My main helper these days has lived and worked in the US for many years, but he’s a native of Fiji. I call him Isaac in my postings, but his actual personal name is the Fijian version of the name, Aisake, and the syntax of his native language Fijian turns out to have lots of characteristics that are a surprise to, say, speakers of English. So I offer you some notes on the language, building on the material in the Wikipedia article on the language.
Archive for the ‘Word order’ Category
Notes on Fijian
March 10, 2026Today’s bilingual jest
June 8, 2025E-mail today from Luis Casillas to me and Luc Baronian (it’s a Stanford connection), with his header:
Apparently English “n’t” is trulyn’t an inflectional affix after all
(intending to convey ‘truly not an inflectional affix after all’) and then the comment:
Seen on Twitter:
(#1) deranged grammar advice on-line
Backup life
July 4, 2023If you’re a normal person and you run out of something in your household — toilet paper, granola, cleaning products, cheese, plastic trash bags, whatever — you just go out to a relevant store and pick it up. If you’re (essentially) housebound, as I am, in this situation, you have to plan ahead and get backup supplies delivered, so that replacements are to hand when you need them. (Even normal people might providently plan for the future and also save time and money on buying in bulk by laying in backup supplies.)
In any case, I’m obliged to live the backup life and have stocks of stuff hanging around — many of them piled up on what was once a sofabed in the study of my condo (which otherwise has very little usable storage space). At the moment, it has boxes or piles of Kleenex, toilet paper, paper towels, and wet wipes. There are similar stashes elsewhere in the condo. I spend a good bit of time ordering in this stuff, mostly through Amazon.
100 years of independence
December 6, 2017Though today is one of the dark days of early December alluded to in my recent posting — it’s Mozart’s death day, a sad occasion indeed — it’s also St. Nicholas’s day (gifts!), and Chris Waigl’s birthday (eggcorns, remote sensing of wildfires in the Arctic, Python, knitting, and more, in three languages!), and Independence Day in Finland. As Riitta Välimaa-Blum reminds me, this year’s Independence Day is something spectacular: the centenary of Finland’s declaration of independence from Russia.
(#1) The Finnish flag
So raise a glass of Lakka (Finnish cloudberry liqueur) or Finlandia vodka, neat, to honor that difficult moment in 1917 — the year should call to your mind both World War I (still underway then) and the Russian revolution, and these enormous upheavals were in fact crucial to Finland’s wresting its independence from Russia.
Conjunct order in the comics
May 5, 2017Today’s Rhymes With Orange.on love and conjunct order:
So: in coordinated pairs of names, which comes first, and why?
In the case at hand, whoever creates the coordination (here, carving it into a tree) will almost always put their own name first; people are strongly inclined to take themselves to be the measure of all things. Similarly, if you’re referring to a couple of people and one of them is a friend of yours while the other is someone you know mostly through your friend, you’ll probably put your friend’s name first. But beyond that, there’s a complex set of factors that tend to favor one order of names over the other. It seems that these factors conspire in (now well-studied) ways to favor — wait for it… — Guys First.
hyperbaton, hypermasturbation
March 11, 2017The Dinosaur Comics from the 3rd, in principle about hyperbaton:
But hypermasturbation (which sounds sort of like hyberbaton) intrudes in the conversation.
Yoda on active and passive clauses
October 13, 2015A meme-slogan card passed on by Bert Vaux on Facebook:
(#1)
The person who composed this (more on the composition process below) was seriously confused about what active and passive clauses are: the text on the card is an active clause, and all the Yoda sentences I’ve seen are in fact active (though a fair number had no passive counterpart, because the verbs in them were intransitive, like the verb in #1).
I’m guessing that the creator of #1 thought that
(A) Talk in active voice I do not.
was a passive sentence because it had non-default syntax (from the point of view of standard English). But the syntax is non-default because of the fronting in it, not because of the status of the clause as active or passive.
Harsh sentences
August 16, 2013Today’s Zippy, on Dingburger hair styles, with an outrageous pun in the middle of it:
Requires topknots Dingburg. Rejects other hair styles the law.
VOS word order — attested, but rare. Certainly harsh for speakers of English.