Gove's random writing style rules

Michael Gove has been the subject of this blog in the past. These days, he's no longer Education bod and is now Lord Chancellor, if you can believe that. Because this job apparently doesn't involve much actual work, he's got a lot of time on his hands and is spending it complaining about the way people write and making lists of things his people should do or not do when they respond to letters.

His list of things is a mixture of surprisingly sensible advice on general style (don't be repetitive, don't be pompous, be nice and thank people for their letters), content (refer to the inherited economic situation at every opportunity) and really random concerns about punctuation and grammar.

He also seems to have been influenced by Strunk and White, as his advice also includes 'if in doubt, cut it out' (which is good advice if you are writing formal documents), and 'in letters, adjectives add little, adverbs even less'. (There is a point here, although it cannot be taken too literally, as 'little', 'even' and 'less' are all adjectives or adverbs.)

According to the Independent article I linked above, his 'rules' include the following:

Use active voice and present tense. 

This is a well-worn rule. It's good advice in some ways, because people do sometimes use passive sentences to 'pad out' their writing, but there's so much nonsense written about it and people are so demonstrably unable to tell what's active and passive anyway (scroll down to section 3 at that link for examples), it's not actually very helpful advice.

Don't use 'impact' as a verb.

Lots of people have peeves about words that were originally nouns being used as verbs. That's fine. It's illogical, because so many of our verbs were originally nouns it seems silly to pick out just one or two, but whatever. I think it's because this particular one is perceived as a 'management-speak' buzzword, which is indeed annoying.

Don't use contractions.

Fair enough. Formal writing does usually avoid contractions (so 'don't' should be 'do not', for example). I used to enforce this quite strictly in student essays, but these days I let it go, as I recently noted, because I'm on a mission to discourage the lumpen, clumsy, underconfident writing style I see too much of. I don't know what kind of letters these civil servants write; if it's very formal then they should follow Gove's rule, but if they want to adopt the 'warm tone' he elsewhere encourages, I'd use contractions.

While 'best-placed' and 'high-quality' are joined with a dash, very few others are. 

Bit of a weird thing to say. There are well-established rules about when you use a hyphen. There are some that are a matter of preference, such as with prefixes (so some newspapers prefer to hyphenate 're-think' while others prefer 'rethink'), and these are (or should be) flexible enough to allow for violations in cases of potential ambiguity. If we turn to examples of the type Gove cites, there is a rule: 'best-placed' and 'high-quality' are spelt with a hyphen if they are used attributively (which basically means before a noun, like I used 'well-established' just now) and not if they are used predicatively (which basically means after a verb like 'to be', as in 'the rules are well established'). You would not write 'the food is very high-quality', for instance. So it's daft to pick out two random examples and incorrectly state that they always have a hyphen and incorrectly state that others don't, when you could just follow the correct way we're all already doing it. But hey - what do I know.

Don't use 'unnecessary' capitalisations.

Agree. Some people like to use capitals to make words seem more important, I think. Capitalisation rules are pretty arbitrary (compare English with German, which capitalises nouns) and it has changed even since I was at school (when I was taught to capitalise seasons), but there are rules and not following them makes you look like you don't know them.

Replace 'ensure' with 'make sure'.

OK. Random, but I guess it seems simpler.

Don't start a sentence with 'however'. 

As I recently wrote, 'however' is tricky. Sometimes people introduce a silly rule in order to rule out a genuinely incorrect usage without having to explain its complexity, but in the process rule out a lot of other correct usages. 'Don't end a sentence with a preposition' used to be one of these. I have a strong suspicion that the common ban on first person pronouns in essays is one too - if students can't write 'I', they can't write stupid waffly phrases like 'I believe that'. Likewise, banning sentence-initial 'however' would also rule out some incorrect used of 'however'. But it would not catch those I complained about in my post linked above, and it would rule out a lot of perfectly fine ones. So I think this another Strunk & White rule, who apparently allow uses like 'However much you complain, I'm not going to stop doing it' but dislike it when it's used with a comma: 'However, we were unable to change her habits'. This is silly, out-of-date advice which will lead to old-fashioned, distant writing. I'm saying nothing about whether that says anything about Gove's character.

