Alphabetical

I like Michael Rosen’s work for children (I use The Sad Book in my children’s literature course at the university) and I’m always interested in what he has to say about language and lit. So I was excited to read his book, Alphabetical.

What a fun, interesting book! You can dip in and out and you can return to it, as there’s so much to learn from it. Sometimes it’s a bit random, as though you’re getting access to what’s going on in Rosen’s brain at any given moment. As he writes about the alphabet, topics range over the Rosetta Stone, nonsense, jokes, umlauts (he jokes about “adlauts”: umlauts used unnecessarily, especially in company names), fonts, and much more.

Here’s a typical example of how he gives history about each letter: “‘A’ starts its life in around 1800 BCE. Turn our modern ‘A’ upside down and you can see something of its original shape. Can you see an ox’s head with its horns sticking up in the air? If so, you can see the remains of this letter’s original name, ‘ox’, or ‘aleph’ on the ancient Semitic languages. By the time the Phoenicians are using it in around 1000 BCE it is lying on its side and looks more like a ‘K’. Speed-writing seems to have taken the diagonals through the upright, making it more like a horizontal form of our modern ‘A’ with the point on the left-hand side.” (p. 2)

But often the chapters go beyond the letter themselves. For example, K is for Korean and Rosen discusses the singer of the popular song ‘Gangnam Style’ as a way into looking at the Korean tongue. Korean is the “earliest known successful example of a sudden, conscious, total transformation  of a country’s writing.” (p. 163) In 1446, the king of Korea created a new alphabet (rather than using Chinese characters) because he was “saddened” that the people of his country couldn’t make themselves understood in writing. Rosen notes “I cannot think of anything in the world of alphabets more humane than that.” (p. 164)

Of course I was particularly interested in references to anything Scandinavian. Rosen mentions how a runestone from 1362 was found in the US in 1898, which seemed to prove that the Vikings had been in America. (p. 337) And he gives a list of some English words from Old Norse, which entered the English language when the Vikings came: “Anger, bag, bask, birth…rotten, rugged, run, skid…window, wing, wrong.” (p. 341)

Basically, this is a book can you return to many times. There’s so much information in it and it’s all fascinating. 

More on Hyperpolyglots

In the last post, I discussed Michael Erard’s book Babel No More. In the book, he offers some resources for learning more about hyperpolyglots and about learning languages in general. I haven’t yet been able to get any of these books/websites, but I hope to. Here’s a selection:

Andrew Cohen: Strategies in Learning and Using a Second Language

Earl Stevick: Success with Foreign Languages

Carol Griffiths: Lessons from Good Language Learners

Erik Gunnemark: Art and Science of Learning Languages

Polyglot Project: http://www.polyglotproject.com/

Language Hacking Guide: http://www.fluentin3months.com/language-hacking-guide-is-ready/

He also recommends the ASSiMiL language courses.

Babel No More

What is a hyperpolyglot? Someone who knows many languages. But how many? Six? Eight or more? Eleven? Or even 30? And what does “know” mean? Being able to speak, write, read and listen like a native speaker? Being able to talk about daily matters? Having a basic conversation? Just saying a few words? Or…?

In Babel No More by Michael Erard, Erard travels around the world to explore what it really means to learn a language, how the brain deals with language, and how you can learn many tongues. He meets researchers, neuroscientists, people who know many languages, and others, and he visits multilingual groups, such as in India.

He shows how our view of language in general and multilingualism in particular has changed over time. Erard writes, “Go back to prehistory, a time of linguistic wildness, when we can imagine that each roving band of humans grunted its own dialect, and uncountable versions of half-congealed speech codes could be overheard at every cave and watering hole. Any one of these codes had a range, not a center nor an edge; not until bands clashed, merged or partnered and settled into villages did they acquire a physical place, a homeland. Over thousands of years, these became city-building empires that swept many languages away. On borders and in cities, people spoke several languages…so did everyone in geographically isolated places where trading and navigating required knowing the languages of one’s equally isolated neighbors. All this was endangered, thousands of years later, in the era of the nation…monolingualism became the standard model in most places, because the boundaries of the nation were drawn to include all the people who spoke alike. This unity was threatened by multilingualism and its taint of barbarity, impurity and unnatural mixing.” (p. 90)

And now, he adds, many counties just want one national tongue. I live in England, where there are people from all over the world, but English is the only language most people know. Young people might study other languages, but not seriously. “Politicians lectured Britons on learning languages so they could get jobs in the European Union, while universities removed foreign-language requirements and shut down language departments when enrollments dropped. Further, the government was constantly exporting English teachers, textbooks, courses, and programs, helping the country to earn £1.3 billion a year. In other words, learning language was for citizens of other countries-who would then compete with Britons for jobs. The irony was underscored by the fact that by 2005, immigrants had transformed London into a place where at least 307 languages are spoken, making the capital of one of the most monolingual countries in the European Union the most multilingual city on the planet.” (p. 71)

In other countries that Erard visits, such as Germany, a number of people want to learn multiple languages. But why? Some because it’s fun or a challenge, while others need to for work. Still others want to understand how language works, so they see learning languages as a sort of course in linguistics. Others learn many languages in order to have many selves. Erard interviews some people who dedicate their whole lives to learning languages, sometimes even to the detriment of their jobs or families.

