Ungainly Acronyms

The thing we’re trying to do, to prevent another 9/11, keeps getting rebranded.

Stylistically, the low point came with the designation “GWOT”, which stands for “Global War on Terror”.

Those who prosecute this mission, normally pronounce it “GEE-watt” (though the acronym has largely fallen out of use);  but I persist in pronouncing it as a monosyllable,  the gwot -- rhyming with blot, not, sot, rot, snot, and other words less respectable still.   “How goes the gwot?” I greet those thus engaged.

An even uglier acronym (if such be possible), likewise self-important in origin, was used, satirically, against Hitler:

Before it was over, his commanding generals  were referring to him bitterly as Gröfaz:  a name ugly enough to have served some monster of mythology, some twisted kobold or goblin  embodying and spreading evil.  In actuality, it was a contraction of the title that General Keitel bestowed upon the Führer  in June 1940:  Größter Feldherr aller Zeiten.

-- Gordon Craig, Germany 1866-1945 (1978), p. 714

As to the pronunciation of this ungainly confection:  it is best described as something between a grunt and a groan, followed by an escape of acrid gas.
(For a similar exercise in non-IPA transcription, cf. the case of "oahspe".)
[More empirically:  GRU-fahts, with "U" as in "put".]

For a nice rhyming poem about this unusual creature, click here:
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2013/08/gare-le-grofaz.html

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Für psychologisch tiefgreifende Krimis,

in pikanter amerikanischer Mundart,

und christlich gesinnt,

klicken Sie bitte hier:

http://www.linguasacrapublishing.com/justice.html

*

The US military-diplomatic world  abounds in acronyms pronounced phonetically as words.   Another ungainly one, designating (so to speak) the “Gröfaz” of the United States, is POTUS;  he rules over CONUS.   -- In the opening episode of “West Wing”, a young fellow gets an emergency call on his cell, explaining to his girlfriend that it is from “Potus”.  She said the fellow should learn not to call at ungodly hours, and moreover “Potus” is a strange name.  “It means ‘President Of The United States’”, he explains.

Note:  The pronunciations of such things is normally alphabetic-phonetic, rather than etymological.  Thus CONUS (meaning, ‘the Lower 48’) is pronounced CONE-uss, with long “o”, even though it is from  CONtinental United States, with short.

~

Und nun:  HoGeSa.

Further, re Cambodia in May 1970:

Formation d'un gouvernement en exil, le GRUNK (gouvernement  royal d'union nationale du Kampuchéa).

-- Mémoires du XXe Siècle , vol. 8, 1970-1979 (Bordas, 1989), p. 56

.

Categories and Sameness (with linguistic appendix)

The free product is a sum in the category of groups;

and the direct sum is a sum in the category of R-modules.

-- old folk saying

We earlier had some fun with (in effect) the notion of hierarchical and cross-cutting patterns of Natural Kinds, in the essay Categories for the Working Mom.  And now that the laundry is fresh and folded and tucked away, we can all relax with a cup of your favorite beverage, and take another look.

“Feynman,” said Wheeler, “I know why all electrons have the same charge and the same mass.”

“Why?” asked Feynman.

“Because," said Wheeler, “they are all the same electron!”

-- Martin Gardner, The New Ambidextrous Universe (1964; third revised edn. 1990), p. 305

Less Zen:

Particles transforming in the same representation of the Poincaré group  and having the same additional quantum numbers  are said to be identical particles.

--  Matthew Schwartz, Quantum Field Theory and the Standard Model (2014), p. 207

~

Linguistic philosophy is familiar with the caveat that to say two things are “the same” must be interpreted under some description.  (The technical name for this:  sortal identity.)

Thus, it is commonly said that the Chevy Whatsis and the Toyota Whomever are the “same” car, because they are built on the same chassis and are mechanically identical, just differently branded.  Now imagine an automotive expert given a pile of paired photographs, each depicting one vehicle; for each pair he must give thumbs up or thumbs down as to whether the vehicles are the “same” in this sense.  He will give thumbs-up to a Whatsis/Whomever pair, though now his assessment is in two steps:  First identifying the particular vehicles depicted as a specific representative  each of a specific brand;  and next, assessing those two models as being “the same” under the applicable metric.

More narrowly -- this, say, for a car-dealer rather than a mechanic -- two vehicles are “the same” only if they are in the same SKU -- a Ford Taurus now being categorized separately from the Mercury Sable, though they are the same for most practical purposes.

More narrowly still, two examples of a Ford Taurus might be accounted equivalent  iff -- we are back in the auto-repair shop -- they are both in the same set of models, these being drawn up according to which parts they require.  The sets will be relative to the part in question:  this group uses drive-train X1, this other requires X2; cross-cutting these, another group uses such&such style of alternator, another another…

Even more narrowly:  the police want to know whether this vehicle sitting here in Arthur J. Mungo’s garage  is the same as the one used as the getaway car in last night’s robbery. 

More narrowly still:  I buy a certain car from you, new, for $20,000.  Five years and many fender-benders later, I demand you buy it back for the same price -- after all, it’s the “same car”.  And indeed, in the sense immediately above, it is, and will still serve to convict you if the robbery happened five years ago rather than last night.  But as seen by the eyeshades of an insurance company, it is not the same at all.

We could keep going, until  ultimately  the only pair of photos that will pass the green-eyeshade test  is ... two identical photos.

I have my mother's eyes ... He has his father's nose

Epigrammatic reflections of the paradoxes of ‘sameness’:

The successive unstable cabinets of the 3^me République, were mostly a reshuffling of the usual suspects.  Thus,

There was some truth in the quip of Clemenceau, when he was criticized by a deputy for having overthrown so many governments.  “I have overthrown only one,” he replied.  “They are all the same.”

-- Wm Shirer, The Collapse of the Third Republic (1969), p. 101

A similar use of same in the sense ‘same-old’, mocking Anglo-American journalists who take the Russia tour and become pundits:

After a year  they went home … sat down at their typewriters, and hastily wrote the same book.  I have been reading that book all spring, under several different titles.

