Dr. Goodword’s Language Blog

A reader who wishes to be known only as “JC” recently sent this comment to our Good Word inamorato:

In response to the inamorato email which states (in regard to feminine/masculine forms); “The use of suffixes like -ette and -ess to distinguish females from males is now harshly frowned upon.”

I can’t help but chuckle, sometimes, at the supposed “good intentions” of our almost obsessively politically correct society. Such morphemes are very useful, and, I suspect, exist for this very reason, [that] they convey meaning much more efficiently.

I’ve noticed this over the last several years in relation to the term actor. The unacceptability of this morpheme now necessitates the use of the term “female actor(s)” if one needs to make such a reference.

Consider the information conveyed in the word bartendress—not in the dictionary, to my knowledge, but useful nonetheless. I shudder to think what would happen if such a fad took hold of a language like Nahuatl, in which there seem to be [a plethora of] morphemes that can be used to construct single words that are pregnant with meaning!

This American sport even takes the liberty of imposing itself on terms from other languages. I’m sure you’re aware of the fact that a mixed group in the Romance languages, when referred to in the third person, will use the plural masculine pronoun unless it is composed of females.

Taíno, in reference to the Taíno Indians of the Carribean, is a word that has been Hispanicized (for obvious reasons), yielding Taínos for a (mixed) group and Taínas for a group of females.

In The Cave of the Jagua, an anthropological study about the Taíno Indians, the text constantly refers to “the Taínos and Taínas” just as readily as one would refer to “the English” or “the Germans”. Unfortunately, the Spanish language has made an insensitive and chauvinist distinction that now necessitates undoing.

Maxine Davis responded to our treatment of loathe in a way we did not expect. However, she raises a point with which many other careful speakers agree. Here is her comment and my reply:

“My loathing for the verbalization of nouns makes me loathe statements such as the one about Prudence Pender’s being ‘ambulanced to the emergency room’!”

“I do realize that this annoying trend is popular; although I am loath to admit it.”

“[I am] Enjoying the good word daily.”

Where would you air a pet peeve about language but before the good Dr. Goodword? He is delighted to see that you practicing the Good Word even as you complain about his description of it.

This is a malady I cannot cure but I can explain why it occurs in English in a way it does not in other European languages. Verbing nouns (if you’ll excuse the expression) is frequently criticized these days and has been for a decade or so. As Calvin and Hobbes (I forget which) put it years ago: “Verbing weirds things.”

English encourages widespread verbing because it has so few affixes that are demanded by grammar. Nouns in most other European languages require a variety of endings whose choice depends on how they are used in the sentence.  Rules of grammar preclude those endings from being replaced by verbal endings.

English has lost most of its morphology, which includes affixation, so nothing prevents the use of nouns as verbs or verbs as nouns, or either as adjectives. (I wonder why using verbs as nouns doesn’t pique anyone: a swing, a hit, a walk, and so on?) The noun hit looks exactly like the verb hit. The plural hits is identical to the one verbal form, 3rd person singular hits. 

In German, however, der Schlag, die Schläge (hit, hits) is quite different from schlagen “to hit”: ich schlage “I hit”, du schlägst “you hit”, er schlägt “he hits”. Nouns are nouns, adjectives are adjectives, and verbs are verbs in French, German, Russian, Finnish, Hungarian, and most other European languages.

So there is no cure but the good news is, it isn’t fatal.

Yesterday and today even more totally undescriptive names of commonplace things in our lives popped into my mind. There must be a word for such but I have not yet been able to find it. If I don’t, I’ll suggest a neologism to press into that service.

OK, here are more: You wouldn’t want an earwig anywhere near your ear nor a rollmop near your mouth if they were anything near what their names suggest.  If the names of things were that important, people who would never dream of eating dogs would avoid hotdogs with the same fervor.

We never serve wingnuts in our nutbowls nor fry silverfish.  Shooting a real bull’s eye is—ugh! The one on a target has nothing to do with bulls.  And wouldn’t a baked Alaska be a mouthful if it meant what its name describes?

OK, I could go on but I probably made my point Monday. I just added these because of the hidden humor in words we use every day—without thinking.  Wouldn’t English be dull without them?

