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#ielts #toefl #gre #english_vocabulary #english
Language Log
One more for the "passive voice" files
There have been many LLOG posts on misuse of the term "passive voice", going back to 2003. As far as I can tell, the most recent post was "'Is is the passive voice you don't like?'", 8/11/2021.
In "'Passive Voice' — 1397-2009 — R.I.P", I wrote that
the traditional sense of passive voice has died after a long illness. It has ceased to be; it's expired and gone to meet its maker, kicked the bucket, shuffled off this mortal coil, rung down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. It's an ex-grammatical term.
Its ghost walks in the linguistics literature and in the usage of a few exceptionally old-fashioned intellectuals. For everyone else, what passive voice now means is "construction that is vague as to agency".
Today, Ambarish Sridharanarayanan sent me a link to a piece of writing that illustrates the issue perfectly:
The press release makes heroic use of the passive voice to obscure the actors: “an unprecedented sequence of events whereby an inadvertent misconfiguration during provisioning of UniSuper’s Private Cloud services ultimately resulted in the deletion of UniSuper’s Private Cloud subscription.”
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Language Log
Retraction watch: Irish roots of "french fries"?
It's been a while since we had a post in the Prescriptivist Poppycock category. This example is more a case of badly-researched etymology, but we'll take what we can get, courtesy of Florent Moncomble, who writes:
In the May update of the prescriptive « Dire, ne pas dire » section of their website, in a post condemning « carottes fries » (for « carottes frites », as the past participle should go), they contend that the ‘French’ of ‘French fries’ has nothing to do with France but comes from an ‘Old Irish verb’ meaning ‘to mince’.
Sensing that that was absolute nonsense, I debunked the assertion on X in a thread that you can find here.
Specialists in Old Irish on X have joined in my (to remain polite) bemusement. Evidently the Immortels trusted the first page of a Google search and did not bother to actually fact-check this (apparently popular) myth. These are the people, paid with tax money, who we trust the official dictionary of the French language with.
I'm guessing that the « Dire, ne pas dire » entries are not written by one of les immortels, but rather by an all-too-mortel intern. Whoever wrote it, the full "Des carotte fries" advice is:
Le participe passé du verbe défectif frire est frit, mais on le rencontre surtout dans la forme substantivée au féminin pluriel, des frites, ellipse de des pommes de terre frites. Ce nom est devenu tellement courant qu’il tend à faire oublier son origine verbale et que l’on hésite parfois sur l’orthographe du participe : on trouve ainsi des menus où sont proposés des légumes fris ou des tomates fries, quand c’est bien sûr frits et frites qu’il aurait fallu écrire. Cette erreur est sans doute favorisée par le fait que nos frites se nomment fries en anglais. Rappelons, pour conclure, que lorsque les Anglo-Saxons emploient la locution complète french fries, french n’est pas un hommage à la gastronomie française mais une forme tirée d’un verbe du vieil irlandais qui ne signifie pas « français », mais « émincé ».
The Wiktionary entry gives the etymology for "French fries" as
Clipping of earlier French fried potatoes (1856) and French-fried potatoes, potatoes supposedly prepared in the French style.
with a footnote to the entry in the Online Etymology Dictionary, which notes that "The name is from the method of making them by immersion in fat, which was then considered a peculiarity of French cooking", with this explanation:
There are 2 ways of frying known to cooks as (1) wet frying, sometimes called French frying or frying in a kettle of hot fat; and (2) dry frying or cooking in a frying pan. The best results are undoubtedly obtained by the first method, although it is little used in this country. ["The Household Cook Book," Chicago, 1902]
The 1856 citation is to [Eliza] Warren, Cookery for Maids of All Work:
French Fried Potatoes.—Cut new potatoes in thin slices, put them in boiling fat, and a little salt; fry both sides of a light golden brown colour; drain dry from fat, and serve hot.
The OED has the same citation in their "French fried potatoes" entry, but antedates Wiktionary's 1903 citation for "French fries" with
1886 Savannah Morning News Clam chowder, white fish and flannel cakes, spring chickens, and Saratoga chips and French fries
The "Irish" etymology is Out There, but Laurent Moncomble debunks it:
Dernière étape, devinez quoi, il existe des dictionnaires de vieil irlandais, dont celui-ci, consultable en ligne.
