I've got a preposition for you

My collection of things grammar and language related, over in a separate blog because I know grammar and pedantry and such is not everybody's idea of riveting entertainment. Who am I? main blog is here

[upwithwhichiwillnotput]

Introducing Philby passives

It is common knowledge that passive sentences only optionally need to express an agent. For example the agent, John, of an active sentence like John patted the cat is only optionally appears in a by-phrase of an equivalent passive sentence The cat was patted (by John). 

An interesting construction that I have come across is where two agentive by-phrases appear. This double-agent construction I have decided to name after the famous English double agent Kim Philby.

It is possible with certain verbs, like hit, where the subject can either be an animate intentional agent, or where the subject can be inanimate serving a more instrumental semantic role. E.g. A certain hypothetical event could be described in either of the following ways: He hit me (with a rock) or A rock hit me. 

*He a rock hit me is not grammatical, they can’t both be subjects of hit, but curiously it seems that at least for some speakers they can both appear as agentive by-phrases in a passive sentences. E.g. I was hit by a rock by him. 

My impression from some quick googling is that it is particularly prominent in Indian English. The following are some examples that I turned up googling:

Troye Sivan reveals he was hit by a car by his dad when he was two (Nova 96.9)

I'm the guy that got hit by a car by an inattentive driver. (Reddit)

A CMO staff was hit by a hammer by a visitor who had come to meet chief minister Mamata Banerjee (Times of India)

Then I got hit by a stick by someone (Chicago Tribune)

I was stabbed by a knife by a boy (Street Children in Kenya)

a 37 year-old female from Brampton, was a passenger in a vehicle when she was struck by a bullet by unknown suspect(s) (Peel Regional Police)

[oupacademic]

Word of the Day: aleatory

adj. Depending on the throw of a dice or on chance; random.

Image: Dice by Willi Heidelbach, Public Domain via Pixabay.

[upwithwhichiwillnotput]

Like in Caesar’s famous alea iacta est “the die is cast”

[shavingryansprivates-deactivate]

romeo romeo

where the fuck is you, romeo

[joeshmo]

Fuck you, the original line in Romeo and Juliet is “Wherefore art thou”. And maybe if you stopped being an assumption-making bag of fucking asshole, you’d know that wherefore does NOT FUCKING MEAN “WHERE”, WHEREFORE MEANS “WHY”.

SHE’S ASKING WHY HIS NAME IS ROMEO. FUCK ALL OF YOU. FUCK ALL OF YOU HARD UP THE TOENAIL. I TAKE MY SHAKESPEARE SERIOUSLY AS TITS.

[j-moriarty-blog]

romeo romeo

why the fuck is you romeo

[upwithwhichiwillnotput]

It would be lovely if the first impulse in reaction to a joke based on a misconception was to educate rather than hurl abuse.

What’s more ‘wherefore’ is not just a Shakespearean version of ‘why’. Shakespeare knew the word ‘why’, he uses it about 10 times as often as ‘wherefore’. There is a subtle distinction between the words: ‘wherefore’ more strictly means ‘what for’ in that it is asking for a reason. ‘why’ can be used in this way but it can also be used, in a way that ‘wherefore’ cannot, to ask about a cause.

‘why are you sad?’ asks what has caused your sadness

 ‘wherefore art thou sad?’/’what are you sad for?’ asks something similar but, by more explicitly asking for a reason, it has more of an implication of ‘what good will being sad do you?’.

‘why art thou romeo?/’why are you a montague?’ are simple questions with simple answers - cos his parents were montagues and cos they named him that.

‘wherefore art thou romeo?’ on the other hand rhetorically asks ‘what good is it that this cute boy i just met turns out to be a family enemy?’ implying that it’s not good at all, and i wish it weren’t so.

[upwithwhichiwillnotput]

[johannesvandergraaff]

The word gender comes via French from the Latin genus (plural genera) which did not originally have the letter D in it.

This goes to show that, in the same way that some people erroneously define gender by the genitals, even etymologically speaking, people use the D where it shouldn’t be used.

[breadboxes-deactivated20130902]

what did vincent say when he lost his car in the parking lot 

[breadboxes-deactivated20130902]

“where did my van gogh”

[yolkygudetama]

the correct pronunciation of “gogh” is “goff”, you uncultured swine

[lotad]

fuck gogh

[shaxaphone]

Well actually, British people pronounce it “goff” and American people pronounce it “go” and unfortunately, both are wrong. Vincent Van Gogh is dutch so his name is actually pronounced “van KHOCK” so suck my gogh

[clintbarthon]

[upwithwhichiwillnotput]

Wikipedia lays it out nice and clear in what should be everybody’s friend, the IPA: “Vincent Willem van Gogh (Dutch: [ˈvɪnsɛnt ˈʋɪləm vɑn ˈɣɔx]”

Now, leaving aside the first three words, whose pronunciations are fairly straightforward (I won’t go into labiodental approximants), we have /ɣɔx/. The final /x/ sound is like the ch in Scottish loch, or German Bach (known as a voiceless velar fricative). 

