Languages in the Big Apple

William Safire’s latest contribution to the Sunday Times tries in vain to prove that the old man ain’t a square. “Language: translating the lingo of adultalescence” is a brief summary of the colloquialisms of today’s young-but-not-that-young. Let’s take a look at what he came up with:

Sketchy about the lingo being spoken by today’s adultalescents? As those in their late teens and early adulthood like to say, Ah-ite!
The sound of that last word is hard to convey on the printed page. The famous cry in comic books of a man being thrown out a window - Aiee-ee - comes closer to the first semi-syllable of the slurred word, but there is a hint of a at the end. When you ask a young person conversant in this campuspeak (a word created on the analogy of George Orwell’s newspeak) a question like “Would you do this for me?” you are likely to hear the answer “Ah-ite“.
The meaning is “O.K.” The sound is an amalgam of all and right, which used to sound like “aw-rite” but now is compressed into a sliding “a’ight”, as the teen-slanguist Fred Lynch transcribes it.

A few other brilliant translations:

Adorkable = endearing though socially inept
Fauxhawk = hairstyle achieved by combing all of the hair to the center to give the appearance of a Mohawk without shaving the head.”
Ginormous = gigantic + enormous
Chillax = chill + relax

… and a few other words you already know and use, plus several you’ve probably never heard of and were probably the result of some kid pulling old Safire’s leg.

Take a look here.

New research suggests that Neanderthals, our closest extinct relatives, may have spoken just like we do. Best known for making tools similar to those our ancestors used, these cavemen were previously believed to have been grunters and groaners, but new data suggests that they possessed the same gene that we credit with our language and speech skills today.

The FOXP2 gene, which scientists assumed had developed into the modern human variant that it is today less than 200,000 years ago, was found in a bunch of Neanderthal bones collected in a cave in northern Spain.

This means, according to paleogeneticist Johannes Krause of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, that “It is possible that Neanderthals spoke just like we do.”

The most interesting (or creepiest to imagine, maybe) part of the study is Krause’s theory on how the FOXP2 gene ended up in our biological make-up: he “noted that some might suggest that interbreeding or ‘gene flow’ (aka sex) between modern humans and Neanderthals led us to having FOXP2 in common.”

So if you’ve ever secretly thought those Geiko cavemen were hot, don’t feel bad. Your great-great-great-great-grandma did, too.

Source

The language police descended upon a Pennsylvania woman last week for swearing at her toilet.

Dawn Herb, a resident of Scranton, PA, let her john know who was boss after it overflowed onto the bathroom floor. Luckily, her rant was overheard by a next-door neighbor, who also happened to be a policeman. His virgin ears were so distraught that he called up some fellow coppers, who raced to the scene of the crime and stuck Herb with a disorderly conduct charge before things got out of hand. Ms. Herb, who reportedly doesn’t remember exactly what she said to the poor toilet but admits using profanity, now faces up to $300 in fines and 90 days in jail.

“It doesn’t make any sense,” she told The Times-Tribune, “I was in my house. It’s not like I was outside or drunk. The toilet was overflowing and leaking down into the kitchen and I was yelling for my daughter to get the mop.”

Sure, lady. In her defense, she was potty-talking to her potty.

Source

Here’s some good news: British researchers recently released a study claiming that profanity in the workplace can “boost morale and esprit de corps.”

“The study observed workers at a mail-order warehouse in England, which employed 14 people, and six focus groups of 10 to 20 people, two in England and six in the USA,” according to the Eastern Daily Press. “They included full-time and part-time workers in a variety of organisations, ranging from restaurants and retail, to a bank, nursing home and hospital.”

Yehuda Baruch, professor of management at the University of East Anglia, adds, “For some people, the use of profanity is a way to create collegiality. For others, it’s a way to relieve stress.”

The study’s other shocking revelations include the fact that young people tend to swear more often than older folks, and that some people find swearing offensive – Baruch himself, actually. He’s quoted as saying: “Personally, I detest the use of profanity. I don’t use it myself and I think it’s something terrible to do.”

Hmm. If he finds it so appalling, why did he conduct a study on it? In any case, journalists got a little giddy in their coverage of the report; here are a few headlines, courtesy of USA Today:

F-Yeah! Swearing At Work Is OK, Study Finds

Office Expletives: H— Yeah!

