hysterical linguistics: 2009 Archives

Apfeaeiip stands for "A Place For Everything, And Everything In Its Place". In the fourth edition of The Macintosh Bible (which, by the way, was an excellent book... i don't know of any modern equivalent introductions to the Mac that do it with the same humor), Arthur Naiman asserts that the word also, coincidentally enough, spells the Fijian word for "good housekeeping".

Anyway, this supposed factoid, which I didn't know if I should take seriously or not, has been bothering me for almost two decades now, so now that we have wikipedia, I decided to finally look up "Fijian language". It turns out that it can't possibly be true: for one thing, "apfeaeiip" violates Fijian CV syllable structure: furthermore, [p] and [f] only occur in loanwords in Fijian, not in the native vocabulary.

So there, mystery solved. And Mr. Naiman... you got me.

One of the terms that's always confused me in linguistics is that of languages being genetically related. Linguistic relatedness doesn't necessarily have anything to do biological relatedness, so why use this term?

As it turns out, the term "genetic" here doesn't mean "having to do with genes", but rather "having a common origin" (think "genesis"). I.e., there's two distinct meanings of the word genetic, one for biology and one for linguistics. Of course, no one's ever bothered to explain this to me... a glaring oversight, especially since the biological meaning is the common one.

Now how about the Chinese translation? In Chinese, to say languages x, y, and z are genetically related, you can use an awkward phrase like this: "x, y, z 等語言在發生學上具有淵源關係". WTF? What does that even mean? I mean, I know it's supposed to mean "x, y, z etc. are genetically related", but really what it translates to is something like "in genetics, x, y, and z have a common-origin relationship", since 發生學, short for 發育生物學 (according to the wikipedia redirect), means genetics or developmental biology—in the biological sense. This is a terrible mistranslation of the English term, imbuing it with a biological significance that it really shouldn't have.

So, I object to the use of the term 發生學 to mean "genetic" in the linguistic sense. It's a good thing I've figured this out... Whereas before I would furrow my eyebrows in confusion whenever I encountered the term in Chinese, I will now shake my head in disapproval instead.