Showing posts sorted by relevance for query "my mother". Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query "my mother". Sort by date Show all posts

Anglo-Saxon

Apr 19, 2025

The first thing that made me want to write about Anglo-Saxon was my experience of French exchange students using the term to mean 'anglophone, English-speaking'. I'd warn them against the term, stating (but perhaps not explaining) that it is inaccurate and has connotations they didn't intend in British/American English. (So here comes the explanation.) The second thing is that I've been writing about the history of English and have chosen to mostly refer to Anglo-Saxon rather than Old English and I'm thinking about that choice. The third thing is that Dave Wilton (who writes the fantastic Word Origins newsletter) published a paper in 2020 on the topic that's been on my TBR pile for a while—so writing this post provided me with an excuse to take the time for it.

Anglo-Saxon v Old English

Let me address my second thing first: Why would I want to call the Germanic pre-Norman conquest language/dialects of Britain (5th–11th century) Anglo-Saxon when the name Old English feels more transparent? It's English! But it's Old! 

It's that transparency that I want to resist. The name Old English makes it sound like it's the same language as we speak, just an older form. But we really have to question whether it is the same language at all. Yes, I would count Modern English as a Germanic language derived from that previous language, but the fallout of the Norman conquest so thoroughly changed English that it stopped being 'the same language'. The grammar is different, the vocabulary is different, the pronunciation is unfamiliar, the words that have survived often mean very different things today. As this Tiktoker says, you don't need footnotes, you need a translation:



Confusingly, it's common to hear people refer to old English (or Old English?) in reference to Shakespearean English—or even Dickensian. The film director Robert Eggers, whose forthcoming film Werwulf is in Middle English, has been fighting a battle against this kind of misuse:

Film Crave‬ ‪@filmcrave.bsky.social‬ · 8d Robert Eggers has revealed that the dialogue in his upcoming film #Werwulf will be entirely in Middle English: « It’s been said, and taken as official, that the movie is in Old English. But obviously, because of the 13th-century setting, it’s Middle English. I just want to be clear on that. »


So, just to be clear, here are the periods of English, as usually defined:
  • ca. 450AD/CE to 1150ish: Old English/Anglo-Saxon. 
    from the Germanic invasions till the start of Middle English. This can be further divided into prehistoric (450–650), early (650–900) and late periods (900–1150). Beowulf is the most famous literary work from this time.
  • 1066 to 1500ish: Middle English
    from the Norman (French) invasion through the Great English Vowel Shift. This also has early and late periods. Chaucer's Canterbury Tales is the most famous bit.
  • 1500ish to 1650ish:  Early Modern English
    Shakespeare times. King James Bible times. 
  • 1650ish to now: Late Modern English
    No more thou, no more hath, and lots more vocabulary thanks to industriali{s/z}ation and the spread of English worldwide.
The dates should be taken as severely "mushy," since change spread gradually through the Anglosphere—or through England and the British Isles, the limits of the Anglosphere for most of its history.

So, that's one use of Anglo-Saxon: to refer to the people, culture or language of the Germanic-speaking people of Britain before the 12th century. That's the most straightforward meaning.

Anglo-Saxons = English speakers?

But the Anglo-Saxons didn't call themselves Anglo-Saxon. That term didn't arrive till the 1600s. And it didn't get much traction until the 19th century. Here's a bit I wrote about it in The Prodigal Tongue:


    At the height of the British Empire, English intellectuals were taken with the notion of an “Anglo-Saxon race”, tracing its roots to the Germanic peoples who settled in Britain after the Romans left in the 5th century. With self-satisfaction they concluded that their “race” was something special, illustrated by the strength of their culture over that of the conquered Celts, their early codification of individual rights with the Magna Carta in 1215, and their break with the Roman church in the 16th century. Belief in their own good example made appropriating other peoples’ lands much easier to justify – and Americans of English stock were happy to share in this myth. But by the 20th century, talk of an Anglo-Saxon race had fallen out of fashion, and instead of genetic inheritance, it was language that seemed to unite us.

    Thus we started to be called the English-speaking peoples, a term used with particular influence by two statesmen-historians, Theodore Roosevelt in The Winning of the West and Winston Churchill in A History of the English-speaking Peoples. President and prime minister turned to this language-based description of “our peoples” because other possible descriptions had become impossible.


My French students were still using the Anglo-Saxon race to refer to 'the English-speaking peoples'. One problem in using the term that way is that "races" allegedly have a common genetic heritage, and English-speakers don't. Many Americans cannot trace their ancestry back to England. We are a transatlantic linguistic group and we share some aspects of our cultures. But it's weird to call us a race in contemporary English.

