DCblog

On falling in love (with a language)

2012-01-25T10:47:00.002Z

A correspondent - in this case, the author of several well-known books on bilingualism, François Grosjean, has sent me a link to his latest blog post. (Incidentally, his blog, 'Life as a Bilingual: the reality of living with two (or more) languages', is a splendid resource on this subject.)

The film Julie and Julia made him think of other people who had fallen in love with a culture and a language. I'm intrigued by the reasons for doing so. Sometimes it's the culture that provides the initial attraction; sometimes it's the language. In my case, I've experienced both.

I can still remember my first French lessons in secondary school, and falling in love with nasalized vowels. It was only much later, on my first visit to France, where I worked with a youth group (called Concordia) building a bridge in the mountains in Haute Savoie, that I realized there was a culture behind the language. Or rather, cultures. At the camp were several Algerians, and they lost no time putting me right about French, much to the disgust of the Parisians who were also there. It took some time for me to realize that I needed to supplement my Algerian colloquialisms with a different variety if I wasn't going to attract funny looks along the Left Bank.

Soon after, I saw an English-language film documentary about France, voiced by Orson Welles. I remember just one line from it. He said: 'Everyone has two homes; his own, and France'. I felt that way too.

The opposite situation took place when I first visited Brazil, for the British Council, in the 1960s, to teach on a summer school. It was February (think about it) and just before Carnival in Rio. I've talked about it in my Just a Phrase I'm Going Through, so I won't go into it here, except to say that in this case I arrived in Brazil with no knowledge of Portuguese at all. However, after a period of immersion in samba schools and the hit songs of the day, and meeting some wonderful people, I became virtually a native-speaker of musical Portuguese in three weeks. I still have a fine collection of vinyl records from that decade, and some of the songs have stayed with me. It was my primary motivation to get to grips with Brazilian Portuguese. I find the intonation patterns of the language, and especially of the Carioca dialect, hugely appealing. And the nasalization. (What is it about nasalization?)

So now I was in love with two languages. At the same time. The metaphor doesn't quite work in such cases. This was a new love-affair - but that metaphor doesn't seem right either, for I hadn't fallen out of love with my previous amour. I was equally in love with both.

And actually, now I think about it, both would in any case have been jealous of an even earlier love-affair - with Welsh, a language I had left behind when moving to Liverpool in the 1950s, but with which I was becoming intimate again after getting a job at Bangor in Wales.

It has been like that ever since. I guess being a linguist means one falls in love with every new language one has the opportunity to explore. They're all beautiful. I can't conceive of an unattractive language. I fell in love with Shona, on my first visit to Zimbabwe. And here the encounter with language and culture was pretty simultaneous. I suppose, if anything, the culture had come first, as I was there as a result of editing John Bradburne's poetry. (I tell that story here.) But that was an introduction to the culture through someone else's eyes. It's a very different experience when you visit yourself.

One's mother-tongue (or tongues) is an interesting case in point. I spend most of my life working on English. Am I in love with English? Yes, but it's different, in some indefinable way, from the feelings I have towards other languages. Maybe that's natural. Can one retain the same level of passion for the language(s) one lives with longest?

It's a commonplace to say that linguists love languages. But what kind of love is it? The analogy is not so much with married or unmarried love, it seems to me, for the associated terminology of flirtations and love-affairs doesn't fit very well. Rather, it's more like the love of a parent towards a child. Somehow, new additions to the linguistic family don't diminish the affection already felt towards the other members.

Then there's the other side of the coin. No wonder people can get so upset when a language dies.

On the rising demand for elocution

2012-01-21T16:27:00.002Z

Another week in which the phone hasn't stopped ringing. Accents again, this time. During the week a private tuition company (www.thetutorpages.com) issued a report headed 'Elocution in the new Britain', in which they told us that they were receiving more requests for elocution lessons than for any other subject, and that demand had doubled. Inevitably, this was translated into media headlines about 'soaring demand' and 'death of accents'. I did a handful of radio interviews. The general attitude of the presenters was that they were appalled - reflecting the current BBC ethos that regional accents are a very good thing. They were certainly surprised - as indeed was I.

And saddened, for two reasons. The report highlights quotations from some of the enquirers which showed that there is still a great deal of national antagonism towards some regional accents, especially in the West Midlands and Birmingham. And it showed a woeful misunderstanding of what elocution is all about.

Elocution is not about replacing regional accents. As the report concluded:

'Today’s elocution teachers are responding to these trends not by seeking to take their students back to the days of The King’s Speech. Most people who come to them for help no longer wish to acquire a cut-glass accent or learn to speak like the Queen. On the whole they wish to retain their accents but to develop a clearer, softer, or more authoritative voice.'

That's the point. There are all sorts of reasons why people feel they need voice help. In some cases it's speed of speech that is the problem: they need to slow down. In others it's a desire for a different voice quality - a softer voice, for example, or one that is less breathy or creaky. (Some quite famous politicians have gone down that road.) In others it's anxiety over speaking in public, which is far more than a purely linguistic matter. In others it's a need to sound more confident, which again is not solely a linguistic matter. In others it's the need for better breath control. And in some cases, yes, it's a worry - real or imagined - that their accent is holding them back in their career.

The point has to be made, loudly and clearly, that all these problems affect all accents - Received Pronunciation included. Even RP can be a handicap in some circumstances, being perceived as too posh, distant, or customer unfriendly. And it's perfectly possible for an RP speaker to lack confidence, speak too fast, or be phonetically unclear. If you want examples, turn on Radio 3, where the infamous 'dropped intonation' at the end of a sentence is often heard obscuring a critical part of the information focus:

'That was piano concerto in D by .......'
'The programme will be repeated next Thursday at .......'

Or listen to some of the RP voices on PA systems in airports, ferries, and railway stations. I spent some weeks once training the people who made the announcements on Stena ferries. Almost without exception, they spoke too quickly - regardless of the accent they had.

Voice training can be enormously helpful in these respects. However, despite the hype, it's worth noting that in all of this, we're not talking about thousands of people. The report refers to 'over 500' enquiries only. That's a tiny tiny fraction of the population. But, from the comments quoted in the report, it's clear that there is still a cause for concern. For whatever reason, far too many people are still being made to worry about their accent.

On Waterstone(')s

2012-01-13T09:39:00.002Z

Another day when the phone doesn't stop ringing, and (once again) all because of the apostrophe. Waterstone's has decided to become Waterstones. In the end I did a short piece on 'Front Row'. I also wrote the following piece for the Mirror, but as they only used 200 words of it, here's the full version, with a couple of extra points added following the chat with Mark Lawson. If you recognize some of the examples, you're right: they appeared in my By Hook or by Crook, making the point that there's nothing new about this story at all.

The apostrophe was one of the last punctuation features to come into English orthography, and it has never settled down. In writing from around Shakespeare's time we see people beginning to experiment with it. It's used to show a missing letter and to mark posssession, but it's also used for plurals and third person singulars in verbs. In the first printing of his plays we find such spellings as fellow's, how fare's my lord, and dilemma's.

Even as late as Dr Johnson, in the 18th century, the system was still developing. There are no longer any plural apostrophes after a consonant, but there are several after nouns ending in -o or -a. In his dictionary we find him allowing such spellings as grotto’s, innuendo’s, and echo’s as well as comma’s, opera’s, and toga’s.

In the 19th century, printers attempted to standardize the system, but they didn't do it very well. They applied the rule about possession rigorously to nouns, but forgot about pronouns, so that his, hers, its, ours, yours, and theirs don't have an apostrophe, even though they do express possession. They banned the apostrophe from plurals, but allowed a number of exceptions, such as after numerals (the 1860's), abbreviations (the VIP's), and individual letters (P's and Q's).

People found it difficult to apply the rules consistently, right from the start. And proper names posed one of the greatest problems. There was a great deal of inconsistency around the end of the 19th century as to whether it should be St Pauls or St Paul's, or Harrods or Harrod's. The fuss over Waterstone's has its parallel a century ago.

To begin with, Charles Henry Harrod was perfectly satisfied with his grocer's apostrophe, when he opened his shop in Knightsbridge in 1849. An advertisement in 1895 for a sewing-machine tells readers that it can be bought from the first floor of 'Harrod's Stores, Brompton'. But as the century progressed, variation crept in. Manufacturer marks on metalware products made for the firm show a mixture of Harrod's and Harrods. By the early 1900s, the apostrophe had largely disappeared. An advertisement in The Times for 9th December 1907 says: '15 acres of Christmas gifts at Harrods'.

The trend affected other firms. Around the same time, Lloyd's Bank became Lloyds Bank. And in 1890 the US Board on Geographic Names made a far-reaching decision, which is still in force: 'Apostrophes suggesting possession or association are not to be used within the body of a proper geographic name.' Why? 'The word or words that form a geographic name ... change from words having specific dictionary meaning to fixed labels used to refer to geographic entities. The need to imply possession or association no longer exists.'

You might have thought that would settle the matter. But no. There are hundreds of names with apostrophes in the official US repository, the Geographic Names Information System. These exceptions are administrative names, such as schools, churches, cemeteries, hospitals, airports, and shopping centres. Such names, the Board concluded, 'are best left to the organization that administers them'. That's the crucial point, which we need to bear in mind when talking about the Waterstones case.

The English writing system in Britain today is full of apostrophe anomalies. Lord's Cricket Ground but Earls Court. McDonald's but Starbucks. A website in London has a big heading: King’s Cross Online. Immediately underneath is the heading Welcome to Kings Cross Online. You can see it here.

But even the firms which insist on apostrophes have to bow before technology. The website of McDonald's restaurants is www.mcdonalds.com. The search engines like their URLs to be as simple as possible. Type mcdonald's into Google with an apostrophe, and you'll probably get 'page not found'. A percentage symbol (%) replaces an apostrophe if it's absolutely necessary.

The Board on Geographic Names identified a crucial point: the rules governing everyday usage no longer apply. Such things 'are best left to the organization that administers them'. That feels right. You can spell your own name or your house name or your shop name however you want, and that's your democratic right. Is it Humphrys or Humphreys? McDonald or Macdonald. It's up to you. If someone came up to me and says my name should be spelled Crystall rather than Crystal I would tell them to mind their own business. And if the name happens to contain an apostrophe, that's a matter of personal choice too. Mr D'Amico can call himself Damico if he wants to.

So if Waterstone's wants to become Waterstones, that's up to the firm. It's nothing to do with expressing possession or plurality or anything to do with meaning. It's simply an identity marker. I hear that the CEO of Waterstones has tried to defend the change on two grounds. He says that dropping the apostrophe suggests plurality - there are lots of the stores. That's definitely not a good defence, for there are not lots of Harrods. He's on much stronger ground when he cites motivation from the constraints of the Internet. Or refers to the trend to make public print less cluttered in appearance - a trend which goes back many decades, and began with the dropping of periods in Mr, BBC, and the like.

It's important to realize that whatever Waterstones does has no immediate bearing on the way we use the rest of the language. An apostrophe is still required in standard written English - whether we like it or not - to make such distinctions as it's vs its, and boy's vs boys', and enough people consider that to be critical to mean that there's still a lot of life in this punctuation symbol. On the other hand, when a prominent firm makes a decision like this, it does reinforce a climate of change, so those whose life depends on the use of the apostrophe are right to feel threatened.

It's impossible to say how long the apostrophe will last. For almost a thousand years of its history, English writing did very well without it. During the 19th century it came to be seen as obligatory, and the rules governing its use were formed. But during the 20th, its role became questioned. Was it really needed? It was sometimes useful in distinguishing meanings, but it seems it could be left out without causing ambiguity most of the time. The electronic revolution provided the evidence, as people voted with their fingers in emails, blogs, instant messages, texts, and tweets, and omitted the apostrophe all over the place without causing any breakdown in communication. The context was generally sufficient to make it clear what the writers meant - and if it wasn't, then an apostrophe was always available to make the point clear.

It's been an awkward time for teachers, who have the task of pointing out to their inernet-savvy students that this is a transitional moment. The old order still rules, and has to be respected. Omitting an apostrophe may not cause a problem in a text message, but it can cause a huge problem in essays, job applications, and other kinds of formal writing. Not because it makes meaning unclear, but simply because it goes against what society considers to be acceptable English. Students have to be taught how to manage this situation, so that they know what's expected of them.

It's the same with spelling. There's never a problem of meaning if we write accommodation with only one c or one m. But it's not acceptable to do so. Standard written English evolved to aid national and international intelligibility. And the rules that guarantee this intelligibility are essentially rules of spelling, punctuation, and grammar. Society judges people in terms of the language they use, and if they break these rules, they must be prepared for a reaction.

But over time, attitudes change. Most of the issues of English usage that caused a furore a hundred years ago have died away now, and the language has changed. It's likely that as the amount of written language on the Internet increases, and becomes more central to our everyday lives, so its norms will become increasingly adopted elsewhere. Punctuation and spelling are likely to simplify, and this may happen to the apostrophe too. This sort of change doesn't happen overnight. Or even over-decade. But over-century, yes.

On being thick

2011-12-10T09:36:00.001Z

A correspondent writes to ask about the utterance 'She was very thick with the gardener', encountered in the Hercule Poirot episode, The Halloween Party. 'I looked it up in a dictionary and it seems it's an old-fashioned way of saying "she was very friendly with him". Then I saw another expression, thick as thieves (is it still used?) .What I can't really understand is how/why the word thick (usu. 'not thin'; 'stupid') came to be used in the sense of 'friendly'.

The original sense, in Anglo-Saxon times, is of material extension, where it's regularly opposed to thin, as in a thick wall. Then it came to be applied to density and abundance (thick hedge, thick hair, thick mist...) and size (thickset) and extended to thickness in general (where it's not opposed to thin), as in 'the cover is an inch thick'.

It then generated several figurative senses meaning 'excessive in some disagreeable way', especially in the phrase a bit thick ('indecent' or 'indelicate'). It's the sense of 'density of contact' that led to the figurative sense of being 'close in association' - in other words, being 'intimate' or 'familiar'. It seems to have been a late 18th-century development. And quite a few similes have since emerged, such as as thick as glue, as thick as peas in a shell, and as thick as thieves, some of which have become proverbial.

The idioms are still used a lot, but the use of the single word to mean 'intimate' is certainly old-fashioned now, redolent of P G Wodehouse and Evelyn Waugh.

On being ignorant

2011-11-19T19:52:00.002Z

A correspondent from the UK writes to say he has encountered a use of ignorant in an active sense. In this use, to say that X 'is ignorant' is to mean 'X goes around ignoring people'. He has the impression that this is a working-class usage, and wonders what I think about it.

Well, this is a new one on me, for any class level. I know that there was an overlap of meaning between the adjective/noun (14th century) and the verb, when this finally arrived (early 17th century). The present-day active sense of ignore ('intentionally disregard') is much later (18th century) and, interestingly, was dismissed as erroneous by Johnson and others. The OED has a lovely quotation from 1854 when the Earl of Carlyle apologises for using the word in this way: 'Mr. Finlay says that the modern Greeks wholly ignore (I beg pardon for the use of the word) the whole period from Alexander the Great to Lord Palmerston.'

I've not come across a correspondingly active sense for 'ignorant'. The OED makes no mention of it, nor does the Urban Dictionary. I've never heard anyone say such things as 'X is a very ignorant man' meaning 'X ignores people'. But my correspondent has friends who use it in this way. It would be good to get a sense of whether this is at all common anywhere and to find examples in writing. Are there any out there? If you've come across it, remember to give details of where and when.

On reading me loud and clear

2011-11-14T22:18:00.002Z

A correspondent, having encountered such usages as 'Do you read me?' and 'I'm reading you loud and clear' in radio interaction, wonders what is meant by 'read' instead of 'hear'. It's an interesting example, as these are well-used expressions used in films and television where radiotelephony is a part of the plot, but they must seem odd to learners of English. For a start, the collocation of read and loud is unusual. And if it's radio, what is being read?

The interpretation is clear enough. The question asks about the quality of the signal being received. The response affirms that the signal is of good quality. The expressions are part of the jargon of two-way radio communication: read has been used along with copy ('Do you copy?'), receive, and other conventions, such as Roger (acknowledging receipt of the message). As radio is the medium, we might have expected a different form of words: 'Do you hear me?' and 'I'm hearing you loud and clear', where the collocations are normal. So what motivated read?

I've not been able to find a source which explicates the point. The usage has been around since 1930, according to the OED. (Receive in this sense is a little older; copy in this sense is not recorded in the OED.) My suspicion is that it was the ambiguity in hear which led to the search for alternatives. 'Do you hear me?' can actually have a negative interpretation, expressing attitudes ranging from mild insistence to aggressive rudeness - 'Are you listening to me?', 'I'm not going to say this again'... - the effect being reinforced by the absence of any facial expressions which might soften the force of the language.

But why read? Presumably it was motivated by the visual display on the receiving equipment, which would show a point of origin or frequency of the signal. This would often be the name of a place or a set of letters and numerals. But even if it were simply a waveform, then there was ample precedent for applying the verb in this way. Read had already been widely used in a range of senses other than that of interpreting conventional written language, as in to study, observe, or interpret something ('reading thoughts/my mind/ my heart/ the road...'). It seems to have been a natural development. As I say, I haven't found a source in the 1920s or 1930s which explicitly discusses this use of the verb, so if any reader is aware of one, do let me know.

Loud and clear was a collocation long before radio telephony. The first recorded use of it is in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-glass: 'I said it very loud and clear; I went and shouted in his ear.' That's how it stayed, resisting prescriptive criticism (that it should be loudly and clearly). And it remains the number one choice, beating the phonetic alphabet alternative (Lima and Charlie) and the fascinating 'I read you five by five'.

This was a response (also not in the OED) where the first number indicated the strength of a signal and the second indicated its readability. Each was rated on a scale from 1 to 5: signal strength went from 'loud' through 'good', 'weak', and 'very weak' to 'fading'; readability went from 'clear' through 'readable', 'unreadable', and 'distorted' to 'having interference'. So, if you read something '5 by 5' you could hear the signal well and also understand what was being said.

The origins of the expression are unclear, though it seems likely that it's another of those expressions based on parts of the body. One commentator suggests that it began with early pilots having to communicate with a controller, before taking off, by signalling with their hands, and showing with their fingers the quality of their radio reception. Plausible - but again, it would be nice to find a written source.

On 'I asks' in Sherlock Holmes

2011-11-12T14:41:00.002Z

A correspondent writes to ask about a construction he came across in a Sherlock Holmes story, 'The Red-Headed League'. He noticed 'that on one occasion Watson adds suffix -s to the first person singular verb in the present simple tense'. Why, he asks, would an educated man use such a construction? Is he referring to himself in the third person?

This is the quotation: 'Spaulding, he came down into the office just this day eight weeks, with this very paper in his hand, and he says: "I wish to the Lord, Mr. Wilson, that I was a red-headed man." "Why that?" I asks.'

The story is being narrated by Dr Watson, but it's actually not Watson talking at this point. It's Wilson who's narrating. So the question is whether Wilson would be likely to use such a construction.

We are given the following description of him by Watson: 'Our visitor bore every mark of being an average comonplace British tradesman, obese, pompous, and slow.' We also learn that he began as a ship's carpenter and now works as a pawnbroker. So it seems quite in character that he should use such a form.

This isn't the third person, though. It's the first person with an -s ending - a widely used regional dialect feature in English, both in Victorian times and today, and common in local London speech, especially in narrative discourse. We also hear such forms as 'I goes', 'I sees', and so on. It's a dramatic use of the present tense in narrative. The rest of the time people say 'I asked', 'I observed', and suchlike.

Conan Doyle does use nonstandard speech in his writing - for example, John Rance's speech in 'A Study in Scarlet': 'I was a-strollin' down ... them two houses... won't have the drains seed to...' - though it's not his stylistic forte. I find the usages rather stilted and tokenistic. But there are only hints of demotic speech in 'The Red-Headed League'. Mr Wilson has a few colloquial turns of phrase typical of the businessman trying to rise in society, such as 'never was such a fellow for photography', 'as true as gospel', 'a pawnbroker's business is mostly done of an evening', '[he] took to coming in only once of a morning', 'he... would come cheap'. 'I asks' is a clear instance of a nonstandard usage, in this story, but it's the only example, and it does stick out like a linguistic sore thumb. Which, I suppose, is why my correspondent noticed it in the first place.

On skyfall

2011-11-03T17:13:00.002Z

A correspondent from BBC Radio 4's Front Row calls to ask whether I have any views about the name of the new James Bond movie, Skyfall. Had I ever heard the word before?

I certainly had. Thanks to various children, I am aware of characters in Transformers universes with this name, and I recall an adventure fantasy from the 1980s which had a planet called Skyfall. And there was a striking use by W H Auden, in the charade (his first dramatic work) he wrote in 1928 and dedicated to Cecil Day Lewis, 'Paid on Both Sides', which has the vivid lines:

Though heart fears all heart cries for, rebuffs with mortal beat
Skyfall, the legs sucked under, adder's bite.

But apart from this, the coinage seems a somewhat predictable compound. Other words ending in fall in English are unremarkable - rainfall, snowfall, waterfall, and suchlike, alongside figurative extensions such as pitfall, landfall, and shortfall. It does lend itself to cosmic invention, though: a quick search on Google produces starfall, moonfall, planetfall, sunfall, and others. So skyfall is in good company. But we'll have to wait and see what motivates the title in this case.

I'm wondering if it's 'James Bond meets Chicken Licken'. You remember him? An acorn falls on his head, and he thinks the sky is falling down so he rushes off to tell the king? Maybe the new Bond baddy is Foxy Loxy in disguise.

On snowtober

2011-10-31T16:30:00.001Z

A correspondent writes from the USA about the news media’s collective decision to settle on Snowtober as their name on Twitter and in headlines for this weekend’s storm. Why, he asks, did this coinage beat the others which had been suggested, such as Snoctober and Octsnowber? Are there any linguistic reasons?

There are always linguistic reasons. We can rule out Octsnowber straight away, on two grounds. First, it is an infixing coinage - something English doesn't do very much. Most blends are combinations of the first part of word A plus the second part of word B, such as brunch, helipad, smog, motel, and so on. Inserting one word inside another is rare - absobloodylutely. Second, the result of the infixation is to produce an unpalatable 4-element consonant cluster /ktsn/.

Snoctober satisfies the blending preference, but loses out on phonological grounds. The long vowel (diphthong, actually) of snow, rhyming with low, has become a short vowel: snoc rhymes with lock, and as a result the immediacy of the semantic connection with snow is lost.

Snowtober does everything right. It blends in the usual way. It keeps the phonological connection with snow in front of our ears and eyes, and it avoids an awkward phonetic sequence of sounds. This had to be the media choice.

On being fairly much aware

2011-09-22T10:10:00.001Z

A correspondent writes to ask if he can say fairly much and still be grammatically correct? If we can have pretty much and very much, he says, can we have fairly much?

A quick trawl of the Internet brings to light quite a few instances, such as:

I'm fairly much aware of that...
I'm fairly much a novice when it comes to marketing...
You can locate virtually anything online now, fairly much...
It's fairly much the same from class to class...
Australia is fairly much in the middle...
This fairly much mirrors my own experience...

What we seem to have here is a lexical issue rather than a grammatical one: we're dealing with a collocational change. Fairly traditionally collocates with well but not much. Words like pretty and very collocate with both. What's probably happening is that the collocates of pretty and very are transferring to fairly.

It's not a usage that's part of my idiolect, but I've heard it occasionally, especially in the north of England. Fairly is one of those words which has quite a wide range of usage in regional dialects in Britain, e.g. She's fairly looking (meaning 'good-looking'). I seem to recall hearing it abroad too, for example in Australia. Can readers of this post add their impressions?

On LARSP latest

2011-09-21T08:09:00.002Z

Long before I began this blog, correspondents were already writing asking how they could get hold of the three texts on clinical language profiling that were developed when I worked at the University of Reading in the 1970s. They had gone out of print, and it was proving difficult for new generations of students in speech therapy and language pathology to get hold of them. Those wanting to improve their proficiency in using the grammatical analysis known as LARSP (the 'Language Assessment Remediation and Screening Procedure') were particularly affected.

Old books have new leases of life today, thanks to Internet technology. So, my thanks goes to Tom Klee and his colleagues at the University of Canterbury at Christchurch, New Zealand, for hosting electronic versions of each of the books. Keyword searches can be made through the search facility of  the PDF reader and the table of contents is linked to each chapter. The various profile forms in these works can be reproduced without charge.

The Grammatical Analysis of Language Disability can be downloaded from  here

Working with LARSP can be downloaded from  here

Profiling Language Disability can be downloaded from  here

As it's a busy university server, there may be the occasional delay in accessing the material. A download takes about a minute per text.

It's great to see these books readily available once more. And this is especially timely, as a new book illustrating the way LARSP has been used in thirteen languages is about to appear: Assessing Grammar: the Languages of LARSP, edited by Martin Ball, David Crystal and Paul Fletcher, published by Multilingual Matters.

On OP latest

2011-09-12T09:27:00.000Z

Several correspondents have written recently asking about the latest developments in 'original pronunciation' (OP) - a recurrent theme of this blog. I've delayed a response until I had something to report - which I now have. This week sees the launch of an OP website. The idea behind the site is to provide a place where people can find out about OP, archive their events, announce plans, and share their experiences of working with it and listening to it.

Although Shakespeare was the stimulus for current interest in OP, the notion is much broader. Any period of English history can be approached in this way, and indeed there have been several projects where people have tried to reconstruct the pronunciation of earlier works in Old and Middle English, notably for Chaucer. The British Library exhibition, Evolving English, which ran from November 2010 to April 2011, had an audio dimension which included OP extracts from Beowulf, Caxton, Chaucer, and the Paston letters, as well as Shakespeare. The 2011 anniversary of the King James Bible also prompted readings in OP, some of which can now be found on the OP site. And there is an ongoing project on one of John Donne's sermons which has an OP dimension.

More than literature is involved. There are opportunities for people interested in the vocal dimension of early English music, as well as for those involved in heritage projects which present original practices, such as Plimoth Plantation in Massachusetts. Examples from these perspectives include an OP rendering of vocal music by William Byrd and of the songs that appear in Shakespeare's plays.

Interest in OP has been remarkable over the past couple of years, and the Future Events section of the website already has three events and will doubtless soon have more. I very much hope so. Each time a new text is explored from an OP point of view, something fresh and interesting emerges. Only half a dozen Shakespeare plays have been OP'd so far, and (as far as I know) none from other dramatists of the period - so there's plenty of scope.

On linguistic apps

2011-09-04T11:24:00.003Z

A correspondent writes to ask if there are any linguistics apps. They are certainly beginning to appear, and coincidentally I received news this week of a grammar app from the Survey of English Usage at University College London. It's called iGE, the interactive Grammar of English, and it's available for iPhone 3 and 4, iPod Touch, and the iPad.

iGE comes in two versions. iGE Lite is free. It contains a glossary and three units of course material covering word classes, nouns, and determiners. It's only a taster. A grammar is a complete system. One can't dive into it without finding oneself pulled in all sorts of different directions. So I quickly found myself wanting to check out aspects of clause and phrase structure which are only available in the complete iGE. But a complete grammar for less than a fiver (in pounds) is good value by any standards.

The interactive bit relates to various exercises and puzzles, where you can score your success rate. Whether you get 100 percent or not will depend on the extent to which you have assimilated the particular grammatical model being presented. For example, asked to find all the nouns in a passage, you won't score 100 unless you accept that attributive items (such as garden in garden wall) are also classed as nouns. But the model presented is a well-established and influential one, and there are lots of real examples of usage, taken from the ICE-GB corpus.

I'm sure it won't be long before we see many more linguistic apps, especially in areas of language which are difficult to handle in traditional ways, such as phonetics and phonology. It used to be almost impossible using a textbook to obtain a good auditory experience of nonsegmental phonlogy, for example, but multimedia technology has changed all that. I would welcome reports from readers of this blog who have experience of using other apps in our field.

On being persuaded about convince

2011-08-26T09:31:00.002Z

A correspondent sends in the following passage from the Times (30 July): 'In Adam Sage’s article about Dominique Strauss-Kahn (July 23) he says that Triston Banon’s mother "convinced her not to make a formal complaint". No, she didn’t: she persuaded her. You convince someone of the truth of something, but you persuade them to take a course of action. ... It is a classic example of a new construction that is acceptable or at least unexceptionable to some and repugnant to others.' And he adds, a mite confused: Can I tell my students it's OK to use convince to do something?

This is purely a grammatical issue. There's no problem when these verbs are used with a following that construction. There is a difference in meaning, but that is a different point. Compare:

(1) I persuaded John that he should go to the cinema.
(2) I convinced John that he should go to the cinema.

In (1), the focus is on the process of argument; it's a step anticipating a successful conclusion. In (2) the focus is on the result; the conclusion has been successfully achieved. In this pair of examples, the nuance is inconsequential; but in (3) and (4) a contrast is drawn:

(3) I persuaded him to go, but he wasn't convinced it was the right thing to do.
(4) I found his argument persuasive but not convincing.

The lack of synonymy is illustrated by the impossibility of reversing the verbs:

(5) I convinced him to go, but he wasn't persuaded it was the right thing to do.
(6) I found his argument convincing but not persuasive.

In some cases, the context motivates the stronger interpretation, as in (7):

(7) He convinced (?persuaded) the police that he was innocent.

However, these examples are few compared with the many contexts in which either verb could substitute for the other without anyone noticing, as in (8):

(8) I persuaded/convinced John that it would be wise to leave early.

Persuade has long (since the Middle Ages) been used with the nonfinite construction:

(9) I persuaded John to go to the cinema.

The infinitive brings a different semantic implication: the focus is on the action rather than on the mental state. And given the overlap in meaning, it was only a matter of time for this construction to be extended to convince. The surprising thing is that this didn't happen until the 1950s. First recorded usages are in the USA:

(10) I convinced John to go to the cinema.

This brought the usual complaints from the prophets of linguistic doom, but the rapid growth in popularity of the usage quickly led to it being recognized in dictionaries and grammars in both British and American English. The OED, for example, notes it without comment. The that construction is still the more frequent one, especially in British English, but the greater succinctness of the to construction - one word instead of three - has probably been a factor in its growth.

So, in short, I would certainly let students use both constructions with convince, but warn them that some people still find the to form uncomfortable. In such circumstances, when one never knows who will be reading what one writes, it is always wise to be conservative. One doesn't want one's application for a job to be rejected by a potential employer who is still living in the linguistic past, and who finds this usage - as the Times writer says - repugnant.

On 'Marley and me/I'

2011-08-01T14:23:00.002Z

A correspondent writes with a query about the title of the book and film Marley And Me. He notes that some people think it should be Marley and I, and wonders which is correct. Is it something to do with the fact that it is in a title, he asks?

Titles, like newspaper headlines, often have a grammar of their own - but not in this case. Both forms are used. Along with Marley and Me in the world of titles we find Monkey and Me, My Bump and Me, Stieg and Me, Ann Boleyn and Me, and more. On the other hand we find Withnail and I, The Egg and I, Gillespie and I, The Duke and I, and others. There is even a minimal pair. In 2009 there was an exhibition of Murray Close's photographs from the set of Withnail: it was called Withnail and Me.

Plainly there's a choice, and that will depend on the general feelings one has about the use of me and I in everyday use. The point has been well discussed in the English linguistics literature, so I won't go into it in detail here. But most people sense a formality difference, with I more formal than me. There's also a pragmatic issue arising out of the way I has been privileged in prescriptive teaching over the past 200 years, so that some people are scared of using me - notwithstanding the fact that the and me or me and constructions have a history of usage dating from the 14th century (see OED under me, pron.1, n. and adj., sense 5), and are found in Shakespeare, Austen, Dickens and many other authors. The linguistics literature also has some interesting observations about the way the grammar of pronouns in a coordinate construction differs from that of pronouns used in isolation (for example, see §2.2 of the Cambridge grammar).

