James Clarke's Stoep Talk column James Clarke November 30 2009 at 04:18AM James Clarke's Tour de Farce

Twenty years ago an American linguist predicted that within the lifetimes of people living today 90 percent of the world's languages will have ceased to exist. We have since witnessed how globalisation has led to the English language smothering many of the world's languages - not because of any deliberate policy but because of an evolutionary trend. Some languages are teetering on the edge of extinction. Only two people are left in North America who speak Lipan Apache; only four speak Totoro in Colombia and a solitary human speaks Bikya in Cameroon. (How singularly lonely.) But as I have said before, even as English overwhelms other languages English itself is fragmenting into dialects which may develop into community-specific languages unintelligible to distant English speakers - like Scots. I recall, years ago, Sky News using subtitles for the responses of a Scotsman who was being interviewed. Recently John Earl, retired Wits professor of geography living in Fish Hoek sent me the transcript of a conversation between a tipsy Glasgow motorist and a policeman: Officer: Yawrite? (Are you feeling ill?) Driver: mawrite. (No. I'm feeling well, thank you) Yeshoor? (Are you entirely certain?) Aye. (yes) In retrospect, that exchange could be almost anywhere. It's Glasgow's exclusive words that baffle: beelin (angry); black affronted (very angry); glaiheet (stupid) piece (sandwich), dinna ken (don't know)... It's another language I tell you. Mary Stuart of Sandton who heads The Teacher Network (www.schoolstaff.co.za) has drawn my attention to a Scots translation company seeking interpreters to interpret the Glasgow accent. It is offering the equivalent of R2 000 a day. Mary sent me the latest monthly newsletter of an organisation called Developing Teachers (www.developingteachers.com) which says the translators' job will be to translate Glaswegian "for puzzled visitors to the city" and to interpret at business meetings and conferences. Glasgow, now an international business centre is hosting the Commonwealth Games soon and will have to help visitors understand what locals are saying. The translation service says the problem is not confined to Scotland. Heavily accented parts of England may need a similar service. Considering what a relatively small region the UK is it does indicate how finely the English language has fragmented. Is it any wonder the people in Odwa (Ottawa) can't understand the people in Sinny (Sydney). In South Africa more people speak Afrikaans than English, yet Afrikaans is being smothered by English in industry, commerce and literature. Can a culture survive the collapse of its language? The good news is that a language can be kept alive if the commitment is there. You'll not see many Maori posters or signs in New Zealand yet the language has been re-established. Welsh - which was nearly dead in the 1940s - has become re-entrenched. And consider Hebrew. Fifty years ago it was becoming a purely academic language like Latin. Now it is far more widely spoken - thanks to a concerted effort by Israel. Talking of translating: Henry Tours of Plettenberg Bay, an aviation insurance consultant in his monthly newsletter Downwind, tells of a new road sign between Penarth and Cardiff in Wales - "Cyclists Dismount". In Welsh it read: "llid y bledren dymchwelyd" - until the local council discovered that meant "bladder inflammation". Nearby Swansea put up a sign that said "No entry for heavy goods vehicles. Residential site only". They e-mailed a translator for a translation and received an immediate response which they posted. It read: "Nid wyf yn y swyddfa ar hyn o bryd. Anfonwch unrhyw waith i'w gyfieithu" which means, "I am not in the office at the moment. Please send any work to be translated". This is James Clarke's Stoep Talk column, published in The Star newspaper. E-mail him at jcl@onwe.co.za

If you have a yen to write a best-seller but can't - a best seller in the South African context being one that sells, say, 8 000 copies - it's probably because you have been setting about it in the wrong way. Some years ago in a New York Times article headed, "O Muse! You Do Make Things Difficult!", Diane Ackerman described how best-selling authors set about writing a book. Dame Edith Sitwell used to lie in an open coffin for a while before she began her day's writing. When Ackerman mentioned this to a poet friend, he said: "If only someone had thought to shut it." Apparently the 18th century German poet Schiller used to keep rotten apples under the lid of his desk and "inhale their pungent bouquet when he needed to find the right word. Then he would close the drawer, but the fragrance remained in his head". This inspired me to think up something eccentric to do and for a time I tried typing standing up like my late colleague, Cliff Scott, used to do. It didn't work for me. Amanadine Dupin (George Sand) found she wrote best when smoking cigars but her lover, Alfred de Musset, complained that immediately after an intimate session she'd go straight to her writing desk. I think it was Brendan Behan who said nothing worthwhile has ever been written without the aid of alcohol - and he was very good in that direction. Another cigar smoker is children's writer Mary Hoffman who has written 90 books. She writes for adults as Amy Lovell. French novelist Honoré de Balzac drank so much coffee while writing - more than 50 cups a day - that he died from caffeine poisoning. Victor Hugo, Benjamin Franklin and many others did their best work only if they had no clothes on. This is not half as bizarre as Voltaire, who apparently used his lover's naked back for a writing desk. Robert Louis Stevenson, Mark Twain and Truman Capote used to write while lying down while Benjamin Franklin wrote while in a bath. TS Eliot "preferred writing when he had a head cold. The rustling of his head, as if full of petticoats, shattered the usual logical links between things and allowed his mind to roam". My only idiosyncrasy is to get Threnody Higginbottom (my secretary) to make me, hourly, a large mug of unadulterated rooibos tea making sure the tea bag lasts the morning before hanging it out to dry. This could, of course, explain why I'm not writing best sellers.

