Behemoth, bully, thief: English taking over the planet

I'm always interested in language. I keep noting that the easiest way to distract me and get me off-topic is to raise something that relates to dialect or a foreign tongue. So this Guardian article distracted me from sermon preparation (where I was kind of not quite getting it).

I'm thinking to my recent experience of the last handful of years of watching a lot of foreign-language films of television series. Many of them spoken in languages I'm not well acquainted with and subtitled (Swedish, Finnish, Russian, Japanese) some in languages I know fairly well (Spanish, French, American English -that last is a wry dig!). And so I've been observing with one part of my brain when English has been getting into those other languages (and for AmEng go along to this blog).

I note that English swearwords have become almost ubiquitous alongside or replacing native words and phrases. But I do wonder whether Tim Parks may have overstated his case or missed seeing it from a different angle:

The writer and translator Tim Parks has argued that European novels are increasingly being written in a kind of denatured, international vernacular, shorn of country-specific references and difficult-to-translate wordplay or grammar. Novels in this mode – whether written in Dutch, Italian or Swiss German – have not only assimilated the style of English, but perhaps more insidiously limit themselves to describing subjects in a way that would be easily digestible in an anglophone context.

My response is that perhaps this is more to do with culture than specifically language. That is to say the Hollywood story industry and its ancillaries.

I'm not saying that English as a language isn't influential, as I said above, I do notice it creeping into other languages and even influencing grammar. However, I do also notice that there are things that the subtitled translation doesn't pick up eg the change from formal to informal address -'you'- or a switch from Swedish to Danish in The Bridge which tells you something about the characters' relationship but isn't signalled in the subtitles. That doesn't seem to indicate Englishising. And in any case the variability of English itself may militate against this idea: regional and class and subcultural dialects some of which are driven by other-language contact may make a big difference in this analysis.

If we're worried about range of expression, it's capitalist globalising culture we should worry about; panicking about English may be a huge distraction from the real task.



Behemoth, bully, thief: how the English language is taking over the planet | News | The Guardian

Linguistic prejudice in editing copy for publication

This is fascinating. Okay some of it is about housestyle and some of it is about readability, but some of it is sheer linguistic prejudice where recognition of a certain diversity in dialect or register should be given. Check out The Most Common Edits and note that while there are three or four fair-enough comments, there are also two or three well-dodgy ones.

In fact it's faintly amusing that the way this one is introduced actually needed editing by me and I'm still not sure it makes sense (phrase containing word 'petard' comes to mind).

the writer putsneither or not only before a verb, and then fails to supply a verb for the matching nor orbut also: “The investigation could neither account for the missing cupcakes nor for the fact that there was a secret door in the back of the manager’s office.” Some readers can skim right past a sentence like that; others will shudder

In fact, not only do I skim past it, I can't even see what the issue is. I think I'm a pretty good user of English, I therefore think that this level of pernickety-ness is OTT: the shudderers should get a life and learn that a vast swathe of English-speakers, natives at that, don't speak/write their variety and don't see why they should have to learn to. Give a little, guys.

Then there is this little gem:

pronouns sometimes fail to match the referent and its verb, especially when a collective noun is involved: “The restaurant continues to advertise their cupcakes.”

This is not a failure to match referent and verb: it's a variety of English usage whereby a third person singular following a gender-indefinite antecedent  may use 'their' or 'they'. It's perfectly respectable: Shakespeare and Jane Austen did it, it was only Victorian grammar Nazis who disallowed it on spurious pseudo-logical grounds.

People who edit: it's about time you recognised that you are ill served by some of this grammer Nazi prejudice: lighten up.
People who suck their teeth when someone uses, for example, 'their' for an indefinite though singular antecedant (sic): other people have to learn to recognise and put up with your English usage when it differs from theirs: do the decent thing and reciprocate.
People who write: by all means learn to shorten sentences, keep phrasing closer together and recognise that punctuation is to help your readers compensate for the lack of intonation and body language. But you are entitled to your own variety of English and to challenge the prejudices of those who claim they don't like any variety but their own. They need to loosen up; why should putting up with different varieties be a one way traffic in their favour.

