Language

Crying, once viewed merely as a distress siren, is now viewed as part of the array of pre-speech sounds that pave the way for future communication. “That’s how language comes into the brain of babies,” Wermke said. “They learn the musical features of the surrounding languages. The music is always first, it’s like a scaffold for the words.”

Which is annoying. Because I’m pretty good at accents. Both code switching in English and picking up the sounds of other languages (I’ve only ever learned, other than schoolboy French, by ear).

But can’t carry a tune even if issued with a tin can to do so in.

Workplace diversity programmes have led to middle-class professionals speaking differently to how they did in the 1990s, a study has found.

However, individuals in working-class jobs that have had less influence from equality initiatives still talk in the same way now as they did in the mid-90s.

Linguistic experts have found that people working in middle-class jobs such as managerial roles, in politics or within the university sector have adopted more “resonance” in the way they speak since the advent of equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) programmes around the turn of the Millennium.

Resonance is a feature of conversations where people imitate and adopt the words of others in their own language.

It is a well-established aspect of human conversations and more common in some cultures than others. It is also a trait often absent in how autistic people speak.

So, code switching.

It used to be possible to speak to everyone in RP. That was rather the point of RP, it was the reference version of the language that everyone understood even if not spoke.

Now that not everyone does learn RP it’s necessary to code switch into the mubled argot they do understand. This might not be an advance.

Given the vagaries of English spelling:

It was a shock and awe tactic that divided opinions, with some critics branding it a “Gerald Ratner approach”, the British jewellery magnate who called his own company’s products “total c—”.

Given that I have a long memory I remember what he actually said – total crap.

But given what is usually elided that actually reads, to a modern, as “total cunt” which doesn’t really quite work, does it?

Neoliberal: Someone who thinks markets are the correct answer more often than you do.

Some Americans I know are calling the campus camp outs for Gaza the “Tentifada” Which I think is pretty good.

Once they start the drag story hours as well does it then become the campifada?

This is a job ad for a government website:

What you’ll do:

Researches, conceptualizes, writes, proofreads, and edits original content and digital experiences

Sure, sure, they’re Americans, but even so…..

Shoot them, obviously.

This is less so in American Englsih and obviously, both vastly less so than bleedin’ French:

It’s fine to end a sentence with a preposition, according to a shock ruling from the American dictionary publisher. But is it OK to recklessly split infinitives?

It is an observation that these things are now OK, not a decision that they are. Just because that’s how the English language works. We do it, they then write up the apparent rules of what we do.

Britain’s unique drinking culture and sense of humour have given the English language 546 words meaning drunk, researchers have found.

Linguists have discovered that in Eng­lish virtually any noun can be transformed into a “drunkonym”, a synonym for intoxication, by adding “ed” at the end, and have listed hundreds of formally identified examples. These ­included expressions such as “trolleyed”, “hammered”, “wellied” and ­“steampigged”.

Professor Christina Sanchez-Stockhammer, of Chemnitz University of Technology in Germany, believes that it is down to Britain’s drinking habits and absurdist sense of humour. “In Eng­lish there’s an extremely large number of words that can mean drunk, and more can be formed simply by adding ‘ed’ to the end. It means pretty much any word in Britain can inherit the meaning ‘drunk’ from the context.

One reader here – and it must have been at least a decade back – once explained his son’s (hmm, maybe nephew?) go to comedy routine. Which was to tell a story about copious drinking while creating these new synoyms for being drunk. One of which I recall was “lawnmowered”. The linguistic point of the routine being absolutely what our German Professor has now discovered.

So, you read it here first. The Tim Worstall blog, beating academia by a decade.

Now, to get really linguistically interesting, you can also do the same with tits. The technique is a little different but the linguistic trick is the same. Boobs, boobies, baps, puppies, norks and on and on. The meaning comes from the context, not the word.

‘House hacking’: the latest trend in Britain’s broken property market
Young homeowners are turning to ‘house hacking’ to pay the mortgage

AKA “taking in a lodger”.

Ultimately, we need to find robust, reliable forms of language learning that aren’t driven by profit or demand. While there’s certainly a place for big tech, we can’t depend on it alone to provide us with resources to maintain endangered languages. Anna Luisa Daigneault echoes a similar thought, advocating for language learning “made by the people, for the people”.

Speak Welsh to each other then. If no one wants to then that’s it for Welsh.

Shrug. It is what happened to Mercian, Northumbrian, Cumbrian and on…..

Say you had something that coule be translated into other languages. Presumably you’d go with the ones that provided the largest possible market. Not everything will work in every language, obvs. Scrabble would be difficult in Chinese perhaps, given ideograms.

But:

Scots Gaelic version of Scrabble released after Isle of Lewis campaign
Latest edition of the board game which is available in 29 languages will be in 1,500-year-old dialect spoken by 60,000 people

Really?

Is there one in Lallans already?

“He just said the most famous Hitler phrase there is in this world,” Zverev told the umpire of a fan in the stands to his left.

What? Drive East? They don’t actually tell us what was said…..

‘Black market’ is racist phrase and should not be used, say bank leaders

We have a well established vocabulary here. Black market – illegal. Grey market – legal but not tax paying. Or possibly legal but not wholly so – so things like parallel imports without IP protection and so on. White market – fully law and tax abiding.

Just bugger off and go touch yourself up over your virtue signalling somewhere else.

You’re misspelling

Proving a law of nature in only two words is impressive.