But how many languages can you really know? Erard suggests we have too high expectations for our language skills. You’ll never speak another language like a native. “If you want to be better at languages, you should use native speakers as a metric of progress, though not as a goal…Embrace your linguistic outsiderness-it’s the way of the world…A language isn’t reserved for the perfectly calibrated native speaker. Words have currency even if they’re not perfectly wrought.” (p. 261)

He also offers advice from hyperpolyglots: “Some studies of successful language learners have suggested that they’re more “open to new experiences” than the rest of us…we have a self that’s bound up in our native language, a “language ego”, which needs to be loose and more permeable to learn a new language. Those with more fluid ego boundaries…are more willing to sound not like themselves, which means they have better accents in the new language.” (p. 238)

So have the courage to continue with your language studies and to dare to speak other tongues, even if you think you’re not that good at it!

Most of us will never know 15 or 30 languages. But it’s fun to read about them and to learn from them in Babel No More.

Historical Linguistics by Lyle Campbell

Like many of you translators, I’m a language nerd, and I like learning more about languages – both specific tongues and also languages and linguistics in general. So I enjoyed Historical Linguistics by Lyle Campbell; it’s a textbook, really, and you wouldn’t want to read it before bed, but it is a fun and interesting book to dip into.

Campbell writes on the first page: ”A number of historical linguistics textbooks exist, but this one is different. Most others talk about historical linguistics; they may illustrate concepts and describe methods, and perhaps discuss theoretical issues, but they do not focus on how to do historical linguistics.” (p. xv) In other words, the book is quite practical and it’s an introduction to historical linguistics. It has more than 500 pages about topics including sound change, linguistic reconstruction, lexical change, language contact, quantitative approaches (for example, “glottochronology”), and more, with examples from loads of different languages, including some I’d never heard of before, such as Mednyj Aleut, Karuk, Cholti, and Uto-aztecan.

If you are interested in how language changes and develops over time, you know that sound change is a big part of this. Campbell talks about different ways for this to happen, such as syncope (“The loss (deletion) of a vowel from the interior of a word”, p. 28), or anaptyxis (“a kind of epenethsis in which an extra vowel is inserted between two consonants”, p. 30), or haplology (“in which a repeated sequence of sounds is simplified to a single occurrence,” such as how some people pronounce “library” as “libry”, p. 34). Campbell then shows how we can see which changes have taken place and when. “In the history of Swedish, the change of umlaut took place before syncope...From Proto-Germanic to Modern Swedish: *gasti-z > Proto-Scandinavian *gastiz > gestir > Old Norse gestr > Modern Swedish gäst...We can be reasonably certain that these changes took place in this chronological order, since if syncope had taken place first (gastir > gastr), then there would have been no remaining i to condition the umlaut and the form would have come out as the non-existent X gast.” (p. 39)

In another chapter, he discusses different models, such as family trees (“the traditional model of language diversification” which ”attempts to show how languages diversify and how language families are classified”, p. 187) and dialectology (which “deals with regional variation in a language”, p. 190), or sociolinguistics (which “deals with systematic co-variation of linguistic structure with social structure, especially with the variation in language which is conditioned by social differences”, p. 193). In still other chapters, he discusses Pidgins and Creoles, endangered languages, how children speak (“mamma” or “baba”, p. 354), and writing. Campbell claims that you can reconstruct a language that doesn’t have a written form (p. 396), but, as he puts it, it is often “a matter of luck, a matter of what happens to show up in the sources” and sometimes you have to make guesses (p. 398). But obviously spelling and pronunciation can help in reconstructing the history of a tongue. For example, in English, there are words such as “marcy/mercy ‘mercy’, sarten/certein ‘certain’, parson/persoun ‘person’, and so on..that /er/ changed to /ar/ in the pronunciation of the writer of these forms. (This change was fairly general, though sociolinguistically conditioned, and it was ultimately reversed, but left such doublets in English as clerk/clark, person/parson, vermin/varmint, and university/varsity.)” (p. 398)

Every chapter also has exercises, in case you want to try your hand at what you’re learning.

This isn’t an easy-to-read book, but it is a good one for learning a little (or a lot!) more about linguistics.

The Story of English in 100 Words

The Story of English in 100 Words by British linguist David Crystal is a fascinating and well-written book in an easy-to-read format. Each chapter deals with only one English word that Crystal thinks is very important and that explains something about the history of English and/or English-speaking countries. Crystal explores words in detail, in an almost archaeological manner.

Some of the words he discusses are roe, riddle, bone-house, pork, grammar, undeaf, bloody, billion, polite, trek, dude, schmooze, doublespeak, blurb, sudoku and chillax. As this list shows, the words come from different time periods (the 6^th century up until today), different languages (Old Norse, Latin, Yiddish, Japanese, etc.) and different aspects of life (food, politics, science, slang, etc.). The history of English is broad and interesting.

