They're just a bunch of Grammar Zombies alright...

With thanks to The Literacy Shed:

on the World's most spoken language: Bad English

Europe’s common tongue: bad English

Sebastian Huempfer, an editor for the Free Speech Debate, reviews an EU English – British English dictionary aimed at helping native speakers understand the European Union’s rather weird brand of English better.

Badly spoken English is the most widely spoken language in the world, according to German finance minister Wolfgang Schaeuble. The European Union, home to 24 official and working languages, has embraced this principle. Although most official documents are translated into the various official languages, a modified version of English prevails when it comes to unofficial communication. The only ones who are having trouble joining the conversation are the British. A fog of linguistic innovation lies over the Channel, and the continent is isolated.

An EU English – British English dictionary may help the native speakers reintegrate. In 2013 Jeremy Gardner, senior translator at the European Court of Auditors, released a memo outlining “the most commonly misused English words and expressions in EU publications”. He argued that because the target audience of English-language EU documents are mostly British and Irish EU residents, these documents should be written in such a way as to ensure that a British or Irish English speaker would be able to understand them.

Thus, some of the most idiosyncratically continental European additions to the English language – nouns like “comitology” and “planification” or verbs like “to precise” and “to homogenise” – ought to be avoided altogether. Others, like “delay” (which means “deadline” in Brussels) and “to dispose of” (continental English for “to possess”) should be used in a way that avoids miscommunication. The warning: “Please ensure that you dispose of all the correct documents so that you can make the delay” could otherwise wreak unintended havoc.

Those familiar with how the European Union operates may not be surprised to hear that “actorness” (active participation), “Anglo-Saxon” (English and American), “budget line” (they are not sure what it means) and “sickness insurance” (health insurance) are among the most commonly misused English words and expressions in Brussels. Many of the items on Gardner’s list are in fact Freudian slips that reveal as much as they obscure about how Europe’s civil servants think. In other cases, it is clear which country the neologism comes from; many of them make perfect sense to a French or German speaker.

Gardner’s dictionary is partly tongue-in-cheek and makes for an entertaining read, though much of the humour will get lost in translation. Underneath the surface, however, some serious questions lurk. As the translators of Free Speech Debate will confirm, transferring meaning from one language into another is a tricky business. Humour and emotion, metaphors and rhetorical flourishes tend to be the first to be left behind. Shades of meaning, purposeful ambiguity and double entendres are also easily lost. Thus, it is hard to believe that a European government of so few native speakers and so much linguistic improvisation can run smoothly. And it is not surprising that Europe’s citizens are disenchanted with a political elite that speaks in incomprehensible tongues of its own.

Gardner admits that there are many varieties of English spoken all over the world, from Kingston to Delhi to London and, as of the 21st century, Strasbourg and Brussels. None of these is any more or less correct than the next, and the point of the EU dictionary is not to teach the continentals how to speak proper English, but to help them avoid miscommunication. Who owns the English language has long been a contested question. If Lagos spawns more English-language films than Los Angeles and Brussels produces more English-language memos than London, the obvious answer is that the question misses the point.

What really matters is how all the different English speakers of this world, whatever letters they drop and whatever variety they speak, can communicate efficiently. A greater awareness of the pitfalls of English-to-English translation is surely a good first step, and Gardner’s dictionary therefore an important contribution to bringing together a Union divided by a common language.

Sebastian Huempfer is associate editor of Free Speech Debate.

It's time to brush up on your "Legalese"...

Introduction to Legal English & EU "Legalese"

I. What is Legal English?

...on the distinctive features of Legal English aka "Legalese", i.e. legal vocabulary, and syntax. 

During this introductory chapter, we shall discuss the distinctive features of the Legal English vocabulary, ranging from the consideration of words whose specific, legal terminology is being used in legal contexts, such as 'alimony', 'collusion', 'distraint' or 'indemnity', to the analysis of the so-called 'sub-technical' ones, such as 'action', 'hand', 'proceedings' or 'service' up to and including here 'general' English language ones, such as 'judge', 'theft' or 'witness', or those deriving from other languages, such as French ('fait accompli', 'force majeure' etc.), or Latin ('bona fide', 'prima facie' etc.). 

We shall also discuss a number of specific features characterizing English language syntax and its sentence structure. We will consider here the manner in which lexical repetitions are being used as a reference mechanism, whereby instead of 'it' or 'this', or any other pronoun for that matter, the use of specific words, such as 'the aforesaid' or 'the aforementioned' is being preferred in 'Legalese' speak.

