Showing posts with label english. Show all posts
Showing posts with label english. Show all posts

Thursday, May 19, 2016

Singlish: Creole, creoloid, creolized language?

Today's post is brought to you by "ongoing problems with terminology in linguistics".

As my newsfeed this week has filled up with reblogged and retweeted articles about Singlish, often the first thing that gets mentioned is that Singlish is an English-based "creole". But what exactly does the term creole mean?

In many introductory linguistics textbooks, dictionaries and the Wikipedia entry (at the time of writing), the term creole (or creole language) is mostly commonly defined as a stable natural language that has developed from a pidgin, while pidgin is typically defined as a simplified contact language developed to enable speakers of different languages to communicate.

In other words, a pidgin is said to become a creole when children learn it as their first language and the new language develops its own set of rules and conventions - its own grammar. That means that languages which have "Pidgin" in their names, such as Hawaiian Pidgin, are by this definition actually creoles.


Pidgin on the street?

The issue with this particular definition of creole, when applied to Singlish, is that there is no attested "pidgin" state for Singlish. I've seen a few sources (including the Wikipedia article) that claim that Singlish arose from a pidgin-like English as non-English speakers started to "pick up" the English that was filtering out "into the streets" from English-medium schools established by the British.

This story is problematic because, as most Singaporeans of my parents' generation will recall, prior to the implementation of post-independence language policies, the main lingua franca used between speakers of different languages was not English, but a simplified form of Malay known as Bazaar Malay. In a 1975 article (behind a paywall), John Platt, who was an Associate Professor at Monash University, noted that even at the time of the paper's writing, people with little education would speak a pidgin English only when communicating with tourists, and that outside of areas frequented by tourists, many older people spoke no English at all. Rather, he suggested that:
[Singapore Colloquiul English's] existence can be traced to the transference of certain features from the languages of local ethnic groups to the English acquired by school children in primary and secondary schools. These transferred features were then reinforced by the use of this variety (particularly its basilect, SCE) in informal situations at school and at home among siblings. 
Consequently, Platt used the term creoloid1 to describe a language variety that has not developed from a pidgin, but nevertheless shares a number of grammatical features with known creoles, such as fewer verbal inflections (or more generally, a loss of morphology). Specifically, he was applying this term to the basilectal form, or the most colloquial / informal register of Singapore English. For instance, in this form of Singlish, you don't need to have 3rd person agreement with most verbs: he say 'he says'.


Simplifying or making things more complicated?

Although the term creoloid hasn't gained a lot of currency in creole studies, it is worth noting that this may be because the term creole itself has expanded in meaning beyond "a language that comes from a pidgin". There is much more recognition that all languages are mixed to some extent, and that what we have been previously identified as creoles, may have been the result of speakers of a language shifting rapidly to another one. For instance, in their 1980 book Language Contact, Creolization and Genetic Linguistics, Thomason and Kaufman, distinguish creolized pidgins (creoles that have developed from pidgins), from languages that have undergone changes to their grammar and vocabulary as a result of different degrees of intensity in language contact. They use the term abrupt creolization to describe the outcome of one extreme of the continuum, where there has been intense contact that results in very rapid language shift.

(This leads to the potentially confusing situation where one might use the term creolization to either refer to: the process of a language gaining structure and complexity as it transitions from a pidgin to a creole; or the process of a language losing structure and complexity, when compared to the target language, as adult speakers rapidly shift to the language.)


In any case, we note the inclusion of Singlish in the online Atlas and Survey of Pidgin and Creole language structures (APiCS). However, the editors explicitly state in that in the absence of clear criteria to define pidgins and creoles, their approach was to try and include as many languages as they could which represented the kinds of contact languages that linguists were interested in.

So yes, Singlish is a creole, creoloid and creolized language. But that depends on how you define the terms creole and creolized. It is no longer fair to assume that a creole only refers to a language that came from a pidgin. And maybe that's something that needs to be addressed in textbooks and other sources of linguistic information.

Also, this is the tip of the terminological iceberg - there are other terms around like post-creoles and mixed languages that I don't have the time, energy or qualifications to talk about!


1Although the Platt article appears to be the first published use of the term creoloid, Loreto Todd presented a paper titled "Pidgins and creoles: The case for the creoloid" at the International Conference on Pidgins and Creole in Honolulu that same year.

References
Michaelis, Susanne Maria & Maurer, Philippe & Haspelmath, Martin & Huber, Magnus (eds.) 2013. Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Language Structures Online. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. (Available online at http://apics-online.info.)

Platt, John T. 1975. The Singapore English speech continuum and its basilect 'Singlish' as a 'creoloid'. Anthropological Linguistics 17(7): 363-374.

Thursday, May 12, 2016

More Singapore English words in Oxford English Dictionary

The BBC just covered this story: Singapore terms join Oxford English Dictionary, which is basically about how Singapore English words like wah and shiok get to join their linguistic compatriots lah and kiasu in the OED, the world's "definitive record of the English language".