-- Malcolm Cowley, The Flower and the Leaf (misc., collected 1985)

(Here, the determiner "that" actually becomes witty, in context.)

 

These recall Wheeler’s quip about the electron, although there the meaning was more subterranean, having to do with fermion statistics;  cf. clonal colonies of trees:  One aspen, or many?

[Update -- a note to our readers.
It has come to our attention  that a number of you have reached this oft-viewed post   under perhaps a misapprehension:  not out of ontological or taxonomic curiosity, but  by searching for a jpeg of "Homer strangling Bart".   This delicious image  we do indeed offer below;  but it is by no means the meat of the essay.  For those of you whose interest runs to cartoons rather than ontology, you may consult our meagre offerings here:
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/search/label/cartoons ]

~ Sigmund Freud  und  Sherlock Holmes: ~

~ ~ Seelen-vertausch! ~ ~

~     ~     ~

In our discussion of “analogy” and “sameness” in the essay Consilience in Mathematics, we saw that this informal term gets formalized in various ways -- isomorphism, homeomorphism, diffeomorphism, bijection … -- that, despite the variegated terminology, are really just one central idea, namely:  detailed pairings (“maps”) between objects, which preserve structure of some sort.  Which sort, depends on the mathematical category you are working in.

*

Commercial Break

A private detective  confronts the uncanny;

an ecclesiastical mystery:

Murphy Calls In a Specialist

[Kindle] [Nook]

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Mathematical structures being immutable and eternal, there is no problem about cross-identifying them across time.  But in the peopled world, things change all the time -- or rather, as we now are careful to notice:  change under certain descriptions, and not under others.

The following is an excerpt from an essay, “Continuity of Identity”, which I hope to post someday.

Here’s a really practical case, of current political relevance.

In the year 19xx, a group of local politicians, and a state or municipal employees union, agreed to keep current wages at a specified modest level, against the promise of lavish pensions in the future:  the latter to be paid by “the taxpayers”.

Now, many of these deals were hatched behind closed doors.  Still, there was little pressure to expose them, for “the taxpayers” ca. 19xx  did indeed benefit from this arrangement:   Their taxes were lower than they would otherwise have been, had the services of police and fire and teachers and what have you had to be bid for on the basis of straight salary and current benefits;  these services were acquired relatively cheaply, the full bill being deferred.

And now, circa half a century later, “the taxpayers” are being asked to pay that bill.  Only… they are not the same people who benefited from the arrangement half a century or so ago-- in many cases, before they were born.  Not the same… as individuals;  but as a corporate body, yes, these are indeed “the taxpayers”.  So: legally, morally:  Can a politician and a union seal an agreement that binds, not themselves, but some third parties in the future, who at the time of the agreement were not even born?

Before you answer too hastily with a resounding outraged No, consider that our entire society is webbed with agreements exactly like that, and would likely fall apart without them.  Every time our nation signs a treaty, or issues a bond, or even launches a project like building highways and bridges (which future citizens will need to keep in repair, or much of the money will have been wasted), we are doing this.

~     ~     ~

An incident earlier this evening reminded me of an old conundrum:  the seemingly uncontroversial matter of what constitutes the same tune.

I happened to overhear on the radio, a snatch of a tune of which I’m very fond, of which I did not know the name.  It is melodic, and simple  apart from some rhythmic oddities.  Emotionally, its effect on me is like that of the brief beautiful interlude in waltz time, in Corelli’s Christmas Concerto.

As the piece segued into the next movement, I realized it had to be Copland, probably quoting someone else -- as he quoted “Simple Gifts” in Appalachian Spring.  Fortunately the announcer eventually came on and said the overall suite of which that piece was a part  was Rodéo. 

Looking at the program for this, I was puzzled.  “Corral Nocturne”?  Surely, for the dreaminess.  But no, it turned out to be -- “Saturday Night Waltz”.

Now, I would never have thought of searching for the piece under that name, since, firstly, it didn’t at all seem to be what some farmer-cowboy couples would be up to on a Saturday night, and futhermore -- okay, this is embarrassing -- I did not realize it was a waltz.  There’s an insinuating syncopation;  certainly if I ever tried to actually waltz to it, I would fall on my punkin haid…

Seeking to learn the mystery of this exotic composition, I got together a safari team -- seasoned explorers and native bearers -- and made my way through malarial jungle and crocodile-infested swamps  over the space of many months, finally scaling an icy peak and putting the question to the loincloth-clad hermit who sits at its summit and --  Well, that’s how it would have been in the old days;  to save time, I simply looked it up in Wikipedia.

And learned, to my astonishment, that the quotation in question is from … “I Ride an Old Paint”.   Astonishing because I absolutely grew up on that song, as sung by Burl Ives.  Our family only owned a half-dozen vocal recordings, so I listened to them over and over; and of these,  “I Ri-ide… an old Paint;  I le-ead…. an old Dan” was one of an even smaller handful at the top.  Never did learn what the lyrics meant, but I heard it and sang it   over and over.  And, being told -- like a puppy by the scruff of the neck -- that the tune right in front of me, in Copland’s ballet, is that; well, yes, I can hear the resemblance.

How could I not have heard the sameness in the first place -- the sameness beneath all the strangeness?  The simplest hypothesis is:  Musical retardation.  To which I partly plead guilty, only -- there are other, even grosser cases of mental compartimentation, which require a different explanation (nobody’s that retarded).

Thus, from childhood:  Consider “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” and the Alphabet Song.  The tunes are identical, note for note;  failure to perceive similarity might be chalked up to incapacity, but failure to note identity (which was my failure until recent times) -- refusal to assent to "A = A" … something else is going on.

A hint at what this is, is provided by cases in which we children were not mere consumers, but producers of isomelodic products.

Thus:  “Nyaah, nyahh, nya-nyaah nyaah.”

And, on the same ‘tune’, any number of smug worthless despicable taunts:  “TIM-my’s Got a GIRRRL-friend…!!!” or what have you.

