Up the creek, sans pagaie/senza pagaia/sin remo...

This tweet led me to a timely Guardian article:

Brexit Britain cannot afford to be laissez-faire about its languages crisis

Of course it can't. A post-Brexit exporter won't get very far by talking English slowly and in a loud voice, or by using home-grown machine-translated customer-facing materials such as this:

Customer misguidance originally shared on Facebook.

<inline_PS DATE="2019.12.20">
I've belatedly realized that the fault wasn't all machine-translation's: it's the unholy alliance of Optical Character Recognition and machine-translation, leaping from disculpen to discuss via a misread discuten.  Or maybe it was just a tired monoglot restaurateur jumping from disculpar to discutir in a dictionary.
</inline_PS>

Over the centuries, we Britons have come to believe that we are naturally proficient – exceptional, even – in certain pursuits. These include engineering, literature, the classics, pop music, geography and football...

But it is instructive, when thinking about the UK and Britishness and what might lie in store for us in the future, to consider the pursuits about which we do not feel so confiden, t. Of these, by far the most significant – and the most worrying – ' other languages. 

Source

But another tweet via the same source underlined the short-sighted idiocy of the government's decision to make languages optional after year 9 (or what we used to know as the third year):

(I'n not  sure how the dates work n this tweet, but the tweeter's heart is in the right place.)

To quote a BBC article published in January 2011:

The requirement for teenagers to take a language at GCSE was ended by the last Labour government in 2004. It led to a massive slump in the numbers taking languages.

Back then it seemed as though some reversal of this obscurantist decision was on the cards.

L‘Envoi

But in a more recent article (February 2019) the BBC quoted Matthew Fell, chief UK policy director for business group the CBI.

"Employer demand for French, German and Spanish skills have significantly increased over the last few years. 

"The decline in language learning in schools must be reversed, or else the UK will be less competitive globally and young people less prepared for the modern world. 

"As well as speaking a foreign language, increasing young people's cultural awareness and their ability to work with people from around the world is just as important."

But I must get on.

b

Update: 2019.12.20.15:10 – Added inline PS

Frites or crêpes? Who cares?

A few days ago the usually unruffled calm of French grammar was rudely disturbed by a pair of teachers in Belgium, who wanted a change:

Currently, the rule is that the past participle of a verb does not agree with the direct object of a sentence if it comes after it, but it does when the object comes before the participle.

So for instance, in the sentence j'ai mangé des frites (I ate chips), mangé remains the same. But in the sentence les frites que j'ai mangées (the chips that I have eaten), the participle agrees with the word chips, which is feminine and plural.

...The rule was imported from Italy by pedants in the 16th Century and is being dropped in everyday use, the pair argue.

BBC source

There are three things about the original Libération article  that struck me:

• Those Italian pedants in the 16th Century had a name, and it started with only one:
  

  Au XVI^e siècle, Clément Marot, constatant le même phénomène en italien, en fait la promotion à l’aide d’un joli poème, ce qui fera dire à Voltaire : «Il a ramené deux choses d’Italie : la vérole [HD: smallpox] et l’accord du participe passé. Je pense que c’est le deuxième qui a fait le plus de ravages [HD: I think the latter did the most damage]».

  This is reminiscent of the history of English, which is littered with pedantic attempts at "tidying up" by introducing rules that cause more trouble than they solve.
   
• The "80 hours of teaching time" claim looks very odd, not to say iffy. I suspect some strange extrapolation of Wallonia's version of OFSTED accounting methods. Before anyone believes this, or worse still acts on it, I recommend a closer inspection of this figure. (On a related topic, I wonder what proof there is of the "being dropped in everyday usage" claim. It seems credible, and should be easy enough to prove, but I'd be happier not relying on what a couple of Belgian teachers ARGUE [I wonder what universe the BBC plucked that verb out of]).
  
  
• The example has changed. This is not a serious counter argument; indeed, it's just not a counter-argument – simply an object of passing interest. The writer of the BBC article seems to have decided that frites was a more telling example than crêpes:
  

  «Employé avec l’auxiliaire avoir, le participe passé s’accorde en genre et en nombre avec le complément d’objet direct quand celui-ci le précède (les crêpes que j’ai mangées). Mais si le complément suit le participe, il reste invariable (j’ai mangé les crêpes).» [HD: my underline, just to make navigation a bit easier.]
  

