WTF

A COW HERD MAKES MORE

GREENHOUSE GAS A DAY

THAN A 3,000-MILE DRIVE

This startling snippet leapt out at me from a Times Magazine article just now. 'A single drover?' I thought, 'WTF!' – meaning, of course, 'What a Tremendous Fart'. Silly me, though, there was a word-space saving it from that hyper-flatulent meaning. But I wondered why the sub-editor had gone for that unnatural choice of words.

I looked in the text, and read this:

A herd of cows daily produces more greenhouse gas than a family car driven for 3,000 miles.

Now look back at the misleading subhead: it is in a 3-line box, with first and third lines very tight. 'A herd of cows' is three letters and a wordspace longer than 'a cow herd'. A monospace typeface such as Courier (in which an N takes up as much space as an M, and an I as much as an O, rather than the sort of proportional font that we are more accustomed to in print) accentuates this:

A herd of cows

versus  A cow herd

And if you made space for those three extra letters and one extra space by moving 'more' down to the second line, then that line'd be too full. So whether or not the medium is the message, the medium can certainly change the message in all sorts of risible (and/or calamitous) ways. I expect examples of the latter will come to me, but it's coming on to rain, and the washing's out.

(Just a quickie to let you know that work on V5.0 is under way, and V4.0 is still free to download!†)

b
Update, 20-13.09.29.18:00 – Added this PS:

And while we're on the subject of flatulence, I was dumbfounded by the ignorance and cultural insensitivity of the English-speaker from (or at least, resident in, Wales) who is reported as having said (one has to be careful – it was the Mail Online):

 'Just imagine how embarrassing it will be to have the word "fart" in your village's name .... I'd be humiliated every time I told someone my address'.

Oh dear.... The alleged speaker was not Hyacinth Bucket, but 'Sioned Jones' (who, with a Welsh-sounding name like that, should be ashamed of herself). OK, there'd be some sophomoric titters and photos of signposts, but that's par for the course when languages rub along together. It is, for example, only the most po-faced and socially insensitive English-speaking pedant who gives Immanuel Kant his native vowel; it's uncomfortably close to a taboo word.

The article 'explains' the problem:

Campaigners say the ancient name^‡ should be replaced because there is no 'V' in the Welsh language

And I'll spell out the URL, as it is a gem: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2430414/Varteg-Wales-renamed-Farteg-villagers-fear-make-butt-jokes.html#ixzz2gIbMlC56  – which invites the rejoinder 'No, it's not the making of butt-jokes they're worried about, it's fart-jokes.'

In fact, that explanation is a bit of an over-simplification. The written Welsh language has no letter 'v'. Welsh does have a voiced labio-dental fricative phoneme, to give it its $10 name; it has a /v/, and that phoneme is represented in writing as a single letter – which explains that old Ffion joke:

<political_history egg_sucker="grandmother">
Ffion was William Hague's wife, and he was PM[correction: ] party leader at the time.
</political_history>

'Why are there two 'f's in Ffion?'/ Because there's no effin' Prime Minister[correction: ] party leader' – /f/ is written 'ff'.

In short, when languages come together,  there is scope for double entendres. I'd rather live in a world with a bit of lavatory humour than in a world bereft of its minority languages.

Update 2013.09.30.09:45 - Added this PPS

And it's just occurred to me that that Ffion joke underlines my point about double entendres happening when languages meet (and if you thought I chose it because of that I'm sorry to disabuse you): here the two languages are the meta-language that addresses spelling and the informal speech that uses such defused (and so inoffensive) obscenities as "effin'".

Update 2013.10.02.15:55 – added this note:
^† Not any more

Update 2013.10.04.10:05  – added this note:
 ^‡I've only just appreciated the stupidity and insensitivity of this subhead. I might have guessed, given that it's the Mail. The 'ancient name' is 'Farteg'. A handful of centuries (maybe 6 –7 at the outside) doesn't qualify for ancientness. Farteg was called Farteg long before the Mail's Year Zero, 1066.

Update 2012.10.15.14:40  – Footer updated

---

 Mammon (When Vowels Get Together V4.1: Collection of Kindle word-lists grouping different pronunciations of vowel-pairs – AA-AU, EA-EU,   IA-IU, OA-OU, and – new for V4.1 – UA-UE.  If you buy it, contact  @WVGTbook on Twitter and I'll alert you to free downloads of the forthcoming volumes; or click the Following button at the foot of this page.)
And if you have no objection to such promiscuity, Like this.

Freebies (Teaching resources: nearly 32,400 views**,  and  4,400 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 1570 views/700 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.