[This just in -- probably from the Vatican:  

Homer Simpson, delivering a stern lecture to his wayward boy

The taunts here cited, are sufficient proof that the Fall of Man spares no-one, not even little children, fancied by sentimentalists  to be innocent.   From a secular perspective, such productions suffice to justify strangling the little bastards in the cradle.  That such action is not in fact justified, is a miracle, unexplained by any reasoning within the purely secular realm.  The overriding fact is, that God loves us -- Lord only knows why…]

Clearly, the melodic medium and its message form a gestalt.  To the child, and to some extent later, it would be as artificial to peel off the tune, as to say that two quite distinct people are actually identical (as regards having two eyes, a nose, etc. etc.), their secondary differentia being whatever is left over.

The nec plus ultra of such a perspective  is spoken sentences:  for these each have an intonation which is partly conventional, like a tune:  differing between French and English, or between British and American English.  Hearing a sentence, we do not  on any level  equate it  with all the (thousands of) other sentences we have heard  similarly intoned.

~     ~     ~

To avoid the distraction of same in the sense ‘self-identical’, let us continue the discussion using the term equivalent.  The latter is actually more mathematical, in that there it has a special sense, that of equivalence classes.  (Check Wiki and read all about ‘em.)

So:  Items will be equivalent or not, depending on whether they are viewed sub specie this category or that.  As, in biology:  When working with multiple species, two individuals are equivalent if conspecific.  When working within a species, two individuals might be identified  if, beyond being conspecific, they are of the same sex, and -- for species which show distinctions such as larva vs. adult, sessile vs. vagile, pupa/chrysalis/imago -- in the same stage of life.

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~ Commercial break ~

http://www.linguasacrapublishing.com/justice.html

We now return you to your regularly scheduled essay.

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In mathematics, two objects can be topologically equivalent -- homeomorphic; smoothly equivalent -- diffeomorphic; algebraically equivalent -- isomorphic;  metrically equivalent -- isometric; numerically equivalent -- equinumerous; and so forth.  An example of such usage, in a Hilbert space context:

…the latter direct sum itself is isomorphic (unitarily equivalent) to H …

…It is unitarily equivalent (I might as well say that it is the same as) the bilateral shift.

-- Paul Halmos, “A Glimpse into Hilbert Space”, in: T. L. Saaty, ed.  Lectures on Modern Mathematics, vol. I (1963), pp. 7, 12

[Remarkably, Wikipedia seems not to devote an article to this subject, the closest being this rather abstract one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equivalence_of_categories

So I’ll say a little more.]

Further, we speak of two norms on a space as being equivalent if they generate the same topology on that space.  Two group-representations are equivalent if they are interrelatable via conjugation by a nonsingular matrix.  Two signed measures are equivalent if each is absolutely-continuous with respect to the other.  Two vector bundles are equivalent if they are related by a homeomorphism that preserves fibres. Two normal series of a group are equivalent if there’s a bijection between the factor groups with these being isomorphic.

There are even finer distinctions:  Two set-theoretic structures are “equivalent if just the same sentences are true in each, and elementarily equivalent if just the same first-order sentences are true in each.  Isomorphic structures are evidently equivalent, and hence  in particular  elementarily equivalent.” -- Michael Potter, Set Theory and its Philosophy (2004)

As it begins to appear, these different labels are not simply definitional and contentless;  sometimes you arrive at them only after doing some work.  E.g. one reads:

A fundamental fact of differential topology is that the notion of isomorphism in the categories Top[ology], P[iecewise]L[inear] and Diff[erential], is the same in dimensions three and below.  In dimention four, PL and Diff agree, but Top differs.  In dimensions above six, they all differ.

In particular, things go hog-wild in dimension seven.  We thought we knew what roundness was, it turns out we did not.

~ ~ ~

[Update 3 Dec 2011]

This phenomenon of tunes known  but hiding their identities beneath disparate lyrics and thus subjectively unconnected,   deserves a name:  we shall dub it cryptomelodia. 

(©2011 Dr J Worldwide Enterprises Inc.)

[Pronounce this krip-to-meh-LO-dee-a.  The word is modeled upon that other stupendous vocable, cryptomnesia ‘hidden memory’, from crypto- ‘hidden’ and -mnesia ‘memory’, as in amnesia (i.e. a-mnesia ‘no memory’).  Those roots are all Greek;  and I wanted to neologize on a proper Greco-Greek model, rather than conjure up some vulgar Greco-Latin hybrid-hippogriff such as Donald Trump would no doubt coin.  But the Latin-looking aspect of “melody” gave me pause. 

So we consulted with Dr Massey, the official philologer for this site, and he reassured us:

Melodia is of Greek origin.  μελῳδία : from melos, musical phrase, and aoide, song. Cryptomelodia is a great rendering.

This is excellent news.  Dr Massey and I shall split the royalties from this outstanding new word, and retire in opulence.]

A startling example of cryptomelodia occurred at work yesterday.   I work at a pretty patriotic place;  the political spectrum among the employees is much broader than you might imagine, ranging even remarkably far to the left, especially on antiwar issues.   Still, I was startled that morning to suddenly hear the song -- or I should say, the tune -- of “Solidarity Forever” blaring from a computer in the neighboring pod.  I leapt from my seat to see what was going on.  Had the Occupy movement spread to us -- Occupy the Fort ?   -- No, my companions scoffed, that’s the Georgia fight song.  (The woman whose computer harbors this tune on boot-up is from Georgia.)

That only raised another issue:  Why would Georgia -- a pretty conservative neck of the woods -- choose “Solidarity Forever” for their fight song ?  -- Actually, they replied, it’s the fight song of lots of schools.  And then it dawned on me:  The words being different, and the setting (a football stadium) utterly so, probably very few of the fans make the connection -- if indeed they have even heard of the old Wobbly anthem.  (And if they had, they might deem it ironic that the hymn of One Big Union should be hijacked  by gridiron jingoism.)  The tunes inhabit different compartments of the mind.

