At Around is Absolutely Alright

I sometimes read the ‘Corrections and clarifications’ column of The Hindu. I don’t know why. I don’t really believe in prescriptivism, nor do I want complete linguistic anarchy. Probably just to find out the current state of linguistic legality and linguistic morality, from the point of the view of the editors as well as the grammatically sensitive readers (this adjective I didn’t want to use, but I couldn’t find better).

A couple of days ago I again read this column. It is written by the Readers’ Editor (RE) of the paper. In this particular edition (is that the right word?) of the column, a list of different kinds of errors made by journalists is given.

At one point the, the RE says:

There are some favourite expressions of journalists that keep recurring despite their absurdity.

And one of the examples given is ‘at around 4 p.m.’, which the RE says is:

a contradiction — at is specific, around is approximate

As it happens, I use this expression quite often.

So, according to the LAPD (Linguistic Abuse Police Department), I am guilty of Using Favourite Expressions Despite their Absurdity.

But I don’t think it’s a contradiction. I don’t really know what the real Linguists have to say about this, but here is my case:

1. When you want to mention a time (say, 4 p.m.) for some purpose (such as making an appointment), you can mean either 4 p.m. sharp or you can mean approximately 4 p.m., give or take 5 (or 10 or 15) minutes.
2. In the first (sharp) case, you would say ‘at 4 p.m.’, with ’sharp’ added optionally, depending on various things such as your and the other person’s habits and the equation between the two etc.
3. The question is, what will you say in the second (approximate) case? Would you say ‘meet me around 4 p.m.’? To me, it sounds very awkward.
4. Even when you do say ‘at 4 p.m.’, you cannot really mean exactly 4 p.m. because it is just not possible physically. This is actually mentioned in some Linguistics literature, though I don’t remember where.
5. Quite often when you say ‘at 4 p.m.’, you actually mean approximately at 4 p.m. Then what is the need of using ‘at around 4 p.m.’ if ‘at 4 p.m.’ can mean approximately at 4 p.m.? To make the approximate nature explicit.
6. In that case, why not use ‘approximately at 4 p.m.’ instead of ‘at around 4 p.m.’? Because the latter sounds better (and shorter and more informal) than the former.
7. My question: Is ‘around’ used at all for specifying time, excluding the cases where it starts a sentence or a clause? Since I am not a ‘native speaker’ of English, however many tons of pages of good English I may have read and however many thousands of publishable and published pages of English I may have written, my linguistic intuition about the Global Language may be questionable.
8. Therefore, I can only resort to empirical evidence. So I searched for the term ‘around 4 p.m.’ on the Web. What I find is that ‘around 4 p.m.’ is used quite often. However, almost all of this usage is in fragments, not in complete sentences (again excluding the cases where it starts a sentence or a clause).
9. In almost all complete sentences, the usage is ‘at around 4 p.m.’.
10. So, it seems that hardly anyone uses ‘around 4 p.m.’ to specify an approximate time. Most people use ‘at around 4 p.m.’.
11. Which makes perfect sense to me, because it doesn’t sound awkward to me and everyone understands perfectly what I mean. In fact, it even sounds more musical to me than just saying ‘around 4 p.m.’. Excluding the cases mentioned earlier.
12. In linguistic terms, it can be explained by saying that ‘at’ in this case is the preposition, whereas ‘around’ is not a preposition. They are serving different syntactic and semantic purposes. ‘Around’ is modifying ‘4 p.m.’ to convert it, so to say, from an instant to an interval. ‘At’, on the other hand is doing what prepositions do. Connecting constituents and specifying the relationships among them.
13. It might be said that ‘at’ can only occur with an instant, not with an interval. In that case, it can also be argued that in reality there is no such thing as an instant (a point on the time scale with zero ‘width’). There are only intervals (points do have some non-zero ‘width’) and ‘around’ is just increasing the size of this interval.
14. If you do insist that there are instants and ‘at’ can come only with instants, then it can be explained thus. ‘At’ is indeed coming with an instant but that instant is not exactly at ‘4 p.m.’ but somewhere near ‘4 p.m.’ (3:55 p.m. or 4:05 p.m.). ‘Around’ is being used to express this uncertainty.

Thus, as far as I can see, ‘at around 4 p.m.’ is absolutely alright. There is nothing absurd about it. Perhaps the law to which the LAPD is referring is absurd. That seems very likely. After all, every law book has more than enough absurd laws.

