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(In fact the link is to a newer version of the Text Analyser.)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

I, Robert

<autobiographical_note> 

It was The Legacy that brought this issue to my attention (hemp, canvas, cannabis and related words).

</autobiographical_note>

I started by consulting Etymonline; and all roads lead back to cannabis:

          cannabis (n.) 

1798, "common hemp," from Cannabis, Modern Latin plant genus named (1728), from Greek kannabis "hemp" ... and English canvas and possibly hemp. 

Source: Etymonline

          hemp (n.) 

Old English hænep "hemp, cannabis sativa," from Proto-Germanic *hanapiz ... probably a very early Germanic borrowing of the same Scythian word that became Greek kannabis (see cannabis). 

Source: Etymonline 

          canvas (n.) 

"sturdy cloth made from hemp or flax," mid-14c., from Anglo-French canevaz, ..."made of hemp, hempen," noun use of Vulgar Latin adjective *cannapaceus"made of hemp," from Latin cannabis, from Greek kannabis "hemp"... 

Source: Etymonline

All those "..."s hide lots of examples from every language under the sun.

I don't like all those possiblys and probablys though.

<bilingual_pun value="nugatory, sophomoric"> 

(which raises the possibility of Signe demonstrating the versatility of hemp by making a picnic hamper out of hamp  [the Danish for "hemp" being hamp]. And the Swedish for "hemp" is hampa; so if she were Swedish it would be even better.)

         <afterthought viability="stillborn">

Hang on though.... Maybe that's why it's called a "hamper". Etymonline says not though. But there's that probably again....

</afterthought>

</bilingual_pun>

And finally I'll give myself a post-Fathers-Day, non-cannabis-related (except for the first syllable) pat on the head. One of the peripheral baddies in Humans has the name "Capek". Maybe this will be worked into the plot in the fullness of time, but I imagine it's just the writer's hommage (or just chapeau, perhaps)... all right, NOD...to the Czech playwright Karel Čapek (who I thought, before doing a bit of digging, coined the word 'robot' – he didn't: it's just Czech for 'worker'). Presumably the actor who said the name in episode one didn't pick up the reference. They said it with a /k/ instead of the whatever – something palatal, I think.

b

PS: And here's a clue for ... whatever these things are for:

Bishop embraced revised rite before anyone could write about it. (11) ^*

PPS A little later, the same day:

But the point (without which this post is pretty flimsy) is, what is  the mechanism for the development of *nab* to *mp*? The short answer is apocope – or perhaps syncope, I forget –  and assimilation. The longer and more helpful answer is the dropping of an unstressed vowel between two consonants. and then one of those consonants changing so that it shares some characteristic with the other: /n/ is a labiodental nasal but /p/ (/b/ after voicing's been dropped) is bilabial. So, after the unstressed 'a' has been dropped, the /n/ assimilates to the /p/, becoming the bilabial nasal /m/.

<aside>

In the case of words that use the Greek ɸ, such as 'emphasis', 'symphony', etc. this assimilation is masked. (There are  languages that do use the voiceless bilabial fricative (IPA [ɸ]), but English doesn't.)  The Castilian equivalents show the change: énfasis and sinfonía. Meanwhile, in words such as 'conflagration', the assimilation of the original Latin cum has gone ahead without anyone ticking the NO PUBLICITY box. In 'inefficient/impractical' there is the opposite change  – not from m to n, but from an original n to m.

<aside>

<example>
An interesting example of assimilation turned up on the news last  night – in the report on  a bionic eye. The context was generally optical, so when the reporter referred to a cure for sight loss I thought I heard a cure for Cyclops. I was just thinking this through, and correcting what I thought had been a mis-hearing, when MrsK asked "Did he just say a cure for Cyclops?" 

Here's why. In forming an /l/ the sides of the tongue touch  approach the sides of the mouth (which is why the $10 word for describing /l/ is lateral – there's a central closure, and the air escapes at the sides of the tongue ). Depending on the thickness of the speaker's tongue and the curvature of the palate, this can cause a closure between the body of the tongue and the palate, normally associated with /k/. So the reporter's /ǝ kju:ǝ fǝ saɪt.../ became /ǝ kju:ǝ fǝ saɪk.../ and the listener's expectations supplied the final /ps/.

So this is an example of the sort of  'accidental' assimilation I mentioned many posts ago, here. 

..well, not assimilation to another phoneme. I think it was John Trim (mentioned elsewhere in this blog: let the word-cloud do its thing if you're interested)  who pointed out that a speaker's  simply closing his/her mouth at the end of an utterance could make a final consonant 'assimilate' to the appropriate bilabial phoneme... 

