"Reëlection" - does English use the diaeresis?
In the linked-to article on the New Yorker, Richard Socarides uses the spelling “reëlection”. This is the first time I’ve seen the diaeresis, the two points over the e, used in this fashion.
Germans call it Umlaut, but use it primarily to modify the sound of vowels. In Dutch we call it a ‘trema’ and use it exclusively to separate two adjoining monopthong vowels, preventing them from being parsed as a dipthong.
Concretely, that means exactly what’s happening here: the diaeresis over the second e notifies the reader that the word is re/e/lec/tion, not reel/ec/tion.
Since Dutch borrows the German habit of combining related words, we need this diacritic pretty badly, though it’s not such a huge problem since the late-’90s spelling reform.
A classic example is the word ‘reeëëer’, a bizarre word even by Dutch standards. A ‘ree’ is a deer, ‘eer’ is honor, and they’re joined by another e to make the word flow. “Honor of deer / a deer”. The result is that the connecting e needs a trema to separate it, and the first e in ‘eer’ also needs separating. The spelling reform chilled it out somewhat and now it’s ’ reeëneer’, which is obviously miles better.
Anyway: I’ve never seen this diacritic used like this in English.
Socarides, who penned the author, was an adviser to Clinton, so I can only assume he enjoyed a robust education.
So, to my American friends, the question: what’s up with this? Is this use of the diaeresis old-fashioned, or restricted to certain educational institutions?
Click here, roll over: ambiguity and Dutch
Followup to the previous piece on the new ugliest word in my language, I’d like to expand a bit on this statement:
Dutch is a merchants’ language, harshly deriding ambiguity and far favoring clarity over beauty. This isn’t to say it lacks grace, simply that our verbal eloquence comes from idiom rather than vocabulary.
An example of this just popped on my screen. A car ad with a clip of a dog whos flews are fluttering in the wind with ‘roll over for more’ underneath it. At least, that’s what I assume should be there, since the ad was creepily localized for me: ‘Erover rollen voor meer’. Let me break this down, since it illustrates the above point precisely.
Er is a particle that’s very difficult to describe in English, because, somewhat contrary to my point here, ‘er’ is hugely ambiguous. Germans and, I presume, Scandinavians will be familiar with its equivalents in their language. The French have a very similar word in y and while I don’t know its equivalent in Spanish, ya is similarly hard to define.
Where ya refers to time (I’m told it can mean ‘already’, ‘still’, ‘now’ or even sometimes ‘later’), er is very much about place. ‘Erover’, then, can be read as ‘over it’ which would make the sentence in the ad: ‘Roll over it for more’. This reads just fine in English, but it’s frustrating to read in Dutch.
It’s too ambiguous, you see. What’s ‘it’, and what are you ‘rolling over’ it?
This isn’t even the right way to construct an imperative sentence. You can often get away with setting an imperative up like this, but only if the subject and object are clear.
‘Click here’, for example, is ‘klik hier’ and that one’s totally fine. I’m being told to ‘click’, which I know how to do, and I’m being told where to do it. No problem. So you could also structure it like the earlier example: ‘hier klikken’. Which one is chosen by a copyeditor will depend on the intende audience: depending on age and cultural background, different Dutch folks will consider one ruder than the other.
In both cases the instruction will be perceived as ruder than it would in English. While in English ‘click here’ is at once an imperative and an implicit invitation, Dutch is profoundly un-weasely and the imperative is always very firm and commanding.
So the copyeditors tried to match the tone of the English phrase ‘roll over for more’ despite the fact that Dutch doesn’t support that particular register, and settled for an ambiguous syntax as well.
Apparently they want us to put the screen on the floor, lean back on it and rock side to side over the ad to learn more.
Fine. Have it your way!
The new ugliest word in Dutch: “gelikete”
In June I railed against ‘geüpdated’, the neerlandified word for ‘updated’. Now there’s a new contender: ‘gelikete’, meaning ‘liked’ in the context of Facebook’s like button.
The verb ‘to like’ knows no translation in Dutch. No surprise; even among its Germanic siblings the Dutch language has a particular paucity in vocabulary, so it certainly can’t hold a candle to its close cousin English, which suckles at the teats of various Francic, Celtic, Germanic and Latin sources.
Dutch is a merchants’ language, harshly deriding ambiguity and far favoring clarity over beauty. This isn’t to say it lacks grace, simply that our verbal eloquence comes from idiom rather than vocabulary.
Usually this means that a single word in Dutch (especially adjectives and adverbs) covers a whole host of English counterparts. ‘Mooi’ can mean ‘beautiful’, ‘pretty’, ‘handsome’, and even ‘convenient’, ‘good’ or ‘fairly’, depending on the context and the tone of the sentence.
With the English verb ‘like’ the situation is reversed. To tell someone ‘I like you’ you’d say ‘ik vind je leuk’ or ‘ik mag je graag’ or ‘je mag er zijn’ depending on the exact nature of your liking.
This makes the ‘like’ button rather problematic. There’s no substitute for it. Fortunately, pretty much everyone here speaks decent English (and most can hold their own in French or German) so there’s no issue with translating that button as ‘like’. We’re used to absorbing useful words from other languages (a habit for which our Flemish neighbours mock us).
Just as in English, verbs can be used as adjectives. Either the present participle (a rolling stone) or the past participle (a broken vase) will do just fine, but this lands us in murky waters when we use loan words.
‘Liked articles’ become ‘gelikete artikelen’ and since we don’t have a current equivalent to ‘item’ we turn ‘liked items’ into ‘gelikete items’. This is worse than ‘geüpdated’ because that one at least offers some guidance as to how it should be pronounced.
