French with tears

Toto, manufacturer of the world’s greatest toilet, no doubt derived their name from the leading character in the French textbook I used when I was a kid, written by a wretch named Whitmarsh. Toto had two sizeable handicaps as far as we were concerned. One he was French and two he was a spineless little twerp who invariably ended up doing whatever his authoritarian father and simpering mother asked him to. But he wielded his irregular verbs and subjunctives like we would never be able to. His only sign of independence came in about lesson 3 when, I remember distinctly, “Toto frappe sur la table.” I believe our hero was demanding an extra helping of mousse au chocolat and I’m pretty sure he didn’t get it. It is, of course, possible that his offspring were manning the barricades in ‘68 but I somehow doubt it. Our French teacher also had an inveterate hatred of everything French as he was rumoured to have had an unpleasant experience with some Pétainistes during the war. The school was right next to a slaughter house and Monday mornings we had to interrupt the French lesson while the unfortunate beasts were led past. ‘Listen’, he used to say as the cows mooed their last, ‘that’s the sound of the French ‘u’”. His normal method of punishment, meted out mildly if there was some indiscipline and with savage ferocity if someone forgot the passé composé of ‘aller’ was ‘la friction’, when consisted in him rubbing his knuckles vigorously along the skull of the offender. “Si j’eusse partir” some hapless pupil would mutter in response to a question and ther would be a whoop of delight as Mr H bounded over calling out ‘la friction, boy, la friction’. Mr H’s francophobia did not extend, however to other parts of Europe and he always came with us on school trips abroad- as long as we avoided France. On one occasion we were taken to a Heuriger outside Vienna to try the new wine. After severe warnings from the teachers, the boys were on their best behaviour, had a few sips of the sourish liquid and remained steadfastly sober. The teachers, however, had their arms round the young female guides, were singing Viennese drinking songs in a drunken cacophony and ended up falling into a fountain. We sixth formers were not amused. One of Mr H’s colleagues told me that the time the school went to Paris (Mr H did not accompany them) the masters decided to take the boys to the Folies Bergeres as they were pretty sure if they didn’t the lads would find their own way there. The teachers sat with eyes popping out of their heads at the amount of female pulchritude on display then one of them heard a boy whisper ‘ Look at that Rolex, do you reckon it’s genuine?’ The boys were ignoring the goings-on on the stage and were busy ogling the expensive technology on display in the audience. I can tell you, things would have been different in my time. Our exhaustive study of the copies of ‘Health and Efficiency’ which were passed round surreptitiously under the desks would have seen to that. Amazingly, I see that ‘A New Simpler French Course’ by W.F.H. Whitmarsh is stillI in print and available on Amazon (though it is only listed as 261,327th in terms of sales). I must get myself a copy for Christmas to see how old Toto is getting along.

words that irritate: ‘feel free to…’