This sparked off an irrelevant memory:

<autobiographical_note date="1968">
After my O-levels [HD: fore-runner of GCSEs] I went hitch-hiking around Europe with a friend. When we arrived outside Paris (at the Auberge de Jeunesse in the unpromisingly-named Châtenay-Malabry [surely bon abri would have been a more attractive-sounding name]), we ate from a stall that sold crêpes. The crêperie was set up a bit like a fish-and chip stall. But this apparent similarity was  a faux-ami. The bottle on the counter, tipped with a pouring spout, was not for free use of the customer.

<meta_digression\>
While I'm on the subect of "false friends", an ongoing cycle repair has alerted me to fact that rubber solution is not solution de caoutchouc but dissolution de caoutchouc; not exactly a false friend, but something that's just not friendly at all.
</meta_digression\>

I ordered and paid for a crêpe and reached for a bottle of Grand Marnier, standing on the counter like a vinegar bottle in a fish and chip stall. The stall-holder was not amused, and gave me an earful. She no doubt agreed with de Gaulle, who for some years had remained obdurate about keeping la perfide Albion out of the EEC.
</autobiographical_note>

I'm glad that the English have avoided this sort of wrangling by the simple expedient of not having a supreme arbiter of correctness. If the rule is being used in practice less and less, that will be it. The Académie (or some more relevant body, as the Académie doesn't really do syntax) can keep its finger in the dyke if it likes, but it won't have much bearing on the linguistic facts.  We are left with a twale twold by a twidiot:

The BBC article translates this: "why not also drop the offside rule in football? That way ... schoolchildren will be able to spell phonetically and football players will be able to play with their hands.

I'm not sure about the "that way", but la règle du hors-jeu will make a useful new entry in my Vocab. Book.

b

Teachers must fight computers

So said the Ottawa Citizen in a feature ironically included  in the "Science" section of that paper nearly 50 years ago (30 November 1981):

This jeremiad is reminiscent of reactions to many other enabling technologies and newly discovered ways of behaving.

• Committing ideas to paper will make us lose the ability to memorize things.
• Teaching people to read and write, especially with the introduction of printing with movable type, will give them ideas above their station.
• Teaching people to read without moving their lips is an invitation to social unrest.
• Letting people in school use paper will decimate the slate industry.
• The use of typewriters (that is, manual typewriters) will make us lose the ability to write longhand.
• Giving learners access to a world of information through the Internet (particularly the World Wide Web, but this Ottawa Citizen piece pre-dates that by 10 years) will hobble a child‘s ability to glean information from books.

And so on, ad nauseam. Whenever  a development threatens the old way of thinking, obscurantists decry its imagined impact on education.

But this link was posted on Twitter by the Pessimists [no apostrophe, of course – this is Twitter] Archive Podcast, who may not have been entirely at one with its message. And later in the article Dr Smith starts to talk sense:

Trusted. This is a crucial word, that should be noted by the Goves (sic) of Academe. IT, and particularly the World Wide Web,  gives access to a world of realia [that's the language teacher's jargon for actual stuff] – in text, images both still and moving, and sounds).

There is a movement in language teaching that has borrowed the name of the DOGME '95 movement in film,  which Wikipedia describes like this:

Dogme 95 was a filmmaking movement started in 1995 by the Danish directors Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg, who created the "Dogme 95 Manifesto" and the "Vows of Chastity" (Danish: kyskhedsløfter). These were rules to create filmmaking based on the traditional values of story, acting, and theme, and excluding the use of elaborate special effects or technology.

Wikipedia

 A few years later (so dropping the "'95" bit of the name) a language teaching movement adopted similar principles

Although Dogme teaching has been seen to be anti-technology,^[6] Thornbury maintains that he does not see Dogme as being opposed to technology as such,^[14] rather that the approach is critical of using technology that does not enable teaching that is both learner centered and is based upon authentic communication. Indeed, more recent attempts to map Dogme principles on to language learning with web 2.0 tools (under the term "Dogme 2.0") are considered evidence of Dogme being in transition^[15] and therefore of being compatible with new technology.

