The virtual linguist

Misspelling

Poor spelling has been in the news today. First Gordon Brown misspelt the name of a soldier killed in action in Afghanistan, in a letter to his parents (and apparently made twenty other spelling mistakes, although Brown claimed these were not spelling mistakes, but his execrable handwriting). More on that story here.

Also, the president of the Queen's English Society has claimed that British graduates are losing out in the job market because of their inability to spell. Even worse, doctors misspell drug names and patients die as a result. That story is here. 

In case anyone thinks I have misspelt 'misspelled', this word has two variants. Misspelt is the British variant (although the -ed ending is perfectly okay here) whilst misspelled is the preferred form in American English.

Babies cry in a French or German accent

Some German biologists are claiming that babies cry in different 'accents' depending on the native language of their mother. This has led the researchers to hypothesise that babies begin to pick up language before they are born. Here is an informative and erudite article from today's Times, and here is a rather less erudite one from the Daily Mail entitled Ee wah gum! Babies cry with regional accents. The German study compared the crying of French and German infants. The Daily Mail has its own hypothesis, namely that British babies born in different regions of the country to parents speaking different dialects and with different accents, will also have their own distinctive crying patterns.

Not all linguists are convinced by the study, which showed that French babies' cries built up from a low to a higher pitch, while German infants' cries were the other way around, matching the intonation rhythm of the French and German languages.

Ee wah gum, by the way, is meant to be a pun on the northern dialect phrase ee bah gum, which means 'golly!' or 'well I never!'. It's supposed to be a Yorkshire phrase but I went to university in Leeds in Yorkshire and can't remember ever hearing anyone say it. The phrase by gum is in the OED. Gum is a corruption of God, as is the interjection golly.

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.

International Talk Like a Pirate Day

Ahoy, me hearties! Today is so-called International Talk Like a Pirate Day, a spoof holiday created in 1995 by a couple of friends (more information here).

Pirates all seem to sound the same in films; they all have the same accent, even though, in reality, Yorkshire pirates would have had Yorkshire accents, Cornish pirates Cornish accents etc. The reason that we all assume that pirates speak with a West Country accent is because of one actor, Robert Newton, whose portrayal of Long John Silver in a couple of films in the 1950s became the standard for future actors. Newton was born in Dorset, and exaggerated his own accent when playing the pirate. The West Country accent is rhotic, which means that the r is pronounced in words such as shiver, timbers, hearties (I do not pronounce it in my accent, nor is it heard in Received Pronunciation). That is why "aarrrgh" is a typical pirate sound.

Here's a ridiculous video on YouTube purporting to teach viewers how to speak Pirate. 

The Soviet Linguist Nicholas Marr

Nicholas Marr is one of the 'lunatics' in Marina Yaguello's book Lunatic Lovers of Language. Other epithets levelled at him by fellow linguists include madman and megalomaniac. Yet his theories were lauded in the Soviet Union between about 1930 and 1950.

With a name like Marr he certainly doesn't sound Soviet. His father was Scottish and his mother Georgian (his Georgian name is Nikolos). He hardly knew his father, who was 87 when Nicholas was born in 1863, and grew up in Georgia, then part of the Russian Empire. He studied Arabic, Georgian and Armenian at St Petersburg University and later became dean of the Oriental faculty at the same university.

At the beginning of his career he gained plaudits for his work on the Caucasian languages and for championing minority languages in the Russian Empire and throughout the world. The descriptions lunatic and megalomaniac refer to his views on the origin and development of language. Marr propounded the so-called Japhetic theory, which considered that the Basque language and the Caucasian languages had a common origin. The name Japhetic comes from Japheth, Noah's third son, since his two first sons Shem and Ham already had language groups named after them (Semitic languages eg Arabic, Aramaic, Hebrew and Hamitic languages (a term no longer used) eg Coptic and ancient Egyptian). Marr believed (or said he believed) that Indo-European languages developed from the Japhetic group.

