Growing Vocabulary And The Poor, Extinct Adverbs

“I was late for the bus this morning, so I sat up and got out of bed quickly, ran down the stairs fast, and closed the door hard behind me when I went out. When I finally got on the bus, I pulled my backpack down roughly onto my lap.”

            What’s wrong with that little anecdote? Nothing, grammatically. It follows all the rules we were taught in Language Arts as kids. So why does it sound so…wrong to us English speakers?

            You probably realized it in the time it took me to start writing that paragraph, but it’s this: The verbs modified with adverbs are long-winded replacements of stronger verbs we use. The paragraph, using standard verbs, would go this way:

            “I was late for the bus this morning, so I jumped out of bed, sprinted down the stairs, and slammed the door behind me when I went out. When I finally got on the bus, I yanked my backpack down onto my lap.”

            Verbs like “yanked” and “sprinted” have negated the need to modify verbs with adverbs. This is why you rarely hear adverbs used in speech – the quicker-to-say verbs have delegated them to use only by poets and authors. Here’s just a couple:

“walk lazily” = “saunter”

“push hard” = “shove”

“sing deeply and loudly” = “belt”

            The interesting thing to me about these verbs is that some of them run on a strength continuum – each word denotes a similar action, but the force of that action is changed by the word used. (Nudge-Push-Shove, Jog-Run-Sprint). Sure, each of the words brings to mind subtle differences in the action, but they’re still relatively the same.

            But now the interest: This is not the case for some verbs. Some “stronger” verbs run along a metaphorical continuum rather than a literal one of strength. Take the above example of “jumping out of bed”. I hear this expression all the time, “jumping” being used for ‘standing quickly/energetically’, or ‘sitting up and standing quickly/energetically’. I cannot physically jump out of my bed, by the traditional definition of “jumping”, without some serious martial arts training. But the use of these metaphorical verbs is just so ingrained into our speech that it looks odd to most of us when we see literal explanations of the word.

            Metaphor. It’s a dang powerful thing.

Songs In Languages I Don't Speak - Round 1: Vérone

L.I.D.S*.: French!

I start with a rather obvious one, from one of my favorite musicals - Romeo Et Juliette.

Catchy, heavy but not too hard, and with a gorgeous chorus.

*Language I Don't Speak

Introducing: Songs In Languages I Don't Speak

I love music. I really love music. I make it, listen to it, play it, study it - it's really the biggest part of my life. (Sorry, linguistics...) But I have a habit that some people call bad, and others call awesome: Loving music that's in languages I don't speak. It can be as almost understandable to me as a Romance/Germanic song, or as foreign as the Sámi national anthem. My tastes run all across the gambit, from Finnish death metal to Romanian folk music.

And guess how I first heard Finnish? Music. Hearing those songs kick-started my interest into this beautiful language. The same story with Hungarian later on.

A couple of people have asked me: Well, why don't you show us exactly what you listen to? (This is because they want to gawk at my bizarre tastes.) But, it got me thinking - maybe its good to spread the love of languages and music around? And at the same time, get attention for some great musicians/works.

So, from now on, every Wednesay and Sunday, I'll post a video of a song in language that is not English or Latin. Genres and styles will vary, to provide a bit of a taste for everything!

Note that this is called "Languages I Don't Speak", not "Languages I Don't Understand". I understand any number of songs that aren't English or Latin, for miscellaneous reasons - the language is so similar to ones I know that I can get it, I've seen English subtitles, or just plain context clues. But still, even if I can understand them, they have a charm that those super-familiar-language-songs just don't have.

You can send suggestions in, if you want to see one of your favorite songs displayed! Long live the music!

(Of course, if I'm gone, I won't be able to post. That should be expected.)

English, Have You Gotten More Partitive-Aware?

*Note: This post deals with a dialect. I will be referring to it as simply "English", because "the English spoken in my region of the world" is way too much of a keyboard-full. I'm not saying you'll be confused, just know that there's no way I'm speaking for all the English everywhere.

Perhaps the hardest thing for me to master in Finnish is the partitive case. Speakers of English might recognize the difference between partitive form and non-partitive in the singular form as the difference between "a dog" and "the dog". We use the singular partitive all the time! But what confused me when translating was the partitive plural. In English, "the *nouns*" is used as both definite and indefinite. I can refer to three dogs as "the dogs" even though those three don't constitute every single dog in the world. So, I was at an initial loss as to how to translate words like "sanoja" - "a select number of the words in existence"?

The textbook I was using then (it wasn't very good, but do you know how hard it is to find Finnish resources in Wisconsin?) suggested I use "some". "Some words." "Some dogs." It didn't sound right to me. I was in middle school at this time, and I had never heard anyone say "I have some dogs." Not even for the division-from-a-whole-substance use of the partitive - people said "a bottle of lotion", not "some lotion".

Now, I've been in high school for a year, and I've noticed something: I'm hearing that partitive "some" being used in casual speech more and more. At least once a day, without fail, I hear someone lean across the aisle and ask "You got some gum?" Instead of "I've got time" being used in response to "It's a long story", I'm now hearing "I've got some time".

