A correspondent writes with a suggestion for inclusion in the next edition of the Penguin Encyclopedia - and as messages of this kind are a fairly regular occurrence, this post provides an opportunity to tell interested parties of the main event this week, which means that there will be no more general encyclopedias under my editorship.
I have been editing general reference works for Penguin since 2002 - mainly The Penguin Encyclopedia and its Concise edition, as well as the Penguin Factfinder and its variants, such as The Penguin Book of Facts, and a set of small 'pocket' books on a range of topics. Earlier this year, Penguin decided not to do any further editions of these books. Why? Mainly because sales of published general encyclopedias have been falling away, thanks to the arrival of Wikipedia and other such sites. That is where most people go when they want information now, it seems - notwithstanding the fact that the information is regularly misleading, biased, or just plain wrong, as is inevitable when entries are compiled in a wiki-like way. Penguin isn't the only encylopedia publisher to withdraw. I read the other day of a French encyclopedia which has stopped publication for the same reason.
My editorial team in Holyhead continued to develop the reference database, nonetheless. Over the years we have been supplying reference data to a number of other publishers and online sources, such as biography.com, and the maintenance of the database continued to be a priority. A reference database is only valuable if it is up-to-date. We used to have a boast that if you died in the morning (and were famous enough) you would be in our database by the evening. The same coverage is needed for hundreds of areas of everyday life, from sports results to Oscars, from political leadership changes (in all countries) to the latest work by leading film stars and novelists. It kept my little team very busy, as you can imagine.
But you will have noticed the tense form, 'kept'. This week, the organization which owns the reference database, adpepper media, decided that its continued maintenance was no longer viable. My team was made redundant, and the database was immediately shelved. I therefore need to record that my intellectual responsibility for that database ceased as of this week. It's a great shame - for we are talking about a database which was compiled over a 22-year-period by hundreds of specialists, belonging to institutions as wide-ranging as NASA and the Natural History Museum - but in business terms it is perfectly understandable. If it doesn't make money, it's history.
Again for the record, let me summarize that history. The project began in 1986, when I was asked to compile the new Cambridge Encyclopedia for Cambridge University Press. Over the next decade, a series of reference books appeared from that publisher (the full details can be found in the books section of my website). In 1995, CUP changed its policy and sold the database to a Dutch IT firm, AND, who were more interested in developing the underlying taxonomy (which allowed us to mine the database for types of information) in relation to Internet search-engine activity (this was pre-Google, remember). The Cambridge encyclopedias continued to be published until 2000, but then AND went into liquidation, and all activity stopped, both on the reference side and on the IT side. Soon after, anxious not to waste the huge amount of work that had been done, and to safeguard the jobs of the Holyhead team (in an area which had been hard hit by recession), I and a colleague set up our own company, Crystal Reference Systems, to develop both the reference and the IT dimensions. We began to produce a new family of encyclopedias for Penguin, and to develop the IT side in a number of fresh directions - chiefly in relation to search engines, e-commerce, internet security, and automatic document classification. I will tell the story of that struggle on another occasion, but the upshot was that in 2006 the business was sold to adpepper media, who then shaped the IT side to focus on providing accurate and relevant placement of ads on web pages - what I call 'semantic targetting'. It is that side of the business which the new owners wish to concentrate on now, and the demise of the reference side of the business has been a consequence.
I hope to have the opportunity to tell the encyclopedia story at greater length in due course, and to acknowledge thereby the role played by the many specialists, editors, and readers who contributed to the projects over more than two decades. For the moment, this announcement must suffice to alert those reference-buffs who are aware of my involvement in general encyclopedia publishing that, as of 12 May 2008, that involvement is ended.
Saturday, 24 May 2008
On false friends
A correspondent writes to ask if I have written anything about 'false friends', and their role in language learning and teaching.
Just in case some readers of this blog haven't encountered the term, false friends are cases where a word in one language resembles a word in another, and a learner assumes that, because the two words look the same, they therefore mean the same. So, abusif in French doesn't mean 'abusive' (which would be injurieux) but 'incorrect, illegal, unauthorized, excessive...'