Machines can hear it

More from the No Such Thing As A Fish podcast. The Elves have an incredible breadth of knowledge, but by necessity cannot have an in-depth understanding of all the facts they present. This becomes obvious when they talk about something that one happens to know something about. This morning, I was listening to them discussing accents, and they said a number of things that reminded me that there's a curious mismatch in terms of how much people like to talk about language and how poorly equipped they are to do so. (Linguistics is not the only subject to suffer from this, of course. Psychology springs to mind.)

The most striking thing was their discussion of (by now fairly old) research analysing the Queen's Christmas speeches over the years, which concluded that the Queen does not speak the way she spoke when she was younger. The reason that this is interesting is that it shows that older people's language shifts, not just young people's. But the shifts documented in that study are slight, and affect vowels, which are notoriously hard to pin down.

Because we need to be able to tell the difference between bet and bat, we hear vowels as categorically different sounds, but they are actually points in a continuous potential noise-range (you can easily slide from e to a with no break in between, and the intervening sounds are halfway between the two vowels). What distinguishes vowels from each other is their relative 'distance' from each other (scare quotes to indicate metaphorical usage and also technical terminology - the distance is literal as well).

This means that when sounds change very slightly, you might not be able to hear it, or you might not hear it reliably because you're expecting to hear a particular sound (the McGurk effect is a famous demonstration of just how useless you are at hearing a sound if you're expecting to hear another). If you can't trust your own ears, you aren't going to do a very convincing scientific experiment, are you? So people use specialist equipment to measure sounds, and then they can analyse these measurements to determine exactly what sounds were produced and how (for instance) the Queen's vowels have changed over time. So, one change they noticed was that her vowel in words like had was produced lower in the mouth in the 1980s than in the 1950s, causing it to sound a bit more like had and a bit less like hed.

The Elves reported the study and in the course of the conversation, said 'You can't hear it though. Machines can hear it'. This was met with astonishment from the audience and the other Elves, but it's no stranger than measuring anything else with a machine (blood pressure, brain activity, blood sugar levels, gravity, atmospheric pressure, wind speed, radioactivity...). It's a peculiar quirk of language that because we all do it with a reasonable degree of consciousness, we think we must know all about it, even though we don't know how our lungs or digestion work without explicit teaching.

So I think the moral of this is that everyone should come to my department's forthcoming event, consisting of an exhibition, two film screenings and a public lecture, and learn more about how amazing language is!

Why everyone who works with language needs linguistics

Someone on a blog I read the other day posted this question, asking for advice:

Does anyone know any tricks to know when English -ed is pronounced as [d~t] as in “begged” and “knocked” versus [ed] like “petted”?

Some of my students have issues and I don’t know how to help them.

(I haven't linked to the actual blog because I don't want to seem like I'm criticising them personally.)

You might think that people who teach language know linguistics. Most people seem to think that linguistics *is* teaching languages. In fact, lots of linguistics graduates go on to do language teaching, but they are far outnumbered by language teachers who don't have a linguistics background. TESOL MA programmes frequently have a core linguistics component, but people who've chosen to do TESOL but not linguistics are probably not that interested in linguistics anyway.

The reason I mention this is that the question above is taught on any first-year linguistics course as the absolute go-to example of phonologically-conditioned allomorphy in English. Typically, we point out that native English speakers do this subconsciously and consistently, and it's an example of how there are rules and we can discover them by careful investigation, as well as to teach the theoretical concept.

Of course, speakers of other languages with different rules will not do this subconsciously, because the rules of their language might not automatically force the same result as English. They'll need the rule taught to them. The fact that someone who (presumably) is teaching English doesn't know how to explain this simple fact is quite shocking to me, but I doubt the asker is alone. A few basic linguistics classes would make life as an English teacher so much easier, I can't even imagine why it wouldn't be standard.

Most tastiest

This story recently appeared in the Guardian newspaper, about a schoolboy who bullied Tesco into changing some 'ungrammatical' wording on its juice cartons. As you can probably tell, I'm (unusually) on Tesco's side here, or rather I would have been if they hadn't caved in instantly and completely.

Here's what happened: this 15-year-old boy noticed that his orange juice was described as being made with the 'most tastiest' oranges, and he felt that it should be either 'tastiest' or 'most tasty'. He felt this so strongly that he wrote first to Tesco customer services, and then to the Daily Mail when he didn't get a reply. And he wrote a real letter, with a stamp, not an email, which is how you know he was incandescent.

