Creativity in pronuciation

All languages are creative. In fact, that's one of the generally accepted criterion for deciding what is or isn't a language. By creative, we mean that a language can change to adapt to new situations, new social realities, new technology. So, even French is creative.
One of the ways that English is especially creative is its willingness to adopt words from other languages and use them, sometimes with the original meaning, sometimes extended metaphorically. The word flak, for instance, is a German acronym, Flieger Abwehr Kanone (spelling approximate), or flier defense cannon. Those bursts you see in the air around bombers in WWII movies are flak. We adopted it and then adapted it to mean any disruption from others.

One of the interesting differences between American English and British English is in how we treat borrowed words. In America, we try to preserve the original pronunciation, even though it may not fit our Germanic accent-on-the-first-syllable pattern. Take the word garage, for instance. It's from the French, and we pronounce it one of two ways: garazhe or garadge, but in both cases with the accent on the second syllable, the way the French do. The Brits, on the other hand, give it a good old-fashioned English pronunciation, with the accent on the first syllable.

All in all, I think the Brits have the smartest strategy. It makes words easier to pronounce because they conform to English patterns. I don't know if we Americans try to pronounce garage and barrage and others in the French way in attempt to placate the French for stealing their words, but it doesn't work, so why try?

When is champagne not champagne?

Saw an ad in a news magazine the other day. Seems that France is up in arms about the theft of one of its words. The word champagne, they say, refers to a region in France and is the name of the sparkling wine produced in that area. It is a legal but morally fraudulent practice to name any other sparkling beverage champagne.
What they mean is, of course, that a champagne produced in California shouldn't be labeled champagne because it isn't produced in champagne.
In this, the ad falls error to a common misconception in language use, and that is the belief that somehow any word is connected to an invisible cord that leads back to the original word. If one learns the word champagne, for instance, one learns (magically, mysteriously) that the word denotes not a general type of beverage but a specific type of beverage.
What the belief ignores is twofold: First, people learn what words mean by identifying them with what they know about the world. When I learned about champagne, I learned only that it was a sparkling alcoholic beverage. Period. It wasn't later that I learned about the area in France, and not until very much later that I learned about France's desire to keep the word French. Second, a word means what everybody thinks it means, and the meanings of words change, will we nill we. If this were not so, virtue would still mean strength.
My advice to the French would be, "Live with it. You don't have a leg to stand on."
Not that they will pay much attention to me.

Creativity in Language

There are tons of books out there telling us what is wrong with the English language and how we can fix it. Many trees have died so that we can learn the difference between shall and will (there isn't any), fewer and less (there isn't any), and who and whom (there isn't any).
All these accounts assume that language is a thing, an object. But it isn't. We have grammar books, but they aren't language. We have dictionaries, but they're not language either. Ditto linguistics texts, writing texts, thesauri. Language isn't a thing; it's a process. It's the means (which we don't understand) by which idea hops from person to person.
As such, it's versatile and creative. It diverges, converges, loops, fragments, coheres, and does almost anything but remain frozen in the form you learned from Ms. Fidditch, your 5th grade English teacher.
Consider two-word verbs, for instance. Compare "I looked over the wall," with "I looked over the document." A moment's thought will show that in the first sentence, we have subject (I), verb (looked), and a prepositional phrase (over the wall). But that won't work with the second sentence, which has a subject (I), but the verb (looked over), and a direct object (the document).
Or consider the next step. We take a two-word verb and make it into a noun. So, the two-word verb look over becomes the noun, lookover, as in, "Give this memo a lookover will you?"
Two things are amazing: That the process happens, and that we get it the first time we hear it. Can't do much better than that.

Being old fashioned

When I discuss my views on language to people, a comment I often get is, "Oh, then you believe anything goes." Well, no. I believe that language is a rule-governed activity, and that there are rights and wrongs. But, I also believe that the rights and wrongs change over time and that the rules are often not what people think they are.

