Screenwriters Latin Up

Last week on Lost, we learned that the mysterious characters known as the Others speak Latin — at least, when they don’t want to be understood in the presence of non-Others. A couple of Latin enthusiasts have blogged about this. This makes the third time that I know of that a TV show has made use of Latin this season.

First, Bob Kennedy at piloklok noted a truly pitiful translation into Latin that appeared in a November episode of the since-canceled Pushing Daisies. It was even worse than this:

Kennedy has a pretty good idea how the writers arrived at such a sorry excuse for a translation, and concludes that the writers for Pushing Daisies were just plain lazy. I’m inclined to agree, based on the diligence I know first-class staff writers are capable of when they need some dialogue translated into Latin. I happen to know one who found himself in that situation not too long ago; he took a crack at the translation, and then sent an email to his brother, who majored in classics in college, saying:

Hey, it looks like the Latin-speaking dudes are going to be recurring on the show, so I might be asking you to check my Latin from time to time. Here’s the latest: …

“We have another candidate.”
Femina candidata alia habemus.

(The “candidate” in question is a woman, and I couldn’t find a noun in Latin for candidate, so I used the adjective candidatus/a/um along with femina. The woman is a (non-consensual) candidate for an experimental procedure, not for a candidate for office, in case that makes a difference.)

“I won’t let you down” (disappoint you)
Te non frustrabo.

-Glen

Jasika Nicole plays a linguist on TV.

These Latin-speaking gentlemen Glen refers to first appeared on an episode where their overheard conversation was translated by the character of Astrid (not Astird) Farnsworth, a linguistics major. I’ve forgotten a lot of Latin vocabulary, and I’m afraid all my reading in it wasn’t enough to give me an intuitive feel for idiomatic word order, but at least I could check up on candidata and frustrabo. I wrote back:

Question: Are these Latin-speaking guys in an ancient-Rome flashback, and to be expected to speak good Latin? Or are they present-day guys who, for their own strange reasons, speak Latin (like maybe Catholic priests)? If the latter, it might be a bit easier to translate, since mistakes are to be expected in their attempts to speak Latin as a nonnative language.

‘habemus’ seems fine. The rest should be in the accusative case: ‘aliam’. Now as for ‘femina’, I don’t see why that’s needed, since the feminine ending of ‘candidatam’ would do the job. Also ‘femina’ is a noun, not an adjective, and I don’t think Latin compounding works like English compounding does. If you must have it, I’d say use the adjective ‘femineam’ (stress on second syllable, since the penultimate ‘e’ is short). Regarding ‘candidatam’, my dictionary has that strictly as a candidate for office (recall that we’re hundreds of years closer to the original meaning of ‘clothed in white’, which I guess is what political candidates did). I tried ‘prospect’ and got the word for hope ’spes’, but that didn’t seem to be what you’re looking for. But if these are modern guys trying to speak Latin, they’d probably light upon ‘candidatam’ just like you did, so maybe it would work.

“I won’t let you down”:
Non tibi deero. (I won’t fail, fall short, disappoint)
Non te destitues. (I won’t abandon you, leave you in the lurch.)

I now open the floor for those with better Latin than mine to tell me what I should have said. Glen, BTW, smacked himself in the forehead for forgetting to put candidata into the accusative case. He made good grades in high school Latin, and definitely knew better. Anyway, what I did was essentially what professional writers tell you to do when using a thesaurus:

1. Find your synonym in the thesaurus, or translation in the English-to-target-language section of the translation dictionary.
2. Look the word up in a dictionary or the target-language-to-English section of the translation dictionary, to minimize your chances of using the word in the wrong context or in an unidiomatic collocation.

I was glad I did this with “let down”, since when I looked up the translations deesse and destituere in the Latin-to-English section, I found they had different shades of meaning. Deesse seemed to mean more of an accidental failure, while destituere seemed to imply a deliberate abandonment. The same went for frustrare, which I found when I looked up “disappoint”.

Knowing all the connotations of English words that don’t make it into the regular dictionaries, let alone translation dictionaries, I can’t have confidence that anything I come up with would truly sound normal to an ancient Latin speaker, but it’s good enough that Glen shouldn’t have cause for embarrassment like the Pushing Daisies writers do. (At least, not on the grounds of his Latin translations!)

Now I know what all you Fringe fans are thinking: “I’ve watched every episode and I don’t remember any exchange like that!” Well, unfortunately, that dialogue, and in fact the Latin-speaking guys themselves, were subsequently cut from the show. But Glen’s still writing for Fringe, and last night’s episode even has him (and his writing partner and one David H. Goodman) credited as the writers! Optime, mi frater.

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December Links

Gabe Doyle at Motivated Grammar takes on the issue of who(m) vs. that to introduce relative clauses describing a human (or at least animate) being. He has gathered data, and found that both are used, and that there’s a clear preference on when to use which word. (Hat tip: Craig Lancaster’s Watch Yer Language.)

Back in November, James Kilpatrick published another poorly thought-out proclamation: that which “rarely accomplishes anything not already well-served by that.” So now it’s not enough to use which only in nonrestrictive relative clauses describing nonhuman things; we’re supposed to avoid it altogether? Well, not altogether: Kilpatrick hedges with the word rarely. Mike Geis (the Language Guy) points out four cases where which cannot be replaced by that, and that’s without even mentioning which as the object of a preposition, as in the destination to which we were headed. Actually, the which in this one could be replaced by that, but not without changing the syntax a bit as well: the destination that we were headed to. I wonder which version Kilpatrick prefers?

