Losing a language

In next week’s LX553 lecture I will be talking about language death. Of course, it’s not the language that dies as such; rather, the speakers… It is assumed that about half of the world’s languages are endangered and there are estimations that one language dies every other week.

I bet you are asking why this topic is important to me. German isn’t endangered after all, right? There are two reasons really. My MA dissertation was concerned with the processes that lead to language death but more importantly, I am part of one of these processes.

My late grandfather spoke what is called Low German (LG) and only LG. The status of LG is debatable. Some people argue that it’s a language and others argue that it is a dialect. In our family, whether it was a language or a dialect was unimportant: It was just a part of our life. Since we lived in the same house as my grandparents, my brother and I were constantly exposed to my grandpa speaking in this variety. However, my grandmother, who had fled from Silesia after WWII, did not speak LG but had learned to understand it over the course of time. Therefore, their children, my father and his two brothers, were not raised speaking LG fluently and my dad, who mainly speaks High German, only uses a few LG expressions. My mum, on the other hand, was raised speaking Low German and High German. When she gets together with her brother and her sisters now you hardly hear any High German but they all speak to each other in LG. Because LG was not fashionable and it was seen as language of farmers when I was born, my brother and I then learned High German as first language. At the dinner table my mum would be switching between Low German when speaking to my grandpa and then switching back to High German when talking to us. So we do understand Low German but when we try speaking it, it just sounds silly and therefore we don’t use it.

As far as I understand my mum, it was a conscious decision to raise us with High German.  And I can remember a scene in primary school when a teacher laughed at a student and corrected him because he had used Low German. After all, parents want to make the best choices for their children.

This is a fairly normal trajectory of decline, which we find in many endangered languages. So one could think I’m just a data point (considering my love for quantitative sociolinguistics) but this is not (only) the case. Language loss has an effect on the speakers. It took me a long time but in my twenties I realised that Low German is an important part of my identity, which I won’t be able to pass on to my children.

Guest Lecture: What is Pragmatics for? Reading, Writing and Relevance

Hello, it’s me again, I hope you’re happy about that.

Today I will offer my typically witty and insightful take on what was a fascinating lecture from Dr. Billy Clark yesterday.

The lecture was very well attended, and as Tim said, we’re a credit to the university, which is nice, I like being a credit to something.

I hope Dr Clark wouldn’t mind me referring to him as Billy in this post, because that’s what I’m going to do.

I’ll start from the beginning of the lecture (rather conventionally). Before Billy went into detail about applying pragmatics to stylistics, he gave an introduction to what inferences are. Inferences are conclusions that we reach from evidence available and our own reasoning. He gave a comical example of an inference that Russell Brand came to when hearing a speaker say ‘we’re running out of time’. In a joke that even I would be proud of (kudos Russ), Russell Brand remarked, ‘we cannot run out of time, time is infinite’. Obviously, this is not what the speaker meant by saying that they would run out of time, he meant they would run out of the time they had allotted for the discussion they were having. Interesting, hmm?

Billy then went on to explain why we study inferences. My favourite reason is ‘because they exist’. He then went on to explain the link to linguistics, summing it up with the question of how the noises we make lead to certain reactions. He had pictures and stuff in the presentation, if you weren’t there, tough.

Now, ‘why is this linked to stylistics?’ you may ask. Seriously, you are allowed to ask. Okay, I’ll explain then, seeing as you asked so nicely. Inferences are linked to stylistics because texts are intended to be understood in certain ways, and to have certain effects. So, for example when I said/wrote ‘you may ask’ above, I imagine you inferred that I meant ‘you might ask because you’re interested’ but I said ‘you are allowed to ask’, to made a ‘joke’ (notice the inverted commas) by playing around with your inferences. By doing so I (hopefully) created an affect, and made you laugh. That is just one way in which we can use the inferences we expect people to have to our advantage, let your imagination run free and try and think of some more if you fancy.

This was just a short account of what I found interesting from Billy’s lecture, there is certainly a lot more to add but as always I don’t like to give you too much to read.

The final thing I’d like to say is that Billy has a very nice sounding voice (that’s not a weird thing to say, shush)

Thanks for taking the time to read my ramblings again, if you’d like me to stop for a while, write something yourself!

Liam out.

A Changing Language

I am currently sat at home next to my mum (a primary school teacher-year 3 currently), who is marking a mountain of P.S.H.E books. Yes, our evenings are very exciting.