To clarify: yes, it 'should' be one of the two options he provided. The superlative doubling that he objects to is a very common feature of everyday speech, and I hear it approximately once a day (I listen out for it because I like it). In writing or formal speech it is considered wrong, and any piece of writing such as an essay should not include this construction. I'm very pleased that the standard of education in our schools is such that this child not only knows this, but cares about it. He sounds utterly insufferable, but I'm sure I was also insufferable at his age, so I'll let him off with that.

I do, however, want to suggest a better way for Tesco to have responded (rather than sending a grovelling letter promising to change the wording). The wording was probably carefully selected by a copy writer who knew exactly what they were doing, picking a construction that's frequent but not prescriptively correct, in order to come across as informal, friendly and possibly more eye-catching. Innocent, for example, while not using any 'ungrammatical' constructions that I can see, do their utmost to make their blurb informal, using no capital letters, lots of contractions ('we're', etc) and words like 'stuff', none of which would be acceptable in formal writing.

It's OK to use non-standard language if you know what you're doing and it's for a particular effect. As the saying goes, you have to know the rules before you know how to break them. Had Tesco been a linguist (and perhaps their copywriter is - lots of our students go on to do jobs like that) they might have responded to this young pedant with some facts about the frequency of use and the contexts in which superlative doubling is found, to demonstrate that it is not in fact ungrammatical, but merely register-specific. Then they could have explained to the young man that this wording was intentionally chosen to give the impression of a nice, friendly orange juice seller that you can trust, to mitigate the fact that you're buying concentrated orange juice from a huge corporation that probably pays its orange growers virtually nothing (I don't know this - just guessing).

Actually, the text from which this doubled superlative is taken is not specially informal, so it probably was an oversight. But there we go. I do think it's important not to always uphold the 'rules' of grammar, as being prissy about it is what causes people to dislike grammar when really it's such an interesting and fun thing, if you just look at it in the right way. I'm much more concerned about the genuinely ungrammatical things people (=students) write. If they'd never say it, why do they write it? But that's another rant for another day.

Legal language: 'it's just semantics'

I read this utterly depressing article about the legal problems of rape cases in India. (Note that I'm not passing judgement on any particular country being better or worse than any other in this regard - I'm not a lawyer. But this is in the news, and it made me think.) It describes, among other things, the fact that some sexual assault crimes are described using very out-dated terms: 

A non-penetrative sexual act is still described as "outraging the modesty of a woman" - a relic of a penal code written by the British in 1860.
"Because of the language, it has often led to judgments where courts have held that a woman did not have 'modesty' which could be outraged," says law professor, Mrinal Satish.
"Such judgments are few and far between nowadays, but the continuance of the archaic language is itself problematic."

Language has become very important here: an old-fashioned term is allowing defendants to get away with serious crimes. Sometimes, I think that as long as people agree on what a word means, that's what it means, and we ought not to get hung up on it. But here it's having a serious effect on real life and has consequences. If ever there was one, this is an argument for prescribing language. (I've written about other instances before.)

It reminded me of this LanguageLog post from last month. In it, they discussed a claim made in The Economist:

In Urdu there is no word for rape. The closest direct translation is "looting my honour". 

LanguageLog and its commenters swiftly demolished this 'no word for X' claim, just as they have done many times before. It's complicated, but if everyone knows and agrees that a particular word means rape, then there is a word for rape. Take English, for instance. The word comes from the Latin word rapere, or 'seize', 'carry off', etc. But no trial is going to turn on whether an accused rapist actually carried their victim off somewhere - all speakers of English agree that the word means something very different from its original 'literal' meaning (and it already had the 'modern' meaning in Latin, by the way). From what the knowledgeable commenters on LanguageLog say, the situation in Urdu is similar:

The legal term is "zina bi'l-jabr" (aggravated fornication), and everyone who speaks Urdu knows what it means. 

The difference in (some parts of) India seems to be that some judges accept the specious 'literal meaning' argument. People who think that saying 'it's just semantics' implies that the question is unimportant are wrong. 

Learning grammar

Recently, English children aged 10-11 had to take their SATs (tests that children take every few years to check the school isn't useless). The English test included a test of their spelling, punctuation and grammar, a new thing introduced by the wildly unpopular and widely-derided Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove.

Michael Gove:
as much of an idiot as he looks.

