A New Pidgin: Berlinglish or Denglish

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The other day in my review of Riddley Walker I discussed the use the author makes of what has been called Riddleyspeak: his imagining of how southern English would sound many generations in the future. It was therefore with great pleasure that I found today an essay by Alexander Wells on a newly developing language called Berlingish or Denglish which is becoming a feature of modern culture in Berlin.

“Which is not to say that Berlin’s English-language readers — the natively anglophones plus many whose first language is Swedish, Spanish, Turkish or Arabic — do not know German at all. The Berlinglish they speak is informal English, slightly simplified, full of swears, nightlife slang and loan words — mostly adopted from German … Taken together, its German-to-English loans register all the points of cultural interface that an expat life simply cannot avoid — Rundfunk, Finanzamt, Anmeldung — as well as some that have made it across on account of their own attractive promises: Spätkauf, Flohmarkt, Falafelteller, Wegbier. The English spoken by those newcomers who settle here and end up making some German friends and studying the language — it also absorbs subtler influences from German …

At the moment, German newspapers describe any kind of drama as ein Shitstorm: who knows if that is here to stay. What leads a loan word to travel? Is it the fantasy of foreign places, the thrill of the exotic? Or is it a culture’s perception of its own shortcomings? Preeminent recent anglicisms in contemporary German — words like recycelt, Streamlining, queer, Smash, Gender-Wokismus, cringe, Slay, Sneaker-Release, Content-Manager — hint at a varied and vivid set of contact points.”

Well worth reading for anyone interested in language and its development.

956 Years Ago

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956 years ago today, Norsemen from France destroyed the English army at Hastings and proceeded to overthrow Anglo laws and language and customs and economic system. England (and eventually Wales and Ireland) have yet to recover from the shock.

Linear A Remains Dark

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For those of us with a passion for language and linguistics, the mysteries and histories of undeciphered languages always intrigue. Possibly the oldest extant script in Europe, the signs that made up the Linear A language of Crete and other parts of the Aegean three thousand five hundred years ago continue to confound scholars. Aeon has an excellent summary of the current state of Linear A studies and experiments.

A later version of the script, called Linear B, was finally deciphered by Ventris and others in 1952 as a form of archaic Greek. “We are therefore in a position to say that the Linear A to Linear B script-transmission process was prompted by the need to adapt the template script (Linear A) to a different language: Greek.” What is still missing is the identification of Linear A’s language.

“Once Linear B had been singled out as Greek, the different linguistic character of Linear A caught the eye. Linear A was unlikely to be Greek: no lexical correspondences could be securely identified between Linear A words and alphabetic Greek ones (as Ventris was able to do for Linear B), nor did Linear A show systematic patterns comparable with Kober’s triplets. From the very outset, Linear A has resisted decipherment: the Minoan language it encoded stood in stark contrast with the Mycenaean Greek language of Linear B.”

The article gives a fascinating account of the work that continues to be done on this enigmatic language. Well worth the read.

Looking For Love With The Oxford Comma

Image: from Reddit

I have always used the Oxford comma. Because of it, I have been abused by grammar “purists”, marked down in school, and “corrected” by copy editors all my life it seems, but still I am happy to cheer lead for it. The battle for and against the Oxford comma is deeply divisive but limited, or so I thought, to those who write a lot. No more, according to an article in GQ:

“Recently, the Oxford comma has found a spot on the Bingo card of online-dating profiles, alongside mainstays like “no hookups,” “no drama,” and “420 friendly.” Whether you’re mindlessly grazing on Tinder or Bumble, OkCupid or Match.com, you’re now as likely to learn someone’s thoughts on the Oxford comma as you are their job title or their penchant for tacos. On the Tinder subreddit, which has 1.8 million subscribers, one user lamented that the Oxford comma features in “like a quarter of bios ’round my parts.” Another said, “It’s everywhere.” Even a journal entry on Tinder’s own blog mentions it: “Honestly, I’m not sure how compatible I can be with someone who is anti-the Oxford comma.”

