Gaston Dorren's Blog, page 7

Interview en français

[image error]Je suis le ‘linguiste du mois d’octobre 2017’ sur le site

Le mot juste en anglais. Lisez l’interview en français

ou la version originale anglaise.

[image error]I’ve been interviewed by the website Le mot juste en

anglais. The text has been translated into French;

you can also read the English original.

Oh blast

[image error]What a pity! In Lingo, I claimed that “English has no loanwords from Bulgarian, with the debatable exception of the name of the Bulgarian currency, the lev, which literally means ‘lion’.”

I’ve just discovered that I missed one, and a very colourful one too: bugger. The invaluable Online Etymological Dictionary has this to say about it (I’ve edited the entry for clarity):

Bugger Meaning: ‘sodomite’, earlier ‘heretic’. First attested in 1550s. Derived from Mediaeval Latin Bulgarus, meaning ‘Bulgarian’. So called from bigoted notions of the sex lives of Eastern Orthodox Christians or of the sect of heretics that was prominent there in the 11th century. Compare the Old French word bougre for ‘Bulgarian’, also ‘heretic, sodomite’.

So it was either sex life or sect life among the Bulgari, as perceived by Western European Catholics, that gave us bugger. And of course Bulgarus was merely the Latinised form of the word used by the Slavic people in question. They in turn had borrowed it from a Turkic language, spoken by their erstwhile Turkic overlords. Its original meaning seems to have been either ‘mixed (group)’ or ‘disturbers’.

 

Struggling with 한글

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The Hangul Museum in Seoul

To Romans like us, non-Roman scripts can be quite troublesome. Greek and Cyrillic I find manageable, and so is Chinese thanks to pinyin, but most others are too complex for comfort. Now that I’m writing the Korean chapter of my next book, I’m having a brush with Hangul (or Hangeul). Even though all my sources are in English, not being able to read the Korean alphabet remains a handicap that rather tests my inventiveness.

One beautiful but somewhat troubling aspect of the script is that the letters are not placed on a line, but in a block. To the layperson’s eye, Korean looks like Chinese (though the differences are easy to spot once you know what to look out for). When Hangul was developed in the 15th century, Chinese characters had been in use for centuries in Korea, so it must have seemed only natural to make the new script look like them. The visual similarity was probably also intended to overcome the resistance of the traditionalists against the new-fangled way of writing. If so, the trick didn’t work, for Hangul wouldn’t triumph until the 20th century.

Another problem for people used to the Roman alphabet is that there are several systems in circulation to Romanise Korean words. One is official in South Korea, a different one in North Korea (which, surprisingly enough, is clearly superior), linguists prefer another one yet – and that’s only mentioning the three that are most prevalent. This diversity explains why the name of the alphabet can be written as Hangeul, Han-geul, Han’gŭl or Hānkul – with Hangul as a compromise, I guess.

So when in one of my English sources I find a Korean word in Roman letters that for some reason I need to look up, I have three obstacles to overcome:

figure out which Romanisation system has been used;
convert the word back to Hangul;
and input Hangul on the website that I want to consult.

And I’ve done it! Not by learning Hangul, mind you. It’s said to be easy but… I mean, come on, I have quite enough on my hands studying Vietnamese. No, it’s the internet that I have to kneel for and offer a prayer of thanks to. Here are the steps:

The Romanisation system used can be determined by consulting Wikipedia’s Romanisation of Korean page, which gives examples of several systems and links to more detailed information. (After a while you can tell the systems apart at a glance.)
There’s the Korean Romanisation converter which will not just Romanise Hangul, but also – hurray! – convert two types of Romanised text into each other. That was a relief, because my sources had chosen (for good reasons) the McCune-Reischauer Romanisation, whereas in step 3, I was going to need the Revised Romanisation that the South Korean government has inflicted upon the world.
Lexilogos offers a keyboard of sorts that will convert your Roman letters into Hangul.
The Hangul can then be copy-pasted into websites of reference such as Wiktionary and Forvo.

As I was going through all of these steps some dozens of times yesterday, I was grateful for these terrific resources. Still, I couldn’t help looking forward to writing the next chapters, which will be on English, French and Portuguese. But wait, there’s also Persian and Bengali coming up…

Irish between ‘very old language’ and ‘1943 political construct’

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In July, I visited a 1500-year-old Irish inscription.

