A Girl With a Sword

This may be totally unrelated, but I read in an article on language choices in music that the Nepali language, under the influence of English language pop songs, was growing more grammatically like English. An example: in Nepali, the attribute is active (so love adheres to me) but in English, all the action is done by the subject (*I* love, *she* loves, *he* loves, etc.). The article went on to say that English-language pop songs were not only challenging Nepali concepts of love as the product of indiviual agency, they were affecting the very language as well.

Anyway, I wonder if this new construct of language is coming from somewhere...another language? Another culture? I can't think from where off the top of my head, but it would make an interesting study.

Neither, really. It is just a new stylistic geegaw, a fashionable paroxysm of bad grammar; probably stemming from some lame attempt at making immediate perceptions absolute from the viewpoint of a particular character (after all, if I am inside a room and someone knocks on the door from the outside, I see— until I deduce that someone is knocking— the door itself knocking). David Hume, I guess, would approve. It should appear clumsy to everyone else. This usage probably appeared in Granta, or the Paris Review, or some similar lit magazine only to be picked up and bludgeoned to death by hack reviewers. Hopefully it will go out of fashion just as quickly as it arrived.

Sorry: the Nepali concept of love did NOT include the notion of individual agency. That was an element introduced by the English language pop songs.

On another, less strident note. The phrase induces just a bit of cognitive dissonance that can be popular among those who seek to create a disconnect between action and effect. I seem to remember this sort of reasoning in "the tree leapt out at the car" phrases that have appeared in famously bad insurance claims (I've seen these sort of expressions appear in criminal proceedings as well, ie. "I pointed the gun at him and his chest exploded".) The search for these claims led to an insurance blog hub (http://www.insuremeblog.com/). Just in case you ever thought that any subject could be too dry to write personalized essays about.

woah, you guys are too quick for me, I was still in the process of writing the blog post, see now the new and improved version complete with syntactic conclusion.

John, interesting, very negative response. The viewpoint thing doesn't work for "torments", though.

And Funke, is "love" the agent in Nepali, with the individual person as its object, so you can't say "I love you" you have to say "my love adheres to you"?

You see, some of us apparently get riled up at LK's hard drinkin' ways while others of us get riled up at grammatical pretense

aha! aha! see, it does have to do with a transfer of subject/object-ness (not a technical term), so the tree and the chest become the subjects instead of the car and the gun. Granted, this is going to greater lengths to get rid of the original subject than the passive construction does, but it's kind of along the same lines. It still makes it more indirect, more impersonal.

I'm not sure about torments since I have yet to see it in a sentence. The phrase "I found it envious" fits in with a cognitive dissonance model. In this case, the student was expressing at once her emotion and her stance at a safe distance from that emotion. It's a bit of an indirect third person. I assume that she does this because her classmates would find it weird if she expressed this in the complete third person (ie. "Sally was envious".) She double guards herself against envy by stating that she found it, as if envy were something lying in a park, to be examined in detached fashion by someone who could never, possibly bear ill will against anyone else. This sort of linguistic yoga appears in environments where there is a perceived danger that a phrase can be misconstrued as contrary to some written or unwritten social order (in this case, as alien to a rigidly non-confrontational academic environment, since envy is aggressive by nature).

That's what the article said. I don't actually speak any Nepali myself...

I got the impression that the Nepali language makes people appear very passive. People don't do things; things happen to them.

This is awesome, Linnea. I'll probably write soon about some of the grammatical constructions I hear around in Boston (I've heard some doozies). If I were a prescriptivist, I'd be going nuts, but as it is, all I can say is "Different strokes for different folks."

Unless of course you're trying to get outsiders from your particular cultural group to respect you. Or doing any serious writing. Prescriptivism is useful, in a limited domain.

Contra JB, I like the new constructs you mention, as long as they don't replace the old. In a limited context (like storytelling), imparting agency to the inanimate makes your story flow better and gives it more immediacy, I think. And "I found it envious" is great - I can definitely see that becoming part of standard English in a few decades.