Four once more: 23 December 2013

Breathing new life 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.

On disappearing and being disappeared an English misunderstanding of Spanish grammar.

Surprising etymology It can hold great surprises.

A pernicketiness of pedants The bane of the linguist's life.

Arms, legs and limbs What's the difference?

I wish my readers a very Happy Christmas or whatever else you may be celebrating.

Comments

[Warsaw Will]

I would suggest that two of your Four Once More show that one man's 'pedantry' is simply another man's annoyance, and that one man's 'mistake' can also be somebody else's pedantry.

One one hand you suggest that, amongst others, people who find 'awesome' (in its present meaning) annoying are the bane of the linguist's life. But there is surely a difference between finding something annoying and saying it is wrong. Of course language changes, but when you get to my age it is only natural not to like certain newish expressions. Personally, I will never use 'awesome' in this sense, nor will I say 'I'm good', both of which now have different meanings from those I was brought up with. But I don't claim they're wrong, either. Can't people express their preferences without being labelled as pedants? If so, aren't are the linguists in danger of being just as intolerant as the pedants?

On the other hand you say that saying 'being disappeared' is a 'mistake', because it is based on a misunderstanding of Spanish grammar. But we're not talking about its use in Spanish but in how it has been adopted into English. There is surely no necessity for English use to slavishly follow Spanish grammar.

Interestingly, 'were disappeared' occurs in a book by Chilean-Argentinian writer Ariel Dorfman (Feeding on Dreams); in another, on the Grandmothers of the Plazo de Mayo, by Argentinian-born Rita Arditti (Searching for Life); and in a book on events in Chile by Macarena Gómez-Barris (Where memory dwells). All three books seem to have been originally published in English by US academic institutions. Yet these particular Spanish speakers apparently saw no problem.

Given this, and its use by organisations like Human Rights Watch and journalists such as Robert Fisk, isn't insisting that it is a 'mistake' being just as pedantic as people not liking the modern use of 'awesome'?

[Warsaw Will]

And it's not only in English that disappear is used transitively like this. Yes, desaparecer is often used with hacer, but googling "los desaparecieron" brings up quite a lot of examples of this type of construction - "Los detuvieron y los desaparecieron" (www.colectivodeabogados.org), literally "they detained them and disappeared them". But "they" here are undefined, so this type of Spanish construction is often translated into English as a passive - "They were detained and disappeared"; "lo fusilaron" - "He was shot". Here's another, with a slightly different meaning, from El Colombiano - "Herbin Hoyos, afirma que a los secuestrados los desaparecieron con una ley" (they disappeared the hostages with a law - the hostages "were made to disappear" - i.e. were given the status of people who had disappeared)

The use of this construction is neatly summarised in the answer to a question on Yahoo answers - "Porque desaparecieron los aztecas?" (Why did the Aztecs disappear?). To which someone answered - "No desaparecieron, los desaparecieron los españoles" (they didn't disappear, the Spanish disappeared them - or as we'd probably say - they were disappeared by the Spanish)

[Peter Harvey]

Spanish has a passive voice made in exactly the same way as in English (ser + past participle) but it is rarely used. There is an impersonal third person plural as you mention, and also a reflexive construction that has passive rather than true reflexive meaning.

As for the Aztecs, their power was effectively destroyed by smallpox.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aztec#Colonial_period_population_decline

[Warsaw Will]

Your original argument was, I think, that desaparacer is not used transitively, and that desaparecido cannot be used as a passive article. This may be true of Spanish in Spain, but it turns out that the transitive use of desaparecer is atandard in Latin American English, with exactly the sinister meaning you refer to. This is from entry for desaparecer in the Diccionario de Español para Extranjeros (Ediciones SE) -

"3. Amér. Referido a una persona, deterrla y retenerla, negando conocer su paradero" and they give this example "Hace dos años que desaparecieron al hijo de mi amiga".

And for "desparecido/a" - "Persona detonida por los servicios policial sin que haya contancia de su paracido posterior".

So the quote from Mario Vargas LLosa is by no means unique, as you will see if you google "lo/la/las desaparecieron".

Now the best way to translate the construction using indefinite third person into English is often to put it into the passive, in fact in the USO grammar practice book, it is shown together with the passive.

