The virtual linguist

English or Mandarin

My daughter is learning Mandarin, and so are lots of other people in the West, believing it will help them find a better job. China's neighbours, however, don't necessarily feel the same way about the Chinese language. This BBC piece looked at how some Malaysian families drive their children miles to expensive private schools over the border in Singapore, because they feel that their children are not getting enough exposure to English in Malaysian schools. In Vietnam, too, there is great interest in learning English, partly because of ongoing political tension with China. What attracts people as much as anything else to English is pop music and Hollywood films.

 

Here's the BBC article.

Eskimo words for snow

Since there is still some stubborn snow lying on the ground outside, I'll revisit a post I wrote three years ago about the "Eskimo words for snow" myth, which is being linked to in a piece in today's Guardian. This Guardian article discusses some other language myths, which will probably interest most readers of the Virtual Linguist blog.

 

The Guardian article also advises people to "look up the origins of marmalade", although it is not a particularly contentious word, as is implied. I've written a post on marmalade, too, as I found it interesting.

Burns Night 2012

It’s Burns Night this evening, so I have looked around for a Scottish theme for today’s post (here are two past posts I have written on this day – on neeps and Sassenachs and on haggis and pluck).

The Scottish government has recently decided that from 2014/15 Scottish school pupils taking Higher English will be obliged to answer questions on a Scottish text, be that one written in English, Scots, or a mixture. Currently there is usually a Scottish text in the exam, but it is just one of the options, and pupils do not have to answer questions on it.

Here’s the story.

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).

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.

Financial vocabulary, and the French Academy, on the radio

I have spent a lot of time listening to the radio over the past couple of weeks as I had a fall, concussed myself and have been seeing stars - and avoiding looking at a screen - ever since. Thanks for all your emails and comments offering your good wishes.

 

Word of Mouth has returned to Radio 4 for a new series (listen here) and the first episode was devoted to the language of the financial markets. It's language that often sounds harmless and innocuous - structured financing or securitised loans, for instance, which sound safe and positive, but which are actually very complex, poorly understood phenomena. Interviewees on the programme mentioned how innocent-sounding euphemisms are used to cover up the harsh reality; so, if leverage was actually called over-borrowing, which is what it is, people might regard it in a very different light.

 

Definitions of business and financial terms are often very fluid and subjective and reflect the speaker's point of view. As a businessman said, the word entrepreneur means much the same as capitalist, but it is far more socially acceptable. Depending on your point of view you either regard selling as a means of providing the goods that people want, or you see it as fraud perpetrated by con-men.

 

We were told that Mervyn King, Governor of the Bank of England's favourite word is counterfactual. Apparently, when asked a difficult question his answer often includes the word 'counterfactual' (which I think means 'no-one can explain it'). I've just checked this and see that in a Treasury Committee Meeting on 28 November 2011 King said "The really interesting question to ask about the asset purchases is what is the counterfactual if we had not made the asset purchases?"

 

Also on the programme was Gillian Tett of the Financial Times. Before her change of career she was an anthropologist, and when she joined the world of finance she approached it as if she were studying a completely unknown people with a completely different culture. She said that you have to learn the language to be accepted and to understand the culture. She compared modern-day bankers to the medieval priestly caste, who spoke an incomprehensible language as far as ordinary people were concerned, but as long as the priests dispensed blessings, incense or whatever, then the ordinary people were satisfied and did not challenge this arcane group. Today's bankers dispensed, not blessings or incense, but cheap mortgages, and these 'sops' had the same effect on the masses.

 

Inside the French Academy looked at the august institution which polices and protects the French language, and writes the definitive dictionary of the French language. The Academy was founded in 1635. At that time, we heard on the programme, there were many different dialects spoken in France, and the aim of the Academy was to promote one single official French language for everyone to speak. The original aims were liberté, égalité and fraternité - all would speak the same language and thus be equal.

 

Much of the Academy's efforts go into resisting the invasion of French by English words, such as the very popular le buzz. Sometimes, it is successful - as in the case of l'ordinateur, computer, for instance, but often it arrives on the scene too late - the English words, blog and podcast, for instance, are already in such widespread usage that no-one wants to use the Academy's original suggestions - bloc-notes and baladodiffusion.

 

One of the 40 'Immortals' who run the French Academy (mainly literary, cultural and scientific heavyweights) compared the dictionary the Academy is in the process of writing with the OED, and said it couldn't be more different. The OED is scientific, whereas the French Academy's dictionary isn't - it represents the views of the Immortals, and it is they who determine spellings, definitions etc, not linguists or lexicographers.

 

Someone in the programme noted that the French has always had revolutionary and egalitarian credentials. When the Arab Spring conflicts were sparked off by Tunisian protests, it was the French word dégage! 'give us freedom' (it also means 'get lost', which was aimed at their leaders) that the crowds shouted.

