Language Museum Blog

I posted previously on this blog about the Evolving English exhibition at the British Library, and this week I got the chance to actually visit it.

Unfortunately I didn’t have much time, and only got a brief overview of the whole exhibit. I chatted to one elderly lady who had visited for three hours the previous day and was back for more! There was plenty to see – from the slightly singed 1,000 year old copy of Beowulf to 19th Century pamphlets on how to improve your English.

A really nice touch was the projection on the walls of words that had joined the English language from other cultures. Booths were provided so visitors could contribute to the exhibition by talking about an aspect of their vocabulary. There were also listening stations to hear different types of English in different forms throughout the years – including a recording of Florence Nightingale.

The exhibition runs until the third of April, I definitely recommend a visit if you’re in London before then. Just leave plenty of time for it!

In my RSS reader I came across an article from Wired.co.uk intriguingly titled ‘Jargon Watch – April 2011’. It took me a moment to realise (slow morning) but it’s still only March, isn’t it*?

So here’s the new jargon you can start using (from next month):

Peep-holing
pp. Driving a snow-covered vehicle with only a small hole cleared on the windscreen. Also called peephole driving. Many people don’t have time or are just too lazy to clear the whole screen, so they scrape a space on the driver’s side and then aim in the general direction of work.

Entomological terrorism
n. The use of insects as a weapon. According to the US Army Medical Department Journal, the practice can be organised into three categories: attacking people directly (killer bees), destroying crops (locusts), and spreading sickness (disease vectors).

Gutenbourgeois
n. The people who maintain a smug belief in the primacy of print, particularly books, over digital works as a cultural driver, and the supremacy of professional writers, editors and publishers over amateurs. Coined by Paul Ford, writer and contributing editor at Harper’s.

Aflockalypse
n. The sudden death of a large number of birds. This year there has been a spate of mass bird deaths: 5,000 blackbirds in Arkansas; 300 turtle doves in Italy; up to 100 jackdaws in Sweden. Experts are unflapped: in North America, 50 million birds die every year.

*OK, there’s a simple explanation – the article’s from the April 2011 print issue of Wired, but that’s no fun, is it?

It’s often said that some languages are harder to learn than others. Tonal languages such as Mandarin for example are supposed to be more difficult for native English speakers who have no experience of listening and speaking in this way.

This reasoning is supported by the US State Department, who “compile learning expectations for a number of languages based on the amount of time it takes a native English speaker to achieve speaking and reading proficiency”. The good people over at the Voxy blog have compiled an infographic from this information to show which languages are rated ‘easy’, ‘medium’ and ‘hard’ and the length of time it should take to achieve proficiency.

What do you think of the infographic? Do you agree that it will take less time to learn Spanish than Japanese?

Via: Voxy Blog

New research has shown than two languages can co-exist in the same society. Previously it had been thought that the ‘stronger’ language would overtake the lesser spoken one, until it died out.

Conducted by researchers at the University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain, mathematical models were created to show that levels of bilingualism can lead to the steady co-existence of two languages. The research analysed patterns among populations speaking Castilian, the main language of Spain, and Galician, a language spoken in Galicia (north-west Spain). The results could be used to inform other bilingual countries such as Wales.

Joseph Winters from Londons Institute of Physics said: Older models only took the number of each languages speakers and the relative status of each language into consideration, concluding that eventually the most dominant language would kill off the weaker; the decline of Welsh is often cited as an example of this.

The researchers used historical data to show how you can predict the continued existence of a language when you also incorporate a mathematical representation of the languages similarity to one another and the number of bilingual speakers, into the calculation.
If a significant fraction of the population is bilingual in two relatively similar languages, there appears to be no reason to believe that the more dominant language will inevitably kill off the weaker, Mr Winters added.

Researcher Jorge Mira Pmrez said: If the statuses of both languages were well balanced, a similarity of around 40% might be enough for the two languages to coexist.

If they were not balanced, a higher degree of similarity above 75%, depending on the values of status would be necessary for the weaker tongue to persist. (Source: Wales Online)

As the start of the UK 2011 census draws closer, more details have been revealed about what kinds of data will be collected.

Language supporters will be glad to know that in Scotland, residents will be asked if they speak Scots, according to an article on Wired.co.uk. One of three languages spoken in Scotland (along with English and Gaelic), Scots is not thought of as a language by a percentage of Scottish people, according to a survey conducted last year.

To help people decide whether or not they speak the language, the government has created a website, Aye Can, where you can listen to and read examples of Scots. For more information, you can view Scotland’s census information advert on YouTube.

An amusing article from NewsBiscuit (“the news before it happens”) has French President Nicolas Sarkozy admitting that the French language is “a one thousand year old hoax”.

