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Occasional commenter Martin writes to ask about adjectives:

The rule in English apparently goes something like, “number + judgement/attitude + size + age + color + origin + material + purpose + noun.” (Wikipedia has an expanded and annotated list.) But there are exceptions, for example “modifying adjectives that are homophonous with reduced relatives, or exhibit a special intonation pattern (such as ‘comma’ or focus intonation) are allowed to escape ordering restrictions.” That’s from this 2006 paper by Alexandra Teodorescu which is focused primarily on this and other exceptions.

One question around the ordering rules is, why are they that way? Why is it that “the strange old Polish ladies” sounds correct to our ears, while “the Polish old strange ladies” does not? This 2017 paper by Gregory Scontras, Judith Degen, and Noah D. Goodman argues that subjectivity governs the standard ordering, with the most subjective adjectives being placed the farthest away from the noun being modified. (It would seem that quantity or number is an exception to this rule, which the authors don’t mention in the paper.)

But in their final discussion the authors acknowledge that their findings about subjectivity just raise another “why” question: “While subjectivity accounts for the regularities we observe in adjective ordering, the deeper explanation for how subjectivity determines the relative order of adjectives remains unsettled.” They continue:

For now we can only speculate about the ultimate source of this desire. Subjective content allows for miscommunication to arise if speakers and listeners arrive at different judgments about a property description. Hence, less subjective content is more useful at communicating about the world. An explanation along these lines, based on pressures to facilitate successful reference resolution, would have to depend on the hierarchical, not linear, ordering of adjectives: noun phrases are built semantically outward from the noun, and more useful, less subjective content enters earlier in this process (cf. the mirroring of preferences in pre- vs. postnominal languages). A full explanation must examine not only why we observe the preferences that we do, but also how and to what extent these preferences get conventionalized via the diachronic processes that shape language—a promising direction for future research.

Whatever its source, the success of subjectivity in predicting adjective ordering preferences provides a compelling case where linguistic universals, the regularities we observe in adjective ordering, emerge from cognitive universals, the subjectivity of the properties that the adjectives name.

This conjecture does start to explain why this particular grammar rule feels so natural or internalized, and maybe is less subject to gradual change over long periods of time, as compared to many others which feel (and are) more artificial and likely change, for example not ending sentences with prepositions or splitting infinitives.

Then there is the question of how the ordering rules vary among different languages, which I can’t find much about. Apparently most languages have rules for the order of adjectives, but does the subjectivity rule apply generally in other languages?

Thoughts?

Somehow I thought of “to step foot” as a recent distortion of the good old phrase “set foot.” But I just ran across it in Frank Herbert’s Dune (1965) — “if you stepped foot where they forbade you to go” — so I thought I’d check the OED (s.v. step, not updated since 1916). Imagine my surprise:

9. To move (the foot) forward or through a specified step. Chiefly with adverbs, as down, in, across. to step foot in (a place). Now only U.S.

1540 J. Palsgrave tr. G. Gnapheus Comedye of Acolastus v. v. sig. Aaivᵛ Steppe not one foote forth of this place.
a1547 Earl of Surrey Poems (1964) 22 Good ladies,..Stepp in your foote, come take a place, and mourne with me awhyle.
1702 H. Blackwell Eng. Fencing-master 51 Engage him in Carte, disingage in Tierce, stepping your Right-Foot a-cross at the same time.
1849 G. Cupples Green Hand (1856) xiii. 130 Stepping one of his long trowser-legs down from over the quarterdeck awning.
1864 R. B. Kimball Was he Successful? ii. i. 182 When Hiram stepped foot in the metropolis.
1880 S. G. W. Benjamin Troy i. iv. 26 (Funk) Calchas announced that the first man who stepped foot on the enemy’s soil was doomed at once to die.

Just goes to show how wrong you can be.

Aaron McManamon has a think-piece (or whatever you want to call it; it’s full of one-sentence paragraphs and uses phrases like “brand uplift”) about the use and abuse of English in advertising campaigns:

Standing out is hard, we’ve said it before, we’ll say it again: standing out is hard. That’s the main job of agencies like ours, to try and cut through the noise to deliver our client’s message. This might be through clever media planning and ad placement, it might be from exceptional, viral-baiting creative or snazzy copy.

And it’s in copywriting aiming for the standout tagline where we’ve seen a trend. Weird, grammatically goofy wording.