Crystals book is different from other language books because he talks about the history of the language through individual words. Most language books either just tell the story of the language through the people (i.e. the Vikings came in this year and they changed the language like this…) or through just describing the important words; Crystal does both here, at the same time. He explains, among other things, that after 1066 in England, when the Normans came, “Anglo-Saxon words could not cope with the unfamiliar domains of expression introduced by the Normans, such as law, architecture, music and literature. People had no choice but to develop new varieties of expression, adopting continental models and adapting traditional genres to cope with the French way of doing things.” (p. xv) New words included chattels and dame.

Another good example of an interesting history is the word “hello”. Crystal writes, “It’s such a natural expression, used every day as a greeting. Surely this is one of those words which has been in the language for ever? In fact, its first recorded use is less than 200 years old.” (p. 163) During the 14^th century, people said hal/hail, which meant be healthy. Then they started to say hallo, hella, hillo, hollo and hullo, but now it’s most often hello and sometimes hallo. But why? “The word was around in the early 1800s, but used very informally, often as part of street slang. The more formal usage seems to have emerged when the telephone was invented. People had to have a way of starting a conversation or letting the other person know they were there, especially if they were using a line where the connection was always open…Thomas Edison, the inventor of the telephone, evidently preferred Hello. This was the word he shouted into the mouthpiece of his device when he discovered a way of recording sound in 1877.” (p. 165) Technology has influenced the development of language in many ways.

Crystal has written many books on language, including about texting language, the Bible and language, Shakespeare’s language, and dialects, and his books are always fun and interesting. You can dip into The Story of English in 100 Words as you like and learn something new about English. It’s an enjoyable read.

Gulp and Translation

There are lots of reasons to love Mary Roach’s fascinating and funny books. But as a translator, one that I appreciate is that she employs translators and interpreters when needed in the course of her research and – and this is the part where she differs from many other writers – she actually mentions this and sometimes even gives their names in her work.

I really enjoyed her most recent book, Gulp, and I liked it even more when I noticed her references to translators. Who knows? Maybe she’ll even write a book on language and/or translation at some point!

Event Factory

I don’t quite know how to describe Renee Gladman’s novel Event Factory, but it is fascinating, especially for those of us interested in language. The protagonist travels to Ravicka, a city-state (that I somehow imagined looking a bit like San Marino) where the language is a combination of words and movements. For example, at one point she wants to apologize, but has trouble “recalling the “turns” I needed to perform my apology…I went through pareis several times, but always tripped up on the same move and had to start over again. You cannot skip ahead, or you’ll be saying something entirely different. I wanted to say, “When you are a visitor to a place, especially one such as Ravicka, it is difficult to remain stationary. The landmarks call out.” But I could not get my body to say “landmark” versus the “shipyard” it kept performing.” (p. 29) Her inability at times to communicate echoes the confusion many travelers feel when in a new place, where a different language is spoken and a different culture is the background. As the main character says, “If only travelling were about showing off your language skills, if only it did not also demand a certain commitment of body communication, of outright singing or dancing—I think I would be absolutely global by now. In Ravicka, I was barely urban.” (p. 42) I think many of us forget that language does involve a certain amount of facial expressions and movements and we tend to focus on the meaning of words, although obviously Ravicka is an extreme (and made-up) example. It is worth reading Gladman’s novel not only for her poetic turns of phrase but also for her philosophical ideas about communication.

Verbs, Verbs, Verbs

Last month, I published a review of a fun book all about verbs, and I thought I’d post it here too.

Vex, Hex, Smash, Smooch

Constance Hale

Gosh.

A book-reviewer.

Alas, no.

The proceeding sentences are all missing something, and for that reason, they’re not terribly informative or interesting. So what is it that is absent?

Yes, that’s right.

The verb.

Now you might be yawning at this stage, filled with half-forgotten and not very pleasant memories of English class and bewildering discussions about parts of speech. But hold on a moment. As Constance Hale points out in her enjoyable new book, Vex, Hex, Smash, Smooch,  verbs are the “pivot point of every sentence” (p. 10). They “put action in scenes, show eccentricity in characters, and convey drama in plots. They give poetry its urgency. They make quotes memorable and ads convincing.” (p. 10)

The way each chapter in Hale’s book works is that she takes on a topic (voice or tense, for example), explains what is challenging about it (this is the “vex” of the title), demolishes a common belief about verbs (“hex”), encourages readers to get rid of a bad habit (“smash”), and educates readers about new things to try (“smooch”). She offers activities (“Try, Do, Write, Play”)  and uses quotations from both literary and popular writing to exemplify her ideas.

For example, in one vex, she explicates verbals, which “don’t change with time…don’t express voice…have no moods. They are bona fide verbs: they can be modified by adverbs and they can take objects and complements. But in sentences they don’t act like verbs.” (pp. 224-5) To demonstrate participles, she quotes Dickens’ depiction of Scrooge as a “squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner!” (p. 227)

In a hex, she tells us to “reject the rule “Always use Standard English”” (p. 117), and she speaks up for the use of dialect, as in Sojourner Truth’s speech “Ain’t I a Woman”. In another, she dismisses the idea that we shouldn’t use double negatives (pp. 96-7). In other words, don’t don’t. Got it?

