Just a Minute - discourse

1.    Students choose a topic and challenge the teacher to speak for one minute on this. The teacher does so, emphasising the use of discourse markers (Well, right, anyway, then, I mean), or chunks of language related to the context. Record this if you can - use your mobile and play the recording through a computer / speakers.

2.    Ask students which words you used often (the discourse markers), and repeat if necessary.

3.    Elicit the discourse markers, board them and decide on their function (e.g. anyway: to change the subject).

4.    Students do the task themselves. Turn this into a game by asking their partner to count the number of discourse markers they can use in one minute.

5.    If necessary, they do the task in L1, and then translate into English. This will demonstrate the use of discourse markers in their L1, which will lead to them asking for a translation which they can use in English. 

Affix of evil

English is a language awash with prefixes to alter meaning (overpaid, counter-productive, anti-war) and suffixes to change word class (happy, happiness). Suffixes can also alter meaning, such as the very useful -ish ("What time do you get off? - About sixish"). I always like teaching this suffix as students identify its vagueness with the actual name for the language they're studying: Engl, ish.

Many languages, for example Tagalog and Bahasa Indonesia, use internal affixes, or infixes, adding to the middle of a word to alter meaning. In English we can use tmesis -  inserting lexical items into words to alter meaning, most notably in the wonderful adjectives "fan-bloody-tastic" and "abso-fucking-lutely". I wonder if it's just the beautiful rhythm of these extended adjectives which leaves, to my knowledge, few other examples if this lexical building in English.

P.S. "diddly" is not an affix, internal or otherwise.

In tune with our language

I'm sitting in the shady terrace cafe at Yves Saint Laurent's lasting monument to beauty and tranquility, les Jardins  Majorelle in Marrakesh. The tranquility remains despite the hustle from the tourists from all over Europe (predominantly). I'm surrounded by languages I recognise and can distinguish without understanding - the dental tittars of Italian; lips and tongues racing each other in Spanish; the swooshing ballet of Polish. I don't have a clue what they're talking about, but I know where they're from, their history, their popular culture, just from the sounds they're making. Even when we don't understand a language we understand people.

What's funny is that there's an English couple on the other side of the cafe. They're talking too quietly for me to hear what they're saying: they are English, after all. I know, however, from the few sounds I can identify that they're from the south-east, probably no more than forty miles away from where I was born. My hearing is not particularly good, but I'm so tuned into my language or accent that I can identify it at twenty paces.

I wouldn't dare introduce myself, though: we are English, and from the home counties at that, after all.

Snow Patrol

According to the show QI, it's a commonly held fallacy that Inuit languages have 100 (or whatever the claim is) words for snow.

What speakers of these languages do have in their linguistic toolkit is a plethora of demonstratives, a grammatical area sadly sparse in English - this, that, these and those. That (ha!) is not the topic of this post, however: please research this interesting usage of demonstratives in Inuit languages elsewhere.

English, in fact, has plenty of words for snow and for describing snow: snow falls, it dumps, it comes in the form of sleet, hail, in a blizzard, in powder and in slush. This week a new member of the lexical family came to my attention as it fell in Auckland: graupel. This is the form between snow and sleet and has been bothering Kiwis in this, an Arctic winter by Antipodean standards.

Have a look here for more information about graupel. It sounds very menacing and reminds me of my favourite Russian word, grom, whose rather wonderful onomatopoeia reveals its meaning: thunder.

Weather words are great, aren't they?

Polish and paint.

We paint our toenails. I don't, to be honest. Mine are pretty ugly. But anyway, we paint them - that's the verb we choose to describe and name this particular action.

It's a funny one because the substance we use to carry out this action is not nail paint, but nail polish.

But if you ask (or demand) someone to "Polish my toenails!", as my five year old daughter did yesterday in the swimming pool, it sounds a bit odd. As if the toenails were painted, but the paint was of such poor quality that the job required a little extra with some Kiwi and a couple of sturdy brushes. Polishing shoes is in the same area, after all. 

The reason this blog exists

linguophile

11 up, 5 down

1. One who loves language so much, that it becomes an irritation to all those in contact with said person. 2. One who majors in linguistics at a pretentious liberal arts college.  http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=linguophile This is me. My lovely wife is a wonderfully patient woman, but we have busy lives. She doesn't have time to listen to my musings about the language we're surrounded by, what it means and where it's leading.  So I'm going to record it here instead.

The Apprentice

I love The Apprentice. I think it's brilliant, brutal, and deeply admire the contestants for their hard work, creativity, and unfailing self-confidence in the face of such stark criticism, evinced by their often total lack of common sense.

I also love it as a window onto my generation.

One thing I noticed from the last series, won by Tom (who I want to be friends with), is how the candidates tried to ingratiate themselves to Lord Sugar through their use of language. Have a look at their antics in the boardroom and see how they use reflexive pronouns instead of personal pronouns to attempt to create a formal distance, and therefore appear more elevated, and, in their minds, intelligent.

"That was myself, Lord Sugar."

"I look at yourself and see a successful man"

The question is whether the fact that this use of language appears more intelligent in people's heads will influence whether it becomes a feature of the language. English has lost its 'respectful' pronouns, unlike other languages (vous, usted) - and this could be an example of how English is streamlined and less needlessly complex than other languages, or a gap in the market ready to be exploited by a group of sales executives lapping at Lord Sugar's bowl of sycophancy.

Only time will tell, but I hope that in years to come the OED and descriptive grammars cite The Apprentice as the origin of this new usage.

I love my daughter's spelling of this adjective. She wrote "I was sged". She was writing "scared" - her phonetic spelling made perfect sense.