Great Minds Think Different

I know I’m roughly 3 years late to this party, but all I have to say about this episode is thank goodness for actual French people. After the infamous (in my mind) Dollhouse French incident, I’m now eternally grateful for any properly-rendered foreign language on an American TV show.

The dude who played the lawyer is definitely French and spoke honest-to-God fast-speech registre soutenu French, like an actual French lawyer would speak. Autumn Reeser is definitely not French, but she tried so darn hard and got pretty close (while speaking pretty fast and, commendably, continuing to act) so that didn’t upset me unduly. Her intonation of Comment le savez-vous? “How do you know?” is totally wrong* but that’s the worst criticism I have, and it’s mild and understandable.

The translations that appeared in subtitle were good. The only complaint I have is minor, which is that the translation of the lawyer’s line Je vous préviens, je me suis entraîné de ne pas réagir aux larmes misses the funny turn of phrase. It’s translated as “I warn you, I am impervious to tears”. Yes that’s what it means, but what it actually says is “I warn you, I have trained myself not to react to tears”. I don’t see why they couldn’t have subtitled it with that. The English line as it is gets a laugh; why not just keep the funnier literal meaning of the French?

Anyway, this is just another in way in which Josh Schwartz continues to improve the world. Vive la langue française.

And in a frigging awesome coincidence, this is my 404th post.

* Her intonation is flat and low for the first two words, then falling through the last two words, whereas it should be rising through the first word, then flat and high for the rest. This is a pretty difficult thing to translate, actually. And as I will demonstrate, the French phrasing conveys what the English stress pattern should be, and thus some additional meaning. Looking at the English, there are two stress patterns that make sense: “you” stressed or “know” stressed. Which word is stressed determines where the uncertainty is. But in French, you’d determine where the uncertainty is by different phrasing, and not all intonation patterns are correct for a given phrasing. If the “you” were stressed in English, I’d say Comment est-ce que vous le sache? (intonation the same as for the English sentence “how is it that you know?”) and if the “know” were stressed in English, I’d say what was actually said in the show, with the intonation I gave at the beginning of this ridiculously long and pedantic footnote.

I hate to admit I was wrong about this, but my conscience compels me.

In my review of Bones season 4 episode 23, I got all in a huff over what I thought was an erroneous treatment of Japanese personal pronouns and ended up writing:

And there’s absolutely no way to infer gender from second- or third-person pronouns.

This is, I now realize, blatantly false. It is in fact very easy to infer gender from certain third-person pronouns, those being kare “he” and kanojo “she”. (Random side note: these words can also mean “boyfriend” and “girlfriend” respectively.) So I was completely bloody wrong about that.

In my (feeble) defense, I have this to offer: the use of personal pronouns in Japanese to refer to people is not common; certainly it’s much rarer than it is in English. Most often, people are referred to either by their proper name, by a demonstrative such as kochira “this person here” or simply not referred to explicitly at all (Japanese permits omission of subject and object from a clause when they can be inferred from context). In formal contexts, the demonstratives are usually preferred over the personal pronouns. The most common scenario I can imagine in which a third-person personal pronoun would be used is in reported speech, such as recounting a conversation. Using personal pronouns there would still be relatively uncommon.

Excusatory heuristics aside, I can’t explain away the obvious factual error, which is somewhat embarrassing. I promise to more rigorously fact-check any linguistics-related content in future.

Oh boy oh boy. An episode focused on Japanese people? Yay for me.

OK, let’s just start with a list of things. I have to whine about all of these, and it’s best to get it all over with now.