Still, there are times when I become a little put out that people don't take more trouble to actually think about what they are writing. I am fond of quoting Alfred Korzybski, the founder of general semantics, when he said, "I say what I say; I do not say what I do not say." In other words, "Pay attention. Language is not a sledgehammer; it's a scalpel."

A case in point. In today's issue of the university paper is a sentence that I love for it's lack of direction. The sentence reads, in part, "... a freshman majoring in biology native to Price, Utah." Hmmmm. Just what is it native to Price, Utah, the freshman or the biology? Structurally it's the biology, but I strongly suspect that it's really the freshman. A simply rearrangement of words would disambiguate the sentence, "...a freshman from Price, Utah majoring in biology."

Or, there's this headline from the same paper: "Indian Students Celebrate Festival." I'm a little uncomfortable with that headline, since it's slightly redundant and a little off kilter. We normally hold festivals and celebrate occasions. The fact that the writer kind of scrambled the two usages makes me focus more on the language than on the meaning, and that's a bad thing.

Innocent bystanders

Consider the word "niggardly." It sounds awful, doesn't it, makes one think it's racist. It isn't, and has no connection historically with the other N-word. There is a news story somewhere about a person who was fired because he used the word "niggardly," and his superior thought he was being racist. It actually means "stingy," according to the only source I trust, the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary. It is not allied to, derived from, or derived from the same source as the other N-word (which is a southernized pronunciation of the word negro).

Ah, but as my friend Bill likes to say, "There's the rub" In a discussion with a group of intelligent people the other day, I learned that the word "niggardly" (henceforth the other N-word) makes people uncomfortable. In addition, they tend to think that it is somehow connected to the N-word. At first, I was upset with this. I mean, how could people be so blind, so ignorant, so, so.....

After I cooled down, I realized I was simply watching language change in action. A new meaning for the Other N-word was in the process of being created. So, I predict that in the future, the other N-word will further cement its associations with the primary n-word and will become vocabularia non grata in almost everyone's dialect. People who know the word won't use it, and people who say the n-word will have no idea that the other n-word exists.

Finally, to seal its fate, the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary, which refuses list demeaning or sexual words, will drop it from its list. Thus, a perfectly good word, which has done nothing to deserve such a fate, will become an outcast. Language change, like evolution, is good for the entire population but sometimes hard on the individual.

Truth in headlines

I remember an address given some years back entitled "Truth is a Linguistic Question." I didn't accept the premises of the address, but sometimes I wonder.
Like now, for instance. I have noticed a strange disconnect between the headlines in my local newspaper and the news accounts as they unfold in the actual articles. On Monday, the headline read, "Most banks won't make it," implying that in my town of, oh, a dozen banks, at the end of the financial crisis only two or three would be standing. The others would be piles of smoking rubble, with citizens poking about in the detritus looking for a stray roll of quarters.
The article itself suggested that perhaps one hundred banks in the U.S. could fail in the next little while. Okay, then Utah's share is two. That's a far cry from most.
The second headline was about the local university, and read, "Enrollment shows downward trend." Well, not really. In fact, most emphatically not. The enrollment is at its second highest level ever. Only last year was greater. So, if one looks at the two years running, it's true that the enrollment has dropped, but a one-year anomaly is not even close to a trend, or to a spiral, or to whatever it was they called it.
A great many times, as I leaf through the daily paper, I don't read the articles. I'll glance at the headline and use that to flesh out my picture of the day. What happens when the headline is a little beside the point, or a lot beside the point, or of the point altogether, or not even in the same county with the point?
So, I think I need to amend Mark Twain's quote. I'll put it, "There are lies, damn lies, and headlines."

