Not long ago, a friend of mine was moving to Germany and looking for flats. She complained, on facebook, that the only kind of apartment to rent was Dachgeschosswohnung. I'm not great at German yet, so I let facebook translate it for me and it said that this word meant 'penthouse'. I took this to mean that she couldn't afford anywhere, as they were all luxury places and out of her budget, as this is the connotation of 'penthouse' in English.
What the word actually means is 'top floor flat', literally, and it's basically an attic. Now, while a penthouse is a top floor flat, it's not at all the same as an attic, which has a sloping roof and is small and non-luxurious, which is exactly what she meant when she made her complaint. Literal translation, yes, but a very different interpretation of the type of accommodation it refers to.
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I haven’t been here for ages because it became a time suck, but I think I’ll start putting my blog posts on here again (as well as on my normal blog). I may not interact much, though, because see above.
Just in case you are interested, here is the first set of facts about cheeky (as in cheeky nando's) - some of you took my survey a while back so thank you :)
Thank you very much for helping with our research. We are linguists at the universities of Cardiff and Kent and we are interested in your opinions about some sentences which include the word 'cheeky'. You will see several sentences and we would like to know how natural they sound to you. Some of them will seem perfectly normal, and others will seem a bit more informal but still natural. Some may seem awkward. Please give your instinctive response for each sentence, without worrying about whether the sentences are 'correct' English. We simply want to know: would you or other people use these sentences, in any context? There are three pages of sentences, and you will see these instructions on each page.
Hey! If you wanted to take this cheeky survey to find out about how people can or can’t use ‘cheeky’, that would be fab!
Thank you very much for helping with our research. We are linguists at the universities of Cardiff and Kent and we are interested in your opinions about some sentences which include the word 'cheeky'. You will see several sentences and we would like to know how natural they sound to you. Some of them will seem perfectly normal, and others will seem a bit more informal but still natural. Some may seem awkward. Please give your instinctive response for each sentence, without worrying about whether the sentences are 'correct' English. We simply want to know: would you or other people use these sentences, in any context? There are three pages of sentences, and you will see these instructions on each page.
Hey! If you wanted to take this cheeky survey to find out about how people can or can’t use ‘cheeky’, that would be fab!
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Mostly I like it, except the font + flat icons looks SUUUUUUUUUUUPER cartoony and jarring compared to the super slick look Apple has developed over the last few years.
My new hope is that this means maybe they’ll have some sort of totally ridiculous throwback colorful iMac sometime soon so that I...
"My new hope is that this means maybe they’ll have some sort of totally ridiculous throwback colorful iMac sometime soon so that I can relive my elementary/middle school days and type on a beautiful, colorful box."
It’s like he’s not even trying any more. It’s like the people ruling have just given up pretending to be in keeping with the modern world, like they’ve said “fuck it, as far as I’m concerned, it’s the seventies but everything is faster and we’ve got more money”. They’re not even pretending to care anymore.
Obviously this is offensive and he's a total idiot for posing for this photo, and I would not dance in blackface at all, because it is offensive. But it isn't as simple as saying it is or isn't racist.
For those that are interested in the actual complicated history of why some morris sides dance in black face paint, well, no one actually knows (it is generally said to have originally been a disguise), but this is a good discussion of what we do know. It's long but interesting, but for those who don't want to read the whole thing, he basically says 'it may not have been racist to begin with but given that now it can certainly appear racist, we should stop doing it and paint our faces blue or whatever other colour we like'. In other words, it isn't important that you don't intend it to be racist and that it's a tradition; what matters is whether the relevant people think it's racist.
I'm behaving like an old person and getting disgruntled at new developments in technology. Google and Apple both have a voice-controlled thing in their various devices which allows you to speak your search query. You can activate this with a button, but now there's a way to make it notice that you want it by saying a specific thing. In the case of Google you have to say 'OK Google' and in the case of Apple you have to say 'Hey Siri' (Siri is the name of the pretend person in your iphone).
Both of these are very rude, 'Hey Siri' perhaps less so, but still rude nevertheless. I think it's just about OK to say 'hey' to a real person if, say, you were just talking to them and you're walking away and then you remember something and you want to signal to them that you want their attention again. Or you can say 'hey' instead of 'hi', if you know the person quite well. So perhaps you can say 'Hey Siri' as if you're saying 'hi' to it, but I haven't tested it to find out. From the inflection in the advert, it's much more like you're summoning a minion (which you are, but if they're going to make it sound like a real person, then you ought to treat it like a real person).
'OK Google', on the other hand, is just downright rude. It sounds to me as if Google is consistently messing up and you're resigned to that but giving it yet another chance to get it right. Poor Google. Or perhaps you're challenging it, like 'OK Google, you think you're so clever, try this'.
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Just in time for back to school, here are some tips for doing better on your linguistics assignments from someone who’s marked a few hundred of them over the years.
General:
1. Read the question. The easiest mistake to fix: if the...
can someone please help me understand the concept of the grammatical case, in general, not in any specific language. i partially understand it but it isn’t clicking in my head and i’m going to be learning german this fall and i’ve been having a hard time wrapping me head around it. i understand...