Et là, on a beau chercher 'cut', 'slice', 'mince', on ne trouve rien qui ressemble de près ou de loin à 'french'. Au cas où, une recherche dans un dictionnaire d'irlandais contemporain ne donne rien non plus. 'Cut/slice' se dit 'gearr', 'mince' se dit 'mionaigh'…
Last step, guess what, there are Old Irish dictionaries, including this one, available online.[...]
Language Log
Peevable words and phrases: journey
They mostly start out clever, cute, and catchy: e.g., "curated". The problem is that they soon go viral, and then just never go away, even after they have become banal and overused, as with "perfect storm":
I'm campaigning to have "perfect storm" added to peeve polls in the future. As in "at the end of the day it was a perfect storm." It's not unheard of for a book title to turn into a catch[22]phrase, and maybe perfect storm will become a permanent part of the language, but it smacks of fad to me. I feel like I hear it at least three times a week in NPR interviews.
[Comment by Dick Margulis to "'Annoying word' poll results: Whatever!" (10/9/09)]
That was 2009, but "perfect storm" is still with us, and so is "curated", which begins to appear with increasing frequency in the early 70s and really takes off in the 80s.
Now we're facing a veritable onslaught from "journey": When Did Everything Become a ‘Journey’?
Changing our hair, getting divorced, taking spa vacations — they’re not just things we do; they’re “journeys.” The quest for better health is the greatest journey of all.
by Lisa Miller, NYT (5/13/24)
Contemporary usage of "journey" is so protean and indicative of our age that I wish I could quote almost the whole of this revelatory article. Instead, I'll just mention some of the rubrics it covers, but focus mostly on the linguistic aspects.
Drew Barrymore has been talking with Gayle King about her perimenopause “journey,” and the soccer phenom Carli Lloyd has just divulged her fertility “journey.” By sharing her breast cancer story, Olivia Munn has said she hopes she will “help others find comfort, inspiration, and support on their own journey.” A recent interview with Anne Hathaway has been posted on Instagram with a headline highlighting her “sobriety journey,” and Kelly Clarkson has opened up about what Women’s Health calls her “weight loss journey.” On TikTok, a zillion influencer-guides lead pilgrims on journeys through such ephemeral realms as faith, healing, grief, friendship, mastectomy, and therapy — often selling courses, supplements or eating plans as if they were talismans to help safeguard their path.
“Journey” has decisively taken its place in American speech. The word holds an upbeat utility these days, signaling struggle without darkness or detail, and expressing — in the broadest possible way — an individual’s experience of travails over time.
It’s often related to physical or mental health, but it can really be about anything: “Putting on your socks can be a journey of self-discovery,” said Beth Patton, who lives in Central Indiana and has relapsing polychondritis, an inflammatory disorder. In the chronic disease community, she said, “journey” is a debated word. “It’s a way to romanticize ordinary or unpleasant experiences, like, ‘Oh, this is something special and magical.’” Not everyone appreciates this, she said.
Now, moving on to the more specifically linguistic aspects of "journey":
According to the linguistics professor Jesse Egbert at Northern Arizona University, the use of “journey” (the noun) has nearly doubled in American English since 1990, with the most frequent instances occurring online. Mining a new database of conversational American English he and colleagues are building, Egbert could show exactly how colloquial “journey” has become: One woman in Pennsylvania described her “journey to become a morning person,” while another, in Massachusetts, said she was “on a journey of trying to like fish.”
Egbert was able to further demonstrate how the word itself has undergone a transformative journey — what linguists call “semantic drift.” It wasn’t so long ago that Americans mostly used “journey” to mean a literal trip, whereas now it’s more popular as a metaphor. Egbert demonstrated this by searching the more[...]
Word of the Day
maverick
Definition: (adjective) Being independent in thought and action or exhibiting such independence.
Synonyms: unorthodox, irregular.
Usage: He was a maverick politician and refused to align himself with any of the established parties.
Discuss
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
rubber
a condom
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Language Log
Political bias in economics
Zubin Jelveh, Bruce Kogut, and Suresh Naidu, "Political language in economics", The Economic Journal:
Abstract: Does academic writing in economics reflect the political orientation of economists? We use machine learning to measure partisanship in academic economics articles. We predict observed political behavior of a subset of economists using the phrases from their academic articles, show good out-of-sample predictive accuracy, and then predict partisanship for all economists. We then use these predictions to examine patterns of political language in economics. We estimate journal-specific effects on predicted ideology, controlling for author and year fixed effects, that accord with existing survey-based measures. We show considerable sorting of economists into fields of research by predicted partisanship. We also show that partisanship is detectable even within fields, even across those estimating the same theoretical parameter. Using policy-relevant parameters collected from previous meta-analyses, we then show that imputed partisanship is correlated with estimated parameters, such that the implied policy prescription is consistent with partisan leaning. For example, we find that going from the most left-wing authored estimate of the taxable top income elasticity to the most right-wing authored estimate decreases the optimal tax rate from 84% to 58%.