There was some argument over whether which song actually came first -- some voted for a football origin, which I thought absurd.   So upon reaching home, I burnt some incense before the altar of the All-Knowing -- and Wikipedia promptly informed me that the tune goes back  not only way before football, but way before the IWW:   that I have myself been the victim of a multiple cryptomelodia in this regard.  For, “Solidarity Forever” is simply a re-lyriced “Battle Hymn of the Republic”, which in turn lyrically recycles “John Brown’s Body”.  I am of course quite familiar with both these songs, having sung the first one  in particular  many times in elementary school.  But I never made the connection among these three.

 

(And upon further reflection … the transposition  to the football field  of the tune that’s held in common by all these anthems, is appropriate after all:  since all of them are  in some sense  fight songs.)

As for the tune itself -- its origins are lost in time;  Wiki traces it to “the folk hymn tradition of the American camp meeting movement of the 19^th century”;  before that, all is mist.

Yet hark -- what lyre upon th' aeolian there wafts ?  Nay, ‘tis Aeneas’ bark, plunging westwards from the flames of Troy !  And what air sets the oarsmen bend their strength as one?  Why -- ‘tis … ‘tis that very tune !

~     ~     ~

[Further examples of the notion ‘same’, this time in linguistics.]

If we project backwards to the Pre-Latin form of a third-conjugation infinitive such as dûcere, we note, for Pre-Latin *doukesi,  formal identity with the locative case of a genuine Indo-European s-stem noun.

-- Robert Jeffers & Ilse Lehiste, Principles and Methods for Historical Linguistics (1979), p. 67

Here meaning:  phonetically identical, though with an ultimately different grammatical role.

Another extraordinarily cavalier positing of equivalence:

Chinese and English, for example, may have the same case system as Latin, but the phonetic realization is different.

-- Noam Chomsky, New Horizons in the Study of Language of Mind (2000), p.

(This recalls an anecdote from Charles Fillmore, author of the classic article “The Case for Case”, from back before the idea of abstract/semantic case was as familiar as the traditional notion that hewed to overt morphology.  He began presenting a paper on “Case in Chinese”, using this expanded or deepened sense of the term;  and his elder examiners, leaning forward in alarmed concern, said: “Aren’t you aware, that Chinese doesn’t have case?!?”)

~

… ‘free variation’:  If two forms are equivalent (that is, freely substitutable for each other), their alternating segments may nevertheless be phonemically distinct.

-- D. Hymes & J. Fought, American Structuralism (1975), p. 214

(Compare that elegant phrase, which slips so smoothly from the pen of Quine:  “substitutable salvâ veritate”.   I have here further spiffed up the expression, by giving the â its neat little ablative hat.)

[Update 12 June 2015]
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2015/06/the-latest-in-math-porn.html

Orthoëpy of the Day: “regulatory”

The adjective regulatory is a ho-hum word, which we Americans pronounce REG-yu-la-tor-ee, with the stress-pattern of the underlying verb, REG-yu-late.

But in England, it is often pronounced reg-yu-LAY-tor-ee, with stress on the third syllable, and a long vowel.   This strikes an American oddly, the first time you hear it, until you consider that it simply matches the pattern of the related noun, which both sides of the Atlantic pronounce as reg-yu-LAY-shun.

Well, you say tomahto, I say tomayto, right?   Not quite.

For such interplay of stress-patterns, which in English is characteristic only of Latinate loanwords, comes with its own internal logic.  Thus consider: 

    => How do you pronounce classificatory ? <=

An Englishman has no trouble with this:  klass-i-fi-KAY-tor-ee.   Whereas an American would have to resort to KLASS-i-fik-a-tor-ee, with no fewer than five unstressed syllables trailing limply along after the nucleus.   It sounds like a coffee-mug  falling downstairs.

In the case of classificatory,  British English exhibits a crisp double-dactyl;  American, a stress followed by a quinquisyllablic mumble.   But in the case of involuntarily, the roles are reversed:  American has six distinct syllables, either as a double-dactyl or a triple iamb ( in-vol-un-TAR-i-lee,  in-vol-un-TAR-i-lee, whereas British (as I just now heard the word pronounced by a master reader, Mr. Frederik Davidson), can have just four rather mooshed one:  in-VOL-un-tr’ly.

Cf. further, re “conflation of repeated sequences (haplology)”:

To judge from British habits of articulating words like temporary, veterinary,  there exist both hesitation and slurring  in attempts to pronounce both [r-initial] syllables;  then, in order to avoid this, speakers settle for /tεmpǝri, vεtɪnrɪ /,

-- M. L. Samuels, Linguistic Evolution, with special reference to English (1972), p. 17

Many Americans (self included) slur these otherwise, dropping not an r, but the schwa:  TEMP-rar-y, VET-rin-ar-y.

An example in which the (or a) British pronunciation is more boneless than the American:  qualitatively.   Americans have a secondary accent on the third syllable, so that the whole is almost a triple troche.   In the pronunciation used by professional reader Ralph Cosham, reading CSL's Letters to Malcolm, it began like the American version  with chief stress on the first syllable, but then petered out into a succession of unaccented schwas, like air going out of a tire.

For further pronunciation fun, click here:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/search/label/pronunciation

~

A word about stress and vowel-tensing.

I have long fretted over the lack of convenient pronunciation for the very useful word classificatory.  There exists, to be sure, a rough synonym, easily pronounceable by a babe in arms:  taxonomic;  but this word, in the context of Chomskyan linguistics, is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of barf. 

Having heard somewhere (Prof. Ch. Fillmore, probably) that the Brits pronounce this word with penultimate stress, I somehow fell into pronouncing it in my mind as klass-i-fi-KAT-or-ee, with a short stressed vowel.  An error, with no basis in pattern.

Now things begin to get interesting.

The other night, I dreamt that a certain young man’s job prospects were

            “cheb-i-CHEE-vi-an”

The pronunciation, with a tensed stressed vowel, is the predictable result of adding the suffix -ian to the name Chebichev (CHEB-i-chev).   The idea, within the dream, was that his job prospects (respresentative of those of millennials generally) were uncertain, like the shapes in a famous painting by an artist of that name.  

