How language can feel wrong (#1)

The human brain is fascinating. You can know that “I ain’t doing the grammar right” has some issues, and you can know that “I am not using correct grammar” feels much better. You know these things, instantly, intuitively. But to go from one to the other, or to explain what is wrong with the first one, is more intellectually demanding.

Similarly in Japanese. 「ご迷惑をかけてすみません。」is fine, but not 「ご邪魔をかけてすみません。」 The first (go-meiwaku-o-kakete-sumimasen) is “sorry for disturbing you”. The second, just changes “meiwaku” to “jama”, and in this context they mean just about the same thing; but it is also wrong.

What about in Spanish? ¿Sabes que la gente es muy lista? (You know that people are very smart?) should feel fine, but ¿Sabes que la gente son muy listo? is like listening to a musician singing off key.

I am going to suggest that this feeling of what is natural-sounding language is our most fundamental language skill. It is the one we learn unconsciously, from using the language in our real life, from using language as part of another process, not as an exercise in itself.

The examples I chose to introduce this subject are quite similar, despite being different languages.

First, the wrong version is completely understandable. The speaker might get smirked at, or patronized, but they would not get a blank stare.

Second, if our goal is solely to communicate, the better version is still better. Why? Because the bad version gives us the heebie-jeebies and distracts us. Part of our brain starts going: “That wasn’t right. Why wasn’t right? What should it have been?” Which means part of our brain is no longer listening.

Third, the way you would fix them (as a native speaker of the language, at least) is not to identify the verbs, adjectives, nouns, prepositions, particles, etc. Instead you would take the bad sentence, internalize the intended communication, and then express that as a better version. If your first try still felt wrong, you would do it again.

There was another way the examples were similar, but I have left that to an appendix, below.

It is that third point that really interests me, because it gives us hints about to do machine translation and artificial intelligence generally. How this might be applied, made useful, is the theme that I will explore more in the next part of this article.

But I want to leave this article with a couple more thoughts. The first is it the heebie-jeebie can be more subtle. Try watching a professional author at work. Perfect words don’t come from their mouths. Hands. Perfect prose does not come from their fingertips. Perfect prose does not pour from their fingertips. Perfect prose does not flow from their fingertips. (Ooh, yes, it took a while, but I like that!) Or, as Oscar Wilde (maybe) said:

I spent all morning putting in a comma… and all afternoon taking it out.

(See QI for the full story.)

The other food for thought I wanted to pass on here, was to ask you three questions:

• is a robin an animal?
• is a robin a bird?
• is a chicken a bird?

According to psycholinguistic research (dating back to 1969!), it took you longer to answer that a robin was an animal, than to answer that it was a bird. You almost certainly did it as two steps: a robin is a bird, and a bird is an animal, so a robin must be an animal. But, apparently, it also took you longer to say that a chicken was a bird, than to say that a robin was a bird! The theory is that, in most people’s minds, “robin” is a more typical bird than a chicken.

Is this the same kind of brain process that knows you use grammar rather than do it? Personally, I think they are very similar.

Appendix: The other similarities

I said the examples I started with were similar in another way, which is the way they are wrong. I tried to create one problem which is the wrong grammatical form, or something a simple dictionary lookup would fix. But the second mistake is one of which words can be used together, and is more at the phrase level.

In “I ain’t doing the grammar right” these aspects jar:

• right (“correctly”)
• ain’t (slang contraction for “am not”)
• you don’t “do grammar” you “use grammar”

In 「ご邪魔をかけてすみません。」:

• ご邪魔 (the politeness prefix for jama is “o”, not “go”)
• You don’t 邪魔をかける, you 邪魔します (also note that the “o” particle isn’t used)

In ¿Sabes que la gente son muy listo? :

• listo (“lista”, because la gente is feminine)
• son (“es”, because “la gente”, the people, is singular)

By the way, my Spanish is too weak to know if these are good examples, and I don’t feel I’ve really captured the “phrase level” kind of mistake I was after. Better suggestions are warmly welcome.

Appendix II: The danger of simple rules

“I’m not doing the grammar right” is wrong, but the word “grammar” can be used with “do”, and can be used with “right”. Consider:

• “Did you all get the grammar right?”
• “Let’s do a grammar exercise.”
• “I will do the Grammar School event”.
• “Make sure you are doing the right grammar exercise in your books.”