Wikipedia

Not everyone agrees with the "compatible with new technology" bit; there are language teachers who insist that the teacher must go "naked into the classroom" (as Nye Bevan so nearly said). But the Wikipedia article on Dogme '95 goes on to say that the movement was "an attempt to take back power for the director". Replace director with teacher, and the arguments about technology become insignificant. What matters, as Dr Smith said in that Ottawa Citizen article, is trust in the practitioner.

<autobiographical_note>
And if, like dear old M. Baring-Gould, he is armed with a magnétophone (reel-to-reel, given that we are talking about the mid-'60s) that doesn't make him any less trustworthy.
</autobiographical_note>

b

Out of the mouths of babes and ducklings

Some time ago, here,  I wrote this:

<soapbox>
To learn to speak a foreign language, we must regress to our infancy and learn to make speech noises the way a baby does. Even infancy is a bit late*; there is evidence that growing familiarity with speech sound starts in the womb. Here is just one such study).

* To quote from a recent article:

"The dramatic finding of this study is that not only are human neonates capable of producing different cry melodies, but they prefer to produce those melody patterns that are typical for the ambient language they have heard during their fetal life, within the last trimester of gestation," said Kathleen Wermke of the University of Würzburg in Germany.

</soapbox>

I've just come across a much more recent source via this NY Times article .  The immediately relevant issue (language-acquisition in the womb) is summed up here:

In the latest study, published in January in Royal Society Open Science, Jiyoun Choi, a doctoral student at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands... and her colleagues looked at Dutch-speaking adults, some of whom had been adopted from Korea, but none of whom spoke Korean. The researchers found that people born in Korea and adopted as babies or toddlers by Dutch families were able to learn to make Korean sounds significantly better than the Dutch-speaking controls who had been born into Dutch families.

It was especially interesting that this effect held not only for those who had been adopted after the age of 17 months, when they would have been saying some words, but also for those adopted at under 6 months. In other words, the language heard before birth and in the first months of life had affected both sound perception and sound production, even though the change of language environment happened before the children started making those sounds themselves.

This is impressive, though I'm not sure the NY Times‘s last sentence (in that excerpt) is entirely justified: "under 6  months" is not the same as "before birth"; and how could they possibly test anything to do with sound production...? (That's a rather immature question: I need to read the original paper – although the title

Early development of abstract language knowledge...

doesn't inspire confidence. The continuation does though:

...: evidence from perception–production transfer of birth-language memory

... is more  promising though.)

<autobiographical_note>
During last Saturday's Purcell concert – which, sadly, many of you missed – I was struck by two pre-echoes of our next (perhaps the little MD knows something about it, as  veterans of the original Bill and Ben series might think

<digression type="cultural background">
Bill and Ben were flower-pot-men (don't ask – it was a children's TV programme in the days when [in the UK] the BBC's Watch with Mother was more-or-less the only source of children's TV) . They caused various sorts of mild mayhem; and the narrator often finished with the words "... and I think the Little House knows something about it").
</digression>

         Where was I...? Oh yes, pre-echoes:

• The trumpets in the canzona in the overture to Come ye sons of art play a phrase remarkably similar to this tune from a very different context (J. S. Bach's St John Passion):
  

• The words "Haste, haste to town" in Dido and Aeneas, which are similar in both sense and melody to this passage::
  

</autobiographical_note>

Enough. Onward and upward: next on the agenda (perhaps that should be canenda –  from Latin cano [="I sing"]) needs work:

PS Quite incidentally (not a COincidence, it just happened), I wonder if Evan Davies in last week's The Bottom Line knew what he was doing when he produced this glorious mixed metaphor:

Is the white van your bète noire?

b


Update: 2017.03.06.18.40 – Added PPS

PPS And here‘s a clue:

• Switch prison guard‘s allegiance and increase metaphorical pressure. (4, 3, 5)

Update: 2017.03.20.16.10 – Added PPPS

PPS: On the subject of my last point, I wonder how a white-van man might become an eminence grise. Oh, and that clue: TURN THE SCREW.

