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The main players in the Spanish-Aztec War (1519-21) are well known: Hernán Cortés and Montezuma. Lesser-known, though no less important, is a brilliant and multilingual exiled Aztec woman who was enslaved, then served as a guide and interpreter, then became Cortés's mistress. She was known as Doña Marina, Malintzin, and more widely as La Malinche.

There's little comprehensive documentation about La Malinche. What historians know has been stitched together through mentions of her in various contemporary writings. While Cortés himself referred to her just briefly in his letters, and only identified her as an interpreter, scholar Cordelia Candelaria writes in :

her paramount value to the Spaniards was not merely linguistic...She was an interpreter/liaison who served as a guide to the region, as an advisor on native customs and beliefs, and as a competent strategist. It appears that her least significant role to Cortés was that most often expected of women: her function as his mistress.

La Malinche was born Malinal, the daughter of an Aztec cacique (chief). This gave her an unusual level of education, which she would later leverage as a guide and interpreter for the Spanish. After her father's death, she was sold to slavers by her mother. Her mother then staged a funeral to explain her daughter's sudden disappearance.

According to Candelaria, the traders eventually sold Malinal to a cacique in Tabasco, where she lived until Cortés arrived in 1519. The cacique presented Cortés with a group of young women to serve him, including Malinal. She quickly distinguished herself. The Spanish gave her the respectful name "Doña Marina," while the Aztecs attached an honorary addendum of -tzin to her name, making her Malintzin.

If there is one villainess in Mexican history, she is Malintzin. She was to become the ethnic traitress supreme.

Throughout Cortés's travels, Malintzin became indispensable as a translator, not only capable of functionally translating from one language to the other, but of speaking compellingly, strategizing, and forging political connections. Candelaria cites two moments when La Malinche directly saved the Spanish conquistadors from destruction-once, in Tlaxcala, "her astute observations led her to uncover an indigenous conspiracy against Cortés." Another time, La Malinche befriended an old woman who led her to crucial information about a dangerous impending attack from Montezuma. Candelaria writes:

Armed with this information Cortés decided to change his plans and to circumvent Cholula before proceeding directly to Tenochtitlan. The change astonished the natives and further persuaded them of the Spaniards' mystical powers...On these and other occasions, La Malinche's presence made the decisive difference between life or death.

Integral as she was to Spain's success, La Malinche is a controversial figure. Candelaria quotes T. R. Fehrenbach as saying , "If there is one villainess in Mexican history, she is Malintzin. She was to become the ethnic traitress supreme." But Candelaria argues that history has been unduly harsh on La Malinche, refusing to see her in the context of the time. She notes, "La Malinche was bred to serve and to obey."

Even La Malinche's role as Cortés's mistress, for which she has been much maligned, is complex. Scholar Kristina Downs explains in Western Folklore that La Malinche was given to Cortés originally as a slave, and there is no indication that their relationship involved love or even enthusiasm.

Additionally, La Malinche may not have been immune to the air of mysticism surrounding the Spanish. Candelaria points out that if Montezuma himself wasn't sure of their mortality or immortality, then "surely La Malinche experienced the same uncertainty. She may have seen herself as a divinely selected participant in a most fateful destiny."

Most crucially, Candelaria points out that La Malinche's act of turning her back on her own people makes more psychological sense when we consider that, at a young age, she had been sold by her own mother into slavery. Candelaria asks, "What else could this outcast from the Aztecs, 'her own people,' have done?"

La Malinche left no records of her own life. What we know of her depends entirely on secondhand accounts, or historians' interpretations. What all the stories of Malinche's life-both damning and sympathetic-ultimately reveal is a particularly intelligent and resourceful woman, betrayed, enslaved, buffeted between two empires, somehow emerging as a historical giant in her own right.

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La Malinche was a key figure in the conquest of the Aztecs. But was she a heroine or a traitor? It depends on whom you ask.

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As a 'third culture kid,' you live a particularly interesting life growing up abroad in a culture different to that of your parents. This experience is often very difficult to explain to those who haven't been in your situation.

I'm half French and half English, and grew up in Thailand. My father is from Kent, and working in the engineering industry he was assigned to various countries around the world as an expatriate.

My mother is French, although she is of Spanish descent, and I was born in Singapore where Dad was on assignment, before moving to France for a year and then to Thailand where I lived until I finished school. My family still lives there.

Thanks to my upbringing, I find that meeting other international kids - and joining expat networks like InterNations - feels like reuniting with long-lost friends. You realise that you're not alone and that they, too, identify with the following 10 things which I believe are the biggest struggles for a third culture kid:

1. Answering the question "where are you from?"

This is the most nerve-wracking and anxiety-inducing question and usually requires an in-depth explanation of your life story, which is exhausting when your parents are from two different countries, you've grown up in three others, and are currently living in an entirely different one.

The concept of home doesn't mean the same thing, and even filling out your home address on official documents makes you uneasy. Having spent many years outside of your home culture and not quite fitting into your host culture, you end up feeling that you fit in nowhere and everywhere.

2. Explaining your "international" accent

Those who listen to someone's accent in order to figure out where they're from will definitely struggle after meeting a third culture kid. Labelled "international", your accent may well resemble an American one the most, but there's bound to be a twang of another depending on the various countries you've lived in, whom you regularly speak to, and which TV shows you watch.

3. Mixing up your languages

Given that you've lived in a few countries, you probably speak at least two languages fluently and end up mixing them together without noticing. However, that does not necessarily mean you speak much of the language of the countries you've lived in. You will of course know a few greetings and some directions to ask taxi drivers, but you've grown accustomed to living in a country where you can't understand everything that's being said around you. Most people are surprised to hear this, but between attending an international school and having other expats as family friends, for me it is understandable.

