Sapir-Whorf revisited
I once saw a painting by a Nordic artist that depicted the sun as a woman and the moon as a man. In most Germanic languages that have masculine and feminine (including German and Nynorsk), ‘sun’ is indeed feminine and ‘moon’ is masculine.
On the other hand, in Romance languages the situation is reversed, and ‘sun’ is masculine and ‘moon’ is feminine.
So when I described the painting to a native Romance speaker, she was shocked.
Ever since that episode, I’ve thought that you couldn’t fully discount the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, even if that placed me in the minority among linguists (I even wrote an essay about Whorf in my second year at uni).
I therefore read this article in the New York Times with great interest. You always have to be extremely cautious about believing any piece of linguistics published in mainstream media, but I didn’t spot any obvious errors.
It’s good that it quickly shows why the simplistic versions of linguistic relativism cannot be true, and I wasn’t aware of the existence of geographic languages, but the description sounds fairly convincing.
I guess I’d better get hold of a grammar of Guugu Yimithirr or Tzeltal to learn more!
Ti og tis
Léon er nu begyndt på anden skoleuge, og han har fået lektier med hjem for første gang i dag.
For det første skal han synge nogle talsange, som jeg sikkert ikke kender. 
For det andet skal de øve ord, der kan skrives med ‘a’, ‘i’, ‘s’ og ‘t’.
På engelsk er der sikkert gode grunde til at begynde med disse fire bogstaver (de prøver vist at undgå bogstaver som ‘e’ og ‘r’, der hyppigt er stumme), men på dansk er der altså ikke ret mange ord, der kan skrives med dem.
Jeg skrev fluks en one-liner til at finde alle ordene, og her er en fuldstændig liste:
ais
asiat
at
i
sats
sit
stat
statist
sti
tast
ti
tis
‘Ais’, ‘asiat’, ‘sats’, ‘stat’ og ‘statist’ kender han helt sikkert ikke, og ‘at’, ‘i’ og ‘sit’ er nok ikke de bedste ord at begynde med (konkrete substantiver og den slags er nok bedst), så tilbage bliver blot ‘sti’, ‘tast’, ‘ti’ og ’tis’.
I Léons aktive ordforråd bliver denne liste nok til reduceret til ‘ti’ og ’tis’.
Jeg glæder mig til senere på ugen, når han også begynder at bruge ‘n’ og ‘p’ – så kan vi da tilføje nogle nyttige ord såsom ‘ananas’, ‘pasta’, ‘satan’ og ‘spinat’.
The emergence of hypergrams in the written language of young people
Anybody who has young Facebook contacts from the UK is likely to have come across weird spellings in recent years.
It started out as text speak, i.e., the abbreviation of words to make them easier to type on a phone, such as gr8t ‘great’, 2moz ‘tomorrow’ and wat ‘what’.
However, recently they seem to have started making the words longer too, typically by repeating letters.
Here are a few examples from my Facebook contacts:
helloooo bestieee ♥
ehhh itss kindaa sick :L
NAKKKKEDDD scenes :O wuu2 ?
yu madeee soo many mistaakes i think u comeee tomorrow i think orr maybeee wednesdaaay :S
in londonnn and itss fiaaaaane !
I’m not aware of any existing term for these spellings, so I’m going to call them hypergrams.
Obviously they help to mark the writer as a young person, but we asked Marcel over dinner whether they served any specific purpose (such as adding emphasis to a word), but he claimed this was not the case.
It would be interesting to know if anybody has done any research on this topic.
Very little Frisian
I’ve been exploring Leeuwarden/Ljowert (the capital of Friesland) for most of the afternoon.
I must say I’m disappointed.
Apart from a few engraved poems, a couple of restaurant menus, and the name of the regional council, I have not found anything written in Frisian.
I thought the language was coöfficial with Dutch here, so I had expected tons of bilingual signs and informal stuff only in the language, just like you would see in Catalonia or the Basque Country.
But there’s more Gaelic in Glasgow than Frisian in Leeuwarden!
