The virtual linguist

Illin'

One of the answers in a recent New York Times crossword, illin', has resulted in a great deal of comment on the internet. The New York Times crossword is a straight crossword, not cryptic, so that generally means that the clues should be straightforward. The clue for illin' was 'Wack, as in hip hop'.

 

Now, at this point in the story (which I read on the Guardian Crossword blog), I got lost, since I had never heard of the words 'slang' 'illin' (amended due to typo - thanks, John, for pointing it out) or 'wack' (except for wack used the Liverpudlian way). A reader had written in to the newspaper saying that wack and illin' were not the same thing. The paper's very eminent crossword editor, Will Shortz, replied that they were the same, illin' being hip-hop slang for 'bad' or 'uncool' and wack meaning 'worthless' (the full correspondence between the reader and Shortz can be read here). An article in the Gawker, which I linked to in the last sentence, too, says that the meaning of illin' is malleable -- it can mean wack, crazy or chilling.

 

The hip-hop slang adjective ill is in the OED -- it went in in 2006. It has two, completely opposite, definitions: a) "Aggressive, irrational, crazy; unpleasant, bad" and b) "Excellent, attractive; fashionable". Wack is in the OED, too; its original meaning (from the 1930s) was 'an eccentric or crazy person', then the meaning 'bad, harmful; unfashionable, boring' went in in the 1980s.

 

Here's the Guardian Crossword blog.

Eve teasing

Eve teasing, or sexual harassment and physical molestation, is commonplace in India, according to this BBC piece. Searching for the term on Google News brings up over 160 hits, almost all of them from Indian newspapers. Eve is obviously a biblical reference and a symbol of womanhood in general, while 'teasing' seems far too mild a word to describe a criminal activity, that led to deaths in India recently, as the aforementioned article recounts. Many people in India have objected to the expression, believing that the terminology is part of the problem -- if the words used to describe an unpleasant activity are not strong enough, then the activity itself is not regarded as particularly unpleasant.

Myanmar or Burma?

The Financial Times has changed its policy of the past twenty years and will in future refer to Myanmar, not Burma (see article). The paper justifies its decision to change the way it refers to that country by saying that the name Myanmar is gaining increasing acceptance internationally and also says that using the name Burma undermines the paper's objectivity.

 

The British government prefers the name Burma (see the FCO page), as does the BBC. Documents and news items on official EU websites usually say Burma/Myanmar. The UN recognises the name of Myanmar.

 

Burma is the colonial name that the British gave to the country. The two names, Burma and Myanmar, are actually derived from the same root. Myanmar is an old name for the country, and the military government decided to use this name from 1989. The British government and other countries decided that, since they did not accept the right of the unelected military junta to rule the country, neither did they recognise their right to change the name of the country.

 

Here's the FT piece giving the reason for the change of policy.

Opium grandpas

Certain words tend to go together in English (so-called collocations), whilst other words rarely occur in close proximity to certain other words. A few collocations you rarely see are 'geriatric junkies', 'flower-power pensioners' and 'substance-abusing septuagenarians', but these were all in an article I spotted in The Times yesterday (it was a hard copy of the newspaper that I was reading in a coffee bar; unfortunately I can't link to it as you have to pay to access the Times' website these days).

 

Apparently, Germany has a problem with so-called 'opium grandpas' (a soundbite which sounds much better and wittier in German, since the word for grandpa is Opi). These are people who took full part in the Swinging Sixties and have not forsaken the lifestyle of that era. Improvements in healthcare means that drug users are living longer, but drug-related prosecutions of the over-60s have increased significantly too - they have more than doubled in the past decade in the state of North-Rhine Westphalia.

 

Here's a Spiegel article on the subject (in German).

Spaces between words

It was Irish monks who first put spaces between written words, as I learned when I listened to part 2 of Melvyn Bragg's series The Written World (on iPlayer here). Two thousand years ago Latin was written without spaces - one word ran on from the next. The librarian on the radio programme said that this didn't matter for most people as written texts acted as an aide-memoire and usually contained information that was already known. However, Ireland was beyond the confines of the Roman empire and so its residents were not used to hearing Latin or seeing it written down. When Christianity was brought to Ireland in the 5th century, and thus Latin too, monks struggled to read the Latin texts they were introduced to. At least one of their number had the bright idea of breaking up the passage of jumbled letters to make it easier to understand.

 

The second programme in the series The Written World looked at the development of books. Although texts written on papyrus have survived in the dry Egyptian climate, similar texts that the Romans must have written, also on papyrus, did not survive in Britain's damp climate. We do, however, have examples of texts from Roman times. They are written on wooden tablets and were discovered at the site of Vindolanda, once a fortress on Hadrian's Wall. A variety of things were being written and written about on these tablets at the time - from Virgil to party invitations.

 

On the programme Melvyn Bragg got a chance to look at some very early religious books and bibles, including the earliest surviving 'proper' book, now held in the British Library and so precious that only one specialist is allowed to touch it. That is known as St Cuthbert's Gospel - it is the text of the Gospel of John and was buried in St Cuthbert's coffin with him for several centuries, which explains why it still survives.

