Posts tagged english

Across the Tasman last week the NZ Herald reported on a recent research paper looking at the use of non-English street signs in Auckland. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to find a copy of the paper, ‘The Cosmopolitics of Linguistic Landscapes,’ from Massey University’s Robin Peace and Ian Goodwin, but it doesn’t matter because as far as I can tell it looks like NZ Herald reporters Lincoln Tan and Hayden Donnell didn’t actually get around to reading it either.

The article starts out acknowledging the research has been done and then Dr. Peace is indirectly quoted as saying ‘Some New Zealanders responded with “annoyance” or “repugnance” when faced with a space that did not make immediate, translatable sense.’ This is then a springboard for an online poll of their readers (not a representative sample of Kiwis), where 39% of the participants said signs should be in English only. As though this wasn’t already a problematic enough way to represent that ‘New Zealanders’ attitudes towards non-English signs they also conducted interviews with ten people ‘in the street.’ It’s from these very impressionistic ‘polls’ that we get the scare-line that Kiwis are apparently ‘uncomfortable’ living in a multilingual society. Then we have a quote from the Auckland Mayor and Auckland Chinese Community Centre chairman, giving proviso-filler endorsement to the signs to give the impression of balanced journalism and round out the piece.

It makes me wonder why we bother even doing rigorous peer-reviewed research at all if the media just pull a quote from a phone interview or media release and then twist it to suit there own agenda (in this case fear-mongering). Choosing to conduct an online poll instead of actually discussing the results of thoughtfully designed and executed research is like choosing to watch your mates race each other around the block over getting premium tickets to the 100m sprint final in London; sure, they’re both running races, but you know that one is going to be a much greater display of aptitude and planning than the other.

Not only is this article a poor performance in objective reporting, but it’s also another sign of the dangerous re-enforcement of the ‘monolingual mindset’ that is a bit passe as far as the team here at Fully (Sic) are concerned. Dr. Peaces quote hints that in the research there is a variety of opinion, not just some misplaced and undefined fear. The article gives the impression that shop owners have something to hide by appealing to non-English-only demographics, instead of helping people to understand that it’s actually a common phenomenon in cosmopolitan cities the world over, and usually a sign (pardon the pun) of a linguistically and culturally vibrant society. Being monolingual isn’t actually a problem (the usual disclaimer: I spent most of my life only being able to speak English), the problem is that people are taught to fear other languages, instead of accepting and celebrating the benefits that diversity offer.

While it would be easy to brush this off as just poor journalism in another country, this article has similar themes to the kind of English-only rhetoric that pops up in Australia too. Hopefully we’ll eventually get to see someone write something that actually reflects Peace and Goodwin’s research, and I’ll happily wager that the pictures a lot more interesting than the NZ Herald portrays.

[This post also appeared on Fully (Sic)]

I’ve had a fun month of wandering throughout Europe - a lovely mix of catching up with family and friends, library adventures, meeting up with some amazing linguists and a bit of sightseeing on the side. I have a suitcase full of Euro-goodies to take home, but I think that ideally I’d like to souvenir a couple of words from some of the countries that I’ve visited. Of course, you can capture all of these ideas in English, but there’s something really nifty about wrapping it all up in a single little word.

Fusy n. Polish It’s a word that captures both the grounds left in a coffee pot and tea leaves left in a tea pot. It doesn’t have the same negative extension that ‘dregs’ carries. Given that we’re a pluri-beverage household we’re always dealing with fusy when it comes to washing up time.

Fika n. or v. Swedish This is the kind of word that always gets wheeled out in ‘why doesn’t English have a word for X’ articles - and for good reason, because it really is a lovely concept. Fika is the combination of a non-alcoholic beverage (usually coffee) and some kind of cake (usually outrageously sweet) and taking time to chat with friends/family/colleagues. It’s not entirely dissimilar to how the word ‘coffee’ is used as a verb in my lab, but I really like the emphasis on the social aspect (and the cake). Needless to say I made the most of every fika opportunity while in Stockholm.

Syrah n. French/English Ok, this one always existed in English. I always thought it was some obscure little grape variety. Turns out that it’s the French name for what Australians and New Zealanders more often call shiraz. In what can only really be a classic case of sound symbolism, if you’d asked me to describe these grapes before I knew this crucial fact I’d have said that shiraz is bolder and more peppery. This trip I’ve learned a new (for an Aussie) wine word, and made sufficiently sure to drink enough syrah to ascertain that it is just as peppery as a shiraz.

This post is entirely prompted by being in France, but I think there’s something really cool about nasal vowels. To make a nasal vowel start by making a ‘normal’ or ‘oral’ vowel. Then lower your velum (it’s the smooshy bit at the back of your mouth that opens and closes the air flow to your nose). It feels a bit weird if you’re not used to it, but you’ll know if you’re doing it right because your voice will sound nasal (big surprise there!).

French has a few nasal vowels, they’re tough to get your mouth (and nose) around at first if you’re an English speaker! There are lots of languages with nasalised vowels; in a sample on WALS 64 out of 244 languages had nasal vowels as well as oral vowels. There are no languages that I know of with only nasal vowels and no oral vowel.

The funny thing is that English doeshave nasal vowels. They often occur before a nasal consonant (m, n, or ng). So if you listen carefully to someone saying ‘tuna’ or ‘piano’ in a natural way it’s likely they’ll nasalise the vowel. The thing is that we’re not trained to hear this difference, because it doesn’t change the word, so we don’t ‘hear’ it!

I thought that since I was in Warsaw I would make this week’s TwwEh Poland-appropriate. The 24 hours since I got here have been rather hard on my brain; three years of Nepali have squeezed out most of my Polish, and it’s rather embarrassing when Nepali words come out instead of Polish ones. 

