That's that

I have referred many times to the problems thrown up by the relative adjective/pronoun that.

<digression>
Incidentally, this relative  that, though spelt the same as the subordinating conjunction, is phonologically distinct as it's always pronounced /ðæt/: examples – "I want thAt one"; "Don't give me thAt"), with the vowel never reduced to /ə/. The subordinating conjunction is often reduced to /ðət/: examples – "She told me that she had gone" (/ðət/) but "She told me that (/ðæt/) she had gone, not why".  My guess is that the /ðət/ form is the more often used, and that the chief exception is when there's contrastive ...

<aside>
Ho-ho. The infernal machine has given that word a red underline, and helpfully suggested I might mean contraceptive.
</aside>

...stress (as in my second example). Machine-generated speech often gets this wrong. The latest example I've noticed  was in the first of the new series of Ability.
</digression>

I've  mentioned the which/that controversy here :

<grammar_point importance="negligible" skip="yes, if you value your sanity" status="shibboleth"> 

Suppose I have two lawn mowers. The green one is in the shed and the red one ... is in the garage. Woe betide you if you refer to the green one as 'the mower which is in the shed'. However, you will have Mrs Thistlebottom*'s blessing if you say 'The red mower, which is newer, is in the garage.' 

</grammar_point>

And earlier I had written here about the grammatical inflexibility, as a relative, of THAT in contrast to WHO and WHICH:

The mower that is in the garage is red 

The mower thats power source is petrol... 

The mower on that you can sit while mowing...

To sum it up, here's a table: (I'm not proud of the layout, but still...)

Case	THAT	WHO	WHICH
Subject	that	who	which
Object	that	whom (with or without preposition)	which  (with or without preposition)
Possessive	–	whose	whose (a rather old fashioned-sounding borrowing from WHO; most speakers today – especially younger ones – say of which)

This area of syntactical inflexibility  causes much grief. One can forgive Paul McCartney for "this cold and hungry world in which we live in"; in fact for years I gave him the benefit of the doubt and heard it as "... in which we're livin'". But people with a more thoughtful (if less creative) approach to the language are often left with egg on their faces. In a recent BBC News interview Jacob Rees-Mogg said (right at the start of that recording, about 14 seconds in) that "the EU should be careful for what it wishes for".

<possible_extenuation>
When I first heard it on the radio I thought he had just changed horses in mid-stream; the linguist's word for this is anacoluthon (mentioned before in early posts, here for example: the song I  mentioned in the last para of that post starts like this: [to the tune of Anna*, of course] 

Ana... [backing vocals continue: "...coluthon"] 

Is when a sentence starts one way

But then it begins to stray; 

You start out with one sentence structure 

But it's really different 

In the end  

[Some critics may notice that "structure" and "different" don't rhyme; delivery of this non-rhyme is a matter of performance: a degree of self-editing may be suggested.]

). He started out with the Mrs Thistlebottom version ("for what it wishes"), realized it sounded prissy, and went for the more demotic "what it wishes for"; so that what he said was "be careful f... (thinks: "no, that sounds like a caricature of an Old-Etonian prig") what it wishes for". 

But on a second hearing (recycled on the TV news) I decided my initial generosity of spirit was misplaced; he just got it wrong.
</possible_extenuation>

Enough for now.

b

* Incidentally, the attribution of the song to "J.P. McCartney" on that clip is wrong. This track was on the Beatles' first album, before they had settled on their default setting of <all-songs-home-grown>. In fact the idea of singers writing their own songs was so out of the ordinary that the pop media of the early '60s were full of the word "self-penned", new to me at the time (although, as so often with suspected neologisms, it had a long history before the 1960s – more than 100 years, according to Merriam-Webster). Some of their promotional literature at the time gushed  that Lennon and McCartney had written enough new material to keep them in the charts until 1975!!! (HD: as Wikipedia might say, "citation needed").

My old man said Follow the lobster...

... and don't Dili-Dali on the way.

'You couldn't make it up' – said John Waite in this week's Pick of the Week, introducing  a BBC report on a self-styled Grammar Vigilante. This masked crusader roams the streets of Bristol righting the wrongs done to Milady the Blessed and Inviolate Language of Our Forefathers the Way Mrs Thistlebotham Taught It. [Mrs Thislebotham was a stickler for proper English who inhabited Dave Barry's Mr Language Person columns, one of which observed that an apostrophe just meant Here comes an S.], The Apostrophizer's special interest was the wayward apostrophe, and the arcane/arbitrary rules governing its "correct" application. I wrote a  few years ago (here) about this:

... my late twentieth-century sightings of apostropho-clasm are far from original. GBS wrote

