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In his 1954 book Language in Relation to a Unified Theory of the Structure of Human Behavior, Kenneth Pike presents a toy language in which meaning is determined by the relative order of the elements. If these expressions have the indicated meanings:

1. los            "It is smoke"
2. mif            "It is a ball"
3. kap            "They are eyes"
4. losmif         "The ball is smoking"
5. miflos         "The smoke is rolling"
6. mifmif         "The ball is rolling"
7. mifmiflos      "The smoke is rolling in round puffs"
8. mifmifkap      "He is rolling his eyes around" or
                  "The eyes are rolling around"
9. losmifkap      "His eyes roam darkly"
10. mifkaplos     "The smoke is trying to escape" or
                  "The smoke looks around"
11. kapmifmif     "I can see the ball rolling"
12. mifkapkap     "He is looking around"
13. losloskap     "His eyes are smoldering menacingly"

… what would be meant by kapmiflos and kapkapkap?

Click for Answer

All Sides

“Conjugated nouns,” offered by Ohio State University linguist Arnold M. Zwicky in Verbatim in 1975:

I steal the keel. I stole the coal. I have stolen the colon.
They choose the hues. They chose the hose. They have chosen the hosen.
They mow the banks of the row. They mowed the banks of the road. They have mown the banks of the Rhone.
I do it with the buoys. I did it with the biddies. I have done it with the bunnies.

Mike Anglin took this up in Word Ways in 1988:

I tear the hair; I tore the whore; I have torn the horn.
I see the sea; I saw the saw; I have seen the scene.
I draw the law; I drew the loo; I have drawn the lawn.
I throw the bow; I threw the boo; I have thrown the bone.
I sink the mink; I sank the manque; I have sunk the monk.
I choose the booze; I chose the bows; I have chosen the bosun.
I weave the leaves; I wove the loaves; I have woven the love-ins.
I forsake the cake; I forsook the cook; I have forsaken the whole mess.

Philip M. Cohen added, “I scare for the mare; I score for the more; I have scorn for the morn.”

Foreign Food

“Ingliz menuyu” presented to writer William Dalrymple at a family restaurant in Turkey in 1986:

SOAP
Ayas soap
Turkish tripte soap
Sheeps foot
Macaront
Water pies

EATS FROM MEAT
Deuner kepab with pi
Kebap with green pe
Kebap in paper
Meat pide
Kebap with mas patato
Samall bits of meat grilled
Almb chops

VEGETABLES
Meat in earthenware stev pot
Stfue goreen pepper
Stuffed squash
Stuffed tomatoes z
Stuffed cabbages lea
Leek with finced meat
Clery

SALAD
Brain salad
Cacik — a drink made ay ay
And cucumber

FRYING PANS
Fried aggs
Scram fried aggs
Scrum fried omlat
Omlat with brain

SWEETS AND RFUITS
Stewed atrawberry
Nightingales nests
Virgin lips
A sweet dish of thinsh of batter with butter
Banane
Meon
Leeches

“It was a difficult choice,” he writes. From In Xanadu, 1989.

Words and Music

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Music_cross-rhythm,_cold_cup_of_tea.PNG
Image: Wikimedia Commons

Wikimedia user Tarquin points out that the natural rhythm of spoken language can be used to teach polyrhythms.

Above: The phrase “cold cup of tea,” spoken naturally, approximates a rhythm of 2 against 3.

Below: The phrase “what atrocious weather” approximates 4 against 3.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Music_cross-rhythm,_what_atrocious_weather.PNG

Roll Call

Remarkable names of real people, collected in the 1980s by John Train:

  • Mac Aroni
  • Cigar Stubbs
  • Legitimate Jones
  • Halibut Justa Fish
  • Daphne Reader’s Digest Taione
  • Halloween Buggage
  • Eucalyptus Yoho
  • Solomon Gemorah
  • Asa Miner
  • Carlos Restrepo Restrepo Restrepo de Restrepo
  • Cranberry Turkey Breckenridge Jr.
  • Demetrius Plick
  • F.G. Vereneseneckockkrockoff
  • Rev. Fountain Wetmore Rainwater
  • Grecian T. Snooze
  • July August September
  • Lobelia Rugtwit Hildebiddle
  • Tarantula Turner
  • Theanderblast Mischgedeigle Sump
  • Theodolphus J. Poontang
  • Vile Albert
  • Welcome Baby Darling

Buggage had a daughter named Easter.

Alienated Majesty

In 2005, Jeremy Winterson bought a bootleg copy of Revenge of the Sith in Shanghai and noticed something wrong with the English subtitles.

The movie’s dialogue had been translated mechanically into Chinese and then translated back again into English, leaving it almost incomprehensible. (A similar disaster had befallen a Portuguese-French phrasebook in 1883.)

Fans replaced the movie’s original audio dialogue with voice actors reading the mistranslated subtitles, and the result is Star War the Third Gathers: Backstroke of the West (highlights above).

The Hollywood Reporter called it a “masterpiece.”

Misc

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Joliet_Illinois_Skyline.jpg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

An Irish riddle: Yonder he is through the stream, a man without a coat, a man without a belt, a man of hard slender legs, it is my woe that I cannot run. Death.

In a Word

vatic
adj. relating to a prophet

futurition
n. future existence

natalitial
adj. of or relating to a person’s birth

aporetic
adj. inclined to raise objections

In 2000, three sisters from Inverness bought a £1 million insurance policy to cover the cost of bringing up the infant Jesus Christ if one of them had a virgin birth.