From time to time one of our Good Words rubs someone the wrong way. This happened to Lucy Medina when we published vamoose, mentioning that is a “materially corrupted” version of Spanish vamos. I was happy that she shared her immediate reaction to our essaylet on that word:

“As a Latina, I really resent the use of words in English that have come about by abusing another language, especially the Spanish language. The so-called western shows seen when I was a child in the 50′s did much to harm to the Latino children and the Latino population as a whole. There are still people alive who believe that what they saw on those western TV shows and movies is | historically true.”

“Maybe a series of word used in English that come from mis-using or abusing foreign languages would be ok, but I am not sure how I would feel about it.”

“Thanks for a usually great daily feature.”

The reason we love our job is because we meet so many people who take their language seriously and are, as we all should be, deeply emotionally affected by it. I would agree that the dissemblance of Western life in the motion pictures of the 40s and 50s probably is a danger to children and adults alike. However, I limited my response to the linguistic question of “corrupting” the pronuncation of borrowed words.

I know of no research indicating that borrowing and adapting words between languages (it works both ways) harms children or adults. Children have no idea where words come from; indeed, most adult speakers don’t know where they come from (unless they subscribe to the Good Word). I probably shouldn’t have said that vamoose is a “corrupted” form of vamos but that is a linguistic synonym for adapted that commonly appears in dictionaries.

Words are borrowed all the time; over half the English vocabulary has been borrowed from other languages. Since the sound systems of different languages are never compatible, adaptation or “corruption” is a normal part of borrowing.

I could see Spanish-speakers taking some pride in speakers of other languages appreciate Spanish enough to (try) to use Spanish words in their own speech. A language usually borrows from a language it considers exotic or superior in some way. That is why English borrowed so much from French and Latin. Spanish belongs to the same family of Romance languages.

The “grammar” taught in US schools over the years has by far done more damage than good. It was written by prescriptive grammarians (as opposed to descriptive linguists) who prescribed rules based on logic rather than an understanding of the actual rules of the language. I came across a wonderful example of their influence while trying to find a few examples of absolute adjectives Saturday. They also are perfect examples of the dangers of the Internet that lurk within its wonders.

Within the first 20 returns of my googling “absolute adjective”, I found three mutually incompatible definitions.

1. At the Summer Institute of Linguistics, we are told that an absolute adjective is an adjective which functions as a noun, e.g. the rich, the poor, an empty. This is an ancient prescriptivist definition; in fact, any qualitative adjective may be used as a noun in English. 

2. The Wikipedia claims that absolute adjectives stand alone and do not belong to a larger construction, as happy is an absolute adjective in “The boy, happy with his lollipop, did not look where he was going.” This is simply an adjective phrase; they are consistently placed after the noun they modify in English.

3. The prescriptive grammarian at About.com defines them as adjectives, like infinite, unique, complete, or dead, that cannot be compared or intensified (no more infinite or very infinite. (I know the author is a presciptivist because he thinks a noun is a person, place, or thing.)

I was once discussing rather critically the performance of a college in the Russian Program with my dean. The dean, quite seriously, told me that she had it on good, objective authority that my colleague (a native speaker) spoke Russian better than me. My response was swift: “But we didn’t hire her to speak Russian.”

We had, of course, hired my colleague to teach Russian and the two activites are not the same at all. Teaching requires a strong understanding of the grammars of both languages and how they interrelate (if they do). A native-speaker’s knowledge of their native language is all unconscioius.

For some reason, many people believe that if you speak a language, you know it well enough to teach it to others. High school and college teachers are hired on the basis of the assumption that anyone speaking a language can teach it. But now hiring is a moot issue: the Internet provides an enormous university where anyone can build a virtual classroom and begin teaching whatever they like however they please. This is one reason I started yourDictionary and alphaDictionary, as reliable, authoritative language (grammar and dictionary) resources. alphaDictionary still is.

Now that I have this point off my chest, tomorrow I will share my thoughts on absolutely fascinating lives of absolute adjectives. They are far more intriguing than their representations in prescriptive grammars.

