Gaston Dorren's Blog, page 8

Lab-in-a-word

[image error]One of the many tiny things that nanotechnologists have developed is a laboratory so small that a mere sliver of silicon can accommodate it. I don’t know what to admire more: this feat of engineering on the littlest imaginable scale or the succinct and graphic name they’ve coined for it, lab-on-a-chip (with lab-on-chip as a fairly common alternative).

But while the word is excellent, the plural is somewhat problematic. Opinions – or perhaps I should say intuitions – are divided between several options, and they nearly all make sense.

My own grammar gut tells me that lab-on-(a-)chip is a case like sister-in-law, tug-of-war and secretary-general. Unusually for English nouns, their main elements (known as heads) come first, which is why their plurals are sisters-in-law, tugs-of-war and secretaries-general. That strongly suggests that labs-on-(a-)chip would be the way to go. At just over 50%, this indeed is the most common form that a Google search turns up.

But hot on its heels, at 46%, is the alternative lab-on-(a-)chips. This seems odd at first sight, but on reflection, it has two important things going for it.

Firstly, there is the rather duh reason that adding a plural s at the end is how the overwhelming majority of English nouns form their plurals. That’s why you and I say sisters, tugs and secretaries, and it’s why some people also say sister-in-laws, tug-of-wars and secretary-generals. The latter set of plurals may pain many readers of this blog, but they’re by no means rare.

However, the main reason why the plural lab-on-(a-)chips occurs so frequently is probably a bit subtler and perhaps more commendable. When you meet your sister-in-law, she’s quite obviously much more like a sibling than a piece of legislation. Secretary-general is somewhat secretarial in nature and does not resemble a general. (Sepp Blatter, who reminds me of a general in a banana republic, is among the exceptions.) And while the word tug-of-war is a bit of a strange beast (to me anyway), the tug is usually more manifest than the war. So it’s always the head you notice most, not the add-on that specifies it (or the dependent, as it’s known).

But when you’re shown a lab-on-a-chip, you don’t see the lab so much – it’s the chip that stands out. As a result, it’s easy to assume that a lab-on-(a-)chip is a particular type of chip, along with the woodchip, the computer chip and the tortilla chip. In which case it goes without saying, almost without thinking, that the plural is formed by simply tacking on the usual s in the usual place: lab-on-(a-)chips.

This becomes even more self-evident when we consider an even newer nanotechnological device: the evolution-on-a-chip. Evolution is a process, not a concrete object, so an evolution-on-a-chip is first and foremost a chip. It takes a fine grammatically attuned mind such as yours to see that the head of the word, the part that would by rights claim the plural s, is evolution. The plural that most mortals will prefer is evolution-on-a-chips. I haven’t found instances yet, but wait for it.

A third, moderately frequent type of plural for lab-on-(a-)chip has not one, but two s’s: labs-on-chips. And if you ask me, there’s a lot to be said for that one too. After all, as soon as you have two of these labs, you also have two chips. With your in-laws, that’s different: no matter how many brothers, daughters, parents and other relatives by marriage you may have, the same law applies to all. Sisters-in-laws is plain silly. Labs-on-chips is good thinking.

Yet there is one plural that makes me shudder. Labs-on-a-chips is thankfully rare, and long may it remain so. Admittedly, it would be a legitimate plural for labs-on-a-chip, but since that singular is nearly non-existent, there’s no need to accept this grotesque plural.

One last observation. Some readers may feel that I’m dealing here with too minuscule an issue. I beg to disagree however. I’ve been blazing a trail into nanolinguistics.

Pilar

Humans only get away with puns that are brilliant, but when reality tries its hand at them, we’re more indulgent.

I am shown around the office of my Spanish publisher in Madrid, and my hostess introduces me to someone I’ve exchanged many pleasant emails with, but never met in person: ‘This is Pilar.’ We hug lightly and peck each other on the cheek.

‘And here’, my hostess continues, ‘we have another Pilar.’ I look in the direction she’s pointing and see… no-one. What I do see is a pillar.

The fact is, pilar is Spanish for ‘pillar’. Is she poking fun at Pilar’s name? That seems a bit out of character. Is she introducing me to the pillar? Unthinkable.

