldn't work it out quickly). For me, the interest was more in the linguistic knowledge rather than in the process of solving the puzzle, although some of them were very satisfying in that regard too. For that reason, I actually found having the answers in the back of the book a bit of a nuisance and would have been happy to have at least the bones of the explanation directly following each puzzle, to provide context and grammar facts with perhaps the full walkthrough in the appendix. But that's me, a linguist, not a puzzle-solver. For the average reader it's probably helpful to have the linguistic details separated out from the cultural context. But is that playing into the unhelpful separation of grammar and its speakers, that formal linguists are sometimes charged with? I don't know. 

It's really hard to write a book like this, where you convey the delight of linguistic variation, without falling into the trap of exoticising or depersonalising the languages you're talking about, detaching them from the people who speak them every day when you talk about them as an object to marvel at. I was well aware of this myself when I was asked to be the linguistic expert on a radio comedy panel show earlier this year. Even though the whole production team was consciously committed to not being racist, and fully aware of the perils of accidentally doing so, I know we didn't fully manage it. We avoided some potential clangers, to be sure, but I know we didn't get it right. Can you ever? I'm not sure. And I also think that it's good for there to be books out there that present this delight in diversity rather than just banging on about how wonderful language is without ever going beyond English, so there must be a trade-off, I suppose. In this book, there are the inevitable untranslatable words, Chinese compound words, and other tropes. There are a few scare quotes that I wouldn't have thought necessary (enclosing 'writing system' or 'texts', when the un-scare-quoted terms would have been accurate). Alexander Graham Bell's contribution to Deaf education is also discussed in a positive light, with no acknowledgement of the eugenicist views he held regarding Deaf people and the negative legacy of the methods he used. There are no signed languages included either, with the one exception of Cistercian sign language. But in the main, the material in the book is presented in the spirit it's intended: fascination with languages and the different ways they can do things. Languages are presented from all over the world, and although Europe is over-represented (especially English, which is a conscious decision on the author's part) and Africa rather under-represented considering the linguistic diversity there, it is a world tour.  

Most of the puzzles don't require you to have any linguistic knowledge at all. Some of them need you to make an educated guess about what a language might be like, but a lot of them are simply pattern-spotting and logical deduction.  Puzzle 10 was a nice example of one where you needed to simply match up the patterns, spot the links, but then make a couple of educated guesses about things that didn't quite fit: it demonstrated very neatly the complications that natural languages can bring. And the twist in that puzzle was a joy. I learnt some language facts from the book, including about counting in Japanese and Danish, and I also learnt other non-language stuff too: things about mathematical symmetry, and botanical notation for describing petal structure, and was reminded of the bizarre language to describe coats of arms. 

There's a strong focus on writing systems, as you might expect, with chapters on alphabets and scripts and invented writing systems and codes of various kinds. There are also chapters on terms for family members, counting systems and dates, which reflect the kinds of things that Linguistic Olympiad puzzles are about (and which you can make a self-contained puzzle about). I was impressed by how coherent the themes are, though occasionally something unexpected popped up - puzzle 45 is a fun puzzle about garden path sentences, in the chapter about kinship terms, linked just by including the phrase the old man. 

I'll be adding this to my department's recommendations for prospective students. It's linguistically accurate, as far as I can tell (bar the definition of parts of speech in the 'technical' chapter on grammatical features that differ most from English), with input from linguists and native speakers. And I'll also be passing my copy on to a teenager who I think will like it, having just taught himself Esperanto. I think it would work for someone who likes logic puzzles just as well as someone who likes language-related trivia, though, and definitely for someone who likes learning languages just for the sake of it. 

How much did it costed?

The Conversation tweeted about an article way back in 2018, when things like the World Cup still happened, and included the phrase could have costed (it's also in the article itself):

Watching the #WorldCup during working hours could have costed as much as US$10.4 billion in lost production time (in 2010).

But there are multiple ways employers can make up for this by embracing the tournament: https://t.co/qyewW8oxVQ pic.twitter.com/apqvOr9zgF

— The Conversation (@ConversationUK) June 12, 2018

In Standard English that would be could have cost – cost is irregular and has cost as its past participle as well as the bare form. In fact, costed isn't even the simple past tense of this version of the verb, as that's also cost:

It costs	Present
It cost	Past
It has cost	Perfect

 and so on. 

