Along with other commentators such as popular etymologist Mark Forsyth, I've been amused this week by reports of eyebrow-raising over the German language's inclusion of the English neologism der Sh**storm in its somewhat sacred Duden dictionary. Here in Switzerland, the term was also voted Word of the Year in 2012. The term denotes uncontrollable public outrage, usually online in the context of social media posts – and often insulting in its content. As I have mentioned in previous posts, neologisms interest me, since their ability to gain currency demonstrates a social need to construct a new term for a new concept. As such, they show that a language is healthy and can adapt to the culture it expresses.
But just in case we are at a loss to understand the kind of public outrage that might warrant use of the term, the torrent of excrement gushing forth in the wake of the plagiarism row engulfing Germany's erstwhile defence secretary Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, and then more recently, use of the term in a speech by German prime minister Angela Merkel are cited as examples. An interesting piece in The Guardian seems to highlight German's preference for swearwords with faecal rather than sexual origins, though quite how or why the term has managed to float to the top of public consciousness and usage is not really examined. Predictably, there is no shortage of verbal diarrhoea in the comments sections attached to these articles.
In this particular case, I think we are once again witnessing the Internet-driven obsession with quantifying and describing everything anew. We clearly need to find new ways to feel anger and to display it, now that previous profanities and practices so obviously date from a time when media outlets defined outrage. These days, I increasingly find that the same outlets are now more than happy to solicit public commentary, stir gently and watch events unfold. But surely this is journalistic laziness masquerading as legitimacy.
I had never heard of the term until I read it in a Swiss newspaper a few weeks ago. I do not believe it is used widely in English. As such, any attempts to cite the word as further evidence of an English assault on the German language are misplaced. Other popular pseudo-anglicisms – das Handy (a mobile phone), der Showmaster (the host of a TV show), der Beamer (a projector) among others – are then used wrongly by German speakers, who believe the term to be an English loan word. In my own experience abroad, I have occasionally used one of the above words as a kind of shorthand to aid another person's understanding. However, I then always point out that the word is a purely German invention. I believe the same is true of this latest addition to the language.
Saturday, 6 July 2013
Sunday, 23 June 2013
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.
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.
Thursday, 13 June 2013
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.
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.
Tuesday, 4 June 2013
Doing things differently
I'll never forget walking into the free school where I work here in Switzerland, going downstairs to the CDT workshop and seeing about 10 children crafting bows and arrows in wood. Jobsworths would never sanction the supervision or manufacture of such weapons by children in the UK! However, the children's pride in their work and the subsequent – safe – archery competition in a nearby field spoke volumes about the activity-based learning that free schools encourage.
From 2014 in the UK, 102 free schools will offer an alternative way of learning to children. I'm sure schools will still be required to cover national curriculum material – if only so that leavers are able to continue with different forms of education later. My hope for the UK is that people begin to recognise that a man or woman standing in front of a board lecturing young minds does not work for everyone. People often say that the most rewarding part of teaching is that moment when a child finally understands a concept for themselves. In cross-subject, activity-based learning where teachers are guides rather than all-knowing lecturers, these moments occur regularly.
During our weekly 'language morning' at school – where all students make plans and set goals for their own language learning – hearing a six-year-old say he wants to "learn all the languages in the world" makes me, as a teacher, want to work harder on his behalf. One seven-year-old is counting a million grains of rice simply because she wants to understand what one million looks like. According to a recent radio factoid, counting to one million, uninterrupted by sleep or eating, would take a person four months. But we patronise these youngsters and their efforts if we remain entrenched in the test-oriented, league-tabled sausage factory of the state school system. If we allow children the freedom, with guidance, to pursue their goals, even if these are overambitious; they will engage with learning on their own terms and will learn better.
