Why is Chinese so hard to learn?

I was reminded a couple of days ago that I once tried. It was a few years ago now, and I didn't get very far, although it is a fascinating language.

Fascinating and hugely difficult to learn. And that's quite hard to admit when you've always been good at languages. But I think many English speakers face a particular handicap. Those of us who speak with something that at least approximates to 'received pronunciation' are accustomed to a certain kind of intonation. It tends to fall at the end of a sentence, unless that sentence happens to be a question.

So the idea that a rising, falling or steady intonation can actually change the meaning of a word, as it can in Chinese, is especially hard to get to grips with. This made me wonder whether those with certain regional accents (Welsh or Midlands, for example), with rising and falling tones, would fare rather better..?

Why does writing get called 'bad' as soon as it's popular?

What makes poor writing? We've seen a not entirely unpredictable backlash against Fifty Shades of Grey from some quarters. It's the reaction that seems to kick in whenever a book (or in this case a trilogy) reaches a certain level of popularity. And I don't think it's completely justified.

It isn't just that it looks like snobbery, although there is, I think, an element of that. The idea that if you are genuinely to appreciate the joy of reading, you must have had a certain level - and a certain kind - of education. If millions of people are enjoying a book, it can't be that good because there can't be that many people with that kind of education. Our 'club' is more exclusive than that ... isn't it?

I said it's not just snobbery because, to be fair, what you think of as good writing will of course be affected by how widely you've read. My reading tastes have certainly changed over the years, and now I would cringe at some of the things I read and enjoyed in my teens and even in my twenties: books full of cliché-ridden characters and hackneyed turns of phrase.

It's also true that we live in a world in which winning a publicity lottery can bring undeserved success - we have celebrities who are famous for nothing more than being famous. And, thanks in no small part to phenomena such as YouTube, people and things can gain incredible popularity (or notoriety) for the most trivial of reasons.

But even if a snowball of hype is how Fifty Shades of Grey achieved its initial success, people are still reading it and they're still enjoying it.

And that's the point: if a particular writing style succeeds in firing your imagination, taking you off to another reality, painting pictures in your mind ... then that writing is good for you. A cliché is a cliché only if you've encountered it many times before.

What's more, if it fails to do those things for someone else, I don't think that person can legitimately say that it's objectively 'bad', even if it's bad for them.

Of course, you may be able to apply all kinds of objective measures to a piece of literature. You may be able to dissect it, analyse it and come up with the conclusion that it's either good or bad. But if your conclusion is at odds with the reaction of millions of readers, might not the flaw be in the analysis, rather than in the readers?

Rebuild the English language from the bottom up?

English is a poor choice for a lingua franca.

Despite its relatively simple grammar, it has so many quirks and special cases that it must be fiendishly hard to learn for non-native speakers. Those of us who have tried to explain some of the rules (or exceptions) must be used to the confused stares and protests of 'that desn't make sense'. Because very often it doesn't. There's no logical reason, for example, to prefer 'I don't drive' to 'I drive not'.

It's clear that it's history, not common sense, that's led to English being the common language for so much of the world's population. And while the very things that make English a great choice for literature – the vast vocabulary, the flexibility and the potential for ambiguity all make it a wonderful language for storytelling – those same characteristics make it a terrible choice for law, commerce and mutual understanding among non-native speakers.

And it made me wonder. Given that attempts to create a new, common world language generally seem doomed to failure (Esperanto, anyone?), might we be better off giving English a proper clear-out? Do away with some of the more bizarre quirks. Simplify the rules. And the spelling for that matter – the idea that English is sometimes spelt phonetically and sometimes not must be very confusing, especially for speakers of languages that are not written phonetically, such as Chinese.

There would be enormous obstacles to any such venture, of course. Who would be in charge of it, for one thing? And there are, I understand, already non-native English speakers, especially in the Far East, who do use a slightly modified, simpler and more logical version of English for business. So perhaps more radical, wholesale, change is just not needed.

