Latest news with #linguistics
Telegraph
4 days ago
- General
- Telegraph
‘Despite the headlines, 'mischeevious' is not considered standard English'
'Mischievous'. It's a word that has come to define my week in quite unexpected ways, ever since I happened to answer a question from an audience member at the wonderful Hay Festival about changes to English that I find annoying. I explained that one bugbear I have recently overcome was the increasing use of the pronunciation 'mischeevious', since I have come to see the rationale for the change and to acknowledge its place in a long history of sound shifts that, for a lexicographer at least, are interesting to observe. The result was a right linguistic foofaraw, thanks to many a mischievous headline claiming I now consider 'mischeevious' to be entirely acceptable. I'm hoping I can set the record a little straighter now. The first thing to say is that a lexicographer's job is to chart the trajectory of words as they evolve. We are describers, not prescribers, of language, despite the understandable desire of many for some form of linguistic government. English has no equivalent to L'Académie française, a body that attempts to preside over the French language. English has always been an entirely democratic affair, subject to the will of the people, and it is inevitable that some of the changes it undergoes will prove irksome along the way. The fact that many of us are messing with the sound of 'mischievous' is clearly one. Despite the headlines, it is most definitely not considered standard English: in fact Oxford's dictionary of contemporary English offers unusually firm guidelines as to its usage: 'Mischievous is a three-syllable word. It should not be pronounced with four syllables with the stress on the second syllable, as if it were spelled mischievious'. Why, then, are we changing it? Is there any method to our madness? The answer involves a process that has informed linguistic evolution for centuries. In the case of 'mischievous', which comes from the Old French meschever, 'to come to an unfortunate end', the '-ievous' ending of the adjective is coming under the influence of such words as 'devious'. In the same way, it is becoming rare these days to hear reports of 'grievous bodily harm': I have heard 'grievious bodily harm' at least three times on news reports just this weekend. This is far from the only example of changing pronunciation, as readers will know all too well. 'Pacifically' and 'nucular' are two other repeat offenders. In the case of the former, 'pacifically' (already in the dictionary meaning 'peacefully'; the Pacific Ocean is the 'Peaceful Ocean') is judged by some to be easier to say, while the shift to 'nucular' brings it closer to such words as 'molecular' and 'secular' – there are fewer common words in current English ending with '-lear', with the exception perhaps of 'cochlear'. In each of these cases, familiarity seems to the catalyst. Similarly, it seems most people feel on 'tenderhooks' these days, rather than 'tenterhooks'. The latter were once a common feature in cloth-manufacturing districts, for they were wooden frames erected in rows in the open air on 'tenter-fields'. Wet cloth would be hooked onto them to be stretched after milling, allowing it dry evenly without shrinkage. Metaphorically, to be on tenterhooks is to be as taut, tense, and in suspense as the wool itself. Today, tenters are no longer a feature of our countryside, resulting in 'tenderhooks' being chosen for the job instead. I of course regret the loss of the story behind such words, but the joy of etymology is digging beneath the surface to discover these treasures of the past. Lest you feel your blood pressure rising already, there is some reassurance in the fact that such shifts are nothing new. If you've ever wondered what a Jerusalem artichoke has to do with Jerusalem, the answer is absolutely nothing: the name arose because English speakers in the 16th century struggled with the Italian word 'girasole', which means 'sunflower' (the Jerusalem artichoke is a heliotrope). It sounded a little like 'Jerusalem', so they plumped for that instead. At the same time, 'asparagus' must have proved equally challenging, for English speakers some 400 years ago decided to call it 'sparrowgrass' instead. The expression a 'forlorn hope' is a mangling of the Dutch 'verloren hoop', or 'lost troop', describing the vanguard of an army that fell in battle. It's hard to deny that there is poetry in our substitution. Slips of the tongue and ear are more common than you might think. Such words as 'umpire', 'apron', 'adder', and 'nickname' are the direct result of mistaken assumptions, for they began respectively as a 'noumpere', a 'napron', and a 'nadder'. In each case the 'n' drifted over to the 'a', since when spoken out loud it was hard to tell which word the letter belonged to. There are dozens more examples. 'Teeny' is an alteration of 'tiny', 'innards' is a take on 'inwards', 'manhandle' is a semi-logical riff on 'mangle', and 'tootsie' represents a child's delivery of 'footsie'. Other words that once wore their hearts on their sleeves have changed their sounds completely: a cupboard was pronounced with 'cup' and 'board' fully intact; only later did we decide it was a 'cubbard'. A 'ward-robe', or 'keeper of robes', is now more usually a 'war-drobe2. And let's not even start with a process known as 'haplology', where a word's syllable is swallowed entirely: who pronounces 'February' with the middle 'r' these days? You're more likely to hear 'probably' as 'probly', too, and a 'library' as a 'libry'. Even our idioms have taken a strange turn over the centuries. Why does 'head over heels' describe being upended by love when this is our regular bodily position? The answer is that the original was 'heels over head', meaning to turn a somersault, but at some point in the phrase's history the idiom was mistakenly (and fittingly) turned upside down. None of these changes mean we should no longer care. The opposite, in fact, for having bugbears means we are passionate about our words and wish to protect their beauty and clarity. What's more, when we mangle them, we run the risk of distracting our audience, and losing our meaning in the process. But it also feels important to know that language – and English in particular – has always been unpredictable and occasionally erratic, changing as its users wish it to, even if that is occasionally by mistake. I'll finish with one request: please don't shoot the messenger. I'm beginning to realise that there is a reason why I am occasionally called a 'minefield' of information.
