Resistance is futile

After relocating to the UK from Switzerland, I now hope to start blogging more regularly again. I enjoyed reading of newscaster Alistair Stewart becoming exasperated at the use of the following English words and phrases:

"Actually" - Here, predictably, the writer assumes the term's meaning as a truth marker. But the less literal interpretation, that of merely foregrounding one proposition against others, is not explored.

"It seems to me ..." — as opposed to "I think" or "I believe" shows a much clearer difference. "It seems to me ..." introduces your own perspective while almost inviting other people to offer a contradictory viewpoint with other evidence. The alternatives are stronger, governed by the first-person subject "I", rather than the weaker, non-referential subject "it".

Alistair Stewart also rails against "almost unique". Rightly, he notes that the adjective 'unique' cannot be graded. Something is either unique or it isn't. But something that is "almost unique" accepts this. If two things are essentially identical apart from one aspect that one of them is lacking; then surely the deficient item would be 'almost unique'. The one-off status of 'unique' as a term remains ungraded and absolute. An instance of "very unique" would indeed constitute grading, though this is not the phrase being considered.

The writer dislikes the term "real people" and the overuse of the modifying adverb "incredibly". Again, these are examples of language users looking for ways to emphasise certain ideas in relation to others. Stewart may dismiss the phrases "real people" if he has never met people who act in a 'fake' manner, governed by self-interest. The implication is that "real people" are more like us: genuine and down-to-earth. 

'King for a day' Stewart is not amused by the verb neologisms "helicoptered" or "motorcaded". Coining a new verb from a noun is done often for effect or as a result of a perceived increase in a certain practice. Do we see more helicopters trips or motorcades to the extent that new verbs are required? Working within the 24-hour news environment, where every journey — and every breath — the politicians, dignitaries and celebrities take is broadcast; Alistair Stewart should know.

His final bugbear is the recent tendency for people to begin utterances with "So ..." with no causal reference to a preceding idea. I don't yet know where this phenomenon originated. Though perhaps by starting an utterance with "So ...", users documenting every detail of their lives in numerous posts on social media are continuing their ongoing personal narratives for the rest of us to follow.

New forms of language, especially these spoken examples, will be rooted in an emerging social practice or function not adequately served by current language use. Some new forms pollute the language; most enrich it. Individuals or news organisations seeking to stand out will use many linguistic devices to make an impact. As competition for our attention increases, this linguistic creativity will only accelerate. Resistance of it is a futile denial of the world as it now exists.

The times they are a-changin'

Recently I've been alerted to the new inclusions in the latest version of the Oxford English Dictionary. In keeping with my previous blog entry, appetites for documenting language change are very strong – regardless of whether we're looking at historical linguistics; or looking at the present or the near future to see where we're heading. So what do the new words for June 2013 tell us about the zeitgeist and who we are? 

Well, from the 1200 new or amended words, it's hardly surprising that media reports have tended to focus on terms such as crowdsourcing, flash mob, geekery and terms related to social media – follow and follower, for example. To me, such examples demonstrate media outlets' own intentions to be cutting edge, on trend – or another vacuous term to separate the leaders from the easily led. Other terms not in the spotlight seem to have been in widespread usage for a great deal longer – head space, jolly hockey sticks or live blog. This is because the policy adopted when compiling lists of new words saw fit to only include those words that had already been in use for a certain period of time. That policy has now changed slightly, as revealed by the dictionary's Chief Editor, John Simpson:

"The noun and verb tweet (in the social-networking sense) has just been added to the OED. This breaks at least one OED rule, namely that a new word needs to be current for ten years before consideration for inclusion. But it seems to be catching on."

To include a term purely because it "[...] seems to be catching on" is rather misguided, in my view. Twitter may prove itself as a durable social media platform. However, as we have seen with other portals and sites; it may yet be superseded by a brighter, better, platform. This process would then have given undue prominence to a piece of ephemera unable to hold its own. Similarly, any dictionary can only document usage retrospectively. If you compile a dictionary this month, it can only be a record of language usage from June 2013 and earlier. At least if a word has flourished for ten years, speakers have assigned it a value and a purpose.

But by concentrating on all that is new, we do not have the full story. If the latest imprint of the second edition of the OED now contains a total of 823,000 entries, who is documenting those words and phrases deemed to have fallen out of common usage altogether? What do we know about these words? Surely it is the relationship between neologisms and these obsolete words and phrases that best illustrates how a language is gradually changing? It will be this information that tells us the most about how certain social and cultural forces dominate others through language, and – since neologisms generally arise from a communicative need not adequately addressed by language to date – even how effective a language is as a means of communication for the people it serves.

We are family

Back in August last year, I wrote a blog entry about cognates (It's all relative, 25 August 2012), which referred to new research indicating that Indo-European languages (of which English is one) may be as much as 9000 years old. A friend alerted me to recent research, summarised in The Guardian, that had been undertaken by some of the same researchers. Their work, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of the United States of America (PNAS), takes the links between languages and language families much further. By applying a statistical model to examine the frequency of certain cognates in everyday speech across seven language families, the researchers assert that high-frequency cognates signify a superfamily of languages that may have existed across Europe and Asia as far back as 15,000 years ago.

Having never conducted any statistical linguistic research myself, the methods outlined simply indicate an attempt by the researchers to counter the usual criticisms or shortcomings of this kind of work in historical linguistics. Having said that, the researchers' results left me feeling that actually, the most prevalent, significant cognates – with controls to take account of chance sound associations – they discovered were actually rather predictable. The list of 23 significant cognates identified, in order of frequency, reads as follows: thou, I not, that, we, to give, who, this, what, man/male, ye, old, mother, to hear, hand, fire, to pull, black, to flow, bark, ashes, to spit, worm. Displaying these words in a table detailing variables such as their respective frequency, half-life (the expected time in 1000s of years before one word has a 50% chance of being replaced by a new cognate word) and the part of speech they exemplify is interesting.

In my view, this is because when they are presented together, knowing that seven language families have been considered; the words invite us to search for universals. From a semantic perspective, it doesn't surprise me that personal pronouns, interpersonal relationships and elements of the natural world are represented – since these words are, and have always been, by virtue of their function, essential to human interaction and/or survival for millennia. The researchers may, essentially, only be revealing by statistical methods what we have always believed to be true. If the pronoun we ain't broke, why fix it, for example? But our non-scientific gut feeling then leads us to consider to spit and worm as anomalies in the context of the table, when further historical or anthropological research may provide further insight.     

So for me, having never previously been interested in anything beyond cognates between modern English, German and French, this research will prove to be significant if its statistical model can be replicated and expanded in further studies. For if we are beginning to understand the rate of language change on a global scale from the distant past until the present; then the next step will surely be to apply the methodology to hopefully be better able to predict changes in languages and communication far into the future.