If it had been left to itself, I'm sure me would have been the normal usage in the short texts that constitute titles. Compare them with other self-contained pieces of 'block language' (as Quirk, et al would call it) or elliptical sentences. It's interesting that me seems to be privileged in these minimalist sentences, especially those that are exclamatory in character. Consider such examples as the following, none of which allow I:

Dear me! Goodness me!
 Silly me! Funny me!
Me go by train? Never!
Me and my big mouth!
Me in Blackpool. [photograph caption]
I got told off - and me only trying to be helpful.
Me? [do you mean me?)
Me too. Me neither.

But of course it wasn't left to itself.

Prescriptive grammarians have a lot to answer for. Their insistence that I usage was correct (as in It is I) and me was incorrect, introducing a Latin rule which went against the natural idiom of English, produced generation after generation of conflicting intuitions and a sensitivity to their use which is still with us. The uncertainty that people feel is a direct result of the attempt to implement that artifcial rule. They don't like to use I in everyday speech because it's felt to be too formal. On the other hand they find me uncomfortable because they've heard that it's wrong. It's not surprising, then, to see the rise of alternatives - especially myself. Usages such as Jane and myself went to the cinema and They saw John and myself in the street are on the increase - an ancient usage, which remained alive only in a few regional varieties, notably Irish English, but which is widespread in British English now. (And outside of Britain? Comments, please.) So expect to see more examples of this in the next generation of book and film titles. We've already had Oscar Wilde and Myself, My Father and Myself, and a few others. If they ever remake the cult film, and feel the need to retitle, it could be Withnail and Myself.

On identifying phishermen

2011-07-18T10:43:00.003Z

Correspondents (of the radio kind) have been keeping the phone hot this week in the wake of a report claiming that spelling mistakes on websites can cut online sales by half. I'm not surprised. If website writers don't take the trouble to satisfy the norms of standard English - which is defined chiefly by its spelling, punctuation, and grammar - then they must expect to encounter trouble. People are very ready to make deductions about the background of a user based on language use, and the argument 'carelessness in spelling must mean carelessness generally (and thus an unsatisfactory product)' is applied regardless of the realities. Quite clearly, firms need to employ proof-readers if they sense they have a deficiency in the spelling department. There are plenty of free-lancers out there willing to help.

Interesting research questions still need to be answered. What are the areas of internet activity that generate these expectations? Clearly there are some outputs where deviations from standard English are normal, expected, and valued. And what pragmatic effects does nonstandard usage on the internet convey? One point which didn't get a mention in the BBC report is the way nonstandard English can be an important clue to the dubious origins of a message. Here are three examples of phishing that I received recently, all from someone purporting to be a gmail service provider and wanting my personal details. The nonstandard English provides the clues (some of which I italicize below). There are pointers of spelling, punctuation, and grammar, as well as awkwardness of style and inconsistency (eg in the use of capital letters). Probably the whole of the first example should be in italics, given the blend of sentence structures!

(1) 'We make every effort to ensure that we provide the Ultimate Security required for maximum protection because we are detecting unusual activity on some user account, we have decided to protect each account with a user account control to protect user privacy and make sure each user account is not accessed unauthorised.'

(2) 'We have received several complaints from users unable to gain access to their email account, as a result of that, we are upgrading our security systems and making sure each user account is not accessed unauthorised. We do not want you to loose access to your Account since your login information are no longer valid on our database system. Now, the Gmail Account Team need to confirm your profile details below for verification purpose and to confirm that you own this Account.

NOTE: If you would like to continue using our services, please click on the reply button and email us the afore mention details immediately for confirmation and validation. We apologize for any inconveniences. Thanks for Using our Service.'

(3) 'This is an important information regarding your Google account. We have just realized that your account information on our database system is out of date, as a result of that we request that you to verify your Information by filling your account information below.'

As time passes, and people become increasingly experienced in reading and interpreting web pages, they are developing intuitions about the status of the originators. This applies as much to matters of graphic design and choice of style as to content. What we are seeing in these examples is the emerging role of nonstandard English as an index of internet illegitimacy. I expect the same sort of thing takes place in other languages? Examples welcome.

On enquiring about inquiry

2011-07-15T13:34:00.002Z

A correspondent reports something he was reading in The Times this week:

1356 BST: Jemima Khan has a complaint about the police investigation into phone hacking. 'Not much hope for hacking Inquiry when they can't even spell it... I received "Operation Weeting Enquiry [sic] Questionnaire" last week,' she tweets.

He notices that I often write in my blog about enquiries from correspondents. He concludes: 'What are the rules and/or usage in British English? I know that in American English it is always inquiry.'

Well, not always, actually. The Cambridge Corpus of American English shows a preference of 97% for inquire and 88% for inquiry. That's a dominant usage, certainly, but not a universal one. In Britain, the picture is extremely mixed. The British National Corpus shows almost exactly twice as many enquire as inquire, and twice as many inquiry as enquiry. The world picture, amalgamating different spelling traditions, is mixed too. Google shows inquire five times more common than enquire, and enquiry seven times more common than inquiry. But all four forms are frequent. Not surprisingly, then, most dictionaries throw in the towel and say the i- and e- forms are interchangeable. The OED, for example, simply lists them as alternatives, but adds a note under enquire:

'An alternative form of inquire v. The mod. Dicts. give inquire as the standard form, but enquire is still very frequently used, esp. in the sense "to ask a question".'

Could there be a sense difference? Prescriptive grammarians tried to find one, citing the difference between insure and ensure as justification, and their view did have some influence. The i- forms should refer to impersonal, formal investigations, it was recommended, whereas the e- forms should be used only for personal questions, and doubtless many people tried to make their usage conform to this distinction. The lists of examples in the large corpora, however, show many counter-examples, and it is difficult to resist the conclusion that, for most people, the forms are as interchangeable as judgment and judgement - in other words, influenced by such factors as region, house style, and institutional preference, but not by anything semantic.

The original forms in English were with e- (from French enquerre), but in the late 14th century we see i- spellings appearing, as people tried to reflect the Latin origin of the words (inquirere) - a common practice at the time. Dr Johnson put all his weight behind the i- forms in his dictionary, and doesn't include the e- forms at all. Modern style guides seem to be going the same way. The Cambridge Guide to English Usage (2004), for example, concludes thus:

'Given no consistent ways of differentiating the two spellings, and the fact that differentiation is unnecessary, it makes sense to consolidate the use of one or the other. Inquire and inquiry recommend themselves as the spellings made first among equals by the Oxford Dictionary, and the fact that they are strongly preferred in North America.'

That doesn't make the e- forms wrong, of course, as the quotation from my correspondent suggested. And it's nonsense to suggest there might be a correlation between this choice of spelling and the conduct of a policy enquiry.

On mouth-filled speech

2011-07-05T10:54:00.002Z

A correspondent writes with an enquiry that needs to be quoted in full:

'This morning I tried simultaneously to brush my teeth and talk. I tried saying, 'I don’t know,' and the listener managed to understand my muffled 'words'. Actually, they could be thought less of words and more as pulsated approximations of words, three throbs with the first one neutral, the second a bit higher, and the third ending on a lilt. Since the words 'I don’t know' are used so often in English, it wasn’t difficult for my listener to guess what I meant. And that got me thinking, how much does this sort of 'speech'—hummed, or pulsated approximations of real words— factor into the English language, as well as others? I imagine that for any language, the most common words and phrases would, even if intonated in such a 'muddy' manner, still be understood because of their familiarity and frequency of use. Is this sort of speech ever used for histrionic or comic effect? Or have any authors ever exploited it for inventive literary purposes?'

This is an area which, in phonetics, would fall under the heading of paralinguistics - though I have to say mouth-filled speech isn't one of the categories recognized when Quirk and I first studied vocal effects back in the 60s. It just didn't turn up in the corpus - unsurprising, really, as 'Don't talk with your mouth full' is a (?universal) pragmatic prohibition that we learn from our parents at around age 3, and the recordings of relatively formal situations we were using then simply didn't present the relevant situations. The surreptitious recording of bathroom or dining-room speech wasn't a top priority at the time.

It's more than just politeness that's at stake. There is a risk of choking. And unintelligibility. But etiquette is a dominant factor. Some people, if asked a question at exactly the point where they have taken a mouthful on board, simply refuse to speak until they have swallowed, which can produce an awkward silence in the conversation (though the mouth-filled one will usually use facial expression or hand gesture to explain what's happening). Listeners understand the problem if they've been brought up in that way. (I muse over my parenthesis above. Is it etiquette in all languages? It is in all the language situations I've experienced.)

Despite the lack of examples in corpora, mouth-filled speech is really rather common. I suspect most people do it, from time to time, in informal eating situations, when they feel the urgent need to make a point. And eating is only one of the relevant situations. Other examples, in addition to speaking while brushing the teeth, are

- speaking while holding a writing implement in the mouth (while the hands are otherwise engaged), as I've often seen in business meetings
- speaking (or trying to) when the dentist, just having filled your mouth with implements, asks you if you had a nice holiday
- and relatedly, speaking after having had your gums filled with anaesthetic
- speaking with pins in the mouth, while sewing
- speaking with a pipe or cigarette in the mouth
- speaking with a hand or finger in the mouth, sucking it better after a hurt
- speaking with ill-fitting false teeth
- little (and sometimes not-so-little) children, sometimes try to speak while keeping a dummy (pacifier) in the mouth
- speaking with a decorative item in the mouth, such as a pierced tongue
- for boxers, speaking with a gum-shield
- in old-style elocution, speaking with a pebble in the mouth to improve one's pronunciation - a technique supposedly used by Demosthenes to overcome a stammer
- more dramatically, movies regularly show us someone trying to speak with a gag in the mouth
- or talking while someone else is in their mouth, as with a passionate kissing scene.

These situations are common enough to have made me role-play mouth-filled speech in listening comprehension exercises, when I used to do some EFL teaching in summer schools. Solo, I hasten to add, in view of the last example.

Linguists are well aware of the importance of avoiding situations where something interferes with natural speech production. Field linguists watch out for any physical limitations in their informants - it would be unwise, for example, to rely greatly on the phonology produced by an aged speaker who had lost all his teeth. And some of the semiotic transcriptions of body behaviour from the 1960s include symbols for such effects as 'speaking through clenched teeth', 'speaking while licking one's lips', and 'speaking with mouth pursed'. However, these are just general markers. I don't know of any phonetic descriptions at the level of the segment.

Do authors do it? I haven't come across any. They seem to leave the effect to the reader's imagination. Here's J. M. Barrie in A Widow in Thrums (Chapter 3):

' "Ye daur to speak aboot openin' the door, an' you sic a mess!" cried Jess, with pins in her mouth.'

The character has that accent throughout; no special effort is made to represent the effect of the pin-holding. Here's George Eliot, in Scenes of Clerical Life (Chapter 1):

' "So," said Mr. Pilgrim, with his mouth only half empty of muffin, "you had a row in Shepperton Church last Sunday." '

That sentence would certainly have sounded differently. And even Charles Dickens, so good at depicting the idiosyncrasies in an individual's speech, leaves this effect to the reader, as in Nicholas Nickleby (Chapter 5):

' "This is the way we inculcate strength of mind, Mr Nickleby," said the schoolmaster, turning to Nicholas, and speaking with his mouth very full of beef and toast.'

A rare example of an author trying to represent the segmental phonetics of mouth-filled speech is Anna Pickard in The Guardian (27 April 2006) which begins:

' "Fankky, i's ow-wajus. I fine i' affo-uuti owajus. Va figiss ... hangom, suwee, nee to swa-oh." Frankly, it's outrageous...'

And she goes on:

'And what, I ask, is so wrong with talking with your mouth full? In an age where multitasking is a marketable skill, surely the ability to eat and keep up your end of the conversation at the same time should be positively commended. '

She specifies three benefits:

'Time management There simply isn't time in the day to set aside a separate amount for eating and for talking. By combining the two activities, an incredible amount of time can be saved. Also, none of your companions will ever need to ask what you had for lunch again. They will know, because they can see.

Portion control  The process of eating while talking can do wonders for the figure. Anatomically speaking, the act of sucking in air for the talking while holding food in the oratory position should, in theory, bring more air into the food, thus inflating it, and making you feel more full (if slightly gassy). While this hasn't been scientifically proven as far as I know, speaking as a university graduate, it certainly sounds like a convincing theory. My degree is in dramaturgy.

Characterfulness  By the simple act of talking while eating, you can easily ensure that you will be memorable to everyone you meet. While what you were saying might have been otherwise forgettable, no one will ever forget you if you gave them a good eyeful of bolognese while you were saying it.'

It's nice to have the opportunity of resurrecting this piece from the journalistic past.

If readers of this post have come across any other examples of mouth-filled speech, especially in literature and in languages other than English, I'd love to know of them, as I'm sure would my correspondent.

On texted vs texed

2011-07-04T20:58:00.002Z

A correspondent writes to ask about the past tense of the verb to text. He uses texted but is aware that many people say text, as in She text me yesterday. 'Why is this>' he asks. 'Is it something to do with the consonant cluster at the end being difficult to pronounce?'

The historical situation is clear in the OED. When text became a verb in English, back in the 16th century, meaning 'write, inscribe', it had the expected regular past tense form, -ed. We find an early use in Much Ado About Nothing, when Claudio says 'Yea, and text underneath, here dwells Benedick the married man'. And we find a past tense in Thomas Dekker's play Whore of Babylon, 'Vows have I writ so deep... So texted them in characters capital...' That's 1607.

Unsurprisingly, then, when text became a verb again in the 1990s, in the modern sense, it followed the normal pattern, and texted is the form given in all the dictionaries. So the interesting question is, why has an alternative form developed. It's very unusual to find a new irregular past tense form in standard English. It does happen, as we see with the preference for shorter broadcast and forecast alongside broadcasted and forecasted, but that was influenced by the basic verb cast, past tense cast. We don't have the same situation with text.

Pronunciation is probably part of the answer. There's nothing intrinsically difficult about the consonant cluster at the end of text, as we don't have a problem with other words in English which have exactly the same consonant cluster in that position in a word, such as next, vexed, faxed, boxed, sexed. Indeed, there is evidence from the history of English that the 'xt' pronunciation is actually easier than some alternatives, as when we see asked change to axed in many regional dialects. But adding an -ed ending alters the pronunciation dynamic. We now have two /t/ sounds in a rapid sequence, as we had in broadcasted, and that could motivate people to drop the ending. Speakers generally prefer shorter forms.

This then means that we have a present tense and past tense which aren't different, but that's nothing unusual in English, as we see with bet, bid, burst put, and others. Indeed, text as a past tense has something going for it: it actually sounds as if there is a past tense -ed form there already. Compare the sound of I fix, mix, fax, sex (meaning 'decide the sex of', as in The vet sexed the kittens), and so on, which in the past tense are fixed, mixed, faxed, sexed. Text sounds like them, and even though there is no verb tex, the pronunciation analogy could still operate. (Also, of course, in colloquial speech, text is often pronounced /teks/ anyway.) So maybe people are beginning to think of text as if it were texed.

Whatever the reasons, we do now find forms such as texed and tex'd being used with increasing frequency. I think it's only a matter of time before we find it being treated like broadcast in dictionaries, and given two forms.

On bottom

2011-06-29T10:53:00.001Z

A correspondent from Shakespeare's Globe writes to ask whether bottom ever meant 'posterior' in Elizabethan England. He has noted the way some modern productions make risque jokes about the character of Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream, and wonders if these are what Shakespeare intended. He wonders, too, whether Bum (the name of Pompey in Measure for Measure) would have had a similar connotation.

This is the kind of case where the amazing Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary comes into its own. Type bottom into the search, and up will come all the senses of that word, grouped thematically. Find the one which means 'buttocks', and there you will find a list of over 80 lexical items for this area of the anatomy, which you can see alphabetically or in chronological order of record. They contain items which are a mixture of learned, jocular, euphemistic, and slang.

1000s: arse
1200s: cule, latter end, fundament, buttock
1300s: tut, tail, toute, nage, tail-end, brawn, bum
1400s: newscher, croupon, rumple, lend, butt, luddock, rearward, croup
1500s: backside, dock, rump, hurdies, bun, sitting-place, prat, nates, crupper, posteriorums,
1600s: cheek, catastrophe, podex, posterior, seat, poop, stern, breek, flitch, bumfiddle, quarter, foundation, toby
1700s: rear, moon, derriere, fud, rass, bottom
1800s: stern-post, hinderland, hinderling, ultimatum, behind, rear end, hinder, botty, stern-works, jacksy,
1900s: sit, truck-end, tochus, BTM, sit-upon, bot, sit-me-down, fanny, beam, ass, can, keister, batty, bim, quoit, rusty-dusty, twat, zatch, booty, bun, tush

So, bum? Yes, that would have carried a rude connotation in Shakespeare's day. But bottom? No. To exploit rude connotations here would be an anachronism. Of course, it's difficult to ignore the modern meaning, when we hear the name, but we have to try, if we want to get closer to Shakespeare's usage.

On being linguistically cognito

2011-06-10T09:08:00.002Z

Some correspondents have been contributing to my last post incognito. It was a post about a point of usage in which, it began to emerge, there was an interesting usage divide between British and American English. The situation is probably more complex than that, with such factors as age, gender, and social context being relevant as well as regional origin. And very important is to establish the relevance, if any, of the contributors' language background. Without a sociolinguistic perspective of this kind, it is impossible to interpret what people are saying. 'I say this' or 'I never say this' is useless without knowing who 'I' is.

And this local issue reflects the main problem presented by the Internet, when it comes to interpreting language data. It's often said that the Internet is the largest linguistic corpus ever, and this is a goldmine for linguists. Well, up to a point, Lord Copper. Because it is also the largest anonymous linguistic corpus there has ever been, and this is an immense frustration for linguists. I take it as axiomatic, these days, that a linguistic analysis has to be sociolinguistically and pragmatically informed. If we want to explain linguistic patterns, as opposed to just describing them, we need to answer the question 'why'. Traditionally, linguistics had its focus on the what and when and where (descriptive, historical, and dialectological perspectives). Today we want to know why a usage occurs. What type of person uses it, in what situation? What was the intention behind using it and what was the effect? It is questions of this kind that sociolinguistics, stylistics, and pragmatics seek to answer. And they can't be answered without basic data, which is what the Internet so often does not provide. The fact that most contributions on the Internet are incognito, or pseudocognito, makes serious sociolinguistic investigation impossible. On the Internet, as the New Yorker cartoon once said, nobody knows you're a dog.

I'm well aware that there are some situations - some social networking domains, for example - where the opposite is the case. People tell the world everything about themselves. But there are still problems. Three, in particular. First, not everything we read can be trusted: false identities are all over the place, in which people adopt alternative ages, genders, roles... Second, saying too much about oneself is almost as problematic as saying too little, as nobody has got the time to trawl through a pile of (linguistically) irrelevant data about hobbies, likes and dislikes, and so on, in order to extract those values which relate to sociolinguistically relevant parameters. And third, linguists have spent a lot of time refining their investigative procedures in recent decades, so that they know the right kind of questions to ask, when approaching a usage issue, and these questions may not be addressed in the information people offer about themselves.

We do not yet have detailed linguistic accounts of the consequences of anonymity. All that is clear is that traditional theories don’t account for it. Try using Gricean maxims of conversation to the Internet: our speech acts should be truthful (maxim of quality), brief (maxim of quantity), relevant (maxim of relation), and clear (maxim of manner). Take quality: Do not say what you believe to be false; Do not say anything for which you lack evidence. Which world was Grice living in? A pre-Internet world, evidently. Analyses in pragmatics traditionally assume that human beings are nice. The Internet has shown that a lot of them are not. Is a paedophile going to be truthful, brief, relevant and clear? Are the people sending us tempting offers from Nigeria - beautifully pilloried in Neil Forsyth’s recent book, Delete This at your Peril (2010)? Are extreme-views sites (such as hate racist sites) going to follow Geoffrey Leech’s maxims of politness (tact, generosity, approbation, modesty, agreement, sympathy)? If brevity was the soul of the Internet, we would not have such coinages as bloggorhea and twitterhea.

I've just come back from a splendid corpus linguistics conference in Oslo (ICAME 32) where this was among the issues being addressed. The paper I gave will be up on my website shortly, but it raises more questions than answers. Maybe one day the Internet as a whole will provide linguistically sophisticated metadata, but I'm not holding my breath. And there may be a limit to what can be, given the collaborative nature of many Web pages, such as those we see on Wikipedia, which are often sociolinguistically heterogenous, reflecting contributions from people of diverse backgrounds. Stylistic conglomerates are emerging as a consequence. None of this helps the poor sociolinguist.

Can anything be done to improve the situation? Well, one small thing is that usage forums could start by demanding greater explicitness when usage issues are raised. And so, from now on, I will not publish contributions to my blog on points of usage that are sociolinguistically incognito. What is relevant to the debate will vary. Sometimes it will be regional background (as in the last post), sometimes it will be age, or gender, or occupation. But there needs to be something, and I hope we will see similar things happening in other usage forums, so that, gradually, a sociolinguistically more informed Internet climate evolves.

On on and on at

2011-06-06T08:52:00.002Z

A correspondent writes to ask if he can say both ‘Open your book on page...‘ and ‘Open your book at page...’ Is there a difference?

Prepositions can reflect personal perspective, if a situation allows it. A book is such a situation. It’s both a physical object and a collection of content. Traditionally, the ‘at’ usage offers us the physical perspective.

I left my bookmark at page 60.
How far have you read? I’m at page 60.

It’s the usual use of ‘at’ to refer to location. The ‘on’ usage reflects content:

He makes an interesting point on page 60.
You'll find the answer on page 60.

People are more likely to refer to the content of a book than to its physical character, so we would expect ‘on’ to be more common.

‘Opening a book’ is an interesting example of overlap between the two perspectives. In one way it’s a reference to location - so, ‘at’. Most people would open a book ‘at’ a particular page. But people have a semantic reason for asking someone to open a book at a particular point - so ‘on’ isn’t ruled out. In the first case, they’re thinking ‘where’; in the second, they’re thinking ‘what’.

But I say, ‘traditionally’. While I don’t sense any change of usage in ‘on’ to refer to location, I do sense a change in ‘at’ with reference to content:

The footnote is at page 60 - instead of traditional ‘on’
You’ll find this at Chapter 3 - instead of traditional ‘in’

Here are some examples from Google:

I found the answer at page 8.
The earliest written account is at page 833 of...
The section dealing with... Darwin’s views is at page ...
You’ll find the answer at section 5...

Why? I think it’s the influence of the Internet, which has foregrounded the use of ‘at’ in fresh ways thanks chiefly to the use of @ and hash. The collocation of ‘find’, ‘at’, and ‘page’ is routine there, and is now being increasingly used offline.

There are several other contexts in which prepositional usage is overlapping on the Internet. I’ve just used one. ‘On’ the Internet? Type ‘find people on the Internet’ into Google and you get some 3 million hits. Type ‘find people in the Internet; and you get 6 million. You’ll find this post ‘on my blog’? ‘in my blog’? ‘at my blog’? Usage doesn't seem to have settled down yet.

On OP latest

2011-04-07T11:17:00.004Z

A correspondent writes to ask if there have been further developments in Shakespearean original pronunciation (OP) since I last posted on this topic (November 2010). Yes, in a word.

The Kansas U production of Dream was hugely successful, by all accounts, and a DVD of the event will be available later this year. In the meantime, some information about the production can be found at KU Theatre, and Paul Meier's script of the production is also available.

OP figured prominently in the British Library's 'Evolving English' exhibition, with extracts read in OP from Old English, Middle English, and Early Modern English. The opening of Richard III, read by Ben Crystal, can be heard here. Ben is just back from the University of Nevada at Reno, helping to plan an OP Hamlet later this year.

Incidentally, actors who read my blog will be interested to hear news of Ben's second Passion in Practice workshop coming up in May. The video footage of the first one I found breathtaking. Passion in OP one day, maybe.

On talking to aliens

2011-03-18T16:14:00.003Z

A correspondent writes to ask what my thoughts are on alien languages. So I suppose I should begin this post with Kaltxi - ‘Hello’, or ‘Greetings', in Na’vi, the language of the humanoids who live on the moon Pandora, explored in the 2009 film Avatar. Na'vi joins a family of invented languages created to add linguistic verisimilitude to science fiction films. Gone are the days when every alien, from Martians to Daleks, gave the impression of being a native speaker of English.

How do you invent an alien language? It isn't as easy as you might think. It's not enough just to take some words from a well-known modern language and twist them a bit. If these beings look really alien, and behave in an alien way, then they should sound alien too - and their writing system, if they have one, should also look alien. So their speech shouldn't remind you of a human language - and especially not a world language like English. On the other hand, one has to be practical. The language mustn't be so different that it can’t be learned or pronounced by the human characters with whom the aliens are in contact. So alien language inventors usually base their creation on existing human languages, choosing the less common sounds and combining them in novel ways. The Ewok language in Star Wars, for example, was based on Tibetan; and if you listen carefully to scenes where aliens congregate you'll hear bits of Quechua, Haya, Finnish, and other languages in the babble of conversation.

Film directors have to think about other issues, when creating an alien language. Are the aliens ‘good guys’? If so, the director will want the language to sound pleasant to human ears, which will mean using softer sounds (such as m's, l's and r's), as in Na'vi. Are they ‘bad guys’? Then a harsher sounding language will be likely, full of sharp-sounding guttural consonants, as in Klingon. That's where linguists come in. The most sophisticated alien languages have been devised by professional linguists - notably Paul Frommer for Na'vi and Marc Okrand for Klingon.

Of course, film directors are also aware that aliens may not use anything remotely like the human system of speaking and writing. Astrolinguists, as they're sometimes called, speculate about the possibilities of cosmic communication. If and when the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence receives evidence of intelligent life, the alien system of communication may be quite unlike anything used by humans on earth. It might use the infra-red scale. It might use musical tones, as in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It might use mathematical symbols, as in Contact. Or consider the range of behaviours used by animals, which include colour-change (as in chameleons), pheromones (as in ants), and dance movements (as in bees). Any of these could be the basis of an alien system. The Wookies of Star Wars sound as if they're growling. Droids such as R2-D2 use a complex system of beeps and whistles.

Alien sounds aren't the only features to be created. There has to be alien vocabulary and alien grammar too. Klingon has the word order Object + Verb + Subject, the reverse of English (though this pattern is found in a few human languages, such as Tamil). Yoda speaks English but with an unusual word order too: 'Your father he is... Strong am I with the Force.' Na’vi has singulars and plural nouns, as all human languages do, but also has special forms for expressing ‘two of’ a thing and ‘three of’ a thing, which are possible but uncommon in human languages. And humans would have trouble counting in Huttese (as spoken by Jabba the Hutt in Star Wars), as Hutts have only eight fingers, so their method of counting uses base 8.

Some alien languages have been developed by their authors well beyond the level achieved in the films. Klingon has the greatest following. So'wl' yIchu'. DoS yIbuS. yaSpu' tIHoH. That is: 'Engage the cloaking device! Concentrate on the target! Kill the officers!' These commands are taken from Marc Okrand's Klingon Dictionary (1992), a helpful guide to the official language of the Klingon Empire. The letters are close to English values, apart from the following:

capital D is a d sound with the tongue curled back (a 'retroflex' consonant)
capital S is halfway between s and sh
capital H is the ch sound in loch or Bach
the apostrophe represents a glottal stop

The author apologises for the phonetic approximation. As he rightly says, following notions of best practice in foreign language learning: 'The best way to learn to pronounce Klingon with no trace of a Terran or other accent is to become friends with a group of Klingons and spend a great deal of time socializing with them.'

There are now many works written entirely in t'hIngan Hol' (Klingon). In September 2010, an opera premiered in The Hague written entirely in Klingon: 'u'. Later that year, a Chicago theatre staged a Klingon production of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. It told the story of a warrior called SQuja' (Scrooge), who is visited by three ghosts to help him regain his lost honour and save Tiny Tim. As the publicity said: 'Performed in the Original Klingon with English Supertitles, and narrative analysis from The Vulcan Institute of Cultural Anthropology.'

Knowing a good thing when it sees it, and possibly anticipating an alien invasion one day, Google already has one alien interface: go to Google's Language Tools and there in the long list of languages you will find Klingon. I expect Na'vi will join it, one day, as Paul Frommer is continuing to work on the language as earthly interest grows.

Invented languages form quite a large family now. Superman (DC Comics) has Kryptonese. The giants in the Japanese Macross anime series have Zentradi. Of course, if you want to avoid the problem of creating a new language, you can simply invent a universal translation device, such as the Babel Fish of Douglas Adams’ A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy or use your Tardis to do it for you. Or go in for telepathy, as the Vulcans do in Star Trek or the Ood in Dr Who. Or simply employ a being who speaks all of them, such as C3P0 in Star Wars, who can handle six million languages.

Evidently, alien languages provide linguistics with a new and expanding field of study. What should it be called? Some writers have opted for xenolinguistics, based on xeno-, meaning 'foreign' or 'strange'. Exolinguistics has been suggested too, from exo- meaning ‘outside’ or 'without'. Either way, it's probably the branch of linguistics with the greatest potential for development if, as they say, we are not alone.

On -ish

2011-03-12T10:34:00.002Z

A correspondent writes to ask if there are any rules governing the use of -ish in English. He says ‘we tend to add it to short adjectives, particularly colours and physical attributes: shortish, tallish, greenish... but googling reveals that we add -ish to just about every adjective under the sun, such as beautifulish, Europeanish, freezingish, exhaustedish...’

He’s right to draw attention to the monosyllabic character of the adjectives. This is an important factor when it comes to inflections in English. We see it in the comparative and superlative forms too, where the distribution of -er and -est vs more and most correlates strongly with length. We prefer bigger to more big. Adjectives with three syllables or more use the other construction (more interesting, not interestinger). There are just a few exceptions, such as unhappier. Adjectives with two syllables are more difficult to describe: some take the inflection (eg those ending in -y and w, such as happier, narrower), some don’t (eg those ending in -ed, such as more worried), and some take both (eg commonest and most common).

A similar situation applies in the case of -ish. In the sense of ‘somewhat’, we find it added to monosyllabic adjectives from Middle English times - colour words such as bluish (1398) and blackish (1486) are among the earliest. Adjectives ending in y and w attract it too: sillyish (1766), narrowish (1823). The usage then extended to other monosyllabic adjectives, such as brightish (1584), coldish (1589), and goodish (1756), and the usage has continued to extend over the centuries. In the early 20th century we find it used for hours of the day or number of years, probably motivated by earlyish and latish - ‘See you at about eightish’, ‘She’s thirty-ish’. Note elevenish, forty-five-ish, 1932-ish, and so on, where the root has three or more syllables.

This ties in with a second use of -ish, where it’s added to nouns in the sense of ‘having the character of'. Some, such as childish and churlish, and the nationhood names such as English and Scottish, go back to Old English. Among later arrivals are boyish (1542) and waggish (1600) - the latter a first recorded use in Shakespeare, as is foppish and unbookish. (Shakespeare quite liked the suffix - knavish, dwarfish, thievish, hellish, etc.) Note that most have a derogatory sense. Again, most are monosyllabic, but we do find the occasional longer form, such as babyish, womanish, and outlandish. This trend really took off in the 19th century, when novelists and journalists extended it to proper names. We find Micawberish, Queen Annish, Mark Twainish, and suchlike, as well as some colloquial phrases - ‘You look very out-of-townish’, ‘He has a how-do-you-do-ish manner’.

What we’re seeing today - and what my correspondent has noted - is the further extension of these patterns in informal contexts to longer adjectives. I can’t see any restriction here, other than the stylistic one - they are informal, colloquial, jocular, daring. There’s a youtube site called extraordinaryish. But one senses the novelty - as does Google. When I typed it in, to see if it was used (I got 193 hits), it was worried. ‘Did you mean extraordinary fish’, it asked.

