ἠγέρθη! He Was Raised!

ἠγέρθη!

Matthew, Mark, and Luke all record this same angelic utterance in their respective recountings of the Resurrection. (It's pronounced ē-GER-thē.). If we parse it we get third-person singular aorist passive indicative, “he was raised.”

The aorist tense gives the action the perfective aspect, a single unit of completed action, without internal structure or ongoing duration. Jesus was raised, over and done.

The passive voice indicates the subject being the recipient of the action and reveals the Divine agency latent in the Resurrection; Jesus was raised by the Father, not of his own agency.

And finally, the all-important indicative mood, not the "possible" or "potential" of the subjunctive or optative moods but the factual actuality of reality. Jesus was raised! Happy Easter everyone!

Diagramming Noun Adjunct-Heavy Sentences

I learned to diagram sentences from my mother (a Linguistics major in college), but didn't appreciate it much at the time (to be fair, my mother didn't appreciate it either until she began teaching me and my sister). Until, that is, I ran across a sentence in the local newspaper that made me want to diagram it.

The sentence in question was “This is not an administrative license revocation matter.” (It has to do with the ongoing investigation into whether the mayor of Hilo inappropriately used government funds for personal benefit.) It's not particularly long—no complicated compound sentence or anything—it was merely the noun phrase in the predicate that attracted me. It took me quite a bit of research, though, to figure out what all those nouns near the end are.

The ending noun phrase “administrative license revocation matter” has what looks like a couple of nested noun adjuncts, which is where a noun modifies another noun the way an adjective normally would. “Administrative” is an adjective modifying “license,” which is itself serving as a noun adjunct modifying “revocation,” which entire phrase is modifying “matter” at the end.

And yet, nowhere could I find how to diagram something like that. One website helpfully told me that noun adjuncts are diagrammed like adjectives—on a diagonal line beneath the noun they modify—but I couldn't see any way to chain multiple noun adjuncts together.

After some time pondering the matter and scratching my head, I decided to pull a mathematician trick reformulate the sentence into something with a prepositional phrase: “This is not a matter of administrative license revocation.” Written this way, I can just about diagram it, though I'm not 100% sure about “administrative.” I ended up diagramming it as you would an adverb modifying an adjective because it looked nice and seemed similar, but I've no idea if that's correct. Anyway, here's what I eventually ended up with:

If any of you out there are more familiar with sentence diagramming and would like to point out how it should actually be done, feel free to sound off in the comments! A hui hou!

Reduplication in Hawaiian: A Pronunciation Aide

Hawaiian words can often be difficult to pronounce for those not used to its idiosyncrasies. This is compounded when the words start exceeding five or so syllables, even though the actual pronunciation of each syllable is quite simple.

There's a particular pattern I've noticed running through a good number of Hawaiian words, one which can really help pronunciation once you learn to spot it. As a quick reminder, all Hawaiian words are composed of one or more syllables, each of which is either a vowel or diphthong, or a constant followed by a vowel or diphthong. Most consonants are pronounced the same way they are in English, except for w which is interchangeably pronounced as either w or v (mostly due to euphony). The only new sound is the ‘okina (the little ‘ symbol), which represents the glottal stop and is pronounced by simply blocking off the airstream at the back of the the throat, like the pause in the middle of “uh-oh.” Vowels are pronounced as follows:

a…“ah,” as in “father”

e…“ey,” as in “hey”

i…“ee,” as in “machine”

o…“oh,” as in “mote”

u…“oo,” as in “flute”

Diphthongs (two vowels together) are pronounced pretty similarly to English; basically just take the two vowel sounds and run them together. Technically there are only about seven diphthongs in Hawaiian, so not every grouping of vowels is one, but for this post I'll point out any exceptions as they come up.

Anyway, the point I wanted to make in this post is there a common pattern in a lot of Hawaiian words of the form A·B·B, where A and B are usually one or two syllables. For example, take the name of the capital of Hawaii:

Hono·lu·lu

which has a two-syllable A part, and a one-syllable B part. The opposite pattern (one-syllable A, two-syllable B) is even more common, and since it's a bit longer it can be harder to parse on the fly. For example, the dynastic name of the first king of the united Hawaiian islands is:

Ka·meha·meha

Very often when encountering a word that fits this pattern for the first time, I'll try to parse it incorrectly at first, in this case something like Kame·hame·ha. Recognizing this pattern will help you pronounce such words correctly; for instance, the primary stress almost always goes on the A part of the word. (The word division here, as an aside, is “ka,” meaning “the,” and “mehameha,” meaning “lonely” or “alone.” Perhaps appropriate for the first king of the whole archipelago who was famously rather reserved and isolated growing up.)

