15 January 25

Fun with antanaclasis

Many languages have it, but English has it more. There's the (in)famous sentence about bullying bison in an American city, the grammatical sentence which repeats the word 'had' a dozen times without interruption and a contrast between the linear nature of time and the dietary preference of some small insects. We shall look at each of these in turn, but first an explanation of Antanaclasis is due.

Antanaclasis is from Latinised Greek, meaning 'to bend back on itself'. It is when we use a word that looks the same (a homonym) and sounds the same (a homophone) but which has a different meaning. For example, consider putting on a pair of gloves in a hurry. Gloves are right and left-handed and if you put the left-hand glove on your right hand then you need to stop and sort things out. However if you get the right right, then just the left is left. Things get worse when someone beautifies industrial facilities with strategically planted trees and flowers, because he plants plants' plants.

We can also use antanaclasis with phrases such as when we refer to the linear nature of time – 'Time flies like an arrow.' Pay attention to the words 'flies like' because they appear again in the next phrase 'Fruit flies like a banana'.

Antanaclasis happens because words sometimes get new meanings derived from the older ones. As a noun 'fly' is a small winged insect that gets its name from a verb that means to get airbourne. Because something in the air can outmanoeuvre something on the ground someone more intellectually competent than the average groundling is called 'fly'. So while a dumb fly stays and waits to get swatted, we can see a fly fly fly.

Now let's take antanaclasis to its absurd but logical and completely grammatical extreme. To do this we have to go to a US city (Buffalo) and observe the bullying behaviour (buffaloing) of bison (buffalo) from that city towards other bison. Because 'buffalo' is the same whether singular or plural, we can say that Buffalo (city) buffalo (bison) buffalo (bully) buffalo (other bison). But it gets worse. That's because the bison bullied by Buffalo bison go on to bully other bison - and we can express this in a non-defining relative clause which does not need commas.

So the entire sentence reads 'Buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo.'

15 November 2024

British Dialects

'Ah'm scunnered wi' ye, tha wee glaikit numpty. Tha mingy havering is nae galus so wheesht yer stramash.'

The average English speaker would be rather astonished to discover that the above statement is English - for a given definition of 'English'. Although an Englishman living in England might not understand that sentence, he would not be particularly surprised. This is because he would recognize that the speaker is a Scot, and the Scots, like the Welsh, Jamaicans, Yorkshiremen and Scousers have accents and dialects that make them hard for the average Englishman to understand, and which renders their versions of English incomprehensible to one another.

Those who study such things note that Britain has a wider range of accents and dialects than many other nations - many more than, for example, the United States despite that country's much larger population. One reason is history. In northern England, for example some local dialects have sensibly ignored the shift from the second person singular thee/ thou/thine to the modern you/your/yours and all the confusion this causes. In other cases words that have become obsolete elsewhere have remained in use locally - for example a speaker might say 'Bide' rather than 'Stay' – a word that remains in modern English with the words 'abide' and 'abode'.

These dialects and accents have remained despite the pervasive spread of standard English in TV programmes and film. Researchers speculate that one reason is that speaking with a dialect identifies one as a local, a part of a particular tribe. This is the same reason why many specialist groups such as policemen or doctors use their own particular jargon even though sometimes it is easier to use the standard English for the same thing. This is particularly true of some branches of academia such as sociology which have almost evolved a separate language. The sentence 'Cultural relativism can predicate anomie or anticipatory socialization' makes perfect sense to some people.

However a Scot hearing the same words might say (in translation) 'I am sick of you, you little foolish person, your disgusting talk is nothing to be proud of, so stop making a fuss'.

15 September 2024

Let's drink to that

Recently I took an interest in the suffix '-ade', examples being colonnade, arcade and lemonade. This suffix comes from the Latin '-actus' which is itself derived from the word 'factus' meaning 'made from'. (Columns, arches and lemons respectively in our examples.) This led to the further question of why we only have lemonade and not teade, coffeeade and orangeade. (In fact the latter is a word, but people always just say 'orange juice'. We use 'lemonade' to differentiate the drink from lemon juice which is used e.g. for cleaning or cooking.)

