Verb + with in the Upper Midwest ... and South Africa

If you've spent any time in the American Midwest, you've probably noticed a construction like this:

Where are you going?
To the store. Wanna come with?

The historical source is usually presumed to be all those Germanic languages that have such constructions -- German ich komme mit, etc. That would be a pretty simple extension of English verb + particle constructions (or whatever they are ultimately) like to come to, so a pretty minor (if salient) change.

A lot of folks have talked about exactly what verbs can appear in the 'come with' construction -- the core context is verbs of motion, clearly: bring with, take with, go with, run with.
It can also appear with to be in forms like in this hypothetical phone call:

Oh, you're in the Dells? Are the kids with?

This would also translate into my dialect with along -- although the result doesn't sound quite right even then. That suggests that it's getting at accompanying somebody during motion, not the actual motion itself. Then a few weeks ago, a Wisconsin English Project team member reported that at a hockey game, his team (NOT his line, he was at pains to add) was not playing aggressive defense at some points, which means that people were not all sticking on their opponents like glue the whole time the puck was in their zone. A teammate (a defensewoman) yelled to those on the ice: Stay with! Stay with! He reports that he's since heard it again from other players and that there's no way there's an object pronoun getting lost.

But it gets wilder ... according to that same person, South African English is reported to have the construction too, regarded as coming from Afrikaans. Here's a quote from his email about this:

In looking for something entirely different, I got this on wikipedia and by the time I got to hey as a tag question, I was left wondering if this was a piece of wikiality (which I imagine is Colbert's best candidate for Word of the Year this time around).
In fact, they have ja (vowel of 'father') too, so this written text is ambiguous between Wisconsin (Minnesota, etc.) and South Africa:

Are you coming with to the movies?
Ja, sure.

Man, if those South African English facts are right, I think I love language change even more than before.

Update, Friday, Sept 29: Word is that a linguist with lots of experience in South Africa has orally confirmed that these features are found in South African English, save for the hey -- which he happened not to remember offhand.

William Safire: Can't you get ANYTHING right?

Man, some guys just never learn. I recall that back in the dark days of Ronald Reagan, people (William Safire among them, I'm pretty sure) complained bitterly about the coining of new words, the usual patterns of back formation, N-V derivations like to impact and new verbs in -ize, etc. (Alexander Haig was notable for some of these.) Somebody in the press -- I think in The Nation, though I can't find this in their on-line archives -- ran the obvious piece showing that most of these 'new' words were actually quite old, some used by Shakespeare, others older.

Now, lo and befreakinhold, Safire is still at it twenty years later (assuming my memory is right that he was at the center of it back then): Today's "On Language" in the NYT Magazine (p. 20, if you have a copy at hand, available on-line only with subscription) shows that he's condemned to repeat the history he cannot or will not understand. The column is titled "Pretexting" and is naturally about the recent Hewlett-Packard spying scandal, where people used pretexts to get private information on employees. He declares that to pretext is "a relatively new word". Bill, buy yourself a subscription to the Oxford English Dictionary on-line. They show the first attestation of this verb in 1606, and give examples like this: "He retraced his steps to the Rue de Fer; where, pretexting business, he entered the shop of the armourer" (1849). There's nothing remotely new about this as a verb.

The extension in the meaning -- to this particular new kind of behavior involving pretexts -- is pretty minor, and utterly unsurprising. Surely this would not warrant a new entry (i.e. constitute a 'new word') in a dictionary, even if it continues to be used beyond this scandal. Merriam-Webster gives an example of how it treats 'senses' (p. 20a of the latest print version); consider their example of 'job': 1a is "a piece of work ..." and 2a "something done for private advantage ..." (like a 'put-up job'). I'm no dictionary maker, but the change in to pretext doesn't even seem that big.

Oh wait, Safire does have access to the OED: He sarcastically uses pretexter and adds: "another new word for the O.E.D. to get busy recording", which sounds a little like it's trivializing the work of some of the world's best lexicographers: Now, go record some new words, boys and girls. (And yes sir, they do hire women for this work these days.)