More about the penis/peonies contrast
After my recent blog posting about penis vs. peonies, I found this in John Wells’s Accents of English: The British Isles:
Some speakers also have instances of apparently autonomous length contrasts in other environments, e.g. leek [lik] vs. leak [liːk], vane [ven] vs. vain [veːn], creek [krik] vs. creak [kriːk], choke vs. joke, made vs. maid, badge vs. cadge.
However, when I asked Phyllis to read aloud these words, she didn’t have any length contrasts in them, so she doesn’t seem to be in the group of speakers mentioned by Wells.
Curiouser and curiouser.
Estuary German
Lena Meyer-Landrut’s weird English pronunciation (only when she’s singing – when she talking, it’s just normal mediocre school English) has attracted some attention.
I’ve tried to transcribe the beginning of the song:
| I went everywhere for you | aɪ wɛnt ɛfʁɪwɛː fə juː |
| I even did my hair for you | aɪ iːvən dɪd maɪ hɛːʁ fə jʉː |
| I bought new underwear, they’re blue | aɪ bɔːt nuː andəwɛː, ðaɪ bluː |
| And I wore ‘em just the other day | ən ə wɔrəm dʒʌst ðɪ ʌðə daɪ |
| Love, you know I’ll fight for you | lʌv, juː nɔʊ aɪl faɪt fə juː |
| I left on the porch light for you | aɪ lɛft ɔn də pɔʁtʃ laɪt fə juː |
| Whether you are sweet or cruel | wɛðə juː aː swiːt ɔː kʁuː(l) |
| I’m gonna love you either way | aɪm ɡʌnə lʌv juː iːðə weɪ |
| Love, oh, love, I gotta tell you how I feel about you | lʌv əʊ lʌv aɪ ɡɔtə tɛl juː haʊ aɪ fiːl əbaut juː |
| ‘Cause I, oh, I can’t go a minute without your love | kɔz aɪ øʊ ai kan ɡɔʊ ə mɪnət wiðaʊt juʁ lʌv |
Some people (at least in Germany and Denmark) have been trying to defend her pronunciation by claiming she’s singing in Cockney (by which I guess they mean Estuary English), but that’s a misunderstanding.
It’s true that many native Londoners would pronounce ‘day’ in a way close to [daɪ], but like all other native speakers of English, they would make it rhyme with ‘way’, which should in this accent be [waɪ], not [weɪ].
In the same way, no matter what accent of English you’re trying to speak, you should use the same vowel/diphthong in ‘oh’ and ‘go’.
Also, no variety of English that I know of conflates the vowels in ‘light’ and ‘day’. In Scottish English, they are [əɪ] and [e]; in RP, they are [aɪ] and [eɪ]; and in Estuary English, they might be [ɑɪ] and [ʌɪ]. The main thing is they’re always different.
Finally, of course there are features of a London accent that she hasn’t copied at all – for instance, her /l/s and /r/s sound very German to me.
So this is not a case of a German who sings in Cockney; it’s a case of a German schoolgirl with mediocre English who’s copied pronunciations at random from songs she’s listened to.
Penis vs. peonies
In RP, the distinction between ‘penis’ /ˈpiːnɪs/ and ‘peonies’ /ˈpiːənɪz/ is very clear.
However, in Scottish English, the /ə/ in the latter word is omitted, so in my current mixture of RP and Scottish English the two words become almost homophones: /ˈpiːnɪs/ vs. /ˈpiːnɪz/.
However, applying the standard rules of Scottish English (not of Scots!) would make the difference somewhat clearer – you would expect the difference to be /’pinɪs/ [ˈpinɪs] vs. /ˈpine#z/ [ˈpineːz].
The difference is even bigger, though.
Something happens to the first vowel in peonies, so the difference is actually [ˈpinɪs] vs. [ˈpiːneːz], as if it were /ˈpi#ne#z/ (almost like a hypothetical compound *pea-nays).
I wonder what’s going on – in Scottish English vowel length is normally predictable if you know the morphology of the word.