I am, of course, in favour of these things being taught in schools. It seems sensible to me that children should learn how to write well and how to understand the language they speak. It would be even better if they learn how language works and were taught linguistics. This can be done, and I once read a very good proposal for how to implement it, which I now can't find. But anyway - that aside, yes, teach children how to spell. Good.

The problem is how Gove wants this taught and tested, as with all his reforms (his changes to history make the curriculum just a list of facts and figures, according to history teachers, because he felt that children were learning too much about Martin Luther King and not enough about ancient kings and queens of England).

Michael Rosen has written about this at great length and David Crystal has added his comments, so I won't add my thoughts here, but basically it's teaching children meaningless terminology out of context, which is at best confusing and at worst wrong. See the Crystal link for examples. It means that people end up with fixed rules that they don't fully understand and can't apply - one of the comments on the Crystal piece:

My son (an American) had a high school Advanced Placement composition teacher who would take points off for every "passive" sentence in a composition. Actually, what she did was go on hunts for instances of "was" and "is", and would deduct points even if the sentences weren't passive.

What I wanted to add to the conversation was this: is it actually useful to teach children grammar?

I know that's blasphemy to anyone of a certain age or temperament, but I'm serious. And I say that as someone whose job is basically grammar. What would the answer be?

If we teach it the way we do now, then I would be of the opinion that we don't teach it till they're older - 13 or so. Then they can cope with learning these unfamiliar terms and rules. But I also think we shouldn't teach it the way we do now, as if there are hard and fast rules. Knowing grammar is useful if you want to learn another language (although it is entirely possible to do it without, if you learn in an 'immersion' style), so perhaps we should introduce it earlier. Many people my age, who weren't taught English grammar at school, learnt all they know from their French lessons. In that case we could do it differently, showing children that there are basic categories of words and they're combined in certain ways, but that language is only real when it's used, and it behaves in interesting ways and the real skill is in learning how to investigate it.

Or, as an alternative, we could just not. I wasn't taught much grammar, as far as I remember. When my generation was at school it just wasn't on the curriculum. It hasn't done me any harm. If you need it or like it, you'll learn it later, and if you don't, well, there is literally no situation in real life where you will desperately need to know if a word is a noun or a verb.

There is one aspect of grammar that does affect real life, and that's using 'correct' grammar - you have to do that if you don't want people to think you're uneducated and not give you a job. That is important, but it's a different thing from learning grammar. That's learning the rules of how to use a particular register of the language to conform to a certain social group. There's no question that schools are failing children if they don't teach them how to do this, because like it or not, it's a vital life skill to be able to speak and write according to the standard language.

And you know what? Schools don't teach children this. I mark essays and there are so many mistakes in them, most students clearly haven't grasped all of the rules. There are maybe 5-10% of essays that are really well-written in any bunch. The rest are mostly not terrible, but they aren't great. This was shocking to me, because I assumed that most people who have managed to reach this stage of education have learnt this stuff along the way.

BUT I do not advocate more grammar lessons in school to remedy this problem. I've taught first-year syntax for long enough to know that if an 18-year-old struggles with grammar, a ten-year-old isn't going to fare any better. It's just going to make them hate writing and feel stupid.

I conducted a poll among my most writerly non-linguist friends - the ones who studied English literature. Some of these people have PhDs in English literature, or will soon, some make a career or hobby out of writing. They know their stuff. Almost all of them said that they don't have conscious knowledge of grammar, it's 'just instinct'. Even the stuff that these children are supposed to know, they wouldn't be confident if they were tested on it. But they can do it, and surely that's the important thing - who cares if you know what a gerund is, if you can use one right?

The way that they (and I) all learnt grammar was by reading a lot. If you read a lot, you pick up good grammar, is my hypothesis. Now of course it is possible that some child might read a lot but still not 'get it'. It might just be that these people picked it up easily AND liked reading, and one is not a cause of the other. I'd like to hear from you if you read a lot but still don't write well, or naturally write well but never read much.

I'm not pretending that this is an easy solution: a lot of children don't like reading and you can't force them to do it, or they end up hating it. I'm just saying, the way Gove is doing it is stupid. Maybe they do have to teach it explicitly. But if they're going to, then they should at least listen to the people they consulted, who specifically advised against the approach they've taken.

And I would bet Gove ten quid that he wouldn't be able to correctly identify, say, the subject of a sentence every single time, but it's not done his career any harm.