A non-paywalled draft is here.
The economist who sent me the link commented "Shocking, I tells ya!"
The analysis techniques are rather old-fashioned (the Porter stemmer, stem ngrams, Chi-Square (χ2) statistics — not a deep net in sight!). Still (maybe for that reason?) the analysis seems solid to me, as far as it goes.
Anyhow, my favorite part is "Table 2: Top Left- and Right-Leaning N-grams" (p. 43):
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/JelvehTable2.png
Some of the connections to word-stems are intuitive — women, employ, wage on the left; hayek, contract, hoover on the right.
But others are more puzzling, especially on the right. Why are cartel, cigarett, and cattl right-associated unigrams? What about the bigrams social_secur, bond_price, child_labor? Or the trigrams impuls_respons_function, line_item_veto, major_leagu_basebal?
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Word of the Day
Word of the Day: veranda
This word has appeared in 28 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence?
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
top
a man who takes the active role in gay or homosexual sex
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Language Log
Nonword literacy
Upon first hearing, the very idea sounded preposterous, but when I searched the internet, I found it all over the place as "nonword reading / repetition", "nonsense words", "non word phonics / fluency", "non-word decoding", "pseudowords", etc. In other words (!), it's a real thing, and lots of people take the concept seriously as a supposedly useful device in reading theory and practice, justifying it thus:
"as a tool to assess phonetic decoding ability" (here)
"contribute to children's ability to learn new words" (here)
"a true indicator of the alphabetic principle and basic phonics" (here)
etc., etc., etc.
I would not have taken the topic of nonwords seriously and posted on it, had not AntC pointed out that it is actually being applied in the classroom in New Zealand.
I was brought up short by an article syndicated in today's New Zealand press:
the reported evidence is based on children’s ability to read non-words, and their ability to read words was not consistently assessed. The report suggests that the approaches are successful in teaching children to blend sounds together to decode words. What is not clear yet is if learning to decode benefited children’s writing and comprehension more than current methods.
There's a 'Bryant Test of Basic Decoding Skills', used internationally, where 'decoding' means being able to sound out words on the page. Seems to be the Bryant ref'd on this wikip.
Then the scenario Dr. Jesson seems to be highlighting is that learners can 'read' a text in the sense of sound it out; but not understand it. Then neither will that help their writing. The situation is particularly critical for newly-arrived immigrant families, where English is not their first language. NZ education has essentially no ability to teach in any other language.
The recently published "independent evaluations of the various structured approaches " seems to be this.
How is literacy education assessed in the U.S.A.? Particularly in districts where English is not the predominant language.
And how in Sinitic cultures, where there's no hope of 'sounding out' from the text?
The back story: New Zealand has a new Government as of late last year. They're now getting into their stride of changing everything the previous administration had initiated, including of course education. This week they've announced a new initiative. What this 'new' masks is that by cutting in-progress initiatives, they're effectively reducing the overall education budget for literacy skills. 'Expert commentary' here — including from Dr. Jesson.
The idea of "sounding out" nonsinoglyphs made me chuckle. It reminded me of Xu Bing's "A Book from the Sky" that consists solely of characters that look real but that he had made up out of thin air. These nonsense characters drove literate Chinese readers mad with frustration when they tried to make sense of them. They also remind me of the "junk characters" we recently discussed, which — although "real" (they exist in some hyper arcane glossary or occurred once in the whole of history in an obscure manuscript, etc.) — their sound and meaning are known not even to one out of a million literate persons. Do Xu Bing's made-up glyphs and the Kangxi's junk characters have an analogous function to the nonwords of English reading theory? Selected readings
* "Unhinged on phonics" (7/26/07)
* "Phonics" (12/30/06)
* "'Book from the Ground'" (12/5/12)
* "The infinitude of Chinese characters" (9/9/20)
* "How many more Chinese characters are needed?" (10/25/16)
* "'Book from the Ground'" (12/5/12)
* "The unpredictability of Chinese character formation and pronunciation" (2/6/12)
* "How to generate fake Chinese characters automatically" (12/30/15)
* "Cucurbits and junk characters" (3/30/24)
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Idiom of the Day
the granddaddy of them all
The biggest, oldest, most impressive, or most respected person or thing of his, her, or its kind. Watch the video
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
sit up (2)
to not go to bed until later than usual
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Language Log
Brown Revisited
A couple of months ago, I told you about a project to recreate the Supreme Court oral arguments associated with Brown v. Board of Education ("Spontaneous SCOTUS", 3/2/2024):
Years ago, Jerry Goldman (then at Northwestern) created the oyez.org website as
a multimedia archive devoted to making the Supreme Court of the United States accessible to everyone. It is the most complete and authoritative source for all of the Court’s audio since the installation of a recording system in October 1955. Oyez offers transcript-synchronized and searchable audio, plain-English case summaries, illustrated decision information, and full-text Supreme Court opinions
He rescued decades of tapes and transcripts from the National Archives, digitized and improved them, and arranged the website's interactive presentations of the available recordings. Jiahong Yuan and I played a role, by devising and validating a program to identify which justice was speaking when (See "Speaker Identification on the Scotus Corpus", 2008).
