Like the majority of people working in an organisation which employs people from around the world, I am used to conversing with people who have a strong accent when speaking English or make incessant grammar errors - 'feedbacks' is used so often it is almost being adopted in English itself. Unlike the character on 'The Fast Show' I do not pick up every error and I make an effort to comprehend the accent. This is because I am grateful that the person is speaking to me in English and not expecting me to know Thai, Turkish or even Spanish in order to have a conversation with them. This is a price British people have to pay for being so poor at learning foreign languages and indeed having a schooling system which increasingly does not even teach them. The 13-year old boy who lives in my house stopped learning any foreign languages at the end of Year 8 (12-13 year old class), having done French just for two years. He is an intelligent child going to a school of 1200 pupils but there is so little language teaching that it is a minority subject. Reports show a steady fall in language learning in the UK: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-31921979 with fewer pupils taking even European languages let alone Asian ones.
Now, I am constantly meeting Chinese people. I have no idea how many Chinese are currently visiting or working in the UK. The bulk of the ones I run across are students. However, of course, because of the UK have had a colony in Hong Kong, there are people with Chinese heritage, predominantly Cantonese rather than Mandarin speakers and generally thoroughly integrated into British society. I am not discussing Chinese assimilated in the past, but people from mainland China who are in the UK. Now I spent 18 months learning Mandarin.
I was poor at the writing but pretty good at the language to the extent that I could say where I came from, talk about my family, ask directions and order a complex meal. I honed my accent by using CDs and copying dialogue in movies. Thus, I would expect that I would speak Chinese with an English accent and probably sound quite a bit like the Chinese equivalent of those people I speak to regularly from a range of countries, who have a strong accent and make errors. However, every time I try please or thank you or excuse me, I get a blank expression from Chinese visitors as if rather than attempting their language I have gone into Ukrainian or Somali.
I used the common Chinese phrase 'shi bu shi' [pronounced 'shur boo shur'] it is a phrase attached to the end of a sentence to make it a question 'yes or no?'. Mandarin word order does not change, it is subject-verb-object all the time, so you need question suffixes to show you are asking a question rather than through moving the verb around as often happens in English. The quote was relevant to the setting but the Chinese man turned to me and said - 'what is that, something in English?'. He did not recognise it as a basic phrase from his own language.
I know that the Chinese are a proud people who value their culture. I know that they row with the Taiwanese over who speaks and writes 'proper' Chinese. However, I have yet to meet a Chinese person who is willing to put in the effort to comprehend other nationalities speaking their language in the way that English speakers often do on a daily basis. This runs contrary to the schemes to introduce Mandarin to schools and to open up Confucius Centres to promote the teaching of Mandarin.
If the efforts of people who have taken time to learn the language are simply dismissed then there is no incentive to learn let alone develop skills in the language. It seems I will never even reach a workable level in my lifetime. I know there is all this argument about the fact that an outsider can never be fluent, but I am not looking for fluency, I am looking to work at the level many people use English when speaking to me. It may not be perfect, but we can function.
Why does this matter? Well, the Chinese population is only 25% of the global population so they are going to meet a lot of people who speak something else. China has a public relations problem. It is both noted as being one of the only remaining Communist dictatorships yet is also operating as a neo-colonial power particularly in Africa and Central Asia. To be so frosty to those trying to speak the language is to put even more distance between the country and those others it has to deal with.
I do wonder if there is a delight in the exceptionality of the use of any Chinese language in a Western context and that Chinese visitors like the fact that their hosts cannot comprehend what they are saying. It seems that they worry that if they give a centimetre of recognition that someone else even knows a bit of their language, they will have lost that privileged position. It is like the Russian nobility speaking French when the servants were around. I have also noted a similar phenomenon with Afrikaans and Flemish speakers. They get very upset when you reflect back some of the details of their language to them. It is as if you have broken the 'code' they are using and thus are suspicious.
I have no idea whether Chinese visitors will change their attitudes. However, I am sure their government, given the money it has put into promoting Mandarin skills in the West, would wish that they were not so dismissive of the efforts of other countries to speak their language and at least be as accommodating as many British are when people speak to us regularly in 'bad' English.
Showing posts with label English language. Show all posts
Showing posts with label English language. Show all posts
Wednesday, 12 August 2015
Wednesday, 3 December 2014
Be Bashless and Norant: Have Gorm and Ruth
The other day the 13-year old boy who used to live in the house I once owned, was playing a computer game in which he constructed vehicles and then takes them on to the Martian landscape where he battles with other players. For his age, his vocabulary is incredibly developed, something I put down to him being the son of an authoress. However, when he was playing he was telling me as his vehicle charged forward that he was being 'bashful'. I watched his game play and said I did not think that was the case; explaining that bashful meant 'shy' rather than being 'full of bash'. He gathered what I meant and subsequently when acting boldly in the game he now tells me that he is behaving in a 'bashless' way, which I thought was a great invention.
This then got me to thinking about words in English which lack the alternative. English is an irrational language anyway and I am not going to get into a discussion of 'cleave' here. The two that came to mind were 'gormless', i.e. someone who is lacking in intelligence and certainly attention and 'ruthless', i.e. someone who is merciless. When did we stop saying someone who is intelligent or attentive is 'gormful' or 's/he has got real gorm'? When was anyone noted as being 'ruthful'?
I did wonder if there was another in 'ignorant'. The prefix 'ig' can mean lacking in something, the main example being 'ignoble'. You can be 'noble' and so I wondered if you can also be 'norant'. Examples might be, 'that Stephen Hawkins is a really norant man'. It is clear that someone who was bashless and norant would be far more dangerous than someone bashful and ignorant. Then I came on to 'baleful' and considered how nice it would be to meet someone who was 'baleless', i.e. jolly. Someone who was 'hapful' as opposed to being 'hapless' may indeed also be baleless as they go through life without any mishaps. Clearly these are antonyms - hap and mishap, but they do not manifest themselves the same way in our language. In the same category would come 'aimful', the natural opposite of 'aimless'.
English has too many left-over remnants. It can be entertaining to note the anomalies. However, not for the first time do they increase my appreciation of anyone able to learn English as their first or subsequent language, especially up to the idiomatic level.
P.P. 08/12/2014
As I had hoped other examples came to mind. Two which seem to lack antonyms are 'wistful' and 'listless'. Often they can go together as someone lost being wistful for the past can end up listless. That is not to say that someone 'wistless', not at all looking at the past with nostalgic sentiment would be necessarily 'listful', i.e. full of life. I did wonder if 'list' was simply a distortion for 'lust' as in the sense of 'lust for life' rather than sexual connotations. We do not speak of anyone being 'lustless' though 'lustful' is certainly used, but again, mainly related to an urge for sex rather than for living.
