In English, when you want to express that a container is completely airtight or sealed, you can talk about it being “Hermetically sealed”. Although the term sounds very scientific, the origin is actually rooted not in science, but in Alchemy and Spellcasting.

Hermes Trismegistus (‘Hermes the Thrice Majestic’) was the Mythical founder of both alchemy and astrology, and a God of Ancient Greece. Several very important alchemical texts are attributed to him (including the Emerald Tablet), and for some Greeks, he took the place of both the Greek God Hermes and of Thoth, the Egyptian God of writing and science.

As you may have figured out, origin of “hermetically” comes from the Latin form of Hermes’ name (‘Hermeticus’). Hermes’ name is associated with this concept because he was purported to be able to magically seal a box or chest in such a way that it could never be opened. [Thanks, Wikipedia] Later on, in the 17th century, Hermes’ name became linked to secrets and seals. The term “Hermetically Sealed” was then popularized by an invention called the Magdeburg Hemispheres, which used a vacuum to remain sealed no matter the force applied to take them apart.

So, what sounds like a nice, scientific Latin term is really a relic of Ancient Alchemy. Aren’t word origins awesome?

Some site news

A few major things are happening in the world of Linguistic Mysticism, most of which involve some form of bragging.

I’m proud to report that this site has now surpassed 21,000 unique hits. Thanks to all of you who read the site and link to me in all sorts of different ways. It really does my heart good to know that people enjoy the site.

I’m even more proud to report that I’ve gotten a flurry of publicity and links over yesterday’s post about LOLCode, including (I’m quite proud to say), a link from the Language Log. I’m just bragging, really, but it’s very neat to see that the world’s most famous language bloggers have noticed me.

Speaking of the site, I’m sure some of you have noticed the slightly tweaked layout, design and color scheme. I hope you like them, but I’m certainly open to suggestions, ideas and complaints. Comments and emails are welcome.

Finally, I’m going off to a conference for a few days, but I’ll be back and posting on Monday.

So, thanks again for reading, for linking, and for commenting. I appreciate it.

Now, off to bag up my shampoo and contact solution, hoping they don’t leak in my luggage on the plane. Where’s Hermes and his magical seal when you need him?

Tagged with Conventional Linguistics, Followups, Site News, Words, Phrases, and Idioms | 5 Comments


Periodically, one goes through periods of deep metaphysical malaise. You look around at the world, wondering how such evil could flourish and such suffering could endure. You descend deeper into darkness, your faith in humanity waning, wondering why we were ever born into this cruel world. Then, suddenly, you realize that somebody has written a programming language based off of the dialect of Lolcats/Cat Macros, and your faith in humanity’s inherent good is completely restored.

LOLCode is a computer programming language concept which draws its vocabulary from the recent internet sensation of captioned cat pictures. Although not fully functional yet, it’s still linguistically fascinating on many different levels, and deserves mention.

i has dialect

One of the most interesting parts of this programming language is that it can exist at all, and the fact that it can goes a long way towards establishing the legitimacy of a feline dialect.

Imagine that I wanted to create a programming language based solely off of star wars vocabulary. I would likely start by finding a donor language, whose basic syntax and ideas I would borrow. Then, I would begin to slowly find equivalents and their translations.

Some equivalent/translation pairs might be obvious. ‘Death Star’ for a verb which meant “remove file”, maybe ‘carbonite’ for “pause process”. One could even get a bit more ornate and incorporate some movie quotes. Perhaps “there is an error” could be coded with ‘It’s a Trap!’, and “load this program” could be ‘Commence Primary Ignition’.

However, no matter how nerdy I felt at the time, my plan would be fatally flawed from the outset. Sooner or later, I would find an expression that was too niché (fulfilling just a small purpose) to have a Star Wars equivalent. I’d have to rely on a set canon of phrases to fill in the blanks, and there’s no way to work around it and still maintain the Star Wars theme.