More recently, Jerry has inspired an effort to recreate oral arguments from famous cases that took place before the recording system was installed, starting with Brown v. Board of Education. Rejecting the idea of producing "deep fakes" using the existing transcripts and extant recordings of the justices involved, he and his colleagues decided to create what we might call "shallow fakes", where actors will perform (selections from) the transcripts, and a voice morphing system will then be used to make their recordings sound like the target speakers. The recreated clips will be embedded in explanatory material.
All the scripts have been written, and in a few months, you'll be able to hear the results — which I expect will be terrific.
And here it is, at https://brown.oyez.org!
There's also a YouTube video "How We Recreated the Brown v. Board of Education Oral Arguments":
A few earlier posts where the overall oyez.org project came up:
"Fun with co-voting percentages", 12/1/2006
"Stress in Supreme Court oral arguments", 6/17/2008
"Mining a year of speech", 1/19/2010
"Big Data in the humanities and social sciences", 5/31/2012
"NPR: oyez.org finishes Supreme Court oral arguments project", 4/25/2013
"Hearing interactions", 2/28/2018
"Vocalizations of wolves and justices", 2/17/2023
FWIW, I was on the advisory committee for the Brown Revisited project:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/BrownAdvisoryCommittee.png
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Word of the Day
Word of the Day: innate
This word has appeared in 107 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence?
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ripheral" Arabic, a question that is vital to the debate on the Arabic vernaculars that has been taking place on Language Log for the last few years? The status of Maltese is crucial for the whole debate, which has significant implications for linguistic taxonomy that go well beyond Arabic and Semitic.
A snapshot of today’s language is revealed by the composition of the lexicon. In Joseph Aquilina’s Maltese-English Dictionary (1987-1990) Arabic words make up 32.4%, Sicilian and Italian 52.5%, English 06.1%. The MED includes archaisms and rare terms among its 41,016 entries, but the Concise version reflects actual usage: its 22,649 entries show more Sicilian and Italian words (61.61%), less Arabic words (22,42%) and a slight increase in English words (8.45%). However, Arabic words comprise grammatical terms and the fundamental vocabulary, and are more frequently used. Together with the rules of grammar (although simplified) they define the language as a variety, albeit “peripheral”, of Arabic. A few examples from the domain of the family will suffice here: members of the inner nucleus have Arabic names: omm, iben, bint, ir-raġel, il-mara, tifel, tifla, (mother, son, daughter, husband, wife, boy, girl), but the word for father is Sicilian, missier. The other members have Sicilian/Italian names: nannu, nanna, ziju, zija, neputi, neputija, kuġin, kuġina, (grandfather, grandmother, uncle, aunt, nephew/grandson, cousin), and the word for family is familja and for relatives qraba. The complementary nature of Arabic and Sicilian/Italian is also seen in the days of the week (Monday to Sunday): it-Tnejn, it-Tlieta, l-Erbgħa, il- Ħamis, il-Ġimgħa, is-Sibt, il-Ħadd; but the months of the year are: Jannar, Frar, Marzu, April, Mejju, Ġunju, Lulju, Awissu, Settembru, Ottubru, Novembru, Diċembru. This stratigraphy marks all the other domains; for example about “bread” we see: ħobż, hobża, qoxra, lbieba, frak, ftira (bread, loaf, crust, crumb, crumbs, low circular shaped bread); bezzun, tal-kexxun, panina, ċabatta, malji (roll, sandwich loaf, flat roll, braided roll); sandwich, toast, baguette.
