pseudo-english

Lexical borrowings from English that do not correspond directly to English word usage.

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.

A structured artificial language that uses English words in order to be more user friendly for English speakers.

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".

Nonsense text or speech that resembles English in some way.

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.

English-language jargon or dialect that does not reflect the way most people speak.

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.

In a style or manner that imitates the way things are done in England.

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.

Imitating the English language.

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.