False friend is the linguistic term for a word in another language that looks just like a word in your own, and so you assume it means the same thing. Be careful! It's wonderful to make friends of new words, but make sure you really know them, or they'll only hurt you.
English has very many words that were borrowed from French, or that English and French both took from Latin, which have kept the same meaning: préparation, longue, noble, thème, champion, etc.
For future reference, if you're ever in southern France and you need new batteries for your camera, it is better not to go into a store asking for "Les batteries." The better word here is piles.
Une batterie is a drumset.
Monday, April 28, 2008
Thursday, April 24, 2008
Speaking of Propaganda, Comrade . . .
Periodically if you read the Washington Post (I don't personally, but I like to look at the pictures), you'll see something that looks like an article, smells like an article, and is written like an article. Don't be fooled! Check the fine print and you'll see it's a full-page ad taken out by the Russian government's Tourism/Cover-up Board. They buy space in a newspaper in America's capital, and present the message they want us to hear, in a package we are more likely to trust. (I think even conservatives in this country trust the average report in the Post more than they trust, say, this.) Check out this and this, for example.
Well, the Post finally caught on to what the Russians were doing, and on March 6th, decided they might as well make a story out of it, so they wrote this article on Russia's "global propaganda machine." One page two of the article is a reference to the recurring "feature" in their own paper:
One of the primary tactics of propaganda is relentless repetition of the message. It doesn't really matter what you think of the message on your first hearing--that's long gone when you hear it in the back of your head after the 30th hearing. That's why "Beyond the Headlines" is a regular feature. This is the same tactic used by advertising campaigns. Advertising is propaganda. The father of modern advertising, Edward Bernays, laid out how it all works in a very important and influential little book truthfully titled, Propaganda.
Another tactic of propaganda is the form the message takes. I don't care if you tell me a hundred times the world is round, if your commercial has Hitler saying it, I'll probably start to doubt the message. That's why commercials use every day people (usually women) selling every day products--if we saw the CEO of Frigidaire asking us to buy his product, our mind would drift to what he gets out of it--profit. So he has to redirect your mind to what he want you to get out of the commercial--that attractive people just like you use it. "They do? Well, I don't want to be left out," your mind says, while you think you're logically weighing pros and cons.
So the Russian government puts out its party line in newspapers: its own mouthpiece Rossiyskaya Gazeta, and features in the Post meant to look real, b/c if you don't look too carefully, you'll assume it is real. And of course that's what Putin wants you to think: that his government, his democracy, his new puppet president--that they're all real.
Btw, for more on His High Putinage, stay tuned to Someone Like Putin.
Well, the Post finally caught on to what the Russians were doing, and on March 6th, decided they might as well make a story out of it, so they wrote this article on Russia's "global propaganda machine." One page two of the article is a reference to the recurring "feature" in their own paper:
The official government newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta is using its healthy profits to fund monthly supplements in newspapers in India, Britain, Bulgaria and the United States. "Russia: Beyond the Headlines," as the publication is called, is a paid advertising supplement in The Post.One of my favorite lines is this one:
The campaign is designed to counter what the government and many people here see as unrelenting and unfair Western criticism of declining political freedoms under President Vladimir Putin.Let's see ... counter ... criticism ... declining ... Well, there are at least three negatives here, but I think they mostly cancel out to show Putin himself as the biggest negative in the whole picture. As the article admits, there are skeptics that simply won't be fooled by such blatant tactics. But we would be foolish ourselves to dismiss Russia's campaign as harmless. Propaganda works because it understands that people can, and in many cases, deep down they want to be fooled. No one wants to think that the Russians are deceiving us and spying on us so deeply that they have spies in positions of high authority in the CIA and the FBI ... but then we discover Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen.
One of the primary tactics of propaganda is relentless repetition of the message. It doesn't really matter what you think of the message on your first hearing--that's long gone when you hear it in the back of your head after the 30th hearing. That's why "Beyond the Headlines" is a regular feature. This is the same tactic used by advertising campaigns. Advertising is propaganda. The father of modern advertising, Edward Bernays, laid out how it all works in a very important and influential little book truthfully titled, Propaganda.
Another tactic of propaganda is the form the message takes. I don't care if you tell me a hundred times the world is round, if your commercial has Hitler saying it, I'll probably start to doubt the message. That's why commercials use every day people (usually women) selling every day products--if we saw the CEO of Frigidaire asking us to buy his product, our mind would drift to what he gets out of it--profit. So he has to redirect your mind to what he want you to get out of the commercial--that attractive people just like you use it. "They do? Well, I don't want to be left out," your mind says, while you think you're logically weighing pros and cons.
