The virtual linguist

Naval slang

"Dagenham Dave went harpic and he's got an appointment with the fang farrier today" -- that was an example of the Royal Navy slang heard on Radio 4's Today programme this morning (listen here for another week).

 

Retired Surgeon-Captain Rick Jolly has written Jackspeak, a guide to naval slang. Some of the examples mentioned in the interview, with explanations, were:

Dagenham Dave: for non-London-based readers, Dagenham is an east-London suburb and Captain Jolly said the reference is to it being 'one stop short of Barking'. Barking is not only another east-London suburb, very near Dagenham, but it is also slang for 'crazy' (barking mad).

Harpic is the brand name of a toilet-cleaning fluid, so, again, the reference is to insanity; the old ad slogan was, if I remember correctly, 'clean round the bend'.

Fang farrier/ molar mangler: dentist

Louse ladders: sideboards (strips of hair at the side of the cheeks)

Hog snarling/ hog whimpering: drunk

 

Captain Jolly said slang develops on board a ship because everybody lives in such a cramped compact space and knows everyone, so expressions travel quickly and are understood by everyone. Also, humour defuses tension.

 

Listen again to the interview for another week here.

 

I'm about to go off for a long weekend to Bologna, Italy. I've prepared some blog posts to be published on a timer while I'm a way, but I apologise in advance for not being able to reply to any comments for a few days. Back Tuesday.

Royal Wedding tops the TV words this year

Royal Wedding was the most used 'word' (or phrase) on television this year, according to The Global Language Monitor, a company that tracks trends in language usage worldwide. I've just checked and I have used it in five posts in three years; mind you, three of those were on the Royal Wedding day itself. Commentators have noted that there are more news-related words on the list than usual this year, such as Arab Spring, 9/11 and Fukashima. However, X-Factor and Oprah are there, too. Obama-vision was at number 8; this same word was at number 1 in 2009.

 

The full Top Ten of telewords is:

 1. Royal Wedding

2. Winner (Charlie Sheen)

3. Arab Spring

4. X-factor

5. Oprah

6. Fukashima

7. 9/11

8. Obama-vision

9. Chicago-style politics

10. Zombies

 

For more from the Global Language Monitor see here.

Drawing-room and parlour

The BBC series If Walls Could Talk is a history of the various rooms of the house, but there is plenty in the programmes to interest the linguist. The series is repeated every few months and Episode 1, which looks at the living room, is available again for those based in the UK for a couple more days on iPlayer here.

 

From the programme I learnt that the word drawing-room is an abbreviation of the earlier withdrawing-room, because it was a private room to withdraw to; the ladies often withdrew here after a meal leaving the men to smoke and drink port. When I was a child I remember elderly relatives and neighbours keeping their 'parlour' in pristine condition until Sunday, or until important visitors called, but that is an old-fashioned word these days. Parlour has been in English since the 11th or 12th century and comes originally from the Old French version of the modern parler, to speak. A parlour was, thus, originally a room for talking, as the OED says, particularly a room in a monastery or convent in which monks and nuns could converse with visitors from the outside world, and with each other.

 

Another interesting word story told in the programme was that for sofa. Although the late 18th-century sofas in Kedleston Hall looked very grand and formal, in fact, the architect historian told us, the sofa was actually a very informal item of furniture -- two people sitting on the same seat was quite shocking! The word sofa comes ultimately from the Arabic, and the early meaning, according to the OED, related to a feature of rooms in Eastern countries, namely a raised platform on which were strewn cushions and carpets for people to sit on.

 

The programme wasn't only about big houses. Lucy visited some old back-to-backs in the Midlands and here the expression 'kippers and curtains' cropped up. This referred to people who wanted the neighbours to think they were better off than they were, so they bought expensive curtains which everyone could see, but behind the curtains, out of sight of everyone, they could only afford to eat kippers or cheap fish.