• The guy who played Ken Nakamura: he looks Japanese, but his accent is messed up and when he actually speaks Japanese, it sounds a bit off. Also, he introduced himself in Japanese to the restaurant guy as “Ken Nakamura” which is wrong; you introduce yourself family name first, like the restaurant guy did (“Takedo Bruce”). My guess is (a) bad writing and (b) the actor is a Nissei who isn’t a native Japanese speaker but knows a bit.
• The guy who played Bruce Takedo: looks and sounds genuinely Japanese.
• The, uh, person who played Haru Tanaka looks and sounds genuinely Japanese. Interesting point: “Haru” is a nickname for both masculine and feminine Japanese names, like “Pat” in English.
• The girl who played Nozomi Sato: if she’s Japanese, I’ll eat my hat. But come on, writers, come up with a more original name than “Sato”, please. (“Sachi” was a good choice of original name, though; I had to look it up to verify that it’s real. I’ve never heard of anyone named Sachi before.)
• The guy who played the sleazy pimp: he could have Japanese blood.
• Back to the question of Tanaka’s gender. (Also, seriously: “Tanaka”? I get the feeling that one of the writers took a Japanese class once and they just lifted the names of the fictitious characters in the class textbook.) Angela apparently looked him/her up on the Internet, and found most of the results in Japanese, “with no personal pronouns”. Now hold on just a darned minute. Where in the hell ass are you going to find gender in a Japanese personal pronoun? Huh? SOMEBODY CALL ME WHEN THEY FIND GENDER IN A JAPANESE PERSONAL PRONOUN

  *calm down*

  Whoooo. Good God. No, OK? Japanese personal pronouns are not gendered. Japanese doesn’t have grammatical gender even for people. It barely even has grammatical number. The only way you can infer anyone’s gender from a personal pronoun is from first-person ones: some are only used by men, some only by women. But if Tanaka is a member of some subculture that glorifies androgyny (I’ve never heard of this; there are way too many of these subcultures for me to keep track) he/she (see? the hell with grammatical gender) would not be using a gendered personal pronoun. And there’s absolutely no way to infer gender from second- or third-person pronouns. So shut the hell up, partly Chinese woman.

• They can identify that the victim was a native Japanese speaker from a feature of the palate? Color me highly skeptical. I doubt that any language causes permanent changes to the physiology of the mouth. Even if they did, there’s no reason for Japanese to affect the hard palate. Japanese doesn’t have any purely palatal consonants other than /j/ (transliterated as “y” in English). In fact, the consonant inventory of Japanese is almost a subset of English’s consonant inventory; the exception is /ɕ/. It’s an alveolo-palatal consonant, but it’s not an obstruent, so I don’t see how it could affect the physiology of the palate at all.
• Ironically, I have no objections about what little actual Japanese dialogue there was. It’s correct. Obviously Emily Deschanel sucks at speaking Japanese, but that’s excusable.

So they’re looking to hire one of the interns permanently? I really hope it’s Vincent. Clark is hilarious, but not as much as Vincent. Wendell is just boring, although a perfectly likeable guy. I’m not sure how they’re going to resolve it. They all have desirable characteristics (to Brennan) but I can see them going with Wendell because Booth prefers him. And it was interesting that they brought in a random guest character to serve as a pseudo-intern for this episode, to avoid having to make a decision just yet.

Other than all the Japan-related stuff, not much to say. Last episode was a hard act to follow, but this one wasn’t too bad.

We now interrupt our regularly scheduled TV posts for a return to roots: linguistics nerdery!

Studying linguistics, I’ve internalized the idea that all languages are created equal and that one can’t really call any language “weird”, no matter how exotic it seems. It’s exotic only in relation to your native language, which to a native speaker of some other language surely seems as weird as theirs does to you. (Example from English: the pronunciations of words of the form “[consonant]ow” — learners hate these.)