On talking among(st) yourselves

2011-02-28T12:29:00.003Z

A correspondent writes from the USA to say he's noticed British English words and phrases increasingly entering public and written discourse. He gives as examples He was sacked instead of He was fired, gone missing, and such slang words as snarky. In particular, he says he's beginning to hear amongst rather than among, and wonders whether there's a difference between British and American English in this respect.

There certainly is. A table in the Quirk Grammar (9.21) shows amongst occurring ten times more frequently in British English, and this is confirmed by later corpus studies. In the huge COCA corpus (Corpus of Contemporary American English) we find 2405 instances of amongst compared with 144,461 instances of among - 1.7 per cent. This compares with 4449 instances in the British National Corpus compared with 22,385 of among - 20 per cent. On the other hand, those 2405 US instances spread pretty evenly over the past decade, so there's no evidence of any kind of very recent dramatic increase. I'd be interested to hear what US readers of this post think.

In the UK, my impression is that all the -st words are reducing in frequency. They began as a development of an ending attached to the base form: among + an -es genitive. We see that ending still in besides. Then in the 16th century, people evidently felt this was related to the -est superlative form, as gradually we find the -st ending used. We see it also in against, where it's the standard form, and in amidst (vs amid) and whilst (vs while), where usage varies. Fowler thought that these differences might be explained with reference to pronunciation - the -st forms would be used when the following word began with a vowel - but this isn't supported by the large corpus collections. The variation in standard English seems to be primarily stylistically conditioned: some people like the sound of whilst; others hate it. There's also a chronological factor: the -st forms tend to be found in older texts and among older people. And there's a great deal of regional dialect variation too.

The OED makes an interesting point about amongst, suggesting a semantic nuance not found in among: 'generally implying dispersion, intermixture, or shifting position'. So, I walked amongst the crowd would suggest a rather more active moving about than I walked among the crowd. If this is so, then I'd expect to see an increase in the proportion of amongst usages in contexts where these notions are dominant; and a quick dip into Google suggests that this is the case. With among(st) a group the proportion of amongst usage rises to 12.6 per cent; with among(st) the waves it is 45 per cent. With talk among(st) yourselves, the usage actually reverses, with amongst being four times as frequent. If there is a trend in US English to use amongst, semantics may well be an influential factor.

On pronouncing Purcell

2011-02-13T19:49:00.002Z

A correspondent writes to ask about the pronunciation of two 17th-century names: Henry Purcell and Andrew Marvell. He says: 'In preparatory school I was taught to place the stress on the first syllable of Purcell and the second syllable of Marvell, always assuming that to be correct. However, I frequently hear the former pronounced with the stress on the second syllable and the latter with the stress placed on the first. Was my English instructor correct? And do American and British usage conform or differ? Has the stress shifted historically?'

When establishing an earlier pronunciation, as seen in earlier posts in this blog on the Shakespearean sound system, there are several kinds of evidence to look for - rhymes, puns, metre, spelling, and explicit comments by contemporaries. In the case of Purcell, we find clear evidence of the stress falling on the first syllable from contemporary spellings. Before spelling standardized, the vowel in an unstressed syllable would be spelled in different ways. So when we find such spellings as Pursal, Purcel, Persill, and Pursall in the 17th century, an initial syllable stress is clearly suggested. It is reinforced by the ode John Dryden wrote on the death of his friend, in which the metre requires the stress to be on the first syllable:

Now live secure and linger out your days,
The Gods are pleas'd alone with Purcell's Lays,

The same stress pattern is found in a rhyme in a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, who rhymes Purcell and reversal. That was 1918. So there doesn't seem to have been any historical change.

Nor is this just a British pronunciation, as American dictionaries say the same thing. W Cabell Greet's World Words, compiled in association with the Columbia Broadcasting System in 1948, gives initial-syllable stress for both Purcell and Marvell, but adds, after Purcell, 'As an American family name the last syllable is often accented'. The Random House Dictionary confirms this. It lists three Purcells: Edward Mills (the US physicist), Henry (the composer), and a town in Oklahoma. The first and third, it says, have the stress on the second syllable; for Henry, the stress is on the first. And the very next entry is for the Purcell Mountains in British Columbia and Montana, with, once again, the stress on the second syllable. American intuitions are thus split down the middle, with Henry apparently in the minority, so it's hardly surprising that people assume he is like everyone else.

However, intuitions in Britain are split too. It's never possible to anticipate the crazy ways in which the English like to pronounce their surnames or placenames, as famous cases such as Cholmondley ('chumley') and Happisburgh ('haysbruh') illustrate. So, when we encounter a surname ending in -ell, there's no way of predicting the stress pattern. There are several examples of surnames ending in -ell which have the stress on the second syllable, such as the Irish politician Charles Stewart Parnell. This end-stress is a typical feature of polysyllabic words in Irish English. But even here there are problems, because in Parnell Square the stress usually reverts to the first syllable (a similar alternation to what we find with he's sixteen and sixteen people). And Parnell himself preferred to say his name with the stress on the first syllable.

So we get the result we see in, for example, the Cambridge English Pronouncing Dictionary, where we find both pronunciations given, in both British and American English. And because linguistic uncertainty is always contagious, it's not surprising to find other surnames vacillating. No dictionary I've looked at gives any other pronunciation for Marvell than one with the stress on the first syllable, and similarly for the members of the famous Durrell family, but we do hear the alternatives, especially from American speakers, from time to time.

On caring about libraries

2011-01-20T09:18:00.002Z

Several correspondents have been in touch this week about the library crisis that is currently attracting a great deal of attention - not least yesterday from poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy - and asked for my views. The question is timely, as last Monday I gave a paper to the Friends of Rhosneigr Library, one of the tiny jewels in the library system in the UK, which has been desperately fighting for survival. As this paper might be useful to others in the same position, I reproduce it below. The local references to Rhosneigr (in Anglesey, North Wales) and to Welsh could of course be replaced by correspondingly local references in other areas. The paper can be used in support of the library movement without further permission from me.

Why care about Libraries?

I spy, with my little eye, something beginning with ... L.

It's a library.

L proves to be an interesting letter in English, because it introduces so many words strongly associated with the venture we are launching today: Literature. Language. Living. Loving. Lending. Learning. Leisure. Legacy. And also: Loss. Liquidation. Lament. Lunacy. We can tell the story of our enterprise by exploring the letter L. (We can do it in Welsh too, if you want: Llyfrau (books), Llenyddiaeth (literature), Llythrennedd (literacy), Lloerigrwydd (lunacy).)

Long before I was asked to give this talk, in Chapter 3 of my autobiographical memoir, Just a Phrase I'm Going Through, I had written about one of the magical worlds I experienced as a child: '...the world of reading. I learned to read very quickly and, according to my mother, I was always reading. We couldn’t afford much by way of books, but the local library was only two minutes away. I got to know every inch of its children’s shelves, and steadily worked my way through them, using my allowance of two books per person per week. ... And then there was the joy of ownership. A book was my book, even if it was due back at the end of the week. The words were mine. I was their master. Years later, when I came across Jean-Paul Sartre’s Words (Les Mots), I was delighted and amazed. This was my story, too: "I never scratched the soil or searched for nests; I never looked for plants or threw stones at birds. But books were my birds and my nests, my pets, my stable and my countryside; the library was the world trapped in a mirror. ... Nothing seemed more important to me than a book. I saw the library as a temple." A temple indeed, but so much more. A library is a refuge, a second home, a leisure centre, a discovery channel, an advice bureau. It is a place where you can sit and draw the shelves around you like a warm cloak. Those who threaten any library service with cutbacks and closures are the most mindless of demons.'

There is, indeed, something that literally takes away our minds when we lose a library. Or put it the other way round: when we gain a library we gain a source of wellbeing. The inscription over the door of the library at the ancient city of Thebes read (in classical Greek): 'The medicine chest of the soul'.

How best to capture the spirit, the ethos, the value of libraries? Over the centuries, people have marvelled at them. It doesn't have to be a huge establishment, such as the National Library. Even the smallest village library captures the magic described so well by the Scots poet Alexander Smith (1830-67): 'I go into my library, and all history unrolls before me. I breathe the morning air of the world while the scent of Eden's roses yet lingered in it, while it vibrated only to the world's first brood of nightingales, and to the laugh of Eve. I see the pyramids building; I hear the shoutings of the armies of Alexander.' And the American political writer Norman Cousins (1915-90) agrees: 'A library ... should be the delivery room for the birth of ideas - a place where history comes to life.'

The lauding of libraries crosses centuries and cultures. First and foremost they are seen as repositories of knowledge, windows into history. 'A great library', said Canadian scientist George Mercer Dawson (1849-1901), 'contains the diary of the human race.' And American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82) echoes the theme: 'Consider what you have in the smallest chosen library. A company of the wisest and wittiest men that could be picked out of all civil countries, in a 1000 years, have set in best order the results of their learning and wisdom. The men themselves were hid and inaccessible, solitary, impatient of interruption, fenced by etiquette; but the thought which they did not uncover to their bosom friend is here written out in transparent words to us, the strangers of another age.' Women too, of course. Emerson's phrasing is of his age, but his sentiment is universal.

The metaphor of a library as a treasure trove is a recurrent figure. Here is British poet and journalist John Alfred Langford (1823-1903): 'The only true equalisers in the world are books; the only treasure-house open to all comers is a library.' And Malcolm Forbes (1919-90), the publisher of Forbes magazine, is in no doubt about the appropriateness of the wealth metaphor: 'The richest person in the world - in fact all the riches in the world - couldn't provide you with anything like the endless, incredible loot available at your local library.' But writers seem almost to be competing to find a metaphor that best captures the function of libraries in society. This is English clergyman William Dyer (1636-1696): 'Libraries are the wardrobes of literature, whence men, properly informed may bring forth something for ornament, much for curiosity, and more for use.' And, 400 years on, this is writer Germaine Greer (1939- ): 'libraries are reservoirs of strength, grace and wit, reminders of order, calm and continuity, lakes of mental energy'. For Norman Mailer (1923-2007), a library was 'a sanctuary', for Francis Bacon (1561-1626), 'a shrine', for Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) it transcends life itself: 'I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library'.

I like the reservoir metaphor - a library as a source of knowledge, waiting for us to simply turn on a tap. Like water, libraries are essential to our wellbeing. As the American social reformer Henry Ward Beecher (1813-87) said, 'A library is not a luxury but one of the necessities of life.' It is a means of self-improvement, of advancement. As American historian Arthur Meier Schlesinger (1888-1965) put it: 'Our history has been greatly shaped by people who read their way to opportunity and achievements in public libraries.' Or, as poet and humorist Richard Armour (1906-89) put it in 1954: A library...

Here is where people,
One frequently finds,
Lower their voices
And raise their minds.

And it brings together people from all walks of life. As 'Lady Bird' Johnson (1912-2007), former American first lady, commented: 'Perhaps no place in any community is so totally democratic as the town library. The only entrance requirement is interest.'

Along with these brief observations, we must not forget the longer and more thoughtful recollections. Esther Hautzig (1930-2009), deported to Siberia as a child during World War 2, wrote an account of her time there, called The Endless Steppe (1968). This is what she says:

'There was one place where I forgot the cold, indeed forgot Siberia. That was in the library. There, in that muddy village, was a great institution. Not physically, to be sure, but in every other way imaginable. It was a small log cabin, immaculately attended to with loving care; it was well lighted with oil lamps and it was warm. But best of all, it contained a small but amazing collection from the world's best literature, truly amazing considering the time, the place, and its size. From floor to ceiling it was lined with books - books, books, books. It was there that I was to become acquainted with the works of Dumas, Pasternak's translations of Shakespeare, the novels of Mark Twain, Jack London, and of course the Russians. It was in that log cabin that I escaped from Siberia - either reading there or taking the books home. It was between that library and two extraordinary teachers that I developed a lifelong passion for the great Russian novelists and poets. It was there that I learned to line up patiently for my turn to sit at a table and read, to wait - sometimes months - for a book. It was there that I learned that reading was not only a great delight, but a privilege.'

Let no one forget that. If you want to truly appreciate the value of reading, imagine it being taken away from you. Imagine a Siberia with no library. Or a Rhosneigr.

Of course, we are not the first to ponder the implications of losing a library. Listen to the claim made by American cardinal Terence Cooke (1921-83): 'America's greatness is not only recorded in books, but it is also dependent upon each and every citizen being able to utilize public libraries.' Listen to American astronomer Carl Sagan: 'The library connects us with the insight and knowledge, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, with the best teachers, drawn from the entire planet and from all our history, to instruct us without tiring, and to inspire us to make our own contribution to the collective knowledge of the human species. I think the health of our civilization, the depth of our awareness about the underpinnings of our culture and our concern for the future can all be tested by how well we support our libraries.' Listen to science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov (1920-92): 'I received the fundamentals of my education in school, but that was not enough. My real education, the superstructure, the details, the true architecture, I got out of the public library. For an impoverished child whose family could not afford to buy books, the library was the open door to wonder and achievement, and I can never be sufficiently grateful that I had the wit to charge through that door and make the most of it. Now, when I read constantly about the way in which library funds are being cut and cut, I can only think that the door is closing and that American society has found one more way to destroy itself.' And in Britain, listen to Victorian critic John Ruskin (1819-1900): 'What do we, as a nation, care about books? How much do you think we spend altogether on our libraries, public or private, as compared with what we spend on our horses?'

Have you noticed? I've just quoted from a Roman Catholic cardinal, an art critic, a scientist, and a science fiction novelist. All sending out the same message. There can be few subjects like libraries to unite such disparate and distinguished minds. And the reason is clear. Libraries are truly special. As American writer Lawrence Clark Powell (1906-2001) put it: 'To be in a library is one of the purest of all experiences.' The point has long been appreciated here in Wales. In 1916 the Welsh Department of the Board of Education published a booklet, A Nation and its Books. On page 11 we read: 'The future of our people depends largely on our books and on our libraries. No teacher is more helpful or more candid than a book, no friend is a better friend than a good book, no school is so inexpensive as a library. ... Every town should have ... its library... Every village ought to have a library.' And if it already has one, it ought not to lose it.

Once a library is gone, it is gone. It cannot suddenly be resuscitated. As the British politician Augustine Birrell (1850-1933) once said: 'Libraries are not made; they grow.' That takes time. Behind each library, no matter how small, is a history of growth, watered by the professionalism of the library's caretakers and the enthusiasm of its readers. It is not an enterprise that can be measured by numbers. It is quality that counts, not quantity. No political body should fall into the trap of judging the success of a library solely in terms of the number of its visitors. That lone reader in the corner: who knows what personal potential will be realized in the future because of today's library experience? As American poet Archibald MacLeish (1892-1982) said: 'What is more important in a library than anything else - than everything else - is the fact that it exists.' If it exists, it will be used. And French writer Victor Hugo (1802-85) sums it up: 'A library implies an act of faith'.

A century ago, in 1911, a king and queen symbolized that faith. They visited Aberystwyth to lay the foundation stone of the National Library of Wales. In 2011, a future king and queen will come to live nearby. In my poetic imagination, I hear Prince William looking towards Rhosneigr - down on it, even, from his helicopter - and repeating my I Spy rhyme. 'I spy, with my royal eye...' - but will he have to end it with 'nothing beginning with L'? It is a scenario that I trust our political leaders will ensure we will never see. It is time for them too to make an act of faith.

On built and builded in the KJB

2011-01-05T09:30:00.004Z

Two correspondents have written to ask about the use of the verbs built and builded in the King James Bible. Is there a difference of meaning? There's evidently a debate going on somewhere online in which this issue is part of the evidence. I haven't explored what the debate is about, so the following observations are offered simply by way of providing linguistic data that might not otherwise be available to the participants.

First, some background. When build appears as a verb in early Middle English, its past tense form was mainly regular (recorded forms include bildide, bylded, builded), though some writers used an irregular form (e.g. bult, byld, built). The past participle form was mainly irregular, with a wide range of forms (e.g. gebyld, bilde, bilt, buylt), along with the occasional use of a regular form (e.g. bylded, builded). In the Early Modern English period, the two forms, regular and irregular, are both frequent, with the built form gradually dominating during the 16th century - an unusual instance of an irregular form defeating a regular one. There are instances of builded recorded as late as 1800, and it's still heard today in some regional dialects. We see both forms in use around 1600, the choice between them being dictated by external factors. Shakespeare, for example, normally uses built (15 instances), but has three instances of builded, each one using the extra syllable to fill out a metrical line. There are many instances in the plays of this sort of thing: for example, the choice between -s and -eth in the 3rd person singular of verbs is also often conditioned by metrical demands. But the reason for choosing one form over another is not always clear, and sometimes one is left with the impression that the choice is random, or perhaps reflecting the preferences of an individual scribe or compositor.

In Modern English, there are several verbs which have two past forms (e.g. dreamed and dreamt) - a situation I discussed briefly in an earlier post (17 April 2008). In British English (American usage differs) there's usually an aspectual distinction: the -ed form is used when the duration of an action or the process of acting is being emphasized, and the -t form when something happens once, or takes up very little time, or the focus is on the result of a process rather than on the process itself (see the post for examples). However, it's unclear whether this kind of contrast was already operating in Early Modern English. And in any case, the built/builded alternation is different. It's more like the Modern alternation between highlit / highlighted, input / inputted, or wet / wetted, where the choice is governed by such factors as euphony, rhythm, and specialized usage (eg highlighted is the norm in hairdressing), as well as preferences related to a person's age and taste. Occasionally the two forms develop different regional uses (e.g. US dove, snuck, gotten) or different meanings (he was hanged/it was hung, I sped/speeded), but this is unusual.

What is the situation in the KJB? There are 271 instances of build used in the following four ways: as a past tense (Modern Standard English built and the emphatic did build); as a past participle form (Modern e.g. have built); as part of a passive construction (Modern e.g. was built by the Romans); and as an adjective (Modern e.g. a well built house). There is just one instance in KJB of an adjectival usage (4 Ezra 5.25, 'and of all builded cities thou hast hallowed Sion unto thyself'), and only six instances of did build: see below at Ruth 4.11, 1 Kings 11.7, 1 Kings 16.34, 2 Chronicles 35.3, Nehemiah 3.3, and Esdras 5.67. Leaving these six aside, we find 196 instances of built and 69 of builded - a ratio of nearly 3:1. The norm for the translators, as for everyone else at the time, was evidently built.

The situation in relation to built and builded in Early Modern English seems very similar to that presented by highlight and the others today. Looking at the list of instances at the end of this post, there are many parallel sentences which suggest that the forms are in free variation:

Genesis 8.20 Noah builded an altar
Genesis 22.9 Abraham built an altar
1 Chron 22.5 the house that is to be builded
1 Chron 22.19 the house that is to be built

There is even an example of both forms in the same verse:

Philemon 3.4 For every house is builded by some man; but he that built all things is God.

This seems to be a case where rhythm is the governing factor: builded in the first clause preserves an iambic rhythm (try replacing it with built to see the effect). And the same rhythmical plus comes from using built in the second clause.

However, there are some grammatical differences between the two constructions. Built is more likely to be used on its own, without auxiliary verbs (e.g. 'he built it'): 112 of 196 instances (57%), compared with 26 of 69 (38%) for builded. And when we look at individual auxiliaries, we find a definite preference for using them with built. The modal verbs used in the dataset are cannot, may, might, shall, shalt, should: only 4 of these are used with builded, whereas 17 are used with built. Similarly, 12 uses of auxiliary have occur with builded compared to 44 with built. On the other hand, there's no such trend with auxiliary be: 18 instances with builded and 17 with built.

Another difference relates to verb transitivity. If people wanted to use the verb intransitively (i.e. without an object, as in Luke 17.28 'they planted, they builded') there is a definite tendency to use builded: 12 out of 69 instances are intransitive (17%), compared with only 3 out of 196 instances of intransitive built (1.5%). The phrasal verb build up is found with 10 instances of built up and 2 of builded up. However, the other syntactic sequences I looked at (I haven't looked at them all!) showed few or no differences, e.g. the sequence build + not is found with 1 instance each (built not, builded not).

In all cases, we are talking about trends, not sharp distinctions. The grammar of the two forms substantially overlaps, and I've found nothing to suggest a semantic contrast.

So, why are there any differences at all? One possibility is that the different committees had a preference for one form or the other. Here are the relevant statistics (builded--built--did build--Total):

First Westminster 15 (16%)--76--3--94
First Cambridge 27 (32%)--55--2--84
First Oxford 4 (14%)--24--0--28
Second Oxford 1 (10%)--9--0--10
Second Westminster 3 (37%)--5--0--8
Second Cambridge 19 (70%)--27--1--47

There's the suggestion of a difference between Oxford and Cambridge, but the figures are small, and the overriding impression is that each committee was comfortable with both usages.

Perhaps individual books prompted one usage over the other? The following table brings to light one interesting fact: Ezra and 4 Ezra stand out in their exclusive use of builded. Together their 22 instances amount to almost a third of all cases. I have no explanation for this, so I asked Gordon Campbell, author of Bible: The Story of the King James Version 1611-2011 (OUP 2010) for his opinion, and he commented: 'An individual translator is a possibility, but so is an individual compositor. There may have been rules or agreed conventions about tense endings, but on many issues compositors took decisions. These weren't based on principles but rather on habits (when there is consistency) or the need to save or occupy space (when there is inconsistency).' Yes, space-saving strategies and compositor preferences have long been known in the case of Shakespeare. It remains to be seen whether they play an equally important role in relation to the KJB.

There are few other instances of builded predominance. Perhaps the poetic qualities of Proverbs and Song of Solomon motivated the exclusive use of the older form, but the numbers are tiny. Only in two other books (Genesis and Nehemiah) are there more instances of builded than built. Genesis is curious: until chapter 13 we find only builded, then there is a switch, with just a single exception.

Here is a complete listing, book by book (built--builded--did build

Genesis 4--7--0
Exodus 3--1--0
Numbers 5--1--0
Deuteronomy 3--1--0
Joshua 6--1--0
Judges 5--0--0
Ruth 0--0--1
1 Samuel 3--0--0
2 Samuel 3--0--0
1 Kings 35--3--2
2 Kings 9--1--0
1 Chronicles 8--1--0
2 Chronicles 36--0--1
Ezra 0--12--0
Nehemiah 5--9--1
Job 2--1--0
Psalms 2--1--0
Proverbs 0--2--0
Ecclesiasticus 1--1--0
Song of Solomon 0--1--0
Isaiah 4--0--0
Jeremiah 9--1--0
Lamentations 1--0--0
Ezekiel 4--2--0
Daniel 2--0--0
Amos 1--0--0
Micah 1--0--0
Haggai 1--0--0
Zechariah 2--0--0
Matthew 2--0--0
Mark 1--0--0
Luke 4--1--0
Acts 1--0--0
1 Corinthians 1--0--0
Ephesians 1--1--0
Colossians 1--0--0
Hebrews 0--2--0
Philemon 1--0--0
1 Peter 1--0--0
Judith 1--0--0
Esdras 8--2--1
1 Maccabees 10--4--0
2 Macc 2--1--0
4 Ezra 0--10--0
Sirach 2--1--0
Wisdom of Solomon 1--0--0
Tobit 3--1--0

And finally, here's the list of all forms, in reading sequence, so that anyone can test other hypotheses for themselves.

The builded/built dataset
First Westminster Company
Genesis 4.17 he builded a city
Genesis 8.20 Noah builded an altar
Genesis 10.11 and builded Nineveh
Genesis 11.5 which the children of men builded
Genesis 12.7 there builded he an altar
Genesis 12.8 there he builded an altar
Genesis 13.18 and built there an altar
Genesis 22.9 Abraham built an altar
Genesis 26.25 And he builded an altar
Genesis 33.17 and built him an house
Genesis 35.7 And he built there an altar
Exodus 1.12 And they built for Pharaoh treasure cities
Exodus 17.15 And Moses built an altar
Exodus 24.4 and builded an altar
Exodus 32.5 he built an altar before it
Numbers 13.22 Hebron was built seven years before Zoan
Numbers 21.27 let the city of Sihon be built
Numbers 23.14 and built seven altars
Numbers 32.34 the children of Gad built Dibon
Numbers 32.37 and the children of Reuben built Heshbon
Numbers 32.38 and gave other names unto the cities which they builded
Deuteronomy 6.10 cities, which thou buildedst not
Deuteronomy 8.12 hast built goodly houses
Deuteronomy 13.16 it shall not be built again
Deuteronomy 20.5 that hath built a new house
Joshua 8.30 Then Joshua built an altar
Joshua 19.50 he built the city
Joshua 22.10 the half tribe of Manasseh built there an altar
Joshua 22.11 the half tribe of Manasseh have built an altar
Joshua 22.16 ye have builded you an altar
Joshua 22.23 we have built us an altar
Joshua 24.13 cities which ye built not
Judges 1.26 and built a city
Judges 6.24 Then Gideon built an altar there
Judges 6.28 upon the altar that was built
Judges 18.28 and they built a city
Judges 21.4 and built there an altar
Ruth 4.11 which two did build the house of Israel
1 Samuel 7.17 and there he built an altar
1 Samuel 14.35 And Saul built an altar... that he built
2 Samuel 5.9 And David built round about from Millo
2 Samuel 5.11 they built David an house
2 Samuel 24.25 And David built there an altar
1 Kings 3.2 there was no house built unto the name of the Lord
1 Kings 6.2 the house which king Solomon built for the Lord
1 Kings 6.5 he built chambers
1 Kings 6.7 And the house, when it was in building, was built of stone
1 Kings 6.9 So he built the house
1 Kings 6.10 And then he built chambers
1 Kings 6.14 So Solomon built the house, and finished it
1 Kings 6.15 And he built the walls of the house
1 Kings 6.16 And he built twenty cubits... he even built
1 Kings 6.36 And he built the inner court
1 Kings 7.2 He built also the house of the forest of Lebanon
1 Kings 8.13 I have surely built thee an house to dwell in
1 Kings 8.20 and have built an house
1 Kings 8.27 how much less this house that I have builded
1 Kings 8.43 this house, which I have builded
1 Kings 8.44 the house that I have built for thy name
1 Kings 8.48 the house which I have built for thy name
1 Kings 9.3 this house, which thou hast built
1 Kings 9.10 when Solomon had built the two houses
1 Kings 9.17 And Solomon built Gezer
1 Kings 9.24 her house which Solomon had built for her
1 Kings 9.25 the altar which he built
1 Kings 10.4 the house that he had built
1 Kings 11.7 Then did Solomon build an high place
1 Kings 11.27 Solomon built Millo
1 Kings 11.38 as I built for David
1 Kings 12.25 Then Jeroboam built Shechem ... and built Penuel
1 Kings 14.23 they also built them high places
1 Kings 15.17 and built Ramah
1 Kings 15.22 timber, wherewith Baasha had builded
1 Kings 15.22 and king Asa built with them Geba
1 Kings 15.23 and the cities which he built
1 Kings 16.24 and built on the hill ... the city which he built
1 Kings 16.32 the house of Baal, which he had built in Samaria
1 Kings 16.34 In his days did Hiel the Bethelite build Jericho
1 Kings 18.32 he built an altar
1 Kings 22.39 all the cities that he built
2 Kings 14.22 He built Elath
2 Kings 15.35 He built the higher gate
2 Kings 16.11 And Urijah the priest built an altar
2 Kings 16.18 that they had built in the house
2 Kings 17.9 and they built them high places
2 Kings 21.3 For he built up again the high places
2 Kings 21.4 And he built altars
2 Kings 21.5 And he built altars
2 Kings 23.13 which Solomon the king of Israel had builded
2 Kings 25.1 they built forts around it
First Cambridge Company
1 Chronicles 6.10 the temple that Solomon built in Jerusalem
1 Chronicles 6.32 until Solomon had built the house
1 Chronicles 7.24 Sherah, who built Bethhoron
1 Chronicles 8.12 Shamed, who built Ono
1 Chronicles 11.8 And he built the city round about
1 Chronicles 17.6 Why have ye not built me an house to dwell in
1 Chronicles 21.26 And David built there an altar
1 Chronicles 22.5 and the house that is to be builded
1 Chronicles 22.19 the house that is to be built
2 Chronicles 6.2 I have built an house
2 Chronicles 6.10 and have built the house
2 Chronicles 6.18 this house which I have built
2 Chronicles 6.33 this house which I have built
2 Chronicles 6.34 the house which I have built
2 Chronicles 6.38 the house which I have built
2 Chronicles 8.1 at the end of twenty years, wherein Solomon had built the house of the Lord
2 Chronicles 8.2 That the cities which Huram had restored to Solomon, Solomon built them
2 Chronicles 8.4 And he built ... all the store cities, which he built in Hamath
2 Chronicles 8.5 Also he built Bethhoron the upper
2 Chronicles 8.11 the house that he had built for her
2 Chronicles 8.12 the altar of the LORD, which he had built before the porch
2 Chronicles 9.3 the house that he had built
2 Chronicles 11.5 And Rehoboam dwelt in Jerusalem, and built cities
2 Chronicles 11.6 He built even Bethlehem
2 Chronicles 14.6 And he built fenced cities in Judah
2 Chronicles 14.7 So they built and prospered
2 Chronicles 16.1 and built Ramah
2 Chronicles 16.6 and he built therewith Geba
2 Chronicles 17.12 and he built in Judah castles
2 Chronicles 20.8 And they dwelt therein, and have built thee a sanctuary
2 Chronicles 26.2 He built Eloth
2 Chronicles 26.6 and built cities
2 Chronicles 26.9 Uzziah built towers
2 Chronicles 26.10 Also he built towers in the desert
2 Chronicles 27.3 He built the high gate of the house of the Lord
2 Chronicles 27.4 Moreover he built cities in the mountains of Judah, and in the forests he built castles and towers
2 Chronicles 32.5 he ... built up all the wall that was broken
2 Chronicles 33.3 he built again the high places
2 Chronicles 33.4 Also he built altars in the house of the Lord
2 Chronicles 33.5 And he built altars for all the host of heaven
2 Chronicles 33.14 he built a wall without the city of David
2 Chronicles 33.15 all the altars that he had built
2 Chronicles 33.19 the places wherein he built high places,
2 Chronicles 35.3 the house which Solomon the son of David king of Israel did build
Ezra 3.2 and builded the altar of the God of Israel
Ezra 4.1 the adversaries of Judah and Benjamin heard that the children of the captivity builded the temple
Ezra 4.13 if this city be builded
Ezra 4.16 if this city be builded again
Ezra 4.21 Give ye now commandment to cause these men to cease, and that this city be not builded
Ezra 5.8 the house of the great God, which is builded with great stones
Ezra 5.11 build the house that was builded these many years ago, which a great king of Israel builded and set up
Ezra 5.15 and let the house of God be builded in his place
Ezra 6.3 Let the house be builded
Ezra 6.14 And the elders of the Jews builded... And they builded
Nehemiah 3.1 they builded the sheep gate
Nehemiah 3.2 And next unto him builded the men of Jericho. And next to them builded Zaccur the son of Imri
Nehemiah 3.3 But the fish gate did the sons of Hassenaah build
Nehemiah 3.13 they built it
Nehemiah 3.14 he built it
Nehemiah 3.15 he built it
Nehemiah 4.1 when Sanballat heard that we builded the wall
Nehemiah 4.6 So built we the wall
Nehemiah 4.17 They which builded on the wall
Nehemiah 4.18 every one had his sword girded by his side, and so builded
Nehemiah 6.1 heard that I had builded the wall
Nehemiah 7.1 when the wall was built
Nehemiah 7.4 the houses were not builded
Nehemiah 12.29 the singers had builded them villages round about Jerusalem
Job 12.14 he breaketh down, and it cannot be built again
Job 20.19 he hath violently taken away an house which he builded not
Job 22.23 If thou return to the Almighty, thou shalt be built up
Psalms 78.69 And he built his sanctuary like high palaces
Psalms 89.2 Mercy shall be built up for ever
Psalms 122.3 Jerusalem is builded as a city that is compact together
Proverbs 9.1 Wisdom hath builded her house
Proverbs 24.3 Through wisdom is an house builded
Ecclesiastes 2.4 I builded me houses
Ecclesiastes 9.14 there came a great king against it, and besieged it, and built great bulwarks against it
Song of Solomon 4.4 Thy neck is like the tower of David builded for an armoury
First Oxford Company
Isaiah 5.2 and built a tower in the midst of it
Isaiah 25.2 it shall never be built
Isaiah 44.26 Ye shall be built
Isaiah 44.28 Thou shalt be built
Jeremiah 7.31 they have built the high places of Tophet
Jeremiah 12.16 then shall they be built in the midst of my people
Jeremiah 19.5 They have built also the high places of Baal
Jeremiah 30.18 the city shall be builded upon her own heap
Jeremiah 31.4 Again I will build thee, and thou shalt be built
Jeremiah 31.38 the city shall be built
Jeremiah 32.31 from the day that they built it even unto this day
Jeremiah 32.35 And they built the high places of Baal
Jeremiah 45.4 that which I have built will I break down
Jeremiah 52.4 and built forts against it round about
Lamentations 3.5 He hath builded against me
Ezekiel 13.10 one built up a wall
Ezekiel 16.24 thou hast also built unto thee an eminent place
Ezekiel 16.25 thou hast built thy high place
Ezekiel 26.14 thou shalt be built no more
Ezekiel 36.10 the wastes shall be builded
Ezekiel 36.33 the wastes shall be builded
Daniel 4.30 Babylon, that I have built for the house of the kingdom
Daniel 9.25 the street shall be built again
Amos 5.11 ye have built houses of hewn stone
Micah 7.11 In the day that thy walls are to be built
Haggai 1.2 The time is not come, the time that the LORD's house should be built
Zechariah 1.16 my house shall be built in it
Zechariah 8.9 that the temple might be built
Second Oxford Company
Matthew 7.24 unto a wise man, which built his house upon a rock
Matthew 7.26 a foolish man, which built his house upon the sand:
Matthew 21.33 and built a tower
Mark 12.1 and built a tower
Luke 4.29 whereon their city was built
Luke 6.48 a man which built an house
Luke 6.49 a man that without a foundation built an house upon the earth
Luke 7.5 he hath built us a synagogue
Luke 17.28 they planted, they builded
Acts 7.47 But Solomon built him an house
Second Westminster Company
1 Corintians 3.14 If any man's work abide which he hath built thereupon
Ephesians 2.20 And are built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets
Ephesians 2.22 In whom ye also are builded together
Colossians 2.7 Rooted and built up in him
Hebrews 3.3 he who hath builded the house hath more honour than the house
Hebrews 3:4 For every house is builded by some man
Philemon 3:4 but he that built all things is God
1 Peter 2.5 Ye also, as lively stones, are built up a spiritual house
Second Cambridge Company
Judith 2 And built in Ecbatane walls
Esdras 1.3 the house that king Solomon the son of David had built
Esdras 2.24 if this city be built again
Esdras 4.51 until the time that it were built;
Esdras 4.55 them until the day that the house were finished, and Jerusalem builded up
Esdras 5.53 the temple of the Lord was not yet built
Esdras 5.58 So the workmen built the temple of the Lord
Esdras 5.67 they that were of the captivity did build the temple unto the Lord God of Israel
Esdras 6.14 it was builded many years ago
Esdras 6.19 that the temple of the Lord should be built in his place.
Esdras 6.24 the house of the Lord at Jerusalem should be built again
Esdras 6.28 I have commanded also to have it built up whole again
1 Maccabees 1.14 Whereupon they built a place of exercise at Jerusalem
1 Maccabees 1.33 Then builded they the city of David
1 Maccabees 1.54 and builded idol altars
1 Maccabees 4.47 and built a new altar
1 Maccabees 4.60 At that time also they builded up the mount Sion with high walls
1 Maccabees 5.1 the altar was built
1 Maccabees 10.12 the strangers, that were in the fortresses which Bacchides had built
1 Maccabees 13.27 Simon also built a monument
1 Maccabees 13.33 Then Simon built up the strong holds in Judea
1 Maccabees 13.38 the strong holds, which ye have builded
1 Maccabees 13.48 and built therein a dwellingplace
1 Maccabees 15.7 fortresses that thou hast built
1 Maccabees 16.9 Cedron, which Cendebeus had built
1 Maccabees 16.15 Docus, which he had built
2 Maccabees 1.18 after that he had builded the temple
2 Maccabees 4.12 For he built gladly a place of exercise
2 Maccabees 10.2 the altars which the heathen had built in the open street
4 Ezra 5.25 and of all builded cities thou hast hallowed Sion unto thyself
4 Ezra 7.6 A city is builded
4 Ezra 8.52 a city is builded
4 Ezra 9.24 where no house is builded
4 Ezra 10.27 there was a city builded
4 Ezra 10.42 there appeared unto thee a city builded
4 Ezra 10.44 even she whom thou seest as a city builded
4 Ezra 10.46 after thirty years Solomon builded the city
4 Ezra 10.51 the field where no house was builded
4 Ezra 13.36 being prepared and builded
Sirach 1.15 She hath built an everlasting foundation with men
Sirach 49.12 who in their time builded the house
Sirach 50.2 And by him was built from the foundation the double height
Wisdom of Solomon 14.2 the workman built it by his skill
Tobit 1.4 the temple of the habitation of the most High was consecrated and built for all ages
Tobit 13.10 that his tabernacle may be builded in thee again with joy
Tobit 13.16 For Jerusalem shall be built up with sapphires
Tobit 14.5 the house of God shall be built in it for ever