Texting research: dilemma for grammar marms

Fascinating and ironic: This research into the way that frequent users of textisms compare with others in accepting nealogisms. The article reporting the research is here:
Texting affects ability to interpret words
The findings, I think, may present a dilemma for those who enjoy a good moan about how English language is going to the dogs -see if you can see why:

... reading traditional print media exposes people to variety and creativity in language that is not found in the colloquial peer-to-peer text messaging used among youth or 'generation text'. She says reading encourages flexibility in language use and tolerance of different words. It helps readers to develop skills that allow them to generate interpretable readings of new or unusual words. "In contrast, texting is associated with rigid linguistic constraints which caused students to reject many of the words in the study,"

Yes, I' sure you see it: At first it seems to offer comfort that texting really might have an adverse affect on your English usage. But, oh dear, it's in the ability to appreciate and respond to new words and usages -the very kind of thing that the grammar marms are allso keen to discourage and tut at. Who'd have thought it grammar marms and texters sharing the same linguistic vice! Hope they enjoy the company ;)

newly minimal proof of everyday grammatical know-how

A few years back I started noticing some educated southern British English speakers were fronting the vowel in 'good'. I think that perhaps this may be part of the same trend that has now given rise to what in my speech are homophones becoming divergently pronounced according to the perception of the speaker as to grammatical analysis: see here...

in southeastern England /uː/ has developed two very distinct allophones: a truly back [uː] before tautosyllabic (or stem-final) /l/, but a fronted quality approaching [yː] in other positions. The kingly ruler, ˈruːlə, is taken as transparently bimorphemic, rule#(e)r, so retains the back uː of rule; but the measuring ruler, ˈryːlə, has lost touch with its origins and is taken as an unanalysable unit, with a corresponding clear l and fronted vowel yː.

And, incidently, this is a riposte to those who reckon that 'certain people' have no grammar. Admittedly this is not knowingly done according to a morphological distinction, yet it shows very neatly that native speakers have, somewhere in their heads, a very sophisticated sense of grammar which can inform the operation of new forms of language.

John Wells’s phonetic blog: newly minimal:

Shakespeare being Irish -mythbusting

Before it goes too viral, let's put an alert to the real story out there. The myth is: "William Shakespeare spoke with an Irish accent"
My former prof David Crystal gives the real and fuller story here: DCblog: On Shakespeare being Irish. It's all about linguistic change, silly.

Machine reading tripped up by old-school orthography

Many of us are aware that in English, time was that the letter 's' could be written or printed in a form that looks to the modern eye like an 'f'. Google books' machine reading doesn't get seem to have 'learnt' this. Check out the entries on this search ...

The more change the more it's the same

I think that this winter I shall be trying to get down to the British Library because this exhibition is just up my street. It's reported here: 'I wrote 2U B4'! British Library shows up textspeak as soooo 19th century | Science | guardian.co.uk

There are a number of things in the article I enjoyed and this was a new information for me: "The well-intentioned Victorian pamphlet Poor Letter H advised its mostly lower middle class readers that if they really want to get on in life, they should be saying house, not 'ouse, and head, not 'ead. But the book also says the H should remain silent in words such as hospital and herb."
Which is presumably why Frasier (and other north Americans) talks about "drawing an 'erbal bath" -the nAm's haven't heard that Euro-Anglo's weren't convinced and so steadfastly hold to the advice to this day. I'm wondering whether it has something to do with the relatively new fad for TV presenters and others to talk about "staying at an 'otel". I was brought up to pronounce the 'h' and it seems to me that dropping it has only been seen as 'sophisticated' sometime in the last ten years or so (or did I miss something?).