The reason that LOLCode is so awesome is that, based on what I’ve seen so far, it doesn’t seem to have that limit. Based on my highly scientific research at icanhascheezburger.com, it would appear that LOLCat has become a full fledged dialect. There are many captioned images there, each slightly different, and each seems to fit a coherent grammatical pattern. Some linguists are starting to pick up on distinct patterns and grammatical rules, and based on the fact that any sentence can now be LOLCatted, I’m quite tempted to say that LOLCat has become a productive and functional dialect of English.

Because of this productivity of the LOLCat dialect, it would be quite possible for somebody to take any given sentence or idea and put into LOLCat, thus ensuring that LOLCode could, in theory, become fully functional without ever breaking character. This is very exciting, and very awesome.

mai translationz r not straitforwerd

LOLCode is a very special sort of translation. Conventionally, when one sits down to label a cat, the source is an English sentence (I’m yet to find any cats “en mi refrigeradora, comiendo mis comidaz”). However, here, what people are doing is finding equivalents in human/feline language for concepts, verbs, and ideas within a computer language.

Rather than being able to simply translate, they’re forced to create the inflexible, ambiguity free grammar required to tell a computer what to do. This is tough enough to do even using all sorts of abstract symbols, but to do it within LOLCat dialect and syntax is wonderfully difficult. They’re adapting a human language into a dialect, then bending it into a computer language. This is by no means an easy ask, and it’s a far more complex sort of translation than many.

For this alone, I salute the creator and contributors to LOLCode. Although it may seem silly to some, this is really some top-of-the-line linguistic work.

d00d. ur dialect is teh suxx0rs

Perhaps the even interesting than the mere fact that LOLCat has become a translatable dialect is the fact that, well, there are already people who are arguing about the “correct” way to say something in LOLCat. Take, for instance, this post on the LOLCode wiki:

I know VISIBLE is the current output command, but it’s so not LOLCAT. What if we used LOL as the output instead? So, the Count-1 example becomes:

(Code)

I think this works very well, is funny to read and matches actual LOLCAT protocol, sorta. I guess the LOL would be at the end normally.

As a linguist, this is really, really exciting. People are already trying to step in and enforce the “rules” of the LOLCat dialect. It seems like, as a “native speaker” of LOLCat, the author of this page had a distinct intuition about the “proper” means of expressing a concept in this dialect. Truly incredible.

Although this community of people has only arisen recently, I’m very excited at the potential for the later discussions of “proper” LOLCat, and the sociolinguistic goodness sure to arise from it.

o hai. i discussed ur werk.

So, author of (and contributors to) LOLCode: I salute you. This is a unique, wonderful, and groundbreaking project, and I really hope that it continues to yield such fascinating linguistic insight into the future.

Keep up the good work, and don’t let anybody convince you that what you’re building is silly or unnecessary. If there are two things that the world of technology needs, it’s probably humor and cute, fuzzy animals, and really, I can’t think of a better way to combine the two.

Alright, I’m done. kthxbye

Tagged with Computational Linguistics, Conventional Linguistics, Dialects and Idiolects, Language Humor, Language Usage, Language, Computers, and the Internet, Sociolinguistics, Translation and Translation Theory | 32 Comments


Some days, I feel like I’ve spent too much time in Academia and have begun to lose touch with the way the rest of the word understands language. The biggest barrier between the public and heavy grammar description, in my mind, is the terminology.

Each and every native English speaker reading this can use past participles, gerunds, and can distinguish transitive verbs from intransitive verbs, simply by virtue of being native speakers. However, when you couch it in fancy grammar terms, it seems insurmountable or confusing.

Part of my goal here is to make the most mysterious aspects of Linguistics less mysterious to the general public, and to that end, I’d like to discuss and explain a bit of Linguistics and grammar jargon today that you’ll see come up from time to time.

