May 30, 2007

Block that organic metaphor!


From the 1923 Compton's Pictured Encyclopedia:

Language grows much as a tree grows--the big simple things first, like the roots of the tree; then more complicated things that reach up like the trunk and the branches; and next the thousands on thousands of little separate words, each like the others and yet different, like the leaves.

Unfortunately, I no longer have the volume of the encyclopedia from which this passage comes, so I can't say whether this is about the evolution of language, the history of an individual language, or the course of language acquisition, or several of these at once, nor do I know what are supposed to be the big simple, root-like, things and the more complicated, trunk- and branch-like, things in language.  But the writer is entirely clear that words come last.  This is a bizarre image.


Thanks to Steven Levine, who gifted me with this encyclopedia some time ago, so that I could plunder it for images and quotations to incorporate in the collages I make.  It's meant for children, and manages to be patronizing, sentimental, and breathlessly enthusiastic all at once.  Its coverage of other lands and cultures is heavy with Exotic Otherness, and it's especially taken with science and technology in the March of Progress.

Steven picks up odd things like this at garage and estate sales and gives most of them away to his friends.  Delightful.

Let me try to salvage a little something of linguistic interest from the encyclopedia passage: thousands on thousands of.  I would have used and rather than on for "extravagant doubling" of words referring to numerical units, though on doesn't strike me as incorrect.  It turns out that and is definitely the favored connector these days, followed by upon, then (usually) of, with on (usually) in last place, though of and on are pretty close.  In raw Google webhits for
    UNITs CONNECTOR UNITs of:


 and
 upon
 of
 on
hundred
 777,000
 150,000
 593
 224
thousand
 1,110,000
 823,000
 23,800
 37,900
million
 761,000
 288,000
 42,100
 38,100
billion
 473,000
 68,000
 10,300
 99

The one surprise in here is the large number for billions of billions of -- most from discussions of astronomy, influenced no doubt by Carl Sagan's use of this version on several occasions.  Sagan really MEANT, and said, of, understood multiplicatively, rather than any of the other connectors, which are understood additively.  (He's often quoted, and parodied, as having said "billions and billions of stars", but he was really referring to a very much larger number than the few billions you'd get by adding some billions to some more billions.)

zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu

Posted by Arnold Zwicky at May 30, 2007 04:13 PM