Pin money

I was reading a fascinating account earlier of 14th-century haberdashers, hatters, mercers and other tradesmen and guilds (it was actually in a book about Chaucer – Chaucer’s pilgrims: an historical guide to  the pilgrims in The Canterbury Tales by Laura C Lambdin) and the author mentioned the origin of the term pin money.

Pins were expensive items in those days and only used by the wealthy; the hoi-polloi used sharpened thorns to hold their hats in place and keep their garments together. There are various allusions in literature, including in The Canterbury Tales, to monks and friars making pins. A guild of pinmakers was first mentioned in 1376, and the livery company, the Company of Pinmakers, was incorporated in 1636.

Because of their expense, pins were regarded as the ideal gift to the ladies in one’s life, and many merchants received financial bonuses with the caveat that the money was to be used ‘for her pyns’.

Galvanize

Mary Shelley was influenced by the newly discovered phenomenon of galvinism when she wrote her masterpiece Frankenstein. So I discovered when I watched a programme on Mary Shelley on iPlayer a couple of evenings ago (no longer available, I'm afraid, although I expect it will be repeated soon).

 

In the 1770s an Italian scientist Luigi Galvani discovered that a spark of electricity would cause a dead frog's legs to twitch. To non-scientist outsiders, this seemed as if the dead could be brought back to life. We know that Mary Shelley was interested in science and found these experiments fascinating. The way the scientist, Victor Frankenstein, created the monster, is not explained in the novel, but he does say 'I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet'.

 

The verb 'to galvanise' or 'galvanize' was formed a few years after the coining of the word 'galvanism' and within about 50 years it was being used figuratively, which is its common usage these days -- to galvanise someone into action (ie encourage, or stimulate to action) or to galvanise life into something.

800 languages in New York

When asked where in the world the most languages are spoken, many people would answer 'the island of New Guinea'; there are about 830 different languages spoken there. However, it turns out that there are around 800 languages spoken in New York City.

 

Many of the languages spoken are considered endangered, and three linguists have founded the Endangered Language Alliance (ELA) to document them -- they codify the grammars, pronunciation, and word-formation patterns and collect songs and legends in the language. Some of the languages they have been working on since founding the Alliance are Garifuna, a language spoken by descendants of African slaves, who ended up on St Vincent after a shipwreck, Mahongwe, spoken in Gabon, and Shughni, spoken in Tajikistan. Volunteers read words one at a time, and bring songs and other cultural material to the ELA. Sometimes things sound the same to the English-speaking linguists, but sophisticated software can often show up subtle sound differences.

 

The ELA has discovered some interesting things about the languages studied, for instance that in Mahongwe it is only tone that differentiates the affirmative verb form from the negative (so, for instance, the word(s) for 'I like' and 'I don't like' are the same, but they are spoken in a different tone, which is difficult for outsiders to even hear).

 

For more about this subject see this Economist article.

Written alphabet for the Shanjo people in Zambia

There are over 70 languages spoken in Zambia, some of which do not have a written form. Dr Paul Tench of Cardiff University in Wales was on Radio 4 this morning (listen here for another week) talking about how he recently spent a few weeks on the Zambian/ Angolan border where about 20,000 Shanjo people live. He was helping the people develop an alphabet for their language. They invited him, because they knew he had been recently working with a neighbouring community, and they did not want to be left behind.

 

Five Shanjo farmers were chosen by their community to sit with Dr Tench around a table each day. These men each knew at least three languages -- English, siLozi, the regional language, and ciShanjo, their native language with an oral form only. One man gave a short talk about farming with oxen and the others represented the words on paper using the letter-sound connections they knew from English and siLozi. They produced, on the whole, similar versions, so the alphabet developed from this. Written samples were given to other villagers to read and they did not have much difficulty with the new written form of the alphabet. When Dr Tench left the area after a few weeks there was also the start of a dictionary and the Church was talking about producing a hymn book and Bible in the language. Children of primary school age could learn it, too, since this is their native language.

