Singaporean Housing Jargon

7 August 2011

While this Economist article is mainly about the market for upscale condos in Singapore, it contains lots of juicy word goodness, from nonsensical apartment complex names like Foresque, Illuminaire, and Waterina, to architectural jargon like residential typologies. The use of swish is one I’ve never encountered before, but it appears to be a well-established synonym for posh.

(Hat tip: Joanne Leow)

Google as a Research Tool

24 July 2011

Google web search is essentially useless as a research tool, as illustrated by this Language Log post which points out that the search engine conflates Freud and Darwin.

Google search results are optimized to help you find a particular site, not to provide information about language use or other data. The combination of personalized search results, based on things like you’re location and search history, plus the algorithms that automatically amend your search parameters mean that one person’s result is not going to be the same as another’s. There was a time when you could rely on the number of raw hits as a rough approximation of a term’s popularity on the web, but with Google’s constant updating of the algorithm’s that power the site, this is no longer the case.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Google has gotten a lot better at serving up exactly what you want. Nowadays it is rare for me to go beyond the top ten results to find the site I need. The other day I did a Google search on “running shoes Toronto” and the number one result was a store right around the corner that I did not know existed. I promptly walked over and bought a pair. (Google obviously knew where I was, thanks to my use of Google Maps, which can be a bit unsettling, but was damn useful.) It used to be the case that any Google search for a hotel turned up hundreds of supersaver travel sites, offering low prices on generic hotel rooms. Finding the website of an actual hotel was next to impossible. But nowadays, a search for hotels actually turns up the hotel web sites, with the sites offering “great deals” buried down below. But this commercial convenience does mean that trying to make any type of objective observations based on Google results is fruitless.

English-Only Signs in NYC

21 July 2011

Linguist Dennis Baron has a post on a New York City ordinance, dating from 1933, that requires the name of a store “to be publicly revealed and prominently and legibly displayed in the English language either upon a window...or upon a sign conspicuously placed upon the exterior of the building” (General Business Laws, Sec. 9-b, Art. 131). I’m not sure that I agree with Dr. Baron’s assessment that the law is discriminatory and serves no other useful purpose.

The arguments for such signs are that they help combat fraud and fly-by-night stores (this was the purpose of the law when it was drafted) and it aids first responders. Dr. Baron points out that people can lie in any language and GPS is better than signs for first responders. Those rebuttals don’t cut the mustard. Yes, a recognizable name does not stop fraud, but it helps in identifying the location. And people who dial 911 don’t necessarily have GPS coordinates available when they give their location. Besides, as the first responders are driving up the street, a sign is much more useful in accurately pinpointing the location than GPS, which can be off by tens of meters. (Not to mention, that line of sight to GPS satellites is often not available in the canyons of New York City.)

But he does have a point about discrimination, particularly against Asian and Arab businesses.

Perhaps what is needed is not a law that requires English, but a one that requires the name be prominently displayed in the Latin alphabet. The point is not to dictate what language is used, but to ensure the sign can be read by the vast majority of people in the city. The law should also clarify that it is not “Latin characters only,” and that “prominently displayed” does not mean it has to be the largest writing on the sign, only that it can be clearly read from a reasonable distance. (Given the street grid and architecture of NYC, it would be very difficult to specify a distance, say twenty-five meters, in advance. If you can’t see the store front from twenty-five meters away, it would be absurd to require that large a sign.) Enforcement of the law would also have to be monitored to ensure that particular groups were not unfairly targeted.

And there is something to be said for making life welcoming and convenient for everyone who lives in the city. Such a law might actually help these businesses, but making them more welcoming to a larger customer base. It would also help, in a small way, in reducing the insularity of ethnic enclaves in the city. We don’t want eliminate these enclaves, they are a vital and vibrant part of city life, but by making the names of the businesses readable to the majority of residents would help foster ties to and communication with the city at large.