More to the point, though, language tends to be pretty democratic, and attempts to dictate widespread rule-changes from on high are often doomed to failure. And perhaps that's the way it should be. English has been influenced by vast numbers of people and has borrowed words and expressions from all over the world. It is not logical, and it is not straightforward. But then neither are people...

Why aren't politicians speaking our language?

It's long been the case that politicians and those in the news media tend to speak a slightly different language from the rest of us. Ministers and journalists each have their own set of stock phrases, which they seem to adopt en masse, almost as if they'd all attended the same seminar... 'Let's be clear about this' seems to be the phrase du jour among the former.

But alongside these words and phrases there's also a way of speaking – one that seems to want to avoid strong language at any cost. You can understand this in the news media, especially those for whom impartiality is important. But aren't the politicians supposed to be speaking on our behalf?

Talk about the recent riots brought it home to me. I've heard rioters and looters being described, rather tamely, as 'youngsters', which somehow conjures up images of mischievous children stealing apples, rather than deranged morons burning down shops and homes. Rioters' behaviour is said to be 'unacceptable'. No – poor customer service may be 'unacceptable' – most of us would use stronger language (which needn't involve expletives) to describe what's been going on. It's almost as if the Westminster elite are shying away from expressing the anger that the rest of us feel.

There may be good reasons for this. The obvious one is that Ministers and MPs are being careful to avoid fanning the flames – a violent reaction to a violent situation is the last thing we need, and it could be that politicians are wary of making things worse with inflammatory language.

However, I think we're left with the impression that those who run the country don't really speak our language. Don't speak on our behalf. Don't understand what we feel. And I think that in itself is more likely to breed anger and frustration among the general population.

From internee to internist

Nothing ages you like receiving an email and realising that there was a time, well into your adult life, when half the words in it would have made no sense whatsoever. I recently received an email about iPad apps and usability (old word but new, specialised, meaning) that mentioned such things as 'swipe ambiguity' and 'navigation overload'.

This golden age of communications technology has spawned a plethora of new words and phrases – some, such as 'app' are relatively new, even to the technologically savvy, even if 'application' has been around for years. Others are better established – just out of curiosity, I checked my old and trusted, but now woefully out of date, Concise Oxford Dictionary to see what was there and what was missing. Interestingly, 'virus', in the computing sense, was there, as was 'email'. But 'internet'? No sign – straight from 'internee' to 'internist'.

Of course, language, especially the English language, is constantly growing and adapting. But I think there's something more at work than the gradual shifts to which we've become accustomed.

Because the very communications revolution that's led to all these new words and phrases means that those words can become embedded in our everyday lives with incredible speed. And developments that might once have taken years need now take only months.

A new word for this extended bank holiday break..?

Because, apparently, they have one in Italy. There, to take a few days off work between public holidays is to do 'il ponte' (the bridge).

It seems this doesn't happen quite often enough in the UK for us to have a word for it. Perhaps we should, though? What would it be? We could adopt the Italian. It sounds rather nice. Or use the translated Italian (which somehow sounds rather less attractive). Or come up with something completely different.

Any ideas..?

Evolving English - well worth a visit

If you have any interest in the English language and you haven't been to the Evolving English Exhibition at the British Library, then (if you’re in easy reach of London) go! There is still just over a week before it closes (it runs until 3 April) and some of the exhibits are just breathtaking. In fact, it’s worth going just to take a look at some of the manuscripts and printed documents on display (11th century Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, for example). But there’s also plenty to learn from some of the video and audio clips, and plenty of common myths about English are exploded. You can even listen to regional accents by hitting buttons on a map of the UK. What’s more, it’s free to attend. I went with the SYP last week and was so glad I did. See http://www.bl.uk/evolvingenglish/index.html.

