The virtual linguist

St Andrew's Day, the Saltire and flag days

The Google UK home page today is showing a picture of bagpipes, as November 30th is St Andrew's Day, St Andrew being the patron saint of Scotland. 
 

The flag of St Andrew, a diagonal white cross on a blue background, is called the Saltire. Saltire is a term used in heraldry to mean a diagonally shaped cross, and comes from the Old French saultoir, meaning "stirrup cord" or "stile".

Wikipedia states that St Andrew's Day is an official flag day in Scotland, meaning that the Saltire should fly on all Scottish government buildings. The expression "flag day" is not generally used in Britain with this sense; flag day means something else entirely here: "a day on which money is collected for a charity in the street and donors are given small paper badges to show they have contributed" (Oxford Dictionary of English definition). 

Wikipedia is misleading on this point. The Scottish government revised its flag-flying policy in 2005 and its instructions are that the Saltire should be flown every day. That's another reason why the expression "flag day" is rarely seen in Britain in the US sense - there isn't one single flag day. There are 18 established days in the UK as a whole when government buildings are obliged to fly the flag (see the dates and reasons here).

The hamza, or glottal stop

Today's word of the day from Ask Oxford is hamza, which is the symbol in the Arabic alphabet for the glottal stop. The word comes from the Arabic meaning "to pinch" or "to compress" and, indeed, the glottal stop is produced when the vocal folds are compressed, or pinched together, then released as pressure builds up.

When I was learning Arabic I found the glottal stop quite difficult to pronounce, especially at the beginning of words, such as at the beginning of the definite article al. I don't know why, as I can pronounce it in German - it appears twice in ein Apfel (an apple) and it is common in spoken English, although it's not a major feature of the English I speak (Liverpool).

The glottal stop is a phoneme in Arabic, in other words it is a sound that distinguishes one word from another. It isn't a phoneme in English, but an allophone ie a variant of a sound, a variant of the phoneme /t/ in English's case. That means that pronouncing the word water with a glottal stop ie wa'er does not change the meaning of the word.

The glottal stop is becoming more prevalent in spoken British English. It was originally associated with the Cockney of London, then with the more recent Estuary English, spoken in the south-east of England (Estuary refers to the Thames estuary), but it's now heard much further afield, including in Yorkshire and the West Country, particularly in the language of young people.

Buffling, or business jargon

In a survey of the most hated business cliches, conducted by the Ramada hotel group, the twenty phrases cited as being most annoying were:

1. Thinking outside of the box

2. Touch base

3. At the end of the day

4. Going forward

5. All of it

6. Blue sky thinking

7. Out of the box

8. Credit crunch

9. Heads up

10. Singing from the same hymn sheet

11. Pro-active

12. Downsizing

13. Ducks in a row

14. Brainstorming

15. Thought shower

16. 360^o thinking

17. Flag it up

18. Pushing the envelope

19. At this moment in time

20. In the loop

The use of such business jargon is described as "buffling", presumably a portmanteau word based on "business" and "waffling". People may claim to despise it, but many claim to buffle regularly, believing it will help their career. The Daily Telegraph has the story.

New translation of The Thousand and One Nights

A new translation of The Thousand and One Nights has just been published by Penguin, the first for over a century.

Professor Malcolm Lyons, Fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge, who is the translator of the new edition, and Robert Irwin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, who wrote the introduction, were interviewed on the BBC radio programme Today this morning (if you are in the UK you can listen to the interview for another week here - it took place at 08.43 hrs). 

Previous well-known translations included the 18th-century version by Edward Lane, which was heavily bowdlerised with all references to sex removed, and with some stories not included at all, since Lane considered them immoral. Then there was the late 19th-century translation by Sir Richard Burton, which reinstated all the erotic images of the original - and probably added a few more besides! Professor Lyons said that the main changes he made were in updating the English. Here's a flavour of Burton's English (this passage is from the story The Tale of the Bull and the Ass):

But thou, O fool, art full of zeal and thou toilest and moilest before the master; and thou tearest and wearest and slayest thy self for the comfort of another. Hast thou never heard the saw that saith, None to guide and from the way go wide? Thou wendest forth at the call to dawn prayer and thou returnest not till sundown; and through the livelong day thou endurest all manner hardships; to wit, beating and belabouring and bad language.