I have written aint, dont, havent, shant, shouldnt, and wont for twenty years with perfect impunity, using the apostrophe only when its omission would suggest another word: for example hell for he’ll. There is not the faintest reason for persisting in the ugly and silly trick of peppering pages with these uncouth bacilli. [ed, 2017: the source I originally gave had papering for peppering, but this is obviously wrong: peppering is the perfect choice, whereas papering makes no sense at all; I suspect the finger of blame points at Optical Character Recognition]

(Isn't that bacilli marvellous? Bacilli were in the news at the time, because of discoveries in connection with these stick-like [Latin baculum – 'little staff'; there's that '-ulus/m' again, denoting a diminutive, as noted in a previous post]  microscopic objects. Shaw was a contemporary of Fleming [HD 2017: I have no idea why I mentioned Fleming. The reason is probably a circumstantial link now lost on the cutting-room floor.] – who was born before Shaw but outlived him. One can imagine Shaw reading a newspaper or scientific leaflet illustrated with a slide covered with these things looking like chocolate vermicelli - and there's another metaphor, 'little worms', but that would be a digression too far). You can read more about apostrophes here [ed, 2017: this source is no longer there. Here's an option], if you're that way inclined. I really can't get awfully excited about this sort of thing. [HD 2017: I'd like to include a contemporary picture {mid-late 19th cent.} but for the time being you'll have to make do with this:

A better one is TBS, but breath retention is not advised.]

The Pedant column in The Times, responding to the BBC's story, layed into the Apostrophizer in a column entitled ...

<digression>
See rant here (the bit in red) if you're interested in my feelings about this wronged word.
</digression>

...The Apostrophiser should Apologize. I'm not convinced the writer came up with that title; maybe a sub-editor was just attracted by the assonance

For a start, the grammar vigilante has misunderstood his own moniker. Grammar encompasses syntax ...morphology ... and phonology .... Mr Vigilante is concerned instead with orthography, the conventions for writing a language, which has nothing to do with grammar.

The distinction matters. [HD: Well yes. I thought as much when I first heard the BBC report but dismissed it as a bit of typical dumbing down; and eternal vigilance in this sort of thing strikes me as almost as anal as the malefactor.] Whenever you hear a complaint about “bad grammar” levelled at a native speaker it will almost invariably be untrue. We know how the rules of grammar go (real rules, I mean, like word order or inflection for tense) and don’t get them wrong. But the conventions of spelling and punctuation have to be learnt. Mr Vigilante believes it’s a “crime” to get these wrong. [HD: Well, again, yes. The self-styled Apostrophizer was making a rhetorical rebuff of the interviewer's question (about the legality of his efforts), without weighing his words more carefully, so ...] What nonsense [... it was indeed pretty silly. He needs a PR training course. But his use of "It's a crime" to refer to something not strictly criminal is fairly standard hyperbole and hardly merits this put-down. Sledgehammers and nuts spring to mind.].

Though agreeing with a lot of what Oliver [Pedant] Kamm writes, I fear this article was not his finest hour. He talks about the history of orthography, giving loads of detail. I sympathize with his objection to being corrected by an ignoramus who thinks English should be pickled in aspic.

Incidentally, Kamm obviously knows but has over-simplified the story:

The apostrophe didn’t enter the English language till the 16th century. It was adopted from French as a printers’ convenience to denote an elision or contracted form. From that usage, [HD: Here's the missing bit, expanded below.]  it was adopted to denote singular possession and then plural possession. But this was no logical stepwise progression. The conventions fluctuated and they didn’t settle down in their current form till around 1800, with mechanised printing.

The printers' convention was applied, in a case of a possessive usage, to a missing letter or  letters that had been part of the possessive inflexion. Chaucer's Pardoner inveighs against the casual use of oaths such as

"By Goddes precious herte," and "by his nayles"...

and the possessive ending is necessary for the metre. So those compositors weren't just inventing a convention for denoting possession, but using a trick used in other contexts (such as ñ for nn); it was just a convention for making the artisan's work easier. The apostrophe came to denote possession more-or-less by accident, by marking the elision of a possessive ending.

Anyway, I must start on the picnic bench in the gaps between rain showers and neighbours' bonfires.

b

Highlights

<rant id="1"  ferocity="intense, but not as strong as that of MrsK">
The term highlights has a longer history than one might think, given that its meaning today is so closely related to radio or television. Etymonline, glossing over the pluralized version (which it doesn't distinguish as a headword), says

highlight (n.) 1650s, originally of paintings, "the brightest part of a subject," from high (adj.) + light (n.). The figurative sense of "outstanding feature or characteristic" is from 1855....  Related: Highlights.

The Collins Online site avoids this dilemma (geddit? LEMMA), even giving it its own frequency graph:

In the words of a comment I made recently to the Collins Online site

The definition 'a selection on the TV or radio of the most important and exciting parts of an event, esp a sporting event' doesn't work any more. To judge by the BBC's coverage of Rio 2016, "highlights" seems to mean "about an hour of celebrity chat, punctuated by very occasional and sparse clips of sports action".