There's even a little quiz at the bottom of article for those of you who want to flaunt your Singlish.

However, I was drawn to the opening line of the article, which I think continues to perpetuate the myth of how words end up in the OED (and many dictionaries in general):
Several Singaporean and Hong Kong English terms, including "wah", "shiok" and "yum cha", are now officially recognised as acceptable English.
By saying that these new words are "now officially recognised as acceptable English", the BBC article continues to perpetuate the myth that the job of the OED is to be the judge of what is acceptable or not acceptable English, and that it serves as the standard which English (or at least British English) speakers can fall back on to check if a word exists, and to see if they or other people are using it in the "correct" way. And while there are many languages that have organizations that regulate their use, English is not one of them.

A quick look at the OED FAQ site, where they answer the question "How does a word qualify for inclusion in the OED?" provides us with the following statement:
The OED requires several independent examples of the word being used, and also evidence that the word has been in use for a reasonable amount of time. The exact time-span and number of examples may vary: for instance, one word may be included on the evidence of only a few examples, spread out over a long period of time, while another may gather momentum very quickly, resulting in a wide range of evidence in a shorter space of time. We also look for the word to reach a level of general currency where it is unselfconsciously used with the expectation of being understood: that is, we look for examples of uses of a word that are not immediately followed by an explanation of its meaning for the benefit of the reader. We have a large range of words under constant review, and as items are assessed for inclusion in the dictionary, words which have not yet accumulated enough evidence are kept on file, so that we can refer back to them if further evidence comes to light. (bold emphasis added)
Vague as the statement is, the criteria for entry are more or less about the frequency of use of a word and its intelligibility. Nowhere do we see the term "acceptable" - although the notion of "general currency" implies that there has to be some kind of social agreement to use a word in a particular way.  The BBC's use of the word "acceptable", in conjunction with "officially recognised", also makes it very difficult to ignore the connotations of social prestige, formality and flaunting one's class and education - all of which have little to do with how a word gets into the OED.

Rather, the OED is a descriptive dictionary that serves as a repository of the words (past and present) that are or used to be in circulation within the different pockets of the English speaking world, much like the Coxford Singlish dictionary (pictured below) is a repository for all kinds of Singlish terms used at the time of publication (and earlier) in Singapore. Of course, the OED is also historical in that it maintains a list of obsolete words, as well as obsolete meanings of words.


The Coxford Singlish Dictionary (edited by Colin Goh and Y. Y. Woo) 

Of course, just as people may assume prisoners are guilty simply because they are in prison, once a word enters the OED, it may eventually gain the kind of acceptability or prestige that people assumed it needed to get in there in the first place.


(Addendum: as much as this post was about the descriptive nature of the OED, and how it isn't intended to be used as a prescriptive tool, I cannot ignore the power that is often ascribed to dictionaries. For speakers of non-prestigious minority languages and language varieties, the very existence of a dictionary in their language or variety is a mark of status: the dictionary not only validates the words they speak, it validates their entire language as something worthy of speaking and studying.)

Saturday, October 26, 2013

On Not Having a Mother Tongue

At the moment, I'm TA-ing for a course called Language and Power here at the University of Oregon, and I've been recounting the following story to my students.

It happened more than 10 years ago after I'd just moved from Singapore to Melbourne. I was at my university orientation, where I met a number of people, including a guy from Sweden. We got to talking, and he eventually asked me what languages I spoke. I told him that I spoke English and some Chinese (Mandarin), but that my Chinese wasn't very good.

The very next thing he said to me was, "Oh, so you don't speak any language well!"

Before I could recover from the shock of what he'd just said, he quickly proceeded to 'correct' my English. I remember we were talking about purchasing textbooks for our courses at a particular bookshop. I said something like: "You can get them cheap over there." He told me that it should be: "You can get them cheaply over there." because you need an adverb with the verb 'get'. At that point, I said something like, "No, I'm using it as an adjective to describe the thing I'm getting." But it was clear that I had little say in what was 'right' or what was 'wrong'.

Now this was before I'd started any formal study in linguistics, but I had had 'English grammar' lessons in school in Singapore, with explanations given for many 'grammatical rules'. Of course, people like me were a pain for our English teachers because they'd give us a particular phrase or sentence, and ask us why it was 'correct' or 'grammatical'.

We'd just say, "Because it sounds right."

And that's the thing about your 'mother tongue' - you don't need to be formally taught the rules of the language in school. Through enough exposure as a child, you just know what 'sounds' right and what doesn't. That knowledge is what linguists usually think of as 'grammar' - it's not the rules that you are explicitly taught in a classroom (unless the language is not your native language), it's knowing how to say things that don't sound odd to either you or the people from the community you grew up with.

