Sunday 31 January 2021

english as a lingua franca in post-brexit europe

What is the future of the English language on the Continent after Brexit?

Jay Doubleyou: brexit and the english language

Jay Doubleyou: the future of the english language after brexit

Some would say it's on the way out:

Jay Doubleyou: the eu has no plans to downgrade the use of english after brexit

Jay Doubleyou: “slowly but surely english is losing importance in europe”

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Recently, the French minister for Europe suggested English should not be a working language of the EU - but that 'linguistic diversity' should be encouraged:

EU should stop speaking ‘broken English’ after Brexit, says French minister – POLITICO

Brexit news: Macron ally moans eurocrats are still using English even after Brexit | Politics | News | Express.co.uk

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Here's the opinion from the EL Gazette, the journal of the ESOL/TEFL profession:

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Is it au revoir to English?

Post-Brexit, it was perhaps no surprise that France’s Europe minister, Clement Beaune, raised the idea of the EU dropping English as one of its two working language. While not advocating a return to French as the only working language, he suggested that each country should speak its own language in an effort to maintain “linguistic diversity”.

He might have a hard row to hoe to get his way. What Beaune referred to as “broken English” when he spoke to reporters last week, is a form described as English as a lingua franca (ELF) by linguists which is widely used and understood by those for whom English is not their first language. Further, in an effort to simplify their operations, many EU institutions now try to operate exclusively in English and in many member countries, even the newer ones, English is almost a second language. In Croatia, for instance, the EU’s most recent member, over 80% of its population can speak English.

So, while the EU has reluctantly said au revoir to the UK, it may still be choosing to say how do you do in its language.

Is it au revoir to English? | E L Gazette

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Tuesday 26 January 2021

disinformation

Will the BBC be banning the 1970s musical 'Grease'?

grease to be banned - Google Suche

It doesn't seem so:

Grease won’t be ‘banned’ and neither will Harold Wilson – a few ‘woke’ tweets does not a story make
Some are so desperate to criticise so-called snowflakes that they report stories based on flimsy evidence pulled from social media
At what point does a story become a news story? When should it make the jump from WhatsApp group-worthy to newsworthy?
These stories should really stay on social media, where they usually originate, but they are regularly reported in national publications. And some are more sinister than others. After the film Grease aired on Boxing Day, The Mail on Sunday published an article claiming that the musical had “become the latest target of ‘woke’ critics”, with millennial and Gen Z viewers tweeting “to label it ‘rapey’, ‘overly white’ and misogynist”. The source? A few tweets – some of which appeared to be made in jest...
The occasional news pieces based on press releases, pseudo-scientific studies and rigged polls are nothing new. But social media, and Twitter in particular, has given rise to even further wilful misreporting. These articles are often fuelled by nothing but a race to the bottom for virality, and an attempt to stoke up the culture wars. The biggest casualty is the integrity of the industry.

Grease won't be 'banned' and neither will Harold Wilson – a few 'woke' tweets does not a story make

Yes, this is part of the 'culture wars':

Jay Doubleyou: culture wars

Jay Doubleyou: brexit and the culture wars: part two

But it's also part of the whole 'fake news' phenomenon:

Jay Doubleyou: fake news

Jay Doubleyou: information wars

Jay Doubleyou: the psychology of lies and why we fall for them

So says a new BBC radio programme:

A Year of Disinformation
The final months of Donald Trump’s presidency and the coronavirus pandemic led to an explosion of misinformation – conspiracy theories, rumours, misleading social media posts and so-called “fake news”.
It’s meant busy times for a team inside the BBC who work to untangle truth from fiction and identify the bad actors behind bad info.
BBC Trending presenter Mike Wendling and specialist disinformation and social media reporter Marianna Spring have investigated some of the most viral falsehoods and conspiracy theories circulating online.
With the help of colleagues, they explored the rise of the pro-Trump movement QAnon. And they unpicked wild rumours and pseudoscience about Covid-19 that led to real-world harm – including deaths, riots and the destruction of mobile phone masts.
In this programme, they look back at some of the biggest stories of the past year, and reflect on what they learned about who spreads disinformation, who believes it, and what we all need to watch out for in the year ahead.

BBC Radio 4 - A Year of Misinformation

A little more on conspiracy:

Jay Doubleyou: conspiracy theories

Jay Doubleyou: brexit, fantasy and boris

Jay Doubleyou: political narratives

Jay Doubleyou: coronavirus and populism

Jay Doubleyou: conspiracy movies

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Sunday 24 January 2021

2021: "The real-life Mad Max will be about water"

2019 was the year Blade Runner was set in:

Futures Forum: 2019: Blade Runner > "The future has arrived: it's just not evenly distributed yet."