4. Planning holidays

Growing up with my immediate family, far from the rest of my relations, Christmas and summer holidays were usually spent together on trips visiting the latter. However, once you're at university or working abroad, these holidays become even more of a struggle to plan. With family spread between two or three countries and friends on almost every continent, when you have a few days off work it is almost impossible to decide what to do and who to see.

5. Long-distance friends and relationships

You get used to people leaving when attending an international school where goodbyes are way too frequent. Once you leave for university, you're moving countries instead of cities, away from childhood friends and family. It's fair to say that third culture kids really know the meaning of friendship, after all; friendships that survive distance mean friends for life, right?

You also end up having a long-distance relationship with family as they are most likely living in another country, and you'll only get to see them once or twice a year; thank goodness for Skype and WhatsApp. At least third culture kids know how to handle a romantic long-distance relationship, but we're probably looking to avoid that.

6. Dealing with ridiculous questions

Growing up abroad, you don't realise that the concept of living in a country other than where your parents are from is actually quite peculiar. You eventually get used to the ridiculous comments and questions from those ignorant of life abroad. Here are some of my favourites: "So you grew up in Thailand, did you ride an elephant to school?", "Do they speak Taiwan in Thailand?", "Your English is really good considering you grew up in Thailand!" Yes, of course it is, I'm British.

7. A constant need to travel

After living abroad and being exposed to the diversity of cultures, people and rich history, it is nearly impossible to not continue travelling. Many find it hard to comprehend those who chose to stay in one place; we just don't understand what it's like to grow up in your home town, continue to live there and never have experienced life somewhere else. Whether you choose to take a gap year, make the most of holidays or work, study or volunteer abroad - any opportunity to explore a new place is an opportunity not to be missed. We crave adventure and all have a serious case of wanderlust.

8. Passports and immigration

Having multiple passports can actually be beneficial, especially for those with dual citizenship in countries that require visas; allowing them to miss those dreadful queues at airport immigration. But the struggle is real when you need to remember which passport you booked your flight with, where it is and what the new visa requirements are to get back home.

* Why business needs our third culture kids

* Expat problems: how to cope with the biggest ones

9. Explaining your lifestyle

When you get asked about a typical day at home, you may be unsure whether you should be honest or make something up that they can relate to. Spending your days at the pool, eating out every weekend, and travelling to new countries may not be the answer they're expecting.

Third third culture kids can be wary of sharing certain things about their life abroad for fear of coming across as a snob.

10. Different currencies and costs of living

Living abroad, the local currency is the money that you become used to spending, and even back home, you probably still convert things into that currency to grasp how much something really is, which takes a lot of effort. For those who lived in a relatively cheap country, you probably went through a period where everything seemed ridiculously expensive. It all really hits you when you realise that you can't actually buy lunch for 50p or afford to go to the cinema more than twice a year.
* Blandine West, 20, is studying Politics and International Relations at the University of Bath and is spending a sandwich year doing a 10-month internship at InterNations (internations.org) in Munich.

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The 10 biggest struggles for a third culture kid

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As a 'third culture kid,' you live a particularly interesting life growing up abroad in a culture different to that of your parents. This experience is often very difficult to explain to those who haven't been in your situation. I'm half French and half English, and grew up in Thailand.

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The icon indicates free access to the linked research on JSTOR.

I took a slow and southerly journey through the Appalachian mountains this summer, hoping to hear the strains of some lost southern speech emerging from hill to hollow along its twisted roads. As the linguistic legend goes, the Appalachian dialect is reputedly so odd and so archaic, hundreds of years out of step with the rest of the English-speaking world, that you "might could" ask, as Shakespeare would have it, "What country, friends, is this?"

Well even if Appalachia is America's mythical Illyria, where rugged mountain men and folk heroes like Daniel Boone roam about checking on their moonshine, some think Shakespeare might feel right at home. In fact, some say that the speech of the southern mountaineers is "pure Elizabethan English" just as Shakespeare would have spoken it. Others go even further and claim that "the dialect of the Appalachian people is the oldest living English dialect, older than the speech of Shakespeare, closer to the speech of Chaucer," apparently preserved by a brutally impoverished rural existence in the isolation of their mountain fastness, with little contact from the modern civilizing ways of outsiders.

Josiah Combs claimed that "the Southern mountaineers are the conservators of Old, Early, and Elizabethan English in the New World. These four million mountaineers of the South from West Virginia to northern Alabama form the body of what is perhaps the purest Old English blood to be found among English-speaking peoples. Isolated from the outside world, and shut in by natural barriers, they have for more than two centuries preserved much of the language of Elizabethan England."

Is it true? It doesn't quite sound like it, though it is a unique kind of speech.

It's of course a myth that is still being repeated by many to this day. For one thing, language in Appalachia has not frozen in time but evolves just as it has elsewhere. But I reckon Appalachia is full of tall tales with plenty of storytellers to tell them in a colorful turn of phrase or two, whether borrowed from Shakespeare or Chaucer or not.

It is true that Appalachian speech can be quite different from standard American English. This is a dialect that famously uses different vocabulary and meanings, some of which may be archaic, such as "britches" (trousers), "poke" (bag), "sallet" (salad, as in a poke-sallet, of pokeweed rather than bags!), "afeared" (afraid), "fixin" (getting ready, as in "I'm fixin to do something"), "allow" (suppose, as in "I'll allow as how I'll go over yander for a leetle spell").

But words are the least of it. Appalachian accents also differ markedly from the standard, such as in words ending in "oh" sounds, such as "holler" (hollow), " winder" (window), 'tater" (potato), or "ah" ending words, such as "sody-pop" (soda-pop), "chaney" (china) ( and that's just for starters).

