To the barricades!
The French have long complained about the encroachment of English words into their language, and have had a running battle with terms like le weekend and le parking. Now they're using technology to fight the spread of English. Oh they're so cunning, these Johnny Foreigners.According to an article in The Daily Telegraph, also covered here in The Mirror, a new French-friendly spell-checker has been devised to replace English words such as email and carjack with their proper French equivalents: courriel and piraterie routiere respectively. Even last year's big word, subprime (the apparent cause of our current world credit crunch and *apparently* the reason why some scrote at Abbey National won't let us get some extra money to double glaze our Dickensian windows) has a French equivalent, the catchy prix hypotecairé à risque. Mmmm, that'll catch on... like the colds my unfortunate offspring now have thanks to the *sniff* windows.
But while the French alternatives may seem a bit clunky and awkward, many French people see them as a necessary evil in the long war to defend their language, culture and identity from the spreading, globalising power of English, as the article reports:
"I think that the defence of a language is the sum of a multitude of small battles, and it's worth the fight", culture minister Christine Albanel told the Telegraph. Even if only two out of ten words stick, the language has moved and breathed and we have marked our territory", she said at a ceremony to launch the "week of French language". Each French ministry has its own commission of terminology and neologisms, whose job is to track down English terms and offer French alternatives. They send their proposals to the Académie Française, a council of guardians of the French language, who debate the new terms and rubber stamp them. Once published in the statutes book, French civil servants are obliged to use them. About 300 such official French terms appear each year.
But what of the significance of this to English Language students? After all, this is English Language at SFX, not Francais Parole à Sexytime (or whatever). Jonathan Swift tried to introduce an English Academy centuries ago, in an attempt to regulate the English language. As you know, it didn't happen, and the debates about our changing language have raged ever since. But would an Academy, along the lines of the French system, have any real impact on our language? Would it be a good idea for a government body to regulate our language, deciding on what's acceptable usage and which new words would be invented?
I don't think so. So much of our language change is actually very democratic: it's a bottom-up spread rather than a top-down imposition of government diktats. Just take a look at how slang evolves: the language of the streets gets picked up by older and more middle class users and then filters through the media into general usage.
But this article also flags up another issue around language change, that of technology and language. Many of us have as our default spell-checker US English - it looks like The Telegraph's sub-editor has it too, given their use of program (the American spelling) as opposed to programme (the English spelling) - and this is having some kind of impact on the way our language is evolving, as this link explains.
And it's not only American spellings - humor, color, recognize - but American lexis. I become a raging prescriptivist when I hear young people talking about the police as the Feds. The Feds?! We don't have a Federal Bureau of Investigation in this country dammit. We have cops. We have rozzers. We have the old bill.Get with the program already, or something...
But is American English really a threat to English as much as English is seen as a threat to French? We've been using American terms for a much longer time than many of us realise as this 1995 article by Henry Porter points out (and this worksheet goes with it if you're looking for a way to use it in a lesson or for revision) and our language has expanded to accommodate it. We may have our own personal prejudices about words that sound American, but that's probably a generational thing. In a sense, because we have no Academy to tell us what is right or wrong, we all have the choice for ourselves, to express ourselves in ways that we want and with whatever mixture of English English, American English or even Franglais (ooh la la) that we want.
ENA5 - Language Change
ENA6 - Language Debates
Training climbs for Ben Nevis – 8c solo
Free-soloing Darwin Dixit 8c, MargalefI just got back from two weeks in Spain climbing at Margalef. Sorry I wasn’t able to blog from there this time. I got some interesting climbs done.
I like to keep my level as high as possible in lots of climbing disciplines, and this means doing each of them as often as I can manage. But one I only do very rarely is free-soloing. In fact, I’ve only soloed two routes in the past nine years. I explained why here.
Right now I am preparing for a very special project I am trying on Ben Nevis and I already completed one or two of my training climbs which I saw as benchmarks for a prerequisite physical level. But it’s obviously just as important to spend time doing some psychological skills training for a climb where the seriousness of a fall could not be higher. For this climb I need to be able to climb 8c+/9a in an unprotected position. So I must have great confidence in my ability to make good decisions in a situation close to my physical limit but under a lot of psychological pressure.
So I decided to try to make a small increase in my free soloing top level; from 8b to 8c. 8c solo seemed like the right level to test and develop my control. The necessary ingredients were a climb at a high enough level that the moves would be totally committing, and one where the random objective danger of loose rock would not enter the risk equation.
Last spring I did the third ascent of an 8c in Margalef called Darwin Dixit. I remember having one of those amazing days when you just seem to climb a grade harder than normal and everything feels easy. I remember locking off on the crux mono and chalking up on a move that was previously a slap and thinking to myself in the moment – ‘I would be ok soloing here’. That feeling planted a seed that rumbled in my mind throughout 2007 and grew into something significant when I was searching for good training climbs for my Nevis project.
Claire enjoying hanging out in a chilly Spanish morning
Claire filming me soloing Darwin DixitOn March 4th I soloed the route at 9am. I wrote a diary of my feelings about the preparation and ascent of the climb, which is a bit long for this blog so I’ll probably publish these elsewhere. But I can say that it was a very relaxed and positive few minutes at the crag. Claire filmed the ascent for the film we are making this year and she seemed very relaxed too. I felt utterly focused, and in the classic performance paradox of extreme effort but feeling effortless at the same time. I also felt the large margin of reserve I was looking for.
