Jess's English Blog

Friday, 10 January 2014

Language rules are meant to be broken

For linguists, the statement "language change is inevitable" is uncontroversial. Yet we're constantly told that teenagers (and, it seems, celebrity chefs) are destroying the English language. If we believe the warnings, then soon all younger generations will communicate as if they're composing an SMS or Facebook update and dictionaries will be full of inane abbreviations and words foreign to older generations.

Most languages have "standard" varieties, which are used for formal occasions, such as academia and the law. These words often have a history going back many years, and originate in Latin, French or German, for example. When communicating with friends and family, online or in other informal situations, "vernacular" or "colloquial" language is more appropriate.

Informal language is the most subject to change and to show variations in use. This is evident in changes to spelling, abbreviations such as "LOL", "CBF" and "FML", and for many users, an almost total disregard for rules of grammar. An understanding of the taboo nature of certain words can be seen in the substitution of "the c word" with the inoffensive "kent". The word "random" has taken on a new meaning of "weird" or "unexpected", as well as being used as a noun to describe someone who is not part of the person's social group — and unwanted.

These spelling and semantic changes are seen by linguists as interesting innovations; by the general (adult) population perhaps as signs of poor literacy, laziness or mental deficiency. But to disregard the creativity inherent in these changes is to forget that many teenagers actively engage with language, but on their own terms. Many adults do not understand them because they're not meant to; they're saying "you're not part of my group". We are unlikely to see new meanings of "kent" or "random" in a dictionary (besides the Urban one), except to bring attention to colloquial usage, which is in a constant state of flux anyway.

In terms of the negatives, of concern to many people is the misspelling and misuse of homonyms such as "they're", "there" and "their", and "to", "too" and "two". It's also common to find a sentence peppered with "u", "dat", "dere" or "y" and to show a complete lack of punctuation, even between sentences. Whether this is done out of laziness, ignorance or economy is unclear, and would only be known if the person was forced to write formally. But if one never has to write an essay for uni, create a cover sheet for a job, or give a speech to hordes of business people, then an almost total use of informal language would not present many problems, except to (critical) others. The difficulties arise if one requires the use of formal language but is unable to wield it. Even for those of us who do write formally, subjunctives ("if I were"), split infinitives ("to boldly go") and prepositions at the ends of sentences, are not things we are generally concerned about (boom boom).

Is education to blame? I know academics who write "gonna", "wanna" and "CBF", and mechanics who use the subjunctive in speech. Go figure. We should not be overly concerned because most humans know the appropriate times for certain kinds of speech or writing, dictated by the context we are in and our audience. All "living" languages are constantly changing depending on the needs of the people using them. Nostalgically clinging to words is pointless. Conversely, formal varieties of language are slow to adopt changes and words or rules tend to fall into disuse, rather than be picked up (who nowadays uses "repugn", "peregrinate" or "jactation"?).

Not everyone will attain the vocabulary of Sir Humphrey Appleby or the linguistic style of Wordsworth, and while the use of highly vernacular language by others may be frustrating or grating, attempts to force people to speak or write in certain ways are usually met with resistance or resentment.

We cannot discount individual differences in language use — you use "LOL" but I use "haha" — and people will always have differing opinions on how others should speak or write, though some may think the sky is falling and we're all destined to utter monosyllabic grunts.

The only way to ensure that all children speak, write and understand formal language would be through a massive overhaul of the education system and a prohibition on other language styles. But as this would do little to prevent informal language from being used anyway, it seems some people need to, like, get over it, and stuff.

Bad Grammar or Language Change?

What is happening to the English language. NBC Nightly News recently aired a criticism of English speakers, accusing us of misusing the grammar of the language. This is a criticism we have heard from editors, publishers, and readers for at least 300 years. But is it fair? Are we battering English grammar or is English grammar simply changing, as all languages do, over time? Linguists have been struggling with this question for ages.

Take, for example, the plural number in English. English traditionally distinguishes one or more objects by a distinct form, the plural, e.g. one table, two tables, many tables. Lately, however, a series of problems has arisen in the language that suggests this distinction is in trouble.

