English tests as part of the 'hostile environment'

A Guardian article last week quoted Stephen Timms, the Labour MP for East Ham:

“Panorama established that a few dozen people cheated, but the way the government has responded has blighted the lives of thousands and thousands who did not cheat. All the people I’ve met feel mortified that anyone would think they would cheat."
Source

My attention was drawn to the article by this tweet:

And the writer also wrote a blog post; "rather angry" she said:

Not very angry – bit of a shame really for a fan of (written) blood sports; I'm partial to a literary hatchet job.  But there's a lot to be angry about:

I knew there had been problems with some of the centres running tests of English, but it now turns out overseas applicants and some who are already studying in the UK for whom there is no evidence of cheating are having their visas cancelled, denied or - in extreme cases - being forcibly removed from the UK.  Many have asked to sit tests again to prove their proficiency and therefore eligibility to study in the UK. This has fallen on deaf ears. 

Source

A few days later the Guardian upped the ante:

The Guardian has learned that a special team overseen by the Home Office was established in January 2017 to deal with the growing backlog of legal actions related to a Home Office decision in 2014 to revoke or curtail the visas of around 34,000 students whom they accused of cheating in a government-approved English language test. 

Guardian

The Indy came late to the party

The Home Office is to be investigated over its decision to cancel the visas of tens of thousands of foreign students and remove more than 1,000 people from the country as a result of cheating allegations in English language tests... 

On Friday, Mr Timms, MP for East Ham, said the treatment of the students had been “a disgrace”, telling the BBC: “They trusted Britain to provide them with a decent education. Instead, they've been falsely accused of cheating and been given no chance to appeal. They've been left in limbo for years.” 

Independent

In truth though that came "late to the party" needs qualifying.  As the same Indy article said:

The Independent revealed in February that some students were still being detained and were living in “terror” despite not being involved in the scandal.

This is a disgrace  – in the fullest sense of the word (was the creation of the "hostile environment" gracious?) Amid all this Brexit nonsense, the last thing we need to  do is alienate well--intentioned visitors (visitors, incidentally, who pay good money to contribute to the educational experience of domestic students). There is a  path to be navigated  between "a hostile environment" and the wielding of soft power; and this shabby episode represents an ugly deviation away from the side of the angels.

b

Heaven, I'm in heaven...

...When we're laid together rotting feet to feet.

This rather ghoulish image will be explained in the fullness of time. It's a long story:

<autobiographical_note date="Summer 1973">
After my first year of Portuguese I went to a summer school at the Universidade de Coimbra, which gave me both a tan and a useful addition to my stock of adjectives-turned-nouns, as every day I caught o eléctrico to the University.

<etymological_note>
I've mentioned this before. In short, one of the engines of word formation is that people get
used to dropping the noun in an <adjective-noun> pair. A peach is a Persian, and cheese is
formed or moulded in some languages. For the full story, see here.
</etymological_note>

Um elétrico is a tram. 

Every Saturday the students were  taken on a guided tour led by a little man who was a geographer, and obsessed with land reclamation. So everywhere we stopped he gave us a lecture on the particular sand of the area. There are several sorts of sand in Portugal, but more than that I couldn't say – as the Portuguese spoken by the students wasn't up to his patter. 

The one other recurring theme of his lectures was the tragic love affair of the prince dom Pedro and his mother‘s lady-in-waiting (Don't queens EVER learn?) Inêz de Castro. One Saturday we visited the Monastery of Alcobaça, where the lovers are buried. The Atlas Obscura recounts:

...King Afonso IV, Pedro’s father, finally had Inês murdered before her children’s eyes. Pedro, heartbroken and enraged, rose up in open rebellion against his father, but ultimately failed in his quest for revenge and justice.  

Two years after Inês’ death, Afonso died and Pedro became king; and here’s where things go a little sideways:  

The tomb at Alcobaça

Legend holds that Pedro ordered Inês’ body to be disinterred, her corpse dressed in finery and propped up in the throne room. Pedro then ordered his vassals to pledge their obedience and loyalty to this corpse he called his wife and queen, and further demanded that they kiss her dead hand. 

Formalities thus dispensed with, Pedro had his corpse bride installed in a lavish tomb...
 Source 

</autobiographical_note>

According to Camões (the author of the piece I‘m working on for the Stephen Spender Prize for Poetry in Translation) her burial place is no less weird – feet-to-feet with her prince, so that the lovers’ first sight (when ‘raised incorruptible’) would be each other....