Now, just as zzz is just the same sound as sss, except that your voicebox is going in the former sound, the first G in Gogh, represented by /ɣ/, is just the same as that final /x/ sound, except with the voicebox going (making it a voiced velar fricative).

[upwithwhichiwillnotput]

Sometimes people manage to come up with the oddest things to complain about in other people’s language.

Look here at people complaining about terms like “golfer” and “footballing”, because “golf” and “football” aren’t verbs.

https://twitter.com/alexshawespn/status/520128475286745089

http://www.ibleedcrimsonred.com/2015/01/yall-please-golf-is-not-verb.html

[upwithwhichiwillnotput]

A couple of trickier examples with respect to what prescriptivists will tell you is the difference between who and whom. In both cases prescriptivists will tell you the above usages are wrong.

We're used to "Turnbull, with whom I have a strong relationship, is my preferred leader of the Liberal party" as the "correct" form. So then why not "I'm prepared to meet with whomever leads the Liberal party"?

To figure it out, try looking at just the subordinate clauses, the ones embedded within a larger sentence, and rearranging them into sentences in their own right using he/him in place of who(ever)/whom(ever). So you turn "With who/whom I have a strong relationship" into "I have a strong relationship with he/him". In the second example, "Whoever/whomever leads the Liberal party" becomes "He/him leads the Liberal party".

Where 'he' sounds good, use who(ever), and where 'him' sounds good, use whom(ever). So because it's "he leads", it's "whoever leads", but because it's "a strong relationship with him", it's "with whom I have a strong relationship". The difference is that in the first case the word 'with' is part of the independent, higher clause going with the verb 'meet', while in the second case, the word 'with' is a part of the subordinate clause.

In the second case, prescriptivists tell us it's "Hockey, whom colleagues despise", so why is it not "Hockey, whom colleagues believe..."? Again, the he/him test can help us. "Colleagues despise him" sounds good, so it's "whom colleagues despise". It is true that "colleagues believe him" sounds good initially, but in the full context "colleagues believe he has failed to sell the budget", 'he', and therefore 'who' is obviously the "correct"  choice. In grammatical terms, who is for the subject doing the verb, whereas whom is for the object having the verb done to it. So since Hockey is the one doing the verb 'fail', 'who' is standard, whereas in the other sentence Hockey is the one having the despising done to him, 'whom' is standard.

I hope this is vaguely clear. Feel free to ask a question if it's not.

Of course, I am a fully-fledged descriptivist, so do whatever feels natural, this is just information for those interested in knowing standard English.

[linguismstics]

The joys of wilful misinterpretation

The other day I heard someone say “I saw her running out the window”. They meant it to be similar to “Whilst I was looking out the window, I saw her running” but, wilful misinterpreter that I am, I so wanted it to mean “She ran through an open window and I saw it”.

Then I thought they could have said “I saw her out the window running” which would have prevented my first interpretation (and possibly a nasty injury!) but “Whilst running, I accompanied her to, and made sure she left via, the window” came to my (but not her) rescue!

[upwithwhichiwillnotput]

Came across this post after googling the phrase "wilful misinterpretation" after I saw a post on facebook about someone who had "accidentally put my car and house keys through the dryer", to which I responded "i'm impressed you can fit a car in a dyer"

[just-shower-thoughts]

If you replace the “W” in Where, What, and When with a “T”, you answer the question

[lost-in-hammerspace-deactivated]

[upwithwhichiwillnotput]

How could this post forget such vital words as 'whither' and 'whence'?

[thelazypolyglot]

when i noticed this i swear my head almost exploded i was so angry FUCKIN ROMANCE LANGUAGES THO LIKE WHY

[upwithwhichiwillnotput]

This is actually really cool because what's going on is that we have two words that were similar in Latin, capillus meaning "hair" and caballus meaning "horse". And then, lo and behold, these words' descendants, in both French and Spanish, are also similar. It's just that some different phonological changes* in each language have made words' common origins a bit harder to spot, and in each case, slightly lessened the difference between the words for "horses" and "hair".

*If we start from Latin's caballus and capillus, and then it's easy to see how Spanish has got caballos and cabellos. Firstly, the -os is a plural ending straight out of Latin (where it's the accusative plural), and there already we've got caballos. A voicing of consonants between vowels is a very common sound change, so that turns the p of capillus into a b. Then all that remains is a slight lowering of the i vowel into an e and we've got cabellos.

On the French side of things, they're the one with the crazy historical sound changes. - Like Spanish, p's between vowels become voiced to b's and following i's lower to e's (capillus -> cabellos) - Initial c's go to ch's (cabellus -> chabellus) - a's after ch's can go to e's (chabellus -> chebellus) - b's between vowels further change to become fricatives and are now v's (chabellus -> chavellus) - the double ll then drops out and we use the absurd French -x plural ending (chevellus -> cheveux) and there we have it. the same changes where applicable to the Latin word caballus will get you chevaux.

Amazing stuff.

