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Does the Language We Speak Affect Our Perception of Reality?

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Does the Language We Speak Affect Our Perception of Reality?

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Englishes in Contact

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Ethnobotanist and hallucinogenic scion Terrence McKenna said in one of his lectures that, "Culture is your operating system." Through hallucinogenic drugs, McKenna posited, one could shed that operating system for a time and gain union with nature, other humans, and even an ancient mode of thinking which could give us insight into modern life. He wanted to bring about an "Archaic Revival," which would end estrangement from society and reconnect us with one another.

That puts a lot of emphasis on the power of language and culture. To some experts, language is considered a technology, perhaps the most powerful one of all. Eminent explainer of Zen Alan Watts said that in our culture, we often mistake words for the phenomenon they represent. "The menu is not the meal," he said. Another insight, "We seldom realize...that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society."

For centuries, linguists have more or less been split into two camps on the subject. One argues that language shapes thought, while the other claims that it is impossible for language to do so. American linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf, modernized this debate. The idea that language shapes reality has henceforth been known as " Whorfianism." He famously said," Language is not simply a reporting device for experience but a defining framework for it." Language in his view shapes the way we think, and determines what we think about.

Whorf studied the language of the Hopi of the American Southwest, and determined that their and Anglo-American culture were vastly different. This was due he said to differences in language. For instance, their perception of time was completely different. With English speakers, time is broken up into units, such as minutes, hours, and days. It's a resource or a commodity. For the Hopi time is a never-ending stream. In this view, a phrase such as "wasting time" is impossible to conceive. How can you waste that which never ends?
A Hopi man in Arizona.
Whorfianism fell out of favor. One reason, as The Linguistic Society of America cites, is that we are able to remember and experience things for which we have no words. The taste of an unknown fruit is no less sweet. What's more, changing the phonetic sounds of a word doesn't change the facts about what it represents. Because of this, in 1994 psychologist Steven Pinker proclaimed Whorfianism dead. Pinker contends that we all think in images and bits of audio which our brain interprets as language. But it doesn't end there.

Consider the interpretation of The Literary Society, who perceive thoughts, language, and culture as three strands braided together that make up human experience. They are hard to parse out. Whorfianism is starting to see a resurgence among some in the linguistic community. This is due in part to the work of Professor Lera Boroditsky, an assistant professor of psychology, neuroscience, and symbolic systems at Stanford University. Whorfianism was considered untestable. Boroditsky wondered if it actually was.

She and fellow researchers at Stanford and MIT traveled the world collecting data, and comparing as divergent language systems as Greek, Russian, Chinese, Aboriginal Australian, and more. Boroditsky and her team found that those who are multilingual think differently from those who aren't. The professor wrote that, "...when you're learning a new language, you're not simply learning a new way of talking, you are also inadvertently learning a new way of thinking."

And within any language system subtle changes in grammar, even mistakes that are accidentally carried on, have a significant impact on that culture's worldview. "Language is a uniquely human gift, central to our experience," Boroditsky wrote. "Appreciating its role in constructing our mental lives brings us one step closer to understanding the very nature of humanity." Simply put, different cultures emphasize different aspects of experience. It is this change in emphasis that makes learning a new language difficult, especially one so different from our own.

Boroditsky along with colleague Dr. Alice Gaby at Monash University, came up with an empirical method to test the influence of language on thought. The Pormpuraaw were selected as subjects. This is an aboriginal community in northern Australia. Their native tongue is Kuuk Thaayorre. Instead of direction words like left and right, their language uses only the cardinal directions: north, south, east, and west. Instead of saying, "Please move your plate to the left" for instance, in Kuuk Thaayorre you would say, "Please move your plate south southwest." Another example, "There's a spider on your northeastern arm." Without being constantly aware of your geographical position, you simply cannot communicate in this language, past a few simple words.
Students learning a second language.
The result Boroditsky writes is that "Speakers of languages like Kuuk Thaayorre are much better than English speakers at staying oriented and keeping track of where they are, even in unfamiliar landscapes or inside unfamiliar buildings." But it goes beyond this. Their focus on spacial relations influences many other aspects of life including, "...time, number, musical pitch, kinship relations, morality, and emotions."

The researchers set out to find how this emphasis on geographic location affects the Pormpuraaw's outlook on time. To do so, they showed volunteers a set of images depicting time's passage, such as a crocodile growing up, a banana being eaten, or a man aging. Researchers wanted participants to put the pictures into their correct order. Each volunteer was given two separate occasions to do so.

The direction a language reads in is pivotal for this exercise. For Anglophones, the images would be placed from left to right, while a native Hebrew speaker would arrange them from right to left. All the Kuuk Thaayorre speakers arranged the pictures from east to west. If they were facing south, the pictures went from left to right. But if they were facing north, they went from right to left. Such arrangement held true whether the person faced east or west. It didn't matter whether the researcher mentioned what direction the subject was facing or not.

But these findings go beyond better understanding of a specific community. Boroditsky said that they have much broader implications for "...politics, law, and religion." Truly, if we can account for cultural differences properly, we should be better at bridging the gaps between peoples, and can deal with individuals and groups from different backgrounds more fairly.
A Pormpuraaw man during a traditional dance.
Beyond her research, "Other studies have found effects of language on how people construe events, reason about causality, keep track of number, understand material substance, perceive and experience emotion, reason about other people's minds, choose to take risks, and even in the way they choose professions and spouses."

Boroditsky said that people from different cultures diverge according to "patterns of metaphor" within language. These surface in art as well. For example when it comes to symbolism, "German painters are more likely to paint death as a man, whereas Russian painters are more likely to paint death as a woman." In 85% of all artistic renderings, the sex of the figure portrayed relates directly to the grammatical gender of the word in the artist's native tongue. The next step according to Prof. Boroditsky, is to find out is whether it is culture that shapes thought which language only conveys, or if it is language itself that does the shaping.

To learn about how language changes the brain, click here:

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Does the Language We Speak Affect Our Perception of Reality?

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The results of one Stanford study has implications for art, politics, law, even religion.

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Englishes in Contact

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English Across Time

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Here is a list of important dates in the development of the English language. The selection of events is my own, and the dates are approximate in some cases, but it gives at least some idea of the time-scales involved, and puts the developments into some sort of perspective.

c.6000 BC

Britain cut off from continental Europe by English Channel

Before English

1622

Publication of the first English-language newspaper, the Courante or Weekly News

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important dates in history of english language

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important dates in the development of the english language

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Here is a list of important dates in the development of the English language. The selection of events is my own, and the dates are approximate in some cases, but it gives at least some idea of the time-scales involved, and puts the developments into some sort of perspective.

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Englishes in Contact

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An Amazonian language with only 300 speakers has no word to express the concept of "one" or any other specific number, according to a new study from an MIT-led team.

The team, led by MIT professor of brain and cognitive sciences Edward Gibson, found that members of the Piraha tribe in remote northwestern Brazil use language to express relative quantities such as "some" and "more," but not precise numbers.

It is often assumed that counting is an innate part of human cognition, said Gibson, "but here is a group that does not count. They could learn, but it's not useful in their culture, so they've never picked it up."

The study, which appeared in the June 10 online edition of the journal Cognition, offers evidence that number words are a concept invented by human cultures as they are needed, and not an inherent part of language, Gibson said.

The work builds on a study published in 2004, which found that the Piraha had words to express the quantities "one," "two," and "many." The MIT researchers observed the same phenomenon when they asked Piraha speakers to describe sets of objects as they were added, from one to 10.

However, the MIT team decided to add a new twist--they started with 10 objects and asked the tribe members to count down. In that experiment, the tribe members used the word previously thought to mean "two" when as many as five or six objects were present, and they used the word for "one" for any quantity between one and four.

This indicates that "these aren't counting numbers at all," said Gibson. "They're signifying relative quantities."

He said this type of counting strategy has never been observed before, although it may also be found in other languages believed to have "one," "two," and "many" counting words.

The paper is part of a larger project that investigates the relationship between Piraha culture and their cognition and language, testing some claims by Daniel Everett, a linguist at Illinois State University, in a 2005 issue of Current Anthropology.

One other discovery of the project is that the Piraha can perform exact matching tasks as long as there is no memory component to them, but once there is a memory component, they approximate their matches. This suggests that language is a cognitive technology that aids humans in memory tasks.

Lead author of the paper is Michael Frank, a graduate student in Gibson's lab. Other authors are Evelina Fedorenko, a postdoctoral associate at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT, and Everett.

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MIT-led team finds language without numbers

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An Amazonian language with only 300 speakers has no word to express the concept of "one" or any other specific number, according to a new study from an MIT-led team. The team, led by MIT professor of brain and cognitive sciences Edward Gibson, found that members of the Piraha tribe in remote northwestern Brazil use language to express relative quantities such as "some" and "more," but not precise numbers.

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Englishes in Contact

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Englishes in Contact

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Language lessons from the happiest place on Earth - Vanuatu and Bislama | Tess Walraven | TEDxBasel

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Englishes in Contact

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By 2013, the Enduring Voices project had completed 15 expeditions, from Australia to South America to India to the California coast. Working with local communities on more than 100 languages, the project team documented the geographic dimensions of language distribution, identified links between biodiversity and linguistic diversity, and recorded and catalogued translations of words and phrases as a resource to help communities teach their native language to the next generation.

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2005 National Indigenous Languages Survey Report

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2005 National Indigenous Languages Survey Report

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Englishes in Contact

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Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies

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In 2004 AIATSIS was commissioned by the Commonwealth Government (through the then Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts, DCITA) to carry out an assessment of the state of Indigenous languages and language programs in Australia. The consultancy was carried out jointly with the Federation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Languages (FATSIL) and included the following three components:

1. An Australia-wide survey of the status of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages;

2. Identify, document and report on language resource material available, including location;

3. Develop strategies to address the findings of the Australia-wide survey, including considerations affecting program development and service delivery and presenting the findings in a report.

This report presents the results of the Australia-wide survey, which was carried out jointly with FATSIL and includes information on numbers of speakers, intergenerational transmission of language, and language programs. These survey results are analysed to give insight into the relative degrees of endangerment amongst Australian Indigenous languages and the kinds of language programs operating. The report provides a detailed discussion of language endangerment in Australia and how to identify the degree of endangerment in order to identify appropriate types of programs for use in specific situations.

The report provides 52 specific recommendations, as well as four main proposals linked to the needs revealed by the NILS and other surveys: language nests, community language teams, regional Indigenous language centres, and a national Indigenous language centre.

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National Indigenous Languages Survey Report 2005

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In 2004 AIATSIS was commissioned by the Commonwealth Government (through the then Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts, DCITA) to carry out an assessment of the state of Indigenous languages and language programs in Australia.

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Englishes in Contact

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The Living Archive of Aboriginal Languages is a digital archive of endangered literature in Australian Indigenous languages of the Northern Territory.

This is a living archive, with connections to the people and communities where the books were created. This will allow for collaborative research work with the Indigenous authorities and communities.

For more news, follow us on social media

Give us feedback on the archive

ARC LIEF LE120100016 and LE140100063
Authorised by: Project manager, Living Archive of Aboriginal Languages
Feedback | ABN 54 093 513 649
CRICOS Provider No: 00300K (NT) CRICOS Provider No: 03286A(NSW)

In the spirit of respect, the Living Archive of Aboriginal Languages acknowledges the traditional owners of the land and seas of Australia, of elders past and present on whose land we work.

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Home | Living Archive of Aboriginal Languages

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The Living Archive of Aboriginal Languages is a digital archive of endangered literature in Australian Indigenous languages of the Northern Territory. This is a living archive, with connections to the people and communities where the books were created. This will allow for collaborative research work with the Indigenous authorities and communities.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The Living Archive of Aboriginal Languages is a digital archive of endangered literature in Australian Indigenous languages of the Northern Territory.

This is a living archive, with connections to the people and communities where the books were created. This will allow for collaborative research work with the Indigenous authorities and communities.

For more news, follow us on social media

Give us feedback on the archive

ARC LIEF LE120100016 and LE140100063
Authorised by: Project manager, Living Archive of Aboriginal Languages
Feedback | ABN 54 093 513 649
CRICOS Provider No: 00300K (NT) CRICOS Provider No: 03286A(NSW)

In the spirit of respect, the Living Archive of Aboriginal Languages acknowledges the traditional owners of the land and seas of Australia, of elders past and present on whose land we work.

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Home | Living Archive of Aboriginal Languages

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The Living Archive of Aboriginal Languages is a digital archive of endangered literature in Australian Indigenous languages of the Northern Territory. This is a living archive, with connections to the people and communities where the books were created. This will allow for collaborative research work with the Indigenous authorities and communities.

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Englishes in Contact

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Established in 2002 by Kaurna Elders, Dr Lewis Kauwanu Yorloburka O'Brien and Dr Alitya Wallara Rigney together with Linguist, Dr Rob Amery, it is a body of Kaurna people, teachers, linguists and language enthusiasts who are passionate about the reclamation and revival of the Kaurna language.

