Category: English

Word of the day – zeugma

By Simon

A zeugma is a figure of speech that joins two or more clauses together in a way that allows you to omit the key verb or noun in all but one of the clauses. The word comes via Latin from the Greek ζεύγμα (zeugma) – yoke.

Here are examples of different kinds of zeugma:

Prozeugma or Synezeugmenon
The verb in the first part of this zeugma governs subsequent parts.

  • Some people like cats, some dogs, some crocodiles.
  • We ate octopus on Monday, camel on Tuesday and ostrich on Wednesday.
  • I speak sense, you nonsense.

Hypozeugma
In hypozeugmas the verb appear at the end of a number of clauses. This results in a sense of suspense in listeners and readers until they reach the end of the sentence.

  • Neither rain nor fog nor dragons will slow this knight on his quest.
  • Friends, Romans, Countrymen, lend me your ears. (William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar)

Syllepsis
A syllepsis joins clauses with different meanings together with a common verb, the meaning of which changes for each clauses. It can be used for comic effect due to the unusual connections and ambiguity involved.

  • She went home in a huff and a taxi.
  • I left my heart and my wallet in San Francisco.
  • Don’t forget to put out the cat and the lights before going to bed.
  • He had to eat his words and his lunch.

Why German can sound funny to English speakers

By Simon

In English when you talk about scientific, technical, legal or medical topics, you tend to use a lot more words of Latin, Greek and French origin. However in everyday conversation words of Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse origin are much more common. Therefore you could say that English has two distinct registers – a higher register used in academic and other formal settings, and a lower register used elsewhere. New scientific terms are usually coined from Latin and/or Greek roots. Mixing the registers or using one where the other would normal be used can a source of humour.

In other languages, such as German, new words tend to be coined from native roots. This gives you words like Wasserstoff (water material/stuff), for hydrogen, Sauerstoff (sour/acidic stuff) for oxygen, and Stickstoff (close/stuffy stuff) for nitrogen.

According to this post, such words can sound funny to English speakers because they are made from words similar to lower register English ones which are not normally associated with serious vocabulary like this.

There have been suggestions and proposals that new English be coined from native Old English / Anglo-Saxon roots, none of which have really caught on. For example, in a text on atomic theory, Uncleftish Beholding by Poul Anderson, almost all the words are of Anglo-Saxon origin and there are many newly coined words, including beholding for theory, waterstuff for oxygen, ymirstuff for uranium, bulkbits for molecules, and worldken for physics.

There is even a group of people called The Anglish Moot, who aim to create a version of English free of loanwords from other languages.

Txtng nt bd 4 U

By Simon

The abbreviations and variant spellings found in text messages are not detrimental to your language, according to this article. In fact kids who send the most text messages tend to be more literate better at spelling than others.

David Crystal, an independent language consultant, author and honorary professor of linguistics at Bangor University, and has done some research into text messaging and has discovered that most of the things people believe about them are wrong. It’s not kids who send the most messages, but adults and businesses who send 80% of them. He comments that:

“If you can’t spell a word, then you don’t really know whether it’s cool to misspell it. Kids have a very precise idea of context – none of those I have spoken to would dream of using text abbreviations in their exams – they know they would be marked down for it.”

What many fear are the ways new technologies will change language. This was true for printing, which some was a devil-inspired machine that would be used to print unauthorised versions of the bible. Some believed that the telephone would lead to the breakdown of family life as people would stop speaking to one another directly, while radio and television stirred worries about brain-washing. Each generation is also concerned about the next generation taking over ‘their’ language and changing it for the worse. Such concerns are not a recent phenomenon and people have been complaining about the way the kids are ruining the language for millenia.

Word of the day – macaronic

By Simon

At the end-of-course ceilidh at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, one of the Irish guys read a story which was half in English and half in Irish. It was very funny, if you understood both languages; those who didn’t missed quite a lot. Even speakers of Scottish Gaelic found it quite difficult to understand all the Irish bits, which suggests to me that Irish and Scottish Gaelic aren’t as mutually comprehensible as some claim.

This type of story is called macaronic, a word coined in the 16th century by Teofilo Folengo, an Italian poet, to refer to a type of verse he invented in which he mixed Italian and Latin for comic effect. He based the name on macaroni, which he described in Latin as pulmentum farina, caseo, botiro compaginatum, grossum, rude, et rusticanum (a savoury dish bound together with flour, cheese [and] butter, [a dish] which is fat, coarse, and rustic).

The word was first used in English the following century and was used to refer to any type of verse which mixes two or more languages together.

Source: http://www.worldwidewords.org/weirdwords/ww-wei1.htm.