I had a look in the French Web corpus in SketchEngine (frTenTen23) and found some examples of the French usage, just so you can see what I'm talking about (the blue bits are from Google Translate):

  • une politique audacieuse pour défendre la langue et la culture française qui se trouvent aujourd'hui particulièrement menacées par l'invasion de la langue anglaise et de la culture anglo-saxonne .
    a bold policy to defend the French language and culture, which are today particularly threatened by the invasion of the English language and Anglo-Saxon culture.
  • L'hôpital a mis en place un concept qui vient des pays anglo-saxons nommé "Kids friendly".
    The hospital has implemented a concept that comes from Anglo-Saxon countries called "Kids friendly". 
  • cette brutale franchise, qui caractérisent la race anglo-saxonne .
    that brutal frankness, which characterizes the Anglo-Saxon race.  

  • Cette ardeur chrétienne est-elle particulière à la race anglo-saxonne ?
    Is this Christian ardo(u)r peculiar to the Anglo-Saxon race?

The Anglo-Saxon race-ism

Meanwhile in the equivalent English corpus (enTenTen21), mentions of "the Anglo-Saxon race" are much more likely to be associated with white power movements and eugenics—a big reason I wanted to steer my French students away that phrase. For example:
  • "The new Constitution eliminates the ignorant Negro vote and places the control of our government where God Almighty intended it should be – with the Anglo-Saxon race ," John Knox, the president of the [Alabama] constitutional convention, said in a speech encouraging voters to ratify the document [in 1901] [source]
  • Galton declared that the "Bohemian" element in the Anglo-Saxon race is destined to perish, and "the sooner it goes, the happier for mankind." [source]
But this isn't a blog about French/English differences. It's a blog about differences in American and British English—and I had a feeling we'd find differences in how Anglo-Saxon is used in my two countries. 

WASP

I first learned the term Anglo-Saxon as a child when I asked my mother about the AmE term Wasp or WASP. The OED's first citation for that term comes from a sociology journal in 1962:
    For the sake of brevity we will use the nickname 'Wasp' for this group, from the initial letters of ‘White Anglo-Saxon Protestants’.
The OED notes that the term is "originally and chiefly U.S." and "frequently derogatory." The Anglo-Saxon in Wasp is meant to distinguish certain white Americans: not the Irish, nor the Scots-Irish, not the Germans, not the Poles... When I hear Wasp I think (NAmE)  "old money", members of Daughters of the American Revolution, and people who claim to trace their ancestry back to the Mayflower. 

It's hard to exclude the stinging insect when looking for Wasp in a corpus, but White Anglo-Saxon Protestant(s) occurs about five times per decade in the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) between 1960 and 2000, and not at all in this century. That's not to say it's dead: there are 11 uses in AmE in the (much larger) Corpus of Global Web-Based English, collected in 2012–3.  According to the News on the Web corpus, that was a stand-out year for white Anglo-Saxon protestant(s). The graph shows worldwide numbers. It occurs 8.7 times per million words in the American news corpus and 3.6 times per million in the British, usually in stories about the US.

Three uses of Anglo-Saxon in American and British corpora (Wilton 2020)

We've seen a few meanings of Anglo-Saxon here, and that's what Wilton investigates in his paper by going deeper into a number of corpora:

  Wilton, David. 2020. What Do We Mean By Anglo-Saxon? Pre-Conquest to the Present. The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 119.425–454. doi:10.5406/jenglgermphil.119.4.0425.

Writing for philologists, he's concerned that trends in how the term is used in general English might be bad for use of the term in medieval studies. (For what it's worth, BrE style guides these days prefer medieval over mediaeval.) Here, I'm concerned just with whether there's a difference between British and American usage, what that's about, and whether there's risk of miscommunication between AmE & BrE.

Wilton tracks three uses of Anglo-Saxon:

  • Pre-Conquest: referring to the Germanic peoples of Britain before 1066

  • Politicocultural: "references to the politics, economics, and culture of present-day Britain, the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, and especially the transnational characteristics that these nations share that are not explicitly ethnic or physiognomic." (p. 433)   So: like the French usage above. 

  • Ethnoracial: "any use of Anglo-Saxon that is applied to an individual person; that refers to physiognomy, personal appearance, DNA or genetics or ancestry; or that contrasts Anglo-Saxon with another ethnic or racial group, as well as instances of the phrase white Anglo-Saxon Protestant and the acronym WASP." (p. 433)

Using those three categories, Wilton analy{s/z}ed use of Anglo-Saxon in the COHA corpus:

He notes the increase around the turn of the 20th century, when "immigration from Southern Europe peaked, Jim Crow laws were instituted, lionization of the Confederacy and the 'lost cause' began, and membership in the Ku Klux Klan reached its height" but that the use is still mostly not making reference to Anglo-Saxons as a "race" with physical characteristics at this point (p. 443). He supposes that this might be because whiteness is such a default at this time in American thinking that there's less need to be racially specific. The Ethnoracial usage becomes dominant after 1970, in a period that, Wilton notes, is marked by "white flight" to the suburbs. (By 1970, immigration laws had liberalized and there had been a "Great Migration" of African Americans from the rural south to northern urban cent{er/re}s.)