On me/my being right

2010-12-20T11:49:00.002Z

A correspondent writes about an earlier post headed 'On Shakespeare being Irish', worrying about the grammar rather than the content. Shouldn't it be 'On Shakespeare's being Irish', he asks? 'Has grammar changed?', he adds.

No, it hasn't - at least, not in the last 200 or so years. As with many issues of this kind, the arguments go back to the 18th century and the rise of prescriptivism. The construction without the possessive is the older one, and can be traced back to the Middle Ages. But the one with the possessive was felt to be more elegant and grammatically correct, and it was given the strongest possible support by Fowler (in his 1926 Dictionary). Indeed, rarely does Fowler attack a usage more intensely than in his entry on what he calls the 'fused participle'. A brief quotation:

'It is perhaps beyond hope for a generation that regards upon you giving as normal English to recover its hold upon the truth that grammar matters. Yet every just man who will abstain from the fused participle (as most good writers in fact do, though negative evidence is naturally hard to procure) retards the process of corruption; & it may therefore be worth while to take up again the statement made above, that the construction is grammatically indefensible.'

Not surprisingly, then, the issue rumbles on.

The two constructions actually express slightly different meanings. The non-possessive one highlights the verb phrase, whereas the possessive one highlights the noun phrase. In 'On Shakespeare being Irish', it's the 'being Irish' that is the focus. It's thus more likely to be used in a context where the implied contrast is with some other verb phrase, such as 'being Welsh or 'being English'. In 'On Shakespeare's being Irish', the person is the focus, so it's more likely to be used where there is a contrast with someone else. I used the first construction in my post, because the content was on the interpretation of original pronunciation, not on the person using it.

However, the prescriptive attitude has had an effect, in that over the years the use of the possessive has come to be associated with formal expression. There's therefore a stylistic contrast involved, with the non-possessive form sounding more informal. This is especially the case when the participial form is used as the subject of a clause, as in 'Going by train is out of the question', where we have the choice of:

John's going by train is out of the question.
John going by train is out of the question.

The stylistic contrast is especially noticeable when there's an initial pronoun:

My going by train is out of the question.
Me going by train is out of the question.

The contentious character of the non-possessive construction is lessened if it is 'buried' later in the sentence:

It is out of the question, my going by train.
It is out of the question, me going by train.

This is presumably why my post heading was noticed. The style I use ('On X') keeps the usage in initial position. If I'd headed the post 'On discussing the argument about Shakespeare being Irish', I wonder if my correspondent would have picked up on the point?

On culturomics

2010-12-17T17:49:00.002Z

Another day when the phone won't stop ringing from correspondents because of a newly reported project involving language. This time it's the so-called Culturomics project, reported on 16 December in the journal Science and picked up in a half-chewed state by several newspapers and radio stations today.

What has happened is that a team of researchers have collaborated with Google Books to present a corpus of nearly 5.2 million digitized books, which they think is around 4 per cent of all published books. The corpus size is 500 billion words, 361 billion being English (the others from six languages - French, Spanish, German, Chinese, Russian, Hebrew). The time frame is 1800 to 2000. This is now available for online searching, and there's a site where you can type in your own words or word-sets and see how they have developed over time. There is a report on the project here. The full report can be read in the journal Science, though you have to register first.

The name culturomics is an odd one, presumably based on ergonomics, economics, and suchlike. They define it as 'the application of high-throughput data collection and analysis to the study of human culture'. Most people in this business I imagine would normally talk of 'cultural history' or 'cultural evolution'. The language side of the project is familiar, as an exercise in historical corpus linguistics. The new term may catch on, as it blends the two notions (culture and language) in a novel way. We'll just have to wait and see.

The news reports have homed in on an analogy the authors make in their paper. They say: 'The corpus cannot be read by a human. If you tried to read only the entries from the year 2000 alone, at the reasonable pace of 200 words/minute, without interruptions for food or sleep, it would take eighty years. The sequence of letters is one thousand times longer than the human genome'. This has led to such headlines as 'Cultural genome project mines Google Books for the secret history of humanity' or (in today's Guardian) 'Google creates a tool to probe "genome" of English words for cultural trends'. But it isn't anything like the human genome, which is the complete genetic account of an individual. Culture doesn't work in that way. The authors themselves don't use the phrase in their paper, and rightly so.

We mustn't exaggerate the significance of this project. It is no more than a collection of scanned books - an impressive collection, unprecedented in its size, and capable of displaying innumerable interesting trends, but far away from entire cultural reality. For a start, this is just a collection of books - no newspapers, magazines, advertisements, or other orthographic places where culture resides. No websites, blogs, social networking sites. No spoken language, of course, so over 90 percent of the daily linguistic usage of the world isn't here. Moreover, the books were selected from 'over 40 university libraries from around the world', supplemented by some books directly from publishers - so there will be limited coverage of the genres recognized in the categorization systems used in corpus linguistics . They were also, I imagine, books which presented no copyright difficulties. The final choice went through what must have been a huge filtering process. Evidently 15 million books were scanned, and 5 million selected partly on the basis of 'the quality of their OCR' [optical character recognition]. So this must mean that some types of text (those with a greater degree of orthographic regularity) will have been privileged over others.

It's still an impressively large sample, though. So what can we look for? To begin with, note that this is culture not just lexicology. No distinction is made between dictionary and encyclopedia. Anything that is a string of letters separated by a space [a 1-gram, they call it] can be searched for - including names of people, places, etc. They also searched for sequences of two strings (2-grams) and so on up to five [5-grams]. Only items which turned up more than 40 times in the corpus are displayed. So, to take one of their example, we can search for the usage of 'the Great War' [NB the searches are case sensitive], which peaks in frequency between 1915 and 1941, and for 'World War I', which then takes over. Note that, to achieve a comprehensive result, you would have to repeat the search for orthographic variations (eg 'The' for 'the' or '1' for 'I'].

A huge problem in doing this kind of thing is punctuation. I know, because I had to deal with it when carrying out a very similar string-related project in online advertising a few years ago. You have to deal with all the ways in which a punctuation mark can interfere with a string - 'radio' is different from 'radio,' for example. The culturonomists have collapsed word fragments at line-endings separated by a hyphen - though there's a problem when a non-omissible hyphen turns up at a line break. And they have treated punctuation marks as separate n-grams - so 'Why?' for example, is treated as 'Why' + '?'. They don't give details of their procedure, but it doesn't seem to work well. I searched for 'Radio 4', for example. The trace showed the usage taking off in the 1970s, as it should, but there were many instances shown before that decade. I found examples listed in the 1930s. How can that be? There was no Radio 4 then. When you click on the dates to see the sources, you find such instances as 'stereo with AM/FM radio, 4 speakers' and 'RADIO 4-INCH BLADE'.

The other big problem is homographs - words which look the same but which have different meanings. This is the biggest weakness in software which tries to do linguistic analysis, and it was the primary focus of the ad project I mentioned above. A news page which reported a street stabbing had ads down the side which read 'Buy your knives here'. The software had failed to distinguish the two senses of 'knife' (cutlery, weapons), and made the wrong association between text and ad inventory. I solved it by developing a notion of semantic targetting which used the full context of a web page to distinguish homographs. The Culturomics project has to solve the same problem, but on a larger scale (books rather than pages), and there is no sign that it has yet tried to do so. So, type 'Apple', say, into their system and you will see a large peak in the 1980s and 1990s - but is this due to the Beatles or the Mac? There's no way of knowing.

The approach, in other words, shows trends but can't interpret or explain them. It can't handle ambiguity or idiomaticity. If your query is unique and unambiguous, you'll get some interpretable results - as in their examples which trace the rise and fall of a celebrity (eg Greta Garbo, peaking in the 1930s). But even here one must be careful. They show Freud more frequent than Einstein, Galileo, and Darwin, and suggest that this is because he is 'more deeply engrained in our collective subconscious' thanks to such everyday phrases as 'Freudian slip'. But which Freud is being picked up in their totals? They assume Sigmund. But what about Lucian, Clement, Anna...?

Linguists will home in on the claims being made about vocabulary growth over time. Evidently their corpus shows 544K words in English in 1900, 597K in 1950, and 1022K in 2000, and claim that around 8500 words a year have entered English during the last century (though of course only some achieve a permanent presence). These totals are pointing in the right direction, avoiding the underestimates that are common (and incidentally showing yet again how absurd that claim was a year ago about the millionth word entering English). The real figures will of course be much higher, once other genres are taken into account.

They point out that their totals far exceed the totals in dictionaries, and - one of the most interesting findings reported - say that over half the words in their corpus (52%) are what they call 'lexical dark matter'. These are words that don't make it into dictionaries, because they are uncommon, and dictionaries focus on recording the higher frequency words in a language. Their figure is probably a bit high, as (as mentioned above) this project includes proper names as well as nouns, and nobody would want to say that knowledge of proper names is a sign of linguistic ability. (I am reminded of the old Music Hall joke: 'I say, I say, I say, I can speak French'. 'I didn't know you could speak French. Let me hear you speak French.' 'Bordeaux, Calais, Nice...')

This 'cultural observatory' has given us a fascinating tool to play with, and some interesting discoveries will come out of it, especially when one types competing usages into the Ngram Viewer, such as the choice between alternative forms of a verb (eg dreamed/dreamt). There's nothing new about this, of course, as other corpora have done the same thing; but the scale of the enterprise makes this project different (though limited by its academic library origins). For instance, I typed in 'actually to do' and 'to actually do' to see whether there is a trend in the increasing usage of the split infinitive, and there certainly is, with a dramatic increase since 1980. The spelling of 'judgment' without an 'e' has been steadily falling since the 1920s, with the form with an 'e' having a stronger presence in British English [it is possible to search separately for British and American English]. Enough, already. As with all corpora, it gets addictive.

On being a champion of - what?

2010-12-14T11:42:00.001Z

Several correspondents, having read Michael Rosen's generous piece about me in this week's Guardian, have asked what I think about being called, as the headline put it, 'the champion of the English language'.

Well, my first thought was: not just English. If I try to champion anything, it is language, and specifically languages, and most specifically, endangered languages. English is a language, so it gets championed. It also happens to be the language which I chose to specialize in, years ago, so in that sense I guess I'm identified with it more than any other. But I'd be sad if anyone thought to interpret the headline as if it meant that I was supporting English at the expense of other languages. In fact I probably spend more time these days making the case for the importance of modern languages, and trying to get endangered languages projects off the ground. The Threlford lecture I gave a few months ago to the Institute of Linguists, was entirely on that subject, for example, as will be a lecture to the British Academy next February. And we are still a long way from the goal of having 'houses' of language(s) presenting global linguistic diversity in all its glory. The first to open, as regular readers of this blog know, will be the 'House of Languages' in Barcelona (see the website at Linguamon) - a project I know very well, as I've been chair of its scientific advisory committee from the beginning. I've tried, and failed, twice, to get a similar project off the ground in the UK. One keeps trying.

Another first is the event with which Michael ended his piece: the 'Evolving English' exhibition at the British Library. This is indeed an amazing exhibition, and it was a privilege to be associated with it. It is like having the history of English brought to life. A significant number of the important texts always instanced in histories of the language are in the same room. You are greeted by the glorious Undley bracteate. You find yourself within inches of the Beowulf manuscript. In one cabinet you can see, side by side, the Wycliffe Bible, the Tyndale fragment, the Book of Common Prayer, and the King James Bible. The curators have been ingenious, not to say cheeky: in another cabinet you will see the first English conversation, Aelfric's Colloquy; next to it is a manuscript of Harold Pinter. Everywhere you look there are headphones. A visit is not just a visual experience. The Library has an excellent collection of sound recordings, and great efforts have been made to provide an analogous audio experience for the texts of the past. If you are passing through London between now and 3 April 2011, visit this exhibition. There won't be another for a long long time.

I was the lead consultant for the exhibition - not the curator, as some online sources have put it (the three curators are British Library staff) - and wrote the accompanying book. This isn't, incidentally, a 'catalogue' of the exhibition, as some reports have suggested. It did begin as an attempt to reflect what would be in the exhibition, but it had to go to press some six months before the exhibition opened, and in the interim other decisions were made about what it was practicable to show. There were some very large display items that it would have been silly to try to fit into a book (World War I posters, for example); and conversely, there were some items that worked well in a book but which were simply too fragile to put on public display. Also, none of the audio items could go into the book - though several are available online, in the Timeline section of the Library website. There's about a two-thirds overlap in content between book and exhibition.

What's really noticeable, when you enter the exhibition, is the lack of a single chronology. Rather, what you see is a series of themes - the evolution of Standard English, local dialects of English, international varieties of English, everyday English, English in the workplace, English at play. The message is plain: there is no one 'story' of English, there are many, each of which has its own validity. It is the driving force behind my The Stories of English, which I used as the guideline for my initial proposals to the Library as to what should be in an exhibition, when the project was first mooted three years ago. What I hope, more than anything else, is that the exhibition will, through its physicality, demonstrate more than any textbook could, the way the language thrives through its multifaceted character. We see Standard English strongly represented - the prestige dialect of the language, the criterion of linguistic educatedness and the means of achieving national and international intelligibility, especially in writing. At the same time, we see regional dialects and other varieties of nonstandard English strongly represented - the varieties which express local, national, and international identity, and which are actually used by the vast majority of English speakers around the world. The atmosphere in the Library is one of mutual respect.

It would be nice to think that this atmosphere will remain after the exhibition is gone, and perhaps it will, through the book and the website. Linguistic climate change there still needs to be. The comments that followed Michael Rosen's article clearly indicate this. There is a great deal of mythology still around - for example, the unfounded belief that linguists say that 'anything goes', when it comes to language teaching in class. Readers of this blog with very long memories will recall that this was something John Humphrys said about me. He eventually apologised, in The Spectator, saying that he was only a journalist, and the role of the journalist was to simplify and exaggerate. But such simplifications and exaggerations do a great deal of harm. So, for the record, once again, and hopefully for the last time: I have never said that 'anything goes' when it comes to language. Read my lips. I have never said that 'anything goes' when it comes to language. Nor do I know of any linguist who has said such a thing. The whole point of sociolinguistics, pragmatics, and the other branches of linguistics which study language in use is actually to show that 'anything does not go'. The only people who use the phrase 'anything goes' are prescriptivists desperately trying to justify their prejudices.

If people want to find out about my educational linguistic philosophy they will find it expounded, for example, at the end of The Stories of English and in various chapters of The Fight for English. It can be summarized as follows. It is the role of schools to prepare children for the linguistic demands that society places upon them. This means being competent in Standard English as well as in the nonstandard varieties that form a part of their lives and which they will frequently encounter outside their home environment in modern English literature, in interactions with people from other parts of the English-speaking world, and especially on the internet. They have to know when to spell and punctuate according to educated norms, and when it is permissible not do so. In a word, they have to know how to manage the language - or to be masters of it (as Humpty Dumpty says to Alice in Through the Looking Glass). And, one day, to be champions of it - all of it.

On shellacking

2010-11-04T14:33:00.001Z

A correspondent (from Radio 4's 'World At One') rings up to ask me about the origins of shellacking, which has received a new lease of life thanks to President Obama's use of it yesterday. How did shellac develop the meaning of 'thrashing, beating'? There's no obvious link, she said.

True. To see what happened, you have to know the intermediate stage in the development of this word. The original meaning of the verb 'to varnish with shellac' (a type of resin) is known from the late 19th century. Anything that had been 'shellacked' would have a nice rosy tinge. By the 1920s, in the USA, this effect had evidently been enough to motivate a slang use of the word meaning 'drunk'. Rosey, illuminated, and plastered show similar developments - all early 20th-century slang.

At the same time, drunks were also being described using such words as busted, bombed, crashed, and thrashed. So it's not surprising to see these words sharing their associations. The connotations of thrashing transferred to shellac, which then developed its later slang sense of 'badly beaten'. I've only every heard this used in US English - but all that is about to change. I predict it will turn up in the House of Commons within the next few days.

So, drink is the link.

On plays, parrots, and plurilinguals

2010-11-02T11:42:00.001Z

A correspondent has just sent me details of a new play on endangered languages. In fact, two. It's like London buses. None come for ages, and then two come along at once.

Kamarra Bell Wykes has written Mother's Tongue, being staged this month by the Yirra Yakin Aboriginal Corporation in Perth, Australia. And Julia Cho has written The Language Archive, currently being staged in New York. You can see the post, from Peter Austin, here.

It's great to hear of these initiatives. I last posted on this subject on 8 January 2007, when I continued to bemoan the lack of arts projects presenting the theme of endangered languages and language death. My own play, Living On, was on its own then. Happily, no longer.

And another correspondent has added a fresh dimension to the famous story about the parrots speaking an extinct language, the inspiration behind Rachel Berwick's living sculpture that I mentioned in the 2007 post. You'll find that here.

And while on the subject of language diversity, another two-bus situation. Bilingualism, this time. Despite bilingualism being the normal human condition, a huge mythology has grown up around it, with monolingual communities being a bit scared of it and certainly not understanding it. Earlier this year, Madalena Cruz-Ferreira wrote a lovely little book, aimed at the general public, about the myths and realities of being bilingual, called Multilinguals are...? (Battlebridge Publications). And now she has started a blog on bilingualism. So has François Grosjean, whose fine book Bilingual: Life and Reality (Harvard University Press) also came out earlier this year. His blog is here. It seems to me that we are seeing a new climate slowly being formed.

On Shakespeare being Irish

2010-11-01T09:53:00.002Z

A correspondent writes to ask what I think of Rod Liddle's piece in this week's Sunday Times. It was headed 'Irish bard? You're taking the mick'. I'd put a link in here, except that the paper now charges you a pound for the opportunity to read something you've missed. I can't believe their journalists are happy with that, as it must lose them so much readership, but that's another story...

Anyway, Rod says that 'A brilliant American academic called Paul Meier has decided that William Shakespeare spoke with an Irish accent', and he then develops the theme in his inimitable way, referring to earlier claims that Shakespeare 'had initially entitled his plays As You Like It, To Be Sure, To Be Sure; A Midsummer Night's Craic; O'Thello; and The Merry Wives of Windsor Park. Not to mention the famous Merchant of Ennis'. I love it.

But I don't love the new myth that's developing here. Paul Meier hasn't said any such thing. I know, because I've just returned from Kansas University, where I've been working with Paul on a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream in OP ('original pronunciation') - a reconstruction, as close as we can make it, of how the play would have been pronounced in Shakespeare's time. I've posted earlier about this (see 2 January 2010), and you'll find some of the relevant history of OP in my post of 10 January 2007, as well as articles on my website, such as in Around the Globe, which is where you'll get answers to the usual questions that arise in relation to this topic - like 'how do we know?'.

Note, first, that this isn't anything to do with how Shakespeare himself spoke. I speak with a British English accent, like millions of others do. It's possible to describe the main features of this accent without saying anything at all about the idiosyncrasies of one of its speakers. When foreigners learn, say, Received Pronunciation, they are learning a system of sounds. They aren't learning to speak like any one individual RP speaker. In technical terms, they're learning the phonology of English.

It's the same when we work on OP. It's Early Modern English phonology, and it allows all kinds of phonetic variations, reflecting the individual speakers who must have used it. Shakespeare probably spoke it with a mixed Warwickshire/London accent. Robert Armin, one of his fellow-actors, probably spoke with a mixed Norfolk/London accent. When we did an OP Romeo and Juliet at Shakespeare's Globe in 2004, the actors came from various parts of the UK. All were taught OP, but this was tinged with their regional backgrounds. So you could hear traces of Scots in Juliet, Northern Irish in Peter, Cockney in the Nurse, and so on. It would have been like that in Shakespeare's day.

So where has the Irish myth come from? Mainly from YouTube. A clip of the OP production and its background has been receiving thousands of hits. You can see it here. Several people who have watched this have said that in their opinion it sounds like Irish. And before we know where we are, this cluster of opinions has become a fact.

Certainly there are some features of OP which are like modern Irish (such as the pronunciation of any like Anny), but there are also features of OP which remind the listener of the West Country of England, or Scotland, or Virginia, or virtually anywhere. When we were doing the Globe production, I used to walk around the audience in the interval and ask people what they thought of the accent, and everyone, without exception, said 'We speak like that where I come from'. There are echoes of most modern accent phonologies in OP - which is hardly surprising, as this is the phonology that lies behind them. It went across the Atlantic in the Mayflower, and to Australia, and elsewhere. If you asked me which modern accent is closest to OP, I'd have some difficulty saying. It's easier to identify the differences. No modern English accent, for example, says words like musician as 'mjooziseean'.

If you don't get your OP exactly right, then it's easy to slip into a modern accent. This is one of the things I have to focus on, when working with a company. The word for 'I', for example, is pronounced with a central opening to the diphthong - with the vowel sound of the word the. If you inadvertently lip-round that vowel, it comes out as 'oi', which is a classic feature of Irish English, often spelled that way in representations of Irish speakers ('Oi'm sure'). I think a lot of the YouTube listeners are reading that in.

OP isn't Irish. If you use or are familiar with Irish accents, you'll notice the bits that remind you of Ireland. If your background is Scottish, you'll notice the bits that remind you of Scotland. An Australian homed in on the pronunciation of yet as 'yit'. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder? If so, OP is partly in the ears. But not entirely, as the many examples like musician illustrate.

I'm delighted to see that the Kansas OP project has generated such interest. It's the first full-length production of a Shakespeare play in OP since the Globe experiments of 2004 (Romeo) and 2005 (Troilus). I hope there will be more. Each time a play is done in OP, I discover fresh insights into it - new puns, new rhythms, new possibilities of expression. In Dream, for example, suddenly all the rhymes work. We've all been used to such painful modern dissonances as here, where the lines by Puck don't rhyme any longer:

Thou coward, art thou bragging to the stars
Telling the bushes that thou look'st for wars,
And wilt not come.

But they did in Shakespeare's day. The vowel in wars sounded like that of stars. Multiply this by the dozens of cases in the play where lines now rhyme, and you can begin to sense the cumulative auditory effect of an OP production.

Paul Meier is planning to make recordings of the production in due course (its first night is 11 November at the university theatre in Lawrence, Kansas), which will add immensely to the still rather limited database of OP available online (at Pronouncing Shakespeare). There may also be a live stream of a performance. I'll keep readers of this blog posted.

On a review of biblical proportions

2010-10-10T16:39:00.002Z

A correspondent has just written in with a puzzling remark. The message was from the American composer David Lang, and he wrote like this:

I just read on an american website that I am quoted in your new book 'begat' for messing up a biblical reference, when I was interviewed after winning the pulitzer prize for music.

It left me totally baffled, as I never would have said any such thing. So I looked it up in my book. I found it in the section where I review ways in which the idiom touch the hem of his garment has been adapted. I list several examples, and then say:

'These days, the expression has been extended even to things that don't have hems. When Bob Dylan got a Pulitzer prize in 2008, the New York composer David Lang, who was also a prizewinner, commented: I am not fit to touch the hem of his shoes. And popstar Bono is once reported to have said that his group U2 was not fit to touch the hem of the Beatles.'

To my mind, these are clever and daring extensions of the idiom. My book is full of examples of this kind. This was one of the reasons why I wrote it: to see just how far people have actually taken such idioms to heart and adapted them in everyday life. It is usually a totally conscious and creative process, and it certainly applies in David Lang's case. How do I know? Because he told me so:

'the ridiculousness of my comment was completely intentional. the interviewer laughed when I said it, which was of course the intended response. I am not sure if in your book it is better to be a voluntary bible mangler or an involuntary one but I wouldn't want you or any of your august readers to think I am any more of a dunce than I really am.'

Absolutely not. But where on earth did the notion of mangling come from?

It remained a puzzle for only a few hours. From OUP in New York I was sent a review of Begat in The Nation, the American weekly periodical which has described itself as 'the flagship of the left'. It was by a poet called Ange Mlinko. And there is the offending passage:

'Crystal even quotes the bungled puns of unfortunate individuals like David Lang, the composer who said, on winning the Pulitzer alongside Bob Dylan, "I am not fit to touch the hem of his shoes."'

Bungled? Unfortunate? Note that this is the reviewer speaking, not me. But in a tweeting world, the source of the opinion can easily get blurred.

However, how extraordinary to see such a narrow-minded attitude appearing through the pen of a poet! I always thought poets were supposed to enjoy other people's creative use of language. Apparently not in her case. All the adaptations of biblical expressions - and I give hundreds of examples in my book - are called by her 'so trite and corrupted as to necrotize the language'. Wow. Her generalization, incidentally, includes lots of creative writers - my examples include adaptations from Byron, James Joyce, and Henry James, to name just three - but that doesn't matter. They all, in her words 'mangle common biblical references'.

Mangle. Doesn't that tell you everything about where she is coming from? But what a shocking shocking thing to hear from a poet.

I'm quoting there. From this paragraph:

'He [Crystal] has come not to praise good style or blame bad style but merely to cite usages and round them up in a bean-counting exercise that ultimately comes to a shocking, shocking conclusion: "Very few idiomatic expressions unquestionably originate in the language of the King James Bible."'

Well I don't see what's so shocking about stating a fact. And beans are worth counting when so many other people get the totals wrong. I've heard people say that 'thousands' of idioms in English come from the King James Bible. That's a long way from the truth. MP Frank Field has quoted Melvyn Bragg as saying that the KJB is 'the DNA of the English language' - in other words, it's there in every word we say or write. Mlinko would probably agree. She says, in one of those vague statements that sound good but which mean little, 'The influence [of the KJB] ... runs deep in the weave of things'. Interpret that, if you can.

When she does give a few examples of what she means by 'style', I see straightaway that she is talking about something which I expressly omit from my book - and spend a few pages discussing why: quotations.

'Abraham Lincoln used locutions from the King James Version in his Gettysburg Address and Second Inaugural to lend theological resonance to his vision of justice and reconciliation. Herman Melville's biblicisms, particularly his references to Job, invoke the Bible in order to subvert the standard Christian interpretation of it ("Christ's redeeming love of mankind...is antithetical to the truth about the world").'

Yes, indeed, these are quotations and explicit allusions, and they provide a very important strand in the history of English literature. But this is not what my book was about. I always think it's bad reviewing practice to criticize an author for not writing the book the reviewer wishes he had written. Mlinko knows very well I am limiting my project. She actually says, at one point:

'Idiom, Crystal acknowledges, is not the only measure of linguistic influence, and he limits the scope of his conclusion accordingly.'