For example, have you heard people say things like this:

A large amount of pigeons flew by
We found less pigeons than we expected

English once distinguished nouns referring to substances that are always in the singular by using amount for singular substances and number for countable objects in the plural:

A large amount of Kool-Aid, ambition, coffee, or crawfish gumbo
A large number of pigeons, bullwhips, armadillos, or blueberry pies

The same distinction was made by less and fewer. Less was used only if the noun were uncountable: less Kool-Aid, less coffee, fewer crawfish but less crawfish gumbo.Fewer was applied to countable objects: fewer bullwhips, fewer armadillos, and fewer blueberry pies. This distinction, too, seems to be swooshing out the window these days. Is that a natural or unnatural process?

One final bit of evidence. Kay Bock, one of the nation's leading psycholinguists, has been researching the plurals of nouns and finding that we are confusing singular and plural more and more.

In English, the noun that is the subject of a sentence agrees with its verb. Roughly, if the noun has an the plural -s on it, the verb doesn't The pigs run) but if the noun doesn't have one (is singular), the verb does (The pig runs).

What Professor Bock is finding is that agreement is not always between the subject noun and the verb, as grammar dictates, but between the noun nearest the verb, whatever its function in the sentence. For example:

A rootery of pigs were running through the barnyard.
As the problem of rooting pigs grow, we have to address them.

In these sentences, the subject nouns are group and problem, so the verb should contain the -s:

A rootery of pigs was running through the barnyard.
As the problem of rooting pigs grows, we have to address it.

What Bock is finding, is that agreement is often between the verb and the nearest noun to it, which is not necessarily the subject of the sentence. She thinks language is changing but such sentences sound a lot like bad grammar.

By the way, this has nothing to do with the difference between British and US English, where the British use the plural with what linguists call 'collective nouns' (as opposed to our use of rootery above): nouns that are singular in form but refer to a plurality of objects:

The Parliament are in session
The crew are on alert
The team play well together.

The British are consistent in this usage. In the US it seems that our grasp of the sense of plurality is diminishing and, if that is the case, we could see the plural disappear from the language in a relative short linguistic period—perhaps, fewer than 200 years!

Before summing up, let me alert you of one final symptom that seems to fit the pattern of the other three. To understand it, you have to be aware of another loss in English: the number of suffixes for marking grammatical functions like number, person, tense, is dropping rapidly. Suffixes like -dom, -ery, -ess and many others are no longer being added to new words.

The result of this is that the suffixes we are left with have to serve more and more functions. For example, the suffix -s is used to mark the following:

The plural: ant-s, launching-s, door-s
The 3rd singular Present tense of verbs: He/she/it run-s, smell-s, plunge-s
Making nouns out of adjectives: linguistic-s, acrobatic-s, mathematic-s
Possessive: George's, Bush's, the anaconda's (ignore the apostrophe since you can't hear it)

This brings us to the fourth bit of evidence that at least US English-speakers are losing their grasp of the plural: plural number is often confused with nonplural uses. You have probably heard things like these:

Boscov's are having a big sale this week.
Logistics are not my forte.

These would be just speech errors if they didn't fit the pattern created by the first three bits of evidence: we are losing our grip on the plural of words.

So, how will we be able to communicate if the plural disappears? Would you believe that many languages get away without the singular-plural distinction today and have been doing so for millennia?

Oriental languages like Vietnamese and Chinese have no singular-plural distinction at all. The reason these languages do without plural number suggests that it might be redundant in English: we generally use the plural with some modifier that makes plural obvious:

Many Cadillacs	Many Cadillac
Five toads	Five toad
A few warts	A few wart

Do we really need -s when we already have many, five, few in the sentence? The Chinese and Vietnamese have built advanced civilizations on languages limited to phrases like those in the second column above. English could be getting more like Chinese!

If the plural is abandoning English, it is too early to be sure. However, if the process has begun, there is no stopping it, so tormenting your kids with constant grammatical corrections will not work. Only time will tell and, as we all know, time takes its time.