The example he gave at the time was when people say 'Fine' at the end of a conversation it  can often make the sound /faɪm/.

</example>

Update 2015.06.23.14:25 – Added afterthought:

PPPS
When I started writing the PPS I stumbled over the first consonant [in cannabis/hemp], but parked the problem [as they say in some circles]: how does [k] become [h]? It's been simmering away on the back burner, and so far all I've got is an example of hyper-correction in the Satyricon.

In Roman Italy there were many speakers of Greek, and resultant borrowings of Greek words that used both κ and χ[; an educated speaker knew where to make the distinction, and a poseur made similar distinctions when there were none to be made]. One of Trimalchio's guests is a social climber, and like the English social climber adding unnecessary /h/s in words that have no 'h', he adds a χ-like sound in words that have a simple [k]: in Language and Society in the Greek and Roman Worlds James Clackson [sic, not him] writes

I'm not saying this is where 'hemp' got its "h", but is seems to me possible, given the κ as the initial – attentive readers will remember Etymonline's

... from Latin cannabis, from Greek kannabis "hemp" 

Update 2015.06.24.08:55 – Added clarifications in red.

Update 2015.07.21.16:30 – Added answer to crossword clue:
^*OK ‐ Time's up. PRELITERATE.

Update 2015.07.22.15:00 – Added inline example in purple and shortly afterwards a correction highlighted like this.

---

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:  Over 49,100 views  and nearly 8,000 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.

I cannot stress enough

Last night on the BBC television news the newsreader – who was, incidentally, a woman, though this sort of slip is not in the immortal words of Wossname [one of the usual suspects in the field of iambic pentameters; Shakespeare...? Milton...?...] A malady most incident to maids'   – got her intonation wrong.

Maybe it was a typo in the auto-cue, maybe it was a mis-reading.

It was caused by a not very common (but still quite common) phrasal verb: rein in: this is pronounced with the dying fall on the ↘in. But the context was a piece about Magna Carta, with its associations with kingship. So reined became reigned in the mind of the auto-cue-writer-or-newsreader-no-names-no-packdrill.

And, as my last sentence cunningly showed ...

<self_congratulation> 

I have to admit I'm fairly pleased with this, although I did cheat a bit, by using reign as an object: in real life, 'reigned in' is a fairly rare occurrence, except in sentences like 'King John reigned in the 13th century' or 'Charles I reigned in an atmosphere of suspicion' or 'The young king's uncle reigned in his stead' or 'The pre-revolutionary kings reigned in complete oblivion...'.... Hmm. For 'fairly rare' read 'not uncommon'. 

</self_congratulation>

...when reigned is followed by in like this, the stress falls on the verb itself: '↘reigned in....'

So the newsreader said 'Magna Carta ↘reined [sic] in the powers of the monarchy' with 'in the powers of the monarchy' having a single intonation pattern, with pitch starting to rise at 'in' , reaching the top of the curve at the first syllable of 'monarchy' and then falling rapidly:

So she said

                               

Whereas what she meant to say was

I don't know whether she even noticed that what she had read out was meaningless. If she did, she hid it well. But there's a lesson to be learnt here: a speaker's  intonation affects the way listeners understand the message. In this case, it forces the listener to assume a different spelling.

If I remember aright, the single intonation curve on 'in the powers of the monarchy' (in the wrong reading) marks what is known to linguists as 'a phonological word'; but...

<health_warning> 

...my understanding of theoretical linguistics terminology is a good 40 years out of date at best, and at worst I may have got the wrong end of the stick.  

</health_warning>

If this sort of thing interests you, you could start here.

But there are nettles to be grasped – and not the figurative sort; I am thinking biocide in the vegetable patch. Though I am reminded (not clearly enough to remember the exact wording) of a politician on the radio last weekend talking about 'grasping the nettle by the horns' or 'taking the bull by the nettles'. I think the precise wording was better than either of those, but you get the gist.

b

Update 2015.06.1914:30.15.30 – Added PS

PS On Tom, Dick, and Harry

I don't know where I heard it first,...

<autobiographical note>
though it was probably in the Raised Faculty Building,  le Corbusier's contribution to the Sidgwick Site
</autobiographical note>

... but it's striking how often examples adduced in Linguistics discussions tend to involve violence. The default passive-voice example, for ESOL teachers, is

The boy kicked the ball

rather than 

Jane kissed John.

Anyway, the example I want to look at now –  to reflect on how intonation can radically affect meaning – is this, which I would attribute if I could. 

<autobiographical note>
It may have been mentioned in a lecture by the then Doctor, now Professor, Erik Fudge (though he may have read it somewhere else):
</autobiographical note>

Tom hit Dick and then Harry hit him.

