The virtual linguist

Nigaz and other branding blunders

The Russian energy company Gazprom has entered into a joint venture with Nigeria; the resulting company will be called Nigaz (story here). In today's Guardian, the designer Stephen Bayley calls the name Nigaz the latest in a long line of branding blunders.

The story had generated over 170 readers' comments when I last looked, many of them written by puerile overgrown schoolboys by the look of it. However, one or two of the commentators make the point that the company name will be pronounced Nigh-Gaz, so there is nothing to get het up about. It will only be the Nigerian half of the joint venture who pronounce it with the first syllable rhyming with 'nigh'; the Russian word for Nigeria looks more or less the same when transliterated but the first i is pronounced ee. The company name Nigaz has not been transliterated into the Cyrillic script, as you can see in this Russian-language article (4th line down), and the author explains how the word Nigaz was arrived at (3rd paragraph). The whole article is about the furore the name has caused in the English-speaking world.

Language Matters report

In a report entitled Language Matters published earlier this month, the British Academy expressed the fear that the decline in modern-language learning might be threatening the country's research base. UK researchers are finding it difficult to compete with their counterparts from other countries because of their poor language skills, which means that the UK is losing its status in the research world. Universities are bringing in researchers from abroad rather than training UK personnel.

The report calls on universities to consider making a language qualification obligatory for entry, an action which UCL has taken. From 2012 all students enrolling in UCL will have to have a GCSE or equivalent in a modern foreign language. If they are not at this standard, they will have to take a half-course in a language as part of their degree.

Language learning has been declining in British schools over the past few years. In 2001, 22% of pupils did not take a GCSE in a foreign language; by 2008 this number had increased to 56%. A Level language entries have declined by 28% between 1996 and 2007. This, of course, is having a knock-on effect on university numbers, which explains the problems highlighted in the Language Matters report.

The British Academy report Language Matters can be downloaded here.

Cockney

In his weekly World Wide Words newsletter this weekend, Michael Quinion mentioned Cockney - in its 14th-century form. He quoted a line from Piers Plowman by William Langland: "I have no salt Bacon, Ne no cokeneyes, bi Crist Colopus to maken". Quinion explained that Langland was talking about bacon and eggs; a cokeneye was a cock's egg, a dismissive term for a small or misshapen egg.

Another meaning of cokeneye at the time was "a child that sucketh long, a mother's darling, a cockered child" (cockered meaning pampered) ie a namby-pamby or a milksop. A later (16th-century) definition in the OED is "A derisive appellation for a townsman, as the type of effeminacy, in contrast to the hardier inhabitants of the country". The word was used in this sense at the time about Londoners, and had a contemptuous tinge to it, or at the very least was used when bantering. A 1617 citation, attributed to Sir Richard Moryson, is "Londiners, and all within the sound of Bow-bell, are in reproch called Cocknies, and eaters of buttered tostes (sic)".

I would want to write Cockney with a capital C, since it refers to a person or a town, so should follow the pattern of Londoner, or Liverpudlian, Geordie etc, to my mind. However, it is often seen with a lower-case c.

Sphairistike

If you're enjoying watching the Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Championships at the moment, just think, you would have been watching the Sphairistike Championships if Major Walter Wingfield, the inventor of the modern game, had had his way. Sphairistike, which is ancient Greek for 'the art of playing ball', is the name Wingfield originally gave to the game.

For a definition of the economic term Wimbledonization, see this post.

Football

"You base football player" is an insult used by Kent to Oxford in Shakespeare's King Lear. As Professor David Crystal said in a talk he gave earlier this week at the Globe Theatre (also mentioned here) to be called a football player, let alone a base one, was very insulting indeed. Noblemen did not play football; football at the time was a violent free-for-all played by rowdy mobs of peasants.

During Shakespeare's time there were no rules in a football game, and no set number of players in a team. Shortly after Shakespeare's death the game was taken up by some English schools, who turned it into an organised team sport with rules.

Although I know very little about football, it does seem to me that there is still something of an elitist attitude towards the game. Many private and public schools in the United Kingdom (public schools are fee-paying, despite their name; see my blog on the definition here) do not have football as part of their curriculum, but are rugby schools.

Despite football being an unruly game for the plebs in Tudor times, King Henry VIII owned a pair of football boots, apparently. See this article.

Spastic means a higher age rating for DVDs

Jennifer Aniston's character in Friends, Rachel, is responsible for causing a DVD collection of early Friends programmes to be classified with a higher age rating than previous DVDs of the same programmes; it has been upgraded from PG to 12. PG, which stands for Parental Guidance, means that the film or programme is usually fine for children aged 8 and over, although younger children are allowed to watch if their parents agree. 12 means that the DVD is suitable only for children over 12 (see the British Board of Film Classification's website).

In a Friends episode from the first series, The One with the East German Laundry Detergent, Rachel describes herself as a 'laundry spaz' ie no good at doing the laundry. 'Spaz' is short for 'spastic', a word which has fallen out of favour in recent years. The charity Scope, which helps people with cerebral palsy, was called The Spastics Society until 1994, but changed the name because the word spastic was seen as stigmatising the disabled (reasons for the name change can be found in this Scope document).

A spokesman for the British Board of Film Classification said that discriminatory language is a priority when deciding on the rating of a film or DVD. They believe that this is as much a concern for viewers as sex, drugs and horror, all previous and current reasons for higher classifications.