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Englishes in Contact

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Education resources for schools teachers and students - ABC Education

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ABC Education has 4000+ educational games, videos and teaching resources for schools and students. Free Primary and Secondary resources covering history, science, English, maths and more

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English Across Time, Englishes in Contact

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How Where You Come From Effects Your Slang

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How Where You Come From Effects Your Slang

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English Across Time, Englishes in Contact

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What your speaking style, like, says about you | Vera Regan | TEDxDublin

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Language Acquisition

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Language Acquisition

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CODE-SWITCHING: Jumping Between 2 Different Languages

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English Across Time

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Great Vowel Shift

The Great Vowel Shift (from ELLO)

A major factor separating Middle English from Modern English is known as the Great Vowel Shift, a radical change in pronunciation during the 15th, 16th and 17th Century, as a result of which long vowel sounds began to be made higher and further forward in the mouth (short vowel sounds were largely unchanged). In fact, the shift probably started very gradually some centuries before 1400, and continued long after 1700 (some subtle changes arguably continue even to this day). Many languages have undergone vowel shifts, but the major changes of the English vowel shift occurred within the relatively short space of a century or two, quite a sudden and dramatic shift in linguistic terms. It was largely during this short period of time that English lost the purer vowel sounds of most European languages, as well as the phonetic pairing between long and short vowel sounds.

The causes of the shift are still highly debated, although an important factor may have been the very fact of the large intake of loanwords from the Romance languages of Europe during this time, which required a different kind of pronunciation. It was, however, a peculiarly English phenomenon, and contemporary and neighbouring languages like French, German and Spanish were entirely unaffected. It affected words of both native ancestry as well as borrowings from French and Latin.

In Middle English (for instance in the time of Chaucer), the long vowels were generally pronounced very much like the Latin-derived Romance languages of Europe (e.g. sheep would have been pronounced more like "shape"; me as "may"; mine as "meen"; shire as "sheer"; mate as "maat"; out as "oot"; house as "hoose"; flour as "floor"; boot as "boat"; mode as "mood"; etc). William the Conqueror's "Domesday Book", for example, would have been pronounced "doomsday", as indeed it is often erroneously spelled today. After the Great Vowel Shift, the pronunciations of these and similar words would have been much more like they are spoken today. The Shift comprises a series of connected changes, with changes in one vowel pushing another to change in order to "keep its distance", although there is some dispute as to the order of these movements. The changes also proceeded at different times and speeds in different parts of the country.

Thus, Chaucer's word lyf (pronounced "leef") became the modern word life, and the word five (originally pronounced "feef") gradually acquired its modern pronunciation. Some of the changes occurred in stages: although lyf was spelled life by the time of Shakespeare in the late 16th Century, it would have been pronounced more like "lafe" at that time, and only later did it acquired its modern pronunciation. It should be noted, though, that the tendency of upper-classes of southern England to pronounce a broad "a" in words like dance, bath and castle (to sound like "dahnce", "bahth" and "cahstle") was merely an 18th Century fashionable affectation which happened to stick, and nothing to do with a general shifting in vowel pronunciation.

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Other changes in spelling and pronunciation also occurred during this period. The Old English consonant X - technically a "voiceless velar fricative", pronounced as in the "ch" of loch or Bach - disappeared from English, and the Old English word burX (place), for example, was replaced with "-burgh", "-borough", "-brough" or "-bury" in many place names. In some cases, voiceless fricatives began to be pronounced like an "f" (e.g. laugh, cough). Many other consonants ceased to be pronounced at all (e.g. the final "b" in words like dumb and comb; the "l" between some vowels and consonants such as half, walk, talk and folk; the initial "k" or "g" in words like knee, knight, gnaw and gnat; etc). As late as the 18th Century, the "r" after a vowel gradually lost its force, although the "r" before a vowel remained unchanged (e.g. render, terror, etc), unlike in American usage where the "r" is fully pronounced.

The English Renaissance

Queen Elizabeth I presided over the English Renaissance (from Wikipedia)

The next wave of innovation in English vocabulary came with the revival of classical scholarship known as the Renaissance. The English Renaissance roughly covers the 16th and early 17th Century (the European Renaissance had begun in Italy as early as the 14th Century), and is often referred to as the "Elizabethan Era" or the "Age of Shakespeare" after the most important monarch and most famous writer of the period. The additions to English vocabulary during this period were deliberate borrowings, and not the result of any invasion or influx of new nationalities or any top-down decrees.

Latin (and to a lesser extent Greek and French) was still very much considered the language of education and scholarship at this time, and the great enthusiasm for the classical languages during the English Renaissance brought thousands of new words into the language, peaking around 1600. A huge number of classical works were being translated into English during the 16th Century, and many new terms were introduced where a satisfactory English equivalent did not exist.

Early Modern English loans from Latin & French (from Google Books, originally from T. Nevaleinen "An Introduction to Early Modern English")

Whichever side of the debate one favours, however, it is fair to say that, by the end of the 16th Century, English had finally become widely accepted as a language of learning, equal if not superior to the classical languages. Vernacular language, once scorned as suitable for popular literature and little else - and still criticized throughout much of Europe as crude, limited and immature - had become recognized for its inherent qualities.

Printing Press and Standardization

The first book printed in English was "Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye" by Raoul Lefevre, translated by William Caxton in 1473 (from John Rylands University Library)

The final major factor in the development of Modern English was the advent of the printing press, one of the world's great technological innovations, introduced into England by William Caxton in 1476 (Johann Gutenberg had originally invented the printing press in Germany around 1450). The first book printed in the English language was Caxton's own translation, "The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye", actually printed in Bruges in 1473 or early 1474. Up to 20,000 books were printed in the following 150 years, ranging from mythic tales and popular stories to poems, phrasebooks, devotional pieces and grammars, and Caxton himself became quite rich from his printing business (among his best sellers were Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales" and Thomas Malory's "Tales of King Arthur"). As mass-produced books became cheaper and more commonly available, literacy mushroomed, and soon works in English became even more popular than books in Latin.

At the time of the introduction of printing, there were five major dialect divisions within England - Northern, West Midlands, East Midlands (a region which extended down to include London), Southern and Kentish - and even within these demarcations, there was a huge variety of different spellings. For example, the word church could be spelled in 30 different ways, people in 22, receive in 45, she in 60 and though in an almost unbelievable 500 variations. The "-ing" participle (e.g. running) was said as "-and" in the north, "-end" in the East Midlands, and "-ind" in the West Midlands (e.g. runnand, runnend, runnind). The "-eth" and "-th" verb endings used in the south of the country (e.g. goeth) appear as "-es" and "-s" in the Northern and most of the north Midland area (e.g. goes), a version which was ultimately to become the standard.

Early printing was a very labour-intensive process

A good part of the reason for many of the vagaries and inconsistencies of English spelling has been attributed to the fact that words were fixed on the printed page before any orthographic consensus had emerged among teachers and writers. Printing also directly gave rise to another strange quirk: the word the had been written for centuries as þ e, using the thorn character of Old English, but, as no runic characters were available on the European printing presses, the letter "y" was used instead (being closest to the handwritten thorn character of the period), resulting in the word ye, which should therefore technically still be pronounced as "the". It is only since the archaic spelling was revived for store signs (e.g. Ye Olde Pubbe) that the "modern" pronunciation of ye has been used.

As the Early Modern period progressed, there was an increased use of double vowels (e.g. soon) or a silent final "e" (e.g. name) to mark long vowels, and doubled consonants to mark a preceding short vowel (e.g. sitting), although there was much less consensus about consonants at the end of words (e.g. bed, glad, well, glasse, etc). The letters "u" and "v", which had been more or less interchangeable in Middle English, gradually became established as a vowel and a consonant respectively, as did "i" and "j". Also during the 16th Century, the virgule (an oblique stroke /), which had been a very common mark of punctuation in Middle English, was largely replaced by the comma; the period or full-stop was restricted to the end of sentences; semi-colons began to be used in additon to colons (although the rules for their use were still unclear); quotation marks were used to mark direct speech; and capital letters were used at the start of sentences and for proper names and important nouns. The grammarian John Hart was particularly influential in these punctuation reforms.

Standardization was well under way by around 1650, but it was a slow and halting process and names in particular were often rendered in a variety of ways. For example, more than 80 different spellings of Shakespeare's name have been recorded, and he himself spelled it differently in each of his six known signatures, including two different versions in his own will!

The Bible

Page from John Wycliffe's English "Bible" (from Wikipedia)

Two particularly influential milestones in English literature were published in the 16th and early 17th Century. In 1549, the "Book of Common Prayer" (a translation of the Church liturgy in English, substantially revised in 1662) was introduced into English churches, followed in 1611 by the Authorized, or King James, Version of " The Bible", the culmination of more than two centuries of efforts to produce a Bible in the native language of the people of England.

As we saw in the previous section, John Wycliffe had made the first English translation of "The Bible" as early as 1384, and illicit handwritten copies had been circulating ever since. But, in 1526, William Tyndale printed his New Testament, which he had translated directly from the original Greek and Hebrew. Tyndale printed his "Bible" in secrecy in Germany, and smuggled them into his homeland, for which he was hounded down, found guilty of heresy and executed in 1536. By the time of his death he had only completed part of the Old Testament, but others carried on his labours.

Ironically, a scant few years after Tyndale's execution, Henry VIII's split with Roman Catholicism completely changed official attitudes to an English "Bible", and by 1539 the idea was being wholeheartedly encouraged, and several new English language Bibles were published (including the "Coverdale Bible", the "Matthew Bible", the "Great Bible", the "Geneva Bible", the "Bishops Bible", etc).

The comparison below of the famous Beatitudes from Chapter 5 of the Gospel According to St. Matthew (in the Wycliffe, Tyndale and Authorized versions respectively) gives an idea of the way the language developed over the period:

Wycliffe
1. And Jhesus, seynge the puple, wente vp in to an hil; and whanne he was set, hise disciplis camen to hym.
2. And he openyde his mouth, and tauyte hem, and seide,
3. Blessed ben pore men in spirit, for the kyngdom of heuenes is herne.
4. Blessid ben mylde men, for thei schulen welde the erthe.
5. Blessid ben thei that mornen, for thei schulen be coumfortid.
6. Blessid ben thei that hungren and thristen riytwisnesse, for thei schulen be fulfillid.
7. Blessid ben merciful men, for thei schulen gete merci.
8. Blessid ben thei that ben of clene herte, for thei schulen se God.
9. Blessid ben pesible men, for thei schulen be clepid Goddis children.
10. Blessid ben thei that suffren persecusioun for riytfulnesse, for the kingdam of heuenes is herne.

Tyndale
1. When he sawe the people, he went vp into a mountayne, and when he was set, his disciples came to hym,
2. And he opened hys mouthe, and taught them sayinge:
3. Blessed are the povre in sprete: for theirs is the kyngdome of heven.
4. Blessed are they that morne: for they shalbe comforted.
5. Blessed are the meke: for they shall inheret the erth.
6. Blessed are they which honger and thurst for rightewesnes: for they shalbe filled.
7. Blessed are the mercifull: for they shall obteyne mercy.
8. Blessed are the pure in herte: for they shall se God.
9. Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shalbe called the chyldren of God.
10. Blessed are they which suffre persecucion for rightwesnes sake: for theirs ys the kyngdome of heuen.

King James
1. And seeing the multitudes, he went vp into a mountaine: and when he was set, his disciples came vnto him.
2. And he opened his mouth, and taught them, saying:
3. Blessed are the poore in spirit: for theirs is the kingdome of heauen.
4. Blessed are they that mourne: for they shall be comforted.
5. Blessed are the meeke: for they shall inherit the earth.
6. Blessed are they which doe hunger and thirst after righteousnesse: for they shall be filled.
7. Blessed are the mercifull: for they shall obtaine mercie.
8. Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.
9. Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall bee called the children of God.
10. Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousnesse sake: for theirs is the kingdome of heauen.

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Although the majority of the King James Version was quite clearly based on Tyndale's (up to 80% of the New Testament and much of the Old Testament), it is often considered a masterpiece of the English language, and many phrases from it have become well-used in every day speech. It is still considered by many to be the definitive English version of "The Bible", and its iconic opening lines "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth" are well known, as are many of its phrases (in addition to those borrowed from Tyndale), including how are the mighty fallen, the root of the matter, to every thing there is a season, bent their swords into ploughshares, set your house in order, be horribly afraid, get thee behind me, turned the world upside down, a thorn in the flesh, etc. Much of its real power, though, was in exposing the written language to many more of the common people.

Dictionaries and Grammars

"A Table Alphabeticall" by Robert Cawdrey (from British Library)

The first English dictionary, "A Table Alphabeticall", was published by English schoolteacher Robert Cawdrey in 1604 (8 years before the first Italian dictionary, and 35 years before the first French dictionary, although admittedly some 800 years after the first Arabic dictionary and nearly 1,000 after the first Sanskrit dictionary). Cawdrey's little book contained 2,543 of what he called "hard words", especially those borrowed from Hebrew, Greek, Latin and French, although it was not actually a very reliable resource (even the word words was spelled in two different ways on the title page alone, as wordes and words).

Several other dictionaries, as well as grammar, pronunciation and spelling guides, followed during the 17th and 18th Century. The first attempt to list ALL the words in the English language was "An Universall Etymological English Dictionary", compiled by Nathaniel Bailey in 1721 (the 1736 edition contained about 60,000 entries).