I say 'this version of the verb' because there's another version of cost that does have costed as the past tense: the one that means 'estimate the price of' rather than 'have a price of', as in We costed the new plans and decided that they were not viable. So there is this form costed that exists, and that you might have heard just as recently as the form cost, and you might reach for that when you're looking for the relevant form to follow the perfect auxiliary have. And then that makes it nice and similar to all the other regular verbs like could have washed, could have dusted, could have wasted, etc. 

I predicted that this mistake would be much less likely to occur with did instead of could have. While could have requires the past participle (actually it's have that requires it, so you'd also get it has lasted us ten years, and by extension possible it has costed us a fortune), did doesn't – it requires the bare form of the verb: Did it last long? rather than Did it lasted long? and so presumably you would expect Did it cost a lot rather than Did it costed a lot? 

Well, never make predictions about what kind of variation people will produce. I'll leave the actual numbers to someone else, but a google search for "did it costed" brings up results, and not just people asking if it's correct to say that (though they're the top hits). There are also examples where it's used as the simple past form, as in I wonder how much that upgrade costed. 

English, amirite? 

As someone firmly on the Left...

Dangling modifiers are one of those 'grammar' things that children learn about, writers are warned about, and peevers peeve about. Strunk and White give this one:

Being in a dilapidated condition, I was able to buy the house very cheap.

They're also one of those grammar things, like so many of these peeves, that actually don't usually matter much. It's nearly always clear from the context what is meant, and maybe the sentence would be neater if it was changed, but not always. The one above is corrected to 'Being in a dilapidated condition, the house was for sale very cheap' which is fine too, but I don't think there's much in it, readability-wise.

So it was quite exciting to find one that actually does matter:

As someone firmly on the Left, Jeremy Corbyn would be a truly terrible Prime Minister, even in comparison to the appalling one currently at No. 10.

— Mary • Pronouns: Hufflepuff/Esquire ❤️🐱🏁🕷 (@MaryMinifieEsq) October 26, 2019

The dangling modifier here is 'as someone firmly on the left'. It can refer to the speaker, as these modifiers often do, or it could refer to Jeremy Corbyn, the closest referent. This is the interpretation that style guides would say is 'correct'. But both are plausible, which is why we can't disambiguate with context here. The two different meanings are as follows:

I am someone firmly on the Left, but I still think that Jeremy Corbyn would be a terrible Prime Minister. 

Because Jeremy Corbyn is firmly on the Left, I think he would be a terrible Prime Minister.  

I actually don't know which is the intended meaning, as I don't know the person who tweeted it. Probably the first is more likely given the audience and tweet it responds to, but who knows. A rare genuine case for writing out the dangling modifier.

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'.)

Pope Francis says no adjectives; I'm going to hell

If you like to take your grammar advice from authority, you'll enjoy the fact that Pope Francis has decreed that we shouldn't use adjectives. Specifically, he has said that his communications team shouldn't use adjectives. He twote thus:

Let us learn to call people by their name, as the Lord does with us, and to give up using adjectives.

And in a speech, he said:

The communicator must make people understand the weight of the reality of nouns that reflect the reality of people. And this is a mission of communication: to communicate with reality, without sweetening with adjectives or adverbs. 

He didn't use adjectives to say this, either, impressively. I'm trying not to use adjectives in this blog post and I think I've succeeded so far, with difficulty. So much difficulty, in fact, that I'm stopping now, with the observation that you shouldn't take the Pope's advice on this or probably anything else.

IT IS LITERALLY IMPOSSIBLE TO WRITE A SENTENCE WITHOUT GRAMMAR

Hooray! Another article about how 'textspeak' is bad for kids is out! (Daily Mail link, so don't click it – you can get the idea from just reading this post.)

It's really a shame that the experts they asked were not experts in the thing they asked them about. They're experts in children's potential and curriculum development, both important things, but not actually language, which is the thing we're concerned about the harm of here. It seems comparable to asking experts in primary education if mobile phone masts are harming children's concentration or something. They'll have relevant things to say about concentration but they won't actually have the expertise to say if it's the mobile phone masts that are the problem.

Anyway I just came here to say this: IT IS LITERALLY IMPOSSIBLE TO WRITE A SENTENCE WITHOUT GRAMMAR.