This then got me to thinking about words in English which lack the alternative. English is an irrational language anyway and I am not going to get into a discussion of 'cleave' here. The two that came to mind were 'gormless', i.e. someone who is lacking in intelligence and certainly attention and 'ruthless', i.e. someone who is merciless. When did we stop saying someone who is intelligent or attentive is 'gormful' or 's/he has got real gorm'? When was anyone noted as being 'ruthful'?
I did wonder if there was another in 'ignorant'. The prefix 'ig' can mean lacking in something, the main example being 'ignoble'. You can be 'noble' and so I wondered if you can also be 'norant'. Examples might be, 'that Stephen Hawkins is a really norant man'. It is clear that someone who was bashless and norant would be far more dangerous than someone bashful and ignorant. Then I came on to 'baleful' and considered how nice it would be to meet someone who was 'baleless', i.e. jolly. Someone who was 'hapful' as opposed to being 'hapless' may indeed also be baleless as they go through life without any mishaps. Clearly these are antonyms - hap and mishap, but they do not manifest themselves the same way in our language. In the same category would come 'aimful', the natural opposite of 'aimless'.
English has too many left-over remnants. It can be entertaining to note the anomalies. However, not for the first time do they increase my appreciation of anyone able to learn English as their first or subsequent language, especially up to the idiomatic level.
P.P. 08/12/2014
As I had hoped other examples came to mind. Two which seem to lack antonyms are 'wistful' and 'listless'. Often they can go together as someone lost being wistful for the past can end up listless. That is not to say that someone 'wistless', not at all looking at the past with nostalgic sentiment would be necessarily 'listful', i.e. full of life. I did wonder if 'list' was simply a distortion for 'lust' as in the sense of 'lust for life' rather than sexual connotations. We do not speak of anyone being 'lustless' though 'lustful' is certainly used, but again, mainly related to an urge for sex rather than for living.
Saturday, 11 September 2010
Making the English Language More Logical
The use of the English language is something I have reflected on before, see: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2009/07/mutation-of-english-language.html However, my thoughts have been stirred again adding new aspects to some of the comments I made last year. The new input came from me recently reading a surprisingly good collection of science fiction stories, first published in 1952. In it I came across what is really an article, slightly humorous in tone, rather than a short story. It is entitled 'Meihem in ce Klasrum' [pronounced as 'Mayhem in the Classroom'], was written by Dolton Edwards and was first published in 1946. It is available all over the internet but I have included it in full here as it makes it a lot easier to comment on than sending you back and forth to other websites. My comments follow the article:
Meihem In Ce Klasrum
by Dolton Edwards
Because we are still bearing some of the scars of our brief skirmish with II-B English, it is natural that we should be enchanted by Mr. George Bernard Shaw's current campaign for a simplified alphabet.
Obviously, as Mr. Shaw points out, English spelling is in much need of a general overhauling and streamlining. However, our own resistance to any changes requiring a large expenditure of mental effort in the near future would cause us to view with some apprehension the possibility of some day receiving a morning paper printed in-to us-Greek.
Our own plan would achieve the same end as the legislation proposed by Mr. Shaw, but in a less shocking manner, as it consists merely of an acceleration of the normal processes by which the language is continually modernized.
As a catalytic agent, we would suggest that a National Easy Language Week be proclaimed, which the President would inaugurate, outlining some short cut to concentrate on during the week, and to be adopted during the ensuing year. All school children would be given a holiday, the lost time being the equivalent of that gained by the spelling short cut.
In 1946, for example, we would urge the elimination of the soft c, for which we would substitute "s." Sertainly, such an improvement would be selebrated in all sivic-minded sircles as being suffisiently worth the trouble, and students in all sities in the land would be reseptive to- ward any change eliminating the nesessity of learning the differense be- tween the two letters.
In 1947, sinse only the hard "c" would be left, it would be possible to substitute "k" for it, both letters being pronounsed identikally. Imagine how greatly only two years of this prosess would klarify the konfusion in the minds of students. Already we would have eliminated an entire letter from the alphabet. Typewriters and linotypes, kould all be built with one less letter, and a11 the manpower and materials previously devoted to making "c's" kould be turned toward raising the national standard of living.
In the fase of so many notable improvements, it is easy to foresee that by 1948, "National Easy Language Week" would be a pronounsed sukses. All skhool tshildren would be looking forward with konsiderable exsitement to the holiday, and in a blaze of national publisity it would be announsed that the double konsonant "ph" no longer existed, and that the sound would henseforth be written "f" in all words, This would make sutsh words as "fonograf" twenty persent shorter in print.
By 1949, public interest in a fonetik alfabet kan be expekted to have inkreased to the point where a more radikal step forward kan be taken without fear of undue kritisism. We would therefore urge the elimination, at that time of al unesesary double leters, whitsh, although quite harmles, have always ben a nuisanse in the language and a desided deterent to akurate speling. Try it yourself in the next leter you write, and se if both writing and reading are not fasilitated.
With so mutsh progres already made, it might be posible in 1950 to delve further into the posibilities of fonetik speling. After due konsideration of the reseption aforded the previous steps, it should be expedient by this time to spel al difthongs fonetikaly. Most students do not realize that the long "i" and "y," as in "time" and "by," are aktualy the difthong "ai," as it is writen in "aisle" and that the long "a" in "fate," is in reality the difthong "ei" as in "rein." Although perhaps not imediately aparent, the saving in taime and efort wil be tremendous when we leiter elimineite the sailent "e," as meide posible bai this last tsheinge.
For, as is wel known, the horible mes of "e's' apearing in our writen language is kaused prinsipaly bai the present nesesity of indikeiting whether a vowel is long or short. Therefore, in 1951 we kould simply elimineit al sailent "e's," and kontinu to read and wrait merily along as though we wer in an atomik ag of edukation.
In 1951 we would urg a greit step forward. Sins bai this taim it would have ben four years sins anywun had usd the leter "c," we would sugest that the "National Easy Languag Wek" for 1951 be devoted to substitution of "c" for "Th." To be sur it would be som taim befor peopl would bekom akustomd to reading ceir newspapers and buks wic sutsh sentenses in cem as "Ceodor caught he had cre cousand cistls crust crough ce cik of his cumb.''
In ce seim maner, bai meiking eatsh leter hav its own sound and cat sound only, we kould shorten ce language stil mor. In 1952 we would elimineit ce "y"; cen in 1953 we kould us ce leter to indikeit ce "sh" sound, cerbai klarifaiing words laik yugar and yur, as wel as redusing bai wun mor leter al words laik "yut," "yore" and so forc. Cink, cen, of al ce benefits to be geind bai ce distinktion whitsh wil cen be meid between words laik:
ocean now writen oyean
machine " " mayin
racial " " reiyial
Al sutsh divers weis of wraiting wun sound would no longer exist. and whenever wun kaim akros a "y" sound he would know exaktli what to wrait.