An unexpected educational divide

Science seems to be getting really popular these days. And the weirder the better. Numerous books and TV programmes feed our fascination for the many bizarre and counter-intuitive theories concerning the laws that govern the universe, from multiple realities to particles that can be in two places at once.

Just a couple of days ago, I saw a truly breathtaking Horizon programme on the nature of reality, which ended on something called the holographic principle. And this is when it struck me that humans really don’t seem to be well equipped to deal with these questions. It appears that the closer we come to a genuine description of the way the universe really works, the further we find ourselves from something we can actually understand.

That’s not altogether surprising. There’s no evolutionary advantage in gaining such an understanding, and it’s perhaps more surprising that evolution has taken us to the point at which we can even scratch the surface of what makes the world tick. Most life on earth gets by perfectly well without that level of insight.

What may be distressing for some people – especially lay people – when it comes to these questions is that what appear to be the ‘best’ scientific theories simply can’t be expressed in natural language. The ideas are just beyond our comprehension – beyond our everyday experience and therefore impossible to describe in those terms.

Of course, the scientists themselves do – apparently – manage to get a glimpse of the ‘true’ nature of reality through mathematics. What cannot be expressed in normal language can be written down and in some way understood in the form of equations. And this makes me wonder whether this actually takes those scientists a step closer to a genuine concept of the ideas they’re describing.

If so, it risks leaving the rest of us out on a limb. In mathematics, there appears to be a language that describes the way the universe works. But most of us don’t understand that language in anything like enough depth. And that includes people who would traditionally regard themselves as well educated.

I can’t help wondering whether the new elite – those with the necessary mathematical skills – are set to take on a role that will appear almost religious to the rest of us.

Books that offer insights into the true nature of the universe, but written in a language that only a select few can truly understand… Where have I heard that before?

Time to accept the comma splice?

It's one of those things that drive some people mad in a 'Why can't people write in proper sentences?' sort of way.

I have to admit that seeing two sentences lazily strung together with nothing more than a comma has a similar effect on me.

Never heard of the comma splice?

Here's an example:

'We will endeavour to ship your order within three days, however it may take longer.'

There are actually two sentences here. One is:

'We will endeavour to ship your order within three days.'

The other is:

'However, it may take longer.'

English has a number of ways to join two sentences together. The trouble is that sticking a comma between them isn't one of them.

What you can do is use a conjunction, such as 'and' or 'but' (often preceded by a comma):

'We will endeavour to ship your order within three days, but it may take longer.'

Alternatively, why not just use a full stop?

'We will endeavour to ship your order within three days. However, it may take longer.'

... or a semi-colon?

'We will endeavour to ship your order within three days; however, it may take longer.'

However, could it be time to ditch the rule?

Sometimes, very well-written literature is littered with comma splices. It can have a real affect on the pace of the text.

For example, 'Say what you want, I don't care' suggests hurried speech, with little or no pause between 'want' and 'I'. 'Say what you want; I don't care' just doesn't have the same effect.

And if the usage has become so widespread, how do we distinguish between a 'good' comma splice and a 'bad' one?

If the rule has become that the comma splice is wrong unless it looks OK or it's a good piece of writing, then that's no rule at all.

And perhaps it would spare editors and proofreaders much agonising if we just did away with it!

When common sense collides with logic

I wrote a post some time ago about the ambiguity inherent in English (http://edittrain.blogspot.com/2010/06/trading-clarity-for-creativity.html), and this reminded me of a case I read while studying for my law degree. This was a very long time ago, and I may have got some of the details wrong (so please don’t rely on this as any guide to the law!), but I think it went something like this…

A van full of stolen goods was intercepted by the police, who, disguised as the thieves, went on to rendezvous with the people who had arranged to buy the items.

The police promptly arrested those people for attempting to handle stolen goods.

To secure a conviction, it had to be proved that the defendants intended to handle stolen goods.

This was the tricky part. As soon as the police had taken custody of the goods, they ceased to be ‘stolen’.