My disapproval is only limited to the written form, mind. There’s no ambiguity or terrible inelegance when the word’s used conversationally; just another bead in the colorful multi-lingual patchwork of daily discourse. But on paper? Yuck.
Collective nouns are awesome.
My favorites include:
- an unkindness of ravens
- a parliament of rooks
- a rake of colts
- a knot of toads
- a busyness of ferrets
- a skulk of foxes
- a leap of leopards
- a blush of boys (don’t judge me)
- a zeal of zebras
Logical punctuation: Should we start placing commas outside quotation marks?
Conan’s staffers’ kids say the darndest things. Unfortunately, in this case “darndest” means “incriminating”.
Slate’s Ben Yagoda makes a good case for ‘logical’ or British-style punctuation rules when it comes to punctuating a sentence with quoted portions:
I practice British spelling in most communication, as that’s how I was educated, but for the publications I’m involved in I mandate American spelling and associated punctuation rules. However, I’d never considered this aspect of American punctuation: when a sentence contains a quoted portion, which appears at the end of a sentence or clause, the closing punctuation mark for that sentence or clause goes inside the closing quote mark of the quotation.
This is of course distinct from dialogue, quoted or fictitious, where the punctuation is part of the sentence being uttered — a distinction Yagoda fails to clarify in this article.
“I’m feeling a mite peckish,” she said. “I could do with something to eat.”
That’s dialogue; it’s punctuated specifically to suit the sentence being quoted.
Describing herself as “a mite peckish”, she said she could do with “something to eat”.
And that’s a sentence with quoted fragments. Because these fragments aren’t themselves sentences, and are only little self-contained units, they should be treated no differently from any other word — quote marks notwithstanding.
I’m actually surprised that this is apparently done differently in the US (at least historically) and I’m glad to see the language gradually self-correcting to a more logical rule.
While I’m all for the preservation of language, even its exigencies, this is clearly a case where historical continuity is damaging to clarity.
It’s important to carefully curate the evolution of language, spoken and written, to prevent divergence and allow people from different places in a country, and even different centuries, to communicate clearly through the written word.
When a rule changes or is entirely abandoned in favor of clearer communication, even marginally so, that’s something worth standing behind.
Details matter.
- Alex
Battle Power vs Magic Love Babies: girls’ and boys’ toy advertising
Admittedly very quick and dirty research, sampling a few dozen television commercials, but still.
Boys: http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/3372921/Words_Used_to_Advertise_Boys%27_Toys
Girls:http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/3372936/Words_Used_in_Advertising_for_Girls%27_Toys
Genealogy of Eurasian languages, Chaucer and Eddie Izzard. #languagenerd
I once saw an episode of the BBC program ‘All Things British’ (wherein former Action Transvestite Eddie Izzard traces the foreign roots of various aspects of British culture) that dealt with the English language and its origins on the mainland. I’ll get back to that in a bit.
The remaining influence of the Roman invasion of the island then known as Albion, and later the Norman and Saxon occupations left a hodgepodge of a language that, really, has far too many words. For example: royal (related to French ‘roi’), kingly (related to German ‘König’) and regal (related to Latin ‘rex’) all mean the same thing!
Dutch is the closest living relative to English. I grew up Dutch-English bilingual, and we learn German and French in high school here, so when I first read the Canterbury tales it felt as if I were Harry Potter and realized I could enderstand snakes. If I turned my head like this, closed oned eye, squinted the other and bit my tongue just right, I could easily parse eighty percent of any passage. The biggest help was that the rhyming scheme could inform me how a word was expected to be pronounced, which allowed me to pick the language it most probably sourced.
Here’s the first lines:
Wan, that April, with his shores sooth,
The droghte of March, hat perched to the rote,
(note that these are not the officially correct lines; this is how they appeared in the version I read)
Soothing shores don’t make much sense for April, but March reveals himself more clearly. A dry month, parched to the root… and if that’s how they pronounced rote, then maybe sooth sounded more like soot. If you then guess that this is cognate to Dutch zoet, meaning sweet, then shores makes sense as showers. Sweet April showers? That’s imagery that survives to this day. And droghte is so clearly related to Dutch droogte that it didn’t occur to me until later that it might have been pronounced drought.
There was a lot of guesswork and likely a lot of false friendship, but it was a fascinating experience that greatly informed how I perceive the cultures of the world as intertwining threads of a single fabric. Most curious of course are the nonsensical frays and knots, like Finnish and Hungarian (the Finno-Ugric isolates) which don’t connect to anything.
Anyway, Eddie Izzard. In this episode of All Thing British he went down to Oxbridge of Camford or some such to take a crash course in Middle English (despite what the above tree would have you believe, Middle Dutch and Middle English still had quite a few linguistic dalliances) to learn conversational and mercantile phrases. On a plane he hopped and arrived at Schiphol airport, the zenith of my daily commute, after which he traveled north, to that strange province of Friesland.
In Friesland they speak Frys, a language ostensibly related to Dutch but so alien that we can’t understand each other, under most circumstances. The Frysian populace actually campaigned for quite a few decades to have Frys reclassified as a language on its own right rather than merely a Dutch dialect.
So our Eddie goes up to a Frysian farmer and uses his Middle English to try and purchase a cow… and amazingly, succeeds. Quick-witted, he observed the patient farmer’s responses and figured out how the patterns of his phrases connected to the patterns of Frys — for instance, the Middle English for cow is pronounced more like kew whereas the Frys actually sounds completely like the modern English cow.
And so he spent the rest of the episode followed by an inquisitive calf on a rope.