RNZ News
4 days ago
- General
- RNZ News
Proto: an ancient language, mother to many tongues
Photo: HarperCollins Thousands of miles apart, people who speak English, Icelandic or Iranic use more or less the same words: star, stjarna, stare. All three of these languages - and hundreds more - share a single ancient ancestor, spread by ancient peoples far and wide. Today, nearly half of humanity speaks an Indo-European language. But, Proto Indo European is a language that has been dead for thousands of years and was never written down. British science journalist Laura Spinney's epic tale Proto - How One Ancient Language Went Global retraces its steps. Spinney has written for the New Scientist, The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph. She speaks with Susie.
Daily Mail
26-05-2025
- General
- Daily Mail
The commonly mispronounced words that infuriate Brits... so, are YOU saying them correctly?
In a country famed for its love of queuing and tea, mispronunciation is a breach of etiquette known to ruffle feathers. Britons have taken to Reddit 's r/AskUK forum to share the linguistic blunders that drive them to distraction. 'Which words do people say incorrectly that really bother you, British edition?,' one user asked. The responses ranged from phonetic mistakes to spelling blunders, with some regional snobbery thrown in. Among the most irksome offenders is the mistake of saying 'pacific' when the person actually means 'specific.' One user quipped: 'Nothing Pacific comes to mind,' highlighting the issue in an amusing way. Others bemoaned saying 'incinerating' in place of 'insinuating,' prompting more than a few grumbles from users with the same language dislike. And then there's the seemingly American phrase 'I could care less.' One commenter vented: 'They're saying the literal opposite of what they mean!' Others on Reddit were particularly scathing of that example, arguing that it completely undermines the speaker's intended indifference. The pronunciation of 'ask' as 'arks' also drew criticism, though not without sparking a broader cultural debate. One user grumbled that the variation made them think of 'toddler pronunciation', only to be swiftly countered by another pointing out that 'arks' has roots in Caribbean English dialects. 'Don't abandon your heritage because some people are up their own a**e about "proper" English,' one person wrote, defending the linguistic variations. Other grievances leaned toward the typographic rather than the spoken. 'Could of,' 'should of,' and 'would of' came under fire for their grammatical inaccuracy. The difference between 'lose' and 'loose' similarly had tempers flaring, with one person noting: 'My wife's a stickler for this one! It's horribly widespread and irritates me no end. 'In a similar vein, "litterly" seems to be usurping "literally" as the preferred spelling.' 'Can I get a shot of expresso?' one user wrote, mocking the common mispronunciation of 'espresso.' Spelling seemed to strike the most sensitive nerves, with people mentioning their annoyance at others for mistaking 'weary' for 'wary,' or 'brake' for 'break'. One person complained about the use of 'defiantly' when they mean 'definitely' and 'then' when they mean 'than'.
