Admiring the Sunset

Here a picture of the sunset from my apartment in Brunei.

There's a story from Chinese philosophy that goes like this:

There was once a monk who every day went out for a walk. And each day he would invite one of his disciples to accompany him. There was just one rule: no talking.

One day, he went out as usual with a selected disciple. As they stood on the top of a hill, there was a magnificent sunset. And the disciple blurted out, "That's magnificent!"

From that day on, the monk never again invited that disciple to join him.

One day, the disciple asked him, "Why are you so cruel? I only said two words!"

And the monk replied, "Yes, but when you were saying those words, you were no longer appreciating the sunset."

Why do we have this constant urge to say something? Why can't we just admire the sunset in silence? What is it about humans that makes us need to keep on talking all the time?

In the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams, an intergalactic visitor to Earth, called Ford Prefect, ponders this same question:

One of the things Ford Prefect had always found hardest to understand about humans was their habit of continually stating and repeating the very very obvious, as in "It's a nice day", or "You're very tall", or "Oh dear you seem to have fallen down a thirty-foot well, are you alright?" At first Ford had formed a theory to account for this strange behaviour. If human beings don't keep exercising their lips, he thought, their mouths probably seize up. After a few months' consideration and observation he abandoned this theory in favour of a new one. If they don't keep on exercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working. After a while he abandoned this one as well as being obstructively cynical.

I am with Ford Prefect here. I have never understood the need for us humans to talk all the time. And if we talked a bit less, maybe we would think a bit more.

Anyway, here's another sunset from my apartment.

Associate Professor

There is a tension in Malay between indigenous vocabulary and words borrowed from English. So, for example, one finds both kegiatan and aktiviti, which both mean 'activity'.

Sometimes, this affects not just words but also phrases, so a calque from English can compete with an indigenous phrase.

The usual Malay for 'Associate Professor' is Profesor Madya. However, I saw Profesor Bersekutu on page 2 of the Media Permata of 17 January, 2013:

where bersekutu means 'federated' so is presumably the equivalent for 'associated'.

Or perhaps Profesor Bersekutu does not really occur in Malay, and this was just a mistake by a translator who was looking up every word separately in a dictionary..

Frogs on the Wall

Here's a story from the Analects of Confucius (论语):

There were a bunch of frogs sitting at the base of a wall. They had heard that there was a splendid view from the top, and if they climbed up there, they would be able to lie happily in the sun, admiring the view. So they all started climbing.

But, after a while, one of them said, "This is tough. Do I really want to climb all the way up there? I'm going down."

On hearing this, another one said, "He's right. Why are we doing this? It's much too tiring." And he too quit.

Soon, one by one, the frogs all abandoned the attempt and returned to the bottom. Except for one frog, who kept on going, steadily climbing, till he reached the top. Then he happily sat in the sun, admiring the view.

All the other frogs were amazed, and when that one frog eventually came down again, the others asked him, "How come you continued going when we all gave up?"

But he did not answer them. Because he was deaf.

And the moral of the story is this: if you want to get on in life, don't listen to the moaning and griping from the people around you. Just get on and do it.

I sometimes think we all spend a bit too much time listening to the complaints of people around us rather than getting on with things.

Presents from Santa

In England, we have certain spoken routines for children. For example:

Parent: What do you say when someone gives you something?

Answer: Thank you.

And here's another one:

Parent: What do you have to be to make Santa give you presents?

Answer: I have to be good.

But sometimes children don't give quite the expected answer. I was just watching a video of my granddaughter, Elsie, aged 2 years 10 months, talking to her Dad about Christmas.

Dad: What do you have to be to make Santa give you presents?

Elsie: I want to be a princess.

Borneo Bulletin

This is from page 10 of the Borneo Bulletin of 8 January 2013, quoting from the welcoming speech for the new intake of students given by the Vice Chancellor of UBD:

It starts out:

UBD is not simply about rote learning and memorising facts, it is not about examinations and testing what you do not know, it is about preparing you for a job in the Civil Service ...

