Joe asks 'Is it me or what?'

Lost in Translation

I learned a lot from the Ukrainian family that stayed with us for a year before they found a place of their own. While they were here, I tried to master some basic Ukrainian and found it difficult. I have a reasonable knowledge of the major Romance languages and some modern Greek and, although I can't claim to be fluent, I can cope with simple situations such as are experienced when travelling abroad - booking restaurants, organising travel, explaining to someone that my wife has lost her earrings/shopping/tickets etc.

But Ukrainian was a challenge with its large alphabet (33 characters) as well as:

• sound groups that don't exist in English such as sht, dv and vsh
• single letter words that are just consonants such as з [z] - with and в [v] - in
• a case system whereby words change depending on what function they perform. Latin is renowned for this feature (and it still exists in other languages such as Russian and German) but it has withered away in English although it can still be seen in such things as pronouns - I love you but you love me
• strange treatments (to me anyway) of plurals

[Skip to next paragraph if you wish] This involves using a different form of a noun if it follows one, two to four or, and this is the strange part, five or more. This would be like English having one year, two years, five yearz (sic). But it seems more complicated than that. The form of the noun depends on the unit value in a large number so twenty-one year, twenty-two years, twenty-five yearz (sic).

Once you've got over the different script then many words, which at first look horrifying, are just transliterations of fairly common words in English and other European languages - the following are all pronounced similarly to their English equivalent:

• Таксі - Taxi
• Метро  - Metro
• Супермаркет - Supermarket
• Ресторан  - Restaurant
• Кафе  - Cafe

The language also has some interesting quirks such as little use of the present tense of to be. No I am, you are etc. Instead the verb is just left out:

• I am tired - я втомився - literally I tired
• Where is Dad? - Де тато? - literally Where Dad?

Our guests struggled with English but with the help of Google translate, some dubious charades and a lot of pointing, we managed to get by. My most memorable misunderstanding was one morning when I was greeted with the sentence, "I have done the cathedral". After a bit of confusion, I realised that the Ukrainian for cathedral (собор) and dogs (собаки) sound vaguely similar and Google had got it wrong. She was trying to tell me she had fed the dogs.

Another cultural awakening was the amount of cooking they did, especially for basics. That, of course, may have been a family trait rather than a Ukrainian one but they did spend a lot more time in the kitchen using the oven and the hob. When they first arrived they were presented with a box of groceries which included a few cans of soup. They asked me what they were and almost laughed when I explained. They always made soups from scratch and had never seen tinned soup before.

One pleasant surprise was Borscht. I always thought of this was that it was a vegetable soup with beetroot as a primary ingredient. This may be the case in Russia but for them, it was a more substantial concoction, almost a stew, and, to my vegetarian wife's regret, usually came with big lumps of pork.

More insights in a later post but enough for now :)

Coffee Break

It's been a long time since my last post. It all seemed to be going well when I wrote Survivor Guilt.

 

I was working entirely from home rather than half and half and I had Fridays off as my firm moved to a four-day week. Like many others, I had such plans: improve my foreign languages; crack on with the novel I have started three times and am yet to finish the first chapter; all those home improvements. Out of these, the last has had the most success but even that has been restricted to organising rather than doing.

 

One of the reasons for so few posts is that most of mine are about incidents in life and not going out much for eighteen months puts a damper on that but I also have an interest in language and this post was spurred on as I queued for coffee after taking our dogs for a walk (to be fair my wife takes them and I provide moral support and buy the refreshments afterwards).

 

As I was waiting to be served I noticed their sign read Cappucino. I have found out after many false starts that no one wants their spelling mistakes pointed out, it should be Cappuccino (mnemonic think two CuPs of coffee to match the two central Ps and Cs).

 

However, what started me wondering was that I knew there is a type of monkey called a Capuchin and I knew there was a religious order called the Capuchins

- so how were these three related and which came first?

 

The word cappuccio meant a hooded cape of a type favoured by monks and worn by many orders including the Camaldolese. The diminutive, meaning a small-hooded cape, is cappuccino.

The actual Capuchin friars were founded as a splinter faction of The Franciscans in 1525 when Matteo da Bascio and others decided that the Franciscans, founded over three hundred years previously by Francis of Assisi, had strayed too far from their founder's way especially in matters of simplicity and discipline. They were given shelter by the Camaldolese and started to wear the same garments and took their popular name from the hooded cape.

