Occasional Tales

The whole Chinese character set. A couple of days ago I determined that I should try to remember the character 创 ( chuàng ) meaning "start doing sth.; achieve". Did I? Well, sort of, but only after much kicking of my memory. At school it's used in some slogan about keeping the school green. Actually, the verb is 创设 ( chuàngshè ) meaning "found; create". I went into town this afternoon and kept seeing the character 招 ( zhāo ) everywhere I went. It can mean "beckon; recruit, invite; offend; infect; confess". I can't place it in context, but I'm guessing that it had something to do with inviting people to do, er, something. I can't see any collocations in the dictionary that look familiar.

The mystery of the missing thesis. I dropped by Blackwell's last night to check out the latest issue of the Transactions of the Philological Society of which I've been a member for about ten years now. I downloaded an article by Don Ringe which was addressing the old problem of the genitive plural in Gothic which is, unexpectedly, -ē rather than -ō. I was wondering what I'd said about it, which is why I was looking for a copy of my thesis. What actually caught my eye was the old myth of trimoraic vowels as an explanation for different reflexes of the same vowel. I don't know who first suggested the idea, but I believe it's been around for quite some time. Although there are trimoraic long vowels, I believe that such entities as distinctive sounds in a language are very rare. I think they're found in Estonian, but it seems more likely they're a surface (phonetic) phenomenon rather than a phonemic one. The point about the assumption that there were trimoraic

I just can't stop myself. Every so often I find that I keep using the same sort of phraseology over and over again. When I was an undergrad, I suddenly became very aware that I was using a lot of participial clauses which I attributed to learning Classical Greek. I don't know whether I really was using more participial clauses at that time than might've been usual, but I found them noticeable. My current mania is for inserting clauses slightly out of their normal order. For example, Winter in Beijing, apart from rare occasions , was almost always dry. where I might place "apart from rare occasions" at the start of the sentence or at the end where I'd probably treat is as an afterthought. Perhaps I've found this construction more noticeable recently because Mill tends to insert clauses into the sentence in a similar fashion. In all likelihood, I've used this device all along, but it took someone else making extensive use of it to bring it to my attentio

Much water under the bridge. I don't really want a repeat screening of the previous post, but here's some weirdness. If you do a Google search for a phrase, you should only find subsets of the total number of hits for that phrase every time you add a word. For example, "much water" gets 1.19 million hits. I would've thought that if I modify "much" with words such as "too", "so", "as", the results should add up to something less than 1.19 million. Instead, these are the numbers I get how much water: 988,000 too much water: 877,000 so much water: 338,000 as much water: 543,000 Total: 2.746 million I'm sure there's something I'm missing because I would've thought that the simpler the phrase, the greater the number of hits. With the phrases above, I end up with over 1.5 million apparently lost hits for "much water". Or perhaps I'm not missing something. [ Apart from a few screws . –ed.]

Or a bunch. Language Log has a post about the phrases "there are a number/bunch of..." and "there's a number/bunch of..." I find myself occasionally changing "are" to "is", but "a number of" and "a bunch of" typically take "are" in my grammar unless I'm using the contracted form "there's". Quantifiers are interesting things. I wonder whether "many" and, especially, "much" might be on the way out. I have problems using the latter without finding that "a lot of" comes more easily. I can say, "There isn't much butter" and "There's too much butter", but "There's much butter" just doesn't sound right whereas "There's a lot of butter" is unremarkable. I find via Google that there are some instances of "There's much + noun" which are grammatical to me. There's much activity (141 hits; "Ther

Machine writing. At English Corner this week one of the kids was banging on about clichés. I've been reading an article about the syntax of 的. One thing that I noticed when I was doing my PhD that almost every article written by American academics had the words "instantiate" and "instantiation" which were noticeable because I'd never seen either before. I'm sure I'd used equivalent phrases and still do. But these words seem to be clichés, part of the mechanistic style which is the hallmark of linguistics papers out of the States. It's as if no one's actually capable of writing anything academic in a style which has a personality. Research students mimic the style and the cycle of dullness continues. One of the other things I've loathed and continue to loathe is the misuse of transitive verbs like "raise" and "derive". You know, you can use the passive or some equivalent intransitive verb. If a determiner does not occur

But why do we need to know your name? I see that the f-word has a review of the book of the blog Girl with a one-track mind . I've been there a few times since Nanny unblocked blogspot, but I'm not a regular reader. I see from the blog that the identity of the author was revealed by those miserable, hypocritical shits from the Sunday Times. Why did they seem to think that the rest of us should know who the blog's author is? If she wanted to tell us her name, then I'm sure she would've. It's up to the blogger how much or how little they reveal about themselves.

...when the teeth meet resistance. I don't know whether this post by Tobias Jones in The Guardian's commentisfree section is very clever or merely the incoherent rantings of someone who writes like a first year undergraduate. Among other things, I think we might say that the entry is a good example of the vast difference between perception and reality. Perception: crime is everywhere; reality: no it isn't. Jones's perception is that some group of people called "secular fundamentalists" want to outlaw religious belief. The reality is that Jones is merely using the word "fundamentalist" which, he knows perfectly well, has pejorative connotations in English, and marrying it to the word "secular" in the same way that it's collocated with the adjectives "Christian" and "Islamic". They - call them secular fundamentalists - are anti-God, and what they really want is the eradication of religion, and all believers, from the

Weirdest game of Monopoly ever. I went into the office this afternoon before class and found Jane there. She told me that apparently our performance at the school concert won second prize which we're going to be given on Monday morning. I'm trying to work out how the judging went. A: There was something odd about the foreign teachers. B: Oh, they always look like that. It's nothing to worry about. A: Yeah, I know they look odd , but I didn't mean like that. B: They didn't have any make-up on. A: That was it! Very avant-garde . What d'you think? Second place prize? B: Agreed. Did you have the faintest idea what their performance was about? A: None at all, but I do find modern theatre so baffling. B: Me too. Now what about third place?

Nanny might be about to have a turn. I've just seen this article in The Guardian about Shinzo Abe's vow to reform the Japanese constitution, allowing the country to be more active militarily if need be. I've just checked the China Daily site, but it's trumpeting the news that RMB is on the verge of exceeding the value of the HK$. I'm sure Nanny will have something to say about Abe's plans, although in the form of creative suggestions from a friend. I'm sure there will be no hint that Beijing thinks it can tell Tokyo what to do. After all, Nanny's policy is not to interfere in the internal affairs of other countries.

Cultural manglings of the English language. I've been looking for the Borat film for some time and finally found a copy in the DVD shop near KFC. Hurrah! I thought in my boyish naivety. It was all hurrah until I got it home and found that the sound track is entirely in Russian. Granted, there are English subs, but they're every bit as mangled as Borat's English. The translation appears to be from Chinese. Here's a sample. This comes from the opening sequence. English overlay (on Cyrillic title): In association with Bagatov Films. English sub : Shot with BA GE2 TUO3's man industry consociation to make. BA GE2 TUO3 looks like a transliteration of the Chinese version of Bagatov . The subs for the opening scene are Yagshimash I is the wave pull especially My love everyone My love make love Feel fit Here my national Kazakhstan Adjacent tower gram Kirghiz Still have the bastard the Uzbekistan My home town database fills here The forcible rape of this gram gold make Ver