Last week I had a Twitter discussion with writer and translator Seanán Ó Coistín, who in an opinion piece in The News Letter, a major newspaper in Northern Ireland, claimed that ‘the Irish language is almost a millennium older than English’. It irritated me and I responded, in the less than gentlemanly tone that Twitter from time to time brings out in me: ‘Can we PLEASE stop claiming that language X is older than language Y? Hardly ever makes sense.’

And it doesn’t. Languages, except the artificial ones such as Esperanto and Klingon, simply don’t have an age. The best we can do is distinguish stages and identify some historic and prehistoric milestones.

Old Irish words have been written since the sixth century; Archaic Irish was carved into stone even earlier. Its speakers came to Britain and Ireland some five or more centuries BCE, and Proto-Celtic must have been spoken on the continent even longer ago. And so it goes on, all the way back to Proto-Indo-European, dating to several thousand years BCE.

A similar story can be told about English: first written in the seventh century, after arriving from the continent in the fifth, as an offspring of Proto-Germanic, which is just another descendant of Indo-European. In a word, English and Irish arguably share a common cradle and a common birthday – though we could also argue that they’re both as old as human speech, for Proto-Indo-European wasn’t the first word in language either.

During their long separation, Irish and English have changed beyond all recognition. The earliest writings are incomprehensible to modern speakers. And while it’s true that the Celts arrived in the islands well before the Anglo-Saxons, does that make their language older? It’s not as if either people upon pulling their ships ashore decided to start speaking something new.

All this is a story often told and I’m sorry to be boring you if you’ve heard it before, as I’m sure Seanán has. But then why does he claim Irish is older? He was provoked. The agent provocateur was a Unionist (I always have to remind myself that Unionists are those opposed to the union of the island), one Davy Wight. Two days before, he had claimed in the same newspaper that ‘the very concept of an Irish language is a wholly political construct’ launched in 1943. Now that’s a shrewd debating trick of Davy, because he’s right in a way – but in an irrelevant way. He’s right because the standard language as taught in Irish schools today is indeed a modern artefact, hand-crafted out of the dialects; not quite as recently as 1943, but certainly not longer ago than the late 19th century. At the same time, the statement is also irrelevant: all national languages of Europe have grown out of regional dialects as a result of political developments, some with little state intervention (such as English, German and Italian), most of them with a good deal of it. Irish is a bog-normal language in this respect.

There, that is, to my mind, the correct rebuttal to Davy, and he surely deserves as much rebuttal as his butt can take. To Seanán, on the other hand, whatever he thinks of the above, I’d like to say ‘thank you’ for responding with more civility than I invited.

Vietnamese (6): a bit of ngôn ngữ học

[image error]The pronunciation of Vietnamese is hard for several reasons. Every syllable carries one of six tones, indicated by five special accents (à, ả, ã, á, ạ) that turn Vietnamese writing into equal parts text and score. The numerous different vowels and diphthongs are no piece of cake either. To give just one example: the language has a shorter and a longer ‘uh’ sound (spelt as â and ơ respectively).

But while these things look intimidating right from the start, something unexpectedly treacherous lurks behind the seemingly innocuous letter combination ng. As in English and other Germanic languages, this pair stands for the sound heard in sing and singer; the phonetic symbol is ŋ. In Vietnamese, however, this sound can also appear at the beginning of a word, as in ngai for ‘throne’. We don’t do that in English, or any other European language that I’m aware of for that matter. As a result, it’s surprisingly difficult for us, or for me at any rate, to distinguish words beginning with ng from those beginning with n. And since ngai and nai (‘deer’) have different meanings, ignoring the difference is not an option.

Why should this be so? Is there anything about the beginning of a word that makes it harder to properly hear the /ŋ/? I suspect not. More likely, it’s a matter of expectations: my listening brain is just not prepared for a /ŋ/ to pop up in that particular position.

I got evidence for this hunch when earlier today I heard someone talk about a ‘union-style effort’ – you know, the sort of effort trade unions usually make. Except that he said this in the context of psychology, and I soon realised that the speaker had actually said ‘Jungian-style effort’: an effort along the lines laid down by the psychologist Carl Jung. What those lines are is a matter I have only a hazy notion of, but they’re certainly unrelated to the labour movement.