—Dr. Goodword is Robert Beard, PhD Linguistics, and President, The Lexiteria

4 changes to English so subtle we hardly notice they're happening.

veryone knows that language changes. It's easy to pick out words that have only been recently introduced (bromance, YOLO, derp) or sentence constructions that have gone out of style (How do you do? Have you a moment?), but we are constantly in the middle of language change that may not be noticeable for decades or even centuries. Some of the biggest and most lasting changes to language happen slowly and imperceptibly. The Great Vowel Shift, for example, was a series of pronunciation changes occurring over 350 years, and not really noticed for over 100 years after that. It resulted in an intelligibility gap between Modern and Middle English and created the annoying misalignment between English pronunciation and spelling. But it was impossible to see while it was going on.

These days, however, it is possible to spot subtle linguistic changes by analyzing large digital collections of text or transcribed speech, some of which cover long periods of time. Linguists can run the numbers on these large corpora to determine the direction of language use trends and whether they are statistically significant. Here are 4 rather subtle changes happening in English, as determined by looking at the numbers.

1. SHIFT FROM "THEY STARTED TO WALK" TO "THEY STARTED WALKING"There are a number of verbs that can take a complement with another verb in either the "-ing" form or the "to" form: "They liked painting/to paint;" "We tried leaving/to leave;" "He didn't bother calling/to call." Both of these constructions are still used, and they have both been used for a long time. But there has been a steady shift over time from the "to" to the "-ing" complement. "Start" and "begin" saw a big increase in the "-ing" complement until leveling out in the 1940s, whiles emotion verbs like "like," "love," "hate," and "fear" saw their proportion of "-ing" complements start to rise in the 1950s and 60s. Not all verbs have participated in the shift: "stand," "intend," and "cease" went the "to" way.

2. GETTING MORE PROGRESSIVEEnglish has been getting more progressive over time — that is, the progressive form of the verb has steadily increased in use. (The progressive form is the –ing form that indicates something is continuous or ongoing: "They are speaking" vs. "They speak.") This change started hundreds of years ago, but in each subsequent era, the form has grown into parts of the grammar it hadn't had much to do with in previous eras. For example, at least in British English, its use in the passive ("It is being held" rather than "It is held") and with modal verbs like "should," "would," and "might" ("I should be going" rather than "I should go") has grown dramatically. There is also an increase of "be" in the progressive form with adjectives ("I'm being serious" vs. "I'm serious").

3. GOING TO, HAVE TO, NEED TO, WANT TOIt's pretty noticeable that words like "shall" and "ought" are on the way out, but "will," "should," and "can" are doing just fine. There are other members of this helping verb club though, and they have been on a steep climb this century. "Going to," "have to," "need to," and "want to" cover some of the same meaning territory as the other modal verbs. They first took hold in casual speech and have enjoyed a big increase in print in recent decades.

4. RISE OF THE "GET-PASSIVE"The passive in English is usually formed with the verb "to be," yielding "they were fired" or "the tourist was robbed." But we also have the "get" passive, giving us "they got fired" and "the tourist got robbed." The get-passive goes back at least 300 years, but it has been on a rapid rise during the past 50 years. It is strongly associated with situations which are bad news for the subject — getting fired, getting robbed — but also situations that give some kind of benefit. (They got promoted. The tourist got paid.) However, the restrictions on its use may be relaxing over time and get-passives could get a whole lot bigger.

How texting is wrecking our language.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-483511/I-h8-txt-msgs-How-texting-wrecking-language.html

A good dictionary is a fine thing - I yield to no man in my love for one. If I stretch out my right arm as I type, I can pluck from my shelves the two volumes of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary.

They are as close to my heart as they are to my desk because they are so much more than a useful tool.

Leafing through a good dictionary in search of a single word is a small voyage of discovery - infinitely more satisfying than looking something up on the internet.

It's partly the physical sensation - the feel and smell of good paper - and partly the minor triumph of finding the word you seek, but it's rare to open a dictionary without being diverted somewhere else.

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The eye falls on a word you've never seen before or one whose meaning you have always wanted to check, and you close the dictionary just a little bit richer for the experience.

