The virtual linguist

English Vinglish

There aren't many feature films, let alone comedies, about learning English, but the Bollywood film English Vinglish is a recent one that has received good reviews (and which I will go and see if and when it comes to a local cinema - I think I might have missed it when it came out about a month ago). It's about an Indian woman, teased by her family about her poor English, who enrols on a language course while visiting New York to stay with relatives (watch the trailer here).

 

I'm not exactly sure about the significance of the title and, in particular, Vinglish. It could be that Hindi forms reduplicative words (examples of reduplicative words in English include nitty-gritty, hocus-pocus) using the letter V for the second element (and this Wikipedia page suggests it does). Or, the vin of Vinglish could be a play on the word 'win'.

 

English as spoken by speakers of Hindi is sometimes called Hinglish. There are other words for other varieties of English spoken elsewhere, which are imbued with vocabulary and features of the home language, including Thaiglish (Thailand) and Konglish (South Korea). Those last two examples are not in the OED, but other varieties of English, or varieties of other languages heavily influenced by English, are. They are listed below with their OED definitions:

Chinglish: A mixture of Chinese and English; esp. a variety of English used by speakers of Chinese or in a bilingual Chinese and English context, typically incorporating some Chinese vocabulary or constructions, or English terms specific to a Chinese context.

Hinglish: Esp. in India: a mixture of Hindi and English; esp. a variety of English used by speakers of Hindi (or in a bilingual Hindi and English context), characterized by frequent use of Hindi vocabulary or constructions.

Japlish: A blend of Japanese and English spoken in Japan: either the Japanese language freely interlarded with English expressions or the English language spoken in an unidiomatic way by a Japanese speaker. (This is the oldest entry among this list - it went into the OED in 1976 and hasn't been updated since. Spanglish and Yinglish went in in the 1980s, and the others only within the last ten years.)

Singlish: An informal variety of English spoken in Singapore, incorporating elements of Chinese and Malay. (There is also another entry for Singlish: An informal variety of English spoken in Sri Lanka, incorporating elements of Sinhala.)

Spanglish: A type of Spanish contaminated by English words and forms of expression, spoken in Latin America.

Yinglish: A jocular name for a blend of English and Yiddish spoken in the United States; a form of English containing many Yiddishisms

Deciphering proto-Elamite

To date, attempts to decipher proto-Elamite, a 5000-year-old writing system developed in what is now Iran, have failed, but academics at Oxford University may be close to a breakthrough, reports the BBC (in this article).

 

Over a thousand clay tablets inscribed with the writing survive, but, even though other ancient writing systems, such as ancient Egyptian and Sumerian, have been deciphered, it has proved very difficult to understand proto-Elamite. One reason for this is that no bilingual texts have been found (and it was the discovery of the bilingual Rosetta Stone that was the key to deciphering ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics - see this old post). Another reason is that there seem to be many errors in the writing, making it difficult to spot patterns.

 

The reason that the article predicts a breakthrough is that a new machine now exists which will 'read' the texts more clearly and make the markings more visible. Researcher Dr Jacob Dahl took the machine over to the Louvre museum in Paris, where there is a significant collection of the tablets.

 

Dr Dahl may not fully understand most of the writing, but he has gleaned enough to give an idea of the society that used the writing system. He can tell that the clay tablets mostly relate to accounting or trading matters (early texts often do - the Rosetta Stone text contains information about taxes). The society was hierarchical with the masses at the bottom subsisting on meagre diets. The upper echelons may have had a life expectancy similar to today's, according to Dr Dahl.

 

Here is the BBC piece with a picture of a tablet showing the writing.

Hartz IV

I am sending this post from Berlin. I have learnt a number of new German words and expressions while I've been here. Before this week I would have said "arbeitslos" for "unemployed", but I have come across a new (for me) expression, namely Hartz IV (or Hartz 4), which is used to mean "unemployed" or "unemployment". Apparently people say things like "Mein Vater ist Hartz IV" (my father is unemployed). 

 

Peter Hartz was an adviser to former Chancellor Schröder, and a top businessman. He devised a series of reforms to do with unemployment benefits, called the Hartz-Konzept. There have been various 'incarnations' or 'amendments' to the original idea, and so far the 'concept' is up to number 4, hence the number 4 in the expression. Herr Hartz later suffered a severe fall from grace (see this BBC article).

 

I've been trying to think off the top of my head of similar expressions in English, ie those containing the name of a politician. I can think of the modern "Boris bikes" ie the bicycles parked all over London which can be hired by the hour. They are named after current London mayor Boris Johnson, who introduced the scheme. The term "Baker day" is sometimes still used in schools, I think. Kenneth Baker was Margaret Thatcher's education minister in the 1980s, when he introduced in-service training days for teachers, which were soon dubbed "Baker days". Then there were the Bevin boys, young men conscripted during the Second World War who were sent to work in the mines. They were named after the wartime Labour minister Ernest Bevin.

European Day of Languages

Today is the European Day of Languages, which is organised by the European Commission and the Council of Europe, and which celebrates Europe's language diversity and encourages people to learn more languages. The European Union has 23 official languages (there will be 24 next year when Croatia joins), around 60 regional and minority languages, and over 175 migrant languages.

 

Various events take place across Europe each year on 26th September encouraging people with different mother tongues to talk to each other. Today there's a 'speak-dating' session in Prague, a 'linguistic bath' in Berlin and an international poetry evening in Cardiff, among other events.