But that doesn't stop her dismissing me - and all linguists, it transpires - as being uninterested in style. Ah, there's the hidden agenda!

'The "gloriousely writen" text [her allusion is to Langland in Piers Plowman] doesn't seem to be the bailiwick of linguists. If there's an offense that unites scientists and post-structuralists against a common foe, it's belle-lettrism. Yet the concern with text as texture--what we've come to call its style--is fundamental not only to the pleasure of reading but to the understanding of what is written, which at its best is a fabric: composed of many strands. Discerning those strands requires knowledge--and judgment. Style is an apotheosis: it is the revelation of any author's "construction of reality."'

I totally agree with those last three sentences. But the first is breathtaking in its ignorance of what has gone on in literary stylistics over the past forty years, much of which has been concerned with exploring the notion of texture. She's obviously had some bad linguistic encounters of the third, or even fourth kind. For my part, having written two books on style, in the broader sense Mlinko hankers after, and tried to disentangle the many strands that make up the style of the most glorious writer of all in English, it's a bit disturbing to find someone writing off a domain of critical experience so dismissively.

If the review had been just about me, I wouldn't have bothered to respond. I appreciate every review I get, positive or negative, but life's too short to reply to them all, even given the marvellous opportunity provided by blogging. But when a reviewer starts calling my quotees bunglers and unfortunate, trite and corrupted, somebody's got to defend them. I'm not expecting emails from Byron and Henry James to complain about their misrepresentation, but I hope this post will prevent others being misled in the way that David Lang was.

On highest mountains

2010-09-20T16:07:00.002Z

A correspondent writes to ask about the difference between tallest and highest in such sentences as Everest and K2 are the two tallest mountains in the world, which he has found on a BBC site. He quotes Michael Swan as an example of a grammarian who says that it has to be Mont Blanc is the highest mountain in Europe and not . . . the tallest mountain, and is understandably confused.

Usage is undoubtedly blurred, because we frequently see such listings (very common online) as 'The Tallest Buildings in the World', 'The Tallest Mountains in the World', and so on, alongside 'The Highest...' Tallest is four times more common than highest for buildings on Google. Highest is over ten times more common than tallest for mountains, but tallest still attracts a healthy 60,000 hits.

When we look for the reason, we enter a world of technical definition. Mountains are actually measured in three different ways. (1) Sea level to the peak. (2) Base to the peak. (3) Distance from the centre of the earth to the peak. The differences are significant. Under (1), the title goes to Mt Everest. Under (2) the title goes to Mauna Kea, Hawaii, which has only 4,245 m of its 30,000 m above sea level. Under (3) the title goes to Chimborazo volcano in the Andes, only 6310 m high but (thanks to the equatorial bulge caused by the earth's spin) further away from the centre than anything else. In this approach, (1) is referred to technically as the highest mountain, and (2) as the tallest mountain.

Most people would never need to refer to (3), and few to (2). We normally think of mountains as being above sea level, so this motivates the use of highest. But the fact that tallest is also a permitted collocation will have reinforced its appearance in everyday usage, resulting in the overlap noted by my correspondent.

Other domains raise similar issues. People normally talk about tallest buildings, referring to the dimension of the building from base to roof. The highest building in the world could be a single-storey house on some mountain-top somewhere. But again there is an overlap, and there are complications, well known in the field of encylopedia listings. Does the radio mast on top of a high building count as part of the height of the building or not? It can get quite controversial when competing claims are being made for the world record. And the complications reverberate linguistically when we encounter such usages as The highest part of the tallest building is well above roof level.

On gonna

2010-09-09T08:45:00.001Z

A correspondent writes to say she had read an interview in Rolling Stone with the cast of AMC’s Mad Men, where one of the actors said they had to be very careful with their pronunciation. 'There was no ‘gonna’ or ‘shoulda’ back then [in the 1960's].' Could this be true?

It certainly couldn't. It's easy enough to check the point. These two forms actually get separate entries in the OED, and there we find gonna with a first recorded use in 1913 and shoulda with a first recorded use in 1933. (Also woulda, 1913, coulda 1925.)

Both usages are undoubtedly much older. Joseph Wright's English Dialect Dictionary has a separate section under go giving examples spelled ganna, gauna, gaunna, and ginnie. The earliest is 1806. And under have there's an example of should ha' from 1899.

Why stop there? In the 1602 Quarto edition of Merry Wives of Windsor we find Nym saying 'I should ha borne the humor Letter to her', and there are several similar examples in the literature of the period.

When it comes to linguistic mythology, it's seems it's a mad Mad world.

On updating and the OED

2010-09-05T11:14:00.002Z

Several media correspondents have been in touch this week to discuss the report that the OED may not have a further print edition. Whether it will or not I can't say, but I do know that I've not looked at my print edition for years, and use the online edition pretty well every day. It includes an amazing amount of new lexical information. There are updates of various sections of the alphabet at regular intervals, as the OED team slogs on. And one of the unspoken messages to scholars that comes across from the updating is: revise.

Like many people, I've used the OED repeatedly for information about the earliest use of words. The first recorded date for a word is of special interest. One knows that such dates are artificial, because they're only as reliable as the sources that have so far been examined, but they're still the best information we have, and they point in the right direction. So I always look with extra interest when I find the OED has discovered earlier citations for words. It's especially important when people are discussing such matters as the originality of Shakespeare's vocabulary or the number of new words in an early edition of the Bible.

It's not just earlier citations that can change the totals. A different dating chronology can wreak havoc with statistics. For example, the dates of Shakespeare's plays used by the original lexicographers are now hugely out of date. Nobody these days would place Love's Labour's Lost in 1588, as the OED does; most people would opt for 1593-5. Similarly, Titus Andronicus is given as 1588 (probably 1590-91) and A Midsummer Night's Dream as 1590 (probably 1594-5). The day they revise these dates, the whole of the 'Shakespeare invented words' industry will have to be reviewed, as in many entries the Shakespearean usage will leapfrog over another citation into second place.

The totals already need serious revision, in the light of the earlier citations that have emerged. I spent a lot of space in my Stories of English reviewing the evidence for Shakespeare's invented words, based on the OED entries, and for years now I've written a regular piece for Around the Globe (the magazine of Shakespeare's Globe) on what we can deduce from such 'Williamisms', as I call them there. We now know that several of the first recorded usages assigned to Shakespeare have been antedated. Not all are in the OED files yet. Lonely isn't, for example. The OED still gives Coriolanus 1607 as a first use, but, as I point out in Think on My Words, Mary Sidney, the Countess of Pembroke, talks about ‘lonely ghosts’ in her Tragedie of Antonie, and that is 1592.

I don't know when will be the best time to do a complete revision of the Shakespeare assignments. It's going to be a long job, and best done, perhaps, when a bit more OED revision has taken place. But I have taken a look at an easier topic: the number of first recorded uses in the King James Bible. In Stories of English (pp. 328-9) I say there are 55, and give a list. I've now gone through that list and checked against the latest OED entries, and the total now stands at 47. There are some additions and some deletions. For the record, here is the current list. Three of of the items (marked with *) also appear in the translations to entries in Randall Cotgrave's 1611 Dictionarie of the French and English tongues:

abased (as an adjective), accurately, afflicting (as a noun), almug ('algum tree'), anywhither, armour-bearer, backsliding (as an adjective), battering-ram, Benjamite, catholicon, confessing (as a noun), crowning (as an adjective), dissolver, dogmatize, epitomist, escaper, espoused (as an adjective), exactress, expansion, Galilean (as a noun), gopher, Gothic (as an adjective), grand-daughter, Hamathite, infallibility*, Laodicean (as a noun), lapful*, light-minded, maneh (Hebrew unit of account), miscarrying (as an adjective), Naziriteship, needleworker, night-hawk, nose-jewel, palmchrist, panary ('pantry'), phrasing (as a noun), pruning-hook, rosebud, rose of Sharon, Sauromatian, shittah (type of tree), skewed, taloned* (as an adjective), way-mark ('traveller guide'), whosesoever, withdrawing (as an adjective)

I say 'for the record'. This is one of the less-publicized benefits of a blog. There's no way I'd be able to draw the attention of Stories of English readers to the update otherwise. There may never be a second edition of the book, and Penguin isn't going to publish an updated edition just because some new facts have emerged requiring revision on pp. 328-9. So, all hail to blogs, as an updating procedure.

On looking well

2010-08-18T21:26:00.002Z

A correspondent writes to say that she has found such sentences as these on the internet:

Keeping these things in mind, you can look well in black dresses.
Peasant tops look well on small busted girls.

She goes on: 'I was always taught that to look good is to be attractive, while to look well is to appear healthy. According to that rule, this use of well would be incorrect. Is there any time when this use of well is acceptable? Is it a regional usage?'

The examples - and there are indeed quite a few of them - suggest that this is an area where usage is changing. I share my correspondent's intuitive preference for good (or great, smart, etc.), and so do three female informants (in their 30s, 50s, and 80s) who happened to be in my house when the email came in. The interesting question is why the change is happening.

I think that well is shifting because of a change in the usage of good. In the early 20th century, look good and listen good emerged in American English in the sense of 'look/sound promising'. The OED has a first recorded usage of 1914. This developed into a general sense of good to mean 'in a satisfactory frame of mind', 'coping well with life', and suchlike. It's most often heard these days in response to a How are you? type of question. I'm well means 'well in health'. I'm good means something like 'things are OK right now'. It's a new semantic distinction in English.

However, it's colloquial, youthful, and originally American, so many older people, especially in Britain, don't like it. (Ironically, pedants who are the first to complain when a semantic distinction is lost - such as the distinction between uninterested and disinterested - are the first to complain when a fresh semantic distinction appears in the language.) And because good has taken on this colloquial resonance when used adverbially, it has made some people sensitive about its use. They may even sense a parallel with such criticized expressions as go slow, where more formal usage requires go slowly. So they look for a more formal alternative expression, and find well available and already being used in a general sense of 'successful'. Indeed, locutions such as go well and do well date from Anglo-Saxon times, actually predating the 'sound in health' sense by a few centuries. So I don't find it at all surprising that people are beginning to say and write It looks well on you, and so on, and would expect it to become more common as time goes by.

On insulting Brits

2010-08-12T19:03:00.002Z

Radio 4's 'PM' programme get in touch today to ask for a comment about insult language. Apparently an Iranian minister has described the British as 'not human' and 'a bunch of thick people', eliciting an angry response from our ambassador out there. What did I think about it?

My first thought was that the minister wasn't trying. What an unimaginative pair of insults! The English language has an excellent insult record. He would have done better to look up some Early Scots examples of flyting (insult exchanges) or taken some lines from Shakespeare. He could have used one of those online Shakespeare insult generators which combine real examples into new strings, such as 'villainous reeling-ripe deformed clapper-clawed hornbeasts'. That would have been much more impressive.

I find political insults interesting as an illustration of language change. They invariably reflect situations of conflict or unequal power relations between peoples (as when colonial masters describe those they have subjugated or indigenous majorities talk about immigrant minorities). What intrigues me is their longevity, or lack of it. Most are likely to be temporary, going out of use when political relations change, but some gain a permanent place in the language. Many of the following examples are either unknown today or have lost their sting. A few are still with us, with usage wavering depending on the sensitivities of the users to political correctness.

The 17th-century conflicts with the Dutch were the original stimulus for dozens of expressions, such as a Dutch widow (a prostitute), a Dutch auction (where the prices are initially high), a Dutch reckoning (a lump sum without a detailed breakdown), a Dutch concert (several tunes played together), a Dutch bargain (made in drink), and a Dutch feast (where the host gets drunk before the guests do). I could go on - Dutch courage, double Dutch, Dutch comfort... Similar lists could be compiled about the Germans, the French, and so on, depending on the point in history when they were enemies. Analogous expressions circulated about the English in the other languages, of course.

But one generations's insults can be the next generation's orthodoxy. In the 17th century, a Tory was a really offensive term - a type of Irish bandit or outlaw. The name came to be applied to those who in 1679-80 supported the exclusion of a Catholic James to the English throne. And gradually it entered the political mainstream. Of course, depending on your political allegiance, you might still consider it an insult.

(If you're thinking of listening to the item, don't bother. It was dropped, as a dead donkey. That's often the way, with newsy language topics. They tend to be placed at the very end of a programme, viewed as light-hearted pieces whose role is to fill a minute or two after the 'serious' items are over. They are therefore prime candidates for being cut, when other items over-run or something more important crops up. For every one piece I've done on the radio, another has been dropped in this way.)

On the distant future

2010-08-04T14:39:00.002Z

A correspondent writes to ask if the English present progressive with future meaning can be used to talk about the distant future. As an example, he cites his father getting retired ten years from now. Can he say: 'I’m setting up my own business when I get retired'?

All the standard accounts stress the imminence of the future event, when using this tense form. Quirk et al (§4.44) do give a non-imminent example:

I'm leaving the university in two years' time.

They stress the need to have the more distant time explained in the context (e.g. when I've finished my studies). But the notion of imminence applies here too. To say I'll be leaving the university in two years' time is a straightforward statement about a future event. To turn this into the present suggests that the speaker sees this event as having some sort of current relevance. The notion of 'current relevance' is usually found with reference to the meaning of the present perfect; but it applies here too.

How to define this relevance? The critical point is that the use of the present progressive implies an element of forward planning. Quirk et al describe it thus: 'future arising from present arrangement, plan, or programme'. It refers to actions brough about by human endeavour. So it isn't possible to say The grass is growing next week. And to say He's dying next week could only refer to an execution. Rodney Huddleston makes a similar point about this form, in the Cambridge Grammar (§4.2.4): 'the future is determinable from the state of the world now'. In other words, there's always an element of scheduling.

So, with these considerations in mind, there's nothing at all wrong with my correspondent's example. The planning element is very much in the forefront of his father's mind.

On long time no see

2010-07-22T17:36:00.002Z

A correspondent, having encountered the idiom long time no see, writes to ask what its origin is and if there are any more like it in English.

Nobody knows exactly where it comes from. Earliest reference in the OED is 1900, the context indicating a simplified English being used in conversation with American Indians. It probably caught on through cowboy movies. Certainly it was in US usage long before it arrived in British English. But the same pidgin expression has been noted in several other contact situations, such as Chinese/English, so it may have multiple origins.

Any more like it? Well it's rare to find pidginized expressions becoming part of standard English idiom, but it's not alone. For a start, there's the analogous long time no hear. Then there's the fictitious me Tarzan, you Jane - 'fictitious' as it doesn't actually turn up in the Tarzan books. And this one has a clearly Eastern source: softly, softly, catchee monkey (also heard as slowly, slowly...). I can think of a few others:

monkey see, monkey do
dog eat dog
no can do

and maybe also no go, as in a no-go situation. Any more?

How unusual are these constructions? They're not so far away from the traditional two-part elliptical constructions often heard in proverbial utterances, and still being created today. Some examples:

the more, the merrier
once bitten, twice shy
out of sight, out of mind
penny wise, pound foolish
more haste, less speed
like father, like son
first come, first served
here today, gone tomorrow
waste not, want not
no pain, no gain
garbage in, garbage out

Nor are they far away from those colloquial expressions where the impact relies greatly on ellipsis, such as:

been there, done that
hail fellow well met
twenty-four seven
how come?
yah boo sucks

These can be the stuff of grammatical nightmares.

On antinyms

2010-07-14T20:02:00.002Z

I've been asked a couple of times what one calls a situation where a word is used to mean the opposite of what it normally means. I've usually interpreted the question to be about euphemisms, where the aim is to obscure or hide a reality. When people talk about 'passing away' instead of 'dying', or 'collateral damage' instead of 'war casualties', the reality stays the same, but the word alters. But an experience this week has made me think that my correspondents might have had in mind a different category of usage, where the word stays the same but the reality alters - and, moreover, alters to the extent of becoming the opposite of what it originally meant.

My wife and I returned from a trip abroad this week, flying Club World on British Airways. This allows one's luggage to be given a bright orange PRIORITY label, which means that it should be among the first bags to be offloaded at the destination. We arrived at Terminal 5 in Heathrow and waited for our bag. The luggage started to arrive, with priority labels randomly dispersed among the items. The term priority was beginning to lose its meaning, and I'd encountered this many times before. But this time it was different. Regular readers of this blog will recall a previous post about new words, one of which is bagonizing. We bagonized. All other passengers came, took up their bags and went, until eventually we were the only ones left at the carousel. We were just about to leave and file a complaint about a lost bag when, lo, alone and looking rather dejected, our bag stumbled through the portal, waving its PRIORITY label triumphantly. So there we have my example: this was as far away from priority as it was possible to get. The word was the same, but the reality was the opposite. For this linguistic relief, much thanks.

What to call such a phenomenon? I'm inclined to coin a term: antinyms. This was, I hope, a nonce-antinym - though others have now told me of similar experiences. They are of course the life-blood of satirical books, of the kind made famous by Andrew Bierce's Devil's Dictionary, such as apologise 'to lay the foundation for future offence'. I have a feeling there is an airline glossary just waiting to be written.

So: antinym - a word whose referent becomes the opposite of its original sense. There are many examples of this happening over long periods of time - such as wicked or wonder moving from 'bad' meanings to 'good' meanings. What I'm wondering is how often this sort of thing occurs synchronically. Maybe synchronic antinyms only occur in contexts of bad vs good practice or incorrect data. The railway station sign that says the 8.32 is 'on time' when it is now 8.40. The electronic road sign that says 'congestion' when there is congestion no longer. Such phenomena are transient, yet they recur to the extent of becoming expected events. I'd be interested to see some more examples.

On since/ago

2010-07-06T09:40:00.002Z

A correspondent writes to ask whether it is possible to use sentences like I've been studying English since four years ago and Since three years ago, I've had several accidents.

It must be possible. The question wouldn't be coming up at all if people weren't being heard to use such sentences. What has happened, of course, is that there is a clash between the usage and the rule that is widely taught in grammar books.

The rule says that since and ago are incompatible, because since refers to an event that has current relevance whereas ago refers to a completed event in the past. Another way of putting it is when teachers say that ago is looking from the present towards the past, whereas since is looking from the past towards the present. There appears to be a clash of logic: people can't be doing the two things in the same sentence, goes the argument.

But of course they can. It's the same issue that arose when I discussed ago with present perfect have in an earlier post. It's perfectly possible to switch or conflate different points of view in a single sentence, especially in speech. And people have been doing this with since/ago for ages, both in phrases and clauses. In As You Like It (2.7.24) we hear Jacques reporting Touchstone saying 'Tis but an hour ago since it was nine'. In 1633, a character in John Ford's play The Broken Heart (3.5.63) says 'Tis long agone since first I broke my heart'. There's also a parallelism between ago and since which dates from the Middle Ages. Here's an example recorded in the OED, from Caxton (1489): 'Long time since... shee fell sick and died'.

The usage isn't as illogical as traditional grammars suggest. The logic goes something like this:

I haven't seen John since 2009.
2009 is a year ago.
Therefore, I haven't seen John since a year ago.

And this is how we most commonly hear the usage.

Every day, since a year ago today, I've been writing in my diary...
I haven't been this happy since a year ago.
Retail sales figures show consumer spending trend at highest since a year ago.
Costs have halved since a year ago.

There are over 2 million hits for 'since a year ago' on Google, several in quite formal written contexts, such as financial reporting. So, I have to conclude that there are two rules in English relating to ago and since, not one:

A
I want to say that a completed event in the past, expressed through ago, has no current relevance: I don't use since.

B
I want to say that a completed event in the past, expressed through ago, does still has current relevance: I do use since

On needed words

2010-06-28T08:36:00.002Z

A guest appearance on BBC Radio 4's 'Saturday Live' last week has initiated a flurry of correspondence, and the only place to focus it seems to be this blog. Once again it is the ludic propensity of language that has grabbed the popular imagination - in the same way that the 'foreign catch-phrases' theme (see my last post) has done.

As always, it is a passing remark that sparks the interest. The presenter asked me whether there were lost words in the language that ought to be resuscitated. That brought to mind the examples I encountered when I was editing an edition of Dr Johnson's Dictionary a few years ago, so I mentioned one: fopdoodle, meaning a foolish dandy, or prig. Well, everyone thought it was a wonderful word - even the continuity announcer at the end of the programme, who described the producer as a fopdoodle.

And one thing leads to another. Inevitably, it was 'words that the English language needs that we don't currently have'. This is a very familiar one, for me. When I was doing English Now back in the 80s this proved to be the most popular competition of all. There was no shortage of suggestions then - I put a selection into my Language Play - and it seems there is no shortage today. Of all the suggestions in those days, the one I thought the language most needed was the word which describes my state of mind when waiting for my luggage to appear on the airport carousel. Everyone else's turns up straight away. So, one is - 'bagonizing', to my mind.

Do such words ever get into the dictionary? Some such spontaneous creations have - such as blurb, invented during a dinner party. And bagonize has 600 entries in Google now! So, who knows?

Anyway, the point of this post is to offer a location for anyone whose urge to create a new word in a language (not just English) is uncontrollable. Already my email inbox has a flood. Here's one, to illustrate. Adrian writes to say 'When I wake up in the morning my hair sometimes points upwards in a curled peak as in the cartoons of a boy detective. I have realised I suffer from tintinnitis'.

On foreign ludicity

2010-05-30T11:35:00.003Z

A correspondent from the US has sent me the list of winners in a recent New York Magazine contest in which you had to take a well-known expression in a foreign language, change a single letter, and provide a definition for the new expression. A few years ago, the Washington Post did a similar thing for English words, which I reported in my Language Play. It's good to see ludic linguistic ingenuity alive and well, and engaging with foreign languages - though I wonder, in this day and age, what proportion of the population will get the jokes.

Here's my top ten selection from the winners.

HARLEZ-VOUS FRANCAIS
Can you drive a French motorcycle?

EX POST FUCTO
Lost in the mail

VENI, VIPI, VICI
I came, I'm a very important person, I conquered

RIGOR MORRIS
The cat is dead

RESPONDEZ S'IL VOUS PLAID
Honk if you're Scottish

LE ROI EST MORT. JIVE LE ROI
The king is dead. No kidding.

PRO BOZO PUBLICO
Support your local clown

FELIX NAVIDAD
Our cat has a boat

HASTE CUISINE
Fast French food

E PLURIBUS ANUM
Out of any group, there's always one asshole

On plural adjectives

2010-05-18T18:38:00.002Z

A correspondent writes to ask why we say a drinks cabinet and not a drink cabinet, given that people use the singular form of nouns when they function as adjectives - a price list, a shoe box, and so on - even if the entities involved are more than one. He adds: 'As a teacher, I have always taught the rule that there are no plural adjectives in English - the big men, the young ladies, etc. - and therefore when a noun acts as an adjective it should not take an s.'

It's true that attributive nouns are normally neutral with respect to number; so we say Toothpaste protects against tooth decay, even though we're talking about all our teeth, I sat in an armchair, even though the chair has two arms, and a five-pound note, a three-year-old child, and so on, even though in postmodifying position the expressions would be plural - a child of three years, a note worth five pounds. But there are several kinds of exception, which are very common in British English and unusual in American English.

When people talk about a concept that is an institution or organization, the tendency is to keep the plural form, and this is especially so when there's a semantic contrast with the singular form:

an examinations committee
a prints and drawings exhibition
the heavy chemicals industry
the Obscene Publications Act
an arts degree [vs an art degree]
a careers administrator [someone who looks after careers in an institution] vs a career administrator [someone who has gone in for administration as a career]

The plural is also likely when there's a contrast between generic ('kinds of') and specific meanings. This is where drinks comes in, for a drinks cabinet means 'a cabinet in which various kinds of drink are to be found'. Other examples are entertainments listing and savings bank. And nouns which don't have a singular (in a particular sense) keep their ending:

clothes basket
arms race
Commons decision
honours degree
mains adaptor
contents list

Stylistic factors are also involved. Newspaper headlines in particular like to use adjectives attributively, as it saves space. So we encounter such headlines as:

Strikes issue back on the table
Recordings compromise reached

There's quite a bit of individual variation, though:

grassroot(s) level
saving(s) account
system(s) analyst
wage(s) freeze
communication(s) network
archive(s) administrator

And, actually, drinks cabinet is a further example, with some firms advertising drink cabinets these days (as a Google search quickly shows). It's an interesting area of language change, especially with American English usage influencing British English.

On useful tautology

2010-05-16T09:13:00.001Z

A correspondent from the Guardian has asked what is to be made of David Cameron's reported comment that 'Our success will be the measure of our success' - also reported as 'This will succeed through its success'. Reporters have picked on this, and other remarks such as 'All the questions were rather subjecty subjects', as evidence of a new linguistic style, dubbed 'Cameronisms'. In fact, there's nothing new about them at all.

Let's take the 'success' example first. Tautology is usually thought of as something to be avoided. But there are occasions when saying the same thing twice actually has a purpose. We need to 'state the obvious', and in so doing, say something that is not obvious at all. If I return from a restaurant, and somebody asks me what the food was like, and I say 'You get what you get', that is saying more than what the words suggest. The food was pretty ordinary. There are dozens of cases like this.

It's as long as it's long.
It takes what it takes.
A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do.
I'll be ready when I'm ready [and not before!]

Why do we say such things? The usual intention is to halt a dialogue. The speaker doesn't want to go into any further detail. There's no more to be said.

Depending on the context, these remarks can be interpreted in various ways (which in linguistics would be part of the subject of pragmatics). They could be an avoidance strategy: 'I don't want to go into this any further'. They could be an assertive strategy: 'Don't ask me pointless questions when I've got a job to do'. And there are other possibilities. A lot depends on the tone of voice in which the words are said.

We learn the value of tautology at an early age. Children encounter it all the time.

'Why is it time for bed, mummy?' 'Because it's time for bed.'
The beanstalk was as big as big could be.

The success example reminds me a little of the kind of word-class conversion which is such an important part of English grammar, and which is an important feature of Shakespeare's style. 'Grace me no grace, nor uncle me no uncle', says the Duke of York to Bolingbroke (in Richard II). As the Guardian reporter put it, rather cheekily, Cameron may have more in common with Shakespeare than George Bush. I'd rather say that what Cameron is doing here is echoing a proverbial strand of the language: 'Nothing succeeds like success' - one success will lead to another.

Nor is there anything new about the formation subjecty. A -y suffix means 'having the qualities of' the noun to which it is added, or 'full of' the noun. Rainy and wintry date from Anglo-Saxon times. Among dozens of later examples we find milky, leafy, and noisy. Modern coinages include doggy and horsy. Some are awkward: skyey, treey. Again, there are echoes of Shakespeare, who liked to coin words such as vasty, steepy, and plumpy.

So, a 'subjecty subject' would be a subject that is characterized by a recognized subject-matter, or one that has already been explored to the full, or one that requires more exposition than there is currently time to go into, or other such meanings. We'd have to explore the context to determine exactly what Cameron meant. But, whatever he meant, the novelty of the phrase may guarantee it a place in the catch-phrases of the next decade - much as Donald Rumsfeld's 'known unknowns' did for him a few years ago.

On the M Quarto of Macbeth

2010-04-23T16:57:00.003Z

Following the amazing discovery of the H Quarto of Hamlet (see the post for 21 August 2007), I now use the occasion of Shakespeare's birthday to reveal another startling find: fragments of the M Quarto of Macbeth, which were reported at the annual meeting of IATEFL in Harrogate earlier this month. Two fragments of what seems to have been called Macbeth's Murderous Mayhem have so far been discovered - the opening witches scene, and the speech which begins 'Is this a dagger that I see before me...'.

Act 1, Scene 1
Enter magical menage-a-trois
Magus 1: More meetings, magic-mates,
Maybe mid meteorological monsoons?
Magus 2: Moment melee-muddle's managed,
Military match mediated.
Magus 3: Momentarily.
Magus 1: Mise-en-scene?
Magus 2: Moorland.
Magus 3: Meet Macbeth.
Magus 1: Metamorphosing, Mousy-Malkin.
Magus 2: Magician-mate murmers.
Magus 3: Minute!
All: Marvels manifest malodorousness, malodorousness manifests marvels;
Meander midst mist, mucky medium.

Act 2 scene 1

Enter Macbeth
Machete meeting me?
Midpoint marking my mitt? Manipulate...
Merde! Missed! Mirage maintaining mien.
Maybe mortiferous manifestation masterable?
More merde! Misapprehension, mistake,
Molten medulla manifesting mental mirage.
Mm? Marshall'st me? Motivating my movements?
Mamma mia. Mistaken madness. Mighty misconception!
Macabre monarch-murder makes me muse.
Mistrust melodramatic mirage.
My mind, make me militant, martial.
Mucho manslaughter, mortal massacre.
Bell rings
Move, Macbeth. Melody manoeuvres me.
Mishear, Monarch. Mayday, Mayday!
Maybe marvellous merriment, maybe miserable moan.
Make my month, monc!

On being orient(at)ed

2010-04-18T14:42:00.002Z

A correspondent writes to ask if it should be disoriented or disorientated.

The answer partly depends on where you live. If you're American, you're in no doubt that it must be the shorter form; and according to Pam Peters (in her Cambridge Guide to English Usage) the same preference is found in Canada and Australia. Some US style guides go so far as to say that orientate is simply incorrect. That's going too far, as British English uses both, with a noticeable preference for the longer form. However, overall (globally speaking), the dominance of the longer form is evident: Google has orient 65 million vs 4 million, disorient 1.2 million vs 0.2 million.

The usage issue is relatively recent. For quite a while there was only the shorter form: the OED gives a first recorded usage for disorient in 1655, and for orient in 1728. The first recorded use of the longer forms is 1704 (for disorientate) and 1848 (for orientate). The new verb probably arose as a result of the associated nouns. Orientation (1839) and orientator (1844) preceded orientate, and the new verb usage would have been reinforced by the arrival of disorientation (1860). Certainly, by the end of the 19th century both verb forms were available.

Fowler has no separate entry on either word in his Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926). We might think he would favour orient, because in his entry on 'Long Variants', he advises the use of shorter alternatives, as in prevent(at)ive, cultiv(at)able. On the other hand, in The King's English, orient is criticised as a 'Gallicism'. In his revision of Fowler's Dictionary (1965), Ernest Gowers (thinking of British English) suggests that orientate 'is likely to prevail in the common figurative use', i.e. with reference to goals rather than physical direction. This is an important distinction. We are more likely to say The course is orientated towards linguistics than The basilica is orientated towards the east.

On speaking music

2010-04-18T11:49:00.002Z

A correspondent writes to ask if singing is ever used in speech. She isn't thinking of intonation, sometimes described in a metaphorical way as the musical property of speech - ‘metaphorical’, of course, because our voices don't need to be tuned to concert pitch before we begin a conversation. She has in mind something rather less obvious - musical quotations or catch-phrases, where a musical extract is given a generalized linguistic interpretation.

Yes, there are instances. I've heard people sometimes say Hallejuah! when a satisfactory outcome has been achieved, but instead of saying it they sing it as the opening bars of the chorus from Handel's Messiah. I can't think of many like that. Rather more common is the vocal rendition of orchestral fragments. A contemporary example is the theme from Jaws. The jocular expression of an approaching dangerous social situation is often conveyed by people sounding out its ominous low-pitched glissando quavers. It forms part of a dialogue that is otherwise speech, and it's meant to be judged by the same standards. Nobody thinks of it as an attempt to artistically render the original musical score.

I've collected several examples of this kind in conversational settings: the theme from the Twilight Zone, Dr Who, Dragnet, the shower-room scene in Psycho, Laurel and Hardy’s clumsy walk music, the riff in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and the opening motif of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. The extract is usually highly stereotyped and brief. It may be just a couple of notes. Someone who arrives in a room with something special to show may accompany it with ‘Ta-raa’, or the fanfare from a racecourse. I've heard people use the whistled motif from Clint Eastwood’s Spaghetti Western films and the chase music from a Keystone Kops film. Devotees of The Prisoner cult TV series (the original one, not the Hollywood remake) introduce its brief musical motifs into their speech to the point of boredom. TV ads can prompt the use of a tune. I'd be interested to hear of other cases.

