Linguistics: October 2007 Archives

Of the past 36 hours, I've just spent 20 of them working on an assignment. Thirteen and a half of those hours were in the university library. I'd carved out quite a little den for myself. I was at a computer desk, surrounded by piles of books (at times I felt like I was in a fort), a bottle of orange juice (or cup of coffee) nearby. I'd be lounging with my shoes off (one needs to get comfortable), my fingers slowly drifting over the keys as I tried to make sense of the data before me.

The assignment was on English grammar, which admittedly isn't my favourite subject. It was in the form of three "short essay answers". There was no guideline as to length - I ended up with 14 pages (over 4,000 words), which I thought was more than enough. I suppose time will tell.

In the course of my research for the assignment, I was browsing through Bennet's Spatial and temporal uses of English prepositions and I found this piece of paper. It looks like a note that's been used as a bookmark. (Click the image to see a larger version.)

When I first saw it, and pulled it out to read it, I turned it upside down so I could read it, thinking for a brief second that it may be Greek. I quickly realised that this was not the case, and turned it around again, noticing that I could read some English words - ambiguous, vague, but most of everything else was very scrawly. It was at this point that I noticed that the 1, 2, and 3 of the list were on the right, not the left. A couple of the letterforms reminded me of something. And then it clicked - is this Hebrew?

I know very little of the Hebrew script, and even less of Hebrew itself, but it seems a reasonable reckoning. A little bit of internet searching for examples of handwritten Hebrew yield similar results.

The fluency of the handwriting makes me think it's a native speaker. Also, the English words that are there are written in a well-formed cursive script - a common feature of those who learn English as a second language. But here's the question - what does it actually say? Anyone know? Comments appreciated.

Bennett, D. C. (1975). Spatial and temporal uses of English prepositions - An essay in stratificational semantics. London: Longman.

Okay, my last couple of posts have involved both references and transcriptions. So it's time to lay down the law. In this post I hope to codify the manner in which I transcribe various non-Roman orthographies (writing systems), and also the way that I provide references in my posts.

Some of you may be questioning the worth of this. I just like things to be consistent, and I also like to give enough information from books that I talk about or quote from so that my readers can follow up the texts for themselves.

In general, when referencing books, I follow the widely-used MLA style. I am tempted to use the APA style, but frankly it's six and half a dozen - the difference is minimal, but consistency is key. MLA style is as follows:

Surname, Forenames. Title. City of publication: Publisher, Year

For example:

Dobrovie-Sorin, Carmen. The Syntax of Romanian. New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1994

However, I adopt a far simpler system when referencing Baha'i texts, usually with this format:

Author, Title.

As well as a page reference, I'll usually try to include a paragraph or section number too (e.g. Baha'u'llah, The Kitab-i-Aqdas. p34, K41).

There are several reasons for this practice. Firstly, many Baha'i texts have been published several times by different publishing houses, but the text is all the same. By simply stating which book I am talking about, and providing a page and section reference, my readers can follow up the reference in their own copy, which may be a different edition to mine.

Secondly is the issue of translation. Standard MLA would dictate that I specify the translator of the text in question. However, for the vast majority of translated Baha'i writings, there exists only one translation, which has usually been authorised by the Baha'i World Centre. As such, I will only specify the translation used when I use an unauthorised or provisional one.

Thirdly is the question of dates. Usually (although I'm not sure how widespread this practice is) when one is referencing a republication of an older book, the date of publication is listed, along with the original date of publication in brackets. For example:

Meillet, A. Les Dialectes Indo-Européens. Paris: La Société de Linguistique de Paris, 1950 [1908]

However, with the Baha'i writings this is cumbersome, partly because of the several editions published mentioned in my first point, and partly because many of the texts were not ever published in the first place. For example, Tablets of Baha'u'llah is a collection of letters Baha'u'llah wrote to various people, on various subjects, at various times in His life. So providing a date of original publication for a citation is almost impossible.

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Now that that's out the way, let's talk about transcription. Specifically of Arabic, the only language not written in the Latin (Roman) alphabet that I am vaguely competent in. Maybe in the future I'll have cause to write about Sanskrit or Chinese, but I'll cross that bridge if and when I come to it - they have more or less standard transcription systems anyway (IAST and Pinyin respectively).