One smash she offers suggests that long words can be too “pompous, highfalutin, and abstract” and she recommends avoiding “bequeath, commence, conjoin, interrogate, and remunerate” (p. 80). I personally don’t agree, because I think there are texts and situations where such words are needed – they presumably wouldn’t exist if they weren’t useful – but I do take her point that people sometimes try to write or speak in an unnecessarily complex way. In another smash, she discusses the challenges inherent in phrasal verbs, such as differ from and differ with (pp. 254-8).

Hale recommends the imperative – in other words, order such as “Just do it!” – in one smooch (p. 194), and nuance in another, by which she means in part understanding the difference between commonly interchanged words, such as careen, career and carom (p. 286-8).

The book comes with a number of appendices, such as recommendations for dictionaries, a list of irregular verbs (did you remember that the past tense of abide is abode, and did you know that tread becomes trod, which then becomes have trodden?), information on challenging words (what’s the difference between raise, raze, and rear, and when do you use behove?), and an analysis of the history of language. I would have appreciated an index, though.

This is definitely not the grammar book you might remember from your school days. Vex, Hex, Smash, Smooch is easy to dip into at will, and it offers useful information, activities, and suggestions that will help any writer. Hale is an opinionated and witty guide to the weird and wonderful world of verbs.

Just buy it! Or don’t don’t.

Chambers Thesaurus, 4th Edition

I just got a copy of the new fourth edition of the Chambers Thesaurus and I can say that this is definitely a keeper. It has over 1100 pages of fantastic information and it is the kind of reference book that you just want to spend time skimming. Here are some of the things I like about this thesaurus.

It explains synonym nuances, so you understand the difference between, well, “difference” and “dissimilarity”, “diversity”, “variety”, “distinction”, “unlikeness”, “contrast”, “discrepancy”, and “divergence”. This will be especially helpful to people who are learning English as a foreign language, I think. When I taught English as a foreign language, I noticed how common it was for people to simply use synonyms they found in a thesaurus without actually understanding these nuances. But of course even native speakers need this sort of information.

The book also includes idioms, so you can find ways of varying them (“once in a while” or “sail through” or “a sticky situation”). People tend to overuse clichés, so being able to look them up in a thesaurus is really helpful.

The Chambers thesaurus also says if a term is technical, old-fashioned, formal, or colloquial, which is essential information when writing or translating. I have found that university students often get confused about formal versus informal language, so I will recommend that they check this thesaurus to get advice.

Another helpful feature is that the thesaurus gives extra information. “Carriage” doesn’t just give synonyms but also offers a list of forty different types of carriage, which can be especially helpful for writers or translators who need just the right kind of carriage in their text. Similarly, “zodiac” also gives the signs of the zodiac and their symbols, and you can learn which “rhetorical devices” exist.

The thesaurus also has quotations. For example, Harper Lee’s “The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience” illustrates “conscience” very well, but it is also a quotation worth knowing.

One of the most entertaining parts is the “word lover’s gallimaufry”, which has over 50 pages of lists and explanations. What’s the difference between a flexitarian and a pescatarian? How can you express disbelief (“what a load of cobblers!” or “pull the other one!”)? What terms might an estate agent or a gamer use? What are some global English words you can use to spice up your language usage (“bergie” or “pom”)? What do you call someone who collects cigar bands and who is a “vecturist”? What are some types of extreme sports (“tombstoning” and “zorbing” are among them)? This section is fascinating and amusing.

Since the Chambers thesaurus is so big, it covers a lot of territory. That means the book takes up quite a bit of space on the shelf, but I think it’s worth it.

In short, this thesaurus (or “lexicon”, “dictionary”, “wordbook”, “vocabulary”, “repository”, or “wordfinder”) is really practical (and “valuable” and “worthwhile”). It is definitely the thesaurus I’ll be using from now on, and the one I’ll recommend to my students and my fellow writers, editors, and translators.

Shoot the Puppy

Even if you have a particular language as your mother tongue, there are always words and phrases that you do not know. I am an American-English-speaking person but I live in England and it sometimes happens that my partner, friends or students use British English words and phrases that I cannot understand. It can certainly feel a little weird sometimes that I don’t know common English words, even though it’s my native language. And if I translate into British English, which I do often, I must know those. For those who translate from English, it’s also key to understand such expressions.

But I’ve got a book that can help us. A friend gave it to me for my birthday in 2010; sadly, she got ill and passed away soon after that, which is probably why I’ve taken so long to write about it. The book is called Shoot the Puppy and it’s by Tony Thorne, who works at King's College London and writes about slang, among other things. He is described as a slang detective, who does research on and explains many interesting English phrases.

Many people know the word moonlighting, which means you have another job at night (i.e. when the moon is shining), for example, but how many understand the word sunlighting? Well, it means you have another job one day a week. If you moonlight or sunlight, you can do so by sitting next to Nellie; that means to learn on the job by watching what others do. We have to knife-and-fork it. What? We’ll use a knife and fork to what? That means we have to deal with a problem one piece at a time. Aye, aye, Shepherd’s pie! Yes, I'll do what you want and thereby knife-and-fork situation.