Beyond Vocabulary

Where it gets interesting are the many grammatical changes from the standard dialect. Michael Montgomery and others have used grammatical evidence, which is generally slower to change than pronunciations, to track Appalachian speech back to their origins from the predominantly Scots-Irish immigrants that settled in the area, along with others. For example, most are familiar with the pronoun "y'all" but there are also unusual constructions such as "might could/should" ("we might should tell him"), "done" ("they have done landed in jail again"), a-prefixing ("he come a-running at me"), "like to/liketa" ("I got lost and liked to never found my way out").

Language has an important place in the folklore of Appalachia and has evolved to become something quite different from its original linguistic sources. It's one of the ways Appalachian communities show solidarity and belonging. Language lovers may marvel at this unique linguistic quilt, a thing of threads and patches, that extends across a region that often seems to have little else going for it. But in some ways, the folksiness, the romanticized hearkening back to the past, holds the region back from telling a more nuanced story about itself, where it came from, and where it might be going.

To many Americans, Appalachia is a frustrating cultural cipher in more ways than one. Its uncertain borders seem to ebb and flow with its fortunes. Appalachian historian Ronald Eller wrote that "we know Appalachia exists because we need it to define what we are not. It is the "other America" because the very idea of Appalachia convinces us of the righteousness of our own lives." People don't always agree on what counts as the Appalachian region, except, it seems, no matter where you are geographically on the mountain range, if you're poor, white and rural, you must be in Appalachia. And that's a difficult definition, separating an Appalachian underclass from the rest of the country with negative epithets like "hillbilly," "white trash," and "redneck." These labels have often been reclaimed and worn as a badge of local pride, yet are no closer to the full story.

So while the Appalachian dialect can be paradoxically praised for being "pure," and for preserving a prestigious archaic form of the language, the people who speak it are frequently socially stigmatized as ignorant and uneducated for using "incorrect" English, just as other non-standard varieties of English are, such as African American Vernacular English (or AAVE). A verb like "reckon" (as in, I reckon it'll take five minutes) is regularly used in Australian and British English vernacular, yet the exact same usage in Appalachian English is stigmatized as backwards hillbilly talk. American language attitudes show a marked disrespect and prejudice for marked dialects like Appalachian English. Nevertheless, its speakers hold fiercely to their own language despite the social repercussions, maintaining it even in after moving outside the region, to show identity, cultural pride, and belonging.

The Scots-Irish Myth

It's important to note that the region is about more than just the Scottish and Irish immigrants who lent their language to the land. Despite the legend that there's a pure linguistic line from Scots-Irish immigrants to present day white Appalachians, this is just another myth. What linguists like Michael Montgomery and Walt Wolfram have shown is the influx of other immigrant groups have had a profound effect on southern speech.

After all, there's a long history of Appalachian cultural and linguistic diversity through immigration in and out of the area. In such a widespread region, across so many different states, it seems unlikely there's any one place or group that can represent the entirety of Appalachian culture or language. Appalachian speech itself varies from holler to holler. The captivating myth of the self-sufficient white mountaineer is deeply embedded in the American psyche, but it is a monoculture myth that dismisses other minority communities that were historically a part of Appalachian life, particularly African Americans, who are often rendered invisible from Appalachian culture (despite being responsible for the banjo, duelling or otherwise), yet made up nearly 10% of the population from 1860.

This matters not just because it's a more complete telling of the Appalachian tale, but because in the present political climate, white supremacy and bigotry are growing contemporary problems. Immigration is blamed for many of the country's ills, yet Appalachian culture and language are strongly intertwined with immigration. One lost eighteenth-century English folk song rediscovered in the Appalachian Mountains is the popular "Pretty Saro," a story of an immigrant far from home.

For Appalachians, a sense of place and of home seem particularly important, yet from the 1940s to 1960s, an estimated seven million immigrated north into urban areas in search of work, only to be met with widespread prejudice against any Appalachian-speaking mountain speech. (The city of Cincinnati saw fit to make it illegal to discriminate against someone of Appalachian origin).

The AAVE Connection

Many have noticed strong similarities between white southern speech and AAVE, although AAVE isn't necessarily tied to the south. For example, Wolfram highlights language from a KKK pamphlet which reads "Look out liberals: Wallace power gonna get you" showing a similar grammatical construction to AAVE with a missing copula be (e.g. you ugly).

If it's true that the two dialects have slightly different linguistic sources as their origins, how did they come to be so similar? As we've seen, white southern speech has a Scots-Irish origin, sharing some of unusual grammatical structures yet is missing many other distinctive features of those dialects. Meanwhile, though most linguists agree that AAVE originated from the same British dialects as white southern speech, some argue that there was some linguistic influence from an English-based creole formed when millions of Africans speaking many different languages were forced, through slavery, to communicate with each other.

Wolfram suggests that the missing copula is a characteristic sign of creole influence from AAVE. The question is, how did this feature get into white southern speech, especially if the grammar was inherited mostly intact from its monoculture immigrants? It seems likely that while both dialects came from similar sources, AAVE had a significant impact on how the white southern evolved. White southern speech could have adopted and assimilated certain features of AAVE through white children spending formative time with slave caregivers and their children, for example. In a social context where white southerners and black southerners were closely interacting, many elements of African American Vernacular English, from grammar to accent, were likely to have been major influences on how southern speech developed into its own distinctive dialect. The writer of the KKK pamphlet might could have been driven plumb crazy had they known that.