ENGLISH IS DIFFICULT FOR THE ENGLISH TO LEARN

	James Clarke December 16 2007 at 11:43PM

I often refer to the eccentricities of the English language but the man who has done most to highlight its absurdities is an American teacher of English - Dr Richard Lederer. Many readers will know his first book, Anguished English, which among other delights contains an essay on world history composed entirely of schoolboy howlers from as far back as the 19th century. Example: "The first book of the Bible is Guinness." It goes on to describe how "Joseph gave refuse to the Israelites" and how the Ancient Egyptians built the Pyrenees. It tells about American history - how Franklin declared "a horse divided against itself cannot stand" and how "George Washington married Matha Curtis and in due time became the Father of Our Country". Abraham Lincoln's mother died in infancy and he was born in a log cabin, which he built with his own hands. He said: "In onion there is strength." Lederer also collated some great science "bloopers" written by desperate examination candidates during the 20th century. "Many dead animals in the past changed to fossils while others preferred to be oil," and "Genetics explain why you look like your father and if you don't why you should." Three of my favourite exam answers: "We say the cause of perfume disappearing is evaporation. Evaporation gets blamed for a lot of things people forget to put the top on." "In looking at a drop of water under a microscope we find there are twice as many Hs as Os." "Clouds just keep circling the earth, around and around. And around. There is not much else to do." Lederer points out the absurdity of saying that "writers write" yet "fingers don't fing and grocers don't groce". "If teachers taught, why don't preachers praught? How can a slim chance and a fat chance be the same, while a wise man and wise guy are opposites? How can a person be 'pretty ugly'?" Recently Lynn Haken sent me an anonymous verse and commented: "I am sure you've come across this before." Indeed I had. Once again it was Richard Lederer's. The verse was written out of sympathy with foreigners who have to learn English. We'll begin with a box, and the plural is boxes, But the plural of ox becomes oxen, not oxes. One fowl is a goose, but two are called geese, Yet the plural of moose should never be meese. You may find a lone mouse or a nest full of mice, Yet the plural of house is houses, not hice. If the plural of man is always called men, Why shouldn't the plural of pan be pen? If I speak of my foot and show you my feet, And I give you a boot, would a pair be called beet? If one is a tooth and a whole set are teeth, Why shouldn't the plural of booth be called beeth? Then one may be that, and three would be those, Yet hat in the plural would never be hose, And the plural of cat is cats, not cose. We speak of a brother and also of brethren, But though we say mother, we never say methren. Then the masculine pronouns are he, his and him, But imagine the feminine: she, shis and shim! This is James Clarke's Stoep Talk column, published in The Star newspaper. E-mail him at jcl@onwe.co.za.

November 14 2006 at 12:30PM

By Paul Majendie London- Going doolally? Getting too filmi? Being a bit of a bevakoof? Welcome to the wonderful world of Hinglish, a rich linguistic curry that stirs together English with Punjabi, Urdu and Hindi. And now novelist and teacher Baljinder Mahal has provided readers with a guide to this lively hybrid language - a new dictionary entitled The Queen's Hinglish: How To Speak Pukka. For British Asian families, it is the perfect way to enliven English. On the Indian sub-continent it is a fast-developing lingua franca. "I had so much fun compiling it," Mahal said of the dictionary that stretches from words dating back to the British Raj right up to today's hip advertising slogans. "Doolally is my favourite word, meaning crazy. It was military slang named after a town near Mumbai called Deolali, which was the location for a sanatorium," she said in an interview to mark publication. She scoffs at academic linguists who fret over the purity of the English language. "Language is not set in stone. It is fluid and organic. Chaucer's English is not the same as Shakespeare's English," she said. She is fascinated by the different ways Hinglish has been adopted as one of the fastest growing hybrid languages in the world. "In India it has become quite trendy. The elite speak it, Bollywood speaks it in its films, Corporate India speaks it in its advertising slogans," she said. Children, as linguistic magpies, love to pick it up in the playground as a kind of secret banter that is incomprehensible to adults. "In Britain it has become fashionable, particularly among the young," she said. The dictionary unveils how this quirky clash of tongues has such choice words as "filmi" meaning melodramatic or "bevakoof", Hinglish for a fool. Anyone feeling "glassy" is in need of a drink. A hooligan is a "badmash" and if you need to bring that office meeting forward, it is time to "prepone", as opposed to postpone, it. She said that Hinglish, like the Spanglish spreading across the melting pot that is America, is also a language that underlines the globalisation of India, one of the world's fastest growing economies. Satellite television, the Internet and movies effortlessly spread Hinglish around the world. Mahal, rejoicing in its rapid evolution, said "Language is never static - just like identity."