But, by the early 18th Century, many more scholars had come to believe that the English language was chaotic and in desperate need of some firm rules. Jonathan Swift, in his "Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue" of 1712, decried the "degeneration" of English and sought to "purify" it and fix it forever in unchanging form, calling for the establishment of an Academy of the English Language similar to the Académie Française. He was supported in this by other important writers like John Dryden and Daniel Defoe, but such an institution was never actually realized. (Interestingly, the only country ever to set up an Academy for the English language was South Africa, in 1961).

In the wake of Johnson's "Dictionary", a plethora (one could even say a surfeit) of other dictionaries appeared, peaking in the period between 1840 and 1860, as well as many specialized dictionaries and glossaries. Thomas Sheridan attempted to tap into the zeitgeist, and looked to regulate English pronunciation as well as its vocabulary and spelling. His book "British Education", published in 1756, and unashamedly aimed at cultured British society, particularly cultured Scottish society, purported to set the correct pronunciation of the English language, and it was both influential and popular. His son, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, later gave us the unforgettable language excesses of Mrs. Malaprop.

In addition to dictionaries, many English grammars started to appear in the 18th Century, the best-known and most influential of which were Robert Lowth's "A Short Introduction to English Grammar" (1762) and Lindley Murray's "English Grammar" (1794). In fact, some 200 works on grammar and rhetoric were published between 1750 and 1800, and no less than 800 during the 19th Century. Most of these works, Lowth's in particular, were extremely prescriptive, stating in no uncertain terms the "correct" way of using English. Lowth was the main source of such "correct" grammar rules as a double negative always yields a positive, never end a sentence with a preposition and never split an infinitive. A refreshing exception to such prescriptivism was the "Rudiments of English Grammar" by the scientist and polymath Joseph Priestley, which was unusual in expressing the view that grammar is defined by common usage and not prescribed by self-styled grammarians.

The first English newspaper was the "Courante" or "Weekly News" (actually published in Amsterdam, due to the strict printing controls in force in England at that time) arrived in 1622, and the first professional newspaper of public record was the "London Gazette", which began publishing in 1665. The first daily, "The Daily Courant", followed in 1702, and "The Times" of London published its first edition in 1790, around the same time as the influential periodicals "The Tatler" and "The Spectator", which between them did much to establish the style of English in this period.

Golden Age of English Literature

Newton's "Opticks" was published in English (from Wikipedia)

All languages tend to go through phases of intense generative activity, during which many new words are added to the language. One such peak for the English language was the Early Modern period of the 16th to 18th Century, a period sometimes referred to as the Golden Age of English Literature (other peaks include the Industrial Revolution of the late 18th and early 19th Century, and the computer and digital age of the late 20th Century, which is still continuing today). Between 1500 and 1650, an estimated 10,000-12,000 new words were coined, about half of which are still in use today.

Up until the 17th Century, English was rarely used for scholarly or scientific works, as it was not considered to possess the precision or the gravitas of Latin or French. Thomas More, Isaac Newton, William Harvey and many other English scholars all wrote their works in Latin and, even in the 18th Century, Edward Gibbon wrote his major works in French, and only then translated them into English. Sir Francis Bacon, however, hedged his bets and wrote many of his works in both Latin and English and, taking his inspiration mainly from Greek, coined several scientific words such as thermometer, pneumonia, skeleton and encyclopaedia. In 1704, Newton, having written in Latin until that time, chose to write his "Opticks" in English, introducing in the process such words as lens, refraction, etc. Over time, the rise of nationalism led to the increased use of the native spoken language rather than Latin, even as the medium of intellectual communication.

Thomas Wyatt's experimentation with different poetical forms during the early 16th Century, and particularly his introduction of the sonnet from Europe, ensured that poetry would became the proving ground for several generations of English writers during a golden age of English literature, and Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, John Donne, John Milton, John Dryden, Andrew Marvell, Alexander Pope and many other rose to the challenge. Important English playwrights of the Elizabethan era include Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, John Webster and of course Shakespeare.

It was really only in the 17th Century that dialects (or at least divergence from the fashionable Standard English of Middlesex and Surrey) began to be considered uncouth and an indication of inferior class. However, such dialects provided good comic material for the burgeoning theatre industry (a well-known example being the "rude mechanicals" of Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream") and, paradoxically, many dialect words were introduced into general usage in that way. The word class itself only acquired its modern sociological meaning in the early 18th Century, but by the end of the century it had become all-pervasive, to the extent that the mere sound of a Cockney accent was enough to brand the speaker as a vagabond, thief or criminal (although in the 19th Century, Charles Dickens was to produce great literature and sly humour out of just such preconceptions, explicitly using speech, vocabulary and accent for commic effect).

William Shakespeare

A page from "Hamlet" from Shakespeare's First Folio (from Hamlet on the Ramparts, originally from Folger Shakespeare Library)

Whatever the merits of the other contributions to this golden age, though, it is clear that one man, William Shakespeare, single-handedly changed the English language to a significant extent in the late 16th and early 17th Century. Shakespeare took advantage of the relative freedom and flexibility and the protean nature of English at the time, and played free and easy with the already liberal grammatical rules, for example in his use nouns as verbs, adverbs, adjectives and substantives - an early instance of the "verbification" of nouns which modern language purists often decry - in phrases such as "he pageants us", "it out-herods Herod", dog them at the heels, the good Brutus ghosted, "Lord Angelo dukes it well", "uncle me no uncle", etc.

A comparison of a passage from "King Lear" in the 1623 First Folio with the same passage from a more familiar modern edition below gives some idea of some of the changes that were still underway in Shakespeare's time:

Sir, I loue you more than words can weild ye matter, Deerer than eye-sight, space, and libertie, Beyond what can be valewed, rich or rare, No lesse then life, with grace, health, beauty, honor: As much as Childe ere lou'd, or Father found. A loue that makes breath poore, and speech vnable, Beyond all manner of so much I loue you.

Sir, I love you more than word can wield the matter, Dearer than eyesight, space, and liberty, Beyond what can be valued, rich or rare, No less than life, with grace, health, beauty, honour, As much as childe e'er loved, or father found. A love that makes breath poor and speech unable, Beyond all manner of 'so much' I love you.

Other than the spellings of words such as weild, libertie, valewed and honor, the most obvious differences from modern-day spellings are the continued transposition of of "u" and "v" in loue and vnable, and the trailing silent "e" in lesse, Childe and poore, both hold-overs from Middle English and both in the process of transition at this time. However, it should be remembered that, just as with Chaucer, the Shakespeare folios we have today were compiled by followers such as John Hemming, Henry Condell and Richard Field, all of whom were not above making the odd change or "improvement" to the text, and so we can never be sure exactly what Shakespeare himself actually wrote.

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Thee, thou and thy (signifying familiarity or social inferiority, as in most European languages today) were still very prevalent in Shakespeare's time, and Shakespeare himself made good use of the subtle social implications of using thou rather than thou. Thee and thou had disapeared almost completely from standard usage by the middle of the 17th Century, paradoxically making English one of the least socially conscious of languages. The commonplace letter "e" found at the end of many medieval English words was also beginning its long decline by this time, although it was retained in many words to indicate the lengthening of the preceding vowel (e.g. name pronounced as "naim", not as the Old English "nam-a"). The effects of the Great Vowel Shift were underway, but by no means complete, by the time of Shakespeare, as can be seen in some of his rhyme schemes (e.g. tea and sea rhymed with say, die rhymed with memory, etc).

International Trade

Major global trade routes, 1400-1800 (from Mail & Guardian Online)

While all these important developments were underway, British naval superiority was also growing. In the 16th and 17th Century, international trade expanded immensely, and loanwords were absorbed from the languages of many other countries throughout the world, including those of other trading and imperial nations such as Spain, Portugal and the Netherlands. Among these were:

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Early Modern English (c. 1500 - c. 1800)

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Early Modern English (c. 1500 - c. 1800)

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English Across Time, Englishes In Contact

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Australia may be a continent but when it comes to the English-Australian accent, it's pretty much standard across the states.

Researchers from the University of Melbourne say it's less to do with geography and more to do with history.

"For instance you can tell when someone's from the south of England or north of England, you can tell when someone's from Wales; you can tell when someone's from Scotland" says Professor John Hajek from the School of Languages and Linguistics at the University of Melbourne.

"But we have a lot of trouble identifying reliably whether someone's from Brisbane or Melbourne or Sydney or Perth."

While Indigenous Australians had developed over 250 different languages at the time of European colonisation, he says Australia is a relatively young country in terms of white settlement.

"It's limited mainly because we're a young country, we're only settled a couple of hundred years ago by Europeans in terms of English and the fact that we are incredibly mobile".

Leith McPherson, Senior voice lecturer at the Victorian College of the Arts describes how easy it is to get the Australian accent wrong.

"I think one of the things that foreign speakers tend to get wrong about the Australian accent is that they key into the sounds that you'll hear in a (British) cockney accent. There are qualities of 'cockney' that are present in the Australian accent. But it's quite distinct. So if you're doing a word like 'laugh' - aagh -- aagh - it's that "A" sound that happens in the middle of the mouth - laugh - whereas like 'laugh' -- if I'm talking like that - it's a position that's much more open in the back of the mouth."

Speaking 'proper'

"If you listen to television and radio recordings from the 50's, 60's and 70's it's quite striking how British it sounds" says Professor Hajek.

"But the announcers are all Australian and it really was a model that we tried to emulate and if you listen to older speakers , particularly of a certain social class, they definitely sound much more British and they're what we call 'cultivated' Australian English speakers."

But, he says those days have gone.

"The broader your accent you're more likely to have lower education; the more cultivated your accent the more likely you are to have elevated levels of education, the more likely you are to have wealth - in fact there's a whole tradition that's basically disappeared of Australians trying to sound more upper class, more British by doing speech and elocution lessons."

"So my mother's generation, my grandmother's generation spent a lot of time in school learning how to speak 'proper'" says Professor Hajek.

As for contemporary Australia, he cites the hugely successful TV series 'Kath and Kim'.

"There's the two contrasts - Prue and Trude - who've this upper class Australian accent, if you listen to them you can hear how different they are from Kath and Kim."

"They've got very distinctive speech mannerisms and sound a bit more British whereas Kath and Kim really play on the broader Australian accent - so the whole joke, you know - she doesn't say 'nice', she says 'noice' - you know the vowel changes that we associate with a much broader Australian accent."

Migrant experience

Dr Debbie Loakes, is also from the School of Languages and Linguistics, University of Melbourne,

Among her projects is a 'Super Diversity Project', looking at whether Irish and Chinese migrants are adopting features of Australian English.

"It seems so far that people who've been here around ten years may be adopting certain features. But there's also potentially resistance. So people might not want to sound like the group that they're moving towards and they might like to keep their own accent and they might be very conscious of it and in that way we've got those factors of identity being involved in someone maintaining their own accent."

"In the case of a second language they're probably more motivated to start sounding like the group that they actually arrived to. It depends on where they're from, if it's a second dialect, a second language, whether they believe their accent's prestigious in the first place.

There's also an element of cross-cultural influence .

'Ethnolect'

Dr Loakes says children are especially influenced by the way others speak - and that can include their migrant parents.

"Linguists call that an 'ethnolect', when it's either a first or second generation of people" she says.

"For example with Lebanese parents, or in Melbourne it might be Greek or Italian, they might have a different accent which may be from features that their parents had in their first language that have translated to their English."

"So it's likely that, especially in a high school, if there's a large proportion of kids who are from a Lebanese or Greek background, it's likely that they might be the prestigious group in that school and then mainstream kids might take on some of the features from their accents because they like it. So there is that whole idea of accents being either prestigious or someone looking to someone else and then being more likely to imitate them."

Professor Hajek says regions, however, are beginning to show their own identity.

"There's evidence that we're getting Melbourne starting to show itself to be distinctive and it's because of one vowel. And even the way we say the city name so many people in Melbourne refer to it as MAEL-bun - so they open the vowel.

"And that's what outsiders often identify as characteristic of Melbourne speech. We're starting to find the same thing in Brisbane now. Because of the movement, mass media etc things change very quickly."

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Why hasn't Australia developed more diverse regional accents?

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Australia may be a continent but when it comes to the English-Australian accent, it's pretty much standard across the states. Researchers from the University of Melbourne say it's less to do with geography and more to do with history.

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Formality in Australia vs Other Countries

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Formality in Australia vs Other Countries

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Nature and Function, English Across Time

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On Monday this week French President Emmanuel Macron was greeting some high school students at a ceremony in western Paris to commemorate General Charles De Gaulle's call for resistance in the second world war. It became an unlikely lesson in French manners.

Greeting a group of boys, Macron said to them, " Ça va?", a phrase you'd use with your friends or people you know well to mean "How are you?". A boy, who'd tried to catch the president's attention by singing the Socialist anthem, The Internationale, then shouted " Ça va, Manu? ". "Manu" is the shortened form of "Emmanuel".

He certainly got Macron's attention. The president responded:

No, no, no, I'm not your mate, no. You're here at an official ceremony, you behave comme il faut [as befits the situation]. You can carry on like an idiot, but today's about The Marseillaise and the Song of the Partisans. You call me "Mr President of the Republic" or "Sir", OK?

