Tricky English

I've seen this in a number of places and, sadly, haven't been able to identity the author of it. That said, it's a very clever set of examples for why English is such a tricky and difficult language for non-native speakers to learn.

We polish Polish furniture.

He could lead if he got the lead out.

A farm can produce produce.

The dump was so full, it had to refuse refuse.

The soldier decided to desert in the desert.

The present is a good time to present the present.

At the Army base, a bass was painted on a bass drum.

A dove dove into the bushes.

I didn’t object to the object.

The insurance for the invalid was invalid.

The bandage was wound around the wound.

There was a row among the oarsmen about how to row.

The two were too close to the door to close it.

The buck does funny things when does are present.

They sent a sewer down to stitch a tear in the sewer line.

To help with planting, the farmer taught his sow to sow.

The wind was too strong to wind the sail.

After a number of Novocain injections, my lips got number.

I shed a tear over a tear in my shirt.

I had to subject the subject to a number of tests.

How can I intimate this to my most intimate friends?

I spent last evening evening out a pile of dirt.

Your Exceedingly Geeky Joke of the Interval

How many Lojbanists does it take to change a broken light bulb?

Two. One to decide what to change it into and another to find a bulb that emits broken light.

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Extra geek cred to the first person to get the joke.
Super-extra geek cred to the first person to translate the joke into Lojban.

The Hyphen Goes Through a Bad Period

This just in: the short version of the Oxford English Dictionary is dropping the hyphen from some 16,000 compound words due to a number of factors, not least of which is the influence of the internet on written communication ("oh noes!") but also because people find them to be confusing and designers aren't fond of them either.

Fortunately, there's still a place for some hyphenation in those cases where the lack would generate an ambiguous construct (the article notes that there is a difference between a party that has twenty-odd people and a party that has twenty odd people -- namely that I'm much more likely to be attending the latter).

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Comic courtesy of XKCD; used without permission

(Really) Unstructured Sentence

I trust that you've already seen the video of that poor Miss Teen USA contestant from South Carolina who floundered her way through a flummoxed monological thicket when asked her thoughts on why Americans can't seem to find the U.S. on a map. Here is Jimmy Kimmel's explanation of what she was trying to say.

Unstructured Elven

A long while back, Elijah Wood was doing an interview on the Daily Show to promote The Fellowship of the Ring. During the interview, he mentioned that he, and the other nine members of the fellowship cast, had all gone out and gotten tattoos of the numeral nine... in elvish. At the time I thought that was just a little bit strange but, in retrospect, I should have realized that there is a reasonably significant demand for Elvish tattoos.

Of course, if one is intent on demonstrating that they are way more geeky than those stupid Klingon poseurs, you can't just run out and get a bunch of random gibberish stamped on your tramp. On no, you must do it properly!

A good place to start would be to find out what your Evlish name is (in my case, that would be Suiadan), but that's only the first step. Once you have your name, you need to know how to write it in Elvish script, bearing in mind that there are several dialects of Elvish as well as numerous calligraphic scripts that you can choose from. (If this intimidates you, you could always cheat with a bit of software.)

This may seem like a lot of effort but if you are a True Tolkien Geek, this will absolutely and permanently establish your Elf Cred. Who knows, you might even meet someone who shares your passion which would mean that you'd eventually need to send out Elvish wedding invitations.

Unstructured Wordplay

I've seen the following bit of clever wordplay floating around the net for a long time but I've never been able to find out who wrote it. It turns out that it was written by Jack Winter for the New Yorker back in 1994. So, with all due credit, here is the story of

How I met my wife

It had been a rough day, so when I walked into the party I was very chalant, despite my efforts to appear gruntled and consolate.

I was furling my wieldy umbrella for the coat check when I saw her standing alone in a corner. She was a descript person, a woman in a state of total array. Her hair was kempt, her clothing shevelled, and she moved in a gainly way.

I wanted desperately to meet her, but I knew I'd have to make bones about it since I was travelling cognito. Beknownst to me, the hostess, whom I could see both hide and hair of, was very proper, so it would be skin off my nose if anything bad happened. And even though I had only swerving loyalty to her, my manners couldn't be peccable. Only toward and heard-of behavior would do.