I use a transcription system based on the Baha'i orthography, but with a couple of changes. There are a number of factors to consider when implementing a transcription. On the one hand, there is the idea that we want a one-to-one correspondence of symbols, so we can transfer from one orthography to another with no data loss. And on the other, there is the idea that we should be transcribing not just the spelling of the word, but the actual pronunciation. This second one is important, as many languages do not have direct "phonetic" spelling systems, and many that do are governed by rules that change pronunciation in particular contexts. For example, the Russian word друг ("friend") is pronounced /druk/, but if we wished to transcribe it letter-for-letter we'd get <drug>. (Yes, the Russian word for "friend" looks like the English word for "drug". But it's pronounced like "droog", and was spelt as such in Burgess's novel Clockwork Orange.) The reason that this word is spelt with the letter usually signifying /g/ is because when we inflect the word, for instance the genitive singular друга "of the friend", then it is pronounced like /g/. So we have two options here: transcribe the word in a way that is faithful to the phonetic reality, which gives us a confusing paradigm of druk - druga; or, transcribe the word in a way that is faithful to the underlying (supposed) mental reality, which gives us the simpler paradigm of drug - druga but requires us to expect the readers be familiar with the rule which says "devoice word-final obstruents" (which is the rule that makes what is originally a /g/ be pronounced as if it were a /k/).

With that in mind, there is the reader/writer distinction. A writer will write something once to be read probably many times. The ratio should help determine what kind of transcription system to use. For example, the transcription system I outline below uses a good number of diacritics and special characters. These take a lot longer for me to type than regular letters. Were I wanting something less intense, I could use the Qalam Romanisation, which is a lot easier on the hands but harder on the eyes. It's plain ugly. I only use the Qalam romanisation in plain-text emails or instant messenger conversations, where the reader/writer ratio is relatively low. (And even then, I do my best to fully vocalise it, and I usually spell the long vowels as <uu, ii> etc rather than <uw iy>.)

Arabic presents some particular problems for transcription, especially if we wish to remain true to the original orthography. For example, a word ending in an /a/ sound can be written in 3 ways: the vowel could be unmarked (so basically not written); it could be written with a tá’ marbúṭa - ة -; or with an ’alif maqṣúra - ى -. These last two are involved in morphophonemic alterations in cases of inflection, where a /t/ appears, or the /a/ changes into an /i/. Do we transcribe these letters as different from regular plain /a/? In my post on Egypt, I transcribed the tá’ marbúṭa as <at>, but then how do we distinguish it from just an /a/ and a /t/ together with nothing to do with a tá’ marbúṭa? At the end of it all, we need to consider the purposes of this transcription. I'm not an Arabicist. I don't intend to write long posts on Arabic philology or grammar. I'm willing to accept a degree of compromise and of ambiguity. Another factor influencing my transcription choice is aesthetics. Some people like to transcribe the hamza and ‘ayn with a 7 and 3 respectively. That looks ugly. I use two different types of apostrophe, which takes a while to get used to for some people (it did for me). It looks nice though, and the number of times you'll find a word whose meaning hinges on whether a letter is a hamza or an ‘ayn is minimal.

So without further ado, here's a brief chart detailing the transcription of each letter:

Letter	Transcription
’alif ا	á
bá’ ب	b
tá’ ت	t
thá’ ث	th
jím ج	j
ḥá’ ح	ḥ
khá’ خ	kh
dál د	d
dhál ذ	dh
rá’ ر	r
zayn ز	z
sín س	s
shín ش	sh
ṣád ص	ṣ
ḍád ض	ḍ
ṭá’ ط	ṭ
ẓá’ ظ	ẓ
‘ayn ع	‘
ghayn غ	gh
fá’ ف	f
qáf ق	q
káf ك	k
lám ل	l
mím م	m
nún ن	n
há’ ه	h
wáw و	w
yá’ ى	y
hamza ء	’

The vowels I transcribe as <i, a, u, í, á, ú> (the acutes marking long vowels), and the diphthongs as <ay, aw>. The tá’ marbúṭa is transcribed with <at>, and the ’alif maqṣúra as simply <a>. This differs from the Baha'i Orthography I mentioned above in a number of ways. Firstly, digraphs are not underlined. This leads to an element of potential ambiguity, but makes the transcription easier to read, write, and copy from. It uses <w> and not <v> for the letter wáw.