The student apologised, and Macron dished out some life advice on the importance of doing things in the right order, needing a degree and learning how to put food on the table. All the while he wagged his finger at the teen - a sign of social and power distance.

Following the encounter, Macron made a call for respect on his Twitter feed. The Australian media questioned whether leaders should be approachable, while the French media were unsurprised; he's done things like this before. Twitter made fun of the president's words.

In Australia, the equivalent would be someone saying to our prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, "How's it goin', Mal?" And in Australia, we could probably get away with it.

What a particular culture thinks are "normal" and good ways of behaving and interacting with other people are reflected in the language and the way it's used. These cultural norms and values aren't always obvious. It may take someone breaking the "rules" to reveal what they are and why they're important.

Informality and familiarity are highly valued in Australia, and our language has phrases and ways of speaking that embody these values. For example, uni students often call their lecturers by their first names. Words are shortened - "sunglasses" become "sunnies"; people's names are cropped - "Sophia" becomes "Soph". In line with this, Australians don't like hierarchy, and the use of titles is an explicit way to mark someone out as being above others.

The use of first names and casual expression reduces distance. It's a way of saying to your listener "I'm like you; we're the same". The Australian distaste for hierarchy is seen in the phrase "cut down the tall poppies". People who don't like seeing others rise to the top may be afflicted with the "tall poppy syndrome".

Australians work hard at presenting themselves as ordinary lest they be seen as thinking they are better than others or in some way special and not like other people. The use of titles, like Dr or Professor, is an explicit way to mark someone out as not like other people. When Macron insisted that the teen call him "Mr President", he was demanding to be treated differently to everyone else.

Australian English has lots of ways to show disdain for specialness. Someone who wants to be seen as better than others could be described as being "up themselves", "big-headed", acting like they "have tickets on themselves", or even "a bit of a wanker ".

For the French, it's good manners to acknowledge the hierarchy by using titles and particular word forms. English has one word for "you", but French has two: a polite "you" and an informal or familiar "you". People who are older, you don't know well or are higher in social standing must be addressed with the polite vous; tu is for mates, people you know well or are younger than you.

Australian English doesn't have this linguistically embedded difference. Titles make us uncomfortable because they go against our egalitarian and matey outlook.

Macron had already established distance by addressing the teen with tu. As the older person, he reinforced this linguistic device with a condescending gesture by wagging his finger.

While a brave, and certainly cheeky, Aussie teen could get away with "How's it goin', Mal?", Turnbull couldn't dole out such authoritarian advice without copping an earful in return.
All translations are the author's own.

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How's it going, Mal? Why Australians can get away with familiarity but French schoolboys can't

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On Monday this week French President Emmanuel Macron was greeting some high school students at a ceremony in western Paris to commemorate General Charles De Gaulle's call for resistance in the second world war. It became an unlikely lesson in French manners.

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English Across Time, Englishes in Contact

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The Australian attachment to slanguage (slang language) goes back to the earliest settlements of English speakers in Australia.

As Edward Gibbon Wakefield noted in his 1829 letter from Sydney:

"The base language of English thieves is becoming the established language of the colony ... No doubt [terms of slang and flash] will be reckoned quite parliamentary, as soon as we obtain a parliament."

Wakefield's observation was spot-on. The cant of the underworld (so-called "flash" or "kiddy" language) flourished in these early days.

Slang had become an important way of fitting in and avoiding the label "stranger" (or "new chum") - and, as linguist Evan Kidd confirms, it still is.

Yet, every few years there's a furphy that our beloved "Strine" slang is doing a Harold Holt.

Slang's not dead

Early in 2017, the Australian pie company Four'N Twenty expressed its concern that Australians hadn't been "slinging slang" enough, and so launched its "Save Our Slang" campaign, aimed at promoting some 70 you-beaut, dinky-di, true-blue Aussie-isms ( bloke, bogan, grouse, straya, you bewdy, and so on).

A few years earlier, in 2014, the appearance of Tony Thorne's Dictionary of Contemporary Slang sparked a series of articles heralding the end of the golden era of Australian slang, prompted by the fact that the work had added only three new (not terribly usual, to our mind) Australian terms: tockley, meaning penis, ort, meaning buttocks, and unit, meaning bogan).

We commonly pin the blame for the death of Aussie slang on our anklebiters-cum-adolescents and their love of seppo (short for "septic tank", rhyming slang for Yank) slang.

But it's worth noting seppo influence has been a lexical and moral concern at least since the introduction of American "talkies" in the 1920s, as documented by historian Joy Damousi:

"... that influx of nauseous American slang and vile English which regularly appears upon the screen, and threatens to reduce the Australian vernacular to the level of the New York gutter-snipe."

Why you're wrong to care about grammar

Proper grammar as we know it was invented in 1762 by an Anglican bishop. Its time has passed and that's OK, writes Tiger Webb.

It's also worth noting that some of what we consider to be true-blue slang in fact finds its origins in - hold onto your Akubra - early contact with American English.

There was an influx of Americans to the goldfields from the 1850s, and they brought with them a bunch of American colloquialisms.

These included bonza/bonzer, which is probably from American English bonanza (originally from Spanish and used in the US in the 1840s for a successful gold mine).

Even waltzing - meaning carrying - is probably from American slang, or at least was used at the same time and in the same way.

Sure, we have records of Australians "waltzing Matilda" in 1890, but Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn were "waltzing" with this same meaning (albeit sans Matilda) in 1884.

We asked you to share your favourite Aussie slang words in the comments.

'Like the eggs of the codfish'

Some align the disappearance of Aussie slang with Australia's maturing as a nation.

Certainly words, more than other aspects of language, are linked to life and culture, and perhaps the changes in Australian society are such that the days of the chiacking larrikin (or cheeky lovable prankster) have passed?

The case of the $13 million comma

A badly written law could cost a US company $13 million, after a judge ruled a comma missing from a statute meant 75 truck drivers were owed four years of unpaid overtime wages.

But it is the nature of slang that there will always be a turnover of terms - today's cobber is tomorrow's mate, ranga for a redhead replaces blue/bluey, bogan replaces ocker and so on.

As American writer Gelett Burgess put it in his 1902 essay, In Defence of Slang:

"Like the eggs of the codfish, one survives and matures, while a million perish."

An expression that fills a need becomes accepted but, as Burgess describes:

"... it is a frothy compound, and the bubbles break when the necessity of the hour is past, so that much of it is evanescent."

His own brilliant creation blurb for "a short publicity notice" was clearly one of the eggs that survived - and thrived.

We are continuing to sling slang

It seems we get so obsessed with the death of Australian English that we miss those many great terms that are being created beneath our very eyes in Australia and by Australians.

Just look at the slew of recent additions to the Australian National Dictionary (most stemming from the 1980s and 90s):

And we continue to play with these terms - goon has been around for a while, but it keeps on inspiring new creations, including goon bag (1998), goon juice (2000), goon of fortune (2004), goon sack (2009), and so on.

The rhyming hoon is another great example of how language is always on the move.

It's attested as a noun in 1938 ("lout", "exhibitionist"), but with the shift to "young hooligan, especially as a driver" in the late 80s, we see a rich proliferation of changes, including hoon as a verb (1988), and nouns denoting the act of being a hoon, including hoonery (1987), hoonishness (1993), hoondom (1998) and their weapon of choice, the hoonmobile (1994), with which they could be adjectives hooney or hoonish.

The other interesting thing about _hoon_ is that it illustrates how one meaning can oust another.

The driver sense of hoon has pushed out the pimp sense that existed alongside it from the 1950s to the turn of the century (a very rare case where a risqué meaning hasn't won out).

So, slang continues to flourish. It's also clear there's no sign that we're about to give up our shortenings - as seppo, firie and trackie daks attest, Australians still love abbreviations.

And we are exporting them it seems.

Aussie contributions to world lexicon

Selfie, coined in Australia, was the Oxford Dictionaries "Word of the Year" for 2013 (the frequency of the word had increased by a whopping 17,000 per cent since the previous year).

Its success was astonishing - in the same year it was even crowned Dutch Word of the Year (no squeamishness about loanwords in the Netherlands).

But there are plenty of other success stories too: budgie, greenie, pollie, surfie, even mozzie are now also making appearances in global English, as are demo, preggo and muso.

These join many other exports - no worries, like a rat up a drainpipe, to put the boot in, to rubbish (someone) to name a few.

Australia recently scored another global hit with Macquarie's Word of the Year 2017, milkshake duck, "a person who is initially viewed positively by the media but is then discovered to have something questionable about them, which causes a sharp decline in their popularity".

It's a "patriotic pick", as Tiger Webb points out.

Milkshake duck is Macquarie Dictionary's word of the year.

Coined by Australian cartoonist Ben Ward, milkshake duck not only marks an Australian contribution to the global lexicon, but also carries shades of an Australian cultural contribution: the tall poppy.

So, let's not milkshake duck (verb) Australian slang by focusing too much on the past cultural cringe and underplaying the evolving nature of slang.

After all, it's funny to think that at the same time as we're complaining about Australian slang dying, the Brits are complaining about Australian language features slipping into their kids' repertoires.
Kate Burridge is a professor of linguistics at Monash University and senior fellow at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies. Howard Manns is a lecturer in linguistics at Monash University. Originally published in The Conversation

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'Get yer hand off it, mate': Why Aussie slang is not dying

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The Australian attachment to slanguage (slang language) goes back to the earliest settlements of English speakers in Australia. As Edward Gibbon Wakefield noted in his 1829 letter from Sydney: "The base language of English thieves is becoming the established language of the colony ...

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Englishes in Contact

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Truganini's death in Hobart in May 1876 attracted worldwide attention. She was widely, but wrongly, believed to have been the last Aboriginal person to have survived the Tasmanian genocide. Her demise symbolised the devastating impacts of British imperialism on Indigenous peoples.

Yet Tasmanian Aboriginal people continue to live on the Bass Strait Islands, in rural and urban Tasmania and elsewhere. Their culture, although severely disrupted by the British invasion, persists. Part of this survival is the resurrection of a language, palawa kani, that is used by some Tasmanian Aboriginal people. Recently there have been calls to use the Aboriginal name nipaluna for Hobart, and other places are already using dual names.

National Library of Australia

Across Australia, an estimated 250 Indigenous Australian languages and hundreds more dialects were spoken before the British arrived. The cultural disruption caused by invasion has resulted in more than half of these languages vanishing.

In parts of the country, Aboriginal people and linguists have been working to preserve and restore some of the country's original languages. In this wider context of language preservation and renewal, a reconstructed Tasmanian Aboriginal language has recently emerged. Palawa kani ("Tasmanian Aboriginal people speak"), is based on surviving spoken and written remnants of the island's original languages. The written form of palawa kani has only lower case letters following a decision by the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre to discontinue capitals.

Read more: Explainer: the evidence for the Tasmanian genocide

Word collectors

In 1981, linguists Terry Crowley and Robert Dixon estimated that between eight and 12 different languages, some mutually unintelligible, were spoken by Tasmanian Aboriginal people prior to invasion. They used a variety of colonial records to arrive at this estimate.

Maritime explorers, missionaries and colonial officials wrote Tasmanian Aboriginal words and phrases in their journals. Some, like botanist Allan Cunningham, jotted down lists of words. Others, such as Quaker missionaries James Backhouse and George Washington Walker, also wrote down the lyrics to Tasmanian Aboriginal songs.

Between 1829 and 1834, the Conciliator of Aborigines, George Augustus Robinson, travelled the island with an entourage of Aboriginal people, including Truganini, and white servants. They aimed to capture Tasmanian Aboriginal people who had survived the Vandemonian War, which had been fought between Aboriginal people and the British colonists. Robinson relied on interpreters, but he and his white companions learned some Tasmanian Aboriginal languages. Robinson wrote down over 4,500 Tasmanian Aboriginal words. His white servant, James Gravenor, later spoke some words in Truganini's Aboriginal language at her burial.

Many Tasmanian Aboriginal words continued to be used by those living on the Bass Strait islands. Tasmanian Aboriginal singer Ronnie Summers grew up on Cape Barren Island. He has written, for example, about how "yolla" is an Aboriginal word for short-tailed shearwaters.

South of Hobart, Fanny Cochrane Smith continued to use some of her Tasmanian Aboriginal language. Famously, in 1899 and 1903, she was recorded singing several songs and speaking in this language.

Since the 1990s, Tasmanian Aboriginal people including Theresa Sainty, Jenny Longey and June Sculthorpe have worked to restore language to their community. palawa kani has been built from words and songs passed down Aboriginal families as well as phrases and words recorded in colonial documents. It is a composite language that has been embraced by some, but not all, Tasmanian Aboriginal people.

Reclaiming culture

Today, Tasmanian Aboriginal people are using palawa kani in different contexts. These include educational settings, during ceremonies and at official functions. Digital materials, posters and flash cards have been produced. People are encouraged to use palawa kani in their homes. Language learning is also supported by palawa kani being used in the award-winning animated television series Little J and Big Cuz.

