"THE" otherness

Sometimes a very little word can clearly illustrate the mind of the speaker, and as for Donald Trump, his usage of 'the' shows what a racist he is. His way of speaking has even created the hashtag "#theafricanamerican" and numerously tweeted.

In the second presidential debate held on October 6th 2016, Trump said,

"I'm going to help the African-Americans, the Latinos and Hispanics. I'm going to help the inner cities."

'The' African-Americans
'The' Latinos

Many people were furious with this generalization of people.
If Trump had said "I'm going to help African-Americans" without the definite article, it would mean he was talking about African-Americans in general, whoever needs help. But when there is a definite article, he is treating the people as a mass, an object, people different from his group.
(The same goes for the 'otherness' about 'Enjoy the Girl!')

In a way, he is sending a message to his white supporters that he is with them, the others are kept at a distance and not included. This message resonates with his past remarks on building a wall along the US - Mexico border, deporting Syrian refugees, banning Muslims from entering the USA.

For Donald Trump, it is always 'the women', 'the African-American', 'the Latinos'. He considers them not as individuals, but as a mass, as an object, people that are not a part of his group.

I cannot show any approval to him and his supporters, 'The Trumps'.

"There is no one compares with you"

One of the Beatles' famous songs, "In my life," goes as follows:

----------
There are places I'll remember
All my life, though some have changed
Some forever, not for better
Some have gone and some remain
All these places have their moments
With lovers and friends I still can recall
Some are dead and some are living
In my life, I've loved them all
But of all these friends and lovers
There is no one compares with you
And these memories lose their meaning
When I think of love as something new . . .
----------

Let me focus on the underlined passage "There is no one compares with you."
The sentence seems grammatically inaccurate because it does not have a relative pronoun which refers back to "one," so it should be "there is no one who compares with you."

Yet, the sentence makes perfect sense. Lambrecht observes 10 examples that have the identical construction from a actual conversation:

(1) There was a ball of fire shot up through the seats in front of me.
(2) There's something keeps upsetting him. (Quirk et al. 1972:959)
(3) There's a lot of people don't know that.
(4) Well, I have a friend of mine called me. (Prince 1981:238)
(5) I have one of my uncles was an engineer and he told me ...
(6) A: I thought maybe your grandmother was using the room.
B: No, we had a friend of mine from Norway was staying here.
(7) I have a friend from Chicago's gonna meet me downstairs.
(8) Check to see if your feature matrixes came out OK. I got a couple of' em
didn't come out right.
(9) I have a friend of mine in the history department teaches two courses per
semester.
(10) I have a friend in the Bay Area is a painter. (319)

These sentences occur when "the first clause is either a there-construction of the 'existential' subtype (examples (1) through (3)), or it contains the predicate have (or got), whose subject is a personal pronoun, typically in the first person singular (examples (4) through (10))" (319).

Both "there" and "have" are the contributing factor in making sentences like the passage in In my Llfe.

To be continued. . .

Works Cited:
Lambrecht, Knud. "There Was a Farmer Had a Dog: Syntactic Amalgams Revisited." Proceedings of the Fourteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society. 1988. 319-39.

Language and Mind 03 No word, no limit

Words are defined, they represent perceived objects or events. If the word is a noun, the definition tells us what it is - what it looks like, how it is used. In other words, it tells us the limit or boundary of the word, to what extent a certain word can do, represent. Words draw lines and clip out objects and events from the big chaotic world. Also, once you acquire words, that is, a language, you can think of not just 'here and now', but of 'there and then'.

Now, what if you come across a tangible matter but you do not have the word in your vocabulary, your mind to express it? Infants acquiring their first language must encounter this situation countless times every day.

Here's a story about my nephew when he was about 2 and a half. He was looking for something in the house, and came to me for help. He tried to explain what he was looking for.

"Long, long. Red. Put marble. Marble go zoom."

I couldn't understand what it was, so I asked him where it was last time he saw it.

"Door, at door. Long and red. Marble go zoom."

He led me to the front door, the place where he got "that thing" first. I thought hard on what my nephew was trying to explain, and finally got it.

It was "a shoehorn".

It was long, red, and always put near the front door. "Shoehorn" had not yet joined into my young nephew's vocabulary, and he had not often seen in action how it was used. For him, the long, red, slightly curved shoehorn was an ideal road to roll his marbles.

Once you know the word, you tend to think only of what is defined, not of what is not defined. A shoehorn is used as a shoehorn, not as a road for marbles. If you can think of what is not defined, that is called "creativity".

Infants unequipped with words have no limit to what they can do.

Dragon Quest

I bought a picture in Dragon Quest Museum. This invokes a scene in one of the Middle English Arthurian stories Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (c. 1400).