Who and whom

Who is, of course, a relative pronoun. It's used when we have a sentence embedded inside another sentence, and both share the same subject. So, let's say we have a sentence "The man is a friend of mine," and we want to specify which man. We can embed a second sentence inside the first, and come up with "The man [the man lives up stairs] is a friend of mine," where the bracketed sentence is the embedded one. Then we change the embedded noun phrase (the man) to a relative pronoun, who, and come up with "The man who lives up stairs is a friend of mine." Tada!
This works well when both noun phrases are subjects, but what if one is an object? Pay attention now. Here's a sentence: "The man [My sister loves the man] is a friend of mine." Now, the noun phrase in the embedded sentence is an object. We can make it into a relative pronoun just fine, but the rule in English is that a relative pronoun has to immediately follow the noun phase that it's attached to. So, we get "The man who my sister loves is a friend of mine."
Wait a minute. That's not right. The pronoun who has a subject form, who, and an object form, whom. So, in the embedded sentence, it's not who but whom, so the correct form of the sentence is "The man whom my sister loves is a friend of mine."
Whew. Lots of work, no?
And not really worth it. So, the English language (and definitely not English teachers) has evolved strategies to get around the complexity of who/whom. There are three of them:
1. Don't worry about it. Just use who in all cases. After all, who knows? Who cares?
2. Replace the who with that. Thus we get the sentence, "The man that my sister loves is a friend of mine."
3. Leave the relative pronoun out altogether. Say, "The man my sister loves is a friend of mine."
It's amazing how creative and logical people are when they have to deal with linguistic deadwood.

Death to the apostrophe

I've had it. Here's a headline from a local newspaper: "Favre throw's two TD's, get's first win as a Jet." There are three uses of the apostrophe in this short sentence. One is not really necessary (TD's) and the other two are flat wrong. And I have discussed earlier the use of an apostrophe to indicate the plural.
So, rather than fulminate further, I'm going to do something about it. I'm going to call for the complete abolition of the apostrophe. Let's get rid of them all.
After all, what service does the apostrophe give? Does it differentiate between clauses, as the comma does? Or call things into question? Or terminate things? None of the above. All the apostrophe does is to indicate that a letter is missing. Can't is can not, that sort of thing. Notice that we say can't all the time, you never hear the apostrophe and somehow we get along just fine (there are speaking analogs to periods, commas, exclamation marks, and question marks). So, speech doesn't need an apostrophe at all. Why, then, should we need them in writing?
So, what are apostrophes supposed to do? They give us contractions and possessives. That's about it. What would happen if we didn't use them at all? Would a sentence like "I judge a mans intentions by his actions" be unintelligible or even unclear? Once we have gotten past our apostrophe dependence, the sentence is quite clear. Or, how about, "The boys restroom is down the hall." Any clarity problems? Nope.
The apostrophe is not a significant differentiator. A question mark clearly indicates a question. A capital clearly indicates a sentence is starting. But an apostrophe doesn't really work much. It's just along for the ride.
In fact, the apostrophe is clearly at the root of one of the dilemmas of modern time: Do I write its or it's? So, off with their head's.

A lesson in phonology

Phonology is the linguistic study of sound, as opposed to phonetics, which is a hokey way of trying to get people to read.
English has a lot of problematic words, such as words that end in -ence or -ance, and words like effect/affect. The problem stems from a curious phonological fact in English. It's this: unaccented vowels all assume the same sound. That sound is called schwa, and is represented by an upside-down lowercase e. The sound produced is uh, and is the most prevalent sound in English. So, my name, Ronald, is pronounced ron-uh-ld. Try it, but don't use careful speech. Say a word as you normally would (the as thuh rather than thee).
The result is that words like effect and affect are pronounced the same: uh-ffect. This make it hard to distinguish them when we right them down. The problem with effect/affect is compounded by some additional uses of the two words. Affect is usually a verb (How will this affect us?). However, there is a word affect that is a noun, and refers to the emotional side of things (There was no affect in his voice; it was toneless). And, to make things even more scary, while effect is usually a noun (What effect will this have?) It can also be used as a verb (We need to effect a change.)
So what we have is one word that's a verb, mostly, and one word that's a noun, mostly, and both (or all four) sound alike. No wonder spellers have trouble.

lie/lay and sit/set

Okay, quick now, do you say, "Yesterday I lay in bed all day," or do you say, "Yesterday I laid in bed all day"? How about, "I know I set the clock on the table," as opposed to, "I know I sat the clock on the table"?