In the image above, Prof. Mellanby says 'these sentences do not contain grammar', of the following:

OMG ikr
Yo dude r u still coming to party Friday

I'm just going to take the second one. It contains, among other things, the following grammar:

• a vocative (Yo dude)
• subject-verb agreement (r for 2nd person singular)
• question inversion (r u rather than u r)
• a verb phrase with a prepositional complement (to party) and adverbial (Friday)
• present tense (r rather than were)
• progressive aspect (coming)
• pre-verbal adverbial (still)
• knowledge of which words can be omitted in this context (the, on)

It also has 100% correct spelling, if one allows that r u is an abbreviation rather than an error.

Have you eaten Grandma? (review)

Cover of 'Have you eaten Grandma?'
by Gyles Brandreth

I was considering writing a review of this book, Have you eaten Grandma? by Gyles Brandreth, but to be quite honest it's not worth bothering.
[Edit: I ended up writing a review of it anyway so here you go.]

It's neither surprisingly good nor toe-curlingly awful. I got it for professional purposes (I'm teaching a module on 'Grammar for Everyone' this term and want to look at all sorts of books that claim to be about 'grammar') and I'll get something out of it for that, I suppose, but I'm glad I didn't buy it for pleasure.

I had been ready to be cross about it after seeing this little video in which Gyles (known as being a pedant, has done truly awfully smug programmes about language in the past) talks about some of his 'bugbears' including redundant myself, can I get rather than may I get, and so on. In fact, it's exactly what you expect.

The majority of it is punctuation advice. It's fine, with only a few mistakes, but Eats, Shoots and Leaves is better if that's what you want. Then there's lists of words, either just ones he likes or ones that people often get wrong in writing (accept vs except, for instance) and mnemonics (sometimes very weird ones) to help remember them.

He has a bizarre joy in some -- but not all -- neologisms. He seems to have (like Stephen Fry) come around from pure prescriptivism to the joys of what he calls 'slang' some time in the 1990s, and so he loves things from then. He's constantly saying End of, for example, like at the end of the video above. He gives a long list of initialisms like WTF (which he loves) and describes some of them as being of 'the Whatsapp and Snapchat generation', which needless to say were totally unfamiliar to the teenager I asked. And yet he is so rigidly inflexible about some things that he was taught were correct, and so are immutable rules for him (you mustn't ever, ever say bored of, for example, despite the fact that there's no harm in it whatsoever and millions of people do say it).

There's an embarrassing section of the abbreviations part where he talks about labels for gender and sexuality that verge on poking fun at LGBTQIA-type initialisms. He shows a clear support for non-binary, non-straight identification, but still betrays an opinion of 'simply straight' being 'normal' and 'knowing where you are'. The section on American vs British English is terrible, and relies only the books of people like him, not linguists. This is not a book that seeks to promote truth.

This is very evident throughout, when he often refers to 'the Brandreth Rule' on particular points. This means that he knows that there are different ways of doing things, and his arbitrary choice is the one he likes the best. That's what this book is. It's for people aged about 50 or 60, who 'love the English language', and just want someone who agrees with them to reinforce their opinions and tell them the things they already know so that they can be smug about knowing them. I've come to realise that anyone who says they 'love the English language' doesn't really love the English language, not as it really is. They love some idealised version of it, the version they speak, the version they think is 'best', and which is being 'corrupted' by Americans, kids, foreigners, or modern education.

It's a perfectly acceptable, slightly dull book. If you want to learn some stuff about punctuation or commonly confused words, then it's one way of doing that (but not the best way). If you just want an authority to refer to on certain style points, it'll do that (but there are better authorities to refer to). It's not the best of any of the things it does, but it is by Gyles Brandreth, and that is its selling point. End of. (Sorry, that was such a lazy way to end this but I couldn't resist.)

pseudo-names

Family members have names, obviously, but they also have sort of pseudo-names - the kinship terms we call them like 'Mum'. I've actually always called my parents by their first names and also my maternal grandparents, who I always called Paul and Rosemary. My paternal grandparents, on the other hand, are Grandma and Grandad.

Now these kinship terms are normal nouns when you're talking about them, and occur with a determiner (usually a possessive determiner, as in my mum). When you're using them as a term of address, though, they work like a name. So just as you don't say the Louise or my Jane, you just say plain Grandma when you're talking to them as opposed to about them.