Even then, though, common sense seems to suggest that, since the would-be buyers believed the items to be stolen, they had every intention of handling stolen goods.

The trouble is that what common sense suggests doesn’t always go hand in hand with what logic dictates.

Consider the following questions and answers:

Did the buyers intend to handle the goods in the van?

Yes.

Were the goods in the van stolen?

No.

Did the buyers intend to handle stolen goods?

On this basis the only logical answer to the question is ‘no’.

I have a feeling that the conviction was secured in the end, but this does go to show how easy it is to tie yourself up in knots, and how poorly suited our language is to representing logical ideas.

The liar paradox

This is something I came across just recently. Someone says something along the lines of: ‘I am lying’ or ‘this statement is false.’ Our task is to decide whether what they’re saying is true or false. If it’s true, then … it can’t be true, so it must be false. But if it’s false … then it’s true!

See http://www.iep.utm.edu/par-liar/ for some really interesting discussion on this.

For me, the answer is ‘neither’. These just aren’t statements that can be categorised as true or false, and perhaps the difficulty we have with such conundrums merely reflects the fact that our language has not evolved to flag up any such problems; a sentence can be illogical or nonsensical and still make sense semantically.

This put me in mind of the way in which interviewers on the TV or radio will sometimes try to trap their subjects (especially politicians!), using a similar well-known ‘paradox’.

Like most people, I get annoyed when politicians refuse to give a straight answer to a straight question.

But I sometimes find myself siding with the interviewee when they’re asked something like: ‘Are you continuing to take bribes from this company? Yes or no.’

If the interviewee wants to deny having taken any bribes, the answer to the question is neither ‘yes’ nor ‘no’.

Apostrophes changed for ever by a word-processing quirk?

Not that I'm normally quite this picky, but ...

If you've ever tried typing something like:

Let ‘em go!

... in your average word-processing program, you probably won’t end up with an apostrophe in front of em.

Why? Because most keyboards don’t distinguish between an apostrophe, or closing quotation mark, (’) and an opening quotation mark (‘). As a result, your word-processor has to decide what it is you wanted to type.

You don’t normally find an apostrophe in front of em, so it reasonably assumes that you were after an opening quotation mark.

You weren’t, though. You were looking for an apostrophe. The trouble is that so many people have got so used to accepting their word-processor’s decision as final, that they seem to have forgotten (or come no longer to care) what an apostrophe is.

The word-processor induced usage seems to have become so widespread as to be generally accepted. Normally, I don’t mind. Really I don’t. But it hit home to me when it appeared on some TV ad or other recently, which had something like:

The class of ‘96

I still wouldn’t really mind, but even my (now pretty ancient) word-processing program can work that one out and automatically makes it:

The class of ’96

Two really annoying things about historical fiction

I have a short attention span. I am easily bored. And if a book is set in the present day, something really has to happen very quickly or I will lose interest.

Turn back the clock 500, 1,000 or 2,000 years, though, and it's different. Well researched insights into how people probably lived, thought and acted in the distant past are, I think, fascinating.

There are just two things that you often find in historical fiction that I find really frustrating.

The first is the use of archaic language in completely the wrong time period. Say, 18th or 19th century slang applied to 11th century 'cockneys', who wouldn't even have been speaking anything like the English we recognise today.

I do see why authors do it; I understand that it's a device designed to take you into the past. And I can see that the alternative – to use entirely contemporary language – has its own problems (it's not historical fiction but, leaving aside the fantasy setting, the Lord of the Rings reads to me as though it's set in the 1930s or 1940s).

What I think is much worse, though, is for an author suddenly to switch a character's dialogue to the language they would have been speaking, only to have that character translate the expression into English.

For example: 'Veni, vidi, vici,' said Caesar, 'I came, I saw, I conquered.'

But Caesar – you're speaking Latin anyway. What language are you supposed to be translating into? And for whose benefit?