So, among my region's youth, the partitive plural form "some" is definitely coming into wider use.

I don't have much of an opinion on whether this is a great thing or not. It's definitely not bad, but what I wonder is: Does English really need this partitive?  Certainly we can already tell that "the chairs" are not the only chairs available to mankind. (Chair shortage! AAAGH! The apocalypse is coming! Sorry....) But, perhaps moving toward a more specific language, one that uses more modifiers, is a good thing. It's really up to you.

I'm seriously dwelling on the idea of a worldwide loss of chairs now...back to Roman lecti?

Yes, Another Linguist Reblogging This...

...Because it's just too perfect not to spread it around as much as possible. I am, of course, talking about this quote from a chat. Ahem:

<%kiwibonga> Je ne donne pas un merde - I don't give a shit 
<%kiwibonga> THAT MAKES NO SENSE
<%kiwibonga> you cannot give a shit to someone
<%kiwibonga> in french
<%kiwibonga> that sounds like "I'm taking a shit in my hands and I'm keeping it for myself"


Y'know, I could make a long post about cultural context and how idioms and metaphors are a huge thing that we lose through lingual assimilation and English-domination, but my mind just doesn't feel up to it, now. So, I would recommend you read the Linguistic Mystic's take on the subject.


I will write that post later, I swear.

This, This Right Here, Is Awesomeness

When people ask me why I'm so vehemently opposed to one language ( English) being forcibly spoken all around the world, I usually try my best to explain the value of dying languages, and the need to preserve ideas and concepts that can't be expressed in English, as well as the national importance of having a country's own language. Now, I just show them this video, which is most of my argument wrapped up neatly:

Very Special Pronoun Time

In my pursuit of gender-neutrality, if there's one thing I'm doing more and more lately it's this: Thinking about pronouns. Pronouns are some of the most interesting and revealing concepts from each language. For example, if a language has a pronoun system vastly different from your own (for example, English speakers' view of Japanese), it's one of the first warning signs that makes your linguistic instinct go "WARNING! WARNING! DANGEROUS! PROCEED WITH CAUTION!" Perhaps the pronouns are only slightly different, but still odd to you (for another example, the all encompassing Hungarian "ő"). But recently, I'm examining the pronouns in my own native language (English) more and more.

I've talked about my support of the singular "they" for a while, so this isn't going to be about that. Instead, I've been thinking about a rather fascinating word: "One".

In first grade, we're not taught that this is a pronoun. We learn the chart as follows:

1st:   I   We

2nd: You  You

3rd:  He  They

        She

        It

But then, pretty soon, we hear people saying "One should always..." or "One must respect one's parents." Our minds work to accept that this is a pronoun, albeit a rare one that we weren't taught.

When I started looking at this word with the perspective I have now, I noticed a couple things:

1.People will only use it in the most impersonal of situations, when even giving the option of gender (i.e. he/she) would be too identifying of the subject.

2.You can't use it like you would any other pronoun.

To show what I mean:

"Jordan must do her duties."

"Jordan must do his duties."

"Jordan must do its duties."

"Jordan must do their duties."

"Jordan must do one's duties."

The last one doesn't sound right to us. To risk violating a very serious analytical rule, I'm going to say it doesn't work. Even though Jordan is our third-person singular subject, when "one" is introduced, the grammar rules embedded in our minds lead us to think that this "one" must be a whole new subject, separate from Jordan. Now:

"One must do one's duties."

That works, just as "He would do his duties" would. Simply looking at this sentence, one would be tempted to think (see what I did there?) that "one" behaves just like any other pronoun. But, as our dear Jordan demonstrates above, it doesn't - the use of "one" requires that it be the only pronoun used in a phrase. You cannot apply "one" to another third-person subject.

This makes me think: Should it be considered a pronoun? It doesn't act like one. In terms of third-person, a pronoun should be completely applicable to another noun. Thus, I say that "one" is not a pronoun. But at the same time, it's also not a noun. Don't believe me?

"A dog cut her paw."

"The car cut its bumper."

"One stubbed her toe."

Because of the impersonality of "one", applying a separate pronoun to it does not work at all. It's an unwritten rule that all nouns should be able to have pronouns applied to them. So, what the hell is "one"?

To be honest, I really have no idea. So I'm just going to call it a "very special word" from now on. Yup.

One last note: How and when "one" is used in place of "you", "a person/student/noun etc.", or "him or her" really fascinates me. At my first glance, there were no rules as to how it was used. But, I think I've developed a little hypothesis:

Notice how I said "one would be tempted to think"? I was explaining how someone would be affected by the sentence. And how about sentences like "one must respect one's parents" or "one should do one's duties"? These sentences don't give a shit about whoever or whatever is behind the pronoun - what they care about is what:

1.Something else does to the pronoun, or

2.The pronoun does to something else.

Now, in sentences like "A person needs to clean his/her/their hair", the sentences care about the pronoun. It's what's doing the effect as while as being effected. Most likely this is just me having a really stupid theory, but perhaps "one" is used when the pronoun need not be the complete focus of the sentence.