Since everyone and their grandmother is busy listening to Why this Kolaveri Di for the 4157th time in 3 days (What! You haven’t heard it yet? Get out from under that rock already!), I thought I’d write this short note on a couple of points of linguistic interest in that song. Apart from the extremely catchy tune that refuses to get out of your head even when you are asleep (I am sure loads of people have this song running like a sinister background score in their dreams), one of the things that make this song fun is of course the strongly Tamil accented English.

The first entry on the WTF files on Linguistrix is supposedly a quote by Jimmy Wales published in today’s HT (Wikipedia woos India with local languages). I say supposedly because I really hope that this attribution is incorrect, that this is the result of stupid paraphrasing, and that Jimmy Wales didn’t actually say something so hopelessly asinine— “In languages such as Latin, expressing an idea becomes difficult because the language is not commonly spoken and written.

Yay! A few weeks ago, I wrote about how a newspaper article in the HT messed up a sentence due to too many negative particles and ended up meaning exactly the opposite of what was intended. On the other side of the spectrum is a dialogue from The Big Bang Theory’s latest episode (S05E10, The Flaming Spittoon Acquisition). The moment I heard it, I whooped with excitement—a perfectly executed quadruple negative, I thought, just as Amy pointed it out for the whole world to notice.

A recent tweet by Tom Cruise shows us the perils of machine translation and literal translation. The first part of the tweet is of course absolutely unidiomatic, but you can figure out what it is trying to say. But the second part will flummox any reader who is not familiar with English expressions. This was obviously the result of English—>Hindi machine translation of something like “We are really looking forward to talking to our friends in India when @GhostProtocol comes out soon.

Sanyam wrote in to ask: ‘Is it true, that we can pronounce proper nouns as we deem fit?’ As far as I understand from my experience at school, this ‘myth’ is more a result of school kids trying to excuse themselves of pronouncing English names correctly by resorting to a bogey rule that you can pronounce a proper noun the way you want. Here’s my personal take on this— In short, I would say, ‘an individual has the right to assert that a particular sequence of sounds (and its corresponding transcription) is their name'.

Pritish told me yesterday that, when he posted on a Google Group, he got this message “Your message will appear in SymphonyxIITB momentarily.” My (and Pritish’s, I presume, from his responses) first instinct was this was obviously wrong. In my idiolect, momentarily could only be used for the sense ‘for a moment’ whereas Google was using it for ‘in a moment’. Google is not averse to relatively weird constructions as was discussed in this post on LanguageLog, so I presumed this was the case here too.

I saw this at Port Blair airport today, on my way back from an excellent family vacation at Andaman and Nicobar Islands. Language errors on notices and boards are very common and are tracked by countless blogs and humor websites. Since most of these follow typical patterns like spelling mistakes (MISSILE PAAV or anything any IITB Hostel Canteen menu lists) or bad grammar, they are funny but mostly unremarkable. However, I am posting this one here since I have the feeling that this wasn’t so much a result of lack of competence as plain confusion.

Sindhu, a lawyer friend, sent me this on chat: You should do a post on who v. whom. VERY confusing, I say! … to which I replied that she didn’t need to worry about it and as long as she trusted her instinct, it was just fine, but she said: Yes, but it is important to know the difference. At our firm, we are very particular about pristine English in mails to clients.

New day, new linguistic fodder to chew on, and another quick note! From an article in today’s HT: “The SC had said that if there is no reason to disbelieve that the accused cannot be reformed or rehabilitated, a sentence of death would be erroneous." The moment I read ‘no reason to disbelieve’, I knew there was a disaster waiting to happen, and I wasn’t disappointed. There are a total of 4 negating elements in this text (no reason, disbelieve, cannot be, erroneous) and you will see that the meaning is virtually impossible to compute naturally.

Another quick note while I spend my days doing uninteresting things. The front page of Hindustan Times today described another in the series of slipper-hurling incidents that have become quite fashionable in the last few years. This time, the hurl-ee, so to speak, was Arvind Kejriwal. The report reads— “The black flag-waving, saffron kurta-clad attacker, XYZ of Jalaun district, Bundelkhand, about 200 km north of Lucknow, attacked Kejriwal when he was about to reach the dais at Jhulelal park near Lucknow University to address a meeting on graft.