To my relief, the puzzle is solved before I can embarrass myself. Something begins to stir from behind the pillar. Another female figure appears, hand outstretched: ‘Hi, nice to meet you.’

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The Spanish translation of Lingo is now for sale in Spain. It will be available in Latin America in late April.

TEDx Talk: Grow Up, Learn Another Language

You may never have heard of Venlo, a medium-sized city in the southeast of the Netherlands, on the German border. The people of Venlo tend to be multilingual, speaking Dutch, German and English as well as their (and my) regional language, Limburgish. The city has gained unsought notoriety as the place where Geert Wilders, the leader of the country’s extreme right, was born and grew up.

Last November, a group of people from Venlo organised their third TEDx event and invited me to participate. I focused my talk on some of the effects of multilingualism: its benefits to the individual, but especially to society. Feel free to let me know what you think.

Vietnamese (4): Flipping the flashcards, fixing the accents

[image error]In just under four months of – ideally – daily practice, I’ve mastered some 300 Vietnamese words.

Or have I? When I see them on my flashcards, there’s a fair chance that I recognise them and can tell what they mean. But if you were to show me words that I haven’t studied, likely as not I would believe I recognised and understood many of those also. The trouble with Vietnamese is that so many of its words look so damn similar. The letter a alone has 18 varieties, counting all the possible single and double diacritics. But my European eyes will focus on the a as such and my European brain will remember only the bare and unadorned a. I have to force them to pay heed to the scribbles above it – and sometimes even below it, as in ạ, ặ and ậ.

However, this wasn’t going to be a lament, this post was to be about my next step in learning and about a tiny but neat discovery.

I’ve decided that just knowing what words mean is not good enough. I need to approach these flashcards differently: from their flip side. It’s all good and well knowing what ngày may means, but if I want to say ‘tomorrow’ and I only vaguely remember it’s a two-syllable word with two a’s in it, that won’t get me far, as there are literally thousands of those. So from now on, I intend to meticulously memorise every letter and every accent of the vocabs I study. I’m sure I’ll be failing most of the time, but I hope that this ambitious effort will make the more modest aim of merely recognising the words seem easy. Wish me luck.

So far I’ve been reading Vietnamese words from the page and from the screen, writing them by keyboard (not a mean feat!), hearing them as audiofiles and repeating them in my own voice as best I could. What I haven’t done much yet is write them by hand. I will correct that now, as I expect it to be a useful additional technique of imprinting the unfamiliar words on my reluctant brain. But Vietnamese writing presents fresh challenges, especially to someone with my abominable penmanship. Will I be at all able to write vowels with two superimposed accents, such as ẫ? What is an ẻ or ỉ even supposed to look like in handwriting? And as for ơ and ư – how exactly are they to be different from handwritten o and u?

Thank Google, the internet is rarely at a loss for words, even hand-written Vietnamese words – see examples below. It turns out that the hook-shaped accent on vowels such as ẻ and ỉ is written like a little dotless question mark on top. (Yes, I know that’s what it looks like in print. But print and handwriting are often quite different. Just think of our a’s and our g’s. And to prove my point, sometimes the same accent is written as a miniature 2 rather than a question mark.) The smaller hooks that grace the ơ and the ư are to rise up much higher than I would have guessed. So they are different from the printed form.

But the real surprise was in the double accents, the superimposed diacritics. The Vietnamese have solved the issue much more elegantly than I had expected. While the accents that change the value of the vowel are placed right above the letter (â, ă, ô, ơ, ư), those that indicate the tone may move to the right, ending up above adjacent letters or even above a space. So tiền (‘money’) may actually look like tiêǹ and số may become sô´. That makes a lot of sense, because these tone signs pertain to the whole syllable.

It’s none of my business of course, but my advice to the Vietnamese would be to adopt the same practice in printing. It would make the language look a lot more orderly and aesthetically pleasing.

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This writer seems to relish in some of the diacritics. If I’m not mistaken, the words môt năm mới ‘a new year’ can be made out in the centre .

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Hold your mother tongue

[image error]It’s impossible to find a language in which the world can communicate across linguistic borders. For the time being, we make do with English, but that was a bad solution even before the two major Anglophone countries contracted Mad Voter Disease. The language gives a 6% minority of the world population an edge that leaves most of the other 94% impotent and frustrated.