Fortunately, the embarrassment that my maculate appearance might cause was evitable. There were two ways about it, but the chances that someone as flappable as I would be ept enough to become persona grata or a sung hero were slim. I was, after all, something to sneeze at, someone you could easily hold a candle to, someone who usually aroused bridled passion.

So I decided not to risk it. But then, all at once, for some apparent reason, she looked in my direction and smiled in a way that I could make heads and tails of.

I was plussed. It was concerting to see that she was communicado, and it nerved me that she was interested in a pareil like me, sight seen. Normally, I had a domitable spirit, but, being corrigible, I felt capacitated -- as if this were something I was great shakes at -- and forgot that I had succeeded in situations like this only a told number of times. So, after a terminable delay, I acted with mitigated gall and made my way through the ruly crowd with strong givings.

Nevertheless, since this was all new hat to me and I had no time to prepare a promptu speech, I was petuous. Wanting to make only called-for remarks, I started talking about the hors d'oeuvres, trying to abuse her of the notion that I was sipid, and perhaps even bunk a few myths about myself.

She responded well, and I was mayed that she considered me a savory character who was up to some good. She told me who she was. "What a perfect nomer," I said, advertently. The conversation become more and more choate, and we spoke at length to much avail. But I was defatigable, so I had to leave at a godly hour. I asked if she wanted to come with me. To my delight, she was committal. We left the party together and have been together ever since. I have given her my love, and she has requited it.

Unstructured Engrish

Japanese pop culture has an interest in English words that's rather analogous to certain westerner's interest in getting Japanese tattoos, which is to say that the coolness of the shapes is often more important than the actual meaning.

This, of course, leads to quite a lot of inadvertant humor on either side. Since this is an English site, I will, perhaps unfairly, highlight the Japanese side of that equation by pointing you to Engrish.com which is a photographic collection of English-like oddities that have been found in Japan.

While it would have been easy to make a site like this with a cruel underlying sense of mockery, I think you'll find that Engrish.com is a good-natured site whose only goal is a bit of gentle humor at the sort of garbling that naturally occurs when cultures mix.

Backstroke of the West

Tuesday Fun

When I was young and naive, I wanted to learn Japanese. I thought that it would be a simple process of simply learning a new set of words. Of course, language is a hell of lot more complex than that. I never did learn Japanese. I did take five years of German (of which I've managed to retain a handful of sentences and the ability to count up to 999), two semesters of American Sign Langauge (I know some cool obsenities including a very graphic sign for the word "orgasm") and a correspondence course in Esperanto (I can ask "Do you hate the evil, blue cups?").

When it comes to language, it is painfully apparent that I am hopelessly monolingual (which is what I get for refusing my mother's attempts to teach me Spanish). As such, I can sympathize with non-English speakers who make hillarious mistakes when trying to do dictionary translations from their native languages.

They're still funny as hell, though.

Today's link is a blog post (with pictures) of poorly translated captions from a bootleg copy of Revenge of the Sith that came from a version of the movie that had been translated into Chinese. Best line: "I was just made by the Presbyterian church."

Unstructured Sniglets

Long, long before The Daily Show there was Not Necessarily the News, which was a kind of sketch comedy take on the news. Overall, it was a medium funny show but it did have one segment which achieved a popularity all its own: I speak of sniglets.

A sniglet is defined as a word that is not in the dictionary but which ought to be. Viewers would send in their suggestions and host Rich Hall would read the best entries on the air. My personal favorite is flopcorn, defined as "The unpopped kernels at the bottom of the cooker".

Bert Christensen's Truth & Humour Collection has a nicely representative sample of sniglets. Enjoy.

Off-site Essay: Loco, Completamente Loco

I've got a personal anecdote to introduce this week's off-site essay. It's a pertinent anecdote since it's about something that the author of the essay touches upon. I'm offering this anecdote as a validation to his claims.

When I was in the fifth grade, my family filled out a survey from my school. The survey asked a number of questions including one that asked whether or not any other languages were spoken in our home.