He gives some examples, then says “We’re trying to understand the trend. What’s happening? Is it clever copywriting, or a lazy word-sneeze?” And I liked that last phrase enough to post the thing. I also like his impeccably descriptivist attitude:

But we’re okay with it, mostly.

Language is something that continuously evolves. It shifts with culture changes, geographical movements of the people that use it, how it’s used and for a thousand other reasons. And right now it’s changing faster than ever.

And he has fun mocking Lexus’s “Experience Amazing.” Thanks, Trevor!

Erhard Rostlund’s “The Evidence for the Use of Fish as Fertilizer in Aboriginal North America” (Journal of Geography 56:5 [1957], 222–228) is an attempt to debunk the apparently widespread (at time of writing) belief “that the Indians used to put fish in the ground to fertilize their corn fields.” Rostlund writes “The first and rather obvious point to make is that fish, a valuable food, would hardly have been used as manure unless it was so abundant that people could easily catch more than they could eat. […] The interior of eastern North America, which constituted by far the greater part of the aboriginal farming area, was not rich enough in fish to warrant its use as fertilizer.” Under “The Negative Evidence” he says “in the entire record there is virtually no reference to the use of fish as fertilizer.” But what brings it to LH is this section:

The Linguistic Argument:

Another type of affirmative evidence, or at least affirmative argument, is based on the etymology of “menhaden” and “poghaden” (also called “pauhagen” and “pogy”), which are local names of Brevoortiu tyrannus, an Atlantic fish of the herring family. These names, according to J. H. Trumbull as quoted by G. Browne Goode, are derived from Indian words that mean literally “to fertilize,” and Goode argues that this derivation constitutes “unanswerable evidence” for the manuring with fish in aboriginal time. The validity of the argument naturally depends on the correctness of the etymology, which can be verified only by authorities in the Algonquian languages, and such verification is clearly needed and would be welcome[…]

If a speculative note may be introduced, one may wonder, since the evidence for Indian use of fertilizers is at best rather dubious, whether they had a word meaning “to fertilize.” The missionaries, who compiled many of the Indian dictionaries, studied the aboriginal languages largely for the purpose of translating the Bible, and had the problem of finding Indian expressions for manuring, for example in the parable of the fig tree, “I shall dig about it and dung it” (Luke 13,8). If the Indians had no word for dunging, they soon got an idea for it — suggested perhaps by the missionaries — from seeing the New England colonists manuring their fields with fish. The question is perhaps whether the etymological cart has been put before the horse. Maybe the fish gave its name to manuring, instead of vice versa.

Thoughts? (Thanks, Warren!)

Jonathon Owen, the linguist/editor who blogs at Arrant Pedantry (“Examining language rules and where they come from”) and whose post on “as such” I quoted with fervent approval in May, has another winner, I Am Begging You to Learn How Dictionaries Work:

It’s a phenomenon as predictable as the tides: a dictionary adds new words or definitions, and then people grouse about those changes, either because they don’t like the new words and think that the dictionary is declaring them acceptable, or because they personally have never heard of those words before and therefore don’t see why they should be included. They often blend in grumpiness about the language supposedly declining or about kids these days. In both cases, of course, the real problem is that readers just don’t understand how dictionaries work.

Take this recent example from Maura Hohman at NBCLX, a site dedicated to “thought-provoking content” “about tech, the environment, politics, community, social issues, and current events.” It takes the familiar kids-these-days trope and gives it an unusual spin: the author is only thirty, but she feels old because she doesn’t recognize a few of the 455 words recently added to Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary. She starts off by calling herself an elder millennial, which I found cute as a millennial who just turned forty. I also found it odd from someone complaining about definitions. Definitions vary, of course, but elder or geriatric millennials are generally considered to have been born somewhere between something like 1980 and 1985 or 1981 and 1988. Even by the more generous definition, Hohman misses the cutoff by three years. Nevertheless, she says it was “a gut punch” to realize that she didn’t know a lot of these new words, which she calls “wrinkle-inducing additions.”

The first word she complains about, zero-day, means “of, relating to, or being a vulnerability (as in a computer or computer system) that is discovered and exploited (as by cybercriminals) before it is known to or addressed by the maker or vendor”. Weirdly, though, the definition she gives appears to be for a noun, not the adjective that Merriam-Webster enters. At any rate, Hohman imagines that this is a term used by children and that her unfamiliarity with it makes her old, when really it just means she doesn’t read much about device security. And that’s fine! But if she ever reads an article that mentions a zero-day vulnerability, now she’ll be able to look up that phrase in Merriam-Webster.