 

The interview with Dr Tench can be heard here. There is an informative article on this Welsh news site. The author clearly sees an analogy between the ciShanjo speakers and Welsh speakers in the United Kingdom -- both groups live surrounded by a 'big' language, and both groups want to use their language to express their identity.

Oi, mush!

Oi, mush! (or oi, moosh) is an aggressive way of calling out to someone -- like 'hey, you!'. The OED says that mush probably comes from the Angloromani (the Romany language spoken in England) word for a man, mush. The first thing that struck me was how similar it was to Russian man-related words: muzh (муж), husband; muzhchina (мужчина), man; and muzhskoi (мужской), male or masculine. The zh sound in all of those words sounds more like 'sh'.

 

Romany (or Romani) is the language of gypsies (actually it is a lot of different languages, or dialects, and there is no standardised version) and, like Russian (and English), is an Indo-European language. It is similar in vocabulary and structure to some of the languages spoken in the north and the central part of the Indian subcontinent, such as Punjabi.

 

Oi, mush! is Cockney slang, and other Cockney expressions are believed to have a Romany origin, probably because Romanies settled in the East End in the 19th century. Dukes (or dooks) meaning 'hands' (as in 'put up your dukes') is from the Romany word for fortune-telling or palmistry, dookin/ dookering. That is not mentioned in the OED, but 'pal' being from the Romany word for 'brother' is. Other words that the OED believes are from Angloromani are the fairly modern derogatory term chav (from the word for young man, or boy), nark (an informer), perhaps from the Romany nok, nose, cushty, slang for 'very good' (and from the Romany word for 'good') and wonga, slang for 'money'.

Condign and the Reader's Digest

My dad used to get the Reader's Digest every month and they stayed on the bookshelves for years, so I listened with nostalgia to the BBC radio programme Trouble in Pleasantville earlier, which looked at the history of that magazine, and considered its founder DeWitt Wallace (programme available here). Like many of the commentators on today's programme, I got my first taste of literature from the magazines -- I particularly remember The Snow Goose, by Paul Gallico - in an abridged format, naturally - that was the Reader's Digest's forte.

 

One of the commentators on the programme was the wonderful Barnsley poet Ian McMillan (see some of his poems here), so it was clearly going to be a tongue-in-cheek programme. Like me, Ian remembered the condensed novels; he mentioned Hemingway's The Old Man and The Sea. That book was only about 60 pages long in the original, and Ian joked that the condensed Reader's Digest version was longer than the original!

 

Again, like me, commentators enjoyed the Improve Your Word Power feature in the Reader's Digest. An Indian commentator on the programme remembered learning the word 'condign' from the book. Apparently Dickens talked of 'condign chastisement'. I can never resist looking up new words, so I looked up 'condign' in the OED. Its original meaning was 'worthy', 'deserving' or 'worthily deserved'. The OED goes on to say that from the end of the 17th century the word was used only when describing punishment, and that is because the word was used in Tudor Acts of Parliament.

 

The half-hour programme on the troubled history of The Reader's Digest can be listened to here.

The Foreign Office to spend more money on language training for diplomats

In an interview on Radio 4's Today programme this morning, prompted by the revival of the Diplomatic Foreign Language Learning Centre, where diplomats will be given intensive language and cultural training before postings, (listen here for another week) Professor David Bellos of Princeton University said that learning a foreign language was important, not only to learn about other cultures, but to help you understand your own. There is more to learning a language, he said, than knowing the vocabulary and grammar. He bemoaned the contraction in foreign language teaching going on in schools here, and said that even a very basic knowledge of a foreign language is worthwhile.

 

A former British ambassador, Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, said that although we need to promote knowledge of a foreign language, we need to guard against over-confidence. Tony Blair, for instance, wanted to tell Lionel Jospin, the then French prime minister, that he had always been envious of Jospin and his policies. Instead he said, in French 'J'ai toujours envie de Lionel, même en toutes positions', meaning 'I've always lusted after Lionel, in every position'.