You may have prochtoheliosis, a problem we can try to knife-and-fork. What is it that you have? Helios is the Greek word for sun and proktos means rectum, so someone who has prochtoheliosis thinks the sun shines from his or her rectum, and that he or she is the most important person in the world. Such a person may also be luxorexic, which means that he or she enjoys the finer things in life and always wants to pamper him- or herself. Thorne’s book contains many words and phrases and gives examples of how to use them.

He also includes information on how the term came to be and on similar phrases. There is a glossary as well. The book is funny and interesting but also useful. Come on, shoot the puppy – dare to do the unthinkable – and buy Tony Thorne’s book.

Alpha Beta by John Man

John Man’s book Alpha Beta is on the history of the Roman alphabet, as you might be able to guess from the title. He covers a range of related topics, such as non-alphabet systems, symbols, rebus, archaeology, orality, and history, and his book is imaginative and exciting. He includes many interesting titbits of information, such as how some of what we think is Roman is actually Etruscan and how Cyrillic is named after Cyril but wasn’t created by him. He refers to languages as diverse as Chinese, Egyptian, Sumerian, and Korean and he explains “why Czechs and Slovaks today look to the West, and use the Latin alphabet.” (299)

One of the major points Man makes in this enjoyable work is that what alphabet is used where and how is often about power. “Script, status, power, identity: the four were indissoluble.” (100) He analyses hieroglyphics and the Greek alphabet to explore their importance to their own societies as well as to later ones. “With this new-fangled intellectual device [writing], the Greeks could aware their own though processes, become self-aware, refine ideas, exchange them, build upon them, create systems of ethics, philosophy and science, evolve new forms of poetry, pioneer history. In brief, it was the alphabet that allowed the ancient Greeks to lay the foundations of civilized discourse as Europe and its descendant cultures came to know it.” (21)

He also explores why alphabets change, or don’t. “Change, it seems, does not arise spontaneously from within. Something has to happen to release a new creative impulse.” (81)

He has what he terms three Working Theories of Script Evolution:
“1 In a writing system, complexity knows no bounds and imposes none.
2 A writing system will last as long as its culture, unless changed by force.
3 New writing systems emerge only in new, young, ambitious cultures.” (82)
In other words, much is required before a language will change.

Another interesting section in this book is where Man discusses four assumptions about literacy and culture and explains how they are false. The assumptions are:
“that alphabetic literacy must have spread from the top levels of society downwards;
that the alphabet would immediately be considered a superior achievement, and be instantly taken up by anyone with a claim to intelligence and culture;
that non-literate cultures are necessarily simple and inferior;
that poetry is more refined than prose and must therefore come later.” (231) Man demolishes these ideas.

While some people might think that one alphabet is better or more sensible than others and while Man does comment that Korean is perhaps one of the most sophisticated and successful of all alphabets, he also writes, “the alphabet is an intellectual device with which to symbolize speech, and it is a mistake to equate it exactly with anything in the real world. Since it exists in minds, any physical representation is only one of an infinite variety. There is no Absolute Alphabet.” (114) There are many possible alphabets, with no single right one.

Robert McCrum’s Globish

In Robert McCrum’s book Globish, he discusses the history and meaning of English, and its relevance today. This is a book that feels longer than it actually is because it covers a lot of ground, looking at history (slavery in America, the Seven Years War, etc), current events and situations (India’s Silicone Valley, for example), and important people (Mark Twain, Abraham Lincoln, V.S. Naipaul, Barack Obama, etc), and the connections to language. It goes back and forth in time and sometimes the book feels too detailed. Despite that, it shows the history of English and makes predictions about where it is going.

As McCrum explains, “‘Globalization’ is a word that first slipped into its current usage during the 1960s; and the globalization of English, and English literature, law, money and values, is the cultural revolution of my generation, before and after the ‘credit crunch’. Combined with the biggest IT innovations since Gutenberg, it continues to inspire the most comprehensive transformation of our society in five hundred, even a thousand years.” (3)

He explores England and the development of the English language from the Normans and old English (for example, “The cultural revolution of Christianity both enriched Old English with scores of new words (apostle, pope, angel, psalter) and, just as importantly, also introduced the capacity to articulate abstract thought.” (26)) through medieval and Renaissance periods (Shakespeare plays a starring role, of course), up to modern times, with stops along the way in creole, black English, Indian English, texting, the influence of cyberspace, and more. He even includes some discussion of translation, particular in you regard to Alfred, King of Wessex during the ninth century, and of course in terms of the bible.