We shall also discuss the matter of long and rather complex sentences, whose multiple levels of subordination are seldom found in general English usage. Moreover, we will consider the frequent use of the passive for the purpose of emphasizing the result of certain actions, rather than their agents and/or agencies.

Even further to that, we will consider another feature - that is yet again seldom found in the everyday use of the English language - concerning the use of the subjunctive; also, we shall analyse the use of conditional sentences with inversion and the particular usage of connectors, such as 'whereas' or 'provided that' as well as the tendency to avoid the negative particle 'not' by replacing it with 'except' or 'unless', or even the omission of the relative pronoun, the appropriate form of the verb 'to be', the use of prepositions which are separated from their complements etc. etc.

To be continued...  

on how a college dropout reordered the heavens and changed our understanding of our place in the Universe forever...

The Rebellious and Revolutionary Life of Galileo, Illustrated

by Maria Popova

In 1564, Galileo Galilei was born into a world with no clocks, telescopes, or microscopes — a world that was believed to be the center of the universe, orbited by the sun and the moon and the stars. By the time he died seventy-seven years later, his ideas had planted the seed for the most significant scientific revolution in human history. In addition to his most notorious astronomical discoveries, which challenged centuries of religious dogma by dethroning Earth as the center of the universe andnearly cost him his life, Galileo alsoinvented modern timekeeping, created the microscope, inspired Shakespeare, and even provided a metaphorical model for understanding how culture evolves.

In I, Galileo (public library), writer and artist Bonnie Christensen — who also gave us the marvelous illustrated story of Nellie Bly — chronicles the life of the great Italian astronomer, physicist, engineer, and philosopher, adding to both the finest picture-book biographies of cultural icons and the best children’s books celebrating science.

The story, quite possibly inspired by Ralph Steadman’s superb I, Leonardo, is told as a first-person autobiography narrated by Galileo himself. Christensen’s beautiful illustrations pay homage to the aesthetic sensibility of Galileo’s era, partway between the stained glass of European cathedrals and the artistic style of the Old Masters.

We meet Galileo as a blind old man, sentenced to lifelong house arrest by the Inquisition for his dogma-defying discoveries, then travel with him back in time.

In childhood, his father’s revolutionary theories bridging music and mathematics instilled in the young boy an ethos of challenging convention; at eleven, he was sent to a monastery for his formal education and decided to become a monk, which alarmed his father into sending him to medical school instead; in late adolescence, he dropped out of medical school without a degree.

For the remainder of his adolescence, Galileo was essentially homeschooled and self-taught, conducting various fascinating experiments with his father — such as manipulating the length, tension, and thickness of a string to produce notes of a different pitch.

But his voracious scientific curiosity came at a cost — by twenty-five, Galileo was already quite unpopular for doing away with tradition, from refusing to wear the professorial robes his peers wore to challenging Aristotle’s sacred laws of physics.

Aristotle, the famous ancient Greek philosopher, claimed a heavy object would fall faster than a light objet. I disagreed. To prove my point, I dropped two cannonballs of different weights from the leaning tower. Just as I predicted, they fell at the exact same rate of speed. But the public was not convinced, even in the face of scientific proof. I was not invited to continue teaching at the University of Pisa.

And yet Galileo persevered, continuing to challenge the dogmas of ancient science and religion. His seminal pendulum insight sparked modern timekeeping and his famous telescopic observations, an attraction for Italian royalty, proved that Sun, not the Earth, was what the heavenly bodies orbited.

Aware of how radical and possibly dangerous his discovery was, Galileo remained silent for seven years, during which he inverted the direction of his curiosity and used his lens-making skills to invent the microscope.

When he eventually published his findings, he did indeed incur the wrath of the Inquisition and was locked away in the hills of Arcetri, where he died a blind old man having seen the truth of the universe. His ideas lived on to usher in a whole new era of science and culture, forever changing our relationship to the cosmos and to ourselves.

Complement Christensen’s I, Galileo with the illustrated story of pioneering Persian astronomer and polymath Ibn Sina, then revisit the picture-book biographies of other trailblazing shapers of culture: Jane Goodall, Pablo Neruda,Frida Kahlo, e.e. cummings, and Albert Einstein.

on the reasons why 'American' may not a language after all...