To be repeatedly confronted and told that my mother tongue - the language I used at home and in daily life, and the language I knew best (let's not even go into what Singapore calls one's 'mother tongue') was 'incorrect' or defective has had a few effects on me. On the downside, I find it difficult to claim 'ownership' or 'expertise' in English. Even now I am quick to get defensive about my own linguistic knowledge, sometimes justifiably so, but sometimes I perhaps get a little too defensive. On the upside, I've often felt motivated me to learn more languages (to varying degrees of fluency). Most importantly, this insecurity has made me delve deeper into the field of linguistics.

Jacques Derrida, in his book Monolingualism of the Other, wrote, "I have but one language - yet that language is not mine." While his words can be interpreted on many different levels (his central thesis was that we are all alienated from our 'mother tongue'), I can think of no better quote to apply to the linguistic situation I find myself in. I also imagine that this is something many people in the modern world whose 'languages' or 'dialects' are looked down upon and vilified can relate to.

(Yes, I ended that last sentence with a preposition. And yes, it's perfectly grammatical to do so in English.)

Saturday, May 4, 2013

What a 'hotel' can mean in India

According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the English word hotel was first recorded in the 1640s and denoted a 'public official residence'. The modern sense of the word as 'an inn of the better sort' (i.e. 'a place offering lodging, food and other services to travellers') was first recorded in 1765. The word comes from the French hôtel, which itself is derived from the Medieval Latin hospitale via Old French hostel.

In French, hôtel was used to refer mainly to public official buildings that frequently received visitors, but this has been largely replaced by the meaning of 'place offering lodging and food to travellers', as used in contemporary English. However, you can still see traces of this old usage in words like hôtel de ville 'town hall' and hôtel des impôts 'tax office' and hôtel de police 'police headquarters'.

In India, the term hotel has taken on a slightly different meaning (and pronunciation, with stress on the first syllable, not the second.) Visitors to India are likely to find that big modern buildings offering lodging are called 'hotels', but they might be slightly shocked to see signs for hotels that do not provide lodging at all.

Take for instance this hotel located right next to the Dimapur Railway Station. As you can see, the hotel only offers 'fooding', a very common term in Indian English meaning 'the provision of food' - this can include the catering at an event or simply selling food at a restaurant.

Next to Dimapur Railway Station

I'm not entirely certain how the term 'hotel' has come to be used to refer to (what I would call) a 'restaurant', where only food and no lodging is provided. I doubt that this use derives from the original French meaning of a public building that frequently receives visitors. Incidentally, there are also hotels in India that advertise 'only lodging' with no 'fooding'.

My guess is that the term did originally designate a place frequented by travellers and provided both food and lodging - I imagine that travellers were the most likely people to frequent places offering food since most people would have taken their meals at home or packed their own food. Over time, some establishments may have stopped providing one service or the other for whatever reason (e.g. greater profits from selling food), but the label 'hotel' remained. Consequently, the term 'hotel' no longer denoted a place of lodging, but simply a place frequented by travellers. Someone else starting a restaurant near a train station or along a highway may then choose to call their business a 'hotel', even though they have no intention of providing lodging, as long as their expected clientele are likely to be travellers stopping in for a meal.

Whatever the history of the word may be, don't be shocked if you rock up to a hotel in India and can't get a room - some of them simply don't have any for guests!

Sunday, April 7, 2013

The persistence of Singapore English and Mandarin

In my previous post, I looked at what the government had hoped to accomplish through its language policies, as summarised here in this quote from Lee Kuan Yew:

"Our ideal was that the Chinese would be able to speak English and Mandarin, Malays would be able to speak Malay and English, and Indians would be able to speak Tamil and English. Alas, the situation did not develop as we had hoped."

In this post, I consider the seeming perpetual need for English and Mandarin campaigns in Singapore. After all, English was meant to be the language of wider communication, and the 'mother tongues' were to be the language of each respective race. But even after decades of policy that has institutionalised and privileged languages like English and Mandarin (and involved the vilification of Chinese dialects), why do we still need the Speak Good English Movement (SGEM) and the Speak Mandarin Campaign (SMC)?



[Note that despite falling use across all three 'mother tongues' in households, the decline of Malay and Tamil has never warranted similar campaigns for these languages.]

Singlish and Singdarin

The villains in this story are typically Singlish and Singdarin (sadly not an Elvish language). The local variety of English Singlish (colloquial Singaporean English) is often viewed as 'broken English', as opposed to correct 'Standard English' and has been described by the government as a 'handicap' which prevents one from accessing better job and educational opportunities (Wee 2010). Similarly, a local variety of Singapore Mandarin also called Singdarin, viewed as 'broken Chinese' has also emerged. This has become another cause of concern, especially if 'Mandarin' speakers from Singapore find it difficult to understand and to make themselves understood by Mandarin speakers in China and Taiwan.