Even the perceived lack of structure or rules at Summerhill in the UK is no longer true, if indeed it ever was. The children have a say in the running of their school. This tradition of direct democracy is also alive and well where I work – and includes agreeing rules for lessons, breaks and other activities. During my teenage years, the demands of our School Council for girls to wear trousers and for us to be allowed to remove our ties in hot weather (usually vetoed by teachers) seem laughable in comparison.
Students do succeed and go on to do apprenticeships, public language exams and/or university entrance exams. But I would argue that the goal-oriented, holistic approach to learning pupils and students experience at a free school makes them more independent and more responsible for their own learning – two skills which are vital to their future progress. The state system worked for me, though it doesn't work for everyone. So I think we should all at least have the courage to do things differently.
From 2014 in the UK, 102 free schools will offer an alternative way of learning to children. I'm sure schools will still be required to cover national curriculum material – if only so that leavers are able to continue with different forms of education later. My hope for the UK is that people begin to recognise that a man or woman standing in front of a board lecturing young minds does not work for everyone. People often say that the most rewarding part of teaching is that moment when a child finally understands a concept for themselves. In cross-subject, activity-based learning where teachers are guides rather than all-knowing lecturers, these moments occur regularly.
During our weekly 'language morning' at school – where all students make plans and set goals for their own language learning – hearing a six-year-old say he wants to "learn all the languages in the world" makes me, as a teacher, want to work harder on his behalf. One seven-year-old is counting a million grains of rice simply because she wants to understand what one million looks like. According to a recent radio factoid, counting to one million, uninterrupted by sleep or eating, would take a person four months. But we patronise these youngsters and their efforts if we remain entrenched in the test-oriented, league-tabled sausage factory of the state school system. If we allow children the freedom, with guidance, to pursue their goals, even if these are overambitious; they will engage with learning on their own terms and will learn better.
Even the perceived lack of structure or rules at Summerhill in the UK is no longer true, if indeed it ever was. The children have a say in the running of their school. This tradition of direct democracy is also alive and well where I work – and includes agreeing rules for lessons, breaks and other activities. During my teenage years, the demands of our School Council for girls to wear trousers and for us to be allowed to remove our ties in hot weather (usually vetoed by teachers) seem laughable in comparison.
Students do succeed and go on to do apprenticeships, public language exams and/or university entrance exams. But I would argue that the goal-oriented, holistic approach to learning pupils and students experience at a free school makes them more independent and more responsible for their own learning – two skills which are vital to their future progress. The state system worked for me, though it doesn't work for everyone. So I think we should all at least have the courage to do things differently.
Sunday, 12 May 2013
Teaching grammar to suck eggs
We all know what grammar is, don't we? Yes, grammar is that part of language and communication that we often find fiddly. We may even actually come to resent it, since it often represents a hurdle to overcome if you want to avoid being misunderstood. It isn't sexy: good grammar has none of the instant gratification for minimal effort that we now demand from other aspects of our lives. No-one's going to congratulate you on your grammar the next time you post an eloquently written comment on Facebook, are they?
In response to a proposal from UK education secretary Michael Gove, The Observer newspaper has today published a debate on the question of whether good grammar is still important. As often happens, the two writers debating were seemingly selected based on their skill at turning the issue into a predictable right wing versus left wing caricature. The progressive left-winger believes that an insistence on grammar pits rich against poor, ignores the inherently changeable nature of language per se, exploits the social divisiveness that good versus bad grammar encourages, and diverts our attention away from a lack of funding in education. The indignant right-winger will usually bemoan the falling school standards and paint a picture of general indolence in a world where he's the only one who cares about anything anymore.
Now, you can take a view on all of that if you like, but if we can focus for just one minute on what grammar is for, we might be getting somewhere. Understanding the grammar of a language is a great liberator, a leveller that allows you to say whatever you want. Learners of German complain about the case system. However, its perceived complexity is precisely what makes its word order so flexible. But of course, we only see such benefits when we learn a foreign language. We don't learn our mother tongue in the same way because we mistakenly feel it belongs to us. We feel we rule it; it does not rule us. But with freedom comes responsibility. We are free to use language however we choose, though we do have a responsibility to ensure that we can be readily understood.