It turns out that I have inadequately acquired the rules about this. When I'm talking about my grandma, I'll often refer to her just as 'Grandma'. So I'll say something like Grandma sent us a Christmas card today. This apparently sounds a bit odd and I should say My grandma sent us a Christmas card today in order not to sound like she's also the grandma of the person I'm talking to. I think that because all my other relatives just have names, I treat 'Grandma' as her name and use it accordingly: compare Rosemary sent us a Christmas card today, which is totally normal. 

Three mistakes in one sentence

This is the first in a short series of posts about things I've noticed in my current book, The Leopard by Jo Nesbo. I'm reading the English translation by Don Bartlett, published by Vintage. It's originally written in Norwegian so some of the things I write about might be influenced by that, I suppose.

Here, Harry Hole, the main character, takes issue with his colleague's grammar. This is not just a quirk of Hole; the other things I'll be blogging about are similar grammatical observations from other characters in the book, so I can only assume Nesbo is the one who is a stickler for precision.

The second two mistakes are factual errors, or judgement differences, so I'll leave those aside. The first, though, is Harry claiming an agreement error. He thinks that the verb should be singular is rather than plural are, to agree with the clausal subject [punks shooting good policemen] rather than the closest noun, the plural policemen. This is a common error; I'm forever correcting it in essays. It's easy to do because there's a suitable noun just before the verb, and our brains have forgotten that the real subject was ages ago, and take the easy option of the closest noun.

He's absolutely right if the subject really is that clause. Why clauses should be singular and not plural, when they don't really seem to be the kinds of things that can be singular and plural, is an interesting question in itself. We might say that it's semantically a singular event, the event of shooting described in the clause. More plausibly, I would say, is that when something can't have number (it's 'underspecified') we default to the singular, which is the unmarked option in English (and in languages generally).

What if, though, the subject is punks? It could be. Then the subject still has a clause, but instead of it being a clausal subject describing an event [punks shooting good policemen], it's a noun punks with a relative clause modifying it: punks [who are shooting good policemen]. What about that, eh? Then we do want plural agreement on the verb and it should be are.

But here's a thing: we can replace the noun punks with a pronoun, which in this case would be they or them, as it's 3rd person plural, and look! It's totally bad with they no matter what form the verb takes, and it's only good with singular agreement when it's them.

*As far as they shooting good policemen is concerned
*As far as they shooting good policemen are concerned
*As far as them shooting good policemen are concerned
As far as them shooting good policemen is concerned

The lack of the option of nominative case (they) shows that this isn't a real subject of the gerund (or rather, that the 'subject' of a gerund is not the same as a normal clausal subject). If there was no modifying clause, we could use they, and then we'd have to use plural agreement: As far as they are concerned. So part of this pattern is actually an artefact of the fact that you can't have a modifying relative clause with a pronoun. Note that if we put back in the who are that I showed as understood earlier on, it is obligatorily plural agreement, and it also demonstrates very clearly that punks is outside the relative clause.

I really do think it could be either singular or plural, depending on the structure. Not that this matters, much, but it does show firstly that subtle distinctions can illustrate different underlying syntax, and secondly that it's not a good idea to be too nitpicky about grammar in case a linguistics blogger comes along and takes issue with your correction.

This adverb is super interesting

The Oxford Times published a whinge about the prefix super- recently (don't click the link; you'll get the idea from this post and like all local papers, the page is full of really annoying adverts that play audio). They're unhappy about the increase in adjectives preceded by super, such as super-strong, super-expensive and super-fit.

The claims about its increased frequency are discussed for American English in this post by Neal Whitman from February this year, and are true. It is getting more common (this is super-unusual, by the way, because normally it's the frequency illusion). Whether the claim that its use over here comes from American English is true or not I don't know; I can't be bothered to check because I don't really care.

What I do care about is whether it really is a prefix in all the examples they mention. Neal has it as an adverb and I instinctively classed it as that as well before I was pointed to his post. Why, though? The Oxford Times' examples are all written with a hyphen, and they explicitly call it a prefix. I also have an intuitive hyphen when it's an attributive adjective rather than predicative (a super-compelling argument vs this argument is super compelling). Whyyyyy??

[Aside: the fact that it can be unambiguously an adjective in examples like This pudding is simply super is irrelevant. Words don't usually have a category* when considered in isolation, and only have categories when considered in context.]

With a noun, as in superyacht, I'd not hesitate to call it a prefix, regardless of whether it's written like that or as super yacht or super-yacht. And when rich is a noun, I'd class it as a prefix (the super-rich ought to pay more taxes), but when it's an adjective it's a more ambiguous (The owner of this company is super rich). This is easily explained: adverbs can't modify nouns, so super (adverb) can't modify a noun like yacht; it must be a prefix meaning something like mega- or über-.

