One of the things that we discussed at the French conversation group last night was how to translate the term handyman into French.
According to Wikipedia, a handyman, or handyperson or handyworker is:
a person skilled at a wide range of repairs, typically around the home. These tasks include trade skills, repair work, maintenance work, are both interior and exterior, and are sometimes described as “side work”, “odd jobs” or “fix-up tasks”. Specifically, these jobs could be light plumbing jobs such as fixing a leaky toilet or light electric jobs such as changing a light fixture.
The term may apply to someone who makes a living doing such work, or to do-it-yourselfers.
The French equivalent on Wikipedia is homme à tout faire (“man who does everything”).
In the Reverso Dictionary a handyman is translated into French as a bricoleur or homme à tout faire. The former is labelled as a do-it-yourselfer, and the latter as a servant. So it seems the connotations of these words are not quite the same as in English.
Perhaps a better translation of homme à tout faire is factotum, which is Latin for “do everything”, and is an old word for a person having many diverse activities or responsibilities, or a general servant.
When you hear the word handyman, what does it mean to you?
While learning a foreign language, the teachers sometimes remark that “even native speakers get this wrong. Don’t imitate them”.
How could native speakers possibly be wrong?? If they’re not the standard, then what is?? An artificial one from the textbook?? We learn a language to communicate with the natives, not with the textbook, right??
The debate looks at these questions from different perspectives. Many commenters agree that native speakers do make mistakes in their own languages, and give examples from a variety of languages. Others argue that native speakers of a language don’t all speak the same version of their language. There are also comments about native speakers not knowing the grammar of their own language, or at least not being able to explain why words are used in particular ways.
When field linguists document previously undocumented languages, they work out how the language is used by the people who speak it. They don’t learn the language, then start telling native speakers that they are making mistakes. However, with languages that have standardised versions, especially written versions, people come to believe that the standard version is the ‘right’ version, and any deviation from it is a ‘mistake’. Thus non-standard varieties may be looked down on, ridiculed, and even erradicated by teachers in schools.
Can a native speaker make mistakes in their own language?
Yes. There are various kinds of mistakes a native speaker might make. Such as disfluencies, when you mispronounce words, or get your syllables or words jumbled up. Or you may spoonerise, as in par cark, rather than car park.
You may confuse words with similar sounds or meanings, such as effect and affect. You may miss out words – I certainly do when writing sometimes, and don’t always realise, as I know what I intended to write, so when I read the text again, I mentally fill in any missing words.
Spelling errors are also common, especially in English, as are orthographic errors, such as adding apostrophe’s when they’re not necessary, or forgetting to add them. Or, using too many, or too few commas.
Here are some examples of ‘mistakes’ native speakers make in English:
Many native speakers don’t know the grammar of their own language
This is a common misconception that often appears in discussions about language, especially when talking about how words or particular grammatical features ‘should’ be used. For example, the use of less and fewer in English. You may not know all the grammatical terms, such as noun, adjective, gender, case, etc, and the conventions like use to apostrophes, but you can use the language effectively. Native speakers of English are unlikely to say something like “To the shop went I morning this” or “Grammar very important is”, unless you’re imitating Yoda.
John McWhorter often talks about things like this on his podcast, Lexicon Valley. On a recent show he mentioned that the less / fewer distinction is an arbitary rule made up by someone in the 19th century. People have been using these words interchangeably for a long time without any confusion. So if someone tells you that the the signs in supermarkets shouldn’t say “five items or less” but “five items or fewer”, you could refer them to his podcast.
In Welsh textbooks and grammar books you are taught how to use mutations – that is the way initial consonants change in various circumstances. For example, Dw i’n byw ym Mangor = I live in Bangor, Dw i’n mynd i Fangor = I’m going to Bangor. Native speakers of Welsh don’t always use these as described in the books – sometimes they mutate, sometimes they don’t. So who is right? The native speakers, or the writers of textbooks and grammars? Or both?
Languages change all the time. New words and grammatical constructions emerge. The meanings of words can expand, or contract, and the ways they’re used changes. Such changes often happen in informal language first. Some of them at least will eventually become part of the standard language.
If your utterances and scribblings are understood by others, then you have managed to communicate effectively, even if you deviate from the perceived standard version of the language.
But we have to have standard’s, don’t we? And there are some things that you just shoudn’t do, like starting a sentence with a conjunction, splitting an infinitve – to happily do so is just wrong. And to finish a sentence with a preposition is something I can’t be having with! 😉
Yesterday I say a post in the Silly Linguistics Community on Facebook challenging people to write a sentence in all the languages they speak. This is what I came up with:
Tha e duilich writing une phrase ym mhob språk atá agam, pero ich 試試 red ennagh symoil を書く, kaj nun я хочу říct že il mio tomo tawa supa está cheio de țipari.