Kontinuing cis proses, year after year, we would eventuali hav a reali sensibl writen langug. By 1975, wi ventyur tu sei, cer wud bi no mor uv ces teribli trublsum difikultis, wic no tu leters usd to indikeit ce seim nois, and laikwais no tu noises riten wic ce seim leter. Even Mr. Yaw, wi beliv, wud be hapi in ce noleg cat his drims fainili keim tru.
The key problem for English is that it is such a mish-mash of different families of languages. The problem really came with the Norman Conquest of 1066 which brought far more Latin-based words into English which up until that stage after absorbing Roman words in previous centuries and having this maintained by the Church's use of Latin, had been evolving into a Scandinavian language which by now would probably have been like Danish or Dutch; as it is, much is close to the Freisian language. Having the Normans who, ironically, three generations earlier had been Scandinavians, invade brought Romance-based French words into the language. As the Normans were the rulers and the Anglo-Saxon-British population the ruled, the application of these words was uneven, the classic case being that for livestock Scandinavian style words are used, e.g. cow, like ko in Danish or ku in Norwegian and kuh German, whereas when the meat is cooked it becomes French in style, e.g. beef like the French word boeuf. Consequently English has a mixture of ways of writing the same sounds because some come from the Romance base and some from the Scandinavian. In addition, being a colonial power, Britain drew in words from across its empire and notably words such as bungalow and jodphur come from Hindi. We also have anomalies such as the regular use of 'ph' from Greek pronunciation when other northern European states would use 'f'.
One of the issues that Edwards touches on is the common use of 'th' in English which is a legacy of the Scandinavian input. There are already a symbol for that:of ð and more commonly from King Alfred's time: þ which appear when you look at Viking or some Old English names or failing that, the Greek symbol: θ which was actually used in Old English writing before the other two symbols came along. Of course, the re-introduction of that would need modification of keyboards and using 'c' instead saves that. One thing Edwards neglects to explain is the sudden move to 'tsh' for 'ch'. I know he has to end the soft c, but the adoption of 'ts' is not detailed. Unfortunately the Greek letter for that looks too much like 'X' especially when in capital; 'ts' is a rendering of 'tʃ' using a phonetic symbol. It works but does not decrease the use of letters as Edwards is aiming for. The symbol 'ʃ' actually is for 'sh', but its use would again mean introducing a new symbol on English keyboards hence Edwards recommending using the redundant 'y'. This would make 'ch' rendered as 'ty' and 'church' would become 'tyurty' almost looking Welsh. This assumes no replacement of 'ur' with another combination such as 'er' which is the more familiar rendering of that sound in English spelling, so 'tyerty' maybe more accurate.
Edwards does address one key difficulty in English which marks it out from modern neighbouring European languages. One is how different pairs of vowels are sounded in different contexts. In German 'ie' and 'ei' always sound the same no matter the word, and they sound different from each other. However, in English the words 'pier' and 'weir' are pronounced the same, as are 'seer', 'near' and 'kir'. However, 'near' and 'bear' are pronounced differently but 'bare' and 'bear' are pronounced the same. As for 'though', 'cough' and 'bough' each is pronounced differently, and to add confusion you have 'ugh' to give you the 'f' sound. Spelling is poor in Britain anyway, but it is not helped when children are told to 'look for and use common spelling patterns', there is no such thing in English, as Edwards article points out.
The use of what used to be called in my school days 'fairy e' to change a vowel to its long version is sensibly tackled by Edwards. Why is it bar/bare, car/care, far/fare, star/stare, par/pare (the latter pronounced the same as pair), war/ware, fir/fire, bit/bite, quit/quite, cur/cure, cut/cute and so on. It would make it far clearer as Edwards does to write bit/beit, quit/queit, bar/baer (though 'bear' would be written the same way) and far/faer (and again 'fair' would be written that way, showing once more the problem with words that sound the same but are very different in meaning in English). Some spellings just seem unnecessarily complex, why 'to', 'too' and 'two'? I can accept different spellings to show the different meanings, but why then pronounce them all the same? Why does 'u' have to accompany 'q'. Though Edwards does not say it, with a little imagination, 'kw' and 'k' can stand in: 'kween' for 'queen'; 'enkwiere' for 'enquiry' and 'chek' for 'cheque' and so on. I think 'ia' should be used for sounds like 'fear', 'beer' and so on which almost have 'y' sound in them. It is not one Edwards suggests.
One challenge in Britain which I guess would be the same with regional dialects in the USA is around the length of vowels. In Britain this is most apparent with words like 'bath' and 'path'. In southern England we pronounce them with a long 'a' almost as if they were 'barth' and 'parth'; in conrast in northern England is it far shorter almost like 'ba'th' or 'pa'th'. Some southern English even take this as far as 'orf' for 'off'. I guess in Edwards world, 'of' would become 'ov' allowing the elimination of the double 'f' so current 'off' would simply become 'of' as many people write it anyway.
The greatest revolution in English of the past twenty years has come from the public. Of course there is text speak which in itself takes some steps down Edwards path such as 'luv' for 'love', but others are just about speeding up the typing of words, as in 'w8' for 'wait', '2' for 'to', '4' for 'for' and 'soz' for 'sorry'. The use of 'u' for 'you' makes it identical to Dutch; 'ur' for 'your' is not in fact a phonetic rendering simply an extension from 'u'. Another common step is eliminating all capital letters, though this does seem to inadvertently denigrate yourself when you use 'i' constantly instead of 'I'; apparently the submissive partner in a dominant/submissive sexual relationship would describe themselves this way, but now it is the general populus who sees themselves so, though simply for convenience.
Beyond the use of mobile phones, the misuse of the apostrophe has made the greatest changes, and has often been commented on. However, it does not seem to add anything to clarity. When I was a boy we would write "Those are my friend's dogs." Nowadays it would be more typically rendered as "Those are my friends dog's." The apostrophe (and I have even seen this on a government document) now designates the plural most as in "orange's", even "car's" rather than the possessive which is generally shown by simply adding an 's' as in "peoples job's", "brothers house's" and so on. Of course, this causes real problem when you are looking at plural possessive. I cannot be clear if "the girls work" refers to the work produced by one girl or a group of them, whereas, thirty years ago, "the girl's work" and "the girls' work" would be clearly distinguished. The greatest switch has been with "its" and "it's". Of course, "its" was the possessive of "it" as in "the dog brought its leash" but now like all contractions like "cudnt" for "couldn't" (the replacement of 'oul' with 'u' I imagine Edwards would favour) and "cant" for "can't" mean that if you read "its" you have to assume it means "it's" i.e. it is. In the meantime the use of apostrophes for plurals seems to have got confused as "it's" now means "its", which in some way you can see makes sense to people who are told that "John's" means it belongs to John even if they no longer write it that way.