 

The kitchen that speaks French

Among the things the British are criticised for are their lack of ability at speaking foreign languages, and terrible food. The University of Newcastle has tackled both of those issues by developing a computerised kitchen which 'speaks' to the cook in French, rather like a satnav system. Apparently sensors are built into cooking utensils so when the cook picks up the wooden spoon, or the whisk, the correct instructions are given.

 

When students learn a foreign language in a classroom the situations are often unreal simulations, but the computerised kitchen is a task-based learning method which results in an actual meal. You can program the computer to give you the English translation if you are worried about the recipe going wrong and producing something inedible. Adding the technology to an existing kitchen costs £2-3000.

 

Here's a BBC article on the story, and here's the relevant Newcastle University page.

Brand names of Western products in China

Instead of getting into a BMW, a Chinese person talks of his Precious Horse. He doesn't drink a beer called Heineken, but one called Happiness Power.

 

Deciding what to call a Western product in China is a very sophisticated and scientific process. Most Western names mean nothing to the average Chinese person, so the object is to find a name near enough to the original Western name, but with sounds and characters that resonate with the Chinese people. Reebok became Rui bu, which means 'quick steps', Nike pronounced the Chinese way (Nai Ke) sounds like the words for 'enduring' and 'persevering', not bad for sports shoes. Marriott's Chinese name means '10,000 wealthy elites' and Pentium (Ben teng in Chinese) means 'galloping'. Many car names include the character for 'horse' since horses are symbols of strength in Chinese culture.

 

Some products, eg Rolls Royce, Cadillac and Hilton have converted their names into Chinese characters that mean nothing to the Chinese people, but the unfamiliar sounds give the products a certain upmarket and exotic cachet.

 

Microsoft was advised not to use its Western name, Bing, in China, as the character pronounced 'bing' in Chinese means 'virus' or 'disease'. Instead, the search engine is called the subtly different Bi ying, which means something like 'responds without fail'. Unfortunately for Peugeot, the Chinese for this car manufacturer's name sounds very similar to the Chinese for 'prostitute'.

 

For more brand translations, see this New York Times article.

Latin in the modern world

Latin is alive and well -- in Dublin University, anyway. Yesterday I went to my son's graduation ceremony at Trinity College Dublin and the entire ceremony was in Latin. This is a nod to the old traditions of medieval European universities.

 

Honours graduates from this university, also called the University of Dublin (Trinity College is its only college), are called 'Moderators' and the degree-awarding ceremony itself is called 'Commencements', a name which alludes to graduate students just beginning their academic journey. These names recall a medieval tradition. As a leaflet given to all guests explained, they hark back to one of the main educational methods in medieval times, particularly in theology and philosophy, known as 'disputation'. This consisted of a formal debate of a proposed thesis, called 'the Question' (quaestio in Latin). The leaflet went on to remind us that this tradition is reflected in Hamlet's soliloquy "To be or not to be, that is the question", in which he sets out both sides of the argument. The level of participation in a medieval disputation depended on a university member's degree status: Bachelors in Arts could only counter an argument or 'reply to the question', Masters in Arts could propose or initiate a question (which explains why the Latin formula for their degree includes the phrase ad incipiendum, to initiate), but only doctors or professors could 'moderate', ie preside over the debate (the modern use of the word 'Moderator' or 'Moderatorship' to refer to BA students - and most degrees at Dublin, even science ones, are BAs - dates back only to the 19th century).

 

It's not unusual for Latin to be used in an academic setting, and, of course, Latin is still used in the Catholic Church, but Latin is still used enthusiastically in unexpected places in the modern world. Wikipedia, or Vikipedia, has a Latin version, and Wallsend Metro station in Tyne and Wear in the north-east of England, once the last outpost of the old Roman Hadrian's wall, has a number of public signs in Latin (see here, here), thanks to an arts project of a few years ago (see story here).

Samhain

Samhain is a less common word for the Feast of All Hallows, which will take place tomorrow, November 1st. Today is known as Halloween because this literally means 'the eve of All Hallows'. Samhain has its origins in Pagan Celtic traditions and marks the Feast of the Dead. It's also considered by some Pagans to be the traditional end of the Celtic year. This particular time of year was once considered the time when the barriers between this world and the other world were at their flimsiest and thus the spirits of the dead could leave their regular domain to mingle with the living.

 

Samhain is an Irish Gaelic word (the Scottish Gaelic equivalent is Samhuinn). The mh of Samhain is pronounced like an English w (mh is sometimes pronounced like a v, particularly at the end of a word, for instance in the girl's name Niamh). The h in the spelling (which is a relatively new phenomeon - old Irish texts have a dot above the m) indicates lenition. In the process of lenition a sound undergoes a weakening - in this case, the m sound, which is a nasal stop (considered a strong sound) weakens to become an approximant (namely the sound w).

 

I looked at more Halloween words and traditions in this post of three years ago.