To me it's the literary equivalent of Lurcio's asides to the camera in Up Pompeii (keeping the Roman theme!). It just seems wrong in a serious novel. Again, I can see why it happens, especially when it comes to famous expressions, as in the example above.

But there's no need to put it in the dialogue, surely? Put the translation in the narrative and we'll all still get it. I promise!

Il fait beau, innit?

There's a great programme on Radio 4 at the moment, hosted by Stephen Fry, called Fry's English Delight. Last week it was all about contradictions, and there was lots of really interesting stuff about the logic of double negatives, and so on.

But the bit that stuck in my mind was a piece by (the brilliant) David Crystal towards the end. He pointed out something which should be obvious, but which never occurred to me before. And that was that the much derided 'word', 'innit', derived from 'isn't it', has come to be used in just the same way as 'n'est-ce pas' in French (which also means 'isn't it').

I'm not sure this holds true in every case – I hear people say things like, 'He told me to get lost, innit', and I'm not sure you could use 'n'est-ce pas' in quite that way (I may, of course, be wrong – my French is rusty!).

Nevertheless, love it or hate it, 'innit' has genuinely added something to the language. What brought this home to me was the fact that when I first started learning French at school, I seem to remember that the teacher had some difficulty explaining the meaning of 'n'est-ce pas'. It was one of those things that didn't quite have an English equivalent. Now it does. So do teachers now say, 'It means 'innit''?

Does the world need semi-colons?

Perhaps not the most pressing issue facing the planet. But I heard an interview recently in which a writer suggested that this particular punctuation mark was redundant, encouraged bad writing and should be done away with.

And you can kind of see the point. Except when it's used to separate items in lists, a semi-colon can always be replaced by a full stop. Shorter sentences tend to be more readable than long ones, so why make your sentences unnecessarily long by using semi-colons?

Certainly, a piece of writing that's littered with semi-colons will look untidy and will be hard to follow. But, personally, I think it would be a shame to do away with anything in the writer's armoury that allows for a little extra nuance of meaning.

The semi-colon allows you to create a closer association between two independent clauses than is possible with a full stop. If you want one thought to flow naturally on from another, then the semi-colon's what you need. It allows you to keep up the pace of a passage of writing, without the pauses created by full stops. So let's hang on to anything that has the potential to make writing just that little bit richer or more diverse.

Have we evolved to be bad proofreaders?

I came across this fascinating article. It suggests a reason why we tend to see patterns that aren't really there: for example, faces in rock formations, etc. Essentially, it seems to be that seeing something that isn't there tends to have less serious consequences than not seeing something that is there. So running up the nearest tree when you see a log that looks like a crocodile confers an evolutionary advantage because, very occasionally, the log will turn out to be a crocodile...

What's that got to do with proofreading? Well, it made me wonder if the same mechanism is at play when we misread words. Could this be why we can stlil raed wrods eevn wehn teh lettres are in the worng order? (See also one of the entries to our recent writing competition, which was based on this idea: http://www.edittrain.co.uk/perfect_start_kersti_h.php).

If so, this tendency to make patterns out of apparently random features means that proofreaders are really fighting against the tide.

But it also made me wonder: if proofreaders do have to suppress this instinct, are they also less likely to fall for other optical illusions? For example, are proofreaders less likely to see faces in the shadows of Martian landscapes?

When is a three-letter word a four-letter word?

Public health minister Anne Milton has caused a stir by suggesting that health professionals use the term 'fat' instead of 'obese'. Many people will have some sympathy for the view. Isn't it just a case of calling a spade a spade? Of reversing the tide of insane political correctness?

Well, possibly. But it made me wonder why people find the word 'fat' so insulting in the first place.

It's clearly not just because it's an everyday word and not a medical term. It's all too easy to say the word in a way that sounds insulting. And that's partly down to its origins. 'Fat' has Old English and Germanic roots, something it has in common with some of the more extreme swear words in the English language. The fact that it is a one-syllable word, ending in the hard 't' (known in linguistic circles as a stop consonant), gives it a short, sharp quality. It's just not possible to spit out 'obese' (a Latin-based word) in the same way.