So the theory of the poor, white, rural Appalachian mountain men going it alone, preserving a pure and unchanging strain of archaic British English, isolated in a hardscrabble place far from civilization, could not be further from the truth. Without the influence of diverse communities of other Appalachians such as African American Appalachians, the southern Appalachian speech and culture simply would not be what it is today. To ignore their contributions to culture and language means Appalachia will always be a distant story, burdened by the myths and legends written by others, left half told.

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The Legendary Language of the Appalachian "Holler" - JSTOR Daily

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Is the unique Appalachian dialect the preserved language of Elizabethan England? Left over from Scots-Irish immigrants? Or something else altogether?

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Educators also say that parents should not limit vocabulary and concepts in either language, even if the child fails to grasp all that is being said. "The richer the topics of conversation the better off the children are," Dr. Hakuta said.

Some educators caution, however, that the process of bilingual education in the home, though rigorous, must sometimes give way to the child'semotional needs. "The major danger is that learning the second language becomes such a big issue that it threatens the child-parent relationship," Dr. Snow said. "If you spend all your time saying, 'No, we speak German here,' then you divert real communication with your children. The major reason bilingual efforts go awry is that the parents put more value on real communication with their children than on the simple acquisition of language skills."

But even diligent bilingual couples can have problems. Those who have succeeded say they rarely speak English at home. They try to make sure their children spend time each year in a country where the foreign language is spoken.

Elena Climent, a Mexican artist living in New York with her husband and two small children, travels with her children to Mexico every summer. "By the time summer vacation approaches they speak only English," Mrs. Climent said. "Then we go to Mexico. As soon as they realize that the world around them is Spanish-speaking, which takes about a week,they go back to Spanish."

Most children in bilingual households speak with their parents in the language of the culture in which they live, partly because they are bombarded by that language daily, and partly because children have a powerful need to conform. "As children move from preschool into the early school years they become increasingly susceptible to embarrassment if their parents are different," Dr. Snow said. Answers in English

When Ms. Pruitt and her husband, Felix Kessler, a professor at N.Y.U.'s journalism school, lived in France, they spoke English to daughter, Gabriela. The child, who was attending French schools, answered in French. The Kessler family then moved to New York, where they enrolled Gabriela in a course in speech therapy to help her with English pronunciation and sent her to an American school. Gabriela now answers her parents in English, even when addressed in French.

According to Dr. Snow, parents should feel comfortable speaking one language with the children responding in another, thus preserving comprehension skills in the second language. And anyway, Mrs. Pruitt said: "A child should identify with the country she is living in. I am not insisting on bilingual writing here, because I feel she should identify with this educational system."

Children who do not begin a second language before they begin school often have a problem developing total fluency in that language. "It is almost impossible to change the language of the home after it has been established," Dr. Snow said.

Eric Fassin, a French national and the assistant director at N.Y.U.'s Institute of French Studies, said that when his daughter started to speak, while the family was living in America, she used English and French. "But then she realized when she was about 2 that the French speakers she knewspoke English," Mr. Fassin said. "We would ask her to speak to us in French and she would say, 'I can't.' "

But after a summer in France, the child, now 3, recovered her French. "It's not perfect," Mr. Fassin said. "Her R's sound American to me."

His daughter, like many young bilingual children, mixes up sounds and syntax. She has the habit, while speaking French, of adding the English "s" sound to third-person French verbs -- for example, changing the French phrase for "she works" ("elle travaille," pronounced "el trav-EYE") to "el trav-EYES." She also will use English constructions in French, saying "mon amie's poupee" for "my friend's doll" instead of the correct French construction, "la poupee de mon amie," literally "the doll of my friend."

Children may also associate one language with particular emotions and activities. "The kids change language according to the roles they act out," Mrs. Climent said. "If they are playing parents they speak Spanish. If they deal with emotions, it is Spanish. English is for their own world, their play world. Whatever things they do in life that relate to their friends they do in English."

Writing and reading in both languages at once can be problematic, studies show and parents attest. Many educators recommend that youngsters be taught to read and write in the dominant language before being pushed to learn the written skills of the second language, although they see no limit to verbal development.

The payoff, say many bilingual adults, is worth the hardships they endured as children. "Speaking French with my mother did not exclude me from my friends," said Susan K. Brodie, a freelance book editor whose mother was raised in France. "It was just something weird my mother did. But by the time I got to junior high school, I had the background and the interest to study the grammar and the language. It opened a new world to me."

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Educators also say that parents should not limit vocabulary and concepts in either language, even if the child fails to grasp all that is being said. "The richer the topics of conversation the better off the children are," Dr. Hakuta said.

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The English spelling system is kind of a beautiful mess.

"Dearest creature in creation
Studying English pronunciation,
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse and worse.

[...]

Hiccough has the sound of sup...
My advice is: GIVE IT UP!"

Thus runs The Chaos, a classic poem on English spelling inconsistencies. It was written a hundred years ago by Dutchman Gerard Nolst Trenité for the amusement of foreign learners of English.

With some 800 examples, the poem neatly sums up the astonishing state of English spelling: it's impressively irregular.

With some 800 examples, the poem neatly sums up the astonishing state of English spelling: it's impressively irregular. Ostensibly phonetic, or so the use of an alphabet would have us assume, the English spelling system has been accused of being a serious stumbling block for many a language-learner, those with learning difficulties, and countless small children. If this is the case, if English orthography is really all that random, what can be done about it? If we have the technology, can we rebuild it?

Some languages that use the alphabet, like Finnish and Spanish, have a more accurate degree of one-to-one, sound-to-letter (grapheme) correspondence compared to English. That is, a 't' in Finnish will always have a /t/ sound, while in English we also see the 't' in words like ' act ion' representing a 'sh' (/ʃ/) sound. Other languages, such as Welsh and Irish, may use complex clusters of graphemes in a many-to-one correspondence but nevertheless manage to be fairly consistent in their sound rules.