 

Next came the monkeys which inhabit south and central America. They were named after the friars because of their colouring. I couldn't find out exactly when the monkeys were named but it appears to be sometime after their discovery (by Europeans that is...) in the early sixteenth century given that the Capuchin friars weren't well-known until later.

 

Finally comes the coffee drink. It was also named after the friars in the seventeenth century but was a different drink from one we know today. It took a couple of hundred years, at least, to settle down into what you will get when you order one now. Whether or not the idea of the monkey also influenced the name is not known for sure but it seems likely.

 

 

So now you know - to sum up, it was Capuchin friars, Capuchin Monkeys and then the coffee and don't forget - it's caPPuCCino.

Worth Its Salt

I have a deep interest in language, how it developed, the origins of words, the relationships between the world's many tongues. I don't often write on the subject but felt that once wouldn't hurt.

The world's languages are grouped into families, the theory being that the languages of one family arose from a common ancestor. Many of the Western European ones fall under the Indo-European group, this includes Latin and its descendants, the Romance languages, as well as the Germanic and Scandinavian ones (Finnish being an exception).

Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is believed to have been spoken around four to seven thousand years ago, there is no literary record and it has been reconstructed from its descendants.

The PIE word for salt was *sal. (The asterisk is used in linguistics to denote a form that has been assumed as there is no actual written record.) The reason for this post is that I was struck the other day by how many words in English derive from this rather humble noun.

The Latin derivation was sal, the Greek equivalent was hal. This follows standard practice, many words in Latin beginning with S started with H in Greek (this is somewhat simplified as it was more of a breathy sound at the start of a word than a traditional English H as in house). For example, the Latin for six was sex as in sextuplets but in Greek we have hex as in hexagon.

But back to salt - here are some of the words we use to today that derive from the Latin sal or the Greek hal:

• Salary: from the Latin salarius, an amount soldiers were paid which literally meant salt money, possibly slang in the way beer tokens is used jocularly for money today
• Halogens: from the Greek meaning salt generator - a group in the periodic table including chlorine and fluorine that produce salts, common salt being the one produced when sodium and chlorine combine
• Salad: from Latin salata meaning salted and used in the expression herba salata meaning salted vegetables
• Sauce/salsa: again from Latin meaning salted or spicy in the sense of making food salty, salsa means sauce in Spanish and the dance is named after that for being metaphorically saucy
• Sausage: salted meat, the root is more clearly seen in salami and also is part of the French stew of spiced meats called salmagundi
• Saltpetre/saltpeter: potassium nitrate, one of the components of gunpowder, it looks like salt encrusted rock (peter)
• Silt: arrived via Scandinavian and/or Germanic languages meaning sediment deposited by salt water
• Souse: to pickle something, via Germanic languages, by extension meaning drunk

So there you are, next time you tuck into a sausage, a salad or add some sauce, remember it all started with sal.

Qué?

The idea of automated translation between different languages has been a goal of many for a long time. The British, and even more so the Americans, are notorious for their poor linguistic skills and seem to think that everyone should just learn English – even if the two groups can’t agree on just what English is. Other nations disagree and, although languages are dying off at a substantial rate, according to some source about two dozen annually, it doesn’t look like we’ll all be speaking in one tongue for quite some time.

There are two main methods used by computers to translate between languages. The first involves documenting the language’s rules in a machine readable format, adding in the exceptions – of which there are many, languages are not logical – and incorporating the vocabulary. This method has never worked well. The second method is to compare vast amounts of text to a known good translation and build up a knowledge of what should be replaced by what when translating. This is the approach used by Google Translate. Google’s arrays of computers have been fed with millions of lines of text from such sources as the United Nations and the EU parliament which constantly require documents in multiple languages. It’s like using the Rosetta Stone to decipher an unknown tongue. This works much better than the first method but I recently stumbled upon an instance were its translations were completely wrong.

Pangrams are sentences that use all the letters in a specific alphabet. The classic English one is:

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

(Note that it’s jumps, not jumped as I often hear.)

They are used to display fonts and test handwriting skills etc. I was looking at some in other languages recently (I know, I should get out more) and came across this one for Spanish:

El veloz murciélago hindú comía feliz cardillo y kiwi, la cigüeña tocaba el saxofón detrás del palenque de paja.