I guess it’s cool that it might be the first 8c free solo (i.e. not highball bouldering and climbed without any mats or spotters). I just did a bit of googling on soloing and came up with two articles criticising the glamorisation of some other free-solo ascents in the media. What I have to say about this is as follows:
I feel that everyone should be encouraged to find and extend their limits. I agreed and was inspired by Alex Huber when he talked about finding his limits in soloing after his free solo of Kommunist 8b+ a couple of years ago. But anyone should think carefully about why they do something as potentially dangerous as soloing a hard rock climb. Your motivation should always be to extend your own limits in this arena, never to compare against anyone else’s. And you should use your mind to extend this limit by knowing yourself and your ability before you leave the ground, never by letting your ego get you into a situation where you must fight for your life! Free soloing must be done perfectly or not at all – you owe this to the people who care about you. But this area of great understanding of one’s own mind and body forms the attraction of soloing. And if you know you have that understanding, then soloing can be rewarding on a deep level. If you ever find yourself at the foot of a solo climb, wondering if you do have that understanding, you almost certainly don’t. Solo climbing is about really knowing, and when you have this feeling it will stand out in your mind so much that you will not have to wonder whether it’s real or not.
Can soloing be safe? Yes. Is it always safe? No! Even for the few who can be in complete control of their body and mind on a solo, they cannot be in control of the rock or the weather. That said, soloists awareness and anticipation of these is exceptional because of their experience and huge dedication to their chosen task. Is soloing worth the risk? Sometimes. As I’ve said before, the risks of doing things in life have to weighed up against the risks of not doing things. Balance of risk and reward is for everyone to think hard upon and then take the right path for them.
Claire’s pictures of the solo of Darwin Dixit and her thoughts on filming the route are on her blog.
Redpointing Double Iluna 8b+, MargalefPS: After the solo was completed I had a great few days on the cliffs of Margalef and felt reasonably fit with some 8a onsights, my first 8a+ onsight (and almost an 8b arrgh!) and I could consistently climb 8b+ and 8c in a day. So I have made some progress in my training although my body is still a little heavy. Some pics of these below and more on Claire’s blog. Dave Redpath blogged about the trip here.
Los Ultimo Vampiros Hippies 8c, Margalef
Los Ultimo Vampiros Hippies 8c, Margalef
The crux move of a long 8b at Margalef. Is that pocket reachable?
Of course! But unfortunately not on my onsight attempt!
The Margalef crag crocodile munches Michael TweedleyFeminazis and language control
A recent post on Language Log blog discusses a mad anti-PC rant from a respected Yale University computer scientist. Among David Gelernter's concerns are the use of he/she or they to replace he, the replacement of fireman with firefighter and person or human to replace man.Of course, the logic behind such gender-neutral alternatives should be fairly clear to most AS and A2 Language students. Linguists have for a long time argued that he is a "false generic": in other words it's believed by some to really mean both genders, but in reality is rarely interpreted as such. Man or mankind are the same: linguists have expressed concern that they exclude women or render them invisible.
Gelernter's arguments are nothing new. They're part of an anti-Political Correctness backlash which casts feminists as deranged, dungaree-clad thought fascists who are trying to destroy the traditions of our language with their crazy (and probably hairy-legged) new language. But as the erudite* linguists of Language Log point out, so many of these arguments about the language being changed are actually very dubious. There has been a long tradition of using the pronoun they to avoid assigning gender, and he has always been contested.
So for ENA6 students thinking about Language Debates for this June's paper, why not have a look at both Gelernter's rant and Language Log's great response, and then think about other arguments about Language and Representation that often crop up. You could always try searching this blog with key terms like Political Correctness, Sexism, Racism and even ENA6 for some links to good articles about these issues.
Go on, you know it makes sense...
Useful for:
ENA6 - Language Debates
*look it up for a bit of A2 vocabulary stretching, ENA6 students!
Cracking the drug slang
A quick link to an article which mentions drug slang helps to illustrate the different uses and purposes of slang, this time as a code to exclude outsiders and hide criminal, drug-related activity. Perhaps the rapid turnover of new words for drugs - tea, cabbage, burger - as quoted in this article, reflects the nature of language change and how the we create, discard and recycle words to keep up with society's changing needs.The end of English?
A lecture by David Crystal (who shouldn't really need any introduction to English Language students, but is a top language expert if you haven't been paying attention) to mark the start of Project English (see here) has suggested that English is fragmenting into different global dialects. He argues that with English being spoken by so many different nationalities around the world and the spread of English as a world language, that Indian and Chinese varieties of English may well start to become the global "standard".We've had different varieties of English since the time the language started to evolve from different versions of Angle, Saxon and Jute way back in the 5th Century, and American English has long been established as a variety of English with international power and prestige, but the sheer power of numbers is what Crystal thinks will drive the language change of the next part of this century.
"In language, numbers count. There are more people speaking English in India than in the rest of the native English-speaking world. Even now, if you ring a call centre, often it's an Indian voice you hear at the end of the phone. As the Indian economy grows, so might the influence of Indian English. There, people tend to use the present continuous where we would use the present simple. For example, where we would say: "I think, I feel, I see" a speaker of Indian English might say: "I am thinking, I am feeling, I am seeing". This way of speaking could easily become sexy and part of global Standard English."
While the focus of our A2 Language Change unit is strictly on English as spoken in the British Isles, the processes of change that are at work globally could well be related to how our language is shaped back here in Britain. And if you;'re a teacher reading this and planning ahead, next years' s new AQA A spec for students starting AS in 2008-9 has a focus on global English.
The comments posted by Daily Telegraph readers, at the end of the article, make for a really interesting read: a mixture of reactionary prescriptivism ("Nigerian English is just nasty" - possibly written by a bitter Ghanaian flushed with patriotic pride on their country's independence day) and expert inside views on global dialects like Singlish and Hinglish. Worth a read.
Langganan:
Postingan (Atom)