Now, I don’t want people to think I’m making fun of non-native speakers of English. I’m aware that if I were to go to China (the place of origin of the business owners), I’d likely be just as error-prone as anybody else, and damnit, I hope people would find them funny too. So, yes, some of the errors I’ll talk about are rather funny. However, I think they’re all of greater Linguistic interest than just “Haha! He’s learning a language entirely different entirely different from his own!”. Here’s just one example:

So, the other day, I went out to dinner with my girlfriend at the local hole-in-the-wall-yet-oh-so-good chinese restaurant. There, I happened to notice something fascinating on the menu board. Written in bold dry erase marker, displayed prominently, was the heading “A la crate“.

Now, this is interesting for me in several ways. First, it’s handwritten, so it’s not just an idle typo caused by some minor keyboard mistakes. Second, this menu board has been up for several months. That means that either nobody’s noticed, or they don’t see a problem. Also, it’s dry erase, so changing it wouldn’t be an issue. Finally, it’s not the error I’d expect.

“A la carte” is an expression which means that something can be ordered separately (on the side), from the French “à la carte” (’according to the (menu) card’). It’s pronounced “ah lah cart”. Now, given the strange spelling (compared to the pronunciation), I wouldn’t be shocked to find “a la cartay” or “ala kart”, but “a la crate” doesn’t sound like the expression at all.

I’m not sure precisely what train of thought would lead a non-English speaker to make that switch. Perhaps the writer had never heard it pronounced, and simply remembered seeing it someplace, then copied it from memory. Perhaps he or she wasn’t experienced with the English writing system and was just copying it from a menu (given that the posted shift schedules are in some variety of Chinese characters, this wouldn’t shock me).

There is another option, though. Maybe they’ve just got a crate of green beans out back that they’re looking to sell. Considering how good their green beans are, I think I’d definitely be interested in making an “a la crate” purchase.

So, I stumbled across an interesting story on fark.com today (link requires totalfark subscription, as they decided not to publish this article). According to this article…

Knowledge of more than one language has been linked by Canadian researchers to a significant delay in the onset of dementia symptoms.

Fluency in two or more languages may be able to stave off cognitive decline because of the mental agility required to juggle them in day-to-day life, principal investigator Ellen Bialystok said.

“How you learn the language probably doesn’t make much difference; how good your grammar is probably doesn’t matter,” she said last night. “What matters is that you have to manage two complete language systems at once.”

According to this study, being bilingual or multilingual seemed to stave off dementia for an additional 4.1 years.

I think this is truly awesome. I’m a firm believer in language learning for fun and profit, but this is icing on the cake. I’d be interested to see if this increase in non-demented time showed up when you compared larger groups of, say, Midwestern Americans (generally painfully monolingual) with Europeans in mixed language areas.

Mind you, this isn’t the first time that the health effects of monolingualism have been discussed. A few years back, a French language school (in France) ran ads featuring the following (tongue-in-cheek) voiceover:

In Japan, very little fat is eaten, and the heart attack rate is lower than in the USA.

In France, a lot of fat is eaten, and the heart attack rate is lower than in the USA.

In India, very little red wine is drunk, and the heart attack rate is lower than in the USA.

In Spain, a lot of red wine is drunk, and the heart attack rate is lower than in the USA.

In Brazil, people have much more sex than in Algeria, and the heart attack rate in both countries is lower than in the USA.

In conclusion:
Eat.
Drink.
Have as much sex as you’d like.
What really kills you is speaking English.

So, get out there and learn another language, if you can. Just think, even if taking it drives you crazy for four years now, at least you know you’ll get four years of sanity back later. Ahh, the wonders of language…

Hello all!

As you’ve likely already noticed, I’m making some changes to the design of the site. As such, in the next few days, you might find the site to be temporarily down (or badly formatted) every once in a while. I encourage you to reload the page in a few minutes if you stumble onto the site during a bad moment, and you’ll likely find any issues fixed. Feedback on the site design is welcome, and nothing’s completely set in stone.

As always, I had to add a Linguistic subtext to the post. So, I lifted part of the headline text straight from this picture, showing a badly translated road sign. Isn’t it amazing what people can come up when they’re translating into a language they’re not familiar with? I just hope my future translation mistakes are as funny…