Lavengro

Keep it simple

My friend Alan Booth has dawn my attention to this sentence in the Independent.

Ms Williams, whose father, Stephen, works as a detective constable for West Mercia Police, which is leading the investigation into her disappearance, was reported missing after failing to attend a driving lesson or meet her boyfriend, Matthew Bird, 18, on Monday morning to travel to a music festival.

Alan asks whether prizes are awarded for such sentences. Maybe they are, but if so they are not called Pulitzer.

First, it must be said that the sentence is grammatically correct and is systematically punctuated, but … it is the grammar and the punctuation that are the problem.

Complex sentences are to be welcomed in their place. The last thing we want is sentences that just have one clause each, but here we have the opposite extreme. Basically, we are told that Ms Williams was reported missing in certain circumstances, but this sentence contains within itself two linked relative clauses: whose father … and which is …. It also contains two cases of apposition, Stephen and Matthew Bird, and a parenthesis telling us Matthew’s age, 18. The relative clauses and appositions are set off in commas; non-restrictive relative clauses should be but the need is not so great for apposition. I see nothing wrong with

whose father Stephen works as a detective constable

or

her boyfriend Matthew Bird.

As it is written, the reader is navigating a rigmarole of clauses that have to be kept in mind while constantly tripping over commas that hinder a clear assimilation of the meaning. A ratio of eight commas to 48 words in one sentence is too much. Why should it be one sentence anyway? Why indeed should we be told Matthew’s age? I see no reason. How about this?

Ms Williams was reported missing after failing to attend a driving lesson or meet her boyfriend Matthew Bird on Monday morning when they were to travel to a music festival. Her father Stephen works as a detective constable for West Mercia Police, which is leading the investigation into her disappearance.

That won’t win a Pulitzer prize either but at least it’s easy to read.

Illustrated etymology

The European Commission interpreters have produced a lovely collection of images illustrating the etymology of some English words. I particularly like their description of glamour.

If not again

On the Language Log Mark Liberman offers an incisive analysis of that troublesome and ambiguous phrase if not. As he says, the construction is curious. He describes two meanings:

“A or even B”, where B is (in context) a stronger form of A, and the implication is that “it might well be B, but I’ll only insist on A”

it’s A, even though I concede that it's not B

I have described this problem, though I made no attempt at logical analysis, and it seems that Mark’s descriptions coincide with mine.

All in all, I stick with what I said then: I never use the phrase and see no reason why I (or anyone else) should want to do so when perfectly good non-ambiguous paraphrases are available.

Four once more: 27 May 2013

Breathing life new into old posts. This blog started in 2005. As readership has grown since then I am reposting some of the older posts in batches of four at 06.00 CET every Monday.

A capital mistake Capitalisation conventions vary with unfortunate consequences.

Teutonic Why call the Germans Teutonic?

Come again / Un hotel poco 'corriente' A translation client with an unusual problem.

Jamón, jamón! The Icelandic ash cloud turns into cured meat.

It’s that myth again

Kennedy	Berliner

On 26 June 1963 US President John Kennedy made a speech in Berlin. This was less than two years after the Berlin Wall had been built and his speech was a powerful defence of freedom. In it he said the words Ich bin ein Berliner (I am a Berliner).

His intention was to identify with the people of Berlin, along the lines of Civis romanus sum or I am Spartacus, and this declaration was received by the people of that city with great enthusiasm. But later he was mocked for having identified himself as a jam doughnut. What happened?

In German the unchangeable (non-declining) suffix -er is attached to any place name to make the adjective of that place: frankfurter, wiener (from Vienna) and hamburger are examples that have made their way into English in connection with food. And it happens that a Berliner is a doughnut with jam inside.

I am a teacher and I am an Englishman. English is unusual in placing the indefinite article in such sentences; other European languages see an identity rather than membership of a class and do not use it. In German Ich bin Lehrer and Ich bin Engländer say that I am a teacher and an Englishman. As a result the idea took root that Kennedy, by saying Ich bin ein Berliner with the article ein, had identified himself not as a citizen of Berlin but as a pastry; that he should have said Ich bin Berliner.

But the point is that he was identifying himself with the people of Berlin, not as one of them. Ich bin Lehrer and Ich bin Engländer express an identity between the concepts of myself on one hand and teacher or Englishman on the other, but what Kennedy intended to express was solidarity and in fact his words were perfectly correct.

Such myths never die, however, and the idea that the US President said he was a jammy doughnut has persisted. It was mentioned in Len Deighton’s Berlin Game (1983):

‘Ich bin ein Berliner,’ I said. It was a joke. A Berliner is a doughnut. The day after President Kennedy made his famous proclamation, Berlin cartoonists had a field day with talking doughnuts.

It may possibly have been around for some time before that but I can find no evidence to that effect; it is true too that the fictional narrator of that book, Bernard Samson, is not reliable as a story-teller and the myth may have originated right there. Nevertheless, Deighton himself is quoted as saying:

the day after President Kennedy proclaimed ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’ Germany’s many newspaper cartoons depicted talking doughnuts!

Even if that is true however, and I have found no such cartoons, it does not prove that Kennedy was wrong; it merely shows that cartoonists were pointing to an amusing ambiguity of language.