On the face of it this might be a tale of righteous retribution taken on Tom by Harry's friend Dick:

There are two violent interactions with two agents and two patients, denoted by two similar intonation curves –  rising/falling from/to more-or-less the same levels.

But change the intonation, keeping the same words in the same order, and a rather darker tale of both Tom and Harry ganging up on Dick emerges:

The first curve denotes Dick's suffering, but that suffering is not finished yet; the second curve starts a bit higher than the and but not as high as Tom  – Dick's travails are not finished yet, and the end of the intonation curve is lower than the first. There's an up-tick in the intonation to mark the pause between blows, but the general sense of the whole sentence is downward.

I have no idea (with my ESOL teacher's hat on) of how to teach this intonation; like most useful language skills it can only improve with exposure, practice, and if possible immersion.

No gender please, we're Anglophone.

Songs in my forthcoming concert have made me think about gender. My first ..issue, thinking point.....? comes in Fauré's Cantique de Jean Racine (written  'when Fauré was still at school', as programme notes tend to say, although he was a fairly mature 19-year-old at the time). The basses sing Dissipe le sommeil [... ⇦ NB] languissante qui la conduit à l'oubli de tes lois. 

I've sung this piece many times [see here for a rantette], but only recently I started to think about gender. There was no feminine noun that the object pronoun la could refer to. If the thing that was the object of conduit was sommeil then the  languissante shouldn't have its feminine ending, and the la conduit should be l'a conduit – so that it's not an admission of weakness but a confession of past sins.

This seemed to me to be a great discovery – all those editors had got it wrong; I started sharpening my mental pencil, in preparation for a letter to the publishers of European Sacred Music. After all, the editor was John Rutter,  and I had a history of textual nit-picking with him:

But look back at that NB a couple of paragraphs back. Before writing my planned letter I checked the score, and realized my potentially embarrassing mistake: the basses don't sing all the words. The upper parts sing the whole sentence:

Dissipe le sommeil d'une âme languissante 

Qui la conduit à l'oubli de tes lois!

Oh well....

So I'm more circumspect about questioning musical  settings now.  But in the case of the Elgar setting of My love dwelt in a northern land I'm pretty sure there's something a bit dodgy about the words. My present score starts:

My love dwelt in a northern land
A tower dim in a forest green
Was his... 
[my emphasis; more here]

But the original text was by the Scottish poet Andrew Lang, possibly with earlier precedent. One site says.

It's a setting of a poem by Andrew Lang which if my memory serves me correctly is itself an adaptation of a far older Scottish poem.

         (more here)

I wonder whether the original was in a language that has gender...? According to this site Lang held that the beloved was female; and here she is dying in Elgar's setting:

"My love" dies

Two pages later, though. she's had another sex-change, back to the "his" of the opening bars:

Could it have been something like sein Herz? But maybe this suspicion  is related to the fact that I first sang this song in a programme together with a later Elgar piece with words by Alice Elgar, who I was ready to believe had got a translation wrong. But, as I said, it's from a Scottish poet; and he didn't use 'he' either; but nor did he use 'she'. He used 'My'....[curiouser and curiouser.]

English students of foreign languages that have gender markings have to get used to the fact that the English possessives are marked for the sex of the possessor; many other languages are marked for the gender of the thing possessed. This gender versus sex distinction was one pointed out to me by Joe Cremona (see this blog, passim [that's Latin for 'So often that I can't be bothered to check a reference']). "Concrete things have sex; words have gender." In English, we put a further restriction on the first part of that rule – "Concrete things have sex only if they're animate"; and we don't have the second part (about gender, with a few arguable  exceptions, like ships and old cars; the few words that look as if they are gendered – mostly pronouns and possessives – in fact denote sex.)

Isn‘t "only if they're animate" an improbably arbitrary restriction? Hardly. In The Unfolding of Language  Guy Deutscher writes of  an Aboriginal language that assigns the gender "edible vegetable" to an aeroplane. He sums up his point:

In linguistic jargon...'gender' has nothing to do with sex  and can refer to any kind of classification that a language imposes on nouns. While sex-based gender is an extremely common type of classification, some languages have special genders not only for 'male' and 'female' but also for classes of nouns such as 'long objects', 'dangerous things', or 'edible parts of plants'.

When there‘s a correspondence between sex and gender (une fille, for example, is both feminine and female, but ein Mädchen is neuter) a phonological rule can interfere; you don't say ma amie because of the initial vowel in amie.