Read more about the new film classifications in this Times article.

Redact and redacted

"Key details had been 'redacted' by Commons officials", "the publication of MPs' 'redacted' expenses", "the redacted version of MPs' expenses" and "the decision to redact vast swathes of MPs' published expenses" are examples of sentences that have been appearing recently in every British newspaper. Before last week, most people had probably never heard of the word redact. I hadn't, but guessed the meaning because I knew that rédacteur means 'editor' in French.

Redact is a rare word, according to the one-volume New Oxford Dictionary of English. It is a back formation (ie a shortened form of an earlier word) from the noun redaction and means 'to edit (text) for publication'. The verb did exist much earlier with a different meaning - 'to bring (matter of reasoning or discourse) into or to a certain form'. Originally the past tense and past participle were redact, the same form, not redacted as now. The word is stressed on the second syllable; it is re-dact (where the e sounds like the e in relax or repay), not red-act.

When you read the articles about MPs' expenses, you realise that redact means more than just 'edit'. The New Oxford Thesaurus of English lists correct, check, improve and polish as synonyms of edit, and that is most certainly not what the big black lines through the expense claims were intended to do. I would say that redact used in the current context is a synonym of censor, doctor or tamper with.

That is how the word redact is used in this headline which has nothing to do with British MPs' expenses: "Chicago Cubs great Ron Santo redacted: Conversation about his Hall of Fame snub is blacked out in U of I documents", so redacted means 'blacked out' here. "CIA officials sought to redact many sensitive and classified elements of the lengthy report, including details about the use of waterboarding, sleep deprivation and other harsh measures against detainees" is a sentence in this Washington Post article. I'd say redacted meant censored here.

From cw- to qu-

Qu- became a more common letter combination in English after the Norman Conquest. Norman scribes, who were familiar with the letter q from their own Romance language, preferred it to the Old English letter combination cw-, which produced the same sound. Thus, the OE cwēn became queen, cwic became quick, acwellen eventually became quell and cwealm became qualm. Other qu- words, eg quest and quiet entered English a century or so after the Normans arrived, so they were spelt with qu- right from the start.

English in Shakespeare's time

I was at the Globe Theatre in London earlier this evening listening to a lecture-cum-performance by Professor David Crystal (there's a link to his blog on the left-hand side of this page) and his son Ben Crystal, an actor. They were talking about the language spoken in the 16th century in England, and read some speeches from Shakespeare's plays in the original pronunciation.

There were no audio recordings of how people spoke in Shakespeare's time, but Professor Crystal said we have evidence how the language sounded. First, there was a movement at the time to fix spellings and ensure that there were rules, so writers wrote about how words should be pronounced and about how words that rhymed should be spelt the same. The playwright Ben Jonson wrote a grammar book and in it he stated that r was pronounced after vowels, although it was not too strong a sound.

Many rhymes and puns in Shakespeare's plays don't work in modern English, because the pronunciation of words has changed. In Shakespeare's time mood rhymed with blood, one was pronounced own, so rhymed with alone, and wars was pronounced to rhyme with stars.

The two Crystals explained why the highlighted lines of this speech of Jaques in As You Like It would have been hilarious to a 16th-century audience:

A fool, a fool! I met a fool i' the forest,
A motley fool; a miserable world!
As I do live by food, I met a fool
Who laid him down and bask'd him in the sun,
And rail'd on Lady Fortune in good terms,
In good set terms and yet a motley fool.
'Good morrow, fool,' quoth I. 'No, sir,' quoth he,
'Call me not fool till heaven hath sent me fortune.'
And then he drew a dial from his poke,
And, looking on it with lack-lustre eye,
Says very wisely, 'It is ten o'clock;
Thus we may see,' quoth he, 'how the world wags.
'Tis but an hour ago since it was nine,
And after one hour more 'twill be eleven;
And so, from hour to hour, we ripe and ripe,
And then, from hour to hour, we rot and rot;
And thereby hangs a tale.' When I did hear
The motley fool thus moral on the time,
My lungs began to crow like chanticleer,
That fools should be so deep-contemplative,
And I did laugh sans intermission
An hour by his dial. O noble fool!
A worthy fool! Motley's the only wear.

Hour was pronounced oar at the time; so was whore. If you substitute the word whore for hour, you will see the joke.

Dark pool

The recently coined financial term 'dark pool' seems to be ubiquitous. I came across it for the first time this weekend in two separate articles in The Financial Times, and it's probably in more articles that I skipped over - I buy the newspaper for the cryptic and general knowledge crossword mainly. I guess it's a recent term as it usually has quotation marks around it, or is prefaced by 'so-called', but despite that, googling the expression came up with over ten million hits.

The FT kindly gave a definition (full article here):

"... the emergence of "dark pools" of liquidity - a relatively new venue for the buying and selling of shares. Pre-trade prices - the price at which shares are offered for sale - are not visible to anyone, even the participants in them, and the price at which shares change hands is only revealed after the trade is done".

The fact that the expression contains the word 'dark' makes it sound fairly ominous. A quick search for the term online shows that words and expressions which often appear in the same sentence as the term 'dark pool' include opaque, anonymous trading venue, criticism, suspicion, need for regulation and alarm.