I sympathize with that final cri de coeur.  However, is it really so important that it can affect your love life?  According to GQ, it is a reliable class signifier:

“The blue-blood punctuation mark, named after the Oxford University Press, acts as a social signifier, a sieve for the bookish and studious (and, perhaps, pretentious). It suggests personality traits that extend far beyond punctuation preferences …  I think it suggests care. It suggests somebody who’s structured and disciplined and not a slob … Somebody who’s into detail, who likes precision. Somebody who has standards.”

Gosh. Who knew?

More Alphabets

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I posted a graphic about the evolution of our western alphabet recently and received some interest, so here is some more along the same lines.

Specialists have been studying an alphabet created in 1834 in Liberia, Africa. It was devised to write down the Vai language which previously had been purely oral.

“According to Vai teacher Bai Leesor Sherman, the script was always taught informally from a literate teacher to a single apprentice student. It remains so successful that today it is even used to communicate pandemic health messages.”

The studies are looking at how the alphabet has evolved over time to see if general characteristics of alphabet evolution can be adduced.

“There’s a famous hypothesis that letters evolve from pictures to abstract signs. But there are also plenty of abstract letter-shapes in early writing. We predicted, instead, that signs will start off as relatively complex and then become simpler across new generations of writers and readers … applying computational tools for measuring visual complexity, they found that the letters really did become visually simpler with each passing year.”

Elsewhere in West Africa, illiterate inventors have reverse-engineered writing for languages spoken in Mali and Cameroon, while new writing systems are still being invented in Nigeria and Senegal.

Alphabetic Evolution

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The always interesting Visual Capitalist has this succinct diagram of the evolution of the alphabet that most of us use today.

TransEurasian Language Family Origins

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The origin of languages is a key part of how we became the species that we are today. And knowledge of the history of each language group allows us to track the migration patterns of humans millenia ago.

I have written before about ur-symbols, the origins of Indo-European, and other linguistic ideas. Now, we have exciting new research on the origin and dispersal of TransEurasian languages such as Japanese, Korean, Mongolian, and Turkish.

“This language family’s beginnings were traced to Neolithic millet farmers in the Liao River valley, an area encompassing parts of the Chinese provinces of Liaoning and Jilin and the region of Inner Mongolia. As these farmers moved across north-eastern Asia over thousands of years, the descendant languages spread north and west into Siberia and the steppes and east into the Korean peninsula and over the sea to the Japanese archipelago … The findings illustrate how humankind’s embrace of agriculture after the ice age powered the dispersal of some of the world’s major language families. Millet was an important early crop as hunter-gatherers transitioned to an agricultural lifestyle.”

Trade-Based Loan Words

The always useful Visual Capitalist supplies this interesting map of certain words we use every day and how they followed the trade routes:

Language Matters

Most people are aware of a phonetic alphabet (A = Alpha, B = Bravo, C= Charlie, etc) that is used to spell out words and to avoid confusion.

In 1934, the Nazis altered the German version because, they said, the original was too Jewish. They changed S = Samuel to S = Seigfried, for example, D = David to D = Dora, and Z = Zacharias to Z = Zeppelin, amongst other changes. That version, the Nazi version, has been used more or less intact for the last 86 years. Many people in Germany today have no knowledge of the Nazi background to this symbolism.

But no longer. Germany will now revert to the pre-Nazi version, at least until a new version is approved next year.

“Michael Blume, the ombudsman for antisemitism in the state of Baden-Württemberg … has been leading a quiet campaign to get rid of the Nazi version of the system. The fact it had stayed in place for so long, he said, was proof in itself of a “deep-seated antisemitic and racist mindset” in Germany. “Just in that one name change, Nathan to Nordpol, which we still use today, you can see how deeply into our language and our thinking this Nazi idea has seeped, with no one really questioning it,” he told the broadcaster Deutschlandfunk. In the Nazi’s pseudoscientific ideology, the north pole was seen as the original home of the Aryans.”