<inline_ps>
Sounds odd to me (not that the whole thing is particularly unodd). I thought the God-fearing rules required the body to be buried a  particular way round. Besides, shouldn’t they have their minds on higher things? (If they had minds, of course).
</inline_ps>

...The notes to the World's Classics edition  say that the exhumation story "speaks of some derangement", going on

Yet his decree that they should be buried feet to feet... so that hers will  be the first face he sees at the resurrection, seems the action of a lover.

How old is this guy? Has he forgotten? Are passionate romantic love and derangement mutually exclusive?

I had come across the name Inêz de Castro in my study of Golden Age Spanish literature as the subject of a missing work by Lope de Vega (that 'missing' is shorthand for "well-we've-only-got-Lope's-word-for-it-that-it-ever-existed" – but he did write quite a lot of other stuff, so we've no reason to think he was just bumping up his cv by claiming to have written another work); but I thought no more of it at the time.

Interesting though this story is, it may not be suitable as an entry for the Spender Prize for Poetry in Translation. The rules restrict explanations to "a commentary of not more than 300 words". And as Os Lusíadas was first published when Shakespeare was only a

whining schoolboy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school

there are single phrases that call for 300 words of explanation. I've started the translation now though, so I'll finish.

b

Update: 2019.04.22.18:55 – Added inline PS.

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").

It ain't over...

 ... till the fa... (Come to think of it, why did the coiner of that adage assume that prima donnas (whose big song tended to end the show) had to be fat; Brünnhilde maybe, but not Tosca...) ...till the fat lady sings

My inbox caught a whiff of musical history  last week:

Liszt began work on an Italian opera in 1845. He started composing in 1850 but abandoned the project after completing the first act. The score — written largely in shorthand — was known to only a small number of Liszt scholars who concluded that it could never be performed because the material was incomplete and largely indecipherable. [HD as Shaw (??*) said, it was not so much weighed in the balance and found wanting as found difficult and not tried at all.]

David Trippett, Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Music at Cambridge University, saw it differently, and spent three years deciphering the forgotten 115-page manuscript, decoding Liszt’s notes and supplying a 20-bar finale. The result is the complete first act of Sardanapalo, Liszt’s only mature opera, based on Lord Byron’s Assyrian tragedy of 1821, Sardanapalus.
Source

I'm not sure why this became newsworthy on 19 March 2019, as the same article goes on to say

Between April 2017 – July 2018 Dr Trippett orchestrated the opera according to Liszt’s cues...

<digression>
HD: I DO hate this pleonastic use of "between" and  "–" , but don't let my bugbears interfere with your understanding of something that, admittedly, is perfectly clear. And while we're here, should that be sic – for clues?
</digression>

...based on the scores on Liszt’s desk during the 1850s. 
Source

In a post on The Conversation on 11 February 2019 Dr Trippett wrote

I am a musicologist and so my interest is primarily in musical sketches. These can pose challenges of presentation that scraps of poetry or incomplete drawings do not. However beguiling incomplete art may be, what are we to do with unfinished music?

And his answer to that question is implied by the title of the piece:

Editing unfinished music by a great composer is controversial – but sometimes it needs to be done

And as Colonel Pickering might have said "He did it".

Notes from a New Enterprise

When this was posted, 29 March was due to be a date that would live in infamy, but that's changed; though HMG's attitude to the revocation of Article 50 is implied by their choice of a date for a petition-inspired debate: April Fools' Day. And if you can't make sense of this paragraph you've had the good fortune to avoid the three years of unseemly wrangling that will perhaps come to be known as Cameron's Folly.

Anyway, that gives me 3 and a bit months to put my money where my mouth is. It's about 40 years since I did any serious translating, and we've all passed a lot of water since then.

So far I've made a start – chosen my author (Camões, in a nod to former glories ...

<autobiographical_note>
[last translation I did won the Camões Award, back in the days when arts funding was less pitiful than it is now; the award has been discontinued]. 

