Three little linguistic nuggets, not really related other than they all cropped up this weekend.
Yesterday we went down to London to the baptism of Xavier. He was utterly well-behaved and cute throughout, and the church was lovely – a holy place. We had only met X through photos and email and, because of his mum’s linguistic background, I thought his name was pronounced in the French way i.e. zavvy-ay. Actually it isn’t, it’s pronounced zay-vee-er (rhymes with saviour), which I think is the way that Saint Xavier is pronounced at least in the UK. Any way his name is said, it was lovely to finally meet him and to spend time with his family again.
The second is with my grateful thanks to Mr. Portico who sent me this link – a work (video) of genius.
The last is a quote from Le Ton beau de Marot. I was inspired by the recent visit of the Off The Path crowd (among many others) at Easter to dust off the bits of my brain I stopped using when I finished university. I’ve had Gödel, Escher, Bach and Le Ton beau de Marot on my shelf for ages and only ever managed a few pages before my brain over-heated. I’m trying Le Ton beau de Marot again, and came across this passage:
Indeed, let us consider how they say “brassiere” or “bra” in German: Büstenhalter. To the German ear, this word busts apart naturally, yielding its meaning as “bustholder”. To my American ear, that sounds awful. I admit that it’s not just the fact that it’s a compound, but also its blunt consonants and vowels. Büstenhalter strikes me as just about as gawky as “blockbuster”. I’m not saying “bra” is a beautiful word, but at least it doesn’t sound like a harsh warning that a Communist border guard might have yelled out to stop some desperate would-be escapee from scaling the Berlin Wall.
I have German colleagues and customers whom I respect and like, but I still find German the language of engineering and precision whereas English and French are the languages of conveying meaning smoothly. (I’m very glad that all my dealings with German and French colleagues and partners have been in English – I’m amazed that they can cope with intense discussions of the details of entity-relationship diagrams and subtle meanings of requirements while speaking a foreign language.)
Hi,
[RANT WARNING]
So much of our attitude to the way other languages do things is nostalgia/prejudice/some other more neutral word. I remember being amazed at how Spanish put together a compound like “limpiaparabrisas” which is literally something like [it cleans [it stops breezes]]. Then it dawned on me that there was absolutely no difference from its English equivalent: windscreen wiper. It wipes the thing which screens us from the wind.
The clue in the above passage is the reference to communist border guards (which I’m guessing is triggered because the German spelling includes what looks like the English word “halt”). It’s just like our attitude to accents of English – they’re nothing at all to do with the sound and everything to do with social prejudice. Studies of speakers of British English tend to put urban varieties low down on the scale of preference (with Birmingham usually bottom) but speakers of varieties of English from other countries (and speakers of other languages) tend not to have such clear-cut views. It’s not about the way people from Birmingham speak; it’s about what we think of Birmingham.
[END RANT]
Anyhow, that’s quite enough thinking about language for one day – got to get back to the day job.
Love,
BW
It’s interesting that Hofstadter should put such value judgments into his writing about language (even when in jest) when he also wrote The Person Paper on Purity in Language (from Metamagical Themas), which is a thought-provoking read even if you don’t agree with his point.
I must confess my own prejudices – I suppose it’s because the weirdnesses of French are closer to the weirdnesses of English than German’s are to English’s that I don’t see French as being as weird as German.
But there are differences between languages – try doing heavy rock in German (easy – lots of lovely hard consonants) and in French (harder), soppy love songs in French (easy) and in German (harder). One’s not better than the other, they’re just different.
Sorry, can’t resist.
Delattre, P. (1965) Comparing the phonetic features of English, German, Spanish and French. page 95
It’s old stuff, and arguable in its accuracy (and relies on the existence of something called a “phoneme”, also arguable). Plus we need to know what’s meant by “hard” consonants. In “hard g”, etc, it seems to mean “plosive”, though “hard” and “soft” sometimes seem to be used for voiceless and voiced. (Hard and soft have a different, and irrelevant, meaning in Slavic linguistics).