There is no British equivalent to the COHA corpus (a real shame), so Wilton had a look in the parliamentary record to see British use of Anglo-Saxon in the same period. It's not (as he acknowledges) a fair comparison, but it is interesting:


He notes that the ethnoracial uses in parliament are mostly about distinguishing the English from the Irish, Welsh and Scots at the national level. I want to know: why are British parliamentarians talking about ancient times so much in the 70s and 80s? I had a quick dip in to the corpus and found reference to Anglo-Saxon law and Anglo-Saxon hoards. It could be that Old English or other descriptors were used more before—but it also looks like there were various arch(a)eological finds post-1970 that might have led to more discussion of antiquities in parliament. But I don't really know.

Moving on to more recent times, here's what Wilton found in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA):



Ethnoracial usage dominates. 

Again, we don't have a good comparison corpus for British English, but the findings from the British National Corpus (texts from 1980–93) look like this:


Wilton followed up with the News on the Web corpus, which is more comparable across countries, comparing two short periods in each, 2012–13 and 2017–18.


(As you can see, he's also analy{s/z}ed Canada, which has its own patterns, and which I'm not covering here because that's not my beat. But do follow up with Wilton's paper if you're interested.)

So both countries have all the uses, but the UK has a lot more Pre-Conquest usage, which is not at all surprising, since you run into Pre-Conquest things in the place that was conquered—less so in the place later conquered by some people from the place that was conquered. 

More notable is the division of ethnoracial versus politicocultural usage in the two countries. 

In Britain, there's either even (BNC, 1980–93) distribution of ethnoracial and politicocultural or lots more politicocultural (NOW, 2010s). Wilton writes:
    One might have expected an increase in the ethnoracial uses of “Anglo-Saxon” [in the UK] since the advent of the Brexit era, but the data shows this not to be the case. Any impression otherwise is probably due to increased awareness of ethnoracial uses of the term. In other words, people are only now noticing the uses that have always been there or are now reading ethnic connotations into the term that they had not before.
Wilton goes on to show that politicocultural interpretations dominate in other English-speaking nations, except the US and Canada, where the proportion of ethnoracial uses is around half of total uses and seems to be increasing. 

In The Prodigal Tongue, I quote the late Guardian columnist Simon Hoggart: 
    A wise American reporter based in London once told me that every British news story is, deep down, about class. Every American story, he said, is about race.
Our linguistic differences often support that impression. 

So, in terms of mutual understanding, I would expect that Americans seeing BrE use of Anglo-Saxon might easily take an ethnoracial impression where a politicocultural one is intended, since AmE use is heavily skewed toward that meaning and vice versa. The differences between these two uses are sometimes hard to pick apart—Wilton acknowledges that he sometimes found ambiguity in his data and needed to pick a side for the analysis. And that makes them even more apt to fly under our "semantic difference radar". 
Read more
Labels: | 26 comments

introducing yourself

Jun 12, 2012
Here is a favo(u)rite passage of mine from Kate Fox's Passport to the Pub: The Tourist's Guide to Pub Etiquette:
Don’'t ever introduce yourself. The “Hi, I’m Chuck from Alabama” approach does not go down well in British pubs. Natives will cringe and squirm with embarrassment at such brashness. If your introduction is accompanied by a beaming smile and outstretched hand, they will probably find an excuse to get away from you as quickly as possible. Sorry, but that'’s how it is. The British quite frankly do not want to know your name, or shake your hand – or at least not until a proper degree of mutual interest has been well established (like maybe when you marry their daughter). You will have to adopt a more subtle, less demonstrative approach.
In her book Watching the English (which I don't have with me at the moment--so this is from memory), Fox quotes the reaction of an American couple who were clearly upset and puzzled by this British behavio(u)r. They felt that it was some kind of cruel game for the British to withhold that basic information about themselves. The thing to understand here is this: the British sense of personal privacy is very different from the American one. Asking someone's name, even implicitly by offering yours, is a premature violation of that privacy until some goodwill has already been established between you.

I observe this all the time on the playground. The British parents strike up conversations, and may ask about each other's children's names (which they can then use to encourage their children to play together), but they don't introduce themselves. If you've got(ten) along very well, then maybe--but probably not the first time you've met--you might say 'By the way, I'm [your name here]' before you part company. Maybe.

I saw Better Half speak on two occasions with the mother of a little girl who is close to Grover's age. After the first time, he said "I think she might be someone I worked with years ago." Only at the end of the second (long) conversation did they do the "By the way, I'm..." thing, at which point they discovered that they had worked together and both had recogni{z/s}ed each other, but were afraid to approach the topic in case they were wrong. Contrast this to me meeting another American at a party--within five minutes we've established our names, where we're from, who we work for, and several points of common experience--places we've both been and people we've met who the other might have met. And I am an awkward American. I hate small talk. But establishing these similarities is de rigueur for American conversation (recall our previous discussion of compliments). Because I am awkward, and hyper-aware of certain interactional markers of foreignness in British conversations, I am completely tongue-tied on the playground. I know how not to start a conversation in a British context, but I consider the most common acceptable ways to start a conversation (commenting on the weather or the busyness of the playground) too boring/obvious to start with, so I get stuck.*

