Illustration: Joseph M. Gleeson

Just so stories in French negation

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Just So stories were named by Rudyard Kipling in his book of the same name, which contained stories like “How the Rhinoceros Got his Skin.” In that one, the rhino’s skin starts out tight, but after he takes it off to swim, a man put crumbs in it to take revenge for the rhino eating his cake. When the rhino put his skin back on, it itched so much he loosened it up with all his scratching. Presumably something similar happened with basset hounds.

These stories can be fun, especially for kids who ask “why?” and won’t take “I don’t know” for an answer. They’re entertaining, but they’re not science and they’re not history. Even if they’re broadly consistent with a scientific theory, if they’re not based on actual data, they’re just fiction.

This is different from the normal simplification that happens in scientific explanations. We know that the Earth is not a perfectly round sphere, that it bulges out a little at the equator. Sometimes it’s enough to think of the world as round, and nobody needs to worry about oblate spheroids.

The main difference is that scientific simplification removes distracting detail from the raw data to allow the bigger picture to be seen more clearly, but Just So stories add detail that doesn’t exist in the data, and may actually create a picture that doesn’t exist. This is why, as science, they are so dangerous.

Linguistics is certainly no stranger to Just So stories. The most famous may be the old chestnut that the Eskimos have a hundred (or a thousand, or…) words for snow. This has long been used to illustrate the effect of environment on language, even though Geoffrey Pullum famously showed it to be false in 1989.

Just So stories are also found in the history of French negation, the subject of my dissertation. There is a story that you will find in almost every article or book discussing the evolution of negation. Here’s the version from Detges and Waltereit (2002):

As a standard example of grammaticalization, consider the French negation ne … pas. A lexical item, the Latin full noun passus ‘step’, has turned into a grammatical item, the Modern French negation marker pas.

(3) a. Before grammaticalization: Latin
non vado   passum
NEG go:lsG step:ACC
'I don't go a step'

b. After grammaticalization: Modern French
je ne vais   pas
I NEG go:lSG NEG
'I don't go'

Reading this, I assumed that Detges and Waltereit have some attestations of non vado passum in Latin. That’s the way science works, and history. We do experiments to collect data, and we base our stories of the past on documents and artifacts. In historical linguistics we have what people wrote, and we have reconstructions. Because the reconstructions are less reliable as evidence, we mark them with asterisks.

I was all ready to repeat this story as I told the history of French negation. In fact, one of my professors suggested that I look for evidence of pas being initially restricted to verbs of motion, then gradually used with a broader and broader range of verbs. I did look, but I discovered that it’s just a story. We don’t have any evidence that anyone ever wrote non vado passum, other than linguists talking about grammaticization.

What I did find was this excellent three-part opus on Romance negation by Alfred Schweighäuser, published in 1851-52, digitized to PDF by Google Books and extracted for your convenience here (section 1, section 2, section 3). In section 3 (Part 2), he takes you on a very thorough tour of all the expressions that have been used to “supplement” negation in Latin and its descendants over the years. After spending some time discussing ne … pas, he concludes:

Observons toutefois que cette modification apportée au sens du mot pas est antérieure aux plus anciens monuments de la langue. Si haut que nous remontions dans le cours des siècles, les textes ne nous montrent jamais cette négation explétive que privée de l’article, et jointe indiféremment ? des verbes de toute signification.

Let us note in any case that this modification made to the sense of the word pas is earlier than the most remote works of the language. No matter how far back we look across the centuries, the texts only show us that negation shorn of its article and combined indifferently with verbs from any semantic field.

One thing I find remarkable about this is that these aspects of language change were known and studied 161 years ago. And yet it was only a year later, in 1853, that P.L.J.B. Gaussin gave us our first citation of non vado passum:

Nous avons encore à parler d’une dernière modification que quelques mots subissent : elle a lieu lorsque, par suite d’un emploi très-fréquent, ils ne deviennent que de simples formes grammaticales. C’est un fait que nous aurons l’occasion de vérifier en polynésien ; nous en trouvons d’ailleurs de nombreux exemples dans nos langues d’Europe : on connaît l’origine des négations françaises pas et point ; on a d’abord dit non vado passum ou passu, je ne vais d’un pas ; non video punctum, je ne vois un point. Pas et point, par un usage devenu de plus en plus général, n’ont plus été par la suite que de simples signes grammaticaux.