Unfortunately, this seems to be misquoting the VC. The context suggests that he actually said:

... it is NOT about preparing you for a job in the Civil Service ...

What a big difference a little word like not can make!

New Quarry Norms

The modern-day extra-long noun-phrase build-up phenomenon for newspaper headlines has been observed for articles in English (see here). Sometimes, these long noun phrases are rather hard to parse, and they can give rise to what we call 'crash blossoms'.

This style of writing newspaper headlines also occurs in Brunei. Here is the headline from page 1 of The Brunei Times of Sunday, 30 December 2012:

The verb appears to be eye, and the article is about new norms for quarries. (It could, of course, be about norms for new quarries; but it appears to be the other interpretation.)

I find such headlines hard to parse, so I don't understand why journalists use them so often.

nospacebetweenwords

However often I read the Malay newspaper, I still find it hard to parse text where the words are compacted together with little space between them. Take this paragraph, from page 2 of the Media Permata of 6 December 2012:

The first line reads:

Sebagai mengenang jasa dan membantu
  act as   remember service and   help

but I find it very difficult to parse with no spacing between the words.

Do English-language newspapers have similar compacting of the text that I don't notice as I am more familiar with English? I'm not sure. But it seems to me that the text-processing software is not working too well when dealing with Malay in this situation.

One other word of interest in this context is sumbangan ('contribution') in line 4. It is printed with a hyphen in it, which is not appropriate. It seems clear that the hyphen was added manually as a means of breaking up the line, and then was not removed when the paragraph was re-arranged. This seems to confirm that line-end hyphenation is done manually, which suggests that the text-processor cannot handle Malay very well.

Digital Image Processing

A colleague asked me: what is meant in English by 'Digital Image Processing'? Is it the digital processing of images (i.e. 'digital [image processing]', with the adjective 'digital' modifying the compound noun 'image processing'? Or is it instead the processing of digital images, (i.e. '[digital image] processing', with the compound 'digital image' modifying the noun 'processing'?

I had to say: I don't know. As far as I can see, it is ambiguous, and it could be interpreted either way.

In fact, this kind of ambiguity is commonplace in English. Does a 'red chair cover' refer to a chair cover that is red, or is it a cover for red chairs? Does 'best train timetables' refer to timetables for the best trains, or to the best timetables for trains?

secara umum

In my last two posts, I have been discussing common phrases in English (such as 'freezing cold') and how they can be said quite fast without disrupting intelligibility, while less common phrases (such as 'flaming hot') may be more problematic. Furthermore, the understanding of some phrases such as 'terminal degree' may depend on which variety of English you are familiar with.

Understanding common phrases spoken fast is, of course, important in learning all languages. I often listen to the Singapore news 'Berita Suria' on YouTube, mostly because it is has subtitles which are exceptionally valuable for me. In this extract (available here), the speaker ends his utterance with 'secara umum' ('publicly'), which he says quite fast as [ʃara umum], eliding one syllable in the first word.

I have considerable difficulty decoding this phrase; but my colleague Adrian Clynes had no difficulty understanding it the first time I played it to him, which just confirms how far I have to go in learning Malay. It also demonstrates how important it is to become familiar with the fast pronunciation of common phrases.

(Actually, there is an error in the subtitles here, as the speaker says 'masyarakat' ('society'), not *'masyarat'; but never mind. Most of the Berita Suria subtitles are excellent.)

terminal degree

In my previous post, I discussed the fact that 'flaming hot' uttered by a male speaker from Hong Kong was not understood by a female listener from Malaysia, mostly because this is not a common phrase in English.

In the same conversation, the Malaysian could not understand the speaker from Hong Kong when he used the phrase 'terminal degree', even though he said it quite clearly so there was nothing about the pronunciation that caused the problem.

