steepholm

This is a question that has long bothered me, but not enough to research the answer.

Let's say you live in a country with strong libel or hate-speech laws. If you write, for example, "X is a racist", and X has the resources to take matters further, you may well find yourself on the wrong end of a libel suit.

But, there is no law against having particular beliefs or thoughts. You're still allowed to believe that X is a racist, even if you can't write "X is a racist" in a newspaper without getting sued.

So, what about writing the sentence "I believe that X is a racist"?

It's a factual statement, and the fact that it reports on is unactionable (because it's a belief, not a statement). So, why do I get the feeling that X might still sue, and win?

Or, if X wouldn't win, why don't people use the tactic of prepending "I believe" (or equivalent) to every otherwise-actionable statement all the time, like some legal version of Simon Says?

I assume this is a matter that has already been well trodden by lawyers, and maybe philosophers too (phrases like "use-mention distinction" and "performative language" are going through my head even now), but what conclusion have they come to?

Well, I followed Covid, after a two-week gap, with a flu chaser. Apart from a bout of heatstroke in Japan in 2017, and a weird series of nosebleeds in Japan in 2018 (see a pattern here?), these are my first illnesses for goodness knows how long. I assume that Covid lowered my resistance generally.

Since I'd been vaccinated against both, I'd like think that both were milder than they otherwise would have been, but neither was pleasant.

Anyway, in the stilly watches of last night I started pondering the way languages get mixed up in number systems. First Japanese, with its weird mixture of native Japanese and Chinese-derived terms that vary according to context, in ways that no doubt seem obvious and natural if you're brought up in the language but otherwise very arbitrary. And then English, which is much the same except that there we're dealing with an even more bizarre mixture of Old English, Latin and also French.

Anyway, I got to wondering about the etymology of the word "first", which I realised with embarrassment I didn't know anything at all about. It didn't "feel" like French or Latin, but neither was it connected to its corresponding cardinal, "one". Why don't we say "oneth", or similar?

Well, it turns out that not having an ordinal version of the number 1 is pretty common across Indo-European languages - why, I don't know. As for "first", the "st" turns out to be a superlative suffix, the whole thing being something like "the most fore" or "forest" if you want to be confusing - i.e. the one at the front. In German, meanwhile, "erst" does something similar - but using the cognate of our "ere" [=before]. Erst is thus a cousin of "earliest".

This may not be news to you at all, or very boring news, but I found it occasioned a general sliding of the number tiles in my brain into a new configuration, and I rather liked the sensation.

The next question, of course, involves "second". What is that Franco-Latin cuckoo doing in the German nest of English-language ordinals? Well, according to OED:

Old English had no proper ordinal for the number two (like German zweite , Dutch tweede , French deuxième ), the sense being expressed by óðer (see other adj.); this being ambiguous, the French word found early acceptance.

This make sense, I suppose, but I'm getting the impression that Old English was culpably negligent in such matters.

I find the kanji 株 (pron. 'kabu', though sometimes 'shu', 'kuize' or 'kabuta') very interesting. It has numerous meanings, including 'share' (as in company shares), 'strain' (as in a strain of bacteria), and 'stump' (as in tree stump).

What's interesting about it is that, in English, the word 'stock' has the same set of apparently disparate meanings. You can buy stocks in a company, heredity is often referred to in the same terms (plant stocks, etc.), and 'stock' is a word, albeit obselescent, for tree trunks too - as in Milton's 'When all our fathers worshiped stocks and stones'.

Behind all these various meanings of 'stock' I think it's possible to trace the image of some kind of branching family tree going back to a common root. A financial stock, for example, can be seen as a slip taken from the root stock of a company - if you want to look at it like that. That's fairly interesting in itself, but it fascinates me that the same set of connections was made not once but twice, in English and Japanese. Coincidence? Or was there some influence? I don't know, for example, whether share trading was a thing in Japan before the Meiji era. If not, that use of 株 may have been modelled on English usage.