A @name

Twitter has a search bar thing and in it, it says "enter a @name or username". Now, I've been pronouncing @name as "at name", because that to me is an "at sign". I don't know if twitter is calling it something else. That's what the article "a" rather than "an" suggests. But what could it be calling it?

In other languages, it's called things like "monkey tail", "elephant's trunk", "little dog", "snail" and other animal-based names reflecting its shape. But in English it's really only called the "at sign".

So twitter, why you no obey phonological rules?

Replace all

I've just finished reading the Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins. It was all right, not great literature but a fun enough read. Odd typos in the last book though.

One thing was that there very often lacked a space between sentences. I have no explanation for that. Another thing was three misspellings, all related. The first was evapourate. The second was elabourate. The third was labouratory. In each case, the error is an extra u where there shouldn't be one. Can you see why?

Prepositions in Prague

I've been in Prague, because my lovely parents took me (and my sister) there for my 30th birthday. It was beautiful and interesting and relaxing (though also tiring because there are a lot of steps and hills). 

When I go to other countries where they speak not-English I generally try to learn a few phrases so as not to be a total rudeperson. This goes down well in France, where they either don't speak English that well or just generally prefer it if you speak French (can't blame them) and luckily my French is passable enough that that works OK. In other countries they seem to have decided it's just easier if we all speak English and it's quite hard to get them to talk not-English to you. 

In Amsterdam, they can spot an English person at twenty paces and get in their English greeting before you even have a chance to say 'hallo' (which is basically English anyway, because a lot of Dutch is English with a funny accent). In Prague they aren't quite as sure, because you might be Italian or Spanish or French or German instead, so they're sometimes a bit more tentative with the English opener, so you do have a chance to go in with the Czech (and from your poor pronunciation they obviously realise that you're English). 

There's a different type of problem though. In Amsterdam, I quite happily parallel-talked, doing my best Dutch beer-ordering and thanking, and they replied in English so that I could actually understand. This worked quite well. But in Prague, it didn't go so well. If I tried to thank them in Czech, they didn't always seem to understand. This is partly because three phrasebooks gave me three different ways of saying it, so I wasn't quite as sure of myself. I'd specifically learnt some phrases, and discovered that my ten weeks of basic Russian would be quite handy (I successfully rustled up the words for 'four tickets'). 

But I think the biggest problem is that they're making it up. Those three ways of saying thank you, for instance. And look at these signs. They all show what appear to be the words 'from' and 'to' (the first one may not, but the second two definitely do), and there are THREE different ones. The second two, especially, are a dead giveaway that they're making it up, because they're saying the exact same thing. There's no way a difference in the length of time you're allowed to park changes what preposition you use with the times you're allowed to park between. 

Reminds me of Welsh, which is definitely doing a similar thing. On one weekend visit not long ago I counted at least three different way of writing 'car park' on signs in just Pembroke Dock.

[08/08/12 Update! 366daysinthelife has informed me that Po - Pa and Po - Ne mean Mon-Fri and Mon-Sun. Of course! It's so obvious once you know. Come back Czech, all is forgiven.]

I'm good thanks

From my Tumblr:

[This is a reblog of a post by a meme tumblr which posts these memes made by 'English majors', and they're pretty snobby about correct punctuation and usage, though you wouldn't know it from the amount of mistakes in their posts. They're also snobby about everything else, including what books they've read, how books are better than everything else, and how nerdy they are. Their post consists of just the meme; the comments below are mine.]

Now, setting aside the fact that some adaptations are a gazillion times better than the book (Lord of the Rings springs to mind), this is about interchanging ‘well’ and ‘good’. Normally, this peeve centres around saying ‘I’m good’ when what the prescriptivists think you should say is ‘I’m well’. I have NEVER EVER heard anyone say anything like the text in the image (‘The adaptation did a well job of…’). I can’t imagine that anyone possibly could - it’s not just wrong in a prescriptive sense, it sounds wrong in a genuinely ungrammatical sense. But hey, dialects differ.

But my guess, if anyone actually did say this, is that it’s because they’ve been told so many times about not saying ‘good’ when you should say ‘well’, that they’ve hyper-corrected. That’s when you change something that was already right because you’re worried about getting it wrong and not quite clear on what the rules are. It’s like when stereotypical Cockney policemen put ‘h’ on words that shouldn’t have it, because they’re hyper-correcting and know they shouldn’t drop the h. So, you know, if this bothers you, stop telling people off for saying ‘I’m good’. If you hadn’t done that, none of this would ever have happened. 