By the way, I also searched in the BNC corpus and the only sentence returned for ‘around 4 p.m.’ was this:

George Mayo was last seen at around 4 p.m. on Friday afternoon.

I think it is not surprising at all, I mean the fact that there are so many absurd laws and rules. If you are the law maker or the law enforcer (or both) and you only make reasonable laws and/or enforce only reasonable laws, you are, in the South Park language, a pussy. Because if you are not, you would be able to make absurd laws and rules and get them enforced.

That’s what having power means. Doesn’t it?

Any, well, pussy, can make and enforce reasonable laws and rules.

The Hemingway (or Pilar) Argument for Diversity

Innumerable arguments can be given in favor (favour for the non-dominant party) of diversity. That is, diversity of all kinds: cultural, ecological, linguistic etc. But in this post I present a particularly good one. It’s from Hemingway’s ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’, which I am reading right now:

…

‘Then calm yourself. There is much time. What a day it is and how I am contented not to be in pine trees. You cannot imagine how one can tire of pine trees. Aren’t you tired of pines, guapa?’

‘I like them,’ the girl said.

‘What can you like about them?’

‘I like the odour and the feel of the needles under foot. I like the wind in the high trees and the creaking they make against each other.’

‘You like anything,’ Pilar said. ‘You are a gift to any man if you could cook a little better. But pine trees make a forest of boredom. Thou hadst never known a forest of beach, nor of oak, nor of chestnut. Those are forests. In such forests each tree differs and there is character and beauty. A forest of pine trees is boredom. What do you say, Inglés?’

‘I like them too.’

‘Pero, venga,’ Pilar said. ‘Two of you. So do I like pines, but we have been too long in these pines. Also, I am tired of the mountains. In mountains there are only two directions. Down and up and down leads only to the road and the towns of the Fascists.’

The forest analogy is good enough in itself, but I really liked the natural connection at the end between the lack of diversity and Fascism.

I don’t need to remind that diversity is fast eroding from every sphere of life. Even in India, the land of more diversity than perhaps any other. I also don’t need to remind that Fascism is rising in almost all regions of India, in various forms. Neither do I need to remind what is being used as a cover for rising Fascism. Yes, the T-word, which is sometimes equated to the M-word and sometimes to the N-word. With a lot of talk about the W-word.

There is no exaggeration here in the use of the F-word, although I do use the device of exaggeration sometimes.

And no, there are no mistakes in the language used in the quote due to my typing. This is just a mild example of how Hemingway represented Spanish speech in English.

English is Language Independent

It’s the Global Language, right? So how can it be language dependent? You propose a theory based on English. It has to apply to all languages. You propose a Natural Language Processing (NLP) or Computational Linguistics (CL) technique for a particular problem. For English. It applies to all languages. You build a software for some purpose. For English. It has to be useful for all languages. You build a dictionary…

Never mind.

But the vice versa is not true. You propose a theory based on Hindi. It is language specific. It doesn’t count for much. You propose an NLP technique for a particular problem. For Hindi. It is language specific. It doesn’t count for much. You build a software for some purpose. For Hindi. It is language specific. It doesn’t count for much.

That’s how it works in practice, if not theory. Or may be even in theory, with some help from the (very valid) idea of Universal Grammar (except that the UG may be the UG of English).

Even today I have got a review of a paper on a problem which is like one of the holy grails of NLP or CL. One of the comments is that the approach has been evaluated on Hindi so it can’t be compared to other techniques that already exist. True. But what is the number of papers published in the ‘first class’ NLP/CL conferences and journals in which the approach has been tried only on English? Doesn’t matter, because English is language independent. If you only evaluate your technique on English, that’s OK. But if you evaluate on only Hindi, that’s not acceptable. Because Hindi is language specific.

We know this very well in India. The Elite talks about (Indian) literature. And sometimes the Elite magnanimously (or dismissively) talks about (Indian) literature in languages. The first, of course, refers to literature in English. The second refers to literature in other languages. Indian languages.

The Elite talks of media. And the Elite (rarely and mostly negatively) talks of language media.

Hindi is a language. English is not a language.

Pardon me.

Hindi is a language. English is the language.

English is above being merely a language.

That’s why all the work done in English is language independent. Not just research. Not just in NLP/CL. Anything. Movies, literature, music.