Once one has begun pulling at an etymological thread it's hard to stop, so I wandered on to the origins of the word 'coffee'. 'Tea' is straightforward because it comes from the Chinese who invented the stuff. They call it t'e, and every other language uses a variant of this. The Chinese also call the stuff 'chai' which is why the affectation of the name chai tea is rather grating. It's basically just saying 'tea, tea' in different Chinese dialects.

'Coffee' is more interesting, because it refers to the finished product rather than the bean, which is something else entirely (for example 'buhn' in Arabic). The process of transforming beans into liquid uses the Arabic word 'qahwah' which also can refer to turning grapes into wine - and probably lemons into lemonade if the Arabs of the time drank the stuff.

Early and enthusiastic drinkers of coffee were the Turks who mangled the Arabic into 'kaveh'. In this form it was encountered by a 17th century English speaker called Thomas Herbert who noted that the Persians were fond of a drink called 'caphe'.The French adapted this into cafe, from where we get the equivalent English word. Oddly enough cafes are now dropping out of the language and being replaced by 'bistros' and 'coffee shops'. Whether a pumpkin-spice latte with extra sprinkles in any way resembles the original qahwah is questionable, but it shows that the drink, like the language that describes it, is constantly evolving.

15 July 2024

Learning Foreign

One reason why it is so hard to learn another language is because language is not just a way to communicate your thoughts, it is also a way to organize your thoughts. So people from other countries don't just speak differently, they think differently. English is hard to learn, but there are tougher challenges.

Consider Latin. The Ancient Romans liked to think of themselves as a very organized people. Perhaps with their language they had to be. Latin is a fully-inflected language. Inflections are the endings that are attached to the end of a word for example to show whether that word is the subject, object or indirect object in a sentence.

Think of the way English changes when you conjugate 'I, me, my mine …'. Now do that with every noun and pronoun, with different endings depending if the word is masculine feminine or neuter. Now do it all again with different endings again if the noun is plural. It's even worse with verbs Think 'be, am, is are ..' six different ways, with another six for plurals and then different forms for the active and passive, present past, future and so on.

Or try Mandarin Chinese, where for example the word 'ma' can mean 'hemp', 'mother' or 'horse' depending on whether the tone of voice used is flat, rising, falling or falling-rising. Or German, where Mark Twain once wondered why a turnip is a female noun, but a young woman is neuter.


How about Navajo, which not only is inflected like Latin, but also uses changing tones like Chinese and a system called agglutination where a whole bunch of meanings are added to a word by prefixes and suffixes – think of English words like 'unpronounceable', but in a more complex form. In fact Navajo was used in the Second World War as a code language, because two speakers talking on the radio were incomprehensible to anyone but another Navajo speaker.

15 May 2024

RAP Artists

'I think my HRT therapy made me forget my PIN number when I was at the ATM machine last week'.

The above sentence is an example of RAP phrases in action. By RAP here I don't mean the music of Snip Doggy-doo or any of the other strangely named artists in the genre. Instead I refer to what lexicologists call a Redundant Acronym Phrase phrase. Note that second 'phrase' in the previous sentence. This is not a typo but an example of deliberate humour in the world of English grammarians. (Given the chaotic nature of English grammar as a whole, examples of unintentional humour abound.)

What this type of RAP phrase does is deliberately repeat the redundancy which one finds hanging around the end of many English-language acronyms. This happens when people refer to things like 'The NATO organization' without considering what the 'O' in NATO stands for. (Or the 'T' in 'HRT', or the 'N' in 'PIN' or …)

Other common RAP phrases include 'LCD displays' the 'HIV virus', and – particularly – the 'NHL hockey league'. These phrases are not necessarily a bad thing. The SALT talks were the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, aimed at reducing the risk of nuclear warfare. Yet without the helpful repetition of 'talks' at the end, many viewers would be wondering why the reporter on TV had interrupted a vital discussion to mention food condiments.

Condiments, of course, can only be added to food, rendering 'food' in the above sentence redundant. Which brings us to the other type of RAP phrase. This involves other languages already meaning the bit that we helpfully translate into modern English anyway. Geography suffers particularly from this form of RAP phrasing – as in the River Avon, the Sahara Desert, Mount Fujiyama, and the Rio Grande River – which translate as the River river, the Desert desert, Mount Fuji mountain and the Big River river.