From what you've said, you already know enough for learning German. That really is literally all it is - the different roles nouns have in a sentence have different cases. So German does with case what English might do with a preposition or with word order (I don't speak German so can't give an example but imagine a language where instead of saying 'I stroked him with a feather' you say 'I stroked him a feather-INSTRUMENT' or even 'I stroked him a feather-with'. Just extra info, or the same info, but as a suffix instead of some other way of doing it.
There is more to it, if you want to get into the linguistics of how it all works. For instance, not all languages that have case have the same cases - some have lots and lots, and there's a split between what are called nominative-accusative (like German) and ergative-absolutive languages, which use case for the same sort of thing but in a slightly different way. But all of this is not needed to speak the language :)
Sorry - I feel like I haven't added anything much to this discussion. But rest assured you will know more than most people trying to learn a language with case.
Hooray! It's been too long since Richard Dawkins last tweeted something massively ill-judged for me to blog about. (tw for after the readmore)
The context: Dawk is back in a previously-contested argument in which he says that 'mild' rape/paedophilia/violence is not as bad as 'violent' rape/paedophilia/violence, and then the rest of the internet gets cross with him about it. Previously, criticism was mostly around the debatable existence of 'mild rape' or 'mild paedophilia', whereas this time he has been more precise and talked about date rape versus violent rape at knifepoint. We don't need to debate which is worse, or if there is any need to have a hierarchy of such crimes (that's for judges or experts in traumatic incidents to decide, I suppose). What I want to focus on is two vaguely linguisticky things: Dawk's utter failure to grasp the need for something beyond logical truth, and 'so'.
Dawk is presenting this as a logical syllogism (in response to criticism; it wasn't how he first presented it). It isn't actually a classical syllogism, which is the 'all men are mortal' type of deductive reasoning. Really, he's just refuting an implication that some people inferred from a statement of comparison. It's unfortunate that the newspapers that get their content by summarising twitter feeds (I'm looking at you, Independent) couldn't be bothered to find this out, but no matter. While syllogisms and other logical arguments are relevant to linguistics (and I have fun teaching them in my semantics module), more important here is the fact that Dawkins is just banging on and on about logical truth, never seeing that the logical truth of his statement really isn't the point. Nobody seems to have put this in a way that he can understand, so it's not entirely his fault, but still: rape, paedophilia and the like are highly emotive topics and there is currently a lot of discussion about 'rape culture'. Given this, it's not surprising that many people would be less concerned with logical truth and more with the rhetorical effect of such public statements. Many people are extremely worried that some instances of rape are trivialised or simply discounted because the victim was drunk/married to the rapist/didn't say no etc. Saying that date rape is less bad than violent knifepoint rape may be logically true (or it may not be - Dawkins is agnostic on the matter), but humans do a lot more than just compute logical truths. We actually have to work quite hard to see purely logical truth (hence the zillions of logical fallacies that we can make), and we set a lot of store in the inferences we make. Even though saying that X is not as bad as Y doesn't condone X, it still appears to make excuses for those people who dismiss the 'date rape' cases as 'not really rape'.
So, on to 'so'. In the tweet pictured above, someone passive-aggressively tweets about Dawkins, not to him, while @ing him so that he sees it. This is the height of bad twitter manners. Dawkins, in his response, takes exception to Sequester Zone's use of 'so', asking why they used it. I assume that Dawkins is making bizarre linguistic assumptions again, and would hazard a guess that he considers 'so' to be incorrect when it is used as an introductory particle, similarly to 'and' or 'but'. I've seen some other peeving about this lately, with people claiming that 'everyone is starting their sentences with so these days'. As it happens, I agree with much of what it says in the article linked via the response above, but 'so' doesn't always indicate a rehearsed pitch or dumbing-down. It's long been used as a turn-beginning marker, or as a way to indicate that you're returning to a previous topic, or many other things. The OED's got an example from 1602 in their sense 5c, where it's a kind of 'hey I'm talking' marker:
So, let me see, my apron.
And in sense 10b(a) from 1710 (Swift, no less), where there is no preceding statement but one is implied:
So you have got into Presto's lodgings; very fine, truly!
And 10b(b), which it attributes to 'reflecting Yiddish idioms', where there is no preceding statement, or where there is adversative force (probably the use in the tweet) from the 1950s (this example is 1960):
‘I warn you..I ain't got no wine.’ ‘So who wants wine?’
Note, though, that it serves another function within twitter. In a tweet, if you begin with an @-name, it will only be seen by people that follow both parties. The convention, therefore, if your tweet begins with a name but is a mention rather than directed at that person, is to begin with a full stop so that all your followers will see it. Alternatively, you could make sure that the @-name isn't at the beginning of the tweet by using an introductory particle such as 'so'.
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I said “have a nice day!” to this old dude and apparently that’s not fucking good enough because he retrieved his wallet and from like a stack of 30 of these things pulled one out and gave it to me and said something like “I hope you reconsider your choices next time”
My boss always says some shit about “not a problem” and it’s like…its meant as a reassurance that they aren’t being an inconvenience even though they most likely are because…retail
Ugh. It's one thing being pedantic, but it's quite another to make someone else feel like crap for something that's personal preference anyway.
PLUS there are at least four mistakes in the text.
I just remembered a time when my partner was doing a theme tune/jingle/intro for a friend's story collection and he needed the title to be creepy so I worked out how it would be if it was said backwards and wrote it out in IPA so I could say it easily and he reversed it and the result was creepy, and LINGUISTICS WAS USEFUL.