My mom's first language is Spanish. Now, just to forestall you leaping to any conclusions, I should mention that her family has been living in (what would eventually become) the U.S. since the 16^th century (take that Daughters of the American Revolution!); it's simply that they've lived in a state of relative isolation from the rest of the country that only really ended in the 1940's as a consequence of World War II. It is for this reason that my mother didn't pick up English until she was already eleven years old (acquiring a degree of fluency that is genuinely astonishing).

As you might expect, mom tended to speak with her siblings and her parents in her native tongue, generally during phone calls because my father (an Anglo) objected to being excluded from conversations. These chats that my mom had with her family were completely opaque to me because my command of Spanish is limited to Mexican restaurant menus. I had the chance to learn it, of course, but by the time I was five I categorically refused to have anything to do with it, mainly because none of my friends spoke Spanish — a choice that I have long since come to regret.

At any rate, the school got back the survey and took note of the fact that Spanish was spoken in my home (however tertiarily). This raised a bright red flag. So one day, without warning or preamble, I was summoned out of my regular classroom and told that I needed to take a test with some other students in order to determine whether or not I was proficient in English or whether I should be shunted into a bilingual education class. I was rather nonplussed by this (and, later, amused) given that I had already been tested as having a high school level proficiency back in the third grade. By this point, I was reading college English texts in my spare time.

My objections, to my immense frustration, fell on deaf ears and I was forced to go along with the silly exercise. That was the end of the story, for me. I easily proved I could comprehend the lingua franca of my culture and was allowed to go back to being an ordinary student in an ordinary class. Since then, I've wondered about the other kids. None of them were my friends, so I don't know how many, if any, of them were compelled to take bilingual ed.

Not everyone has great English skills and not everyone is good with those kinds of tests. I knew plenty of kids whose first language was English who would have been challenged by the questions on the test. Of course, those kids weren't required to demonstrate that they could understand the language. It seems to me that a lot of kids whose English skills weren't any worse than their monolingual peers could, very well, have been required to take classes taught in a language that they might not even have known well or, in fact, at all (considering that I couldn't even have counted to ten in Spanish but I was considered a candidate by default).

I think that bilingual education &mdash at least the sort that tends to be taught in most districts, which is known as transitional bilingual education, or TBE &mdash is an excellent example of good intentions and soft-headed thinking triumphing over empirical evidence and pragmatism. The problem is that the focus of TBE is not on getting children up to speed in English but, rather, to keep kids "comfortable" by, essentially, removing English instruction from their educations altogether. The end result is that kids end up being consigned to linguistic ghettos.

Today's external link is to a 1998 article in Reason magazine that explores the issue. Be warned, Reason is very much a Libertarian publication with a definite political agenda and more than a little of that view comes across in this article. Never the less, I think that the article, on the whole, makes some very good points and provides some excellent examples of what's wrong with the current state of bilingual education (there has been progress since 1998, but TBE is still alive and kicking, unfortunately). Whenever I re-read this article I feel a slight shudder when I realize how close I actually came to being caught up in that mess.

Linguistic Curmudgeon

I try not to be a linguistic curmudgeon and I think that I do a reasonably good job. I've got a high tolerance for acronym confusion, e.g., "I went to the ATM machine," I tend to be patient with slang, and I've even fully embraced the "singular they" as a gender-neutral pronoun. I have found, however, that I just can't stand it when people say "We're pregnant."

I understand the point of the phrase is to emphasize that pregnancy requires teamwork and that the man's role extends beyond passing out cigars to his buddies and reading magazines in the waiting room while his wife labors. I am all for the notion that men should be part of the process; however, when a couple says "we're pregnant" the phrase only makes sense if each half of the couple can legitimately say "I'm pregnant" as well and, frankly, any man who does so is making a rather implausible biological claim to fame.

The problem, for me, is that pregnancy is a rather specific medical term with very strict connotations. Might I suggest the broader, more colloquial term "we're having a baby" or "we're going to have a baby"? The understanding and the implications of mutual effort remain without the suggestion that a human male is gestating a fetus.

Now if you'll pardon me, I see some more windmills in the distance that need to be tilted at.

A Proposed Solution to the Fermi Paradox

I am sure that it says something about me that one of my hobbies is the Fermi Paradox. More precisely, it says that I'm a hopeless nerd who could really stand to get out more often. Be that as it may, the Paradox is something that engages and delights me.