<inline_PS>
Not to be confused with the Camões Prize, first awarded in 1989 and awarded annually thereafter by the Portuguese Direcção-Geral do Livro e das Bibliotecas and the Brazilian Fundação Biblioteca Nacional. The Camões Award was made by the Luso-Brazilian Society, Canning House, and I submitted my entry in 1974.
<-inline_PS>

</autobiographical_note>

...) and chosen my extract (the Rules say "translate a poem" but Os Lusíadas runs to nearly 300 pages in the original Portuguese; that's not the original original, which was first published in 1572). More anon, when the weather is less inviting...

b

Update: 2019.04.01.10:45 – Added footnote,  added to <inline_PS>, and added PPS.

*
Regardless of the date of this update, I really got it wrong; well, right era, wrong opinionated ideologue. It was Chesterton who wrote "The Christian ideal... [HD And if I'd remembered this bit of context I'd have had a better chance of placing the source.  Added to this, the Colonel Pickering thought brought Shaw to mind] ...has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried."

PPS
Stop Press. My entry for the Stephen Spender Prize has met choppy  waters (quite appropriately,  given  the poem's subject matter: voyages of discovery). The Conditions of entry call for "a commentary of not more than 300 words", and – given that  Os Lusíadas was published when Shakespeare was still  a schoolboy – there are single phrases in it that would be quite meaningless to a 21st century English  reader without more than 300 words of explanation.

Update: 2019.07.01.13:15 – Added PPPS

PPPS
All is – if not well, exactly – at least settled. I chose another passage, less footnote-iferous, and submitted that. But the more interesting passage (discussed a few posts later than this one, with title Heaven, I'm in Heaven) wouldn't accept its suppression; so eventually I made a second submission (with a second entry fee – but hey, you're only old once).

That's easy enough for YOU to say

I saw a tweet the other day, which at first struck me as fanciful (or, maybe, even jocular):

Source

The article starts with a point that I have often made in this blog, but puts it rather better:

Babies have an astonishing talent that adults entirely lose. By the age of one, they can recognise the significant noises in the babble around them and group them into a language. When we have lost this capacity as adults, it becomes enormously difficult to distinguish between sounds that are glaringly different to a native speaker.

But I'm not sure what this has to do with the headline. So I'll quote from the abstract of the  actual research paper (not from the body of the document, which I can't see without spending money or knowing the secret handsh... erm... password.

Human speech manifests itself in spectacular diversity, ranging from ubiquitous sounds such as “m” and “a” to the rare click consonants in some languages of southern Africa. This range is generally thought to have been fixed by biological constraints since at least the emergence of Homo sapiens....

[W]e expect that any change in the human apparatus for production, perception, or learning affects the probability—or even the range—of the sounds that languages have. Paleoanthropological evidence suggests that the production apparatus has undergone a fundamental change of just this kind since the Neolithic. Although humans generally start out with vertical and horizontal overlap in their bite configuration (overbite and overjet, respectively), masticatory exertion in the Paleolithic gave rise to an edge-to-edge bite after adolescence... 

Chewing  roots and seeds altered what in phonetics classes we learnt to call "the buccal tract" – the stuff that we use to make vocal sounds: the teeth, palate, lips and so on. The suggestion is

... that this post-Neolithic decline of edge-to-edge bite enabled the innovation and spread of a new class of speech sounds that is now present in nearly half of the world’s languages: labiodentals, produced by positioning the lower lip against the upper teeth, such as in “f” or “v.” 

Biomechanical models of the speech apparatus show that labiodentals incur about 30% less muscular effort in the overbite and overjet configuration than in the edge-to-edge bite configuration. This difference is not present in similar articulations that place the upper lip, instead of the teeth, against the lower lip (as in bilabial “m,” “w,” or “p”). Our models also show that the overbite and overjet configuration reduces the incidental tooth/lip distance in bilabial articulations to 24 to 70% of their original values, inviting accidental production of labiodentals. 

Interesting stuff. I'm inclined  to believe it, but also to wonder what other coincidental environmental changes affected (and sometimes, perhaps, caused) other phonological differences: why, for example, Hawaiian has 13 phonemes but other languages have several times that (Danish, for example, has 4 times as many, and Lithuanian has even more (two examples taken from this EU document ...

<digression>
Some of these figures look a bit off to me. Does Portuguese have only 9 diphthongs (as claimed in that EU document)? They must be ignoring something – nasals, I suspect. My bible for information about  Continental Portuguese is a typescript, possibly later published by L. W. Keates. He lists 10 oral diphthongs and 4 nasal diphthongs – two of which can be combined to form the triphthongs heard in words such as têm and põem. However you count it, that looks to me like more than 9.

