Friday 29 June 2012

We've lost the blot!

According to a UK survey for online stationer Docmail (no, me neither), cited in the German tabloid Bild and elsewhere, those questioned had, on average, not written anything by hand for 41 days. Germany's harbingers of handwriting doom are quick to tell us that computers and mobile devices are to blame, as we are led to believe that important developmental skills in coordination, dexterity and the anchoring of handwritten knowledge in young minds are all under threat as a result.

We learn that 85% of German companies use computers. Stop the press! No, really. Those knee-jerk news organs bemoaning the general disappearance of handwriting need to abandon their fancy desktop publishing packages and write everything by hand. Starting now! Alternatively, they could attempt some joined-up thinking and adopt a less alarmist approach. Though a variety of communication options may mean we write by hand less often, we have not lost the ability completely.

When was the last time you put pen to paper? Perhaps you left a note on the fridge for your beloved before you left this morning. Maybe, like me, you write shopping lists regularly. Perhaps you have recently completed or corrected exam papers (admittedly, computer-based exams are on the rise). Commentators tell us that handwritten words are more personal and bring out our emotions. That's undoubtedly true. After all, writing scores of Christmas cards and then seeing the price of postage stamps is enough to make anyone cry!

My own view is that handwriting is not dying out. It is a vital skill and will remain so. What's changed is simply the number of social situations where handwriting remains appropriate and has not been fully replaced by a less time-consuming form of communication. Surely a significant amount of text within schools (and to a lesser extent, universities) will continue to be written by hand. This strikes me as logical, given that before they negotiate the computer-based anonymity of the university campus or the outside world, young people of school-age are in the business of building their own personal knowledge base. This learning process requires the kind of correction and ongoing refinement that only the handwritten form can document. For me, even with the perceived threat from new technology, it's the personal, educational and 'Post-It-note' private spheres – away from any pronouncements in the print media – where handwriting will continue to flourish.

Have you kept all of your school exercise books for future retrieval? I have. Have you intentionally kept all the draft versions of texts you wrote using a computer? If I have, I certainly don't need to refer to them again. For me this proves that ultimately the pen is mightier than the Word.

Thursday 28 June 2012

To whom it may concern

There's still no escape from the ubiquitous hit Somebody That I Used To Know by the Belgian-Australian musician Gotye. As a joke, someone at www.grammarly.com posted a picture with the song title changed to Somebody Whom I Used To Know.

Googling whom then led me to an interesting entry on Wikipedia. Having recently covered English relative pronouns with my students here in Switzerland, seeing who and whom mentioned in comparison with their German equivalents pleased me somewhat. This is because German's rigid case system makes it clear which pronoun is correct in each instance. More of that later.

We are told that the pronoun who is used when the person it replaces is the subject of the sentence, most commonly as an interrogative pronoun (i.e. in a question):

 Who is the President of the USA?

The pronoun who currently stands in place of Barack Obama and is the subject of the above sentence. We are also told that whom is used when the person it replaces is the object of the sentence (in this case, more specifically, the object of the preposition to), thus:

Who is the President of the USA talking to?
To whom is the President of the USA talking?

The President is still the subject carrying out the action, but whom is the recipient of that action – the object. (The two variants should calm those who hyperventilate at the sight of a clause ending with a preposition.) But few people use whom anymore, anyway. Besides, why use whom or who when even for Cambridge University it's fine to say '... the woman that he married' (Hashemi and Thomas, 2011:201)? And as for the distinction between direct objects and indirect objects – we can get by without all of that, surely?

Well, not if you want to learn German, you can't! This is because the German case system means that all syntactic elements – including pronouns – are marked by case endings to indicate gender (masculine, feminine, neuter), number (singular or plural) and their respective functions:

Who are you giving the book to?
To whom are you giving the book?

German translation: Wem gibst du das Buch?

The subject in both English sentences above is you (du in the German). But there are two objects – the book (das Buch), the direct object; and its recipient (Wem in the German), the indirect object. The role of the recipient in German can only be played by Wem. There is no who/whom/that uncertainty. Here's a hypothetical scenario: imagine that the computer at an adoption agency has crashed and details of prospective parents, children and their caseworkers have been lost:

Who is giving who to whom?
Who is giving who to who?

Again, avoiding a full explanation of the German case system (and what we might refer to here as the subject case, direct object case and indirect object case) – the case markers in German give us this translation:

Wer gibt wen wem?

So to conclude, where English seemingly requires a new rule or exception for every conceivable sentence; for all its apparent complexity, German grammar is much simpler in comparison. I still believe that Gotye's protagonist is a direct object rather than an indirect one. The jokey whom is a hypercorrection of who or that – though the song title could even contain no relative pronoun at all!

I trust that I have not bored you too much, dear reader. If we have met in real life, I hope I do not now count as one of your erstwhile acquaintances.