The virtual linguist

Gifting

This will be my last post for a fortnight, as I am going on holiday tomorrow until the beginning of November and am having a break from my computer. Please come back in two weeks' time!

I popped out earlier to get some last-minute things for my trip, and I saw that Marks & Spencer had a sign saying 'Gifting' over some shelves. Gifting isn't a word that is often used in British English (although it's not new - the OED has citations dating back to the early 17th century). It tends either to be used in formal contexts eg gifting one's stately home to the nation (which seems a bit over the top when referring to M&S bubble-bath sets and the like), or in negative contexts eg pyramid gifting schemes, or should I say scams (you recruit eight people to send you £1,000, they recruit eight people each to give them £1,000 and so on). It's sometimes used in sports reports in the sense 'giving away as a result of error or poor play' eg 'England wing Ugo Monye admitted Harlequins wrecked their own Heineken Cup campaign by gifting Toulouse top spot in Pool Five following a 19-23 defeat' which appeared in a UK Press Association report today. The Telegraph had the headline 'Labour big guns warn against gifting election to Tories' recently, which is a similar use of the word.

Why Marks & Spencer prefers to call its department Gifting rather than Gifts is a mystery to me. I think that most customers won't be familiar with the term.

Disappearing languages

The French linguist Claude Hagege was on the Today programme on Radio 4 this morning (article and interview here) talking about endangered languages. He reckons there are about 5,000 languages in the world today, but this number is dwindling by 25 a year, so a century from now he estimates that there will only be 2,500 languages spoken in the world.

Some linguists argue that as cultures evolve, their traditional languages become irrelevant, but Claude Hagege regrets the death of any language as he says that language and culture are closely inter-related, so if the language dies, so does the culture.

In his interview he praised the fact that Cornish, a language that supposedly died out 150 years ago, has been revived. Languages that are written down, like Cornish, can do this - Hebrew did it successfully, for instance. Admittedly there needs to be a very committed body of people to bring it back to life.

You can hear a short tale in English, common Cornish and modern Cornish on the aforementioned BBC page. These two varieties of Cornish are both modern (they were developed in the 1980s), but use different spelling conventions. Cornish words sound nothing like English words, but I thought the reader's intonation sounded very similar to English's.

There is a Cornish-language version of Wikipedia here.

International radio or spelling alphabet

Alpha, bravo, charlie, delta ... This is the best-known spelling or radio alphabet (also sometimes called a phonetic alphabet) in English. Its correct name is the NATO phonetic alphabet according to its Wikipedia page and it dates back to 1956. During the Second World War the armed forces used other words for letters; in Britain A was Able or Affirm, B was Baker, D was dog, K was king and there were other differences (there is a full list halfway down the aforementioned Wikipedia page).

Words for some letters have changed several times, because they could be confused with another word or they contained vowel sounds which non-native English speakers found difficult to pronounce. Tare was the code word for T in the 1940s (it's now Tango), a word that few people would know nowadays, and if you don't already know a word, it is easy to confuse it with something else. The OED's entry for emma has a citation dated 1891 which tells us that emma was signallers' code for the letter M; ack emma was slang for a.m or morning, pip emma was p.m and emma gee was a machine gun.

Thanks for giving me the idea for this post, Helen.

Glaswegian interpreters sought

A translation company has advertised for Glaswegian interpreters to help business people understand the Glasgow accent. It has been inundated with applications, apparently. The Glasgow accent and dialect are incomprehensible to a lot of us south of the border; apparently in the 1960s and 70s MI5 tried to bug the Communist Scottish miners' leader Mick McGahey but were completely foxed because they didn't understand a word of what he said.

There is an article here with links to some recordings so you can listen to the dialect. There was also an interview on Radio 4's Today programme this morning. That will be here for another week; scroll down to 08.50.  

POTUS

I learnt a new word today, thanks to a friend (thanks, Helen). The word is POTUS. It's an acryonym, which is why it's usually written in capitals, and stands for president of the United States. A quick review of some news reports came up with:

... Hillary Clinton wasn't elected POTUS ...

... whether she'll run for POTUS again ...

The POTUS was in office for a scant twelve days before ...

Nearly all the hits I found on Google News were from US sites, although after a quick survey of my colleagues I discovered that the word is known by a few of them, particularly those who watch The West Wing and American political thrillers.

There are also several mentions of FLOTUS, or First Lady of the United States. Here's an entertaining article from The Irish Times in which the columnist sees a hankering after ancient Rome in these naming practices. POTUS reminds her of the Latin word for 'power', potestas, and FLOTUS evokes the Roman goddess of flowers.

How are Chinese dictionaries arranged?