It was reassuring, then, to see some quantitative research backing up my own impressions and Fox's observations in Klaus Schneider's new (in-press) paper 'Appropriate behaviour across varieties of English' in the Journal of Pragmatics. Schneider compared the openings of small-talk conversations between teens at parties in Ireland, the US, and England. The majority of English teens (56.7%) start with a greeting only (e.g. Hi), while Americans prefer greeting + identifying themselves (60%) and sometimes explicitly asking for the other person's name. The Irish teens prefer greeting + what Schneider calls an 'approach' (73.3%), in which they refer to the context and evaluate it (almost always in a positive way). His example of an approach is Great party, isn't it?**

Looking at the elements of an opening separately, Americans are more likely to introduce themselves than to greet you with a hi or hello.  In the graph below DISC-ID means 'disclose identity'--i.e. introduce yourself.


(The figure is about a subset of the data, so the numbers don't match the more general analysis of the data in my earlier paragraph. The numbers don't add up to 100% because there are other things you might do besides these three--but these are the most frequent.)

While the data is from teens, it feels pretty representative of what adults do.

So, please, go to some parties and experiment with this and report back here. Just don't do your experiments on me. I'll be standing in the corner, pretending to notice something remarkable in my drink, trying to avoid all the pitfalls of small talk.

And in other news: 
  • I've been pathetic about blogging here, haven't I? So I completely didn't deserve to be in the Lexiophiles/bab.la Top 25 Language Bloggers this year, and I wasn't. (For the first time. I feel duly punished!) But have a look at the link for the good ones.
  • The voters and the judges were kind to my Twitter account (even though they didn't identify me by my Twitter handle in the voting--it was strange). I made it to #9 there. Here's the full list.
  • But I haven't been completely neglecting my writing-about-AmE/BrE vocation. Since the last blog, I've talked at TedXSussexUniversity on American/British politeness norms and at Horsham Skeptics in the Pub. I'll link to the TedX talk when it's on-line. The SitP talk is reviewed here. But don't read the review if you want to see me give the talk (too many spoilers!). I'm doing it again at the Brighton Skeptics in the Pub in October. A few other things are in the pipeline...


*In a cross-cultural communication course I used to teach, one of the readings was about Finnish culture, and the point that really stuck with me was that Finns are often puzzled (or maybe annoyed) by English speakers' need to state the obvious. Why say Nice weather!, for instance, when everyone can see what the weather's like? It made Finland sound like some kind of anti-small-talk Nirvana that I'd want to live in, but it's also made me super-critical of myself when I interact with Finns. There is no hope for me--I am awkward in every culture.

** Schneider also notes the predictability of the Great party! line:
Great is clearly preferred by speakers of IrE, but speakers of AmE make use of a wider range of lexical items. These include great, good, nice, especially cool and also fun, as, e.g.in Fun party, huh?
Read more
Labels: , | 66 comments

take-outs and take-aways

Feb 13, 2010
I've settled into Twitter by attempting a "Difference of the Day" each day, as well as passing on other (BrE) titbits/(AmE) tidbits of possible dialectal and cross-cultural interest.  There's only so much you can do in 140 characters, so most of the "differences" are over-simplified, as my Twitter followers and Facebook friends are happy to point out.  Yesterday's tweet inspired a fair amount of fine-tuning by readers.  It went:
In hono(u)r of Friday night, the Difference of the Day is AmE take-out (noun) and to-go (adj/adv) vs. BrE take-away.
Let's start with the BrE one.  Take-away is extremely flexible, both grammatically and semantically.  It can be:
A noun for the food that's been taken away:  We had a Chinese take-away.
A noun for a place that only sells prepared food to eat off-site: We went to the Chinese take-away.
An adjective for such food or place: a take-away pizza
A phrasal verb: Is that to eat here (or eat in) or take away?
On the last point: it's not really a full-fledged verb. You never hear anyone say We took out or We took out a pizza (or even worse, We took out a Chinese).  It's used mainly in the infinitive and mainly in the process of making or receiving a food order.  After the fact, you'd say We got a take-away, or some such thing.

A couple of readers pointed out that in Scottish English it would be carry-out (with the same grammatical range) rather than take-away.  I'll still call take-away BrE rather than just English English since (a) it's certainly spread that far, even if it's not the native term; there are businesses that call themselves take-aways in Edinburgh and Glasgow (though probably more that call themselves carry-outs, it's true) and (b) 'non-Scottish' doesn't necessarily mean 'English'--there are other parts of the UK too.  On point (a), there are over a million hits for each of take-away+Edinburgh and carry-out+Edinburgh, and the Glaswegian equivalents--in fact, one of the first hits is www.glasgowtakeaways.co.uk.