Union (/junjən/) of course is a much more common word than Jungian /juŋjən/, and words ending in /njən/ (companion, opinion, draconian) are generally much more common than those ending in /ŋjən/ – indeed, I have trouble finding any at all. So what happened is that expecting to hear an n, I heard just that, even though the speaker undoubtedly vocalised ng, that is /ŋ/. At the same time, I’m confident I would have no such trouble distinguishing sinner and singer or winger and winner. I know that these pairs exist, and therefore my expectations wouldn’t lead me astray there.

So while the bad news is that the initial /ŋ/ is one more headache for a European student of Vietnamese, there is good news too: once my brain gets wise to the possibility of /ŋ/ appearing as the initial sound of words, it will probably start listening out for them and at some point catch them. And a good thing too, since the Vietnamese word for linguistics is ngôn ngữ học.

 

Vietnamese (5): travel!

[image error]Did you think I had stopped learning Vietnamese? I can’t blame you, for I thought so too. But I’ve managed to rekindle the dying flame with a bold plan: I’m going to visit Vietnam. That’ll teach me! (Hopefully in the literal rather than the idiomatic sense of the phrase.) I haven’t booked the tickets yet, but the idea is to spend three weeks in Hanoi next spring. And that perspective has already given me just the motivation I needed to go back to my books. Or rather, go back to one and start on another.

The one I’ve gone back to is the Assimil course book, which I think is an excellent resource for self-study. For me, it has the right pace, the right emphasis on pronunciation and a good mix of stories, grammar, vocab and drills. (Here’s a video where professional polyglot Alexander Arguelles reviews the Assimil series.) Of course, nothing can beat learning with a teacher or immersing yourself in the language community. But if you’re on your own, Assimil is a great companion.

The book I’ve started on is How To Speak Any Language Fluently by British polyglot Alex Rawlings. It’s subtitled ‘Fun, stimulating and effective methods to help anyone learn languages faster’, and I think it lives up to its promise, because it makes many practical suggestions, based on Rawlings’s own plentiful experience in this type of endeavour. Some came as insightful surprises, like his advice to try and acquire a good, but not perfect accent – hearing you’re foreign makes people more forgiving of errors and faux-pas, both linguistic and social. Most, however, fall in the ‘I could have thought of that myself (but never did)’ category. In other words, Rawlings gives us the benefit of what he himself must have learnt through valiant trial and embarrassing error, condensing many years of effort into barely 200 pages. If you are thinking or dreaming of learning a language, this book is a highly recommendable first step to making it a reality. You’ll still have to do the hard work yourself, but you’ll get further if you do it the Rawlings way.

Following his advice, I have now spelled out my reasons for studying Vietnamese as well as my exact targets. My ambitions for the next few months are modest: I want to be able to introduce myself and greet people in a socially acceptable manner (not all that easy a feat in Vietnamese culture, I should add), order stuff in shops and restaurants, understand prices and ask for directions. Once I’m there, I want to find out how much I can learn through immersion, taking a few hours of daily classes and walking the city.

My real objective remains the

Less of the many and more much, please

[image error]To me, ‘many more’ sounds silly. It reeks of inkhorn grammar, prescribed by some logical-minded schoolmaster who reasoned that if we say ‘many books’ we should also say ‘many more books’ rather than ‘much more books’. I’ve dutifully internalised the rule, but even after many years of obedience in speech and writing, it doesn’t feel quite right.

And I’ve just figured out why.

‘Much more books’ makes sense for the same reason why ‘much cheaper’ and ‘much more expensive books’ make sense: ‘much’ is there to intensify the comparative. ‘More’ is the comparative we use instead of both ‘manier’ (‘more books’) and ‘mucher’ (‘more milk’). To intensify the comparative, just add ‘much’. There’s no point in using ‘many’, because it’s already there. In its comparative form, that is, hidden in the innards of ‘more’. Therefore, ‘many more’ is ill-formed, it’s illogical, it’s illusory correctness.

(Not in ‘many more happy returns of the day’, by the way. That’s different. Now, ‘many’ doesn’t intensify ‘more’, but simply counts the returns of the day, while ‘more’ means something like ‘in the future’. German and Dutch, and I believe also French and Spanish, would put this differently: something like ‘still many returns’ or ‘many returns more’.)

In spite of the above, I’m not actually going to use ‘much more books’ from now on. My priority it to write and sell many more books, and defying standard grammar is hardly the path to best-selling. Moreover, I’m a second-language speaker, so when it comes to English, though I’m granted a voice, I don’t get to vote. My job’s to fall in line.