Informal everyday speech sees a lot of code-switching: firstly, because as most subjects are taught in English their terms are the first words that come to mind; secondly, because young parents prefer to speak English to their babies. At present this is not leading to language shift, because as they grow up children see Maltese as an adult language. Nowadays, the source of innovation is no longer Italian but English: some common words are adapted (kettle > kitla), others are Sicilianized (evaluation > evalwazzjoni), others become false friends (related > relatat, involved > involut), and new formations are created (enforceable > inforzabbli, developers > żviluppaturi, privacy > privatezza, occupancy > okkupanza). This is necessary for the language to keep up with social progress. A tricky problem is how to write unadapted English words, like bicycle and washing-machine (bajsikil? woxing maxin?). It is not easy to decide whether they are irreplaceable or translatable. Otherwise, being recognizably English, they can be attributed to code-switching, in which case they are written in their original spelling.
Brincat's concluding paragraph is profoundly telling:
Understandably, the pressure of English in a bilingual situation like Malta’s is very strong. As the 2011 Census shows, almost all Malta-born citizens know Maltese (99.6%) and English (91.3), many also know Italian (61.3%) and French (21.4%), but few know German (5.1% ) and Arabic (4.3%).
One thing is certain, the Maltese are proud of their language and have done much to study and preserve it, even in the face of overwhelming influence from English.
I am grateful to Mark for prodding me to look deeper into the evolution of Maltese as a language that is indeed "unique" and to examine the island nation of Malta as a[...]
A. H.) and a new settlement in 1048-49 (440 A. H.) composed of Muslims and slaves. Depopulation between the conquest and the settlement is suggested by the lack of both Muslim and Christian cemeteries, and also by the local toponyms which recall the Arabic place-names of Medieval Sicily, especially by the component of raħal or Ħal (Rahal gidit and Rachal saphy in Sicily, Raħal Ġdid and Ħal Safi in Malta). The Maltese language, too, has a marked affinity with the Maghrebin variety that was spoken in Sicily in the Norman age. Roger’s conquest introduced Romance elements in Sicily and Malta, where Arabic customs prevailed from 1091 to 1127 until Roger II reasserted his rule and society took on a European lifestyle.
Another vital section of Brincat's article is titled "From Punic to North African Arabic":
Definitions of the Maltese language differed: the locals saw it as unique and called it lingua maltensi (1436), lingua melitea (1549), whereas foreign travellers heard unfamiliar sounds and called it parlata africana (1536), parlar saracino (1558), “un langage arabe corrompu” (1694). Hieronymus Megiser was intrigued: “Although they are Christians, they make use of a language which is Saracen, Moorish, or Carthaginian or ‘lingua franca’, which is a kind of Arabic and which has its origin in Hebrew”. The scientific classification of the Semitic languages was still distant, but Megiser deserves credit for printing a booklet on Maltese, the Propugnaculum Europae in 1606, listing 121 words in German translation. Jean Quintin (1536) associated the Maltese language with the Punic inscriptions and, although the script had not been deciphered yet, the idea pleased many scholars in Malta and the myth was perpetuated for political, religious, and racial reasons. However, the historian Gian Francesco Abela (1647) had understood the real origins of Maltese, was aware of the Arabic substrate in the Sicilian dialect and knew that a similar language was spoken in Pantelleria. In 1810 Wilhelm Gesenius gave scientific proof that the origins of Maltese lied in a North African dialect of Arabic, but the Punic myth was upheld by some local scholars up to the 20th century.
The standardization of Maltese was a slow process. At first only a few isolated words appeared in notarial deeds and in the minutes of the local government, mostly place-names and domestic objects, but around 1470 Petrus Caxaro wrote a poem of sixteen lines, a cantilena, modelled on Romance genres. It is revered as the earliest text in the Maltese language. Occasional phrases in administrative texts show that Sicilian/Italian words were adapted according to Maltese grammar rules. An example from 1473 in a Sicilian sentence shows the word “isfeduene” which is from sfidare, to defy, with initial i for today’s j, a morpheme in the conjugation of verbs in the present tense, third person singular and plural, with the inflectional ending –w, that indicates the third person plural, jisfidaw (they defy), and the pronominal suffix –na, which means “us”, therefore “they defy us.”