So the Russian government puts out its party line in newspapers: its own mouthpiece Rossiyskaya Gazeta, and features in the Post meant to look real, b/c if you don't look too carefully, you'll assume it is real. And of course that's what Putin wants you to think: that his government, his democracy, his new puppet president--that they're all real.
Btw, for more on His High Putinage, stay tuned to Someone Like Putin.
Sunday, April 20, 2008
New Focus
So at long last, I've realized why I haven't been posting, and what I can do about it. As I have floated from point to point in the vast ocean of my interests, my blog came to feel too limiting, so I'm refocusing it. That is, I'm putting back on the wide-angle lens, based on all of my myriad interests. Now, don't worry, all that Germanic and obscure linguistic stuff isn't going anywhere--like curious explorations of how Vatican and Wednesday come from the same root. Still, I have a few areas in particular I'm looking forward to exploring, all in some vague way related to language.
I'd like to serve a slightly more definite "public diplomacy" purpose by looking at some aspects of other languages that have lessons for understanding other cultures--something Americans are so tragically bad at. The sad part really is not that Americans are bad at languages--you can't know you're bad at something you don't try. But by not opening those horizons for ourselves, we do keep ourselves needlessly from the opportunity for more precise thought. George Orwell makes this point famously--and brilliantly--in his 1946 essay on Politics and the English Language.
I'd also like to look again at the whole prescriptivist/descriptivist approaches to language. The prescriptivist grammar school approach to what is "correct" in language is certainly inadequate--to what other field do we feel it is sufficient to apply a grammar school understanding in our adult lives? Yet the strict descriptivism that I think I see in linguistic academia seems a bit restrictive in its own way: If Keynesian prescriptivism ignores the unpredictability of human nature and therefore the fact that languages evolve naturally over time, laissez-faire descriptivism may be too afraid to view language as a tool--one which others will master even if we don't.
In other words, I'm interested in the the whole idea of language being a tool of humanity, and the various applications this has for strategic communication, rhetoric, propaganda, semantic battles in public discourse--the conscious use of language as a tool by people, or the unconscious use of people as tools by language.
I'd like to serve a slightly more definite "public diplomacy" purpose by looking at some aspects of other languages that have lessons for understanding other cultures--something Americans are so tragically bad at. The sad part really is not that Americans are bad at languages--you can't know you're bad at something you don't try. But by not opening those horizons for ourselves, we do keep ourselves needlessly from the opportunity for more precise thought. George Orwell makes this point famously--and brilliantly--in his 1946 essay on Politics and the English Language.
I'd also like to look again at the whole prescriptivist/descriptivist approaches to language. The prescriptivist grammar school approach to what is "correct" in language is certainly inadequate--to what other field do we feel it is sufficient to apply a grammar school understanding in our adult lives? Yet the strict descriptivism that I think I see in linguistic academia seems a bit restrictive in its own way: If Keynesian prescriptivism ignores the unpredictability of human nature and therefore the fact that languages evolve naturally over time, laissez-faire descriptivism may be too afraid to view language as a tool--one which others will master even if we don't.
In other words, I'm interested in the the whole idea of language being a tool of humanity, and the various applications this has for strategic communication, rhetoric, propaganda, semantic battles in public discourse--the conscious use of language as a tool by people, or the unconscious use of people as tools by language.
Monday, November 19, 2007
Most Unread Books Meme
Meme: The 106 Most Unread Books (according to LibraryThing)
(Bold is for books you've read. Italics for books you've started but haven't finished. Strikethrough is for books you found unreadable. And, finally, leave the ones you haven't read as they are.)
I have a lot of reading to do. And I've enjoyed everything I've bolded below.
=================
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
I have a lot of reading to do. And I've enjoyed everything I've bolded below.
=================
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492 - Present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-Five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers
Wednesday, September 5, 2007
A New One
Here's one I haven't heard of before: documentation of a Basque-Icelandic pidgin that developed about 400 years ago. Sailors and traders have to communicate somehow, so they ended up with this interesting combination of languages. Also mentioned in the link: evidence of a 16th-century basque-algonquinian language.
H/t languagehat.
H/t languagehat.
Tuesday, September 4, 2007
Linguistic forced adoption
I wish more linguists were language teachers.
In the last couple of years I've done some tutoring in Latin. Part of the program in teaching Latin usually includes a specific focus on what English words have descended from the vocabulary taught in each lesson. I discovered a small pet peeve on my part when I noticed that the kids' teacher often gave them words that, while related to the Latin word, did not come from them. E.g.: English night from Latin nox, noctis. Yes, we have very many words that come from Latin (let's see, so far I've already used: tutoring, usually, includes, specific, focus, descended, vocabulary, discovered, part, noticed, related). But we do speak a Germanic language, after all, and lots of our words go back from modern English to Old English to Proto-Germanic to Indo-European. (I'm skipping steps here, of course, but the route is clear nonetheless, and doesn't pass through Latin.)