And then there's English, with a supposedly chaotic many-to-many correspondence, where sounds can be many things to many people in as many places, yet still manages to be understood, regardless of accent. It's natural to ask - if other languages can have a consistent spelling system, why can't we? Could we? Should we?

For eight hundred years people have been complaining about English spelling and yet not much has been done about it.

The question of whether English should undergo serious spelling reform had its heyday in the 19th and early 20th centuries, but calls for reform, both radical and conservative, actually started eight hundred years ago, according to Patrick Groff's 1976 paper, "Why There Has Been No Spelling Reform." Yes, for eight hundred years people have been complaining about English spelling and yet not much has been done about it. Notable public figures from President Teddy Roosevelt to Andrew Carnegie to George Bernard Shaw have attempted to fix what they see as an unacceptably messy problem for the English language. "For a long time English orthography was considered an utter abomination," according to Groff. Noah Webster, who in 1789 called for an all-American language and orthography, was mildly successful yet wildly inconsistent in his proposed reforms to break away from the shackles of traditional British spelling. It was the widespread use of Webster's American Dictionary of the English Language, the available technology of the day, which disseminated some of his more conservative changes, such as -our being replaced by -or in words like colour/color and favourite/favorite. However more radical Webster proposals such as "definit, reezon, masheen, juce" were not successful, no matter how many dictionaries were thrown at the American public.

Further initiatives in 1906 were enthusiastically funded by Andrew Carnegie, developing simplified spelling approaches that were distributed to the public via circulars and much pleading. They were, at first, strongly supported by terrible speller President Roosevelt, who issued a surprise executive order for government publications to use the new simplified forms. Despite generating some interest and much criticism, these approaches were not generally adopted by the public. The reforms were doomed to failure as Roosevelt ceased his support and Carnegie ceased his funding after coming to the realization that radical changes could not come from the top. "Amended spellings can only be submitted for general acceptance" he told the editor of the London Times, "It is the people who decide what is to be adopted or rejected."

For some, myself included, perhaps there's sentimental value in keeping the historical forms of English spelling in place. Like beloved antique furniture, there's a kind of etymological patina on many an antique word, worn down perhaps, but still wonderful. These literal vestiges show how a word might have been pronounced in an older age (such as in knight), the blithe carelessness of early Caxton typesetters (appending a Flemish infused h to ghost for example) or even that one time an enthusiastic classicist insisted on adding an unnecessary silent letter to make English look more like Latin (as in doubt and debt).

However Anatoly Liberman, the Oxford Etymologist, a contemporary supporter of gradual spelling reform, believes "with regard to spelling, etymological considerations should be of minimal importance. [...] What sentiment? What value? Those who love the history of English (a laudable passion) should enroll in courses on the older periods of their mother tongue." Alas, it's true that etymological traces are not always complete or consistent. We don't see an h in loaf (originally hlaf) for example and island ( originally igland and surprisingly unrelated to isle) never even had an s to begin with. Are incomplete (and sometimes false) etymological aesthetics enough reason to keep a decrepit system in place? Probably not.

However, from a linguistic point of view, there's also much to be said about having a visual linguistic connection of words to each other and their morphology. For one thing, if words were spelled in a consistent phonetic fashion, the many accents of English would conceivably have a much harder time understanding each other in written language. For another, as Chomsky and Halle have pointed out, a purely phonetic spelling would obscure phonological rules in place that are regular. A learner can easily see that the ' s' in caps and cabs represents the English plural, which would be much less clear if these words were spelled phonetically (' caps' and ' cabz'). Furthermore, the notorious example of ghoti, popularised by G. Bernard Shaw, which can't actually be pronounced 'fish', has been easily debunked. English orthography has plenty of rules where letter combinations in certain positions show a high degree of regularity and phonemes can be predicted. Complex, perhaps, but not quite the wild west as its been made out to be.

Meanwhile, back at the internet, the native speakers are getting restless.

Meanwhile, back at the internet, the native speakers are getting restless. If, like Andrew Carnegie, you're in favour of gradual orthographical reform adopted by the people, it might already be happening.

Yas (and its even more enthusiastic variants yaas/ yaass/YAASSS!! etc.) follows other internet slang spellings, old and new, such as thanx (thanks), kewl (cool), moar (more), hai (hi), among others. These examples are simply the latest in a long line of orthographical playfulness. It's unlikely that the users of the meme don't actually know how to spell 'yes' so they aren't misspelling, but are kind of eye dialect spelling, as words are written how they might be spoken by a particular speech group, to convey an emotion that tellingly can't be conveyed by formal spelling. These creative spellings aren't really new, the internet just spreads them around faster than ever before.

Quite apart from the concerns that prompted 19th century spelling reform proposals, or even the reasons against it, it appears people have always played around with spelling. Brand names in advertising and pop culture have often experimented with unusual word forms for eye-catching visuals and attention, in examples like "Beanz Meanz Heinz" and "Krisis at Kamp Krusty".

Research shows that those kids who text frequently are more likely to be the most literate and the best spellers, because you have to know how to manipulate language.

So are these deliberate misspellings a sign of English orthography simplifying organically, or deteriorating rapidly? The early constraints of mobile phone text messaging gave rise to short form spellings-which inevitably gave rise to a moral panic about literacy rates decreasing in young people. However, studies have shown that text-speak actually improves literacy, as users receive more exposure to language and different word forms, improving their reading development. According to David Crystal "there is no evidence that texting teaches people to spell badly: rather, research shows that those kids who text frequently are more likely to be the most literate and the best spellers, because you have to know how to manipulate language. [...] If you can't spell a word, then you don't really know whether it's cool to misspell it. Kids have a very precise idea of context - none of those I have spoken to would dream of using text abbreviations in their exams - they know they would be marked down for it."

