Rorschach Morphology

In a classic cartoon, two psychiatrists are depicted in the first panel  as approaching each other, each saying “Good morning.”

In the second panel, as they walk away from either other, each has a thought-balloon, thinking:  “I wonder what he meant by that?”

It’s supposed to be a joke on psychiatrists;  though indeed, anyone familiar with psychology and linguistics recognizes that to be a quite valid, indeed deep, question.

~

So this morning, we have a “Good morning” scandal.   It has been reasonably widely (though not well) reported in the mainstream world press, though so far not the American.  E.g. a high-circulation popular Parisian daily:

http://www.leparisien.fr/politique/israel-un-palestinien-arrete-apres-une-erreur-de-traduction-de-facebook-22-10-2017-7348206.php

La police israélienne a arrêté par erreur la semaine dernière un Palestinien qui avait publié sur Facebook une photo de lui accompagnée des mots «bonne journée ». Selon le quotidien israélien «Haaretz», pour une raison encore inexpliquée, le logiciel de traduction du réseau social a converti cette phrase en «attaquez-les » en hébreu et «faites leur du mal » en anglais.

The BBC’s brief note on the matter  is sociolinguistically useless for readers who wish to figure things out for themselves, since it shows neither the photo nor the Arabic:

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-41714152

Israeli police arrested a Palestinian man last week after a Facebook post he made saying "good morning" in Arabic was mistranslated to read "attack them" in Hebrew, local media have reported.

Police confirmed that the construction worker was briefly held under suspicion of incitement but was released as soon as the mistake was realised.

The post showed a photo of the worker next to a bulldozer in the West Bank.

Such vehicles have been used to attack Israelis in the past.

There is only one difference in lettering between the colloquial Arabic phrase for "good morning to you all" and "hurt them", pointed out The Times of Israel.

Actually the Times of Israel doesn’t “point out” any such thing.  It merely piggybacks off an earlier Haaretz report, and does not give either the original Arabic nor the purported “one difference in lettering” that would give the meaning “hurt them”.  -- Indeed, to anyone familiar with printed Arabic, that proviso is a cop-out anyway:  The (usual) unvoweled Arabic ductus is so low in redundancy  that, “merely” by changing “one letter”,  you can radically change the meaning of just about any short message.   -- More anon.

Here is the beginning of the original article in Haaretz:

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/1.818437

No Arabic-speaking police officer read the post before arresting the man, who works at a construction site in a West Bank settlement

That detail provides an innocent explanation of why the fellow would take a selfie with a bulldozer.  He probably drives the thing.

It continues:

The Israel Police mistakenly arrested a Palestinian worker last week because they relied on automatic translation software to translate a post he wrote on his Facebook page. The Palestinian was arrested after writing “good morning,” which was misinterpreted; no Arabic-speaking police officer read the post before the man’s arrest.

That bit about the dreadful consequences of not having an Arabist on your payroll is a pleasing one (to Arabists).   Compare this:

Where is an Arabic linguist when you need one ???

~

Back to the psycholinguistic intricacies of “Good morning”.

The linguistically naïve reader (here in the hands of linguistically naïve journalists, so no help) will assume that “Good morning” in Arabic  is completely straightforward, and that any translator -- human or machine -- that couldn’t translate that simple phrase, would be utterly incompetent.

Now, there is in fact  a straightforward, MSA phrase for ‘Good morning’ in Arabic,

صباح الخير

Phonetically (and we’ll stick to phonetics from here on, since Microsoft often mangles Arabic script): ṣabāḥ al-xayr.  Literally, ‘morning of goodness’ (syntactically, an idafa), to which the usual Arabic morphosemantic rules apply.

But that is not what he wrote.

Einführung in die vergleichende “Guten Morgen”-Morphosemantik

Of the languages with which I am familiar, German comes closest to having a word-for-word equivalent to “Good morning”:  Guten Morgen.  Yet even that is not linguistically straightforward:  the idiom involves not guter, but guten -- grammatically an accusative.   So, you understand the way the phrase is used, but you probably have never reflected on its grammar, and perhaps could not explain it if you did.