Damien Hall wrote to say:

I haven't checked this, but I think I've heard that this is a demonstration of a classic dialectological phenomenon, two varieties with an intermediate transition zone in between: so Southern English take-away, Scots carry-out, and I think some bits of Northern English say take-out.
Damien has remembered correctly.  I found this quotation in "The study of dialect convergence and divergence: conceptual and methodological considerations" by Frans Hinskens, Peter Auer, and Paul Kerswill (in their edited collection Dialect Change, Cambridge University Press, 2005):
Whenever dialect mixing leads to the stabilisation of the variants that are typical of the respective ‘pure’ lects along with additional ‘compromise’ variants, one usually speaks of fudging (cf. Chambers and Trudgill 1998: 110–118; Britain 2002, 2004). [...] a similar, more recent, example from British English, discussed by Trudgill, concerns central and southern take away, the northern variant carry out, and the intermediate take out, which is used in the southern part of northern England.
Incidentally, if you're getting fish and (BrE) chips, you generally don't need to mention that it's take-away.  As we say in Linguistics, fish and chips are unmarked for taking-away--it's far less usual to have your fish and chips in a restaurant. A (BrE) fish-and-chip shop is perhaps the archetype of British take-away establishments, and they most often don't have seating for eating-in.

On to the American: take-out does not have quite the range that take-away does, since it shares the work with to-go (which we have discussed a little bit already).  A friend pointed out that he'd say carry-out for pizza or Italian food.  And you know what?  So would I.   I'm not sure why this is--it doesn't seem to be particularly regional, since my friend is from California, living in Illinois, and I'm from New York state.

The noun take-out has a very New York City feel to me, but that's probably just because I grew up in a part of the state that didn't really have take-out establishments (fast food, yes; Chinese restaurants, no) in my long-ago (1970s/80s) youth.  The fast-food places would ask if you wanted your food for here or to go.  (Indeed, I had to ask that myself during my two stints of McDonald's purgatory-on-Earth.)  The pizza places ask if you want it for carry-out (or also pick-up) or delivery.   For me in my youth, getting a take-out was what people on television did--though getting carry-out pizza was a regular treat for us.

A completely non-linguistic aside: it can be funny to reali{s/z}e how atypical one's everyday foods can be.  For me, pizza is the food of childhood (perhaps it wasn't so in other parts of the US way back then--I'm not sure. The northeast has had plenty of Italian immigration.)   Better Half was introduced to pizza when he was about 13 at Pizzaland, where they served up a half a pizza with a (BrE) jacket potato/(AmE) baked potato and cole slaw.  I still get the giggles whenever he mentions it.  (His sister's mother-in-law made it into her 70s without ever having had pasta.  She was not impressed when Sister-in-Law introduced her to it.)  I also find it funny that some English people say to me that they couldn't eat pizza often.  I reply: but you have sandwiches every day--what's the difference? It's another way of having bread with cheese, meat or veg and condiments.  (It becomes clear in most cases that we're never going to see eye-to-eye on this.  But as a conciliatory point, I really like British pizza--which is more like what one gets in northern Italy. Thin, olive-oily crusts and top-rate toppings.)

On the other hand, a few English people have asked me how curry here compares to Indian food in the US, and I have to explain that I never had Indian food until I moved to South Africa in my mid-20s--and that I have never lived in an American town that had an Indian restaurant (though some of the towns have changed by now--though their Indian places are generally fairly fancy, not the kinds of places you'd get a take-away/take-out curry from).  I still haven't acquired the British native's facility with an Indian menu. I can tell you that I like dupiazas (or dopiazas), that chicken tikka masala is supposedly the national dish of the UK and that kurmas (or kormas) are for (orig. AmE) wimps.  Other than that, I have to read all the fine print on the menus.  Here's a cheat-sheet if, like me, you need one...
Read more
Labels: , , , | 63 comments

aberrant

Apr 8, 2010
Regular reader/commenter John Cowan wrote a few weeks ago to ask:

Would you consider polling your readership for their pronunciation of aberrant?  The OED2 gives only penultimate stress (the OED3 hasn't reached the word yet); m-w.com gives both initial and penultimate stress. My sense is that initial stress is far more common, partly because I've only heard that, and partly because of the frequent misspelling "abberant", which would be regular for initial stress.  But there may be an AmE/BrE factor at work here.
Unlike John, I only really know the penultimate stress version (aBERrant rather than ABerrant).  Just to prove me exceptional (doesn't that sound better than wrong?), my mother has just pronounced it with first-syllable stress.  On other recent occasions, I've heard the ABerrant pronunciation and assumed it to be from someone who's less than familiar with the word.  I know it, and have feelings about it, because  I had to learn for vocabulary quizzes in (AmE) 9th grade.  Last week I went to the funeral of the teacher who made me so judg(e)mental about other people's pronunciations.  Rest in peace, Mrs(.) Biddle!

