The virtual linguist

The X in Xmas

Some people object to writing Xmas, rather than Christmas, saying that it is taking the Christ out of Christmas, and a sign of increasing commercialism. In fact, it has been around for a long time - the first OED citation (spelled X'temass) is dated 1551.

 

The letter X is a long-standing abbreviation for Christ - it appears in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles of a thousand years ago (in the phrase 'On Xp̄es mæsse uhtan'). X, called chi in the Greek alphabet, is the first letter in the Greek spelling of Christ. Xp (chi and rho) are the first two letters and they were often combined to form a symbol that represented Christ (see the symbol on this Wikipedia page).

 

A Merry Christmas everyone.

Collins Dictionary's words of 2012

Collins Dictionary has chosen twelve words of 2012, not just a single word of the year - there were too many new words in the language this year. Here they are:

January: Broga (yoga for men; you need to know, too, that 'bros' are men)

February: Legbomb (a word coined after Angelina Jolie wore a dress with a long slit up the side)

March: Eurogeddon (the worst-case scenario of the euro crisis)

April: Mummy porn (erotic fiction similar to Fifty Shades of Grey)

May: Zuckered (of Facebook shares, plummeted after the company's public offering)

June: Jubilympics (a blend of the Queen's jubilee, and the Olympics, both of which happened this year)

July: Romneyshambles (a series of gaffes, mainly related to the Olympics, made by Mitt Romney on a trip to London in 2012)

August: Games makers (staff and volunteers at the 2012 Olympics)

September: 47 per cent (another Romney gaffe, referring to the proportion of the population who live on benefits and pay no income tax)

October: Superstorm (a reference to Sandy)

November: Gangnam Style (the title of a song by South Korean Psy, whose video has to date had a billion hits on YouTube)

December: Fiscal cliff (tax increases and spending cuts)

 

Read more in this Guardian article. Collins Online Dictionary, with other suggestions received from members of the public for the words of the year, is here.

 

Linguistic diversity of Manchester

New York might be the most linguistically diverse city in the world with over 800 languages spoken (see previous post) but, as the Guardian reported recently (here), Manchester, with over 150 languages, might be in second place. The city has been booming over recent years, which means that many people are encouraged to go there for jobs and study. That gives it its linguistic diversity. Here’s the article.

Languages in New York

About 800 languages are spoken in New York, and some of these are languages threatened with extinction. Some languages that still have a few speakers in New York are no longer spoken in their place of origin – Gottscheerisch, a dialect of German, and Garifuna, an Arawak language from Honduras and Belize, for example.

 

There has been a short series of BBC radio programmes about languages (listen here), and the third one was about the languages spoken in New York. The BBC site also has a written report on the subject (here). It reports how there is a resurgence of interest in Yiddish, which began to wane as children of immigrants were more likely to speak English than Yiddish, unlike their parents.

English on the internet

More and more people are using English to communicate with others and English is the single most common language on the internet, but that doesn't mean that English is ousting other languages. In fact, more people speak several languages. What's more, words from these other languages are making their way into English, resulting in various varieties of English, such as Hinglish (a blend of Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi and English), Singlish (Singapore English) and Konglish (Korean English).

 

This information all came from an article on the BBC website today. The use of English as a lingua franca between two or more people for whom English is a second or foreign language means that the nature of English is changing rapidly. For one thing, non-native speakers communicating in English are not that concerned about correct grammar and spelling. Secondly, new words are being coined: co-brother (brother-in-law) and pre-pone (the opposite of pospone) are from Hinglish, and skinship (intimate physical contact) is from Konglish.

 

It's not just English being changed by the internet and technology. Some previously oral languages are gaining a written form thanks to text messaging.

 

See the BBC piece here.

Vandals and barbarians

Vandals and barbarians are negative terms these days, but in the second episode of the series The Dark Ages: An Age of Light (watch on BBC iPlayer here, or on YouTube here), the art critic Waldemar Januszczak considered the contributions to art and culture of the original Barbarians and Vandals.

 

English took the word 'barbarian' from Latin, and its original meaning in English was 'foreigner' or 'one you couldn't understand', as in 1 Corinthians 14.11 (King James version), "Therefore if I know not the meaning of the voice, I shall be unto him that speaketh a barbarian, and he that speaketh shall be a barbarian unto me." Latin got the word from Greek, and the Greek word, as well as meaning 'foreigner' had earlier meant 'one who stammers'. The even older language, Sanskrit, also has the root barbara-s meaning stammering, according to World Wide Words. The Romans called anyone who lived outside the Roman Empire a barbarian.

 

The word soon gained the derogatory meaning 'rude or uncivilised person', and the definition of barbarian in the first English dictionary, Cawdrey's Table Alphabeticall of 1604 is "a rude person".