Learn English or be fired, president warns     December 19 2005 at 04:24PM   IOL NEWS

Ashgabat - Turkmenistan's president has threatened to fire his entire government unless ministers learn to speak English fluently within six months. Previous decrees issued by President Saparmurat Niyazov Turkmenbashi include banning recorded music and men with long hair, and recently he has ordered that a desert zoo have a penguin enclosure. Now, President Turkmenbashi has given his government a six-month ultimatum to become fluent in English in order for them to lead trade talks with foreign companies and governments. Turkmenbashi said: "In the next six months you have to be able to speak English without the help of an interpreter. "I don't care whether you pay for a teacher or you learn it on your own, but you have to talk English in six months. Anyone not fulfilling my decree will be sacked." - Ananova.com

Business emails do require due care   IOL News

April 25 2005 at 08:40AM

By Career Staff Modern business writing is complicated. Mostly, we communicate via email, fax or SMS, and you can't always decipher the sender's intention from a few short words. This is far different from a face-to-face meeting where you can analyse body language, facial expressions and the mood of the meeting. But you can make your business correspondence more effective, says Lisa Lazarus of Boston Language College. The Online Writing Lab at Purdue University offers tips for appropriate email etiquette: Email is like a conversation. For each new subject, write a greeting, for example, Hello John or even simply John. If there are several emails being exchanged about the same topic, it is not necessary to include a greeting with each subsequent email. Use the subject line to alert the recipient to the content of the email. Try to be specific: "follow-up sales meeting", not "meeting". If you are sending an email to several people who are not connected in any way, make sure that you create an anonymous mailing list to keep the identity of the recipients confidential. Punctuate and use capitals in the same way you would for any other document. Don't suddenly switch to all lower-case or upper-case letters. It makes your email look less important and is more difficult to read. Use the correct tone: don't send emoticons such smiley faces or winks to your boss. Emails create an electronic trail, so be very careful about what you send out. Give attachments appropriate titles so they can easily be found if downloaded, and keep them small. If you're sending the attached file to a home email account, keep it smaller than 150kB or ask permission to send a larger file. Business email addresses can often accept larger files. Boston Language College offers a variety of short courses that assist in improving communication skills. Contact Boston Language College on 021 422 4111 or info@bostonlanguagecollege.com

James Clarke's Stoep Talk column:   Verbosity: circumlocutory and boring   (from IOL News)

James Clarke April 11 2005 at 07:03AM

Annually a media group in Britain lists winners and sinners in a project called the Plain English Campaign. The campaign includes a Foot in Mouth Award which this year went to Boris Johnson, MP for a comment on television: "I could not fail to disagree with you less." The category that, for me, holds a morbid fascination is the Golden Bull Award. In a letter to widows the Bank of Scotland won a GB award for: "We hereby give you notice that the Bank of Scotland have retrocessed, reponed and restored Executors and Assignees, in and to their own right and place in the undernoted policy of Assurance by our Office, Videlicet..." The Department of Health won a similar award for a definition of a container in the "Medicines for Human Use (Clinical Trials) Regulations". "'Container', in relation to an investigational medicinal product, means the bottle, jar, box, packet or other receptacle which contains or is to contain it, not being a capsule, cachet or other article in which the product is or is to be administered, and where any such receptacle is or is to be contained in another such receptacle, includes the former but does not include the latter." Then an educational project at the University of Reading was explained thus: "The project is structured around a multifaceted incremental work plan combining novel content design based on new pedagogical paradigms blended with the e-learning environments to facilitate hybrid mode of delivery ... "Our pedagogical approach is based on the educational model which assumes that the learning process is an interactive process of seeking understanding, consisting of three fundamental components: Conceptualisation, Construction and Dialogue. The relevant modules of the New Curricula are mapped onto these three components and a hybrid way of delivery is investigated through different scenarios." Pedagogical paradigms! Oh, how somebody must have hugged himself over that one. And that dreadful use of the word "impact" when they mean "affect". Panorama Software won a Golden Bull for a brochure advertising a seminar with Microsoft: "Accountability has taken on a new meaning. Any employee that can impact results must be empowered to make decisions. How do you provide information access and business visibility universally across your enterprise? "The Panorama Software and Microsoft Roundtable is gathering leading minds in business intelligence and the analyst community for expert consensus on the answer. Dialogue and discourse will focus on how business intelligence can address key strategic challenges concerning customers, costs, competition and change. "Industry experts will highlight how you can leverage business intelligence to provide visibility into business critical information." British Telecom also won an award for an e-mail to a customer: "BT have started processing the first stage of our MPF orders i.e. the line test and production of a line characteristics report. However with the second stage (i.e. physically installing the metallic facility path between the customers line and the Trilogy equipment) they will only walk one or two orders through the system Thursday of next week." Did you get it? "Physically installing the metallic facility path" means, "laying the cable".

IOL News: The Cape Times       August 22 2003 at 02:38AM