He goes on to discuss blank check company (a term I, like Owen, was unfamiliar with), deplatform, oobleck, and teraflop in equally lively and convincing style, concluding:
[Read more…]

I found Dmitri Sitchinava’s FaceBook post (in Russian) interesting enough I thought I’d translate it here:

Many, many years ago, the Russian Language Corpus compiled a list of “turns of phrase” (units of more than one word that, at the whim of Russian spelling, are written with a space). Useful stuff. It was based on Rogozhnikova’s dictionary (2003) The Explanatory Dictionary of Word-Equivalent Combinations and on the corpus’s frequency collocations.

Well, in this list the combination “и так далее” [‘and so on’] (48700 occurrences, counting [the abbreviations] “и т. д.” and, especially for Victor Sonkin, “итд”) does NOT exist, but there is a hyperfrequency [?] combination “в супряге с” [‘in a yoke with,’ i.e. ‘together’] (2 occurrences, both in [Sholokhov’s] Quiet Don).

This is not a criticism or mockery of the corpus — it is an objective typological and theoretical “hole” in the description of language (not merely Russian, but language in general), and it is clear why it happened. The point is that these “turns” are classified according to the syntactic function they perform — conjunction, adverb, parenthetical word, or particle, whatever that means. And “и так далее” [‘and so on’] is a continuation of any homogeneous list, it doesn’t care about part of speech. It’s a cross-category… cross-category what? Rogozhnikova’s dictionary has “и так далее” [‘and so on’], of course, but where there should be a particle marking, it says in italics “at the end of an enumeration.” Thanks, cap.

Of course, this problem has nothing to do with how many words it takes to write an expression with the meaning of “and so on.” You don’t have to go far from Russian — in Ukrainian, it’s one word, тощо. I started thinking about this when I encountered the Chinese Penn Treebank part-of-speech tagset, where for the corresponding character (which can be doubled) there is the special notation ETC.

A kind colleague tells me this is described as a general extender (Overstreet, Whales, Candlelight, and Stuff Like That: General Extenders in English Discourse. If the morpheme is arranged in this way (this includes, as I understand it, the legendary китаб-митаб [redoubling of китаб ‘book’], consequences shmonsequences, маслице да фуяслице, etc.), it is a similative plural.

WALS has such constructions under The Associative Plural: “By virtue of its referential heterogeneity, the associative plural construction is related to other non-homogeneous plurals, such as what might be called the similative plural (e.g. Telugu (Dravidian; India) puligili ‘tigers and such’ (Colin Masica, p.c.)), which differs from the associative plural in that it denotes a class of objects sharing similar features rather than a group of closely related associates.”

I’m going to quote the start and end of Grace Schulman’s “The Examination: Remembrance of Words Lost” (Poetry 113.5 [Feb. 1969]: 319-321), because I’ve remembered much of it for half a century now and want to have it conveniently to hand (I have the issue of Poetry somewhere around the house, but who knows where?). It begins:

—What happened at your orals, Grace?
Taking a pipe from a row of suckling pigs, The chairman swung
In his chair. An A-shaped face, kind voice. Eyes, rubber stamps:
Failure. Special case.
          —I lose it now,
But I will try to call it back. Dim stars
That fade to a stare can shine at a backward glance.
—Why did you fail?
          —I did not. Words failed me […]

And ends:

Oh, yes. Of course. But nowadays we can’t
Give Ph.D.s for that. What’s your profession?
—Poet.
   —Published poet?
            —Yes.
               —Well, poetry
Has nothing to do with scholarship. Your sentence:
A year of failure and a crown of silence.

Five fathers vanished. One remained.
                 —My friend,
I see you have been walking under water.
Look upward now.
          I surfaced then, saw shadows
That had been knives, and moved into myself.

I have often muttered “Well, poetry has nothing to do with scholarship” to myself over the years. Those italics in the chairman’s speech are devastating.