Greenberg's diversity index

Well, this is interesting. It's an article from the Economist, showing language diversity in several countries. It gives the probability of two people selected at random from any one country speaking the same language. So in Papua New Guinea, two people are almost certain to speak different languages, whereas in North Korea, they will definitely both speak the same language.



The UK isn't on this list, but the fuller list at Ethnologue gives us a probability value of 0.133, so around the same as Mexico or Australia. However, we have many fewer indigenous languages spoken than either of them (Ethnologue says 12; click here if you want to know what they are) so it looks like we must have more speakers of our minority languages than they do.

Weird and wonders

Recently there was a trailer for a Radio 4extra programme hosted by Mel Giedroyc. In the trailer she used the phrase

Life's weird and wonders

and I liked it. I don't know if it was a slip of the tongue which they decided to leave in, or if it was done on purpose. I presume, as it was a scripted and recorded thing, that it must be on purpose.

What's unusual about it is that we have an adjective weird co-ordinated with a noun wonders. Normally this would be bad. But we have a phrase that's become a fixed expression, weird and wonderful. When a phrase becomes fixed like this it can engage in some odd behaviour that a composite phrase wouldn't normally do. It starts to behave almost like it's a single word (it's become lexicalised). And wonderful can be made into a noun by removing the adjectival suffix -ful, so it stands to reason that the 'word' weirdandwonderful can as well. More lexicalisation!

Swedish words of the year

Why Swedish? Well, why not. They're so much better than our boring old candidates for this honour, anyway. 


One I like is åsiktstaliban. It means 'opinion taliban'. Perhaps related is attitydinkontinens, which if you read it carefully says 'attitude incontinence', or an inability to keep your opinions to yourself. 

As proof (if we needed it) that knowing the etymology doesn't affect your use of a word, they have juholtare, which describes 'a situation when someone says something hastily and then has to take it back', and terja, which is to manipulate a photograph. Both handy words, and both come from the names of people you've probably never heard of if you're not Swedish. Håkan Juholt is the leader of the Social Democratic party and apparently keeps making rash and incorrect statements. Terje Hellesø is a nature photographer who confessed to having messed about with his photos (which won an award). This also makes him unusual in having a word based on his first name rather than his surname. 


appa, which means to solve a problem by using an app, is another good word which we simply don't have in English and I think might be usefully borrowed. We could just use app as a verb, as in:

What's the weather going to be like tomorrow? Hold on, I'll just app it.  

Some of the words are frankly bizarre. Take Säpojogg ('Säpo jog'), 

a term describing a run or race emulating how security service agents jogged in suits and ties behind a vehicle, such as at Crown Princess Victoria's wedding.

Why would you need such a word? Why would there be a race like that? 


And what about mobildagis ('mobile phone daycare')? It means  

a place for the collective storage of multiple mobile phones

What? What is such a place? Like the place in the house where everyone's phone lives? These crazy Swedes. 

Language trumps race

Young children see language as a more salient factor than race in determining identity, it seems.

A study from the University of Chicago asked groups of children aged 5-6 and 9-10 to do a matching task. They were shown images like the one below and asked which adult the child would grow up to be.

I think you and I would pick the man on the left, as we know that it's fairly likely that a white child will grow up to be a white man, and skin colour changes in later life are relatively rare. OK, he's speaking a different language, but maybe he moved to France or whatever. The 9-10-year-old kids agreed with us and matched the same pair.

But the younger children matched the boy with the black man, who speaks the same language as the child. How odd. Katherine Kinzler, the lead author of the study, says:

From a child’s perspective, language offers many of the characteristics of a biologically determined or inherited category. Children usually speak the same language as their families, and they likely do not remember the time as infants that they spent learning a native language.

They've found that accent and language are really important to kids (which I guess we knew) and this shows that a person's language is even more important than their race to a young child. So, would this be different for black Americans, to whom race is important because they early on have to learn that lots of people are racist bastards? Yes, it would. When groups of black children were given the same test, the younger ones matched according to race, not language, just like the older children. How sad. 