So if Indo-European is the parent language, then the languages that descended from her dialects into their own separate languages are the daughter languages: Sanskrit, Latin, Greek, Persian, Slavic, Germanic, etc. That makes Latin a sister of (proto-)Germanic. She may be an elder sister, but a sister nonetheless. So if an Indo-European root yields words in both Latin and Germanic, then we say they both come from IE, not that the Germanic word comes from Latin, or vice-versa. Let's trace a few random words to get this distinction down.
Night. Not from Latin. There is a direct line from Modern to Middle to Old English (niht, neaht) to proto-Germanic naht, which also yields nahts in old Gothic, Nacht in German, natt in Norwegian, etc. Parallel to the Germanic naht (sisters, again) would be Latin nox, noct- and Greek nyx, nyxt-, as both descend from the Indo-European root nekw-t-.
Cry. From Latin. This word has an interesting etymology, recently posted at Language Hat. It is one of many words that came into Middle English through Old French and Latin. It doesn't appear in any form in Old English, and therefore doesn't come from Proto-Germanic.
Picture. From Latin. Pictus, past participle of pingere, plus the -ura suffix, came directly into Middle English. (The pingere form, having morphed to peindre in old French, finds itself with a new past participle form--peint--that also comes into English as paint.)
At. Not from Latin. The Latin preposition ad is related, but as a sister (not a mother) to the Germanic at. (Ado also comes from Germanic at, but through Norse.)
I'm not sure why it bothers me that people attribute to Latin words that came from Germanic; it's not like the English language has its feelings hurt, and either way kids are learning that languages are connected. And yet, Latin is so obviously important, it doesn't need help from false attribution; whereas I always enjoy pointing out the Germanic character still strong in our language (since it is the most Romancified of the Germanic family). Mostly I guess I just like it when people are precise, and while I know too much about how languages change to expect precision from the average speaker, I would like teachers to be able to make the distinction, or know enough to look it up.
In the last couple of years I've done some tutoring in Latin. Part of the program in teaching Latin usually includes a specific focus on what English words have descended from the vocabulary taught in each lesson. I discovered a small pet peeve on my part when I noticed that the kids' teacher often gave them words that, while related to the Latin word, did not come from them. E.g.: English night from Latin nox, noctis. Yes, we have very many words that come from Latin (let's see, so far I've already used: tutoring, usually, includes, specific, focus, descended, vocabulary, discovered, part, noticed, related). But we do speak a Germanic language, after all, and lots of our words go back from modern English to Old English to Proto-Germanic to Indo-European. (I'm skipping steps here, of course, but the route is clear nonetheless, and doesn't pass through Latin.)
So if Indo-European is the parent language, then the languages that descended from her dialects into their own separate languages are the daughter languages: Sanskrit, Latin, Greek, Persian, Slavic, Germanic, etc. That makes Latin a sister of (proto-)Germanic. She may be an elder sister, but a sister nonetheless. So if an Indo-European root yields words in both Latin and Germanic, then we say they both come from IE, not that the Germanic word comes from Latin, or vice-versa. Let's trace a few random words to get this distinction down.
Night. Not from Latin. There is a direct line from Modern to Middle to Old English (niht, neaht) to proto-Germanic naht, which also yields nahts in old Gothic, Nacht in German, natt in Norwegian, etc. Parallel to the Germanic naht (sisters, again) would be Latin nox, noct- and Greek nyx, nyxt-, as both descend from the Indo-European root nekw-t-.
Cry. From Latin. This word has an interesting etymology, recently posted at Language Hat. It is one of many words that came into Middle English through Old French and Latin. It doesn't appear in any form in Old English, and therefore doesn't come from Proto-Germanic.
Picture. From Latin. Pictus, past participle of pingere, plus the -ura suffix, came directly into Middle English. (The pingere form, having morphed to peindre in old French, finds itself with a new past participle form--peint--that also comes into English as paint.)
At. Not from Latin. The Latin preposition ad is related, but as a sister (not a mother) to the Germanic at. (Ado also comes from Germanic at, but through Norse.)
I'm not sure why it bothers me that people attribute to Latin words that came from Germanic; it's not like the English language has its feelings hurt, and either way kids are learning that languages are connected. And yet, Latin is so obviously important, it doesn't need help from false attribution; whereas I always enjoy pointing out the Germanic character still strong in our language (since it is the most Romancified of the Germanic family). Mostly I guess I just like it when people are precise, and while I know too much about how languages change to expect precision from the average speaker, I would like teachers to be able to make the distinction, or know enough to look it up.