But my lifetime love affair with the OED is at risk. The sixth edition has just been published and - I feel a small shudder as I write these words - it has fallen victim to fashion.

It has removed the hyphen from no fewer than 16,000 words.

So in future we are required to spell pigeon-hole, for instance, as pigeonhole and leap-frog as leapfrog. In other cases we have two words instead of one. Pot-belly shall henceforth be pot belly.

You may very well say: so what? Indeed, you may well have functioned perfectly well until now spelling leapfrog without a hyphen.

The spell-check (sorry: spellcheck) on my computer is happy with both. But that's not why I feel betrayed by my precious OED.

It's because of the reason for this change. It has happened because we are changing the way we communicate with each other, which means, says the OED editor Angus Stevenson, that we no longer have time to reach for the hyphen key.

Have you ever heard anything quite so daft? No time to make one tiny key-stroke (sorry: key stroke).

Has it really come to this? Are our lives really so pressured, every minute occupied in so many vital tasks, every second accounted for, that we cannot afford the millisecond (no hyphen) it takes to tap that key?

Obviously not. No, there's another reason - and it's far more sinister and deeply troubling.

It is the relentless onward march of the texters, the SMS (Short Message Service) vandals who are doing to our language what Genghis Khan did to his neighbours eight hundred years ago.

They are destroying it: pillaging our punctuation; savaging our sentences; raping our vocabulary. And they must be stopped.

This, I grant you, is a tall order. The texters have many more arrows in their quiver than we who defend the old way.

Ridicule is one of them. "What! You don't text? What century are you living in then, granddad? Need me to sharpen your quill pen for you?"

You know the sort of thing; those of us who have survived for years without a mobile phone have to put up with it all the time. My old friend Amanda Platell, who graces these pages on Saturdays, has an answerphone message that says the caller may leave a message but she'd prefer a text. One feels so inadequate.

(Or should that have been ansafone? Of course it should. There are fewer letters in that hideous word and think how much time I could have saved typing it.)

The texters also have economy on their side. It costs almost nothing to send a text message compared with a voice message. That's perfectly true. I must also concede that some voice messages can be profoundly irritating.

My own outgoing message asks callers to be very brief - ideally just name and number - but that doesn't stop some callers burbling on for ten minutes and always, always ending by saying: "Ooh - sorry I went on so long!"

But can that be any more irritating than those absurd little smiley faces with which texters litter their messages? It is 25 years since the emoticon (that's the posh word) was born.

It started with the smiley face and the gloomy face and now there are 16 pages of them in the texters' A-Z.

It has now reached the stage where my computer will not allow me to type the colon, dash and bracket without automatically turning it into a picture of a smiling face. Aargh!

Even worse are the grotesque abbreviations. It is interesting, in a masochistic sort of way, to look at how text language has changed over the years.

It began with some fairly obvious and relatively inoffensive abbreviations: 'tks' for 'thanks'; 'u' for 'you'; 4 for 'for'.

But as it has developed its users have sought out increasingly obscure ways of expressing themselves which, when you think about it, entirely defeats the purpose.

If the recipient of the message has to spend ten minutes trying to translate it, those precious minutes are being wasted. And isn't the whole point to 'save' time?

Then there's the problem of ambiguity. With my vast knowledge of text language I had assumed LOL meant 'lots of love', but now I discover it means 'laugh out loud'. Or at least it did the last time I asked.

But how would you know? Instead of aiding communication it can be a barrier. I can work out BTW (by the way) but I was baffled by IMHO U R GR8. It means: "In my humble opinion you are great." But, once again, how would you know?

Let me anticipate the reaction to this modest little rant against the text revolution and the OED for being influenced by it. Its defenders will say language changes.

It is constantly evolving and anyone who tries to get in the way is a fuddy-duddy who deserves to be run down.

I agree. One of the joys of the English language and one of the reasons it has been so successful in spreading across the globe is that it is infinitely adaptable.

If we see an Americanism we like, we snaffle it - and so we should. But texting and 'netspeak' are effectively different languages.