But I would like to find out three things. One: do native speakers feel similarly about this? Two: did ‘many more’ indeed begin life as an inkhorn rule of grammar or did it come about organically in the spoken language? And related to these: do young children growing up with English go through a stage where they say ‘much more picture books’ rather than ‘many more picture books’?

 

 

Linguistic gibberish

The study of languages has long been prone to nonsense. Why is linguistics such a magnet for dilettantes and crackpots?

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Ah, for the days of fact-free linguistics! The pre-scientific era may have produced a lot of codswallop and hogwash, but how entertaining it is to look back upon. Scholars erred in ways that few modern linguists ever would. Today, their field of study is a respectable social science, exacting in its methods, broad in its scope and generous in its harvest. Without phoneticians, computers wouldn’t be able to process spoken English. Without sociolinguists, prejudice against dialects and non-Western languages would still be rife – or rather, rifer still. Forensic linguists help solve crimes, clinical linguists treat people with language impairments, historical linguists shed light on language change and even on prehistoric culture and migration – the list goes on and on. As in other disciplines, pertinent questions and rigorous methods to answer them have been at the root of success.

When natural philosophy began to slowly develop into physics and other natural sciences, learned speculation in the human domain did not immediately follow suit. But it too gradually developed into what we now call the social sciences, and the study of language was one of the earliest adopters of the new methods. Its practitioners would pore over ancient texts written in long-dead languages and long-forgotten scripts, and compare them ever more systematically. This led to a breakthrough in the late 18th century, when there emerged new ideas about the historical origins of modern languages. Most of these ideas have stood the test of time.

But the budding discipline did not merely come up with new answers, it also changed the questions. Scholars of yore, when reflecting upon language, would wonder things like: Which of the contemporary languages was spoken by the first man? Which one is superior to the rest? And which of the human tongues deserves the label ‘divine’? Modern linguists will not touch those with a ten-foot pole. The oldest language is unknowable, but it was certainly different from anything spoken today. The ‘best’ language is impossible to define in any meaningful way. And as for ‘divine’ – the very word is meaningless in relation to languages, except in a cultural sense.

Not so in the olden days. Indeed, the answers seemed pretty obvious to many thinkers, if only thanks to that most anti-scientific habit of mind known as ethnocentrism. To the ancient Greeks, determining the world’s most excellent language was a perfect no-brainer: it could only be theirs. Continue reading →

Free Norwegian!

[image error]The Norwegian quality daily newspaper Klassekampen has published an opinion piece about the Norwegian language that I wrote for them. Below, you’ll find my English original. Click here for the translation by Eivind Myklebust.

(Klikk her for norsk.)

[image error]One of the remarkable and likable things about the Norwegian language is how dialects are used even in formal situations. In most other countries, that is highly unusual. I’m a dialect-speaker myself, yet much of the time I speak standard Dutch, a language I learnt in school. The situation is similar in nearly all other European countries.

Another remarkable, but less likeable thing about Norwegian is its split into two official written standards, Bokmål and Nynorsk. To me as an outsider, that looks like a tremendous waste of school-children’s time and tax-payers’ money. (How much time and money exactly seems to be a taboo question; I haven’t found any research quantifying the waste.) The two standards also make Norwegian troublesome for newcomers and outsiders. I can read a fair bit of one (Bokmål, as it happens), but I find the other hard to decipher.

I know the history, of course. I know about centuries of Danish rule and about Oslo’s higher classes adopting Dano-Norwegian. I know about Ivar Aasen’s heroic and admirable attempt at linguistic emancipation and nation-building. And I know about the sensible drive to merge the two standards into Samnorsk, causing such a public outcry that the idea is now dead in the water.

Even so, I think two standards are simply one too many. But how to reduce the number to one without sending either the majority of the population or a militant minority up in arms? It looks like an intractable problem, and the Språkråd can’t deal with it, given that it’s much committed to the present situation. Moreover, for all their endless tinkering with the Norwegian language, reforming it no fewer than ten times since times 1900, the Språkråd and its predecessors haven’t come close to solving the puzzle. With such a track record, the Språkråd has clearly forfeited its right to even try.

The way forward, if you allow me to suggest, is in the opposite direction. It’s high time to get rid of the very labels. Both of them. ‘Bokmål’ should go, and so should ‘Nynorsk’. They should be scrapped, ditched, abolished, abandoned, jettisoned, junked and rejected. Burn the old rulebooks! Instead, let the people write the way they like. Let them write Norwegian freely. In other words, let them write Frinorsk [Free Norwegian].