One thing I’ve always loved about Polish is that it has a regular stress system, which makes it a little easier on the learner. Stress is when a part of a word sounds more emphasised than the rest. Polish stress is almost always on second last syllable of a word (which is also known as the penultimate syllable). There are only a small number of examples, such as words from Latin or English, for example one I always remember is universitet (‘university’) where the stress is on the second syllable in the word.

Not all languages have stress, for example tone languages are generally considered to not have stress as well. Of languages that have stress, the location of the stress varies between languages. In a survey of 502 languages in WALS, Rob Goedemans and Harry van der Hulst found that 220 were like English and had no fixed stress pattern, and the other 282 were spread across different fixed patterns, for example the first, second or last syllable.

Stress is notoriously hard to hear for non-native speakers, most of the time when we talk quickly you don’t really hear the stress, but a native speaker always instinctively knows where it is. Take this English-learners’ website with its seemingly random collection of rules that learners of English are subjected to, and that’s not even all of them. This is one of those times I’m rather glad to be a native speaker of English!

This may just look like a gratutious holiday tie-in post, but I’ve always been mystified as to why this day in the Christian religious calendar is called ‘Good Friday.’ Sure, I’m deliberately playing up my ignorance of the finer points of Christian theology, but as a kid I never understood why such an austere day that we were all supposed to feel sad about was ‘good.’

It comes from a sense of the word ‘good’ that isn’t used much any more. It can be found in the Oxford English Dictionary as one of the many senses of ‘good;’ ‘Pious, devout; worthy of approbation from the religious point of view.’ There’s a whole sub-definition under this sense that notes it is used ‘of a day or season observed as holy by the church.’ It also notes that it’s an archaic usage; in this day and age it’s not a use that extends much beyond established religious constructions. The earliest record of the term ‘Good Friday’ in the Oxford English Dictionary is from around 1290 and it’s been with us ever since.

There are other terms for this day in English, including ‘Black Friday,’ ‘Holy Friday’ and ‘Easter Friday’ but as you can see from this Ngram below none of them have come close to the popularity of Good Friday in the last two centuries:

I quite like the alternative ‘Long Friday,’ now historical, but used as far back as the Aelfric Homily in Old English and up to around the 13th century. Another option is the post-classical Latin word ‘Parasceve’, also found in the Oxford English Dictionary, although that does sound a little to fancy for my liking.

Do you know a language that has a better name for Good Friday than English?

If my meme-fiend sister is to be believed, I am the last person on the internet to use ‘derp’ in a sentence.

You know you’re definitely behind the times when there’s already a Cheezburger Network site given over to an internet meme (http://derp.memebase.com/). From what I can tell, something that is derp, or derpy is both stupid and relatively unattractive, although when cats are involved this dimension doesn’t appear to be so important.

According to Know Your Meme’ the word was first used in the 1998 Parker/Stone comedy Basketball. Clearly it was a word that amused them as ‘Mr. Derp’ appeared in a single episode of South Park the following year. Mr. Derp would perform all kind of incompetent slapstick as Chef’s replacement, exclaiming ‘derp’ as he did so.

As well as the proliferation of one-off image macros with ‘derp’ themes there are a few current ‘derp’ characters on the internet. Derp and Derpina from Rage Comics are probably two of the most well know. There is a My Little Pony character called Derpy Hooves - the name originated on the internet because of her cross-eyed expression, but the makers the officially adopted the name for the character.

My favourite definition so far is the second entry in Urban Dictionary ”Herp da derp derpa derp. A derpity.” ‘Herp’ is often used in conjunction with ‘derp’ in extended utterances.

For me there’s a little too much of a tone of mocking people with non-standard cognitive development to really find ‘derp’ funny - but it looks like it’s a term that has made itself at home on the internet, and somehow managed to elude me until now. 

I’m off to Europe for a few weeks after Easter. Most of my time will be spent poking around in archives and buying coffee for colleagues and picking their brains on a number of topics. I’m also wedging in some social calls - including a weekend in Warsaw, which I’m very excited about.

One of the few things I still remember from my Polish-learning days was that the @ ‘at symbol’ was known as małpa, which means ‘monkey.’ Since then I’ve always been impressed by how creative the speakers of Polish were compared to the relatively unimaginative English.

The origin of the @ is not entirely clear. It was used in Medieval versions of the Bible to save precious parchment space, and appeared in Norman French in the grocers’ ‘at’ sense of 2 apples @ $1 each. This is where it got its even less appealing English name ‘commercial at.’ It first popped up on a typewriter in 1900 at a good thing it was, given how useful it’s been for the interwebs. Indeed, the addition of the @ symbol to Morse Code in 2004 was the only change since WW1.

English hasn’t just lagged behind the Polish in the naming of the ‘at’ sign. Languages all over the world have done a much more creative job of naming it; there’s a big list at Wikipedia but I’ll just share some of my favourites. In Bosnian it’s known as ‘crazy a’ (ludo a), while in Basque it’s ‘wrapped a’ (a bildua). I generally have a fondness for the animal names it’s been given, which include ‘worm’ (kukac) in Hungarian, ‘duckling’ (papaki / παπάκι) in Greek and ‘puppy’ (shnik / շնիկ) in Armenian. The Swedes refer to it as an ‘elephant trunk a’ (snabel-a) but also use another common naming theme, food, and call it a ‘cinnamon roll’ (kanelbulle). The Czechs also go with the food theme and refer to it as ‘rollmops’ (zavináč). I also like Kazakh, which has two great names; the official is ‘moon’s ear’ ( айқұлақ) and the unofficial is ‘dog’s head’ (ит басы). 

Do you speak a language with a cool name for @?