Further, in parts of Germany (e.g. Schweinfurt, where I lived for a summer with a German family), people don’t usually say Guten Morgen anyway, they say Grüß Gott -- a phrase I am fond of, and frequently use, but whose syntax is obscure;  I suppose it’s a sort of iḍāfa.

In French, a word-for-word equivalent to the greeting is not current.  You don’t say “bon matin”, you say bonjour, literally ‘good day’, or (as in the Le Parisien version) bonne journée (the nuance of difference being untranslatable).  (There does, however, exist in French  an early-morning greeting  which we lack in English:  bon réveil.  I’ve never myself heard that, not being an early riser.)

In Spanish, you must go even further afield, using a plural, buenos días, lit. ‘good days’.

As to what such phrases are used for, there are subtle distinctions.  Thus, in current American English, Good morning! is simply a greeting -- a pure illocution, like hi or hello, with no descriptive content. (Note:  In British English, it can serve as a good-bye, even as a curt dismissal.  Thus, the heavy father in Wodehouse's Pearls, Girls, and Monty Bodkin says "Good morning, Mr Bodkin" to the unwelcome suitor of his daughter, signaling that their interview is at an end.)  Good night!, by contrast, cannot be used as a greeting:  it is a formula of leave-taking -- a valediction.   Good day!, the word-for-word equivalent of the French greeting bonjour, is no longer used in everyday American English, though it survives as a breezy greeting in Australia -- the iconic G’dye!  Good afternoon and Good evening can still be used in the U.S., though they sound a bit formal.  And at least the latter has also been used (at one time, primarily perhaps in England) as a valediction.

As mentioned, French doesn’t normally use “Bon matin”, at least not the variety of French I’m familiar with.  Bonne matinée might be used but, like bonne journée, my hunch is that it is not so much a pure greeting as an optative, relating to what might follow the encounter, like the trademarked American “Have a nice day!”  (I first heard that one in Berkeley, California, decades ago;  since then it has spread like kudzu  throughout the English-speaking lands.) 

As for Guten Tag, there’s that accusative, a fossilized echo of its likely origin in such a phrase as “Ich wünsche Ihnen einen guten Tag”, which is an optative.  Do contemporary speakers feel this influence, in which case Guten Morgen is not after all an exact equivalent of Good morning ?  Hard to say.

In Modern Standard Arabic (and in most dialects), ṣabāḥ al-xayr corresponds pretty closely to “Good morning”, but things get colorful from there.  Although you may respond in kind, usually (in line with the Koranic injunction, “When you are greeted, respond with the same greeting, or a better one”) you say something like ṣabāḥ al-nūr (‘morning of light’),  or ṣabāḥ al-full or ṣabāḥ al-yāsimīn (both meaning ‘morning of jasmine’).

In the dialects, things get wilder.  Thus, in Yemeni, a very characteristic morning greeting is kaṣbaḥtu, to which the standard reply is  baḥḥakum Allah bi-xeir (sic; the initial ṣ has been dropped).   And -- save the mark! -- there even exist untranslatable Yemeni expressions involving the ṣ-b-ḥ root, which my Sanaani teacher explained as “a morning warning” -- thus potentially, in line with the interpretation of the Israeli police, a threat.

However, what the Palestinian really wrote was:

يصبحهم

And in view of what has gone before, you will no longer be inclined to jump to conclusions that you understand all the nuances of that.

First, we cannot  without further analysis  give a phonetic transcription of that, since it is a script sans diacritics.   Morphologically, it’s a third-person-masculine-singular transitive verb, with third-person-masculine-plural direct object.   The verb could be either Form I, II, or IV, all of which have transitive uses. 

So, how did the translator the Israelis relied on  parse it?

The “automatic translation software” is not identified, though its digital facepage is doubtless blushing magenta.    I just tried it in Google Translate, and (taking the verb as form-IV) it renders the Arabic phrase  as “become them”, so the mystery remains.

The most straightforward assumption is that we are here dealing simply with the MSA verb, form II (syntactically transitive, semantically delocutive), in which case  the expression means “He says ‘Good morning’ to them.” 