A while back, the great physicists Enrico Fermi (one of the key players for the Manhattan Project) came across some of his colleagues discussing the question of whether or not there was life in the universe. Fermi pondered the question for a bit and then said (and I paraphrase), "Where are they?"

Like many profound questions, it's deceptively simple. Fermi's point was that if life did, indeed, exist and was, in fact, common (as is often believed), why haven't we seen any evidence for it? Indeed, why aren't they already here.

Other physicists have emphasized this last question by noting that the time it takes to get to the farthest star in the galaxy is the same duration that it takes to get to every star in the galaxy since you can send out a multitude of ships in every direction. Since the farthest star, from us, is about 100,000 light years away, this means that if we were expanding through the galaxy at only 10% the speed of light it would take one million years to completely colonize the galaxy. At a mere 1%, you could do it in ten million years. Even at a glacial tenth of a percent, you could still manage the task in 100 million years.

These may seem like long durations but, when you consider that the galaxy is approximately 10 billion years (or 10,000 million years, if you prefer British notation) old, even 100 million years isn't a very long time. If alien colonizers had developed just 200 million years ago at the farthest galactic point from us, they would have already gotten here well before the dinosaurs went extinct (aided by the fact that the stars, themselves, are in orbit around the galactic center).

So where, in fact, are they?

That's the Fermi Paradox. It cuts to the very core of our place in the universe and it has no easy answer. This isn't, however, to say that answers have not been proposed. On one side, you have the bleak proposition that we are, in fact, likely to either be alone or so isolated as to make no difference (see, for instance, Rare Earth by Ward and Brownlee). On the opposite extreme, you have the contention that aliens are, in fact, already here and that they've been here since the dawn of history (as the infamous Chariots of the Gods suggests). In between these extremes, you have diverse propositions including Zoo hypotheses that suggest that we're in a kind of cosmic wildlife preserve (where we mustn't be disturbed!), economic models that suggest that interstellar colonization is just too damned expensive to make it worth the effort, and such disturbing suggestions as the theory that intelligence is self-limiting and always results in its own extermination before it gets out of hand.

I will be the very first to admit that, right now, the Paradox is basically a philosophers game. A less kind way to put it would be to call it mental masturbation. In truth, the only way to solve the Paradox is to go out there and to actually take a comprehensive look around. I think that it's fair to say that this won't happen for a very long time, if ever. Be that as it may, even if there's no value to be had in considering the question, right now, it doesn't change the fact that it is still an important question as well as a good way to stretch one's mind. We certainly don't criticize the ancient Greek philosophers for thinking about the nature of the Cosmos (even though their answers were typically wrong and often amusing). In the last resort, it's harmless fun and I see no risk in indulging myself.

The first challenge for any attempt to address the Paradox is that it must account for the existing data. If alien intelligences are out there, their presence is not obvious. We have (tabloids and UFO enthusiasts to the contrary) not found any solid evidence that we are being visited. We have found no artifacts, much less anything as telling as a piece of advanced machinery recovered from the Carboniferous. Diligent sky surveys have also failed to yield anything above natural cosmic noise and a single, unrepeated "Wow Signal" that's more likely than not just an artifact of the equipment that detected it. The universe is eerily quiet. This is a challenge not only to the UFO crowd, but also to the Sagan's and Drake's of the world who imagined a universe brimming with life.

My personal hunch is that intelligence is, for one reason or another, rare. I also suspect that we are near the beginning of the fertile age of the universe and that we may well be among the first to look out upon the universe with wondering eyes. Might there, however, be some way to preserve the notion that life and intelligence are common while, never the less, accounting for the silence?

I don't have much confidence in the theories of Intelligent Design that are currently being offered as a popular alternative to the Theory of Evolution. I distrust any theory whose ultimate support rests upon the proposition that, at some point in time, a miracle happened. Appeal to miracles has always struck me as lazy, even when I was a theist. I no longer believe in any gods but, even if there did exist something godlike, I think that I would have less respect for it if it had to prop up crucial elements of its creations with supernatural buttresses. I think that a truly consummate deity would only need a single miracle to start the universe, if that many, leaving a creation that could look after itself from that point forward. Call it an aesthetic preference for Deism if you like.