What is linguistically interesting is that some of these excerpts make sense even if the participants have never encountered (or have forgotten) the original version. The Jaws theme, for example, has taken on a life of its own - a musical idiom expressing mock danger. In such cases, the semantic interpretation is clear. On the other hand, in cases such as the Dr Who theme, the function seems to be pragmatic rather than semantic - to build rapport among people who have shared a cultural experience. Some of the examples may be very transient, therefore, and (as in the case of TV ads) may not make sense outside of the regional setting in which they were first heard.

Phoneticians have problems with these things. They aren't easy to transcribe, not least because they use an absolute musical scale, whereas speech uses a relativistic scale. It doesn't make sense to think of people as speaking 'out of tune' (though some prosodic disorders in speech pathology might aptly be described in that way). Try transcribing the theme from Jaws, and you'll see the problem straight away.

And now for something completely different

2010-04-02T08:36:00.002Z

A correspondent writes: 'I was wondering what your thoughts are regarding beginning sentences with the coordinating conjunction and. I see it being used more and more regularly in the media and in texts. As an English Language teacher I am wondering if I should just accept it? I was always taught never to start a sentence with this word. Am I being too 'prescriptive'?'

Well, yes, in a word. But 'used more and more regularly?' Not a bit. It's always been used in that way, from the very beginning of the language. It's one of the most noticeable features of Old English. We find sentences beginning with and in Chaucer, Shakespeare, the King James Bible, Macaulay, and in every major writer. Take this sequence from the opening chapter of King James:

1:1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
1:2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
1:3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
1:4 And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
1:5 And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.

It goes on like that. All but two of the verses in the first chapter of Genesis begin with And.

So where on earth did the distaste of initial and come from? It was during the 19th century, when some schoolteachers took against the practice of beginning a sentence with a word like but or and, presumably because they noticed the way young children often overused them. It's certainly a common feature of early story-writing style, because the children are replicating in their writing the style of everyday spoken narrative, which is full of ands. But instead of gently weaning the children away from overuse, the teachers banned the usage altogether! Generations of children were taught they should 'never' begin a sentence with a conjunction. Some evidently still are.

There was never any authority behind this condemnation. It isn't one of the rules laid down by the first prescriptive grammarians. Indeed, one of those grammarians, Bishop Lowth, uses dozens of examples of sentences beginning with and. Henry Fowler, in his famous Dictionary of Modern English Usage, went so far as to call it a 'superstition'. He was right. Joining sentences in this way has been part of the grammatical fabric of the language from the very beginning.

On having done something yesterday

2010-03-23T14:18:00.002Z

An Australian correspondent writes to say that he's encountered sentences like I have been to the cinema yesterday which, he says, would be 'completely out in British English'. It seems like a natural development, he adds, but asks: 'isn't this against the "rules" of simplicity, which languages are so keen to comply with? Isn't it more "economical" to use simple structures than complex ones and aren't languages prone to such economy?'

I don't think economy has anything to do with it. Simplicity is only one factor in promoting language change, and is not always the determining factor. Issues of identity and clarity, for example, can motivate the maintenance of a more complex construction.

'Completely out' in British English? Not so. I use this kind of construction regularly. All that has happened is that the aspect has shifted, which is perfectly normal in spontaneous speech. At the beginning of the sentence, the notion of current relevance is in the forefront of the speaker's mind; at the end of the sentence, it isn't, thus allowing the use of such adverbs as yesterday. One can even renew the current relevance meaning, as in a response to Have you been in touch with John about what he owes me? It could begin: Yes, I've spoken to John yesterday, and ... Now, what will come next? I've told him what you said or I told him what you said? It all depends on whether the have spoken bit is in the forefront of our mind (in which case we'll probably stay with the present perfect) or whether the yesterday bit is (in which case we'll probably switch to past).

All this is for spontaneous colloquial speech, of course, where sudden changes of thought are normal, but I think people are more likely to follow the traditional constraint in formal speech and in writing. I would myself. But even in everyday speech a lot depends on the semantics of the adverbial.

I've seen him yesterday.
I've seen him a day ago.
I've seen him a week ago.
I've seen him six months ago.
I've seen him last year.
I've seen him 10 years ago.

For me, these are increasingly unacceptable because increasing strain is being placed on the notion of current relevance.

The system does seem to be slowly changing. Or perhaps I should say 'reverting', for there are examples of ago with a present perfect in Middle English -in Chaucer, for instance. And there's probably some pressure coming from the modal construction (I should have done it yesterday).

On the dangers of Facebook

2010-03-19T09:54:00.002Z

A correspondent writes to ask if linguistics has anything to offer in relation to the recent Facebook paedophile scandal and all the current discussion about panic buttons.

Of course it does. Indeed, the point has already come up on this blog, when I was talking about internet applications a few years ago (March 2007). In 2003 I developed an application called Chatsafe, using a technology I call a sense engine, which carried out a linguistic analysis of a conversation in order to identify dangerous or sensitive content. It worked fine. It processed a conversation in real time, and as dangerous content built up it would warn the user (or the user's parents) that there was a potential problem. The system needed a lot of testing, using real paedophile conversations, and as it's virtually impossible to get this kind of research done safely without clearance, I approached the Home Office. They said they'd get back to me but didn't. I approached a UK university department that specializes in such things and had a meeting with one of the researchers. No subsequent interest. I sent the idea to a mobile phone company after a scandal there. No response. A couple of years ago I sent it to a US child protection conference. Never heard anything further. I had hoped that someone somewhere would be following up the leads, but the Facebook disaster suggests not. I'd send it to Facebook now if I could work out how, but they hide their senior management contact procedure very well.

It's all very well offering a panic button, but how do you activate it? It's not enough to leave it up to the individual recipient, who may not be aware of a problem until it's too late. One needs an independent method. And as it's impossible for all conversations to be checked manually, it has to be done automatically.

Maybe that lass would be alive now if a system like Chatsafe had been used. That's why I'm writing this post. Maybe someone out there knows how to alert the social networking agencies to the relevance of a linguistic approach. It hasn't been for want of trying, on my part, and why the organizations most closely involved in this awful subject are ignoring the potential that linguistics has to offer is quite beyond me.

On a forthcoming exhibition

2010-03-10T10:58:00.002Z

A correspondent, having noticed February bloglessness, asks if I am still alive. Yes, but a combination of travelling and deadline has kept me out of the blogosphere for a while. The reason for the deadline is interesting, though, and readers of this blog might like an early alert to a forthcoming exciting event.

The British Library is presenting its first English language exhibition later this year. It will run from mid-November to early April. In fact, I don't know of any similar exhibition anywhere else in the world. This seems to be a genuine first.

'Similar' is the operative word. How could anything be 'similar' to the BL? I've been helping to curate the exhibition, and am putting together the book which will accompany it (hence the deadline), and one of the amazing perks has been the chance to go deep inside the Library, visiting areas that one normally never gets a chance to see. And seeing at first hand what an extraordinary collection it houses. The collections in the lower floor strongrooms seem to go on for ever - boxes, books, and box files of all shapes and sizes containing most of what you've ever heard of in British literary history.

It became surreal after a while. What did I think should be in the exhibition and the book? I reflected on all the major literary and linguistic moments in the history of the English language, such as the ones I talk about in The Stories of English - Beowulf, Aelfric's Colloquy, Caxton, Chaucer, Paston letters, Tyndale, First Folio... - and they are all there. I prepare a wish-list with one of the brilliant BL staff, and he makes arrangements for a visit to the relevant collection. There I meet the curator, who seems to know where everything is. 'You don't also happen to have...?' 'Oh yes that's over here somewhere...' and he is there unerringly. Moreover, he is able to take me through an old text with an awareness that saves huge amounts of time. Many early manuscripts have been bound into huge volumes, and he knows exactly where the particular text I'm interested in (such as the medieval poem 'The Owl and the Nightingale') is located. He also makes suggestions about pages of particular interest - pages which, as far as I know, have never been seen in public before. Several of these will be in the exhibition and the book.

Curators love a challenge. See a First Folio of Shakespeare? Bo-ring. A first edition of Caxton? Oh come on, ask me something difficult. All right, then, the unique copy of Tyndale's fragmentary bible, the one that survived the fires that burned all the others? That required a journey into the huge middle tower of the BL containing the King's Library (of George III), which is what visitors to the library see in front of them when they enter the building. But it was there, fragile, silent, open to view. I like to think I have molecules of some of these books on my hands still. I don't want to wash them off.

It's not just the famous items that are of interest, of course. The BL has amazing collections of ephemera, such as the Evanion collection of 19th century posters and advertisements. People sometimes forget that these are just as important, as a guide to linguistic history, as are the classical works of literature. They also have great collections of regional and world literary history, and, with such topics as dialects and global English important themes of the exhibition, it was important to explore some of those resources too.

The BL doesn't have everything. Cawdrey's 1604 Table Alphabeticall, the first English dictionary, is in the Bodleian at Oxford. But it will be borrowed to be a part of this exhibition. In some cases, though, borrowing isn't possible. The Exeter Book, which contains so much Anglo-Saxon material, has to remain safely in Exeter. But at least I'll be able to use a photograph of a page in the book. And a good-sized picture, too. That's the point of the book, to provide full-colour large illustrations of these iconic works, so that they can be read and used in a practical way by those wanting to really read them, or to study them as part of a course in the history of the language. I never saw pictures of most of the texts I was studying, when I was an undergraduate. Just the occasional black-and-white example, or a thumbnail size picture. I could only imagine what an Anglo-Saxon Chronicle really looked like. Or all the faces of the Franks Casket. Or a Paston letter. Things can be different today. There'll be an online presence too, whose character is still being decided.

English language scholars, students, and enthusiasts - which means most people - will be indebted to the British Library for its initiative in developing this exhibition. Yet I understand the Library is soon going to suffer from the same crazy preoccupation with cuts that is devastating the universities right now. Staff are going to go and services chopped. Any government that allows this to happen to a library service of such huge public significance has, to my mind, undoubtedly lost its way.

On linguistic dreams

2010-01-24T15:44:00.002Z

A correspondent writes to tell me of a linguistic dream he just had. As follows:

'I had a dream the other night with Significant Linguistic Content. It started out as the standard nightmare (mercifully infrequent these days) that I was teaching in a secondary school, as was the case long ago. But things improved and softened: the kiddies (11-year-olds, I’d say) were nice, and their music teacher, a fiftysomething German lady, came in and asked me would I mind if they practised the song that they were working on. I assented readily, and they sang a couple of verses of a song in German, about which I can remember nothing save that it was very sweetly done. I thought they deserved complimenting and encouraging, so I said to them “Ihr singet sehr gut auf Deutsch”.
I should explain that my German is far from good (I came to it very late), but they seemed to understand, and smiled and giggled pleasedly. I followed that up with “Wie heißt das Gesang?”.
Quick as a flash, the music teacher corrected me. “Der Gesang”, she said, entirely amicably; and I remember nothing after that.
Now, I was under the impression that German nouns that start with Ge- were uniformly neuter, so when I woke up I thought I’d better check it out in a dictionary; and, blow me, it is der Gesang. Now, what I can’t understand is how it’s possible to dream a person who knows the rules of a language better than one does oneself! Any thoughts?'

Not really - which is why a blog post might help. The only thing I can think of is that my correspondent must have encountered this correction before, and it impressed him at the time (as it did in his dream), and he's now forgotten all about it.

It's certainly possible to forget whole chunks of one's earlier linguistic life. I remember meeting an aphasic patient in his 70s who had lost his English very largely but who was able to produce some words in a foreign language. He himself denied he knew any of this language, and his wife had never heard him speak it, nor had they ever been to a country where it was spoken. But it eventually transpired he had lived in such a country for a while as a young child. And there was an interesting paper in the Journal of Child Language last year suggesting that some components of early childhood language memory can remain intact despite many years of disuse.

Sad to say, I don't recall ever having had a linguistically interesting dream. I can't be trying. But I'd like to hear of any others. I can't think of anything in the literature on this topic. Do phoneticians dream in accents? Do grammarians dream grammatically? Do lexicographers dream alphabetically? It's a whole new research domain: dreamlinguistics.

There's a thought. All those students who fell asleep in my lectures, over the years. Maybe they were doing research all the time.

And maybe that's what Chomsky's 'sleeping furiously' really meant.

On language and colic

2010-01-16T09:57:00.003Z

A correspondent writes to ask whether singing to her baby will help when it's colicky.

The power of song over babies has long been recognized. The word lullaby has been in the English language since the Middle Ages - one of several, such as rockaby and hushaby, which show how generations of mothers and caretakers have helped their children fall asleep through music.

But music has greater power than this. As any adult knows, music has the power to engage all the emotions - from excitement to relaxation, from tears to laughter. Its power to calm is well recognized. The dramatist William Congreve summed it up in a famous quotation: 'Music hath charms to soothe a savage breast, to soften rocks, or bend a knotted oak'. But if the breast of adults, then why not the tummies of children?

Why does music have such a power over us? And why, in particular, does it have such an influence on tiny babies? A huge amount of research in infant perception over the past few decades has begun to reveal the answers. And it begins before birth, in the womb.

The womb is actually quite a noisy environment, and from around 30 weeks gestation the ears of the foetus are sufficiently well formed to enable it to hear what is going on. Indeed, the tiny little bones inside our ears, which transmit sound to our brain, are already fully formed by the time we are born. During some types of gynaecological examination, researchers have inserted a tiny microphone, called a hydrophone, into the uterus, enabling them to hear what the foetus can hear. And what the foetus hears is a great deal of background noise - the mother's heartbeat, the blood sloshing around the arteries, tummy and intestine rumbles, voices and loud noises from outside - and, above all, the mother's voice resonating through her tissues, bones, and fluids. The foetus is asleep a lot of the time, but when awake, its heart rate slows when the mother is speaking - the first evidence of a calming response.

It can't hear everything perfectly, of course. The effect is a bit like listening to a voice with cotton wool in our ears. The voice sounds distant and muffled. But there are certain things the foetus can hear very clearly. It can hear the intonation, or melody, of the mother's voice, and it can hear the loudness and rhythm of her speech. Sound and movement combine: when she laughs, the foetus can be seen to bounce around.

Once the baby is born, people have performed experiments which demonstrate just how much the foetus has heard. Researchers monitor the baby's heart-rate, the amount of cortisol in its saliva, the way it turns its head, the length of time it looks in a certain direction, or the rate at which it sucks on a special kind of nipple. The idea is that if a baby recognizes something, or is specially interested in something, then its heart-rate or saliva cortisol content will alter, or it will turn its head towards a stimulus, or it will look at a stimulus for longer, or it will suck faster.

And this is the sort of thing they've found. Newborn babies, even just a day old, prefer their mother's voice to that of a stranger. The show more interest when hearing their native language as opposed to a foreign language. And if the mother has told the foetus a particular story, during her pregnancy, they show a preference to that compared with an unfamiliar story.

The effect of music emerges too. One study played the same tune to a group of mothers every day throughout pregnancy; another group of mothers didn't hear the tune. When all the babies were born, the tune was played to them. The changes in heart-rate, movement, and general alertness of the 'musical' babies showed clearly that they recognized the tune. To check that it wasn't just a general response to music, the researchers played the babies a different tune, but they didn't react to it. Nor did they react to it when they heard the same tune played backwards!

There seems to be something special about the music of the voice. From the moment the baby is born, the mother - and other caretakers too - start talking to the baby in an unusual manner. That's what we call 'babytalk'. One of its most noticeable features is the way the voice ascends and descends throughout its whole pitch range - almost like singing in speech. And the exaggerated tones stay throughout the first year of life. The mother's voice is higher in pitch, and she speaks more slowly, when addressing the baby than when talking to others, and she is emotionally much more expressive. The effects can be clearly heard when playing simple games, such as peep-bo or round-and-round-the-garden. Games like this also draw attention to the importance of sensory reinforcement - sound, vision, touch, and movement all combine to create the maximum effect - 'and TICKLE him under there!!!'

Not surprisingly, then, the first features of the mother's language that the baby learns to reproduce are its intonation and rhythm. If we record babies' early vocalizations, at around a month or so of age, we cannot tell which language they are learning. Nor can we tell from their cooing or babbling. But at around 9 months the vocalizations start to sound 'shaped', and it's possible to distinguish babies who are learning English from those learning French from those learning Chinese, and so on. This is long before they learn any words, so what is it that we notice? The rhythm and intonation of the languages. The English baby is vocalizing with a 'tum-te-tum' rhythm. The French baby with a 'rat-a-tat-a-tat' rhythm. The Chinese baby with a sing-song rhythm. Why intonation and rhythm? It's no coincidence that these were the very features first perceived in the womb.

Melody, whether of speech or music, seems to be especially significant. Singing holds a special place in the emerging world of babies. They notice it. In one study, six-month-old infants were presented with pictures of their mother while she was singing and while she was speaking. They looked for longer at the singing one, and were less active while they did so, suggesting that they were paying more attention. Other studies show that infants can recognize melodies, even when they are presented at different pitch levels (sung higher or lower) or sung at different speeds. The melodic contour is the thing. Maternal singing, especially, is critical. It's different from normal singing, in that it is slower, higher in pitch, and emotionally more expressive - just like maternal speech.

Singing also simplifies vocal behaviour: words tend to be shorter, sounds are clearer and repeat more often, and they often rhyme. The value of repeated sounds and rhyme is well established, both for children's speech development and also later on in relation to reading. Repeated sounds are a major feature of babbling (babababa, dadadada); early words use them (mama, papa); and parents instinctively repeat syllables (doggie, bunny). Nursery rhymes work so well because they combine several effects - clear rhythm, repeated sounds, and rhyme. The effect of rhyme on babies can be measured from around 7 months. Primitive spontaneous singing can be observed in babies from around 9 to 12 months. When combined with vision, touch, and movement - as when telling a nursery rhyme while rocking a child in a cot or playing on a knee - the effect is extremely powerful. If the baby can see the singer, the effect is even more enhanced.

Maternal singing has a moderating effect on the emotional state of the baby. There are now many reports of music being used to calm sick babies. Music therapy is routine in many premature baby units. It seems to provide them with a safe and positive sensory experience. There is a bonus in that maternal singing seems to have a calming effect on the mothers too. Exploiting the melody and rhythm of song and speech would thus seem to be an ideal way of helping mothers to soothe their babies when need arises.

On the 800-word myth

2010-01-10T18:10:00.002Z

A Sunday Times correspondent rang up last week to ask what I thought about the claim made by Jean Gross (described as the new UK 'communications czar') that 'the average teenager uses just 800 words in daily communication'. It was one of those waste-of-time interviews, where I spoke to the reporter for about 20 minutes, explaining how simplistic statements of that kind are rubbish, and what the linguistic realities are, and got one sentence in the report for my pains. Plus an ignoring of all the issues. The report was headed 'Youngsters are using just 800 words in everyday speech', as if this was a fact. I'm already receiving emails asking whether this is true, and I expect more as the week proceeds. So this post is to try to save a lot of time by summarizing the issues. In short: it isn't true, and I would call it the biggest load of chicken-droppings... except that I've already used that line in this blog [the post about the 'millionth word in English' claim - also, incidentally, listed as a fact in this Sunday Times report. Heigh ho... :( ]

Nobody has developed a satisfactory methodology for establishing the whole of someone's spoken lexicon. It isn't enough to take a sample of written material, such as counting words in blogs, as that is only going to be a partial reflection of speech. Few people have tried to record the whole of someone's spoken output in a day (e.g. by attaching a radio microphone to them and recording everything they say). When this was done - for example, in a study of young children in the Journal of Child Language some years ago - the word totals were in the thousands.

People always understimate vocabulary size. How many words do you know? Most people have no idea, or think it's just a few thousand. A few years ago, I read a report which said that the average size of a Sun reader's vocabulary was 500 words. I got hold of an electronic copy of the paper and counted the number of different words it contained (grouping inflectional variations, such as walk/walks/walking/walked, as a single item, or lexeme, as linguists call it). I found around 8000 - and that wasn't the complete total, as not everything in the paper was online. (Incidentally, how many different words are there in the King James Bible - excluding the names of people and places? Answer: about 8000.)

People know and use far more words than they (or communications czars) think they do. They forget about the whole year - about all the words to do with holidays, shopping, cars, animals, birthdays, Christmas... It's totally fallacious to think that the words you elicit from someone on a particular day or from a particular sample is an accurate index of all the words they know or use. The frequency stats on such networks as Google, Facebook, and Twitter show huge variations in the most popular words, day by day, depending on what's making the news. They're based on what people are talking about - or writing about. This week it's words about the weather. Next week...

It's even more difficult to make estimates when dealing with an unfamiliar world. Which is where teenagers come in. Few adults have any real idea about what teenagers talk about. When I've had the opportunity to listen in to such conversations, I've found it just as sophisticated as any adult area of vocabulary, for the topics which they find important. Listening to a group of kids rapping at each other recently, I heard them using a remarkable range of vocabulary, all with clever rhythms and rhymes. I certainly couldn't match their lexical range when they started to talk about pop music, clothes, favourite TV programmes, mobile phones and their applications - and I was aware I was only at the edge of their vocabulary when it came to some of the topics they would never dream of talking to adults like me about.

Moreover, in talking about these things, they weren't just using slang or text-messaging abbreviations or all the other things that adults imagine teenagers do. They were using a great deal of vocabulary of a general and useful kind, such as (to take a small extract from one list I compiled a few years ago): spoon, spot, spring, spy, squabble, square, squash, squeak, squeeze, squirrel, squirt, stain, stairs, stamp, stand, star, start, station, stay, steady... Find me a teenager that doesn't know any of these words.

I usually use a dictionary method when I want to get a rough idea of the size of a person's lexicon. I've reported it in several of my books over the years. Anybody can do it. You go through a sample of pages in a college-size dictionary (e.g. one containing around 100,000 entries) and mark the number of words you think you use (active vocabulary) or know (passive vocabulary), then scale up. I've rarely found estimates of adult active vocabulary falling below 40,000 words, and usually they are in excess of 50,000, with passive vocabulary being about a third larger again. In other words, most people expect at some point to have an opportunity to use about half the words in the dictionary. And when you look at the words they tick in such an exercise, like the ones above, it shouldn't be surprising. It doesn't take long to reach a total of several thousand. I've done this with mid-teenagers too, and I can't recall an estimate ever falling below 20,000. Some sixth-formers have a hugely impressive vocabulary, much higher than this.

So it's nonsense for anyone to suggest that teenagers have a lexicon of 800 words, which is how the media generally seem to have taken the comment. Nor is it very useful to say, as I've also seen in a couple of places, that 'the average daily vocabulary' of a teenager is 800 words. That's nonsense too, because (a) I don't know what an average lexical day is, either in content (weather today, something else tomorrow, Easter eggs soon...) or in quantity. I am writing this at the end of a day when I guess I have spoken for about an hour, in total. At the speed at which I speak, that means about 5000 words in all. The main subjects, insofar as I can recall them now, have been about the weather, the activities of my children, some points arising out of the papers, general mealtime chat, and holiday activities. I'd be very surprised if I used more than 800 different words today. (I read and heard tens of thousands of different words, of course, but that's a different matter.) Another day, involved in a discussion about linguistics or whatever, it would be very different. It's all a matter of subject-matter and motivation. Start an argument going amongst teenagers about the last episode of Dr Who, and you'll hear some fantastic vocabulary, from aliens to regeneration. Listen to one of the school debating competition contests, such as those organized by the English Speaking Union, and you'll be amazed at the lexical fluency of the participants.

And so, finally, on to the third strand in the report, that 800 words isn't enough 'to get a job', as Jean Gross put it. Well, we're agreed on that (for most jobs, anyway), but if most teenagers have a much larger vocabulary, then this argument is beside the point. So if she feels there is a problem here, the diagnosis must lie elsewhere. There are two possibilities. The teenagers she is thinking about may not have the right kind of vocabulary for the job she imagines they have in mind. Or they aren't able to use their vocabulary within the formal style of communication which is required in, say, an interview. I think there's some truth in both these observations. Acquiring the lexicon of areas outside your immediate situation is an important index of educational achievement. 'It pays to increase your word power', as Reader's Digest used to say, and this maxim is as true today as it ever was. And acquiring a mastery of diffent styles of English, so that one can switch confidently from everyday colloquial to formal discursive, is also critical. This is one of the aims of the National Curriculum in English, to develop that kind of language awareness in teenagers. And it was also the thrust of the research the Sunday Times reported by Professor McEnery, who has pointed out that teenagers are still developing their oral communication skills, and that oracy needs to be an educational focus alongside literacy. This is where Jean Gross needs to direct her energies: to supporting the need for more systematic language work in the school classroom. Promulgating myths about limited vocabulary and stereotyping youngsters as Vicky Pollards won't help.

It's such a shame. There was a great deal of importance in the interview with Jean Gross, drawing attention to the problems which affect early language learning in many children, the importance of speech and language therapy, and so on. These areas need the higher profile which she could help to provide. But all of this was overlooked because media attention focussed on one silly claim.

On OP 2010

2010-01-02T10:30:00.002Z

One of the first enquiries of 2010 has been a request for information about Shakespearean 'original pronunciation', which was the subject of this blog some time ago. 'Is there anything in the pipeline by way of fresh productions?', my correspondent asks.

I know of one being planned, at the University of Kansas, where a production of A Midsummer Night/s Dream in OP is scheduled for towards the end of this year - an excellent choice, given the number of rhymes in that play which don't work in a modern English accent. I'll be involved in helping that event get off the ground. The director is Paul Meier, who many will know from his International Dialects of English Archive.

Judging by the number of requests I've had for the OP CDs, the interest is spreading, and there may well be some other activity going on that I don't know about. I don't know of anything that has happened in the UK other than the talks on the Sonnets in OP that I did during the year, and the associated write-up in Around the Globe 43, which will be online on my website soon.

One other thing has happened. The CD method was proving very awkward and time-consuming, so I've now replaced this by a direct downloading facility at the Pronouncing Shakespeare website, which is proving to be much more convenient for all.

On tens, teens, or whatever

2009-12-31T11:58:00.002Z

This week has seen a dozen requests from radio stations and the press for comment about the same thing: what are we going to call the new decade? There was a similar fuss a decade ago, I recall, when the noughts (noughties, etc) were being debated. An Australian initative a few weeks ago asked for popular suggestions. The winner was one-ders - a piece of word play involving wonders and the ones which will be part of every year. Other suggestions were decnos, tentions, tweens, tennies, and twenteens.

I don't think human linguistic nature has changed much in the past century, so my guess is that what will happen today is the same as happened then. During the middle years of the century, people talked a lot about 'the tens, twenties, and thirties'. Tens was the predominant usage. However, there was also quite a lot of reference to the teens - the OED has citations dating from the 1930s. So the choice, it seems to me, will be between those two. If I had to choose, I would bet on tens, because these days teens has the dominant sense of teenagers, and people may well avoid using it for that reason. But it's not wise to bet, where language change is concerned.

Of course, this is all to do with informal usage. At a formal level, the issue is clearer. We have the choice of two thousand and ten (in British English - two thousand ten in American English) and twenty ten. Again, based on past centuries, speech is more likely to go for the shorter version. It's rare to hear 'in nineteen hundred and ten'. And I've never heard Tchaikovsky's overture called 'eighteen hundred and twelve'.

On couple (of)

2009-12-09T23:17:00.000Z

A correspondent writes to ask about the premodifying use of couple without a following of. She has found a usage comment in her Canadian Oxford Dictionary which says that this usage 'is highly informal and should be avoided in writing', whereas her Merriam-Webster states that the usage 'has been called non-standard, but it is not'. "Why has the usage developed?', she asks.

Couple of goes back to the 14th century, whereas the of-less construction seems to be relatively recent. The OED first recorded usage is 1925, and tags the expression as 'US colloquial': 'a couple months in Italy', 'a couple hundred'. The American origin is enough to explain British caution, and thus the difference in attitude of the two dictionaries.

But where did the usage come from? I opt for a phonological explanation. The reduction of of resulted in coupla, usually written that way (as also cuppa tea and suchlike) . That has a first recorded usage of 1908. It would have been a short step to elide the vowel completely. Reinforcement may then have come from the later usage couple more, where of is disallowed, as in: 'Wait a couple more minutes' (cf also 'Wait a couple minutes more'). That began to appear in the 1930s.

The Merriam-Webster comment suggests that the usage has become increasingly accepted in the US, but not everyone agrees. It's made very little headway in the UK, so far.

On being a tragic

2009-12-03T21:50:00.002Z

A correspondent writes to ask about the noun use of tragic, as in a Beatles tragic or an opera tragic, where it means 'someone who is intensely interested or absorbed in a topic'. She had used it unconsciously in a message to a US colleague, who didn't understand it, and she wonders how widespread it is.

My correspondent is from Australia, where it's quite a common usage - for example, all the instances of opera tragic I've found on Google come from Australia. A site called cricket-blog is headed 'a blog where an Australian cricket tragic talks Ashes' and goes on to say that this is the place 'where cricket tragics rant'. I've never come across the usage, singular or plural, outside that variety. I'm not surprised her American contact didn't get it. A British contact wouldn't have either. I've no idea if it has any usage outside Australia, and perhaps readers of this blog would let me know if they've encountered it elsewhere.

How it developed this meaning is a bit of a puzzle. Presumably it's like the reverse semantic shift we find in such words as wicked to mean 'great'. But when and how this shift took place with tragic isn't established. There are no references to the usage in the OED. All the noun uses of tragic there are related to the traditional meaning: the earliest use, in the late 16th century, meant 'a tragic actor'; then it was used for 'a tragic author'; later, it came to mean 'a tragic work of some kind' or 'a tragic event'. We find such usages as That was a miserable tragic and all the tragics you can think of. But all these earlier (and now obsolete) usages maintain the traditional sense of tragic.

On hip-hop Shakespeare

2009-11-27T11:17:00.001Z

A correspondent (son Ben in this case) has sent me a link to an amazing BBC Blast programme, being broadcast today, which I just have to share. It tells the story of how hip-hop artist Akala worked with a group of young people off the street to present Shakespeare's Othello in his genre. Ben did a workshop with them, and uses the hip-hop parallel in his book Shakespeare on Toast, where he uses an Akala quote at one point.

It's an unexpectedly moving experience, to hear the familiar lines used and reinterpreted in this way, supplemented by the hip-hop rhythms and rhymes. Throughout there's a respect for the original text that is impressive, and the encounter with the play was evidently a Pauline experience for some of the group. One affirms he's going to read more Shakespeare. Another, on a visit to the John Rylands Library in Manchester, to see a real First Folio, talks about feeling humbled at the sight. From being scared about the language they end up mastering it. All evidently fall in love with the poetry of the lines, and perform it well. The extracts from the final performance are enthralling.

Having a blog allows me to congratulate Akala and the whole group in a public way which would not otherwise be possible. Any teacher who's having trouble getting the message across to a class of reluctant teenagers that Shakespeare is relevant, accessible, and generally fantastic will find this programme immensely helpful. I just hope that the BBC will make it widely available in due course.

One of the best bits for me - and something which will surprise a lot of people - were the sequences where lines in Shakespeare and hip-hop lyrics were mixed up, and people were asked to tell which was which. Most got the answers wrong. And I must admit I had trouble myself once or twice.

The show will be online for several days, so if you've got a spare hour, watch it. If you've ever doubted the proposition that Shakespeare can be made interesting to young people today, this will change your view. Here's the link:

Othello Retold.

On for/in ages

2009-11-25T12:35:00.001Z

A correspondent writes to ask why (2) is odd, for him, when (4) is OK:

(1) That's the worst book I've read in ages.
(2) ?That's the worst book I've read for ages.

(3) I haven't read a good book in ages.
(4) I haven't read a good book for ages.

