Pseudo-english

Then and now Back in 1981 when I wrote the first article on this subject (The Incorporated Linguist 20, 104, 1981), Naples was in the throes of a boom in the use of English (or rather pseudo-English) in local facias and tradenames.

There is a strong feeling that pseudo-English is more "user friendly" than symbolic notation.

The possibility of verbal encoding of mathematical formulas into pseudo-English has deliberately been built into COBOL; for example, "compute velocity times time giving distance" is nothing but syntactic sugar for "distance := velocity · time".

However, even then, pseudo-English is a useful intermediate output since it can be used to update the dictionaries, to refine the partitioning methods, and to derive rules for syntactic analysis.

Pseudo-English has been reported to me by several mothers of three-year-olds. One Bengali-speaking mother provided me with an audio recording of her daughter using it while talking on a toy telephone to an imaginary English-speaking friend, and I videotaped a Japanese boy using this medium with English-speaking adults and children at the nursery school.

In Pseudo-English (i.e. a non-existent English or language), questions are formed by means of mirror inversion of the word order in corresponding declarative sentences.

But he could not write or speak English in a manner tolerable to any Englishman; and although he knew nearly all the words in the language, it was dictionary knowledge, and so different from an Englishman's apprehension of the same words that it was only a sort of pseudo-English that he knew, and not our living tongue.

What fevers Barzun, of course, is the artificial pseudo-English that schoolma'ams, whether in panties or in pantaloons, try to foist upon their victims, and the even worse jargon that Dogberrys in and out of office use for their revelations to the multitude.

One of the problems in writing about the new pseudo-English lies in finding the right nomenclature. Terms like jargon, gobbledygook, cant, argot, and so on have their uses; but they apply poorly here, partly because the new "English" covers all of these and more and partly because there is something nonlinguistic and inhuman about it.

In his diabolical joke-typist persona, Perec murdered the English language, but his aggression was directed as much towards the unfunny ghastliness of scientific pseudo-English as towards the language itself, which he knew well and could bend quite effectively to his own humour.

During his adolescence he went to the most exclusive of the pseudo-English schools that try to recreate a Harrow or an Eton on the alien American scene.

"The phone would ring. "Is this the Jesus Yoder or the Merton Yoder?" a pseudo-English voice would inquire.

In 1928, on the verge of moving into his pseudo-English mansion on Long Island's North Shore, Cantor was in a state of reflective happiness.

The other two are done very badly — so badly as to be in parts unintelligible, unless the reader has the skill to hammer out conjecturally the German or Italian original from the pseudo-English gibberish which is set before him.

Occasionally the French mania for showing off the talent they do not possess leads to still more amusing linguistic comedies — for instance, that case of the pseudo-English verb, flirter.

English or pseudo-English nicknames were liable to turn up amongst his friends—so he is found referring in 1897 to Sophia Goudstikker as 'der Puck" and in 1915 to the much-married Marianne Mitford as 'Baby Friedländer'!

Invent an even more elegant pseudo-mathematical or pseudo-English language for programming. Fix things so a single pseudo-English statement might generate many machine-language instructions instead of merely one.

These pseudo-English lexical borrowings were coined from English roots in Hungary like in other countries of Continental Europe, and they do not have their historical, primary historical or generic sources of borrowing in the macrosystem of English.

A school where non-native speakers agree to use English in order to create a pseudo-English environment for practicing their English would not be truly ESL if indeed they all had a common first language.

Pseudo-English spellings characterize Category 4 names.

In order to express the general statement that pipes are hollow, we had to transform the natural English sentence into the pseudo-English form "For all possible values of x, if x is a pipe, then x is hollow."

Such words have not been borrowed from English because they do not exist there but they have been formed in the receiving language on the basis of English elements and pseudo-English pattern, e.g. golman (Serbian word for goalkeeper), džezer (Servian word for jazzman), boks (Servian word for boxing); Serbian examples have been made by the processes of composition, derivation and ellipsis.

Three types of letter strings were used: real English words, pseudo-English words (nonsense, but orthographically legal, letter strings); and nonwords (orthographically illegal letter strings).