Language following

Last week, I was at a party in Edinburgh to mark Peruvian independence day. As I was leaving, I heard someone refusing a drink because "tengo que manejar" -- "I have to drive".

Funnily enough, I've had a couple of discussions recently about that very word "drive". It all started with a discussion on a Welsh-language Facebook group. The traditional word presented there was gyrru, whereas people often tend to use the term dreifio, presented there as an Anglicism. Strangely enough, the very next day, I ran into an old university classmate of mine, Carwyn, who was up from Wales to visit a conference in Edinburgh. When I asked him which word he would use to say "drive", his answer was "probably the wrong one", which I immediately took to mean dreifio.

I explained to him why I felt that dreifio was less of an Anglicism than gyrru.

How so?

This is a phenomenon that I call "dictionary following", for wont of a better term. (If there's a widely-accepted alternative name, please do let me know in the comments.) It's a peculiar form of language change that minority languages seem particularly prone to undergoing, where a word-form in one language gets locked to the changing meaning of a single equivalent in another language.
Edit: An Cionnfhaolach over at IrishLanguageForum.com tells me that this transferrence of all meanings for a word in one language to a similar word in another is called a "semantic loan".

In this case, the dictionary word gyrru is a word that means to spur animals onwards -- it's "drive" as in "driving cattle": what drovers do. The modern sense of "drive" comes via the idea of forcing carthorses forward, and thus the English word has broadened.

Across Europe, the equivalent word often evolved analogously. The French and Italian equivalent term is actually to "conduct" a car, and in Spanish, you either "conduct" or "handle" your car -- which is where manejar comes into the equation (manejar = manage = handle; mano = hand).

It's too easy to focus on the grammatical and lexical items as being the characteristics of a language, but if that is not underpinned by idiomatic usage and unique linguistic metaphors, then it doesn't feel like a complete language; and for me at least, much of the joy of learning and speaking that language is lost.

So for me, I'm happier to adopt the English "drive" morpheme into languages like Gaelic and Welsh than to adopt the English metaphor with a native room and claim that this is somehow "purer".

Undefined article error

No, Blogger isn't on the blink, that's the intended title of the article.

The error in question is the continued use of classical terminology for grammatical articles: specifically the terms definite article and indefinite article. For over a decade, I tried to reconcile the grammatical feature with the common sense of the words "definite" and "indefinite" -- i.e. certain and uncertain -- but it made no sense at all.

It wasn't until I started discussing grammar in foreign languages that I clicked what I'd been missing all along -- the terms we use are basically a mistranslation of classical terminology.

The English word definite has diverged drastically from its etymological roots, but this is not true in the Romance languages on mainland Europe. When the French say défini or the Spanish say definido, what they are actually saying is defined.

That's right, the definite article is really the defined article, which means the indefinite article must be the undefined article. From that perspective, everything seems to make much more sense.

Plenty of languages survive quite well without any articles -- they are essentially redundant as even in English, in a lot of circumstances you can drop them without losing any information in the sentence.

What I'd never got my head round was that the articles don't add any information to the sentence -- they simply act as a sort of "signpost" to information that already exists elsewhere. But most importantly, it refers to the listener's frame of reference and not the speakers.

What the definite article flags up is essentially "you know which one I mean", and the indefinite article says "you don't know which one I mean". If I say "You should go home -- the wife'll be waiting," context says I'm talking about your wife, but if I say "I should go home -- the wife'll be waiting," then you know that I'm talking about my wife. And if I say "a friend of mine is coming to visit," I'm telling you that I don't expect you to know which one I'm talking about. But in both cases, if you delete the articles, I would still make the assumption of yours/mine or that I'm not sure in the second.

Now I know that isn't very clear, but to be honest, I still haven't got this that clear in my own head.

This "signposting" idea is pretty abstract, so describing it is pretty difficult. But to be fair, it's no more abstract than the phenomenon it's describing, and the more I think about articles, the more weird and abstract they look to me. For something at first class so basic, they are incredibly complex.

I suppose I'll be working for years trying to work out the best way to teach, discuss and describe them, but for now I'll satisfy myself with using the terms defined and undefined in place of definite and indefinite, because at the very least we'll be one step closer to a meaningful definition.

I would of written this headline properly, but...

I wanted to revisit an old theme today. A lot of people still complain about people writing would of instead of would have. There's a saying in linguistics: there's no such thing as a common error (for native speakers) because standard language is (or should be) a statistical norm of what people actually say or write, and a legitimate standard is one that accepts all common variations (hence modern English spellcheckers accepting both "all right" and "alright" -- and as if just to cause maximum embarassment, the Firefox spellchecker doesn't like "alright"... or "spellchecker").

If people write "would of", it's because in their internal model of the English language, they do not see the verb "to have" in there at all. I was looking back at an earlier blog post on this topic, and I saw that I used the phrase "the "error" only occurs when have is used as a second auxiliary". Spot the mistake.

Standard Modern English clauses can only ever have one auxiliary -- there is no "I will can..." or "I would can...", you either have to switch to a copular construction ("I will be able to...") or inflect, eg can to could: I could tell him (if you want).