Daily Mail
24-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Amorous Or Loving? by Rupert Gavin: Who really invented Twitter? A) Jack Dorsey B) Jeff Bezoz C) Geoffrey Chaucer D) Elon Musk E) Mark Zuckerberg
Amorous Or Loving? by Rupert Gavin (Unicorn £25, 224pp) Spoken today by 1.6billion souls, English is a mongrel language, words flung together down the millennia from Latin (Saturday, amorous), Anglo-Saxon (writing, laughter, riddle, ask), Norse (slaughter, berserk, fog, mire) and Norman French (park, beef, govern, duke, commence). In more recent epochs, Native Americans gave us skunk and moose. Hindus provided bungalow, chintz and juggernaut. It is Rupert Gavin's contention, in this properly scholarly yet highly accessible study, that our language evolved and came about through invasion and conquest. The Romans, Vikings and Normans were 'all attracted by the relative wealth of these islands', exploiting the natives and bequeathing vocabulary. The Romans were here for 400 years, leaving behind roads, cities, fortifications – and their Latin continued to be used in religious services and on legal documents for centuries. The first court case was not conducted in English until 1363. Meanwhile, the Vikings were busy sacking holy places, preying upon the weak and the helpless, raping and pillaging generally. Ravens learned to follow their armies, aware there'd be plenty of dead bodies to feast upon. From this period, English developed many words for arrows, bows, archers and fletchers. The Norsemen were 'the stuff of collective nightmares', and there were still hundreds of years to go until the Normans turned up – enough time for an anonymous scribe to set down the 3,182 alliterative Anglo-Saxon or Old English lines of Beowulf. Talk about collective nightmares. Back in the Eighties, when I sat my Finals, I had to translate and memorise the nonsense. It's all about heroic deeds, gods and monsters, and much influenced Tolkien, let alone nerdy teens devoted to Game Of Thrones. Gavin gives us plenty of information about battles, assemblies, treaties and 'inter-tribal squabbling', each mob babbling away in Kentish, Mercian and Northumbrian dialects. When he says, 'the position of women merits consideration', he must be conjectural, as nothing much was said about them, save praise for embroidery skills. My theory is that, as their names were unpronounceable and impossible to spell – Aethelwynn, Aethelflaed, Eadburgh, Leoba and Berhtgyth – it was easier to ignore them altogether. I hadn't realised the Normans were such immense brutes, starting with William's arrival at Hastings in 1066. Anglo-Saxon lords were killed, their families stripped of lands. Castles went up, to oppress the population. Executions, branding and the severing of noses were common punishments. Nevertheless, in the credit column, London was developed, to concentrate 'our language and culture' in a single place. The Normans also had a mania for building cathedrals, which ultimately gave jobs to little old ladies to work in the gift shops. Though Gavin has an interesting chapter on Chaucer – who in 1389 deployed 2,000 new English words in The Canterbury Tales, including twitter, femininity, narcotic, erect and plumage – his chief interest is in the industrious translations of the Bible. Wycliffe in 1384 brought in the words excellent, problem, ambitious and wrinkle, as well as graven image, keys of the kingdom and root of all evil. Tyndale, a century and a half later, gave us coat of many colours, eye for an eye, suffer fools gladly and the skin of my teeth. Behind these enlightened tasks of translation lay much bloodshed, the whole Catholic-Protestant divide and the upheaval of the Reformation. Theologians and politicians, such as Sir Thomas More, were for some reason dead against 'making the scriptures intelligible to the common man'. Possessing a Bible in English rather than ornate, ritualistic Latin was a heresy punishable by death. Thomas Cranmer, for example, was burnt at the stake – yet the simple beauty of his Book of Common Prayer, dating from 1549, was to last for more than 400 years, until shamefully replaced by the ugly nonsense of the Alternative Services pamphlet. When I wanted the old-style liturgy used at my father's funeral, the trendy vicar said, 'Oh, these days people prefer a chorus from The Lion King.' In 1611, the King James Bible was published. Fifty scholars had been kept busy for seven years, 'agonising over the original texts', the Hebrew and the Greek. There was a hysterical misprint in an early edition: 'Thou shalt commit adultery.' They'd missed out the 'not'. Gavin is correct to say that the Authorised Version, as it became known, was English at its most 'poetic, vivid, direct, rhythmic, fluent'. It is a crime that it has fallen into disuse – and perhaps no surprise that churches are empty. Gavin omits to mention a fascinating puzzle. In Psalm 46, the 46th word from the start is 'shake' and the 46th word from the end is 'spear'. In 1611, Shakespeare was 46. Spooky – and did Shakespeare have a hand in the enterprise, polishing the text, I wonder? Apart from the pulpit, what Gavin calls the other 'prime user of language' was the theatre. Hence a marvellous discussion of Shakespeare, who used 31,534 different words, coining 2,000 new ones, such as bedroom, barefaced, dewdrops and leapfrog. He is matched in ingenuity only by Dickens, who invented 1,600 words, including flummox, dustbin and fairy story. Wondering how 'a single language would create a single and unifying identity', Gavin explains that mass printing and education made works accessible, and made English 'increasingly uniform across the nation', regularising spelling, ironing out regional accents and dialects. Don't get me started on Welsh, brought in during my lifetime by Welsh nationalists to cut my native Wales off. Finally, we must not underestimate how English was spread around the world by our 'military prowess, maritime power, mercantile strength and industrial development', ie by our colonial expansion, which made Britain globally pre-eminent, the map painted patriotic pink. People are meant to feel guilty about all this. I don't myself. Gavin must follow up this first-class book with others on the compilation of dictionaries, the mysteries of pronunciation, the uses of slang and swearing, the power of jokes and wordplay, the censoriousness of wokery, and finally the language of the internet, where words are fast disappearing in a blizzard of acronyms and emojis. Who needs literacy (and literature) now?