That said, if there is one thing about humanity that strikes me as verging on the miraculous, it is the invention of writing. More specifically, it's our very capacity for being able to invent it and use it in the first place. Every other element of our biology and our cognition has developed through evolutionary time, including the explosive development of our brains over the last two million years. Even tool making, which has been seriously proposed (with little contention beyond stick using Chimps) as one of the few things that genuinely distinguishes us from the other animals, has an evolutionary pedigree.

Writing is not like that. Writing relates to language, of course, but language was shaped into our throats and our brains by selective pressure. Even if language is only as old as this more recent (and lonely) branch of the Hominid family, it had time to be forged by evolutionary pressures. Writing, by contrast, is too recent. Much too recent.

The earliest proto-writing extends back a mere 7,000 years, or so. Most humans were not introduced to writing until the last few centuries. Many people, throughout the world, remain illiterate. Despite this, if you were to take any random child from any random part of the world without any concern about selecting a child of the proper race or lineage, you could teach that child to write with as much facility as any other randomly selected child. What's more, if you were to apply a specific sort of lesion to a literate person's brain, you could destroy their ability to either read or write or both. This means that although we didn't evolve literacy, the structures that allow us this feat are present in every single person on the planet barring only those who have developmental handicaps and those who have suffered particular forms of neurological trauma.

I said that I would consider this to be something that verges on the miraculous. I do not mean that literally. Clearly, the skills that allow us to become literate must be co-opting existing neural structures. PET scans and MRI bear this out. Our ability to read and write is closely tied to our ability to speak and comprehend. It is, in practice, little different from being able to use a heavy wrench to drive a nail. Was it, however, an inevitable adaptation?

Is it possible that our easy facility with the written word is a fluke? Could it be that there's something particular about our own neural architecture that allowed us to adapt existing linguistic skills to the novel solution of literacy? We know that intelligence alone does not guarantee literacy. If a person misses a certain magic window, between the ages of four and seven, their ability to become literate, at some later point in life, is compromised even if their overall linguistic development is not impaired. It is not that far-fetched that there could be a species, out there, that has strong linguistic skills but no innate ability to learn how to read and write. From there, we only need to take the further step of supposing that our own species is the exception rather than the rule.

Imagine what it would mean for an entire species to be illiterate. Imagine what would happen to our own species if we were to suddenly lose the ability. Literacy is more than a form of communication, it's a way of distributing intelligence. Instead of each person having to hold everything they know in their own heads, they can offload part of the burden of memory to paper freeing up space to more efficiently use their overall intelligence. Consider how much more difficult the task of constructing a large building would be if the foremen were forbidden from using blueprints. For that matter, think of how much more challenging it is to do long division without a pencil and paper.

Literacy also gives us history. Oral histories are notoriously unreliable over any sort of long term. There is a reason that our understanding of the past changes sharply once you pass the point where we had developed any systems of writing. Once you go past that terminus you literally have to start digging history out of the ground and piecing it together in the form of pot shards and other durable artifacts. This is the reason that we know next to nothing about European history beyond a mere two thousand years ago. Literacy hadn't reached that far, yet, and more the pity.

If literacy is rare, so, I believe, must be technology. Without an ability to record a reliable history, innovations don't tend to accumulate at anything but a glacial pace (again, I use that term literally). More so, the overall level of innovation that you can achieve is limited to the population's ability to hold their entire store of knowledge in their own brains. It is not, I think, outrageous to suppose that a truly illiterate species could not achieve a high technology, much less an interstellar one.

So there is my proposal. Let's call it the Rare Readers hypothesis.

Now, do I believe that this is likely to be the case. No. I suspect that once you achieve brains that are capable of complex symbolic manipulations and abstract associations (that is, language), it's probably that the tools for literacy are already in place and only waiting to be discovered. Even if literacy requires particular neurological features, I think that it's probable that there would be selective pressures towards developing those particular features. I would not be surprised if there were a few intelligence species out there that were stranded in islands of illiteracy, but I am doubtful that this would constitute a norm.

So what was the point of all this. Well, it's fun to think about. At least if you're the kind of nerd that I am.