Most modern linguists and philologists say that they do not know for sure how and when language first appeared, but Marr had a theory. He claimed that speech, in the form of several different languages, emerged in lots of different places simultaneously. He believed that the sounds of the languages arose via collective human activity and it was the socio-economic nature of the society that determined the language. Over the years he worked to discover the minimum number of semantic elements that formed the basis of all the world's languages and he finally got this number down to four. So, what he was saying was that all the words in all the languages of the world could ultimately be traced back to four 'words' or elements, namely sal, ber, yon and rosh.

Furthermore, Marr believed that all languages went through stages in a pre-determined pattern, linked to the prevailing socio-economic features in the society where the language was spoken. The Japhetic languages thus represented an early stage of development and the Indo-European languages represented a later stage. Marr believed in the mixing of languages and claimed that humanity was moving from plurilingualism to monolingualism and that ultimately there would be just one universal language.

Although Marr had never believed in the superiority of Russian, or that this universal language would be Russian, his theory was seized upon by Stalin, who saw parallels between Marrism and Marxism eg the idea of stages of development and a move away from a class system to unification. There is no evidence to suggest that Marr had actively participated in the 1917 Russian Revolution and he was not a Party member until after the 16th Congress of the Communist Party in 1930 when Stalin spoke of the USSR being diverse in its culture and nationalities but unified in its socialist content, and of the USSR being on the path to a single entity with a single language. Marr, presumably, jumped on the bandwagon.

In the early 20th century there were several very eminent linguists in Russia and the young Soviet Union, but with the rise of Marr's theories, they were forced to leave (eg Trubetskoi - who described Marr as 'utterly mad' - left for Prague, where he was to found the influential Prague School along with another defector Roman Jakobson, who described Marr's ideas as 'the sheer nonsense of a paranoia-patient'). Worse things happened to others: Evgenii Polivanov, a very respected linguist who had transcribed the unwritten languages of the Soviet Union, and had criticised Marr's Japhetic theory, was executed in 1938.

Now that he was affiliated with the Party, Marr changed his theories to make them more orthodox Marxist. He introduced the idea of language as a superstructure, which develops as a result of 'leaps' taking place in the economic structure of a country. He claimed that the class characteristics of language took precedence over national characteristics, a claim which led to the absurd statement that the language of proletarians, regardless of their country of origin, is more similar than the language spoken by different social classes purportedly speaking the same language.

Stalin changed his views and rejected Marr's theories in 1950 (Marr had died in 1934 at the height of his fame). He still talked of a single socialist society, but no longer talked of a single language. However, Marr's theories over the previous twenty years had provided a smokescreen to bring about the increasing Russification of the Soviet Union, and the imposition of the Soviet Cyrillic alphabet on languages spoken in the non-Russian republics, such as Moldovan.

Whip Ma Whop Ma Gate

When I was in York last weekend I walked down Whip Ma Whop Ma Gate (picture of road sign here). It didn't take long - it's the shortest street in York. The street used to be called Whitnourwhatnourgate, which meant 'neither one thing nor the other', but later, when the street became the place where petty criminals were whipped, it acquired its present name.

York's centre has many picturesque, narrow little alleyways called snickelways. This sounds a very quaint word, but it was only coined in the 1980s. Snickelway isn't in the dictionary, but snicket, meaning a narrow passageway, is. Different parts of the country have their own dialect words for such narrow roads or alleys; in Brighton they're known as twittens.

Health and safety and language problems

Migrant workers in the UK construction industry risk injury through a lack of knowledge of English. Such workers often have no experience of construction work before coming to the UK, so are not necessarily familiar with hazards and safety procedures as a matter of course.

I picked up a health and safety trade magazine on the train today that someone had discarded, not expecting to find anything relating to my field in it, but there was an article in it entitled 'Making health and safety a world language'. One of the problems is that migrant workers often end up working for rogue employers who don't pay much attention to health and safety. The Health and Safety Executive works with churches and community groups to reach migrant workers, but a professor speaking at a recent construction industry conference said that going to Polish shops and pubs frequented by Poles was the best way of getting the safety message across (to Poles).