Gradually people living in and beyond the wider Tasmanian community are becoming used to hearing or seeing palawa kani. In 2014, Tasmanian Aboriginal musician Dewayne Everettsmith's debut album Surrender included melaythina, the first song released in palawa kani. More recently, in April 2018, the oratorio A Tasmanian Requiem premiered in Hobart. It included palawa kani, English and Latin. On approaching the ningina tunipri Tasmanian Aboriginal gallery at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery in Hobart, visitors hear palawa kani.

Read more: A Tasmanian Requiem is a musical reckoning, and a pathway to reconciliation

Around Tasmania, some national parks and other significant landmarks now have dual names. Examples include Mt Wellington, near Hobart, which is also known by its Aboriginal name kunanyi and Asbestos Range National Park in the north of the state. The latter was renamed Narawntapu National Park in 2000, prior to the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre discontinuing the use of upper case letters in palawa kani.

The word nipaluna, for Hobart, came from a word recorded by Robinson on 16 January 1830. The Conciliator wrote in his journal that his Aboriginal informant Woorrady (Wooreddy) told him Hobart was called nib.ber.loon.ne. On 11 July, Robinson recorded the name for Hobart as niberlooner. Different spellings were common in the 19th century for Aboriginal and English words. Those working on palawa kani have had to take these variations into account.

Present day use of palawa kani goes beyond dual place naming. It is also being used as a language of protest. Earlier this year, in February 2018, a television advertisement spoken in palawa kani went to air to protest against the Tasmanian Government's plans to reopen some four-wheel drive tracks in the remote Arthur Pieman Conservation Area in Tasmania's north west.

Despite not all Tasmanian Aboriginal people embracing palawa kani, the reemergence of an Aboriginal language in Tasmania is providing the island's first peoples with a culturally distinctive, unique voice.

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Explainer: how Tasmania's Aboriginal people reclaimed a language, palawa kani

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Truganini's death in Hobart in May 1876 attracted worldwide attention. She was widely, but wrongly, believed to have been the last Aboriginal person to have survived the Tasmanian genocide. Her demise symbolised the devastating impacts of British imperialism on Indigenous peoples.

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English Across Time, Englishes in Contact

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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?

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Language Acquisition

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Duolingo Documentary: Something Like Home

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Language Acquisition

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I no longer remember when I started speaking to Raffi in Russian. I didn't speak to him in Russian when he was in his mother's womb, though I've since learned that this is when babies first start recognizing sound patterns. And I didn't speak to him in Russian in the first few weeks of his life; it felt ridiculous to do so. All he could do was sleep and scream and breast-feed, and really the person I was talking to when I talked to him was his mother, Emily, who was sleep-deprived and on edge and needed company. She does not know Russian.

But then, at some point, when things stabilized a little, I started. I liked the feeling, when I carried him through the neighborhood or pushed him in his stroller, of having our own private language. And I liked the number of endearments that Russian gave me access to. Mushkin, mazkin, glazkin, moy horoshy, moy lyubimy, moy malen'ky mal'chik. It is a language surprisingly rich in endearments, given its history.

When we started reading books to Raffi, I included some Russian ones. A friend had handed down a beautiful book of Daniil Kharms poems for children; they were not nonsense verse, but they were pretty close, and Raffi enjoyed them. One was a song about a man who went into the forest with a club and a bag, and never returned. Kharms himself was arrested in Leningrad, in 1941, for expressing "seditious" sentiments, and died, of starvation, in a psychiatric hospital the following year; the great Soviet bard Alexander Galich would eventually call the song about the man in the forest "prophetic" and write his own song, embedding the forest lyrics into a story of the Gulag. Raffi really liked the Kharms song; when he got a little older, he would request it and then dance.

Before I knew it, I was speaking to Raffi in Russian all the time, even in front of his mother. And while at first it seemed silly, because he didn't understand anything we said, in any language, there came a point when I saw that he did. We started with animal sounds. "What does a cow"- korova-"say?" I would ask. "Moo!" Raffi would answer. "What does a cat"- koshka-"say?" "Meow." "And what does an owl"- sova-"say?" Raffi would make his eyes big and raise his arms and pronounce, "Hoo, hoo." He didn't understand much else, though, at a certain point, around the age of one and a half, he seemed to learn that nyet meant "no"-I said it a lot. He didn't understand me as well as he understood his mother, and he didn't understand either of us all that much, but still it felt like a minor miracle. I had given my son some Russian! After that, I felt I should extend the experiment. It helped that people were so supportive and impressed. "It's wonderful that you're teaching him Russian," they said.

But I had doubts, and still do.

Bilingualism used to have an undeservedly bad reputation; then it got an undeservedly exalted one. The first came from early twentieth-century American psychologists, who, countering nativists, proposed that something other than heredity was causing Eastern and Southern European immigrants to score lower than Northern Europeans on newly invented I.Q. tests. They proposed that the attempt to learn two languages might be at fault. As Kenji Hakuta points out, in his 1986 book, " The Mirror of Language," neither the psychologists nor the nativists considered that I.Q. tests might themselves be useless.

In the early nineteen-sixties, this pseudo-science was debunked by Canadian researchers in the midst of debates over Quebecois nationalism. A study by two McGill University researchers, which used French-English bilingual schoolchildren in Montreal, found that they actually outperformed monolingual children on tests that required mental manipulation and reorganization of visual patterns. Thus was born the "bilingual advantage." It remains the conventional wisdom, as I have recently learned from people telling me about it over and over.

In fact, in recent years, the bilingual advantage has been brought into doubt. The early studies have been criticized for selection bias and a lack of clear, testable hypotheses. It's possible there is no bilingual advantage, aside from the indisputable advantage of knowing another language. And while it is not the case, as some parents still think, that learning another language alongside English will impede English learning significantly, it may be the case that it impedes it a little bit. As the psycholinguist François Grosjean stresses, language is the product of necessity. If a child discusses, say, hockey only with his Russian-speaking father, he may not learn until later how to say "puck" in English. But he'll learn when he has to.

In any case, in the absence of a "bilingual advantage" that will automatically test your kid into the preschool of his choice, you have to decide, as a parent, whether you actually want him to know the language. And here, for me, the trouble begins.

My parents took me out of the Soviet Union in 1981, when I was six. They did it because they didn't like the Soviet Union-it was, as my grandmother kept telling us, "a terrible country," violent, tragic, poor, and prone to outbursts of anti-Semitism-and they did it because there was an opportunity: Congress, under pressure from American Jewish groups, had passed legislation that tied U.S.-Soviet trade to Jewish emigration. Leaving wasn't easy, but if you were aggressive and entrepreneurial-my father at one point paid a significant bribe-you could get out. We moved to Boston. Probably no other decision has had a greater effect on my life.

My parents were attached to Russian culture by a thousand ineradicable ties. But they did not cut me off from American society, nor could they have. I assimilated wholeheartedly, found my parents in many ways embarrassing, and allowed my Russian to decline through neglect. Six is an in-between age in terms of assimilation. If you're much younger-two or three-the chances of keeping your Russian are slim, and you basically just become an American. If you're older by a few years-for Russians, nine or ten seems to be the cutoff-you probably won't ever lose your accent, and you will be marked as Russian for the rest of your life. At six, you can still remember the language, but you won't have an accent. It's up to you what to do. I know many people who came over at that age and still speak Russian to their parents, but don't do anything with Russian professionally and never go back to Russia. I also know people who came over at that age and go back all the time and even married Russians. I am in the latter group; I started going over while in college and have been writing and thinking about Russia ever since.

Knowing Russian has meant a great deal to me. It's allowed me to travel with relative ease throughout the former Soviet Union. Culturally, I have enjoyed the things my parents enjoyed-the Soviet bards, some of the charming Soviet rom-coms of the nineteen-seventies, the poetry of Joseph Brodsky and the plays of Ludmilla Petrushevskaya. As I got older, I added some things of my own. But I am aware that my connection to Russia is an attenuated connection. I do not know Russian or Russia as well as my parents did. I am an American who inherited certain linguistic and cultural skills and saw in the wake of the Soviet collapse an opportunity to deploy them as a writer and translator, as my parents once saw a different opportunity-to get out. But most of my life has been lived in English. Does a talented computer programmer teach her children C++? Maybe. If they show an interest in it. But a talented computer programmer doesn't teach her children languages for which they have no use, or languages that will get them into trouble. Right?

Russia and Russian aren't useless, exactly, but the country is for the foreseeable future a place of darkness. How old will Raffi be when Putin finally departs from the scene? In the most optimistic scenario, with Putin retiring in 2024, Raffi will be nine. But if Putin holds on longer, maybe Raffi will be fifteen. Maybe twenty-one. Is it impossible for Raffi to go to Russia in the meantime? Not impossible. But not exactly, from his parents' perspective, desirable. I still remember the look on my father's face when he dropped me off at Logan Airport so I could go to Russia on my own for the first time. It was the spring of 1995, the end of my sophomore year of college. My father had recently lost my mother to cancer; my older sister, a journalist, had moved back to Russia to pursue her career there. And was he now also losing me? It was the closest I've ever seen my father to crying. I wonder if he regretted at that moment that he had kept up my Russian. In my case, I came back. Nothing too bad happened to me. But that doesn't mean I want Raffi going over there. He's so small!

I wish I could teach him Spanish, a language that would dramatically expand his access to people in New York City as well as much of the rest of the world. I wish I could teach him Italian or Greek or French, so that he could visit those beautiful countries and speak their languages. It wouldn't be too bad, in terms of his future job prospects, to teach Raffi Mandarin or Cantonese, the way ambitious hedge funders do for their kids in New York. Hell, even Israel has beaches. If I taught him Hebrew he could read the Torah. But I don't have access to any of those languages. All I have is Russian. And I don't even speak it that well.

It is a disadvantage for Raffi that his father's Russian is as imperfect as it is, that I often can't remember or don't know the names for common things-the other day I was trying to summon the name for scooter and called it samogon (moonshine) instead of samokat. I frequently have trouble remembering how to say sheep and goat ( ovtsa and kozel, for the record). It doesn't help that Russian words are so much longer than English ones-milk is moloko, apple is yabloko, hello is zdravstvuyte, and ant is muravey! On top of that, my grammar is full of errors.

I see friends who came over at the same time as I did but didn't keep up their Russian, raising their kids entirely in English. Sometimes I feel sorry for them and all they're missing; at other times, envious. They have finally liberated themselves from Russia's yoke, just as their parents wanted them to. They are free to be themselves around their children, to express themselves with ease. They always know the words for scooter and goat and sheep.

There are intense White Émigré communities on Long Island that keep their kids learning Russian into the fourth generation. The journalist Paul Klebnikov came from such a community. After the Soviet Union fell apart he went to Moscow, where he published a book about the corruption of the Russian state by big business. In 2004, he was shot nine times and died on a Moscow street. A poorly conducted trial ended in a not-guilty verdict for the two defendants. No one has been punished for his murder.

Kiev is a place where a lot of Russian is spoken. Parts of Estonia and Latvia, also. Entire neighborhoods in Tel Aviv. Brighton Beach! These are all places I would like Raffi to visit before he visits Moscow, where his father was born.

During the first two and a half years of Raffi's life, the development of his Russian was by any measure pretty halting. His first word was "kika," by which he meant "chicken" (there are chickens in the community garden next door to us). For a while, because he used k rather than ch to start the word, I thought it might be a combination of "chicken" and the Russian word, kuritza. But none of his subsequent approximations of words- ba for bottle, kakoo for cracker, magum for mango, mulk for milk-had any Russian components. A glossary we compiled for his grandparents when he was almost eighteen months identified fifty-three words or attempted words, only one of which was an attempt at Russian: mech, i.e., myach, i.e., "ball." In retrospect, I had to admit that he said kika not because he was trying to say kuritza but because he couldn't pronounce the "ch" sound in chicken.

Despite all my qualms about Russian, I was speaking a lot of it to him, and his failure to learn it was hard not to take personally. Did Raffi prefer the language of his mother (and everyone else around him) to that of his father? Was I-this is probably closer to the truth-not spending enough time with him? Did he sense my ambivalence about the whole project? Did he hate me?

The psycholinguist Grosjean, in his summary of contemporary research in the 2010 popular textbook " Bilingual: Life and Reality," says that the major factor that determines whether a child will become bilingual is need: Does the child have any actual cause to figure out the language, whether it's to speak to a relative or playmates, or to understand what's on TV? Another factor is the volume of "input": Does he hear enough of it to begin to understand? A third factor, more subjective than the others, is the parents' attitude toward the second language. Grosjean uses the example of Belgian parents whose children are supposed to learn both French and Flemish; many parents have a less than enthusiastic attitude toward Flemish, not exactly a world language, and their children end up not learning it very well.

In our case, there was absolutely zero necessity for Raffi to learn Russian-I didn't feel like pretending I couldn't understand his fledgling attempts to speak English, and neither was there anyone else in his life, including the Russian speakers in my family, who didn't know English. I did my best to create a reasonable volume of Russian in his life, but it was dwarfed by the volume of English. Finally, I had, as I've said, a bad attitude.

