Hummingwolf's Neighborhood

Posted by languagehat

https://languagehat.com/withering-scorn/

https://languagehat.com/?p=17993

My wife and I are reading Nancy Mitford’s 1945 novel The Pursuit Of Love (as AJP recommended back in 2012) and we reached a passage that prefigured her famous 1954 essay “The English Aristocracy” and the Alan S. C. Ross article it was based on, about U and non-U English:

Uncle Matthew and Aunt Emily were now engaged upon an argument we had all heard many times before. It concerned the education of females.

Uncle Matthew: ‘I hope poor Fanny’s school (the word school pronounced in tones of withering scorn) is doing her all the good you think it is. Certainly she picks up some dreadful expressions there.’

Aunt Emily, calmly, but on the defensive: ‘Very likely she does. She also picks up a good deal of education.’

Uncle Matthew: ‘Education! I was always led to believe that no educated person ever spoke of notepaper, and yet I hear poor Fanny asking Sadie for notepaper. What is this education? Fanny talks about mirrors and mantlepieces, handbags and perfume, she takes sugar in her coffee, has a tassel on her umbrella, and I have no doubt that, if she is ever fortunate enough to catch a husband, she will call his father and mother Father and Mother. Will the wonderful education she is getting make up to the unhappy brute for all these endless pinpricks? Fancy hearing one’s wife talking about notepaper – the irritation!’

Aunty Emily: ‘A lot of men would find it more irritating to have a wife who had never heard of George III. (All the same, Fanny darling, it is called writing paper you know – don’t let’s hear any more about the note, please.)’

For notepaper, mirror, mantlepiece, and perfume, see the list at the Wikipedia article I linked above; I don’t know what the problem with handbags is, or why one should not take sugar in one’s coffee or have a tassel on one’s umbrella, but I’m sure someone here will enlighten me.

https://languagehat.com/withering-scorn/

https://languagehat.com/?p=17993

Posted by languagehat

https://languagehat.com/humanising-the-text/

https://languagehat.com/?p=17982

John Jamieson’s Humanising the text: Walter Benjamin and machine translation has a good deal to say about Walter Benjamin’s ideas about language and understanding a text, as well as “the seemingly inexorable drift we are seeing towards a disembodied language — the language of machine translation output and AI.” He begins with “an article in a Finnish philosophy magazine about a new collection of Walter Benjamin essays translated into Finnish” and says:

The essential idea I gleaned from the article was the contemporary — that is to say, occurring about 100 years ago — decline in the art of storytelling. Particularly in “The Storyteller” (Der Erzähler), his essay devoted to the Russian author Nikolai Leskov, Benjamin describes and laments a transition from the epic genre, storytelling and the “exchange of experience” — firstly to printed texts and the novel, and then ultimately to mere “information”.

This transition from relationships to information provides a very useful and suggestive framework for describing linguistic communication on all sorts of different scales, and on many different levels, from the most general — the evolution of language as such — to the most specific — ie what happens every time we open our mouths or listen to what someone is saying to us.

It seems to me that the starting point on Benjamin’s transition — the genuine exchange of experience — is basically where speech comes from, where it originates.

But what I want to highlight, as usual, is the part where he gets specific:

At this point I want to transit to the very personal story of my efforts to understand the final paragraph of the Finnish article I was reading that day on a Wellington suburban train.

This is the original text:

Seminaaripäivän kenties mieleenpainuvin puheenvuoro onkin tarina Pariisin ruumishuoneista. Ensin en tajua, mistä on kyse — eihän aihe liity Benjaminiin lainkaan. Mädäntyvien kalmojen haju ja kuoleman ihmittely täytävät kuitenkin pian hapettoman huoneen, ja unohdan, että kaikesta kuullusta tulisi olla jotain hyötyä. Tämän tarinan myös kerroin eteenpäin heti kotiin päästyäni. Lopuksi tarinankertoja kieltää itse lukeneensa Benjaminia, ja kutsuu meitä niin tehneitä hörhöiksi.

And this is my translation:

Perhaps the most memorable presentation during the day’s proceedings was a description of the morgues of Paris. My first reaction was, what on earth did this have to do with Benjamin? But the odour of rotting corpses and the dread fascination of death soon filled the stuffy seminar room, and I forgot the rule that all the day’s presentations should have some relevance or value for the participants. And I have to admit that this was the first paper I talked about later on returning home. In any event, the presenter concluded by telling us he had never read a word of Benjamin’s writings, and more fools we if we had.

Initially I found this paragraph very hard to understand. There I was, sitting in the train, letting my thoughts drift somewhat aimlessly over these sentences. Then, just as I arrived at my destination, I “got it”.

What did I get, and how did I get it? I realised that my obtuseness had been because of my failure to intuit the experiential exchange, the interactional how, that underpinned the text — which changed from one sentence to the next, as we shall see.