It’s quite long as it has all the diacritical marks (in Spanish ñ, ch and ll are also counted as separate letters and therefore some insist that pangrams must include these). I wanted to translate this so pasted the first part into Google, this is the result:

The quick brown fox ate happy golden thistle and kiwi.

Because pangrams are rarely literally translated but are often near their foreign counterparts Google Translate has decided that El veloz murciélago hindú , in reality the quick Hindu bat, means the quick brown fox. It also decided that the end of the sentence, palenque de paja, meant lazy dog. The actual full translation should read:

The quick Hindu bat happily eats golden thistle and kiwi, the stork played the saxophone behind the straw arena.

Now you know where Dalí got his inspiration, no one said pangrams had to make much sense.

So the majority of interpreters (who do real time translation) and translators won’t be out of a job just yet, even using automated tools you still need a fluent speaker to tidy up the results, but for many less formal translations tools like Google Translate are good enough.

For some areas, such as legal and scientific documentation it will probably take a lot longer for automation to be reliable.

(There is a feature in Google Translate that lets you change the result. If anyone notices that these translations are now correct it might be because Google updates based on these contributions.)

And if you want to test Google even further you can use the old favourite:

Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana.

It makes a good job it getting fruit flies correct, but fails on the second like.

English Like What She’s Wrote

I’m in two minds about the formation of an English Academy by the Queen’s English Society. Yes, in some ways it feels right to have a body aimed at promoting correct usage, it’s amazing how people, me included, get so upset over missing or, even worse, superfluous apostrophes.

On the other hand the rules of language aren’t written in stone, they’re not even written at all except as description. At the end of the day language is determined by usage and if more people start to use different from or different than rather than different to then that’s what will end up as common usage and so the correct way.

Of course some mistakes are just that, should of instead of should have is one example, but dozens of bodies have been set up to regulate language and most have failed miserably. Even the famous Académie Française has given up trying to fine French newspapers for using an imported word rather than the native French equivalent. Other countries, notably Spain and Italy, have also formed such committees to little effect. Some succeed in some aims, there is a one which tries to mediate between Portugal and Brazil to try and keep their spelling consistent, especially for neologisms; but they’re are always words which escape the net and common usage still overrides the boy’s pronouncements.

Perhaps the Romans had the right idea, they had two versions of the language, one for formal writings and another, colloquial Latin, for general everyday speech. It is thought by many that at one stage they were one language but gradually diverged over time rather than being officially recognised.

It is from the colloquial strand that the modern Romance languages derive so that, for instance, the word for fire in French, Spanish and Italian is feu, fuego and fuoco respectively. These all come from focus, technically a hearth or fireplace, rather than the classical ignis. So is there any hope for the English academy? Only, I think, if they limit their remit and otherwise stick to describing the state of play.

The Light Dawns

I was on a rare bus trip in Exeter recently. Sitting behind me were two Chinese, a young man and woman. They were speaking, in English, about his job and it appeared he was trying to convince her to move into the same field. He went over a few of the benefits and then she began to question him about the actual work. This was apparently translating from Chinese to English. He said how the pay was okay and the job not too arduous. He would be presented with written material in Chinese and have to produce an English version. Some of it was a bit technical he said. When the girl asked him about this, worried she wouldn’t be able to manage, he assured her:

Oh, I don’t often understand a lot of the stuff I translate, but you don’t need to.

Now I know why those manuals I get with appliances I buy are so difficult to follow.

Schindler’s Lift

Spent a pleasant Sunday at a wedding in Torquay, the Barceló Imperial Hotel to be precise. It’s described as four stars and, to be fair, the bedrooms and function rooms are lovely, as with most places it’s let down by its staff, more specifically the bar staff. (Okay the full English breakfast should more accurately have been described as a two-thirds one, but you can’t have everything.)

On the plus side their English was reasonable, it’s getting harder and harder in England to find hotel staff whose English can cope with anything other than the very basics, heaven help you if you want anything other than a standard type of drink.

Firstly they are incapable of holding more than one thought in their heads. You order a couple of pints and they ask you if you want anything else. Once you’ve told them about the gin and tonic with lime but without ice they’ve forgotten what the second pint was and just dropped a mini-glacier into the gin and added lemon.

Secondly they don’t have simple customer skills. When I arrive at a bar and they’re fiddling with something I’m happy to wait, personally I think that stocking shelves can wait but as I said, it’s one thought at a time. What they should do though is acknowledge your presence and say something along the lines of be with you in a minute. Instead you’re completely ignored and you just wonder if you’ve succumbed to the invisible customer syndrome again. They also can’t keep track of who’s arrived at the bar first so there’s inevitably resentful customers fuming about being ignored for the third time.

