A long time ago, in a far-off country, a young man by the name of Luke pulled on his best trousers and a freshly ironed shirt. He was due to meet Rosemary, an English girl who had recently moved to his town, for a date.

He couldn't believe his luck. She was gorgeous, and he could help feeling that she was out of his league.

Now Luke couldn't speak a word of English, but Rosemary was fluent in his language. This only helped to increase Luke's sense of inadequacy, so Luke set off early for his date and stopped at the Beefeater's Arms, the local English pub, on the way.

He walked in, and immediately called for quiet, and asked if someone could teach him an English compliment that he could pay a beautiful lady.

An old sailor took a mouthful of beer and put down his glass. He wiped the foam from his beard and offered his reply. Luke couldn't quite get this, and was a little perplexed at how quickly the old sea-dog became irritated at this, but after a few minutes and several repetitions, Luke felt he had it nailed, so he sauntered happily to the restaurant where he was due to meet Rosemary.

He was still a bit early, so he sat at the bar and bought a pint. Soon enough, though, he saw Rosemary's unmistakable flaxen hair passing the window. As she passed through the door, Luke took another mouthful of ale to steady his nerves. As she prepared to sit down beside him, Luke fixed his eyes on hers and said, in a perfect Liverpudlian accent, "F--- off, I'm trying to enjoy a quiet pint."
--
So, before you blunder into a web forum or mailing list asking for a free translation, think of poor Luke and the one that got away....

I must warn all readers of the dangers of electronic study aids for language.

If the same electronic course is available in more than a handful of languages, it's most probably not worth using.

Why?

The cheapest way to produce a series of tools is a colour-by-numbers approach. Produce a list of items and a manner of displaying them, then send this list to speakers of various languages in order for them to translate it to their respective languages.

This misses a very important point: languages are all different -- otherwise we wouldn't need to learn them, would we?

What do you do when presented with a list of words where a single word in one language could be any of two or more in the other?

The first time I came across this problem was in a Scots Gaelic course TeachMe!. The two terms garden and yard are both covered by gàradh in Gaelic, but this is also spelt gàrradh. TeachMe! Scots Gaelic arbitrarily had one spelt one way and the other differently, and I was never able to remember which was which, so I spent a heck of a lot of time "revising" this because the computer thought I didn't know the words.

The approach handled by EuroTalk's TalkNow is interesting: ignore it. I have the version for Kannada a language for which there are two words for "no": beda (used to refuse an offer) and illa (used to deny, disagree or contradict). The standard template doesn't provide any space for an explanation, so they just binned one. Friends who have used the Scottish Gaelic version have highlighted the same problem. (In Gaelic, and the other Celtic tongues, there is no word for yes or no -- instead you must say something equivalent to is, is not, saw, did not see etc, appropriate to the verb used in the question.)

Most recently, I encountered this problem with the Transparent Language "Before You Know It" (BYKI) flashcard program. I downloaded the free cut-down version of their Polish flashcard package. The Poles have no concept of a city, only of towns. Both words, then, translate to a single word: miasto. As a result, when prompted with the word miasto and asked to translate it to English, you've got at best a fifty-fifty chance. Also, there's the whole matter of English vs US English. Having to type grey as gray really doesn't feel right, and I haven't seen any courses on the net explicitly stating which English they use.

In recognition of these problems, they have given you the ability to add in alternative forms. All well and good, but if the learner makes a mistake and enters incorrect alternatives, the value of the program as a teaching aid is lost.

There are other problems with grammar and idiom. To mention two:

TeachMe! Uses good morning, good afternoon, good evening, good night and good luck as a simple lesson on adjectives. All well and good... madainn mhath, feasgar math, feasgar math, oidhche mhath... until you hit Gura math a thèid leat which doesn't fit the pattern at all. But good luck is in the template, so it's in the lesson.

And how to do you handle phrases that have multiple forms in both languages? If you define different translations for Bye, Goodbye and Bye-bye, your choice will be pretty arbitrary.

This style of material will be with us for a long time. There are 43 languages in the TeachMe! range, and 41 in the Before You Know It series. EuroTalk offer a total of 113 different languages. Each of these ranges includes rarer languages, so there's not a lot of competition, and that which there is is generally highly priced. They're cheap to produce, so they produce as much as they can, knowing that lack of competition means that quality is not an issue.

Ho-hum.

Recently, on one of the Gaelic forums I frequent, someone requested a translation of "To thine own self be true." He wished to get this on a tattoo.

Is this not the most beautiful irony? In Hamlet, Polonius said this to his son, warning him against assuming false airs and pretending to be someone he's not. Yet a man who can't understand Gaelic choses to wear these words, trying to align himself with a language and culture that he is not a part of.

OK, time to admit I was wrong.

My last posting, on the borrowing of words, failed to get to the core of the problems of word borrowing.

The crux of the matter is publishing. As soon as a word comes into our language today it is written down, printed and seen by millions of people. That makes it very hard for the spelling to change. This is the reason we have curious spellings like niche in our language. Of course, this wasn't the situation in the past. After the vikings were expelled from England, it took hundreds of years for the words they left behind to appear in writing. As a result, the original foreign spelling was long forgotten and the words were written as they pronounced them. The pronunciation probably changed too, to better fit the cadences of English.

These problems with borrowing do not only occur in English; this is a current problem in Scots Gaelic and the strong viking influence in the Hebrides makes the two languages quite comparable.