We have yet to discuss one last modification that certain words undergo. It happens when, in the course of very frequent usage, they are transformed into simple grammatical forms. This is a fact that we will have the opportunity to confirm in Polynesian; we also find many examples in our European languages. We know the origin of the French negations pas and point: people first said non vado passum or passu, I am not going one step, non video punctum, I do not see one point. Pas and point, by virtue of more and more general usage, have become nothing more than simple grammatical signs.

Schweighäuser and Gaussin perfectly illustrate the difference between history and Just So stories. Schweighäuser combs through Latin and Old French texts in detail to find all the different ways that the words are used. His wealth of detail is perfectly appropriate for his task, but the story could be told to outsiders in a compelling way by simply omitting some of that detail. There are many examples of this kind of semantic broadening with other constructions; those could have been used instead. But Gaussin doesn’t do that. He just makes stuff up.

It is obviously silly to single out Detges and Waltereit for this Just So story, since it came from Gaussin, and has been handed down ever since. But other than a brief mention in 1907, it was dormant until Lüdtke (1980) revived it. It seems to have been most widely propagated by Paolo Ramat in 1987.

Looking back on this, I appreciate my professor’s invitation to re-examine this story rather than simply repeating it. We should do that with all of our standard stories, to find out which ones are supported by the data, and which are Just So.

Two changes in French negation

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I realized today that I hadn’t yet blogged about my dissertation, the Spread of Change in French Negation. That’s too bad, because I like my dissertation topic. It’s fun, and it’s interesting.

You may see here, from time to time, posts about my dissertation research. I’ll try to make them accessible to anyone, not just the specialized audience that I wrote the dissertation for. If you have a reaction or a question I hope you’ll comment or send me an email. If there’s anything you don’t understand, please tell me, because I mean for this blog to be easy to understand.

When I studied French in high school, I learned the standard line: that to negate a sentence you put ne before the verb and pas after it: Je sais becomes Je ne sais pas. But then my teachers were smart enough to show me a movie that aimed for authentic language. Diva, the 1981 action film, features a moped chase in the Paris M?tro, and a pair of grumpy hitmen. One of the gangsters is a man of few words, but he repeatedly takes the time to say that he doesn’t like whatever’s at hand. And in one scene with cars, he says, “J’aime pas les bagnoles.” In case our French wasn’t good enough, we had the subtitle: I don’t like cars.

I laughed, I repeated the line, mimicking Dominique Pinon’s terse delivery. Then I realized: what happened to the ne? The other lines where the hitman declared his dislike for elevators and other burdensome features of the environment were also missing the ne. And years later when I went to live in Paris and walk through the same m?tro stations, I heard lots of negation with the pas only, no ne. I learned to negate my own sentences with just a casual pas after the verb, because when in Paris, do as the Parisians do.

Another six years later, in a class on Frequency Effects in Language Change, Joan Bybee asked us to pick a change for our term project. I chose to look at French negation. I was sure the story of the missing ne would turn out to be a compelling one.

I was right. It was so compelling that it already had a big literature on it. Worse, because it had only recently entered mainstream media, the data on ne-dropping were hard for me to get in time for a term paper. But as I looked further back in time, I discovered an earlier change. This one had been studied a lot, but not quite as much, and there was quite a lot of data. This was the original addition of pas to the ne. Or, as I was to find out, the large increase in the use of ne ? pas.

Want to read the rest of the story? Stay tuned to this blog. If you can’t wait, go read my dissertation. Oh, and ask if you have questions!