What prompts me to write this now? In yesterday’s Independent the letters editor Guy Keleny repeats this myth in an article in its errors and omissions section referring to an article that it had headlined ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’ (my emphasis):

“I am a Berliner,” [Kennedy] declared. Except that he didn’t. Giles Cooper writes in from north London to confirm what an old friend with a degree in German told me long ago. Kennedy, or his speech writer, got it wrong. “Ich bin ein Berliner” means “I am a doughnut” (that is, a particular kind of German doughnut known as a Berliner). The German for “I am a Berliner” (meaning a person from Berlin) has no indefinite article. Kennedy should have said, “Ich bin Berliner.”

In Spain we make jokes about how services are provided by friends of friends, along the lines of: ‘Why pay a translator? This was done by my neighbour’s cousin’s brother-in-law’s 15-year-old son who got a good mark in English last term’. When I see this sort of attribution made seriously in a supposedly reliable British newspaper, however, I despair.

It is always possible for someone else with a better knowledge of German to know otherwise, or for anyone at all to check the facts on the internet. Sadly, that is not the worst we get from the Independent. In a nod to truth and research the article concludes:

It is only fair to add that Wikipedia, in its most solemn American fact-checking mode, dismisses what it calls the “jelly doughnut misconception”, maintaining that what Kennedy said was correct all along. But why spoil a good story?

Yes indeed. If you’re a British journalist, why should you allow ‘solemn fact-checking’ to spoil a good story?

Notes:

Following British usage I write about a jam doughnut. This foodstuff is called jelly in American English, and what is jelly in British is jello in American, where a doughnut is a donut. Such is life and language

Link to Wikipedia and the jelly doughnut misconception.

The Kennedy myth is also comprehensively taken to pieces here, though without mentioning Len Deighton.

An academic view (Wikipedia note)

German Foreign Policy: Navigating a New Era. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. p. 52. ISBN 1-58826-168-9.

I do not wish to get into the English/British problem for Engländer. I am an Englishman by birth and what I say above is correct.

(Images of Kennedy and the Berliner from Wikipedia)

Copyright © Peter Harvey 2013, all rights reserved.

Spanish possessive adjectives and menus

On the Language Log Mark Liberman has found a Spanish menu. Such things are notorious, as I have described (here and here), but this has a new twist with squids in his (her, your) ink. As Mark points out, this is ‘the delightful consequences of someone's earnest reliance on a bilingual dictionary’, but how has it happened?

While English has separate possessive adjectives (his, her, its) for the three genders of the third person, Spanish has only one: su. On the other hand, unlike their English counterparts Spanish possessive adjectives change according to the number, and in some cases the gender, of the thing that is possessed: mi libro is my book but mis libros is my books, and nuestro/s libro/s is our book(s), but nuestra/s casa/s is our house(s).

The problem is that su corresponds to the three English third-person forms, but where does the your come from? In Spanish the polite form of address is usted, which takes a third-person verb because it is a contraction of vuestra merced, which is like Your Worship. Thus su/s is your (singular or plural you) as well as his, her and its. As well as that, it is also the possessive adjective for the third-person plural corresponding to their so in this menu Calamares en su tinta should be Squids in their ink. It follows that Spanish su/s has five English equivalents: his, her, its, your (polite) and their. Not surprisingly, this causes difficulty for Spanish-speaking learners of English.

Corpulence and false friends

Once, my Spanish doctor described me as corpulento. Fortunately, as I discovered, this means according to the Gran Diccionario Oxford:

hefty, burly, heavily built;

not as the COED defines corpulent in English:

fat

That was many years ago but today in reporting on the Woolwich attack, El País describes this man as

un hombre negro y corpulento

It’s one of those tricky false friends. Some of them are obvious; it’s easy to know that Spanish carpeta (file, folder) has nothing to do with English carpet but some false friends are so similar in meaning that confusion can easily arise.

The Ballad of the Amateur Grammarian

After what we’ve been through lately it’s surely time to revisit the Ballad of the Amateur Grammarian:

I am the very model of an amateur grammarian
I have a little knowledge and I am authoritarian
But I make no apology for being doctrinarian
We must not plummet to the verbal depths of the barbarian

The Stroppy Grammarian has the rest of this splendid poem here but as a tribute to Nevile Gwynne I will also quote these two lines:

When you crusade for good English, it’s not all doom and gloom you sow
The secret of success is: it’s not who you know; it’s whom you know

(Image – Wikimedia Commons)

Theatres for surgery

Old operating theatre in London

In countries that follow the conventions of British English, the place in a hospital where operations are performed is called an operating theatre. In American English this is known as an operating room.

The British usage comes as a surprise to people not familiar with it but the reason is clear. In the early days of anatomy and surgery operations were infrequent and were seen as educational events, open to other surgeons and students and they were performed in a place where a good number of people could watch what was being done. Of course, in those days there was no concern for sterility, surgeons worked in their street clothes, and a prosperous surgeon could be identified by the blood stains on his clothing.

The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Tulp, Rembrandt

(Images – Wikimedia commons)

British media and the English language

In recent days I have written about the dreadful treatment of the English language in the British media (Telegraph, Guardian, Guardian, BBC). I dealt with the Times in 2008. Now Geoff Pullum takes on the Times again.

Articles about English grammar in UK newspapers tend to exhibit an almost incredible degree of stupidity. In no other subject could such self-contradictory idiocy be accepted, or subjected to so little fact-checking.