In one of my early German lessons, aged 11, I was charmed to make the discovery that meanings and words don't map neatly onto each other between languages. The trigger was learning that 'aber' and 'sondern' both meant 'but', in different senses. (For anyone unfamiliar with German, 'aber' is the 'I meant to come but the bus was late' sort of 'but', and 'sondern' is the 'He was not cruel but kind' variety.) Although not particularly interested in learning German as such, I was nevertheless intrigued by its ability to highlight semantic distinctions that English hid from me by lazily assigning just one word to a bunch of meanings. Other examples quickly followed, such as the different senses of 'new' implied by 'neuf' (brand new) and 'nouvelle' (new to the speaker). (Yes, I started learning French shortly after.)

I think that experience did a lot to heighten my awareness of semantic nuance generally. However, I quickly forgot both German and French for all practical purposes, though I'm trying to resuscitate the former a little while my Swiss-German lodger is here. (Meanwhile, the household alternates English days and Japanese days, with everyone - except Maisie, who speaks feline throughout - trying to communicate solely in one of those languages.)

Anyway, I just learned another nice example of the type. I'd been saying 'dou ni ka' for 'somehow', but yesterday Rei informed me that I should sometimes have been saying 'naze ka' instead. 'Dou ni ka' is 'somehow' where the outcome is due to one's efforts, as in 'The door was locked, but I somehow managed to get in through the window.' 'Naze ka' is 'somehow' in a more 'just winding up that way' sense, as in 'I left the pub, and somehow forgot my keys.'

This of course poses a question for translators. A sentence such as 'Donald Trump somehow became President' could plausibly be translated into Japanese either way. Someone sympathetic to Trump might choose 'dou ni ka' (suggesting that Trump managed it against the odds), but someone antipathetic might choose 'naze ka' (suggesting that the universe placed him in that position despite his evident unfitness for it). In English, both meanings crouch for employment, and we're quite unlikely even to notice that they pull in different directions.

This is another insomnia post, but its origins go back to 1974, when I first took classes in German. Then, I noticed that the word "ganz" sometimes meant "fairly" or "moderately", and sometimes "very" or "absolutely." It's usually translated as "quite," which has the same characteristic. I thought that an interesting coincidence at the time.

Much more recently, learning Japanese, I found that "kekkou" (けっこう) shared similar characteristics. Perhaps it's a general feature of terms of degree that they're liable to semantic drift, and hence ambiguity.

But how much ambiguity? It occurs to me that there are very strong rules of thumb in place for determining the meaning of "quite." (I speak here of British English - I believe it's a bit different in America.)

In short, moderate adjectives/adverbs are made even more moderate by "quite," while intense adjectives/adverbs are intensified by it. Hence, in "She is quite pretty"="She is fairly pretty," but "She is quite beautiful"="She is very beautiful." You can try this with other pairs: "quite useful" vs. "quite essential," "quite annoyed" vs. "quite apoplectic," etc.

There are of course some borderline cases that have to be sorted out by context. "She was quite insistent," for example.

But then I noticed that "quite" has not two, but four degrees of intensity.

1: "Moderately": It is quite hot today.
2: "Above a certain threshold": He is quite tall.
3: "Extremely": This food is quite delicious."
4: "Absolute": He is quite dead.

Last thought: I wonder how much the British addiction to understatement is involved in this proliferation. For example, if I say of a maths problem, "It's quite tricky," the net meaning is that it's a very difficult problem. So, you might think I was using "quite" in sense 3 above. However, in my head I'd be using it in sense 1, but with a suitable dose of understatement. Likewise, "He is quite tall" might once have meant "He is (only) moderately tall," but a few inches have been added to allow for understatement.

I think that's all I have to say on the matter.

Things are sometimes lost in translation - I understand that. Cultural references can't always easily be preserved. Quite a lot of anime titles in English are not exact translations of the Japanese original, and that's fine.

But there are some cases where they seem to have gone out of their way to shoot themselves in the foot before sticking it in their mouths. And I want to take a moment to rant about a couple here.

Attack on Titan. When I first saw this title, I assumed that it was an about an attack on Titan, the moon of Saturn immortalised by Kurt Vonnegut. Or, if not that, an attack on a titan from Greek mythology. Or just on something very big.