So similar to my own experience of German, one predictable point made in the debate concerns the idea that the English grammar of non-native English speakers and writers is better than that of the Brits – cue a slew of grammarians rubbing their hands with glee. So when I focus on English grammar and tenses with my students here in Switzerland tomorrow, when I ask them to give me a sentence using the past perfect continuous, they will answer within about five seconds. How long will it take the man on the street in London – Michael Gove, say – to do the same, I wonder?
In response to a proposal from UK education secretary Michael Gove, The Observer newspaper has today published a debate on the question of whether good grammar is still important. As often happens, the two writers debating were seemingly selected based on their skill at turning the issue into a predictable right wing versus left wing caricature. The progressive left-winger believes that an insistence on grammar pits rich against poor, ignores the inherently changeable nature of language per se, exploits the social divisiveness that good versus bad grammar encourages, and diverts our attention away from a lack of funding in education. The indignant right-winger will usually bemoan the falling school standards and paint a picture of general indolence in a world where he's the only one who cares about anything anymore.
Now, you can take a view on all of that if you like, but if we can focus for just one minute on what grammar is for, we might be getting somewhere. Understanding the grammar of a language is a great liberator, a leveller that allows you to say whatever you want. Learners of German complain about the case system. However, its perceived complexity is precisely what makes its word order so flexible. But of course, we only see such benefits when we learn a foreign language. We don't learn our mother tongue in the same way because we mistakenly feel it belongs to us. We feel we rule it; it does not rule us. But with freedom comes responsibility. We are free to use language however we choose, though we do have a responsibility to ensure that we can be readily understood.
So similar to my own experience of German, one predictable point made in the debate concerns the idea that the English grammar of non-native English speakers and writers is better than that of the Brits – cue a slew of grammarians rubbing their hands with glee. So when I focus on English grammar and tenses with my students here in Switzerland tomorrow, when I ask them to give me a sentence using the past perfect continuous, they will answer within about five seconds. How long will it take the man on the street in London – Michael Gove, say – to do the same, I wonder?
Sunday, 10 March 2013
Muddling Sunday!
Like the Let's eat grandma vs. Let's eat, grandma error, where an errant comma has seen cannibalism replace what should have been a lovely meal with a much-loved matriarch; I have seen instances of a more immediate, worrying state of affairs. In many parts of the world, today, though not here in Switzerland (when it falls on 12 May), is the designated Sunday when we celebrate the women who bore us – our mums.
After conspiring with my sister back in the UK, our mother received a lovely bunch of tulips from us both. I saw the flowers myself on Skype (the wonders of modern technology). They were lovely! So today I blindly went about my business, having made Mum happy. But then I noticed that many people – including the UK store M&S – have named today – Mothers' Day. I was under the mistaken impression that I only had to worry about my own mother. Do we now have to look after everyone else's as well?
Luckily I posted a song this morning on Facebook for all women and mothers, I hope that suffices!
After conspiring with my sister back in the UK, our mother received a lovely bunch of tulips from us both. I saw the flowers myself on Skype (the wonders of modern technology). They were lovely! So today I blindly went about my business, having made Mum happy. But then I noticed that many people – including the UK store M&S – have named today – Mothers' Day. I was under the mistaken impression that I only had to worry about my own mother. Do we now have to look after everyone else's as well?
Luckily I posted a song this morning on Facebook for all women and mothers, I hope that suffices!
Tuesday, 26 February 2013
La langue est morte. Vive la langue!
Last Thursday was the 14th annual UNESCO International Mother Language Day. I'd call it Mother Tongue Day, myself – but who cares? In a world where we are bombarded with initiatives all the time, why should the language we speak – a 'choice' usually imposed on us by family and/or the accident of where we were born or raised – be given any special attention at all? Well, UNESCO's initiative here is part of a desire to "promote the preservation and protection of all languages used by peoples of the world" and "promote unity in diversity and international understanding, through multilingualism and multiculturalism."