“Clemens Schwender, a professor of media who has studied decades of spelling tables that were typically listed in telephone books from 1881 onwards, told Die Welt that the fact that people still habitually used words such as Siegfried “shows that the 12 years of the Nazi era, which they had intended to be 1,000, still have their impact … even secretaries who are supposed to have learned S is for Samuel hardly ever use it,” he said.”

Happy Birthday OK!

On this date in 1839, the initials “O.K.” were first published in The Boston Morning Post, meant as an abbreviation for “oll korrect,” a popular slang misspelling of “all correct” at the time.

The Boston Magazine has the full story.

Listophilia

I have always loved writing, words, languages. It is one of the great joys of my life that the final chapter of my working life was as a professional writer.

I remember with the clarity of the senile the day in 1960 I first discovered Roget’s Thesaurus. It was a moment of sheer ecstasy for a 10-year old boy with undiagnosed OCD and an over-developed love for words. Pages of words. Lists of words. Lists of words in clever categories. Words referring back to other words. I spent several months reading it from front to back. To hell with God, this was heaven.

This nostalgic torrent was unleashed through the agency of Jonathan Yardley’s review of Joshua Kendall’s biography of Peter Mark Roget. From the review I was fascinated to learn that the Thesaurus for Roget was a form of therapy for depression.

“As a boy, he stumbled upon a remarkable discovery — that compiling lists of words could provide solace, no matter what misfortunes might befall him. He was particularly fond of cataloguing the objects, both animate and inanimate, in his environment. As an adult, he kept returning to the classification of words and concepts. Immersion in the nuances of language could invariably both energize him and keep his persistent anxiety at bay.”

I’m sure I know exactly how he felt.

Wither Punctuation?

There is a very good article in History Today by Florence Hazrat on the history (and possible future) of punctuation.  She notes that:

“In classical times there were no punctuation marks or spaces between words. Since punctuation determines sense (‘Let’s eat, Grandpa’ versus ‘Let’s eat Grandpa’), scriptio continua allowed scribes to offer their masters a clean text, waiting to be interpreted by those higher up the social ladder. Writing was merely a recording of, or preparation for, speech: any punctuation that was inserted had oratorical, rather than grammatical, functions, indicating the degree of pauses upon delivery only.”

When classical texts were being rediscovered and copied in the early Middle Ages, scribes added various pauses to assist comprehension and these eventually developed into the comma, the colon, and the full stop.

“The 15th century saw a boom of inventive punctuation, including the exclamation mark, the semicolon and brackets (or parentheses). New marks arise when a lack of clarity needs to be redressed, communication controlled and sense disambiguated, an emergency perhaps stemming from greater reliance on written diplomacy as well as the newly fashionable art of letter writing.”

The semi-colon made an appearance first in 1494; while the dash and the ellipsis had to wait until the 18th century.

She concludes with a warning and a suggestion:

“When constant availability makes us minimise the effort and time we devote to messages, one may assume that punctuation is doomed. After all, December 2019 saw the demise of the Apostrophe Protection Society, because the ‘ignorance and laziness present in modern times have won’, according to its former president. Yet studies on the use of the full stop in text messaging have shown that we do care about punctuation, even in a medium that promises endless continuation. When is it time to not send another text back? A full stop, the study suggests, comes across as aggressive and cuts conversation short. Perhaps a new mark is necessary?

 

When “Fuck” Actually Meant Something

It is hard to imagine that hearing the word “fuck” used in a casual conversation would shock many people these days. We hear it so much — on TV, in films, on the bus, in the playground — that is has become little more than an annoyance of constant repetition.   However there was a time, in my remembrance, when the word carried real freight.

Fifty-four years ago today, on 13 November 1965, I was part of the audience for a BBC late-night satirical show called BBC-3. On the show was the renowned theatre critic and public intellectual Kenneth Tynan. In an answer to a question about sex in plays, he said: “I doubt if there are any rational people to whom the word ‘fuck’ would be particularly diabolical, revolting or totally forbidden.”

