Category: language

» I’ve been an avid reader all my life.
» I have a BA in Linguistics.
» I’ve studied seven foreign languages.
» I taught reading for over two years.
» I wrote a grammar curriculum.

Words are really important to me.

The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu

It’s as if Kafka decided to write a book with Carl Sagan, M.C. Escher, and Edwin Abbott Abbott (author of Flatland), and set it in China: You’ve got alienation, disillusionment, despair; satellite dishes listening for alien messages and actually receiving them; complex or impossible geometry, organisms passing from life to death and back again, meditative reflections and echoes of the self; and extrapolation that gratuitously passes beyond three dimensions… all of which is set against the backdrop of the bloody Cultural Revolution and conveyed in English that sounds like fingernails on a chalkboard.

I found it hard to enjoy The Three-Body Problem because I found the book badly written on a macro level as well as a micro level and because I dislike some of the themes. It was only interesting to read because it was really weird. Specifics but no spoilers below.

Continue reading The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu

Healthy yet delicious Korean food

Whoops! The sign in front of this shop in the basement of United Square is implying that healthy Korean food is usually not delicious. I mean, okay, maybe, but that’s not what you want people to be thinking when they’re standing in front of your Korean restaurant at lunchtime.

What if they used “and” instead?

Healthy and delicious Korean food

Well, now it almost sounds as if they’re offering two different kinds of food, healthy Korean food and delicious Korean food, which still implies that “healthy” and “delicious” are incompatible.

They should just put the two problem adjectives in front of Korean with just a comma:

Healthy, delicious Korean food

The reverse order sounds okay too:

Delicious, healthy Korean food

Storewide sale in a narrow store

Far East Plaza is a warren of small fashion shops (and, sadly, fewer bookstores than it was when I arrived in Singapore in 2008).

Whenever I read the signs advertising promotions and discounts, I always laugh because there’s always at least one that says “storewide sale” in front of a narrow little shop.

I’m thinking, “Your store is—what, ten feet wide? So it’s not a very wide sale, is it?”

One could deploy the same pun in the context of discounts offered at “all outlets islandwide”. It’s not a very wide island, in the scheme of things.

Sakura Cuisine’s Saliva Chicken

I posted a photo of this restaurant before because the name seemingly advertised so many kinds of food. They’ve simplified the name—presumably not because they saw my blog post, but who knows?

Now they are promoting a dish they call “Saliva Chicken”.

The Chinese name of the dish is three characters (that’s the traditional one for chicken, not the simplified one):

口水雞
mouth water chicken

Note that there is no sure-fire way to determine how many characters in Chinese correspond to a “word” in English. If you take the first two characters together, they mean “saliva”, because that’s what “mouth water” is.

口水
saliva

The restaurant seems to be offering a chicken dish cooked with saliva (?!), but actually it just wants you to order the chicken dish that makes you salivate. If they’d named it “mouth-watering chicken” in English, the name would have been perfectly unobjectionable.

In my opinion, the problem is not that the Chinese language is hard, or that English is hard, just that translation is hard. All languages assign meanings in arbitrary ways. Why, after all, should we English speakers think that “saliva chicken” sounds gross, but “mouth-watering chicken” sounds delicious? This distinction is not meaningful in Chinese, any more than the distinction between “cow meat” (eew) and “beef” (yum).

Signatrer Dishes

Well, the photo is gorgeous, and the restaurant should definitely get credit for correctly pluralizing “dishes”, but that is not how to spell “signature”.

I think the mistake is a phonetic spelling mistake and not a manual typo. The consonant combination “tr” often sounds like “ch” (listen to yourself saying “treasure” or “train”), so I can imagine someone coming up with this by trying to spell what the word sounds like. The “tu” spelling pattern found in words like “nature/natural”, “picture”, and “adventure” is not all that common.

I took this photo outside a restaurant on Mosque Street in Chinatown. I think the restaurant was Chong Qing Grilled Fish. These onions are probably for flavoring the grilled fish.

In one corner of the menu were a bunch of Chinese characters and the English brand “Classical aftertaste”. I think “Classical flavor” was probably more like what they were aiming for. Or “Classic taste”, maybe.

Shang Antique: Established Since 1984

Although Shang Antique only moved into this unit at the front of Tanglin Shopping Centre sometime within the last year or so, I am willing to believe that the business has existed from 1984 until now. However, they should use “Established” or “Since” and not both!

More below on why the sign is wrong.

Continue reading Shang Antique: Established Since 1984

Ruth Chew books from Japan

Below are photos of the three Ruth Chew books translated into Japanese and published in Japan in 2016, which I just ordered by mail from Amazon.jp.

The Amazon Japan website is easy to use (there’s a button to switch the site to English), and you can check out with USD, but now I keep getting emails (marketing emails, presumably) from Amazon in Japanese!

See below for more photos of these exotic books.

Continue reading Ruth Chew books from Japan

Opaque

Once upon a time, I knew that ‘opaque’ had something to do with whether you can see through something, but I thought it was a synonym of ‘transparent’, not an antonym.

Since most things are not transparent, we don’t use ‘opaque’ nearly as much as ‘transparent’ to describe things; the opaqueness of material objects is assumed by default.

However, ‘opaque’ beautifully describes ideas that are somehow inscrutable—inaccessible because perfectly obstructed by some stark, looming, indifferent, featureless impediment.

If transparency is commonplace and opaqueness is abstract, translucence, the middle child, is enigmatic, shimmering and mystical. It evokes iridescent dragonfly wings and Tiffany windows.

Painstakingly

For the longest time, I understood how to use the word ‘painstakingly’ but I thought that the action embedded in the adverb was ‘staking one’s pain’ on something, which perhaps I thought meant something like ‘betting one’s life’ on something.

Why did I think that? Phonology interfering with morphology.

Once the two words ‘pains’ and ‘taking’ lost the hyphen between them, there was a tendency for the second syllable to absorb the consonant at the end of the first, according to the phonological principle that we automatically maximize syllable onsets. That is, if it’s possible to lump a group of consonants together, we do it at the beginnings of syllables, not at the ends.

In short, because English allows the consonant cluster ‘st’, the morpheme ‘stake’ naturally obtrudes and creates confusion as to the word’s actual underlying components.

Here’s an explanation and another example involving ‘st’.

In truth, the ‘s’ is ambisyllabic—has the quality of ambisyllabicity. It belongs to two syllables at once, even though it started out belonging to a single morpheme.