Today, he points out, “global English, floating free from its troubled British and American past, has begun to take on a life of its own…the twenty-first century expression of British and American English – the world’s English – is about to make its own declaration of independence from the linguistic past, in both syntax and vocabulary.” (6)

It’s worth quoting one of McCrum’s final paragraphs in full, as it sums up his thoughts about where English is going: “The enemies of English culture will criticize its guile and greed, but the outcome is beyond question. In the first decade of the twenty-first century English-speaking people and their culture are more widespread in numbers and influence than any civilization the world has ever seen. Globish, a world dialect, will be less a language and more a means to an end. It will continue to enfranchise millions who lack the benefits of a formal education into a global economy and provide a means of communication that will, for the most part, leave local languages unscathed. Globish might seem to have imperial roots, but it is not imperious. It derives its character from a language that has always been hospitable to change, from the roots up.” (257)

Archaeology and Language by Colin Renfrew

Archaeology and Language by Colin Renfrew is a dated but still relevant book that serves as a good introduction to the idea of using archaeology as a way of tracing the history of language. As he states at the beginning of the book, we need not look at just economic developments to explore the history of humanity because national, ethnic and linguistic identities are important too. Thus, people study ruins, documents, pottery, language, and more as a way of understanding the development of languages.

Renfrew admits how “extraordinary” it is that languages in Europe and Asia (India and Iran, for example) are related, and then asks “But what is the historical reality underlying this relationship? Where did these languages come from? Did they derive from a single group of people who migrated? Or is there an entirely different explanation? This is the Indo-European problem, and the enigma which has still not found a satisfactory answer.” (11) Many scholars have attempted to understand this by a) trying to construct a Proto-Indo-European (PIE) language that is the parent of all the other languages and b) by trying to figure out where the so-called Urheimat, or homeland, of PIE was.

Renfrew feels we must question “the extent to which it is legitimate to construct a Proto-Indo-European language, drawing upon the cognate forms of the words in the various Indo-European languages that are known.” (18) As an example of how far wrong we can go with this method, he uses the example of Latin. He quotes Ernst Pulgram, who tried to reconstruct Latin based on the Romance languages and to thereby make sense out of “Latin” culture, without actually looking at Latin that we know, and he found that what we would construct is actually different in many ways from actual Latin and what we know of ancient Roman culture (85). Hence it is argued that we cannot reconstruct languages in this way.

As for the Urheimat, Renfrew runs through the various theories, such as that the people who spoke PIE came from north-central Europe, or that they came from eastern Europe and the steppes, and some scholars have even suggested northern Europe, such as Lithuania. But he argues that this idea of a homeland is problematic and that many who have suggested it have fallen into “dangerous traps. They have placed too much faith in the idea of some reconstructed Proto-Indo-European vocabulary, from which some kind of word-picture of the original homeland might be put together. They have too readily assumed that a given pottery form, or an assemblage of items of material equipment can be equated directly with a group of people and hence supposedly with a particular language or language group. And they have not adequately explained why all these languages, or the speakers of all these languages, should be wandering around Europe and western Asia so tirelessly, in a series of migrations, thus setting up the pattern of different languages which we see today.” (75)

Renfrew discusses the idea that the similarities in the Indo-European languages came from contact, not common ancestors with one homeland, and he offers the various models that might work for this idea (replacement models, colonization, or continuous development).
In sum, this book is an interesting exploration of the history of the Indo-European languages, with some sections that read almost like mystery novels, because of the excitement (for example, when he discusses the discovery of Hittite or explores the history of the Celts). It’s not the most recent book on the subject, but it’s an important one.

Give-Away of The Pun Also Rises by John Pollack

The last post reviewed a great new book on the history of the pun, The Pun Also Rises by John Pollack. The publisher, Gotham Books, is giving away a copy of the book to one lucky Brave New Words reader.

To win a copy of the book, post a comment here with your favorite pun. Make sure you include your name and location too. You have five days to post; the winner will be chosen randomly and announced on 16 May. So get thee to a punnery!