In Young People's Everyday Literacies: The Language Features of Instant Messaging, the analysis of a 32,000 word corpus of college students' instant messages shows how IM users employ rich linguistic features to convey paralinguistic cues and clarify conversational contexts. One of the main features was eye dialect spellings and other simplified spelling forms. So deliberate misspellings are being used all the time, not because users are necessarily illiterate but because they know how to manipulate language in the right contexts. These new spellings are productively used and widely shared, quite unlike a spelling reform drafted by committee and applied by edict.

With the rise of the internet, it's easier than ever to track the spread of a neologism from subculture to mainstream use and what we see is that certain simplified spellings are spreading fast. David Crystal writes that "the internet is allowing more people to influence spelling than ever before. In 2006 there were just a few hundred instances of "rubarb" on Google. By 2010 there were nearly 100,000. This month there's around 750,000. People are voting with their fingers. The original medieval spelling without h is reasserting itself. It will be a standard alternative one day, and-who knows -may eventually supplant rhubarb entirely."

It seems the internet, however inadvertently, has emerged as a kind of spelling reform school by motivating users to manipulate language in innovative, playful, and clever ways, in which knowing how to spell is a definite advantage. These days, you can read the news on the internet with a side of casual slang as publications use attention-seeking linguistic features to seek views. Curiously, this both reinforces knowledge of formal spellings as well as broadcasts newly accepted spellings, as mainstream publications use these newer forms in an effort to reach their target audience. At least in terms of literacy, the dream of 19th-century reforms might eventually be achieved, in spirit at least, even if it isn't spelled out to the letter.

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Yas Queen! It's the Spelling Reform School for Wayward Words | JSTOR Daily

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The English spelling system is kind of a beautiful mess. "Dearest creature in creation Studying English pronunciation, I will teach you in my verse Sounds like corpse, corps, horse and worse. [...] Hiccough has the sound of sup... My advice is: GIVE IT UP!" Thus runs The Chaos, a classic poem on English spelling inconsistencies.

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Recent research by Katherine Kinzler, described in , adds to the plethora of evidence that early exposure to multiple languages is a mental boon. In Kizler's studies, bilingual children and children raised in multilingual households were better at adopting non-self perspectives, an important marker for empathetic thinking later in life. Even preverbal infants brought up in multilingual environments evidenced an ability to understand what another person was thinking:

Multilingual exposure, it seems, facilitates the basic skills of interpersonal understanding. Of course, becoming fully bilingual or multilingual is not always easy or possible for everyone. But the social advantage we have identified appears to emerge from merely being raised in an environment in which multiple languages are experienced, not from being bilingual per se.

Further Reading on JSTOR

Neuroscientists have long wondered whether different languages are stored separately or together in the brain: separate dictionaries, if you will, or terms associated with their equivalents in all languages (the "independence" and "interdependence" theories). Joel Saegert, Shahe Kazarian, and Robert K. Young, in 1973, tested this idea by measuring "negative transfer" in bilingual subjects. Negative transfer refers to difficulty switching between two tasks that are similar (such as driving a standard versus automatic car): the old habits of your more familiar mode interfere with learning a new one.

Negative transfer when switching from dominant to non-dominant languages can show how languages are stored in the brain. Saegert, Kazarian, and Young found that presenting the same terms in a different language can trip up bilingual subjects in a way we wouldn't expect if languages were interdependent. Presenting the non-dominant-language terms first, conversely, seemed to prime subjects to recognize them in their dominant language, contradicting the independence theory.

At the same time, bilingualism can have both positive and negative effects on cognition: for example, bilingual children and adults have smaller vocabularies than monolingual people, and have a harder time expressing themselves.

On the other hand, bilingualism can help stave off dementia. In 1999, Ellen Bialystok found another benefit to bilingualism: increased focus. She asked children to solve problems while superfluous animations could confuse their attention:

On tasks in which distracting information made the solution difficult, bilingual children were more skilled than monolinguals.... The bilingual advantage emerged in a nonverbal sorting task that appears to have no connection to linguistic competence.

The JSTOR archive contains more amazing studies, including whether bilingualism affects false-memory symptoms, or whether gesture usage is related to language acquisition. It's a controversial subject-one we've take up before. But for now, we'll point you to this lovely literature review/personal essay by Michael Agar, on the places where bilingualism and biculturalism overlap. Agar identifies "rich points" in languages, concepts, and terms, points that transfer to other languages, and says they reveal things about the two cultures that seem to desire this overlap.

A colleague at the University of Houston told me to practice Spanish with translated American bestsellers. "Not only do the idioms wash out," he said, "but so does the culture." He was right. They were much easier for an American to read, because the story rested on the hidden base of American background knowledge.

To Agar, the ability to cast oneself in another's shoes is less about language apprehension and more about having been exposed to distinct ways of living:

The review of [various studies] shows that bilinguals-to some extent, in some areas-keep the conceptual systems of their two languages distinct.... At a more global level... the differences extend into identity, attitudes, behavior, and feelings of altered connections to the original [native language] world.

Resources

JSTOR is a digital library for scholars, researchers, and students. JSTOR Daily readers can access the original research behind our articles for free on JSTOR.

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Bilinguals Do It Better: JSTOR Daily Reads the News | JSTOR Daily

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Recent research by Katherine Kinzler, described in , adds to the plethora of evidence that early exposure to multiple languages is a mental boon. In Kizler's studies, bilingual children and children raised in multilingual households were better at adopting non-self perspectives, an important marker for empathetic thinking later in life.