Anglocentrism gone mad

Today's post is based on an article in The Times a few Saturdays ago, which I can't link to without involving you in the 'To pay or not to pay?' debate. And you know how I feel about paywalls. It is an Opinion piece about the loss of languages.^††

English is not the centre of the universe, though the writer of this article seems to think otherwise. The basis of what he says is right and lamentable, and the article is perhaps laudable for saying it. Language is a key to the way we think, and every lost language is a lost key [that's me, not him, in case you're thinking of publishing The Wit And Wisdom of Bob Knowles]:

...[W]hen a native language dies, a lot of other things disappear too [ed: a bit like saving a species saving a whole ecosystem...] . Place names and family names become inexplicable. Local traditions vanish because people no longer have the words to describe  their customs. The names of plants, birds or animals unique to a particular region go too – so the natural world has to be re-catalogued all over again in incongruous Latin or English.... Let your native language die and part of you dies with it.

He might have said, I've just thought,  'Ask not for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee.'

So far so true, so lamentable in content, and so laudable as journalism (if not brilliantly written); is inexplicable the right word? Yes, a linguist might explain a toponym, but what matters is that it has become meaningless – it's explicable all right, given a footnote or two. And why does anything have to be 're-catalogued all over again' (which is a bit like 'déjà vu all over again')? And is Latin's incongruity to the point?

The writer has a strange attitude to Latin in other ways:

,,, [W]e owe the glorious multiplicity of English to the mingling and mangling of Latin with all those tribal tongues. [ed He has mentioned the extinction of 'many Germanic and Celtic languages' by Latin.]

 WTF? We owe the glorious – erm... something ('multiplicity' is surely not the word: 'multifariousness' perhaps) – to a lot more than the naïve equation  

Latin + tribal tongues [whatever-the-hell THEY are] = English. 

And what does this Little Englander think Latin did throughout the rest of Europe? French, Provençal (+ N dialects, where N is a large number) Spanish, Catalan, Galician, Portuguese, Italian, Romanian, Sardinian... need I go on?

Well I shan't. #WVGTbook calls.

b
Update 2013.06.19.18:20
PS And I'm sorry, I recognize the difficulties of verse translation, believe me, but there's a time and place for it. That place is not in the closing lines of a piece on the loss of languages – particularly when the column-width makes it impossible to format it as verse: when there's no such consciousness (this is verse, so expect a dodgy translation). For the record, I'm not a speaker of Guernésias, but I'm pretty sure (OK, absolutely certain) that these words –

Que l'lingo  seit bouan ou mauvais
J'pâlron [ed. sic  –  looks ver-r-r-ry suspect to me] coum' nou pâlait  [ed. sic –  those  verb inflexions look REALLY odd†] autefais.

– don't mean

Whether the lingo be good or bad
I'm going to speak like dear old dad.

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

Update 2013.06.19.22:40 Added this footnote: 

† And 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....

Update 2013.06.20.17:10 Added this meta-footnote: 


‡ And you at the back, yes you, the smart-arse who's thinking 'First conjugation? The Latin for TALK isn't first conjugation.  It's the semi-deponent loqui [whence 'loquacious'].'  The verb I'm talking about is the Vulgar Latin PARABOLARE [whence parler,  parlare, falar... etc (presumably also the Guernésias pâler {in which the infinitive ending is a guess})] Phew, three levels of parenthesis in a meta-footnote. This is navel-gazing of the first order.

Update 2013.06.21.09:45 Added this PS:
Yesterday's copy of The Times reported on an event that is tangentially relevant to the issue of the loss of minority languages – it was a local cricket match abandoned  because one side was 'gaining an advantage in an ungentlemanly way' by speaking Welsh.'  It couldn't be, I wonder, that the English-only-speaking side were losing hand over fist, and wanted a way to save face...?

The story had a fairly obvious filler in the form of a jokey translation into 'Welsh' [I'm always dubious about this sort of thing] of cricket-related terms.  One that struck me was 'Win the Ashes', which struck me at the time as a suitable name for the undertaker at Llaregub – a friend of Dai Bread (GEDDIT?) There's a reason why throwaway lines are called that.

Update 2015.07.08.12.30 – Added this note

^††
I've found the article on a site devoted to another minority language: Manx.

Update 2017.09.26.10.05 – Brushed up, and deleted old footer.

¿Qué?

MrsK asked me the other day why Spanish tennis players (her main source of linguistic exemplars) spoke English less well than other foreign players. And it reminded me of this exchange, which I had contributed to some time ago in my early days as a UsingEnglish moderator.

To summarize my points (PS: in response to the request for 'the difficulties spanish speakers may have with pronunciation in english', and I may well have been talking to myself, as after the initial question the only contributor to that thread was me), these are the difficulties I could think of at the time, with a few other thoughts:

• Ease of mapping from writing to sounds in Spanish. Spanish learners try to pronounce every letter, because that is infallibly right in Spanish. (It's interesting - and perhaps relevant - that when I was at a teachers' training session about dyslexia, one teacher reported that she had had a Spanish student [an adult] who had been successfully through the Spanish education system without having his dyslexia diagnosed .)
• L1:L2 phonemes almost all (?maybe all) don't match.
• Timing - unlike English, Spanish is a syllable-timed rather than a stress-timed language. There is quite possibly a Spanish tale of pet-abuse to match
  