The Pun Also Rises by John Pollack

This new book by John Pollack (I accidentally spelled his last name Pollock, but luckily noticed there was something fishy about that) is all about the pun and its role in human history.
As he explains, no one is certain where the word comes from but it seems possible that it is from the word pundit, which means “a learned Hindu versed in Sanskrit” (5), and Sanskrit is a complex language that has many puns in it. Another suggested etymology is that it comes from the Latin punctilio, which means “fine point” (9). Besides the issue of etymology, it is also hard to clearly define what a pun is. It’s not exactly the same as wordplay; rather “a pun transforms one thing into another by relating them through sound or, in the case of visual puns, sight. A play on words only works if the two things it relates are already intrinsically connected, either by etymology or function.” (9)
From the word itself, Pollack moves into detailed discussions of brain research, how we hear sound/language, and how the evolution of human bodies primed us for the ability to crack jokes. Evolution made people walk upright and then because of the change in gait, which caused a concomitant change in hip size, there were lower birthrates. All this “required compensatory survival skills to make up the difference. Among those that emerged, most likely about 150,000 years ago in East Africa, were the interrelated capacities for language and for abstract thinking.” This eventually also led to a sense of humor, which obviously also helps in difficult times, as Pollack points out. (49)
But puns have had their ups and downs throughout our history. At one point, it was thought to be the sign of intelligence to use puns, and there were even pun duels (such as there were sword fights), whereas at other times, it was argued that puns were inappropriate and that they shouldn’t be part of intellectual discourse. Another point of contention has been whether they are appropriate for children (this is, incidentally, something that has been part of my research). But as Pollack writes: “it’s this very wordplay that exposes children to the mechanics of semantics, long before they every tackle grammar in a classroom. Studies also indicate that children’s facility with language has a major impact on their ability to excel in other subjects, too, including math and science. Playing with language helps them discover similarities, differences and patterns, as well as how to make bold conceptual leaps” (105).
One of the major misconceptions about puns is that they have to be funny. In fact, as Pollack explores in his work, puns can be used to make people think about language and meaning, or to refer to taboo issues (“the more rigid a society becomes, the greater its reliance on subtexts, especially puns, to address sensitive or taboo topics.” (140)), or to serve a range of other functions. Pollack writes: “One should remember, though, that puns are at their core defined by multiplicity of meaning, not always humor. The common expectation that puns should always be funny, or die in the attempt, is a relatively modern development.” (65)
Pollack also discusses why people have negative feelings towards puns and why some groan when they hear one. He says that “if a pun’s secondary meaning does not clearly echo or reinforce a conversation’s greater context, such wordplay can come across as deliberate and disruptive nonsense. This is likely a principal reason why many people who strongly prefer order to ambiguity often express such antipathy, even hostility, to any and all puns.” (145)
If you’re expecting a joke book, look elsewhere (although you can watch Pollack on a pun safari). If you want to learn about puns through history and how puns influence culture, this is the book for you. Still, Pollack does offer some puns, including one of my favorite jokes: “A distraught patient rushes into a psychologist’s office. ‘Doctor, doctor! I think I’m a wigwam, then I think I’m a teepee. I’m a wigwam, I’m a teepee. I’m a wigwam, I’m a teepee…’
‘Relax,’ the shrink says. ‘You’re just too tense.’” (43)
If you’re too tense, why not take a break and read this book? It’s fascinating and funny, and it proves that there’s always something new and worth learning under the pun.
And if you want to win a copy of this book, check back here for the next post!

Lost in Translation

For my birthday in October, one of the gifts I received was Lost in Translation by Charlie Croker. It’s a funny collection of odd English phrases and sentences from around the world. Some of the mistakes come from bad translations, but many are simply due to people trying to write in English even though their language skills aren’t quite up to it.

A Chinese hotel tells guests: “We serve you with hostiality.” A Japanese shopping bag offers this message: “Now baby. Tonight I am feeling cool and hard boiled.” In the Czech Republic, people are warned: “No smoothen the lion.” An Australian dish is “dumping soup” while an Indian restaurant includes “Aborigines” in their brinjal bhaji and a Greek dish is “chopped cow with a wire through it and bowels in sauce.” Yum.

This is a light, fun book that made me giggle. I wish people took translation more seriously but if they did, we wouldn’t have these mistakes to laugh at.

Thinking Italian Translation

I was looking at the Thinking Italian Translation book put out by Routledge as part of my thus-far lazy effort to learn Italian. This book is part of a series that also includes Spanish, German, and French. These texts do not teach you the language, but they teach you to think about the language from a translator’s perspective and thus they’re quite useful both for translators and for language-learners (well, for language-learners of a certain nerdy inclination, like yours truly).

There is some basic information, such as explanations of sociolect, adverbs, code-switching, and calques, among other topics, and there is information on scientific and technical translation and legal and business translation. Throughout the book, there are a number of examples, tips, and practical exercises. There are also several chapters on contrastive linguistics, in which the authors compare and analyze linguistic features in English and Italian, such as the conditional tense.

Books on Language

Last year, Brave New Words had our first giveaway. As part of this, we asked readers for suggestions for books on language. Here is the compiled book list:

Maya wrote: There was a classic book on language called The Mother Tongue. It must be out of print by now, but it was what started my passion for language and its history, way back in the early seventies.

Pennifer suggested: How about Horace Lunt's "Old Church Slavonic Grammar" one of my bibles when I took an OCS graduate seminar back in the day?

From Debs: I recommend David Crystal's "Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language". Covering everything from gender issues to regional variations, this gold mine of information is a definite asset on anyone's bookshelf.

S. Borei wrote: With a library full of books on language with some dating back to the early 1700s it is no easy task to choose just one or even two. So instead of picking an out-and-out reference work, let me recommend one that has given me both insights and pleasure - the latter a somewhat rare commodity for someone who struggles constantly with language. So for that then, I recommend Karen Elizabeth Gordon's "The Deluxe Transvestite Vampire – the ultimate handbook of grammar for the innocent, the eager and the doomed." It's a wondrous window on the winsome, winning ways of words.

Susan King recommended: I grew up in a house filled with books. I don't remember the exact title but I loved browsing through Menken's American Language when I was in Junior High. I didn't understand much of it, but it was fun.

Jaax suggested: My bible for paper-writing: The Little, Brown Handbook by H. Ramsey Fowler and Jane E. Aaron.

Nina wrote: _In the Land of Invented Languages_ by Akira Okrent discusses non-naturally occuring languages like Esperanto, Klingon, Bliss Symbols (an early communication system for people with disabilities who are nonverbal. This is perhaps an unconventional choice, but I read it some time ago, and found it interesting.