So let's focus on the ambiguous cases where it modifies an adjective, so could be a prefix (like über-strong) or an adverb (like incredibly strong). How do we tell which it is? Intuition is notoriously unreliable.

It would be useful to know if anything else can occur between the putative adverb and the adjective. You couldn't split a prefix from its base (apart from with expletives, like un-bloody-fortunately) but you might be able to put another word between an adverb and an adjective (really very pleasant). I don't think you can with super, but it's not a super-compelling argument; you also can't put anything between very, an undisputed adverb, and an adjective (very really pleasant is awful). But you can stack it up, which is more adverbial-like (super super happy).

One argument for it being a prefix would be that it can modify just adjectives. Adverbs can modify verbs and prepositional phrases (not nouns, as noted above). But it looks like super can actually modify these too: Neal Whitman gives these examples of prepositional phrases:

Three is super off tee, but not off turf.
I was super into rollerblading which I'm not any more.

Other adverbs:

Lift super slowly, taking 10 seconds to raise and 5 to lower.
My job was to 'appear', super suddenly.

And verbs:

Their media strategy... is to kind of exalt and super serve the conservative media.
I super hate to lose.
I super want a desert tortoise!
We super like this song.

The fact that these are less common is slightly an issue, though - perhaps this is a prefix in the process of breaking free and making a bid for adverbialhood? It's times like these I wish I was more of a morphologist and knew how to find out. Advice welcome - anyone want to do a study?

*That's a super-controversial way of putting that. I don't mean to imply any stance on whether the category of a word is part of its inherent content, or whether the same word in more than one category is a single word that changes category rather than being two homophonous words, or anything really. I have opinions about these things but they aren't the point of this post. 

English Grammar Day

I seem to do nothing but livetweet linguistics events these days. Here's the tweeting from the English Grammar Day at the British Library yesterday, organised by UCL.

Warning: extra care has been taken

Asda's smoked salmon trimmings have this warning on the packet:

Warning: Extra care has been taken to remove bones, although some may remain. 

If you scroll down a bit at the link, you can see it there. For most of the time it took me to make smoked salmon crostini this morning, I was trying to work out why I didn't like this phrasing. Eventually, I worked it out, and I think it's a real-life example of the misunderstanding that conjunctions and subordination work in different ways that I'm constantly correcting in my students' work.

Our online marking software allows you to create comments that you can use whenever you need them. Here's the one I created for this:

Whereas: introduces a subordinate clause (usually before the main clause). It is not followed by a comma, but the clause it introduces is. It therefore looks like this, where X and Y are complete sentences:
1. Whereas X, Y.
2. X, whereas Y.
And it does not look like this:
3. X. Whereas Y.
Although: works exactly like 'whereas'.
However: Unlike 'whereas' or 'although', when followed by a comma, it can introduce a sentence. Also unlike them, it cannot join two sentences unless you also use a semi-colon. If you're trying to do this with 'however', you probably want 'but'.
It looks like this:
1. X. However, Y.
2. X; however, Y. [but I would recommend 'X but Y' instead]
It does NOT look like this:
3. X, however Y.
4. X however, Y.
Therefore: works exactly like 'however'.

The substitution of however for but is the one that annoys me the most: it's pure 'big word syndrome', and sounds clunky.

Back to the salmon, they've used although when but would have been better. That would have given them the precise meaning they wanted to convey, namely that even though they've been totally diligent, there might even so be some bones in the salmon. That would work because but coordinates two clauses, so neither clause 1 (extra care has been taken to remove bones) nor clause 2 (some may remain) has more importance than the other and the whole of clause 1 and clause 2 together is interpreted as the warning.

The problem with although here is that it subordinates the clause that it introduces. In their formulation that's clause 2 (some may remain). This clause, because it's subordinated, can't be the main bit of that sentence and therefore can't be the warning. Only the main clause can be the warning, and the main clause is the one that's not subordinated, namely extra care has been taken to remove bones. They're warning me that they've taken extra care to remove bones, and as some extra information they note that some may remain. That's not right! If they really wanted to use although, they could have: they just need to make the warning be the main clause and although subordinate the real extra information (their claim of diligence):

[Although extra care has been taken to remove bones,] some may remain.  