[allofthegrero-blog]

meanwhile, in Latin class…

[upwithwhichiwillnotput]

This construction is certainly future perfect; its passivity is dubious, however. "Disappointed" is formed from the past participle of "disappoint", but I would say it has undergone a zero-transformation to become an adjective, making this a predicate complement construction, rather than a passive construction.

"Disappointed" in this context just seems to be a description of the Ebenezer Chicken, rather than explicitly being about Ebenezer actually undergoing an instance of the verb "disappoint". We can see this clearly by comparing a clear predicate complement construction that uses the adjective "angry" with a clear passive construction that uses the past participle "punched".

1. "By the time you die, you will have been angry many times."(clearly just a description of someone's state at various points in their life.)

2. "By the time you die, you will have been punched many times" (clearly about someone actually undergoing the verb "punch" at various points in their life.)

The case above with "disappointed", to me, seems clearly much closer to sentence 1 than sentence 2. "Disappointed" is a description rather than being about undergoing the verb "disappoint".

The preposition "with" used in the cartoon is an excellent piece of evidence for this. "With" is more common with adjectives ("been angry with your life"), and "by" is what's used to denote the agent (the doer) in passive constructions (been punched by your brother).

If it were a passivisation of an active sentence like "Your life will have disappointed you", you would expect the preposition "by" in the passive sentence: "You will have been disappointed by your life". Since "with" is used, it seems clear to me that "disappointed" is an adjective here in the cartoon and that the sentence is not future perfect passive.

[han-nara]

The Linguists

The Linguists (2008) 65 min - Documental http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1172995/ http://www.thelinguists.com/ David y Greg en “The Linguists”, documentan las le…

You guys, this is one of my fav. movies ever. It follows two linguists, Greg Anderson of the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages and David Harrison of Swarthmore College as they travel around the world to collect recordings of some of the last speakers of several moribund (dying) languages. It can be sad but it also shows the beauty of language. It wasn’t available to watch online till recently, please check it out when you have time!

[linguismstics]

I just watched this as well and I recently read Harrison’s book When Languages Die. The best thing we can do as linguists (either in the field or out of it) is to help people appreciate languages and language in general from more perspectives than simply economic or political value. There’s a trend I think to see a language as a singular tool, when actually it is more like a entire toolbox. Different languages equip you with many different ways of interacting with the world and it would be short-sighted to value particular ways over others before we even know the full spectrum of ways available to us.

[johannesvandergraaff]

If you have even the slightest interest in languages and linguistics, you should watch it.

[johannesvandergraaff]

What is the plural of platypus? Please give me a detailed answer explaining why.

Well, anon, the descriptivist in me is telling me to tell you that you should use whatever plural form feels right.

However, if you want my thoughts on the matter here they are:

There are probably 4 potential forms that come to mind: platypus, platypuses, platypodes and platypi. If the prescriptivist in me were to sneak out for a bit, the only one that I would have a problem with would be ‘platypi’, since this form is created on the assumption that ‘platypus’ is a 2nd declension Latin noun, which it is simply not. ‘Platypus’, is a combination of the Greek words πλατύς (broad) and πούς (foot). This form πλατύπους then undergoes the typical transliteration process for forming Latin words from Greek ones (in contrast to a better phonetic transliteration of ‘platupous’). This gives us a pseudo-Latin noun ‘platypus’ (pseudo because it doesn’t actually occur in Latin). This noun would be in the 3rd declension, with a plural platypodes reflecting the fact that πούς is a 3rd declension Greek noun, and has a plural of πόδες.

This is why platypodes is ok. But really, if you just want to be normal, I have no problems with either ‘platypuses’ or just ‘platypus’ as the plural.

[mapsontheweb]

How the Pronunciation of “Bath” Varies in England

AlmightyB:

Source: Telegraph http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1546787/Map-that-shows-Northerners-have-the-last-laff.html

[upwithwhichiwillnotput]

'a', 'aa', and 'ah'? I can't make sense of that. someone needs to get some IPA all up in its shit.

[helpwhatisablog]

Young people who think politics aren’t important can go juuuuuuuuump

[upwithwhichiwillnotput]

Young people who think politics is a plural intrigue me. Natural usage picked up from others or hypercorrection?

[upwithwhichiwillnotput]

I had a great realisation last night.

It's the stereotypical thing to do to annoy a linguist, when you hear they're a linguist, to ask them how many languages they know.

My great realisation was that maybe people ask this because they are actually doing linguistics themselves on a subconscious level. They're identifying the suffix -ist as a doer, in that an artist does the arts, a scientist does science, a physicist does physics, a removalist does removals etc. So people are breaking down "linguist" into "lingua" (Latin for language, or tongue) plus "-ist" which makes a "linguist" as "someone who does languages". On this interpretation, a question of how many languages seems more reasonable.

I mean, a more appropriate name for someone who does linguistics might be something like linguisticist (as in "physics" -> "physicist") or even linguistician ("mathematics" -> "mathematician").

Whether my musings are true or not, I think it's worth considering that the stereotypical annoying question might not arise just from ignorance, but instead from the fact that that "linguist" could be a misleading name.