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Based on the bilingualism literature, the author's recent experiences in Austrian German, and a discourse analysis perspective, a way of looking at bicultur...

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Acting U.S. Education Secretary John B. King Jr. recently addressed the importance of bilingual education for our increasingly multi-ethnic society. King said the federal Every Student Succeeds Act, which President Obama signed into law late last year, allows states to include biliteracy in their definitions of educational excellence.

States have the opportunity to invest in ensuring that all new teachers are ready to work in the diverse settings that characterize our schools, and to see the fact a child that speaks a language other than English at home as an asset rather than as a deficit, he said.

Since the 1970s, different political forces first encouraged the rise, and then the fall, of bilingual programs. In a 2005 paper, Theresa Montaño et al. looked at the history of bilingual education, particularly in California. Court rulings there in the 1970s identified bilingual education as a civil rights issue. The federal government offered funding for bilingual education and California, with its large immigrant population, quickly became a leader in the field, creating teacher preparation programs that included strategies for supporting students from both linguistically and culturally diverse backgrounds.

In 1976, California began to issue bilingual certifications to teachers who understood practices for bilingual education and spoke a second language-usually Spanish-fluently. Bilingual education advocates called for programs that placed value on each student's native language and culture, while also helping them to learn English. As JSTOR Daily noted recently, bilingualism, biculturalism, and empathetic thinking are closely bound together.

But a backlash to this bilingual movement followed as xenophobic attitudes about foreign cultures and language gained political power from the late '70s through the 1990s. Local school boards and state education departments began to develop bilingual education programs that ignored the retention of native languages and cultures, instead setting a sole goal of moving students into English-only settings.

Then, in 1998, California voters approved Proposition 227, which called for schools to end subject-matter instruction in languages other than English. The state legislature followed by creating new guidelines for teacher credentialing that reduced the focus on bilingual skills and cultural competency. When Montaño et al. were studying this history, they found teacher education programs then heavily focused on the goal of getting all students into English-only classrooms, despite the fact that the number of students learning English had grown 48 percent since 1992.

"State policymakers could view such growth as an opportunity to education a new type of California teacher, one that is culturally and linguistically responsive, as well as bilterate," they wrote. A decade later, federal policy could encourage a new look at this recommendation.

Resources

JSTOR is a digital library for scholars, researchers, and students. JSTOR Daily readers can access the original research behind our articles for free on JSTOR.

Social Justice/Global Options

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Is Bilingual Education Returning? | JSTOR Daily

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Acting U.S. Education Secretary John B. King Jr. recently addressed the importance of bilingual education for our increasingly multi-ethnic society. King said the federal Every Student Succeeds Act, which President Obama signed into law late last year, allows states to include biliteracy in their definitions of educational excellence.

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Dear language learners: have you ever embarrassed yourself in Spanish... enough to cause a pregnant pause? Ever talked about preservatives in food, in French, only to receive weird looks? And why should you think twice about offering a gift to a German?

Hapless language learners around the world have fallen into this common linguistic trap countless times: while learning a language, you desperately reach out for the friendly familiarity of a similar sounding word in that language-only to be met with semantic treachery! Confusingly, the words may not always mean what you might assume from what they sound or look like. Hilarity ensues (for your listeners at least) as the dastardly "false friend" strikes again.

In Spanish for instance, "embarazada" sounds like English "embarrassed" but actually means "pregnant." The sneaky looking " préservatif"in French means "condom," as it does in most other languages that use a version of this Latin word ( preservativo in Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese, präservativ in German for instance)-except for the outlying English language. Definitely an odd thing to find in food. And as for the poor Germans sidling away nervously if you offer a gift, "gift" means "poison" in German. On the other hand, any Norwegians standing aimlessly nearby might suddenly be intrigued by the offer because "gift" in Norwegian means "married."

False friends are those confusing words that appear or sound identical or similar to words in their own language, yet have different meanings or senses.

False friends, as many may already know firsthand from their own unfortunate linguistic encounters, are those confusing words and phrases that appear or sound identical or similar to words in their own language, yet have different meanings or senses. The term comes from the longer phrase "false friends of the translator" coined in 1928 by French linguists Koessler and Derocquigny. Since then, they've also been called false cognates, deceptive words, treacherous twins, belles infidèles (unfaithful beautiful women), so as we can see, this inadvertent lexical trickery apparently gives people a lot of feelings.

Though often seen as a kind of amusing but inevitable rite of passage for the budding translator or language learner, an embarrassment of hilarity is not the only thing to come out of this. The existence of false friends can have a major impact on how information is received by people across different cultures, cause serious offense and misunderstandings, and can actually start to change languages, exerting pressure on how the semantics might shift, through influential contact from other word senses.

Many examples are benign, such as the etymologically unrelated Italian "burro" (butter) and Spanish "burro" (donkey), or Spanish "auge" (acme, culmination, apogee), French "auge" (basin, bowl) and German "auge" (eye). These all happened to converge into the same form at the same time, from different cognates. Making a mistake with these words might result in a laugh or two, but some other lexical traps have a more interesting effect on communication.