Simon Burgess, managing director of britishinsurance.com, told the BBC, “The people were concerned about having sufficient funds if they immaculately conceived. It was for caring and bringing up the Christ. We sometimes get weird requests and this is the weirdest we have had.”

The company withdrew the policy in 2006 after objections by the Catholic Church. “The burden of proof that it was Christ had rested with the women and any premium on the insurance was donated to charity, said Mr Burgess.”

Apt

Writing in the Wall Street Journal about long sentences in literature, Laurie Winer offered her thoughts in a single sentence of 854 words:

In order to credit William Faulkner — as the Guinness Book of World Records does — with the longest sentence in literature, one must include, when counting the words in Faulkner’s erratically punctuated, loosely defined ‘sentences,’ lengthy italicized passages that echo what passes through a character’s mind; not to mention parentheses within parentheses; and long sentences connected to sentence fragments by dashes where periods, strictly speaking, should be; as well as run-on paragraphs that begin audaciously with a lower-case letter; and, while Guinness says the longest sentence is a 1,300-word tirade in Absalom, Absalom! there is, by liberal Faulknerian standards, a 1,928-word sentence (beginning ‘They both bore it as though in deliberate flagellant exaltation’) in that book which contains a 1,360-word parenthetical memory/thought that has within it at least 32 traditional sentences; so perhaps Faulkner should not be holding this title after all (from his London office a Guinness editor, Colin Smith, who says he has never seen Absalom, Absalom!, names as his source for the longest sentence entry the 1945 Bookmen’s Bedlam of Literary Oddities, a fustian collection of curiosa by bibliophile Walter Hart Blumenthal, which doesn’t mention Faulkner at all and instead gives the palm for sequential verbosity to Edward Phillips’s Preface to Theatrum Poetarium, written in 1675, for a 1,012-word sentence) even though others, including the writer Malcolm Cowley, cite another Faulkner sentence, found in the story ‘The Bear,’ as among the longest ever written; viz., in his introduction to the story in the 1946 The Portable Faulkner, Mr. Cowley calls this whopper, which begins ‘To him it was as though the ledgers in their scarred cracked leather bindings,’ a 1,800-word sentence when in fact it is, by the most liberal definition, a 1,600-word Faulknerian sentence, which is, under closer scrutiny, a 91-word sentence with no period followed by a new paragraph (indented) beginning with a lower-case letter that contains nothing but a 67-word sentence fragment that is followed by another paragraph fragment, etc. (even Albert Erskine, Faulkner’s editor at Random House, says of the long word group in ‘The Bear’: ‘New sentences begin whether the author puts a period there or not’), which may sound petty, but, if you’re going to call something the longest sentence, the term sentence must have some meaning or else what’s the point of bestowing the title (you may believe, as a confident New York City librarian told me, that the longest sentence in literature is the last 40,000 words of James Joyce’s Ulysses, which does contain two periods but which is really a poem, a chant, or free association that disintegrates at times to a point where it is unrecognisable as formal grammar or even as English (‘… I can see his face clean shaven Frseeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeefrong that train …’) and clings only, as the critic Roy K. Gottfried points out, to a morphemic structure, though while Joyce broke ground and freed his prose from the tyranny of syntax, he did not write a 40,000-word sentence) unless you give it to someone who actually wrote an extremely long sentence, as Marcel Proust did in his seven-volume masterpiece (first published as eight volumes, though Bookmen’s Bedlam calls it eleven and another reference book, Felton & Fowler’s Best, Worst, and Most Unusual, remembers it as sixteen — these record books seem to get none of the numbers right) Remembrance of Things Past, which contains in it a famous, perfect 958-word (in the C.K. Scott Moncrieff translation) sentence (it begins ‘Their honour precarious, their liberty provisional …’) that appears near the start of the fourth book, Sodome et Gomorrhe or, as it is known in English, Cities of the Plain, just after the narrator has witnessed a homosexual encounter between Jupien the tailor and the Baron de Charlus, an encounter that initiates a rumination on the part of our young hero, whose creator was himself a half-Jewish homosexual, on the tenuous situation of the homosexual in society and on how he is like the Jew in respect to the duplicity of his life, seeking to assimilate and yet compelled to remain different, permeated with the pain of the ever-present knowledge that, because of what he is, he gives cause to others to snub him, alienate him, or hate him, and of how this difference, shared by members on the highest and lowest rungs of society, bonds the ambassador to the felon, or the prince to the ruffian, for here is a sentence that does not suffocate the reader with its verbiage (as might the work of certain Teutotonic runners-up for the longest sentence, such as Thomas Bernhard or Hermann Broch); here is a sentence whose length befits its subject matter and its context in the whole; here is a sentence that can be parsed; here is a sentence that should be called the longest in literature (taking into account the possibility that there exist longer grammatical sentences — maybe some crank somewhere wrote a one-sentence book — but we are biased in favor of our titleholder’s also being a genius) by the Guinness people; so we suggest they change their Faulkner entry.

She followed this with a one-word paragraph: “Now.”

(Via Willard R. Espy’s The Word’s Gotten Out, 1989.)

Missing the Mark

“The Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.” — Voltaire

“It has been said that this Minister [the Lord Privy Seal] is neither a Lord, nor a privy, nor a seal.” — Sydney D. Bailey

“Television is a medium, so called because it is neither rare nor well done.” — Ernie Kovacs