</rant>

<rant id="2" ferocity="mild – not even a rant really, just an occasion of vague regret and nostalgia">

I know I know  I KNOW, this is the way language develops – I've defended so-called "mistakes" often enough in this blog.

But I'll never say (or write, except here, of course) appeal the decision. The most recent "infraction"("He only does it to annoy, because he  knows it teases") was probably to do with drug cheats before Rio.  I compared this construction (and the version we dinosaurs still use, with a preposition and no direct object) in the British National Corpus and in its American analogue COCA.

The search appeal against the [n*] (by the magic of BNC, you can just click on that link) occurs 136 times in BNC. Meanwhile, appeal the [n*] occurs only 36 times: the version with the preposition outnumbers the newcomer about 4:1. (That word newcomer suggests a possible PhD study: "The usage of non-traditional grammatical forms – an age-related study". That would put some numbers on what to me at least is a self-evident truth: as language develops over time, the trail-blazers are the young.)

In COCA, unsurprisingly (although possibly the extent of the preponderance [nearly 20:1] is a bit of a surprise), the relative weights are reversed: the American English strong preference is for appeal the [n*]. (Given the state of the hedge [] I must leave the workings as an exercise for the reader.)
</rant>

b

Stating the obv... hang on though ...

See the original here.

This comes with the cachet (or should that be caché?) of the saundz.com stable, so presumably one should pay it some heed. I have to say, though, that whenever – in the past – I have looked at their site for purposes of preparing a lesson I found that it was (intentionally, I suppose) heavily, if not entirely biased in favour of American English. OK, that makes sense. There are many more native speakers of American English than of British English, and students of ESOL usually want to learn American English in preference to British English; or else they don't care either way.

<mini_rant force="Just saying">
But my reaction to sites that say just "English" when they mean "American English", or for that matter "Portuguese" when they mean "Brazilian Portuguese", or sports commentators who say "World Champion" when they mean "US-wide Champion" get my goat.
<mini_rant>

A few counter-examples from the rule as stated there – one for each word:

1. BELIEVE
   I believe I am being taken for a sucker.
2. UNDERSTAND
   I understand you have seen the figures...?
3. KNOW
   I know you were there.
4. DOUBT
   I doubt  if we‘ll ever know the truth.
5. LOVE
   I love what you did with the lentils.
6. WANT
   I want to be going first thing tomorrow.
7. ADMIT
   I admit I am being blackmailed.

Of course I'm ignoring (or at  least overlooking) context – not the context surrounding the situations in the examples, but the context of the lesson itself; the rule is given to students who just haven't met any other tense than the present, so that it is implicitly preceded by the words WHEN ANY OF  THESE WORDS IS FOLLOWED BY A VERB IN THE PRESENT...

But even so,  there must be a typo in the opening sentence (unless this is a bit of American English syntax that I haven't met). State verbs are usually used 

with [THE – does the writer have difficulty with articles?] Present Simple instead [OF, surely...?] with [THE ...?] Present Continuous

And the lack of articles can't be blamed on "typographical  licence" – the  last two lines in that four-line extract (the exhibit I started with) are plenty loose enough to accommodate a few extra characters.

Besides, only a few days' exposure to the Western world is going to expose students to the infamous I'm lovin' it (which vies with 10 items or less for the

Most egregious tweaker of Grammar Nazis' chains 

award). This really does break not only the spirit but also the letter of the law (Present Continuous rather than Present Simple). But students will quickly realize that rules are not so much made to be broken, in the words of that tired cliché...

<digression>
Isn't TIRED CLICHÉ itself one of those ... erm, THREADBARE commonplaces?
</digression>

... as defined by actual usage. The repeated failures of practice to match up with theory have to be accommodated by weasel words like that USUALLY.

b
PS As I write I have the BBC‘s Julius Caesar in the background; and the line Who is it in the press that calls on me leapt out at me with its two anachronistic puns: press and call on. And this reminded me of a recurrent annoyance, apparently irrelevant but similarly depending on an anachronistic pun sadly repeated ever and anon (is that Shakespeare?) by people who should know better: the roots of OMG:

This one’s for all you amateur internet archaeologists out there: The first recorded use of the ubiquitous texting abbreviation OMG wasn’t uttered by a precocious tween in the 1990s, but by one Lord Fisher in a letter to none other than Winston Churchill.

          Time report

Well well; silly us! There‘s everyone thinking that abbreviation's a child of the late 20th Century. How wrong we were! Umm,  no. Lord Fisher‘s "OMG" was a joke based on the names of honours such as "OBE" and "CMG". Here's the context:

To cite it as the etymological basis of the SMS-based abbreviation "OMG" is to indulge in an anachronistic pun – the sort of textual "discovery" that is increasingly common in these days of easily accessed electronic text  databases. In the words of that prescient ophthalmologist Friar Lawrence

What a pair of spectacles is this?