'Is it something to do with the verb being negative?', he asks.

There are several factors here. First, intuitions may vary between British and American English, as the in construction is especially used in the latter. That aside, there is definitely an effect of negation, as these sentences show:

(5) I haven't read a book in ages.
(6) *I have read a book in ages.

There is also a difference in meaning:

(7) I've been reading that book for ages.
(8) I haven't been reading that book for ages.

In (7), the action is included in the time span - 'it has taken me a long time to read the book, and it's still going on'; in (8) it isn't. (8) is equivalent to 'It's been ages since I was last reading that book'.

So, to return to (2), here we have an action (the reading of the worst book) which is evidently over, so we need a sentence like (8): 'I haven't read such a bad book for ages'. However, the positive sentence suggests an inclusive meaning with ongoing duration (cf 7), which is anomalous - hence my correspondent's disquiet.

On Twitter prompts

2009-11-23T10:37:00.000Z

A correspondent from Valleywag wrote last week to ask if I saw anything interesting in the Twitter decision to change its prompt - from 'What are you doing?' to 'What's happening?'.

I do think this is interesting. My impression is that Twitter has become steadily more discursive over the past few months, with people maintaining threads and introducing a great deal more interaction, rather than posting isolated tweets. As a result the focus has shifted from the individual to the group, and a more open question is required to capture this emphasis. 'What-doing' looks inward. 'What-happening' looks outward. It's a natural development, it seems to me.

I love one of the reactions to the Valleywag post. Someone suggests that a much simpler prompt will emerge one day: 'Sup?'

On or so

2009-11-22T22:51:00.001Z

A correspondent writes to ask if he is allowed to say I've spent the past hour or so in the hall to mean 'less than an hour'. He thinks he uses or so to mean 'roughly', and this allows a meaning of less as well as more. His friend disagrees. What do I think?

The OED definition suggests it could be either: 'or about that amount or number; or thereabout' (so, sense 33b); but the examples tell a different story. The first recorded usages are from Shakespeare, as follows:

If I could go to hell for an eternal moment or so (The Merry Wives of Windsor, 2.1.50)
Some two thousand strong, or so (Twelfth Night 3.2.59)

The first couldn't conceivably mean 'less than a moment': or so here means 'one or a bit more'. The second is an estimate by Sir Toby Belch of how much money he has had from Sir Andrew Aguecheek. If the money was counted up and found to be only £1990, nobody would accuse Belch of being a liar. It is a vague estimate only. Here, or so means 'more or less'.

This suggests a working principle: the force of the phrase depends on the quantity involved. With small numbers (and especially when the number is just one) the sense is driven upwards. I could not possibly use an hour or so to mean less than an hour. This upwards direction I think is always present, but its force diminishes as the numbers increase. So, I could say 1500 or so people read her blog, suggesting that it is more, but allowing (if challenged) that the figure could be less.

There may also be an effect from the noun that is being quantified. Time-scales are determinate, so an hour or so allows little flexibility. But I think there was an audience of 20 or so at the theatre allows the possibility that there were 19 (or so) because audiences are unpredictable.

I'd be interested to know if anyone has a different intuition about this.

On between each

2009-11-22T21:12:00.002Z

A correspondent asks for my views about such sentences as There will be an intermission between each act. Is it acceptable?

Well, not according to Fowler, for example, who adopted a very strict line about the usage of between: 'it must not be followed by a single expression in which a distributive such as each or every is supposed to represent a plural'. Similarly, between was not supposed to be used for more than two entities (among being recommended instead).

All this despite the fact that, from the very earliest recorded uses of between, we find it used in situations where more than two entities are involved. As the OED puts it, in a useful note (between V.19):

It is still the only word available to express the relation of a thing to many surrounding things severally and individually, among expressing a relation to them collectively and vaguely: we should not say ‘the space lying among the three points,’ or ‘a treaty among three powers,’ or ‘the choice lies among the three candidates in the select list,’ or ‘to insert a needle among the closed petals of a flower.’

However, over the past 250 years or so, prescriptive grammarians have privileged the etymology of the word (tween - 'two'), though often failing to live up to their own prescriptions. Dr Johnson was especially influential, when he wrote in his Dictionary:

Between is properly used of two, and among of more ...

However, he adds:

... but perhaps this accuracy is not always preserved.

And indeed it isn't. Boswell records Johnson himself as saying:

I ... hope, that, between publick business, improving studies, and domestick pleasures, neither melancholy nor caprice will find any place for entrance.

Between each has a similar history. Prescriptive grammarians would insist on my correspondent's sentence being rewritten as something like There will be an intermission after each act - ignoring the problem that there is no intermission after the last act. Fowler would have suggested a change to ...between each act and the rest, which is momentarily confusing. There really is no easy alternative - which is presumably why the between each usage is frequently found in literature over the centuries. Here's an early example from The Passionate Pilgrim, a text from Shakespeare's time:

Between each kiss her oaths of true love swearing...

Gowers (in his Plain Words) called the fuss over between each 'pedantry', and advises us to 'ignore' those who insist on restricting between to its etymological meaning. I agree.

On being welcome

2009-11-18T11:42:00.003Z

A correspondent writes to ask about the modern usage of you're welcome as a politeness formula used in response to an expression of thanks. Is it an Americanism?

Certainly the usage is very frequent today, in some parts of the world. It seems to have become the expression of choice in service environments (such as responding to customers in a restaurant), and it has been seized (I suspect with some relief) as an easy response by service personnel who have English as a second language. It isn't the only option: expressions such as no worries (eg in Australia) and no problem are also heard. But it isn't modern, in the sense of 'recent', nor is it especially American. The OED has a first recorded usage of 1907, but it didn't take me long to find an earlier instance. Here's a British example from the mid-1850s - Dickens' Little Dorrit, Chapter 2:

'I thank you,' said the other, 'very heartily for your confidence.'
'Don't mention it,' returned Mr Meagles, 'I am sure you are quite
welcome.

Where does the usage come from? It's a natural development of the earlier greeting when someone says 'You are welcome' to a visitor. This has been in English for hundreds of years. Here's an example from Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew (4.2.72):

Pedant: God save you, sir.
Tranio: And you sir. You are welcome.

It's a very short step from here to the usage in question.

When did the change take place? Difficult to say. There would have been a transitional period in which people would have reacted uncertainly to the usage. I've been looking for examples, and think I may have found one. What do you make of this, from Thackeray's The Wolves and the Lamb, Act 1, written at the same time as Little Dorrit?

MRS. PRIOR. Oh, how thoughtful it was of your ladyship to ask me to stay to tea!
LADY K. With your daughter and the children? Indeed, my good Mrs. Prior, you are very welcome!
MRS. PRIOR. Ah! but isn't it a cause of thankfulness to be MADE welcome?

Is Lady K's response to Mrs Prior a politness formula, or a literal welcoming? My feeling is that it is the former, and this prompts Mrs Prior to focus on the latter.

There's nothing unusual about that kind of reaction. We hear it still, when people encounter a usage change and draw attention to it by focusing on the earlier meaning. Here's an example I heard the other day at an airport, where B was saying goodbye to A, who was about to take a plane:

A: See you later.
B: Not unless the plane has a puncture.

A was using the phrase, very common among young people today, to mean 'see you the next time I see you'. But for older people, it has to mean 'later the same day' - hence the comment.

So, my feeling is that you're welcome as a politeness response was arriving in the mid-19th century. If anyone comes across an earlier example, do share it.

On singing accents

2009-11-14T15:01:00.002Z

A correspondent writes to say he's noted that regional accents disappear in songs, or at least become less detectable, and wonders if there's an explanation.

This is true, as a general observation, and there two reasons for it. The first is phonetic. Several of the main identifying features of a regional accent tend to disappear when singing - the intonation (obviously, as a melody replaces it), the speech rhythm, and vowel length (for many syllables are elongated). Vowel quality is also often affected, especially in classical singing, where vowels are articulated with greater openness than in everyday speech.

All of this can affect the artistry. I found a quote from Billy Bragg saying that a London accent forces a singer to approach melody differently. ‘You can’t sing something like 'Tracks Of Your Tears' in a London accent. The cadences are all wrong. It’s also difficult to sing harmonies in a London accent. And you can’t sustain syllables for long'. It's not possible to generalize from this, because accents have very different norms - different rhythms and rates of articulation, for example - but it's interesting that some singers have reflected on the issues.

The other reason for accent levelling in songs is social. Some singers want to drop their regional accent, because they want to sing like the fashionable mainstream. This has been especially noticeable in popular music since the early days of rock 'n' roll. Singers everywhere imitated Bill Haley and Elvis, and many still do. A mid-Atlantic hybrid quickly emerged, which levelled natural regional features. From his singing, who would ever guess where Cliff Richard comes from? Or Sting, Rod Stewart, Tom Jones, or Elton John?

However, it's perfectly possible for singers to retain an individual accent, if they want to, and many do. In fact, they've been doing it for years. If we listen to recordings of music-hall days, we'll hear broad Cockney, Lancashire, Scots, Irish, and others. You could hardly get more Cockney, for example, than in such songs as 'Any Old Iron' or 'Boiled Beef and Carrots'.

And now there are signs of modern pop music returning to its dialect roots. The Mersey sound was an early development. A Liverpudlian accent regularly stands out in the Beatles - such as (in 'Penny Lane') customer with a rounded first vowel and words like there and wear (in 'Only a Northern Song') with a central vowel (rhyming with her). I recall Paul McCartney saying (but I can't remember where) that the Beatles did experiment with singing in an American accent early on, but decided against it because it sounded ridiculous. Other early departures in the UK from an American-sounding norm (or, at least, a mid-Atlantic-sounding norm) were Tommy Steele and Joe Brown.

More recently we have the London accents of Ian Dury, Chas & Dave, and Lily Allen, and the rather more gentrified tones of Anthony Newley. Mike Skinner's accent is so noticeable (with its glottal stops, replacement of th by f, and other Cockney features) that it has been called Mockney. The accents of the Celtic areas of the British Isles are often heard. Listen for example to 'Daddy's Gone' from Glasvegas and you'll hear several local Scottish features, such as a rounded [y] in you, an [e] vowel in sitting, and plenty of glottal stops. Glottal stops are one of the things to listen out for, actually: you'll hear them in groups from different parts of the UK, such as Futurehead and The Rakes. Listen out too for the /r/ after a vowel in Irish accents, as heard in, say, Mary Coughlan (from the south) and Snow Patrol (from the North). And of course in rapping we regularly get a distinctive accent, because of the syllable-timed rhythm. But my impression is that, rapping aside, in hardly any case do singers use a consistent regional accent throughout the whole song. Mixed accents seem to be the norm.

On 'It's Only a Theory'

2009-10-12T09:10:00.002Z

A correspondent writes to ask, having seen a newspaper listing for the new BBC4 TV series 'It's only a theory', whether I am the 'David Crystal' listed in this week's episode (being broadcast at 10 pm on the 13th October). I had to think for a moment, as the programme was recorded months ago; but yes, it is me, and I have a certificate to prove it.

It's an interesting idea. They got various academics to present and justify their 'theory' to a team of three (led by Andy Hamilton) in front of a TV audience. At the end, each member of the team decided whether the academic had made his/her case. I defended the proposition that 'texting is good for the English language', and managed to persuade two of the three that this was so. (I would have persuaded all three, but Andy felt I was being too enthusiastic about it!) They ceremoniously stamped a certificate with the word 'Approved'. And they gave me a souvenir, in the form of a pseudo-Scrabble game with all the vowels left out.

It was good fun, and, on the day I was there for the recording, I very much enjoyed watching the others who had to defend their propositions - one was Stanley Wells, arguing that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare. It's a strange rhetorical exercise, having to reduce sometimes quite complex points to the bare minimum, and in a way that will get an audience on your side. Bit like debating, really. They recorded about 20 minutes worth of material per person, and I imagine will use less than ten, in the transmission, so it'll be interesting to see one's already pared-down arguments pared down even further. Maybe they'll just leave out my vowels.

On a new m-novel

2009-10-09T09:40:00.002Z

A correspondent writes from South Africa's Shuttleworth Foundation to tell me about the world's first m-novel written in English and isiXhosa (an indigenous South African language). It's a teen mystery story set in Cape Town about four graffiti writing friends. You can read it (still evolving) at Kontax on your PC or a WAP-enabled phone.

The Foundation believes that m-novels have the potential to be big in Africa and wants to explore this space through a project they're calling m4Lit. It's planning to conduct research with 50 teens in Cape Town to understand their experience of the m-novel within a broader literacy context. Post-project papers are planned too. The comments from users so far are really interesting.

I'd come across m-novels and short stories in Japan, China, India, and a few other places, when I was writing Txtng: the Gr8 Db8, but I'd not encountered it in Africa, and certainly not involving a language like Xhosa. Given the remarkable growth of mobile phones in Africa, where they foster communication in areas which don't have good computer connections, I wouldn't be surprised if the genre catches on. It could be a useful additional strategy for involving young people in community languages that are endangered.

On English Language Day

2009-10-07T08:25:00.002Z

The English Project - the Winchester-based group that is planning the first permanent English-language exhibition space, with a target opening in three or four years time - have come up with a lovely piece of PR: English Language Day. It's 13 October. They hope to make it an annual event.

They chose this date because it was on 13 October 1362 that the Chancellor of England for the first time opened Parliament with a speech in English. In that same Parliament, a Statute of Pleading was approved that permitted members in debate to use the English language. It had become again an official language of law and law-making.

Because of this connection with law-making, the theme this year is the language of law. The English Project’s contribution to the Day will be three events hosted by London law firm Taylor Wessing, for schools, for university law students, and for the public. They're also carrying out a survey of legal language. For more information, visit their website: English Project.

I think language days are important, as they keep the subject in front of people's minds. It's a pity that so few people are aware of the two we already have: 26 September, European Day of Languages, and 21 February, World Mother-Tongue Day. If I were in charge, I would give every language its special day. Maybe English Language Day will start a trend.

On Chambers

2009-09-30T11:56:00.002Z

I've just heard of a sad development in British publishing. It was announced a few days ago that the firm of Chambers Harrap in Edinburgh is threatened with closure by their parent company Hachette UK. Apparently this decision has been motivated by falling sales of print reference works.

I have a strong sense of deja vu. Readers of this blog with long memories will recall that I bemoaned the closing of my own encyclopedia editorial office in early 2008. Penguin had stopped publishing encyclopedias for the same reason. It's the emergence of free online sources of information that were the reason then, and I imagine the same factor accounts for the decision about Chambers now.

It's so short-sighted, though. The one thing the online sources cannot do is provide the quality control that comes from years of experience in reference editing. In the case of Chambers, we're talking about products, such as The Chambers Dictionary, which have benefitted from an editorial tradition that goes back over a century. I knew the Chambers team well in the late 1980s and 90s, as they were responsible for the production of the work that was eventually called The Cambridge Encyclopedia, and published by CUP. Cambridge and Chambers were in a joint venture project at the time. When the two parties separated, I sat on the Chambers board for a while, advising on their new projects, and doing some writing and editing in a series called Making Sense of... The professionalism and expertise of the Chambers editors was second to none. I'm horrified at the thought that this might now be lost, and hope that, even at this late stage, some rethinking might take place.

It will only be a matter of time before people realize that online reference sources created by anyone who cares to contribute cannot match the judicious selection and checking of material, and the attentive concern for presentation and style, that we find in the quality reference literature. While enterprises such as wikipedia are fine for browsing, I would personally never use a piece of information found there without checking its accuracy. For the worlds I know, the errors are legion. For the world I know best - me - I'm tired of correcting the errors that are introduced by unknown forces in the 'David Crystal' entry.

Wiki is trying to sort things out by introducing a tier of editorial management, but, as far as I can see, without giving anyone the training that is essential in order for this to be done properly. It's an expensive business, ensuring that quality standards are maintained. But it's money well-spent, because humanity needs accurate, consistent, and intelligible inter-generational transmission of information. It's profoundly disturbing to think that the very people who are in the best position to guarantee our intellectual future are being made redundant. And it's especially ironic, in the case of Chambers, when we think that Edinburgh has been made the first UNESCO City of Literature.

On many

2009-08-24T12:51:00.001Z

A correspondent writes to ask about the use of the unpremodified quantifier many in affirmative sentences. He says: 'When I venture to use many affirmatively, the result sounds awfully unnatural: I’ve seen many fish while I was snorkelling, I’ve seen many hybrid cars in Wellington. Other examples that puzzle me include: I’ve interviewed many people (which I think sounds natural) vs I’ve eaten many biscuits (which is an example that Geoffrey Pullum singles out as particularly objectionable).' And he adds: 'Does many actually refer to a different number from a lot of?'

I think we're dealing with a stylistic issue here. Many has long had an association with formality, as also, incidentally, has few and much. It's always difficult to pinpoint the origins of a stylistic preference, but I think this one is due to biblical influence, especially via the King James Bible, where we find many examples:

many are the afflictions of the righteous
a father of many nations
a coat of many colours
many are called but few are chosen

It also appears a lot in proverbs, such as Many hands make light work. And it became a feature of high-blown rhetorical style: Many would agree with me....

The stylistic contrast is easy to demonstrate. Take the sentence I used just now. Replacing many produces an immediate informal tone:

...where we find many examples.
...where we find a lot of examples.
...where we find lots of examples.

Conversely, when many is used, the collocations ought to satisfy the demands of that stylistic level, otherwise they will seem anomalous. This, I suspect, is why Geoff Pullum doesn't like many biscuits, and why many hybrid cars and many fish in the context of snorkelling sound odd. These notions are perhaps a mite too downmarket for an upmarket quantifier, as would be many hiccups, many flutters (on the races), and so on, where one of the lot constructions would be the usual quantifier. As always, we should try to find convincing contrasts:

Many people were waiting to enter the building.
?Many guys were waiting to enter the building.

But the situation is fluid, because there is a far more flexible use of many in negative constructions and when modified (how many etc). So I'd expect there to be quite a bit of opinion difference about this, and probably quite a bit of regional difference too.

On the world in which we live in

2009-08-20T18:28:00.002Z

A correspondent, in the form of BBC Three Counties Radio, phones to ask one of the strangest questions I've had for some time. What do I make of a Paul McCartney line from the song 'Live and Let Die'? Apparently there's some discussion going on at the moment about whether the line is the world in which we live in or the world in which we're livin'. When asked recently, Paul himself couldn't recall which it was, though he thought the first of these versions 'wronger but cuter'. What did I think?

No question, as far as I'm concerned. It's the world in which we live in. Apart from the fact that this is the version in the published sheet music, I wouldn't expect a Scouser to reduce an -ing ending to -in. On the contrary, -ing is often said with the -g sounded as well, in that part of the world. While it's always possible to 'drop the g' in rapid colloquial speech, as it is in any accent, this is unlikely in the more forceful articulation of a song whose beat is relatively slow. I don't recall other Beatles songs with -ing endings - such as 'All My Loving' - reducing the final consonant.

Why did the issue arise at all? Presumably because some people couldn't tolerate the thought that such an ungrammatical construction was being used. Certainly it's ungrammatical; but it's not unnatural. That kind of prepositional doubling is common enough in speech when people start to use one construction and switch into another, especially when the construction involved (as here) is a usage shibboleth. Should one end a sentence with a preposition? Here we see that hoary issue in the choice between the world in which we live and the world we live in. People who have been sensitized to the issue are likely to begin with the first and then, when they reach the end of the sentence, realize that they need a preposition to make the sentence sound natural. Another example I heard recently is: I don't know to which hotel I'm going to. We've talked about anacoluthon before, in this blog, and here's another instance.

In the case of the song, the rhythm of the piece asks for unstressed syllables at both ends - imagine how it would sound if the line ended on live, with an elongated vowel - and that is what we get. Wronger and cuter it certainly is. When music calls, grammar bends.

On Baby

2009-08-13T08:56:00.002Z

A correspondent writes to say he's noticed a trend to drop articles from common words or phrases. In reading baby books he's noticed that 'they refer to the baby as simply baby, as if they assume you will name your child Baby. They never use a baby, the baby, or your baby'. He considers this a 'misuse... exasperating'. And he sees the same trend also in coffee and danish and in TV ads for cars - Get $2,000 back on Camry. 'Am I overreacting?' he asks.

Yes, in a word. 'Never say never' has to be the watchword in linguistics. I just pulled down off my shelves two of the most famous baby books of all time. The opening paragraph of Dr Spock's book has a and the before baby five times. Penelope Leach's book is actually called Your Baby and Child, and uses articles throughout. Plainly my correspondent has noticed a distinctive style that some authors use, but by no means all.

Where has it come from? English doesn't use articles before proper nouns, so the dropping of an article can be a sign of a change in the grammatical status of the noun, as my correspondent senses. The motivation is easy to see. One talks of Mummy and Daddy, so why not Baby, to complete the triad? The media will have had its influence in popularizing the usage. Bringing up Baby was a very popular film (Hepburn, Grant), and the phrase has named a TV series, as well as several books and websites. I don't know whether the usage was around a century ago, and if anyone has an example I'd love to know of it.

The extension to cars was a natural metaphorical development: Baby Bentley, Rolls, Ford, Austin..., so it was not long before the abbreviated form came into use too, with people saying 'How's baby?', and suchlike, referring to the car. Bringing up baby has been used several times as the headline of car articles.. And other products have been babified too, such as hoovers, cookers, and tables. It seems to be a perfectly standard naming option now.

The exasperation probably comes when the noun is used generically, as in some baby books. Any generic person label can be given this treatment. Tell Teacher. Let Nurse do it. There's a 'baby talk' feel about some of these expressions which can seem patronizing or demeaning to adults. I recall a drill-sergeant in a comedy film once saying sarcastically to an unhappy recruit 'Tell Sergeant all about it, then'. I imagine my correspondent has sentences in mind like this:"Why don't you let Baby have his first toothbrush in a bright colour?' I don't like that style much either. It feels like the author talking down to me. There, there, David. It'll be all right.

The other examples are different. It's normal to omit the article in headlines, headings, and suchlike. Certainly it's common in ads. Usually, in car ads, the noun is specified with a model name: 'cash back on Toyota RAV4'. I don't routinely see things like 'cash back on Toyota', singular, so the Camry example is odd, to my mind. The same abbeviated style accounts for 'coffee and Danish', again very common in restaurant signs. In this case, there is a motivation for speech, as customers will readily ask for what they read. I'll have coffee and Danish, please. It's not the same trend that we see in Baby.

On living Latin

2009-08-12T10:48:00.002Z

A correspondent writes to ask if Latin is a dead language or not. She goes on: 'Obviously there are no native Latin speakers born any more, but on the other hand there are a number of people who can speak it, or at least understand it...'

The distinction between life and death can be a bit fuzzy, when applied to language. The essential difference is that living languages change, dead ones don't. Just because I study a dead language and get to understand it, or even speak it aloud, does not make it come alive, in that sense. It would come alive only when speakers use it in interaction and adapt it to meet their current needs. Several dead languages (in the sense that their last native speaker died some time ago) have been resurrected in that way, as with Kaurna in Australia. Sometimes there is a tradition linking the present with the past, as with Cornish. But the crucial thing, to say that a language is alive, is to find it changing and growing - new vocabulary, in particular, to express present-day notions, and new variant forms (accents, dialects), to express different identities. Latin is alive in that sense. The 'most alive' languages have native speakers and transmit from parent to child between generations. Latin is plainly not alive in that sense.

Latin is an interesting case, therefore. Many people study it as a dead language, as a way in to an ancient literature and history. On the other hand, it still has live status as a language of real interaction in the Roman Catholic church. The Lexicon Recentis Latinitatis came out a few years ago - over 700 pages of modern vocabulary. I have ingenious translations of Winnie the Pooh, Peanuts, and other texts, so plainly many people are actively concerned with revitalization. How much use is actually being made of the language is unclear, but it certainly suggests there's life in the old language yet.

Anyone interested in the history of Latin as a language should read Nicholas Ostler excellent Ad Infinitum: A Biography of Latin.

On hedging

2009-08-12T09:43:00.002Z

A correspondent writes to ask about a phrase he has commonly heard in weather forecasts: in the way of, as in not much in the way of cloud tonight, and more in the way of rain tomorrow. He wonders what its grammatical status is, and what it adds to not much cloud and more rain.

This is one of the class of what are usually called 'hedges' - expressions which provide approximations or which reduce the force of an utterance in some way. A large number of expressions fall into this category, such as more or less or something in the order of - and in the way of. Hedges provide a way of having your cake and eating it. I'm expecting more or less a dozen means that you are correct if a dozen people turn up and also correct if 11 or 13 turn up. Exactly how much fuzziness a hedge allows is never clear. If 10 people turn up, is this also 'more or less a dozen'? Or 9? Or 8?

Grammatically, in the way of is a complex preposition, like by way of, in accordance with, and many more. Functionally, in the present example, it is a way of enabling forecasters (as the phrase is) to hedge their bets. Anyone who tries to predict the future knows what a dangerous game they're playing. Everyone is waiting to get them. So hedges are popular because they permit a greater chance of accuracy. If I say There'll be sun tomorrow I'm suggesting you will see the sun in the sky all day long. If I say There'll be more in the way of sun tomorrow I'm saying that there will be some sunshine, but not always, and maybe even there'll be no clear sun at all (perhaps because some cloud gets in the way). In the way of Noun implies a continuum of Nounness from maximum to minimum.

Presumably my correspondent writes about this because he has noticed the phrase being overused by individual forecasters. Any hedge being overused will attract criticism, and ultimately be considered a cliche. But it's by no means restricted to forecasters. People who provide traffic reports use them all the time. They never say No problems on the roads in our area this morning but No major problems on the roads in our area this morning. Nor is it restricted to the media. Listen to any scientist talking figures, and watch out for the more intellectual hedges. Some 10 per cent of the population..., plus or minus.... And everyone else does it too, sometimes filling their utterances with hedges. For all I know, not to put too fine a point on it, this sort of behaviour is very likely going to be used by more or less everyone, I imagine.

On prosiopesis

2009-07-30T08:25:00.003Z

A correspondent writes to ask for an explanation of prosiopesis and whether this can be used in relation to writing.

The term was introduced by Otto Jesperson in his Philosophy of Grammar. Here's his definition: 'the speaker begins to articulate, or thinks he begins to articulate, but produces no audible sound (either for want of expiration, or because he does not put his vocal chords in the right position) till one or two syllables after the beginning of what he intended to say'. He gives the example of 'Morning' for 'Good morning'. Another example would be 'Kyu' for 'Thank you'.

This is plainly a phonetic definition, and it could only apply to writing in cases where the same type of communicative pressure applies. I suppose one could adapt the definition as follows: 'the writer begins to type, or thinks he begins to type, but produces no graphic form (either for want of energy, or because he does not put his fimgers in the right position) till one or two syllables after the beginning of what he intended to type'.

I do this often, when typing on screen, but you don't see the results in print because typing allows revision in a way that speech does not. However, in styles of writing which simulate spontaneous speech, I think we can see the same sort of process in operation. Looking back over some instant messaging logs, for example, I can see several examples. My daughter sent me one the other day which began 'Morning'. And any genre of spontaneous written electronic communication (chat, social networking, twitter, etc) is likely to display such things.

The notion becomes more obviously applicable to writing if we replace Jesperson's phonetic definition by one in terms of syntactic or semantic processing. When someone says 'Coming out tonight?' or 'Looks like rain', these days people talk more in syntactic terms, such as 'elision', 'pro-drop', and suchlike.

On aren't I

2009-07-27T18:44:00.002Z

A correspondent writes to ask how aren't I? became acceptable usage. 'For first person questions it is easy enough to say, for instance, "I am right, am I not?" So why would it have developed as alternate usage?'

The history is a bit obscure, but it seems to be this. The verb forms of English have long existed in two styles - formal and informal. Alongside I am going we have informal I'm going. Alongside, formal are you not (earlier are not you) we have aren't you. And so on.

The first person followed this pattern. We find both am I not and amn't I - the latter usage still the colloquial norm today in Irish English and some Scots. But there's a pronunciation problem - the sequence of /m/ and /n/ is awkward, and it was a natural development to simplify the consonant cluster. The final /t/ made it more likely that the simplification would go to /ant/ rather than /amt/, and this is what we find in 18th century texts, where it appears as an't. The OED has an earliest citation for 1799, but I'm sure much earlier instances will turn up in due course.

The pronunciation of the /a/ vowel probably varied in length - sometimes short, sometimes long ('ahnt'). That would have made it sound exactly the same as the other forms in the paradigm (aren't you / we / they) - bearing in mind that the /r/ after the vowel would not have been sounded in the newly emerging Received Pronunciation around 1800. So, if the first person sounded like the other persons, it would have been very natural for people to start spelling the word in the same way as the others. It's an example of orthographic analogy. Aren't I became the standard form in British English, and an't I (very popular in the 1800s) gradually fell out of use. It's widely used in US English too, but some Americans dislike it, finding it genteel.

As soon as aren't I became the norm, it lost its colloquial status. So, if people could say and write aren't I in formal situations, what could they say in informal situations? The stage was set for the emergence of a further alternative: ain't, which originally didn't have the nonstandard resonance that it has today, being widely used as a colloquialism among upper-class as well as lower-class speakers. It was probably the frequent use of this form in the literary representation of lower-class speech (especially in Dickens) that eventually turned educated people against it. Fowler tried to resuscitate it, in his 1926 Dictionary of Modern English Usage, describing ain't as 'a natural contraction... supplying a real want', but his view had no influence.

On being typical(ly)

2009-07-11T08:54:00.002Z

A correspondent writes from Germany to say that he is often corrected for saying typical German (for typisch Deutsch). He has been advised to say a typical German or typically German, but he feels that his version is all right. What do I think?

The use of the article isn't relevant here, as that depends on whether the noun is countable or not.

That's a typical English tree
That's a typically English tree.

That's typical English weather.
That's typically English weather.

These examples display a very slight difference in meaning: typical means simply 'characteristic of', whereas the adverbial force of typically highlights the way of behaving. (The difference is more marked with some other pairs, such as basic/basically, happy/happily.)

There's no usage issue here. An issue arises only when English (or other such nouns) is made the head of the noun phrase. Normally we wouldn't find two adjectives in predicative position without modification. If we start with That's tasty home-made cake, we wouldn't normally say (in a single intonation contour) That's tasty home-made, but something like That's tasty and home-made.

But this has happened with the type of example which motivated this post, where we find both:

That's typically English.
That's typical English.

Typical has taken on an adverbial role, and this is what makes some people uncomfortable. They like adjectives to stay adjectives, so they object when people say It's looking good, Drive slow, and suchlike. It's part of the prescriptive tradition in English.

But the fact is that both constructions are common. The present-day usage has probably been reinforced by frequency. Constructions such as typical English/German are actually three times as common as those with typically, as a quick Google search will confirm.

So we now have a pair of sentences which mean the same thing. And when this happens, a stylistic difference is bound to emerge. Typical is more informal than typically. I can imagine a curator in an art gallery stopping in front of a picture and saying That's typically Dutch - less likely, That's typical Dutch. But I wouldn't be at all surprised to hear the latter from a group of people chatting about the picture.

We can get a stronger sense of the informality if we change the example. That's typically Rembrandt is the sort of thing one would say about a picture. That's typical Rembrandt might be heard after someone told a story about his naughty behaviour. So I think my German correspondent needs to look to the context before deciding whether to say or write typical German or not.

On a child's view of English

2009-07-07T10:19:00.003Z

A colleague writes from Switzerland with a nice child language story. Her German-speaking 6-year-old daughter picked up English very quickly on a visit to New Zealand, and has been keeping it up since. At one point her husband pretended he needed help with his English, so the little girl read a story to him, and he asked her questions about spelling and suchlike, which she tried her best to answer (e.g. why now and know sound so differently, despite being similar in spelling). In the end, she said Weisst Du, Papa, Englisch ist so schön klanglich. ('You know, dad, English is nice and soundly.') The adverb is a nonce formation in both languages.