The politics of soft “g”

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Soft or hard “g”? It’s been in the news lately in relation to the file format “gif,” which is currently enjoying a renaissance as a new generation discovers its usefulness in creating annoying animations. This week the “creator” of the Graphical Interchange Format weighed in that he’s always pronounced it with a soft “g.”

Arika Okrent gives some historical context on the sources of “g” words in English. Soft “g” is actually one of the world’s most controversial sounds, along with “sh”, “r” and “l,” and this is hardly the first pronunciation fight over it, as noticed by the singer Frank Black:

I heard them saying “Los Angeles”
In old black-and-white movies,
And if you think there’s nothing to this,
How come we say “Los Angeles”?

Black pronounces the first “Los Angeles” with a hard “g,” and the second with a soft “g.” There are vowel differences as well, but the “g” is the most salient difference. A friend of mine sent me this song back in 1994, and I happened to know the answer to Frank Black’s question because I had just read it in an obituary for the linguist Dwight Bolinger by his colleague Robert Stockwell. In 1952, as Chair of the Department of Spanish and Italian at the University of Southern California, Bolinger served on a mayoral “jury” appointed to decide the pronunciation of the name of the city. The jury was supposed to have an answer for the 171st anniversary of the founding of the city on September 4, but admitted they were deadlocked. On September 9 they announced that they had come to a decision, which Stockwell credited to Bolinger:

From a linguistic point of view, the real possibilities, no matter how they came to be represented in the press, were, of course, only these three: [los?ŋxeles], [lasǽndʒələs], and [lasǽŋgələs]. The third version, with [g], was favored by the mayor and most Anglo natives of Southern California who expressed opinions in the polls (over a thousand of them, not counting columnists). Hispanics predictably preferred the first version because it is correct Spanish. Bolinger apparently persuaded the jury, contrary to the two opinions most favored in the polls, that ‘Loss-An-juh-less’ should be recommended, and there are headlines all over the newspapers of early September 1952 citing Bolinger as the one responsible for ‘the phonetic syllables’ and quoting him as saying that, ‘from a Spanish language standpoint, the pronunciation is not as much at variance with the true Spanish as that employing the hard “g”. (Los Angeles Times, September 13, 1952). What he had done was diplomatically persuade the jury to accept the pronunciation which is in accord with English orthographic traditions. It should be added that he was consistent: for his own name he preferred [báləndʒər] though his son prefers and has always insisted on [bóliŋər].

The current soft “g” pronunciation of “Los Angeles” was actually crafted by Bolinger as a compromise between the hard “g” preferred by Anglos and the jota used by Hispanics. It just happened that it fit with Bolinger’s own agenda. In 2011, the L.A. Times compiled more details from its reports at the time. Of course, in 1952 “the mayor prayed that civic pride would prevent its citizens from ever, ever referring to it as ‘L.A.’,” but really, that’s what they do today.

Stan Carey argues that “You can pronounce ?GIF? any way you like,” and echoes another linguist’s pronouncement from the early 1950s, “Leave your language alone.” In this particular case I’m with Carey: I don’t really care how “gif” gets pronounced; I just want people to stop using them so much, especially those annyoing 4-up captioned screencaps. But as the “Los Angeles” case indicates, some pronunciation choices do have political consequences. To paraphrase Deborah Cameron and Joshua Fishman, we can’t leave our language alone because it’s not just ours. It’s community property, and if we don’t take care of it others will mess it up.

This week in category fights, May 19

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Dealbreaker’s Jon Shazar reassures us by excluding Green Cannabis from the category of “marijuana hedge fund,” contrary to its earlier inclusion by HedgeCo. It’s just a privately traded manufacturing company – of cookies and candy made with marijuana. But hedge funds might invest in it! It’s not clear where these would be sold.

ExtremeTech’s Sebastian Anthony wanted to include the World Press Photo of the Year in the category of “fake,” labeling it as a danger, and Foreign Policy’s Dana Stuster even wants to exclude it from the category of “photo,” on the grounds that it’s a bait-and-switch.