One more example of this style is the Hawaiian word for “rainbow”:

ā·nue·nue

Here, “nue” is not a diphthong, and is pronounced as two syllables, ”nu-ey.” (The line over the a, called a “kahakō,” just means to draw that syllable out slightly longer – Hawaiian has both long and short vowels.)

When I first conceived of the post I had a whole host of words in mind to illustrate this pattern, and it figures that by the time I've sat down to write it I can't remember most of them. I'll add any new ones I think of at the end of the post in the future. A hui hou!

Edit (11/29/17): The name of the first known interstellar asteroid, ʻOumuamua, also follows this pattern (ua is not a diphthong):

ʻou·mua·mua

ʻOumuamua means “scout” (like in a military sense) from ʻou meaning “to reach for” and mua, meaning forward or ahead.

Multilingual Machine

Partly as a result of my new job, I've begun stopping at the local Subway restaurant more often for lunch. Having also developed an appreciation for toasted sandwiches I've had ample time to notice things about the place while waiting for my sandwich to toast, including the fact that the toaster oven is apparently multi-lingual.

The LCD panel that displays things like the time helpfully informs people that the door is open whenever it is, but it does so in different languages each day. I've seen it in English, Spanish ("la puerta está abierta"), Portuguese ("a porta está aberta"), French ("la porte est ouverte") and even German ("Tür ist offen").

I'm not sure if the machine rotates of its own accord in an oddly touching attempt to facilitate communication with as linguistically diverse a group of sandwich-toasters as possible or if it's trying to teach them new languages one sentence at a time, but it's fun to notice. I wonder if the ovens in other Subways do it as well? Anyone care to confirm or deny?

English, Entropy, and Assignments

Tonight I've been writing a paper for my linguistics class on the historical development of Hawaiian Pidgin English into Hawaiian Creole English as it exists in the present day. This is an important, if subtle, distinction: a pidgin is a simplified language that is used as a second-language lingua franca between two or more groups of people who cannot otherwise communicate with each other, while a creole is an actual language used by a group of people as their primary language. Pidgins can be created between any two (or more) languages, and oftentimes throughout history have developed into full-fledged creole languages. The “Pidgin” spoken in Hawai‘i is a true creole, no longer a pidgin (and hasn't been for quite a few decades). (It draws mainly upon English and Hawaiian, but also upon languages such as Japanese, Chinese, Tagalog, and Portuguese, from the various people groups that were brought in to work on the plantations after the overthrow of the monarchy in 1893.)

The interesting part in this is that, while pidgins are simplified forms of language used only for specific purposes (such as business transactions) and not spoken otherwise, the creoles they develop into are complex languages capable of dealing with all aspects of life that their speakers encounter. This flies in the face of the established linguistic wisdom that languages tend to simplify over time, which is why it got me interested. For instance, in the Middle Ages English used to have special verb forms for present singular verbs, namely -e for first person (“I speake”), -(e)st for second person (“thou speakest”), and -eth for third (“he speaketh”). These have now been dropped completely, and first, second, and third all use the same form of the verb now (the bare verb stem itself, “speak” in this example). Middle English itself is a simplification of Old English, for instance having dropped the nearly one dozen forms of the word “the” that used to exist. Many other examples from other languages could be given as well.

Given this general trend, what are we to make of the fact that a full-fledged creole language seemingly arises from a simplified pidgin? There are several things to keep in mind. First, we must remember where this complexity comes from: it does not arise from nowhere, but rather comes from the languages that originally combined to create the pidgin. Speakers of a pidgin borrow syntax, grammar, and vocabulary from their native tongue and weave it into the collective pidgin language, increasing its complexity. Second, we must remember that there are intelligent agents at work. The observation that languages tend to decrease in complexity is a result of the fact that people like ease and simplicity. If everyone understands you when you take shortcuts in your speech, leave out a conjugation here, a declension there, pretty soon everyone's doing it and shortly thereafter those conjugational and declinational forms no longer exist. However, if people can't understand what you're saying, or you can't figure out a way to say what you want to in the pidgin you're using, you will add (or more likely borrow from your native tongue) ways of speaking that will allow you to express what you want.

In a way, it's similar to the loophole in the Second Law of Thermodynamics that allows life to exist. Technically, it's not quite as iron-clad as that law, because people could, if we chose, increase the complexity of our language; however, it's overwhelmingly unlikely. Also, the decrease of entropy in one portion of a system requires an equal or larger increase in another, while the increase in complexity of a pidgin turning into a creole requires no such corresponding simplification in the parent languages, but the general idea is similar. It's possible to mathematically quantify the entropy of a particular message in information theory, and it would be interesting to see how the entropy of a language changes as it develops from a pidgin into a creole.