Of course, any world language spoken natively by some would be a weapon of mass destruction in their hands, leaving all others vulnerable and exposed. In amiable conversation, that’s sort of okay – people don’t nuke their friends. But as soon as there’s conflict of interest, the natives win every time. It’s a fact of life and every international negotiator knows it. Personally, I remember participating in a discussion on a UK radio station a few years ago, in which my English opponent was talking absolute, utter and demonstrable rot. I would have devastated the fellow in any other language I speak. But the shots I fired in what happened to be his first language were barely audible amidst his relentless bombing.

So we need something better, but what? Machine translation has potential, but let’s not put our hopes too high in the short term. Esperanto lacks the political, economic and cultural clout. Mandarin then? Who knows. Frankly, I hope not.

There is a solution though. It’s fairer than what we have at present and more realistic than the alternatives. It’s this: not one world language, but two.

One of these would, at this point in history, still be English. As for the other, let’s call it WL. It could be Spanish, it could be Hindi, it could even be Mandarin, never mind how I feel about it. It’s not the exact choice that matters, it’s the fact that, once we all speak both WL and English, we will never be forced to speak to anyone in their mother tongue again. It will become a matter of basic civility to shut up in one’s first language except in the company of those who prefer to use it – mostly fellow native speakers. At long last, the verbal battle field will be level.

But isn’t it simply too difficult to learn two foreign languages, you wonder? Before answering it (in the negative), let me point out that native English speakers would have to learn only one. But more importantly, multilingualism used to be common in Europe and it still is in Africa, India and many other, smaller regions, so learning two languages is perfectly feasible. Moreover, learning English will become easier as soon as we no longer have to listen to people using obscure idioms, talking at breakneck speed and frowning at our grammar – the native speakers that is, and especially the monolinguals among them.

I guess monolingual native English speakers they are to be pitied rather than censured. But they do cause the problem, and now we have the solution. I can’t wait for WL to emerge. I’m hoping it will be Spanish. But I’ll welcome any of the major languages. Communicating in Mandarin, Arabic or Russian, spoken as a second language by both parties, is preferable to being outtalked and patronised by native English speakers.

Politically correct spelling

[image error]In chapter 32 of Lingo, I describe – and poke fun at – the way Latvians and Lithuanians write foreign names. Basically, they spell every name as phonetically as possible and then tag on a case ending for good measure. The first US president is known as Džordžas Vašingtonas in Lithuanian, Džordžs Vašingtons in Latvian; the capital and state named after him are written as Vašingtonas in Lithuanian, Vašingtona in Latvian. In Lingo, I trace the history of this habit, once widespread across Europe, in a very general sort of way.  But at the time, I had no specific information as to why the Lithuanians and Latvians have maintained it, whereas most other language communities using the Latin script dropped it long ago.

Which is why I am grateful to a Lithuanian-American reader of Lingo, Joe Yčas, who recently sent me exactly that.

‘Over the period 1863-1905’, he writes, ‘Lithuanian was written in three alphabetizations: the old Polish style, Czarist-mandated Cyrillic, and the nationalist “Czech style”.’ He illustrates this by giving his family name in three ways. Polish-style would be Yczas (see chapter 22 of Lingo); in Cyrillic script, it’s Ичас (chapter 24); the one that finally prevailed, Yčas, was the nationalist, Czech-style variety (chapter 21).

Given that Cyrillic was, then as now, Russia’s predominant script, ‘any historical Latin-style spellings had to be phoneticized’, he explains. ‘In developing the modern “patriotic” (i.e., non-Polish, non-Russian) alphabet, perhaps letter-for-letter transcription was made from the Cyrillic, which was despised, but probably quite widely read. In this way, any native spellings such as ‘Washington’ were lost in transcription.’ And apparently, this practice continued after independence, when the Czech-style spelling became the undisputed standard.

But why? Joe doesn’t provide the whole answer, but he does give a clue when he says that ‘Lithuania and, for all I know, Latvia are a little unusual in that their nationalist movements were largely defined by struggles over alphabetization.’ In other words, how words were spelled mattered a great deal, and doing it the nationalist way was the order of the day, even after independence. Incorrect, that is politically incorrect spelling could carry grave consequences. ‘I have several ancestors who were exiled for how they spelled Lithuanian’, he says, adding wryly, ‘Then they had to learn to spell English.’