These two little gems have been giving people fits for years. The rule goes something like this: If you place something, you lay it or set it (past tense, laid and set). If you place yourself, you lie or sit (past tense lay and sat). I think I've got it right. The present tense of lay is the same as the past tense of lie.

The difference in usage seems to be that lay/set have direct objects (clock) whereas lie/sit don't. One doesn't sit anything. One just sits (or lies).

Actually, almost nobody pays any attention to the rule anymore. It simply isn't worth the trouble. So, the rule is moving closer and closer to the trash can, pausing on the brink only because so many English teachers and keepers of the grammar flame won't let it die.

The changers of language (who are most definitely not English teachers) seem to do a cost/benefit analysis of linguistic usage, and if the payoff in clarity isn't worth the effort to acquire the skill, they simply abandon it. It's been happening in English since roughly 450 AD, or the year English became a language.

Think about it though. How much benefit do we get from using lay/lie and sit/set "properly"? Is there any meaning lost when someone gets it wrong? No, because one is transitive and one is intransitive; one has an object, one doesn't. It's that simple. No meaning loss, no reason for the rule to be there.

Let it die; I shan't mourn.

Apostrophe's as plural markers

One of the things that bugs me is that people are using an apostrophe as a marker for the plural. So, it's one boy, two boy's. What bugs me is that I can't see a reason for it. Most language change in English represents a streamlining of the syntax (Thaes cyninges becomes of the king. Trust me, it's a streamlining) or vocabulary (taxicabriolet becomes either taxi or cab). If we look at some dialects of English, we can see this in operation. In one dialect, you can say "The boys," but "The two boy," leaving off the "s" altogether, since it's redundant. With such a streamlining, I'll predict that nouns will become regular in form, so that eventually we would have one sheep and two sheeps. It's already that way for cow. We no longer speak much of cattle, but of cows. The same is true for non-count nouns (nouns that are usually not pluralized). When we speak of coffee, for instance, we get the awkward, "cup of coffee," designation, since coffee is not regularly pluralized in the sense of "a brewed beverage." But that's changing, isn't it. We say, "Two coffees," meaning "two cups of coffee."
Purists, of course, grind their tooths at this. They're the ones who think that contact has no place as a verb and that we're getting sloppy and losing our ability to think and dropping several dozen IQ points.
Not so, of course. Except for boy's as a plural. I can't buy that.

The Gnomes in the Dictionary Place

Ever wonder who makes the rules of grammar? They are not absolute, you know, even if Miss Fidditch, your fifth-grade English teacher, made it seem that way. They do change. So, who does the changing? The dictionary weasels out of any responsibility by putting the onus for change on 'the best writers." Okay, but who are they and who decides that they are the 'best?" If it's popularity, then Star Trek beats Rigoletto hands down.
It seems to be the case that the people who decide who the best writers are are also the people who decide what words to use and also seem to be (strangely enough) the same best writers that were selected by, can you guess it, themselves.
I remember a quote from way back. I wish I could remember the source. It goes: "There are two kinds of people: the righteous and the unrighteous. The classifying is done by the righteous."
It's a self-feeding autocracy, folks, and I'm not part of it
For instance, not too long ago, as glaciers go, the Government Printing Office Style Manual (didn't know there was such a thing, did you?) made some changes in the way we do things. They eliminated the periods from a lot of abbreviations. The abbreviation for foot is now ft, without the period. So, who made the change and why wasn't I asked about it?