Even at the time, that struck me as an unusual word.  Upon waking, I seized upon the dream as a counter-example to Freud’s assertion that the words we hear in dreams, we have heard before, or are a blend of several such.  Whereas here, the word is apparently not blended with anything, but rather has been subjected to a phonological rule, with rare results.

The painting in question -- a favorite of my brother’s when he was in high school, a reproduction of which hung on his wall after a family visit to MOMA, where the original is displayed -- is called “Hide and Seek”.  Only, the artist’s name is Chelichev (Tchelitchew), with an l instead of a b.  Chebichev was a mathematician,  with whose work I am only vaguely familiar.

FWIW.

~

Here we are not really concerned with the pronunciation of this or that specific word, nor with the amusing habits of our cousins across the pond (a description that can be used no matter which side of the pond  you yourself happen to hail from), but rather with the phonological economy of a language -- cf. Martinet’s classic L’Economie des changement phonétiques.   That is to say, our perspective is (in happy parallel to the modern tendency of differential geometry) no longer local, but global:  considering a linguistic-units fate  only in tandem with that of its fellows.  The textbook example being the Great Vowel Shift, in which the articulatory trapezoid, the Germanic vowel-whale, rolled slowly over in its sleep.

In the case of an American baffled by classificatory, or an Englishman tripped-up by involuntarily, we see the paradoxical  situation of a speaker left in the lurch by his own language.   Part of the explanation for the possibility of this, is that, to an extent, it is not our own language, not entirely:  a large unruly immigrant population of Graeco-Latin Fremdgut, along with borrowings of a greater or lesser residual flavor of Frenchness, have come to disturb the simply Saxon pattern:  mostly forestress, and transparent structural reasons when not;  vowel-alternations  minor.   There is no native analogue of the insanely contra-semantic and even contramorphological wordstress in psychology, where the least-important, merely-transitional syllable gets the stress (versus the natural psychic, or the less-than-ideal but still defensible psychological).    Even a simple French disyllable like garage  gets us all in a worrit:  Americans pronounce it to rhyme with massage or mirage, Englishmen to rhyme with carriage.   And when it  comes to a word like internecine -- all bets are off.

The fault by no means lies in any pointless, Basque-like complexity of the lending languages:  in Latin and in French, the stress-patterns are as easy as can be.  Yet somehow English managed to ingest these borrowings sideways, or wrong-way-round:  like that classic jest of third-grade playgrounds -- pull a pinch of skin out from either side of your neck; “What’s this?”; (kid says) “I dunno”; (you say) “A moron swallowing a pencil.”

French, by contrast, virtually never suffers so dramatic an orthoëpic quandary;   but then, it pays a larger metrical price, quite lacking the resources to construct something as stunning as “Sir Patrick Spens” or “Pied Beauty”.   To anyone whose blood still thrills  to the rhythms of our helmed and byrnied ancestors, such milksop codswallop  as the alexandrin  is near-beer at best.

~

A couple of further concrete examples.

Just now I happened upon a sentence in M.L. Samuels’ Linguistic Evolution (1972), that read:  “A comparison of three Dravidian languages has shown that simplificatory changes of phonology and grammar take place …”  (p. 108).

Now, the author teaches in Glasgow.  Were he American, or solicitous of American readers, he would have written simplifying or even simplificational -- the latter, though exactly as much a mouthful as simplificatory, is at least instantly clear in pronunciation.

[Update 11 May 2014]  Another example from Mr. Davidson (a.k.a. David Case), again from Bleak House:  "with his confirmatory cough", stressed còn-fir-MAY-tor-ee.

~

It has long been pointed out, that an extremely arcane writing-system like that of Chinese or Japanese, as opposed to a maximally transparent one like that of Spanish, reserves literacy for a kind of scribal priest-caste, and those beholden to it.  Certainly, the English spelling-system, which is rather a mess (though much closer to the Spanish end of the spectrum, than the Mandarin), presents burdens to whose would observe the niceties of orthography (less so to any who are content simply to read):  but all that is not pertinent to the problem noticed here.   Our bafflement at how to pronounce certain words, has little to do with the writing-system, nor with any mandarin impositions of any sort.  The fact is, words like confirmatory and classificatory lie already implicit in the language, for anyone who uses the words confirm/confirmation and classify/classification.   The the problem, how to pronounce these less-familiar derivata, is identical, whether you are analphabetic or an English professor.

(It does have a little something to do with the writing-system, however.  In Latin, (Classical) Arabic, and Spanish, you can tell from the spelling  which syllable is stressed: in the former cases, owing to certain simple syllabic rules;  in the last-named case, likewise save for certain exceptions, which however are called-out to the reader by an acute accent over the stressed vowel.)

Thus, only the other day, I put up a post (“Dylan Mystery Album”) which used one of my favorite words [Alert to logophiliacs:]  resipiscence.   Which I have come across in reading, and savored, yet have never heard pronounced.   And so, before publically using it (albeit not orally), I looked up the received pronunciation (fortunately, it turns out, there is only one), and was startled to learn that it differed from what I had always silently said to myself in my mind’s ear:   the approved pronunciation has main stress on the third syllable.

[Update July 2016]  Reading aloud one evening, my wife pronounced indefatigable as in-de-fa-TEEG-a-ble -- quite on the measure of British class-i-fi-CATE-or-ee.   I personally say in-de-FAT-ig-a-ble;  but that is morphosemantically opaque, whereas her version nicely brings out the notional relation to fatigue (with its French-derived oxytone).  Might this be another case where the Brits displace the accent?  But no, according to the dictionaries, no;  she came up with it on her own hook.

Word of the Day: “manure”

(And if you are already inclined to titter, that proves my point.)

Frequently to be met with, in these troublous times, is this quote from Thomas Jefferson (1787 -- thus, somewhat before the French revolution -- they took him at his word):

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.

We shall not comment on the current use of this phrase to justify some rather ill-advised assassinations, for our point here  is purely linguistic.

What you will seldom meet, is the co-text.  The very next sentence reads:

It is its natural manure.