The perils of international trade

I read a really nice piece in the Bangkok Post this week (yeah, I'm global). It was written by an Australian, as far as I can gather from the textual clues, who has been living in Thailand for 22 years. This, I think, makes him qualified to comment on Thai matters with an authoritative outsider's point of view. His article concerns the pronunciation of companies when they open branches in Thailand. Ikea is the business he discusses, and how many Thai people have begun saying it as 'ickier'. The writer suggests a possible reason for this:

The answer lies in the ''I'' at the beginning of the word. In Thai, a short sharp ''I'' is a derogatory way of describing somebody. If you didn't like me, for example, you can call me ''I-Andrew'' with a scowl, though not to my face because it's very rude. I am guessing Ikea sounds like a rude way of referring to a person by the name of ''Kea''.

But some companies have fared a lot worse in the name-mangling stakes. Volvo, for instance:

First, there is no ''v'' in Thai, so they replace it with a ''w''. Second, the final sound of a syllable in Thai cannot end in ''l'', so ''Vol'' becomes ''Wonn''. And so Volvo becomes Wonn-wor.

Thai is, actually, a language with a very different phonology from English so pronunciation is hard in both directions. My Thai friends are too polite to laugh at me when I try to do it, but they can't quite hide their amusement.

Learnt vs learned

Mr T likes to get his grammar and spelling all correct when he writes facebook posts, so he checks things he's not sure about. Last night he suddenly realised he didn't know what the difference was between learnt and learned (as the past tense form of the verb learn). He googled it, and after a few dictionary entries, one of my posts was on the first page of hits. He was quite frankly astonished: of all the blogs in all the world, he had to google across mine.

I'm really pleased about that, but surprised. Does that mean that it's only me using the word learnt? I can't believe it's just me and the dictionaries. It looks like it's used more in the UK than in the US, which would explain a big lack of it on the internet. Still, there must be other British bloggers out there. For the record, either is completely acceptable and there is no preference for either in terms of formality or 'correctness'. I use learnt mostly just because that's what's in my idiolect. But if I were to justify it, well, I like it better. I like irregular verbs, I think they're pretty. And they often have something to reveal about language.

Steven Pinker, in his Words and Rules, notes the unusual fact that the 'default' (i.e. regular) plural suffix in German is -s, despite the fact that it's nowhere near the most common plural marker. He argues this on account of the fact that it's the suffix chosen for nonce words and proper names, which aren't normally pluralised. In English, although we spell our regular past tense suffixes -ed, there are actually three: /d/, /t/ and /ɪd/. I wonder if one could argue that the default one is /t/, based on the fact that it surfaces in such forms as learnt, dreamt and sent.

Furthermore, if we stopped using these irregular past tense forms, we'd lost interesting facts like this one: dreamt is the only word in English to end in the letter combination mt (apart from derived forms like daydreamt).

Kitchen tells you how to cook in French

There's an article in the Guardian about a kitchen that talks to you in French and tells you how to make French dishes. I've actually seen this kitchen, as it's at my university. I haven't used it but I understand it's very impressive. It also has accelerometers in all the equipment (the things inside an iphone) so it knows if you've stirred onions when it told you to chop carrots. Brilliant idea, and I hope it become more widespread.

Rules of language vs prescriptivism

I blog this blog over at Tumblr as well, as there's a linguistic community over there and Blogger is so uselessly hopeless at having any kind of interaction between bloggers. There was an interesting post recently from Lesserjoke, which I replied to.

He was asked this question:

Question: Hey, I’m just wondering- and totally not in a sarcastic/condescending way- from a linguists perspective, if there’s no “wrong” usage of words or grammar, why have rules at all? Are there any that matter? Just wanted to get your views on it.

And this was his reply:

Answer: Linguists really do vary, and most are not as pigheadedly anti-prescriptivist as I am. =) But, from my perspective, we don’t need rules at all. English survived for quite a while before people started writing down the rules to it, and there are many societies around the world still today that don’t actively enforce linguistic rules.

There’s a huge pressure on people who directly interact to understand one another. If X and Y are going to communicate to each one’s benefit, they’re going to need to be able to successfully pass messages back and forth. And when you expand that to an entire society, the principle remains the same: the language of people who are forced to communicate naturally converges to the point of understandability, without the need for actively prescribing rules.

Due to that pressure, most variation within a language is just statistical noise: it’s interesting, it can teach us a lot about the principles of grammar, and I would even say it’s beautiful… but it’s so minor that it doesn’t get in the way of comprehension. It’s really rare for two speakers of the same language to truly not be able to understand each other.