I am guilty of the sin of indulging too much in mere languages. I should be working mostly on English. Not just writing blog posts in English. Sometimes, of course, I can bestow a bit of my attention on languages. Like Hindi.

But I won’t do that. I will do the opposite. I am incurable.

Bernard’s Bogus Fish

About an year ago I had submitted a paper to a journal. The paper had mentioned Bernard Shaw’s famous ‘ghoti’ example, which he used to illustrate (according to him) the unpredictable and illogical nature of English spelling, and therefore of the Latin script as used for English. The paper was rejected, but that is not the interesting thing here. What is interesting is that one of the reviewers tersely commented that:

- Shaw’s “ghoti” example is bogus, as even Shaw must have known.

This is just the type of comment that makes me want to write a real red hot rant about reviewers. And you can understand that from the fact that I still feel strongly about it more than six months after I received the review. And the reviewer was most probably a senior scholar working on scripts.

Just in case you don’t know, Shaw argued that ‘ghoti’ is a plausible spelling for the word ‘fish’ because ‘gh’ can stand for ‘f’ (enough), ‘o’ can stand for ‘i’ (women) and ‘ti’ can stand for ’sh’ (nation). Of course, I wasn’t the first to quote Shaw to argue that English has quite an idiosyncratic spelling.

The question that I want to ask is this: is the ‘ghoti’ example bogus, and if it is, did Shaw know this too?

I will tell you my answer: Shaw’s “ghoti” example is definitely not bogus. It is merely an exaggeration. And, yes, Shaw must have known that it is an exaggeration. And all the sensible people who have read this quote or used it, must have known very well that it is an exaggerated example. But it is not a bogus example. Shaw was a writer with considerable wit (which the above mentioned reviewer seems to lack). Writers use exaggerated examples all the time to make a point. There is a common understanding between the writer and the reader that something is being said with slight (or may be more than slight) exaggeration, but what is being exaggerated is not “bogus”: there is some valid point that needs to be made, but has to be made in way that will not sound like a boring repetition of some fact. Leave aside writers, even common people use this literary ‘device’ just to say something in an interesting way.

So, ‘ghoti’ definitely does not represent a typical English word. But it does illustrate the idiosyncratic nature of English spelling. It definitely is a valid example: a witty exaggeration which is supposed to be taken as a witty exaggeration. If your linguistic patriotism does not allow you to think bad of English in any way, too bad. That doesn’t change the fact that English words are spelled in a very irregular way. Yes, it is not as irregular as some people would like to claim (otherwise I would be making many more spelling mistakes), but it certainly is more irregular than many other languages. Is that a necessarily bad thing? I don’t think so. Many others have explained this point, so I wouldn’t go on about this, but this nature of English is a bad thing in some ways, and is perhaps even a good thing in some other ways. There is no need to feel bad about it.

By the way, Shaw tried to ‘reform’ the English script, but he failed. He even devised a phonetic alphabet for English and published a version of his play ‘Pygmalion’ in that alphabet. I am not at all enthusiastic about ‘reforms’ in languages or scripts, simply because I don’t think they are practical in most cases. But you won’t be baffled by this fact if you knew that he was heavily interested in phonetics and knew and admired Henry Sweet, one of the greatest phoneticians after the great ancient Indian phoneticians (that is a fact: I am not being patriotic). The protagonist of ‘Pygmalion’ (’My Fair Lady’ on the silver screen) is loosely based on Sweet.

Years ago I had read a book called ‘More than Words can Say’. The writer of that book had called Shaw a crackpot. He didn’t give any particular reason. But my guess is that he said this because he too was one of the linguistic patriots, the kind who devised English language tests for aspiring immigrants to the USA in early 20th century and decreed that those who didn’t know English were inferior human beings. I wonder where the above reviewer is situated with respect to those linguistic patriots.

Just for the record, there is a claim that the ‘ghoti’ example actually came originally from some other spelling reformer, not from Shaw. I don’t think that affects what I have said above.

A Joycean Blasphemy

I wrote:

I am buried, right now. Under deadlines.

That was just a bit Joycean.

This one is more Joycean:

I am buried. Right. Now. And-er dead. Lines.

(Actually, there is also a touch of Arundhati Roy here.)

I can’t help imagining how a sub-ed would react to this: coming from a nobody. Not even a native speaker of the Global Language.

Blasphemy!

(The rant and the rave are yet to follow. They will come. I promise.)

(प्राण जाएं पर वचन न जाए)