The exercise being marked shows a row of six pictures down the left hand edge of the sheet, showing different facial emotions. Next to each of the pictures are 2 empty boxes. In the first of the boxes, the child had to write a reason to be ‘said emotion’, for example, ‘I think this person is opening a present’ and in the second box, the child had to state what the ‘said emotion’ was, for example, ‘surprised’. That probably isn’t very well explained, but it’s not massively important.

Anyway, a few books in, mum got confused about what a child had written, and asked for my advice. Next to an angry facial expression, a child had written ‘angry-because he looks like he’s going to panchter’. At first, ‘panchter’ baffled us both, but I soon realised that it probably meant ‘punch her’. Both mum and I were interested by this. The way this child says/hears others say ‘punch her’ has seemingly affected the way they spell it. Not only do they hear ‘punch’ as ‘panch’, but it shows that they don’t hear two separate words. This isn’t the only example we have seen over the past few months. Interestingly, mum has said such a thing is becoming an increasingly common occurrence in children’s work, year on year.

As we all know, language is constantly changing and evolving, diverging from the ‘standard’. This can sometimes be problematic, when young children haven’t fully grasped the basics. My mum (as an example), finds it challenging to teach children phonics and spelling when they are used to hearing/speaking a non-standard form at home. Using the example above, we would recognise the standard spelling as ‘punch’. The child recognises the word as ‘panch’. If the child’s parents/guardian pronounces ‘punch’ in this way, it suddenly becomes very difficult as a teacher to tell them that it is in fact wrong to write ‘panch’, if that’s what they hear from the people they aspire to. In extreme cases, if a child hears their parent or guardian speak with a strong dialect or accent, then teaching them the standard almost becomes like teaching them a foreign language.

I found this quite an interesting subject, and it could (or may already be) an interesting study.

Not Acquiring Language at the “Typical” Age

Anyone who’s studied English Language or learnt about Child Language Acquisition, will tell you that most children say their first utterance, which is usually a word long, around the age of 12 months, give or take.

However, not everyone was so fortunate to say their first word then. I’m one of those people – I didn’t say my first word until the age of five. Why? Doctors told my parents that it was a case of “she will or she won’t”, and I had numerous tests to make sure that I wasn’t deaf. I like to think that I thought it was too mainstream to say my first word at 12 months, and decided to be original by not uttering anything until a few years later.

That sort of backfired on me, because people then thought I was incredibly stupid and my first word after five years was, “No.” After five years, you’d think I’d have come out with something a bit more original, elegant and witty. But I simply looked up and said, “No.”

Nowadays, the majority of my friends find it hilarious that I couldn’t speak for so long, as I now don’t shut up. My parents despair that my future partner will never be able to get a word in edgeways, as I like the sound of my voice too much.

I digress. The point of this blog was to talk about how else I communicated with my parents whilst being taught basic grammar concepts and vocabulary at speech therapy nursery.

My Mum’s favourite story is how I use to bring objects to show her what I wanted. If I wanted to go to the park, I’d bring her my shoes and put them down in front of her, before pointing at them, then me, then the front door. My Mum likes to say, affectionately, that it was like having a two-legged, mute puppy in the house.

Love you too Mum.

But the most interesting way of communication, in my opinion, was the use of Makaton, a way to use sign language and symbols developed especially for people with speech problems. Unfortunately, I can’t remember any sign language I would have used, but it’s incredibly fascinating to read about how flexible Makaton is and how it can be used for a variety of different things e.g. to share thoughts, choices and emotions. Today, over 100,000 children and adults use Makaton – most use it as a child and, like myself, use this communication system until they no longer need it. However, there are still people who will need to use it for the rest of their lives.

To find out more about Makaton, check out their website at http://www.makaton.org.

A Brief Instant Messaging Story

So, I’ve been trying to think of something to write about, and I remembered that for a presentation that I’m doing for one of my modules this year, we spoke about the language use of teenagers, and in particular, instant messaging.

I thought I’d create a little conversation between Steven and Holly (fictional characters) on Facebook, which will be both entertaining and, I hope, informative.