So, British English is evolving in a way which makes it even less accessible not only to foreigners but older people and comprehension between the different generations is becoming harder. People who try to keep the traditional approaches are criticised as being pedantic. British English never seems to be reviewed in the way that certainly French, German and Portuguese have been in recent decades. It is only done for humorous purposes, usually to suggest that English would end up looking pretty much like German which is something it is assumed no Briton would accept, though if it had not been for the result at the Battle of Hastings, it is likely the two languages would be very similar by now, though hopefully without having to move the verb all over the place as in German. Linguistic authorities do meet to discuss German language and I remember discussion over the possibility of 'sss' in the middle of a German word and the extent to which 'ß' for 'ss' should be used. Portugal reduced the number of letters in Portuguese in 1990, eliminating many accented ones. In France, the government often gives direction on what things should be called in French to avoid over Anglicisation. The USA has looked at spelling in its form of English with Noah Webster in 1828 in 'An American Dictionary of the English Language', for example the elimination of 'u' from words like harbour and colour; the use of more Anglo-phonetic approaches rather than French influenced spelling in centre/center, metre/meter (though meter is also a word in British English it means something different), manoeuvre/maneuver.
One thing which is interesting is that Edwards in 1946 was pushing for the elimination of double consonants in words, though in fact in American English that already often seems to be the case. The British write of a 'traveller'; the Americans of a 'traveler'; the British have 'channelling', the Americans 'channeling' (though I image Edwards would want ''chaneling'); 'skillful' and 'skilful' and so on. The grammatical differences are very varied and there seems to be no greater simplicity in the American approach than in the British.
I think that the challenge for English in becoming a global language is that it makes it very hard for both its own children and learners from overseas to grasp. If there was one pair of letters for each sound in the middle of words and the double-use of 'c' was removed people could engage with English with more confidence far more quickly. I think the persistence of tough spelling in English is somewhat an elitist approach, something like the testing of people by how they pronounce Beauchamp ('Beecham') or Mainwaring ('Mannering') to show that they have appropriate social standing to admitted to the circles that you are in. In the same way insisting they know four or five ways to make words rhyming with 'ear' is similarly a way to shut them out. However, in doing that, for the bulk of the people using English it reduces their ability to have people understand them clearly. Accuracy of spelling would increase immediately if there was a greater, and vitally, a consistent match, between how a word is said and how it is written. British is rare among European languages in not permitting that. There is no need for us to move to Esperanto, just to have a committee of the kind that the German language has had, to reduce the unnecessary complexity of English, which despite its so widespread usage, is a nightmare language to use, or, should I say: 'a naitmeir langwij to yews' or would you prefer 'mare lang 2 use'?
Meihem In Ce Klasrum
by Dolton Edwards
Because we are still bearing some of the scars of our brief skirmish with II-B English, it is natural that we should be enchanted by Mr. George Bernard Shaw's current campaign for a simplified alphabet.
Obviously, as Mr. Shaw points out, English spelling is in much need of a general overhauling and streamlining. However, our own resistance to any changes requiring a large expenditure of mental effort in the near future would cause us to view with some apprehension the possibility of some day receiving a morning paper printed in-to us-Greek.
Our own plan would achieve the same end as the legislation proposed by Mr. Shaw, but in a less shocking manner, as it consists merely of an acceleration of the normal processes by which the language is continually modernized.
As a catalytic agent, we would suggest that a National Easy Language Week be proclaimed, which the President would inaugurate, outlining some short cut to concentrate on during the week, and to be adopted during the ensuing year. All school children would be given a holiday, the lost time being the equivalent of that gained by the spelling short cut.
In 1946, for example, we would urge the elimination of the soft c, for which we would substitute "s." Sertainly, such an improvement would be selebrated in all sivic-minded sircles as being suffisiently worth the trouble, and students in all sities in the land would be reseptive to- ward any change eliminating the nesessity of learning the differense be- tween the two letters.
In 1947, sinse only the hard "c" would be left, it would be possible to substitute "k" for it, both letters being pronounsed identikally. Imagine how greatly only two years of this prosess would klarify the konfusion in the minds of students. Already we would have eliminated an entire letter from the alphabet. Typewriters and linotypes, kould all be built with one less letter, and a11 the manpower and materials previously devoted to making "c's" kould be turned toward raising the national standard of living.
In the fase of so many notable improvements, it is easy to foresee that by 1948, "National Easy Language Week" would be a pronounsed sukses. All skhool tshildren would be looking forward with konsiderable exsitement to the holiday, and in a blaze of national publisity it would be announsed that the double konsonant "ph" no longer existed, and that the sound would henseforth be written "f" in all words, This would make sutsh words as "fonograf" twenty persent shorter in print.
By 1949, public interest in a fonetik alfabet kan be expekted to have inkreased to the point where a more radikal step forward kan be taken without fear of undue kritisism. We would therefore urge the elimination, at that time of al unesesary double leters, whitsh, although quite harmles, have always ben a nuisanse in the language and a desided deterent to akurate speling. Try it yourself in the next leter you write, and se if both writing and reading are not fasilitated.
With so mutsh progres already made, it might be posible in 1950 to delve further into the posibilities of fonetik speling. After due konsideration of the reseption aforded the previous steps, it should be expedient by this time to spel al difthongs fonetikaly. Most students do not realize that the long "i" and "y," as in "time" and "by," are aktualy the difthong "ai," as it is writen in "aisle" and that the long "a" in "fate," is in reality the difthong "ei" as in "rein." Although perhaps not imediately aparent, the saving in taime and efort wil be tremendous when we leiter elimineite the sailent "e," as meide posible bai this last tsheinge.
For, as is wel known, the horible mes of "e's' apearing in our writen language is kaused prinsipaly bai the present nesesity of indikeiting whether a vowel is long or short. Therefore, in 1951 we kould simply elimineit al sailent "e's," and kontinu to read and wrait merily along as though we wer in an atomik ag of edukation.
In 1951 we would urg a greit step forward. Sins bai this taim it would have ben four years sins anywun had usd the leter "c," we would sugest that the "National Easy Languag Wek" for 1951 be devoted to substitution of "c" for "Th." To be sur it would be som taim befor peopl would bekom akustomd to reading ceir newspapers and buks wic sutsh sentenses in cem as "Ceodor caught he had cre cousand cistls crust crough ce cik of his cumb.''
In ce seim maner, bai meiking eatsh leter hav its own sound and cat sound only, we kould shorten ce language stil mor. In 1952 we would elimineit ce "y"; cen in 1953 we kould us ce leter to indikeit ce "sh" sound, cerbai klarifaiing words laik yugar and yur, as wel as redusing bai wun mor leter al words laik "yut," "yore" and so forc. Cink, cen, of al ce benefits to be geind bai ce distinktion whitsh wil cen be meid between words laik:
ocean now writen oyean
machine " " mayin
racial " " reiyial
Al sutsh divers weis of wraiting wun sound would no longer exist. and whenever wun kaim akros a "y" sound he would know exaktli what to wrait.