Incidentally, for the benefit of anyone expecting sense from my subject lines, ... no, it's gone. There was a reason though.

Phrasal verbs and intonation

The British National Corpus reports 666 instances ...

<wonders_of_computicles>
(just click on that link and watch while the search unfold. 

<INLINE_PS DATE="2019">
This has stopped working. You can run the search for yourself with the search string    run in    (no quotation marks, no vinculum, just those two words).
</INLINE_PS>

</wonders_of_computicles>

... of run in – a (suitably) devilish number – and devilish it is, for students of ESOL at least.

I've written before (here) about phrasal verbs:

...I hadn't realized, until I started to  teach ESOL, what a big hurdle phrasal verbs were. Try Googling English Dictionary of Phrasal Verbs. You get (or at least I get – Heaven alone knows what customized search algorithms are at play) over 500,000 hits. That's a world of pain for ESOL students; who have to remember not only apparently-paradoxical meanings but a range of syntactic oddities. And to make things worse, we English-speakers keep inventing new ones....

(If you're new to this blog, you might want to have a read [and on the subject of problems for ESOL students, what about "have a read"?]

Phrasal verbs are a huge problem, even if you consider only the ones that are listed in the thousands of  dictionaries and web-pages and other lists of all kinds, but as I said in that excerpt we English-speakers keep inventing new ones. And a mis-reading on the news just now alerted me to a new one.

Intonation was the tell-tale slip (as it often is). The newsreader said [of a rugby player,  voicing over a bit of VT] "Here he is, running in a try". But run in, except in the context of internal combustion engines isn't usually a phrasal verb. It is very commonly (in most if not all of those BNC hits I mentioned earlier – here's one of the first of those 666: "...if we allow it to run in the way the government have in mind...") a prepositional usage; the verb run and the preposition in just happen to fall together.

So the voice said (or, to give him his due, he bailed out as soon as he realized that the words in a try were not a meaning-bearing unit [or semanteme, as I regret some linguists feel it necessary to say]):

 ... as he would have said if the words had been

Here he is, running in his Nth race.

He didn't know that in the world of rugby (I only have experience of Rugby Union, being a feeble effete Southerner, but I don't see why it shouldn't also be used in the world of Rugby League) run in is a transitive phrasal verb – referring to an easy, almost unopposed try (which, for our American readers, is not unlike a touch-down  – with the possibly counter-intuitive difference that it involves TOUCHING THE BALL DOWN).

The correct intonation would be one introductory phrase of three words, and then running in his Nth try in a separate and continuous rising and falling curve:

In a phrasal verb, both the main verb and the preposition (often, for clarity, called a particle in this context) usually (if not always – though I'll have to think about that) belong in the same intonational curve; by starting a new intonational curve at the onset of the preposition the speaker disrupts the meaning of the phrasal verb. But you can't get the intonation  right  if you don't understand the context. And phrasal verbs are readily created in specific contexts.

<autobiographical_note date_range="early 1971">
This puts me in mind of my days down and out in Barcelona. I didn't speak Spanish and hadn't done it at school; I had an O-level grammar book (not aimed at self-study), and was reading it. My daily budget extended to a copy of La Vanguardia (so not that down and out), which I scanned diligently. Articles in the sections dealing with international affairs, current events, politics and so on were not too difficult to make sense of: the vocabulary – with, on the face of it, "harder" vocabulary – was often guessable on the basis of cognates in other modern languages and/or Greek or Latin-based etymology.

Not so the sports pages  – and not just in sports I knew nothing about, such as handball, pelota, or (though the word sport is questionable in this case) bull-fighting. Even, say, reports about football (aka soccer) were a closed book to me. The words and the syntax associated with them was just not the same as you get from books.
</autobiographical_note>

Anyway, the point is this: phrasal verbs are, in the case I have looked at, just the prompt for the recognition of a problem with intonation. (Or vice versa. Often, in language teaching, a problem in one sphere points to a problem in another. So there's a lesson for teachers here: if you hear a problem, don't be satisfied with just "fixing" it – when you think about it, you might find that it's a symptom of another problem.)