<harebrained_notion>
Did Bizet make use of this rule in Carmen's claim to be going chez mon ami(e?) Lillas Pastia? Does she toy with Don José's jealousy with doubts about the sex of Lillas Pastia? Lilas is a girl's name; certainly, when I first heard the Seguidilla I assumed Carmen was referring to a woman; I couldn't hear the -ll- that Bizet gave it. Does this make it male, I wonder.... Bizet's only clue (well, I haven‘t read the libretto in detail)  is to write that Lillas is an aubergiste – and I think Mistress Quickly was one of those.
</harebrained_notion>

But I must get this post out there before the concert this Saturday.

b

Update 2015.06.12.11:55 – Added links and further Lillas speculation in purple.

Update 2017.05.25.23:00 –  Deleted old footer.

Andrew Marvell and Bert Jansch

Marvell wrote:

Now therefore, while the youthful hueSits on thy skin like morning dew,And while thy willing soul transpiresAt every pore with instant fires,Now let us sport us while we may...

More here 

Or, as Bert Jansch put it [with more brevity if  less decorum]:

Love be bold,

We're not so old,

Don't you be afraid to lie

By me, my love,

Your father will not know.

More: here 

This sort of correspondence strikes me quite often. In a summer concert (probably called Music for a summer's evening  – they usually are [see here]) given by a choir I used to sing with we were singing, inter alia [or should that be aRia? {bou-boum-tsh  – Ithangyou}],  Verdi's Va Pensiero and Borodin's Polovtsian dances [victim of many a metathesis, but I digress]. They seemed quite dissimilar, until you look at the lyrics – particularly the metaphors in them:

Verdi's setting is:

(the melody known to the listeners of Classic FM as The Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves)

The words are translated ('after a fashion' as my brother once said in response to a sales assistant's 'Are you being served?') in this Wikipedia article:

Fly, thought, on wings of gold;

go settle upon the slopes and the hills,

where, soft and mild, the sweet airs

of our native land smell fragrant!

Borodin's setting is:

(the melody known to the listeners of Classic FM as Stranger in Paradise)

– translated as

Fly away on wings of wind

To native lands, our native song,

To there, where we sang you freely,

Where we were so carefree with you.

There, under the hot sky,

'Fly', 'wings', 'native land'  – it's all there in both of them., because the people singing, in both pieces, are expatriated slaves. Moreover, the Wikipedia translation does the correspondence no favours: Borodin's sky is 'hot', but Verdi's 'sweet airs' are 'mild' – a flamboyantly inappropriate translation of tepidi (which you'll see towards the end of the second line).

In our coming concert it took me a while to make this sort of link between seemingly disparate pieces. But I've finally got it; it's not  matching words, but matching structures, between Palestrina's setting of Psalm 42 (Sicut cervus) and Elgar's setting of Longfellow's 'As torrents in summer'. The first word gives it away ('Sicut...' vs 'As...'). They are both extended metaphors.

In the Palestrina† (sung here beautifully by the Cambridge Singers) the deer (cervus) occupies the first third; and although the 'That's the way...' (Ita...) bit starts at 1'15", God doesn't get a mention until quite near the end (2'23", the whole piece taking only 3'16"). The text is:

Sicut cervus desiderat ad fontes aquarum, ita desiderat anima mea ad te, Deus.

<philological_note comment="insufficient data">
In  my youth I would have hazarded a guess [okay, I do now too, though with less confidence] that the writer of that translation into Latin had links with the Iberian peninsula. I've not met this use of desiderare ad elsewhere. It is reminiscent to me of the Castilian desear a.
</philological_note>

The Elgar/Longfellow is more evenly divided – into two verses. The first verse is about torrents in summer (duh), and the second verse starts with 'So hearts that are fainting' – in a Mills & Boon novella tears would suddenly well up, reinforcing the generally wet theme – and God enters the picture only in the closing bars.

Is that the time...

b

PS:
Many of my posts kick off from something I've heard on the radio. This time, the radio has followed the blog. After writing about Bert Jansch – who was big in the '60s and early '70s and active until his death in 2011 – I caught on Radio 3 a recording I have, insulated in vinyl. (That's my word of the day; on In Our Time just now I heard the phrase 'insulated Christians'‡ and  it's inspired me to find innovative uses of the word. My vinyl records are an island of unplayability [well, not unplayable, but just not easily playable given the technology I have]).

PPS (later the same day, after rehearsal): added this footnote:
^† Oops, no – this piece has been axed. Shame.

Update 2015.06.05.10:25 – Added this footnote:
^‡ By this she didn't mean 'uninfluenced by non-believers' – which depends on a more common application of the insulation idea (cut off  – in an intellectual sense). This is a usage (perhaps a common one among religious historians, but one that's new to me) that refers to physical isolation.

Update 2021.10.18.15:30 – Deleted old footer.