But won’t that plunge us into chaos, you ask, startled by this un-Nordic lawlessness. The answer is: it won’t. Of course, there will be some diversity (but then, the Språkråd itself has for the last 117 years created a lot of diversity). But when people write, they want to be understood. They want to come across as articulate, literate, civilised and employable. Therefore, this written Frinorsk will change gradually rather than radically. At first, things will remain pretty much the same, with Bokmål and Nynorsk (and even Riksmål and Høgnorsk) persisting more or less as before, though no longer under those official and semi-official names.

But after a generation or so, as dyed-in-the-wool Aasenistas and confirmed Danomaniacs are going extinct, the old allegiances will appear increasingly irrelevant. In young people’s writing of 2040 or 2050, the boundary between what used to be Nynorsk and Bokmål will become blurrier and blurrier. The two old straightjackets now forgotten, writing will start to shift towards what is perceived to be the best form of Norwegian, to a language that meets people’s needs for clarity and status and reflects their identity. That’s how it always goes within a speech community, be it local, regional or national: the need produces the standard. The wisdom of the crowd will create what the wisdom of the Råd couldn’t.

What exactly this will look like, I can’t predict. It may be based on the Oslo dialect or on today’s Standard Eastern Norwegian, because capital cities usually have a strong influence on standard languages. It may be similar to the less Danified, more Nynorsk-ish dialects, as these are spoken by the majority, albeit in a rather diverse manner. Or it may be a blend, a middle ground of sorts between the two (with some elements from English and immigrant languages thrown in to reflect the times). Whatever its shape and form, this new Frinorsk standard will emerge organically, without anyone feeling forced to comply. As for the term ‘Frinorsk’, that will eventually fall into disuse. At long last, the written language will once more be called by the old, simple and beautiful name of ‘Norsk’.

The new situation will have many advantages. Children and teachers will not have to waste time on a second variety of their language. Official publications and other printed matter no longer have to be produced in two editions. Second-language learners will finally know what they’re at. Even the language itself will profit, since Frinorsk will be richer than either Nynorsk or Bokmål: all words that existed in either of them can still be used, but will now have stylistic connotations, such as ‘nationalistic’, ‘Danish’, ‘rural’, ‘old-fashioned’ or ‘snobbish’ – a great literary asset. Of course, authors wishing to write dialogue or entire works in dialect rather than standard Norwegian will be at complete liberty to do so.

Admittedly, one group will lose out. Today’s Norway has a small industry of well-meaning language activists, regulators, Nynorsk-Bokmål translators and other hard-working individuals who profit from the language’s dual standard. That sector will vanish. Such is the fate of futile lines of work.

Except for these few men and women, the general prospect is a most alluring one, I would say. And yet, while it’s realisable, I doubt whether it will actually be realised. After so many years of well-meaning Språkråd tutelage, the Norwegians may lack the courage for so much linguistic freedom. But I hope you will surprise me.

Tonal tongue, keen ears?

[image error]‘It seems with a tonal language you can talk in a much lower volume than in European non-tonal languages. In the days before cell phones, in Bangkok, one of the noisiest cities of the world probably, there were phone booths where I could observe Thais chatting away, even on a cacophonous sidewalk on Sukhumvit Road.

When I tried to use the same phone booth in English, I had to shout at the top of my lungs. Maybe tones reduce the importance of the words’ other characteristics, like their phonetic contours.’

I received this interesting observation from a well-travelled American reader, Bill DeFelice. Could it be true that other phonetic features than tone are somewhat less vital in tonal languages, thereby allowing the speaker to reduce the volume? Or can his observation be explained in some other way? Perhaps Thai people are used to speaking at a lower volume, say for cultural reasons, and this habit may have honed their skill for picking up a signal amidst much noise. Or perhaps the Thai language has more redundancy than English, so that missing part of the signal is less fatal for understanding.

Or perhaps none of these ideas makes any sense at all – I’m speculating wildly here. But Bill observed what he observed, and we’re both curious what might be behind it. Suggestions, anyone?

Update: I’m told by linguist Mark Dingemanse that in research comparing twelve languages, including five tonal ones, he did not find any differences between them relating to noise and frequency of misunderstandings. This suggests that Bill’s observation requires some other explanation.