Linguistics textbooks and scholars can say that all they want, but I’m going to have to say that there are some things about some languages that are pretty darn wild. One of these is Japanese and its possession of closed lexical word classes. “Word classes” is the syntactician’s term for what elementary school teachers call “parts of speech”: a class of words characterized by their interactions with words of other classes (if this definition sounds circular, don’t worry about it; syntacticians don’t). Lexical word classes are, informally, those that BLAH. Japanese verbs and adjectives are closed classes. That is, Japanese doesn’t get new verbs or adjectives, or at least words that are “pure” verbs and adjectives, strictly speaking. It does get these things through periphrastic constructions (new verbs come from putting the verb “to do” with what is essentially a gerund, and new adjectives are not really adjectives but things that act almost like verbs). As you might imagine, I am very glad that I don’t have to learn Japanese grammar through stuff like this. I still possess a few of the more crucial native-speaker instincts for Japanese, among which is an ability to guess what an onomatopoeia means. (Japanese people love onomatopoeia. A lot.)

Another thing that I have to point out as weird: the sound ع in Arabic, technically the voiced pharyngeal fricative, but in my head the gargle. Apparently almost no other language has it. I am bitter towards this sound because I was trying to learn how to pronounce it while I had a cold, and it actually made my sore throat worse. Also you have to say it if you want to say “Arabic” in Arabic. I can deal with all of Arabic’s other throaty sounds, even ح, the voiceless version of the above, but the gargle I cannot.

I just noticed that the following is a search term through which someone found this blog recently:

what does tango say in french dollhouse

GLAD TO BE OF SERVICE, INTERNET

In the past couple days I’ve gotten my first taste of what it’s like to be an ethnic minority.

I’m half white and half Japanese. I have to be honest and say I identify more with the white side than the Japanese side, although I do bust out the Japanese side when necessary, for example when engaging in food snobbery. So when I say I’m an ethnic minority here (Sunnyvale, CA), I mean that the white part of me is in a minority. (The Japanese side is too, unless you want to get non-specific and say “Asian”. I don’t.)

This situation dawned on me gradually. I just arrived here from Pittsburgh, which has a decidedly different racial makeup from the Bay Area. I started noticing the difference when I realized that every service person I was dealing with – airport staff, cashiers at various stores – was neither white nor black. A few hours ago, I was out in a park alternately reading a book and people-watching. The park was teeming; it was that time just after dinnertime when families bring their kids to the park to play, and when teenagers come out to do silly teenager things – boys do tricks on skateboards while little clots of girls stand around giggling and pretending not to notice the boys, while the boys pretend not to notice the girls. I looked around and not a single white person was in sight. Everyone I saw was either Latino, Indian, Chinese, Vietnamese or Thai. (Trivia: apparently there are enough Vietnamese people here to merit putting informative signs in buses in Vietnamese along with English and Spanish.) After a few more minutes of intrigued looking-around, I spotted a white man. Oh, hang on – he’s followed by his family, which comprises an Indian woman and their two halfie kids.

Idle musing: what would happen if I had kids with a half white half Asian woman? (Apart from me ruining the kids’ lives.) What the hell would those kids look like? (Answer: awesome, being the kids of two white/Asian halfies. We white/Asian halfies are particularly attractive. It’s true.)

On my way out of the park, as I pondered my new minority status, I overheard two little kids talking. I glanced at them and the first thing that registered was that they were both dark-skinned. Now to figure out whether they’re Latino or Indian…I listened to what they were saying. I figured I could easily distinguish Spanish from an Indian language. There was something strange about it though. After a few seconds it hit me and I believe my jaw actually dropped: they were speaking in a Hindi/Spanish pidgin!

I couldn’t quite believe it at first, so I listened intently, trying not to look creepy or insane. I had unmistakably heard what I know is the Hindi confirmation-soliciting interjection (equivalent to English’s sentence-final “OK?”). Much of the vocabulary was Spanish, but there was enough I couldn’t understand (and that included Hindi speech sounds) that it was by no means just Spanish with one Hindi interjection. I couldn’t pick up enough to figure out what the syntax was like (the fact that I can’t understand spoken Spanish very well, and I can’t understand Hindi at all, didn’t help). It seemed like the pidgin was predominantly Spanish (which is odd because the older kid was Indian and the younger one was Latino).