A recent article in a Sunday newspaper over here in nearby Liechtenstein, quoting UNESCO's own figures, claims that 50% of the world's 6000 or so languages could die out this century, as the natural process of language death is accelerating like never before. It is understandable that UNESCO should want to celebrate linguistic diversity and cultural pluralism. But languages cannot be kept in a glass cabinet and protected for their own sake. They are changing entities. The survival of any language variety depends on its capacity to fulfil communicative functions which, crucially, are accepted and practised in the same way by significant numbers of users internationally for their own social or economic needs. Incidentally, I prefer the term 'language variety' to 'language' in discussions of this nature. Otherwise we run the risk of getting bogged down in issues of 'dialect' vs. 'official language' as well as language and national identity.
However, the surprising fact that half of humanity speaks one of only 19 different languages does not mean that lesser-spoken language varieties will necessarily die out if they are unable to compete with the others (the top five most-spoken ones currently being Mandarin Chinese, English, Spanish, Hindi/Urdu and all forms of Arabic). I say this because last Wednesday (20 February) was also the 75th anniversary of the recognition of Romansh as the fourth national language of Switzerland. Figures vary, though according to the 2000 census, the variety was said to have around 60,000 regular speakers.
You might wonder how such a minority language variety could survive. But if the will of the people and active governmental support are able to secure a viable future as an important form of communication – and more than a mere cultural relic – then even acknowledging that many varieties will struggle globally; there is no reason why people cannot at least slow down the rate of language death through their own actions. I believe we should accept that a significant number of language varieties will die out. In the top 10 languages cited by the Liechtenstein article as those languages most widely spoken at present, French did not even make the list! I think the changes we are seeing are an inevitable consequence of globalisation. So if the future of any language variety cannot be secured beyond a local level; then whilst we should actively investigate its bygone culture, keeping it alive artificially serves no purpose.
A recent article in a Sunday newspaper over here in nearby Liechtenstein, quoting UNESCO's own figures, claims that 50% of the world's 6000 or so languages could die out this century, as the natural process of language death is accelerating like never before. It is understandable that UNESCO should want to celebrate linguistic diversity and cultural pluralism. But languages cannot be kept in a glass cabinet and protected for their own sake. They are changing entities. The survival of any language variety depends on its capacity to fulfil communicative functions which, crucially, are accepted and practised in the same way by significant numbers of users internationally for their own social or economic needs. Incidentally, I prefer the term 'language variety' to 'language' in discussions of this nature. Otherwise we run the risk of getting bogged down in issues of 'dialect' vs. 'official language' as well as language and national identity.
However, the surprising fact that half of humanity speaks one of only 19 different languages does not mean that lesser-spoken language varieties will necessarily die out if they are unable to compete with the others (the top five most-spoken ones currently being Mandarin Chinese, English, Spanish, Hindi/Urdu and all forms of Arabic). I say this because last Wednesday (20 February) was also the 75th anniversary of the recognition of Romansh as the fourth national language of Switzerland. Figures vary, though according to the 2000 census, the variety was said to have around 60,000 regular speakers.
You might wonder how such a minority language variety could survive. But if the will of the people and active governmental support are able to secure a viable future as an important form of communication – and more than a mere cultural relic – then even acknowledging that many varieties will struggle globally; there is no reason why people cannot at least slow down the rate of language death through their own actions. I believe we should accept that a significant number of language varieties will die out. In the top 10 languages cited by the Liechtenstein article as those languages most widely spoken at present, French did not even make the list! I think the changes we are seeing are an inevitable consequence of globalisation. So if the future of any language variety cannot be secured beyond a local level; then whilst we should actively investigate its bygone culture, keeping it alive artificially serves no purpose.
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