Ring of Fire Radio’s Joshua De Leon wants to transfer the Food and Drug Administration’s “510(k) expedited approval” from the category of “approval” into the category of “rubber stamp,” labeling it because it constitutes a bait-and-switch allowing dangerous products like Boston Scientific’s defective “Pinnacle Pelvic Floor Repair Kit” (ow) to be marketed without necessary oversight.

CBS DC’s Chris Lingebach reports that NFL analyst Jason La Canfora speculates – hypothetically! – that Washington Capitals hockey team captain Alex Ovechkin isn’t really a team captain. By excluding Ovechkin from the category of “team captain,” he accuses him of playing a bait-and-switch on his team.

Mexican food authenticity fetishism of the week: Gawker’s Caity Weaver wants to exclude Taco Bell’s Waffle Taco from the category of “taco” on a slippery slope argument, because hey, you could just put a marble in your hand and have a hand taco! Newser sums it up.

Making dreams and stuff

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Yesterday Tyler Schnoebelen posted an important warning to anyone who thinks translation is simple, by going through various translations of the quote “the stuff that dreams are made of” from the movie the Maltese Falcon.? Unfortunately it’s even worse than he says, because the official French translation, at least, is not very good.

One spring evening when I was in college in Paris I went out to see Casablanca.? I had liked it in high school film class, and noticed all the references to it that pervade Anglo-American pop culture.? When I watched English-language movies in Paris I always checked the subtitles to pick up some good French expressions.? The lobby was full of French people excitedly chattering about how much they loved “Casa” too.

Well, if these French people loved “Casa,” it must’ve been for the visuals, or because they understood the English dialogue, because it sure wasn’t for the French subtitles.? I got to read one famous, poetic line after another rendered in dull clich?s.? There were two that I remember most vividly.

There’s the line, “Here’s looking at you, kid,” that Rick says to Ilsa four times in the movie. I’ve never heard anyone say it when they weren’t referencing the movie.? It’s a toast, but it’s clearly a very affectionate toast, and Rick repeats it even when they’re not drinking, instead of something more direct, like “I love you,” as fits the conflicted nature of their relationship.? How did our subtitler render these complex nuances? With the most standard and formulaic French toast, “To your health!”

The other line that really struck me is the last one in the movie. [Um, SPOILER ALERT!] Police Captain Renault, who has demonstrated a lack of morals throughout the movie, has just allowed Ilsa to escape, shielded Rick from prosecution for killing a Nazi officer, and offered to flee to the Congo with him. As the two men walk off into the dark, Rick says, “Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

By hedging with “I think” and explicitly referencing “the beginning,” Rick emphasizes that this is a turning point for them, and that he has been impressed with Renault’s actions. How did this come out in the subtitles?

Maintenant, nous sommes amis!

They didn’t even translate the whole thing! It was just “Now we’re friends!” with that silly little exclamation point on the end. No thinking, no beginning, not even a friendship, just “friends!”

I’m not necessarily faulting the subtitler. I don’t know when it was translated, and how famous the movie was at the time. The people who pay for subtitles are often in a hurry, but don’t want to pay for quality, so they get what they pay for.

Casablanca deserves better, of course, and for the seventieth anniversary DVD they got it. “Here’s looking at you, kid,” is translated as “? vous, mon petit !” and then finally, “Bonne chance, mon petit.” The last line is rendered as, “Louis, je crois que ceci est le d?but d’une merveilleuse amiti? !” which is very literal, but a lot better than the first version.

I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the original subtitles for the Maltese Falcon were just as bad as those for Casablanca, and if they haven’t been updated for a seventieth anniversary release, they may still be bad. “L??toffe dont sont faits les r?ves,” isn’t horrible, but as Tyler points out, ?toffe is a very concrete noun, usually indicating some kind of fabric or stuffing. The noun mati?re (also feminine) is much closer to the sense of “substance” that I think the Maltese Falcon screenwriters were aiming for, and it is in fact frequently used to translate the original Shakespeare quote, as in this 1882 translation: “Nous sommes de la mati?re dont on fait les r?ves.”