As I listened, I observed something fantastic: both of these kids had phoneme inventories larger than those of their L1s. By this I mean: each one could produce speech sounds that don’t exist, or aren’t distinguished, in their native languages. The Indian kid could roll her Rs like a native Spanish speaker. The Latino kid could make perfect retroflex [t] and [d]. I was fascinated and excited beyond all reason. If I could have picked out minimal pairs, I think my head might have exploded on the spot.

Deep inside my head, the linguist in me was jumping around in excitement, making a big fuss, jabbering something about how I was witnessing the birth of a language. That’s not true (I must give my inner linguist a talking-to about that), but there’s no denying that I witnessed something profoundly fabulous. Despite all their terribleness, little kids are the most phenomenally adept language users of any living beings. They have such incredible raw talent for language – witness these two little kids conversing fluently in a blend of two languages that diverged so many thousands of years ago that it took many talented linguists hundreds of years to realize they are related. Language is not a barrier to little kids like it is to adults, but as they turn into adults they forget what that state was like.

Once I came back down from Linguistic Cloud Nine, there I was back in my ethnic-minority status. Of course I can’t pretend that I’m getting the full brunt of being an ethnic minority – nobody’s discriminating against me on that basis – but it’s a mildly unsettling feeling all the same. If, as I hope, living in the States has not stripped me of the (metaphorical) color-blindness I had living in Europe, I’ll get over it right quick. Especially if linguistics keeps giving me these gems of awesomeness that spring from ethnic diversity, like the little kids’ Hindi/Spanish pidgin.

Moral of the story: linguistics can distract me from anything.

So remember this? (And this and this and this?)

I wrote that at the end of last semester. I’ve now finished a class called Language and Culture, in which I did a semester project studying the language divide in Belgium. In fact, I was studying the exact crisis that I wrote about in “Letdowns”. I managed to take two quotations from an interview that Yves Leterme (the new Belgian Prime Minister) gave to a French newspaper, and yammer on about them for nine pages.

I can’t believe I’m about to say this and get perilously close to vindicating my high school English teachers who I hated so much: I have learned a lot from doing this project, and enjoyed it. Basically I’m turning into a humanities major. Not that this is a bad thing; not at all. I just never expected this to happen.

What I’ve learned from doing this paper is that the problem in Belgium is more serious than I thought it was. The country’s not at imminent risk of splitting in two, but the possibility is on the horizon. I’ve also found out that there are sound, legitimate reasons for the separatism that an unfortunately large number of people adhere to. While I was researching for the project, I changed my mind from thinking that Leterme is a tremendous jerk to thinking that he just needs to choose his words more carefully. I’ve gotten a bit disillusioned with Belgians: a lot of them don’t believe that being Belgian counts for anything, or even that it’s possible to “be Belgian”. I’ve thought about what it might be like for me if Belgium split, and I just can’t imagine it – can you imagine what it would be like if your home country ceased to exist?

This is one of the best kinds of learning: learning something you wish wasn’t true, but having fun in the process. Because that means thinking about how to fix it isn’t a hardship.

I harbor no illusions of coming up with a real solution to Belgium’s linguistic problems. Chances are there isn’t one. But at least I don’t mind putting my mind to it.

L’étymologie de ce mot est un peu bizarre. En anglais, le mot est “unicorn”, ce qui est raisonnable – “uni” pour “un”, et “corn” pour “le truc sur le front”. En fait, “uni” provient du même racine que les mots français “un” et “uni”. D’où donc ce préfixe “li”?

C’est un cas de ce que l’on appele “réanalyse”. Des francophones, en entendant le mot composé du latin “unicorne”, l’ont aperçu comme “une icorne” – l’article indéfini féminin, et en suite un nom: “icorne”. Quoi donc veut dire ce mot? Du non-sens c’était, mais on l’a pensé signifier un cheval avec un truc pointu sur le front.