And yet I kept it up. When Raffi was really small, the only Russian books he enjoyed were the nonsense poems by Kharms and the cute nineteen-eighties Swedish books about Max by Barbro Lindgren, which my sister had brought me from Moscow in a Russian translation. But around the age of two he started to enjoy the poems of Korney Chukovsky. I had found these too violent and scary (and long) to read to him when he was very little, but as he became somewhat violent himself, and also able to listen to longer stories, we read about Barmaley, the cannibal who eats small children and is eventually eaten by a crocodile, and then moved on to the kinder-hearted Dr. Aybolit ("Dr. Ouch"), who takes care of animals and makes a heroic journey to Africa at the invitation of a hippopotamus-Chukovsky was a big fan of hippopotamuses-to cure some sick tigers and sharks. I also put a few Russian cartoons into his "screentime" rotation-most of them were too old and too slow for him to like, but there was one about a melancholy crocodile, Crocodile Gena, who sings a sad birthday song for himself, that he enjoyed.

As the months went on I could see that he understood more and more of what I was saying. Not that he did what I told him. But sometimes I would mention, for example, my tapochki, my slippers, and he would know what I was talking about. One time he hid one of my slippers. Gde moy vtoroy tapochek? I asked him. Where is my other slipper? He went under the couch and produced it very proudly. And I was also proud. Was our child a genius? Just from my repeating the same words enough times, and pointing to objects, he had learned the Russian words for those objects. It was incredible what the human mind was capable of. I couldn't stop now.

I recently read one of the foundational texts in the study of bilingualism, Werner F. Leopold's " Speech Development of a Bilingual Child," in four volumes. It's an amazing book. Leopold, a German-born linguist, came to the U.S. in the nineteen-twenties and eventually got a job teaching German at Northwestern. He married an American woman from Wisconsin; she was of German extraction but did not know the language, and when, in 1930, they had a daughter, Hildegard, Leopold decided to teach her German on his own. He kept a painstaking record of the results. The first three volumes are quite technical, but the fourth volume is less so. It is Leopold's diary from the time Hildegard turned two until the age of six.

The book is full of Hildegard's cute grammatical mistakes, and also a fair number of technical transcriptions of her German speech. After developing an impressive German vocabulary in her first two years, Hildegard begins to submit to the predominantly English-language environment. Leopold repeatedly laments the decline of her German. "Her German continues to recede," he writes, when Hildegard is a little past two. "The progress in German is small." "The displacement of German words by English ones progresses slowly but steadily." He gets no support from the German émigré community: "It is very difficult to have the influence of the German language reinforced by our many friends who speak German. All of them lapse involuntarily into English when Hildegard answers in English."

At the same time, one senses in Leopold a beautiful serenity about Hildegard's progress, because she is so cute. "It is surprising that she says to shave in English," he writes, "although I am the only one whom she sees shaving. She asks me every time what I am doing and receives the answer in German, 'raiseren.' One evening, she touched my beard stubbles and said, You must shave? " A few months later he notes that Hildegard has begun to be curious about the two languages she is learning. She asks her mother if all fathers speak German. "Apparently," Leopold writes, "she has up to now tacitly assumed that German is the language of fathers, because it is that of her father. The question reveals the first doubt concerning the correctness of the generalization."

The decline in Hildegard's German is finally and impressively reversed when she is five and the family is able to go to Germany for six months. She hears some "Heil Hitlers" in her kindergarten, but otherwise has a great time. I thought, reading this, that if Leopold can take Hildegard to Hitler's Germany to improve her German, surely I can go to Putin's Russia. But I haven't yet.

About six weeks ago, a month before his third birthday, Raffi's Russian development suddenly accelerated. He began to notice that I was speaking a different language from everyone else-that he was "facing two languages," as Leopold said of Hildegard. Raffi's first reaction was annoyance. "Dada," he said one evening, "we need to put English in you." He clearly conceived of language-correctly, according to Grosjean-as a substance that fills a vessel. I asked him why he couldn't speak Russian to me. "I can't," he said simply. "Mama put English in me."

Then, one night, when Emily and I were talking while putting him to bed, he noticed something strange: "Dada, you speak English to Mama!" He had not observed this before.

Then his mother went away for a long weekend. For the first time in a long while he was hearing more Russian than English. He began to get the hang of it. "Dada," he exclaimed one evening as he was riding my shoulders home from day care, "this is what it sound like when I speak Russian." He proceeded to make a series of guttural noises that did not at all sound like Russian. But he was beginning to see that it was a different language, and one that he could, theoretically, speak.

He started having more fun with it. "Fee-fi-fo-fum," he chanted one evening, before getting into the bath, "I smell the blood of a Englishman!" He made as if he were going to eat me. "Me?" I said, in Russian. "I'm an Englishman? " Raffi the giant took the point and adjusted: "I smell the blood of a Russian man!" He laughed riotously-he loves replacing one word or sound with another, often nonsensically. But in this case he made sense. A few days later, at dinner, he said something even more striking. I had been speaking to him, but then changed the subject and addressed Emily. Raffi didn't like it. "No, Mama!" he said. "Don't take Dada's Russian from him!" Russian in this instance was a symbol of my attention.

We were really in it now. Not only did he understand Russian, he understood it as a distinct form of communication between us. If I withdrew it at this point, we would lose that. There was no going back.

At the same time, Raffi was going through one of his periodic bouts of bad behavior. They tend to come in cycles. A month of good behavior followed by two months of willful disobedience and tantrums. The most recent one started a couple of months ago. It involves running away from me or Emily when we're out for a walk-sometimes entire blocks away. It involves a certain amount of hitting. And it definitely involves bad behavior with his playmates-taking their toys, pushing them, pulling their hair.

I have found that I am shorter-tempered in Russian than I am in English. I have fewer words and therefore run out of them faster. I have a register in Russian that I don't seem to have in English, in which I make my voice deep and threatening and tell Raffi that if he doesn't choose right away which shirt he's going to wear this morning, I'm going to choose it for him. When he runs down the street, I find myself without any embarrassment yelling in a very scary manner that if he doesn't come back, he'll get a timeout. (We don't have a Russian word for "timeout," so it sounds like this: " RAFIK, YESLI TY NEMEDLENNO NE VERNESHSYA, U TEBYA BUDET OCHEN' DLINNY TIMEOUT.") I am more of a yeller in Russian than I am in English. Raffi is afraid of me. I don't want him to be afraid of me. At the same time, I don't want him to run into the street and get hit by a car.

Sometimes I worry about this. Instead of an articulate, ironic, chill American father, Raffi is getting an emotional, sometimes yelly Russian father with a limited vocabulary. It's a tradeoff. Then again, I had a permissive mother and a strict father. And I was very happy.

One of my downfalls as Raffi's Russian teacher is that I am bad at scheduling. There are constant Russian parent meetups in Brooklyn that I can't attend or just don't care to drag myself to. Nonetheless, a few weekend mornings ago I took Raffi to a kids' sing-along in a bar in Williamsburg. A Russian parent had booked the space and gotten a singer, Zhenya Lopatnik, to perform some children's songs. There we were-a bunch of Russian-speaking parents with our two-and-three-year-old kids. Most of us were more comfortable in English than in Russian, and none of us had any wish to repatriate. Why, then, were we doing this? What did we want to pass on to our children, exactly? Certainly nothing about Russia as it is currently constituted. Perhaps it was fitting that we were listening to children's songs. There was something magical about our childhoods, we were sure of that; what we couldn't know was whether any of it was due to the music we listened to or the books we read in Russian or to the very sound of the language. Probably none of these things; probably it was just magical to be a child. But as we couldn't rule out that Russian had something to do with it, we had to give it to our kids as well. Maybe.

Raffi didn't know most of the songs. But then Lopatnik sang Crocodile Gena's birthday song, and Raffi grew excited and did a little dance.

At the end of the kids' program, Lopatnik announced that she wanted to do some songs for the parents. "What do you think of Tsoi?" she asked. Tsoi was a songwriter and the lead singer of Kino, one of the greatest Russian rock bands. The adults cheered. She did a song from Kino. Then she did a famous though less cool Nautilus Pompilus song-"I Want to Be with You." It's a banal title, but the song has real conviction-the conceit is that the singer's lover has died in a fire and he longs for her, though in later years the author would insist that he believed the song had religious connotations and that the addressee was God.

I broke glass like chocolate in my hand
I cut these fingers because they could not touch you
I looked at those faces and could not forgive
That they didn't see you and yet they could live.

We had never listened to this song together and yet Raffi was transfixed. All of us were transfixed. The original version was accompanied by much late-Soviet-rock nonsense, like synthesizers and a sax solo. Yuck. Stripped of these, in Loptanik's rendition, it was a haunting song. "But I still want to be with you," went the refrain. "I want to be with you. I so want to be with you."

In that room, at that moment, it seemed not about religion but, as Nabokov said of " Lolita," about culture, about language-about our longing to remain somehow connected to Russia, to Russian, despite everything. And the impossibility in so many ways of doing so.

Raffi hummed the Nautilus Pompilus song on the way home. A few days later I heard him singing it to himself as he played with some Legos.

Ya hochu byt' s toboy
Ya hochu byt' s toboy
Ya hochu byt' s toboy

And a few days after that, he said his first Russian sentence. " Ya gippopotam," he said. I am a hippopotamus.

I was deeply, stupidly, indescribably moved. What had I done? How could I not have done it? What a brilliant, stubborn, adorable child. My son. I love him so much. I hope he never goes to Russia. I know that eventually he will.

Keith Gessen is the author of the novel " A Terrible Country," to be published in July.
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Why Did I Teach My Son to Speak Russian?

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I no longer remember when I started speaking to Raffi in Russian. I didn't speak to him in Russian when he was in his mother's womb, though I've since learned that this is when babies first start recognizing sound patterns.

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English Across Time

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From the first time we step into an English class, we're told that the rules matter, that they must be followed, that we must know when it's appropriate to use a comma and what it means to employ the subjunctive mood. But do these things really matter? Outside of the classroom, what difference does it make if we write "who" instead of "whom" or say "good" instead of "well"?

It does make a difference, at least sometimes. In order to determine when those times are, the question must be asked: For whom are you writing? Take that last sentence, for example. As Joan Acocella wrote recently in The New Yorker, "Every statement is subjective, partial, full of biases and secret messages." The above sentence is no exception. Its ostentatious structure and secret message says, "I am one of you." It also says even sneakier things like "I'm educated, an authority," and "You can trust me about language usage." The average New Yorker reader recognizes the effort the sentence exerts to maintain grammatical correctness, and in recognizing this, the reader bonds with the writer. "I" becomes "we." We share a secret now. We're a team.

But how different would things be if I walked into the sports bar down the street on a Sunday afternoon and asked, "For whom are we rooting today?" The wording would not be likely to win me many pals at the pub. The most likely response from the collective would be banishment to a far corner, a shake of the head, and an astonished, "What'd ya mean, who're we rootin' for?"

Why did it go so wrong? In short, different audience, different dialect. The key to linguistic acceptance is recognition and adaptation. Know thy audience, know thy friends. It's not a matter of which sentence is "correct"-"for whom are we rooting" versus "who are we rooting for"-so much as which sentence is correct for the given situation.

All of the complex linguistic theories of language acquisition and whether grammar is universally hardwired or learned through practice don't matter one bit in practical everyday living. If "correct" is only a matter of situation, then what we should really be asking is why we need to be able to use both versions of the sentence. Why should we bother to learn prescriptive English-the grade-school rules-if it isn't our natural dialect?

Repugnant as it may be, the simple answer is that we need to learn prescriptive English because that's the way the people in power communicate. As far as daily survival is concerned, it doesn't matter whether the origins of this linguistic power structure are racist, classist, or élitist, or whether they're based on the whims of dead white males. This is how the system works right now, today, and in order to best get the attention of those in power, to begin to effect change, we must be able to use their dialect. We must know their rules.

People who say otherwise, who say that in all situations we should speak and write however we'd like, are ignoring the current reality. This group, known as descriptivists, may be fighting for noble ideas, for things like the levelling of élitism and the smoothing of social class, but they are neglecting the real-world costs of those ideas, neglecting the flesh-and-blood humans who are denied a job or education because, as wrong as it is, they are being harshly judged for how they speak and write today.

Furthermore, as David Foster Wallace points out in his essay "Authority and American Usage," it's not at all clear that "society's mode of expression is productive of its attitudes rather than a product of those attitudes." In other words, Wallace continues, it's bizarre to believe that "America ceases to be elitist or unfair simply because Americans stop using certain vocabulary that is historically associated with elitism and unfairness."

This is not even to mention the descriptivists' dirty little secret. When it comes time for them to write their books and articles and give their speeches about the evil, élitist, racist, wrongheadedness of forcing the "rules" on the masses, they always do so in flawless, prescriptive English. Ensconced behind a mask of noble ends, something obscenely disingenuous is happening here. How easy it is for a person who is already part of the linguistic élite to tell others who are not that they don't need to be. Or, as Joan Acocella puts it, the descriptivists will "take the Rolls. You can walk, though."

These do-as-you-please linguists imagine themselves to be fighting for the common man, but they don't practice what they preach. Playing the game and being able to deploy the rules has afforded them the luxury of a good education, a steady job, and decent income. It has allowed them to have their noble voices heard in the fight for linguistic equality. But they fight from a good, safe distance. They're not on the front lines, naked and exposed.