This was quickly recognized as the first deliberate use of the word on the BBC and the event became a weekend sensation for the more lurid media.  In 1988, Paul Johnson called the moment, Tynans’s “masterpiece of calculated self-publicity.”

Times have changed.

A Question For Etymologists: Skulk

I am looking to find the ultimate origin of the English word SKULK which, in the southern England that I grew up in, means to hang around, in a semi-concealed fashion, for some underhanded purpose.  “That burglar is skulking around the neighbourhood.”

In all the etymological dictionaries that I have examined, the word origin is given as Scandinavian from the 12th or 13th century.  For example: Danish “skulke“, Swedish “skolka“, and Icelandic “skolla.”  Those derivations are from Walter Skeat’s Dictionary, and similar derivations can be found at various online dictionaries such here, here, and here.  Normally that would be that; all the sources agree.

However, I have also been read 1985 PhD dissertation on the settlement of 6th and 7th century northern Italy by the Langobards who came from Pannonia which is roughly Croatia, and northern parts of Serbia and Bosnia-Herzeogivana.  In a discussion of military organization, the author mentions: “the sculca, denoting a spying or reconnaissance group or look-out … it was of Germanic origin which passed into Byzantine usage.”

Sculca as spies or look outs and skulking seem awfully close in both meaning and sound.  Could the Scandinavians have picked up the earlier word via the Germanic tribes between Lombardy and the Baltic?  Or perhaps both words derive from a proto-Germanic or even PIE original. Is there any debate on this anywhere?

Deep History

A quick review of  David W. Anthony’s extraordinarily fine 2007 volume:  “The Horse, the Wheel and Language“.

It has a sub-title that I am sure came from the publisher’s marketing department rather than from the author — “How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World.”  However, this is not a text that is aimed at the popular market. It is a thoroughly documented 500-page academic essay on the development of culture and the birth of various language families within the period from about 9,000 years ago to roughly 4,000 years ago in the area stretching from south-east Europe through the central Asian steppes.

That probably doesn’t sound particularly exciting to most people. But for the minority of us who try to keep up with research on the period between the last glaciation (say, 20,000 years ago) and the birth of “modern” society (5,000 to 8,000 years ago), who are fascinated by the origin and development of languages, and who are interested in the beginnings of certain cultural forms (hierarchy, for example) and technologies, this is a work of seminal importance.

Anthony brings together his own archaeological work and the previously unavailable texts of the most recent generation of Russian and East European scholars and creates a highly refined synthesis that argues, convincingly to me, at least, that horses were first domesticated in the grasslands of the central Eurasian steppes, and that horse-riding played a significant role in the expansion of what would become the Indo-European languages (including, much later, the dominant English language).  Along the way, he examines the beginnings of Indo-European myths, the establishment of the guest-host relationship, leadership functions, funeral practices, the purpose of feasting, the origin of wagons and chariots, and a wide range of other topics that, in their modern manifestation, dominate our lives today.

Anthony writes very well but it cannot be denied that, for the general reader without some background in these subjects, there are some difficult sections.  They are well worth the effort, though, for the understanding that this research brings with it.  I cannot recommend this too highly to anyone interested in this stuff.

Ur-Symbols

One of my enduring interests is the history of language in general, the historical and genetic links between each language in a language family (Indo-European, for example, or Niger-Congo), and between each of the families into which we have divided the earth’s 7,000+ spoken and written forms of communication.

Languages, like all living forms, evolve and change. We know that each language and each language family had earlier forms, known as proto-languages; and there has been speculation that all languages are ultimately derived from some original or ur-language.  I haven’t accepted that thesis for quite some time, preferring instead to believe that language — being so vital to the complex world that the fast-rising homo genus was creating — evolved multiple times in multiple locations.

That being said, and while understanding that language and writing are not the same thing, Canadian paleoanthropologist Genevieve von Petzinger has presented evidence that the same symbols of human communication might well be global at a period many thousands of years before the Sumerians “invented” writing.