(There are slight differences between how languages and physical systems change. Physical systems tend towards states of high entropy, because those are more likely, and thus simpler. Think of the number of ways in which the parts of a clock can be assembled such that the clock will work. Now compare that with the enormous number of ways that you could arrange those same parts without the clock working, and you'll see why over time, without repair, the clock would tend toward one of those numerous simpler states [since a non-working clock is simpler than a working one]. Languages, on the other hand, tend towards states of low entropy, because for languages those are simpler. Think about having 12 different ways to say “the” compared to one. One way is simpler in this case, which is one of the reasons English no longer has 11 other ways. This apparent inversion [physical states tend towards high entropy, languages towards low] comes about because of the way entropy is defined in information theory, but regardless of the semantics, the basic idea is that both physical systems and languages tend to change into less complex forms, even if the way of measuring such complexity is different.)

Serendipity!

Today I learned the origin of the word “serendipity” in geography class. Yes, geography class, because it turn out to have a geographical origin: prior to being known as Sri Lanka, said country was known as Ceylon. And prior to that, it was known as (I kid you not) Serendip. In the 1700's a guy named Horace Walpole created the word from the Persian fairy tale The Three Princes of Seredip. Apparently the heroes of said fairy tale possessed a remarkable aptitude for good fortune, thus, “serendipitous”!

Language Teachers - Some Thoughts

I was thinking today that of the several language teachers I have had, they've all had one thing in common. And while it makes sense in my mind, I find it somewhat hard to define or articulate. It's...a sort of theatrical quality? The ability to take a sentence someone randomly created a few seconds ago, and give it life. Paint a picture of words describing the conjured scene in such a way you feel yourself there. Come up with a few more sentences to flesh it out and give it life, with such amazing intonation and verve you could be right in the midst of whatever is being depicted.

Are all language teachers like this? Or am I just fortunate?

Combinatorial Fun with Hawaiian.

I've been wondering recently about how many distinct words Hawaiian could have, if you consider a fixed number of syllables. With fewer sounds than English, it's tempting to think that it must have a smaller vocabulary. I'm going to use combinatorics (basically easy ways of counting large numbers) to estimate the number of distinct words of progressively larger syllable count and see how it compares to English. It's rather simple to calculate, as long as you take care with your linguistics.

To start off with, Hawaiian has 18 official sounds (represented visually using the letters a, ā, e, ē, i, ī, o, ō, u, ū, h, k, l, m, n, p, w, ʻ), 10 of which are vowels and 8 of which are consonants. It also has 15 diphthongs (iu, ou, oi, eu, ei, au, ai, ao, ae, ōu, ēi, āu, āi, āo, āe). Now, a syllable in Hawaiian always only consists of either a single vowel, or a consonant + vowel or diphthong, represented schematically by (C)V where the 'C' represents a consonant, the 'V' a vowel or diphthong, and the parentheses show that the consonant is optional (one side affect of this is that Hawaiian words always end in a vowel). The first question to be asked is, "How many syllables are possible?". We can see that there are 10 possible one-letter syllables consisting of the 5 vowels plus 5 long vowels, plus an additional 15 syllables comprised of a single diphthong, plus an additional 80 syllables formed by taking one of the 8 consonants and adding one of the 10 vowels to it, plus an additional 120 syllables formed by taking one of the 8 consonants and adding one of the 15 diphthongs. Not all of these syllables actually exist in common usage; for instance, the syllable wū does not exist in Hawaiian, and the syllable wu occurs only in two loan-words from English. However, for the purposes of this post I am calculating only how many words could theoretically exist, not how many actually do (which would require exhaustive knowledge of the language that I do not possess). So for single syllables, we have a total of \(10+15+80+120=225\).

Now, since any word in Hawaiian will be made up of these syllables, we can quickly calculate how many distinct words of a given number of syllables would be able to exist. Since Hawaiian has nothing against duplication of sounds (and often rather encourages it), for a word of two syllables we may have any of the 225 for the first syllable, and any of the 225 for the second. Thus to find the total number of two-syllable words we just multiply those two numbers (or equivalently raise 225 to the nth power where n is the number of syllables in the word), for a total of \(225^2=50,625\) words of two syllables. That's not bad in terms of vocabulary. Pretty much all words necessary for daily life plus quite a few extra would fit pretty nicely into that amount.

But Hawaiian utilizes many longer polysyllabic words, so if we expand our list to words of three syllables, we get \(225^3 = 11,390,625\) distinct words. At this point we're already well over the vocabulary of even the most linguistically rich languages on Earth. Even using a rather lax definition of "word", the English language has around 1–1.5 million words at the most, the vast majority of which are scientific, legal, technical, medical, financial and other terms of generally non-everyday use.