The 2020s are when quite a few dystopian films are set:

10 great films set in the 2020s | BFI

And several in 2021:

It gets … worse: what can we learn from movies set in 2021? | Film | The Guardian

And there's one in particular:

I don't want to be pessimist but mad max is set in 2021 meme - AhSeeit

Which has been recalled after events earlier this month:

Twitter Compares Capitol Siege to Scenes From 'Mad Max', Believed To Be Set In 2021

Although there's some debate about the accuracy of the date:

Capitol riots compared to Mad Max as false meme confuses fans | The Independent

If you are interested:

No, ‘Mad Max’ is Not Set in 2021

What's perhaps more prescient are some of the themes running through the cult movie:

Futures Forum: "The real-life Mad Max will be about water"


As this piece from 2015 points out: 

Over the past 20 years, Australia has weathered one of the most devastating droughts on the planet. You’ve seen the dust storms. You’ve seen the wildfires. And you’ve seen the trailer for Mad Max: Fury Road. The film takes place in a parched, near-future Australia, where the control and manipulation of water is the greatest power in the world...

The lesson here is that in the climate of today, cities cannot just prepare for one extreme or the other — they must be prepared for anything.

As for where to shoot the next Mad Max, Miller might need to look for yet another location. Namibia — considered to have some of the driest places on Earth — has started to see its own historic floods. Climate change may force the filmmaker to follow emerging weather patterns, chasing catastrophic droughts all over the globe for the best post-apocalyptic settings. Hopefully they won’t be filming the next Mad Max in the Central Valley of California.

What The US Can Learn From Australia To Avoid A Mad Max Future

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Friday 22 January 2021

brexit and the english language

Here's an interesting piece which looks at how the most traumatic event for years has effected the way the British use their language:

How Brexit changed the English language

The UK's departure from the EU not only introduced new phrases, but showed how language can be used to shape political debate. ANDREAS BUERKI reports.

A number of expressions have entered everyday use since Brexit started. Terms like 'Article 50', 'no deal', 'hard border' may now seem just part of life but they were seldom, if ever, used before Brexit.

New and interesting phraseological patterns have also arisen around some of these words. For example, treaty articles didn’t used to get 'triggered'. Instead, they were 'invoked'. But we now take as obvious that Article 50 of the Treaty of the European Union is 'triggered'.

In linguistic terms, this is known as a 'collocation' – the idea that words are commonly used together. So, just as in English (but not in some other languages) one brushes one’s teeth rather than cleans them, one now 'triggers' Article 50 in stead of 'invoking' it. These patterns show that language is a system of conventional habits of expression more than a system governed by strict, logical rules. After all, there is no strict rule that says you can’t use the word 'activate' or 'invoke' before 'Article 50', and yet hardly anyone says that.

These new patterns have entered the grammar of English and need to be part of speakers’ linguistic knowledge if they wish to discuss Brexit (although some of these patterns might well fall into disuse once we talk about Brexit less). This shows that language can change very fast if required, despite the fact that the traditional view of language change is that grammatical patterns take hundreds of years to change.

Language is also often far from neutral. ...

How language became a Brexit battleground | The New European

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Wednesday 20 January 2021

vocabulary apps

It's not easy learning words - but if we can make it enjoyable, that certainly helps:

Word up: how to improve and enlarge your vocabulary | Books | The Guardian

There are some great apps to help keep up our vocabulary:

Top 15 Best Vocabulary Apps (Android/IPhone) 2021

And here's one in particular:

WordUp is the easiest way to learn English words and understand them deeply, with entertaining examples from movies, songs, famous quotes and more. It is unlike any vocabulary builder app you've seen before!

WordUp Vocabulary - Apps on Google Play

Thursday 14 January 2021

contronyms


What is a contronym?
Single words that have two contradictory meanings:
  1. Apology: a statement of contrition for an action, or a defence of one
  2. Bolt: to secure or to flee.
  3. Bound: heading for a destination, or restrained from movement
  4. Cleave: to adhere, or to separate
  5. Dust: to add fine particles, or to remove them
  6. Fast: quick, or stuck or made stable
  7. Left: remained, or departed
  8. Peer: a person of nobility, or an equal
  9. Sanction: to approve, or to boycott
  10. Weather: to withstand, or to wear away
Here are a few:

With more from Wikipedia:

To finish with a video: 


Saturday 9 January 2021

the commonplace book as a language-learning tool

Writing helps you to get to know yourself - but also to get your thoughts together:

Why Writing Helps You Understand Yourself | by Bill Widmer | Medium

One way to do some regular writing is to create a 'commonplace book':

Commonplace books are private collections of information, but they are not diaries or travelogues.