A number of notable points concern the definite article al-. I transcribe this consistently as al-, even when preceding a "sun" letter - so al-shams, al-núr etc rather than ash-shams, an-núr. Also, when the vowel of al- disappears due to a preceding vowel, this elision will be marked with an apostrophe. This is how we get the name ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’, which in some other transcription systems is ‘Abd al-Bahá’ (or even 3abd al-bahaa7). Again, this causes a little ambiguity, but I feel it is minimal, and is is consistent with the Baha'i Orthography system. Where possible, I eliminate the inconsistencies noted in Winters (1997) and Momen, both cited below. One inconsistency I don't deal with is that of the lack of inflection from nominative case ending in names like ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’: Winters (1997) reckons that it should inflect for the accusative and genitive cases (rather than being frozen in form), making ‘Abda’l-Bahá’ and ‘Abdi’l-Bahá’ respectively. However, to treat foreign words as English words and inflect them thusly is quite normal for English. This is why we speak of "paninis" (despite panini already being plural in Italian). This kind of attitude would likewise require us to say saunassa instead of "in the sauna" (because sauna is a Finnish word, right, so it should be inflected for the inessive case, surely?). While commendable for wishing to preserve the original linguistic integrity of the word(s), this kind of approach ultimately only acts as impediment to communication. Which is why I keep this "inconsistency" in my transcription system.

Finally, when using common terms such as "Baha'i", "Baha'u'llah" and so on, I will leave off the diacritics and only use simple apostrophes (rather than right- or left-leaning ones), simply for the sake of convenience.

Momen, Moojan. Transliteration. http://www.northill.demon.co.uk/relstud/transliteration.htm

Winters, Jonah. Dying for God: Martyrdom in the Shii and Babi Religions. Unpublished MA Thesis, University of Toronto, 1997 (available online)

Wow. I was away for just over a week and I come back to 61 emails. Not including Facebook messages and the like. I'd also scheduled a blog post to be published on the 15th for Blog Action Day, however I had to manually do it once I got back. I must have missed something - I'm still new to this publishing software.

Anyway, yes, I'm just back from a week in Egypt! I had a really great time, it's a fascinating country. I took a course in Arabic last academic year, which really helped. The course I took was in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) (Arabic: فصحى fuṣḥá, literally "eloquent"), while in Egypt everyone speaks colloquial Egyptian Arabic, so there was some adjustments to be made to how I spoke and so on, but it wasn't too rough. This post, however, isn't intended to be a description of the sociolinguistic situation in Egypt (or indeed in any Arabic-speaking country), as fascinating as it may be. (Briefly though, if you're interested: the situation is one of diglossia: with a prestigious literary language (MSA) that is mainly written, used in all realms of officialdom, and formal contexts; and with a low-prestige local language (Egyptian colloquial) that is used in all everyday and informal contexts. The colloquial is learnt as a native language; MSA is learnt through school education.)

As you may or may not know, Arabic is written right-to-left (the opposite of English), and does not usually mark vowels. This is slightly untrue - long vowels and word-initial vowels are written with the letters ’alif, wáw, and yá’, however the latter two can also be used to represent consonant sounds. Short vowels are almost always not marked - only in children's or learners' texts and the Qur’án do you commonly find the diacritics used to mark the short vowels.

As such, there is a knack to reading Arabic. You have to learn the vowels for each individual word - for example that كتاب is kitáb (book) and that مدنة is madinat (city). Fortunately, Arabic has a number of patterns that words stick to, so it's more a matter of learning which pattern a word takes - for example, رجال is rijál (men, the plural of رجل rajul), the same vowel pattern as kitáb. After a while, you get used to the common patterns and become fairly proficient at sounding out unfamiliar words.

This can cause a problem when reading foreign words loaned into Arabic. There are a number of tourism companies with English names that are borrowed straight into Arabic, or even just foreign brand names. These names have to be altered to fit Arabic phonological structure - for example, (Modern Standard) Arabic has only three vowels - /a, i, u/ (plus long versions). As such, Coca-Cola becomes كوكا كولا kúká kúlá. Arabic also has no /p/ sound - consequently, Pepsi becomes بيبسي bíbsí. They're not all this easy to read, however, and often regional dialects have to be taken into account. When confronted with سبرينج, I first read it as something along the lines of sabrínaj (almost sounding a little like a certain teenage witch). It took me a while to realise that it was meant to be read as sbrinj, i.e. spring. Arabic dislikes word-initial consonant clusters, whereas in English, things like spr- aren't all that uncommon. Also, in Egypt, the letter <ج> (which I have transcribed as <j> after its classical pronunciation of [dʒ]) is pronounced as [g], which explains the final consonant.

As well as lacking /p/, Arabic also lacks /v/ and /tʃ/ (the first and last sounds in the word "church"). This isn't a problem for Arabic, but it is for the languages that feature these sounds who adopted the Arabic script for writing - such as Kurdish¹. To solve this, new letters were added to the alphabet: پ for /p/ (styled after the letter ب bá’); ڤ for /v/ (styled after the letter ف fá’); and چ for /tʃ/ (styled after the letter ج jín). While these letters are not present in Arabic proper, I saw them used infrequently in Egypt, for example "riviera" rendered as ريڤييرا, and also "7 Up" rendered as سڤن أپ. Interestingly, because in Egypt the letter <ج> is pronounced as [g], the sound [dʒ] (the first sound in the word "James") I saw represented in Egypt by <چ>, for example بريچ bríj for "bridge".