But speaking of to trivialize, the last chunk of his current rant is called "Ization Nation", aimed at verbs in -ize. (Wonder if he checked OED to see that Dickens actually used ization as a word back in 1865: "He was not aware that he was driving at any ization.") He seems to be accepting and rejecting these on an individual basis: Trivialize and characterize are presumably acceptable but operationalize and anonymize are apparently not -- especially not when you can quote Hillary Clinton using the former term.*

Maybe this reveals the real idiocy of people like Safire. He seems to realize (oops) that there's a generalization (oops) here -- noun/adjective + -ize is used to form new verbs, yadda yadda yadda -- but he's trying to fight over individual words. Rather than accepting that izing and ization is part of active English word formation, he wants to be gatekeeper to our lexicon. Surely this stuff is productive enough that even Safire realizes that he can't stomp on so many cockroaches.

I hereby pledge to coin a new -ize verb a day. Will you join me in antisafirizing American English?

*On the latter term, I have to note that he screws up anonymize too: He seems to suggest that privatize should be used, but is avoided because of the use of the term in the Social Security debate. In fact, to privatize has to mean 'to make private' and to anonymize 'to make anonymous' — they simply don't mean the same thing. In the very quote he gives from Eric Schmidt (CEO of Google), you can't possibly make the substitution: "The data as released was obviously not anonymized enough." Releasing data is the opposite of privatizing it.

'to incent' and productivity

Sunday's Dilbert cartoon strip (not up yet, but to be posted on Sunday, presumably) uses 'to incent' and my instant reaction was 'oh, another one of those businessy back formations'. Of course, it turns out that the word has been around for decades, according to various sources and I slowly realized that I've heard and seen it before. And naturally a lot of the URLs discussing it are of the 'is this a word?' and 'you can't say that' type.

This set me to wondering if people somehow react worse to back formations than to other sorts of morphological productivity. I just used -y above without thinking about it, but a lot of well-established back formations sound odd to me and I wonder if they get the same reaction from other people. Just look at some examples given by wikipedia: to burgle and to tweeze sound humorous, to sightsee a little weird, and to commentate sounds televisiony.

Maybe there's some socio-morphology out there to be done ...

Update, Sunday, Sept. 24: The strip is now on the website.

Super!

A suggestion has wound its way through to the ether to this blog, namely that we …

should cover whether 'super' is the new 'cool' and quantifier ('super nice') and the new squeaky clean 'great!' (smile obligatorily when you use the term). You should get to it before Colbert uses it against Bush.

In all the time of sending and receiving email, I don't think I've ever had back to back notes with the same message. Today I checked my email and had notes from two people. They both had the same message: Super. Thanks. (with slightly different punctuation, though). It was a super cool moment.

I've noticed this too, with some surprise: It sounds like something we said in the 1970s.

CNN: "Chavez calls Bush 'devil'" ... but there's more

Every linguist around will probably post this picture -- here from CNN's website (and it looks like it's credited to AFP/Getty Images) -- but maybe we're riding the front of this wave ... The fiery rhetoric of saying that the lectern still smelled of sulphur from Bush's speech there yesterday gets your attention. Way back when, I remember guys in dark suits standing up yelling to crowds about the devil's presence, and they held up books too, but not Noam Chomsky. Sure, you say, it's one of his political books, not Syntactic Structures or the Minimalist Program. But it is a striking picture.

Update, Friday, Sept 22: I recognized the cover, but couldn't remember what book it was. According to the NYT, it's Hegemony or Survival, 2003.

Grimm's Law = 'one of his fairy tales'?

Historical linguists are all but obligated to jump up and down about wildly speculative popular publications claiming to have unravelled Proto-World or whatever. The latest to come through the ether is this, and the author seems to be posting a massive work piecemeal (and in a whole set of languages at once!) But you gotta like it when a pretty slick website asserts:

One of Grimm’s “laws” for example was …. just another of his fairy tales!

... and without any explanation from the 'over 800 pages' of prose the author has. I'll be staying tuned to this site, hoping to learn the truth, or maybe get entertained. If we get a page a day, this'll go on for years.

It's hard to say for sure with the little snippets we have so far, but it looks like the author is pursuing the pseudo-scholarly angle du jour on the distant linguistic past -- popular now in the far north of Europe -- positing a big influence of a Finno-Ugric substrate on the development of modern western European languages.

"Your chances of being involved in a fatal accident have not improved"

That's the headline on a piece of (insurance company) junk mail that came to Mrs. Verb (not her real name) this afternoon. They give a scary number or two about what's happened "since we last contacted you a few weeks ago." (Bastards ... where's the no-junk-mail list?).