In fact, it's about giants (many of them) attacking a small remnant of humanity. Japanese doesn't have plurals, so there is indeed an ambiguity in the title Shingeki no kyojin (進撃の巨人), but the natural translation is surely "Attack (or Charge) of the Titans"?

Then there's Weathering With You, about a girl who is able to control the weather. In Japanese, this is Tenki no ko 「天気の子」, which translates as Weather Child - a perfectly adequate name in my opinion. Whereas, in English the word "weathering" suggests, at best, a stone being worn away over time. It might be appropriate if the film were a tribute to an aged Baucis and Philemon couple who'd gone through thick and thin together, who'd weathered storms and come out of it a bit weathered themselves. But that is not a good description of the film's teen protagonists. The English title is awkward, unnatural and confusing.

In both those cases, you wonder how much trouble it would have been to find an English speaker to run those titles past.

I also have a third grumble, though in this case it's no fault of the Japanese. The letter at the end of Dragonball Z is, naturally enough, pronounced "zee" by Americans, but in Japanese, where they take their hint from British pronunciation, it's "zetto." What is slightly annoying is that even British and Australian fans invariably pronounce it "zee" - even when they are also fluent in Japanese (yes, Joey the Anime Man, I'm looking at you). What gives with that?

Yes, these are trivial matters, but I have a lot of marking to do, so I had to come here and write about all this instead.

Not long ago I discovered to my surprise that the dialect phrase, "More X than ever the parson preached about," meaning "a lot of X," was unknown to any of my Facebook friends. It was much used by my mother and grandmother, and I've been known to say it myself: it is after all the kind of phrase you can roll round your mouth like a gobstopper. Not that it was a family phrase in the sense of originating with us; one friend managed to track it down in a regional dialect dictionary. But it's died out, it seems, except in a few isolated instances - surviving at this point, perhaps, only in my head and that of my elder brother.

Anyway, noticing that a new version of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was about to air, I wondered whether the idea of the Child Catcher might owe something to the dialect phrase used for truancy officers in early twentieth-century Shropshire:"babby hunter." My great-(great?)-uncle Joe was one such. An unsophisticated man, according to my mother, it was his delight to sit in his outside toilet watching the trains go past at the end of the garden, before wiping his bottom with torn-out pages of What Car. One of her favourite stories was of Uncle Joe coming across one of her schoolfriends, then in her late teens and very much from the right side of the tracks, and pointing his long bony finger at her with the words, "Ah've 'unted thee!"

I just looked up "babby hunter," but Google knows it not. Could this another linguistic isolate?

I dreamt last night that I was speaking a language without ostension (would that be the right word?). What I mean is that, to refer to a plate, for example, you actually had to hold the plate up for inspection.

I found this so interesting in my dream that I woke up, and (unusually) still found it interesting even after that. Thinking about it, the development of ostensive capacity in language must have been a big evolutionary leg-up. That, and deixis. With ostension and deixis, you can do most of the practical things needed for a huntery-gathery life. You can tell stories, too. You can get a long way, in fact, without the need for abstract concepts. Although, of course, you can't dream about languages that lack ostension.

In Japanese, 朝飯前 literally means "before breakfast," or (even more literally) "before the morning meal" - but is used to refer to something that's really easy, a bit like "a piece of cake." The idea is that something so easy that it can be accomplished without the sustenance provided by a full Japanese (rice, miso soup, natto, grilled mackerel, etc., with a health-giving pickled plum on the side) must be child's play indeed.

I suppose it must be a coincidence that the same expression exists in English - although I think it's a little old fashioned now. Think of the Red Queen's "six impossible things before breakfast." Or did Carroll coin it, in fact? It's easy to hear the Red Queen echoed in later usages, such as the "six VCs before breakfast" won on the first day of Gallipoli.