Speeling

A very close friend sent me a link to an article on spelling. Seems that several misspellings are becoming legitimate. One, so my friend said, was "seperate" (the real spelling is separate). I assume this will upset a great many people, who see such changes in spelling as moving from "correct" (please note the quotation marks) to "illiterate."
What such folks (and I sympathize with them in a couple of cases) don't realize is that this is not random. There are powerful linguistic forces driving these changes. There is a strong drive toward regularity, for instance. That's why we no longer say, "I boke a loaf of bread," or "Hang up your hosen." Also, there is a strong drive toward spellings that make sense, no easy task in a language like English, which is a 1500-year-old patchwork quilt. So, when people write seperate instead of separate, they do so because it makes sense. I applaud the move to make alright an acceptable alternative to all right. In two generations, alright will be favored and in five all right will be available only as "all okay."
This thing has been going on for centuries. People have been misspelling words and the misspellings have become standard. A napron became an apron. Hros became horse.
So, whose fault is it that we have so many words hard to spell? I blame three cultures: Rome, Greece, and France. Rome because it gave us so many odd plurals (the plural of stadium is still sometimes stadia). Ditto Greece (phenomenon, phenomena). French, you might say, is an outgrowth of Latin, so why put them by themselves? Two reasons. First, French is not descended from classical Latin, but from the bastard Latin spoken by illiterate, coarse, Roman soldiers. Second, a sizable chunk of our vocabulary came from France with his highness William, cognomen Bastardus, the Conqueror. And of course, no French word is spelled anywhere near the way it sounds, so there you have it.
What the people who misspell words are doing is kind of straightening out some historical bumps in the road. More power to them. Let's go to work on calendar, supersede, and all those annoying -ance/-ence and -ent/-ant words.

Things Changing

Most of the obvious change in language is in the form of vocabulary. Words come in, words hang around for a couple of centuries, words go out (more slowly, 'cause the dictionaries keep them alive). But there are other changes taking place more slowly, but taking place nevertheless.
Syntax, or the study of sentence structures, is thought to be fairly stable. And it certainly is more stable than vocabulary. There have been some major syntactic changes in the past, though. For on thing, we've gone from being a language like German, which signals parts of speech with changes (Der Mann for a subject, Den Mann for a direct object) to a language which uses word order to establish meaning (Man bites dog and Dog bites man don't mean the same thing in English, but Der Mann beisst den Hund and Den Hund beisst der Mann do).
One of the interesting facets of this word order thing is that it sets up expectations in the minds of the readers/hearers. English is an SVO language. That is, we have a Subject, a Verb, and some sort of Object (Doesn't matter what kind, forget all that direct, indirect, objective complement, subjective complement stuff).
So, here's a short quiz. One of the following sentence forms is gradually disappearing. Which one?

A. I gave the book to Alice.
B. I gave Alice the book.

I have no hard data on this, naturally, but I'll bet the second one is the goner. Why? It's got the form S, V, IO, O (Indirect Object), which frustrates our expectations.
On the other hand, archaic forms are remarkably resistant to being killed, so it may well stay on for a while. Like ox, oxen (but not shoe, shoon)

How many words are there in English?

I read recently that sometime in September English will acquire its one millionth word. I also read somewhere sometime ago that English had more than one million words already. So, who's right? And, how do we know?
See, the problem is that we really don't know how to count whether a word, say, "time," is one word or many. Last time I looked, the word time had six different categories and 41 definitions within those categories. Some were very close, and could be said to be shades of meaning, some were different meanings, and some were different words that happened to be spelled the same.
English has clearly the largest vocabulary of any language that we know of (The exact size of Klingon not being known). But it's actually much smaller than one million words, for a number of reasons.
First, as I've noted above, numerous words, such as time, run, face, hand, may or may not be different words, depending on how we look at them and how well we argue our points.
Second, there are words which are still on the books but are so archaic that we use them only in crosswords and Scrabble. Words like grot (grotto) and arew (arrow) fall in this category,
Third, there are words so specialized in their meaning that they are used by about one half of one tenth of one fifth of one percent of the population. Words like epiclesis (invocation).
Fourth, there are slang words, with often have the life expectancy of a mayfly, flitting in and out of the lexicon, living and dying in an instant. Words like george, zoot, bad, rad, have all at one time meant good.
So, if you don't know a million words, don't worry. You can make do with the 50,000 words that you recognize (If not know how to use).