A. Argandona recommended: I recently bought in France 'Le Pourquoi des Choses' by Anne Pouget. It is a very entertaining read about word origins, expressions and curiosities.

From Liz Nutting: One of my favorites is Sin and Syntax, by Constance Hale. She gives the grammar and syntax rules--then tells you how to break them for more effective prose!

From Luella Goodman: I still think "Eats, Roots and Leaves" by Lynne Truss is a winner in terms of presenting idiosyncracies of English punctuation in an entertaining read that appeals to both professional and lay linguists. Its tongue-in-cheek style dares any wannabe writer to flex their punctuation muscles!

Stephen wrote: Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language by Steven Pinker. Steven Pinker examines a rather narrow topic (irregular and regular verbs) and the cognitive processes behind these verbs. In it, Pinker explores how language is stored, produced, learned, etc. The book is more technical than his more famous work, The Language Instinct, but for anyone who wants to understand regular and irregular verbs and the many language oddities that come along with these verbs, it is a wonderful read. It will teach you more about language processes than almost any other mainstream book on the market.

Ben Boblis recommended: I love Native Tongues by Charles Berlitz. I can read it over and over and always find something new and interesting. It has a little bit about a lot. :)

Lauren Redman wrote: I'd like to recommend a fairly new book titled 'The Secret Life of Words' by Henry Hitchings. It's about the 'promiscuous' English language and how it came to have so many words - and synonyms - from over 350 other languages! It's entertainingly written and includes a bit of history too. Lots of interesting tidbits to drop into the dinner conversation!

Mehregan suggested: Halliday's An Introduction to Functional Grammar is a quite fruitful book. It is the basis of My M.A. thesis. I found wonderful notions about different languages especially English. I am not an English native speaker but this book took me to the depth of English.

From Prof Adam: I would recommend Bill Bryson'a book, "mother tongue" as it is a truly fascinating book about the Development and history of the English Language. I would also recommend "Troublesome Words" by the same author as it highlights interesting uses and misuses of modern English.

A Magnificent Give-Away

Brave New Words is pleased to present our first give-away. In order to win a copy of John McWhorter’s book Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English, all you have to do is leave a comment on this post.

In your comment, please recommend a book about a language. Give the name of the book and its author, and write a couple of sentences about why this is a book worth reading.

You do not have to use your real name and you should definitely not post your address, but you do need to include your e-mail address, so I can contact you, and you have to be prepared to give me your real name and your address so I can make sure the book reaches you. Your personal information will not be used for any other reason.

Post your comment by midnight (GMT) on November 9 and I will randomly pick a winner the following day.

Good luck!

A Magnificent Book Told in a Magnificent Bastard Tongue

This past weekend, I read what I quickly realized was my favorite language book of the year, John McWhorter’s Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English.

This fascinating book is not about words, as interesting as they are. Instead, it is about grammar. Why is English grammar different from that of the other Germanic languages? As Mr. McWhorter puts it:

“English’s Germanic relatives are like assorted varieties of deer-antelopes, springboks, kudu, and so on-antlered, fleet-footed, big-brown-eyed variations on a theme. English is some dolphin swooping around underwater, all but hairless, echolocating and holding its breath. Dolphins are mammals like deer: they give birth to live young and are warm-blooded. But clearly the dolphin has strayed from the basic mammalian game plan to an extent that no deer has.” (p. xx)

Mr. McWhorter explores how English came to be the dolphin it is and, as you can tell from the quote, he does so in an entertaining, easy-to-understand way (he also calls English “kinky…(with) a predilection for dressing up like Welsh on lonely nights.” (1))

So what exactly happened to make English so deviant? Why do we have the “meaningless ‘do’” in negatives and in question sentences? Why do we employ verb-noun progressives to express the present tense (i.e. “I am walking to my office”)? Why do we have certain sounds that other Indo-European languages don’t? Why are there no genders in English? And why do linguists not discuss these issues or, if they do, why do they fall into certain assumptions about language and in particular about the English language? Why do linguistics mostly look at how contact with other cultures and languages influenced vocabulary but not grammar?

Mr. McWhorter, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a columnist for The Sun, reviews the evidence for and against the ways that the following tongues influenced and bastardized English grammar: the Celtic languages via Welsh and Cornish, Old Norse thanks to the invading Vikings, and the Semitic languages Akkadian and Aramaic. He makes very solid and persuasive cases for all these language groups, which I will not summarize here because I’d rather you just read his hard-to-put-down book.

My one complaint was that the sources weren’t more detailed, but I have to keep in mind that Mr. McWhorter wanted this book to be popular and not scientific, and that’s why there aren’t long footnotes and bibliographical lists.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who knows and uses the English language. English is unique and if you want to know why it is the way it is – and if you use it, you should want to understand it – this book will offer you insight into its grammar. A magnificent bastard tongue indeed.

P.S. Check back later in the week for Brave New Words’ first give-away – a copy of John McWhorter’s magnificent book, courtesy of his publisher, Gotham.