Volvo’s got a car called the “Recharge” At least in Portuguese it does.

Isn’t that rather reinforcing range anxiety in potential buyers?

Reminds of the problems Chevy had selling the Nova in Iberian speaking countries. Nova or No Va?

Investors have started legal action against the Swiss financial regulator over its decision to wipe out bonds worth more than £14 billion during the emergency rescue of Credit Suisse.

The Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority, known as Finma, caused uproar among debt investors last month by writing down some bonds issued by Credit Suisse to zero but preserving some value for the troubled bank’s shareholders.

It emerged yesterday that a group of investors representing SwFr4.5 billion (£4.1 billion) of the SwFr16 billion of decimated bonds

Decimated is one in ten, or 10%. So centimated, no?

French purists go to court in fight against Franglais

Bit weird even for the French to be suing someone 15 years after their death……

In the field of cryptozoology — the study of animals which have not yet been proven to exist — there are no bigger questions than what is Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster.

Now, a scientist has used statistics to try and explain the legends of two of the world’s most high profile urban myths.

Given that we don’t spot Bigfoot on Brtaodway, Nessie in the Thames, I think they’re rural, not urban, myths, no? Something brought on by an excess of turnips in the diet, not the pressures of city life?

Language is us applying words to some feature of life that we’d like to use a word to describe. Changing the word doesn’t change that feature. Therefore, over time, changing the word doesn’t in fact change the meaning being conveyed.

N-word to Negro to colored to African-American to Black to Person of Color is still a description of the melanin tinteness of the one being so described. Cretin to retard to disabled to differently abled to arrives on the Variety Club Fun Outing coach is still describing that same sad feature of some lives.

Members of the department’s Homeland Security Group, which leads work on Britain’s counter-terrorism response, attended a talk last week focused on “the right language” around LGBT issues.

On Monday, the Home Office moved to distance itself from its contents, which it said did not represent “departmental or government guidance”.

Across 12 slides on gender issues, first reported by Guido Fawkes, Whitehall staff were told: “Be aware a person’s sex, gender identity, and gender expression may not correspond.

“Genderqueer is a blanket term for those who don’t define their gender in binary terms … It is not a modern invention. Each identity is valid and deserves respect.”

A slide on language to avoid using included the terms homosexual and homosexuality, which it said is “generally considered a medical term now. People tend to use gay instead. Can reduce the person to purely sexual terms”. It also warned against the use of the word transsexual.

We can call it gay, homosexual, shirt-lifting or bum banditry. Genderqueer if we prefer. But it’s not going to change the connotations of the description because they are what exist and what is being described. Changing the word doesn’t change those connotations.

British society has long made distinctions here – Mrs. Patrick Campbell and not frightening the horses is different from going all John Gielgud at Praed St Gents for example. Thus cottaging is different from homosexual. But that’s very much the point being made here. We can call cottaging seeking love in a public manner if we wish, even a human right as some try to insist, but it’s still willy waving in the council privy. Changing the word doesn’t change the thing that is being described.

The Welsh language is being threatened by social media, as a study found “the erosion of a language online would threaten the cultural identity of a nation”.

Last month, it emerged that the number of Welsh speakers had fallen to a record low of 17.8 percent, as fewer children are speaking the language.

Academics at Swansea University found nearly 70% of Welsh speakers used English “often” or “always” on social media, with the vast majority using it more than Welsh.

All of them, always, are subject to two contrasting forces.

1) They become increasingly fissiparous. Latin into Catalan, Andalucian, Galician, Portuguese, Provencal, D’Oc, Florentine, Sabian and on and on. A household comes up with a new word or two – happens in every household all the time. Some of those spread and become the accepted version in the village – or town, county and so on. Continual changes bubbling up from the bottom and the accumulated changes create those new languages over the years. Latin took 1600 years or so to become many really entirely different languages. Old Germanic took about the same to become The varied Germans, Norses, Cloggie and so on. Some languages are a bmic across boundaries – English.

Shrug, well that happens. Happened to Welsh too – Cumbrian, Cornish, Scots, Irish, Manx and so on. Wouldn’t surprise me at all to find that northern Welsh is different from southern.

2) Certain events consolidate languages. New methods of communication being one of them. Radio, newspapers, they both consolidate the previous fissiparity. Because there becomes a standardised version which exists across the distribution area. One of the most common was in fact the Bible. When it first started appearing in the vernacular (c. 15th c) which version of the local language was used became the nailed down and formal version. The King James had a lot to o with the creation of English as a unitary language. The other one I know of was the selection of which variant of Slovakian to use – the selection then led to the language of one subset of the greater becoming the formal version of that language.

This is all just normal about languages. OK, so now we’ve got a new comms method, Twitter. To some extent – and only some, nothing is 100% here – this will mean the standardisation of language across the platform. Just because that’s what happens. And, also, there will be the neologisms there some of which spread. As with texts – KTB, LOL and so on.

This doesn’t greatly help the Welsh with their cultural identity of a nation shtick of course. Because the Welsh language is their unifying factor in that official and give me more culturalmoneyforthebureaucracy sense. The population of the south is – genetically, culturally a century back – near entirely unrelated to that of the North. The mines and steelworks were populated not by the local farmers of yore but by vast waves of immigration from the Midlands, SW and Ireland. Pretending they’re all Welsh by shouting Yakki Da at each other is the only cultural identity they’ve got in common.

That last paragraph might not be as entirely and wholly true as those preceding it.