How however almost kicked but's butt: Linguistics study

However you're using the word however, be aware you might be getting it wrong.

A new analysis of more than a century of books, newspapers, magazines and online writings has revealed the life and journey of the word however, but particularly its common misuse as a synonym for but.

University of Melbourne researcher Dr Andrew Hamilton has dubbed the erroneous trend Conjunctive Howeveritis, a phenomenon that peaked in the 1980s and 1990s.

His study shows that instead of correctly using however as an adverb, it is often misappropriated as a conjunction.

For example, according to the Cambridge English Dictionary:

"My teacher is very nice but a bit strict" not "My teacher is very nice however a bit strict".

Dr Hamilton is a renowned ecologist and an Honorary Principal Fellow with the University's Faculty of Veterinary and Agricultural Sciences, but has had a long-standing interest in linguistics.

He pored through more than 100 years of literature with the aid of trends-tracking software to analyse how the word has been used from 1900 to 2008.

"I personally noticed this trend after having to stop and re-read sentences like 'however the cat walked down the street'," he said.

"This has the reader thinking that the author meant 'in whatever manner the cat walked down the street'."

Dr Hamilton analysed the misuse of however both at the beginning of a sentence (sentence-initial conjunction) and in-between (within-sentence conjunction).

Looking at however as a sentence-initial conjunction, Dr Hamilton said its incorrect use has risen roughly since World War II, and has been mirrored by a decrease in the use of but.

Dr Hamilton suggested the trend is a result of the common misconception that sentences shouldn't start with but.

'However sounds much more impressive, he said.

Dr Hamilton's study has been published in the journal, English Today, of Cambridge University Press.
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Reference:

EurekAlert. 2016. “How however almost kicked but's butt: Linguistics study”. EurekAlert. Posted: July 20, 2016. Available online: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2016-07/uom-hha072016.php

Eating naartjies in the bioscope: a little guide to South African English

The vocabulary and grammar of spoken South African English are coated in a fine layer of Afrikaans dust. It's been there so long that most of us no longer notice

The first English lesson I ever gave was in a little language school in a sprawling Taiwanese city. The theme was Fruit, a subject about as straightforward as it gets for a native English speaker. Unless you're from South Africa.

To prepare, I flipped through the previous teacher's handmade flashcards and consulted my English guidebook for the names of the "exotic" fruits found in Asia – apple-shaped Chinese pears and otherworldly dragon fruit. But when I flipped over the card showing an innocuous-looking orange citrus fruit, my stomach dropped. Everyone I knew would call it a naartjie ("naah-chi"), and I suddenly realised that this wasn't actually an English word.

I'd heard of clementines and satsumas, but were either of these naartjie in English? I had to enlist the help of my bemused Chinese co-teacher, who told me "tangerine", and, later, "cantaloupe". (Spanspek, the Afrikaans word for "cantaloupe" that all South Africans use, is literally translated as "Spanish bacon", allegedly because a 19th-century Cape governor had a Spanish wife who always chose fresh fruit over a big English breakfast. Their mystified Afrikaans servants coined the word.)

After that first lesson, I had endless opportunities to marvel at how stealthily my mother tongue had colonised the Afrikaans lexicon. I would tell my students that I was holding thumbs for them (from the Afrikaans idiom duim vashou) before they wrote a level-check test. I asked my co-teacher if he could help me move my new couch in his bakkie (bak means "container": add another "k" and an "ie" to turn it into a diminutive, and you've got the affectionate Afrikaans name for a small truck). I texted my British friend asking her if I could borrow a pair of takkies (from tekkies, Afrikaans for trainers). When one of my kindergarten students went through a stage of eating beetles she'd found in the car park, my kneejerk reaction of disgust wasn't "yuck", but sis! (from sies).

Occasionally, the direct translations of Afrikaans prepositions slip out in the wrong context, such as when you used to go sleep by your friend's house when your parents went out to the bioscope (this now defunct English word survived here because of the Afrikaans bioskoop).

Of course, it makes sense for English to have been given a good lick here and there by other native tongues – our country does have 11 official languages. According to the results of the 2011 census as quoted in this Daily Maverick article by Rebecca Davis, English is the fourth most widely spoken mother tongue behind isiZulu, isiXhosa and Afrikaans.