In this case, the phrase 'terminal degree' is a common phrase in the United States to refer to the final degree one studies — it occurs 40 times in the COCA Corpus of American English. However, it is not a common phrase outside of the United States. I checked with my colleagues, and only one of them had heard it before.

This illustrates that problems of intelligibility can be affected by a range of different factors: not just pronunciation, but also familiarity with typical phrases that occur in the variety of English being spoken.

freezing cold and flaming hot

I have recently been doing quite a bit of work on intelligibility, and some of my data comes from a male speaker from Hong Kong talking to a female speaker from Malaysia. My research is concerned with places where they failed to understand each other, and specifically with what causes those misunderstandings.

In one place, the male speaker says that he likes the steady climate of Brunei as, in previous places he has been, it has been 'either freezing cold or flaming hot'. And, as is common for speakers from Hong Kong, he simplifies the consonant clusters at the start of freezing and flaming, omitting the [r] in the first and the [l] in the second.

What is interesting from these examples is that his listener understood him perfectly well when he said 'freezing cold' but could not understand him when he said 'flaming hot'. In fact, she transcribed it as 'fuming hot' instead of 'flaming hot'.

The explanation for this is, of course, that 'freezing cold' is a common phrase (it occurs 197 times in the COCA corpus of American English ‑ see here), but 'flaming hot' is much less common (it only occurs 2 times in the COCA data).

What this tells us is this: when you are using a common phrase, then you don't need to articulate it too carefully to be understood; but if you are sayng something less common, then you need to say it very carefully.

The other thing to note is this: loss of intelligibility does not just involve pronunciation, as we have to consider other factors as well. Both of these phrases involved the same kind of non-standard pronunciation, but one was understood while the other was not.

42

What does 42 represent?

Well, we all know it is 7 times 6. And some of us know that it is the ultimate answer to Life, the Universe and Everything. (See here). But what else is it?

Here is something useful for you to know: row 42 on aircraft is the emergency exit.

Now, that may not be of much help to you as the plane goes down in flames. But it is jolly useful to know when you are booking your seat, because row 42 always has extra leg-room.

Job Opportunities

There is a recent analysis in Language Log (here) of linguistics dissertations submitted and job opportunities advertised, based on work done by Stephanie Shih and Rebecca Starr. The results look like this, where the blue columns show the number of dissertations in each field and the orange and yellow columns show job opportunities.

Basically, for someone starting their academic career, you want the blue column to be low (you don't want too many competitors) and the other two columns to be high (lots of jobs).

Guess what: for mainstream linguistics, you are best off in phonetics (the leftmost category). Morphology, syntax and semantics are not so good, and sociolinguistics is also not good. Psycholinguistics looks OK, though.

Phone Usage

Did you know that texting is the second most common use of a mobile phone? (See here).

So, you might ask, what's that most common use?

No, it's not talking. It's checking the time.

Gardens by the Bay

While I was in Singapore, I visited the Gardens by the Bay. This is what the super-trees look like at night:

I know we are supposed to be impressed; but I felt intensely sad about the place. The towering concrete and metal "trees" seemed incredibly ugly.

What message is it supposed to be sending out? Given that the two domes there are reported to cost millions of dollars per year to maintain their cool, temperate atmosphere, the message seems to be this: we can waste a huge amount of money creating something modern and ugly, and we don't care.

Maybe visiting it at night was not the best time. But I think if I had gone there during the daytime, I would still have found it really depressing.

Vegetarian Water

Just recently, I was in Singapore for a few days. The breakfast in the place I was staying offered 'vegetarian water' and 'vegetarian fruit juice':

What on earth would non-vegetarian water look like?

/w/ + 'a'

Here's a phonological puzzle for you. Consider the pronunciation of the following words of English:

• wag
• swagger
• wacky
• quack
• swanky
• swan
• wasp
• swamp
• wash
• watch
• wander
• quality
• quantity
• squash

All of them have [w] followed by 'a'; and in the first five, the 'a' is pronounced as [æ], while in the remainder it is pronounced as [ɒ]. Why is this?