Tom Hinkle at Language Hack has two interesting posts about teaching Spanish pronouns to English speakers, and why current textbooks are doing it wrong.

Poisonous Syntax

Doug has recently been reading every book in Brian Jacques’s Redwall series that he can get his hands on. Earlier this week, he was telling me about scenes in several of the books in which one character is trying to poison another. In one, the poisoner pours the drink out of the same bottle for himself and the character to be poisoned, having wiped poison on the rim of the other’s glass. I told him of a similar scene in this book, where two characters each eat half of a single, freshly cut peach, and one dies of poisoning because the knife that sliced the peach was poisoned on one side of the blade. Doug told me of another scene, in which the ultimately poisoned character reaches not for the glass in front of him, but the one in front of his poisoner — a move that his poisoner anticipated. That, of course, reminded me of this now-classic scene (in a movie I’ve written about before), in which this kind of second-guessing was taken to its logically absurd conclusion.

So I popped the DVD in the DVD and pulled up the scene for Doug, and as I watched it, I suddenly picked up on … (answer after the jump)

Ken Jennings and the Like a Racehorse Ambiguity

I learned today that Jeopardy! winner Ken Jennings has a blog. I learned this when I saw a spike in my hits, from people that Jennings sent here to read Like a Racehorse. Thanks, Ken! And for the Jennings fans who clicked on the banner and found themselves here, you might also be interested in a Jeopardy!-related post I wrote in 2004, when Jennings was still working on his million-dollar-plus winning streak.

Two Stories on Language Ownership

Back in 2006, maybe you read the news stories about the Mapuche tribe in Chile suing Microsoft for translating Windows into their native language, Mapudungun, and the issue of language as intellectual property. You might also have come across the story on the linguistics blogs, but if not, here are a few good articles or blog posts on it:

• A news article on Engadget gives the basic story.
• Jangari of matjjin-nehen takes a crack at defining the circumstances in which speakers of a language can claim ownership of it in this post.
• In this blog post, Jane Simpson of the University of Sydney links to some Language Log posts and relates the issue to language ownership in Australian Aboriginal languages.

So what reminded me of this old news? Some even older news about language ownership that I only just learned. Longtime readers may remember that Doug and Adam like playing with Bionicles. Now and again I’d ask Doug and Adam why something like Ronaka (I just made that up) would be a plausible name for a Bionicle character, while Floogie or Shumpt would not.

Now, Doug’s friend Holt has clued me in to the fact that Bionicle names, especially in the early series, were taken from Polynesian languages, with Maori being a particular favorite. After I read his blog post, I did a bit of searching and found out that a few years before Doug and Adam got interested in Bionicle, the company that makes them (i.e. Lego) even got into some PR trouble for misappropriating Maori names. Some other sources on this controversy:

• A Wikipedia article that gives some examples of Polynesian names used for Bionicle characters, and briefly summarizes the legal action
• A paper by Rosemary Coombe and Andrew Herman on intellectual property, which devotes one section to a narrative of the Bionicle case.

Like Son, Like Father

Readers who have been with me since 2004 may remember this post; if you found that one interesting, then you should have a look at this article from The New York Times.

Yateraw Gwiding

The December 2007 issue of Language arrived while we were packing for our trip to visit Mom and Dad. I glanced at the contents and some abstracts, figuring I’d read more when we got back. The first article: “Positional neutralization: A case study from child language,” by Sharon Inkelas and Yvan Rose. When I looked at the abstract, I realized this article couldn’t wait for us to get back from our trip; it would have to go in my carryon bag for the plane. It was about a child they referred to as E, who from the ages of about one and a half to three years exhibited … lateral gliding.

Lateral gliding, you say?

Yes, lateral gliding! Lateral is the phonetic term for /l/ sounds, and glide is a term referring to vowel-like consonants such as [y] and [w]. (They’re also known as approximants.) Lateral gliding, then, is the pronunciation of /l/s as [w]s and [y]s. Sound familiar?

Maybe you remember a few years ago, when I wrote about how Doug pronounced his /l/s until he was about six years old. Sometimes he’d say them as [y], sometimes as [w]. (BTW, I should mention that I’m using a corrupt version of the International Phonetic Alphabet here. Technically, the consonant y sound is written as [j]. The j sound, meanwhile, is written [ʤ]. But for consistency with the posts I’m linking to here, and to lessen confusion for my nonlinguist readers, I’m representing the y sound as [y].) I was dissatisfied with my own analysis of the rule describing when Doug would produce a [y] and when he’d produce a [w]; another linguist had a better one, but I was naturally curious about what a paper in a scholarly journal would have to say on the subject. This wasn’t academic; it was personal.

Another Funny Story

“Bilingual by Breakfast” is a funny piece by Leigh Ann Henion that appeared on the last page of the February 2006 issue of Smithsonian magazine. She even uses the word guttural correctly. Go read it.

Nuh-Uh!

Imagine that you’re back in elementary school, having a discussion on the playground with one of your classmates. It goes something like this:

You: My dad can beat up your dad!
Classmate: Nuh-uh!

What is the proper response here? For me, it is and has always been, “Uh-huh!” But in the past few years, I’ve been hearing “Yuh-huh!”
more

Conspiratorially Yours

Eugene Volokh has kindly invited me back for another week of guest-blogging at The Volokh Conspiracy. I’ll be posting there until Sunday the 25th, so please drop by. Be sure to check out the postings of another guest-blogger there, Cathy Seipp, who has some interesting, and in one case very politically incorrect, observations.