 

Vietnamese (3): What’s harder than the language

[image error]“How’s your Vietnamese coming along?” people ask me, for it’s the sort of outlandish hobby that gets remembered. The answer is: so-so, could be better. I’m struggling with two problems, and I’m pretty sure that many serial language learners are familiar with them.

One is keeping up the self-discipline. I found that not too hard at school, easy when I was staying in Latin America and very easy, indeed irresistible, when I was in love with a German woman. Using Duolingo, with its computer game based psychological tricks, also used to help. But studying at home from a conventional book and CD, motivated mostly by my wish to write an article in a year’s time, I find the going somewhat hard.

The other problem is vocabulary. I’m trying to study my course book – from Assimil’s With Ease series – at a pace that will allow me to learn not only the grammar, but also the words. Grammar, for me, is comparatively easy, and Vietnamese is not particularly demanding in this department. I could probably acquire the broad outlines in a theoretical manner by assimilating a short article. But studying grammar without vocab is like finding out about love-making from a sex ed video: without experiencing what it’s really like, you miss all the fun.

But there the metaphor stops, for memorising words is less self-rewarding and more of a challenge – the fun only starts when you try to say things with them, probably to stumble. And even the first set of 200 includes such devilish doppelgangers as có ‘to have, there is’, cô ‘Miss, madam, you (female, young)’, and cố ‘to try’, while cơ followed by thể means ‘human body’ – on its own, it means ‘muscle’, but fortunately that’s not on my flashcards yet.

So considering the whole situation, I guess what I’ll have to do is set aside half an hour every day at a fixed time and do the nitty-gritty work.

Okay. Here then is my belated new year’s resolution: the first 30 minutes after my lunchbreaks will be dedicated to Vietnamese. Should it on some occasion prove utterly impossible, I have to reschedule it. Skipping it is no option.

And you can help, too. You are hereby invited to ask me, “How’s your Vietnamese coming along?” I hope that next time I can truthfully answer, “Not too badly, thanks.”

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I’m quite looking forward to the book that polyglot Alex Rawlings has written, How to Speak Any Language Fluently: Fun, stimulating and effective methods to help anyone learn languages faster; due out in June. Knowing him and having read a few paragraphs, I have high expectations.

Idioms and images

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Some idioms are puzzling

As chance would have it, I was holidaying in Spain just when I had to read the galley proofs of the Spanish edition of Lingo, so I spent part of the time hearing and speaking one of my favourite languages and another part reading and writing it. It was while reading that I came across a translation that made me pause. The original says that Basque and the Indo-European languages are ‘worlds apart’. The translator, José C. Vales, rendered this as mundos independientes, ‘independent worlds’. Perfectly fine, I think: Basque is one world, Indo-European another, and they’re independent, separate – apart.

But his translation also made me realise that this was not how I had visualised the idiom up till then. In my mind’s eye, things that are ‘worlds apart’ are not two worlds positioned a certain distance apart, but two things separated by a distance of several worlds. The meaning is the same, of course, but the mental image isn’t. ‘Worlds apart’, for me, is not similar to ‘poles apart’: with poles, it’s obvious that there can’t be several of them between two things, always assuming we’re talking north and south poles or magnetic poles, not fence poles or flagpoles. Rather, I consider ‘worlds apart’ to be analogous to ‘miles apart’, ‘years apart’ or ‘a few houses apart’. I’m not at all claiming I’m right; indeed, I’m more likely to be wrong. But I find it interesting that I should have such a specific image of this idiom in the first place.

My scholarly friend Jenny Audring has since told me that in linguistics, there is a jargon term for this phenomenon, as of course there would be: imageability. Some idioms are imageable, say ‘Don’t spare the horses’: even now that we do not use horses much anymore, it’s still pretty obvious why we should say this to prod someone to hurry. Others are unimageable (except to those equipped with etymological knowledge), usually because the words have assumed a new meaning or because the wording itself has changed over time. In Dutch, for instance, if you know a person van haver tot gort (literally ‘from oats to groats’ – free bonus rhyme in English!), you know them ‘through and through’. Centuries ago, the idiom ran van aver tot aver (‘from ancestor to ancestor’ – Old English had eafora for ‘ancestor’), which is not just imageable, but straightforward bordering on the mundane. An example in English would be the equally mysterious (to me anyway) ‘push the envelope‘.