My overall point is that translation is hard. Even the best translators get stumped regularly, and mediocre translators can put out some real howlers. More importantly, translation is not a repetitive and precise task like statistical analysis where computers can improve on the job that humans do. It requires knowledge, subtlety and art, and if this is the best that people can do, computers aren’t going to get anywhere close.

Appreciating interpreters

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My friend Dan Parvaz, who is a registered American Sign Language interpreter, posted yesterday on Facebook that it was Interpreter Appreciation Day. Further investigation reveals that this day is intended specifically for sign language interpreters, but spoken-language interpreters work hard and deserve appreciation too. Dan mentioned that September 30 is Saint Jerome’s day, the patron saint of translators, but as far as I know nobody mentions interpreters then. It’s as good a day as any other to appreciate the hard work that interpreters do in all languages.

I wanted to share a couple of radio stories that have made me appreciate professional interpreters even more – by their absence. In one case things seem to have turned out well despite the lack of interpreters, and in another they went very badly.

The first is a segment, “I Am Curious Yellow” in the “Tribes” episode of This American Life, which first aired on March 29. Debbie Lum, a Chinese-American filmmaker, produced a documentary Seeking Asian Female, which premiered at South by Southwest last year. She focuses on a white American man with a fetish for Asian women and his Chinese mail-order bride. She recounts how she intended to play the part of the neutral documentarian, but found herself being drawn into the story. She serves as an unpaid, amateur interpreter for Sandy and Steven, and even an informal relationship counselor, helping them both to understand each other and what they want from the relationship.

The second segment, “Yellow Rain,” was part of the Radiolab episode “The Fact of the Matter,” which first aired on September 24 of last year. During the bombing of Hmong villages by the Viet Cong in 1975, a suspicious “yellow rain” fell; some people believe it was poison, and others that it was “bee poop.” Host Robert Krulwich interviewed one of the survivors, Eng Yang, “translated by his niece,” writer Kao Kalia Yang. Krulwich later admitted that he “pressed too hard” in his quest to get evidence to condemn Ronald Reagan. At a certain point in the interview, Kao Kalia Yang, overcome with emotion, cut off both Krulwich and her uncle, yelled at Krulwich and then terminated the interview.

You can read Kao Kalia Yang’s side of the story here and here, and a brief statement from Eng Yang. Krulwich’s statement is here, and one from his co-host Jad Abumrad.

The only place that I have seen discussion of Kao Kalia Yang’s role as interpreter was a comment from “Diane from MN” on the “Yellow Rain” show page: “I speak Hmong and can hear Eng telling the interviewers repeatedly in the final cut he knows what bee pollen looks like. … Even Kao Kalia’s husband, who witnessed the interview, has said Eng was talking about his knowledge of bees and told the interviewers he is an experienced beekeeper. Did you hear any of this in the final cut? Not unless you understand Hmong!”

What Diane from MN is telling us is that Kao Kalia Yang, in her frustration, did her uncle and their cause a disservice. By stepping out of her role as interpreter, she left no one there to honor his voice. It is not even clear to me that he wanted to end the interview.? But even before that she did herself a disservice by agreeing to interpret in a situation where she would not be able to remain impartial.? In her reaction to the show she expresses frustration at being “reduced” to the role of niece in the show credits, when she is a published author.? But taking on the role of interpreter requires the humility to set aside your own agenda and qualifications, something she was not prepared to do.

Over the years I have watched Dan and my other interpreter friends work hard to convey meaning between Deaf and hearing people in as clear and neutral a way as possible.? Many of them are accomplished scientists of language and that may help them to interpret more clearly, but they set aside their research and their egos when they are interpreting.? Some of them will interpret for a friend or spouse in a casual setting, but in a formal situation where the stakes are high, Deaf people need to know that they are getting an unbiased translation of what’s being spoken, and that their own words are being translated fairly. It is the same for Hmong speakers in the United States – for anyone who needs to communicate with someone without a common language.