Kontinuing cis proses, year after year, we would eventuali hav a reali sensibl writen langug. By 1975, wi ventyur tu sei, cer wud bi no mor uv ces teribli trublsum difikultis, wic no tu leters usd to indikeit ce seim nois, and laikwais no tu noises riten wic ce seim leter. Even Mr. Yaw, wi beliv, wud be hapi in ce noleg cat his drims fainili keim tru.
The key problem for English is that it is such a mish-mash of different families of languages. The problem really came with the Norman Conquest of 1066 which brought far more Latin-based words into English which up until that stage after absorbing Roman words in previous centuries and having this maintained by the Church's use of Latin, had been evolving into a Scandinavian language which by now would probably have been like Danish or Dutch; as it is, much is close to the Freisian language. Having the Normans who, ironically, three generations earlier had been Scandinavians, invade brought Romance-based French words into the language. As the Normans were the rulers and the Anglo-Saxon-British population the ruled, the application of these words was uneven, the classic case being that for livestock Scandinavian style words are used, e.g. cow, like ko in Danish or ku in Norwegian and kuh German, whereas when the meat is cooked it becomes French in style, e.g. beef like the French word boeuf. Consequently English has a mixture of ways of writing the same sounds because some come from the Romance base and some from the Scandinavian. In addition, being a colonial power, Britain drew in words from across its empire and notably words such as bungalow and jodphur come from Hindi. We also have anomalies such as the regular use of 'ph' from Greek pronunciation when other northern European states would use 'f'.
One of the issues that Edwards touches on is the common use of 'th' in English which is a legacy of the Scandinavian input. There are already a symbol for that:of ð and more commonly from King Alfred's time: þ which appear when you look at Viking or some Old English names or failing that, the Greek symbol: θ which was actually used in Old English writing before the other two symbols came along. Of course, the re-introduction of that would need modification of keyboards and using 'c' instead saves that. One thing Edwards neglects to explain is the sudden move to 'tsh' for 'ch'. I know he has to end the soft c, but the adoption of 'ts' is not detailed. Unfortunately the Greek letter for that looks too much like 'X' especially when in capital; 'ts' is a rendering of 'tʃ' using a phonetic symbol. It works but does not decrease the use of letters as Edwards is aiming for. The symbol 'ʃ' actually is for 'sh', but its use would again mean introducing a new symbol on English keyboards hence Edwards recommending using the redundant 'y'. This would make 'ch' rendered as 'ty' and 'church' would become 'tyurty' almost looking Welsh. This assumes no replacement of 'ur' with another combination such as 'er' which is the more familiar rendering of that sound in English spelling, so 'tyerty' maybe more accurate.
Edwards does address one key difficulty in English which marks it out from modern neighbouring European languages. One is how different pairs of vowels are sounded in different contexts. In German 'ie' and 'ei' always sound the same no matter the word, and they sound different from each other. However, in English the words 'pier' and 'weir' are pronounced the same, as are 'seer', 'near' and 'kir'. However, 'near' and 'bear' are pronounced differently but 'bare' and 'bear' are pronounced the same. As for 'though', 'cough' and 'bough' each is pronounced differently, and to add confusion you have 'ugh' to give you the 'f' sound. Spelling is poor in Britain anyway, but it is not helped when children are told to 'look for and use common spelling patterns', there is no such thing in English, as Edwards article points out.
The use of what used to be called in my school days 'fairy e' to change a vowel to its long version is sensibly tackled by Edwards. Why is it bar/bare, car/care, far/fare, star/stare, par/pare (the latter pronounced the same as pair), war/ware, fir/fire, bit/bite, quit/quite, cur/cure, cut/cute and so on. It would make it far clearer as Edwards does to write bit/beit, quit/queit, bar/baer (though 'bear' would be written the same way) and far/faer (and again 'fair' would be written that way, showing once more the problem with words that sound the same but are very different in meaning in English). Some spellings just seem unnecessarily complex, why 'to', 'too' and 'two'? I can accept different spellings to show the different meanings, but why then pronounce them all the same? Why does 'u' have to accompany 'q'. Though Edwards does not say it, with a little imagination, 'kw' and 'k' can stand in: 'kween' for 'queen'; 'enkwiere' for 'enquiry' and 'chek' for 'cheque' and so on. I think 'ia' should be used for sounds like 'fear', 'beer' and so on which almost have 'y' sound in them. It is not one Edwards suggests.
One challenge in Britain which I guess would be the same with regional dialects in the USA is around the length of vowels. In Britain this is most apparent with words like 'bath' and 'path'. In southern England we pronounce them with a long 'a' almost as if they were 'barth' and 'parth'; in conrast in northern England is it far shorter almost like 'ba'th' or 'pa'th'. Some southern English even take this as far as 'orf' for 'off'. I guess in Edwards world, 'of' would become 'ov' allowing the elimination of the double 'f' so current 'off' would simply become 'of' as many people write it anyway.
The greatest revolution in English of the past twenty years has come from the public. Of course there is text speak which in itself takes some steps down Edwards path such as 'luv' for 'love', but others are just about speeding up the typing of words, as in 'w8' for 'wait', '2' for 'to', '4' for 'for' and 'soz' for 'sorry'. The use of 'u' for 'you' makes it identical to Dutch; 'ur' for 'your' is not in fact a phonetic rendering simply an extension from 'u'. Another common step is eliminating all capital letters, though this does seem to inadvertently denigrate yourself when you use 'i' constantly instead of 'I'; apparently the submissive partner in a dominant/submissive sexual relationship would describe themselves this way, but now it is the general populus who sees themselves so, though simply for convenience.
Beyond the use of mobile phones, the misuse of the apostrophe has made the greatest changes, and has often been commented on. However, it does not seem to add anything to clarity. When I was a boy we would write "Those are my friend's dogs." Nowadays it would be more typically rendered as "Those are my friends dog's." The apostrophe (and I have even seen this on a government document) now designates the plural most as in "orange's", even "car's" rather than the possessive which is generally shown by simply adding an 's' as in "peoples job's", "brothers house's" and so on. Of course, this causes real problem when you are looking at plural possessive. I cannot be clear if "the girls work" refers to the work produced by one girl or a group of them, whereas, thirty years ago, "the girl's work" and "the girls' work" would be clearly distinguished. The greatest switch has been with "its" and "it's". Of course, "its" was the possessive of "it" as in "the dog brought its leash" but now like all contractions like "cudnt" for "couldn't" (the replacement of 'oul' with 'u' I imagine Edwards would favour) and "cant" for "can't" mean that if you read "its" you have to assume it means "it's" i.e. it is. In the meantime the use of apostrophes for plurals seems to have got confused as "it's" now means "its", which in some way you can see makes sense to people who are told that "John's" means it belongs to John even if they no longer write it that way.