 But we don't need to stop here! Going to four syllables gives \[225^4=2,562,890,625\] This is a mind-bogglingly big number when it comes to words. That's over two-and-a-half billion words, and that's not counting the one, two, and three-syllable words already formed. It's common to have words of four or five syllables in Hawaiian, which blows the realm of neologisms so far open that it would be nearly impossible to come up with concepts for all of them (for words of 5 syllables, the number is  1,078,203,909,375, over a trillion words!).

Conclusion: Although the sound range of Hawaiian may sound limited to the Anglophone ear with our 44-odd sounds, combinatorics shows that Hawaiian is capable of forming astronomically many times more words than even the most wordy languages on Earth. I'd do a similar calculation for English, but for the fact that it would be several orders of magnitude harder. This is not because of the greater number of sounds in English, but how they group together to form syllables. In Hawaiian, you can only have (C)V syllables. In English, syllables are of the form (CCC)V(CC). (This is of course a bit of an edge case – the only words like this I can think of off the top of my head start with “str”, such as “strings” and “strips”, each of which has 3 consonant sounds, 1 vowel sound, followed by an additional 2 consonant sounds.)

Now, while in Hawaiian any syllable can follow any other syllable and be pretty easily pronounceable, making all possible combinations of sounds would lead to some very difficult or impossible to pronounce words in English. Certain consonant sounds double easily or sound good together, while other do not. This is partly why, for instance we have words like “kitten” but not “kiththen” or “kixthen” in Modern English: languages tend to change in the direction of being easier to say quickly. An analysis of potential English words would have to take all this into account, which would require looking at all the sounds of English individually with respect to both preceding and following syllables – not an impossible task, but certainly a daunting and difficult one. (If I had to take a stab at it, I'd guess that English probably has more possible syllables than Hawaiian does, but within the same order of magnitude. I'm not motivated enough to actually try it though.)

And with that, I will close off this post. A hui hou!


December 4, 2010: Edited to fix some completely inexcusable mathematical mistakes. Turns out the numbers I got were orders of magnitude too low. They should be correct now.

August 30, 2011: Edited to fix some really elementary mistakes in naming numbers. It should be correct now.

August 1, 2014: Edited to correct the really basic mistake of forgetting that syllables can be made up of single diphthongs as well as single vowels (indeed, the Hawaiian word for "I" is simply "au"). This increased the base number of syllables, which had a domino effect of inflating all the further numbers. How did I ever manage that minor in Mathematics...

The yards of Hilo.

Went for a walk to go pay my rent today and was struck with the fact of how distinct all the yards in Hilo are. I mean, I'm sure yards are distinct in most places in the world, but in Hilo there seems to be an extra layer of distinctness. I think part of this distinctness is because of the huge range of exotic tropical plants and trees you see in every yard. But what really makes different yards stand out for me, and which you don't see most places, are the distinct lava outcrops (or lack of them) in each yard.

Hilo is really not a flat town, not even down by the sea shore. The streets are deceptively flat down here, but the yards on either side of them are often full of bumps and protuberances, with rocky outcroppings of black basalt poking up through the grass and gleaming dully in the sun. That, I feel, gives each yard a totally different and distinct flavor, because each one has different outcroppings and formations. Or a yard may have no outcroppings, merely bumps and swells like the bulging muscles of some immense beast where the lava beneath has been conquered by the grass above, broken into a layer of growth-supporting soil. I wouldn't go so far as to say that most yards in Hilo have lava outcroppings because I can't claim to be familiar with that much of the city, but certainly a good portion do. Our yard, for instance, has an outcropping in the front running parallel with the road that stands about a foot and a half about the level of the street. It's not much more than a miniature cliff face, however; the grass quickly takes over a little ways in from the road. The basalt fades on one side into the driveway, and on the other into the neighbor's yard where it suddenly loses its layer of top-soil and becomes bare rock for about half of his property before diving below the grass again, only to reappear later on down the street in another form, like a playful pod of dolphins frozen half-in and half-out of the water. I have a suspicion that having lived here I will forever be slightly bored with cities whose yards do not display such variety and originality!

In the category of "learning something new every day", while writing this post I discovered that 'proturbance' is not a recognized English word, at least not according to the dictionaries I consulted. Apparently the correct term is 'protuberance'. I was a little shocked to discover that a word that has been in my vocabulary for I don't know how long would turn out to be a chimera of my imagination like that. I was a little sad, as well, because 'proturbance' sounds much nicer to my ear than 'protuberance'. Though I have not let a word's prior non-existence prevent me from inventing and using it before, I bow to tradition in this case to prevent someone becoming hopelessly confused by trying to look up 'proturbance' in the dictionary.