The continuing existence of these varieties seems to be why we perpetually need to have such language campaigns. But why do these 'substandard' varieties still persist? After all, they're not exactly prestige forms and even speakers of Singlish sometimes describe it as sounding 'uneducated' and 'immature'. Some speakers, who are able to codeswitch between the colloquial variety and the variety closer to what is understood as 'standard English', cringe at the use of Singlish by other Singaporeans, especially in the presence of non-Singaporeans.

One common answer I get to this question is that in most schools, English teachers and Chinese (Mandarin) teachers themselves cannot speak 'good English' and 'good Mandarin'. Therefore, the students learn 'bad English' or 'bad Mandarin' and continue the cycle when they leave school. The media has also been blamed in the past - hence the banning of Singlish on TV shows like Phua Chu Kang back in 1999.

This is still a rather simplistic answer to the question. Language is used in numerous domains outside the classroom and the media. The use of Singlish and Singdarin in schools (and previously in the media) is not enough reason to explain their persistance. The prescribed solution is equally simplistic. Modelling 'proper English' and 'proper Mandarin' for speakers to follow in schools and in the media, does not immediately, or eventually, result in the faithful reproduction of these models of 'good English' and 'good Mandarin'.

Instead, we need to re-examine the associations made between language and identity, and move beyond the official racial categories and the 'mother tongues' that have been assigned to them. We need to start considering what goes on in day-to-day interactions among speakers of Singlish and Singdarin.


Language in the moment

When talking about language and identity, much attention is paid to the correlation between what language you speak and your identity (defined in racial terms here). In contrast, little attention is paid to how speakers actually use the languages they know, and in what context they use these languages.

I am reminded of John Gumperz, a famous sociolinguist who passed away week ago, and his work on conversation analysis and interactional sociolinguistics. [You can read the story of how he helped identify a source of intercultural miscommunication at Heathrow Airport in the 1970s in the article.] He was interested, amongst other things, in how people make conversation. This sounds simple enough, but to maintain a conversation, speakers have to process a huge amount of verbal information (e.g. choice of words and topics) and non-verbal information (e.g. intonation, gesture, clothing & appearance) within a particular context (e.g. at the workplace between an employer and an employee). The actual processing is mostly unconsciously done, but being able to read these cues has consequences for how we speak, what we can talk about, and what attitudes we think we can share regarding these topics.

Most people are aware that the way we speak to our boss is usually different from the way we speak to our friends (and even if our boss was our friend, there may be differences when we are speaking in the workplace and when we are outside). However, what they may not realise is that they are always doing this, even when speaking with friends, or when buying food at a hawker centre.

Taking a simplified example, I've noticed that my Singapore English-speaking friends and I will avoid using sentence-final particles like lah when speaking with non-Singaporean English speakers. However, these particles may appear again when speaking in the presence of Singaporean English speakers. On one level you might say, "It's because others don't understand 'lah'." But it's more than just that. In a sense, what we're doing is monitoring our own speech to ensure that we are recognised as competent English speakers in the first situation, since lah is associated with 'broken English'. In the latter, we're subtly asserting our identity as a Singaporean and that we share some cultural knowledge that others may not be aware of.


Why u so liddat ah?

Some people might ask: But why do we do this? Shouldn't we be free to say whatever we want and however we want to, especially when we are in less formal situations?

A few days ago, I went to Toast Box in Clementi for lunch. I ordered nasi lemak. The person at the counter told me that they'd run out of ikan bilis. I took an extra second to look at the menu to see if there was anything else that could satisfy me more than an ikan bilis-less nasi lemak. In those few seconds (milliseconds even), the person at the counter interpreted my hesitation as confusion, and proceeded to explain to me what ikan bilis was: "the small fish".

For me, something had gone wrong in this communicative exchange, minor as it was. Having grown up in Singapore, of course I knew that ikan bilis refers to the crispy anchovies (which really should accompany any decent nasi lemak)! However, some element of the interaction, whether it was my appearance or my accent or my choice of language (although, all I said was, 'One nasi lemak'), signalled to her that I may not have been Singaporean. Consequently, rather than interpreting my hesitation as 'considering my choices', she thought it was because I didn't understand what 'ikan bilis' meant. From her perspective, she was just trying to be helpful, but from my perspective, it was actually a little annoying that she didn't recognise that I was Singaporean, and that she had to explain to me something that I understood as basic local knowledge.

This is one reason why we might modify our language behaviour and more generally, present ourselves in a certain way (which I clearly failed to do in the above situation) - we are trying to make it known to the people we are talking to that we have shared knowledge and experience. At the same time, we are also using cues from other people in the conversation to work out if we do share any of this cultural knowledge and experience. Ultimately, this has consequences for what we talk about and how we talk about these topics (e.g. what attitudes we can share) within that particular conversation.