Here goes:

Steven: hey holly wubu2 2dai
Holly: been at skool wiv you
Steven: oh ye lol, science was sick 2dai
Holly: i h8 science lol
Steven: yeah me 2 lol i ment bad sick lol
Holly: okkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk
Steven: wuu2 l8r
Holly: nothin u?
Steven: nothin lol

5 minutes later…

Steven: u wanna do somethin 🙂 xxxx
Holly: yeah wot?
Steven: go kfc?
Holly: dont like kfc
Steven: maccy ds?
Holly: yeh i like that
Steven: k meet you at urs in half hour?
Holly: how u kno wear i live?
Steven: errm scotty told me
Holly: ow does scotty know?
Steven: dunno
Holly: not going maccy ds wiv you creep
Steven: i aint a creep
Holly: k. bye.

As heartbreaking and hard to read as that is, I hope you picked out some things that maybe even you did as a young teen and are now painfully ashamed of. Now go grab a Kleenex, I know how upset you are for poor Steven

ReadLing

Hello there, nice of you to join me. Yesterday the first ReadLing session was held in one of the far, almost unreachable corners of the Checkland building so I thought I’d write a blog about it (honestly, I thought that, it’s nothing to do with Tim suggesting it).

I still don’t know what I’m going to write but I’m sure it will all turn out well (this happens to be the attitude I take with my essays as well).

I guess the first thing I should mention is the fantastic turnout for the event. I didn’t count how many people were there but if anyone did and would like to enlighten those of us that don’t know, please do. Anyway, it was a lot.

I think, without being biased, the most represented group was the second year Linguistics group, so if you’ve got that bit of competitive spirit and would like your year group to beat us in the attendance competition (it’s not real) please do come along.

What was spoken about was Relevance Theory. For those of you reading this that didn’t come along and don’t know what Relevance Theory is, I’ll give a short explanation. Relevance Theory, very basically, states that when communicating, humans will find meaning that they find most relevant according to their expectations, and then stop computing. An input (which could be anything, a sight, a sound, an utterance) is considered relevant when an individual can use it to come to a conclusion that is relevant to him/her/other. These conclusions could be that it confirms a suspicion, answers a question or improves knowledge of a certain topic. These are called positive cognitive effects (it’s bold because it’s important). We like to come to these conclusions by using as little brain power as possible.

Anyway, back to the interesting stuff (you should disagree with that statement, Relevance Theory is interesting). Many interesting and imaginative  points were raised in the discussion, such as ‘What if Germans don’t know what tea is?’, and ‘If something doesn’t conform to your expectations it’s like pretending to give your dog food and then hitting it.’ You may be wondering what these points have to do with Relevance Theory, and to be honest, so am I. I will try to explain. The Germans not knowing about tea thing means… errrm, if someone doesn’t understand a certain idea (in this case tea) how will they decide whether it’s relevant to them? My answer is I don’t know, hopefully someone can explain in the comments section below. The hitting the dog thing strikes me as particularly sinister, but refers to expectations we have whilst in the midst of listening to an utterance. So, for example if I say ‘would you like to join me in the cafe at lunch time for a cup of kangaroo’. You wouldn’t expect me to ask you to join me for a cup of kangaroo, that’d be weird and you’d probably not want to be my friend. That utterance, then, seems to be, for the most part, irrelevant and nonsensical and would have no value whatsoever. If that wasn’t the point please correct me, to be honest I’m just trying to be funny.

I’m looking at my word count which currently stands at 533, and thinking that maybe that’s enough writing for now, to be honest I’m quite surprised you’ve made it this far. If anyone would like to add anything or even write a separate blog post about their experiences of ReadLing, please feel free. If you came along, good on you, I hope you enjoyed it. If not and you think I’ve made it sound marvellous, please come along next time! I’m not sure when and where it will be but there will be announcement in the near to distant future, so keep an eye out!

Thanks for reading, have a lovely day and see you for the next edition of ReadLing.

It’s rather good; a brief meander through a scale.

I’m a big fan of scales. most> a lot> many> some> a few> none. Brilliant. A linear relationship between words when each one entails the one below it. Lovely. Not only that, but we can move items around the scale through prosody. Even more excellent. I think the following four words, in certain uses, fit together into a scale rather neatly.

