A correspondent - presumably from the UK - writes to say she is 'fascinated by the American habit (inability?) to say mirror, terror, etc as we do in two discrete syllables. mir-r, ter-r, is what we hear.' Why do they do it?, she asks. She offers four explanations:
'1. A desire to be stylish or a reluctance to be too correct/too English?
2. Their frequent desire to speed speech up, as in giving a year as Two thousand eight instead of Two thousand and eight?
3. A form of shyness, like saying duiper instead of nappy?
4. Or maybe a Deep South accent becoming unable to embrace it?'
She also asks if we know when such usage began, adding (in a totally different connection): 'the first occurrence I have come across of, for example, would of instead of would have is in Gone with the Wind.'
The answer to the first point is much, much simpler. Most accents of US English are rhotic - that is, they pronounce the /r/ after a vowel. The phonetic character of the /r/ is retroflex, i.e. the tip of the tongue is curled back towards the palate. In words like mirror we find two retroflexed /r/s occurring in quick succession. It is therefore the most natural thing in the world to run the two /r/s together. The alternative, to drop the tip of the tongue for the vowel and then to raise it again, would slow the pronunciation down so artificially that it would sound weird. In fact, nobody ever does this. A 'long /r/' is the result. No need to delve into the imagined American psyche here.
The fallacy in the explanations given by my correspondent is clear when one realizes that this isn't exclusively an American thing. Any rhotic accent will display the same effect. You can hear the same sort of 'long /r/' in West Country UK accents, for instance, or in Northern Ireland, and many other regions. Where did the American /r/ come from in the first place? Think of the people on the Mayflower, and where many of them came from.
As for the spelling would of and other such usages... this isn't a recent American thing either. The earliest instance I have come across of have appearing as of is in one of Keats's letters (5 Sept 1819). And the elliptical pronunciation has probably been around as long as the auxiliary verbs have existed in English. there are several 'ves in Shakespeare, for instance.
Sunday, 8 June 2008
Friday, 6 June 2008
On good times and bad
A correspondent learning English as a foreign language writes to say he is uncertain about whether he can say for four times (vs four times) and for several times (vs several times) in English. He has found the former in Othello and the latter in Frankenstein, he says.
The Othello example is a red herring. It is: 'I have looked upon the world for four times seven years' - so this is the use of times meaning 'multiplied by'. The preposition governs the noun years, and the usage is fine (although the phrase as a whole is stylistically unusual).
The Frankenstein one is found in Chapter 12 of Mary Shelley's book, and this is more interesting. It is: 'for several times they placed food before the old man when they reserved none for themselves'. That's certainly odd. The OED has 364 instances of the phrase several times in its entire database, and none of them have a preceding for.
Numerals provide occasional examples. The OED has 600 instances of three times, and there are two preceded by for - a British one in 1830 and a US one in 1919. So it may have been more common in earlier times - but two instances out of 600 isn't very convincing evidence for a norm. Today, as earlier, the standard usage for times meaning 'occasions / instances' is as follows:
I've been to France several/three times.
I knocked on the door several/four times.
Why do the for instances arise at all? I think it's the influence of the construction used for specific time periods, which readily allows an optional for:
I stayed there (for) several/four days.
I waited (for) several/three hours.
That's probably why there's some EFL uncertainty.
The Othello example is a red herring. It is: 'I have looked upon the world for four times seven years' - so this is the use of times meaning 'multiplied by'. The preposition governs the noun years, and the usage is fine (although the phrase as a whole is stylistically unusual).
The Frankenstein one is found in Chapter 12 of Mary Shelley's book, and this is more interesting. It is: 'for several times they placed food before the old man when they reserved none for themselves'. That's certainly odd. The OED has 364 instances of the phrase several times in its entire database, and none of them have a preceding for.
