Logomacy
Between logomachy and logomancy . . .

Set your wayback machine to…well, last February:

Home Run

A group of four coverall-clad workmen were gathered near the elevators the other day, fiddling with a partially disassembled door (all the doors leading into the interior spaces of our building have magnetic locks), their tools spread out around them. I overheard one of them, reporting via his walkie-talkie, “We’re on the lower mezz, fixing your wiring _faux pas_.”

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo.

Is that a valid English sentence? Can you parse it if you haven’t had it explained to you before? (if you haven’t, try it with some extra words to help indicate the clauses: Buffalo buffalo that other Buffalo buffalo buffalo themselves buffalo other Buffalo buffalo that Buffalo buffalo buffalo. It also helps to know the transitive verb buffalo: to intimidate; to deceive or hoodwink; to confuse.)

There’s something that strikes me as fishy about sentences that are theoretically well-formed according to an analysis of the grammar, but no competent speaker could ever actually produce or parse without aid (such as pencil and paper or a computer program). The Buffalo sentence can actually probably be understood if spoken aloud by someone who understands it and punches it up with strategic pauses and stress. But it’s easy to imagine sentences where that’s impossible.

For instance, it seems to be relatively common to say something like:

Or, if you suffer from sesquipedaliaphobia, you can think of your great-grandmother, your great-great-grandmother, your great-great-great-grandmother, and so on, limited only in practice by the number of generations since Eve. - Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct, p. 123

In theory it may be limited only be the number of generations since Eve, but in actual practice I bet it’s limited to no more than will fit comfortably in iconic memory, and more than three is probably somebody deliberately being funny.

A Google search, restricted to English pages, gives:

||”great-(great)+ grand”| 209,000|
||”great-(great)+ grand”| 25,600|
||”great-great-(great)+ grand”| 5,740|
||”great-great-great-great-(great)+ grand”| 933|
||”great-great-great-great-great-(great)+ grand”| 389|
||”great-great-great-great-great-great-(great)+ grand”| 269|
||”great-great-great-great-great-great-great-(great)+ grand”| 196|
||”great-great-great-great-great-great-great-(great)+ grand”| 131|

Beyond that Google drops terms, because the search string is limited to 10

But do people even read these many iterations of “great”? Can they? Again, my guess is that after a small number that they’re able to visually recognize, they either switch to counting (until they tire of that) or just give up, look for the next non-great and continue reading the sentence happily unconcerned with how many generations they’ve skipped. All competent speakers understand the rule that’s being used to generate these sequences, but I think they also all recognize that there comes a point where the speaker is using the rule correctly but breaking a meta-rule that the sentence be intended to be understandable.

Jesse Sheidlower, in Slate, writes:

John Leland kicks off his entertaining new book, Hip: The History, with a seductive little linguistic anecdote. The word hip, he says, derives from the West African language Wolof, and was “cultivated by slaves” from West Africa. Leland goes on to use the etymology of the word as a framing device for part of his argument: Hip—the word and the concept—”was one of the tools Africans developed to negotiate an alien landscape, and one of the legacies they contributed to it.” Sounds fascinating, right?

There’s just one problem: The etymology is wrong.

Mighty weathervanes grow. Naked Translations, in discussing how to translate flip-flop into French has a really neat discussion of the evolution of the French term for weathervane: girouette. A crucial step appears like it might have been an eggcorn. Wirewite became gyrouette, probably because the folk-etymology of gire (turn) + rouette (little wheel) seemed more compelling than the real ancestral Anglo-Norman borrowing of Norse veðrviti (weather + indicator).

From the same post:

Finally, this morning on Radio 4, I heard two men bicker over whether English spelling should be simplified or not. The one against it argued that a word’s spelling gives us a good idea of its etymology and origin, the other argued that a word’s spelling is actually often misleading (see girouette!). However, I think that if you simplify English, then you’ll lose any chance at all of knowing where a word comes from and what its relationship to other words is.

For what it’s worth, I agree. As a word nerd the advantages of simplified spelling often seem to me to be overstated.

In some webcomics like qwantz at least

Tip of the hat to It’s Ablaut Time for pointing out the amusingly-named MorBo bibliography of morphology literature at the University of Bologna.

Calacirya | Riddles

It’s cheating if you remember them from the Hobbit.