The virtual linguist

Scrabble letter scores

A software creator has suggested revising the scores for the individual letters in the Scrabble game. The original scores were based on the occurrence of letters on the front page of an American newspaper in the 1930s, but the language has changed since then.

 

Q and Z are the only two letters in Scrabble currently worth ten points. Joshua Lewis, the software developer concerned, considered raising the score of a Q to 12, but downgrading a Z to 6 points, thus maintaining a discrepancy between very hard letters to place and more versatile ones. U is currently worth one point, as are all the vowels, but Lewis suggests raising this to two points. He has a point, I think, as, although U is fairly common, that is mainly because it appears as the first letter of so many words beginning Un-. If you haven't got an N among your seven letters you'll struggle more to place your U.

 

Lewis suggests raising the value of a G from two to three points. This is another interesting letter. G is very common in English words but mainly because of the number of words ending -ing.

 

I like Scrabble, but I must say that I am not usually overjoyed if I pick up a J, X, Q or Z, despite their being the highest-scoring letters. The humble S, which scores just one point, is a much more valuable tile, and can win you a score of far more than the 10 of a Z or Q. Having an S makes it a bit easier to find a 7-letter word, using all your tiles (especially if you have an E, A, R and T along with it) and makes it far easier to find a slot on the board to put your 7-letter word. If I had seven tiles forming the word STRANGE, although it only scores 8 points at face value, if I put the S at the end of a word already on the board, say ZEBRA, I would also gain the 16 points represented by those letters, plus gain a bonus of 50 points for putting down all my tiles at once.

 

The manufacturers of Scrabble, Mattel, say they have no plans to make any changes to the current scoring system.

 

Read the story here.

Hashtag is the American Dialect Society's Word of the Year

Hashtag, the word used ubiquitously on Twitter, has been voted the Word of 2012 by the American Dialect Society. The criteria the Society uses when deciding on a winner is that the word (or phrase) needs to have been 'newly prominent or notable' in the past year.

 

Runners-up included another internet-related item, YOLO, an acronym for 'you only live once', and words which were on other organisations' Words of the Year lists, such as fiscal cliff and Gangnam style.

 

There are various categories in the American Dialect Society's annual competition. Beardruff (dandruff on one's beard) appears on the 'Most Useful' list, mansplaining (a man's condescending explanation to a female audience) is on the 'Most Creative' list, Dunlop effect (when the stomach protrudes over ill-fitting pants) is among the 'Most Outrageous' words, and one of the words voted 'Least Likely to Succeed' is phablet (a device of the size between a smartphone and a tablet).

 

Here is the page on the American Dialect Society's website.

The ampersand

From the 12th to the 15th century it was hardly used, but enjoyed a resurgence in popularity after printing became established. Then it fell out of fashion again in the 1960s/70s but again had a resurgence; it is now an integral part of many business names, and has an important role in html writing. The ampersand (&), a mixture of the letters E and T, was initially conceived as a shorthand way of writing the Latin et, and. In its history it has often been less popular than the Tironian note for et, which is older than the ampersand, having been created in the 1st century BC by Tiro, a freed slave of Cicero.

 

Radio 4 had an interesting programme devoted to the ampersand yesterday (listen here for another week). The reporter Alastair Sooke visited a punchcutter in Paris, who made punches for traditional printing machines. It was the Parisian printer Garamond who was partly responsible for the popularity of the ampersand, because he designed a particularly elegant and beautiful one (see examples here). The 18th-century English designer of typefaces, William Caslon, also designed an influential ampersand (see here).

 

The word ampersand only came into being in the 19th century. At the time the ampersand was included on alphabet charts. When people recited the alphabet they would say X, Y, Z "and per se and", per se meaning 'by itself' and this became shortened to ampersand.

Lake Superior State University's list of words to be banished

Fiscal cliff was the ‘word’ that received the most nominations for banishment from the English language in Lake Superior State University’s annual list of ‘Words to be Banished from the Queen's English for Misuse, Overuse and General Uselessness’ (see this Guardian article, and the university’s own page here).

Other words and phrases appearing on the 2013 list include: kick the can down the road, double down, job creators/ creation, bucket list, superfood, and trending.

Long-existing words such as passion, passionate and guru are on the list too. They are considered annoying by many people because of the way people are using them these days.

The word banishment list was started by the public relations director at Lake Superior State University in 1977 as a way of gaining publicity for the institution. The very first list back then included the words meaningful, input, scenario, detente and dialogue.

See some of this year’s contenders on the university’s website here.

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.

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.

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.

 

Pontifex

The Pope has taken to Twitter, using the handle @pontifex (see this BBC article for an explanation of other papal communication methods). Some press reports say that the name pontifex was chosen because it means both pope and bridge-builder. In classical Latin, however, pontifex meant Roman high priest, and the OED says that the idea that the fex part of the word is from facere, to do or make "may represent merely a folk etymology". The Dictionary says that the bridge-maker or bridge-builder meaning is "chiefly used punningly or allusively with reference to the supposed etymology".