Numerals provide occasional examples. The OED has 600 instances of three times, and there are two preceded by for - a British one in 1830 and a US one in 1919. So it may have been more common in earlier times - but two instances out of 600 isn't very convincing evidence for a norm. Today, as earlier, the standard usage for times meaning 'occasions / instances' is as follows:
I've been to France several/three times.
I knocked on the door several/four times.
Why do the for instances arise at all? I think it's the influence of the construction used for specific time periods, which readily allows an optional for:
I stayed there (for) several/four days.
I waited (for) several/three hours.
That's probably why there's some EFL uncertainty.
Tuesday, 3 June 2008
On Caxton as linguist
A correspondent writes to ask, in relation to the emergence of standardization in English, whether the choices made by William Caxton in his publications were linguistically motivated.
I've actually dealt with this question at some length in my The Stories of English (Chapter 11), so I won't repeat myself here. My view, in brief, is that the spellings in Caxton's books were so varied that it isn't possible to ascribe to him any sort of conscious standardization policy. I agree with Norman Blake, in his excellent study (Caxton and his World), who concludes that Caxton was 'an opportunist in linguistic matters'. I see Caxton as a jobbing printer, who wanted to get books out as quickly and efficiently as possible. My impression is that he was a man of the moment, devising ways of solving the immediate printing task presented by a manuscript, and not especially concerned to check that the linguistic solution for book X was the same as the one he had already adopted for book Y. Even within one book, there are many variations. In the famous 'egg' story (from Eneydos we find 'asked' spelled within a few lines of each other as axed and axyd, 'wife' as wyf and wyfe, and many more such instances of variation. His books did introduce several features which would eventually help to shape Standard English. The 'egg' story shows that he was aware of the need to make choices. But there's precious little sign of a linguistic policy in his work.
I've actually dealt with this question at some length in my The Stories of English (Chapter 11), so I won't repeat myself here. My view, in brief, is that the spellings in Caxton's books were so varied that it isn't possible to ascribe to him any sort of conscious standardization policy. I agree with Norman Blake, in his excellent study (Caxton and his World), who concludes that Caxton was 'an opportunist in linguistic matters'. I see Caxton as a jobbing printer, who wanted to get books out as quickly and efficiently as possible. My impression is that he was a man of the moment, devising ways of solving the immediate printing task presented by a manuscript, and not especially concerned to check that the linguistic solution for book X was the same as the one he had already adopted for book Y. Even within one book, there are many variations. In the famous 'egg' story (from Eneydos we find 'asked' spelled within a few lines of each other as axed and axyd, 'wife' as wyf and wyfe, and many more such instances of variation. His books did introduce several features which would eventually help to shape Standard English. The 'egg' story shows that he was aware of the need to make choices. But there's precious little sign of a linguistic policy in his work.
On early splitting
A correspondent writes to ask about split infinitives. He has read The Fight for English, where I say that the construction has been in the language for centuries, but I don't give any examples. He is suspicious. Are there really any before the 19th century, he asks?
Oh, yes, plenty. They've been traced back to the 13th century, at first usually with a single negative word or pronoun as the splitting element, but then with adverbs. The early 15th-century cleric Reginald Pecock frequently used them. Here is an example from his The Repressor of Overmuch Blaming of the Clergy (chapter 5):
Goddis forbode y schulde be so lewde for to so seie
[God forbid I should be so foolish as to say so]
There are examples in Wyclife, Tyndale, More, Donne, Goldsmith, Burns... From Thomas More (1557) we find 'and then to not byleve them'; from Thomas Stapleton (1565), 'to flatly gainsaye'.
The practice became less common in the Early Modern English period - I don't know why. I can't recall any instances in Shakespeare, for instance. It builds up again in the 18th and 19th century - which is presumably why late 19th-century prescriptive grammarians started to condemn it - notwithstanding instances such as 'in order to fully appreciate' from Lord Macaulay (in 1843), among others.