We just passed 100,000 pieces of spam deleted from this blog’s “Replies”. I spend a good 15 minutes a day weeding out the porn, pharma, investment, and other offers from companies who are bent on destroying the Web by choking it with unwanted ads. One company was sweet enough to send over 100 copies of the same piece of spam as a reply to one of our blog entries in the course of one day.

OK, now that is out of my system (sort of), let’s take a look at word reanalysis. I mentioned phrase reanalysis in an earlier blog. Some call reanalyses mondegreens, after perhaps the most famous instance, which you may read about here. Just remember that mondegreens are not limited to song lyrics.

The real process is called reanalysis by linguists because what happens is that the listener mishears a phrase and draws the lines between the words in the wrong place. Listening is not a passive process: a listener is constantly analyzing sentences and drawing words out of what is a long single tune coming from the speakers mouth. Language is a spoken means of communication and there are no spaces between words in speech as they are here, for example.

The alternation of a and an before nouns has presented problems of analysis by hearers for as many centuries as English has had this article. Generally, the rule is a before a word beginning with a consonant and an before a word beginning with a vowel: a pear but an apple. The problem has always been in drawing the line between this word and the next when the next begins with an N.

My first example is orange, which arose from the misanalysis of the original phrase ‘a narange’, based on Arabic word narange “orange”.

Another famous example is Old English naedre “adder” (an nadre) which turned into an adder between 1300 and 1500, after two centuries of wide-spread, constant reanalysis.

The noun apron was originally napron, from Old French naperon, the diminutive of nape “tablecloth”, which came from Latin mappa “napkin”. Well, the phrase a napron became an apron but the English diminutive of napron, napkin, a small apron after all, survived the cut and preserved its initial N.

Now I have discovered yet another of these misanalyzed phrases: auger is a reduction of Old English nafogar from Germanic compound *nab-gaizaz, a tool for splitting wheel hubs. nab came from PIE *nobho- “navel”, which also referred to the navel of a wheel, its hub, called its nave. This produced in Old English nafu-gár “nave-piercer”. This word reduced by Middle English to nauger and the phrase a nauger. But if you (mis)place the space one letter, the result is what we have in Modern English: an auger.

So don’t laugh at your children when they mistake “Gladly the Cross I’d Bear” for “Gladly, the Cross-Eyed Bear”.  Adults misanalyze and reanalyze spoken English in ways that permanently affects it.

Andrew Gillett just sent “a quick question which has been bugging me and my friends. I recently saw an ad in a magazine for mascara by Chanel. It had the word inimitable written on the ad and my friends and I had absolutely no idea why inimitable is spelt that way and not inimitatable or unimitatable, which seems to me to be more obvious since translate becomes translatable.”

Andrew has stumbled on an example of ‘haplology’, which should be ‘haplogy’ since it refers to the deletion of two adjacent identical or near identical syllables. English doesn’t like inimitatable because of the duplicated TATA in the middle—so it drops one TA. The same thing happens in other verbs, e.g. demonstratable becomes demonstrable though, if one of the syllables is accented (as in translatable), haplology will not apply.

Did you ever hear anyone say probly? This is the result of the same process since the OB and AB are pronounced identically in this word. This word undergoes haplology that is not reflected in its spelling but we find haplology built into the spelling of other words.

Other forms, like inimitable reflect haplogy in their spelling and everyone but Andrew ignores them: emphasis+ize is spelled emphasize and feminine+ize has permanently become feminize, dropping one of the INs.

The British apply haplology to those words with R appearing in two adjacent unaccented syllables: library becomes lib’ry and February becomes Feb’ry. So, haplology is all around us. Why then has haplology itself not undergone haplology? Because one of the LOs is accented.

I think it was in J. D. Salinger’s Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenter that the word jeechet first appeared in print. It has always fascinated me because it is clearly one single word phonologically (a phonological word is easily defined as a series of linguistic sounds bearing a single accent). However, this ‘word’ corresponds to an entire four-word sentence!

Now, before you say that this is not a word but just the result of lazy speakers slurring their speech, let me assure you that linguists can track every single change from the sentence to the word using common rules of English phonology, i.e. rules that occur widely elsewhere and throughout the language. Here they are for your amusement and edification.