Linguists do routinely collect examples of false friends, and I'm no exception. But I've never written a book about them - unlike, say, Philip Thody and Howard Evans, who compiled an excellent collection of French/English 'faux amis' a few years ago - Faux Amis & Key Words (Athlone Press, 1985). The Munich-based English-teaching magazine Spotlight also regularly lists German false friends.
The nearest I've got to writing on this subject is in relation to Shakespeare. I used to do a column in the Times Educational Supplement called 'Will's Words', which was on Shakeapearean false friends. You can see many of these pieces on the Shakespeare's Words website (www.shakespeareswords.com). I also discuss them in my recent Think on my Words: Exploring Shakespeare's Language (CUP 2008).
I'm no methodologist, so I don't have anything really to say about how best to incorporate false friends into language teaching. But they certainly should receive a special focus, at some point, for they are among the easiest errors to make, both in production and comprehension. I think time spent on assimilating false friends is time well spent, especially as some of them are very frequent (French demander comes to mind - meaning 'ask' not 'demand'). And it would certainly save a lot of Shakespearean misinterpretation if people took the trouble to learn the commonest false friends in Early Modern English - such as naughty and merely.
Just in case some readers of this blog haven't encountered the term, false friends are cases where a word in one language resembles a word in another, and a learner assumes that, because the two words look the same, they therefore mean the same. So, abusif in French doesn't mean 'abusive' (which would be injurieux) but 'incorrect, illegal, unauthorized, excessive...'
Linguists do routinely collect examples of false friends, and I'm no exception. But I've never written a book about them - unlike, say, Philip Thody and Howard Evans, who compiled an excellent collection of French/English 'faux amis' a few years ago - Faux Amis & Key Words (Athlone Press, 1985). The Munich-based English-teaching magazine Spotlight also regularly lists German false friends.
The nearest I've got to writing on this subject is in relation to Shakespeare. I used to do a column in the Times Educational Supplement called 'Will's Words', which was on Shakeapearean false friends. You can see many of these pieces on the Shakespeare's Words website (www.shakespeareswords.com). I also discuss them in my recent Think on my Words: Exploring Shakespeare's Language (CUP 2008).
I'm no methodologist, so I don't have anything really to say about how best to incorporate false friends into language teaching. But they certainly should receive a special focus, at some point, for they are among the easiest errors to make, both in production and comprehension. I think time spent on assimilating false friends is time well spent, especially as some of them are very frequent (French demander comes to mind - meaning 'ask' not 'demand'). And it would certainly save a lot of Shakespearean misinterpretation if people took the trouble to learn the commonest false friends in Early Modern English - such as naughty and merely.
Thursday, 17 April 2008
On boilt
A correspondent writes to say : 'I discovered that the verb to spoil has preterite and past participle spoiled but that it also has spoilt (not sure whether one is British and the other American). What I want to know is whether boil works the same way.'
I can find no trace of the boilt spelling in standard English. There are no instances in the OED, although there was a great deal of spelling variation in the early centuries of its use. But regional dictionaries show examples, especially in Scotland, Ulster, the Isle of Man, and parts of the USA (especially those influenced by Scots-Irish). A Scots poetic example from 1790: 'Twa pints o' weel-boilt solid sowins' [an oat-meal beverage].
With verbs which have two -ed forms, such as spoiled and spoilt, the situation is interesting and not entirely understood. The -t ending is rare in American English, certainly. In British English, an aspectual distinction is usually involved. 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.
To test this hypothesis, the best way is to compare pairs of examples. In The house burnt down, the implication is that the event took place quite quickly, whereas burned is more likely in The house burned for days. Similarly, I've dreamed all my life of living in Scotland is more likely than I dreamt all my life of living in Scotland. Dreamt tends to be used for single, short, and determinate instances of dreaming, where the dreamer is asleep (I dreamt last night I was in Italy); dreamed tends to be used for a more continuous and indefinable dreaming, where the dreamer is awake (I dreamed of meeting you all week). There is some overlap, though not in contexts where the 'awake' sense is clear, such as day-dreaming, which gives rise to I day-dreamed, not I day-dreamt. It is not a hard-and-fast rule, but it does help to explain the relative frequency of different items. Spilt is much more likely than spilled because the action of spilling is usually short. Learned is much more likely than learnt because the action of learning usually takes some time.