Ted Xiong, a Hmong interpreter at the Fairview Clinic of the University of Minnesota, told Minnesota Public Radio in 2008, “It’s being in the middle, between the patient and the provider. You cannot advocate for them, you can’t give them advice. It’s like… you are just a voice.” Xiong finds that frustrating, but the alternative is worse. Elizabeth Heibl, a doctor, added, “What you want is a two-way conversation between the clinician and the patient, with the interpreter there to help with communication.”

Unfortunately, children of immigrants like Kao Kalia Yang – the “1.5 generation” – and hearing children of Deaf adults are often thrust into the role of interpreter without any training or qualification. They find themselves interpreting for their parents with bureaucrats, teachers, shopkeepers and doctors, because nobody has hired Ted Xiong or Dan Parvaz or one of their colleagues – because interpreting services are expensive and many in government and business don’t know or care that people need this service. They find themselves forced to choose between conveying accurate information and being a full participant in the event. This is not fair to anyone.

There are some languages that have very small communities in the United States, and it can be very hard to find a trained, neutral interpreter. The Hmong languages are not like that. In a quick Google search I found three services offering professional Hmong translation. Eng Yang should have insisted on one; if so desired, Kao Kalia Yang could have participated as an advocate, free from the responsibilities of interpreting. But really, they shouldn’t have had to ask. WNYC can afford a Hmong interpreter for a two-hour interview session, and Pat Walters, the producer, should have simply provided one as a matter of course as soon as it was clear that Eng Yang’s English wasn’t fluent enough.

Walters and Krulwich set out to find the Truth. The Truth is a slippery thing. But you’re never going to get anywhere close to it without a reliable, neutral interpreter. And you’re probably going to mess things up.

How to get to the bottom of category fights

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Even if you didn?t grow up in a hippie town like I did, you may very well like to eat natural foods. If I weren?t allergic I would eat natural chicken; everyone says it?s healthy, right?

Not so fast! According to an Associated Press report from 2010, The Truthful Labeling Coalition says that chicken labeled ?natural? isn?t always natural.?What does that mean??It turns out that some ?natural? chicken is a free rider, exploiting the ambiguity that comes from the polysemous term ?natural,? and the Truthful Labeling Coalition is attempting to play the role of gatekeeper, excluding this ?plumped? chicken from the ?natural? category.?When we look deeper, we find that the Truthful Labeling Coalition is composed of companies like Foster Farms that claim to produce ?100% natural? chicken.?There are consumers who could be buying Foster Farms chicken, but are instead buying plumped chicken from companies like Tyson and Pilgrim?s Pride, depriving Foster of revenue.?Beneath the fight over words is a fight over money.

This example is a good introduction to how category fights work.?Not all members of the category are equal.?A gatekeeper accuses another category member of free riding and tries to exclude them.?Beneath the terminological dispute there is always an underlying dispute over resources.?The gatekeeper benefits from membership in the category and is attempting to deny these benefits to the accused free riders.

Just because this is about resources doesn?t mean that it?s not a valid argument.?Fairness, after all, is about access to resources.?What it means is that the fight is not ?just semantics.??It can be semantics in the service of justice.

Let?s define some terms.?Homonymy is when two words are pronounced or written the same, like ?bear? and ?bare.??Polysemy is a special kind of homonymy where a word develops multiple senses, like ?since? meaning ?subsequent to? or ?because of.??Some polysemous words can even split to the point where they?re pronounced differently by most people, like ?not? and ?naught.?

Ambiguity is when there is more than one interpretation for a particular utterance.?Homonyms can be ambiguous, like the famous ?Gladly, the cross-eyed bear,? but polysemous words even more so ? and in fact that?s how words change their meaning, according to Elizabeth Traugott.