That is actually a somewhat strange thing to say.  You’d expect more like “(I say) “Good morning” (to you(-all))”.   “He” makes sense as referring to the fellow in the photograph; but who are ‘they’?   The object-pronoun is definitely third person (and thus, the BBC rendering as "good morning to you all" is incorrect).

Whether there is some further nuance in Palestinian, I do not know offhand.  And as for a translation as “attack”, with the information we have been given so far, it is inexplicable.

~

For another cautionary-tale  about the perils of interpreting  brief swatches of Arabic, try this:
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2017/10/rorschach-philology.html

[Appendix]  The article that prompted this post  was of the “Mistranslation Howlers” motif;  my reply was partly out of annoyance with that complacent genre, which often finds linguistic illiterates gloating  over anecdotes that turn out  either to be more gray-area than appears at first blush (such as the one above), or to be urban legends.  A likely example of the latter is the hardy perennial about the Chevy Nova being marketed among hispanophones under that name.   Laymen observe triumphally that, in Spanish, “No va” means ‘it doesn’t go’; epic fail !!  Actually, nova is a perfectly normal word of Spanish astronomical terminology (https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova );  it is neither spelled like “no va” (being one word, not two), nor pronounced the same (being forestressed).

The “Good morning” article was at the expense of the Israeli counter-terrorist authorities.  There seems indeed to have been a misstep in the software, though one more subtle than most accounts suggested.  The article first appeared in Haaretz, itself an Israeli publication;  its appearance may have been unmotivated other than by the universal Schadenfreude over (alleged) mistranslations (some of which pass into legend, like “Ich bin ein Berliner”, whether or not the interpretation is linguistically well-founded), or there might have been a little Israel-internal scalpel to grind -- nescio.  But I would like to add a further observation, of respect for those who must work the intricate and dangerous CT mission.

Notoriously, terrorists (and criminals) use cover-terms.  The IC took a beating over a now-celebrated message intercepted (we are told) from Afghanistan on September 10, 2001: “The match begins tomorrow.”  The post-hoc Besserwisser wagged their fingers and berated the Agency for not getting that message translated until September 12 (which, given the exotic language of the message, and the skeleton crew left in CT after the relentless whittling-down of the Clinton and Bush years, is only too understandable.)  More to the point than the timeliness, is the interpretation:  Was it really obvious, or should it have been obvious, that this particular message, among a mass of similar things, foretold the 9/11 attacks?  I personally have no idea (though a later news story did aver that the message was eventually determined to have referred, in fact, to an upcoming soccer-match).

Now, as mentioned, the message in the current case  is rather cryptic:

يصبحهم

It is not (according to a Comment to this post, below, from a colleague with significant language experience in Palestine) a particularly usual way to wish someone (or some third parties, in this case) top o’ the morning.   Might it have been an allusion, a wink-wink, or at least contextually suggested one, to the Israel CT team?  In other words, we need not assume that the team just blindly-blandly took the Hebrew mistranslation as the final word on the subject.  They might (given their special knowledge of the folkways of their target-set) actually have known what they were doing.

 

But surely (objects the straw-man, less savvy than yourself), something as simple as a verb meaning ‘to offer a morning greeting’  could not be re-interpreted to mean anything nefarious.  Yet as present company has learned, language has more tricks up its sleeve  than most folks give it credit for.  Consider the following famous phrase of German, which contains a verb meaning ‘greet’:

Und täglich grüßt das Murmeltier

Now, I know German reasonably well;  but when I first encountered that expression, my hair did stand on end (like quills upon ye fretful Murmeltier).   It has the d’outre-tombe knell of those mystery radio-phrases that Cocteau (with a wry nod to maquisard comsec during WWII) stuck into his 1950 movie Orphée ("L'oiseau chante  avec ses doigts").   What could it possibly mean?  Were it my day-job to interpret such things, if it came up in traffic  my first instinct would be to shut down all our embassies instanter.   Yet it is merely the German version of the movie-title “Groundhog Day”.

Inghimasi Murmeltier ... greets you

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