Why does American English take such liberties with our common tongue

By James Harbeck

15 July 2015

... English speakers first started colonising America more than 400 years ago. Since then, American English has been evolving, influenced by other languages, culture and technology. As the linguist Max Weinreich said, a language is a dialect with an army and a navy; the US has been an independent country for more than two centuries – and boasts the world’s most powerful examples of both. So why is American not a separate language? Or should we view it as one? How did it come to be so different, and how did it not come to be more different?

It starts with the identities of the first American English speakers. Four hundred years ago, the colonies were particularly attractive to people who were strongly opposed to the Church of England or couldn’t make a living there – they were not the cream of society. Once tobacco caught on, America became more attractive for those with money, but it still needed servants more than owners – servants and eventually slaves. The earliest American linguistic landscape was strongly influenced by dialects of the sort that even today are not highly esteemed by those with money. But they were still British, at first.

Then British English started changing in ways American didn’t. The  ‘proper’ English of the early 1600s would sound to us like a cross between the English spoken in Cornwall and Dallas; the accent has changed more in British English than in much of American. Even at the time of the American Revolution, educated speech in England fully pronounced “r” in all places, and King George III probably said after, ask, dance, glass, and path the same as George Washington did: with the same a as in hat and fat. The ‘ah’ pronunciation was considered low-class in England until after the Revolution.

Along with pronunciation, word use in the two countries began to differ. Bill Bryson, in Made in America: An Informal History of the English Language in the United States, lists a number of words the English have left in the dustbin but Americans have kept using, including cabin, bug, hog, deck (of cards), junk, jeer, hatchet, slick, molasses, cesspool, trash, chore and mayhem, American uses of gotten as a past participle of get, fall to mean autumn, mad to mean angry and sick to mean more generally ill, which came from England but fell out of favour in the native land.

Brave new world

American English changed too. It had influences not present in England: a new landscape, new animals, and new people – not just those who were already there when the Europeans arrived but immigrants from continental Europe, as well as African slaves brought over to work on the plantations. Spanish gave many words useful in the South West, such as canyon, coyote,mesa, and tornado; French handed over words such as prairie, bureau, and levee; Dutch gave words such as bluff, boss, andwaffle; German gave pretzel, sauerkraut, and nix; the African languages of the slaves gave words such as goober, jambalaya, and the synonyms gumbo and okra. Later immigrant groups brought still more words. Many words were also taken (usually somewhat altered) from the indigenous cultures, eg moose, raccoon, caribou, opossum, skunk, hickory, pecan, squash, and toboggan.

English was also altered to suit need. Some things were named using existing words for passably similar things: laurel, beech, walnut, hemlock, robin, blackbird, lark, swallow, hedgehog. Once the Americans had their new government, words were pressed into service for some of its details as well, such as congress, senate, and assembly. Some things were named with new compounds: rattlesnake, bluegrass, bobcat, bullfrog; later, as the need arose, sidewalk, skyscraper,and drugstore. Words for things invented after American independence have often differed on opposite sides of the Atlantic: does your car have a boot and bonnet or a hood and trunk?

Tongue twisters

Early British visitors sometimes wrote of how little the dialect changed from place to place as they travelled through the colonies. America was also settled by people from all over Britain, not just one region, and they were quite mobile, which had a further homogenising effect. But the USA is a large country, and groups of immigrants from different countries have given distinct flavours to different regions. Once people settled in place, their speech started localising.

Regional variations in accent also came – and are still coming, even today – from the same kinds of phonological shifts that, in England, had turned person into parson and more recently have given us the Sloany “fraffly” (frightfully). Sometimes regional pronunciations of words made their way back into the standard version of English as different words: varmint from vermin, cuss from curse, thrash from thresh, chaw from chew, tetchy from touchy, and gal from girl. Turns of phrase have developed differently in different parts of the country, too: depending on where you are in the US, “I might could do that,” “Anymore, we do it this way,” and “So don’t I” may or may not be perfectly normal speech.

Americans felt most free – even obliged – to take linguistic liberties once they had taken their political liberty. As Noah Webster wrote in his 1791 Dissertations on the English Language, “As an independent nation, our honor requires us to have a system of our own, in language as well as government.” Not that all Americans felt the same. When, in 1800, Caleb Alexander came out with his Columbian Dictionary of the English Language, one reviewer wrote: “This work, a disgrace to letters, is a disgusting collection of every vicious word or phrase, chosen by the absurd misapprehension, or coined by the boors of each local jurisdiction in the United States. It is a record of our imbecility.”