  Ding dong bell
  Pussy's in the well
  Who put him in?
  Little Johnny Flynn
  

  But if there is you can bet the line-lengths don't differ so widely  (the numbers of syllables fitting into the same four-beat measure are, in the first four lines, 3,5,4, and 5; but What a naughty boy was that, really takes the biscuit, at 7 syllables! :)
• Consonant clusters. English uses lots, while Spanish breaks them up with vowel sounds so that there are usually at most two consonants together in a single syllable. For example, English 'strange' has the cognate word extraño; whereas English is happy to start a syllable with three consonant phonemes, Spanish ensures that there are only two each in 'es-' and '-tra-'.
• English uses many phrasal verbs; Spanish doesn't. An English child might ask its parent 'Why didn't you bring the book you said you'd read to me out of up with you?' and the hearer would go back downstairs to get the right book without missing a beat (though probably not applauding the elegance of the construction).

But many of these apply to other languages too. Italian and French (and of course hundreds of others) are syllable-timed (although some southern dialects of Italian are stress-timed). Besides, the idea of syllable vs stress timing is not universally accepted. The title of Mark Liebermann's Language Log post leaves little doubt that he thinks it's boloney (although the jibe has an academically-polite disguise, in the Italian bologna):

[T]his is a complicated and contentious issue, and there have been many ideas over the years about how to rescue the (clearly much-loved) stress-timed vs. syllable-timed distinction. You could write a book about it. (And then someone else would write another book, disagreeing with you.)

So the jury's out, or rather it's a hung jury.  For me, I think a factor in the difficulties Spanish speakers have with English are something to do with the stress-timed/syllable-timed distinction. But there is plenty more to think about here. For example, I wonder if Catalan is stress-timed - which might account for the fact that I find the Castilian spoken in Catalonia much easier to follow than the Castilian spoken in Castile.

Which reminds me of an annoying encounter I had with a barman in Ibiza some years ago. I had asked for dos cervezas and he corrected me: he was used to lingistically-challenged Britishers who he could laugh at when their backs were turned, and presented with a competent speaker he had to find fault with something. It should be [θ], he said. The nerve of the man! He was the imperialist oppressor with his fancy foreign ceceo. In fact, it was a guilt-ridden holiday. It was all-inclusive, meaning that the local economy was virtually untouched (except for some employment at bread-line wages). The local Catalan-speakers had to put up with a lot from the Castilian-speaking interlopers.

But I digress.

b
updates 13.01.06.16.40 and 13.01.06.19.30
update 13.01.10.17.25 - a few tweaks to the PS

PS And while we're on the subject of annoying encounters involving Spanish speakers, with particular reference to 'fancy foreign ceceo', or 'imperialisp' as I'm tempted to call it, I'd just like to put on record my loathing of José Carreras' rendition of Misa Criolla (which I'm not going to dignify with a link - though Classic FM, and therefore Amazon, was full of it around the turn of the century).

In the '60's, when Ariel Ramirez wrote it‡, it came out at more or less the same time  as the Vatican's Second Ecumenical Council. Coming, as I did, from a God-fearing family (and we are talking 'Holy Mother Church' - unam sanctam catholicam et apostolicam ecclesiam - none of your Anglican nonsense), and saying the Mass in the vernacular was a big deal. Gloria a dio' e' las altura', E in la tierr' pas a los hombre'.. - so much gutsier than Gloria in excelsis deo. Et in terra pax hominibus.... In the time of Cortez, ceceo ('the imperialisp') didn't happen. I've forgotten the details, but I remember writing an essay with the stirring title 'The De-Voicing of Mediaeval Sibilants in Castilian'; Cortez would have called himself [kortɛdz], or if he was a serious trend-setter [kortɛts] (unless he spelt his name Cortés, as most historians have it - but why should a little thing like spelling be allowed to interfere with a perfectly good joke?) Carreras' pronunciation - you can almost  hear him saying 'Thees eeza 'ow djou  suppos-et to pronoonce-a eet, paisanos' - is plain offensive (in the 'weapon-like' sense); it's a weapon of imperialism, as when Churchill intentionally mispronounced 'Nazis' as /næzi:z/ or La Thatcher said /gæl ti: eǝ ri:/, giving it four contemptuous syllables.

So when Señor Carreras sings [paθ] a los hombres I want to scream 'You just don't get it!' I want to... (time for my medication).

update 2013.06.24.10.45 - Added this footnote and updated TES stats:
update 2013.06.24,17.05 - L'esprit del l'escalier

‡ This, the Real Missa Criolla was played – in possibly the shortest and most crassly truncated extract I've ever heard on Desert Island Discs (one could almost hear Sue Lawley's 'That's enough of this. No wonder nobody's ever heard of it') – on the radio  yesterday morning on Radio 4 Extra. Fortunately it was first recorded in 1996, before Carreras' Crime Against Humanity was perpetrated.


Update 2017.11.20.22:35 – Removed old footer.

Update 2018.06.26.10:20 – Added inline PS in red.