Transitive Verbs and Intransitive Verbs: Not as scary as they sound

First, just for grins, let’s look at the Linguist’s definition of this concept, taken from pg. 171 of Thomas E. Payne’s Describing Morphosyntax:

…
A transitive verb is one that describes a relation between two participants such that one of the participants acts toward or upon the other. An intransitive verb is one that describes a property, state or situation involving only one participant.
…

As you can see, when it’s presented in a very complex, jargon-filled way, it seems very complicated, and thus, intimidating. Really, though, it’s not that difficult a concept.

Sometimes, in the action described by a given verb, one person is doing something to or towards another person. These are verbs like “to hit” (Stacy hit John), “to see” (I see penguins). In linguistics terms, we say that these verbs take an “argument”. This means that in addition to having a subject (a do-er/“agent”) , the verb also has an object (a do-ee/”patient”). When a verb represents somebody doing something to somebody else, it’s called a “transitive verb”.

Intransitive verbs are, as the name implies, not transitive. The actions in intransitive verbs are performed by a subject, but just in general, and are not directed at anybody or anything. Some examples are “to sleep” (I sleep after dark) and “to smile” (He smiled). You’ll never see an intransitive verb with an object (*”I sleep John” or *”I smiled her”). So, if a verb doesn’t take an object, it’s considered “intransitive”.

So, here’s a quick quiz: Are the bolded verbs being used as transitive verbs or intransitive verbs?

1) John ate the cake.
2) Varinia hugged Spartacus.
3) Lisa sang in the shower.
4) The Mona Lisa hangs on the wall.

Answers (No Cheating): Because they both take an object, numbers one and two are transitive, and three and four are not.

You might be wondering why I phrased the question as I did, adding “are the verbs being used as transitive or intransitive verbs”. Well, all but one of the example verbs could be used either transitively or intransitively (‘to hug’ is always transitive). Here are the other possibilities for the other three:

1) John ate quickly last night.
3) Lisa sang “Con te partiro”.
4) I alwayshang paintings with duct tape.

As you can see, some verbs can be used both transitively and intransitively. As a speaker of English, you quickly begin to learn when a given verb can be used either way (like “to eat” or “to sing”), and when you can’t (like “to smile” or “to whip”).

While we’re on the subject and explaining strange grammar terms, there are some verbs that are what linguists call “ditransitive”. This means that they can “take two arguments”, or, in plain terms, they can have a subject and two objects. Examples of verbs like this are “to give” (I gave John a book) and “to bake” (John baked Susie a cake). Ditransitive verbs are common in English, and more information about them is available at the Wikipedia page on Ditransitivity.

Transitivity in Modern Culture

This can be a bit of a dry topic, and I’m sorry I can’t make the explanation more interesting. However, the distinction can be interesting, and can show up in very interesting ways.

Let’s look at the verb “to facebook“. It can have two completely different meanings depending on how it’s used.

Used intransitively, it means ‘to access the facebook’. An example might be the sentence “I was up until 3am facebooking”.

However, when used transitively, it shifts meaning. “to facebook somebody” means ‘to look somebody up or communicate with them via the Facebook’. For instance, you’ll hear sentences like “I facebooked that cute brunette from the LSA convention” or “You should facebook her before you ask her out”.

So, as dry as the explanation may seem, transitivity can definitely be relevant, even to the most grammar-resistant of young internet users.

Conclusion

So, now you understand what the difference is between a transitive verb and an intransitive verb. If you’d like more information, Wikipedia’s transitivity page has some good links, and any linguistics textbook will discuss it in more depth.

In addition to being able to better understand grammar talk, you can also use this newfound skill to better understand when to use “who” versus “whom”. Perhaps the greatest benefit of all is the coolness factor of discussing verb transitivity at parties.

However, I must warn you: Pick up lines involving intransitive verbs and the phrase “I won’t take any argument” will be punished swiftly, decisively, and transitively.

Tagged with Conventional Linguistics, Language Usage, Words, Phrases, and Idioms | 2 Comments

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