twitter – Nigel Caplan

AP is running a fun story today about Twitter in Japan, which taught me that the verb Tweet (which I’ve written about here) is translated as mumble in Japanese. Here’s the quote of the day:

“It’s telling that Twitter was translated as ‘mumbling’ in Japanese,” he [a Japanese media analyst] said. “They love the idea of talking to themselves.”

That’s not a trend I’ve ever noticed when teaching Japanese students — any truth in it? It is striking that mumbling is a private act, so even if twitter.jp users are not exactly talking to themselves, they are at least talking quietly and unobtrusively. Compare that to the English “tweet” and “twittering,” which suggests to me a rather louder, more irritating sound.

The report goes on:

Ending Japanese sentences with “nah-woo” — an adaptation of “now” in English — is hip, showing off the speaker’s versatility in pseudo-English Twitter-speak.

(Here‘s a detailed blog posting about this neologism.) It’s not surprising to me that technology has caused new words to come into Japanese, or any language, but I’m curious that the Japanese have calqued (to use the technical word) an English adverb, rather than a noun or verb. For example, German borrowed der Computer, and even French has l’Internet (attempts to translate the word literally using webs and nets never caught on). So, I would have expected the word Twitter (or even Tweet) to crop up — although wouldn’t those words both be very hard to fit into Japanese phonology? And doesn’t Japanese already have a word that expresses the English now? Does its (apparently) word-final restriction mean anything?

Japanese linguists, please help out!

Today’s Daily Tar Heel, UNC’s rather good student newspaper, ran an interesting article on athletes who post messages on Twitter, the social network for people who have very short things to say.

“When Ed [Davis, UNC men’s basketball star] Tweets at 2:30, there’s more conversation about why Ed Davis is Tweeting at 2:30 in the morning when he’s got a game the next day than what he actually says,” [Associate Athletic Director Steve] Kirschner said.

I have to admit that I’m less interested in Mr Davis’s late-night pearls of wisdom than I am in the capitalization of “Tweets”, “Tweeting” and “Tweet” (the simple present, present participle, and noun forms, respectively). Clearly, the name of the website (Twitter) needs a capital since it is a proper noun — although the official logo is all in lower case. But seeing this extended to the derived verbs and nouns surprises me. In fact, even though the DTH editors have correctly applied the rules of the Associated Press style guide, Twitter’s own website doesn’t!

Indeed, a majority of Twitter’s use comes through third-party applications that lets users tweet and read tweets wherever they choose.

They would be well advised to update their page, though. The precedent is that once a word starts being “verbed” and drops its capital letter, it risks losing its protected trademark and its unique association with a particular brand. The classic example is the verb “xerox” (meaning to photocopy) — you can xerox your handout on a Canon photocopier, although the Xerox company would prefer you not to.

The Xerox trademark should always be used as a proper adjective followed by the generic name of the product: e.g., Xerox printer. The Xerox trademark should never be used as a verb.

So, Twitter is safe, at least in US newspapers, but there remains the question: why is called Tweeting? Especially when there’s a perfectly good verb “to twitter”? Twitter — the verb — of course suggests irrelevant, uninteresting babbling (hmm … sounds about right). But tweeting is what birds do.

One of the postdocs in my writing group, Aleck, brought up a wonderful alternative: the archaic verb to twit (not to be confused with the noun twit, which is a mild British insult), defined in the OED as “To tell tales; to blab.” That is, to gossip.

Ah, now that seems much closer to reality. And no, I neither Tweet nor twit. At least not in public.