Frisian

Frisian, a West Germanic language spoken in the province of Friesland in the Netherlands and parts of northern Germany, is English's closest relative, apart from Scots. Frisia was once (from about the 7th century) a powerful and independent kingdom, but by the 15th century it had lost its independence.

Frisian is a language rich in vowels, diphthongs and triphthongs (as is English). Frisian is unusual among Germanic languages in that it has nasal vowels (Afrikaans does too). The Frisian "r" is similar to the English "r" (an alveolar sound, not uvular as in German or Dutch).

At one time Old English and Frisian were mutually intelligible, but after the Battle of Hastings English became influenced by Norman French, whilst Frisian was influenced more and more by Dutch. A phrase often quoted to show the similarities between English and Frisian is: Buter, brea, en griene tsiis is goed Ingelsk en goed Frysk (butter, bread and green cheese is good English and good Frisian) (there should be a circumflex over the u of buter).

Eddie Izzard presented a documentary series on Discovery Channel called Mongrel Nation, and in one programme he learnt some Old English. He then went to Friesland and found a local Frisian-speaking farmer. Izzard asked to buy a cow in Old English, and the farmer more or less understood and led him off to look at cows. You can see the clip from the series on YouTube here.

How big is a trillion?

Most people go to a dictionary if they want to find the definition of a word. They get the definition, but they get it presented baldly; no emotional or picturesque language is used. Take the word "trillion", which has been bandied around a lot lately in connection with debt, government borrowing and the credit crunch. Most dictionary definitions say that a trillion is the number 1 followed by 12 noughts, or a million million. Chambers says a trillion is "the cube of ten thousand", which isn't a good way of explaining it, as you need to have some mathematical ability to understand the phrase.

The word "billion" is defined similarly as "a thousand million". It is the Oxford Dictionary of English which provides the more complicated definition this time - "the number equivalent to the product of a thousand and a million".

The definitions for billion and trillion are similar and will leave you equally moved - or unmoved, more likely. They don't give you a mental image of exactly how big the numbers are, nor how they compare to one another. The words are pretty similar, and it is my guess that people feel that the numbers are too. You don't get a sense from the words themselves, or their dictionary definitions, just how many or how large a trillion is.

For that you need a picture, or an anecdote or story. I heard one once - can't remember where - which made it very clear just how huge a number a trillion is. If you had decided to count one trillion seconds and had started counting at the moment Jesus Christ was born (let's assume that He was born in the year 0000) and had counted every second in the 2008 years since, you would now be around one fifteenth (or around 6.5%) of the way through your task. You would have to carry on counting for another 29 and a half thousand years!

Jam and Jerusalem

Jam and Jerusalem is a fairly well-known phrase in British English (there's a BBC sitcom starring Dawn French and Joanna Lumley with that name). It is associated with the Women's Institute (WI), a membership organisation for women in England, Wales, the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man (Scotland and Northern Ireland have their own organisations). The 2003 film Calendar Girls, which stars Helen Mirren, is about a village WI group, and one of the characters in the film says "it's not all jam and Jerusalem, you know", meaning that the group gets involved in all sorts of activities, not just the traditional jam-making and patriotic hymn-singing.

The Women's Institute in England and Wales was founded in 1915 (based on the Canadian organisation founded in 1897) with the purpose of involving rural women in the war effort. The words "jam" and "Jerusalem" hark back to the organisation's wartime origins. Jam, because the women canned or made jam to feed the population, and Jerusalem after the patriotic hymn (poem by William Blake set to music by Hubert Parry in 1916) which was also associated with the Suffragettes.

Jerusalem is still sung at WI AGMs, but each local group can decide for itself whether to sing it at meetings. I often speak to WI groups (on the subject of language or dictionaries) and have only ever heard it sung once. It may be sung today at a conference when the UK's minister for women, Harriet Harman, will ask WI members to help crack down on sleazy ads in local newspapers. (I blogged on the origin of the word "sleazy" here).