What's the calculation I'm supposed to make here? It might motivate me to buy life insurance if the odds of my dying in an accident were increasing -- say, if I were to do the 'live in a glass cage filled with poisonous snakes for a month' routine. But I'm thinking they wouldn't cover me in that case.

Actually, the claim is surely wrong, statistically: I'm getting older and my odds of dying in an accident are decreasing: My odds of dying from heart attack or other non-accidental means are increasing steadily (if slowly, I hope), thus lowering the odds an accident will get me first, presumably.

Now that makes me feel better.

Ya(h) hey!

Just mentioned the Wisconsin Englishes Project here in a recent post and it looks like they're getting another round of coverage in papers and on radio around the state. The brains behind the operation, Tom Purnell, says that this one has the best image ... I agree. It just appeared in On Wisconsin (the alumni mag), credited to Spencer Walt.

Update, Sept 13: Another member of the Wisconsin Englishes Project suggested to some students today that the graphic is beautiful and wonderful, but actually kind of goes in exactly the opposite direction of much of the project: They're working on really contemporary changes, often in urban areas, etc., while this image evokes a really classic image of dialect and dialect speakers.

Stressed -ly

Have been pondering the probaBLY question and then today encountered basicalLY from someone, who was surprised that she'd uttered it when I called her attention to it. Clearly this is something only possible with single word utterances -- for that speaker and for me too (though I don't think I say this much). It's surely coincidence that both are three syllables -- likeLY must be possible for such speakers (though I didn't think to ask about it).

ProbaBLY

I wonder when word-final stress of probably got started. Seems like it's widespread socially and geographically today.

The sad truth about cow dialects

Well, the big glacier of publicity on 'cow dialects' in the UK (here's the CNN version) has melted away faster than real glaciers are going today.

Linguists had to figure something was wrong when they quoted renowned phonetician John Wells as endorsing the idea. The good folks at Language Log (actually, Mark Liberman, in this case) call attention to what really happened ... sounds like some remarkably bad journalism.

What a shame that it's not true. The just-started Wisconsin Englishes project could surely have landed some grants to pursue non-human linguistic variation in America's Dairy State.

Safire on moonbats and e-maelstorms

One of the real reasons every working linguist needs a blog is because it offers a chance to heap scorn on William Safire ... I figure that people just can't pound on his wretched, prescriptivist, Nixonian butt enough. So imagine my shock this morning when I read his ill-titled "On Language" in the NYT Magazine and actually read a novel (well, to me at least) observation about language that could not be easily found in five minutes in any smalltown library reference room: He connects the use of moonbat ('term of abuse for dogmatists' according to a rightwing blogger identified with early use of the term) to earlier taunts about the loony left and even earlier lunatic fringe, not to mention Mike Royko's name for Jerry Brown, Governor Moonbeam. Who knew that there's a whole string of associations between the moon and the left! I almost choked on my coffee or spit out my delicious organic sour cherry juice (don't recall which I happened to be drinking at that moment).

But our story has a happier ending: Safire uses the term e-maelstrom and, before closing with a classic little bit about how maelstrom really ought to be capitalized -- give me a freakin' break -- it is simpy not a proper noun in contemporary English in any real sense unless you're actually talking about that particular tidal current off of Norway, which happens only in discussions of the history of the word and maybe among those who sail the region --, Safire pompously claims:

Don't knock yourself out looking for the origin of e-maelstrom, "a storm of electronic communications." It was minted today, right here ... .

Actually, that can only be true in a trivial sense and presumably not the one Safire intends: He may have made it up -- rather than learning it from a dictionary or something -- but the term gets about 1,450 g-hits (that is, hits in a google search), going back a couple of years and including stories on CNN, in the Chronicle of Higher Education and Seattle Weekly, and it's in both Urban Dictionary and pseudodictionary.com. That the word has been constantly coined by different people is utterly unsurprisingly given the wild productivity of e- prefixing and the use of maelstrom for 'flurries of communication' (to paraphrase from the entry in pseudodictionary.com: E-maelstrom). Also unsurprising is that the meaning varies considerably -- from being more or less a synonym for spam to perhaps the most useful: "A long and complicated email trail with dozens of CC's discussing a situation almost none of the recipients cares about" at Urban Dictionary.

Safire of course has a research assistant and may even access to the internet himself. How does he get away with such stuff? Does nobody at the NYT bother to check his facts?