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.

And another thing…

On the Singapore classical music station, I am hearing the phrase “as well as” used in place of “and” before the last item in a series.

…an opera full of passion, sacrifice as well as beautiful arias…

This misuse of “as well as” irks me at least as much as the host’s pronunciation of “genres” as “John Rez”, which I didn’t even understand the first twenty times I heard him say it.

Let’s look at another example with “as well as”.

I read fantasy, science-fiction, romance novels, as well as literary fiction.

This is just a list of four items. The sentence should just use “and”.

I read fantasy, science-fiction, romance novels, and literary fiction.

If the sentence is going to contain “as well as”, then it should say:

I read fantasy, science-fiction, and romance novels, as well as literary fiction.

Now the sentence isn’t just a list; it means, “Of course I read literary fiction. However, in addition, I also read fantasy, science-fiction, and romance novels!” The list of three surprising genres is followed by the one obvious genre separated by the phrase “as well as”.

Here’s another correct example of how to use the phrase “as well as”:

I, as well as my dad, am allergic to cats.

This sentence doesn’t just mean, “My dad and I are allergic to cats.” It means, “Not only is my dad allergic to cats, but guess what? I am, too!”

And yes, though maybe you think the verb sounds weird, coming, as it does, right after “my dad”, it should indeed be “am” and not “is” or “are”.

The upshot here is that the phrase “as well as” is NOT a fancier version of the word “and”. When I hear it used that way, the I feel like something is missing, unbalanced, and off-kilter.

But hey, don’t rely on my intuition. Ask the internet. Here is a particularly good set of explanations that adds a surprising note about -ing verbs, as well as upholding what I’ve already said:

http://site.uit.no/english/grammar/aswellas/

Do’s and Taboos of Using English around the World by Roger E. Axtell

Basically, this book is full of meaningless trivia on a subject I happen to like. It was amusing but not deep or scholarly.

I learned, among other things, that:

  • “blimey” is a contraction of “God blind me!” (60)
  • “biro” is pronounced “by-row” and refers to the kind of ballpoint pen invented by Lazlo Biro (60)
  • to express disbelief in German, say “My hamster is scrubbing the floor.” (88)

When and Why I Read It

Bought it cheap in Colorado.

Genre: nonfiction (reference / language)
Date started / date finished:  08-Jul-16 to 17-Jul-16
Length: 202 pages
ISBN: 9780785825289 (hardcover)
Originally published in: 1995
Amazon link: Do’s and Taboos of Using English around the World

No Admin Fee and GST

This is a sticker on the inside of the window in a taxi. It says:

NO ADMIN FEE & GST
when you pay with Dash!

Even assuming you like the ampersand in this font (I don’t), the conjunction needed here is ‘or’.

(No admin fee) and (no GST) => No (admin fee or GST)

The sign that says “no food and drinks” is also wrong for the same reason.

However, “Don’t leave your handphone & wallet behind”, assuming we find ‘handphone’ acceptable, sounds fine, since ‘handphone’ and ‘wallet’ can easily be considered a pair of items that would be forgotten together.

dont-leave-your
“Record shows 50% of the reported lost cases in taxi are Handphones and Wallets” on the other hand, has several problems…

I would rewrite that as follows.

Records show that 50% of the items reported lost in taxis are mobile phones and wallets.

On the other hand, I like the ampersand on this half of the sign much better. Even if it is crowding the descender on that letter ‘y’.

How to punctuate dialog

Good writing is self-effacing.

Personally, when I’m critiquing fiction, I find it very, very difficult to evaluate things like character, plot, and pacing if there are a lot of distracting technical errors.

One easily fixable error I often see is this one.

how-to-punctuate-dialog

Whenever I see this mistake, I feel as if I have been stabbed in the eye.

One Mississippi

That’s the name of a folk song sung by Steve Seskin*. The chorus goes:

The seconds turn to minutes
The minutes into hours
The hours into long, lonely days
This waitin’ on you, darlin’
Is takin’ all my will power
I keep countin’ all the moments you’re away
One Mississippi, two Mississippi
Without you, girl, I’m blue Mississippi.

It struck me that people who don’t live in the U.S. probably don’t use ‘Mississippi’ to count the passing of seconds. The only other placeholder I could think of was ‘one hundred’. But there are lots! What’s strange is that some have two syllables, some have three, some have four, and some have five, so surely they’re not all equally accurate…

I wonder what words people use in other languages?

*I met Steve Seskin while I was on Qwest West in 1998.

MYE: Meiyuer Cables

The trademarked name on this “High-speed USB 2.0 extension cable” is “MYE Meiyuer Cables”.

Students of Romance languages might be forgiven for thinking ‘Meiyuer’ is a kreative spelling of the word ‘meilleur’ meaning ‘better’ in French, because that double ‘ll’ sounds like a ‘y’ and it’s a plausible positive-connotation company name.

  • French: meilleur
  • Spanish: mejor
  • Italian: meglio
  • German: besser
  • Dutch: beter
  • Danish: bedre
  • English: better (ameliorate means ‘to make better’—further proof that English is schizophrenic)

Okay, so probably this Chinese company did not choose a Romance language name. What does it mean? I dunno, let’s ask Line Dict.

meiyuer-cables-translation

This tool, which I love, by the way, is coming up with the name of an opera composer named Étienne Nicolas Méhul, because ‘Meiyuer’ is presumably as close a transliteration as is possible. But I guess I didn’t really expect the dictionary to tell me the meaning of a brand name.