Between these extremes, there are the idioms and expressions of limited or ambiguous imageability. ‘Kicking the bucket’ is one: I’ve always imagined somebody with their head in a noose, ending it all by kicking away the bucket they’re standing on. But the Oxford English Dictionary tells us it’s more likely that the ‘bucket’ refers to a beam from which a pig is hung to be slaughtered; the kicking occurs in the animal’s dead throes. ‘Worlds apart’, belongs into this category, in my personal lexicon anyway. And not only in mine: when I discussed it on Twitter, opinion was somewhat divided, with the majority (well – three people) choosing the interpretation along the lines of ‘poles apart’, not the ‘miles apart’ one.

Okay, this seems to have become a bit of a rambling blogpost, so I might as well add that imaging idioms is not just the habit of an overly language-oriented mind such as my own. Here’s what researchers have found: people ‘demonstrate tacit knowledge of the metaphorical basis for many (…) idioms. When asked to form a mental image for a phrase (…), people can do so without difficulty and can answer a variety of questions about that image’ – and their answers tend to be similar. So there, I’m normal.

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Lingo will be published in Spanish this spring, by Editorial Turner of Madrid.

A gap year on Basque, thanks to Lingo

Guest blog by Lily Finnie (South West London, UK)

[image error]In my last year of school, I was planning on doing an Extended Project Qualification, which is basically an extra qualification answering a question on any topic of your choice. At first I had no idea what I wanted to do it on. My initial idea was an investigation into sound symbolism, but after admitting defeat due to a severe lack of supportive information, I was back to square one.

 As it happened, I had just finished reading the book Lingo, which has a chapter on Basque. It made a question pop into my head: ‘Why is this language so weird?’ Having never heard of ergativity before and experiencing a rapidly increasing, reasonably obsessive interest in different language grammars, I decided to use my project as a way of delving into the world of Basque. And it was with that vague idea as my inspiration that I decided to undertake the project of answering the question, ‘How and why is Basque a linguistic isolate?’

Quite swiftly, I realised that this was a more demanding endeavour than I had anticipated, and on top of four A-levels it was too much. I didn’t want to give up though; the small dip into the wonderfully exotic world of Basque grammar that I had received was way too exciting to just leave it unfinished. The opportunity to carry out this project was due to my volunteering at my old school at the same time. I was primarily helping in the language department, for the languages I studied at A-level, Spanish and French, which has been useful to keep the languages going when Bascologists don’t translate French quotes!

Deciding to take a gap year to get my head straight, I delayed the project until the next September. That is how I got where I am now, still going. Meanwhile, I have changed the question around twelve times, finally arriving at ‘Why is Basque a present-day surviving linguistic isolate, and to what extent can its main typological characteristics be explained historically?’

This gives me lots of leeway to go into detail about Basque’s frankly awesome grammar and how it is most likely to have come to exist among all the Indo-European that surrounds it. And of course, there is also the very thing that inspired me to take on this project in the first place: its strangely anomalous ergative morphology.

By the end of this project I will have produced an essay answering this question, as per the specification of Extended Projects in order to receive the qualification. However, it has a maximum word limit, unfortunately, and the amount of information I have collated probably quite easily exceeds it! I would say therefore that the most significant product of this endeavour is the detailed knowledge of the grammar and history of the Basque language that I am developing, and the inspiration to continue on my linguistic odyssey that it has given me: as of next year I will start a degree in Philosophy and Linguistics. I have been given a brief taste of the world of Bascology, its prominent figures and extensive debates, somewhere which once this is over I hope to visit again in the future.

How to be an Anglosplaining jerk

Alison Edwards, the linguist who translated my book Lingo into English, is a columnist and blogger that I much enjoy reading. Here’s her latest blogpost. As it was first published in a Dutch university magazine, she didn’t translate the book title at the end, so I will do it for you: The Discovery of Heaven. Or am I blundering into ‘Dutchsplanation’ here…?  

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ll have heard the term mansplaining being bandied around; a portmanteau of the words man and explaining. It was inspired by a landmark essay by the Ameri…

Read the full post at How to be an Anglosplaining jerk