Damn atas, he

As much as language is used to mark membership of a group, it can also be used as a basis for exclusion. Taken to its extreme, people can use language to isolate and ostracise others who do not belong to the community - at the national level, we have the infamous diction test from the White Australia policy era, but all societies have had their own shibboleths to mark who belongs in a group, and who doesn't. It does seem that at least a small degree of exclusion is necessary to maintain an individual and a group's sense of identity (through a process of 'Othering' others.)

It is not just a case of people with higher status excluding people who are perceived to be of lower status. The opposite can happen too. For example, if an Australian went to the UK and came back speaking with any sort of British accent, they would probably be ostracised and called a 'twat'. Similarly, if a Singaporean started speaking with a foreign accent in most informal situations here, people would say they 'talk like ang moh'. There are a myriad of reasons for the adoption of the other accent, especially if the person grew up in that country. When the other language variety carries more status or power, people back in the home country may read the linguistic cues as a projection of dominance by the returning person - 'They think they're better than us!' In some cases, they would be right, but even in others, social exclusion is still inflicted on the 'offending' person where no offence was intended.

I've also encountered this myself - once I was criticised by a friend and a waiter for sounding atas, a term used to describe something or someone as being 'high class' (from Malay, meaning 'above'), but with a slightly pejorative sense. All I was doing was speaking what I considered to be 'standard' Singapore English, as opposed to the more colloquial form of Singlish. In a sense, I was being 'punished' for not conforming to the expected social norms of that situation.

But as frustrating and painful as it is for individuals to be marginalised like this, we also need to remember that the very groups responsibility for this marginalisation -usually speakers of the basilectal / most colloquial varieties of Singlish and Singdarin who are generally unable to codeswitch to more standard varieties- are also among the most marginalised within Singapore society (typically an English-speaking elite and middle class). It is easy for a speaker of a dominant language variety to ignore the sociolinguistic realities of other people in society and think, "I speak [language / language variety], why can't they too?" or to assume that people of lower status will always want to emulate the speech of people with higher status. That speakers of non-standard varieties of English and Mandarin continue to use and enforce the use of these varieties, can be seen as the result of their own social exclusion from the rest of societyThe solution therefore cannot be for the government to simply tell people to accept the standard form and to stop speaking the way they currently do.

Furthermore, I suggest that Singdarin actually serves an important function of helping to distinguish Chinese Singaporeans from more recent migrants from the Peoples' Republic of China, given the very different histories of the two countries. For instance, Mao and the PLA mean very little to people here, and there's still a great deal more trust among people here since we never went through the Cultural Revolution. The current Speak Mandarin Campaign slogan "Mandarin - It Gets Better With Use" seems almost absurd when we consider the contexts where Singdarin is currently used and why it is used. However, I acknowledge that more research is needed in this area before any conclusive arguments can be made.


Switching back and forth

If we recall, use of these varieties form the basis for social identification through their use in everyday interaction, which would be lost if people were made to speak like people from China, or to emulate 'proper' English speaking habits derived from British English. (In fact the problematic nature of what is 'standard Singapore English' and 'Standard Mandarin' will have to be discussed in another post.) The effect of forcing most Singaporeans to use standard Singapore English or standard Mandarin, which are associated with more formal situations, in all day-to-day interactions would be akin to making the participants at a birthday party sound like they were at a business meeting full of strangers. What would work better is if speakers were able to switch between the colloquial and the standard.

I should state that I'm not actively advocating the use or development of Singlish or Singdarin. What I am advocating is that we acknowledge their existence and the important role they play in personal and social identification in this country, which will explain their continued existence despite the government's efforts. At the moment, there is little motivation for Singdarin speakers who only live in Singapore to give up Singdarin and only speak 'standard' Mandarin, especially if it means that they will end up being identified as Mainlanders themselves. There is also little motivation for individual Singlish speakers to completely abandon Singlish in favour of standard Singapore English in their day-to-day interactions with other Singlish speakers, since they would risk being labelled atas or worse, like they talk like ang moh.

Ideally, these speakers would be able to codeswitch between Singlish and standard English, or Singdarin and standard Mandarin, depending on the situation. The problem here is that many speakers can't switch between the two varieties (not that they need to in many day-to-day situations) and it is unrealistic to eliminate the colloquial varieties, since others will pop up to fulfill the sociolinguistic functions mentioned above. Consequently, we will end up in an never-ending cycle of campaigns encouraging 'better' language use.

The current language policy favours a one-variety-or-nothing rule (for both English and Mandarin) and ignores any of the sociolinguistic functions of these language varieties. My own feeling is that rising xenophobia in this country can be partly attributed to the fact that a good portion of the population is constantly told both by the government (and by new arrivals) that they are not good enough, that their language skills are not good enough, and that they should learn to be and speak more like foreigners - and to essentially, give up their old identities. And yes, at the moment, many people have language skills that are not good enough if they want to work in areas like the banking sector, but how do we get to a point where most speakers of these varieties and their children are able to effectively switch between varieties for use in different situations?