Of course it also relates to that lovely piece of stupidity: school children being told to drop the initial sound (okay there are phonetic problems with that statement but let's set them aside) of 'H' so to pronounce it "aitch" rather than "haitch". I say 'stupidity', of course, because the logic is that the name of the letter should, surely, contain the sound!

Ah well: I wonder whether 'honour', 'heir' and the like will eventually acquire the H's that a number of readers will often give them?

 

Oaf of office

Stephen Pinker has an interesting explanation of Obama's difficulties with the oath of office the other day. I'm not sure whether the split verb thing entirely convinces me, but it has a plausibility about it. Here's the articleEdge 272 and here's the guts of the claim: "How could a famous stickler for grammar have bungled that 35-word passage, among the best-known words in the Constitution? ... the wayward adverb in the passage is blowback from Chief Justice Roberts’s habit of grammatical niggling. ... President Obama, whose attention to language is obvious in his speeches and writings, smiled at the chief justice's hypercorrection, then gamely repeated it. Let's hope that during the next four years he will always challenge dogma and boldly lead the nation in new directions."

uptalk

My thanks to Cath (uptalk description & references � ninetysix and ten:) for this intro into what is being called uptalk. The article referenced points out that there are vareties of English that use final rising intonation in 'ordinary', declarative sentences (one I hear a lot is in the NE of England, being as I live there!). The development is the occasional use in dialects of English that haven't had HRT before in that kind of sentence. My informal observation concurs with this characterisation of its apparent usage-meaning. "linguists who have analysed HRT have identified its positive discourse functions. It has been shown that HRT serves to track the listener’s comprehension and attention, especially when the speaker is presenting new information. Listeners perceive HRT to be deferential but friendly (Guy & Vonwiller 1984). It also acts as a turn-holding mechanism in narratives (e.g. Warren & Britain 1999).”
So now you know.

Don't let the Language Crazies win

Another helpful piece at Language Log : it discusses the difficulty that while it is true that split infinitives are actually standard English, the opinionated but misinformed ("the crazies") are sometimes in positions of power and could take against the split infinitive on your job application or mark your dissertation down. The problem is that altering our linguistic behaviour to accommodate their unfounded prejudice only encourages them. So Arnold Zwicky's advice, at the end of it all is this: "The objective fact is that split infinitives are standard English. So my advice is: split an infinitive if it suits you (or don't, if that suits you). Good writers do it. And you don't even have to have a defense for it; do it because it sounds right for you. Don't let the crazies win."
And yet, do we want to risk it? Well one of my tactics has been to have a standard footnote to (a) recognise that 'yes: I have split an infinitive' and (b) it's deliberate because (c) it is standard English and here's a reference or two to demonstrate it (and perhaps mention Shakespeare and Jane Austin, inter alia, used them).

Real English grammar

A couple of good items on my two English usage hobby-horses: first on singular 'they' from Language Log: Everyone knows each other.

"“Everyone knows each other”, ... The -s suffix on the present-tense verb knows tells us that the subject ... counts as singular for purposes of subject-verb agreement. But each other, famously, requires a semantically plural subject. That is why They know each other is grammatical and *He knows each other is not. From this and nothing else it follows that semantic plurality and morphosyntactic singularity are compatible in English."

The rest of the article points out that singular they has a long history.

The second article, Irrational terror over adjunct placement at Harvard, also at Language Log, bears on so-called split infinitives, also making the point of their long history of good English usage. In this case, it's by way of noting bad usage arising from trying to avoid a split infinitive. Picking up a section from a Harvard publication, the issue becomes clear:

David Rockefeller,... has pledged $100 million to increase dramatically learning opportunities for Harvard undergraduates through international experiences

What's the issue? Well, read it again and if that doesn't work here's the thing: ""What are “dramatically learning opportunities”, you might ask? We’d normally expect an adjectival rather than adverbial modifier on “learning opportunities”; is it a typo for “dramatic learning opportunities”?
Now here's the analysis:

Standard English in both its American and British varieties permits a manner adjunct (like the adverb dramatically) to occur in various places in a clause, one of them being between to and the plain form verb in an infinitival clause, but it does not normally permit any adjunct to occur between a transitive verb and its direct object. Thus [1] and [3] are grammatical, but [2] is not:
[1] This gift has dramatically improved things. (before verb)
[2] *This gift has improved dramatically things. (before object)
[3] This gift has improved things dramatically. (after object)

A further piece of evidence to show the legitimacy of the split infinitive. Students: use 'em and be happy.

s/t/he/y

In a nice taking-apart of a bit of grammar-marmery, Geoffrey Pullum in this article: Language Log: Lying feminist ideologues wreck English, says Yale prof gets a lovely counter example in, which I must hold in reserve for one of my colleagues.

it is claimed that purported sex-neutral he ('a student who lost his textbook') 'has no pejorative connotations; it is never incorrect.' White's claim seems to me quite untrue. Consider how weird this sounds:
Is it your brother or your sister who can hold his breath for four minutes?
Why would it sound so weird if forms of the pronoun he could be sex-neutral? They can't. He is purely masculine in reference. The claim that it can be sex-neutral is not in accord with the facts.

In fact, I'd be surprised if the majority of English speakers didn't use 'their' at that point, like Shakespeare did (e.g. A Comedy of Errors, Act IV, Scene 3:
There's not a man I meet but doth salute me / As if I were their well-acquainted friend ). And Pullum links to examples of the latter and also of a very full listing of Jane Austen's usages of the same.

PS Nice post on the same topic at A Billion Monkeys Can't be Wrong And a follow-up at Language Log.

US readers only need apply ...

I know from my site stats that there are quite a number of US readers to this blog who've stayed loyal despite my occasional ribbings. I came across this recently and wondered ...

If you're a speaker of American English with no experience of life in the United Kingdom, here's a quiz question (this is not for you if you live in Britain; to you it will seem absurdly easy).
Choose the correct meaning for the phrase "white goods" from the following list of potential meanings:
1. Goods of any sort that are white in color — flour, paper towels, lilies, emulsion paint, toothpaste, ermine fur, milk, eggs, refined sugar, button mushrooms, etc.
2. Goods that carry no duty and can thus be freely imported and carried through customs without officials needing to be in any way concerned with them.
3. Garments typically or traditionally made with undyed white cotton, such as plain dress shirts, underwear, tennis shorts, cricket clothes, and so on.
4. Goods that are fully legal, in the sense of being properly imported with duties properly paid rather than being part of the so-called "black economy".
5. Office paper, letter envelopes, and similar white paper office supplies.
6. Household appliances such as washing machines or refrigerators that are often painted white.
7. Linen household goods such as sheets, pillow cases, and towels.
8. Goods of a sort determined by market research to be primarily of interest to customers of European rather than African or Asian origins.
9. Goods deemed by government regulatory agencies to be (unlike an increasing number of toys and other products from the People's Republic of China) free of harmful features and fully fit for sale to the general public.
10. Milk, buttermilk, yoghurt, and other non-cheese liquid dairy products.
...I'll leave a few days for you to do your own guessing and to test monolingual American friends, relatives, and colleagues to see what percentage of them can guess the correct meaning (they are not allowed to do any Googling or Wikipediery before answering, of course

Want to be in on this experiment? Then check out language log

Don't you just love this evolving thing we call English?

I just loved these that I'd not come across before. Looking for opportunities to use them in blogging! "Some words are lovely additions - I'm particularly fond of whataboutery ('the practice of repeatedly blaming the other side'), and silver, which enters as a verb, meaning 'to age'.
Others, meanwhile, just make you despair. Has it really been necessary to cultivate masstige ('the impression of exclusivity in goods that are affordable for many')? Or preneed ('arranged or made available in advance of eventual requirements: preneed funeral arrangements')? Now that's a barbecue-stopper."Aida Edemariam: More new words (most of which we could do without) | News | Guardian Unlimited Books: