日米社会言語学

Observations on Japanese and American languages and societies from a Japanese language learner. In English and Japanese.

Tuesday, April 07, 2009

Je ne think so pas

OK, this has nothing to do with Japanese, but it's so weird I wanted to record it somewhere. I'll try to replicate in it Japanese, too.

For reasons I can't fully explain, I searched Google for web pages written in English containing the clause je ne sais quoi and pages written in French containing the clause I don't think so.

As I expected, there are many pages using those clauses, but very few that switch from English to French - or vice versa - within the clause.

Here are the number of hits suggested by the search:
Phraseestimated
pages
Je ne sais quoi405,000
I ne sais quoi3
I don't sais quoi0

Phraseestimated
pages
I don't think so25,700
je don't think so1
je ne think so (pas)0


This is pretty much what I expected; it seems to accord with most theories of code-switching constraints.

Since the search for je ne think so returned no results from French pages, Google helpfully shows me the results from all pages, regardless of language. According to Google, there are eight English-language pages that contain je ne think so pas. Curious, ne c'est pas?

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