But was "before breakfast" used earlier than the Red Queen? Google Ngram is, as so often, our friend in these situations. In the decades prior to Through the Looking Glass people doing things before breakfast are generally doing them for the sake of their health:

These facts show the importance of breakfasting soon after rising and dressing, at least in many cases. I am fully aware that there are numerous exceptions to this. Some persons not only suffer no injury from but actually appear to be benefited by active exercise taken before breakfast, its effect being with them to create or augment the appetite. But in others the effects are those which I have already stated. I am satisfied from repeated observation that in children disposed to spasmodic and other brain diseases the practice of making them attend school for two hours before breakfast is injurious, and I fully agree therefore with Dr Combe that in boarding schools for the young and growing, who require plenty of sustenance, and are often obliged to rise early, an early breakfast is almost an indispensible condition of health. Epileptics, especially those disposed to morning attacks, should invariably breakfast soon after rising. (Western Journal of Medicine and Surgery, Vol. 6, 1842)

A walk to Priessnitz Quelle by the Silver and Fichten Quelles, and back the same way, is more than three miles, and this is the regular walk before breakfast in winter. In summer the guests usually extend their excursions much farther. As they return many stop to drink again and some return by the douches having become sufficiently warm to take that bath before breakfast. ... In his Graefenberg dishabille the patient, whether he be count, baron, captain, general or priest, forgets all his dignity in the feeling of irrepressible joy and energy produced by the plunge bath and the bracing morning air. A few stalk along the path in stiff and formal dignity as if offended at the liberties taken by the careering sporting winds and the merrily waltzing snow that surround them. It is deeply interesting watch this infinite variety in the guests they ascend the mountain on a cold morning before breakfast stopping now and then to pant and breathe, and look back upon the glorious amphitheatre around them. (Water Cure Journal, 1849)

I think the Red Queen probably did kickstart the meme, at least in the English language. The only person doing an impossible thing before breakfast turns out to be Mozart, who uses that opportunity to write the overture to Don Giovanni:

Showers of crotchets and quavers now gushed from the rapid pen. At times, however, and in the midst of writing, nature would assert her sway and cause the composer to relapse into a nod or two. To these, it is generally pretended, the leading passage in the overture turned, repeated, and modulated into a hundred varied shapes, owed its origin. The somnolent fits, however, soon gave way to the cheerful converse of CONSTANTIA and the excellent punch which formed its accompaniment. The overture was completed before breakfast and the copyists scarcely had time to write out the score. (Proceedings against William Hone before his Trials, 1817)

As for me, all I did was write this rambling Livejournal post.

There are many difficult aspects to learning Japanese as a native English speaker, but I think one of the hardest is word order. Japanese is a language with left-branching syntax, whereas English is most the other way round: think of the difference between "the woman who stole my jacket" and "the my-jacket-stealing woman." While the difference in pattern isn't too hard to grasp in principle, in practice when the sentences get a bit complicated it's hard to construct them properly in real time.

That's why it seems worth recording, as a mark of progress, that yesterday when I was talking to a friend on Skype and she asked me whether I'd taken a photo of the Mona Lisa when I visited the Louvre in 1986, I was able to reply that I thought the postcards on sale in the gift shop were probably clearer than any I could have taken from the back of the crowd around the painting. And I was able to do it in real time:

絵前の人混みの後ろで撮った写真はお店で売っていた葉書よりはっきりじゃないと思う。

Picture-before-crowd-behind-taken photograph is shop-sold-postcard than clear not think.

It may not be brilliant Japanese, but the word order at least is more or less right.

I just learned something rather cool about kanji surnames. One of the main characters in the anime I recently watched has the family name "Takanashi." The "natural" way to write this might be something like 高梨, where the first kanji (taka) means tall, and the second (nashi) pear tree. However, in the case of the anime the name is written "小鳥遊": three kanji (meaning, respectively, "small", "bird" and "play") that have various readings, but none corresponding to the sounds in Takanashi.

Of course, I come from a country where "Featherstonhaugh" is pronounced "Fanshaw" and "Cholmondeley" is "Chumley", so I'm hardly in a position to take umbrage at such heterographic extravagance, but I was still curious as to what was going on.

Someone on Facebook just supplied the answer. Another way to read the sounds in "takanashi" is as "鷹無し" where 鷹 (taka) = "hawk" and 無し (nashi) = "without." The idea is that, if there is no hawk then small birds can play safely - hence, 小鳥遊. Ingenious, huh?