The first rule is that function words (monosyllabic pronouns, auxiliaries, prepositions, etc.) like did are rarely accented except for emphasis which is irrelevant here. The second rule is that unaccented vowels occurring before the accented syllable like the [i] here are regularly dropped in English, e.g. p’lice for police, s’pose for suppose. Since did is unaccented, it attaches to [you] for accent and the [i] then disappears, giving us
 
ddyou eat yet
 
However, since English (unlike Italian, for instance) does not tolerate double consonants, [dd] regularly reduces to [d] resulting in
 
dyou eat yet

Since you is another function word, it isn’t accented either and is regularly reduced to yê where [ê] represents a schwa, pronounced, roughly, [uh] dyê eat yet. However, since it is not accented, it must attach to the following word for accent, giving us
 
dyêeat yet
 
The only accent in this sentence is on eat which means that the vowel [ê] is now an unaccented vowel preceding the accented one and so falls to the ax of the second rule mentioned above, resulting in
 
dyeat yet

Next, the combination [dy] regularly reduces to [j] and [ty] to [ch], e.g. mature [mêtyur > [mêchur] and picture [piktyur] > [pikchur]. Since the accent is on eat in this sentence, both the [dj] and [ty] are subject to this rule, which reduces our sentence further to
 
djeachet
 
pronounced [djeechet]. Of course, the sound [j] is a combination of [d] + [zh], the sound of the Z in azure. This makes the [d] redunant, giving us
 
jeechet

One reason we can’t determine the number of words in a language is because a phonological word (the sound part) does not always directly correspond to a semantic word (the meaning). According to Dr. Language at yourDictionary.com (also me), “I would have” comprises 3 distinct sounds and meanings but “I’d've” is a single two-syllable phonological word that matches the same three meanings—one word or three?

Speaking a language involves a complex set of mental activities in different parts of the brain each of which follows its own rules. The output of these rules are plotted onto the input of others in ways linguistics is still exploring. One of the most remarkable aspects of language is the surprising variety of rules and interaction of rules that the brain must carry out in order for us to express ourselves and be understood.

No other ‘word’ in the English language exemplifies the labrynthine nature of the levels of grammatical rules and their interactions better than jeechet.

Alyce Guinn today raised the following question about a new usage slipping into North American speech:

“There seems to be a new word, or a modification of an old word in use these days. It is occuring. I remember it used to be reoccurring. That meant that something that had happened was happening again. How can something occur and then when it happens again still be occuring?”

This is an interesting question. Of course, reoccurring is completely redundant given the existence of recur, so let’s rephrase the question to whether recurring is necessary.

Occur means “to happen once”; to recur is to happen again or happen many times. Obviously, we need these two words since their meanings are different.

Once you add -ing to them, however, the difference in meaning at least partially disappears. Why? The suffix -ing converts the verb into a present participle which designates an on-going action. Now, on-going action can be action in progress (a growing fear) or one that is repeated (pounding headache). So, when you add -ing to occur, the result is a form of the verb that refers to an action in progress or a repeated action, which is the same meaning as recurring, for example, a (currently) occurring pain or a (continually) occurring pain.

Even though occurring has both meanings, however, it is not a good idea to use this word in both because of possible confusion. Since we have recurring and since it has only one of the meanings occurring has, it is better to use occurring in reference to an action in progress and recurring for repeated actions.

NPR this morning had a piece on the cooperation of Greenpeace and the Cargill Corporation in attempting to slow the rate of deforestation in the Amazon basin. The major problem they are focusing on is land clearance for raising “soy”. I think I have heard this usage before but everyone interviewed on this show used it, making me acutely aware of the change for the first time.

What change? Well, if we say that we raise soy, we are categorizing soy beans as a grass or grain. We raise soy as we raise wheat, barley, or parsley. Soy, however, is a bean, a legume, which is why until rather recently why we referred to it as “soy beans”. Along the way, the two words were combined as a compound, soybean then, apparently, simplified to just soy.

I am not opposed to language change but I am uncomfortable, as I have said many times before, with linguistic inconsistency. So, unless we want to talk about raising lima, string, navy, black-eyed and snap, I think we should stick to calling soy beans soy beans.