Brincat then moves on to outline the impact of war and religion on the development of Maltese:
A knight from Provence, Thezan, wrote instructions on firing muskets for Maltese-speaking troops, a short grammar and a glossary of 3,000 words in two sections, Maltese-Italian and Italian-Maltese. Thezan faced a dilemma which troubled sixteenth and seventeenth-century writers: the spelling of sounds that are not Latin. Today Maltese has only two such sounds, aspirate h (ħ) and the glottal stop (q), but in those days pronunciation was closer to the Arabic. Thezan added ten Arabic letters to the Latin alphabet, but Gian Pietro Francesco Agius De Soldanis opted for a wholly Latin alphabet in his grammar (1750) and dictionary of 12,000 entries. Later, Michel Antonio Vassalli published his grammar in 1791 and 1827, and a lexicon in 1796 with 18,000 entries, adopting twelve letters from Greek [...]
And there, no matter how much we search for 'cut', 'slice', 'mince', we find nothing that even remotely resembles 'french'. Along the same lines, a search in a dictionary of contemporary Irish does not give nothing neither. 'Cut/slice' is 'gearr', 'mince' is 'mionaigh'…
He ends the thread by promising
Après, si un·e #gaeilgeoir confirme les dires de l'Académie, je ferai amende honorable.
Afterwards, if a #gaeilgeoir confirms the Academy's statements, I will apologize.
I should note that there's another etymological myth for "French fries" out there, namely the idea that they were first served at a food stand associated with the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, run by a man named Fletcher Davis who came from Athens, Texas. Davis (supposedly) told a reporter that he learned to cook the potatoes that way from a friend in Paris, Texas. The reporter (supposedly) thought he meant Paris, France, and used the term "french-fried potatoes" in his story.
Given the earlier citations for the phrase, this story (even if true) is clearly not its origin — though I think it's a better myth than the one about borrowing from Irish…
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than one billion words in a database called COCA for the nouns people put before “journey” to clarify what sort they’re on. Between 1990 and 2005, the most common modifier was “return,” followed by words like “ocean,” “train,” “mile,” “night,” “overland,” and “bus.”
But between 2006 and 2019, usage shifted. “Return” remains the most common noun modifier to journey, but now it’s followed closely by “faith,” “cancer,” and “life.” Among the top 25 nouns used to modify “journey” today are: “soul,” “adoption,” and “hair.”
In almost every language, “journey” has become a way to talk abstractly about outcomes, for good reason: According to what linguists call the “primary metaphor theory,” humans learn as babies crawling toward their toys that “‘purpose’ and ‘destination’ coincide,” said Elena Semino, a linguist at Lancaster University who specializes in metaphor. As we become able to accomplish our goals while sitting still (standardized tests! working from home!), ambition and travel diverge. Yet we continue to envision achievement as a matter of forward progress. This is why we say, “‘I know what I want, but I don’t know how to get there,’” Semino explained. “Or ‘I’m at a crossroads.’”
Journeying along with cancer, instead of doing battle against it, has become one of the most frequent applications of this current buzzword, and it is also employed in what used to be thought of as a fight against many other diseases as well. The journey to health and wellness is one that more and more people are striving to take.
Some of my friends are almost what I would call professional travellers. They have visited scores, even upwards of a hundred, countries all around the world (see, for example, Stefan Krasowski at Rapid Travel Chai, who once visited (and toured through) three Middle East countries within 24 hours) For them, life is a literal, perpetual journey, not a metaphorical one like changing your hair.
A peevable feast? No, journey is their raison d'être. Afterword
I'll never forget the shock I experienced the first time I heard someone use the expression "bad hair day". Until that moment, I had never realized to what degree some people look upon the hair on the top of their head as virtually extrinsic to and independent of themselves. Learning now about hair journeys that certain individuals engage in, I can see how they are possible. Selected readings
* "An explosion of curation" (5/22/18)
* "Everything's curated now" (3/6/20)
* "Curated language" (7/9/21)
* Miya Tokumitsu, "The Politics of the Curation Craze Amid flat wages and dwindling public services, curation gives us the illusion of control." The New Republic (8/24/15) — in which "UC Berkeley linguist Geoffrey Nunberg [speaks] about the tendency for the vernacular of an esteemed or prestigious profession to trickle down into popular parlance".
[Thanks to June Teufel Dreyer]
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Learn English Through Football
Learn English Through Football: (to) Slalom
The learn English through football podcast explains the language of football: the words, phrases, and cliches used in the game. This week, we look at the verb ‘to slalom’, and how it is used to describe dribbling with the ball . You can find a transcript of the show below, which is great for learners […]
The post Learn English Through Football: (to) Slalom appeared first on Learn English Through Football.