It stands to reason that Afrikaans, which became the language of power when the National party took over in 1948, has influenced South African English more than any other. Afrikaans was used as a tool to suppress the masses throughout apartheid, itself an Afrikaans word that has been appropriated not only by South African English speakers, but in English the world over. As Davis writes, knowledge of Afrikaans was a barrier to entry into the civil service from the late 1940s, which meant that black people were frozen out of high-prestige positions as they were being schooled only in "indigenous" languages.

Fast-forward one generation, and you see the Soweto uprising breaking out on 16 June 1976 to protest against the Bantu Education Department's decree that the compulsory medium of instruction in local high schools is to be Afrikaans, specifically for subjects like maths and arithmetic. Hundreds of people, mostly high school students, were killed in violent confrontations with police that day.

Now, 19 years after our transition to democracy and after nearly two decades of English being the dominant medium of politics, the media, commerce and education, the shards of Afrikaans that were left behind in English still occasionally poke through.

So it's remarkably easy, even for an armchair etymologist, to write a litany of South African regionalisms that English has pilfered from Afrikaans. But there are two words that are foremost in my mind when I think about how Afrikaans has shaped the way I speak.

One is ja (with a soft "y"), meaning "yes", whose ubiquity might be attributed to its pronunciation. It's takes so little effort to say that it's basically an exhale.

The other is lekker, which is like "great", but better. To me, our cheerfully patriotic mantra "local is lekker" is true for everything from our biltong (if you've never sampled our best export, get on the South West Trains line from London Waterloo to Surbiton, get off anywhere between Clapham Junction and Raynes Park, and head for the nearest shop flying a South African flag: you can thank me later) to the way we speak. No matter how ambivalent we may be about our homeland, our hodgepodge potjie of English, subtly spiced with Afrikaans, is just that: ours.
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References:

Edwards, Michelle. 2013. “Eating naartjies in the bioscope: a little guide to South African English”. The Guardian. Posted: May 24, 2013. Available online: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/mind-your-language/2013/may/24/mind-your-language-south-africa

Why Can't Germans Say 'Squirrel'?

"Squrrrrr … skraaaawl … squirruh … SQUOOW!"

As YouTube videos all but prove, Germans have a really hard time pronouncing "squirrel." After nailing the "squ-," chaos ensues.

In an episode of the British TV show "Top Gear," host Jeremy Clarkson jokingly suggested that asking people to pronounce the word would be a surefire way to identify undercover German spies. "No German, no matter how well they speak English, can say 'squirrel,'" Clarkson asserted.

Exceptions to the rule notwithstanding, why is the name of small, bushy tailed rodents so difficult for the Deutsche?

Carlos Gussenhoven, a phonologist — a linguist who studies the sounds used in different languages — at Radboud University in the Netherlands, believes the challenge lies in squirrel's syllable structure.

Linguists break words into clusters — groups of consonants that have no intervening vowels. In German, "-rl" is an end cluster, Gussenhoven explained. It comes at the end of a syllable, as in the common German name Karl, rather than forming a syllable of its own. Thus German speakers try to translate the two-syllable English word "squirrel" into the monosyllabic German sound "skwörl " in the same way that "squirm" becomes "skwörm."

But that doesn't sound quite right, and Germans know it. "Dissatisfied with this result, the German speaker tries to produce a real 'R,' of the sort you get in (Rock 'n) Roll, in the end cluster, wreaking havoc," Gussenhoven told Life's Little Mysteries.

He outlined the steps a German should take to pronounce "squirrel," and boy, does it sound like no fun.

"The solution is to say skwö first and then Roll. If the speaker then also manages to avoid saying (1) sh for [s] and (2) [v] for [w], and uses the vowel in the first syllable of getan [German for 'done'] instead of (3)ö in the first syllable and instead of (4) o in the second syllable, and (5) makes the r like the English r and (6) the l like the 'dark' l of English, the result will be quite acceptable," he wrote in an email.

No wonder it's so difficult for Germans to nail the English name. Gussenhoven said "squirrel" is a shibboleth, a word notorious for the way its pronunciation identifies its speaker as a foreigner.

Jessica Williams, a linguist at the University of Illinois in Chicago who studies second language acquisition, said that, based on YouTube, the issue may not be confined to Germans. "I notice that there are plenty of other videos that say the same thing about Arabic and Farsi speakers," she said.

Go on, then, native English speakers: Say "squirrel" and be proud.