----------
Mony klyf he ouerclambe in contrayez straunge,
Fer floten fro his frendez fremedly he rydez.
At vche warþe oþer water þer þe wyȝe passed
He fonde a foo hym byfore, bot ferly hit were,
And þat so foule and so felle þat feȝt hym byhode.
So mony meruayl bi mount þer þe mon fyndez,
Hit were to tore for to telle of þe tenþe dole.
Sumwhyle wyth wormez he werrez, and with wolues als,
Sumwhyle wyth wodwos, þat woned in þe knarrez,
Boþe wyth bullez and berez, and borez oþerquyle,
And etaynez, þat hym anelede of þe heȝe felle;
Nade he ben duȝty and dryȝe, and Dryȝtyn had serued,
Douteles he hade ben ded and dreped ful ofte.
For werre wrathed hym not so much þat wynter nas wors,
When þe colde cler water fro þe cloudez schadde,
And fres er hit falle myȝt to þe fale erþe;
Ner slayn wyth þe slete he sleped in his yrnes
Mo nyȝtez þen innoghe in naked rokkez,
Þer as claterande fro þe crest þe colde borne rennez,
And henged heȝe ouer his hede in hard iisse-ikkles. (l. 713-32)
----------

J.R.R. Tolkien, a life-long lover of the poem, translates the passages as follows:

----------
Many a cliff he climbed o'er in countries unknown,
far fled from his friends without fellowship he rode.
At every wading or water on the way that he passed
he found a foe before him, save at few for a wonder;
and so foul were they and fell that fight he must needs.
So many a marvel in the mountains he met in those lands
that 'twould be tedious the tenth part to tell you thereof.
At whiles with worms he wars, and with wolves also,
at whiles with wood-trolls that wandered in the crags,
and with bulls and with bears and boars, too, at times;
and with ogres that hounded him from the heights of the fells.
Had he not been stalwart and staunch and steadfast in God,
he doubtless would have died and death had met often;
for though war wearied him much, the winter was worse,
when the cold clear water from the clouds spilling
froze ere it had fallen upon the faded earth.
Wellnigh slain by the sleet he slept ironclad
more nights than enow in the naked rocks,
where clattering from the crest the cold brook tumbled,
and hung high o'er his head in hard icicles. (p. 38)
----------

Works Cited:
Tolkien, J. R. R., and E. V. Gordon, eds., Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 2nd ed., rev. Norman Davis. Oxford: Oxford Clarendon Press, 1967. Print.
Tolkien, J. R. R. trans. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, and Sir Orfeo. London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1975. Print.

What to wear on a hot day

I spent nearly 5 years of my childhood in Australia, so the roots of my English is Aussie English. I came back to Japan when I was 12, equipped with basic structure of the language, and had not much problem in easy communication.

I have always thought that Australian English was close to British English, so I did not think that I would have much trouble when I went to England in my early twenties to study for a year. However, I experienced that little odd differences make big misunderstanding.

It was unusually hot day for a summer in England, and I was talking with my flatmates about what each of us were doing that afternoon.


'I think I'll go to TESCO (supermarket) and get food for the week'

'But we can't give you a lift today, Maki. Will you be alright?'

'I'll be alright. I'll walk down there, not that far. Will wear my new thong today.'

'....Ah, yeah, it's a hot day... yeah, thong.... yeah.'


My friends looked at me with bewilderment. I could not figure out why, but I did not care much, happily put on my new thong, and went to the supermarket.


thong (OED)
1. a narrow strip of leather or other material, used especially as a fastening or as the lash of a whip.
2. a skimpy bathing garment or pair of knickers like a G-string.
3. <Austral.>a light sandal or flip-flop.


Oh, dear. I meant 3...
But my friends must have imagined 2, me wearing G-string to the supermarket.

fear, terror, trepidation

In a post "O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms"

I mentioned one way to analyse the English lexicon, in which three etymological levels are sometimes observable.

How about "fear / terror / trepidation" ?

Most of the time, a word with many syllables is "a big word," which means the word tends to be Latin/Greek origin and is not used in a casual conversation.

To Japanese, this distinction is understandable because of its similar lexical feature.

I would translate:

----------
fear 恐さ
terror 恐怖
trepidation 戦慄
----------

Just by looking at these Japanese words, a certain different aura of meaning they emit somehow sinks in our mind. Interestingly, the number of strokes in the letters increases as
the words become more literary and difficult. In general, many strokes tend to signal a sense of complexity, a phenomenon equivalent to a big word with many syllables in English.

We have some familiarity with multiple layers of lexicon due to the borrowings and adaptations from the continental culture throughout history.

Language and Mind 02 Language for quarreling

From my experience of living in a bilingual environment, I am sure that language shapes our mind and attitude. When I was a child, there were certain things I preferred to do in English rather than Japanese.

One of them was quarreling with my brothers. I have two brothers, one elder and one younger, both three years apart. Three years of age difference is quite big when you are a kid. We used to fight over everything - TV channels, toys, who gets to sit in the front seat of the car, who gets to push or ride the shopping cart, who gets the first scoop of the ice-cream, etc. When we start a quarrel, I would switch to English.

There was a clear reason why I did this. Speaking English, I felt more aggressive and I could stand equal with my big brother. 

When I call my brother in Japanese, I would have to say "お兄ちゃん (onii - chan)" which means "big brother + suffix for familiar person", and calling him that way, I would have to accept the fact that I was younger and smaller than him. Whereas in English, I could call him by just by his name or use the second person pronoun "you". 

In Japanese it is not so common to address a person who is older than you in a second person pronoun, let alone just by his or her name. It would be considered as rude. If you had to address a person older than you by his or her name, you would have to put say the name with an honorific. Also in Japanese, not just "mother" or "father", but there are words for "big brother" and  "big sister", so the family hierarchy is firmly planted in the younger siblings once they start speaking.

In the quarrel, it felt good to be able to just blurt out my brother's name. I was not the little sister, I was standing equal. I felt more powerful speaking English.