Whether it's a modern innovation or not, I'm not sure (I'd like to know); but I also wonder whether there are any other examples of this type? I can't think of any equivalent in English, although some of the puns in heraldic devices may come close.

I occasionally watch Richard Osman's House of Games with my dinner. The other day they were doing a round where one contestant has to fill in clues (as best they can) to help another contestant guess a thing, person, event, etc.

In this case the answer was a person, and the clues were:

He was born in the ... century.

He is most famous for being ....

He invented ...

The contestant filled in the clues as follows:

He was born in the nineteenth century.

He is most famous for being President of the USA.

He invented the bank note?

Now, one name immediately sprang to my mind - which turned out to be correct. Perhaps the same name has occurred to you?

( Answer under cut )

What's interesting to me is that, despite all the suggested clues being wrong, it was still easy to guess. Which goes to show the degree of second-guessing we do in these situations - not just 'What's right?' but 'What kind of mistakes might this person be expected to make?' The conscious recall of a few facts is so much less impressive than the unconscious back-and-forth that traces someone else's flawed recall - at least, to me.

Remember that bit in Nineteen Eighty-Four where Winston Smith tries to see O'Brien's four fingers as five? It's especially hard, I think, because fingers are countable objects. Had fingerness been a graduated quality, it would have been relatively easy to move from seeing a small degree of fingerness to a larger one, just as the boiling frogs of legend think their bath is tepid. But O'Brien wasn't trying to make it easy.

All kinds of political analogies spring to mind, but this is a linguistic post. Yesterday, as I wandered round Bristol city centre, I made a point of trying to see the green traffic lights as blue - which is what they're called in Japanese. Partly this is because the Japanese language traditionally chops up the colour spectrum differently: the word for green (midori 緑) is of relatively recent date, I've heard, and in the old days blue (ao 青) used to serve for both, and still does in certain contexts. But actually the lights (at least in the UK) are a pretty bluey-green (or greeny blue) anyway, so the Winston-Smith shift wasn't hard to achieve, and soon I was able to train my brain to see them as blue first. It was kind of fun, as a psycho-linguistic experiment while shopping.

I have far greater difficulty seeing the orangey-yellow lights as amber. They have none of amber's lambency, which is its distinctive quality as a material. And, as a colour name - well outside the world of traffic lights, who uses it? How did such a hifalutin colour name get attached to such a quotidian object in the first place, in fact?

In the previous entry I mentioned a distinction that English has but Japanese lacks. Here, to redress the balance, I want to do the opposite, by thinking about the multiple meanings of the word "should."

Take a sentence such as "He should take the bus." It has at least three different meanings, or possible emphases or shades of meaning, if you like.

a) If I want describe someone's expected movements, I might say, "He's not home yet because he'll be at work till 6, but after that he should take the bus home." Here, "should" indicates that that's X's usual practice, the norm, what's to be expected. "The bus should be here in five minutes," is another example of this sort.

b) On the other hand, "should" can also indicate the preferable course of action. "He should take the bus because it's quicker than walking, cheaper than the train," etc.

c) But we can also use "should" in a specifically moral sense. "He should take the bus because it's kinder to the planet than driving."

How sharp are these distinctions? In English we don't need to think about it, because we can say "He should take the bus" in all three cases. In Japanese, however, these require three distinct grammar constructions:

a) 彼はバスを乗るはずです。kare ha basu wo noru hazu desu.

b) 彼はバスを乗る方がいい。kare ha basu wo noru hou ga ii.

c) 彼はバスを乗るべきです。kare ha basu wo noru beki desu.

Of course, it's attractive to be able to make fine distinctions, and it's certainly good to be made to think about distinctions that one's native language tends to gloss over. How much of our sense of what is morally right derives from our sense of what is prudent and/or natural? Japanese makes you think about that - at least, if you are me.

On the other hand, Japanese speakers and English speakers (at any rate UK ones) alike love vagueness and ambiguity, particularly when it comes to ascribing motives, and in this case English is preferable for that important purpose.