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References:

Wolchover, Natalie. 2012. "Why Can't Germans Say 'Squirrel'?" Live Science. Posted: March 8, 2012. Available online: http://www.livescience.com/18932-germans-squirrel.html

Whoopensocker dictionary of American dialect completed after 50 years

Collecting regional English from across the US, final volume of 60,000-entry dictionary will be published next month

From whoopensocker to upscuddle, strubbly to swivet, 50 years after it was first conceived the Dictionary of American Regional English is finally about to reach the end of the alphabet.

The fifth volume of the dictionary, covering "slab" to "zydeco", is out in March from Harvard University Press. It completes a project begun in 1962 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, when Fred Cassidy was appointed chief editor of a dictionary of American dialects. Cassidy spent several years crafting a 1,600-question survey covering all aspects of daily life, and in 1965, 80 fieldworkers set out in "word wagons" to 1,002 communities across the US, interviewing 2,777 people over six years. This information has been mapped by editors over the last 40 years with written materials dating from the colonial period to the present, creating a 60,000-entry dictionary that its chief editor says gives the lie to the popular myth that American English has become homogenised by the media and the mobility of America's population.

"There is still a tremendous amount of regional variation," said Joan Houston Hall. "Yes, of course the language has changed: it's the nature of language to change. But it doesn't change in the same ways or at the same pace across the country. And although some local words get pushed out by nationwide commercial terms, new ones come into the language. They are the kinds of words we use with family and friends rather than those we learn at school, and often we're not aware that other people aren't familiar with them."

Some of Hall's favourite terms from the fifth volume, which runs to over 1,200 pages, include whoopensocker (something extraordinary of its kind, especially a large or strong drink, chiefly used in Wisconsin), willywags (a New England term for an area with tangled underbrush), upscuddle (southern Appalachian term for a noisy quarrel), strubbly (Pennsylvania German term for untidy) and swivet (a term for a state of anxiety from the South). A slough pumper is the Minnesota term for a bittern, because it lives in sloughs or marshes and makes a noise like an old wooden pump, a tolo is the Washington State word for a dance to which women invite men, and to "tump over" is to knock something over in the South.

The dictionary shows how different regions of the US refer to the same item in various ways: fluff under the bed is described as dust kitties in the Northeast, dust bunnies in the Midwest, house moss in the South and woolies in Pennsylvania, while a sandwich will be a po'boy in Louisiana, but a hoagie, sub, grinder, hero, or torpedo elsewhere. A description of a remote place, meanwhile, can range from the boondocks to the puckerbrush, the tules, or to Hall's favourite, the willywags.

"A friend told me this weekend that when he starts browsing the pages of DARE, he gets seduced by the next entry, and the next, and pretty soon he looks up to discover that an hour has gone by. I find the same thing, and I've read all this many times over," said Hall. A digital edition of the dictionary will launch next year, allowing the team to update the text on a regular basis and add new entries.
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References:

Flood, Alison. 2012. "Whoopensocker dictionary of American dialect completed after 50 years". The Guardian. Posted: January 31, 2012. Available online: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/jan/31/dictionary-american-regional-english-dialect

English Is an Optimistic Language, Study Suggests

When a team of scientists set out to evaluate the emotional significance of English words, they expected most would fall at the center of the scale, at neutral, while equal shares trailed out to the positive and negative ends of the spectrum.

That is not what they found, however: Instead, we appear to speak an optimistically biased language.

"I think it is a happy story," said study researcher Chris Danforth, an assistant professor of mathematics at the University of Vermont. "Fundamentally, we have this happy bias built into our language."

Overall, English words — which he described as the atoms of the language — tend to be more positive than negative, regardless of whether they are more common or more rare, they found.

Danforth and colleagues compiled the 5,000 most frequently used words found in four sources — two decades of material from The New York Times, 18 months' worth from Twitter, manuscripts from Google Books produced between 1520 and 2008 and music lyrics from 1960 to 2007 — for a total of 10,222 words. Then, using a service called Mechanical Turk, they had 50 people evaluate each word on a scale of 1 to 9, with 1 being least happy, 5 neutral, and 9 happiest.

They found that the average score fell at 6, a full point shift toward positivity.

"That phenomenon is not dependent on which list of words you go to — it is the same shape for all of these different sources," Danforth said.