Last year I wrote about Andrei Bely’s Симфония (2-я, драматическая) [Symphony: Second, Dramatic], and I’m happy to announce that Columbia’s indispensable Russian Library series (see this post) has published The Symphonies, a complete translation by Jonathan Stone of all four of his first published prose works, and Columbia was kind enough to send me a copy. As I expect of the Russian Library, it’s well produced, with a gorgeous cover, a good introduction by the translator, and helpful endnotes. The introduction starts by describing a sunset Bely watched from the balcony of his family’s apartment and wrote about as an instance of “a world transformed — the everyday became magical, the ordinary became mythical”; the prose “symphonies” he wrote and published between 1902 and 1908 “demonstrate a reformed vision of the world that reflected the combination of optimism and fear that accompanied the new century” and that “was captured by the emerging literary and artistic movement of Russian Symbolism.” Stone then has sections on Russian Symbolism and on Bely’s life before proceeding to the symphonies themselves:

In addition to being literary works, the Symphonies are musical, philosophical, autobiographical, visual, and theurgic compositions that continually destabilize all notion of genre and bombard the reader with vaguely familiar allusions and echoes (both internal to the work and drawing on outside elements). […] The vision of a world transformed is always lurking at the edges of even the most realistic and biographical moments in the Symphonies, and as readers we cannot escape the sensation that a centaur or serpent or mystical eagle may suddenly interrupt our evening walk home. The simultaneity of both this world and the other is the most constant feature of these stories because it was how Bely had come to see reality around him, a reflection of his view from the balcony on the Arbat. […] One of the most frequent words we encounter in the Symphonies is “passerby.” Bely fixates on the anonymous Muscovites, a city whose population had surpassed one million around the time Bely began writing the Symphonies, because he sees in each of these ordinary and unremarkable characters the potential to be mystical, magical, mythical.

He ends with this summary:
[Read more…]

A good point, from Eduard Fraenkel, Aeschylus, Agamemnon, Vol. II, p. 90, n. 1 (on line 149 ἐχενῇδας):

In all periods poets have the right to restore to a word its ‘original’ meaning, which in daily usage it has entirely or almost entirely lost. Horace, Odes 1.36.20 lascivis hederis ambitiosior provides a good example. The peculiar use in Horace, Odes 4.4.65 of evenit, to which several critics have objected, belongs to the same category; Baiter ad loc. rightly says ‘Horatius saepius ad propriam vocabulorum vim redire ausus est’.

Tradition-minded poets still do this, and it’s a good thing to my mind, keeping the thread of the language unbroken — though of course poetry in the spoken language of its day is also a good thing. (Via Laudator Temporis Acti.)

A piquant description of a situation familiar to anyone who has studied various languages and has to toggle from one to the other, from The Amur River: Between Russia and China, by Colin Thubron (Harper, 2021), courtesy of Joel at Far Outliers:

Next morning, the day before I cross to China, I lock myself in my hotel room and prepare to ease into the language that I learnt poorly more than thirty years ago, and have rarely spoken since. My Mandarin notes and textbooks, squashed into my rucksack, spill out like ancient scripts, still covered in my tutor’s red biro, and stained with the rings of coffee cups. Beyond my window, through an opening in the shoreline flat-blocks, a section of the Amur gleams, with Heihe lying beyond under a clouded sky. A Russian patrol boat is crossing the gap.

The only sounds in the room are my own. I return to my makeshift table. It’s a relief to leave behind the complexities of Russian grammar, the dual aspects of verbs, the exacting cases of nouns, the sheer length of words. Chinese, which lacks verbal tenses, genders, even the singular and plural, seems suddenly, radiantly simple. I shift my table to the light of the window and the glint of the Amur, and my exhilaration rises. The vocabulary flows back. Sometimes I have the illusion that I am not remembering, but learning anew. I anticipate the stark thrust of Mandarin replacing Russian wholesale. A change of language feels like a change of person. Sounds and structures dictate emotion. New concepts emerge, while others die. I have the illusion that I become more aggressive in Mandarin, and that my voice descends an octave. Perhaps I will need this. I have no idea what dialects may be coming my way. Yet for a long time I hear Mandarin returning, and imagine all will be well.

But as the hours go on, this happy remembrance stiffens. The unfamiliar structures start to weigh on me. There are words I have clean forgotten. Perhaps it is all too long ago. The blessed existence of Western borrowings (in Russian there are many) is all but absent. Mandarin is a tonal tongue – its words change meaning with their pitch – and the language turns, in my memory, to an echo of discordant gongs. I remember finding it easier to speak than to understand: the reverse of what I wish. Suddenly I miss the pliant beauty of Russian.

By evening a self-induced dementia has set in. When I go down to the hotel restaurant I mistakenly ask for the lavatory in Mandarin, then order a meal in Russian and chat to the bewildered waitress in a deranged mixture of both. Often my poor grasp of either leaves me suspended in mid-speech. I have no idea what is going to come out of my mouth.

Joel recounts his own similar experience involving Romanian and Chinese; I have had it happen with French and Spanish.