In our example, ?natural? has become polysemous.?In terms of food, I (and lots of other people) associate it with the absence of industrial methods and additives.?As shopper Muembo Muanza told Juliana Barbassa of the Associated Press, “If it says natural, I expect it to be all natural – nothing but chicken.”?But Pilgrim?s Pride and Tyson claim that it?s still ?natural? as long as what gets added ? typically salt, water and the seaweed product carageenan ? are ?natural.??The word ?natural? is ambiguous between those two senses.
natural chicken1
In this diagram, the smaller, darker circle is the ?natural? of Foster Farms, Perdue and Muanza, while the bigger circle indicates the ?natural? of Tyson and Pilgrim?s Pride.

It?s an open question whether the executives at Tyson actually believes that their chicken is natural.?If they don?t and are being dishonest, it?s a bait-and-switch tactic.?If they do believe, it?s a free rider problem ? at least from the point of view of the Truthful Labeling Coalition.?Regardless, Foster Farms believes that it is unfairly losing revenue because its chickens are in the same category with the “plumped” chickens.?The Truthful Labelers want to exclude ?plumped? chicken from the category of ?natural,? and the other companies want to deny that exclusion.

You can see now how I used the Power of Semantics to get beyond a category fight to the underlying resource conflict.?I first identified the category and the players, and the ambiguity at play.?Then I reported the players? stances towards the category and what they wanted.

Who should win this fight? Well, the Truthful Labeling Coalition is hoping that your category of “natural chicken” is closer to theirs; if it is, you probably want to exclude the “plumped” meat from your diet and will support their efforts.

Wittgensteinian villages

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Last month I guessed that when Ari Wallach said that Hastings-on-Hudson is a village “in a Wittgensteinian sense,” he meant that it was part of a family of things that are called “villages,” but don’t all share the same set of criteria. Wallach confirmed on Twitter that this was what he meant.

Wittgenstein’s example came from the area of games, where poker is competitive and contains elements of chance, tic-tac-toe is competitive but involves no element of chance, and solitaire contains elements of chance but is not competitive. Meanwhile, there are things that are not games but are competitive, like war, and things that are not games but involve chance, like weather forecasting.

In my previous post I had four criteria for “games,” but I chose to focus on two of them to make the diagrams easier to read.

Similarly, George Lakoff argued, a typical mother provides genetic material to her child and nurtures the child once it is born. A genetic mother does not necessarily nurture the child and an adoptive mother does not provide genetic material, but they are both considered to be mothers. A father can provide genetic material, and an teacher can nurture, but they are not mothers. Lakoff calls these radial categories.

(Strictly speaking, war contains elements of chance, and fathers can nurture, so the diagrams don’t quite fit the way people think about these categories, but it’s hard to capture everything.)

Back to Hastings-on-Hudson: it is legally incorporated as a village, but it is more suburban than rural, bordering on the city of Yonkers. Greenwich Village and Queens Village were once villages, but are now neighborhoods in New York City, and may not be considered villages by anyone anymore. Meanwhile, Huntington Village on Long Island is more rural, but is not legally a village. A typical village, like New Paltz, is incorporated and rural. Then there are rural areas like Wittenberg (where I spent a good part of my childhood, essentially a crossroads with a general store), and incorporated areas like Buffalo, that are not villages.

These “family resemblances” are everywhere in human categorization, and they are the basis for many of what I call “category fights.” The existence of this kind of polysemy is rarely acknowledged, unfortunately, and many people argue over these categories as though they were Platonic categories with necessary and sufficient conditions, when the actual facts are more complicated.

In a Wittgensteinian sort of way

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This weekend the New York Times Styles section ran one of their periodic stories about kids growing up and moving to the suburbs, and changing both themselves and the suburbs in the process. A while back the suburb in question (more of an exurb) was Rosendale, and this time it was Hastings-on-Hudson. This particular article was notable for its sheer number of evocations of the wacky hipster frame, and specifically the description by “futurism consultant” (sorry, I have to put that in quotes) Ari Wallach that Hastings is a village “in a Wittgensteinian sort of way.”

Blogger Kieran Healy responded by posting the “Top Ten Ways that Hastings-on-Hudson might be a Village in a Wittgensteinian Sense.” And of course he’s right that it is a very funny quote, name-dropping a philosopher that hardly anybody has read in the original, in a “Styles” article about real estate trends. I would crack up if I ever found myself saying something like that, and I hope Wallach has enough of a sense of humor to do the same.