Oh, yes, plenty. They've been traced back to the 13th century, at first usually with a single negative word or pronoun as the splitting element, but then with adverbs. The early 15th-century cleric Reginald Pecock frequently used them. Here is an example from his The Repressor of Overmuch Blaming of the Clergy (chapter 5):
Goddis forbode y schulde be so lewde for to so seie
[God forbid I should be so foolish as to say so]
There are examples in Wyclife, Tyndale, More, Donne, Goldsmith, Burns... From Thomas More (1557) we find 'and then to not byleve them'; from Thomas Stapleton (1565), 'to flatly gainsaye'.
The practice became less common in the Early Modern English period - I don't know why. I can't recall any instances in Shakespeare, for instance. It builds up again in the 18th and 19th century - which is presumably why late 19th-century prescriptive grammarians started to condemn it - notwithstanding instances such as 'in order to fully appreciate' from Lord Macaulay (in 1843), among others.
Monday, 2 June 2008
On tolerating
A correspondent writes: 'What, if any, is the difference between tolerance and toleration? As far as I know, tolerance is the commoner word. Are they synonymous?'
Tolerance is certainly the commoner word - try a Google search and you'll see it's about forty times as common. But that's not the issue. There are certainly meaning differences. Tolerance is the broader concept. It is used in a variety of settings, some quite specialized, especially in engineering (where people talk of tolerances, meaning a permitted deviation from a specified norm), biology (where it means the ability of an organism to withstand a particular environmental condition), and in medicine (where people talk of a tolerance for a certain drug, say). In its most general sense, it expresses a sympathetic willingness to accept views or behaviour other than one's own.
You also find tolerance quite often used as part of a compound expression, as in tolerance dose, tolerance level, and tolerance limit. A 2007 proposed addition to the OED notes tolerance zone - a designated area in which prostitution is tolerated by the local authority. That's a 20th-century usage.
Toleration is usually used when someone wants to talk about a specific instance of tolerance - a particular act of allowing something. In history, there are some famous cases of this kind, as reflected in such government names as Act of Toleration and Toleration Bill. It also has a much stronger suggestion of limits, and sometimes even a sense of reluctance. Tolerance has more positive connotations (a desire to accept) than toleration, which can mean 'we have to put up with this'. Compare the phrase religious tolerance with religious toleration. The country which practises the former is more likely to be enthusiastically supporting religious diversity than the latter.
During the history of these two words, there have certainly been occasions when their meanings have overlapped. But they seem to be pretty distinct today. Note that both have the same opposite: intolerance. There is no intoleration.
Tolerance is certainly the commoner word - try a Google search and you'll see it's about forty times as common. But that's not the issue. There are certainly meaning differences. Tolerance is the broader concept. It is used in a variety of settings, some quite specialized, especially in engineering (where people talk of tolerances, meaning a permitted deviation from a specified norm), biology (where it means the ability of an organism to withstand a particular environmental condition), and in medicine (where people talk of a tolerance for a certain drug, say). In its most general sense, it expresses a sympathetic willingness to accept views or behaviour other than one's own.
You also find tolerance quite often used as part of a compound expression, as in tolerance dose, tolerance level, and tolerance limit. A 2007 proposed addition to the OED notes tolerance zone - a designated area in which prostitution is tolerated by the local authority. That's a 20th-century usage.
Toleration is usually used when someone wants to talk about a specific instance of tolerance - a particular act of allowing something. In history, there are some famous cases of this kind, as reflected in such government names as Act of Toleration and Toleration Bill. It also has a much stronger suggestion of limits, and sometimes even a sense of reluctance. Tolerance has more positive connotations (a desire to accept) than toleration, which can mean 'we have to put up with this'. Compare the phrase religious tolerance with religious toleration. The country which practises the former is more likely to be enthusiastically supporting religious diversity than the latter.
During the history of these two words, there have certainly been occasions when their meanings have overlapped. But they seem to be pretty distinct today. Note that both have the same opposite: intolerance. There is no intoleration.
Saturday, 24 May 2008
On not editing encyclopedias any more
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.
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.
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.
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