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We now return you to your regular maundering.

When trying to explain the niceties of English grammar to my Japanese friends, one of the hardest concepts to get across is the use of the pluperfect tense (the perfect is no pushover either). Japanese only has two tenses, you see: past and present/future. How do you explain the pluperfect to someone coming from that starting place? I normally end up having to draw a little timeline with three positions on it, a bit like this:

X (me now [present])--- Y (me two days ago [simple past]) --- Z (me last week - [pluperfect])

We use the pluperfect, I explain, when X wants to say something about Z from Y's point of view. As, for example, when I (X) talk about how I (Y) realised that I (Z) had forgotten to cancel the milk. At this point their eyes glaze over. Why do we need a whole tense for such an abstruse situation? Would it really be confusing if we just put it in the simple past, i.e.: "I realised I forgot to cancel the milk"?

And of course one does hear that latter construction, increasingly frequently, in speech. Is it also entering written English? This post was occasioned by my seeing an American book called Things I Wish I Knew Before Going To Japan. That gave me a bit of a start. If it had appeared in an essay, I would certainly have corrected it to "Things I Wish I Had Known Before Going to Japan" - but which seems better/more natural to you? Is the pluperfect dying out? If so, is its demise a primarily American phenomenon, as yet? Should we mourn it?

I had no idea until today that the word "Anglo-Saxon" was in any way controversial. Apparently it's because I hang out in the wrong part of the internet.

Anyway, I learned from a colleague that "Anglo-Saxon" has been co-opted by white supremacists in America, and that because of this there are demands that the term be dropped by scholars (e.g. historians of Britain between 500-1100C.E.) generally. My colleague is writing about just that period, and is having difficulty finding acceptable alternatives.

Is that a fair summary of the situation, or am I missing important context?

I feel fairly conflicted. On the one hand, if a term is being used by racists I'd rather avoid it, to avoid a) giving them credibility and b) appearing racist myself.

On the other hand...

a) I'm not sure what alternative terms are both available and widely understood.
b) Racists have also adopted terms such as "English" and "British," but there's no demand to drop them: why is this different? (Also, letting racists effectively dictate what words can be used seems like a kind of capitulation.)
c) There seems something imperialist in the idea that because something is unacceptable in the USA it must be so throughout the world. (I was sad to read that the Japanese government intended to efface the swastika symbol from tourist maps - where it indicates a Buddhist temple - because it might be misinterpreted by Westerners. Isn't this similar?)

Anyway, I'm sure neither of the facts nor of my own opinion, so I'd appreciate any help in clarifying either.

Being made to think about the hidden rules of English is a major side-benefit of learning Japanese. The other day I watched a helpful Youtube video about the passive voice. Now, I'd learned the grammatical form of the Japanese passive a while ago, but I hadn't taken in how differently it's used.

For example, in English we would use the passive for a sentence such as "This castle was built 700 years ago," and the same would be true in Japanese ("このお城が七百年前建てられました。"): so far, so similar. However, the Japanese also tend to use the passive in other places where English speakers would not. Suppose someone stands on your foot in the bus. In English, you might say "Someone stepped on my foot." Grammatically, you can make that same sentence in Japanese ("誰かが私の足を踏ました"), but it sounds pretty unnatural. More likely you'd say "My foot was stood on" ("足が踏まれた"), leaving the "somebody" out altogether.

Of course, that would sound slightly unnatural in English - but then, why don't we also say, "Someone built this castle 700 years ago"? What are the rules in English for determining when the passive is used and when we use a "dummy" marker like "someone"?

I'm sure linguists have thought about it, but I don't know what their answers are.

In honour of the rugby World Cup, Cardiff is full of trilingual posters, indicative of gutsy determination:

This piecemeal Welsh-Japanese-English lexicon of sporting inspiration is of great interest to me, you may be sure. For one thing, it's got me wondering about similarities (if any) between Welsh and Japanese. Of course, I'm slightly hamstrung in this respect due to my almost total ignorance of Welsh - albeit I was pleased to find myself reading and understanding "Y Hen Gorsaf" in Aberystwyth in August without needing to think about it. There's the vague similarity between yma ("here" in Welsh) and ima/今 ("now" - its temporal equivalent - in Japanese), but that's the kind of coincidence one might expect to be thrown up in comparing any two random languages.