This means “It is difficult writing a sentence in every language I speak, but I will try to write something interesting, and now I want to say my hovercraft is full of eels”.
The languages, in order, are Scottish Gaelic, English, French, Welsh, Swedish, Irish, Spanish, German, Chinese, Manx, Japanese, Esperanto, Russian, Czech, Italian, Toki Pona, Portuguese and Romanian.
It’s not the best sentence ever, perhaps, but I enjoyed the challenge of putting it together. It also got me thinking about how many languages and writing systems I could use in a version of my motto “one language is never enough“. This motto appears on some versions of my logo, such as the one above, and I usually try to write it in several difficult languages.
Here are some versions I came up with today. The first version incorporates some of the languages I speak and am learning, plus a few others.
Une singură 语言 är nikdy недостаточно – languages = French, Romanian, Chinese, Swedish, Czech / Slovak, Russian.
Ett seule 言語 ist nunca yn ddigon – languages = Norwegian / Swedish, French, Japanese, German, Portuguese / Galician / Spanish, Welsh.
Jeden lingua er niemals suficiente – languages = Czech / Polish / Slovak / Rusyn, Asturian / Chamorro / Corsican / Galician / Italian / Latin / Sicilian / Interlingua, Danish / Faroese / Icelandic / Norwegian, German, Spanish / Asturian.
Can you incorporate more languages and/or writing systems into this phrase?
Last night I saw the film Black Panther, and quite enjoyed it, especially the linguistic elements.
The film is based in the fictional African country Wakanda. The characters speak mainly in English, but sometimes slip into Xhosa, which is nice to hear.
The titles and credits at the beginning and end of the film first appear in a mysterious script, which also appears on various signs and decorative elements in the film. Today I found a font for this script, which seems to be called Wakandan, and put together a page about it. Here’s an example:
The text then changes into a version of the Latin alphabet which looks a bit like the mystery script. It is in fact a typeface known as BEYNO, which was designed by Swiss designer and illustrator Fabian Korn. Here’s an example:
The other day I meet a Faroe Islander, and one of the things we talked about was mutual intelligibility between Scandinavian languages.
I was under the impression that Faroese and Icelandic were closely related, and assumed that there would be quite a bit of mutually intelligibility between them.
She told me that this is true to some extent – if you know Faroese, you can understand written Icelandic quite well, but spoken Icelandic is more difficult to follow.
I also thought that Danish, Norwegian and Swedish are more or less mutually intelligible. I’ve been learning Swedish for a while now, and can make some sense of written Danish and Norwegian, and understand the spoken languages to a limited extent.
Everyone in the Faroe Islands learns Danish, which is very close to Norwegian, so they can understand both languages. According to my Faroese informant though, Swedish differs more from the other Scandinavian languages and is more difficult to understand.
If you speak one or more of the Scandinavian languages, how much can you understand the others?
In an email I received today, I saw the phrase “If I really had my druthers”, which puzzled me. I hadn’t come across the word druthers before, and had to look it up.
According to Wikitionary, druthers [ˈdrʌðəz] means “wishes, preferences, or ways” and is used informally in the USA. It comes from the the expression “I’d rather” (meaning “I would prefer to”), which is often pronounced “I druther” in some dialects.
According to Dictionary.com, druthers first appeared in the 1870s.
Here are some examples of use:
I’d druther stay home today.
We druther go swimming than go to school.
If I’ve got my druthers, I(‘d) druther not.
If I had my druthers, I would prefer to be a writer
The other day I saw post on the Omniglot fan club on Facebook about fox-related idioms. The discussion started with a fox-related Swedish idiom: Ha en räv bakom örat (“to have a fox behind one’s ear”) = to be cunning like a fox.
I found a few of interesting fox-related expressions in Welsh:
Cysgu llywnog [kəsgɨ ɬʊɨnɔg] (“fox’s sleep”) = simulated sleep to deceive the onlooker
Llwybr llwynog [ɬʊɨbr ɬʊɨnɔg] (“fox’s path”) = a secret path used by quarrymen when late for work to avoid being seen by the steward
In English you might someone is a sly fox, or as sly/cunning as a fox if they’re particularly cunning and/or clever. This association is an old one mentioned in folk tales such as Aesop’s Fables, and also in Shakespeare’s plays [source]. You can also outfox someone when you outwit them, especially if you’re a wily old fox.
Do you know any other interesting fox-related idioms?