“it’s rather quiet”

“it’s quite quiet”

“It’s only quiet”

“It’s just quiet”

Ok, so they all go before adjectives. They’re adverbs. Great. So are thousands of other words. What good is saying these are adverbs? (Not very, is the answer I’m implying here). What else can we say about them? When we look at Quite closely, what do we think of?  “It’s quite quiet” implies not only that you agree but that you’re only agreeing tentatively. “I suppose you’re telling the truth, but I’m not certain.” Let’s compare Rather. “It’s rather quiet” is implying that you’re slightly more certain. It’s more forceful in agreement. We could say it’s more positive. Only, what does only say to us? “it’s only quiet” seems to imply that we were expecting something else. That we were given cause to expect more than the feature noted. Just, to finish the set, implies that the other features were expected and that that feature isn’t particularly impressive. I’m starting to think the scale’s making itself clear here. The scale goes something like Just>Only>Quite>Rather. With emphasis Only can come to mean the same as -or something similar to- Just, although I don’t think you can turn Just into Only. This seems to be a downwardly pointing scale. Rather, with emphasis, can be lowered in positivity, to Quite. Can we change Quite to Only? Given suitable emphasis, perhaps a humorous amount of emphasis, I think this is perfectly do-able. It might be presumptuous to say that there’s a gap in this group, that a word could come in between Rather and Quite. If we were, like Mendeleev with his periodic table, to guess what fills the gap, we would first need to understand the scale a little better.

So, what’s common among the scale? These words are adjectives, but more specifically they are- as I used in an essay to my A-Level Teacher’s surprise- graduators (graduators may or may not be a word that I made up. The Microsoft Corporation seems to think it is a word so make of that what you will). They mark for gradience. Gradiators might be a better name but that sounds like radiators so we’ll leave things as I’ve set them. They mark on a graduated scale, so it makes sense to call them graduators because they make a thing graduated. Anyway, this is tangential. These are graduators. Their common feature, it seems, is of disappointment. Just is the most disappointed. Another sender may have said “Listen to how quiet this is!” or “What is that noise outside‽” and you’ve responded negatively. Rather, on the other hand, seems to be more positive, this could’ve been a positivity scale; but we are stuck with litotes now. Rather is the least disappointed. The question this implies is something more along the line of “Isn’t it quiet?” or “Where’s all the noise gone” (if we were, say, in a situation that was previously very noisy and was suddenly quiet. The music at your hip young alcohol-fuelled festival has cut out inexplicably, for example).  Quite would imply a slight disappointment (“it’s not as big as I thought but still quite big”) and Only would be more disappointed again (“It’s not as big as I thought and not really worth boasting about”). All of these include an agreement, though. Even Just includes “it is x” what changes along the scale is how impressive x is. Now that we have a sense of how the scale works and what is being scaled, we can begin to act like Mendeleev. Where is our gap? For Mendy, my Russian pal, it was between Silicon and Tin. For us it is between the positive response (Rather) and the negative (Quite). Mendy noticed, using a much larger scale than ours admittedly, that his gap would need something of atomic weight near-72 to fill it. We might say that we need something of near-neutral semantic weight to fill it. Mendy found his thing; it’s called Germanium and has weight 72.8. We’re not so lucky, in that our thing has yet to exist. It needs to imply agreement, but neither impression nor disappointment. We need a word that says, perhaps, “I am yet to judge this”. Or, perhaps, simply stating the facts will suffice (I’m inclined to put this on the same level as Quite or maybe in Only though).  Perhaps it just can’t exist.

And that’s all I’ve got. It’s not particularly rigorous nor is it that ground breaking. But It’s quite nice.

Being Polish in England

I was thinking – being Polish in England. What does it mean? Well, it means that if you know English you are a non-native speaker of the language, and your mind is a bilingual mind. Trivial.

What is not so trivial though, is how to deal with the fact that I have to learn to think in a way the English language works.

I have been coming to the UK since I was 11 and have been learning English for around 14 years. Even though linguistically developed since my childhood, I still struggle with some issues concerning the use of my second language.

Some time ago I discovered that talking about feelings and expressing them in my second language isn’t the easiest thing to do. Being brought up in a Polish linguistic community I have learnt that we have certain ways of talking and describing our feelings. It is natural that in our mother tongues we attach certain emotions to some words but unfortunately translating these emotions to another language is not always very efficient.

The words seem to be empty, just learnt in order to communicate but not to express genuine emotions. ‘I love you’ may become very meaningless sometimes, and there is a drive to express yourself in your own language but unfortunately the ‘other half’ may not only not understand what you say, but also do not attach any emotions to these words.