In this case, the quoters may be fully excused for omitting that continuation.

Jefferson was writing for a highly educated and restricted 18^th-century audience (indeed, the quotation in question  stems from a private letter).    He was not addressing the latter-day louts and yahoos  raised on “Animal House” and cable TV, for whom ‘manure’ means neither more nor less than excrement (and more likely to be flung, than planted).

An honorable man of metaphor;  no scatologist, he 

What, then,  is the linguistic landscape  here?  Any well-read person of our own day, knows that the word manure  is often used specifically for said substance as used for botanical fertilizer.  Jefferson was obviously alluding to this latter use.  But was he thereby averting his gaze (and trusting that his readers would likewise avert theirs) from a concrete central meaning -- the way, if we metaphorically refer to a statesman as an “eagle”, say, we wish purely to point to a kind of soaring nobility, and nowise to suggest that the fellow moults or eats mice?   To imagine that, is to get the semantic evolution  exactly backwards.

It is not the case that Jefferson was here bracketing an original defectatory sense  for the benefit of a metaphorical extension, the way (in the hippie era) “get your shit together” came to mean “get your act together (get your ducks in a row)” with no real excretory reference.   Rather, the excremental sense of the word manure is itself purely secondary -- indeed tertiary.   In origin, the word has nothing to do with that, indeed not even immediately to do with fertilizer of any variety. (Compare, mutatis mutandis, German Jauche.)  The word is cognate with our word manouevre (borrowed from French; a term in no wise redolent of the outhouse), and in terms of its Latin etymology  means  ‘handiwork’ (cf. manual, operate).

~

So, semantically, what has come to pass?

In the blandest, most schematic sense, we have here a case of specialization, followed by a familiar variety of metonymy (concrete for abstract [**]);  but that is of little interest.   What we wish to emphasize is that the evolution here is not a case of either euphemism or dysphemism, as you might imagine if you were under the misimpression that the cloacal sense was original.    Any taboo designatum will, predictably, launch a euphemistic replacement-term -- indeed, an ever-obsolescing, self-abolishing series of same, since the stain of the referent is not thereby abolished.   Thus, words denoting ‘excrement’, ‘genitals’, ‘prostitute’ and (interestingly) ‘stupid’, form a never-ending series of neologisms  attempting to escape from what they mean.   Here, rather, we are confronted with a situation almost exactly opposite.  Rather than a word denoting something taboo, we have a completely innocent and uncontroversial expression (here, denoting a manual process of any kind, and later the fructification of agriculture), which, by historical accident, eventually became associated in particular  with a proscribed referent.    After the reference of the word manure became, in some contexts, identifiable merely with (horresco referens) poo-poo,  the word became unusable in contexts like Jefferson’s.   In much the same manner, the blameless designation of the male of the genus Gallus, namely the cock (saving your presence): so soon as this became a metaphor for the membrum virilis, it ceased to be salonfähig (at least in sensitive America) and was replaced by the improbable deverbal term   rooster. 

     Note that, in this last case, the sense of taboo was related purely to the word itself in its new application, rather than to anything specially concerning the he-hen (that proverbial rooftop alarm-clock), who is not  inherently  particularly phallic.   Other zoological comparisons suggest themselves at least as prominently:  the rhino comes prominently (upstandingly) to mind, a fact not lost upon the aphrodisiac-seeking Asians who are largely responsible for the slaughter of rhinos and elephants.

To see what’s going on,  consider the Engish word face.  It was borrowed from the French word of the same spelling, and continues to serve us unobtrusively in that capacity down to the present day.   And yet, as a term of human anatomy, it has quite dropped out of modern French, yielding to the neologism visage.  What is going on?   Is there something obscene about the human face?

Not at all.  What happened is, in French and not in English, the word face fell into bad company, specifically in the metaphor (much savored by the misnamed Enlightenment) la face du grand turc -- meaning, the buttocks.  That was enough to doom the innocent original.

In essence, this whole process isn’t even especially semantic, and tells you less about the linguistically skittish society that gave rise to it, than do such truly meaning-based evolutions  such as the words (in Europe and in America) for someone who is dumb as dirt.  Look up the etymology of cretin (from Christian-- and no, this was not a Dawkinsian-Hitchensian slur against the smarts of evangelicals, it was meant as a gentle euphemism), and the whole train of words whose origin was euphemistic (imbecile, idiot, moron, …) which yet can no longer even be used in polite society, in their original objective sense (though they survive as loose insults for bosses and bad drivers).   The process that affected French face or English manure  rather involves, neither euphemism nor dysphemism at its core, but something which we might dub infection:   a perfectly innocent word with an innocent meaning, by happenstance acquires a new association (perhaps in a single day, as when some wag coined the phrase about the big Turk’s bottom, which went viral), which dooms it.  In an extreme case, the infection may contain no semantic component whatsoever, but be strictly accidental and phonetic.   Thus, an old word for ‘stingy’, niggardly, which has no ethnic reference whatsoever, in contemporary jittery America has become taboo’d, owing to its merely phonetic resemblance to an unrelated word which I dare not even name.  (Lexical change in taboo-ridden tribal societies provide thousands of examples of such things.)   Or, to take an example  entirely removed from any semantic taint at any point:   reflexes of the Latin hodie ‘today’, which survives in Spanish hoy and Italian oggi, in phonetically slipshod French became so debased that it had to be replaced by a circumlocution, in which the original etymon survives almost imperceptibly:  (au jour d’)aujourd’hui.   Or again, the reflexes of Latin apis ‘bee’ became so worn-down and homophonous in the daughter languages, that the originally diminutive apiculus  had to plug the gap:   Spanish abeja, French abeille.

[** Footnote:  Example of concretum pro abstracto:  Originally, both bureau and toilette referred (in French) to a piece of cloth.  Their separate, contingent evolutions  then led to abstract senses, ‘bureaucratic organization’ and ‘mode of dressing for the day’, respectively.]