Grammar! It's the bestest!

Schoolchildren in this country are currently mired in SATs. These are tests designed to assess how well a school (not individual children) is doing, but have been being roundly criticised because they're stupid and pointless. Michael Rosen in particular has been very vocal on Twitter about the SPaG (spelling, punctuation and grammar) one, which I believe is happening today.

It does seem a stupid test, and many of the examples he has picked out do contain confusing or apparently pointless things. The main criticism many people seem to have is that young children don't need to know this stuff, that it's too hard, and that it doesn't take creativity or expression into account, and that grammar puts kids off language. This facebook post is (I think) an analogy which makes exactly that point - that focussing too much on the mechanics ruins the fun of it. Lynne Murphy has written a good post pointing out that learning grammar is good and useful and helps you to know more about language. I would go further, though, and make the case that grammar is absolutely bloody brilliant.

Spelling and punctuation are a bit dull. The types of grammar that kids are having to learn is a bit dull: they're essentially labelling parts of speech. But real grammar, the kind that I spend all day every day thinking about, the grammar that I chose to study for 8 years and then make my career, is fantastically and endlessly interesting.

How can you not be fascinated by the fact that words might not really exist, that adjectives occur in a particular order (small green apples, not green small apples), that the rules of be deletion in AAVE are precisely the same as the rules of be contraction in British English, that you can have a cheeky Nando's but not a cheeky salad, that speakers can innovate constructions like because noun and the exact same damn thing happens in Finnish and French and who knows what other languages, that through reanalysis and tiny shifts Latin became the romance languages, that languages all over the world are wonderfully diverse but equally astonishingly similar... hell, even the most basic fact about syntax, that it is a hierarchically-structured system, is still amazing to me and something that most people don't even realise.

And even more than this, most of what I've just said is controversial to some people. We don't know the answers. Language, and I take grammar to be central to language (some would disagree but I'm happy to be biased), is inextricably bound up with our humanity and we don't even know how it works. We are still finding out. Isn't that exciting?

Don't teach 8-year-olds about subordinating conjunctions. It probably will put them off writing stories for fun. And don't ban 'slang'. That'll make them scared to speak. Once again, I make my call for all teachers to study linguistics and then teach everyone grammar - but fun grammar. Learn a foreign language and see how it's like English, or different from English, and wonder why. Look at Beowulf and Chaucer and marvel at how far English has come, and what happened to that verb-second word order. And then come and study linguistics.

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.

I were saying I wa'

It's National Grammar Day! Sadly this isn't as fun as it sounds due to the idiots on the internet. However, here is a thing I have learnt. Jeremy Butterfield wrote an article about how linguists and other people have different ideas about what grammar is, and in the comments someone mentioned the famous(?) Dennis Skinner complaint about being misquoted as saying I were. It's mentioned at the bottom of this link.

As he says there, he's not saying I were, because that would be 'grammatically incorrect'. He's saying I wah, as in dropping the 's' from was, and it just happens to sound like I were. Someone from Yorkshire in the comments agreed with him:

This is fine, I suppose, except that I really want it to be I were. It's a nice symmetrical counterpart to the We was found in many other places. Both are examples of levelling of verb forms, and I  teach it as an example of how levelling is something that tends to happen, but that it's more or less chance what form is chosen in what dialect. If it's not levelling, then that means the the levelling only takes place in some dialects, and it's always towards was.

On the other hand, if it is a phonological reduction of I was, then there's other interesting questions to answer. Why don't these dialects level? Do other dialects actually have I were? If not, why would there be a preference to level towards was? How can we tell, for sure, that it's I wa and not I were?

Ne translatez pas les languages

A friend posted this photo on facebook the other day:



A number of highly intelligent people then missed the point of the joke and began to comment on how bad the translations are. I think they're pretty good imitations of the languages in question, with one big error: the 'German' looks (unmistakably) more like Dutch in the second half of the sentence.

These are not intended to be translations, of course, or rather they're deliberately not accurate. They're just meant to amuse the English-speaking audience by including funny words to compound the humour of the warning in English ('avoid pouring on crotch area'). After all, we love nothing more than when a foreign language does something in a funny way (cf. Welsh popty-ping for 'microwave' or German Handy for 'mobile phone') so it's nice to imagine that these might be for real.