Many employers use pictures to get across important information eg a picture of a bad practice such as a badly placed ladder, or someone not wearing a helmet with a big red cross through it. This usually works fine, although there is always the danger that cartoon-type drawings are not taken very seriously.

Another academic speaking at the conference advised construction companies to exercise caution when using interpreters, and to be sure they are using a qualified and competent interpreter who doesn't translate 'plant and machinery' as 'flower and machinery'.

I was interested to see the term 'elf and safety' used in this particular trade journal. 'Elf and safety' is used by certain newspapers in a derogatory sense, usually in connection with a trivial story about games of conkers being banned, or children having to wear goggles to use glue in the classroom. The magazine was not using the term seriously or as a realistic alternative to 'health and safety' but clearly recognised the image the Health and Safety Executive has in the public imagination.

Parliamentary Select Committee on official language

The proceedings of the Parliamentary Select Committee on official language (mentioned here) which took place a couple of weeks ago with Professor David Crystal, the sketch writers Matthew Parris and Simon Hoggart, and Marie Clair of the Plain English Campaign on the panel were televised and can be seen for a few more days on BBC iPlayer (here - am not sure if it is available to viewers outside the UK).

Professor Crystal was reasonably understanding of and sympathetic to politicians, saying that all groups, not just politicians, used jargon. He said that it is easy to criticise politicians' language, but a lot harder to come up with something to replace the current state of affairs. He also said that ideally we need good models of English for politicians to follow.

Examples of unacceptable language given by the panel, and by the MPs questioning them, included words that on the surface sound simple and comprehensible, but that are in fact meaningless, eg core values, vision. Then there were the sound bites eg train to gain, patient pathways. Also, there were words and phrases which did not mean what they sounded as if they meant eg care in the community, entitlement, guarantee. There were the euphemisms eg the government no longer talks of subsidising the railways, but always says 'investing in the railways' and the unemployed have become job-seekers in government-speak. Examples of gobbledegook were given, too, eg quality of outcomes framework and rising horizons.

Select Committee hearing on politicians' language

The Public Administration Select Committee (PASC) is holding a public hearing today on the language used by politicians (details here) in response to the increasing number of complaints from members of the public regarding the 'impenetrable' jargon used by MPs. Some people claim that the politicians have been influenced by the business sector, which has plenty of jargon of its own, while those who are more cynical say it is a deliberate policy of obfuscation on the part of politicians.

In a discussion on this subject on Radio 4's Today programme this morning, Evan Davis interviewed Matthew Parris and Professor David Crystal, both of whom will be giving evidence at today's hearing (you can listen again for another week if you go to the Today home page for 9 July - it's here at the moment, but this page is always the latest edition, so will have been updated by tomorrow; scroll down to 08.42). As an example of impenetrable gobbledegook, they replayed a recent interview with government minister Liam Byrne, who said this:

"[...] and if power is pointing up for the decade ahead, power has to point out, which is why we need a change of gear and a power-shift."

Top ten 'bad-boy' names

Adolescent boys with unpopular, uncommon or 'girlish' first names are more likely to be delinquents, according to a study carried out by an American economist (see here). This study bears out previous studies, which have found, for instance, that people judge boys' masculinity and trustworthiness from their names, and that parents with fewer years of education are more likely to give their children unpopular names. Another study showed that boys with unpopular names are more likely to be living in a single-parent household. All of these studies are American, by the way.

It's not the name per se that causes the criminal behaviour. In some cases, a negative reaction from others causes the young man to have lower self-esteem. If a young man has a name that makes his ethnic group clear, this can sometimes lower his job prospects, which might be related to a drift into criminal activity.

The top ten bad-boy names (listed in alphabetical order), according to the latest study are Alec, Ernest, Garland, Ivan, Kareem, Luke, Malcolm, Preston, Tyrell and Walter.

An unusual name did not harm Barack Obama, it must be said.