This is a phrase that really causes my hackles to leap upwards. ‘Feel free to take a brochure.’ Presumably the use of the imperative here is an invitation or a granting of permission rather than an order. In which case, why not simply ‘Please take a brochure’? I don’t need anyone’s permission before I feel something. All I need these wretches to do is to tell me whether taking one of their brochures (presumably without paying for it) is allowed or not. Either I am free to take one of their pathetic bits of publicity or I’m not and if not they should put them under lock and key where my prying fingers can’t reach them. But the weaselly ‘feel free’ doesn’t actually give me permission to take a brochure, it merely allows me to think I can take one. My feelings of freedom could turn out to be unfounded- there could well be a policeman lurking there just waiting to pounce. Their lawyers would have a field day. I imagine a particularly malicious dictator who allows people to ‘feel free’ to do things before calling in the midnight police and banging them up in jail.I can feel free to commit a crime either believing that I can get away with it or just not caring. Feelings can often bear little relation to objective reality- I can feel cold in the summer heat and vice versa. I may feel free even if I am imprisoned in all sorts of ways I am unaware of or choose to overlook.
Anyway, my feelings are my business and they are not things that I expose to any Tom Dick or Harry. As Brassens said, on a slightly different subject: “Je ne fais voir mes organes procréateurs A personne, excepté mes femmes et mes docteurs.” I resent the implication that if I do take one of their wretched bits of publicity it’s because I am sheepishly grateful to them for having given me their permission to harbour feelings of freedom. I imagine fingers pointing in my direction and a whisper running round the asembled crowd ‘look at him, we know what he’s feeling.’
Sadly, that otherwise irreproachable body, the European Commission blotted their copybook with a campaign entitled FEEL FREE TO SAY NO (to tobacco). Enough to make me want to take up smoking, but fortunately the offensively termed campaign is over so I won’t. Having recovered from that, I now read that “British style maven James Dyson plans to open a free school where teenagers can experiment with hands-on projects and problem-solving design’ under the label “Feel Free to Fail.” Not something, I say cynically, in which the average teenager needs much encouragement. Equally insulting to my mind is the slogan of Project Liberty, ‘which was created in 2001 to provide supportive crisis counseling to individuals and groups affected by the World Trade Center disaster:’ ‘Feel Free To Feel Better.’ Do people really have to be told that they are allowed to get over tragedies? The dubious morality of ‘feel free’ is highlighted in this article about Wal-Mart: ‘Wal-Mart: Feel free to steal cheap stuff. – Wal-Mart is altering its zero-tolerance policy and will now only prosecute shoplifters who are between 18 and 64 and try to steal merchandise worth more than $25.’ As my age precludes me from prosecution I shall feel free to leg it over to the US of A and grab as many $24.99 goodies from them as I can stuff in my pockets. That really would be a holiday to remember.

room with a view

our ‘house in the country’
Linguists and other boringly serious (or seriously boring) people have often pointed out that a word in one language might carry different connotations from the equivalent word in another. Take ‘house’, for example. Westerners have a pretty good idea of what a house is like but the average house in the Thai countryside, in terms of robustness and comfort, would not, in our eyes, even come up to the standard of a garden shed. Being made of wood they are fairly easy to dismantle so when you move house you can literally move your house with you. When you buy a house in the country it’s worth checking first if you are buying the land too or just the timber that the house.is made of. Hilltribe houses can be even flimsier- ours is pretty solidly constructed out of strips of bamboo with a sort of thatch covering (see picture).
When I first bought a flat in town the builders seemed rather surprised that I wanted a kitchen. Good cheap food is on every street corner so it’s an exceptional person who can be bothered to cook. In the countryside the ‘kitchen’ is often a small area outside where there is a charcoal stove and sometimes a bottled gas ring. Furniture such as chairs, tables, beds, is definitely an optional extra.The average Thai eats on the floor, that’s one reason why they are so fussy about people not coming in houses with outside shoes on and about keeping the floor swept clean. They don’t notice dust and cobwebs higher up as they rarely sit and eat on the ceiling. No Thai house, though, is complete with pictures of the King and an aged monk, or a shrine for offerings to the spirits. Most rural families I know use the house as such only for sleeping: other activities (cooking, chatting, working around the place, sometimes even watching TV) are done outside.
Then there’s the toilet/bathroom. In towns showers and flushed lavatories are becoming more common but the norm in the countryside is a large container full of water which you either pour over you as a shower or down the hole in the ground that serves as the toilet. Few Thais take hot showers, even in our winter (when temperatures can sink as low as 13 degrees celsius). The idea of a sitting in a bath strikes them at best as comical- ’soaking in water, that’s what you do to clothes’, one said caustically.
I was reminded of these observations by seeing a house someone had just built nearby. The front is on a street with a straggly collection of uninteresting houses huddled together; the back looks over a beautiful expanse of rice fields with mountains in the distance. Where do you think the owners put the rooms with a view? Why, at the front of course; the back is a windowless surface of brick. Thais go to great lengths to keep the sun and, unfortunately, light out of their houses.I was once asked to explain the meaning of the phrase ‘it’s a nice sunny room’ to some Thais whose English was good enough to understand every word. What they could not understand was how a sunny room could be nice. When I showed the same two Thais (both doctors) my pictures of Angkor Wat, they said “but it’s all broken, how can you call that beautiful?” That more or less sums up the attitude of many Thais to old things, including houses. Certainly the Thais I know are very reluctant to live in an old house, or even one that has been occupied before. They claim they’re afraid someone has died there or that it has collected bad spirits. Not surprisingly, most builders are also experts in demolition.