Anyhow, Delattre’s table suggests French has 34.6% plosives while German has 29.66%. If we look only at voiceless plosives, French has 23.98%, while German has 14.8%. Mind you, if we look at voiceless sounds more generally, French has 36.28% and German has 37.07%.
I would respectfully suggest that the burden of proof rests with those who would contend that German has more hard consonants than French. The French soppy song index might be more to do with the fact that French has Sacha Distel (one voiceless plosive). while German has Kraftwerk (3 voiceless plosives).
Good grief, I really am going mad now. Sorry, Bob – I don’t mean to get at you, just to comment that many linguistic myths are a bit shaky when challenged by reality (for further examples see snow, Eskimos, words for).
Welsh, by the way, is clearly the language of the heavens and the only true medium for the singing of hymns…
PS Discovered this demonstration of the value of practical phonetics:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6pTKQkBuYY
(The voices are from a genuine course on phonetics – indeed I was sitting next to the owner of the male voice at a conference last week!).
beardie, ate you from brimingham then? i had a chance to hear prof carl chin talk for 2 hours non-stop about birmingham and speaking brum, and the history of place and language was totally fascinated, and enthralled the room of jaded conference goers! he came to the evening do too. it was challenging, engaging and amazing
http://www.bbc.co.uk/birmingham/your_birmingham/bullring/bullring_history.shtml
Obviously the people who know most about linguistics are professional linguists :), but I find that thing about French c.f. German surprising.
In French, every consonant at the end of a word disappears e.g. carnet, but this doesn’t happen in German. This means there would need to be more / harder consonants in the earlier parts of French words than in German words to even be equal overall, let alone stronger.
They use basically the same alphabet (ignoring accents), so French has no extra supply of consonant-producing characters. There are consonants in French that are or can be softer than in German e.g. c is always (AFAIK) a plosive in German, but in French can be a fricative e.g. garçon. In the French wordbillet the l acts like y in English, but German it always (again, AFAIK) acts like the English l which is a bit harder for some hand-waving definition of harder.
I know this is anecdotal and incomplete, but it’s things like this that made me state my rather bold claim earlier.
Aha – let’s call a truce, eh, Bob?! I had been ignoring the spelling (as I am wont to do in my professional capacity). And you’re advancing considerably more evidence in favour of your claims than most people do! Moreover, I was writing with my tongue somewhat advanced towards the cheek, given the whole range of problems inherent in the idea of frequency of occurrence of particular sounds. There’s a rather good blog called Language Log (though there seems to be some problem accessing it at the moment) which, among other things, delights in debunking the sort of thing people sometimes write about in the newspapers without any evidence to back their claims up. The myth that women talk more than men is one of their favourites.
By the way, there’s just been a paper given at the annual British Psychological Society conference which looked at how subjects judged attractiveness and intelligence of people whose photographs they were viewing. While looking at the pictures, some had speech in RP English, Yorkshire English or Birmingham English played to them while others heard no speech. There was no significant effect in attractiveness ratings, but Yorkshire came out top for intelligence, followed by RP, followed by silence, followed by Birmingham.
Now, we might say that showing people photographs of models is a sure fire way to swamp anything else which might be influencing attractiveness judgements, but the intelligence rating results are interesting. The authors offer a social explanation for the rise in status of Yorkshire compared to previous studies, but poor old Birmingham is bottom again.
And for the benefit of those who don’t know my background (thanks for the question, HelenHaricot) — now, incidentally, I’d say “haricot” has only 2 consonants, though we could argue that it has 2 plus two sort of half consonants at each edge of the word — anyway, I’m not from Birmingham, as it happens (though my brother-in-law is). I’m from the north-east of England originally but I’ve lived for lengthy periods on Merseyside and in York. I’m currently commuting weekly from York to north Wales, where I am a lecturer in Linguistics at Bangor University.
As an aside, Language Log is back up and running with a new server:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/
(though most of their stuff is still on the old system – link on that page.
)
… a common error of mine.