Thirdly they have no initiative. When they see they’re low on something they don’t do anything until they have to. Yesterday I ordered a rum and coke and mentioned as they poured that it was the last measure in the bottle, hoping they’d take a hint – no chance. Instead of ordering or fetching a new one when there was a lull, and there was one during the buffet, they just stand there watching the tumbleweed drift by. Then when I came up later and asked for another they were too busy to get a new bottle. That’s what happens when sales don’t directly affect your pay as it would with a traditional pub landlord.

Anyway, having got that off my chest, here’s my nomination for the Plain English gobbledygook award. It was in the lift and explained what to do if the lift broke down, I’m sure most non-native English speaking people would struggle to understand it, so that’s most of the hotel staff then. If you can't read it states:

The operation of the alarm button will automatically effect a vocal link with the communication centre of Schindler.

In other words: Press the button to ask for help. Perhaps the person at Schindler’s, the lift company, who wrote it wasn’t a native English speaker either.

Finally congratulations to Lisa and Al, hope you enjoy your exotic honeymoon destination.

Be Careful

Muphry’s Law states that in criticising something in writing mistakes will be made in the criticism itself. For example if you moan to a publisher about spelling mistakes in a book then your email will contain a spelling mistake. One of the best examples recently was in the Sun newspaper when it lambasted Gordon Brown who had mis-spelled a soldier’s name in a letter of condolence to his mother following his death in service. Needless to say the Sun mis-spelled the mother’s name and was forced to publish an apology soon after.

I was reminded of this law reading an article about Conrad Black who is currently spending time as the US President’s guest in Florida following his inability to distinguish Hollinger’s money from his own.

Black wrote:

I am enjoying tutoring secondary school-leaving candidates in English, practicing the piano, writing and shaping myself up…

Whether the incorrect spelling of practicing was Black’s or the editors is not known but the trouble deciding which version of some word pairs such as practice/practise and licence/license is common. In the USA they seem to have just adopted the s version for both noun and verb usage but in the UK practice is a noun and practise a verb. So you can say:

to do well at sport you need to practise

but:

to do well at sport you need practice.

If you have difficulty remembering which is which then use advice/advise as your model. Because these are pronounced differently they are easy to differentiate, one can give advice (noun) or one can advise (verb).

Now I will grammar and spell-check this article three times before posting it.

Is It a Bird?

People often include a summary of the year’s family news in their Christmas cards. These are often fascinating tracts, as you know.

It was a bit of a roller coaster year for the Miggins family this year, it started when I cut myself shaving and then, to cap it all, we couldn’t find little Johnny’s training shoe for his games lesson on his first day back at school.

Popularly this is known as a round robin, it isn’t of course, a real round robin is a petition where the subscribers sign along the radii of a circle, originally so the first signatory, and the presumed ring leader, couldn’t be identified and paid a visit by the factory owner’s heavy mob.

But such is the way of the English language, attempts to regulate it have constantly failed, and the idea of a letter going round, plus – I suspect – the association at Christmas time with the robin redbreast, means that this new definition is probably here to stay, especially as the need for the original round robin has more or less disappeared.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year

What’s This Phenomenon Called?

I know many people have experienced coming across a new word that they are unfamiliar with and looking up what it means; strangely, the word then seems to pop up in the next few days. A few explanations have been given, from just random chance to the fact that the word was often seen before but ignored and only after learning what it means does the word register in the brain and people notice it. It’s the sort of thing that Steven Pinker, one of my favourite authors, deals with in his works.

I came across what seemed like a related phenomenon a few days ago when my son asked me a question. We were planning a shopping trip and mentioned that we needed to go to B & Q, the DIY store. My ever inquisitive son asked me, Why is it called B & Q? I didn’t know and couldn’t think of any DIY related phrase so guessed that it was the initials of the founders and forgot all about it. Yesterday I was reading an excellent book, Jeremy Paxman’s The English: A Portrait of a People, and there was the answer, the store was started by Richard Bloch and David Quayle in 1969 before growing remarkably quickly as the idea of Do It Yourself took off.

So there you are, what’s the name of the first experience and is the second one related? Or have I seen the word before and it just hasn’t registered yet?