So 'fat' is not just a word. Depending on the context, it's come to be an insult. And even if health professionals don't mean it to insult people by using it, it will be interpreted in that way.

Englaland, England, Ingerland?

An end to cries of 'Ingerland' will, for many, be one of the silver linings on the cloud that was England's world cup exit. If you're supporting your country, you should at least be able to get the name right, surely?

And yet, of course, it didn't start off as 'England'. When the name first came into use, more than a thousand years ago, it was 'Englaland' – land of the Angles. That's also what it continued to be for hundreds of years thereafter. So, while it's not quite the same, you could say that football fans are, by adding the extra syllable, just returning the nation's name to a closer approximation of the original.

Is there anything wrong with that? And does it matter why it's happening?

Presumably, the reason is to do with the many chants and songs. The additional syllable just seems to make the word fit a little more easily. In this respect, it's not unlike the extra syllable often added to the ends of French words in songs (think of 'Frère Jacques', for example).

As to the rights and wrongs of it, irritating as it is to many, it's difficult to see why it should be seen as any more reprehensible than the mutation of 'Englaland' into 'England'.

So, come on Englaland!

Just not this year, obviously...

Can your native tongue affect your nation's success?

I'd love to know if any research has been done on this. It does seem to have been established that being bilingual, or being brought up in a bilingual environment, at the very least boosts your mental agility (see http://www.livescience.com/culture/090413-bilingual-smart.html, for example).

And this made me wonder whether the intellectual demands of a particular language can actually affect a country's performance on the world stage, in terms of economic output, the propensity to come up with new inventions, or the tendency to nurture or discourage entrepreneurship.

For example, might the stereotypical German efficiency be due in part to the relative complexity of German grammar? Does fluency in Chinese, with its extra layer of difficulty (at least for English-speakers!), based on a falling or rising intonation, help you to think in different ways? Does speaking Japanese, which seems, to me at least, to be a highly logical and efficient language, make you better at thinking logically and efficiently?

And what of English? Grammatically, it has become relatively simple, and yet it is still difficult to master, largely because of its idiosyncrasies. It is certainly not the most logical language, although it is arguably one of the most flexible and expressive. Quite what that might mean for native English speakers is difficult to imagine!

Of course, the effect, if there is one, will also be working in the other direction, and it's natural to suppose that culture affects the development of language just as much as, if not more than, language affects culture.

And even if language does affect whole nations in this way, it is just one of many factors, so testing the idea would be far from easy. Still, I wonder if anyone has tried...?

Trading clarity for creativity

If there's one thing that makes life especially difficult for the proofreader or editor, it's that the English language is in a constant state of change. Unlike the French, we have nothing like the Académie française to give definitive rulings on grammar, etc.

Would we be better off if we did?

Well, life might certainly be a lot simpler. There might also be a benefit in diplomatic and legal circles. French is widely regarded as the international language of diplomacy, partly because of the precision of the language, in contrast to the ambiguity often found in English. This must be due in part to the fact that it's possible to identify a single 'correct' version of French at any one time. In theory, it advances much as a computing language does, in carefully defined steps, as opposed to the gradual changes that take place in English. Of course, it's not quite as simple as that, and 'unauthorised' new words do effectively enter the French language, but the existence of the Académie at least means that it's possible to get a definitive answer when one is required.

The difficulty in English is magnified because a lot depends on the context. What might be acceptable in a novel written for teenagers may not be acceptable in an academic textbook. Knowing where to draw the line takes more than a knowledge of language and grammar; it also requires an understanding of the cultural setting in which a particular piece of writing will be read.

But it's possible that this great weakness in the English language is also its greatest strength. Ambiguity allows for creativity. The ease with which new words enter the language (and with which grammatical rules can become eroded) allows for new forms of expression.