PPS And here‘s a clue:

Measurement of time absorbing one new virtue (7)

Update 2016.05.03.22:35  – A couple of typo  fixes (including a deletion), + this clue:

Cutting short brusque indisposition. (11)

Update 2017.09.25.14:15  – PPPS
 PPPS Second answer first, as I'm sure of it: CURTAILING. The first one could be HONOUR, but if so I counted wrong (and it's a pretty dodgy clue anyway).

No particulate place to go

Today‘s subject announces a valuable competition. No age-restrictions. The prize: IMMORTALITY. Brief: make a .jpeg or .png of a cartoon copy of this incompetent version (which reflects the fact that I didn't see eye-to-eye with ‘Pug' [as, for obvious reasons, we knew our art master – Father Ignatius]). I see it in the style of ‘Larry‘ (particularly the furtive emissions character, who I shall refer to for convenience as Mr Smokey).

Grist to the mill

your picture here

It might work better as a comic strip:

• Frame 1 – Interior of car approaching test centre; Mr Smokey is in the passenger seat
• Frame 2 – Mr Smokey hiding (behind WC door?);  car being tested in the background
• Frame 3 –  Car leaving test centre and Mr Smokey getting back in (throwing away his cigarette butt?)

Anyway, it's up to you.

And now, the thought for the day, on echolalia, or 

the tendency to repeat mechanically words just spoken by another person: can occur in cases of brain damage, mental retardation, and schizophrenia

as Collins puts it. That dictionary classifies the word as pertaining particularly to the world of psychiatry, but I know it from the world of language (where it might have another name – I just like the word echolalia)

Some languages do it systematically. The response to the Continental Portuguese (I don't think this is true of Brazilian) Fala Português? , for example, is Falo sim or Não falo, não [or Falava sim bastante bem há 40 anos, mas agora...{="Yes, I used to speak it quite well 40 years ago, but now..."}] This involves a certain amount of linguistic processing on the part of the respondent; they need to identify the verb in the question and then change the ending (so that it's first person rather than second). Often this is not too difficult, but irregular verbs can confuse the issue.

<digression type="autobiographical note">
I'm reminded, not entirely relevantly, as echolalia doesn't come into it, of an exchange I had (I won't call it a conversation, which would've been barely possible at the time) with a young Argentinian woman in Bilbao arcelona, where I was starting to learn Spanish. After work one day (the nature of which is discussed here) María Fernanda said Contános. She was asking me what had happened that day. 

In much of South America, they speak Spanish but with many differences from the Castilian Spanish largely taught in schools. The crucial difference in this case is in verb inflections. Argentina preserves the informal second person vos (originally plural as in Old Castilian, in current Spanish (but with -otros tacked on^*)  and in modern(-ish [older people use it {or at least did in 1971}] ) Portuguese, but in the singular. The informal Spanish imperative plural of contar is contad – with stress on the second syllable. 

The imperative singular of contar  was – according to the O-level grammar book I was using at the time – cuenta (the stress on the etymological o causing the diphthong). So, if I had reached the bit in the book that dealt with the position of object pronouns (doubtful), I would have expected cuéntanos in place of María Fernanda's 'Contános'.
</digression>

The subject of people repeating things said  – especially in the context of language-learning – came to mind while I was listening to the first of the Price of Oil series plays on Saturday, Stand Firm, You Cads!; it‘s about 22-23 minutes  in, in a conversation between an Englishwoman and a speaker of English as a second language whose mother tongue is Farsi:

She:  I ... I think I misjudged the whole thing.  

He:   You didn't get anything wrong.

This didn't ring true for me, as a student of other languages. The speaker of ESOL was a competent speaker; and I know no Farsi – but it's possible, though improbable, that Farsi has an idiom that translates word-for-word as 'to get something wrong'. If this is true, that's just the sort of lucky coincidence that language learners hang on to (and a prolific source of near-misses – false friends) like 'take French leave' [which doesn't mean the same as filer à l'anglaise]).

But otherwise I feel it would be more likely that the speaker of ESOL would reflect back the native speaker's expression and say "You didn't misjudge anything'.

<digression type="autobiographical note", "again, not entirely relevant"> 

In the mid '70s I was on the books of the police as an interpreter. This could be quite exciting (being called in the small hours and given a lift in a Jamjar that could jump red lights with impunity, for example). On one occasion I was called to interpret for some Brazilian students who had had a few drinks and made off with a dustbin-lid. In the car on the way to the Station I was talking to the arresting officers, trying to glean the details of the alleged offence (so that I could rehearse the appropriate vocabulary, and if necessary think up some periphrases to make up for lacunae). 