the million dollar comma

Commas in the news again. As an unrepentant misuser of commas, I have some sympathy with the company who misunderstood one in this case (reported in the Language Log). The argument over whether a company can cancel a contract after one year turns on a single comma in the 14-page contract. The answer is worth 1 million Canadian dollars.
‘The dispute is over this sentence: “This agreement shall be effective from the date it is made and shall continue in force for a period of five (5) years from the date it is made, and thereafter for successive five (5) year terms, unless and until terminated by one year prior notice in writing by either party.”

The regulator concluded that the second comma meant that the part of the sentence describing the one-year notice for cancellation applied to both the five-year term as well as its renewal. Therefore, the regulator found, the phone company could escape the contract after as little as one year.’
The other company, though, have a potential trump card- the French version, which is not included in the report, is apparently unambiguous in their favour. I guess that the French virgule, although even mightier than the English comma, would be used in the same way  to indicate a parenthetical phrase. So either the number or the position of the commas would be different in the two documents.
One or two other examples where commas can make a difference :

1. Jane walked on her pert bottom, wiggling provocatively.
2. The convict said the judge is a danger to society.
3. The Green party candidate who had the least money lost the election.
and one I spotted in an obituary a while ago:
4. He was brought up in Godalming in Surrey, the only child of a war veteran who had entered the print trade and a nurse.

How to make a cow happy

Three news stories courtesy of the Language Log. One is a spoof, in one the linguist has been misquoted and one is highly dubious.

1.   “A farm is supplying the British Mark’s & Spencer chain of stores with Welsh beef known for its  tenderness. The secret, according to an M&S spokesman, is that, at Cig Calon Cymru farm, the Welsh Black cows take their leisure on foam mattresses while farmhands whisper to them only in Welsh. The language, explains Manchester University linguist Martin Berry, “is more melodic than English,” and that relaxes the animals.”

2.’ Germans can be grumpy, unpleasant people—and it’s not because of post-Nazi guilt or a diet filled with bratwurst, says one American researcher. It’s because of their vowels. Hope College psychology professor David Myers says saying a vowel with an umlaut forces a speaker to turn down his mouth in a frown, and may induce the sadness associated with the facial expression. Myers added that the English sounds of “e” and “ah” naturally create smile-like expressions and may induce happiness. Clearly the solution for the Germans, much like the solution for every other people in the world, is to become more like Americans. The German Embassy would not comment on the findings, saying they were “too scientific.” “Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen.”‘

3. FLINT, Mich.–The French ability to remain slimmer than Americans despite a diet higher in fats and overall calorie density has puzzled nutritionists for decades. But a new study suggests that scientists are looking in the wrong place for the secret of Gallic leanness, and that staying svelte may have nothing to do with food at all. “The answer is swallowed consonants,” said Dr. Eric Gross, professor of  biology at Lester College in Flint. “We’re finding that the pronunciation of these sounds can induce a feeling of satiety in French speakers, and can lead, over the long-term, to lower body weight.”