So, far from being a mistake based on a misunderstanding of Spanish grammar, "were disappeared" is a direct translation from Latin American Spanish, albeit putting it into a more suitable form for English. So perhaps your previous remark that "there can be no excuse for this kind of thing" was, well, a bit "previous".

[Warsaw Will]

Correction: that should have been 'passive participle' not 'passive article'. And my point about the Aztecs was grammatical, not historical. That the quote neatly showed desaparecer being used both intransitively and transitively.

[Peter Harvey]

Will, I was puzzled by your response "Your original argument was, I think, that desaparacer is not used transitively, and that desaparecido cannot be used as a passive article." but it seems that with Christmas and New Year I omitted to post this comment which I had drafted.

Will, I agree that language changes and that there are certain expressions that are popular among young people that I would never use, just as my generation use language in a way that was different from my parents’ generation. But my point is not that people find such usage annoying. That was posted at a time when there was a lot of amateur pedantry floating around the internet and what Steve is doing here is not merely expressing his annoyance but claiming an understanding of language that he plainly does not possess. I may perhaps be doing him an injustice but I feel sure from the general tone of the piece that he is unaware that awful is just as etymologically false as awesome and that he uses it without thinking of its origin. My point is not that he is annoyed by it – life is full of minor annoyances that we all grumble about – but that he is claiming an insight into a subject of which he is ignorant and bases that insight on a fallacy. And that is a common problem that we have to face in getting language understood properly.

As for the other point, an Ngram search in Spanish for “fueron desaparecidos, fueron desaparecidas, fue desaparecido, fue desaparecida” shows an increase from practically zero in the 1980s followed by a sharp rise in the mid 90s. Though Google does have a citation from Quevedo (17th century), all the post-1980 internet references that I can find are from Latin America. This expression clearly shot into prominence from nowhere at the time of the Argentinean dictatorship. On further investigation I find that the Royal Academy’s Diccionario panhispánico de dudas (standard usage guide like Fowler for English) says of desaparecer (my translation):

“In American Spanish it is often used as transitive, with the causative sense of ‘to make [something or somebody] disappear’: example from Uruguay 1995; this use is found alongside the normal causative structure to make disappear: example from Chile 1991.” Both examples apparently refer to people being taken unaccountably by the state. Vargas Llosa, who is Peruvian, uses it for the forced disappearance of Poland.

The overall use of this form in Spanish seems rare. Fue desaparecido is the highest on Ngram with 0.000007% and achieves a modest 36,300 ghits.

[Warsaw Will]

While not particularly liking this use of awesome, I totally agree that Steve's comment about "awesome when it isn't" suggests that he hasn't caught up with modern usage. But I was also very pleased to hear Jonathan Dimbleby use it twice in its original sense in two different TV programmes recently. But I would just make two points about the Steve post - you say he's 'claiming an insight into a subject of which he's ignorant'. That's a bit heavy for a quick website comment, isn't it? Does that mean nobody but a linguist can express an opinion about their own language? Sorry, but I don't buy that. He wasn't writing an academic paper, after all. He's not claiming to be an expert in the way, say, Neville Gwynne is. Now he would be a rather fairer target for your scorn than poor old Steve Bloggs.

And secondly your analogy with "awful". Its use as an intensifier has been around for nearly two hundred years, whereas the newer use of "awesome" only really took off in the eighties (at much the same time as 'fueron desaparecidos' and 'lo desaparacerion' ironically). For someone my age, that makes a huge difference.

But didn't you also claim an insight into Spanish based on your knowledge of a dialect that is spoken by less than 10% of Spanish speakers, which also turned out to be incomplete. When you said 'In Spanish, desaparecidos means missing and nothing more' that was simply not the case in Latin American English. In any case, its English usage is what matters, not the original Spanish.

What I'm really saying is that I'm afraid I don't see an awful lot of difference between Steve's remark and your original "Disappearance" post. I don't like pedantry, but you sometimes seem to find it where I don't. And I would have thought that somebody who was so concerned about pedantry in others would be a little more circumspect before criticising what they deem an error, basing it simply on their own experience, without perhaps investigating it very far.

[Peter Harvey]

"When you said 'In Spanish, desaparecidos means missing and nothing more' that was simply not the case in Latin American English."

As I have recognised in my most recent comment.