So, British English is evolving in a way which makes it even less accessible not only to foreigners but older people and comprehension between the different generations is becoming harder. People who try to keep the traditional approaches are criticised as being pedantic. British English never seems to be reviewed in the way that certainly French, German and Portuguese have been in recent decades. It is only done for humorous purposes, usually to suggest that English would end up looking pretty much like German which is something it is assumed no Briton would accept, though if it had not been for the result at the Battle of Hastings, it is likely the two languages would be very similar by now, though hopefully without having to move the verb all over the place as in German. Linguistic authorities do meet to discuss German language and I remember discussion over the possibility of 'sss' in the middle of a German word and the extent to which 'ß' for 'ss' should be used. Portugal reduced the number of letters in Portuguese in 1990, eliminating many accented ones. In France, the government often gives direction on what things should be called in French to avoid over Anglicisation. The USA has looked at spelling in its form of English with Noah Webster in 1828 in 'An American Dictionary of the English Language', for example the elimination of 'u' from words like harbour and colour; the use of more Anglo-phonetic approaches rather than French influenced spelling in centre/center, metre/meter (though meter is also a word in British English it means something different), manoeuvre/maneuver.
One thing which is interesting is that Edwards in 1946 was pushing for the elimination of double consonants in words, though in fact in American English that already often seems to be the case. The British write of a 'traveller'; the Americans of a 'traveler'; the British have 'channelling', the Americans 'channeling' (though I image Edwards would want ''chaneling'); 'skillful' and 'skilful' and so on. The grammatical differences are very varied and there seems to be no greater simplicity in the American approach than in the British.
I think that the challenge for English in becoming a global language is that it makes it very hard for both its own children and learners from overseas to grasp. If there was one pair of letters for each sound in the middle of words and the double-use of 'c' was removed people could engage with English with more confidence far more quickly. I think the persistence of tough spelling in English is somewhat an elitist approach, something like the testing of people by how they pronounce Beauchamp ('Beecham') or Mainwaring ('Mannering') to show that they have appropriate social standing to admitted to the circles that you are in. In the same way insisting they know four or five ways to make words rhyming with 'ear' is similarly a way to shut them out. However, in doing that, for the bulk of the people using English it reduces their ability to have people understand them clearly. Accuracy of spelling would increase immediately if there was a greater, and vitally, a consistent match, between how a word is said and how it is written. British is rare among European languages in not permitting that. There is no need for us to move to Esperanto, just to have a committee of the kind that the German language has had, to reduce the unnecessary complexity of English, which despite its so widespread usage, is a nightmare language to use, or, should I say: 'a naitmeir langwij to yews' or would you prefer 'mare lang 2 use'?
Wednesday, 22 July 2009
The Mutation of the English Language
Note that this post is not called the mutilation of the English language. As it is, English comes in quite a few varieties and even back in the 1990s I started seeing 'American' phrasebooks, so titled, in use in France and Germany. Having worked with South Africans over the past few years, I have seen the intricacies of an English with both British and American input. Though they number the floors the way the British do, i.e. ground floor as opposed to first floor being the lowest, they refer to 'pants' to mean trousers rather than underpants. Of course they mix in some of their own like 'conscionise' which I have heard nowhere else, unlike either the British or Americans they measure distance in kilometres and as for 'stay' and 'live' as in 'where are you staying/living?' the meaning is exactly reverse of what it is in Britain. The Americans had the input of Noah Webster (1758-1843) who through his 'An American Dictionary of the English Language' (1828) moved to USA to spelling harbour as 'harbor' and so on. There are differences in grammar too, for example, in the USA you 'write your father' whereas in Britain you 'write to your father'. In American the 'building is named for Abraham Lincoln' whereas in Britain the 'building is named after Abraham Lincoln' and so on. The Americans still have a Simplfied Spelling Society: http://www.spellingsociety.org/journals/j9/american.php with some sensible suggestions for easing the confusion in the English language further.
Having a seven year old living in my house I know how mad the English language can appear to newcomers. Just this morning there was a mix up over 'paws', 'pores' and 'pause', which in the dialect (middle class, southern England English) I speak, are all pronounced the same. Given that English is the second most spoken language in the world, it seems mad that we had adhered to all the complexities of this language and not made it a bit easier not just for foreigners but also for our own children. A lot of it comes out of the way English sounds, setting aside dialects, even in plain English you can 'fear', 'pier', 'weir', 'here', 'cheer', 'kir', 'Kia' all rhyme, whereas, for example 'schliessen' could never rhyme with 'schreiben' and most languages are the same.
The problem for the English is that they had too many inputs. We had the roots of what became Danish and Swedish, German and Dutch as well as French and Latin input too, and mixed in words from Hindi such as jodphur and bungalow. You could argue that this makes the language dynamic and so easier to use in the modern world. This can be compared with the challenges of say, the Vatican and the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, in finding Latin words to describe modern technology, or more often, those who oversee the Welsh language to create vocabulary for such innovations without simply taking the English word and pronouncing it in a slightly different way or altering the letters. The Welsh word for Pakistani is Pakistanii; the Welsh word for tyre (tire in American) is teiar, which in my view is pronounced the same. However, it means that to learn English you have to learn loads of exceptions and it has recently been declared that there is no point in learning spelling rules for English because there is so much variety.
Anyway, whatever learned scholars and politicians might suggest about altering English, it is changing while we sit here arguing. A lot of this stems for technology. Playing online games, as I have commented before, writing the way I do here, I use a very different language to that of many others. 'Lol' seems to have become a word now (steming from Laugh Out Loud) and there are less common ones like IMHO (In My Humble Opinion which sounds likes Dickensesque language brought into the 21st century). Of course this stems from speeding up the transmission of messages when texting or typing. Some are simple contractions, such as 'soz' for 'sorry' and 'luv' which is an old contraction from way back. I find the adoption of 'u' for 'you' interesting as u is the Dutch word for you and for a few shifts in history we could be using that. Such contractions even begin to evolve their own grammar, so 'ur' stems from 'you' and means 'your', as in the Pink album title, 'U + Ur Hand'. Of course not all texting is about words and even the oldest mobile phone users will recognise :-) and many ;-) though XD might be more of a challenge. So, for many, symbols are now mixed in with words, taking us back to a semi-hieroglyphic form of English.