<brazilian_Portuguese status="query">
Maybe, as is so often the case, the authors of that EU document have been led astray by the Internet default position that

Portuguese=Brazilian Portuguese

which would be ridiculous in a document dealing with languages spoken in Europe. But I know next to nothing about Brazilian Portuguese, so won't speculate further.
</brazilian_Portuguese status="query">

</digression>

... but still); why click consonants are confined to a handful of South African languages....

Another case of environment moulding language occurs to me, but I have notes and words to learn for next Saturday's concert (mentioned before in this blog, here), so I'll save it for an update.

b

Update: 2019.03.25.11:10 – Added PS

PS

Another case where environment has affected not phonology but vocabulary is that of Proto-Indo-European. I vaguely remember some research cited by Joe Cremona (see this blog, passim [that's Latin for 'So often that I can't be bothered to check a reference']). The research placed the origins of PIE on the basis of vocabulary. Indo-European langages are spoken today in all kinds of environment, but common words like pond...

<PIE_examples case="pond">
Ancient Greek lakkos, Latin lacus, German lagu/, Irish loch/loch, Old Armenian լիճ (lič), English lagu/--, Lithuanian lekmenė, Albanian lumene, Old Norse lǫgr, Serbian lokva, Russian лужа (luža) (puddle)?
Source
 </PIE_examples>

...lake...

<PIE_examples case="lake">
Lithuanian ežeras, Latvian ezers, Old Church Slavonic jezero, Russian озеро (ozero), Illyr. oseriates, Ancient Greek Akherōn, Polish jezioro, Slovak jazero, Czech jezero, Old Prussian assaran Source
</PIE_examples>

...river....

<PIE_examples case="river">
Latin aqua, Russian Ока (Oka), Gothic aha, German aha/Ache, English īg/island, Sanskrit ap, Hittite akwanzi, Luwian ahw-, Palaic aku-, Old Norse á, Gothic aƕa  
Source
</PIE_examples>

...wolf...

<PIE_examples case="wolf">
Lithuanian vilkas, Latvian vilks, English wulf/wolf, Gaulish vail, Latin lupus, German wolf/Wolf, Ancient Greek lukos, Albanian ujk;ulk, Sanskrit vṛka, Avestan vehrka-, Tocharian --/walkwe, Persian varka/gorg, Old Prussian wilkis, Gothic wulfs, Old Norse úlfr, Old Church Slavonic vlĭkŭ, Russian волк (volk), Polish wilk, Slovak vlk, Kurdish/Zazaki gurg/verg, Luwian walwa, Welsh gweilgi, Pashto lewë, Serbian vuk Source

</PIE_examples>

...salmon....

<PIE_examples case="salmon">
Tocharian laks/läks, Old Norse lax, Lithuanian lašiša, Latvian lasis, Russian лосось (lososʹ), Polish łosoś, Slovak losos, German lahs/Lachs, English leax/--, Old Prussian lalasso 
Source
</PIE_examples>

...etc. etc. suggest that the language they derive from was spoken originally in a certain kind of environment. Of course, there are hundreds of attested words – and I'm using "attested" there in a loose sense . They are only attested to the extent that they are reliably assumed to have existed, on the basis of relatively modern examples of cognates.  There can, by definition, be no direct attestation of an unrecorded language. But a fellow can dream.

But that's enough navel-gazing for now. :-)

<For_further_research but="not by me">
Proposed study: on a possible relation between the number of phonemes used  in a language and the per capita length of the coastline surrounding its speakers: e.g. Hawaiian versus Danish.
</For_further_research>

Enough I said.
b 

Ö-Ö-Ötzi Goodbye

At the weekend Radio 4 Extra Radiolab dealt with Ötzi.

In September 1991 a corpse was unearthed (unsnowed, perhaps?) near the border between Austria and Italy. The nearness to  the border wasn't a matter of great import at first: it was just a question of whose authorities would handle the red tape – checking missing persons lists, informing relatives...

There were some living relatives as it happens:

Living links to the Iceman have now been revealed by a new DNA study. Gene researchers looking at unusual markers on the Iceman's male sex chromosome report that they have uncovered at least 19 genetic relatives of Ötzi in Austria's Tyrol region.