The crucial word was 'dustbin-lid', and I had no idea how to say it. It was with huge relief that I heard the students blurt out, as soon as they saw me, o tampo de lixo, 

Speakers of foreign languages rely very heavily on what they hear. 

</digression>

That's all for today.

b

PS A clue:  Wind about one means of avoiding a possible miscarriage of justice. (8)
 
^* I made the unreasonable assumption that everyone had a passing knowledge of Spanish when I added this rather gnomic parenthesis. The Spanish vosotros means you (plural and informal). By coincidence, French does a similar thing, but with a word-break; and the result is extremely informal (meaning something like "you lot" – vous autres).

Update 2015.11.02.09:55 – misremembered placename fixed.

Update 2015.11.16.09:50 – The solution: MISTRIAL.

---

Mammon When Vowels Get Together V5.2: Collection of Kindle word-lists grouping different pronunciations of vowel-pairs. Now complete (that is, it covers all vowel pairs – but there's still stuff to be done with it; an index, perhaps...?)

And here it is: Digraphs and Diphthongs . The (partial) index has an entry for each e cvowel pair that can represent each monophthong phoneme. For example AE, EA and EE are by far the most common pairs of vowels used to represent the /i:/ phoneme, but there are eight other possibilities. The index uses colour to give an idea of how common a spelling is, ranging from bright red to represent the most common to pale olive green to represent the least common.

I'm thinking about doing a native iBook version in due course, but for now Mac users can use Kindle's own (free) simulator.

Also available at Amazon: When Vowels Get Together: The paperback.

And if you have no objection to such promiscuity, Like this. 

Freebies (Teaching resources:  Well over 49,300 views  and nearly 9,000 downloads to date**. They're very eclectic - mostly EFL and MFL, but one of the most popular is from KS4 History, dating from my PGCE, with nearly 2,700 views and nearly 1,100 downloads to date. So it's worth having a browse.)

** This figure includes the count of views for a single resource held in an account that I accidentally created many years ago.

A Tale of Two Typoes

A long time ago I commented here on an article in The Times on endangered languages. I was not very impressed by the article itself, although its heart was in the right place; my scorn was directed in particular at this quote/translation:        

"Que l'lingo seit bouan ou mauvais,

J'pâlron coum'nou pâlait autefais."

(Whether the lingo be good or bad,  

I'm going to speak like dear old dad.)

Especially the last three words:

No 'dad', no 'dear', no 'old'.

(Any argument about the difficulty of verse translations, and the licence for idiomatic embellishments, I said, should be ruled out in view of the narrow measure of a newspaper column – which makes it impossible to detect the need for suspension of accuracy on poetical grounds. The newspaper article, transcribed on a website devoted to Manx, is  here.)

In that piece I expressed doubts about two verb forms. A recent holiday led me to do a bit of research, and rather than write  yet another update to an already over-updated piece....

The Wikipedia article on Guernésiais has the same text for Métivier's verse but no "dear old dad". Possibly coum'nou pâlait (specifically the "nou + 3rd person singular verb") is an impersonal form; so the Wikipedia translation is good: I’m going to speak as we used to speak). But that still doesn't account for j‘ pâlron  which, as I said here, seemed most unlikely:

...here's why, if you really want to know. There are systematic features of Latin-derived verb endings. There are in some cases exceptions, but they tend to be noted in philology texts; examples from minority languages are  the stock-in-trade of philology – I explained here how and why I know a single word of Gascon. If there were a language that had -ron as the first person singular in the future form of a first conjugation verb (-er verbs in French, -ar verbs in Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and so on‡) I'd very probably have heard of it. 'Nou' looks like we, which would make the ending -ait first person plural – which I'd very probably have heard of. If one language had both oddities....

I was wrong about nou. As I suggested just  now, it's probably impersonal (like the standard French on  –  as that Wikipedia article says in a regrettably sparse section  on phonology 'Metathesis of /r/ is common in Guernésiais, by comparison with Sercquiais and Jèrriais.' I wouldn't be at all surprised if metathesis were common with n as well. I know of no language that restricts metathesis [which I discussed here] to a single phonological context).

All of this leaves  J'pâlron as an object of my doubt. The only verb table ...

<autobiographical_note meta="old fogey alert">
or paradigm as we used to say at school, before the word was exposed to such wanton over-use:

Collins frequency chart.  I rest my case

(and blame that Kuhn chap. His book was published in 1962 right at the start of that sharp rise).

</autobiographical_note>

...I can find gives "oimaïr - to love (regular conjugation)"; and that "regular" suggests that anything else is irregular. And among Romance languages, I can't imagine the word derived from PARABOLARE (the Vulgar Latin word for 'talk', adopted for its regularity) being irregular. Which would suggest that j'palron should fit this model:

oimaïr paradigm at  Wikipedia

An extraordinary feature that leaps out (eventually – it‘s so extraordinary that I missed it at first glance...

