The virtual linguist

British graduates accused of poor foreign language skills ... again

Overseas businesses wanting to set up in Britain have complained to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office about the lack of foreign language skills among British graduates. Managers of leading companies already here say they prefer to appoint foreign nationals because they assume that British graduates cannot speak a foreign language.

So says an article in today's Times. I have commented on it, because this is the sort of thing that annoys me. When people go on about the good language skills of natives of other countries, they do not mean good foreign language skills at all, they mean good English skills. You try learning Greek, Korean, Latvian, Dutch or another so-called minority language in Austria, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Denmark and so on through the alphabet. You'll be very hard-pressed to find a class.

The governments of Sweden, Saudi Arabia, Romania, Japan etc have no problems deciding which language their schools should teach. The answer is obvious -- English. It's not quite so simple for English-speaking countries. Which language should our children learn? Is French more useful than Spanish? Would Chinese ensure that youngsters got jobs? It's difficult to say.

One of the sources cited in the above article said potential employees should have "a good grasp of the parent company’s home language", but that home language could be anything, and how is an 11-year-old to know which companies will have vacancies ten years later to aid his or her foreign language choice at school?

There are many competent linguists in Britain and thousands of enthusiastic language learners. I do not have to travel far from home to find a class in Polish, Greek, Russian, Irish, Welsh and many other languages. I am a moderator for the Open College, and at the last count you could gain one of their qualifications in French, German, Italian, Spanish, Welsh, Arabic, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Greek, Gujarati, Irish, Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, Panjabi, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Swedish, Turkish and Urdu. The British foreign-language learning landscape has a breadth that few other countries can match.

Kazuo Ishiguro and footballing clichés

The writer Kazuo Ishiguro was accused by John Mullan, Professor of English at University College London, of using clichés in his work during this week's Hay Literary Festival. Phrases such as "to tell the truth" and "to be fair" were the sort of expressions footballers used, said Mullan. Ishiguro defended his use of the phrases by saying he found much of the language used by footballers poignant and beautiful. In particular, he found "at the end of the day" an expression of stoic ruefulness, which comes close to reflecting the human condition. Well, that's one way of putting it, I suppose.

What Ishiguro thinks of common footballing clichés such as "it's a game of two halves", "he gives 110%" and "take each game as it comes" was not reported. Story here.

Mark Tully on translation

While cooking my evening meal I stumbled upon an interesting programme on the BBC World Service -- Mark Tully was talking about translation in the series Something Understood. I must have heard the repeat, because I notice there is only one day left to listen again on iPlayer (here).

There were several different strands to the programme. Jamaican poet Kei Miller read his Speaking in Tongues, AS Byatt talked about her relationship with the translators of her works, and Serbian author of Chernobyl Strawberries, Vesna Goldsworthy, talked about how she felt like a completely different person sometimes when she spoke English, compared to how she felt when speaking her native language. Mark Tully also spoke to Father Nicholas King, translator of the Bible. Father King said that Romans V.12 was a very difficult section to translate and also referred to the Book of Job. Apparently, academics and translators more or less agree that only 40% of Job is perfectly clear and easy to translate -- but no-one who reads the translation is aware of that. He said that a word that he translated as 'in so far as' had thirteen other meanings, so another translator would have perhaps ended up with a completely different sense. Similarly, the key word logos could be translated as principle, nationality or accounts, as well as the more usual 'word'.

Murderess and other -ess words

As I mentioned in my previous post, The Sun newspaper is often assumed to use easy language, but in a recent article it described a soap opera character as a 'murderess'. Generally speaking, there is a move away from using the feminine -ess forms in modern English (I have blogged on this before, see here and here) as such forms can be construed as pejorative and sexist. This is because the -ess form can signify 'the wife of' as well as a woman doing the particular job in her own right (eg ambassadress). The -ess form thus suggests lower status. One hears of the manageress of a shop but not of a large corporate department.

I don't know why The Sun chose to use the word murderess rather than murderer, especially given that it named the character -- Tracy Barlow -- so it was obvious that a woman was the killer. Perhaps the reporter was being ironic and wanted to add a touch of melodrama to the article.

Reading age of The Sun

The Sun newspaper is usually regarded as having simple language and you will find articles and comments on the internet as to it having a reading age of about nine. In fact, the newspaper is falsely maligned over its 'easy' language. I've just done an experiment on two of the top stories in today's Sun, one on the murder of two children by their mother in Spain and the other on a Cabinet minister being outed as gay and allegedly falsely claiming living expenses. I used these formulae to determine reading age.

The three different formulae I used all gave different figures so I averaged them. The reading age for the first piece came out as nearly 14, and for the second as 12.4. The score for the first article might have been higher than a typical Sun article because the mother's words were quoted directly.

These data were originally going to be the introduction to a post about The Sun's use of the rather quaint and old-fashioned word 'murderess', but that is now the subject of my next post.

Says

If you are learning English you would no doubt say that 'says' is the third person singular of the verb 'to say' and it therefore follows a singular noun or pronoun (John says, she says, the book says).

In fact, it is reasonably common in colloquial English to say, or hear, "says you" or "says I". The Standard English equivalent would be "You said" and "I said". This construction is in the Oxford English Dictionary with this explanation: the 3rd sing. pres. is often substituted colloq. for the pa. tense said. Hence, in vulgar speech or jocular imitations of it, says I, says you = ‘said I’, ‘said you’.

Because it is so colloquial, 'says' is often written 'sez'. The phrase is usually said or written in the order 'says you', 'sez I' etc and not the other way round.