Automatic subtitles
During the election campaign, I wrote a blog posting about an uplifting video.
At some point, I discovered that YouTube are testing automatic subtitles, i.e., speech recognition, and that it was available for this video.
Here’s is my transcription of the video, together with YouTube/Google’s take on it:
| Original | Google/YouTube |
|---|---|
| Now, we want change | We’re going to change |
| It’ll never happen | Yeah |
| I no longer believe the future is in our hands | I mean he thinks is enough |
| I know the media can control us | I knew the meetings’s collapse |
| It’s just not the case that we have a real choice in this election | It’s just not the case real choice incident |
| Instead we have to vote the way we’re told | He said we have to think that way this time |
| No longer do I believe things can be different | You know what it’s like to be seems to be different |
| Vote for change and you waste your vote | They’ve changed at least, thanks |
| Vote for a party you don’t really believe in | They affect us today |
| This is how things have to be | The southeast |
| I don’t accept that a third party could win | I think it sets a sense posturing |
| More and more people are realising that politicians are more powerful than the people | More and more people in real life, Clinton since and powerful the people |
| But what if we could turn things upside down? | But what if we could send things upside down? |
| The people are more powerful than politicians | The people, almost half of those positions |
| More and more people are realising that a third party could win | More and more people realizing that that cost thing |
| I don’t accept that this is how things have to be | I can accept this is how things be |
| Vote for a party you don’t really believe in and you waste your vote | The effect on Saturday the the make sure things |
| Vote for change | Things have changed |
| I believe things can be different | I don’t think so |
| No longer do we have to vote the way we’re told | You don’t have to be that the women’s health |
| Instead we have a real choice in this election | Instead of the UN to lift the sanctions |
| It’s just not the case that the media can control us | It’s just not the case at least told us |
| I know the future is in our hands | Pointed he can’t do not |
| I no longer believe it’ll never happen | You know |
| We want change | He hasn’t changed |
| Now | Yeah |
It’s quite shockingly bad, isn’t it?
I have a suspicion that it might have been designed primarily for American English, but I guess the background music didn’t make it easier for the program, either.
I’m very happy I don’t have to rely on those subtitles just yet!
Pippinen på tebunen
Da vi var i Danmark i sidste måned, begyndte Anna at bruge efterhængt bestemt artikel.
I begyndelsen overdrev hun dog endelsen, og de fleste ord fik påhæftet suffikset -nen: pippinen ‘fuglen’, bobonen ‘bukserne’, tebunen ‘bordet’, Majanen ‘Amaia’.
På det seneste er hun dog begyndt at forkorte endelsen, men stort set alle ord er fortsat fælleskøn.
Hun er også begyndt at overføre danske idéer om, hvor pluralis bruges, til engelsk. For eksempel sagde hun forleden It is pinks ‘De er lyserøde’.
En og et
Léon hører normalt godt efter, så hvis man læser en bog om “et egern” eller “et får”, er der en god chance for, at han vil gentage artiklen korrekt, hvis man taler med ham om historien eller billederne.
Men det gik op for mig i forgårs, at hvis man stiller ham spørgsmål om ting, man ikke lige har talt om, og hvor det oplagte svar er “et”, siger han altid “en”:
– Hvor mange borde er der på billedet?
– Én.
Så jeg har nu brugt et del tid på at stille pædagogiske spørgsmål, så han kan få lært at bruge køn korrekt. Han er trods alt næsten 4½ år gammel og skal starte i skolen efter sommerferien.
Han skal nok blive glad for det i længden. Jeg har i hvert fald ofte ærgret mig over, at jeg kun fik lært tysk køn og kasus i det omfang, det var nødvendigt for at forstå talt tysk.
Det er jo forbandelsen ved at være tosproget i en situation, hvor man næsten aldrig har brug for at tale sprog nummer to: Man lærer at forstå det som en indfødt, og ens udtale er stort set perfekt, men man laver stadigvæk dumme fejl, der straks afslører en som ikke-indfødt.