Language perfection

One of the hardest things for people (me included) to accept is that there is no one true and perfect form of any language. We are all grammar snobs to a certain extent, convinced that the way we were taught English was the way English is. The idea that the language flexes, warps, moves underfoot, and responds to whims of political and economic power is a hard one to get one's mind around.
Nonetheless, it's true. Here's how it works. Let's say that, oh, 1500 years ago or so you have a developing country. Let's call it England. In this land are a number of different versions of the language. They are all pretty much equal in status, and serve more to differentiate people geographically than any other way. Sort of, "I tell by your speech that you come from north of the Humber." Let's call these different versions dialects. As is inevitable, the geographic sections of the country kind of align themselves in an economic and social stack, with the more powerful, wealthy, and populated sections gaining prestige. As the parts of the country gain prestige, so do their dialects. Generally, one dialect will emerge as king of the hill and will assume the status of language, with all other dialects socially subservient to it.
Gradually also, the other dialects will come to be seen as imperfect forms of the standard language. Thus cockney, which is a perfectly good linguistic structure, comes to be seen as a depraved form of "English." And its speakers are looked down on as unschooled and possibly stupid.

The two rules of language

There are two crucial rules about language that everyone, especially highschool English teachers, ought to know. The two rules are
Rule one: Language changes
Rule two: You can't do anything about rule number one

There are some interesting corollaries to these rules. For one thing, language change does not come from the upper crusts of society, who have invested lots of time and energy into being able to differentiate who from whom. Language change comes from the streets -- always has. Scholars point to all the new words coined by Shakespeare, but that's just a drop in the bucket (so to speak). It's the masses, man, who change the syntax and drive the acquisition of new vocabulary.

How has language changed? Well, if we look at it long-term, it's easy to see. Compare Beowulf, which is in English, or Chaucer, who wrote in English, or Shakespeare, who wrote in English, or Jane Austen, who wrote in English, with what goes on today.

Wait a minute? Jane Austen? She writes just like we do. If you think that, you haven't been paying attention. For one thing Janey adheres to a rule we haven't had for quite some time now: the I shall/I will rule. Do you know it? I thought not. It goes like this:

"I shall" means "I intend to"
"I will" means "I am determined to"

"You will" means "You intend to"
"You shall" means "You are obligated to"

Note how the sense of obligation versus simple futurity changes? That's probably why the rule is dead. It seems to be the case that if a rule is more trouble than it's worth, or if it's not really necessary, it's scrapped. For instance, take the rule (please) that differentiates between "fewer" and "less." "Fewer" is used with things that one counts, such as beans or chairs. "Less" is used with things that one doesn't count, such as air or animosity.

Only no one pays any attentions to it. Go through the quick line at the local supermarket and you'll see, "Ten items or less," instead of "fewer," and somehow everyone gets it right.

What happens to people who don't know the rule is that they make some pretty strange judgements on writing based on what they learned in the fifth grade. I remember a man who wouldn't pay any attention to any document that had the word "hopefully" used wrong. "Hopefully," he would lecture us, "means full of hope." It does not mean "It is to be hoped."
Well excuse me, but you have your head in the sand (at least). At one time it may have been the case that "hopefully" had that one meaning, but the times they are a changin'. By this geezer's logic a marshal is still the guy who cares for the horses and "silly" means innocent.

Still, many people believe that they are preserving the "purity of the language" when they try to hold back the tide of change. The real irony of this is that the language never was pure in the first place.