I can find no trace of the boilt spelling in standard English. There are no instances in the OED, although there was a great deal of spelling variation in the early centuries of its use. But regional dictionaries show examples, especially in Scotland, Ulster, the Isle of Man, and parts of the USA (especially those influenced by Scots-Irish). A Scots poetic example from 1790: 'Twa pints o' weel-boilt solid sowins' [an oat-meal beverage].
With verbs which have two -ed forms, such as spoiled and spoilt, the situation is interesting and not entirely understood. The -t ending is rare in American English, certainly. In British English, an aspectual distinction is usually involved. 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.
To test this hypothesis, the best way is to compare pairs of examples. In The house burnt down, the implication is that the event took place quite quickly, whereas burned is more likely in The house burned for days. Similarly, I've dreamed all my life of living in Scotland is more likely than I dreamt all my life of living in Scotland. Dreamt tends to be used for single, short, and determinate instances of dreaming, where the dreamer is asleep (I dreamt last night I was in Italy); dreamed tends to be used for a more continuous and indefinable dreaming, where the dreamer is awake (I dreamed of meeting you all week). There is some overlap, though not in contexts where the 'awake' sense is clear, such as day-dreaming, which gives rise to I day-dreamed, not I day-dreamt. It is not a hard-and-fast rule, but it does help to explain the relative frequency of different items. Spilt is much more likely than spilled because the action of spilling is usually short. Learned is much more likely than learnt because the action of learning usually takes some time.
On who plurals
A correspondent writes to say that someone corrected him when he asked (before a tennis match): Who are playing? His friend said it should be Who is playing? He agreed that the plural sounded funny, but couldn't think why.
The plural sounds a bit odd because it is the normal unmarked use of who to be singular. This is because the who question is usually definite and particular. Who wants to open the bidding? is asking a specific individual to begin. Note the contrast with the indefinite and general use of who in the singular, as in Who wants to get Alzheimer's?, which means 'There is no-one who wants...' Faced with a question where a singular or a plural answer are both possible (as in the tennis case), people will find the singular interpretation more natural than the plural.
A plural indefinite who is perfectly possible, however, especially when the post-verbal element is explicitly multiple, as these examples illustrate:
Who are our top ten salesmen this year?
Who won first three places in the race?
Who are playing Smith and Brown in the doubles?
Who were fighting to preserve their nation?
Who are playing Hamlet and Horatio?
The last type of case is nice: it would be impossible to have a definite singular interpretation here, unless the actor somehow managed to play both parts simultaneously!
The plural sounds a bit odd because it is the normal unmarked use of who to be singular. This is because the who question is usually definite and particular. Who wants to open the bidding? is asking a specific individual to begin. Note the contrast with the indefinite and general use of who in the singular, as in Who wants to get Alzheimer's?, which means 'There is no-one who wants...' Faced with a question where a singular or a plural answer are both possible (as in the tennis case), people will find the singular interpretation more natural than the plural.
A plural indefinite who is perfectly possible, however, especially when the post-verbal element is explicitly multiple, as these examples illustrate:
Who are our top ten salesmen this year?
Who won first three places in the race?
Who are playing Smith and Brown in the doubles?
Who were fighting to preserve their nation?
Who are playing Hamlet and Horatio?
The last type of case is nice: it would be impossible to have a definite singular interpretation here, unless the actor somehow managed to play both parts simultaneously!
Monday, 14 April 2008
On semi-colons
Are semi-colons really necessary, asks a correspondent?
Well it all depends on what she means by necessary its perfectly possible to have a long piece of writing with no punctuation at all and it still makes sense with very little if any ambiguity people arent used to it of course so it isnt particularly easy to read
And so on. James Joyce did it better (at the end of Ulysses). Punctuation gives us two kinds of information: it helps us see the grammatical structure of a sentence, and (the older use) it gives us a clue about how to read text aloud.