~

For a languages-in-contact look at twee euphemisms for “Number 1” in French and German (aller au pipi-room; die Pipi-Pause), try this:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2013/01/word-of-day-pipolade-bis.html

Stress and Intention

The logician and analytic philosopher Michael Dummet  is a dense writer:  never wilfully obscure, but the ideas have heft, and are tight-packed,  the arguments of the sort for which “Follow me closely here, Watson” applies.

I read any of his essays  sentence by sentence,  possibly moving my lips, and pausing for breath after each;  and frequently pen-in little accent-marks, or separation-signs whose value is taken as slightly weaker than that of commas, to make antecedently clear, upon re-reading, whích clump of words belong together, and which individual words are to be taken in other than the unmarked sense.   (As, just there, whích, corresponding to Spanish qué versus que.  --  The grouping-mark, in manuscript, is a small downtick between minor constituents;  in these essays, I often place two spaces between such members  rather than one, for the convenience of readers.)   For in writing such as his, where the thoughts are not already familiar to the reader, it is easy to start down an interpretive “garden path”, whenever some connective might be taken in more than one way  and we ill-fatedly take it (without taking thought) in a given way (generally, the commoner use of the word), and  so doing  provoke a “premature collapse of the semantic wave-packet” (thus foreclosing the continued interplay of mutually influencing ambiguities), and are obliged to begin again at the beginning.

Consider then this, from his closely-reasoned essay “Is Logic Empirical?” (a reply to Putnam’s celebrated paper of the same title)

            … the assumption is that …

The usual reading of the assumption is that X would be the same as for one assumes that X, or X is assumed.   In this case, the “is that” is quite unessential, and the phrase could be rephrased with neither copula nor relative pronoun: Our assumption:  X, where the colon has ostensive force.

That, however, was not the intended use in the sentence in question, which we now quote unabridged:

Putnam remarks  of this assumption  that it is the usual operationalist idealisation.  That is perfectly true:  but the specifically operationalist part of the assumption is that to the effect that, for every property, there exists  a test  for its possession.

Or, rewritten with diacritics:

Putnam remarks  of this assumption  that it is the usual operationalist idealisation.  That is perfectly true:  but the specifically operationalist part of the assumption   is thát   to the effect that, for every property, there exists  a test  for its possession.

In this sentence, indeed, there are three occurences of the orthographic word that, each of which is prosodically and grammatically distinct, and which indeed would each be translated differently  into French, much as with our Spanish example above.  

(1) The first that in the second sentence is an anaphoric back-glance at the content of the proposition stated in the previous sentence.   Its rhetorical import, and consequent phonetic treatment, can differ subtly in strength.  It its weaker use, it does not focus at all on the details of the proposition anaphorized, serving rather as a sort of blandly dismissive wave of the hand, and accordingly would be completely unstressed, and indeed could even be omitted completely:   the first clause could be rephrased

            All very true, but…

The French equivalent is likewise phonetically reduced (c’), and even omissible:

            C’est bien vrai, mais … / Bien vrai, mais …

In a slightly strengthened form, the phrase would instead take seriously  the proposition being anaphorized,  conceding the point but only in so far, implicitly contrasting it with congeneric propositions with someone might likewise put forward but which the present author might reject; the particle could here be stressed:

            Thát (much) is (indeed) true;  but …

And here the French would use the full form of the particle:

            Cela est vrai ;  mais …

or even (now mimicking the fuller rephrasing  of the English  which we denoted using parentheses:

            Ce propos-là est bien vrai;  mais, …

or (in a context in which propos or proposition would be understood)

            Celui- là / Celle- là …

(2) The thát which I have graphically stressed  could be replaced by the one;  the French here would have celui qui.

(3) The remaining occurrence of that , in to the effect that, presents subtleties of its own.  In this idiom, that makes no independent contribution, and would accordingly be destressed, in uses like “… to the effect that a person….”, where the French could (antevocalically) reduce que to a mere clitic  qu’ :    “ … dans le sense qu’une personne…”.  

Here, however, the vicissitudes of syntax, leaving that at the end of a breath-group, insures that it should not be so fully destressed;  nor could French elide (phonetically or orthographically) elide the schwa in que :

            … to the effect that, in every case, …

            … avec le résultat que [*qu’], en chaque instance …

French here makes a triple orthographic distinction  where  English makes none,  not because “ce qui n’est pas logique  n’est pas français”, but owing to the heavy effect that stress-within-the-sentence has had  in the evolution of (usually curtailed) French words  from their Latin originals.   English has a few such instances phonetically, less likely to be reflected orthographically:  as, stressed that, with the vowel of cat, versus destressed, with but a schwa.   Or, consider the very different uses of the complex word always spelled some.   I once participated in an ongoing “Formal Grammar Group” at the University of Alberta, where we discussed things like quantification and mass terms, where we invented graphies some versus s’m to make a stab at making visual distinctions.

One English case in which differential phonetic erosion  did produce a triplet of distinct spellings is that of one > an > a.   Here orthography has still not quite caught up with the phonetic evolution:  depending upon the speaker’s intentions, a may be pronounced  either with a schwa, or with the vowel in day.  -- In German, the parallel evolution (from number-word to indefinite article) did not likewise result in an orthographic split:  ein is used in both senses.  However, a careful writer, analytically inclined, may supply a written acute accent:  eín Grund, wofür …. ‘one reason for which …’

~

Let us take a different example  from the same author.

First, try to contextualize the following initial fragment:

            Yet it is a delicate matter so …

Here is the text in full:

 

Yet it is a delicate matter so to describe the connection between premisses and conclusion as to display clearly the way in which both requirements are fulfilled.

-- Michael Dummett, Truth and other enigmas (1978), p. 297;  as typeset.

Which, in our scribally enhanced verion, would come out

Yet it is a delicate matter   só to describe the connection between premisses and conclusion   as to display clearly the way in which both requirements are fulfilled.

Note that here that the reason that the só receives an accent, is not (as in the case of the last that analyzed above) that it finds itself fortuitously at the end of a breath-group, but that it finds itself separated, by a lengthy complement, from a second particle  with which it logically forms a single correlative conjunction  (like either … or, or neither … nor):  the stress, then, prospectively points (cataphorically links) to its idiom-mate which is eventually to come, much as the full phonetic form of  either / entweder / ou bien  points forward to an upcoming or / oder / ou.