 

Vandals were members of Germanic tribes, and their name suggests they were probably Scandinavian, maybe from present-day Sweden or Denmark. In the television programme Januszczak suggested that the root of the name was linked to the old-fashioned English verb 'to wend', meaning 'to make one's way'. Later historians and writers gave the Vandals a bad press for sacking Rome. Hence a 'vandal' became someone who destroyed something valuable or worthy of preservation.

Spare ribs

Someone asked me why spare ribs were so called. They are not 'spare' because they are extra, or thin, or any other meaning of the English word spare, but the name is a modern version of the original 'spear-rib', a cut of meat once roasted on spears. The word comes from the Middle German ribbespêr. The OED also has the entry ribspare, a rarer form of the same thing, with citations from the 1630s to the 1930s.

 

There was a very influential feminist magazine in the 1970s/80s called Spare Rib. The name was a pun on Eve being created from a rib of Adam, as told in Genesis 2 (this is the King James version):

21 And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept; and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof.
22 And the rib, which the Lord God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man.

Blackmail

I came across this very interesting article in the Christian Science Monitor about the origin of the word 'blackmail'. I learnt a lot from the article, and went to the OED to see what that had to say.

 

As the CS Monitor article says, the word has its origins in Scotland and Scottish protection rackets. According to the OED, blackmail was "A tribute levied on farmers in Scotland and the border counties of England by freebooting Scottish chiefs in return for protection or immunity from plunder". Mail was an old word used in Scotland meaning "payment, tax, tribute or rent". Black here has the sense of an unofficial financial transaction as in black market or the black economy. White money is also in the OED with citations ranging between the 15th and 19th centuries. It means, or meant, silver money or silver coins.

 

There are other old 'mail' words in the OED including burrow-mail, which was ‘the annual duty payable to the sovereign by a burgh for the enjoyment of certain rights’ (the Scottish sovereign is meant - the most recent citation in the dictionary is 1617). Grass-mail was 'rent for the privilege of grazing', land-male was ‘a reserved rent charged upon a piece of land by the chief lord of the fee, or a subsequent mesne owner’.

 

Another meaning of blackmail from the mid-17th century is 'Rent payable in cattle, labour, or coin other than silver'. By the late 18th century the meaning of blackmail had become "Any payment or other benefit extorted by threats or pressure, esp. by threatening to reveal a damaging or incriminating secret" (OED).

 

Here again is the Christian Science Monitor article entitled 'Etymology notes on a scandal'.

Preface to Johnson's Dictionary

Yesterday I was at Westminster Abbey to watch Professor David Crystal lay a wreath on Samuel Johnson's grave (Johnson died in December 1784) in a ceremony organised annually by the Johnson Society of London (with prayers and readings by a member of the Abbey's clergy). Professor Crystal later, after a large Christmas dinner in a nearby hotel, gave an after-dinner speech entitled "Did Johnson fix English spelling?"

 

Johnson himself used the words 'fix our language' in the Preface of his famous Dictionary (read an abridged version of the preface here). That was what his brief originally was, but, as the Preface makes clear, he soon realised the futility of such a task.

 

Professor Crystal said in his speech that Johnson did not fix English spellings and, indeed, one can see how spellings have changed since the mid-18th century in the Preface. See, for instance, just the final paragraph of the abridged Preface here. Johnson spelled words that we now end in -ic, in -ick. Examples in the paragraph include phlegmatick and publick, and the word excentrick, which has lost its x nowadays as well as the k.

 

Rust and russet

My favourite apple variety is the russet (sometimes written with a capital R when describing a particular variety of russet eg Egremont Russet or Roxbury Russet). It's got a rough, greyish-brown skin, with touches of reddish brown, hence the name russet. (The skin texture is reflected in an old word for the russet apple - leather-coat.) The word russet is similar to the word rust, which can also describe a reddish-brown colour, but the two words have different histories.

 

Russet entered Middle English from French, which got it from Latin. The original meaning was a russet-coloured homespun cloth worn, as the OED puts it, by "country people and the poor". Indeed, another of the OED definitions of russet is "rustic, homely, simple".

 

The suffix -et on an English word usually indicates that it is a Middle English borrowing from French. Words belonging to this group include bullet, fillet, pocket, pullet, sonnet, tablet, turret and many others. In Old French, -et indicated a diminutive (masculine form - the feminine form was originally -ete, although it's -ette in modern French). So, pocket was originally a small bag, tablet a small slab or panel, and bullet a small round ball.

 

Rust is one of the oldest words in the OED, having been in existence since the early Old English period. The word has a Germanic root and there are cognates in other Germanic languages such as Frisian, Dutch and the Scandinavian languages. The OED thinks that the word rust may have also been pronounced with a long vowel sound in Old English, shortening later due to the consonant cluster following.