These phrases are usually used when talking to a third party, or writing on an informal internet forum, and usually refers to something that you did not say but might have done. It is difficult to explain exactly when it is appropriate to say them, but here are a few examples I've found on the internet (written as found). These are all from Google Ireland pages. That's because my Irish relatives say these phrases a lot, so I thought I might get good examples from Irish sources.

"Anyhow, Im an FG supporter ('course you are sez you)" (a comment on this blog).

"Therefore, points out the Minister, the degree to which VAT is passed on should be less than the full rate of 13.5 per cent. Hmmmm, sez you!" (from this newspaper article) .

"The difference between this and other networking sites is that it's not just about "social" networking. Businesses, government bodies, NGOs and groups of all kinds are also welcomed. "So what?" sez you" (a contribution on this social networking forum).

"This week she gave the nixers to Aidan Power, Baz Thingummy and Dustin the Turkey. And why not, sez I -- these are straitened times and the least you can do is help out your RTE pals" (from this newspaper column)

"I'm not says I...I'm fine!" (title/slogan here)

As you see, there is often an ironic undertone to the comments, if not downright sarcasm.

Euphemisms for redundancy

A representative from the travel company Hogg Robinson uttered the phrase "... reshaping of our cost base ..." on the BBC Today programme this morning (listen here for another week at 1hr 21 mins and 50 secs in). "Does that mean 'redundancies'?" asked the BBC reporter.

Well yes, it probably did mean redundancies. Businesses are forever looking for new euphemisms for redundancy or firing staff. Once people understand the true meaning of the expressions, then it becomes pointless for managers to say them. The whole idea is to present the fact that you, or your colleagues, will lose your jobs, as a positive development. So, early euphemisms for redundancy were layoffs and early retirement, but they are mainstream terms now, as is downsizing, which came along a bit later.

Here is a selection of clichés and euphemisms that have been used somewhere to mean redundant, make redundant, or redundancy, depending on the part of speech.

Employees might be:

dehired

derecruited

disemployed

displaced

furloughed

selected out

surplused

uninstalled

... because the management is implementing a:

career alternative enhancement program (yes, more likely to be the US spelling)

career change opportunity

involuntary attrition

involuntary career event

modernisation programme

planning of the workforce

realignment

rightsizing

scaling back

skills mix adjustment

streamlining

vocation relocation

Employees have reported that they received emails announcing staff cutbacks or were offered courses with the following terms in the subject line:

creative futures

managing change

the future landscape

The government is, or the government are?

The Queen in her speech today at the opening of Parliament said, among many other things, "My Government looks forward to an enhanced partnership with India" and "My Government is committed to spending 0.7% of gross national income in development aid from 2013". Note the singular verb (looks, is).

Government can also be followed by a plural verb. For instance, Bob Crow, general secretary of the RMT transport union said: "Once again, the government are talking in only the vaguest terms about HSR and the urgently-needed modernisation of the UK's rail network" (see this article). Jane Hutt, a Welsh Assembly minister said "We now know that the new UK Government are looking to cut the Welsh budget by £187m in 2010-11" (here). And Martin McGuinness, deputy first minister of Northern Ireland said "... the British government are going to announce a budget in something like 45 days' time" (here).

There are a number of words like government, eg company, team, department, committee, which can be followed by a singular verb or a plural verb. It depends on how you perceive the noun, whether as a unit, or as a group of individuals. Formality also comes into it. Generally it would be more formal to use a singular verb agreement (as the Queen does). For instance, you would use a singular verb in a sentence like "The average family eats three portions of fruit a day" but a plural verb in a more informal sentence from someone who sees a family as individuals, such as "My family are great lovers of fruit and vegetables".

Full text of the Queen's speech is here.

Listen to Polari

I have posted on Polari before, but there was a very interesting article on it in today's Guardian, which included a video snippet where Polari can be heard (here). Polari is a 'language' associated with homosexuals in the England (and particularly London) before homosexuality was legalised in the 1960s. It is much older than that, however, with its origins in the slang of travellers or other marginalised groups going back to Elizabethan times. It is influenced by the language of circus and fairground workers, Cockney rhyming slang, back slang, Yiddish, forces slang and other sources.

There isn't a standard Polari, as it is, or was, a spoken vernacular. Since being homosexual could once get you arrested, people didn't advertise the fact that they were gay by writing in Polari. Polari meant that gays could communicate with each other without getting caught, and could also find out whether a new acquaintance was gay or not by dropping some phrases into the conversation.

Polari was very much associated with a camp sub-culture, which came to be seen as unfashionable. Nowadays homosexuals do not need to speak in a secret language, but are part of the mainstream, and that is the main reason for the demise of Polari.

See here for the full article.

More tea, vicar?

I noticed in the kitchen department of John Lewis china teapots with the phrase "More tea, vicar?" written on them. I wondered if the phrase meant anything to the hundreds of tourists around. I doubt it. "More tea, vicar?" is a phrase associated with old sitcoms where vicars were always either bumbling old dodderers or naive simpletons. Something would happen in the storyline eg someone would start swearing, belch or be generally uncouth, at which point the genteel lady of the house would pick up the teapot and ask "More tea, vicar?" in a desperate attempt to divert his attention from the insalubrious goings-on. Outside of sitcoms someone who commits a faux pas, or gets himself/herself in a tricky or embarrassing situation while with a group of friends, might utter the phrase "More tea, vicar?" as a way of changing the subject. It is meant to be amusing, of course.

The sitcom writers no doubt lifted the phrase from earlier serious sources, where it wasn't meant to be at all amusing, but was illustrative of a lifestyle where the vicar called on his parishioners, who treated him with politeness and genteel hospitality. It's the sort of thing you would expect Miss Marple to say in an Agatha Christie story.