I was interested to read the American Heritage Dictionary Usage Panel's take on the matter:
Traditionally aberrant has been pronounced with stress on the second syllable. In recent years, however, a pronunciation with stress on the first syllable has become equally common and may eventually supplant the older pronunciation. This change is owing perhaps to the influence of the words aberration and aberrated, which are stressed on the first syllable. The Usage Panel was divided almost evenly on the subject: 45 percent preferred the older pronunciation and 50 percent preferred the newer one. The remaining 5 percent of the Panelists said they use both pronunciations. 
 So, that's America.  What about the UK?  The Oxford BBC Guide to Pronunciation offers the older pronunciation only--but the fact that the word has made it into the guide probably indicates some insecurity about how it should be pronounced.  John Wells's Longman Pronunciation Dictionary lists both (older first) with no comment.  He's graciously responded to my email on the topic, saying:

Our stress rules for Latin and Greek words give stress on the -err- because of the geminated consonant (i.e. double in Latin and in spelling). Compare "venerate" with single r. So penultimate stress is what we expect, and the only form given in the OED.  However I have heard initial stress occasionally. I have no statistics on how widespread this might be.

So, what do you say (if you say it)?  Please remember to say where you're from when you answer!
Read more
Labels: , | 77 comments

write (to) someone

Oct 26, 2009
Frequent contributor Marc wrote to say that he:
received this comment about a draft letter I prepared:

"Can you please put in I AM WRITING TO YOU NOT I AM WRITING YOU..this is amercian and bad english."

Comment is from an England-born Australian.

I am willing to admit that this may be American English (and the letter is on behalf of an organization that is supposed to use "international" (i.e., British) English. But it's certainly not "bad English", is it? (And I do find it easier accepting criticism on my English that is spelled and capitalized properly... but that's another issue.)

If there is a difference between UK and US English on this, does it apply to other verbs, such as "send"?
Well, as long as people are being judg(e)mental about others' language here, I'll say that it's Rude English (RdE) to claim that someone else's dialect is 'bad English'. Let's see what Fowler's Modern English Usage (3rd edition) has to say about write:
The transitive AmE use = 'to communicate with (a person) in writing' is shown in the following examples from short stories in the New Yorker. I had written my mother about all this (1987); Liza, my dear, I have never written you yet to thank you for going out to our house (1993). This construction was formerly standard in BrE ('frequent from c 1790' says the OED), but it is now in restricted use unless accompanied by a second (direct) object, as in I shall write you a letter as soon as I land in Borneo. In old-fashioned commercial correspondence the types We wrote you yesterday; Please write us at your convenience were often used, but nowadays to would normally be inserted before you and us.
Meanwhile, John Algeo's British or American English? says:
Ditransitive [i.e. with two objects--Lynneguist] use of write (I wrote them a letter) is common-core English. But some ditransitive verbs can also be used with either object alone: I told them a story. I told a story. I told them. In American English, write belongs to that category: I wrote a letter. I wrote them. In British English, however, if write has a single object, it is normally the ditransitive direct object, and when the ditransitive indirect object occurs instead, it is the object of a preposition: I wrote to them. Also in British, if the direct object function is filled by direct or indirect discourse, the same prohibition against the ditransitive indirect object exists: I wrote to them, "I'll come on Sunday," not ?I wrote them, "I'll come on Sunday." I wrote to them that I would come on Sunday, not ?I wrote them that I would come on Sunday.
So, to sum up:
  • I'm writing you a letter is standard AmE and standard BrE.
  • I'm writing you to ask a question is fine in AmE and used to be fine in BrE.
As for other verbs, Marc mentions send, but we can't use that with just the recipient of the sending in either dialect: *I sent you. (* means 'ungrammatical')
send: I sent a package to him. I sent him a package. I sent a package. *I sent him.
So, send is in the wrong class of verbs for comparison. Write in AmE is more like tell and the following verbs, in that it can both take two objects without any prepositions and it can have just the recipient of the communication as a single object (which may or may not occur with other non-object kinds of things, as indicated in the parentheses/brackets below).
tell: I told Di a secret. I told Di (about the fire).
ask: I asked Di a question. I asked Di (about the fire).
teach: I taught the students an equation. I taught the students (about fire safety).
All of those ditransitive and transitive versions are fine in BrE--so it is only write, as far as I know, that creates a problem. Having a look in Beth Levin's wonderful* English verb classes and their alternations (1993), I'm a little disappointed to find that she's not treated this class of verbs ('Verbs of transfer of a message') fully--but she does admit to this. Since the class also includes things like preach and quote and those don't fall into the same patterns as ask and teach and tell, there's yet some work to be done here.**

So, this is all to say that there are some patterns to be found in verbs of this type, but that not every verb follows them, so it's not surprising that this is an area where dialectal differences might crop up. But don't blame the Americans. We're not the ones who (orig. AmE) ditched a perfectly good transitive verb!

* No, I'm not being sarcastic. Linguists adoooore books like this.
** Hey, final-year students--why not you?!
Read more
Labels: , , , | 66 comments

the language of bridge

Nov 9, 2020

On occasion, I invite people whose insights I trust to contribute guest posts for the blog. On rare occasions, they deliver the goods! I hope you enjoy this one on terminology in the game of contract bridge.