Certain positively oriented words (such as"pleasure," "comedy" and "love") and other negatively oriented ones (such as "terrorist," "rape" and "cancer") naturally fall at far ends of the scale. Other words — such as "the" or "and" — are truly neutral, receiving solid 5s from evaluators. But there was also another, trickier category. [8 Meanings of the Word 'Love']

Words such as "pregnant," "beef" and "alcohol" received a wide spread of scores from their evaluators, signaling that their positivity or negativity is linkedto the context they are used in.

All were included in the analysis, published online Jan. 11 in the journal PLoS ONE. However, the researchers found that any word with an average score of between 4 and 6 could be excluded without changing the overall result.

Why the positive bent?

The reason for the positivity? The researchers think it is evidence of a pro-social nature of our language.

"[English] developed in a society that succeeded, there must be many reasons behind that, but one of them ought to be that we communicate with each other in a good way that produces good results," Danforth said.

"You need the words to be meaningful," said study researcher Peter Sheridan Dodds, an associate professor of mathematics at the University of Vermont. He pointed out negative words are less abundant but more meaningful.

"We don't run around saying them all the time — it's the boy who cried wolf sort of thing," he said. "But we are happy to say 'Have a nice day,' lots of small social things," he said.

In another analysis focused entirely on Twitter, the researchers discerned daily, weekly and annual mood cycles, as well as mood spikes associated with holidays and other events. Overall, however, they found the recent trend has been a downer, with Twitterers using less positive words over time.

Building on their work so far, Dodds and Danforth are constructing a happiness sensor they call a "hedonometer," which would draw on Twitter and other sources to provide a real-time measure of a population's mood.

"We are trying to put another dial on the dashboard of how we think about society's performance," Dodds said. The hedonometer's readings could join measures such as the gross national product or the consumer confidence index to inform policymakers and others, he said.
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References:

Parry, Wynne. 2012. "English Is an Optimistic Language, Study Suggests". Live Science. Posted: January 23, 2012. Available online: http://www.livescience.com/18062-english-language-positive-bias.html

Chinese-English bilinguals are 'automatic' translators

New research into how the bilingual brain processes two very different languages has revealed that bilinguals' native language directly influences their comprehension of their second language.

The innovative study by researchers in The University of Nottingham's School of Psychology set out to explore whether Chinese-English bilinguals translate English words automatically into Chinese without being aware of this process.

More than half of the world's population speaks more than one language but up to now it has not been clear how they interact if the two languages are very different, unlike some pairs of European languages which share the same alphabetical characters and even words.

The research, to be published in the journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds that Chinese people who are fluent in English translate English words into Chinese automatically and quickly, without thinking about it.

Like her research volunteers, University of Nottingham PhD student Taoli Zhang is originally from China, but lives in the UK and is fluent in English. With co-authors Drs Walter van Heuven and Kathy Conklin, they set out to examine how Chinese knowledge influences English language processing in Chinese-English bilinguals.

Taoli Zhang said: "Earlier research in European languages has found that both languages stayed active in the brain. But that work was in pairs of languages, like English and Dutch, which have a lot of similarities in spelling and vocabulary. That's not true for English and Chinese."

The subjects in Zhang's experiments were all Chinese students at The University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom. For the study, each person was shown pairs of English words. The first word flashed on the computer screen so quickly (for just 59 milliseconds) that the person didn't realise they had seen it. The second word appeared for longer; the person was supposed to hit a key indicating whether it was a real English word as quickly as possible. This was simply a test to see how quickly they were processing the word.

But the test had a clever trick to it which would shed light on whether the bilingual volunteer accessed their Chinese words.

Although everything in the test was in English, in some cases, the two words actually had a connection – but only if you know how they're written in Chinese. So, for example, the first word might be 'thing' which is written 东西 in Chinese, and the second might be 'west' which is written 西 in Chinese. The character for 'west' appears in the word 'thing' but these two words are totally unrelated in English.

Zhang found that, when two words shared characters in Chinese, participants processed the second word faster – even though they had no conscious knowledge of having seen the first word in the pair. Even though these students are fluent in English, their brains still automatically translate what they see into Chinese. This suggests that knowledge of a first language automatically influences the processing of a second language, even when they are very different, unrelated languages.