They have been kept from antiquity, and were kept particularly during the Renaissance and in the nineteenth century. Such books are essentially scrapbooks filled with items of every kind: recipes, quotes, letters, poems, tables of weights and measures, proverbs, prayers, legal formulas.

Commonplace book - Wikipedia

In other words, you are not writing out your own created words, but someone else's:

A commonplace book is a central resource or depository for ideas, quotes, anecdotes, observations and information you come across during your life and didactic pursuits. The purpose of the book is to record and organize these gems for later use in your life, in your business, in your writing, speaking or whatever it is that you do.

Some of the greatest men and women in history have kept these books. Marcus Aurelius kept one–which more or less became the Meditations. Petrarch kept one. Montaigne, who invented the essay, kept a handwritten compilation of sayings, maxims and quotations from literature and history that he felt were important. His earliest essays were little more than compilations of these thoughts. Thomas Jefferson kept one. Napoleon kept one. HL Mencken, who did so much for the English language, as his biographer put it, “methodically filled notebooks with incidents, recording straps of dialog and slang” and favorite bits from newspaper columns he liked. Bill Gates keeps one.

Not only did all these famous and great individuals do it. But so have common people throughout history. Our true understanding of the Civil War, for example, is a result of the spread of cheap diaries and notebooks that soldiers could record their thoughts in. Art of Manliness recently did an amazing post about the history of pocket notebooks. Some people have gone as far as to claim that Pinterest is a modern iteration of the commonplace book.

How And Why To Keep A “Commonplace Book” - RyanHoliday.net

This programme looks at the 'commonplace book' - where we would write down things we heard or read or thought of during the day - where you focus on the language as well as the content:

The Death of Nuance - Regaining Nuance - BBC Sounds

This can be a great way to improve your English: 'copying' is learning:

Teaching English composition with early modern-style “commonplace books” | Vade Mecum

The Commonplace Book Assignment /

100+ COMMONPLACE BOOK ideas | commonplace book, journal writing, sketch book

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Wednesday 6 January 2021

why is it that languages always change?

The anthropologist David Graeber looks at rules and freedom, games and play - by taking language as an example:

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The most obvious example is language. Call it the grammar-book effect. People do not invent languages by writing grammars, they write grammars—at least, the first grammars to be written for any given language—by observing the tacit, largely unconscious, rules that people seem to be applying when they speak. Yet once a book exists, and especially once it is employed in schoolrooms, people feel that the rules are not just descriptions of how people do talk, but prescriptions for how they should talk. 

It’s easy to observe this phenomenon in places where grammars were only written recently. In many places in the world, the first grammars and dictionaries were created by Christian missionaries in the nineteenth or even twentieth century, intent on translating the Bible and other sacred texts into what had been unwritten languages. For instance, the first grammar for Malagasy, the language spoken in Madagascar, was written in the 1810s and ’20s. Of course, language is changing all the time, so the Malagasy spoken language—even its grammar—is in many ways quite different than it was two hundred years ago. However, since everyone learns the grammar in school, if you point this out, people will automatically say that speakers nowadays are simply making mistakes, not following the rules correctly. It never seems to occur to anyone—until you point it out—that had the missionaries came and written their books two hundred years later, current usages would be considered the only correct ones, and anyone speaking as they had two hundred years ago would themselves be assumed to be in error. 

In fact, I found this attitude made it extremely difficult to learn how to speak colloquial Malagasy. Even when I hired native speakers, say, students at the university, to give me lessons, they would teach me how to speak nineteenth-century Malagasy as it was taught in school. As my proficiency improved, I began noticing that the way they talked to each other was nothing like the way they were teaching me to speak. But when I asked them about grammatical forms they used that weren’t in the books, they’d just shrug them off, and say, “Oh, that’s just slang, don’t say that.” In the end I found the only way I could really learn contemporary spoken Malagasy was to tape-record conversations, try to transcribe them myself, and then ask friends to clarify every time I came across an unfamiliar usage or expression. Nothing else would work: once they had decided these grammatical forms were errors, they simply could not describe them to me in grammatical terms. 