 

The Chinese invented paper about two thousand years ago, and it gradually became known in Europe, via Samarkand and the Arab world, by the Middle Ages. The Arabs had been using paper for several centuries before Europe had heard of it, and we learned on the programme that in the 9th century there were about a hundred stationers' shops in Baghdad where people would go to read books. The Chinese were printing books on paper in the 9th century, well before Gutenberg's printing press of the 15th century.

 

Programme 3 of the series (available to listen here) was about how writing facilitated the spread of religion, and that's a very interesting programme too.

Melvyn Bragg's The Written World

The Written World is a series of five radio programmes running each morning this week, in which Melvyn Bragg looks at the history of writing over the last 5000 years or so (listen on iPlayer here, and see some of the documents discussed and links to other sites of interest here).

 

I've only heard episode 1 so far, but it's an interesting programme, albeit basic if you know anything about the history of writing (and I realise that the series is not addressed at these people). Bragg speaks to specialists in the British Museum and the British Library and begins with the invention of writing, believed to have been in Mesopotamia in about 3400 BC. From the clay tablets that have been discovered, we can see that writing was invented for accountancy purposes - to keep records of what was sold, bought and stored. Writing began as pictures (so if an ear of barley was drawn, it meant only an ear of barley), but eventually the pictures gained a symbolic, wider meaning, and were simplified to make them easier and quicker to produce. The Mesopotamians wrote in what is called a cuneiform, or wedge-shaped script, the shape being caused by the reeds that served as 'pens' -- they made imprints in clay. Clay fragments from these ancient times have survived because at the time, once they had served their purpose, the clay tablets were used as building material and landfill, and were well preserved in the climate.

 

Egyptian hieroglyphs probably developed at around a similar time to the cuneiform script of Mesopotamia, and probably after having come into contact with it. A thousand or so years later other writing systems spontaneously came into being, notably in China, and also Meso-America. Clay was used by the Mesopotamians as it was freely available in the locality. The ancient Egyptians, on the other hand, used papyrus, as this was a material available locally. The museum curator explained that black and red ink was used, with the latter being used for headings, to record deficits and to highlight any other words or sections.

 

Writing was always centred around the court and pharaoh and was thus usually related to prestige and wealth. The ghosts of hieroglyphs still live on in our own alphabet today, as the Latin alphabet, which English uses, can be traced back through Greek, Phoenician (an ancient Semitic language), the Proto-Sinaitic script to the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs.

 

The oldest things in the British Library are some Chinese oracle bones (pictured on the BBC page). Such bones were used for divination as far back as 1700 BC. The bones came usually from the shoulder of an ox, and holes were burned in these bones by means of a heated poker-like object. Piercing the bone had the effect of causing little cracks to appear on the other side of the bone and these cracks were 'read' to predict what would happen. Messages on the bones can still be read today - the characters are like modern Chinese characters - and can give historians a lot of information about the period - names of emperors, news of eclipses and so on.

 

The Greeks developed their alphabet from the Phoenician alphabet. Phoenician was a Semitic language and had sounds that didn't exist in Greek, and Greek had sounds that didn't exist in Phoenician. Phoenician did not have symbols for vowels (Semitic languages today don't have written vowels), so the Greeks adapted their alphabet to add vowels and other sounds important for speakers of Greek. The Greeks wrote on wax tablets, not clay, using a stylus with a point for writing on one end, and a flat spatula on the other. When you had finished writing whatever it was you wanted, you heated the spatula end of the stylus and dragged it across the wax giving a fresh, smooth surface.

 

Well, I don't want to repeat everything that was in the programme as it is worth listening to over a cup of tea, or breakfast. Here's the programme on BBC iPlayer. Episode 2 is apparently about the invention of paper, so I shall be listening to that as soon as I can.

How do you pronounce 2012?

Happy New Year everyone, and all the best for 2012. But how do you say 2012? It was still quite common to hear 'two thousand and eleven' during the past year, but it is my guess that you won't hear 'two thousand and twelve' very much this year. Instead, most people will say 'twenty twelve' - in the UK, anyway.

 

We tend to pronounce things in a way that 'sounds right'. And how are we to know that it's right? We get our cues mostly from what we hear. The BBC seems to have made the decision over a year ago to go for the 'twenty ten/eleven/twelve' pronunciation (although certainly last year a sizeable number of their guest interviewees said 'two thousand and eleven') and the BBC is a very influential organisation. Most of us have heard the phrase or slogan London 'Twenty Twelve' Olympics thousands of times over the last year or so, and are hearing it even more often now, so that, too, is ensuring that 'twenty twelve' just sounds more natural than 'two thousand and twelve'.

 

Indeed, one might wonder why we are having this discussion at all. We say without thinking 'ten sixty six' for 1066, and would say 'nineteen twelve' for 1912, never 'nineteen hundred and twelve' or 'one thousand nine hundred and twelve'. We always say 'eighteen-oh-one' and 'nineteen-oh-two', yet when we came to 2001, most people did not follow the previous pattern (twenty-oh-one) but said 'two thousand and one'. This is possibly because we were already familiar with the phrase 'two thousand and one' as a result of the very influential science fiction film 2001: A Space Odyssey (indeed, we'd had over thirty years to get used to the phrase as the film came out in 1968).

 

So, a Happy Twenty Twelve to everyone!