This story made me think: I don't have many examples to hand of the reactions of young children to the languages they're in the process of learning. Descriptive statements like this one are especially rare. It would be nice to have a few more. Anyone recall any?

On studying history/History

2009-06-30T10:00:00.003Z

A correspondent writes to report a school argument about whether a subject area should be capitalized or not. Is it: 'There'll be exams in History and Geography' or '... history and geography'? Opinion was split.

I'm not surprised. Capitalization is one of those areas very much subject to fashion and change. As Fowler once said, long ago, 'the use of capitals is largely governed by personal taste'. Some people overcapitalize; some undercapitalize.

It isn't usually a contentious issue when the reference is to a unique entity, such as an individual name. But generic notions always pose problems, and subject names fall into that category. Here, capitalization is primarily used either to draw special attention to a notion or to avoid ambiguity. An example of the latter would be: You'll find History on the third floor (ie the department) and You'll find history in the library (ie the subject). A capital is obligatory when talking about a specific notion, such as a course or exam paper, e.g. History 231.

But fashion always rules. For the past few years there's been a noticeable trend towards graphical simplicity - B.B.C. becoming BBC, and the like - and capitals have been affected. You'll find far more in newspapers of a few decades ago. And where there is an option, as in subject names, the trend has been to avoid caps. This is the advice of the main copy-editing style guides, and usage generally concurs, at present.

On be having

2009-06-27T12:08:00.002Z

A correspondent writes with a nice child language story. While in a supermarket she heard an exasperated mother say to her child:

Will - you - be - have!

To which the child replied:

But I am being have.

With have pronounced /heiv/, of course.

I've got quite a few word-part substitutions in my collection of children's analytical errors. I reported several in my Listen to Your Child in the various 'The Things They Say' sections. 'Don't argue!' says the mother. 'I don't argme' says the child. Or this sequence, heard on a train approaching London.

Child: Are we there yet?
Father: No, we're still in the outskirts
Child (after a pause): Have we reached the inskirts yet?

Usually, children maintain grammatical identity in their substitutions. In the first of these examples, the perception that ue is you leads to the replacement by another pronoun. In the second, out is replaced by in. But I don't recall hearing one which switches grammatical status quite so radically, with a word-part becoming a copula verb. Presumably it's the abnormal stress which motivated it. Anyone come across other examples like this?

On texting saving a life

2009-06-16T18:01:00.003Z

Some interesting stories about the value of texting have begun to emerge, especially of its role in life-threatening situations. In my book Txtng, I mention the Virginia Tech shootings, and how text messages would have been far more helpful than emails in alerting people to the impending danger. I mentioned this on an NPR chat-show a little while ago, and got a call from a student who was on the campus that day, and who - while lying on the ground to avoid the bullets - texted to let his folks know he was safe.

But that story is capped by this one, sent to me by Liwei Jiao, who kindly advised me on texting in Chinese when I was writing my book. He told me about a hostage-taking incident at Wuhan University in central China about two weeks ago, and included a report (in English) from China’s state news agency, Xinhua, and a report (in Chinese) from the same agency. I thought it was well worth wider circulation, and with Liwei Jiao's permission, here it is, in slightly edited form:

University resumes order after hostage taking incident
www.chinaview.cn 2009-06-04 00:05:21

WUHAN, June 3 (Xinhua) -- A university in central China's Hubei Province lifted blockade and resumed normal operation Wednesday afternoon after a hostage taker was shot dead by police earlier in the day.

The school authority released a statement on its website about the incident and is trying to appease the hostage, surnamed Liu.

A man took a female staff member hostage at gun point in an office in the Wuhan University at 9 a.m.

Police negotiated with him for several hours but found he had no clear demands. He appeared very agitated and sometimes hallucinatory, said Xia Zhigang, vice director with the Public Security Bureau of Wuhan, the provincial capital.

In the rescue operation, an armed policeman Tan Jixiong was disguised as a canteen man bringing him a meal. He entered the room at about 2:50 p.m., but was shot in the head by the hijacker.

Police waiting outside the room immediately shot and killed the hijacker. The female staff, who works on Communist Party affairs, was unharmed.

Tan was seriously injured but remained in stable condition after the bullet was taken out of his head in a first aid treatment in hospital. He has to undergo a second operation on his chest.

The hijacker, Zhou Kai, 40, used to serve in the armed police force before he joined the university as a logistical worker.

He was sentenced to two and a half years in prison for illegally confining others in July 2008, with a three-year reprieve. He was still under police supervision. He was a drug user before, according to Xia.

Police are still investigating the case.

A translation of the Chinese item follows, with some editorial glosses added.

Xinhua News Agency, Wuhan, China. A special report: short messages from a hostage under gun muzzle

The hostage, Liu Sainan, communicated with the police through short messages, while under a gun muzzle. She sent out nine messages, 163 [Chinese] characters altogether.

The first message was sent out at 9:25 a.m., about twenty-five minutes after the incident happened. It reads ‘I am very worried about Xie Yun, [the hijacker is] quite rude to him’. [Xie is senior to Liu.]

Fifty minutes later, Xie Yun was released. Zhou Kai (the hijacker) hid himself in a corner of the office. He ordered Liu to sit in a chair in front of him and pointed the gun with his left hand against her back.

The crazy hijacker never imagined that, while having a gun trained on her, the vulnerable hostage had hidden her cell phone between her knees, adjusted it to vibrating [or silent] mode, and was sending out many messages secretly.

'[The hijacker’s] counter-reconnaissance ability is very strong, [he] can observe the third floor.'

'Director [Xie Yun], now he will not let me switch [with someone] and go, the stuff [gun] is against me on my back, I will be strong'

Liu Sainan constantly sent messages to report the situation on the spot, and the police sent her a message to remind her: 'Remember to delete text messages promptly'. Liu replied: 'Got it, I have already done that.'

10:40 a.m. '[He] will kill me if his conditions are not met by 7 [pm]'

'He is apt to be irritated by the movement on the third floor and the balcony, temporarily will not shoot [me], he said he would shoot me if [this issue] was not settled by 7 [p.m.], what state should I keep[?]' The police decided to send specially trained policemen to save her, so they sent a message to Liu: 'Be careful, someone will send food in a minute, please escape when you eat.' Liu replied: 'understood'.

Then Liu sent out two messages. It showed that she was preparing for the rescue. The messages were: 'When you send food, can you put something like anesthetic into it, but if it could not work immediately then do not try, he was armed policeman before, [His] counter-reconnaissance ability is very strong'. 'He has an illusion that I belong to the police'.

While Liu was carried out on a stretcher by paramedics, she sent out the last message of that day at 3:03 p.m. to the leader of the university: 'How was the wound of that special policeman'[?]

Xia Zhigang, the on-the-spot commander-in-chief, also vice director of the Public Security Bureau of Wuhan, said that 'Liu Sainan was very clever, brave and calm. She used her cellphone to report the situation inside. It was very helpful for us to grasp the hijacker’s behavior and mind. It was remarkable that she was able to hide this very well, not letting the hijacker find out throughout the incident.'

Jiao adds, by way of comment:

Evidently texting helped to save Liu Sainan’s life. Under such circumstances, texting is the only possible way to inform the police about the true behaviour and mental state of the hijacker. She had to be a skillful texter - familiar with such functions of texting as silent mode and message deletion. I also assume she used one hand to press buttons and send out messages. It needs a great deal of skill.

Liu was really brave. A comment on her name: Liu is her family name, and Sainan is her first name. The sai in her name means ‘to compete, to beat’, and the nan means ‘male’. It proved that she was more brave than most males, I think!

I also noticed she sent out a message 'I will be strong’. This part, especially the adjective ‘strong’ (jianqiang in Chinese) is very popular on the internet after the mega earthquake in Sichuan, China on 12 May 2008. There was a pig which survived the earthquake after 36 days, and people named the pig Zhu Jianqiang (literally ‘pig strong’). That pig is still popular today. Jianqiang has been frequent on the internet and in texting since.

And he concludes: 'Texting does not solely belong to youngsters. It can save lives.'

On 'quarter of'

2009-05-15T14:40:00.002Z

A correspondent writes to ask if the US English time expression quarter of, as in quarter of four, is an ellipsis of something like 'It lacks/wants a quarter of four'.

I don't think it's necessary to suggest an implied verb. The preposition of has several locative uses, and it's a natural semantic extension to move from space to time. The original meaning of the preposition was 'away from' (a sense today now usually found with off), as seen in such obsolete usages as not far of the town and still found in relation to compass points (eg north of London) and specified distances (eg within a mile of).

In fact the OED (see of 4c) locates the clock sense along with other senses 'expressing position which is (or is treated as) the result of departure, and is defined with reference to the starting point', The time quarter of four, from this perspective, means 'a quarter away from four'.

The British use is quarter to, and is quite old. The OED (see to, 6b) has citations from around 1000 illustrating a wide range of usage, such as half hour to five and two hours to day (i.e. 'until daybreak'). The usage with of is less easy to track, because it has also had a dialect use in Scotland and Northern Ireland which probably antedates the US use, though citations are lacking. The earliest OED citation for the American use is 1817.

On a memoir, or is it?

2009-05-09T09:35:00.002Z

A correspondent writes to say he is a tad confused about my latest book Just a Phrase I'm Going Through: My Life in Language, which came out this week. He has seen it referred to as an 'autobiography' and as a 'memoir', and wonders which it is.

The two labels are certainly difficult to distinguish these days. Traditionally, a memoir is a subgenre of autobiography, in that it is much less chronological and comprehensive. It is a narrative about a part of a life, usually focusing on the writer's involvement in external events (as when a general writes a memoir of a military campaign). Its main purpose is to describe the events and to 'take a view' of them. So memoirs deal more with public matters than private ones. Typically, the writers tell us a lot about other people, and little about themselves. If it is self-directed, then it is about their career rather than their private life, though that distinction breaks down when the writer is a celebrity, and certainly some memoirs are highly personal and subjective - as in the case of Gore Vidal's Palimpsest. This he describes as a memoir, and suggests the difference with autobiography to be as follows: 'A memoir is how one remembers one’s own life, while an autobiography is history, requiring research, dates, facts double-checked'.

Personally I find that distinction much too sharp. An alternative is William Zinsser's comment, in his Inventing the Truth: the Art and Craft of Memoir: 'Unlike autobiography, which moves in a dutiful line from birth to fame, memoir narrows the lens, focusing on a time in the writer’s life that was unusually vivid, such as childhood or adolescence, or that was framed by war or travel or public service or some other special circumstance.' 'Narrowing the lens' is a more relevant criterion, to my mind.

Just a Phrase, on these accounts, is neither one thing nor t'other. It is somewhere in between. It is a memoir, in that it has certainly 'narrowed the lens'. This is the story only of my life 'in language'. You will not find in here an account of my politics, or whether I like broccoli, or all the other bits and pieces that make up a life, except insofar as these arise in relation to my work as a linguist. On the other hand, it is definitely chronological, from - as Shakespeare put it in his 'seven ages of man' - infant to pantaloon. And it is full of the dates and double-checking that Vidal wants to see.

The public and the private life interact in all kinds of unpredictable ways - in my case, strikingly so, as it is only through linguistics that I ever found my father. Such interactions blur the traditional genre distinction and demand a new label. So I opt for 'autobiographical memoir'.

On giving 100 percent

2009-04-28T14:09:00.002Z

This week my phone has been overworked because apparently Alan Sugar fires people who say they are giving a job '110 percent'. He's evidently got the impression that the English language only allows people to get up to 100, in terms of percentages.

I was surprised to hear that, coming from a businessman, who is presumably used to seeing shares going up by 200 percent, and such like. There's nothing mathematically wrong with going over 100. But of course what he's getting at (and failing to recognize) is a recent change in usage. It's a kind of semantic inflation, which (it occurs to me) is a bit like the discussion on this blog a while back about '1000 apologies'.

In its figurative usage, 100 percent always meant a notional maximum: one gave up to 100 percent of one's effort, and could give no more. Now the meaning has altered: 100 percent has come to mean 'the norm, the usual level'. 110 percent thus means, '10 percent more than what ordinary people do, or what has been someone's norm hitherto'. 200 percent means 'twice as much'. And so on. I'd expect Alan Sugar to be pleased that someone has expressed the desire to make that extra effort, not to dismiss it.

I've heard 500 percent, 1000 percent, and other values in recent times. Clearly the numbers are not important: it's the rhetoric that counts. And people seem to need the rhetoric. If a football team makes a greater effort than normal, managers routinely compliment them by raising the percentages. Of course, if such phrases become frequent, they turn into cliches, and lose their meaning. But that is precisely what Alan Sugar should have probed. Was his candidate thinking of what he was saying? If I'd been Sugar, I wouldn't have automatically dismissed the 10 percent as a 'waste', I'd have asked the candidate how exactly he would have improved on his previous performance by that amount, and judged him on the quality of his response.

On the rich's

2009-04-25T18:08:00.002Z

A correspondent writes from Denmark to point out this usage seen in The Economist at the beginning of April:

But what makes the rich's behaviour so galling for many critics is that their two greatest crimes were committed in broad daylight...

He observes: according to A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (7.23), 'Adjectives as noun-phrase heads, unlike nouns, do not inflect for number or for the genitive case...' And he wonders what is going on.

A change does seem to be taking place among some of these 'de-adjectival class nouns'. A quick Google search brought to light several other examples of the rich's, such as:

At last, a budget where the super-rich's bluff is called.
Close study debunks myth of the rich's tax burdens

And many more examples of other items, such as:

Private education? The poor's best chance.
This would drastically reduce the wealthy's taxes while forcing them to take up more of the slack

Why is it happening? Well, from one point of view, there's nothing new here. Historically, adjectival nouns have taken a genitive for centuries. Plymouth's first workhouse was known as the 'Hospital of the Poor's Portion', which dated from around 1630. And the OED has examples from around 1400 going right through into the 20th century. Both singular poor's and plural poors' are found. The switch to a solely non-genitive usage seems to have emerged in the 18th century. That's when we find poor tax alongside poor's tax, poor money alongside poor's money, and so on. Scotland seemed to keep the 's forms longer. The OED now says that the 's is 'archaic and rare'. It has no examples of the rich's, but that will need to change. The Middle English Dictionary, for example, has an instance from 1425.

Looking at the examples, I can see some reasons motivating the change. There's a succinctness (and possibly greater clarity) in The poor's best chance compared with The best chance of the poor. And this is likely to be reinforced whenever the item turns up within an of-postmodification, as in:

Close study debunks myth of the rich's tax burdens.

The alternative, with its sequence of of's, is not likely to appeal, especially in headlines, where space is at a premium:

Close study debunks myth of the tax burdens of the rich.

The genitive usage may well have originated as a journalistically-motivated change, but it's wider than that now. Certainly worth keeping an eye on.

On the biggest load of rubbish...

2009-04-22T21:21:00.002Z

The phone hasn't stopped ringing this week. An American organization is claiming that the English language is just about to get its millionth word. They've even suggested a day when this will happen. It's the biggest load of rubbish I've heard in years. But it's attracted a huge amount of publicity.

All it means is that the algorithm they've been using to track English words has finally reached a million. But the English language passed a millon words years ago. Way back in the 1980s, the OED had well over half a million words in its collection. Webster had around half a million. And if you made a comparison of the two (as I did when I was writing The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language) you could see straight away that the coverage was by no means the same. I estimated then that there was about a third difference in coverage between the two dictionaries, due largely to the OED's historical remit - so from these two projects alone there was evidence of some three-quarters of a million words in English.

I then did some comparisons with technical dictionaries, such as dictionaries of botany and linguistics. Most of the really specialized terms in those books weren't in either the OED or Webster. I reached a million very quickly, and it was obvious that this was a task without end. Something like 80 per cent of the vocabulary of English is scientific and technical. There are over a million insects in the world, for example, and English presumably has words for most of them - even if several are Latin loan words. At the same time I also looked at Gale's Dictionary of Abbreviations. There were over half a million of those.

And we haven't even started talking about the spoken language yet. Dictionaries traditionally base themselves on the written language. That's where they get their citations from. But we all know that there are thousands of words in everyday speech which never get recorded in dictionaries - slang, argot, colloquialisms of all kinds (such as the hundreds of words for saying you're drunk). If the American firm is relying on a trawl of internet sources for its database, it's missing out on all of that. And, of course, it's ignoring all the developing 'new Englishes' that exist in largely spoken form around the world. Dictionaries of South African, Jamaican, and other regional Englishes routinely contain 10, 15, 20 thousand or more items. And each editor acknowledges that there are many more 'out there'.

Even if it were possible to ascertain coverage, there's the methodological question of what counts as a word. This is an old chestnut for linguists, but computer firms still ignore it. Flowerpot is one word, but so is flower-pot and flower pot. Will this be counted as one word or two? No computer programme can yet identify all compounds efficiently - let alone idioms such as kick the bucket - and there are tens of thousands of these. Nor can they cope with the problem of distinguishing between words and names. David Crystal isn't a word in the English language in the usual sense; but White House is, in its sense of 'US government'.

The distinction between 'words' and 'lexemes' is critical when you're studying vocabulary. If we count Shakespeare's words, in the grammatical sense, we get around 30,000. If we count Shakespeare's lexemes, we get less than 20,000. A million words is not the issue; a million lexemes is. But I don't know of any computer algorithm which can identify lexemes efficiently. Even linguists with much more powerful brains than computers have got have trouble with the concept sometimes.

A few years ago, world population passed 6 billion. One paper even claimed to have found the 6 billionth child. It was an intriguing idea, which probably sold a few papers, but we all knew it was nonsense. Claiming to find the millionth word is the same - an intriguing idea, and extra PR for the US firm. But it's still nonsense.

On welcoming in

2009-04-18T09:26:00.002Z

A correspondent writes to ask whether it is possible to say 'Welcome in England' as well as 'Welcome to England'.

It certainly isn't standard British or US English, nor have I heard it in regional dialects, but I've certainly heard it used in several of the countries I've visited. The first time I noticed it, about 20 years ago, it took me aback, and I simply put it down to interference from the first language. But I recall once being in Egypt, where several Egyptians at the airport, in taxis, and so on, greeted me warmly with a 'Welcome in Egypt'. Then I met the local British Council director, an English native speaker, who also greeted me with a 'Welcome in Egypt'. So did several other expats. The usage was evidently more than just interference, but an indication of a locally evolving dialect. It reminded me, in its use of an alternative preposition, of the way in which US English has evolved such usages as 'it's a quarter of four' where British English would say 'it's a quarter to four'.

I've no idea just how widespread 'Welcome in' is, around the world, and would be interested to hear from readers of this blog if it's a usage they have in their own countries. I have a feeling it might just become a feature of lingua franca English, one day.

On postpositions

2009-04-16T08:35:00.002Z

A correspondent writes to ask if English has postpositions - by which she means prepositions which follow the noun. As so often in linguistics, the answer is 'it all depends on how you analyse things'.

English plainly doesn't have postpositions in the strict sense, i.e. an item which governs a noun phrase and obligatorily occurs after the noun phrase. In English we say 'in the house' and never 'the house in'. In a postpositional language, people would say 'the house in' and not 'in the house'. Turkish, Finnish, Hindi, Korean, Hungarian, and many other languages have postpositions like this.

English does very occasionally allow a preposition to follow the noun phrase. My correspondent mentions notwithstanding, as in:

these considerations notwithstanding

which is stylistically a more legalistic phrasing of

notwithstanding these considerations.

But, as these examples suggest, the contrast is a stylistic one. It isn't obligatory for notwithstanding to follow the noun phrase.

Another example is the whole night through vs through the whole night. Again, both versions are possible, and the contrast is stylistic in character. Adjectives, incidentally, can also be postposed for stylistic reasons, as in the old ruined house stood on the hillside vs the house, old, ruined, stood on the hillside.

Some people have suggested that constructions such as who with (vs with who(m)) are examples of postposition - but I think it makes more sense to analyse these as elliptical sentences (i.e. a shortened version of such sentences as Who did you go with?)

Ago is also sometimes called a postposition, because it's obligatory for it to follow the noun phrase. We have to say three weeks ago, not ago three weeks. But ago is usually classified as an adverb, not a preposition. One can see the gradient from preposition to adverb when considering such examples as five years before, three years later, and far away.

On also, too

2009-04-05T16:34:00.002Z

Two correspondents write recently with the same concern. One says: 'Yesterday I came across a sentence in a local newspaper: Have you ever tried Chinese food yet?', and he asks: is it right to have both ever and yet in the same sentence? The other asks whether one can have also and too in the same sentence, citing this example (about Shakespeare): And he is also pretty high up in the league of affixers too.

Well, seeing as the second sentence is from a paper of mine, I guess my answer has to be yes! So let me explain why.

There is a literary critical tradition in English that all repeated meaning is a bad thing. Tautology is a deadly sin, according to stylists. Fowler, for example, came down strongly against people who 'fail to notice that they are wasting words by expressing twice over in a sentence some part of it that is indeed essential but needs only one expression.'

The issue, of course, is whether the repetition is an identical expression of meaning or not. The prescriptive temperament tended to condemn anything that was even slightly repetitive, ignoring the nuances of emphasis and aspect that subtle speaking and writing can convey, and failing to appreciate the way adverbs in different parts of a sentence have different modifying roles.

What's happening in the 'Chinese food' example? First, by repeating the notion, the speaker is adding extra emphasis to the time reference. Secondly, he is adding a nuance, as 'ever' looks backwards in time while 'yet' looks forwards. And thirdly, there are different pragmatic issues involved. If someone asked:

Have you ever tried Chinese food?

the question is very general. It is asking you to think back into your past and remember an occasion when you tried Chinese food. It is a new topic of conversation, presupposing no prior discourse history. By contrast, if someone asked:

Have you tried Chinese food yet?

the question is more likely to be alluding to a previous discourse. We've had this conversation before, and now I'm raising the subject again.

A lot depends on the intonation, of course. If the stress falls on the verb, the speaker could be construed as querying a state of mind.

A I don't like Chinese food.
B Have you ever tried Chinese food?
A Well no, actually...

As for the 'Shakespeare' example, my two adverbs have very different directions of modification. This can be seen if we view the sentence in context.

Shakespeare is the doyen of functional shifters. And he is also pretty high up in the league of affixers too.

The role of the also is to relate pretty high up to the doyen. The role of the too is to relate league of affixers to functional shifters. I want to make two emphatic comparisons here, not one.

In both cases, the message is clear. We need to see a supposed tautology in its discourse context, and not just within a single sentence. Only when that context has been eliminated might we justifiably condemn a usage as tautologous also as well.

On not being last

2009-03-29T14:35:00.001Z

A correspondent writes to ask: 'If there is a queue of 5 people, which person is second from last? person 3 or 4?'

If there's an uncertainty here, it must be because of a conflict between logic and language. I suppose logically it could be either, depending on how you 'see' the queue - whether the fifth person is included in the sequence or excluded from it. But linguistically, the weight of usage surely makes it person 4. Usual usage has such sequences as (in a race):

He came last
He came second last = second from the end
He came third last = third from the end

and so on. Note that we can't say:

He came first last.

The same point applies to second from last. There is no first from last, which we'd have to allow if person 3 was the interpretation.

On the other hand, there are two usages: second from last and second last. Is there a difference in meaning between these two?

We went to the beach on our second-last day.
We went to the beach on our second-from-last day.

The stress is on the second-last syllable.
The stress is on the second-from-last syllable.

For me, these are the same. The OED illustrates the first usage but not the second. Is there anyone out there who makes a distinction?

On apologies

2009-03-02T11:16:00.002Z

A correspondent writes to ask one of those annoying questions which I feel I should know the answer to, but then realize I don't, without a bit of research! Why do we say my apologies, in the plural?

The word apology has been around a long time. Shakespeare uses it half-a-dozen times, always with its sense of 'formal justification or explanation', and always in the singular. If Shakespearean characters want to apologise, in the modern sense of 'regret', they say such things as I cry you mercy. The OED has no examples of plural usage until quite modern times.

This suggests to me a pragmatic explanation, focussing on the 'century of manners'. The 18th century strikes me as being the time when people might have felt one apology wasn't enough, so they really went in for pluralizing it. The sense of 'regret' was strong by then, as can be seen several times in Boswell's Life of Johnson - 'Johnson walked away to dinner there, leaving me by myself without any apology; I wondered at this want of that facility of manners'. But there are no plurals in the Life.

An early instance of the plural use is in Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726): 'at last he plainly invited me, though with some apologies, to be surgeon of the ship'. By the time Jane Austen was writing, at the end of the century, it was common, as this example from Pride and Prejudice illustrates: 'Her ladyship, with great condescension, arose to receive them; and as Mrs. Collins had settled it with her husband that the office of introduction should be hers, it was performed in a proper manner, without any of those apologies and thanks which he would have thought necessary'. By the time Dickens was writing, fifty years later, it was found with ironic uses too. Bleak House, for instance, shows both the regular use and the ironic one. 'With all apologies for intruding...', says Mr Bucket. And we are told that Mr Weevle 'who is a handy good-for-nothing kind of young fellow, borrows a needle and thread of Miss Flite and a hammer of his landlord and goes to work devising apologies for window-curtains, and knocking up apologies for shelves'.

So, I'm putting my money on the 18th century as the time when this usage became fashionable. I'd be interested to hear of anything earlier.

We keep upping the ante today, of course. A hundred apologies. A thousand apologies - the most popular usage, which has appeared as the title of a TV show, a music album, and more. Even a million apologies. And (especially since the economic crisis) a billion or trillion apologies.

On anacolutha

2009-02-10T11:01:00.002Z

A correspondent writes to draw attention to this sentence:

The table was covered with objects, although once he removed the books, he was able to drag it to the centre of the room.

He asks: can a subordinating conjunction be used to connect the complex sentence beginning with once to the preceding simple sentence or can only a coordinating conjunction join compound-complex sentences? He suggests this alternative:

The table was covered with objects, but once he removed the books, he was able to drag it to the centre of the room.

The use of 'although', in cases like this, is certainly common in spontaneous speech. What we have is technically described as an anacoluthon, defined (eg by the OED) as 'a construction lacking grammatical sequence'. Such sentences work semantically, but at the expense of syntax, because they usually omit a required element. What's missing here is something like

The table was covered with objects, but this wasn't a problem because, once he removed the books, he was able to drag it to the centre of the room.

Anacolutha are able to occur because they rely on our semantic or contextual awareness to allow us to make short cuts in grammar. They're very frequent in spontaneous speech. There's no problem understanding such sentences, of course. There's no ambiguity. But they're frowned upon in formal writing, where (in the above example) the coordinate conjunction would be recommended. Many of the strictures in Fowler's Dictionary of Modern English Usage are against anacolutha of this kind.

No traditional grammar handles them - and even linguistic grammars pay scant attention to them. The realization that the grammar of speech is very different from the grammar of writing has become a big thing, over the past 50 years, but anacolutha remain one of the neglected areas of grammatical investigation. This is a shame, as they're so common in speech. I've just spent a mind-numbing few days listening over and over to a series of lectures I recorded last year, in order to write a commentary on them for a book/DVD package which Routledge are publishing in May this year, called The Future of Language. Because these were spontaneous performances, without written notes or an Obaman autocue, they contain several anacolutha. I draw attention to them in the commentary. Interestingly, the firm contracted to add the sub-titles regularized many of them, so that they conformed to written English norms. I had to change them back. WYS (in the sub-titles) IWYG.

On not writing a book

2009-01-31T12:30:00.000Z

There is a book reviewed in today's Guardian called Shakespeare on Toast, and if you look carefully you will see the paper says it is by me. Read on: 'a matey attempt to make Shakespeare relevant... Crystal, who is also an actor, paints in a lot of useful context... Crystal ends up admirably succeeding in his ambition to provide a toolbox for getting to grips with Shakespeare's plays'.

What a nice review. But people who know me must be a bit puzzled by this point. Matey? Actor? That doesn't sound quite right. And indeed, alas, no. The Guardian, once again, has lived up to its Grauniad reputation. The book was written by son Ben. You can see more about it at his website Shakespeare on Toast .

I know life is one long battle to stay ahead of your kids, but this is taking things a bit far. Ah well, maybe Ben will get his revenge one day. I expect the Guardian will assign my autobiography to him, in due course.

On holding a speech

2009-01-25T23:41:00.000Z

An English teacher from Germany writes to ask: 'Do you hold a speech or give a speech'. He adds: 'I could have sworn it was give, but people claim to have seen hold a speech in newspapers'.

Indeed you will - and on the internet too, as you'll quickly discover if you type hold a/the speech into a search engine. What's interesting about these cases is that an adverbial of place or time seems to be obligatory. It's usually a place adverbial:

Obama will hold acceptance speech at football stadium with more seats.
Students hold free speech rally at Danish consulate.
Canadians Hold Free Speech Rally in Toronto.
Merkel opposed the Obama campaign's initial plan to hold the speech at the Brandenburg Gate.
the decision to hold the speech at Invesco was made two months ago.

Sometimes it's a time adverbial:

Sayyed Nasrallah to Hold Speech on Resistance Day.

And sometimes it's both:

Professor David Ray Griffin will hold a speech on 8 September 2006 in the Tropeninstituut in Amsterdam.

By contrast, give a speech is the norm when the focus is non-specific or where the adverbial gives further information about the topic.

Mike gave an excellent speech.
She gave a speech on the environment.

And of course, we can add adverbials of place or time to this:

Mike gave an excellent speech on the environment on Friday last at the Planetarium.

So the generalization seems to be something like this: give a speech is the more general usage; but hold a speech can be used where the focus is explicitly on the event rather than on the subject-matter. Without this focus, I find the usage dubious:

Mike held an excellent speech.

I think I could only use this if I meant 'the arrangements Mike made for the speech were excellent' - analogous to 'Mike held a meeting to talk about the environment' , 'I held a party and nobody came' (The Bee Gees), and so on. I'd be interested to know if others share this feeling.

On a disappearing dialect

2009-01-18T14:39:00.002Z

Philip Holland has sent me a copy of his book Words of the White Peak. The subtitle explains: 'the disappearing dialect of a Derbyshire village'. I've talked about the importance of documenting dialects in this blog before, so I'm happy to bring it to the attention of readers.

The village is Earl Sterndale, just south of Buxton, in the Peak District. He was a dairy and sheep farmer for some 40 years, but the book describes him as many other things besides - hotelier, pianist, poet, and now lexicographer. The present collection came out of a three-year course in creative writing as a mature student at the Devonshire campus of Derby University in Buxton. It's never too late to become a lexicographer!

Dialect studies always start small and then grow fast. In the end Philip interviewed over 150 people to get all the words and phrases which form his dictionary. But, as he says in his introduction, it's more than a dictionary: it's also a memoir of his life and work on his farm. Many of the words are local farming words, such as beldering, for the bellowing of a bull, or blareting, for the bleating of a sheep. But there are also several general words, such as crozzled 'dried-out, burnt up, withered', and discourse phrases, such as choose 'ow (i.e. 'how'), added to a sentence to reinforce inevitability - 'the outcome would be the same whatever you did'.

You have to be careful, when you're reading a dialect book about a particular area. The words it contains simply illustrate what is used in that area. It doesn't mean that they're all unique to that area. Several of the words used in Earl Sterndale are found in other dialects of the British Isles, such as cack-handed 'clumsy', chuntering 'mumbling disagreeably', and nous, 'common sense'.

Dialects always overlap in this way. What we see in Earl Sterndale is a unique constellation of usages, some local to the area and some part of a wider dialect community. Every village would probably have its own voiceprint. The pity is that so few have been studied. Philip Holland's book shows what can be done.

You can find the book through Derbyshire bookshope, including shops on the Charsworth Estate and the Farming Life Centre in Blackwell, near Buxton, price £8.95. Also via the publisher, Anecdotes Publishing (www.anecdotespublishing.co.uk).