 

In fact, she suggests that this system is “a carryover from modern humans’ migration into Europe from Africa” tens of thousands of years ago. ‘This does not look like the start-up phase of a brand-new invention,’ she writes.”

Like much cutting edge science, this analysis remains to be proven or otherwise. In the meanwhile, it allows for fascinating speculation.

Looking For Love With The Oxford Comma

Image: from Reddit

I have always used the Oxford comma. Because of it, I have been abused by grammar “purists”, marked down in school, and “corrected” by copy editors all my life it seems, but still I am happy to cheer lead for it. The battle for and against the Oxford comma is deeply divisive but limited, or so I thought, to those who write a lot. No more, according to an article in GQ:

“Recently, the Oxford comma has found a spot on the Bingo card of online-dating profiles, alongside mainstays like “no hookups,” “no drama,” and “420 friendly.” Whether you’re mindlessly grazing on Tinder or Bumble, OkCupid or Match.com, you’re now as likely to learn someone’s thoughts on the Oxford comma as you are their job title or their penchant for tacos. On the Tinder subreddit, which has 1.8 million subscribers, one user lamented that the Oxford comma features in “like a quarter of bios ’round my parts.” Another said, “It’s everywhere.” Even a journal entry on Tinder’s own blog mentions it: “Honestly, I’m not sure how compatible I can be with someone who is anti-the Oxford comma.”

I sympathize with that final cri de coeur.  However, is it really so important that it can affect your love life?  According to GQ, it is a reliable class signifier:

“The blue-blood punctuation mark, named after the Oxford University Press, acts as a social signifier, a sieve for the bookish and studious (and, perhaps, pretentious). It suggests personality traits that extend far beyond punctuation preferences …  I think it suggests care. It suggests somebody who’s structured and disciplined and not a slob … Somebody who’s into detail, who likes precision. Somebody who has standards.”

Gosh. Who knew?

History of the English Language in 10 Minutes

Listophilia

I have always loved writing, words, languages. It is one of the great joys of my life that the final chapter of my working life was as a professional writer.

I remember with the clarity of the senile the day in 1960 I first discovered Roget’s Thesaurus. It was a moment of sheer ecstasy for a 10-year old boy with undiagnosed OCD and an over-developed love for words. Pages of words. Lists of words. Lists of words in clever categories. Words referring back to other words. I spent several months reading it from front to back. To hell with God, this was heaven.

This nostalgic torrent was unleashed through the agency of Jonathan Yardley’s review of Joshua Kendall’s biography of Peter Mark Roget. From the review I was fascinated to learn that the Thesaurus for Roget was a form of therapy for depression.

“As a boy, he stumbled upon a remarkable discovery — that compiling lists of words could provide solace, no matter what misfortunes might befall him. He was particularly fond of cataloguing the objects, both animate and inanimate, in his environment. As an adult, he kept returning to the classification of words and concepts. Immersion in the nuances of language could invariably both energize him and keep his persistent anxiety at bay.”

I’m sure I know exactly how he felt.

When “Fuck” Actually Meant Something

It is hard to imagine that hearing the word “fuck” used in a casual conversation would shock many people these days. We hear it so much — on TV, in films, on the bus, in the playground — that is has become little more than an annoyance of constant repetition.   However there was a time, in my remembrance, when the word carried real freight.

Fifty years ago today, on 13 November 1965, I was part of the audience for a BBC late-night satirical show called BBC-3. On the show was the renowned theatre critic and public intellectual Kenneth Tynan. In an answer to a question about sex in plays, he said: “I doubt if there are any rational people to whom the word ‘fuck’ would be particularly diabolical, revolting or totally forbidden.”

This was quickly recognized as the first deliberate use of the word on the BBC and the event became a weekend sensation for the more lurid media.  In 1988, Paul Johnson called the moment, Tynans’s “masterpiece of calculated self-publicity.”

Times have changed.