And if that were to happen — if, without the active enforcement of grammatical rules, a formerly common language begins splitting apart… who cares? Historically, that’s happened plenty of times. The various Romance languages all descended from dialects of Latin, Old English branched away from Old Germanic, and so on and so forth. Languages split when that social pressure goes away: when one population of Old Germanic speakers no longer are interacting enough with the others to need to maintain cross-group intelligibility. It’s a perfectly natural linguistic process, and it almost doesn’t make sense to stand in its way. If we need to understand one another, we will, and if we don’t, what’s the point of making sure we can?

So that’s my answer! The explicit enforcement of grammatical rules is unnecessary and only serves to unfairly shame speakers of nonstandard variants. If we just let the invisible hand take care of it (the way many societies have done and continue to do today), an equilibrium of necessary intelligibility in language would soon be achieved.

I thought that was broadly right but overlooked a fundamental aspect of language, which is that it is strictly rule-governed. I agree that we don't need to explicitly enforce the rules, but speakers of language enforce them themselves without outside interference. I replied stating as much, as follows:

A crucial point is the difference between prescriptive rules and the principles of grammar that underlie language. I agree with the above regarding the explicit enforcement of ‘rules’ - but these are the little things, the things that vary in non-standard usage and so on. 

The fact there are asymmetries that hold across every language tells me that there are underlying principles (rules) that form the structure of language. Variation is on top of that and provides the difference languages that we see. For example, there is no language, not a single one, which has the opposite of V2 (i.e. that places the verb in the penultimate position). There are loads of these facts and they tell us that there must be some kind of rules. 

And furthermore, although speakers can communicate even when there’s a lot of variation, there are limits to what speakers will produce and judge grammatical. It’s basically the difference between saying that you can’t say ‘I done it already’ and saying that you can’t say ‘already it I’ - a speaker may well say the first and a prescriptivist would rule it ‘wrong’, but no speaker of English would produce the second. 

These are examples from syntax, but we can look at phonology too. We can say that it’s fine to pronounce the vowel in ‘grass’ (there’s a massive difference between the north and south of England on this one) in two wildly different ways, and both are fine and understandable. One might be judged wrong by certain people, but as long as both say ‘grass’, it’s not wrong from a linguistic point of view. But it’s simply not possible for an English speaker to pronounce a word [rgas]. It’s against the rules of the language - not the ones someone made up, but the real, natural rules that underpin the structure of the language. 

So I would say we DO need rules; we don’t need prescriptivists because speakers enforce the real rules themselves naturally. This doesn’t preclude language change, because the rules can change, but at any one time, the language is stable enough for us to communicate. 

Ambiguous signage

Faced with this sign, what would you do?

Today I saw a woman frankly baffled by it. I'm not picking on the civic centre, really I'm not, but I do happen to pass there often and their signs are just so very unconventional. 

To clarify, the building has two sets of doors on either side of this sort of corridor. On each side, one of the sets is out of order due to the weight of the glass. This sign, saying 'We are sorry - this door is not in use', is stuck on the glass next to one of the sets of doors, with an arrow pointing towards that set of doors. The question is, is that the door that's out of order, or is it the door you should use? 

The answer is (a), it's the door that is out of order. Of course it is: this door (points) is not in use. But it's really quite odd to point towards the thing that you're supposed to be getting people to not use. Normally an arrow would direct people towards the correct door to use. This leads to a conflict between apparent meaning and expected use of arrows, and people get baffled. 

(The sign is, of course, intended to be the precise bridge between these two conditions: it should be placed on the out-of-use door, with the arrow pointing towards the door that people should use instead. It's just been the unfortunate victim of poor sign-redeployment.)

14 punctuation marks that you never knew existed

I did know that some of them existed, actually. The full list is here. It's an annoyingly ad-full page but worth persevering with to learn that marks like these exist (comments are from the original site, not mine):

Because Sign

This one's so cool. It's like the "Therefore" sign, but upside-down, and it means because.

Exclamation Comma

Just because you're excited about something doesn't mean you have to end the sentence.

Hedera

Hedera is Latin for ivy. Why that is relevant here is not very clear at all, but this little glyph was used back in the day to mark paragraph breaks. Seems like it was probably really hard and annoying to draw, but it looks nice.