I hope that from what I've discussed, it has become to some readers that a good first step is to acknowledge the need and the value of these local varieties in providing social cohesion, instead of trying to eliminate them completely. They do not need to become enshrined as official languages, but the people behind language policy and language teachers need to know they have more value than people realise. For instance, at the classroom level, teachers could be trained to help students codeswitch between the two varieties. In this way, students can maintain a sense of identity (and self esteem), while picking up the language skills that the government so desperately wants its citizens to have to participate in its workforce.

Finally, although I've been speaking about Singlish and Singdarin as being distinct varieties from their respective standards, it might actually be more useful to think of them as being on a continuum. Even speakers of the 'standard' varieties will find themselves on different parts of the continuum in their interactions with other Singaporeans. I would argue that for many of these speakers, it is their ability to place themselves on this continuum depending on the situation that actually forms the basis of identity for them, much more so than any official 'mother tongue' they are supposed to speak.

Of course, if the government and the educated public still find these language varieties so vile and broken, maybe we should try and bring back Chinese dialects and encourage speakers to codeswitch between them and standard Mandarin.

Wednesday, March 6, 2013

Expressing the agent in Chinese

I've been meaning to post this for a while now, since I saw this advertisement at my uncle's clinic here in Singapore. It's an ad for some type of hair loss treatment.


In English, the ad reads: "Male pattern hair loss can be treated".

In contrast, the Chinese (Mandarin) ad reads: 医生可以治疗你的脱发问题。yīshēng kěyǐ zhìliáo nǐ de tuōfà wèntí which can be roughly translated as 'The doctor can treat your hair loss problem.'

For now, let's just ignore the fact that English version obligatorily requires some sort of article with doctor and that doctor must be specified as being singular or plural, while the Chinese one does not. (Given the ad's location in a clinic where it was in full view of waiting patients, I interpreted it as referring to the doctor working in the clinic that day, whom the waiting patient was going to see.) Also ignore the fact that the English one specifies this as a male problem, while the Chinese one assumes that the reader is male.

What's important to note is that the Mandarin version actually specifies the agent, the person who will be undertaking the action, 医生 yīshēng 'doctor'. On the other hand, the English version uses a passive construction where the agent no longer needs to be mentioned, though it could be if we wanted to, by simply adding the phrase by the doctor. By using the passive voice in English, one can omit the agent / doer of the action and still construct a grammatical sentence. This is one common use of the passive voice in English, and a fairly important one, so please ignore 'blanket rules' that state to 'avoid the passive voice' at all costs - it does have its uses!

With the current buzz on language and its potential effects on thought and behaviour, and given that only the Mandarin one expressly mentions an agent, the 'doctor', I would be tempted to ask this question: If the treatment fails, would a Mandarin speaker who has read the advertisement in Mandarin be more likely to blame the doctor than an English speaker who has read it in English?

The obvious hypothesis would be that a Mandarin speaker would be more likely to assign blame to the doctor if the treatment fails than an English speaker would. Why? Because in the Chinese version, 医生 'doctor' is explicitly mentioned.

Now, if this hypothesis were proven correct, could one then conclude that it was due to some fundamental difference in the way that Mandarin and English are structured or view the world?

I would definitely say, no.


The problem is, the English version could easily have read: A doctor can treat your hair loss problem, using the active voice which means that the agent has to be mentioned / one must mention the agent. Mandarin also has a way of marking the equivalent of the passive using 被 bèi (see here for more info), although writing 脱发问题,可以治疗 would be acceptable, and would be closer to 'Hair loss problem can be treated', with 脱发问题 'hair loss problem' placed at the front as a topic.

You might then say that it is more common in Mandarin Chinese to mention the agent here - a Google search for 脱发问题可以被治疗 'hair can be treated' (using 被 bèi)  doesn't come up with identical results, while most results mention some sort of force / process, e.g. 头发移植 'hair transplants', 锌 'zinc' and 中草药 'Chinese herbal medicine' that might cure hair loss problems.

The problem is, there are numerous reasons why 医生 'doctor' was mentioned explicitly in the Chinese version, and not the English one. One reason might be a cultural expectation among Mandarin speakers (or in the case of Singapore, older Hokkien and Teochew speakers who also know Mandarin) that it is up to the doctor to help them. Older Chinese speakers, who are less likely to know English, are more likely from a generation that held doctors in the highest esteem and would not question their actions. By mentioning 医生 'doctor', the copywriter / translator of the advertisement in Chinese could simply be tapping into the revered status accorded doctors, since this would likely promote sales. Another reason might be that the copywriter simply felt the need to be more explicit in directing Chinese speaking patients to the doctor for help.