For the individual looking for a higher education or trying to secure a decent job, what seems more humane: Admitting that, ugly, élitist, and unfair as it is, prescriptivism is currently the dialect of power and being able to manipulate that dialect can help you get ahead, or pretending that utopia is at hand, that everyone is a revolutionary, that linguistic anarchy will set you free? The choice to use our natural dialects whenever and wherever we please, to live in a world free of language-based racism and classism, may indeed be a worthy end for which to strive, but it's also worth remembering that individuals don't live in the end. They live now.
Photograph by Carl Iwasaki//Time Life Pictures/Getty Images.

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Inescapably, You're Judged By Your Language

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From the first time we step into an English class, we're told that the rules matter, that they must be followed, that we must know when it's appropriate to use a comma and what it means to employ the subjunctive mood. But do these things really matter?

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English Across Time

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Will we stop speaking and just text? - Flipboard

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BBC Culture - The young often text more than make calls so is speech itself doomed? Texting may be closer to speech than formal written language, writes James Harbeck. Say this out loud: zomg wtfffffff im going 2 pwn you!!!!1111 lololol Well, OK, you can't. And yet, in its loosely structured live interactivity, ...

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Language Acquisition

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The Brain-Changing Power of Conversation

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Interplay between parents and children ignites the brain and boosts its response to language, spurring lasting literacy skills

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Nature and Function, English Across Time

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In the wake of Barnaby's 'Bonk Ban', we asked ABC's word guy Tiger Webb to hit our back walls with a complete history on Australia's varied terms for Doin' It.

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English Across Time

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Nature and Function

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Experiment with a new feature of version 4.0--a "phrase-parser" which shows a constituent representation of a sentence.

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What unites a nation? A shared culture, similar values, healthy respect? Or in the case of Australian English, perhaps a rabid obsession with nicknames?

In these polarizing times, it's all too easy to feel as though you don't even share a common language with some of those you share a country with. We're keenly aware of how changing language can divide and bias us, even if we sound the same. Bewildering linguistic innovations in slang, jargon, the idioms and argots of different subcultures, generations and even genders can be used to put people in their separate places.

So it's fascinating to observe those communal language quirks that work to bring everyone back together again. When speakers share a linguistic camaraderie that reflects a community's values, it can ultimately help build a culture.

This is the case for the weird, wonderful, and distinctly Aussie habit of nicknaming and abbreviating everything. Nicknames may seem trivial, and even childish, but they also reveal how Australians see themselves and relate to each other, all baked (under a hot summer sun) into their language use.

The Aussie Habit of Nicknaming

"Strine" slang has always been an important part of Australian life, prized for its informality and irreverence, at times vulgar, at times poetic, employing metaphors ( "don't come the raw prawn with me"), similes ( "as mad as a cut snake"), as well as rhyming slang ("dog's eye with dead horse"-obviously a meat pie with tomato sauce). But Aussie slang, and Aussie nicknames, have moved on from the colorful ocker idioms of yesteryear.

Enter nicknames of the hypocoristic persuasion, beginning in baby talk or childhood language as shorteners (and in some cases lengtheners) for actual people's names. Thus a Robert might be "Robby," Mark could end up "Marko," Sharon is classically "Shaz/Shazza" and for this Australian linguist, it was sadly impossible to avoid being called "Cheese" at school. This shows that though nicknames might generally end up as a shorter, easier version of something, length is probably not the most crucial aspect of a nickname. Rather, nicknames carry certain other pragmatic senses, such as a rejection of formality, and breeding familiarity (and therefore sometimes contempt, as we shall see).

Australian English gave the world the word "selfie," and (probably) the new cute word on the block "doggo."

Now, not content with making up informal pseudonyms for all our friends' names, Australian English also tries to make friends with the rest of words in the dictionary. That's right, Australian English is not just to blame for giving the world the word "selfie," and (probably) the new cute word on the block "doggo", but so much more. Many other ordinary words can be abbreviated into these childlike, diminutive forms that can have a curious effect on how Australians interact with each other-even if they don't know each other.

Australian hypocoristics are formed by a semi productive process, easily understood and enthusiastically shared by its native speakers, and providing a rich source of new slang, just as an older, more idiomatic slang style begins to die out. Australians can't seem to help themselves and will attempt to shorten any poor, innocent word they can get their hands on, whether it's an avo toastie for brekkie or a choccy bikkie with a cuppa in the arvo-it can often seem so incomprehensible to the wider English speaking world, but not to Australians.

All the ways in which Australian English can form these abbreviations is an interesting story in itself, so I'll keep it short. Consider these examples, some more common than others, in which the first syllable (or so) is truncated and a suffix is added to the end:

1. : exxy (expensive), mozzie (mosquito), uey (u-turn), selfie (self-portrait photograph).

2. : aggro (aggressive), rando (random person), weirdo (weird person), arvo (afternoon), povo (poverty/poor person), avo (avocado).

3. : dins/din-dins (dinner, with reduplication), totes (totally), probs (probably), turps (turpentine), Salvos (Salvation Army, with -o ending), maths (mathematics).

4. : preggers/preggas (pregnant), Maccas (McDonald's), champers (champagne). This patterns after the so-called Oxford slang suffix that gave us soccer (association football).

5. : soz (sorry), appaz (apparently), Bazza (Barry). (This last form may puzzle you, as it weirdly changes "r" at the end of syllables to "z". This has to do with non-rhotic Australian English's inability to pronounce /r/ at the end of a word or syllable. Phonologically speaking, /z/ is not only a common replacement for /r/, but it also then patterns after the plural-like -s ending).

The act of nicknaming is not unusual in itself-other dialects of English do it too, in similar morphological ways, but perhaps in more restricted contexts, such as the aforementioned baby talk and pet names. It's just that Australian English speakers ( along with our trans-Tasman cousins, the New Zealanders), seem to regularly do it so much more, and in much wider social and speech contexts. The fascinating thing then is not just how all these hypocoristics are formed, but why Australian English speakers do it so often.

It's related to how baby talk is formed, and certainly looks like a diminutive, but unexpectedly, Australian hypocoristics don't necessarily have the sense of being a smaller version of something, as linguist Anna Wierzbicka points out. For example, the abbreviations used in American English baby talk, like "birdie," "doggie," and "kitty," have a diminutive effect (and might also be used this way in Australian English), but when the same suffixes are used with other, less childish words, such as " tradie" (tradesperson), "lippie" (lipstick), or " sunnies" (sunglasses), this doesn't hold true. Instead, according to Wierzbicka, the pragmatic effect is one of "convivial good humor" and fellowship, while downplaying the importance or formality of what's being said.

Nevertheless, because these abbreviations look just like the diminutives used in child language, some cultural commentators might find themselves cringing at the overuse of Australian hypocoristics, regarding them as infantile or juvenile, or even uneducated. So why don't Australians start taking themselves more seriously, and use full, grown up words like the rest of the world?

What Diminutives Do

There might be a point to it all. When we dig a little deeper, it turns out that some of the unique characteristics of diminutives, found in so many different languages, could hold a clue to why these diminutive-like nicknames are so popular with Australian speakers.

Diminutives, a fascinating grammatical class in themselves, are near universal, according to scholar Daniel Jurafsky, and are prominently used in child language. The association that diminutives have with childhood is key when we start to consider their use in wider, adult speech contexts. Some researchers claim that diminutives can also be gendered, as apparently more women use them than men, theoretically because women are more likely to be communicating with children. It's not clear, however, that this assumption holds water across the sea of languages. In a quantitative study of Greek diminutives, for example, sociolinguist Marianthi Makri-Tsilipakou finds that Greek men are more frequent users of diminutives in speech, possibly because it is more marked when Greek women use them. Meanwhile, in Australian English, hypocoristics do not appear to be constrained in use by gender or generation. Everyone uses them.

As a matter of fact, Jurafsky points out that the semantics of diminutives are not restricted or limited to this idea of smallness or childishness, even if that is their core meaning. There's evidence that, in many languages, diminutives developed from hypocorism, that is, from people's nicknames in childhood, rather than the other way around. When people nicknamed words in the same way, these abbreviations acquired the baby talk sense of "small" or "nonserious." When regularly used in different speech contexts, perhaps this core meaning of the diminutive then developed new, related connotations-sometimes even contradictory ones. In Mexican Spanish for instance, "ahorita," a diminutive form of "now," has the more intense sense of "immediately, right now" while in Dominican Spanish the very same word means "soon, in a little while."

The enthusiastic and effective use of nicknames mirrors core Australian values and desired national characteristics, such as mateship, friendliness, informality, and solidarity with other Australians.

It's easy to see how the close association of diminutives with children's and (as it's assumed) women's language can give rise to a range of non-threatening pragmatic senses in different languages. They've been used to convey affection, informality, playfulness, familiarity, euphemism, inoffensiveness, politeness... and even, in the end, contempt. While a friendly nickname can express familiarity and help build relationships, an ironic nickname like "little Donny" applied to an adult you don't respect can carry the weight of contempt.

What Language Use Reveals About Culture

So how does this all play out in the great Australian obsession with nicknames? The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis being what it is, linguists tend to be cautious about directly or causally linking linguistic or grammatical processes to real social and cultural phenomena. Nevertheless, Anna Wierzbicka makes a compelling argument that this widespread use of Australian hypocoristics is evidence that language use can be strongly associated with culture. The enthusiastic and effective use of nicknames mirrors core Australian values and desired national characteristics, such as mateship, friendliness, informality, and solidarity with other Australians. This claim has been made for other languages too, such as Greek, where a similar, informal socialization and friendliness is interpreted through the use of diminutives.

Playful hypocoristics are a way to convey this shared ethos, downplaying formality and minimizing the kind of bragging so upsetting to Australia's infamous Tall Poppy Syndrome, in which those who rate themselves and their successes above all others are cut down (in this case, probably with a sharply worded, friendly nickname or two). Perhaps the cuteness makes everything seem friendlier. Pure speculation? Research studies have shown that the use of hypocoristics by Australian English speakers to each other does have a real world effect, resulting in an increased positive reception, as speakers are seen as more likable. The same use of those same nicknames by a non Australian accented speaker does not have the same effect.

Interestingly, there's a contrasting example of how language and culture interact when we consider American culture, with its national stereotype of the rugged individuals going it alone, the ethic of hard work, and the drive for personal success. Studies have observed, in language found in books, song lyrics, and T.V. shows, that there's a marked increase in ego-driven language use, phrasing that emphasizes uniqueness, the personal, the individual, the self.

Likewise, in a study of compliments and politeness, Americans were described as "emphatically enthusiastic" (PDF download) in the way they tend to offer direct, maximized appreciations of success compared to some non-Americans. In American English, for example, speakers are socialized to be politely, but forcefully, complimentary through structures like " I love your -" (I love your shirt/hair/car/etc.), while in New Zealand English the more tepid "like" replaces "love" in twice as many compliment cases. While Americans tend to overtly observe and celebrate successes through enthusiastic compliments, non-Americans such as Brits, Germans, and Scandinavians are more likely to praise by understating or minimizing the force of the compliment, if they use them at all, such as "you're not a bad driver," or "that wasn't the worst meal you've cooked."

While Australian and American societies are similar in many ways, they differ markedly in which national characteristics are most valued by their citizens. Where Americans might elevate the individual, self-sufficiency, and success, Australians seem to value mateship, the collective, and community building-and it's possible this is reflected through the language use of both societies. Australia's quirky, playful obsession with nicknames, a kind of small poppy syndrome that helps Australians share and celebrate their culture of egalitarian friendship and community, might have a serious side after all.

JSTOR Citations

By: Anna Wierzbicka

Language in Society, Vol. 15, No. 3 (Sep., 1986), pp. 349-373

Cambridge University Press

By: Daniel Jurafsky

Language, Vol. 72, No. 3 (Sep., 1996), pp. 533-578

Linguistic Society of America

By: MARIANTHI MAKRI-TSILIPAKOU

Discourse & Society, Vol. 14, No. 6 (NOVEMBER 2003), pp. 699-726

Sage Publications, Ltd.

By: John Greenway

American Speech, Vol. 34, No. 3 (Oct., 1959), pp. 224-226

Duke University Press

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Small Poppy Syndrome: Why are Australians so Obsessed With Nicknaming Things? | JSTOR Daily

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What unites a nation? A shared culture, similar values, healthy respect? Or in the case of Australian English, perhaps a rabid obsession with nicknames? In these polarizing times, it's all too easy to feel as though you don't even share a common language with some of those you share a country with.

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Nature and Function

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It's an incongruous pairing. Labor leader Bill Shorten, the ruthless right-wing political operator; and a self-proclaimed "left field artist" and master of the ancient art of throat singing, Dean Frenkel.

Lambie vows return to Senate

Frenkel, who lectures at Victoria University in public speaking, has been employed by Shorten, working on and off with the Opposition leader for the best part of a year to improve his communications skills.

Labor's improbable and rapid rise to a lead in Newspoll this week rests largely with the mis-steps of Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull.

But underpinning the resurgence in Labor's fortunes - critics and confidantes concur - is a lift in the Opposition leader's performance on the stump and in front of the television cameras.

Has Bill Shorten, finally, found his voice?