Young people have always sought to use slang and even code languages both to mark them out from parents and to have a sense of belonging with others in their peer group. Pig Latin, is probably the most enduring one, but there are thousands of local varieties. Such a language was an element in an episode of 'Wallander', the Swedish detective series, I was watching recently, giving a little challenge to the subtitler. However, I believe that the current mutation of the English spoken in Britain is going deeper than that. In some ways it is based on social class with adult working class people adopting the text speak that middle class adults leave to their children. We are not at the stage of Imperial Russia in which the nobles spoke French and only the peasants Russian, but you can mark yourself out in British society by the language you use. Of course, this has always been a form of segregation. My father always quoted sayings about how an Englishman defines himself by the way he speaks. There is RP - Received Pronunciation, the upper class, South-East England accent which for decades was all that was permitted to be heard on British broadcasts. In more democratic times things have shifted and a few years back it was noted how even the Queen had moved towards so-called 'Estuary English', stemming from the cadences of Essex, where the estuary of the River Thames is located.
Having spoken to a woman back in the mid-1990s who was researching the impact of Arabic on French used in urban France, it is noticeable that British English is not mutating that way. We seem to have had our influx of Hindi words more than a century ago and there is no flow now of Urdu or Arabic or Polish phrases, perhaps because Britain has always had such a diversity of immigrants and not concentrated from a particular region as happens in France due to its intimate connection with North Africa. However, in the UK in our changing language we are now moving beyond pronunciation to grammar shifts. These seem prompted not just by simplification of the language for ease of use in speech and technology, but because errors are beginning to stick and become what is now seen as the proper approach.
One that has been developing now for quite a while, is 'I could of won the match if I had tried harder'. In this sentence it should be 'I could have won ...' with have defining the tense and the emphasis of the verb. This has come about simply because of and have, let alone 'ave sound so similar that people mixe them up. Now they write that way. The sense is not really lost but there is no way to explain why you would use 'of' at all in the sentence. Less tortuous, but perhaps bizarre is the appearance of what was once called the 'grocers' apostrophe'. The fact that could have been 'grocers apostrophe' or 'grocer's apostrophe' begins to show some of the difficulty. I was told at school that in Tudor times a man would write: 'Henry Brown, his book' and over time this evolved into 'Henry Brown's book' with the apostrophe after Brown showing the dropping of the 'hi' from his. I am sceptical of this explanation partly because I learnt German and in their possessive cases they often have -s on the end of a possessive noun or adjective. It also does not explain why it never became 'Elizabeth Tudor'r book' for women. I can understand that over time, to speed things up, people would drop the apostrophe and say 'Henry Browns book', but whilst this has happened in many cases of popular usage, the application of the apostrophe has now been added to plurals instead. This brings us back to the grocers, because it was first seen in signs advertising egg's, cheese's, cauliflower's and so on. In some cases, notably, potato's or tomato's it could be acceptable to point to the missing 'e' though that was not the intention. I realised that this unneccessary use of apostrophes in plurals had come into mainstream usage in 1998 when, in the Cabinet Office, in London I came across a report on the work of different government departments. It was a very glossy publication which would have cost you £50 if you had chosen to buy it and there I saw such apostropheed plurals. If it was being used at the highest government level then the rest of us need to get in line. The clearest swap has come in the anomaly that is it's and its. Its is like his and hers, it is a possessive pronoun, but of course, in the past people expected possessives to be made with a 's as in Henry's book. So, it was very common for them to use it's instead. However, it's is in fact a contraction of 'it is', with the apostrophe showing where the 'i' once was. With the disappearance of apostrophes to show missing letters and didnt, cant, etc. becoming words in their own right the switch of its and it's is now complete.
The problem, of course, is in contrast to France and Germany where the government and its appointed bodies make declarations on language usage, whether you can have three 's' in the middle of a German word and how much music should be sung in French on the radio no-one in Britain makes any ruling. This is where the key problem, confusion. If I read 'the girl's coughing' now, is it about the coughing of one girl; a joint activity by a number of girls or is it about the very immediate occurrence, i.e. 'the girl is coughing' with the 'i' simply dropped rather than something more continuous? Of course, a lot of language is contextual and that is possibly why the class issue creeps in. When working at a warehouse a man once told me, in a calm tone, that he was going to 'fucking fuck that fuck' which meant he was going to unload his lorry. Of course, that phrase in anger might have meant he was going to beat up someone or he was going to win a race or a score of other issues. However, standing by the lorry he had driven in, the context made more or less it clear, though still he might have set off to beat up someone who had cut him up or something and used the same phrase. Communication, though is not about the instance, it is about a broader usage. While we may use it to emphasise the exclusivity of our group, it is actually more vital in allowing us to get comprehension from those beyond our own group. While we get by day-to-day, there must be thousands of cases when clarity was needed and instead there was confusion. I am not saying we should or can stop English evolving, but once in a while we need someone to clarify what is the baseline. I never liked American spelling, but I now feel that simplifying English, especially now that so much of it is taught through phonics rather than visually, could only help not just newcomers to the language but us who have been using it for decades and want to ensure we are understood and can understand what is being written to us. In addition, there may be other benefits, because it is often argued that the British are so poor with other languages because they find their own one so difficult.
P.P. 24/07/2009: One thing I neglected to mention is the disappearance of silent letters from writing English. To some extent, I suppose this is overdue, the most common examples I have seen recently are 'wich' rather than 'which' and 'wat' in the place of 'what'. Of course 'wot' for 'what' has been a common element of the grafittier's vocabulary for many decades, but 'wat' seems a bit more elegant and has the example of Wat Tyler, though in this case it seems to be a variant, perhaps a contraction of Walter and ironically means 'commander of the army', so in fact in the context of Wat Tyler (1341-81; full name Walter) a leader of the Peasants' Revolt of England in 1381, it might have been a title rather than his real name.
Having a seven year old living in my house I know how mad the English language can appear to newcomers. Just this morning there was a mix up over 'paws', 'pores' and 'pause', which in the dialect (middle class, southern England English) I speak, are all pronounced the same. Given that English is the second most spoken language in the world, it seems mad that we had adhered to all the complexities of this language and not made it a bit easier not just for foreigners but also for our own children. A lot of it comes out of the way English sounds, setting aside dialects, even in plain English you can 'fear', 'pier', 'weir', 'here', 'cheer', 'kir', 'Kia' all rhyme, whereas, for example 'schliessen' could never rhyme with 'schreiben' and most languages are the same.
The problem for the English is that they had too many inputs. We had the roots of what became Danish and Swedish, German and Dutch as well as French and Latin input too, and mixed in words from Hindi such as jodphur and bungalow. You could argue that this makes the language dynamic and so easier to use in the modern world. This can be compared with the challenges of say, the Vatican and the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, in finding Latin words to describe modern technology, or more often, those who oversee the Welsh language to create vocabulary for such innovations without simply taking the English word and pronouncing it in a slightly different way or altering the letters. The Welsh word for Pakistani is Pakistanii; the Welsh word for tyre (tire in American) is teiar, which in my view is pronounced the same. However, it means that to learn English you have to learn loads of exceptions and it has recently been declared that there is no point in learning spelling rules for English because there is so much variety.