Clearly, it would be impossible to simply compare two versions of a sentence in two different languages and start making hypotheses about the effects of language on thought and behaviour. However, I thought it would be a nice way to illustrate some of the problems faced by researchers in this field, especially if we start considering a feature (like an agent) that could be omitted in a language, but are often not. Is such a tendency the result of the structure of a language affecting thought, or is it thought and cultural expectations that result in this particular use of language / stylistic choice?

In order to exclude the possibility of the latter, we go to Roman Jakobson's quote “Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey”. It would therefore be more fruitful to look at features of English that must be mentioned, like the use of either an indefinite or definitie article with singular nouns in English or the marking of all countable nouns as either singular or plural - all features that Chinese does not oblige its speakers to mention.

[On a related note, here's a link to Lena Boroditsky's article in the Wall Street Journal on her work with English, Japanese and Spanish speakers and the perception of blame (23/07/2010): Lost in Translation
Here's a Language Log post that critically examines this study (26/07/2010): Boroditsky on Whorfian navigation and blame]

Friday, November 30, 2012

Xtrm txt msging

Whenever I'm in India, I'm often struck by the 'extreme brevity' of some of the text messaging language or textese here. It may certainly be as extreme back in Australia among certain age groups, but I don't communicate via phone with any of these groups.

Here are just a few examples of messages I've received over the past few months. See if you can decipher what they mean.

1) M sori 2 say bt gues i wont b able 2 mak it on tuesday bcoz of d shftn... Will it b k if we mit on friday noon??

2) U cn kum 2 r plc bt d thng s we rnt stl proprly stld so it may b an inconvinc 4 u! If not u r most wlkum :-)

3) Its fyn... Do tk kr of ur health! So wn shl we mit? Ran ut of sms blnc!


[My apologies if I cause any embarrassment here. However, my point is not to embarrass, but to simply show examples of textese.]

You can see typical features of textese such as vowel deletion and the Rebus principle, whereby a letter or number that sounds like the word is used instead of the whole word. However, the reason I find this sort of texting 'extreme' is that most of the abbreviated forms are not in my textese vocabulary (which does include forms like 'cos', 'u', 'r'). In fact I wouldn't consider some of these to be conventionalised short forms of words.

I do acknowledge that there is a good economic reason underpinning this extreme brevity: fitting in as much information into a text message so you don't have to spend so much on phone credit. Consequently, more of the onus is transferred to the receiver to decipher the message, and not on the person texting to make the message more reader-friendly.

In the end, I did manageto understand the messages, but it took a lot more cognitive work on my part.

At this point, I can almost hear the usual complaints and laments about how things like text messaging and Twitter are causing the English language is going to the dogs. To this, I usually say, "Well, I can see that prescribed English spelling is suffering, but doesn't mean that the language itself is in a state of degeneration. Languages are constantly evolving and people often mistake change for degradation." There is however, some research out there about how texting can cause reading ability (and even grammar) to suffer.

TXT BAD 4 UR BRAIN? Text messaging can dent your reading abilities, say scientists. (Daily Mail, 17/02/2012)
Texting May Lead to Bad Grammar. (LiveScience, 26/07/2012)

I'm not about to critique these studies, as the findings seem to be all quite preliminary and there are other studies that suggest texting might help children's language development. Personally, I'm used to a certain amount of textese and I'm happy if the message is easy to understand. For me, communication is about a shared code, and if both parties are using the same code, then that's fine.

I do gripe occasionally when my students email me as if they're texting a friend, although I suppose that's to be expected as more people send emails from their phones. However, I think I gripe more about people who think that since I'm a linguist, I must be concerned about spelling, and worse, people who think 'good grammar' and 'good spelling' are the same thing!

Wednesday, August 22, 2012

Social Bondage

I was reading one of the local papers here in Guwahati the other day, and this headline caught my eye.


Most English speakers outside of India (and quite a few in India) would probably be wondering what on earth 'social bondage' refers to, and why on earth some students would even want it.

I think the word they're actually looking for here is 'bonding' and not 'bondage'. In standard English, bondage refers to 'slavery', or 'the act of being tied up'. On the other hand, bonding refers to 'the establishment and development of a close friendship / relationship'. The related verbs are also somewhat different: you bind someone by tying them up, but you bond with someone by develop a relationship with them.

Now the reason I thought this was something to write about wasn't to poke fun at the writer, though I can imagine a few of you gagging over the picture. It reminded me of one time I was proofreading a report written by a non-native English speaker. While her written expression was good, in my mind it seemed like she was overusing gerunds, those non-finite verb forms like swimming that also behave somewhat like nouns. For example, she would write something like "their investigating of the causes ...", where it would sound more natural for me to say "their investigation of the causes ...". Similarly, she'd write something like "the failing of the report to demonstrate ..." where I would say "the failure of the report to demonstrate ...".