On taking the leadership of Labor, Shorten seemed to change. Not the most gifted orator, he made a deliberate attempt to shed himself of his reputation as a union hardman and factional warrior who played a pivotal role in removing two Labor prime ministers.

As Shorten told journalist David Marr last year: "I was a union speaker for 14 years but I've got to have more styles than just that ...

"You've got to take some of the rabble rouser out of you. I think it's just about making what you say accessible to people."

Trying to soften his image, Shorten's voice frequently took on a singsong cadence, like a parent telling a bedtime story to a child, especially when delivering the pre-arranged grab for the cameras. He spoke slowly with a high pitch, his intonation rising at the end of sentences. The head tilting unnaturally for emphasis, almost pleading to be liked.

The content was often as bad as the delivery. As brilliantly parodied by Shaun Micallef's Mad as Hell, these awkward "zingers" became a sensation.

In one classic, mangled barb in Parliament, Shorten seemed to be channelling Yoda, the ancient Jedi master from Star Wars: "Just when I thought nothing else could this government do surprise me."

He's given up the zingers. There's more gravitas about him.
Hugh Mackay

Shorten embraced the jibes good-naturedly, but it was hardly the stuff of a serious leader.

Rather, he came off variously as nervous, patronising, annoying, fake, ridiculous. As the social researcher Hugh Mackay observed last year, Shorten has came across "weak, evasive and untrustworthy".

For some colleagues, it has been painful to watch.

"He's just been woefully deficient in the basics that you would expect from a party leader - being able to speak with some authenticity, for starters," said one Labor figure. "That's surprising for someone who has told people that he's wanted this all his life."

The inadequacies are the more surprising given Shorten was a skilled debater as a student, competing in the national championships as a member of the Victorian team. As a youngster, at the urging of his mother, he took elocution lessons. As a union organiser, he could be an inspiring orator at the factory gates.

But there has been a notable improvement in Shorten's presentation recently. The exaggerated mannerisms have not disappeared, but have been muted.

The slips of the tongue are less frequent and his voice seems to have dropped half an octave.

The latter change is instructive. Researchers have studied that voters like deep voices, conveying strength, competence and integrity. This principle stands for men and women speakers.

"There's been a huge improvement.," Mackay told Fairfax Media this week. "He's given up the zingers. There's more gravitas about him."

Shorten's office is reluctant to illuminate what positive role, if any, Frenkel played in the transformation, other than to confirm he has been coaching the Opposition leader.

Frenkel is bound by a confidentiality clause in his employment contract with Shorten and can't comment.

However, his website describes his skills as an "analyst, vocal coach, speech guru, writer, author and one of the world's best harmonic overtone singers". He is also a qualified hypnotherapist and has written a book on meditation. Another of his tomes is titled The art of being massaged.

He first gained a measure of fame as a throat singer, an ancient musical form originated in Mongolia 14,000 years ago that sees otherworldly sounds brought forth ranging across tone.

It can, purportedly, mesmerise animals, calm unsettled babies and allow people to project their voices across vast distances.

Vocal training is not uncommon for politicians. Bob Carr, a former radio journalist, has been coached and credits his "masterly" baritone for underpinning his political success. Margaret Thatcher was trained by an expert from Britain's National Theatre to lower her voice.

Shorten's supporters prefer to focus on the Opposition leader returning, rejuvenated after his Christmas holidays, determined to hit the hustings and reconnect with voters.

This year, the Labor leader has done 10 town hall forums and visited marginal seats 47 times. Over the same period, he has done 87 media events.

Like an out of sorts batsman, Shorten has gone back to basics, hit the nets, and played himself into form.

"Bill's a confidence player," remarks one Labor staffer.

That self-assurance grew as Turnbull faltered, beginning with his flirtation and abandonment of the GST in early February and culminating in the short-lived plan to hand the states taxation powers and Turnbull's musing on withdrawing federal funding from state schools.

It was around this time, in late February and early March, that a "contingency plan" by Labor powerbrokers from both NSW and Shorten's home state in Victoria to replace Shorten with Anthony Albanese was shelved.

How well advanced those plans were varies in the telling.

"It was close to being a done deal," said one Labor source. "Then there was divine intervention in the form of Malcolm screwing up.

"Luck's a fortune and he's had some."

Recent revelations of corporate malfeasance - Fairfax's revelations of industrial scale bribery involving Australian firms tied to the Monaco-based firm Unaoil, the Panama Papers highlighting tax avoidance, and allegations of manipulation of interests rates by Australian banks - could also be filed under good fortune by Shorten.

It plays to Labor's strengths and shifts the debate away from union corruption.

However, they say fortune favours the brave and Shorten's embrace of going early and hard on policy has allowed him to cash in. Labor launched its policy to crackdown on multinational tax avoidance last year. Its politically risky decision to clamp down on negative gearing and slash capital gains tax concessions gave Labor credibility on reform when it comes to its critique of the government chaotic policy conniptions.

This week's Newspoll showed Labor ahead 51-49 on a two party preferred basis, well within the margin or error of 3 to 4 per cent. Malcolm Turnbull remains well ahead of Shorten as preferred prime minister at 48 per cent. Shorten's rating on this key measure of personal popularity is at 27 per cent, low but up from the devastating nadir of 14 per cent registered in December.

There hasn't been a one term federal government since James Scullin was ousted in 1932, in the midst of the Great Depression. Turnbull remains easily the most skilled communicator of the two.

When the government delivers its budget on May 3, the damaging prevaricating over economic policy should end, removing a key advantage for Labor at the moment.

The old adage that governments lose elections, rather than oppositions winning them, still holds, notes Mackay.

Even so, the electorate is more volatile, less forgiving, less patient. The fall of one term governments in Queensland and Victoria in the past five years are testament to that.

Dennis Glover, a speechwriter and adviser to several Labor leaders, says Shorten has been rewarded for his boldness on policy. He advised Kim Beazley who ran a small target strategy in 1998 election, concentrating on opposing John Howard's GST.

The famously pessimistic Beazley never really thought he could win and was banking on a two-term strategy to get back into power.

Beazley comfortably won the two party preferred vote but lost the election, largely by being unable to sway middle-income voters in marginal seats. A more positive agenda, more policy differentiation could have won it.

"If he can carry it off, Shorten will need some boldness. He should keep being brave, not curl up in a ball," says Glover.

While Shorten's performance has improved, most voters still don't feel they know him. Many still don't like him or trust him,

"He's stopped speaking in sound bites and zingers and started talking in sentences," he says.

"The next step is to speak in paragraphs."

More policy - on health, higher education, innovation and budget repair is essential. But this must be accompanied by an over-arching narrative.

"He shouldn't get preachy but he has to help people put together the pieces of the puzzle about what's happening to the nation and how it's affecting their lives."

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It's an incongruous pairing. Labor leader Bill Shorten, the ruthless right-wing political operator; and a self-proclaimed "left field artist" and master of the ancient art of throat singing, Dean Frenkel. Frenkel, who lectures at Victoria University in public speaking, has been employed by Shorten, working on and off with the Opposition leader for the best part of a year to improve his communications skills.

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Englishes in Contact

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Taa , also known as ǃXóõ (ǃKhong, ǃXoon - pronounced , ), is a Tuu language notable for its large number of phonemes, perhaps the largest in the world. Most speakers live in Botswana, but a few hundred live in Namibia. The people call themselves ǃXoon (pl. ǃXooŋake) or ʼNǀohan (pl.

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The Horrors and Pleasures of Misused Words

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The Horrors and Pleasures of Misused Words

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English Across Time

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Posted December 05, 2017 06:49:25

American film director Judd Apatow once confessed to Stephen Colbert that he'd been mispronouncing his wife Leslie Mann's name for nearly two decades. He'd been saying "Lez-lee", while she pronounces it as "Less-lee".

When he asked her why she hadn't corrected his mistake, she said she "thought he wouldn't be able to make the adjustment".

Barbra Streisand, unlike Mann, is reportedly insistent that her name be pronounced correctly by everyone, even Apple's voice assistant Siri.

In Australia, mispronunciation is often said as "mispronounciation". Although it is a noun, there's no "noun" in it.

In 1987, Harold Scruby, who later functioned as deputy mayor of the Mosman City Council, published a quirky compendium of instances of mispronunciation by Australians. He labelled these "Waynespeak".

Prior to the publication of Mr Scruby's book, his friend Leo Schofield had run some of the expressions in his Sydney Morning Herald column and been drowned in "a Niagara of correspondence".

Hordes of respondents regarded these expressions to be at least non-standard, or just plain wrong.

Despite this, many of Mr Scruby's examples remain current today: "anythink" and its companions "everythink", "nothink", and "somethink"; "arks" ("ask"); "astericks" ("asterisk"); "bought" ("brought"); "could of" ("could've"); "deteriate" ("deteriorate"); "ecksetra" ("et cetera"); "expresso" ("espresso"); "haitch" ("aitch"); "hone in" ("home in"); and so on through to the end of the alphabet with "youse".

For those of us who wince when we hear "youse", it might be a surprise to find the term in a dictionary. The Macquarie Dictionary feels compelled to explain the dictionary is a complete record of Australian English. The criterion for inclusion in it is thus "evidence of currency in the language community".

When I polled friends for their pet pronunciation peeves, many of them listed those in the Waynespeak collection, while others added examples that readers may cringe at: "cachay" ("cache") and "orientate" ("orient").

A favourite was "Moët" - often pronounced as "Mo-eee" or "Mo-way". The name is of Dutch origin and is correctly pronounced as "Mo-wett". Moët drinkers (and customers of Nike, Hermes, Givenchy, Porsche, Adidas, Yves St Laurent, and Saucony) who wish to check whether they have been pronouncing their luxury products correctly can check this advice.

My pet pronunciation peeve is the mispronunciation of the word "the" in front of a word beginning with a vowel.

Many people, and just about all newsreaders, pronounce it as a neutral "thuh" instead of sounding it out as "thee", as in "tea". It's thee apple, not thuh apple.

Effluent, suppositories and other malapropisms

Some of the suggestions that surfaced in my poll classify as a "malapropism" rather than as a mispronunciation. The term "malapropism" derives from the name of a character in Richard Brinsley Sheridan's 1775 comedy of manners, The Rivals.

Mrs Malaprop's bungled attempts at erudite speech led her to declare one gentleman "the very pineapple of politeness!" and to say of another, "Illiterate him ... from your memory".

Writers of television scripts often create characters prone to malapropisms: Irene in Home and Away, Virginia Chance in Raising Hope, and Tony Soprano in The Sopranos. The Australian television characters Kath and Kim were notorious for their malapropisms, such as "I want to be effluent and practise serial monotony".

Tony Abbott once embarrassingly substituted "suppository" for "repository".

In an article about the proposed airport at Badgerys Creek in Sydney, a reporter mentioned "a relatively modest and small group that would have some affectation". Did the reporter mean "effect"?

The San Remo Hotel in San Francisco, meanwhile, highlights its "turn of the century decorum". On the UK television show The Apprentice, one of the contestants talked about "appealing to the female genre".

Other examples that I have noted include "What are you incinerating about me?"; "a Dorian of the theatre"; "a logo that amplifies modernism and professionalism"; "It's not as if the English language is frozen in aspen" (though it's pretty cold in Aspen); and "As we approach the footy finals, I can emphasise with the players".

Justin Bieber once said: " I was detrimental to my own career". I think we can guess that Justin meant "instrumental", though he may have been just self-aware. We can also guess what the other malapropisms should have been (decor, gender, insinuating, doyen, exemplifies, aspic, empathise).

Note that there needs to be a tinge of humour for an expression or word to be labelled as a malapropism, and it needs to be a real word.

Richard Lederer has a hugely amusing post on malapropisms on his Verbivore site, including this fine example: "If you wish to submit a recipe for publication in the cookbook, please include a short antidote concerning it".

An extension of malapropism occurs in the malamanteau, which is a word that The Economist defines as an erroneous and unintentional portmanteau.

It was launched as a word on the xkcd comic strip and is apparently unpopular with the Wikipedia administration folks, who objected to the word having an entry on the site.

The most quoted malamanteau is George W Bush's "I misunderestimated". Others that have evoked smirks have been "miscommunicado" (from "miscommunicate" and "incommunicado"), "insinuendo" (from "innuendo" and "insinuation"), and "squirmish" ("squirm" and "skirmish").

I recently heard a sparkling new malamanteau, "merticular", used to describe a fussy person. It appears to combine "particular" and "meticulous". When I questioned this and suggested that "meticulous" would do, the speaker said: "No. A merticular person functions at a higher level of "pickyness" than a "particular" person".

It's over to you now: Are you merely "picky" or are you "merticular"?

Is it worthy of the moniker of malamanteau? If so, how would you spell it?
Roslyn Petelin is an associate professor in writing at The University of Queensland, where she teaches in the postgraduate writing, editing, and publishing program. Originally published in The Conversation

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The horrors and pleasures of misused words

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Posted December 05, 2017 06:49:25 American film director Judd Apatow once confessed to Stephen Colbert that he'd been mispronouncing his wife Leslie Mann's name for nearly two decades. He'd been saying "Lez-lee", while she pronounces it as "Less-lee". When he asked her why she hadn't corrected his mistake, she said she "thought he wouldn't be able to make the adjustment".