Dr Walter van Heuven added "This research shows that reading words in a second language is influenced by the native language through automatic and very fast word translation in the bilingual brain."
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References:

EurekAlert. 2011. "Chinese-English bilinguals are 'automatic' translators". EurekAlert. Posted: August 2, 2011. Available online: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-08/uon-cb080211.php

Books that didn’t make the exhibition #3

Page from George McKesey, The Belizean lingo (Belize City, 1974). © The British Library Board.

The Englishes of the Caribbean appear throughout the exhibition: in manuscript (John Agard's draft of the poem 'Listen Mr Oxford Don'), in print (a 1731 issue of the Barbados Gazette), as sound recordings (Linton Kwesi Johnson), and in film (a hilarious Jamaican Dr Who sketch from 'The Real McCoy'). As always, however, the richness of the British Library's collections means that we could have told so many more stories.

The Belizean lingo is a 106-page book which reproduces a wide range of material gathered by the broadcaster and comedian George McKesey. Among its contents is the story shown here 'Bra Hanahncy an di Craab' (Brother Anancy and the Crab). Tales about the trickster Brother Anancy (or Anansi) are found throughout the Caribbean and also in West Africa.

This variety of English is today usually called Kriol, or Belizean Creole English. It is part of a family of Englishes spoken in and around the Caribbean. Jamaican Patois and John Agard's Guyanese are also part of this family.

Kriol is used as the spoken language by the vast majority of the population of Belize. This book's publication in 1974 came shortly after the country's name was changed from British Honduras. It can be seen in the light of a growing sense of national identity.


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References:

2010. "Books that didn’t make the exhibition #3". . Posted: December 16, 2010. Available online: http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/evolvingenglish/2010/12/books-that-didnt-make-the-exhibition-3.html

English, The Global Language?

For a business site, I have to say, I really love the extra information they provide. It gives you a better appreciation for language learning. The following article is just one of many. I do recommend that you visit the site and read their other articles.

English, the global language as many would say, is the most widely spoken language by non-natives in the world. There are 71 countries across the globe that have English as their official language, equating to a staggering 400 million native speakers of it.

What is more, there are an estimated 600 million people who speak English as their second language. Then there are all of the others, million of people who learn it at school, pick it up from movies, know a few words.

English is one of the official languages of the United Nations. It is the language of aviation. It is also the predominant language for science, entertainment and diplomacy.

The spread of the British Empire and the increasing dominance of the United States of America has led us to this situation we have today where the concept of English – the global language – is one that many people hold in high regard.

This perceived dominance of the language of English is not helped by the fact that so many British people simply refuse to learn another language, because they are confident that wherever they may travel they will meet someone who can converse in their own language.

These facts add up to suggest that English, the global language, is more than a mere concept. But there are factors, which are stopping the march of English and preventing it from being as widespread as many would like, and just as many would not.

The Fight Back

Even within the UK there is a fight back happening, against the dominance of English. The fight has been well and truly started in Wales, where Welsh, once an almost extinct language, is being taught again in huge numbers, and, moreover, used in towns and villages across the country.

This is happening too with Gaelic. Although not to the same extent as Welsh, people are learning it and using it – putting it before English as their language of choice.

Immigration

In the USA, Spanish is quickly becoming as widely spoken as English because of the numbers of people of Hispanic origin who chose to use it. English, the global language, is actually being marginalised there, in a country that wields enormous power. Although English remains the official language and the language in which most business is conducted in, Spanish is gaining more and more ground.

In the UK itself, immigrants do not always speak English. In some areas with high numbers of Polish immigrants, local newspapers have even started producing special editions in Polish for them – a sure sign that the way language is used is changing.

New Powers

But perhaps the biggest threat to the idea of English, a global language, is new superpowers. Chinese is the world’s most spoken language due to the sheer numbers of people who live there and speak one of its native forms.

Together with India, China is emerging as one of the crucial players on the world scene for the future. With these populous countries gaining so much power, their languages are set to gain in importance and see a rise in people who speak them outside of their borders.

There are too many factors at work for the idea of English, a Global Language, to ever become a true reality. But for now, it would certainly seem that English is the closet thing to a global language we have.

It is still the language people choose to use if their native languages are not common to each other and as the international language of business, it is vital.

Things may change in the future and shake up the world stage, but for now, English is here to stay, global language or not, its importance undisputed.
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References:

Anonymous. Nd."English, The Global Language?".Language Tutoring. Available online: http://www.languagetutoring.co.uk/EnglishTheGlobalLanguage.html