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Idiom of the Day
give (someone) an out
To provide someone with an excuse or a means of escaping (from something). Watch the video
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
hold down
to stop something from rising by pressing down on it or putting a heavy object on it
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Word of the Day
bonhomie
Definition: (noun) A pleasant and affable disposition.
Synonyms: affability, affableness, amiableness, geniality, amiability.
Usage: The good humor and bonhomie called up by this last evening amongst his old friends had disappeared.
Discuss
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Idiom of the Day
have a yen for (something)
To have a very strong and persistent desire or craving for something. Watch the video
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
think back
to think about a past event or a past time
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Word of the Day
Word of the Day: demarcation
This word has appeared in 26 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence?
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
jock
an athlete, sportsman
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Word of the Day
formicary
Definition: (noun) A nest of ants.
Synonyms: anthill.
Usage: Hours after accidentally stepping on a formicary, she was still picking stray ants off of her jeans.
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Word of the Day
escritoire
Definition: (noun) A writing table; a desk.
Synonyms: secretaire, writing table, secretary.
Usage: In the large shining mahogany escritoire Mr. Osborne had a drawer especially devoted to his son's affairs and papers.
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fascinating linguistic laboratory. Afterword Britannica (this article has extensive coverage of all aspects of Malta's land, climate, flora and fauna, people (including ethnic groups and demographic trends), religion, economy, government, education culture, and history) Maltese and English are the official languages of Malta as well as official languages of the EU. Maltese resulted from the fusion of North African Arabic and a Sicilian dialect of Italian. It is the only Semitic language officially written in Latin script. English is a medium of instruction in schools. Italian was the language of church and government until 1934 and is still understood by a sizable portion of the population. The country of Malta became independent from Britain and joined the Commonwealth in 1964 and was declared a republic on December 13, 1974. It was admitted to the European Union (EU) in 2004. Selected readings
* "Maltese Google" (5/18/10)
* "Maltese email ARC" (6/9/21)
* "Mayor Pete's multilingualism" (4/18/19) — his father is from Malta
* "Recommended reading" (6/24/13)
* "Arabic proficiency levels" (6/23/07)
* "THE PROBLEM WITH FUSHA" (6/23/07)
* "Arabic proficiency levels" (6/23/07)
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and Punic but not from Arabic.
In the meantime two important steps were taken in the domain of religion. Ignazio Saverio Mifsud wrote sermons in Italian and in Maltese, and enriched the latter with many Italian words and Latin phrases, attempting a literary style that rose above everyday speech. Even more far-reaching was the translation of the Italian catechism into Maltese by Francesco Uzzino in 1752. This had no literary ambition but for the first time all Maltese boys and girls learned it by heart for their First Holy Communion. Religious terms like fidi, liġi¸ sagramenti, Apostoli, Spiritu Santu, etc. were learnt by constant repetition. As for most domains, both high (administration, culture, law and medicine) and low (carpentry, fishing, building), words denoting religion, churches and their furniture, are largely of Sicilian origin.
Brincat then moves on to examine Napoleonic and English attempts to influence the development of Maltese more toward Francophone and Anglophone usages at the expense of Italian ones, but I won't go into the details of that here.
The final sections of Brincat's article trace the growth of English in the language mix on Malta after it became a British colony in 1813 and the rise of the Maltese language among the population.
Knowledge of Italian and English was limited to educated persons: in 1842 the former was spoken by 11% and the latter by only 5% of the population, but when English became compulsory for employment with the British forces, the Police, the Civil Service, and for emigration, the figure rose to 22.6% in 1931. After the Second World War Malta changed completely. English became fashionable, cinemas showed English and American films, pop songs replaced opera and, most important of all, in 1946 primary education became compulsory, teaching only Maltese and English. The battle against Italian was favourable to the Maltese language because the English had realized that its promotion was indispensable to end the long cultural battle.
Throughout the 19th century Maltese literature grew and found its highest expression in Dun Karm Psaila in the early 20th, while grammars, dictionaries and schoolbooks completed codification. The alphabet was standardized, consisting of Latin letters with a few diacritics: dots distinguished palatal ċ and ġ from velar k and g, voiced s became ż, crossed ħ identified the aspirate, j and w were adopted for the semi-consonants, x was adopted for sh and q for the glottal stop. This followed the principle of one letter for one sound but għ and h, both mute, were retained for etymological reasons. In 1924 cable radio relayed the BBC on one channel and Maltese programmes on the other, and for the first time standard Maltese was heard everywhere by illiterate dialect speakers. A chair of Maltese was set up at the University in 1937 and exams in both official languages were compulsory for jobs in the Civil Service.