There seems to be a historical process that makes the vowel after [w] become a back rounded vowel (in British English at least; in American English, the vowel is [ɑ:], which is back but unrounded). But this process does not occur in some phonological environments. So what is it about the first five words that prevents the 'a' being pronounced as [ɒ]?

The answer is that the consonant following the vowel is velar: [k], [g] or [ŋ]. But what is it about a velar consonant that prevents the preceding vowel becoming a back rounded vowel?

I don't know the answer to this; but it might be that English prefers to have dissimilarity in its syllables, so words with a velar consonant followed by a back vowel followed by another velar consonant, such as kung or gong, are not particularly good words of English. (Of course, gong is a word of English, but then it comes from Malay, so maybe it doesn't count.) There are some exceptions, such as cook and cog; but my impression is that this phonological shape is dispreferred in English.

In contrast, there seems to be no similar restriction in Chinese, where gong is a common syllable shape. Furthermore, the vowel in wang (王, 'king') is more back than the vowel in wan (完, 'late'). So, in Chinese, a vowel between [w] and [ŋ] becomes back, which seems to be the opposite of the process in English.

Malay Cupertinos

The cupertino effect is when a word gets changed by an over-enthusiastic spell checker. The term derives from early spell checkers converting cooperation (with no hyphen) into Cupertino, a city in California (see here).

This process can be quite problematic if you try to incorporate non-English words into a text of English. For example, I have found that if I type the Malay word borang ('form in an application'), it gets automatically converted into boring, and similarly datang ('to come') gets changed to dating.

I was just reading a student report which included the Malay phrase:

berberapa keeping gambar

    several     ???     picture

It took me a while to figure out that keeping should really be keping, a measure word in Malay, so the phrase means 'several photographs'.

Abbreviations on TV

In a previous posting (here), I discussed abbreviations found in Malay reference materials such as dictionaries, and I suggested that the news channel Astro Awani uses similar abbreviations in its subtitles.

When checking on this, I found I was wrong: Astro Awani in fact always uses full spelling for subtitles when the language spoken by the person in the news is not Malay. However, abbreviations do sometimes occur in the scrolling news feed at the bottom of the screen. I have noticed the following:

• dgn : dengan ('with')
• dlm : dalam ('in')
• dpt : dapat ('get')
• drpd : daripada ('from')
• kg : kampung ('village')
• klhkn : kalahkan ('defeat')
• kpd : kepada ('to')
• krn : kerana ('because')
• M'sia : Malaysia
• org : orang ('people')
• pd : pada ('at')
• p'raya : pilihan raya ('election')
• sbg : sebagai ('as')
• S'pura : Singapura
• utk : untuk ('for')
• wjr : wajar ('should')

Most of these are prepositions (dgn, dlm, drpd, pd, utk, ...). They are similar to those used in the dictionary, and they adopt the same conventions (vowels are omitted unless they are the fist letter; 'n' is omitted if it is before a consonant). But a few are verbs (dpt, klhkn, wjr) or nouns (org, p'raya), and there are some countries (M'sia, S'pura), so it seems that the scope is a bit wider. Perhaps it is not surprising that these abbreviations are adopted when the message has to be conveyed in a single line.

flare-up

I love crash blossoms (newspaper headlines that are easily mis-parsed on first reading). Here is one I saw in today's BBC World News site:

At first, I thought flare-up was a verb, so the dead and injured in Gaza were being set on fire. It seems reasonable if the dead are being cremated, but it's a little bit gruesome if the injured are being subjected to the same treatment.

Of course, flare-up should be parsed as a noun, so in Gaza flare-up is a prepositional phrase functioning as an adverbial. This becomes apparent when you read the paragraph following the headline.

This headline is probably not really ambiguous, as flare-up would not be hyphenated if it were a verb. But never mind: I did mis-parse it initially.