I really should check my referrer log more often than I do; I find some very interesting things that way. Just now I discovered Blazing Hyphens (Makafim Lohatim), Yuval Pinter’s blog: “Since language is my main passion, most of the posts revolve around the meaningless parts of linguistics.” He goes on to say, “I also write meaningful squibs (sometimes with more-than-just-google research!) which I post at Dagesh Kal, the Israeli answer to Language Log,” so of course I had to investigate the latter; they write:
Hi and welcome to the Dagesh Kal blog (= dagesh lene), a young Israeli linguablog. We (Ben lee, Itamar, Tal, Yair and Yuval) try and touch on a variety of topics that have to do with language, directly or indirectly, in a manner accessible to the general public. In other words, we’re basically ripping off Language Log. If you think a certain post might interest you but can’t understand it because you can’t read Hebrew (or rather, because Google’s machine translation system isn’t good enough yet), just drop us a line and we’ll see if we can help.
They’ve translated a couple already, Paul McCartney and the World in Which we Live in and Dolphins Obey Natural Language Rules! They also Obey Danish Cities (“A cautious debunking of claims regarding the syntactical abilities of dolphins”), and they “welcome guest posts in any language from people working in language-related fields.” Live long and prosper, both of you!
Wow. Truly an honor.
I guess we’ll be writing a lot more of our posts in English from now on…
Re the Paul McCartney and the World in Which we Live in post, couldn’t we say that in the unstressed suffix -ing the velar nasal is drawn forward to the alveolar position by the preceding high front vowel?
The last two analyses lead me to conclude that McCartney did in fact originally try to sing In which we’re livin’.
You don’t need a bunch of fancy machinery for this. Just listen to the Youtube Wings live song he links to. Paul says, quite clearly, “in which we live in”. He says it twice.
When asked recently, Paul himself couldn’t recall which it was, though he thought the first of these versions ‘wronger but cuter’.
Of course he did. It’s a typically whimsical McCartney piece of rhyming. Wasn’t “Yesterday” originally called “Scrambled Eggs”?
No, the “scrambled eggs” lyrics were just used as a place-holder to practice the song until the real thing came around on the guitar. But you’re not wrong: after all, he is the eggman, not to mention the walrus. Speaking of which, I once asked the Zompist what the connection was between McCartney’s “goo-goo-ga-joob” and Paul Simon’s “koo-koo-ka-choo”. After taking thought, he sagely replied: “Same brand of dope, I guess.”
I hadn’t heard of the Zompist – thanks. Isn’t “I am the Walrus” by John? I keep seeing it mentioned in the Guardian. Someone may have re-released Magical Mystery Tour (perhaps its the 200th anniversary).
“I was the walrus, Paul wasn’t the walrus! I was just saying that to be nice.” (God, National Lampoon was funny back in the day, the day being forty years ago.)
That guy didn’t say the G at the end of ing.