I’m flying over the pacific ocean right now but a little bit of language caught my eye. Here’s a picture of the menu for this flight, in three languages: English, Japanese, Chinese.
What caught my eye is the line “served with ご一緒に 配,” meant to be read as part of “Beef in BBQ sauce… served with Pepsi…”. The Chinese 配 (pèi) is fine here, meaning “with,” but the Japanese “ご一緒に” (goissho-ni) seemed awkward to me.
Bailey just asked me what the difference between 回収 (kaishū) and 収集(shūshū) is—two words that would both map to the English verb “collect.” I intuitively came up with a hypothesis to explain the distinction:
Not content with armchair theorizing, however, I decided to take advantage of one of the largest corpora in the world: Google.2 To test my hypothesis, I chose two “objects of collection”, one you can take away (and often is distributed first) and one you can’t take away: アンケート (ankēto “survey,” from the French enquête) and 意見 (iken “opinion”). I then took the four resulting collocations3 on Google in quotes (“•”) and recorded how many hits there were.
This second point could also be hypothesized based on the component meaning of 回, which in the verb 回る (mawa=ru) can mean “circle back.” ↩
Google is of course a huge corpus but it has very limited search and can easily be misused and misunderstood, thus making Google an unreliable (unprofessional) source for statistical data. One Google alternative for some different statistics is the n-gram data they offer for research. ↩
”Collocation” on Wikipedia says: “Within the area of corpus linguistics, collocation is defined as a sequence of words or terms which co-occur more often than would be expected by chance.” ↩
I got hooked on The Office
I’ve been a fan of the SNL Digital Shorts since Lazy Sunday, but this is absolutely something else. It’s a brilliant piece of cross-cultural parody. Many on the associated Hulu page had some questions, however, so I decided to write up a little explanation of what’s actually going on in this short, and why I love it so.[^2]