She wanted to know why I had suggested these changes. To be honest, I should have just said, "I don't know. It just sounds better." Instead, I made up some grammatical rule (based on this handful of examples) that it was better to avoid the gerund forms (those -ing forms) if there was already a noun that had been derived from the verb. I mean, would you say "the starting of the race" or "my loving of dogs"?

But of course the rule doesn't quite stand up to scrutiny. Gerunds and other nominals can co-exist quite happily in some contexts, e.g. the ending of the novel and the end of the novel are pretty much the same thing. And non-finite verb forms can also be lexicalised, e.g. beginning and opening - these are the words you'd find listed as their own entries in a dictionary, unlike words like fainting which would be treated as an entry under the verb faint.

In the end, I guess the choice between 'gerund' and 'other lexical nominal' just depends on what is used more frequently in that context or in an analogous context.

Of course, looking at the headline above, I can't help but think that someone had been told something similar, and was just trying to avoid the gerund without realising the full effect of their final word choosing. Um, choice.

Sunday, November 27, 2011

Plans, programmes and projects

Generally, if I wanted to know what someone else was up to at a later point in time, I'd probably ask them, "Do you have any plans for today / tomorrow / later?" or "What're your plans for today / tomorrow / later?"

Except when I'm in India. Here, it was far more common for people to ask, "What is your programme for today / tomorrow?" Consequently, it's what I've come to ask people too.

The first time I heard the word 'programme' used in this context, it sounded as if my life was some sort of show with carefully scheduled performances throughout the day. Ironic of course, given that in my experience of India, nothing has ever run according to schedule - I was once booked to catch a train that turned out to 13 hours late. As a friend pointed out, "Back home, we'd called that train 'cancelled'.

However, the words 'programme' and 'plans' are not always interchangeable. For instance, today my host here in Dimapur was explaining to his sister-in-law that we were running late because "we had a programme at 3.30". In that particular context, I would've said "something came up at 3.30".

On a related note, hearing the word 'programme' used in this context reminded me of when I was on exchange in Lyon. One of the French professors said during orientation that in French, you didn't ask someone "Avez-vous des plans?" but "Avez-vous des projets?" if you meant 'Do you have any plans?", the French word projet being a cognate of English project. (This I believe is for a more formal register of French.) In any case, I wonder if French learners of English often mistakenly ask people if they have any "projects" on for the day...

Monday, October 17, 2011

Japanese issues with Siri / Shiri

I don't actually own a smartphone, but this video's been making the rounds since the introduction of Siri with the new iP***e. I thought I'd just make a small phonetics-related comment.


Listening to the speaker, the main problem here is his production of the NURSE vowel (typically /ɜ/ or /ɜr/),  which is a notoriously problematic one for many a non-native English speaker. The Japanese speaker produces the vowel closer to the THOUGHT vowel (typically /ɔ/). I'm just surprised that with a binary option: 'work' or 'home', Siri doesn't just go with what sounds closer to the 'work' option (but I'm not one who knows anything about programming, so I'll let the techsperts deal with that.)

I'm a little late to talk about this, but for the past 2 weeks, people have been talking about how siri means 'buttocks' in Japanese. Some people like this guy at TechnoBuffalo argue that it doesn't (it means nothing he claims). The thing is, technically, the 's' /s/ sound in Japanese never comes before the 'i' /i/ vowel: think of Japanese words that have been borrowed into English, like sushi, where 's' can precede the 'u' /ɯ/ vowel, but 'sh' /ʃ/ comes before 'i''.

However, in some transliterations of Japanese, you will see the word for 'I' written as both watashi and watasi. The reason is, as stated above, that the 's' sound can't come before 'i' and must be replaced by 'sh'. Therefore by default, the si in watasi will be read as shi. So siri by default, will be pronounced like shiri, which the internet would have me believe is Japanese for 'buttocks'.

Monday, February 14, 2011

'Push' or 'press'?

The other night I went to the Crystal Jade restaurant at Holland Village (Singapore). As I got to the top of the stairs I saw a sign on the glass door saying 'PUSH' with a mini handprint next to it. I was just about to push the door, when it started to slide to the side. This confused me greatly and I mentioned it to my friends once I walked in and found their table. One response was, "Aiyah, it means 'push the button to open the door.'"

The glass door at the entrance was one of those semi-automatic sliding doors that only open when you touch the sensor (I can't remember there really was a button) on them, so that they don't keep opening and closing every time someone walks by. It just so happened that someone had touched the sensor for me from inside when they saw me walking towards the door.

Now it's perfectly alright to say 'push the button', but the problem with seeing a sign that says 'PUSH' on a door, is that one would immediately assume from the context that it means pushing the entire door. I suppose what I was expecting to see was 'PRESS' or 'PRESS TO OPEN' or 'TOUCH TO OPEN'.

For me it was another one of those examples that I want to offer to linguists who largely ignore the contexts in which language is used. But my first thought was that the restaurant ought to change the sign before someone breaks the door trying to get in by pushing on it.