Enough for now...

b

PS: A crossword clue:

• Weight of the Holocaust – he doesn't believe it. (6)
  
  

Update: 2017.02.11.14:15  – Added PPS


PPS And another:

• Leaders of other teams interrupt scrum – for keeping balls in? (7)
  
  

Update: 2017.02.13.15:15  – Added PPPS

PPPS

Added a clarification, in the main text, in blue, and yet another clue:

• Average quantity? Much more important than that! (9)
  
  

Update: 2017.04.15.15:55  – Those answers, at last: 

1. DENIER
2. SCROTUM
3. PARAMOUNT

Update: 2019.10.8.11:10  – Added inline PS

You say /espǝræntǝʊ/ ...

... and I say /esperɑ:ntǝʊ/. These were two of the pronunciations I  heard on Radio 4 this morning. Which underlines a problem with trying to create a 'universal language': it can't be done. The people who insisted on the /ɑ:/ did not try to do anything outlandish to the uniquely English /ǝʊ/, though I imagine there are carefully-spoken Esperantists who give it an [ɔ] (or whatever it's supposed to be).

In my pre-1966 boyhood (the date will have resonance for Roman Catholics living through the revolution that replaced the Latin Mass with the vernacular Mass, following the 2nd Ecumenical Council called by Pope John XXIII) I often heard the argument

 'That's the wonderful thing about having the liturgy in Latin: any member of the Faithful anywhere in the world can go into a church anywhere else in the world and feel at home.'

Erm... no they couldn't.  And people who said they could were either telling a pious lie (which I'm sure they believed), or were linguistically insensitive on an epic scale, or both.

This 'argument' was very popular among traditionalists opposed to the introduction of the vernacular Mass, But it holds very little, if any, water, as this  reminiscence shows:

<autobiographical_note> 

During an exchange visit to a family living in Motteville, I went to a French church. I was an altar-boy (and fully paid-up member of the Guild of St Stephen to boot, I'll have you know), as I've said elsewhere, and knew the Latin Mass by heart. But it wasn't until the altar-boy rang the bell at the end of the 'Mass of the Catechumens' (the bell that signals

 <Hocus_Pocus interesting tidbit="1655 usage note†">
'OK, we've come to the Really Secret stuff, so if you haven't been baptized  you know where the door is' [that's a fairly loose interpretation,  but you get the gist]
</Hocus_Pocus>

 ) that I had any idea where the ceremony had got to; we  had arrived late, as Madame had a lot of children to organize, without the help of Monsieur, whose sole contribution to the family atmosphere seemed to be to sit at the table before meals shouting 'On a faim'. 

</autobiographical_note> 

This is what happens when anyone tries to impose a universal language; because of local accidents of pronunciation and context, the beautiful system breaks down into a babble of mutually-incomprehensible dialects.

<PS>
Incidentally, I can't stand the French pronunciation of the Latin U à la française, although that [y] was more than likely what Fauré had in mind for his various liturgical settings.
</PS>

Of course, Esperanto limps on; listen to the programme. But it never lived up to the dreams of L. L Zamenhof (its creator). And although articles like this big up its numerical importance, one can't but agree with that programme's conclusion: if you want a common language, learn English (which is just as well, since foreign language learning in the UK [to any useful level] seems to be the privilege of a dwindling minority of the [largely] privately-educated.)

b

Update 2015.01.27.10:15 – added note:

† In fact, it's just struck me that that supposed derivation from the crucial^‡ words of the Consecration of the Eucharist makes my choice of tag-name strangely apposite. (I say 'supposed' because the fact of its having been written down doesn't  cut much ice; in 1655 people were quite capable of preserving in aspic a piece of folk etymology [which may, in this case, it seems to me, be more ben trovato than vero]).

Update 2015.03.22.22:40 – added PS
PS

^‡And there's another pregnant coincidence, given the etymological link between crucial and crucify.

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.

---

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.