 

More on this story here.

The inventor of Pinyin

Zhou Youguang is 106 years old and became active in Chinese politics only in his late 80s, according to an International Herald Tribune article published earlier this year (and sent to me by a friend - thanks, Elizabeth). He is perhaps best known, and most celebrated within China, for inventing the Pinyin system, which is a Romanised spelling system for Chinese characters. Pinyin literally means 'to piece together sounds'.

 

Children in Britain may learn to read and write using the phonics method, where the sounds of words are pronounced individually -- C-A-T (Kuh-Ah-Tuh), for instance. However, this system doesn't work for a language without an alphabet, like Chinese, and Zhou was entrusted with the task of inventing a phonetic alphabet in order to help more Chinese people become literate. It did have a huge effect on literacy in the country. The article mentioned above says that nowadays all Chinese pupils begin with Pinyin before moving on to characters.

 

Creating the Pinyin system was a mammoth job, the first task of which was to decide whether to use an existing alphabet, such as a Cyrillic, Japanese or Roman alphabet, or whether to invent a new Chinese alphabet. Zhou felt that using a Roman alphabet would help China connect better with the rest of the world.

 

Zhou had an interesting, if difficult at times, life, working in a Wall Street bank (he was an economist by profession with an interest in linguistics), having several discussions with Albert Einstein and being in and out of favour with various Chinese governments, with the result that he was banished to a rural wilderness for two years to undergo 're-education'. Here's the full article.

Elizabeth I's Primer of Irish

In the 1560s Queen Elizabeth I expressed an interest in becoming familiar with the Irish language. Although the Queen was interested in learning and knowledge in general - she knew French, Italian, Latin and Greek - she mostly wanted to use the Irish language as a tool in her policy of controlling and anglicising rebellious Ireland, as well as spreading her own Protestant faith and the ideas of the Reformation, which encouraged Bibles written in people's native language, rather than Latin. Elizabeth had already provided funds to produce an Irish typeface to facilitate the publication of an Irish language Bible.

 

Christopher Nugent, Baron Devlin, an Anglo-Irish nobleman, was the author of the Irish Primer. It is a short work - just 18 pages - but is of interest as one of the earliest works, if not the earliest, to explain the language to non-Irish speakers, and to have Irish phrases translated into English and Latin (see facsimile here). It also includes a gushing address to the Queen ("moste gratious and vertuous Soueraigne").

 

You can click on a facsimile of every page of the Primer, and read more about it on this site. Click on Collections, then on Farmleigh House, then on Irish Primer. The alphabet and glossary can be found on f8 - f10. You can see the actual Primer in Episode 5 of the BBC history series The Great British Story (on BBC iPlayer here).

 

I decided to write this blog post after watching this programme myself on iPlayer earlier. As an aside - and quite unconnected to this topic - I attended an Old English language and literature course last weekend, held at Cambridge University's Madingley Hall. By coincidence, the Irish primer mentioned above was discovered in the 1860s or thereabouts in a cupboard in the very same Madingley Hall, which was once a private residence.

 

Here's a newspaper article on the Irish Primer.

Hobson-Jobson on BBC radio

I shall be glued to my radio at 11 o'clock tomorrow when Radio 4 is broadcasting Hobson-Jobson: a Very English Enterprise. I have often written on Hobson-Jobson (for instance, here and here) - it's one of my favourite topics, and the dictionary Hobson-Jobson: a Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases is one of my very favourite books, and the book I would choose to take with me were I ever dispatched to live on a desert island.

 

There's a page on the BBC website accompanying the programme (here), which gives the background to the dictionary, and some words in it. Here's a taster from the article, which is well worth a read:

Here is how Hobson-Jobson defines naukar-chaukar. It means "the servants" but the authors continue:

"One of those jingling double-barrelled phrases in which Orientals delight even more than Englishmen... As regards Englishmen, compare hugger-mugger, hurdy-gurdy, tip-top, higgledy-piggledy, hocus-pocus, tit-for-tat, topsy-turvy... harum-scarum, roly-poly, rump and stump, slip-slop…"

Troika

The word troika has been making a frequent appearance in articles discussing the Eurozone crisis, where it refers to a 'group of three', namely the European Union, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

 

Troika is a Russian word based on the Russian word for the number 3 (три pronounced 'tree'). When used in English (especially in translations of Russian novels) it often means a sledge pulled by three horses. It means that in Russian too, but troika is also used in Russian where we might say in English the/a number three (buses etc), a three (a school mark or playing card), or a three-piece suit (jacket, trousers, waistcoat). There is an almost obsolete word in English for the number 3 on playing cards - trey. I blogged on the words for the numbers on playing cards here.

German is the foreign language most valued by UK managers

72% of UK businesses value foreign language skills, according to a recent CBI/Pearson survey. The language rated as 'most useful to the organisation' was German (50%), closely followed by French (49%). Spanish was next at 37%, then it was Mandarin (25%), Polish and Arabic (both 19%), Cantonese (12%), Russian and Japanese (both 11%), Portuguese (6%) and South Korean (3%).

Here's the story.

BBC quiz on less-spoken languages

Try your hand at this quiz on the BBC website to test your knowledge of some of the world's smaller and rarer languages. I had to guess most of them, although, since only one of the answers to the question "Which Cornish phrase means 'how do I get to the shops?'" had a question mark at the end of it, it was pretty easy to get that one right.