The semi-colon first appears in Europe at the end of the 15th century, and (according to M B Parkes) 'seems to have been a deliberate invention designed to fulfil a particular need'. Aldus Manutius explains it as a sort of compromise: the semi-circle (i.e. comma), he says, doesn't give a long enough pause, whereas the double point (i.e. the colon) slows up the speech too much. It rapidly spread in Europe during the 16th century, and is found in English from the 1530s. It took much longer to become widely accepted, probably because of uncertainty about its overlap with the function of the colon. Henry Denham was said to be 'the first to use the semicolon with propriety' (in 1579). It was well established by Ben Jonson's time, but typesetters varied enormously in their use of it. Semi-colons appear on some pages of Hamlet in Shakespeare's First Folio and not on others.
Today, the semi-colon has a clear grammatical (rather than a phonetic function), allowing writers to mark a level of grammatical organization higher than the comma. Its function is to coordinate. Semantically it closely resembles 'and':
John drank tea; Mary drank juice.
It is therefore used to link units at the level of clause or phrase - even allowing single-word units, when some of the other units contain a comma. The example I found for Making Sense of Grammar illustrates the value of the semi-colon:
The menu offered us juice; a boiled, fried, or poached egg; toast; and tea or coffee.
Replacing the semi-colons by commas makes this much more difficult to read:
The menu offered us juice, a boiled, fried, or poached egg, toast, and tea or coffee.
So yes, it's a useful mark, I think.
Well it all depends on what she means by necessary its perfectly possible to have a long piece of writing with no punctuation at all and it still makes sense with very little if any ambiguity people arent used to it of course so it isnt particularly easy to read
And so on. James Joyce did it better (at the end of Ulysses). Punctuation gives us two kinds of information: it helps us see the grammatical structure of a sentence, and (the older use) it gives us a clue about how to read text aloud.
The semi-colon first appears in Europe at the end of the 15th century, and (according to M B Parkes) 'seems to have been a deliberate invention designed to fulfil a particular need'. Aldus Manutius explains it as a sort of compromise: the semi-circle (i.e. comma), he says, doesn't give a long enough pause, whereas the double point (i.e. the colon) slows up the speech too much. It rapidly spread in Europe during the 16th century, and is found in English from the 1530s. It took much longer to become widely accepted, probably because of uncertainty about its overlap with the function of the colon. Henry Denham was said to be 'the first to use the semicolon with propriety' (in 1579). It was well established by Ben Jonson's time, but typesetters varied enormously in their use of it. Semi-colons appear on some pages of Hamlet in Shakespeare's First Folio and not on others.
Today, the semi-colon has a clear grammatical (rather than a phonetic function), allowing writers to mark a level of grammatical organization higher than the comma. Its function is to coordinate. Semantically it closely resembles 'and':
John drank tea; Mary drank juice.
It is therefore used to link units at the level of clause or phrase - even allowing single-word units, when some of the other units contain a comma. The example I found for Making Sense of Grammar illustrates the value of the semi-colon:
The menu offered us juice; a boiled, fried, or poached egg; toast; and tea or coffee.
Replacing the semi-colons by commas makes this much more difficult to read:
The menu offered us juice, a boiled, fried, or poached egg, toast, and tea or coffee.
So yes, it's a useful mark, I think.
On possessive apostrophes
A correspondent writes to ask about the possessive apostrophe. Is it actually an apostrophe of omission?
The apostrophe is a relatively late arrival in English. Its origins lie in Europe, where early 16th century printers introduced it (based on Greek practice) to show the omission of a letter (usually, showing the elision of a vowel in speech). The earliest appearance of it in England is in a book printed by John Day in 1559, William Cunningham's The cosmographical glasse. It was definitely seen as a sign of omission. Ben Jonson describes it as 'the rejecting of a vowel from the beginning or end of a word', such as we would see in heav'n or desir'st. And this is how it was with the possessives, where it was originally used to show the omission of an e, as in dogges - and also to mark a plural, especially of foreign words (where folioes would be written as folio's).