<autobiographical_note>
I'd no doubt have known about it if I'd bitten the bullet of studying the History of French (which I didn't do for reasons discussed in an  earlier post , I think)
</autobiographical_note>

)... is that Je (or j'  in this case) serves as both singular and plural,   so that J'pâlron[s?] in Métivier's poem means We will talk.

With curiosities like this lurking in every natural language, 20th-21st century mankind's insouciant destruction of the Earth's linguodioversity* is lamentable.

But there's a Velux to refurbish ...

b

PS 
<crossword_clue>
Flourish backfires. (5)

</crossword_clue>

Update 2015.07.09.16:20 – Added PPS

              <occasional_FOGGY_nomination explanation="here" perpetrator="mercifully anonymous">

This approach was on the understanding that these 11 units would not being [sic] subjected to any additional financial contributions, nor assessed against any policy, nor be included in any calculations which could result in affordable housing provision or environmental services that would not otherwise be expected via a prior approval and CLD application process.

           Wokingham Borough application F/2015/0346

              Hmmm... No idea what this means, but it imparts a nasty whiff of  nods and winks.
              </occasional_FOGGY_nomination>

Update 2015.09.09.17:20 – Added link to earlier post.

Update 2015.12.14.14:00 – Crossword answer: SERIF (easy enough, I think, but pleasing) and added this note:

* My model for this is 'biodiversity'; but if I follow that model (or paradigm as I'm sure a true modernist would say) I should mix Greek (βιος) and Latin (divertere). Some commentators decry this mixing, irrationally; mixed etymologies are common, useful, and sometimes necessary for the coiner's purpose. And where, in any case, do you draw the line between a language and its descendant? A morganatic marriage, I've  just discovered, is one that involves no transfer of property except for a morning gift (OE – morgengifu):

morganatic (adj.) 

1727, from French morganatique (18c.), from Medieval Latin matrimonium ad morganaticam "marriage of the morning," probably from Old High German*morgangeba (Middle High German morgengabe) "morning gift," corresponding to Old English morgengifu (see morn + gift)...

More here

But you'll look in vain for morganaticus in a Classical Latin dictionary, although the suffix -aticus was common. Television mixes Greek and Latin, but try calling it teleopsy.

So my linguodiversity ('pure' Latin) might better be glottodiversity (at the risk of sounding as though it could be thought to refer to trendy accents that affect a glottal stop [but inconsistently]).

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Mammon When Vowels Get Together V5.2: Collection of Kindle word-lists grouping different pronunciations of vowel-paimercifullyrs. Now complete (that is, it covers all vowel pairs –  but there's still stuff to be done with it; an index, perhaps...?) 

And here it is: Digraphs and Diphthongs . The (partial) index has an entry for each vowel pair that can represent each monophthong phoneme. For example AE, EA and EE are by far the most common pairs of vowels used to represent the /i:/ phoneme, but there are eight other possibilities. The index uses colour to give an idea of how common a spelling is, ranging from bright red to represent the most common to pale olive green to represent the least common.

I'm thinking about doing a native iBook version in due course, but for now Mac users can use Kindle's own (free) simulator.

Also available at Amazon: When Vowels Get Together: The paperback.

And if you have no objection to such promiscuity, Like this. 

Freebies (Teaching resources:  Well over 49,200 views  and nearly 9,000 downloads to date**. They're very eclectic - mostly EFL and MFL, but one of the most popular is from KS4 History, dating from my PGCE, with nearly 2,700 views and nearly 1,100 downloads to date. So it's worth having a browse.)

** This figure includes the count of views for a single resource held in an account that I accidentally created many years ago.

Speaking truth unto power...

...ful FOLLY.

Earlier this week, on Woman's Hour, I heard Sarah Vine being interviewed, and towards the end Jane Garvey [showing remarkable self-restraint] revealed that Ms Vine was married to Michael Gove. The interviewer (who no doubt knew that Gove and grammar were in the news) asked 'Does he correct your grammar'. And my hackles rose: what did she mean by correct; what did she mean by grammar? [She didn't use those words, but that was the gist. And that was the 'quote' that I chose to use as a peg to hang my outrage on. (I expect Gove would want me to say 'peg on which I chose to hang my outrage' –  )] I have ranted about this inhuman DISMEMBERMENT of phrasal verbs more than once; I think this is the UrRant.

Later I learnt the background. Gove had done a Churchill.