What’s funnier to me, as I just realized yesterday morning, is that I have an idea what Wallach was saying, and I agree with him. In fact, on Sunday I was at the Lavender Languages Conference arguing that I am transgender in a Wittgensteinian sort of way. I didn’t use those words; instead I referenced George Lakoff, who got the idea from Wittgenstein via Eleanor Rosch.

I learned about Ludwig Wittgenstein in Philosophy of Language class 22 years ago, but that class was so rich with theories that I couldn’t keep track of them all. So now I’m catching up with the help of Wikipedia, which gives us this quote (Philosophical Investigations 66, 1953) about the idea of “family relationships”:

Consider for example the proceedings that we call ‘games’. I mean board games, card games, ball games, Olympic games, and so on. What is common to them all? Don’t say, “There must be something common, or they would not be called ‘games'”–but look and see whether there is anything common to all. For if you look at them you will not see something common to all, but similarities, relationships, and a whole series of them at that. To repeat: don’t think, but look! Look for example at board games, with their multifarious relationships. Now pass to card games; here you find many correspondences with the first group, but many common features drop out, and others appear. When we pass next to ball games, much that is common is retained, but much is lost. Are they all ‘amusing’? Compare chess with noughts and crosses. Or is there always winning and losing, or competition between players? Think of patience. In ball games there is winning and losing; but when a child throws his ball at the wall and catches it again, this feature has disappeared. Look at the parts played by skill and luck; and at the difference between skill in chess and skill in tennis. Think now of games like ring-a-ring-a-roses; here is the element of amusement, but how many other characteristic features have disappeared! And we can go through the many, many other groups of games in the same way; can see how similarities crop up and disappear. And the result of this examination is: we see a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing: sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities of detail.

I made the Euler diagram above (which is not a true Venn diagram, according to the Wikipedian who made this page) to illustrate Wittgenstein’s use of “game.” Some of the games that he mentions, like Olympic track and field games, are amusing (in the sense of not being boring) and involve competition among players, skill and chance.

Other games fit only some of these criteria. There is no element of luck in chess or tic-tac-toe. There is no competition among players in solitaire or throwing a ball at the wall. There is no skill involved in ring-around-the-rosie. Tic-tac-toe is not “amusing.” Nevertheless, we call these all “games,” and if we tried to say that any of the four were necessary criteria we would exclude some of the games.

Similarly, these cannot be sufficient criteria either. Surgery involves skill, but it is not a game. Weather forecasting involves chance. War involves competition. Theater is amusing. That said, they are often compared to games, and described with game metaphors.

This is a good place to stop. I’ll talk in another blog post about how Hastings might be a village in this way.

Nonstandard relative clauses

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I was browsing through the Wikipedia page on relative pronouns and I found this table:

Position With explicit relative pronoun With omitted relative pronoun In formal English
Subject That?s the man [who ran away]. ? That?s the man [who ran away].
Direct object That?s the man [who I saw yesterday]. That’s the man [I saw yesterday]. That?s the man [whom I saw yesterday].
Indirect object That?s the man [who I gave the letter to]. That?s the man [I gave the letter to]. That?s the man [to whom I gave the letter].
Oblique That?s the man [who I was talking about]. That?s the man [I was talking about]. That?s the man [about whom I was talking].
Genitive That?s the man [whose sister I know]. ? That?s the man [whose sister I know].
Obj of Comp That?s the man [who I am taller than]. That?s the man [I am taller than]. That?s the man [than whom I am taller].

The “in formal English” column is a bit odd because it only contrasts to the “with explicit relative pronoun.”? I’m guessing the middle column is supposed to be “informal,” but it doesn’t include nonstandard forms that can omit a subject relative pronoun, like “There was a farmer had a dog” (observed by Arnold Zwicky among others), or those that can omit a genitive relative pronoun, like “That’s the guy’s name I was trying to remember.”