Apparently French is complete gibberish and all French people really speak English, except in front of British people of course. From the article:

During a speech given in received pronunciation, the French President came clean, stating that it all started off as a joke during William the Conquerer’s invasion to make the aggressors seem a bit more exotic. “What was initially a prank snowballed and after a few years we realised we’d look silly revealing the truth, so we had to keep up the façade,” said the Premier. “In the company of any Brits we would try to make convincingly “French” sounds, a mixture of guttural grunts and rapid-fire syllables.

But as soon as we were on our own we’d all heave a huge sigh of relief and revert to English. We developed a heavy reliance on hand gestures to cover up when we ran out of likely noises, and the shrug was a particular boon if inspiration dried up. In the end we became quite the raconteurs, with an impressive array of supposed vocabulary. So what began as a game for the élites, became a hobby across all levels of society, and it shocked us that the Brits were so naïve as to not see through the charade.”

It’s certainly nice to poke some fun at languages for a change!

A fascinating video from Cambridge University shows some of the work of the World Oral Literature project.

The anthropologist Mark Turin discusses his work with speakers of Thangmi, spoken in eastern Nepal. Spoken by less than 20,000 people, the language had never been written down before. Children are learning only Nepali (the national language) in schools, so Thangmi has become endangered. Turin has produced a Thangmi-Nepali-English dictionary and has been working with the people for over a decade. He also does an excellent job of explaining why it’s important that endangered languages are documented and if possible, saved.

Watch the video below.

We all use this one simple word many times every day, in many different contexts, without even thinking about it.

“Is that OK?”
“OK! That sounds great!”
“Oh, OK.”

But why do we use OK and not something else? According to Allan Metcalf, author of a new book on the history of OK, one reason is that it provides neutrality, “a way to affirm or to express agreement without having to offer an opinion”.

The use of OK used to be restricted to business contexts (o.k. meant that a document was “all correct”) and was associated by some people with illiteracy. Now however, it’s used by everyone in except in formal settings – speeches and reports for example. If you’re interested, it’s well worth reading the rest of the article by Metcalf over at BBC News.

A new study of word frequencies has found that certain words can shake the political blogosphere in a similar way to an earthquake.

The study, completed by researchers at the Medical University of Vienna, looked at 168 political blogs in the US and tracked spikes in the frequency of individual words. They noticed that some events trigger ‘reverberations’ and can cause social change.

The types of blogosphere responses took two forms, the researchers say. Some words suddenly spiked in popularity in response to a real-world event. Sarah Palin’s nomination as the Republican vice presidential candidate was the most dramatic example.

“Indeed, aftershocks of this event are still trembling and quivering through our society,” Klimek and colleagues wrote. Because these events are triggered from outside the blogosphere, the researchers called them “exogenous.”

Other words gradually grew in frequency and then died down, like the use of the word “inauguration” in the days before and after Barack Obama took office. Such events are called “endogenous” because they seem to arise within the blogosphere itself. (Source: Wired.com)

So what does this have to do with earthquakes? Well, apparently the ‘aftershocks’ of the increase in word frequency fit the equation of Omori’s law for the frequency of earthquake aftershocks.

It’s a pretty interesting concept, but as Duncan Watts says in the article, “it sort of can’t be true” as the analogy is between two unrelated phenomena.

Ah, Valentine’s Day. A day for romance, hearts, flowers and chocolates. A day for heartfelt proclamations of love.

Not all of us are good at the latter however, so here’s a little help. A poll of 2,000 Britons by Warner Home Video showed that a line from Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights is considered the most romantic in English literature. The line? “Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.”

That’s not so easy to drop into conversation, so what of the others in the top ten?

2. “If you live to be a hundred, I want to live to be a hundred minus one day so I never have to live without you” – A A Milne

3.”But soft! What light through yonder window breaks? It is the east and Juliet is the sun” – Shakespeare “Romeo and Juliet”

4. “He was my North, my South, my East and West, My working week and my Sunday rest, My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song; I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong” – W.H. Auden

5. “You know you’re in love when you don’t want to fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams” – Dr. Seuss

6.” When you fall in love, it is a temporary madness. It erupts like an earthquake, and then it subsides. And when it subsides, you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots are become so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part” – “Captain Corelli’s Mandolin”

7. “Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be” – Robert Browning

8.”For you see, each day I love you more. Today more than yesterday and less than tomorrow” – Rosemonde Gerard

9. “But to see her was to love her, love but her, and love her forever” – Robert Burns

10. “I hope before long to press you in my arms and shall shower on you a million burning kisses as under the Equator” – Napoleon Bonaparte’s 1796 dispatch to wife Josephine. (Source: Canada.com)

Yeah… maybe these are all best written rather than said.