What is more, I do not find English as descriptive as my own language is and it is certainly not because of the lack of vocabulary. Sometimes I cannot express myself adequately to the state of my emotions. I do feel that I did not say enough and that there is a lack of expressiveness in my words (no, reading Shakespeare’s sonnets and citing them out loud does not help).

Maybe the emptiness of the words concerning emotions depends on the time of exposure to the language we live in, and after x years my mind will create emotional associations with certain lexical items. For now, I have to live with the fact that my bilingual mind does not accept this concept (yet!).

Names

Today I awoke to a message from Tim. In this message Tim pointed out that I follow a lot of people called Liam on Twitter, and said ‘Why not write a blog about names?’ and I thought ‘Why not write a blog about names’. So here I am now, writing a blog about names.

My first thought when I saw that message from Tim was ‘I need some breakfast’. After that thought though, I wondered what I could write about names. We all know that names are a very important tool in human communication, but really, are they interesting?

Well, names aren’t really very efficient. Think about it, how many times have you been in a room and someone has said (let’s say your name is Harry, for the purpose of this example) ‘what do you think of this idea, Harry?’ and you and the two other Harrys in the room have turned around to respond? What ensues is utter verbal chaos, as the person who asked for your (or one of the other Harry’s) opinion tries to explain which Harry they mean, and the three Harrys are all talking on top of each other.

I have a real life example of name ambiguity from just last night for you now. I was chatting on Facebook in a group chat. We were talking about the impending release of the new Hunger Games film, when out of nowhere, someone says ‘Liam is a fine specimen’. Obviously, being a Liam, I thought ‘Ooo, that’s nice, I am a fine specimen aren’t I’, then went and looked in the mirror at my fine specimenness for 5 minutes. Then it dawned on me. She was talking about Liam Hemsworth, star of The Hunger Games. I was very upset.

The above problems can normally be solved by using surnames however, so really, names are quite efficient, but we don’t really want to be going round calling people by their full names, that would be a waste of time. Things like those that I have mentioned then, can happen, and can be very funny.

 

Meanie!

Prof. Arnold Zwicky, commenting on six inclusions in my good friend (and gastronomic co-author) Richard Horsey’s book ‘101 Key Ideas in Linguistics’, writes:

‘OK, here’s Horsey’s list, in alphabetical order: Leonard Bloomfield, Noam Chomsky, Gottlob Frege, H. Paul Grice, Roman Jakobson, and Ferdinand de Saussure? Frege and Grice are the surprises, of course. Getting the other four is no great feat, but if you got both of these names, then you definitely have a Horsey take on things, and you get a dinner.’

Well, I’m afraid I’m busy tonight (and tomorrow, and…), but I do think Prof. Zwicky’s being a bit of a meanie begrudging a mention for Grice. Indeed, it seems to me that Grice’s contributions to modern day pragmatics – not forgetting his contributions to the philosophy of language, and the influence this work has had on modern-day psychology and even cognitive science – make him, well, impossible to leave out.

I wonder why Grice’s importance is so often over-looked. I never met him (though my PhD supervisor Deirdre Wilson knew him well), but he does seem to have been a fairly diffident, restrained chap. Perhaps that somehow lingers on in his legacy. He wrote his ground-breaking paper ‘Meaning’ (1957), for example, in 1948, but he didn’t deem it worthy of publication. Reliable reports (from Richards Grandy and Warner, who worked closely with Grice in his later years) have it that Peter Strawson had the article typed out (9 years later) by his wife, Lady Anne Strawson, and then submitted it without his knowledge, only informing him once it had been accepted by Philosophical Review.

Much of Grice’s work was, quite simply, ahead of its time. Philosophers of language and pragmatists continue to build on the foundations he laid (still, perhaps, underestimating the extent of those foundations – more excavation required… I think). I recall psychologist Alan Leslie revealing at a workshop in Oxford ten or so years ago that it was ‘Meaning’ (1948, 1957) that sparked his interest in belief-desire psychology and Theory of Mind. Many of Grice’s ideas on reason and rationality are reflected (not to say retrospectively endorsed) in recent work in cognitive science, particularly that by Gerd Gigerenzer. Moreover, Mike Tomasello and colleagues have argued that it was ‘shared intentionality’ and ‘cooperation’ that were the central factors in the evolution of human cognition. I must say that makes a nice change from cheating, deceiving and outmanoeuvering (of which there’s enough around…).

Grice’s Cooperative Principle anyone?