In the seventeenth century, practice slowly standardized. The use to mark the e in a plural died away (though not entirely - it can still be found in the quotations in Johnson's Dictionary of 1755), and the use to mark a possessive extended to all cases of possession, whether there was an original e there or not. So we find, in the 18th century, such forms as woman's as well as for conscience' sake. 19th-century printers then developed the rules which made the distinction between singular and plural possession (cat's vs cats') - though not without some opposition from grammarians. The OED has a nice example from Mason's English Grammar of 1876 which shows how the idea of elision was still present in people's minds : 'It is an unmeaning process to put the apostrophe after the [possessive] plural s (as birds'), because no vowel has been dropped there'.
The apostrophe is a relatively late arrival in English. Its origins lie in Europe, where early 16th century printers introduced it (based on Greek practice) to show the omission of a letter (usually, showing the elision of a vowel in speech). The earliest appearance of it in England is in a book printed by John Day in 1559, William Cunningham's The cosmographical glasse. It was definitely seen as a sign of omission. Ben Jonson describes it as 'the rejecting of a vowel from the beginning or end of a word', such as we would see in heav'n or desir'st. And this is how it was with the possessives, where it was originally used to show the omission of an e, as in dogges - and also to mark a plural, especially of foreign words (where folioes would be written as folio's).
In the seventeenth century, practice slowly standardized. The use to mark the e in a plural died away (though not entirely - it can still be found in the quotations in Johnson's Dictionary of 1755), and the use to mark a possessive extended to all cases of possession, whether there was an original e there or not. So we find, in the 18th century, such forms as woman's as well as for conscience' sake. 19th-century printers then developed the rules which made the distinction between singular and plural possession (cat's vs cats') - though not without some opposition from grammarians. The OED has a nice example from Mason's English Grammar of 1876 which shows how the idea of elision was still present in people's minds : 'It is an unmeaning process to put the apostrophe after the [possessive] plural s (as birds'), because no vowel has been dropped there'.
On question-marks
A correspondent writes to ask when the question-mark symbol was first used in English? Was it an inverted semi-colon.
No, the question-mark is much older. The origins of punctuation lie in the need to give clues as to how liturgical texts should be read aloud. A system of symbols developed in Europe in the eighth century - they were called 'positurae' in the Middle Ages - distinguishing the end of a statement, the end of a question, and a major within-sentence pause. The punctus interrogativus, as it was called, consisted of a dot underneath a right-leaning or horizontal wavering dash - a bit like a modern italic question-mark, but lacking the prominent semi-circular bend. The influence of Charlemagne's court spread it throughout the monasteries of Europe in the ninth century, including England. As handwriting practice changed, in the Middle Ages, the mark became more rounded in shape, to distinguish it from the other marks (and especially, later, from the exclamation-mark). The earliest printers cut a fount which reflected this shape, and gradually the question-mark emerged in its modern upright look. The 'old roman' fount of Aldus Manutius became the European norm in the late 15th century. In England it seems to have been first used by Pynson in 1502, and question-marks are regularly found in printed texts of the 16th century. The semi-colon took much longer to be accepted.
Anyone interested in the history of punctuation should look at M B Parkes, Pause and Effect (Scolar Press, 1992), which has an excellent set of pictorial illustrations of manuscripts throughout the period.
No, the question-mark is much older. The origins of punctuation lie in the need to give clues as to how liturgical texts should be read aloud. A system of symbols developed in Europe in the eighth century - they were called 'positurae' in the Middle Ages - distinguishing the end of a statement, the end of a question, and a major within-sentence pause. The punctus interrogativus, as it was called, consisted of a dot underneath a right-leaning or horizontal wavering dash - a bit like a modern italic question-mark, but lacking the prominent semi-circular bend. The influence of Charlemagne's court spread it throughout the monasteries of Europe in the ninth century, including England. As handwriting practice changed, in the Middle Ages, the mark became more rounded in shape, to distinguish it from the other marks (and especially, later, from the exclamation-mark). The earliest printers cut a fount which reflected this shape, and gradually the question-mark emerged in its modern upright look. The 'old roman' fount of Aldus Manutius became the European norm in the late 15th century. In England it seems to have been first used by Pynson in 1502, and question-marks are regularly found in printed texts of the 16th century. The semi-colon took much longer to be accepted.
Anyone interested in the history of punctuation should look at M B Parkes, Pause and Effect (Scolar Press, 1992), which has an excellent set of pictorial illustrations of manuscripts throughout the period.
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