Then I thought - front mutation! That's something both languages do quite a lot. For example, the Welsh word for "bridge", "pont," mutates to "bont" when there's something in front of it, as in Dôl-y-bont. Similarly, in Japanese the word for "bridge" is "hashi" (橋), but again this front-mutates to a "bashi," as in "Nihonbashi." You get many other similar mutations, typically from unvoiced to voiced consonants: sa-->za, ka-->ga, etc. English, although it dabbles in medial mutations (e.g. "leaf"-->"leaves"), as far as I know doesn't do front mutations at all.

Also, "popty ping" and "denshi renji" (電子レンジ) are both very cute ways of saying "microwave oven."

I was watching a video the other day about the IPA consonant chart:

As you know, Robert, this chart has two axes: the horizontal one refers to positions in the mouth and vocal tract; the vertical to the various ways that air can be stopped or constricted to make sounds. Plosives, for example, which involve air being completely stopped and then released, can be made at various points in the mouth from the lips to the epiglottis, but the lips can also be used to make other kinds of sound (nasals, trills, etc.).

The shaded parts on the map represent "impossible" sounds - impossible because of the limitations of human anatomy. A sound that requires vibrating a loose flap of skin, for example, can't be made using a part of the mouth that has no such feature.

But it's the empty-yet-unshaded parts that are most interesting. These represent sounds that are physically possible but that have not yet been discovered in any known language. I suppose an obvious comparison is with gaps in the periodic table deliberately left by Mendeleev for others to fill after him. What could be more enticing? Who wouldn't want to be the person to find that element and get to name it? Who wouldn't want to be the first to identify a particular phonetic sound and add it to the IPA map?

I'm reminded also of the white spaces left in nineteenth-century maps of Africa: an enticement to young explorers to go off and 'discover' and name new countries. This isn't entirely coincidental. Some seekers after rare minerals must have been among those who donned pith helmets to go into the Amazonian or African jungles. Seekers after rare phonemes go there now. White space is catnip to imperialists, whatever their brand of imperialism.

Since when was Shinzo Abe's wife the "First Lady" of Japan?

I first saw this usage on the internet a few months ago, and dismissed it as the parochialism of an American reporter, transferring language appropriate to the United States to a context where it didn't fit - like the woman interviewing Nelson Mandela who asked him to comment on an issue "as an African American." (He was too polite to point out her error.) But then I saw it again, and again - and recently I even heard it from a Japanese friend, who confirmed that it was indeed a thing in Japan - even if, as in America, it's a courtesy title rather than a constitutional one.

But, while it makes a kind of sense in the States, where the President is also the head of state, surely it makes no sense in a monarchy? If Akie Abe is the First Lady of Japan, what number lady is Empress Masako?

I was about to write that if Boris Johnson tried to call Carrie Symonds the First Lady a couple of Beefeaters would be round to No. 10 sharpish to let him feel the business end of a pike - but I see that some newspapers have indeed started referring to her, albeit flippantly, as the "First Girlfriend". Will that take root?

I don't know why this even bothers me, since I'm not a royalist, but a) I do find the confusion of presidential and monarchical systems irritating, and b) I would be sorry to think that the whole First Lady meme was spreading, since it was always pretty irredeemably sexist.

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Belief versus Expression

Erstwhile Firsts

Taking Stock

Somehow Becoming President

Quite

Annoying Anime Titles

Child Catchers and Babby Hunters

Ostensibly

Before Breakfast

Japanese Diary 42: The Order of Things

And a Small Bird in a Pear Tree

Wrong but Romantic

Don't it Make My Green Eyes Blue?

"He should take the bus."

Tenses, Past and Present

Anglo-Saxon Attitude

Japanese Diary 41: What do they know of English, who only English know?

Japanese Diary 40: Hidges, Pridges and Bridges

Indiana Jones and the Uvular Approximant

Ladies First

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April 2025

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