L’histoire ne se conclut pas ici. Avec ce nouveau nom féminin “icorne”, si on y préfixe l’article défini, on se trouve avec “l’icorne”. Et puis les francophones ont appliqué encore une fois du réanalyse, et voilà encore un nom apparement inventé: “licorne”. Il est devenu un nom en soi, malgré sa composition: article défini + nom féminin. À présent, on voit des constructions comme “les licornes”, où avant le réanalyse, on aurait eu “les icornes”.

C’est une histoire amusante, à moi, et j’avais envie d’écrire quelque chose en français. Je m’excuse aux lecteurs qui ne comprennent pas cette langue.

I will now demonstrate the incredible, awesome versatility of the English verb “get” by describing a hypothetical day in the life without using any other verb. Watch me go.

I got up, after getting a good night’s sleep. I got dressed, then I got some breakfast. I got a shower, and got ready for work. I got in my car and got on the road. Right after I got off the highway, I got stuck in a traffic jam and got rather impatient. After a good long wait, I got to the office, where I got in a discussion with a colleague about a new assignment we’d gotten. At first I didn’t get what he was getting at, but after I got some coffee, he got his point across and we got somewhere. At twelve-thirty, I got lunch with some friends. After lunch, I got a phone call from my mom; she’d gotten a letter for me. Sometimes I still get mail at my parents’ house. Then I got to a meeting; it got boring pretty quickly. After I got out of the meeting, I got a lot of good work time in. As it was getting towards evening, I was getting tired. I got out of the office and got dinner with an old friend who had gotten a job in the area recently. We got into a bit of an argument over sports teams, but we got a good laugh out of it in the end. When I got home, I got some ice cream out of the freezer and got my fill of bad late-night TV. I got to bed before midnight.

I defy you to do that in any other language.

Whatever your grade-school English teachers may have said, parts of speech in English are as complicated as all hell. Forget about words that have multiple parts of speech (e.g. “run”); what about words like “would”? Did you ever have to classify that? (Linguists actually call “would” and friends “modals”, but the exact properties of modals in English are not quite well understood.)

I got to thinking about parts of speech in the phrase “it was worth it”. That sentence is actually linguistically interesting in another way: how English speakers are able to resolve the pronoun “it” so easily. That’s not what I got interested in, though. What part of speech is the word “worth” in that sentence? I think most people would be tempted to say “preposition”, failing to fit it into any other category, but to me, a preposition is something that expresses a relation between two nouns, and that word doesn’t.

I never quite figured that one out (I don’t think linguists have either), but it led me to something else. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that “it was worth it” is a very idiomatic phrase in English, and the words that comprise it are hard to classify into parts of speech. Then I started thinking about how other languages express it.

En français, on dirait « Ça valait la peine ». Literally translated, that phrase means “that had the value of the cost”. “Valait” is a conjugated form of the verb “valoir”, a word that is related to a slew of modern English words: “value”, “valor”, “valiant”, and even “available”. Properly translated, we’d have to say “valoir” means “to be worth”, but that kind of defeats what I’m trying to do here. The phrase, then, is basically saying that the value of the first “it” in “it was worth it” is at least enough to overcome the cost.

In Japanese, it’s also an idiomatic phrase: 割に合った. This is pronounced approximately “wari ni atta” (if you don’t know what Japanese sounds like, don’t even try). Literally, it means something like “it met with profit”. This actually makes a lot more sense to the English speaker than a lot of Japanese idioms. Something that was worth it is profitable; i.e. the benefit is greater than the cost. I’m starting to think the Japanese might even make more sense than the English.

I have a bunch more to say about “it was worth it”, parts of speech, and idiomatic phrases, but right now, my attention span has run out.

(It’s entirely possible that one day I will write about something other than linguistics or computers. However, today is not that day. In fact, neither is tomorrow; I’ve got a neat language-related post lined up for tomorrow.)