The use of this figure in the sentence quoted, which is characteristic of the author’s thought and style, is absent from spoken language, as from the written  of all but a sliver of the population:  most people would never use it, and might not quite understand a sentence like Dummet’s above.  Indeed  it is characteristic, not merely of the formal or literary style, but of the philosophical, the analytical.

Here is how the plain man uses these words:

John rigged up the contraption so that it would both do your taxes and toast bread.

In light of that,  you might imagine that the unitary connection bolded above (and quite unstressed;  you could even pronounce it as a sort of monosyllable:  s’th’t) represents the basic or original idiom, and that this logically and phonetically tense  só  … that  is a later or professorial refinement.    Yet in fact the versions in which so has a full illative sense, came first, and were widely used in all sorts of writing in former times:  Só that you mind! = “Just so long as you pay attention!” or God so ordered the world that each creature might occupy its proper place in the Chain of Being. 

Now, in our “contraption” sentence, the so, although colloquially quite unstressed, still retains the logical role it fills in God so ordered the world that…;  it could be replaced by something fuller, like in such a way that … ;  and French would use relatively mouth-filling equivalents:  de manière à ce que, afin de, tant et si bien que.  In this case, the modification is logically restrictive:  John constructed the thing using thát method which would insure …   But these unstressed contiguous words  can easily fade into a weakened, non-restrictive meaning:

John blundered up against the house of cards, so that it toppled.

Here there is no design or intention on John’s part, the way there was with his contraption  or with the crafty Creator.   The relation between the propositions is no weaker:  ‘with the result that’, whether or not that result had been consciously compassed  by the actor.  The sentence  could indeed be written with no intrasentential conjuntion at all, the effect of the triggering accident being exported to another sentence entirely:

John blundered up against the house of cards.  (What a schlemiel! ) It toppled.

.

Yet it is a delicate matter so to describe the connection between premisses and conclusion as to display clearly the way in which both requirements are fulfilled.

-- Michael Dummett, Truth and other enigmas (1978), p. 297;  as typeset.

Which, in our scribally enhanced verion, would come out

Yet it is a delicate matter   só to describe the connection between premisses and conclusion   as to display clearly the way in which both requirements are fulfilled.

Note that here the só receives an accent, is not (as in the case of the last that analyzed above) that it finds itself fortuitously at the end of a breath-group, but that it finds itself separated, by a lengthy complement, from a second particle  with which it logically forms a single correlative conjunction  (like either … or, or neither … nor):  the stress, then, prospectively points (cataphorically links) to its idiom-mate which is eventually to come, much as the full phonetic form of  either / entweder / ou bien  points forward to an upcoming or / oder / ou.

The use of this figure in the sentence quoted, which is characteristic of the author’s thought and style, is absent from spoken language, as from the written  of all but a sliver of the population:  most people would never use it, and might not quite understand a sentence like Dummet’s above.  Indeed  it is characteristic, not merely of the formal or literary style, but of the philosophical, the analytical.

Here is how the plain man uses these words:

John rigged up the contraption so that it would both do your taxes and toast bread.

In light of that,  you might imagine that the unitary connection bolded above (and quite unstressed;  you could even pronounce it as a sort of monosyllable:  s’th’t) represents the basic or original idiom, and that this logically and phonetically tense  só  … that  is a later or professorial refinement.    Yet in fact the versions in which so has a full illative sense, came first, and were widely used in all sorts of writing in former times:  Só that you mind! = “Just so long as you pay attention!” or God so ordered the world that each creature might occupy its proper place in the Chain of Being. 

Now, in our “contraption” sentence, the so, although colloquially quite unstressed, still retains the logical role it fills in God so ordered the world that…;  it could be replaced by something fuller, like in such a way that … ;  and French would use relatively mouth-filling equivalents:  de manière à ce que, afin de, tant et si bien que.  In this case, the modification is logically restrictive:  John constructed the thing using thát method which would insure …   But these unstressed contiguous words  can easily fade into a weakened, non-restrictive meaning:

John blundered up against the house of cards, so that it toppled.

Here there is no design or intention on John’s part, the way there was with his contraption  or with the crafty Creator.   The relation between the propositions is no weaker:  ‘with the result that’, whether or not that result had been consciously compassed  by the actor.  The sentence  could indeed be written with no intrasentential conjuntion at all, the effect of the triggering accident being exported to another sentence entirely:

John blundered up against the house of cards.  (What a schlemiel! ) It toppled.

~

Our colleague  Dr Massey  comments:

It is my impression that such logical fine distinctions, supporting distant correlative constructions,  are characteristic of English and German, and even moreso of Latin;  less so of Arabic (though in other ways that classical language is very rich).

[Postscript]   Dr. Massey, the official Latinist of this site (lavishly compensated out of our enormous profits selling Platonism Rules! coffee-mugs and t-shirts), weighs in with a parallel to the two uses of so that  noted above.   In this case, no phonetic/stress disambiguation is available, since the equivalent is here is single word, indeed a monosyllable:  UT. 

Similar remarks could be made about the classical Arabic Hatta.

Pertinent is, perhaps the distinction between the Latin Purpose Clause and the Result Clause.

Interestingly, the clauses are identical with the exception of some element in the Protasis such as "So much, so great, so" (tantum, tot, etc) in a result clause.

Consider the following.

Caesar urbem intravit ut inimicos interficeret.

Caesar entered the city in order to kill the enemy.

Here we have a simple purpose clause, Caesar did one thing in order to do another thing.

But the addition of some "so much, so great" element in the protasis can render the apodosis to be a result:

Caesar tantos inimicos interfecit ut sanguis in vias fluxerit.

Caesar killed so many enemies that [as a result] blood flowed in the streets.

Now, Caesar did not kill because he felt the streets needed more blood in them. He killed because he was a murderous thug. But the result of his activities was that the streets flowed with blood.

.