 


My mother could never understand how I was allowed a (AmE) college/(BrE) university degree without learning to play bridge, but I was educated in the decade of Trivial Pursuit. I tried to rectify this gap in my education in the early 2000s. After maybe three lessons, the couple who were teaching me had a fight and that was the end of that! Maybe learning to play bridge be my retirement project. One of the dozens I have in mind. At any rate, I am not the person to tell you about bridge terminology, but here’s someone who is.

 

Simon Cochemé is an English bridge writer and is a regular contributor of light-hearted articles to bridge magazines. He has recently published a collection of the best of them in a book, Bridge with a Twist (Master Point Press). ‘Destined to be ranked as a classic, alongside its prequel, Oliver Twist.’

 

There are seven chapters on the language of bridge – vocabulary and idioms from (a)round the world. This post is an edited version of the chapter on American terminology – written with American spelling.

***

 

The Language of Bridge III

 

In which we look across the Atlantic at what the Americans have to say

 

George Bernard Shaw (or possibly Oscar Wilde) said that England and America were two nations separated by a common language. Bridge terminology certainly proves the point. We say protect, they say balance; we say switch, they say shift; we say dummy, they [sometimes] say board; we say peter, they say echo; we say tomahto, they say tomayto; we say finesse, they say hook; we say singleton, they say stiff; we say discard, they [often] say pitch.

 

There’s more. They say push instead of flat board, down one instead of one down, ace-fourth instead of ace-to-four, set for beating the contract, and drawing trump rather than drawing trumps, as though they always played in twelve-card fits. You will still occasionally read deuce for the two of a suit, although the quaint trey for the three has all but disappeared.

 

There are some words that have yet to cross the Pond: tight, meaning doubleton, as in ‘He held king-queen tight’ and swish, meaning passed out, as in ‘The bidding went 2♠, swish’. I have also heard (but not seen in print) ‘Four hearts in the East’ where the British would say ‘Four hearts by East’.

 

Things get even more confusing with the word tap. Where we say force (as in force declarer), they say tap; but where we say tap (in plumbing), they say faucet. 

The most extreme of American phrases is ruff ‘n’ sluff for ruff-and-discard. I haven’t seen sluff or slough used anywhere else in bridge literature, so presumably the lure of the rhyme was too hard to resist, as it was with surf ‘n’ turf.

 

Americans like variety in the presentation of their sports results: ‘The Red Sox downed the 49ers’, for example, or ‘The Chipmunks whupped the Bears’. The English tend to stick to the ‘Chelsea beat Liverpool’ formula, with the occasional ‘Villa lost to Spurs’ thrown in. Americans [tend to] put the winning team first, whereas the English usually put the home team first. Either way, the English results are a bit boring. 

 

Sporting metaphors abound in American writing, and I have seen bridge articles where a player covers all bases, or makes a clutch shot, or plays a shut-out. I have no idea what slam-dunk means; it sounds as though you had twelve tricks on top but went one down. I have yet to find mention of a triple-double (basketball) or pass interference (American football), but I’m sure they’re out there.

 

We must fight fire with fire; difficult contracts must be played on sticky wickets and small slams hit for six Declarer must play a blinder, and overbidders should be caught offside or shown the red card.

 

There is a nice expression that I have seen American teachers use, encouraging their pupils to draw trumps before the defenders can ruff something: Get the kids off the streets.

 

The French have names for the kings on their cards (David (from the Bible), Charles (after Charlemagne), Caesar (Julius), and Alexander (the Great). I understand the Americans have noted it and like the idea. They don’t have any real kings of their own, so the debate is whether to reuse the Mount Rushmore quartet, or to go with four from the shortlist of Martin Luther, Stephen, Billie Jean, Burger, Kong and Elvis. [jk—ed.]

 

Let’s have a deal. This one features Zia Mahmood, who was (AmE) on (BrE in) the USA team against Italy in the final of the World Championships in 2009. …

 

[The chapter goes on to describe a bridge deal, the bidding and play, in great detail using the American terms. It will be completely incomprehensible to anyone who doesn’t play bridge. If you want to see whether the USA team wins or loses, you will have to buy the book …]

 

***

 

Lynne says: For good measure, here’s a corpus search of that last difference, in/on the team, which goes far beyond bridge:

 


 

 

Bridge with a Twist (RRP £14.95) is available at a number of online sites.

 

 

 

Read more
Labels: , , , , , | 19 comments

rambling, hiking and walking on footpaths and trails

Jun 28, 2020
We went for a walk with the neighbo(u)rs, and we saw this sign.


The sign reads "Permissive Footpath avoiding Golf Course", and all the adults in our group (2 English, 1 Spanish, 1 American) found the sign amusing. Jokes about what kinds of permissive activities we might find on the path (or that we might find the path doing) resulted, as well as a conversation about what the sign meant and whether it could have been phrased better.

You can tell from this that we're not seasoned country walkers, we're just lockdown people finding new ways to get some exercise. The term permissive footpath is a term of art in the British land-use bureaucracy, and such signs can be found on many paths. It differs from a public footpath in that the land is privately owned. The landowner is permitting people to walk on their path. This explanation of the term offers other expressions like permitted footpath and concessionary footpath, but these seem to be much less common, and we would not have been able to joke as much about them. (For those puzzled by our amusement: permissive usually means 'characteri{s/z}ed by great freedom of behavio(u)r', which can include 'sexually liberated'.)