Let's begin with the French. The grammar is fine, as far as I know: you'd make an imperative in French with the negative and the 2nd person plural inflection, just as it's done there. The phrase dans l'area seems OK to me, too. The vocabulary used just isn't French, that's all. The verb for 'pour' should, I think (Google Translate helped) be verser so you'd have ne versez pas. I don't know if you'd also need a pronoun in there (don't pour it) or not. And, of course, no French person ever says ooh-la-la, but it's stereotypically French and referring to ones' crotch that way goes nicely with the French reputation for romance.

Next, the 'German'. This one caused a bit more controversy in the comment thread, because it very obviously isn't German. My German is less good than my French, but I'm pretty certain the word order here is wrong as well as the vocabulary and morphology. I think you would say literally 'drop you not...' rather than 'not drop...', which is what we appear to have here: nein is German for 'no'. Then the verb is obviously just English again, with droppen instead of pourez. I think they've simply selected words that have a combination of letters that resemble the language in question (so French has a word pour, for instance, but it doesn't look very Germanic).

Next, though, I think we've got a nice case of representing an accent in words that look like (or indeed exist in) the language. So ze haut kaffe does not mean 'the hot coffee' in German (haut apparently means 'skin', for instance, and the German for 'coffee' is in fact kaffee, which they could have used instead), but it looks German-ish and sounds like someone saying the hot coffee in (some kind of representation of) a German accent. It reminds me of this a bit. Notice also that the 'German' has an overt object with article, while the French has nothing at all ('don't drop _ on the crotch area' vs 'don't drop the hot coffee on the crotch area').

Then it most definitely switches to Dutch-looking words, if we hadn't already. Dutch word order is a little bit more familiar to English speakers as well, I think, although I know even less Dutch than I do German. Anyway, here we've got a dead giveaway for Dutch: that word oont. It just has a Dutch-like feel to it, though I don't know why (double 'o'? final 't'?). And then finally the lovely phrase, ze knakkers. Again, this is definitely Germanic and in fact Google Translate does give 'knackers' as the translation of this as a German word (it gives 'frankfurter cherry' if you tell it knakkers is Dutch!).

Good work, coffee-cup-humour-producing-person!

Seen as this is the 1930s

I watched ITV's Harry Price: Ghost Hunter over the Christmas break, which starred Rafe Spall as the eponymous psychic investigator/faker/unmasker.

One linguistic fact of note is the spelling of his first name, which I assume is a respelling reflecting the pronunciation of the name Ralph, which is now usually pronounced as it looks.

But what caught my ear was the very modern-sounding language. One character used vowels which I would have said were characteristic of Estuary English or MLE: monophthongs where RP would have had a diphthong, for instance. And Rafe Spall himself said, at one point, seen as rather than the normatively correct seeing as (meaning more or less because or since). I'm hesitant to say that this is anachronistic, as it's almost invariably a 'recency illusion' when anyone makes an argument like that. Rather, it's probably just that we expect posh and middle class people in period dramas to speak in RP, and when they don't we find it jarring. But I can't find out how old this variant is, because it's virtually ungoogleable and I'm not sure where else to go to look for it. Seen as has indeed increased massively since 1960, but I can't filter out the false hits like we were seen as inferior, where it's not the same thing. Anyone happen to know about this? (Sorry if the chart is not the right size - html skillz are failing me today. Follow the link above to the original.)

Michael Rosen loves grammar

This isn't a post, just a link. It's a post by someone who criticises Michael Rosen. I won't have this. Michael Rosen tirelessly defends good language teaching. This person says he is down on grammar, when grammar is important. But he isn't - he gives every impression of finding it fascinating, and is admirably intelligent and well-informed on modern linguistic thinking. He just thinks the SPaG test for children is stupid (which it is). It also seems that the post's author regards grammar as a set of terminology that help you to write well, whereas Rosen appears to see grammar as something interesting and exciting in its own right (which it is). Anyway, here's the post and below it you can read Rosen responding at length.

Not as much hedgehogs

On the RSPB's website there's this rather charming text (emphasis mine):

Many of us feel there are fewer bumblebees bumbling around our flowerbeds, less sparrows flitting between our gardens and not as many hedgehogs sniffing around our green spaces. 

We might also add 'not as much' to complete the set.

Of course, a pedant would say that less is ungrammatical for a countable noun like sparrows, and that both ought to be fewer. Similarly, it would be 'wrong' to say not as much if it were followed by something like hedgehogs, but in this paragraph it provides a nice variety in the expression used.