It should perhaps be noted, however, that the use of these letters in loans was, as far as I could see, relatively rare. Big western brands like Pepsi, Hilton, and Mercedes (for example) generally adapt their names to fit Arabic phonology, rather than resorting to the use of unusual letters². Smaller, local brands, that were using English names either out of trendiness or to attract a tourist clientele, were far more likely to use these letters.

It's at times like this when I wish that I knew more about this - about how common these letters were in, say, Egyptian newsletters, or the number of Egyptians who know how to read these letters correctly (and if so, then where do they learn them?). Going to Egypt may have satiated my wanderlust, but spending just a week there has only given me a tiny glimpse into a larger world. And that's just linguistically speaking - I could go on about the sociohistorical dynamics, the contemporary political and economic climate, the persecution of the Egyptian Baha'is (and other minority groups), and the vast swathes of desert that characterise the majority of the country. But I won't. Instead, I'll leave you with this picture of sunset over Egypt's Eastern Desert. Being a lot closer to the equator than Scotland is, sunset is a relatively speedy affair in Egypt - less than two minutes after I snapped this the sun had disappeared behind the mountains. Looking at the sky alone in this picture, it looks like daytime. Looking at the mountains and sun, it looks like sunset. And looking at the ground, it looks like dusk, turning into night. Appearances can be deceptive in an unfamiliar land.

¹ To be honest, as far as I understand it Kurdish is most often written in the Latin or Cyrillic scripts, but I have chosen it in particular over other languages like Urdu, Dari, and Persian because it exhibits all three of the new letters I wish to talk about.

² 7 Up is the obvious exception here, which is odd as it is owned and operated by PepsiCo.

The word of the day over at Oxford English Dictionary is skoosh. Since it changes every day, and you have to be a subscriber to look it up, I'll reproduce the entry for it below (only the meanings, no quotations or datechart or pronunciation and so on).

Sc. Colloq.

I. Simple uses.

1. a. intr. Of a liquid: to gush, spurt, or squirt. Also: to emit liquid in a gush.

b. trans. To squirt or spray (a liquid); to wet with a jet or spray of liquid.

2. intr. To move rapidly, esp. (of a vehicle) with a swishing sound; to depart quickly. Also in imper. (Children's slang): ‘go away!’ ‘run for it!’.

II. Compounds.

3. skoosh car, (esp. in Glasgow) a tram (now hist. and rare).

Now why am I talking about this word? It's marked as Sc[ottish] Colloq[uial], so it's just a little quaint word used by us harmless Scots, right?

Well, not necessarily. I've seen this word cause heated debate. The main form I heard this word in is skooshy, as in skooshy cream - that is, whipped cream in a pressurised container. The stuff that goes "ksshhh" all over your dessert. Mmmmm.

The first question is rather bland, but important. Like many Scottish words, there is a debate over spelling. The Oxford English Dictionary lists <skoosh>, <scoosh>, and <schoosh>, and I've seen people even consider <squoosh> (only to change their minds when they realise that this is skwoosh). Anyway, none of these really feel right - using <k> feels too "hard", and with <c> it feels too "soft".

But the real debate is what skooshy cream is actually called. The manufacturers, and many English people I know, maintain that is is simple whipped cream. But that fails to distinguish between non-pressurised and pressurised creams, which can make all the difference. While hand-whipped cream is nice, there's nothing quite like having a skoosh of cream fluffed up by nitrous oxide all over your strawberries. (I don't think anyone has ever said that sentence before.) Another of my English friends, from Shropshire, claims to call it squirty cream. While this maintains the distinction, it just sounds wrong to my Scottish ears. Squirting is what waterguns do. (It also means something else, but I'll leave it to your imagination/googling.) Skoosh, however, is almost onomatopoeic in the way it expresses the smooth, fluid diffusion of luscious cream onto your favourite foods.

In conclusion, this is one of my favourite words. Not only is it useful in distinguishing types of cream (which is always a plus), it simply sounds scrumptious.

[Edit: I just remembered another use of skoosh, this time in a compound noun - tam skoosh, referring to tomato ketchup. I've heard this around Dumfries (mainly from my sister), and I don't know if it's found anywhere else in Scotland. Google gives no hits for it. Can anyone shed any light on this?]