The have of the perfect aspect in English has traditionally been slightly ambiguous as to whether it's an auxiliary or not. Placement of adverbs gives us an indication of what's going on: "I always have time for it" is fine where "*I have always time for it" feels quite odd and stilted, whereas perfect have is perfectly OK with having such adverbs after it, which makes it look like an auxiliary: "I have always been lucky".

Negatives (and questions) take us further: "I don't have a car" is far more natural to many English speakers than "I haven't a car", but "*I don't have been to Russia" is clearly wrong, and "I haven't been to Russia" is the only possible correction.

So, let's say that the history of the perfect-aspect-have has been one of becoming more and more like the auxiliary verbs. English has, over time, lost the ability to have more than one auxiliary verb in a clause. Those two changes, taken in parallel, means the construction "would have" is in the process of becoming impossible in English.

What do we have instead? Well, like I said before, I see it as the formation of a new suffix, one that is applied to auxiliary verbs to indicate perfect aspect.

I would argue that we already have one established, recognised auxiliary suffix in English: -ould. This first appeared as "would" (or rather "wolde"), the past form (both indicative and subjunctive of "willan" (will). Notice that there are two changes here -- firstly the grammatical vowel change i->o (->ou), and the suffixing of past D. The same changes from first principles could describe shall giving us should, even though the exact vowel change is different, but cannot account for can giving us could, as the N->L change isn't typical in English. Furthermore, it is not a commonly observed pattern for people to spell could would and should differently. Therefore -ould must be a single morpheme common to all three words.

If this is the case, then adding another suffix to that seems perfectly sensible, and we've got coulda, woulda, shoulda; or could've, would've, should've; or coodov, woodov, shoodov or however you want to write it.

Of course, this same perfective suffix can be applied to certain auxiliaries without the -ould suffix:

• must: that must've been him etc.
• will: he'll've been told by now

And yet "must" is already practically dead (we all use have to/have got to) in normal usage, leaving "will" rather isolated as the only non-ould auxiliary to take [ha]ve, so even that might slip out of usage fairly quickly.

The case for writing "have" is purely etymological, it doesn't fit the evidence from "mistakes", and it presents a rather more complex model of the language than the alternative I present. It's a complexity that is possible, but I believe only insofar as it is as a transitional form between two stable conditions. I think we should let the language take that final evolutionary step to find a stable state.

The UK's privatisation agenda hits immigrants and language students

I normally try not to put too much politics into a language blog, but this time it definitely deserves it. I have never been a fan of privatising public infrastructure, as it typically shifts the burden of cost to those who can least afford it. This case is no exception.

I discovered through a news story shared on Facebook this morning that the UK's Home Office is changing the English language prerequisites for visas. Previously, the SQA (the public sector exam board for Scotland) had an ESOL qualification that was recognised by the Home Office, but this will be struck off the list, which will now consist only of two exams -- the big ones, the expensive ones: Cambridge and Trinity.

The site reporting it, having nationalist inclinations, chose to focus on the angle that Westminster was trying to undermine Scotland's education sector. As a left-leaning site, though, they failed to spot the bigger picture: this is about privatisation.

The current UK government is determined to dismantle whatever public infrastructure that remains to us, and leave the populace at the mercy of marketplace economics. (Which does make this a Westminster vs Holyrood issue, to an extent, as the Scottish Government is far less keen on privatisation.)

But anyone involved in the language teaching sector will know roughly how expensive the private sector exams are, and anyone teaching English in the UK will have seen firsthand how little their students can afford these tests.

Forcing more immigrants into expensive exams (which many criticise for not being a good measure of language ability anyway) is just making life harder for some of the most vulnerable members of our society, because make no mistake -- an immigrant is a member of our society, regardless of what the majority of politicians and newspapers tell us.

Well-rounded learning...?

I just stumbled across a post from last year on the Guardian's language learning blog. It's by a guy trying to learn Spanish using only Duolingo, and I thought his feedback was quite interesting.

The author Alan Haburchak, found himself struggling to internalise the grammar of Spanish as there is no conscious presentation of verb tables. I found similar problems using the course for German -- not with the verbs (I'd done most of the verb system via the Michel Thomas course already), but with the articles. The declension of the articles in German is more complex than verb conjugation, because there are so many sets of overlaps. There is no marking for gender for plural, but gender is marked in singular. The feminine declension matches the plural declension in 3 out of 4 cases.  Masculine and neuter declensions match in genitive and dative, but not nominative and accusative... and the neuter nominative and accusative are the same as each other, but not the masculine ones. I'll stop now because I've probably lost you, and that's only half of it. And when you've finished with the definite articles, there's the indefinite ones too, and the adjective endings which are more complicated again. Certain patterns are shared, certain are distinct.

Trying to learn such a complex and arbitrary pattern from examples is, I think, pretty much impossible. So much information is obscured (not least of all the gender of the noun) that you cannot generalise. The end result is an ability to read fairly comfortably, but not to reproduce.