The spoof is number 3; number 2 was reported in all seriousness by the BBC. Language Log reminds us that  ‘William James famously argued that emotion itself is simply our perception of its bodily expression: “we feel sorry because we cry”‘. I can quite believe that someone saying an umlaut can look pretty grumpy but, reluctant as I am to argue with the illustrious academic, I can’t believe he’s right that saying one makes you feel miserable. I don’t cry that much- does it mean I don’t feel sorry sometimes? Mind you, if some linguists are to be believed, the sounds you make have some pretty strange origins themselves. I remember reading in a book by the French phonetician Georges Faure that he attributed the particular quality of English vowels to the weather, especially to the smog prevalent at the time.
Language log reports that when the ‘expert’ in number 1 was asked about this by a reporter, he replied that Welsh English is said to be more “lilting” than other varieties of English, which probably reflects a difference in pitch accent alignment, but that he had no idea whether cows find Welsh more relaxing than English. Goodness knows what would happen if someone spoke to the poor cows in German. Enough to curdle the milk.
What these three items seem to have in common is that people are reluctant to accept that language is just language. If it’s to be newsworthy, language has to govern thought, change personality, affect your health and calm cows. The idea that a lot of what we say is quite arbitrary is not going to make any headlines.

Viking fashion

A nauseating piece of writing quoted in the excellent Policeman’s blog introducing ‘Operation Viking’, the second paragraph of which reads

“The challenge of Viking is not to commit local Police to working harder, but through collaboration and effective, meaningful problem solving partnerships to work smarter. Problem solving models have been developed to address the root causes of crime and disorder in the Town and we will systematically dismantle these. Viking will forge new partnerships and balance respective agendas, enabling the realisation of intelligence led Policing.
Where we lack resources, we will be innovative, when we respond, we will be lawfully audacious and by harnessing the potency of collaborations, we will ignite synergy.
Vision, Transparency, Ingenuity - we welcome you to Operation Viking.”

So coppers ‘ignite synergy’ these days, here was I thinking they just nicked villains.
SilverTiger has a post today in which he asks ‘What motives do people have when they deliberately choose what style to wear?’ He suggests a few answers such as such as “To impress”, “To be different”, “To look professional”. The Operation Viking extract makes me wonder what makes people choose the words they do. To impress and sound professional certainly, sometimes to sound different sometimes to show they’ve joined the gang, quite often to cover things up and obfuscate and, very occasionally, to say clearly what they mean.

Found in translation

Some great new excuses I did not include in an earlier post after Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has been overheard joking about the virility of his Israeli counterpart, who is accused of multiple rape.
First excuse: Mr Putin’s spokesman said the joke was not meant to be overheard
Second excuse: Come on, Russkies you can do better than that.  The spokesman again: “Russian is a very complicated language, sometimes it is very sensitive from the point of view of phrasing. I don’t think that the proper translation is able to reflect the meaning of the joke.”

What Putin apparently said was: “What a mighty man he turns out to be! He raped 10 women - I would never have expected this from him. He surprised us all - we all envy him!”
The Russian media have been quick to try and defend their nation’s president, speculating that Mr Putin simply wanted to express support for Mr Olmert. So “I envy your President raping ten women” is diplomatic parlance for ” I think you’re doing a good job.” And I, naively thought ‘diplomatic’ language worked the other way round. Anyway, always ready to help a world leader out of a hole,  I dug into this business of translation a bit (I’m not a Russian speaker). The word for ‘rape’ (насиловать) can also, according to an online dictionary, mean ‘gorilla’; ‘jam one up’; ’shake somebody down’, ’snag’. ‘Woman’ (женщина) also has the meaning of ‘frail’; ‘furniture’  or ‘bit of mutton.’ So I imagine Putin really said something like ‘He’s a gorilla who really shook up the furniture’ or ‘there is a snag with his piece of mutton’. I’m quite prepared to believe this as I know how tricky a language Russian can be. I once sat in on a lesson conducted for British military intelligence people where the instructor explained a new word by saying: ” This word has two meanings. One, underpants. Two, Unconditional surrender.” Don’t mess with Russian translations, that’s my conclusion.

no mencionéis vosotros la guerra

A pretty duff article in the Telegraph a while ago picked up by something called digg which I have only just heard of.
A second language ‘changes personality’

If only Basil Fawlty had learnt a little Spanish. Psychologists have discovered that people take on the characteristics of foreign nationals when they switch into their language - and such a change in the embittered hotel owner could well have improved life for the hapless Manuel.