Anyway, whatever learned scholars and politicians might suggest about altering English, it is changing while we sit here arguing. A lot of this stems for technology. Playing online games, as I have commented before, writing the way I do here, I use a very different language to that of many others. 'Lol' seems to have become a word now (steming from Laugh Out Loud) and there are less common ones like IMHO (In My Humble Opinion which sounds likes Dickensesque language brought into the 21st century). Of course this stems from speeding up the transmission of messages when texting or typing. Some are simple contractions, such as 'soz' for 'sorry' and 'luv' which is an old contraction from way back. I find the adoption of 'u' for 'you' interesting as u is the Dutch word for you and for a few shifts in history we could be using that. Such contractions even begin to evolve their own grammar, so 'ur' stems from 'you' and means 'your', as in the Pink album title, 'U + Ur Hand'. Of course not all texting is about words and even the oldest mobile phone users will recognise :-) and many ;-) though XD might be more of a challenge. So, for many, symbols are now mixed in with words, taking us back to a semi-hieroglyphic form of English.
Young people have always sought to use slang and even code languages both to mark them out from parents and to have a sense of belonging with others in their peer group. Pig Latin, is probably the most enduring one, but there are thousands of local varieties. Such a language was an element in an episode of 'Wallander', the Swedish detective series, I was watching recently, giving a little challenge to the subtitler. However, I believe that the current mutation of the English spoken in Britain is going deeper than that. In some ways it is based on social class with adult working class people adopting the text speak that middle class adults leave to their children. We are not at the stage of Imperial Russia in which the nobles spoke French and only the peasants Russian, but you can mark yourself out in British society by the language you use. Of course, this has always been a form of segregation. My father always quoted sayings about how an Englishman defines himself by the way he speaks. There is RP - Received Pronunciation, the upper class, South-East England accent which for decades was all that was permitted to be heard on British broadcasts. In more democratic times things have shifted and a few years back it was noted how even the Queen had moved towards so-called 'Estuary English', stemming from the cadences of Essex, where the estuary of the River Thames is located.
Having spoken to a woman back in the mid-1990s who was researching the impact of Arabic on French used in urban France, it is noticeable that British English is not mutating that way. We seem to have had our influx of Hindi words more than a century ago and there is no flow now of Urdu or Arabic or Polish phrases, perhaps because Britain has always had such a diversity of immigrants and not concentrated from a particular region as happens in France due to its intimate connection with North Africa. However, in the UK in our changing language we are now moving beyond pronunciation to grammar shifts. These seem prompted not just by simplification of the language for ease of use in speech and technology, but because errors are beginning to stick and become what is now seen as the proper approach.
One that has been developing now for quite a while, is 'I could of won the match if I had tried harder'. In this sentence it should be 'I could have won ...' with have defining the tense and the emphasis of the verb. This has come about simply because of and have, let alone 'ave sound so similar that people mixe them up. Now they write that way. The sense is not really lost but there is no way to explain why you would use 'of' at all in the sentence. Less tortuous, but perhaps bizarre is the appearance of what was once called the 'grocers' apostrophe'. The fact that could have been 'grocers apostrophe' or 'grocer's apostrophe' begins to show some of the difficulty. I was told at school that in Tudor times a man would write: 'Henry Brown, his book' and over time this evolved into 'Henry Brown's book' with the apostrophe after Brown showing the dropping of the 'hi' from his. I am sceptical of this explanation partly because I learnt German and in their possessive cases they often have -s on the end of a possessive noun or adjective. It also does not explain why it never became 'Elizabeth Tudor'r book' for women. I can understand that over time, to speed things up, people would drop the apostrophe and say 'Henry Browns book', but whilst this has happened in many cases of popular usage, the application of the apostrophe has now been added to plurals instead. This brings us back to the grocers, because it was first seen in signs advertising egg's, cheese's, cauliflower's and so on. In some cases, notably, potato's or tomato's it could be acceptable to point to the missing 'e' though that was not the intention. I realised that this unneccessary use of apostrophes in plurals had come into mainstream usage in 1998 when, in the Cabinet Office, in London I came across a report on the work of different government departments. It was a very glossy publication which would have cost you £50 if you had chosen to buy it and there I saw such apostropheed plurals. If it was being used at the highest government level then the rest of us need to get in line. The clearest swap has come in the anomaly that is it's and its. Its is like his and hers, it is a possessive pronoun, but of course, in the past people expected possessives to be made with a 's as in Henry's book. So, it was very common for them to use it's instead. However, it's is in fact a contraction of 'it is', with the apostrophe showing where the 'i' once was. With the disappearance of apostrophes to show missing letters and didnt, cant, etc. becoming words in their own right the switch of its and it's is now complete.
The problem, of course, is in contrast to France and Germany where the government and its appointed bodies make declarations on language usage, whether you can have three 's' in the middle of a German word and how much music should be sung in French on the radio no-one in Britain makes any ruling. This is where the key problem, confusion. If I read 'the girl's coughing' now, is it about the coughing of one girl; a joint activity by a number of girls or is it about the very immediate occurrence, i.e. 'the girl is coughing' with the 'i' simply dropped rather than something more continuous? Of course, a lot of language is contextual and that is possibly why the class issue creeps in. When working at a warehouse a man once told me, in a calm tone, that he was going to 'fucking fuck that fuck' which meant he was going to unload his lorry. Of course, that phrase in anger might have meant he was going to beat up someone or he was going to win a race or a score of other issues. However, standing by the lorry he had driven in, the context made more or less it clear, though still he might have set off to beat up someone who had cut him up or something and used the same phrase. Communication, though is not about the instance, it is about a broader usage. While we may use it to emphasise the exclusivity of our group, it is actually more vital in allowing us to get comprehension from those beyond our own group. While we get by day-to-day, there must be thousands of cases when clarity was needed and instead there was confusion. I am not saying we should or can stop English evolving, but once in a while we need someone to clarify what is the baseline. I never liked American spelling, but I now feel that simplifying English, especially now that so much of it is taught through phonics rather than visually, could only help not just newcomers to the language but us who have been using it for decades and want to ensure we are understood and can understand what is being written to us. In addition, there may be other benefits, because it is often argued that the British are so poor with other languages because they find their own one so difficult.
P.P. 24/07/2009: One thing I neglected to mention is the disappearance of silent letters from writing English. To some extent, I suppose this is overdue, the most common examples I have seen recently are 'wich' rather than 'which' and 'wat' in the place of 'what'. Of course 'wot' for 'what' has been a common element of the grafittier's vocabulary for many decades, but 'wat' seems a bit more elegant and has the example of Wat Tyler, though in this case it seems to be a variant, perhaps a contraction of Walter and ironically means 'commander of the army', so in fact in the context of Wat Tyler (1341-81; full name Walter) a leader of the Peasants' Revolt of England in 1381, it might have been a title rather than his real name.
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