<digression theme="Doing a Churchill"> 

When Churchill first briefed the newly-set-up War Cabinet, he did something similar (but without so many obvious and trivial and self-evidently ridiculous bees in his bonnet). In a TES Resource that's been viewed well over once a day since I posted it four years ago I used Churchill's memo as input to the Text Analyser provided by UsingEnglish.com. As I say in the introduction for that resource: 

This handout looks at a memo written by Churchill to his wartime cabinet on the subject of plain writing. Opposite Churchill's original there is a parody breaking all the rules he mentions (and a few more). On the reverse, there is a textual analysis done by the tool available at http://www.usingenglish.com/resources/text-statistics.php, showing the quantifiable effects of using woolly language. This could be a basis for web research into writing skills. 

(In fact the link is to a newer version of the Text Analyser.) 

The parody is not nearly complete. To make the two analyses comparable I wanted to have similar word-counts. (I also got bored.) I begin my introduction to the parody: 

This is a version of Churchill’s memo, using unnecessarily long and obscure words, redundancy,  deadwood…any bad writing practice. Sadly, it wasn’t difficult; bad writing isn’t.

</digression>

Many a commentator has commented on Mr Gove's FOLLY, notably David Crystal who started thus (on the very morning of the FOLLY, so immediate was his disgust – and I'm choosing my words carefully here: I expect Gove's FOLLY left a bad taste in Crystal‘s mouth; it did in mine. And I expect that's not the last of it. I look forward to Oliver Kamm's reaction in Saturday's The Times.

Here's the beginning of Crystal's piece:

On being a pedant with power'Michael Gove is instructing his civil servants on grammar' said the headline in today's Independent. And Mark Leftly went on to describe how instructions posted on the Ministry of Justice intranet, after Gove was appointed Lord Chancellor last month, warned officials about the kind of English they shouldn't be using. Nicholas Lezard in the Observer made a similar point. His headline read: 'Has Michael Gove dreamed up these grammar rules just for our entertainment?

I'm not going to make much of a contribution to the tsunami of ridicule; my views on  this sort of nonsense are well-known; here's one of my earlier posts on pedantry (and interestingly, the word's  origin). The word cloud on the right will guide you to others.

But one particularly silly nostrum leapt out; I can't conceive of Gove's reasons; is he satirising himself?

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

Wha..? Where to begin? I could fight pedantry with pedantry and ask whether he means a hyphen – but that‘s the sort of quibble that springs too easily to the lips of an erstwhile Editorial Assistant.*

Rather than this I went to OneLook:

And I only got it down to 33 by selecting Common Words and Phrases. Without that filter there are well over 1,000. (I gave up after 10 pages.)

b

Update 2015,06,26.12.45 – Serendipitous PS

Tale from the Word Face

The importance of the hyphen was just underlined for me by an ad that appeared on my screen while I was  looking into the word "well-versed":

On a first reading I imagined a miracle cure  – showers that make the disabled walk. With a heavy heart I diagnosed the missing hyphen.

Update 2015,06,28.11.05 – Added footnote;

* Not to mention the comma splice. Gove seems to inhabit a string of glass houses.

Ursine sylvan defecation mystery solved

My attention was caught today by this tweet:

As the tweet suggested, the headline 'finding' was hardly surprising. But I wanted to know just how it had been reached. So I had a look at the survey here. 

The article introduces the survey like this:

Nearly seven out of 10 middle and high school students in South Korea are dissatisfied with English lessons at school because they are too focused on grammar, a study showed Wednesday. [Break for frankly pointless picture of SOMEONE'S HANDS IN THE ACT OF  WRITING SOMETHING] Based on a survey of 990 students attending middle and high schools in Seoul, the study showed 67.5 percent of them were discontented with the way English is taught at school.

My first impression [apart from 'Gosh – only two-thirds of  school kids don't like prescriptive rules; what a bunch of conformist drones' ] was that it could do with some images more eye-catching than the frankly pitiful ones supplied by the Korea Herald. So I knocked this one up without thinking too much [at first] about the message it conveys:

The first thing that leapt out of this picture was that the respondents (and, more importantly, the people asking the questions) saw only about two-thirds of language in terms of the four skills traditionally considered by language teachers – Speaking, Writing, Reading, and Listening (or, for lovers of mnemonics, SWhiRL). Personally, I can't conceive of teaching any of those skills without some vocabulary to start with, and without some way of choosing how to organize those words into meaning-bearing utterances (LS) or sentences (RW).

So it seems that this survey says more about pedagogy in S. Korea.  How do you learn vocabulary without any of the four productive/receptive skills? Presumably it is an entirely solitary and reflective process. And the same goes for grammar. How lucky I am not to have been exposed to that sort of regime.

There's a message here for language teachers: 

DON'T TRY TO TEACH EITHER OF THOSE YELLOW THINGS

WITHOUT A SOLID GROUNDING IN 

 ONE OR MORE OF THE BLUE ONES.

You won't get anywhere and your students will quickly side with the malcontents.