The viking word for hall was halla (as in Valhalla). This was borrowed into Gaelic, but over time the pronunciation changed to better fit Gaelic and became talla. This is due to a process called delinition. (Under certain circumstances an initial T is lenited to the form TH and pronounced like the English H. As this sound cannot occur at the start of a true Gaelic word, this sound was retained for the lenited form and the root form of the word had the delinited T.)

Modern borrowings, however, are taken as close as they can be, eg bhuruca for verruca. This is inappropriate for two reasons:
1) It's a lenited form and should be delenited.
2) The stress in Gaelic words is on the first syllable, whereas the stress in the English verruca is on the second.

No-one wants to engage in artificial language change, quite understandably; languages can and should change of their own accord. However, when we put a newly borrowed term in writing, we are fixing its spelling before it's had time to "bed in" with its new host language. The spelling encodes a pronunciation which is therefore enforced by the use of the dictionary as an authority. By fixing things in an alien form, you force this new form to be accepted as part of the host language. As such, a written borrowing is a form of language change.

We are now at a stage where we understand language change enough to model the changes that have occurred in older borrowings. I concede that consciously applying these models is not a natural form of language, but I contest that it is a naturalistic form of change. If writing borrowed words down is a language change then it must be considered artificial, as language is first and foremost a spoken system.

In the absence of natural language change we must embrace the naturalistic.

Borrowing books, borrowing words

I was doing my semi-regular trawl through the bookshelves of charity shops yesterday, when I stumbled across a book on the "correct" pronunciation of commonly mispronounced words. I didn't buy it, in no small part due to the fact that I pronounce the letter R in many places where it said you shouldn't.

Anyhow, I did have a little flick through it and one example that caught my eye was the word niche. The book duly informed me that the common pronunciation was now neesh, although it used to be nitch.

This illustrates one of the biggest classes of historical mistakes in the development of modern English: inappropriate word borrowing.

Niche is a direct borrowing from French, with the spelling unaltered. But on the face of it, it's unpronouncable. The consonant cluster CH doesn't normally occur inside words unless it's part of TCH -- eg. itchy, ratchet etc. It occurs at the start of a word (chat, change, Charlie). The only words I'm aware of with CH (no T) at the end are sandwich and place-names ending similarly -- Norwich, Harwich etc..

The other problem with niche is that final E. Is it "Magic E" or not -- nih-tch or neye-tch?

Well what is magic E? It's that silent E at the end of a word that changes the sound of a vowel earlier in the word, but there's really no such thing. The rule is a little broader than that. Where the pattern is vowel-consonant-vowel, the first vowel is modified to sound the same as its name, so A goes from ah to ae, E from eh to ee, I from ih to eye etc.. However, where there are two or more consonants between the letter, this change is blocked -- eg to fit becomes fitting to preserve the original sound.

However, is CH really two letters? Linguistically, it's a digraph: two symbols representing one phonetic letter. As CH only occurs without T at the start and end of words, it's not something that we'd normally have to face. Thinking it through logically, words like fishing and without show us that similar digraphs are considered two letters, but the brain doesn't think like that.

Your brain cannot resolve the word niche on first sight against rules learned from other English words. That's why the pronunciation has reverted to neesh: it's a French word with a French spelling, so it only makes sense with the French pronunciation. Unfortunately, linguistic elitists saw fit to borrow the word whole-heartedly -- lock, stock, spelling and pronunciation -- rather than borrowing the pronunciation and writing it as though it was English: neesh.

Say it right first time

I'm putting a lot of money into Polish lessons so that I can do it right. I have to take private lessons -- when you've done a bit of language learning before, classes tend to go too slowly for you. There are so many concepts that I already understand that most English-speakers don't, so I'd just sit there, bored and miserable, as the teacher tried to explain grammatical gender or something basic like that.

I could, of course, learn off my own bat with a book. Why don't I do that? A copy of Teach Yourself Polish or Colloquial Polish, a Polish dictionary and a Polish reference grammar would all come in at the same price as half-a-dozen private lessons.

There is a mistake I commonly make in Gaelic: I drop the second n in urrainn. This is because I'm comfortable enough with the relationship between sounds and letters in Gaelic to write what I say. However, when I started learning to use the term, I wasn't. I learned the term from a book and used it at a conversation circle with a group of other adult learners. I learned the pronunciation wrong, and this has led to misspelling it. Now that I'm aware of this, I'm trying my best to change it, but changing is not just a matter of learning something new -- it means unlearning the mistake and it's really very difficult.

I'm taking Polish lessons because I know that, contrary to the beliefs of some teachers and learners, pronunciation is not a "minor detail" that can be "ironed out" at a later date. I couldn't learn the accent from a book -- I need a person there. My advice to all learners is not to worry too much about written details, but focus on the spoken. Language didn't begin on paper -- it began in people's mouths.

The easiest language to learn.

Dzien dobry.
This week I took my first Polish lesson. Why Polish? Because it may just be the easiest language to learn right now. This may surprise you. Doesn't everyone say that Polish is a difficult language? Yes, they do.

However, my philosophy is fairly simple.

Q. What is the best way to learn a language?
A. Use it every day.

So:
Q. What is the easiest language to learn?
A. One you can use every day.

With such a large Polish population in Scotland at present, that would be Polish.

Do widzenia.