The personality changes, however, run deeper than a desire to gesticulate wildly when talking in Italian or to plunge into gloom when speaking Russian. According to research, using different languages alters basic characteristics traits such as extroversion and neuroticism.

Researchers at the University of Texas made the discovery while studying the personality traits of bilingual English and Spanish speakers in the United States and Mexico. ….

The results showed that English-speaking Americans are typically more conscientious, agreeable and outgoing than native Mexicans, but also less neurotic.

As someone noted, if these research conclusions really were as reported (unlikely) Basil Fawlty would probably have made life more difficult for Manuel rather than less if he had learned Spanish.

One digger opined that  ‘the syntactic location of memes within grammar, as well as the different networks of connections in vocabulary has an effect on the path along which thoughts, conversations and all manifestations of personality develop. A good example would be to think of the assotiations (sic) you have with the word “brown.” In English you might think of brown things like chocolate, dirt, shyte etc… but how closely is the word “tea” associated with that color in our language? Pretty far away. Yet in Japanese the word for brown, “chairo,” litterally means “tea-color”.’ In Thai ‘brown’ is ’sugar colour’ but knowing that hasn’t changed my personality.
I suspect that learning a language is like travel- some people’s minds are broadened by it; others have their prejudices confirmed. I think I make a conscious effort not to have my personality changed when I switch to another language- I’m not trying to be a Malay or whatever, just someone who can understand and make himself understood.

Another digger argued that it isn’t the new language that changes personality but the exposure to a new culture and the ‘global viewpoint of the world’ that results. Changes ideas, yes, personality, not so sure. I do find, though, that if I am unsympathetic to the culture of a people I have difficulty in getting very far in their language.
I was wondering whether it works the other way round. that is whether extroverts, for example, are likely to learn languages more successfully. Being adaptable certainly helps- the expatriates over here who have never learned Thai tend to be pretty mired in their old ways. But then I’ve known people who are quite hostile to other cultures who are brilliant language learners.

comma-hunting

Apologies for being three weeks late on this but news sometimes takes a while to reach this part of the world. Now the dust has settled on Bush’s infamous characterisation of the Iraq violence as ‘just a comma’ I thought I’d draw together some of the threads that were spun. Commas normally denote a pause in speech but, as the White House spokesman later ‘clarified,’ Bush meant ‘a relatively short period of time’: “when you look at the history book a ten month period is a comma.” So far so innocent. But then a bit of Googling revealed a widely-quoted witticism by comedienne Gracie Allen: “Never place a period where God has placed a comma.” By whom is this aphorism extensively quoted? By evangeicals and the religious right. So this was Bush speaking in politicode, the comma was actually a dog whistle to his evangelical base, the message being ‘forget the lies, the incompetence, the cock-ups, mistakes, God will sort it out in the end.’ Britain, too, has a leader who believes that God will pick up the tab in the end. I wonder whether it isn’t better to have leaders who sort out problems and take decisions themselves rather than hoping that God will tell them what to do and sort out the ensuing mess in the fullness of time.
Now we don’t know President Bush’s views on semi-colons or parentheses but others have suggested some appropriate punctuation marks. including Greg Mitchell: “One can think of other punctuation that might be apt, including “?” for the 140,000 Americans still deployed there, “!” for the cries of the gravely injured, and “$” for Haliburton and other contractors. Or perhaps, as in the comics pages, when an angry character really wants to curse: “!@#%^&*()#*” But I’d like to offer one more, the simple period, to replace the hopeful comma. Below you will find some 2,700 periods, each standing for an American life lost in Iraq.” (and he does).