Monday, September 3, 2007
Cool Quotes #11: The Decline of English
There seems to have been in every period in the past, as there is now, a distinct apprehension in the minds of very many worthy persons that the English tongue is always in the condition approaching collapse and that arduous efforts must be put forth persistently to save it from destruction.--Thomas R. Lounsbury, grammarian (1908).
Sunday, September 2, 2007
China Fixes Signs, For Great Justice
This article is from back in February, but I just came across it while browsing funny signs and bad translations. Apparently the coming of the Olympics has Beijing all embarassed with the prospect of the rest of the world seeing the horrendously funny translating job displayed on many of their signs, and there's a campaign underway to fix the signage around Beijing:horror slide show.
The funniest part to me is the actual resistance to removing such signs on the part of nostalgic Westerners. It's ok, guys, we'll always have Zero Wing.
For the next eight months, 10 teams of linguistic monitors will patrol the city's parks, museums, subway stations and other public places searching for gaffes to fix.(Eight months starting last February, and lasting the rest of this year.) You absolutely must click on the picture and enjoy the
The funniest part to me is the actual resistance to removing such signs on the part of nostalgic Westerners. It's ok, guys, we'll always have Zero Wing.
Friday, August 31, 2007
Language Stops Plane
Language Log reports that the mere speaking of Arabic got air passengers suspicious enough to alert authorities to ... the speaking of Arabic. Now that I'm studying Arabic in more earnest than previously, I hope this won't cause undue concern--ok, I admit, I don't really care if people have a problem with it. And anyway, my pasty white northern Europeanness probably will work in my favor in the eyes of similar suspicious passengers. Seriously: you can't live in the modern world and be terribly surprised to hear just about any language, especially one spoken by hundreds of millions of people worldwide. (And I'll admit here I was spoiled growing up in Brooklyn and hearing everything!) But if you do think of Arabic primarily as a language that many of our enemies speak, wouldn't you want more people speaking it? Anyway, Bill Poser's point about what languages terrorists actually speak is well made--I better be careful who I speak French around.
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
Aryanland
Reading up on Central Asian history and names and such took me to the word Turan, a vague term used in medieval Persian literature for the land of Turkic and other peoples beyond Persia, meaning literally "land of the Tur". Interesting enough, especially given the article's attempt to sort out historical common usage from actual ethnic, geographic, and linguistic distinctions (always a tricky job), but what struck me was the analogy provided for the formation of the word:
Incidentaly, the A-to-E vowel change also gives us the name of England out of Angla-lond, as well as word pairs like man-men, Denmark-Dane, and even ultimately star-steer. In Old English this is called I-mutation, since you mutated the sound of the first vowel by anticipating the sound of the I in the following syllable. This mutation remained even after the syllable with the I, often a inflectional (grammatical) ending, had been dropped. There are other examples in Old English that don't look like they apply in Modern English because lots of Old English a's have become modern O's.* But if you allow for this, you can see the effect of I-mutation in pairs like whole/hale and heal (OE hal/hæl, halian), strong and strength (OE strang, strengþu), long and length (OE lang, lengþu), old and elder (OE ald, ieldra), know and knew (OE cnawan, cneow).
*This is where we get off having the O-sound represented by "oa" as in boat, throat, coat, etc. The A in Old English bat was pronounced close enough to an O that people noted it by writing an O next to the A. I assume the same origin for the Scandinavian letter Å, except scribes there wrote the O on top instead of to the side.
Tūrān ("land of the Tūrya" like Ērān, Īrān = "land of the Ārya")I never realized the etymology of the name of Iran before.
Incidentaly, the A-to-E vowel change also gives us the name of England out of Angla-lond, as well as word pairs like man-men, Denmark-Dane, and even ultimately star-steer. In Old English this is called I-mutation, since you mutated the sound of the first vowel by anticipating the sound of the I in the following syllable. This mutation remained even after the syllable with the I, often a inflectional (grammatical) ending, had been dropped. There are other examples in Old English that don't look like they apply in Modern English because lots of Old English a's have become modern O's.* But if you allow for this, you can see the effect of I-mutation in pairs like whole/hale and heal (OE hal/hæl, halian), strong and strength (OE strang, strengþu), long and length (OE lang, lengþu), old and elder (OE ald, ieldra), know and knew (OE cnawan, cneow).
*This is where we get off having the O-sound represented by "oa" as in boat, throat, coat, etc. The A in Old English bat was pronounced close enough to an O that people noted it by writing an O next to the A. I assume the same origin for the Scandinavian letter Å, except scribes there wrote the O on top instead of to the side.
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