Since I started looking at tables myself, I've found the German course much easier, but still not trivial. Alan's doubt was about whether this was a general problem with "naturalistic" learning, or just his own habits formed through school language classes. I could (and maybe should) have the same doubt, but I just cannot fathom how anyone would intuit these patterns without some conscious knowledge to help them sort through the tangle.

Possessives and terminology

A couple of years ago, I wrote a post describing my objections to the traditional definitions of possessive adjectives and possessive pronouns. At the time, I still favoured calling what is called the possessive pronoun a "possessive adjective" (eg. "it is mine"), and calling the possessive adjective a "possessive pronoun" (eg "my car"0 for English... in theory.

However, practicality is another thing entirely, because there is nothing more confusing than using the same words as someone else to mean entirely the opposite thing, so I have never used the terms that way for students. In fact, I actively avoid using either term if I can possibly avoid it, as it doesn't seem helpful.

So recently I've been working on trying to find ways to better categorise grammar, and I've settled on what actually seems like a reasonable compromise.

For the possessive "adjective" of traditional grammar, I'm going with the alternative from the previous post -- the possessive determiner. It aligns with this, that, a and the, so it naturally falls into the class of determiners. This doesn't mean it isn't a pronominal form -- it actually means that forms like "John's" have to be considered determiners themselves... which is entirely logical, as "John's car" is "the car that belongs to John", but "John's" has replaced the definite article; hence "John's" must be a determiner anyway.

For the possessive "pronoun", I'm going with the possessive predicate. I decided on this when I was thinking about it as a predicative adjective in sentences like "It is mine," or "that's yours." Of course, that's not the only situation it occurs in, which is something I overlooked a little when blogging from the unbearable heat of Corsica in the summer. There is no predicate in "I'll give you mine," or "She didn't have hers, so she took yours." But at least it gets away from the counter-intuitive implication that the other form is not a pronoun.

I will continue to think about this, but if I do ever come up with a better term, I can just do a search-and-replace on what I've already got without any problems....

The slow death of the MOOC continues

This morning, I checked my email like I always do, and Coursera were plugging their latest "specialization" -- one for so-called cloud computing.

Coursera specialisations were originally launched as a single certificate for a series of "signature track" (ie "paid for") courses, but there's always the free option alongside it.

So I was very surprised when I clicked on the link for more information about the specialisation, then clicked through to the course, and it was only offering the $49 paid-for version. Now I did go back later and track down the free version of the course by searching the course catalogue, but the notable thing was that you can't get to the free version by navigating from the information about the specialisation.

It's there -- it is -- but by making click-through impossible, they're actively trying to push people into the paid versions. This suggests that the business model isn't working, and it's not really much of a surprise -- there's no such thing as a free lunch, and the only free cheese is in the mousetrap.

Some of the universities seemed to be using the free courses as an advert for there accredited courses, but it's a very large and expensive way to advertise -- teaching thousands in order to get half-a-dozen extra seats filled on your masters programme -- and so really the only way to get money is to get more of the students to pay.

Is it worth it for the student?

Cloud Computing costs £150, and going by their time estimates, that's between 120 and 190 hours of work. The academic credit system here in Scotland says that ten hours of work is one "credit point", and there are 120 credits in a year. Timewise, the Cloud Computing specialisation is then roughly equivalent to a 15-point or 20-point course -- ie. a single "module" in a degree course. A 15-point module costs £227.50, and a 20-point module costs just over £300, so £150 for this seems like a pretty good deal. Of course, this is only the cost to students resident in Scotland to begin with, and it is controlled by law to stay artificially low -- in England, the basic rate would be £750 for a 15-point course or £1000 for a 20-point one, but many universities "top-up" their fees by half again: £1125 and £1500 respectively. And English universities are still cheaper than many of their American counterparts.

So the Coursera specialization could be half the price of a university equivalent, or a tenth, or even less, depending on where you live. Sounds like a good deal, right?

Sadly, though, the certificates are worthless -- almost all the institutions offering courses through Coursera (and EdX, and FutureLearn) are allowed to accredit their own courses for university credit, but they choose not to. If they accredited a £30 course as university-level study, they'd be competing against themselves, and they'd kill the market for their established distance courses, and perhaps even their on-campus courses.
If they can run a course for £150, is there any justification for their usual high prices? Well... yes. Coursera is on a freemium model (free for basic use, pay for "premium" services), but in reality everything on Coursera is still the "free" part of the freemium. The online-only courses are not viable for universities for a number of reasons, so it's the fully-accredited courses run by the universities themselves that make it possible for the universities to offer the cheap courses "on the side", using repurposed versions of their existing course materials.

Technology and knowledge sharing can and should be used to reduce the cost of education. When I studied languages with the Open University, I looked at the cost of the course I was taking, vs equivalent unaccredited alternatives -- I could have bought equivalent books and spent more time with a one-on-one teacher than I did in group tutorials, and still only spent half of the money I did with the OU. If I hadn't wanted to get the degree, it would have made no sense at all to continue with them, but I want to teach in schools, so I need the degree.

So yes, there is undoubtedly unnecessary expense in education and there's a lot of "fat" that could be trimmed away, but the Coursera model won't do it, and for now it remains something of a distraction -- a shiny object that draws our attention away from the real problems and solutions.