Probably the company name uses ‘měiyù’ meaning ‘good reputation’? But it could also be using the characters for ‘beautiful jade’… Hang on, why don’t I just look up Meiyuer, the company, online?

Ohhhh, now I’m getting flashbacks of the editing/fact-checking job I had that involved looking at a lot of Chinese companies’ websites. They’re practically all red and clunky looking with ugly fonts, bad punctuation and English that ranges from unintelligible to unintentionally poetic…

meiyuer-cables-logo

Anyway, this company’s name in characters is 美鱼儿, which is pronounced ‘měiyúér’, and in English apparently means ‘beautiful fish child’. (I’m still mystified.)

‘(Little) Mermaid’ is close (but no cigar).

(小)美人鱼
(xiǎo)mĕirényú

Interestingly, it seems the company uses both the traditional and simplified versions of the characters… maybe because Guangdong borders Hong Kong, where traditional characters are the norm.

The point of all this was to say that in Singapore, I’ve noticed a tendency to make acronyms using one letter for each syllable rather than each word, because in Chinese, all the syllables are (more or less) considered separate words.

For example, if you look at the word Meiyuer, you probably wouldn’t split it into MYE, right? Unless you knew pinyin, in which case it’s obviously Mei Yu Er, even though they didn’t write it that way.

Oh, you thought I had something to say about the cable itself?

Nope.

Wear and use your personal protective equipments

Pluralized uncountable nouns are a pet peeve of mine. The one that’s most frequently publicly wrong is ‘equipments’ because it’s posted at every construction site, and there are a lot of construction sites.

equipments
apparels
cutleries
furnitures
cuisines (meaning ‘dishes’)
slangs, jargons

I’ve also noticed uncountable nouns being used in the singular, which is just as wrong.

a bread (meaning ‘a bun or roll’)
a paper (meaning ‘a piece of paper’)

There are many words that are countable about half the time and uncountable about half the time, which I’m sure doesn’t tend to help people to understand the underlying distinction.

effort / efforts
content / contents
experience / experiences
praise / praises
detail / details
instruction / instructions
input / inputs
dialogue / dialogues

Recently I saw an email from a marketing agency in which the text of the ads was referred to as ‘ad copies’ instead of ‘ad copy’. Ack, no.

Fighting such errors may be impossible in the long run, because in principle there’s no reason you shouldn’t be able to say ‘equipments’, and obviously people here already feel perfectly free to do so. Until uncountable nouns die off completely, though, you’re better off knowing how to use them correctly.

Main Wait

National Heart Centre Singapore logo

  • Nice new 12-story building? Check.
  • Nifty quasi-anatomical logo? Check.
  • Building signs checked by English expert? Nope.

The signs in this waiting area at the National Heart Centre Singapore say “Main Wait” when they should say something like “Main Waiting Area”.

To be fair, “wait” can be a noun as well as a verb (but I don’t think it means what you think it means). Also, the signs are totally intelligible, so… close enough, I guess!

No, actually the real problem is that there’s ample waiting space in some parts of the building and not enough in others. My guess is, it’s easy to design a building, but hard to design a building that is used by people. Which is every building, actually.

The Origins of Chinese Characters by Wang Hongyuan

Ever wondered what etymology is like in the Chinese language?

It’s like this.

origins-of-chinese-characters-interior

So, is Chinese ‘pictographic’?

Well, does the ‘zhōng’ in ‘Zhōngguó’ (‘China’) look like part of a sundial? Because that’s what it is.

Drawing of a pole with some decorative streamers. The pole was placed in the center of a circle or dial so that a shadow cast by the sun on a calibrated dial could measure solar time—much like the gnomon or style of a sundial.

So yeah, ‘zhōng’ means ‘middle’ (as in ‘middle kingdom’), but it’s not because the line passes through the middle of the box. Rather, it’s because the whole stick thing (which has lost its notably asymmetrical streamers) is in the middle of a sundial.

I don’t know enough Chinese to benefit much from this book, but here and there I found something interesting, and the whole things reinforces the idea that the Chinese writing system is old, old, old. Examining how the characters evolved is like looking back in time. Reading the book made me feel like an archaeologist holding up a burning torch to peer at mysterious lines scrawled on the walls of a cave. The oldest characters embody the basic concepts of the society in which they were invented: food and shelter, war, birth and life and death…

When and Why I Read It

It was a gift to me from my husband’s parents years ago (sometime between 2003 and 2005). At the time, it was even more over my head than it is now, so it just sat there.

Frankly, I’m shocked that it’s still in print. It’s even got three reviews on Amazon. And since it’s selling at at a moderate price and a 15% discount, it’s not one of those print-on-demand inventory items.

Genre: Non-fiction (language, Chinese)
Date started / date finished:  22-Mar-16 to 11-May-16
Length: 200 pages
ISBN: 7800522431 (paperback)
Originally published in: 1993
Amazon link: The Origins of Chinese Characters