The match was made from samples of 3,700 anonymous blood donors in a study led by Walther Parson at Innsbruck Medical University. Sharing a rare mutation known as G-L91, "the Iceman and those 19 share a common ancestor, who may have lived 10,000 to 12,000 years ago," Parson said. 

Source

When it was found that the corpse was a mummy of a man who lived and breathed (and suffered and feared and bled) 5,300 years ago the nearness to the border took on a heightened importance. The fact that the mummy is now in a custom-built museum in Bolzano indicates that the Italian claims won (by a few metres).

The mummy, as shown in Wikipedia.
(See note)

Ötzi ...also called the Iceman, the Similaun Man (Italian: Mummia del Similaun), the Man from Hauslabjoch, the Tyrolean Iceman, and the Hauslabjoch mummy, is the well-preserved natural mummy of a man who lived between 3400 and 3100 BCE*.The mummy was found ...on the border between Austria and Italy. He is Europe's oldest known natural human mummy, and has offered an unprecedented view of Chalcolithic (Copper Age) Europeans. His body and belongings are displayed in the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in Bolzano, South Tyrol, Italy.

*HD note: The numbers differ between reports ("...may have lived 10,000 to 12,000 years ago" versus "lived between 3400 and 3100 BCE") because  Ötzi's remains have been the object of nearly 30 years of speculation and study during which there has been much speculation punctuated by actual finds.  

Note on the image: the Radiolab programme says his right arm is raised, suggesting that the jpeg is displayed back-to-front. 

Source

Ötzi was in his mid-forties at the time of his death – making him relatively old, for his day (long before the founding of the NHS, or indeed  the founding of the Roman Empire, or the building of the pyramids). He had had what some would call a good innings, although that "good" is questionable given the signs of wear and tear:

The 40-something's list of complaints include worn joints, hardened arteries, gallstones, and a nasty growth on his little toe (perhaps caused by frostbite).  

Furthermore, the Iceman's gut contained the eggs of parasitic worms, he likely had Lyme disease, and he had alarming levels of arsenic in his system (probably due to working with metal ores and copper extraction). Ötzi was also in need of a dentist—an in-depth dental examination found evidence of advanced gum disease and tooth decay... 

Despite all this, and a fresh arrow wound to his shoulder, it was a sudden blow to the head that proved fatal to Ötzi. 

Source

But it was the contents of  Ötzi's gut that are of particular interest; and findings based on his gut contents are relatively recent as at first his stomach seemed to be missing; but they were found in 2010. And the intestinal tract is 'like a map and  a diary' – to quote one expert interviewed for the programme. The contents of his innards show that he was high in the mountains drinking water containing fir pollen, then down in the valley drinking water containing traces of hornbeam pollen, and then back up drinking water containing traces of fir pollen.

And before his final killing (brought down by the arrow and then dispatched with blows of a rock to the  head) he had cooked and eaten a feast  – 1½ pounds of cooked goat meat (a heavy meal by any standards, and so heavy that it  made flight impossible). Which one of the presenters said, showed that 'he felt safe enough' to build a fire, cook his meal and eat it.

In my view there's another explanation. Maybe, foreshadowing Marcus Aurelius, and even the Stoics who inspired Marcus by several thousand years, he had accepted his fate:

Soon you'll be ashes or bones. A mere name at most—and even that is just a sound, an echo. The things we want in life are empty, stale, trivial. 

Meditations

He  was tired of running. Let his pursuers see the smoke of the fire. He was bleeding and tired. His village in the valley had been overrun (and maybe his family had  been killed or worse), and there was nothing he could do about it. But he was going out with a full stomach: Never weather-beaten sail more willing bent to shore.

In Passing

I ordered these the other day:

When I searched for them I used the search string pink tepe.  But I held the e key down for a millisecond too long, and got this helpful alternative:

Be careful what you wish for, especially when AI's involved. (And I bet Ötzi's  teepee wasn't pink.)

But I must be getting on (which I am of course, but you know what I mean: both getting on and getting on).

b

Update 2019.03.14.09.05 – Added PS.

My note on the mixed reports was correct in general but unnecessary in this case, as the speaker was referring to a shared ancestor  " who may have lived 10,000 to 12,000 years ago" which of course isn't incompatible with the "5,300" claim; silly mistake, reminiscent of the Darwinian  "descended from apes" mistake.

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