...The Malagasy attitudes towards rules of grammar clearly have nothing to do with a distaste for arbitrary authority, and everything to do with a distaste for arbitrariness itself—a distaste which leads to an unthinking acceptance of authority in its most formal, institutional form. After all, what is our first experience of formal, rule-governed authority if not our grade-school teachers? This is as much true in Madagascar as anywhere else. In fact, when I asked my friends why people didn’t really speak the language described in the textbooks, the inevitable reply was always to the effect of “well, you know, people are lazy.” Clearly, the problem was that the entire population had failed to memorize their lessons properly. But what they were actually denying was the legitimacy of collective creativity, the free play of the system. 

It’s worth thinking about language for a moment, because one thing it reveals, probably better than any other example, is that there is a basic paradox in our very idea of freedom. On the one hand, rules are by their nature constraining. Speech codes, rules of etiquette, and grammatical rules, all have the effect of limiting what we can and cannot say. It is not for nothing that we all have the picture of the schoolmarm rapping a child across the knuckles for some grammatical error as one of our primordial images of oppression. But at the same time, if there were no shared conventions of any kind—no semantics, syntax, phonemics—we’d all just be babbling incoherently and wouldn’t be able to communicate with each other at all. Obviously in such circumstances, none of us would be free to do much of anything. So at some point along the way, rules-as-constraining pass over into rules-as-enabling, even if it’s impossible to say exactly where. Freedom, then, really is the tension of the free play of human creativity against the rules it is constantly generating. And this is what linguists always observe. There is no language without grammar. But there is also no language in which everything, including grammar, is not constantly changing all the time. 

We rarely ask ourselves why that should be. Why is it that languages always change? It’s easy enough to see why we need to have common agreements on grammar and vocabulary in order to be able to talk to one other. But if that’s all that we need language for, one would think that, once a given set of speakers found a grammar and vocabulary that suited their purposes, they’d simply stick with it, perhaps changing the vocabulary around if there was some new thing to talk about—a new trend or invention, an imported vegetable—but otherwise, leaving well enough alone. In fact, this never happens. We don’t know of a single recorded example of a language that, over the course of, say, a century, did not change both in sound and structure.

(Note 169: Not only do they change, they tend to change at a fairly constant rate, regardless of historical circumstances. There is, indeed, a whole science, glottochronology, premised on this fact.)

This is true even of the languages of the most “traditional” societies; it happens even where elaborate institutional structures have been created—like grammar schools, or the Académie Française—to ensure that it does not. No doubt some of this is the result of sheer rebelliousness (young people trying to set themselves off from elders, for example) but it’s hard to escape the conclusion that ultimately, what we are really confronting here is the play principle in its purest form. Human beings, whether they speak Arapesh, Hopi, or Norwegian, just find it boring to say things the same way all the time. They’re always going to play around at least a little. And this playing around will always have cumulative effects. 

The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy

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From Britannia:

Glottochronology, the study of the rate of change occurring in the vocabularies of languages for the purpose of calculating the length of time (time depth) during which two related languages have developed independently. Glottochronology rests upon statistical comparison of the basic vocabulary shared by two or more related languages and on the assumption that the rate of vocabulary replacement is constant over sufficiently long periods of time. A number of linguists do not accept the methods or findings of glottochronology, for two reasons: the difficulty of compiling a culturally unbiased basic vocabulary list and the belief that the rate of linguistic change is not the same for all languages and is not constant for any single language.

Glottochronology | linguistics | Britannica

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And from Wikipedia:

The original method presumed that the core vocabulary of a language is replaced at a constant (or constant average) rate across all languages and cultures and so can be used to measure the passage of time

Glottochronology - Wikipedia

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And a couple of videos:

How Fast Do Languages Evolve? - Dyirbal glottochronology 1 of 2 - YouTube

How long can a language last before it's unrecognizable? - Dyirbal Glottochronology 2 of 2 - YouTube

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It is clear, though, that language changes over time:

Linguistics 001 -- Language Change and Historical Reconstruction

Why does language change over time? - BBC Bitesize

How language changes over time | TED Talks

Language change - Wikipedia

How the English language has changed over the decades

How does language evolve? - LanguageWire

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With a couple more videos:

TYP104 - Reasons for Language Change - YouTube

LANGUAGE CHANGE OVER TIME EXPLAINED! | YouTube

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Sunday 3 January 2021