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. 

It end ups being a word

[Please note that this is a schedule post and I am currently observing my union (UCU)'s industrial action over pensions, pay, workloads, and equality.]

English has a group of verbs that you might know as 'phrasal verbs'. It's things like cheer up, find out, turn off. They include what looks like a preposition (up, out, off) so can be hard to distinguish from normal verbs with a preposition following them. To add to the complication, verbs that are not really phrasal but might have a preposition after them come in two types: they have to have a particular preposition, or they can have any old one optionally. Here's a classic Linguistics 101 example to clarify: 

Look can occur with no preposition at all: 

I'm not sure where it is, I'll look. 

Or it can be followed by one of several prepositions: 

I'm not sure where it is, I'll look at a map. 

I'm not sure where it is, I'll look up the address. 

I'm not sure where it is, I'll look in the atlas. 

I'm not sure where it is, I'll look to the stars as my guide. 

I'm not sure where it is, I'll look with my soul. 

OK, I'll stop there before it gets silly. But one of these is different from the others. Compare these two sentences: 

*I'm not sure where it is, I'll look a map at. 

I'm not sure where it is, I'll look the address up. 

In the second one, we can put the preposition at the end, whereas we can't do that in the first one. That's because look up is (in this case) a phrasal verb, and up isn't really a preposition. It's sometimes known as a verbal particle and it's doing something other than signifying direction. Compare it to the same phrase when it's not a phrasal verb. As we just saw, phrasal verbs like this one can move the 'preposition' to the end: 

I looked up the address.

I looked the address up. 

They can't have any other preposition than the one they go with, though:  

*I looked down the address. 

But if look up is not a phrasal verb, but instead just a normal verb that happens to be followed by a preposition, the opposite is true. You can't move the preposition to the end, but you can change it for another one. (I've added in a bit of context here to make the meaning clear.) 

I looked up the street and saw my friend arriving. 

*I looked the street up and saw my friend arriving. 

I looked down the street and saw my friend arriving. 

Anyway, this is all stuff that's in grammar books, so on to the observational content that you know and love. Someone I follow on twitter used the phrasal verb end up, but treated it as a single unit, putting the verbal ending on the particle, like this: 

...because it end ups reproducing the same situation they want to avoid. 

Normally, you'd expect to see ends up, not end ups. But this does make sense if you consider a phrasal verb to be a single unit. End up is a bit different from look up in that we can't move up anywhere else. It really always does have to be end up, with nothing in between them, and no other preposition than up. The parts don't really mean the same on their own (end could be used in the same way, but it's not). So it's really functioning as a single word in any meaningful sense, and therefore it makes sense to stick the word ending (the 'inflection') on the end of the whole unit, as this person did. 

100% belief about 100% racism

As promised, more on Stormzy. He caused a right ruckus the other day, not on purpose. In an interview in Italy, he said, when asked if he thought Britain was still racist today, "Definitely, 100%". This was reported by ITV and then others as him saying that he thought Britain was "100% racist". This was widely condemned, ridiculed and mocked, as well as provoking an absolute meltdown among people who took it to mean that Stormzy was calling them personally racist. (An aside: even if he had meant that Britain is 100% racist, he wouldn't be wrong, on the sensible definition of a racist society as one in which your racialised identity affects your success and advantage in life, which it does in Britain.)

Curiously, both phrasings could actually mean both things, but there's a tendency for them to be interpreted differently. The two meanings are: Stormzy is 100% of the belief that there is (some) racism in Britain; and Stormzy believes that Britain is 100% (i.e. entirely) racist. '100%' either quantifies the amount of racism (complete racism), or it quantifies his level of belief (total belief). While his phrasing lends itself strongly to the interpretation where he means "Yeah, I believe 100% that there is (some) racism", the phrasing reported lends itself more to "Yeah, I believe that Britain is 100% racist". Why? the position of the '100%' next to the adjective 'racist' in the inaccurate reporting implies modification of that adjective, or in other words, totally racist.

His answer as it was actually given could also mean this, though, even with the preceding question ("is Britain still racist today") for context: "Definitely, [it is] 100% [racist]". As noted above, I'd have supported his answer if this had been what he meant. But he was clear about the fact that it wasn't!

And I think you can get this correct reading even with the inaccurate phrasing, although it's less salient. In "Britain is 100% racist", I can get an interpretation here where '100%' is an intensifier rather than a proper quantifier, and means something more like 'definitely'. The meaning of "Britain is definitely racist" doesn't necessarily mean that every aspect of and person in Britain is racist: "Britain is racist" can mean "There is some racism in Britain". But because it can also mean the entirety, and the partial meaning isn't made explicit, the 'entirely racist' meaning is more readily available.