The danger - for young people especially - is that they will come to dominate. Our written language may end up as a series of ridiculous emoticons and everchanging abbreviations.

It is too late to save the hand-written letter. E-mailing has seen to that and I must confess that I would find it difficult to live without it. That does not mean I like it.

I resent the fact that I spend so much of my working day (and, even more regrettably, weekends) checking for e-mails - most of which are junk.

I am also cross with myself for the way I have adapted my own style. In the early days I treated e-mails as though they were letters. I tried to construct proper, grammatical sentences and used punctuation that would have brought a smile to the lips of that guardian of our language, Lynne Truss.

Now I find myself slipping into sloppy habits, abandoning capital letters and using rows of dots.

But at least I have not succumbed to 'text-speak' and I wish the OED had not hoisted the white flag either. I recall a piece of doggerel which sums up my fears nicely: Mary had a mobile.

She texted day and night. But when it came to her exams She'd forgotten how to write.

To the editor of the OED I will simply say: For many years you've been GR8. Don't spoil it now. Tks.

Have we literally broken the English Language?

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/13/literally-broken-english-language-definition

It's happened. Literally the most misused word in the language has officially changed definition. Now as well as meaning "in a literal manner or sense; exactly: 'the driver took it literally when asked to go straight over the traffic circle'", various dictionaries have added its other more recent usage. As Google puts it, "literally" can be used "to acknowledge that something is not literally true but is used for emphasis or to express strong feeling".

Did we, as genuinely hundreds of people are tweeting, just break the English language? Or did we, as totally tens of bloggers are writing, prove that the English language is a beautiful, organic creature that is forever slipping out of our control? Well, no: to be precise, we have done something mildly annoying.

"Literally", you see, in its development from knock-kneed, single-purpose utterance, to swan-like dual-purpose term, has reached that awkward stage. It is neither one nor the other, and it can't do anything right. So to use it at all is to encounter one of several pitfalls:

1. Mucking about with its meaning isn't clever or inventive any more

"Literally" has been playfully abused since the time of Walter Scott. In Chronicles of the Canongate, for example, he writes: "The house was literally electrified; and it was only from witnessing the effects of her genius that he could guess to what a pitch theatrical excellence could be carried." This was 1827, before the popularisation of the electric light: the house was figuratively electrified.

In 1837, a piece in The Mother's Magazine by Abigail and Samuel Whittelsey contained the phrase, "They both literally slept in Jesus", and in 1894 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote, in The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, that Sherlock's room "was literally ankle-deep with congratulatory telegrams" (we can probably also take this as figurative).

The point is that even if it was fun and surprising to force a "literally" where another word should go back in the 1800s, it's getting a bit old now. But not quite old enough to change the word's meaning completely and clean it of all the irritatingly playful associations.

Plus, since then the word has picked up way too much baggage to make it usefully nifty. "Literally" has been mainstream shorthand for "talking like a teenage girl" for a decade – you're not going to get rid of that reference without violent verbal acrobatics. Literally, I'm afraid, is, like, totally eighteen-hundred and late.

2. To use it is to teeter on the edge of a conversational wormhole

You might be near a pedant, and they will say something like "Don't you mean 'figuratively?'" (no, no one says "figuratively" – it is pretentious) or go into "Yes, your foot is LITERALLY coming off. I LITERALLY believe you" paroxysms until smothered. These are the same people who use the word as a definitive intelligence measure – see the snobbery over Jamie Redknapp last year – which in my mind is as much of an error as using a specific piece of knowledge as a mark of cleverness ("X% of Americans don't know where Armenia is! So stupid…").

3. There isn't much to be done

Given all of this, even when someone does use the word correctly, ("he's literally the prime minister"), it is often such a surprise to the listener that the conversation halts anyway – prompting something like "er, yes. You're right. He literally is" to emphasise just how much they have acknowledged your traditional use of language.

So there really is not much we can do with the word "literally", other than avoid it completely. At the moment it is irredeemable. It is a moot word. We just have to leave it up in its bedroom for a while until it grows up a bit.