But I don't see what else can be gleaned from the survey. There seems to be a great deal of confusion over what was being asked – what students liked, what they valued, what they saw as being valued by some other stakeholder (parents, teachers, examination authorities, potential employers...). The article doesn't say, and I suspect I'd have to learn Korean to read the original.

b

Update 2015.01.21.18:20 – A  few cosmetic tweaks.

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Mammon When Vowels Get Together V5.2: Collection of Kindle word-lists grouping different pronunciations of vowel-pairs. Now complete (that is, it covers all vowel pairs –  but there's still stuff to be done with it; an index, perhaps...?) 

And here it is: Digraphs and Diphthongs . The (partial) index has an entry for each vowel pair that can represent each monophthong phoneme. For example AE, EA and EE are by far the most common pairs of vowels used to represent the /i:/ phoneme, but there are eight other possibilities. The index uses colour to give an idea of how common a spelling is, ranging from bright red to represent the most common to pale olive green to represent the least common.

I'm thinking about doing a native iBook version in due course, but for now Mac users can use Kindle's own (free) simulator.

Also available at Amazon: When Vowels Get Together: The paperback.

And if you have no objection to such promiscuity, Like this. 

Freebies (Teaching resources:  nearly 48,200 views  and over 6,500 downloads to date**. They're very eclectic - mostly EFL and MFL, but one of the most popular is from KS4 History, dating from my PGCE, with over 2,400 views and nearly 1,000 downloads to date. So it's worth having a browse.)

** This figure includes the count of views for a single resource held in an account that I accidentally created many years ago.

Firssst falterring foottstepps

Just to prove I can – up to a point – here‘s my first effort at Harmless Droidery.   And I take as my starting point a bit of silent editing on the part of the Beeb...

<rantette intensity="The heat of a million Suns" point="none, the battle‘s lost">

NOT, gaawd help us, on behalf of the Beeb – WOW (Why oh why) do people find the two so easy to confuse?

</rantette>

When the railway fares went up again today, with the inexorability of <inexorable-thing> this morning, some spoke (that‘s my home-grown PC version of ‘spokesman‘, on the not entirely solid analogy of chair) said that ‘any price rise was to be erm ... regrettable, but <blah-blah-blah>‘

<digression>
The notion that English people abroad speaking to foreign people just speak English more slowly and loudly seems to  me analogous to these spokes too. And it‘s a pleasing coincidence that one of the Spanish words for such a person – portavoz – means ‘megaphone‘.
</digression>

In the midday replay of this clip the Beeb‘s engineers had saved a millisecond or two by repairing the anacoluthon (that‘s a grown-up word for ‘whoops, you can edit that can‘t you?‘, or – to use the word favoured by David Crystal blend – (when the syntactic engine jumps the points‘, as it were).  They deleted the ‘to be erm..‘ and left the ‘any price rise was regrettable‘. I doubt if iPlayer will have preserved the evidence; I  guess the spliced version is THE TRUTH from now on.

Finally, I hope to do some Bluetoothery. Gimme a sec... Nope, phone‘s charging. So I‘ll improve the shining hour by showing off the  camera app, not to  mention the very cool slip-case Daughter Christmas gave me:

Now about that Bluetooth thing, my phone couldn‘t hack it. It‘s paired  OK, but it needs thpaathe [that's /θpeɪθ/]. I could  probably fix it by  deleting some stuff, but  life‘s too  short. So, with the deepest of apologies for the Close Quotes (which I suppose are a feature of this mobile stuff – Mobility justifies barbarity; discuss) I‘ll sign off.

b
Update 2015.01.04.17:00  – Added IPA bit in red [I haven't yet learnt to hack this sort of thing in Android.]

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Mammon When Vowels Get Together V5.2: Collection of Kindle word-lists grouping different pronunciations of vowel-pairs. Now complete (that is, it covers all vowel pairs –  but there's still stuff to be done with it; an index, perhaps...?) 

And here it is: Digraphs and Diphthongs . The (partial) index has an entry for each vowel pair that can represent each monophthong phoneme. For example AE, EA and EE are by far the most common pairs of vowels used to represent the /i:/ phoneme, but there are eight other possibilities. The index uses colour to give an idea of how common a spelling is, ranging from bright red to represent the most common to pale olive green to represent the least common.

I'm thinking about doing a native iBook version in due course, but for now Mac users can use Kindle's own (free) simulator.

Also available at Amazon: When Vowels Get Together: The paperback.

And if you have no objection to such promiscuity, Like this. 

Freebies (Teaching resources:  nearly 48,200 views  and over 6,500 downloads to date**. They're very eclectic - mostly EFL and MFL, but one of the most popular is from KS4 History, dating from my PGCE, with over 2,400 views and nearly 1,000 downloads to date. So it's worth having a browse.)

** This figure includes the count of views for a single resource held in an account that I accidentally created many years ago.