when I was studying Greek I would get frustrated and annoyed because often, at the beginning of a sentence or clause – or just scattered haphazardly throughout – there would be three or four “particles” with no specific meaning. the literal translation might be “so thus and”, but of course you couldn’t put that down. they were just placeholder words, colloquial linguistic padding.
now, of course, I realize that I start sentences with “okay but like”.
you can sing the praises of the Greeks all you want, but the fact is, Plato wrote with all the elegance and grace of an off-the-cuff tumblr post.
my professor literally told us to think of all the “ἤ̂ δ᾽ ὅς”es in the Symposium as “so then he was like”
I swear, “particle” is just linguist-speak for “I’m not really sure what this small word does but speakers sure do seem to use a lot of them.” It’s not even a coherent class and the ones that have discourse-y functions are the hardest to pin down.
And of course, languages differ in the extent to which they commonly write the discourse-y particles, while registers of the same language can often be distinguished based on particle use – “well” is more formal than “but like”, and the most formal varieties of English barely use discourse particles at all. But as we can see from Ancient Greek, not all formal written traditions avoid particles.
English: I love you
Slovak : Milujem ťa
Finnish: Panisin
Slovenian: Ljubim te
Danish: Jeg elsker dig
Portuguese: Amo-te
Tagalog: Kantotan tayo
Punjabi: Panchod chup kar
Somali: Dhillo iska amus
Arabic: انتا حمار
Spanish: quiero sentir tu lengua en mi pene
Bangla: Tumi ekta kuthar bacha
Indonesian: ngakak anjrit
Hindi: Mein ghadhe ka bacha hoon
Pashto: spey pashante khkarey
Urdu: Mujhay tum say mohabbat hai
Tamil: Po da mairu pudungi
Malayalam: Patti kazhuda de mone
Kannada: Nind tale nal gobra thumbide
Telugu: Nee muddilo manta petta
Azeri: Seviram Sani
Russian: иди на хуй (idi na houy)
Bosnian: Mrš u pičku materinu
Marathi: Mi tula prem karate/karato
Kurdish: Ez te hezdikhem
Chinese: 你是个混蛋
Greek: είσαι μαλάκας (ise malakas)
German: Opfere mir dein Erstgeborenes
Swedish: Ät min röv
Romanian: Te iubesc
Norwegian: Jeg elsker deg
Polish : Kocham cię
French : je veux m’étouffer sur ta bite
Lithuanian: Aš myliu tave
Korean: 사랑해 (sa rang hae)
Hungarian: szeretlek
Dutch: Blijf met je vieze tengels van mijn fiets af
Italian: sei un caga coglioni
Hebrew: אני אוהב אותך
Estonia: Ma armastan sind
Latvina: Es tevi mīlu
Croatian: volim te
Japanese: あなたのチンコと遊びたいです。
Latin: amo te
Turkish: Seni seviyorum
the tag thing is strong with this
The german one says “Sacrifice your first-born to me”.
xkcd namechecking two linguistic effects: the Stroop effect (which is very well-attested) and the Sapir-Whorf effect (which is not, except in its weakest form and in very specific domains).
The tonal parts aren’t related to a specifically linguistic effect but rather refer to the Doppler effect in physics, whereby a sound that moves sounds like it changes pitch. Naturally, in a tonal language, a change in pitch equals a change in tone, which would make it harder to understand.
I thought Comic 1632 would make a nice shirt. Earlier, I had seen and bought a quite nice shirt Ryan North had made from teespring. It seemed like something I could do too: a lot easier than previous shirt making escapades, where I had to do the shipping and billing myself.
(As an aside, in case you didn’t know, Ryan North is one of my biggest heroes in comics. This will become important later in the story.)
A few days after having the idea , I get an email from none other than Thomas Bever, the first linguist to describe garden path sentences. He had seen the comic! He wanted to point out that “I like garden path sentences am delightful” is not a true garden path sentence because the speaker can use intonation and pauses to clearly convey the meaning of the sentence. Assuming you have a speaker who is trying to convey meaning rather than SOW DISCORD, you oughtn’t get led down the garden path by that sentence.
(As opposed to the classic “the horse raced past the barn fell”, where there is no way for the speaker to convey (without changing the words in the sentence) that [the horse (that was) raced past the barn] [fell].)
Anyway, I was quite starstruck, and even more than that, QUITE pleased with myself. I actually thought to myself “I bet RYAN NORTH doesn’t have Thomas Bever fact checking his linguistics comics” and “I wonder if this is what being a big shot is like”.
This also presented an amazing opportunity. I hadn’t thought to ask permission to make a shirt about garden path sentences because I hadn’t thought about who invented them. I asked if I could make a shirt out of my comic, and Thomas Bever said yes! We are going to split the profits, half going to his lab and half going to fund my projects (I’m still planning on self-publishing a book soon!)
And so, after some technical and artistic help from my friend Greg, I have this shirt design:
I AM EVERYWHERE (Also Thomas Bever is a great guy).
If you are not yet reading Dinosaur Comics, I can definitely recommend it as a source for linguistically-informed humour. (And perhaps “create a webcomic” can be added to the list of things people do with a linguistics degree?)
Kimchi and Justice 