The Guardian
23-05-2025
- General
- The Guardian
Americans and Britons swear more online than Australians, research finds. WTF?
Australians' proud reputation as a pack of cunning linguists has taken a hit from a study finding they come only third in the swearing stakes online. The research found Australians were more restrained – online, at least – than potty-mouthed Poms and vulgar Americans. 'What the feck?' as the Irish would say – 'feck' being their preferred profanity relative to other countries' use of the word, according to the research. For the British it's 'cunt', and for the US it's 'asshole'. For Australians, disappointingly, it's 'crap'. 'We were super surprised by that,' says Dr Martin Schweinberger, from the University of Queensland's school of languages and cultures. 'We expected it to be 'fuck' or something.' Schweinberger and his colleague, Monash University's Prof Kate Burridge, analysed more than 1.7bn words from 20 English-speaking countries to find the frequency of almost 600 vulgar words (and their spelling variations, such as 'fuuuuuck', 'feck' or 'focking'). The results have been published in the journal Lingua, and Schweinberger said it was the first large-scale analysis that combined traditional linguistics with computational methods. To pick the words, the researchers used 'the middle-class politeness criterion' and other measures. 'Vulgar language generally refers to words or expressions that are considered rude, offensive, or inappropriate in certain social contexts at a given time,' the researchers wrote. 'The usual suspects that challenge social norms in this way include overlapping categories such as blasphemy, curses, ethnic-racial slurs, insults, name-calling, obscenity, profanity, scatology, slang, swearing, tabooed words, offence, impoliteness, verbal aggression, and more – essentially, any form of speech capable of violating conventional standards of politeness.' They acknowledge that the real world is more complex, with culturally specific norms. One example cited in the article is the cheeky 2006 'Where the bloody hell are you?' Tourism Australia advertisement. That ad – created while the former prime minister Scott Morrison was managing director – resulted in a string of complaints to the UK advertising regulator. Another example of culturally specific differences is 'cunt', which is highly offensive in many settings. But the authors say it is now viewed by younger Australians as a 'significant part of Australian culture and identity'. High school students see it as normal, and typically Australian, and think that criticising it is basically un-Australian. The researchers say vulgar language is a 'natural playground' for unleashing 'linguistic creativity'. It taps into taboos and societal fears, to make an impact through 'shock value, the emotional charge and the social fallout when boundaries are breached'. They found swear words made up 0.022% of Australian general online content, which is the average across all the nations. Britain's content was 0.025% sweary and the US came in at 0.036%. But there is a heartening twist to the tale that shows Australians are not here to fuck spiders. One is that the Global Web-Based English Corpus (GloWbE) dataset the researchers used did not include blogs for Australia – and blogs are typically more sweary than general online content. But it did include them for other countries. 'If we had blog data for Australia it might have pushed us to second place,' Schweinberger says. He says it could be that in the US, which is 'often associated with Protestant puritanism, Christian fervour, and prudishness', people are less likely to swear in public. That, Schweinberger says, might mean they are more likely to let it all out online. Australians are likely to swear more face to face, he says, and they also do better on another measure – creativity. 'What we see with Americans is that they really stick to 'fuck' … they really like that word,' Schweinberger says. 'But when we look at low-frequency words which typically are more creative – like 'cockknuckle' – Australians are actually in second place.'