That’s for $@#! Sure

What the …? Workplace profanity boosts morale: study

Hey-ho.. It’s eff to work we go

Harvard mathematicians have come up with a formula that will help predict the future of language evolution. It is, in short:

“Verbs evolve and homogenize at a rate inversely proportional to their prevalence in the English language.”

Got that? What it boils down to is thinking of linguistic development in terms of evolution: ” Just as genes and organisms undergo natural selection, words — specifically, irregular verbs that do not take an “-ed” ending in the past tense — are subject to powerful pressure to “regularize” as the language develops.”

Their research is based on seven of the verb conjugation rules of Old English – only one of which is still used today.

They found that the one surviving rule, which adds an “-ed” suffix to simple past and past participle forms, contributes to the evolutionary decay of irregular English verbs according to a specific mathematical function: It regularizes them at a rate that is inversely proportional to the square root of their usage frequency.

In other words, a verb used 100 times less frequently will evolve 10 times as fast.

To develop this formula, the researchers tracked the status of 177 irregular verbs in Old English through linguistic changes in Middle English and then modern English. Of these 177 verbs that were irregular 1,200 years ago, 145 stayed irregular in Middle English and just 98 remain irregular today, following the regularization over the centuries of such verbs as help, laugh, reach, walk, and work.

Don’t ask me. I almost failed Calculus.

Source

Warning: this is a long one!

Living in a multicultural urban environment like New York can really skew your perception of racism in America. Sure, we get regular reminders of xenophobia in many forms – the uproar over Brooklyn’s Arabic school, for example – but more often than not, blatant racism is blurred by the diverse make-up of the city. If you’re a white person who hates brown people, you probably shouldn’t live here.

So it’s both surprising and sobering to come across letters such as this one, from KansasCity.com, in which a woman rants against people who live in America and can’t speak English.

This is in regard to Zdenko Bergl’s letter “Coming to America” (10/5). I agree with Mr. Bergl, who has no sympathy for immigrants who do not learn English. They are just as capable as the immigrants from long ago.

My family came to America from Sicily. They also attended English classes and became U.S. citizens. They were true Americans who loved our country. They and the other immigrants from long ago learned to speak English and adopted the ways of the American people. Why can’t the new immigrants?

I get very upset when I go shopping to hear the salespeople speaking in their language instead of English. I get upset when products we buy today are printed in Spanish. Why Spanish? Why not in Italian, Russian, German, Arabic, etc.? Why has Spanish become our second language? Why can’t the new immigrants use English in America because that is our language?

If the immigrants want to use their own language in their home or with their own people, that’s great. But they should learn English if they want to live in our great country.

Virginia G. - Kansas City

Why Spanish? Well, Virginia, maybe because the Latino population makes up the largest minority group in the country? The question should be, Why not Spanish? The fact is, she and so many other racists continue to misuse the immigrant argument. Yes, the United States is a country of immigrants, many of whom were treated at some point or another with prejudice and contempt. But what these people fail to realize is how everything is arbitrary. Like Saussure’s declaration about the link between signifier and signified, so, too, is the fact that our country chose English as our national language instead of German. (It was a close call.) But what good is there in sanctifying English? Trust me, Virginia, it ain’t going anywhere. The treatment of the most prominent language in the world as a precious, disappearing commodity reminds me of an interview I once saw on a college campus about the importance of Women’s Studies. One boy, when asked what he thought about the department, replied proudly:

“I don’t see any buildings dedicated to Men’s Studies, do you?”

Take a look around, buddy. The whole bloody campus is dedicated to Men’s Studies. And giving Virginia Woolf a room of her own won’t wipe you or your manhood off the map. Nor will the Spanish on your cereal box.

My personal exposure to the Icelandic language is pretty limited; except for the occasional Bjork song, it’s not something I hear often, but I’ve often wondered about the history behind the language.