He proceeds to a detailed account of how the Finnish passage works (from that, and from assiduous use of Wiktionary, I learned a fair amount about the language) and why he translated it the way he did (“The change from historic present to simple past has been made because in English, to my ear, the use of the present tense in the MT version gives the text a vivid, suspenseful feel that is out of keeping with a description of past events presented as essentially true and accurate”); if you like that sort of thing, click on through to the other site.

https://languagehat.com/humanising-the-text/

https://languagehat.com/?p=17982

Posted by languagehat

https://languagehat.com/when-you-cant-speak-the-language/

https://languagehat.com/?p=17978

This one-and-a-half-minute video by Khalid Al Ameri will give you a brief introduction to some of the languages of India, as well as a good laugh. (Via Language Log.)

https://languagehat.com/when-you-cant-speak-the-language/

https://languagehat.com/?p=17978

Posted by languagehat

https://languagehat.com/in-the-interests/

https://languagehat.com/?p=17976

A guest Log post by Bob Ladd opened my eyes to a language issue I had never noticed:

A few days ago I received an editorial decision letter from a journal, which included a request to deal with a few typos. I had begun a sentence with the phrase “In the interests of brevity,” and the editor wanted me to remove the final -s from the word “interests”. Since I know that the editor is not a native speaker of English, my first reaction was to ignore the request, but I thought I should back up my insistence that this was not a typo with some sort of evidence, so I searched for the phrases “in the interests of” and “in the interest of” on Google n-grams. To my surprise, I discovered that both versions of the expression occur, with a roughly 60:40 preference for the version with “interest”, and that this proportion has been roughly stable since the early 20th century. Since Google’s book corpus permits the user to distinguish British and American English, I could also see that the version with “interests” is more common in BrEng and the version with “interest” in AmEng, but that both versions occur in both varieties.

He ends up with this:

I have never seen this difference cited as an example of British/American variation, and nor do I know of any prescriptive grumbling about people using the wrong version. In fact, until I received the editorial review last week, I was completely unaware of the existence of this variation. The consistency in my own writing suggests that individual speakers may settle on one form or the other and use it exclusively, but that the choice is essentially random.

Since modern sociolinguistics has made clear that much variation is meaningful, this conclusion is vaguely troubling. Only one observation from Google n-grams suggests something other than randomness: there is a striking diachronic difference that suggests that the choice between the two versions may once have meant something. Over the two centuries of the Google Books corpus, AmEng consistently prefers the version with “interest” in a ratio of about 3:1, while in BrEng there was a marked shift in the second half of the 19th century: over the course of 50 years or so British usage swung from 3:1 in favour of “interest” (as in AmEng) to 3:1 in favour of “interests”. The new British preference for “interests” then remains consistent through the 20th century, and this is what averages out to the 60:40 proportion in 20th century English as a whole. Could there have been a social motivation for the change in British usage?

For what it’s worth, here’s what the OED (entry revised 2024) says:

P.3. in the interest(s) of: † (a) (In early use) in support of; acting or operating to the advantage of (a particular person, faction, cause, etc.) (obsolete); (b) out of concern or consideration for; for the sake of.

1653 A Declaration of the High and Mighty Muggulls of the Low-Countreys, concerning their joyning with, and aiding the King of Denmarks Navy in the Interest of the King of Scotts.
Mercurius Democritus No. 49. 378

1716 The Women of our Island, who are the most eminent for Virtue and good Sense, are in the Interest of the present Government.
J. Addison, Freeholder No. 4. ⁋1

1771 The party in the interests of Lewis began to lose ground.
O. Goldsmith, History of England vol. I. 347

1801 He did not choose to keep a clerk, who was not in his interests.
M. Edgeworth, Forester in Moral Tales vol. I. 129

1858 ‘In the interest’ (to use a slang phrase just now coming into currency) of enlightened patriotism.
T. De Quincey, Selections Grave & Gay vol. IX. Preface 10

1884 In the interests of humanity there is no need to regret the change.
Manchester Examiner 27 May 5/1

1953 We shall define mainstream fiction as any fiction which is not fantasy or science fiction, an arbitrary distinction made in the interests of clarity.
R. Moore in R. Bretnor, Modern Science Fiction 95

1978 In the interest of time, I felt I should go ahead and notify the president..of my decision.
Associated Press (Nexis) 7 July

2011 Surely, in the interests of domestic harmony, there should be an HRH HR department to take new members of the Firm through bowing and curtseying.
Daily Telegraph 27 July 21/2

The De Quincey quote about “a slang phrase just now coming into currency” is striking, and I am pleased to see the OED citing Modern Science Fiction.

As I said in my comment at the Log, if I had run across “In the interests of brevity” back when I was still a professional copyeditor I would have unhesitatingly changed it to “In the interest of brevity.” Now I know better, but I am left in a phraseological quagmire. What do you all think?

https://languagehat.com/in-the-interests/

https://languagehat.com/?p=17976