Here are links to a few examples of Macaronic songs in English and Irish:
http://academic.evergreen.edu/w/williams/macaronic.htm

The accent game

By Simon

A website I found today has a game which shows you a series of short videos of people reading a few lines of a poem in English. Then they ask you to guess the where they’re from based on their accents. If you guess correctly, it also asks you to guess which city they’re from. Some of the people are native English speakers from various countries; the rest are non-native speakers from all over Europe. Visitors to the site can also submit their own videos.

I did better with the native speakers than the non-natives, but got quite a few of the former wrong as well. I’d probably do better if the videos were longer.

Do you know of any similar websites?

Doctors and nurses

By Simon

The words doctor and nurse in English aren’t gender-specific, however many people expect doctors to be male and nurses female. As a result, the terms female doctor or lady doctor and male nurse are used to specify the gender of those who don’t fit such stereotypes.

In Welsh a doctor is meddyg and a female doctor is meddyges, while a nurse is nyrs and a male nurse is nyrs gwrywaidd. An older word for nurse is gweinyddes, which means “female attendant” and is a feminine version of gweinydd (attendant).

In Irish a doctor is dochtúir and nurse is usually banaltra (female), while banaltra fir is sometimes used for male nurses. There is also altra, which is a non-gender-specific version of nurse. The ban in banaltra comes from bean, woman / female.

How do other languages handle these words?

Irreversible binomials

By Simon

Irreversible binomial is a linguistic term I came across today on this blog post. It was coined by Yakov Malkiel in a 1959 article in the linguistics journal, Lingua, and refers to pairs of words on either side of a conjunction such as and that are always used in a particular order. For example, bread and butter, salt and vinegar, fish and chips, meat and potatoes, gin and tonic, time and tide, cloak and dagger, ladies and gentlemen, knife and fork, and head over heels.

Some such pairs are reversible in parts of the English speaking word – is it cheese and bacon or bacon and cheese, for example? Both versions are used in the UK at least. To some extent is depends on the ratio of cheese to bacon – if you have more cheese than bacon in your sandwich, then you might call it a cheese and bacon sandwich.

Can you think of any other irreversible binomials in other languages?

In Welsh there’s bara menyn (bread (&) butter).

More on code switching

By Simon

When I lived in Taiwan I was in a multilingual environment. The main languages I encountered there were Mandarin, Taiwanese and English. Sometimes I came across speakers of Japanese, Korean, Hakka or Spanish as well.

As a student I had friends from many countries and we tended to communicate amongst ourselves in Mandarin. In some cases this was the only language we had in common. With other students from English-speaking countries I generally spoke English, unless we were with people who spoke little or no English.

At work I spoke a mixture of Mandarin and English, with occasional bits of Taiwanese thrown for good measure. With colleagues who spoke both Mandarin and English fluently, I spoke a mixture of the two languages switching between them frequently, though some conversations were mainly in Mandarin, and others mostly in English.

Quite often when we were all be talking in Mandarin, I found myself talking Mandarin to the other Western colleagues, which felt a bit strange. When our boss was with us we all spoke English because his knowledge of Mandarin and Taiwanese was minimal, but I think some of my Taiwanese colleagues with limited English found this awkward.

I’ve heard that some people in Taiwan who speak Mandarin sometimes play the dumb foreigner and pretend they don’t. Apparently it can be quite an effective way of dealing with problems as locals don’t expect you to understand how things work and may be more helpful. Have you tried this?

Word of the day – grawlix

By Simon

While looking through Language Log today, I came across the unusual words, grawlix, which is apparently a spiral used by cartoonists to indicate a character is swearing or cursing, along with other typographic symbols – for example @$£*&%!! (Here the ampersand (@) stands in for the grawlix).

According to Wiktionary, grawlix means “A string of typographical symbols used (especially in comic strips) to represent an obscenity or swearword.” It was apparently coined by American cartoonist Mort Walker.

Walker also coined a number of other terms for symbols used in comics, including jarn and quimp, which are also used as alternative names for typographic swearing; phosphene, which describes the stars that form over characters’ heads after they’ve been knocked out; and squean, which might float around a drunken character’s head.

Here’s an example of a comic character saying the cartoon-style swear squiggles.

Grawlix dollar sign jarn asterisk hash quimp!

Signed off

By Simon

The other day I heard that one of my colleagues had been “signed off”. As this was the first time I’d heard this expression in this context I wasn’t sure what to make of it. Later I discovered that she had been signed off by her doctor due to carpal tunnel syndrome and would be spending a week or two at home resting.

Have you heard this expression used in this way before?

I’ve heard of radio and television stations signing off at the end of the day, though many stations no longer do so as they broadcast 24 hours a day. I’ve also heard of projects, expenses and budgets being signed off.

There are a number of other English idioms involved signing here, including sign on, sign up (for), sign over and sign out. I suspect such expressions, and similar ones like get on/off/up/down, etc. might be quite tricky for learners of English.