How and when did Maltese become an official language on the island of Malta?
Maltese was given official status with English and Italian in 1934. Italian was removed in 1936, but came back in 1957 when Italian television could be viewed from Malta. It assumed a new role now: no longer official, nor limited to culture, it became a passive tool for entertainment and information, kept the highest audience up to the 1990s when local stations got a bigger share, and is still watched by about 20% in prime time. Italian is also the favourite foreign language in the secondary schools. English is the teaching medium of half the subjects in the schools and of all subjects except languages at University. It is also preferred for reading and sending emails and sms, and for ATM banking, but Maltese is spoken by over 90% of the population and boasts two daily newspapers (three in English), three major TV stations, and local radio channels. Production of books and plays is also healthy. In 2003 Maltese became one of the official languages of the European Union.
Where does that leave "pe[...]
2007, Vol. 4, pp. 1-52
"Between typology and diachrony : some formal parallels in Hebrew and Maltese"
by Alexander Borg Abstract
Hebrew and Maltese are obliquely related members of the Semitic language family. Past comparative research inspired by Bible translation highlighted in atomistic fashion a number of common traits in these two languages. The present research probes aspects of selected phonological, morphological, syntactic, and lexical traits in Biblical and Israeli Hebrew from the comparative perspective of contemporary Maltese. Given the fact that the latter may well retain substratal elements inherited from Phoenician and Punic, the parallels tentatively indicated here, particularly in the lexical domain, may provide the basis for a reconstruction of the earliest diachronic stage of the Maltese word stock. If on the mark, it also seriously calls into question claims advanced in recent historical work on Maltese to the effect that the Arab invasion of the Maltese Islands in the 9th century entailed the complete annihilation of the indigenous population thereby breaking the continuity with the linguistic heritage of pre-Arabic ancient Malta.
Returning from this brief, comparative inquiry into one facet of the deep relationships of Maltese, we now take a broader view of the language.
"Maltese, a Language so Unique in Europe:
Arabic origins, Sicilian and Italian vocabulary and a strong influence of English are the characteristics of an original European language with a long history: Maltese."
by Joseph M. Brincat (University of Malta [L-Università ta’ Malta]), Orient XXI (5/7/22)
Because it affords such a comprehensive, informed account of the engrossing linguistic situation on Malta, I will quote extensively from Professor Joseph / Giuseppe Brincat's article.
Situated in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, Malta and Gozo present an intriguing linguistic picture. Although they are nearer to Sicily (93 km) than to Tunisia (288 km) and Libya (355 km), the Catholic, culturally and genetically European inhabitants still speak a language that is basically a variety of Arabic spoken in the Maghreb and Sicily around the year 1000. Its survival is unique because Sicily, Spain and Pantelleria abandoned Andalusi and Siculo-Arabic, but Malta was spared language shift by the Normans, Swabians, Anjevins, Aragonese and Castilians although it had remained part of Sicily. When Charles V of Spain ceded it to the Knights of St. John in 1530 it became an autonomous state, but the Grand Masters (French, Portuguese or Catalan, with a handful of Italians) did not apply a linguistic policy on the spoken level. They were content to use Latin and Italian as high languages. Besides, education was poor and literacy hovered around 10%, and so the population remained mostly monolingual.
Under Muslim rule (870 – 1091) the population was less than ten thousand inhabitants, but under the Knights of St John it reached 100,000 till 1798. It kept increasing during the British period and now surpasses 500,000. The disproportion between its territory (316 km2) and its population, together with the large number of Sicilian, Italian and English surnames, and a few French and Spanish ones, reveals the importance of immigration in shaping the local language.
I met a Chinese family who happily and successfully spent some years running a business in Malta, using English for their daily needs and transactions, before moving to America, where they are now happily residing and using more Chinese than they did in Malta.
Brincat's article probes the earliest evidence for language usage on Malta and finds that the first inscriptions are in Punic, "the Phoenicians having settled there in the 7th century B.C." That was succeeded by Greek and Latin.
Then follows an important paragraph on the linguistic history of Malta:
The language spoken today shows no substrate because Arabic was introduced in a sudden manner. Al-Himyari describes a ferocious Muslim raid in 870 (255 [...]