Unexpected adverbials

Liliane Haegeman has been here at Kent all week on an Erasmus teaching mobility visit. She's been giving four seminars on adverbial clauses, including among other things the difference between what she calls 'central' and 'peripheral' adverbial clauses. Central adverbials modify the event itself, so in this case the 'while' clause tells you the time during which the main event happened:

I took out the rubbish [while you were watching telly] 

Peripheral adverbials, meanwhile, don't tell us about event time or anything like that, but are more about the relation between the clauses or speaker attitude. In this case, the 'while' clause gives a contrastive or concessive meaning: 

I’m quite active, [while he is a total slob] 

These clauses have various properties that distinguish them. One of these properties is the tense of the verb. Central adverbial clauses (e.g. expressing time) have the same tense as the main verb, or if they don't, they're interpreted as doing so. Here, there is a future marker 'will' in the main clause, and the 'while' clause has present tense 'watch', but it's interpreted as happening at the same time as the main clause.

I'll take the rubbish out [while you watch telly]

A peripheral (e.g. contrastive) adverbial with different tenses is interpreted as being two different times:

I was fortunate to get full funding for my degree, [while he has to borrow a student loan]

The 'full funding' happened in the past (with past tense 'was') and the 'borrowing' is now (present tense 'has').

All of the above is paraphrasing what Liliane told us in the first seminar. She also said this this is something that you specifically have to tell learners of English, that they have to use present tense in this kind of clause. 'If' clauses are the same, in that they have two meanings:

If you don't understand this part, you won't be able to follow tomorrow's seminar. [if = condition]

If you didn't understand, why didn't you raise your hand and ask? [if = assumed background]

The conditional one is the one where the tense should be present even if the main clause is future, as it is here. Then, at the end of the seminar, Liliane was talking about the following one the next day, and she said this:

Even if you won't come back to the class, you have the handout. 

For this to be a normal conditional, it needs to be present tense 'Even if you don't come back'. But Liliane used the future tense marker 'won't', and then all of a sudden it was forced into the assumed background interpretation: 'Even though I understand it's the case that you won't come back...' where the implication was that she knew that we wouldn't return, and so she had given us the handout, when in fact the meaning was that she thought we would but if we didn't, we had the handout.

Another example of the same thing is a little more complicated because you need to know about Dutch word order. Dutch has 'V2', which means that the finite verb is the second constituent in the clause. So it can look like English, where you have the subject, then the verb, then the object, or it can be some other part of the sentence before the verb, like the object or an adverbial clause like the ones we just talked about. Now here's the thing: only the central adverbials can be this first element before the verb. If it's the other kind, then it doesn't 'count' and you need something else to be there, like the subject. Look at this, where the verb is in bold (example from the seminar handout):

Dutch: [Als het je interesseert,] er zal in Parijs ook een vacature zijn.
Word-for-word: If it you interests, there will in Paris also a vacancy be.
Idiomatically: 'If you are interested, in Paris there is also a vacancy.'

The 'if' clause is the kind that gives you background info, that doesn't count, so you have something else (the subject 'there') before the verb 'zal', which is now the third constituent. If you swap the order and have 'Als... zal er...', namely 'if... will there' where the 'if' clause is the one element before the verb in normal second position, it magically gets forced into the interpretation where the 'if' clause is a real conditional - the vacancy only exists if you're interested in it!

(NB: I've massively over-simplified this, and much of the week was spent learning how lots of this has interesting exceptions, and I've conflated two types of clause, etc etc. I've also paraphrased Liliane's work to write this, so consider this a citation.) 

Josh Scot likes

This graffiti appears on a wall near where I live:

I imagine that that last word is an unfinished name, and Josh Scot was declaring his liking for that person but got caught in the act and had to scarper.

But I prefer to think that Scot likes Josh, and for whatever reason used an unusual word order to say so. Perhaps he was halfway through a comparison of the various people that other people like: Josh, Scot likes; Kieron, Phil likes. It's a bit strange to use this topicalisation construction in graffiti (or at all, to be honest - you see it in linguistics papers more than anywhere else) but you never know.

Incidentally, an indication of how uncommon a construction this is is that I just nearly got the participants the wrong way round: I typed 'Josh likes Scot' originally and had to think about it a bit to get it right. But you do sometimes find them occurring quite naturally and spontaneously, so it is a genuinely grammatical English sentence.

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!

The complicated strange business of stacking up adjectives

There was recently a nice Slate article on adjective ordering. I won't repeat it all here, as you can go and read it if you're interested, but it seems to me to be a very clear and interesting description of which order adjectives can appear in, and why it's weird to say bad big wolf rather than big bad wolf. It discusses the clearly sensible idea that a more 'intrinsic' or 'permanent' or 'inherent' property is closer to the noun than a temporary one (happy French student vs. *French happy student), but also notes the fact that not all adjective orders can be determined that way, and some orders are actually in contradiction to that idea. It also provides a spectacularly unmemorable mnemonic, GSSSACPM. 

Quick survey

Under the cut I'll explain this, but before you go there, decide on the answer to these questions:

If you heard the phrase The black ladies'/lady's bicycle, so you didn't have spelling as a clue, what could it mean?
a. a black bicycle designed for women
b. a bicycle belonging to a black woman
c. both a and b
d. neither

If you heard the phrase The ladies'/lady's black bicycle, again without spelling as a clue, what could it mean?
a. a black bicycle designed for women
b. a bicycle belonging to a black woman
c. both a and b
d. neither