Noah Webster wrote in 1791, "As an independent nation, our honor requires us to have a system of our own, in language as well as government." (Credit: Getty Images)

Throughout the19th Century there was a great dictionary competition: between Webster’s deliberately American approach (his first full dictionary came out in 1818) and the much more British-orientated approach of Nathaniel Worcester (whose first dictionary was published in 1830). Both were very popular, and such esteemed authors as Longfellow, Hawthorne, and even Noah Webster’s distant relation Daniel Webster preferred Worcester’s conservative spellings. Which won out in the end? Well, we know, don’t we? No one today has heard of Worcester’s dictionaries. The Americans opted for a distinctiveness to mark their independence. The British, seeing this rebellion by those rough Yanks, pulled in the opposite direction.

Dollars and sense

The most cosmetically salient differences are, of course, the spellings. Webster promulgated many spelling reforms. Some did not catch on, and were reversed in his later dictionaries: no one spells bread as bred, give as giv, mean as meen, speak as speke, character as karacter, ache as ake, or tongue as tung. Others stuck. A few were inconsistently used in America and England before Webster, and his endorsement helped them to be standard in America and, consequently, rejected in England – notably the shift of words such as colour to color and of words such as naturalise to naturalize. 

Others for which Webster’s dictionaries were the prime vector include changing centre to center, defence to defense, connexion to connection, and chequer and masque to checker and mask. His removal of the k in words such as magick, musick, and logick even came to be the standard in England.

For that matter, while many Brits are quick to denounce Americanisms where they see them (even ones that, as we have seen, came from England first), quite a few words of American invention have been adopted into British English, including belittle, caucus, prairie, cloudburst, blizzard, cafeteria, cocktail, talented, reliable, and influential.

The commerce of words, as of goods and culture, has continued apace across the Atlantic. Traffic between the colonies and in particular, London, has always helped keep American from diverging more. London remained the centre of English culture as the American colonies developed, and Americans with money and connections regularly crossed the Atlantic. The areas of the US where more distinctive dialects of English are spoken are well away from the halls of power, and their speech is typically stigmatised in the general culture. New York and other money cities – and the great universities – have maintained versions of English not so different from the educated British standard.

And that is an important reason American English is still American English. Money talks, and the US has not seen it as worthwhile to declare a distinct language, since American English, like the American dollar, is the current dominant force globally, like it or not.

*

P.S./N.B. Lest one forgets...

Speaking the bright and beautiful English of Shakespeare - The English Language Council Lecture

The British Council and the English-Speaking Union welcomed Ben Crystal as part of the English Language Council lecture series. The lecture marked the 450th anniversary of the birth of William Shakespeare.

The guardian of English poetry, the inventor of over 1,000 words still in use today, and one of the greatest players with our language, Shakespeare has given us a treasure trove of English to read - funny how so much of it doesn't make sense until it's spoken out-loud.

Actor and author Ben Crystal explores the accent, the theatrical conventions, and the world of Shakespeare, to reveal a bright and beautiful English.

Who is Ben Crystal?

Ben Crystal is an actor, producer, and writer. He studied English Language and Linguistics at Lancaster University before training at Drama Studio London. He has worked in TV, film and theatre, at the reconstructed Shakespeare’s Globe, London, and has been a narrator for RNIB Talking Books, Channel 4 and the BBC.

He co-wrote Shakespeare’s Words (Penguin 2002) and The Shakespeare Miscellany (Penguin 2005) with his father David Crystal, and his first solo book, Shakespeare on Toast – Getting a Taste for the Bard (Icon 2008) was shortlisted for the 2010 Educational Writer of the Year Award.

His productions of Simon Stephens' One Minute in 2008 and Robin French's Gilbert is Dead in 2009 were critically acclaimed.

In 2011, he played Hamlet in the first Original Pronunciation production of the play for 400 years with the Nevada Repertory Company.

In 2012 he was the curator for the first CD of extracts of Shakespeare recorded by professional actors in Original Pronunciation for the British Library, their best-selling CD to date, and his new series for Arden Shakespeare / Bloomsbury - Springboard Shakespeare was published in June 2013.

A SCIENCE OF TEACHING

A SCIENCE OF TEACHING offers a comprehensive guide for teachers, educators, and anyone else interested in human behavior on how learning occurs at a biological and environmental level. What shapes our behavior? How do our behaviors become reinforced? What are some useful techniques to help shape human behavior towards acquiring new skills and behaviours? How do we measure human behavior and what is the science behind teaching and learning? These are all questions which are addressed within this film. The film covers many sections ranging from the biological basis of learning, tools for educators, precision teaching and technology in the classroom.