I was giving a talk earlier this evening to a WI (Women's Institute) group on the history of dictionaries and I was completely stumped by a question from a woman in the audience. She asked me if there were Chinese dictionaries and how they were organised. I am ashamed to say I didn't know, so I have just looked it up.

The Wikipedia page on the subject is complicated. From what I can see there are two popular ways of arranging a Chinese dictionary - by pronunciation and by so-called radicals, which are recurring parts of Chinese characters. The entries in dictionaries that are arranged by pronunciation are listed alphabetically by Pinyin spelling (ie romanised Chinese). In dictionaries organised by radicals, there is a core of 214 standard radicals to which sections of the dictionary are devoted. If you need to look up a character you first identify the radical and find that section of the dictionary. Then you count the remaining strokes in the character and the entries will be arranged by number of strokes added to that particular radical. You can look inside this OUP dictionary and see the list of radicals (not the full 214, as this is a dictionary for learners) and other pages.

This, in a very oversimplified nutshell, is how Chinese dictionaries are arranged. There is more information on this Wikipedia page devoted to section headers in a Chinese dictionary. Section header is another term for radical. All of these pages are pretty difficult to understand if you don't know any Chinese, which is my problem.

British businesses use English too much

A British Chambers of Commerce (BCC) survey showed that small British businesses were losing up to a quarter of a million pounds in business because of poor language skills. 11% of the companies surveyed in the report said that it was language factors that put them off exporting and another 5% said it was cultural barriers. Even among those businesses that do export, there is a bias towards exporting to English-speaking countries, and these are not the world's rapidly growing economies. 14% of companies said they only chose a particular export market because of linguistic and cultural similarities with the UK.

British businesses tend to assume that their customers are willing to learn English, but research in the USA has found that people with poor English are six times less likely to buy online than those with good English. People are also happier to spend more money when a company website is written in their language.

Despite all these findings, few British companies have any intention of changing and suddenly taking up a foreign language. Only 5% of the members surveyed by the BCC said they would appreciate subsidised language training.

More on the report here.

Scottish Gaelic to be used at the EU

Scottish Gaelic may now be spoken by Scottish government ministers and officials at EU meetings, after a memorandum of understanding was signed last week. Gaelic does not become an official language (large languages like Basque and Catalan are not EU official languages either) but people may write letters to the Commission in Scottish Gaelic and receive a reply in the same language. Ministers may speak Scottish Gaelic if they give sufficient notice so that interpreters may be found. No Scottish ministers, incidentally, have more than a smattering of the language and the Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond doesn't know any.

A similar memorandum was signed last year regarding Welsh and I blogged on that at the time. Several Welsh ministers, including First Minister Rhodri Morgan, do speakWelsh, however.

A BBC report on the story can be read here. You can also learn Scottish Gaelic via the BBC website. I normally skip over any programmes in Scottish Gaelic when looking to see if there's anything worth watching on BBC iPlayer, but I discovered a documentary programme about the Russian investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya had been on BBC Alba (Scotland). The narrator spoke Scottish Gaelic but there were English subtitles. There was a lot of Russian spoken in the programme and there were English, but not Gaelic, subtitles for that. If you are in the UK, you can watch the programme for a few more days here.  

Widow's weeds

I mentioned the obsolete expression husband weed in my recent post on the word husband. Nobody uses that term any more, but widow's weeds is still known. Not many people say the expression, and even fewer widows wear widow's weeds these days (traditional mourning clothes including a veil), but most people of a certain age would understand the expression in a book.

The OED entry for weed meaning a garment is not the same entry as weed meaning an unwanted plant. It's a very old word: the OED has a citation for the meaning 'garment' from the year 888. It is possible that it derives ultimately from a pre-Teutonic verb meaning 'to weave' (the Wand of the German Leinwand, linen, is probably related). Weed meaning plant is just as old; in fact there is a citation from 888 for this sense too, from the same source as before, but it is written differently and it is clearly not the same word or meaning. The adjective weedy meaning puny and sickly-looking derives from this sense of weed, and dates back to the mid-19th century. Weed meaning marijuana dates back to the USA of the 1920s, but in the mid-19th century it meant an ordinary cigar or cheroot.

'Whatever' voted most annoying word

'Whatever' has been voted the most annoying word in a survey conducted by a US research institute. It beat 'you know', 'anyway' and 'at the end of the day'. 'Whatever' was equally unpopular regardless of the age, sex or background of the respondent. Nobody likes it, it seems.

Of course, it's not the word itself that is the problem, but the bored intonation which usually accompanies it when a teenager responds to your question. The Daily Mail is the only British newspaper to have picked up on this story at the time of my writing this, and its readers, never short of an opinion or two, have chipped in with their most annoying words: 'like' and 'innit' top the list. My own personal bugbear is when my son answers 'And your point is ...?'