Here from Wonkette is a punctuated map of the area:

Others have dug further into this comma business (see here):
‘From The Youth’s Companion, July 31, 1919, p. 412:
Don’t get to thinking in ultimate terms too quickly about life, my dear. There are not so many finalities in life as you young folks think. Remember the old saying, “Man’s periods are God’s commas.” Someone else comments: “I thought you would like to know that for a modern Hebrew speaker, there’s nothing odd about the Bush comma metaphor. We use comma quite a lot to designate small things, or things of no or little significance. Bush has linguistically blown his cover: He must indeed be an undercover Mossad operative, after all.” So, the plot thickens. Language log probes even further back and quotes, ‘from the middle of the 17th century, Samuel Sheppard’s Epigram 31, “Disorder the fore-runner of Ruine” [from Epigrams theological, philosophical, and romantick (1651)] which attributes periods as well as commas to the divine plan, though not in a way that will provide any comfort to those concerned about the situation in Iraq:

Both bodies Politick, and Naturall,
By this ill-shaped enemy doe fall:
Christendomes whip, who now doth soare so high,
By this in her own ruine low shall lie,
Factions those Comma’s are, ordain’d by God,
When he’l bring Kingdomes to their period.’
Going even further back, the word ‘comma’ apparently comes from the Greek ‘komma’ meaning ‘a piece cut off’ though in present circumstances it is not clear which or whose piece should be cut off.
Moving away from Bush for a moment, another blog reader reported seeing a billboard promoting the cardiac care department of a local hospital: heart attack. or heart attack,
How soon will it be before we see protestors with placards saying “Blair. not Blair,”?
My favourite comma quotation, though, is by Mistinguette: “A kiss can be a comma, a question mark or an exclamation point. That’s basic spelling that every woman ought to know.” (note: for those kissing cobras it can also be a period).
Two final scary thoughts. In the original tape of the 26 September interview it appears Bush corrected himself and what he actually said was “I like to tell people when the final history is written on Iran. er Iraq, it will look like just a comma.” And is it purely coincidence, I wonder, that only a few days after I came up with a post that poured scorn on the comma the US President suddenly starts referring to some pretty bad business in Iraq as ‘just a comma’? In case, you’re still reading, Mr President, I would just like to say that to refer to you as an ‘asshole’ is totally unfair. To a highly valuable part of the anatomy that is very good at its job.
A final quotation warning us of the ultimate futility of comma-hunting from Francis Cornford: “Another sport which wastes unlimited time is comma-hunting. Once start a comma and the whole pack will be off, full cry, especially if they have had a literary training…But comma-hunting is so exciting as to be a little dangerous. When attention is entirely concentrated on punctuation, there is some fear that the conduct of business may suffer “
Well, here we positively lap up excitement and danger and in this case the business is the punctuation.
P.S. If you enjoy a piece of verbal fisticuffs I highly recommend the clip of Bill Clinton walloping Chris Wallace, Fox News and his critics Wonderful stuff and not a comma in sight.

a man of many metaphors

I obviously underestimated Sir Richard Dannatt in my post yesterday. He’s not just a one-metaphor soldier but commands a whole platoon or battalion of them to deploy on appropriate occasions.  According to the Downing Street website the “General had said he did not want a cigarette paper between the Prime Minister, himself and the Secretary of State for Defence.” I should certainly hope not, though I notice that the General conspicuously failed to mention whether he would tolerate other sorts of paper (wall-, toilet, news- etc.) separating the trio.  To prove he’s not just an army man he shows he is equally at home with nautical metaphors:
“Our society has always been embedded in Christian values; once you have pulled the anchor up there is a danger that our society moves with the prevailing wind……There is an element of the moral compass spinning.”
I’m not an expert on matters maritime, but I wonder whether part of the problem might be that too many people believe that it is only some supernatural being that can steer the boat and supply the moral compasses when in fact both these tasks we should be doing for ourselves. Also, I’d like to remind Sir Richard that a boat with an anchor firmly embedded in the sea floor aint going nowheres fast.
The General has me puzzled with another of his metaphors:
“We don’t do surrender.(see this post) We don’t pull down white flags” Again, I’ve never actually been a soldier but I thought the normal way of surrendering was to raise or wave a white flag, not pull it down. I might be wrong but it seems to me the General is saying ‘once we’ve surrendered we don’t stop surrendering.’ Perhaps some kindly vexillologist will enlighten me.