The WI's website includes an explanation of the phrase "jam and Jerusalem".

Uxorious

The adjective "uxorious" and words derived from it rarely appear in the newspapers, but an article in today's Daily Telegraph contains "uxoriousness" in connection with celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay. Not that it was he who said the word - he would probably pronounce it with an "f"! According to the author of the article, Ramsay has always "splurged on about his uxoriousness".

Uxorious means "devoted to one's wife" and comes from the Latin for "wife", uxor.

Language teaching in schools in Europe

A European Commission study on the situation regarding language teaching in 31 European countries (the 27 member states of the EU plus Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Turkey) has been published. The full 136-page document can be read here, but here are some points I gleaned from it: 

• Over 90% of pupils learn English at some stage during their school career, even if English is not a mandatory language to learn in their country
• English is a mandatory language (ie the first foreign language learnt) in only 13 of the countries. The countries where English is not mandatory are mainly the newer members of the EU in eastern Europe, but France, Spain and Austria are in this group too
• Pupils are learning a foreign language younger and younger, with pre-school children learning in some countries
• In most countries it is obligatory to learn two foreign languages for at least one year
• Only in Scotland and Ireland are pupils not obliged to learn any foreign language for at least one year (English, Scottish Gaelic and Irish are not considered foreign languages in these countries regardless of the native language of the pupil). The situation in Scotland is that schools have a duty to offer a foreign language, but pupils do not have to take up the offer. In practice, most do
• At upper secondary education level in Cyprus schools have to offer 5 foreign languages; it's 6 in Malta, and pupils have to study three of them
• Slovakia and the UK are the only countries where it is not compulsory to learn a foreign language at primary school level
• English, French, German, Spanish and Russian account for 95% of all the language learning going on in European schools. Russian is mainly being taught in the Baltic states and Bulgaria
• At primary school level foreign language teaching takes up about 10% of the total teaching time. This figure varies widely by country; it's 39% in Luxembourg and less than 5% in 10 countries
• 7% of 15-year-olds speak a different language at home to the language of instruction at their school, and this isn't because they are immigrants. This figure varies by country; in Poland it's less than half of one per cent, whilst in Luxembourg it's 25%. This is because they speak Letzeburgesch (or Luxembourgish) at home, but are taught in German and French
• England and Wales score highly when it comes to the range of languages being offered in schools, with provision for Arabic, Japanese, Mandarin and Urdu as well as many European languages 

Eton mess

Eton mess is a yummy, summery dessert made from strawberries, cream and crushed meringue (picture and recipe here). I had always thought it was called a "mess" because it looked an untidy, jumbled mess of ingredients swirled around together, and, indeed, that may be the reason - no-one seems to know for sure. Checking in the dictionary, I found that mess in the "untidy state of things" sense dates back only to the beginning of the 19th century.

The Oxford English Dictionary's first definition is "a portion of food" and the dictionary has citations from the 14th century for this sense. Mess was applied, in particular, to sloppy food such as porridge, milk or broth. The word's origin is in old French, mes being a portion of food, which itself is from the late Latin missus, a verbal noun meaning "sending" (to table, presumably), and is thus related to words like "mission".

A second meaning of "mess" is "a group of people eating together" as, for instance, officers' mess. It tends to be used with regard to certain groups of people - the armed forces, lawyers and in some English public schools.

And that brings us back to Eton. Eton is a top English public school. A public school, by the way, for the benefit of non-British readers, is the opposite of what you might think it is. It is a very expensive private school, usually a boarding school. The dessert Eton mess was first created by a chef at the school, and is traditionally eaten at the school's biggest holiday, the "fourth of June", when the annual prize-giving ceremony is held, cricket is played, there is a procession of boats on the river and boys and their families picnic. The significance of the 4th June is that this was the birthday of King George III, who had a great fondness for Eton (it is a stone's throw from the monarch's Windsor Palace). The "fourth of June" is never celebrated on the 4th June, but is always held on the Wednesday following the May bank holiday (the May bank holiday is the last Monday in May). More from Eton's own website here.