False friends do not always stem from false cognates. They can diverge markedly in word sense from the same etymological origins, through semantic changes such as pejoration or amelioration as speakers move away from certain meanings and towards others. The fact that they clearly appear to come from the same source can actually cause confusion when we least expect it. Consider a longer word like in Spanish, in Catalan, in French and in Italian. All these words were drawn from the same Latin word "fastidious," which has come to develop a slightly more positive nuance in English (attentive to detail) compared to its cognate counterparts in the Romance languages, "fastidioso" " fastidiós" " fastidieux" " fastidioso" "fastidium," meaning "loathing, dislike, disgust. " Once again, English is an outlier, as the Romance versions stay truer to the original negative sense, with meanings like "annoying, irritating, boring," etc. This apparently once caused a minor diplomatic incident at a conference, according to researcher Chamizo Domínguez, when an English speaker approved of a Spanish delegate's speech as "fastidious," which was misunderstood to mean that it was boring.

Most European languages follow each other in maintaining a certain word sense, while English seems to go another way.

So what's the cause of this? How do false friends arise and why does it seem like English is such an oddball compared to other European languages in the way its semantics have changed over its history? Research has recorded multiple examples where most European languages follow each other in maintaining a certain word sense, while English seems to go another way. "Eventually" (in the end, finally), for example, means "perhaps, possibly" in the "eventuell" and eventualmente." Other examples are "actually" ("really, in truth" in English vs "currently" in other languages), "fabric" ("a textile" vs "factory"), "etiquette" ("polite behavior" vs "label") and even "billion" ("a thousand million" in English vs "a trillion" in other languages). Make a mistake in your accounting with that last example and you'd have a bit of a problem.

False friends arise through the various actions of semantic change. This might appear to happen randomly but often it's the case that there are identifiable patterns of semantic shifts on groups of words. English seems to have had more major shifts and upheavals than other languages, from the merging of two language families into a single language, with a large part of its vocabulary borrowed from Latinate Norman French, to the Great Vowel Shift markedly changing how words are pronounced, which might account for its outlier status. As the unofficial global language spoken and shared through social media by so many from different cultural backgrounds, it would be understandable if the push and pull of semantic changes happen rapidly and false friends arise.

Even within a language or dialect, confusion can reign if speakers don't consider the pragmatic contrasts in different discourses.

As languages share words and meanings, the influence of certain words might slowly and surreptitiously add shifting nuances that may take over a word's primary sense completely. Carol Rifelj discusses how French has struggled with itself over the many English flavored borrowings that have entered the language, creating false friends -some more obvious than others. Clear borrowings such as "les baskets" (sneakers, from "basketball") or "le look" (style in a fashion sense) acquire their own senses in the language and might mystify an English speaker, developing into false friends. But what if English speakers all started calling their sneakers "their baskets" and this changed the primary sense of the word "basket" in English? Rifelj observes that this is happening in the reverse direction, to French. Loan words from native English words is one thing, but Rifelj points out how a more furtive semantic change passes by unnoticed by most French speakers, simply because all the words are actually originally French. Les faux amis might suddenly develop into " très bons amis" when French borrows back French origin words, complete with their brand new English meanings. For example "contrôler" (to verify), started taking on a new meaning thanks to English, in terms like " c ontrôle des naissances" (birth control), yet because the words are French the change passes by unnoticed. " Futur" has taken over many of word senses once carried by " avenir" (future). An English inspired phrase such as " conference de presse" (press conference) has overtaken the old " réunion de journalistes, " and so on.

Well, with all this embarrassing confusion it's enough to make a person stop learning languages-false friends can also be found lurking in the dialects of the same language, as many researchers have pointed out. George Bernard Shaw is famously reputed to have said "The United States and Great Britain are two countries separated by a common language," and that's putting it mildly when it comes to false friends. Misunderstandings of words like " rubber" (eraser vs condom), " pants" (trousers vs underpants), " suspenders" (straps to hold up trousers vs stockings), " biscuit" (hard cookie vs a soft scone), " fag" (cigarette vs a pejorative term for a gay man), " fanny " (vulgar slang for vagina vs backside) can cause some serious blocks in communication, if not outright offense in some cases. From personal experience, as a nervous student anxious to make a good impression on a strict and straight-laced potential landlord, I remember innocently asking if it would be okay to have pot plants in the apartment. "She means potted plants! POTTED PLANTS!" interrupted my face-palming American roommate. It can certainly be easy to make errors because we're so sure we know what the words in our own native dialect mean that we might not consider or question the new cultural context that they're said in.

Even within a language or dialect, confusion can reign if speakers don't consider the pragmatic contrasts in different discourses. Speaking of preservatives, take an example like " conservative," someone who is aligned to the right of the political spectrum. The word stems from the same cognate as " conservation," meaning to "keep, safeguard, aiming to preserve" so it might confuse some why conservative political views seem to be ideologically opposed to conservation of the environment. Especially considering Ronald Reagan once said: "You're worried about what man has done and is doing to this magical planet that God gave us, and I share your concern. What is a conservative after all, but one who conserves?"

Some have pointed out that historically, American conservatives, led by Republican presidents, have been staunch friends of conserving the environment around us, with the National Park System, the EPA and the Clean Air Act all enacted under conservative administrations. A major cultural and semantic shift since then has meant that the conservative outlook today has all but abandoned a strong environmental legacy and become very much a false friend in this regard, with conservative Republican leaders consistently voting against conservation and for big industry polluters instead.

Because meaning can be fluid and languages eventually change, it can be often confusing for speakers, for language learners, and translators to find that finely preserved words and phrases no longer mean what they once meant. While we might have to do more work to overcome the treacherous pitfalls of the false friend, they also preserve a lexical legacy between and within languages that reveals much about the movement of meaning over time.

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Friend or Faux? The Linguistic Trickery of False Friends | JSTOR Daily

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Dear language learners: have you ever embarrassed yourself in Spanish... enough to cause a pregnant pause? Ever talked about preservatives in food, in French, only to receive weird looks? And why should you think twice about offering a gift to a German?