An article I found answered a lot of my questions. Here it is, the history of Icelandic, in a nutshell:

The most used language of Iceland is “the Icelandic” and it is one of the very famous Nordic languages group. This group is the sub-group of the Germanic languages. Normally, Germanic language is divided into two groups i.e. North Germanic or Nordic languages and West Germanic. Iceland was first inhabited in around 870 A.D and most of the first visitors were from Norway [west Norway], Sweden and Ireland. Some Celtics were also in the earliest arrivals to Iceland. The language that became the most popular in Iceland was that of the people of Norway. Some traces of Celtic language are also visible in Icelandic language. The only words borrowed from Celtic language are some personal names and some names of places. Till 14th century Icelandic and Norwegian language was almost same. It was after 14th century that they became totally different from each other. This change occurred due to significant changes in the language of Norway. Icelandic language didn’t change and this was due to rich Icelandic literature that was written in read in the same language in 12th and 13th centuries. Now it is said that not even a single word has changed in Icelandic language that’s why the texts written in twelfth century can be read by a ten year boy even now. Another quality of Icelandic language is its uniformity i.e. the absence of dialects.

William Safire’s latest On Language article for the Sunday Times magazine takes a look at the meaning of the phrase “suspension of disbelief,” and how its usage has changed over the years. Lately, it’s been in vogue among the political set: Hillary Clinton said it would be required to believe General David Petraeus’ report on the progress of the war, Republican Mitt Romney in turn used it to question the validity of Clinton’s statement, and Senator John McCain used it as a noun, declaring that “It’s a willing suspension of disbelief that Senator Clinton thinks she knows more than General Petraeus.”

What’s all the hoopla about? And who, if anyone, used the phrase correctly? Safire first gives us a little history:

“The phrase ’suspension of disbelief ,’ ” noted the columnist Alan Nathan in The Washington Times, “is a literary term of art referring to one of Aristotle’s principles of theater in which the audience accepts fiction as reality so as to experience a catharsis, or a releasing of tensions to purify the soul.” He went on to characterize the general’s testimony as “more in keeping with Bertolt Brecht’s philosophy of Verfremdungseffekt, or distancing from that suspended belief, in order to maintain a clearheaded appreciation of the drama in focus.”

He then takes us from politics to poetics, pointing out that Coleridge and Wordsworth had plenty to say on the matter as well. Read the entire article here.

A Tokyo judge recently ruled that the suicide of a 35-year old man was work-related, and that the government must pay reparations to the man’s family.

The man, who worked for a Tokyo-based pharmaceutical company, left a suicide note detailing the verbal abuse he received from his boss, which purportedly caused him to spiral into a depression that ultimately ended his life. He wrote: “My defects echo around my head, and I now despise myself.”

According to his wife, the man’s boss abused him on a daily basis, throwing out insults including: “Your existence is offensive to my eyes. Get out of my sight,” “You’re a wage-snatcher parasitizing the company,” and “You’re a social phobic, aren’t you?”

The ruling is significant because it is the “first time a court has ruled harassment by senior staff, such as abusive language and bullying, as being the direct cause of suicide, and recognized such a death as being work-related.”

While the incident may seem odd to write about on a language website, the legal action taken in response to the bullying is a significant step for workplace security. And while this particular man in Japan chose to end only his own life, the outcomes of verbal abuse have been bloodier here in the U.S. – for every school massacre and work place shooting that’s happened in America, there is a story of bullying behind it. Seung-Hui Cho was repeatedly made fun of for his social ineptitude and taciturnity, the Columbine kids claimed they were acting out in response to a school-sanctioned favoritism of jocks and jock culture, and the list goes on. There’s a great book by Mark Ames entitled Going Postal that looks into the environments in which these violent outbreaks have occurred; in each case, there is endless evidence of verbal abuse.

A new article in Science Daily reveals that toddlers are grasping language skills much earlier than expected, and “by the age of 18 months understand enough of the lexicon of their own language to recognize how speakers use sounds to convey meaning.”

Apparently the wee tykes are also able to discern which sounds to ignore – those, for example, that don’t play a significant role in speaking their native tongue. If you’ve ever wondered why you have so much trouble rolling your ‘r’s, this is why – the most important period for acquiring the speech patterns and sounds of one’s native language is during a child’s first year. Sounds that don’t factor largely into the language a child is hearing – in our case, the rolled ‘r’ – are categorically ignored, causing our tongue and brain to develop accordingly.

This is why Japanese toddlers, like Japanese adults, cannot tell apart the English “r” and “l” sounds and why English speakers have trouble with certain French vowels because they all sound the same to non-native speakers due to language learning in infancy. The Penn study shows that even when two words sound very different, toddlers know whether to take this difference seriously or to chalk it up to random variation depending on how their language works.

So while linguists are finding that learning a new language as an adult isn’t as impossible as previously believed, your accent could be there forever.

Read the complete article: here