So, permissive footpath is not something you'd see in AmE, but that's because there's a lot different about leisurely country walks in the two countries. And this is why this post has taken a couple of weeks to write...

walking verbs

Let's start by mentioning (it has come up on the blog before) that to hike is usually considered an Americanism, in the sense that it's widespread and "standard" in American English, but it's only ever been a dialect word in the UK. The OED cites an 1825 dictionary of west-of-England dialects as one of its earliest sources for it.

While it's been coming back to the UK, all of its senses were more common in AmE first, for example the noun use as in go for a hike and the more figurative use in hike up a price. Some of the figurative uses seem more common in BrE corpora now, though. You can see the change in this Google ngram for price hike, where the red line indicates the phrase in AmE books and the blue in BrE. It looks like the kind of pattern you'd see with parents and slang...they start using the word when the kids are already moving on to a new one, then carry on using it at a higher rate than those who made it up.


In BrE, those who hike as a regular pastime are often referred to as ramblers, but it's far more common to talk about walking than rambling. (Rambling and Rambler tend to be used in the names of walking clubs, such as the Essex Area Ramblers, who are responsible for the website that taught me about permissive paths.) Of course, English-speakers everywhere use the verb to walk. But for me (at least) what's different is that I have a town/country divide in my AmE: If I'm walking around town for leisure, I'm going for a walk. If I go out of town to walk (on less even terrain, taking more care with my footwear and supplies), I'm going hiking.  Or maybe it's better characteri{s/z}ed as: if I'm on a paved path/road or the beach, I'm on a walk, and if I'm on less even terrain (fields, woods, mountains, deserts), I'm on a hike.

footpaths/trails/ways

In its broadest use, any way that's made for walking is a path or a footpath, but the word footpath is much more common in BrE than in AmE. A footpath can be urban or rural, but is usually distinguished from the (BrE) pavement/(AmE) sidewalk by being narrower, unpaved, or not running parallel to the road. For instance, a marked "public footpath" in my mother-in-law's suburb is a paved path between houses that let people take a shortcut to the (BrE) railway station, but the "permissive footpath" above is a (AmE in this use) dirt path through a wooded area.

Click to enlarge


Path and pathway are a normal things to call places where people can walk in either country. The GloWBE corpus has a bit more path in AmE than BrE, but I'm not going to to through and find out how many of them refer to the PATH (Port Authority-Trans Hudson) trains in New York. Pathway is about the same in both.


For places to hike, trail is more common in AmE. This is again difficult to do a corpus chart for, because there are lots of other uses of trail (what a snail leaves, a trail of clues, etc.).  (It originally referred to things that trailed behind, like the train of a dress or coat.) But if we look at which words occur before trail in the two countries, we can see a real tendency for trails to be walking places. Many of these relate to names of famous places to hike, such as the Appalachian Trail. 

Click to enlarge

In AmE I'd use trail as a common noun to talk generally about hiking paths. I've just asked the English spouse whether he'd use trail to refer to some of the English ones we know, and he says "No, that's American. That's why we don't understand trail mix.  According to the OED, this sense of trail is:

A path or track worn by the passage of persons travelling in a wild or uninhabited region; a beaten track, a rude path. (Chiefly U.S. and Canadian; also New Zealand and Australian.)


The US has a National Trails System, established in 1968, which includes Scenic Trails and Historic Trails, all of which have Trail in their name. (See the link for the list.)  England and Wales now also have something called National Trails, but that was only founded in 2005, and does look like a case of UK government borrowing an American idea with its language. Most of the "long-distance footpaths" included in the National Trails are named Way: the Cotswold Way, the Pennine Way, the South Downs Way. Some are called Path, e.g. Thames Path, Hadrian's Wall Path. None are called trails.

Scotland has Scotland's Great Trails, formerly known as Long Distance Routes. The rebranding seems to have happened sometime in the past 10 years. Unlike England's National Trails, some are actually named trail, and those names seem to pre-date the national rebranding, raising the question of whether this sense of trail is longer-standing in Scotland.

It's not uncommon to find commonalities between Scotland or Ireland and the US—not necessarily because of more recent Scottish/Irish immigration to the US than English immigration. The similarities can be there if the meaning was formerly widespread in English English, but then went out of fashion in England. However, the OED only has examples of this sense of trail since 1807, which makes it more likely that it might have started in the US and been fed back to the UK. Hard to know without much more work than I can put into this!

Related posts

I've written some other posts that cover related concepts to these ones. If you have comments about those terms, please comment at those posts, where it will be much more useful to their readers.


Read more
Labels: , | 40 comments
Subscribe to: Posts ( Atom )

The book!

View by topic

Abbr.

AmE = American English
BrE = British English
OED = Oxford English Dictionary (online)