Why Do English Speakers Eat Their Words?

One of the keys to being a foreign spy working as a double agent is to have an immaculate accent in the language you are pretending to be a native speaker of. You are supposed to be able to use slang expressions, produce idiomatic expressions at will, and possess a full knowledge of cultural, geographical and historical points that only native-born people would know. You are expected to be able to blend in to society like a sugar crystal in hot coffee. You should understand and be able to replicate the inside jokes and indulge in subtleties of nuance that will not arouse the suspicions of even the top military brass.

It is little wonder, then, that countries like the UK and Russia devote a large amount of money towards linguists, for the purposes of translation of course, but mainly for training as spies. This is where both governments then diversify: Russia spends a vast amount of money on converting the information it collects to use against its enemy, and the UK seeks to infiltrate deep into a government's innermost sanctum to gain as much knowledge of the enemy's moves without being noticed until it's too late.

And it is here that we find the spies with balls of tungsten - those that can get the knowledge they need, memorise it, or make replicas of it under the noses of the enemy, and disappear before anyone raises the alarm. Often, these are people who have another skill and can get hired as interns or service providers, such as IT specialists or security guards - in other words, people with access to many physical locations or who can handle sensitive material.

So the real secret to sniffing out a spy is to know the subtlest of signs when you are facing one, and how to call that person out before they get their hands on their target. For that purpose, there are people who are hired specifically to listen out for signs of non-native behaviour: this can be patterns of pronunciation in their speech, a particular way the person writes a specific letter of the alphabet, even how the person gesticulates.

For example, a Czech person is more likely to write a "t" similar to a "d". A Bulgarian will have difficulty pronouncing a full "L" so that it sounds more like a vowel. Spanish, Dutch and Finnish people often can't differentiate between "s" and "sh", "ch" and "dj", or "z" and "s". And one from WW2 was which fingers an operative used to order drinks - did they use their thumb for one or their forefinger for one? And did they use their thumb and forefinger for two, or forefinger and middle finger for two? These are just some of the very subtle differences top spies use to identify and catch double agents. There are plenty more, and some are unnoticeable to monolinguals, but to ninja linguists, they are bread and butter.

Do you remember the case of Robin Van Helsum, known as "Forest Boy" in Germany back in 2012? Some Dutch kid showed up in a forest saying he had no idea what he was doing or where he was from. The Wikipedia page on him says this: "[He] spoke English with a slight accent suggesting to the German Authorities that one or both of his parents were American or British. Police in Berlin believed that he may have been from the Czech Republic having given the indication that he lived in the undergrowth of the Ore Mountains." Well this goes to show that the German authorities really didn't hire any proper linguists, because if they did, I'm sure they would have identified his nationality, even down to the region he was from, in less than half a day. To not even know if he was American or British shows territorial behaviour and a real lack of wanting to involve real experts on the case.

To discover where someone is from in a case like that, one needs to ask the most pertinent questions, and listen to the way he pronounces certain words. I give language training to multinational classes of professionals, and one of the things I enjoy most is, on the first day of a course, guessing the person's name (and therefore his/her nationality) from the entries on the presence list without them telling me directly who they are, just by asking questions like "what's your job?" and "what did you do at the weekend?" Because that's our métier.

So that brings me on to how to catch an English-speaking double agent: and that is the schwa, represented in the IPA by the symbol /ə/. The schwa is a sound made by English speakers that falls in unstressed syllables, for example the "u" in "support", or the "a" in "England". It is a nondescript sound that can appear in many different letter combinations and is really just a filler for the space vacated by the original sound. It is Schrödinger's phoneme - a sound that is both there and not there at the same time. If it were a person, it would be the one who at parties sits in the corner reading a book, sips tap water and never makes eye contact with anyone.

It is always unstressed and never has any set letter combination to identify it. The schwa is so elusive, it sometimes really isn't there even when you think it is. Let me elaborate: how many syllables in the word "separate"? Well, as a verb, three /sɛpərɛɪt/, but as an adjective some pronounce three, some two, so either /sɛprət/ or /sɛpərət/.

For that reason, English speakers are sometimes picked up by foreign spycatchers when attempting to speak their language by the way they pronounce unstressed vowel sounds in the target language. This is not the heaviest feature of English speakers, but it is one that a British double agent might forget when trying to speak another language, and either overcompensate the weak sound or add a schwa where none is found.

The vast majority of European languages pronounce sounds as they are written, and even if they don't, like French, Portuguese or Greek, there are rules as to the letter combination. Two languages even have a dedicated letter of the alphabet to make this schwa sound - Romanian and Bulgarian. English is not like this, and this phoneme, the most prevalent vowel sound in English, can be found in many different places. Below are some words that contain the schwa but with wildly different letter usages. See if you can identify the parts of the words where the schwa is found (sometimes there are more than one):

information
combine
provide
Nottingham
Gorilla
forgive
apology
molecular
anxious
Oxford
doctor
glamorous
photography
Edinburgh
mathematician
maternal
allowance
Portsmouth
harbour
dermatology
comfortable
Scotland

The rise of the schwa was an important step in uniting different dialects to be mutually intelligible. Different people in various parts of the country pronounced words and place names differently, but the one thing they had in common was the way the consonants were pronounced. So in order to be more intelligible to each other, they dropped their local way of pronouncing words. Slowly, those sounds disappeared, but the spelling lived on.

Other things have contributed to the slow process of English standardisation and elimination of dialectal differences, such as the arrival of television, but one constant remains - if you want to speak good English without an accent, especially if you want to be a double agent, you firstly need to perfect the schwa and recognise where to (not) use it!

How Words Travel Through Time (Part 2): How Did English Get Such Odd Spelling?

English is not known for being very consistent with its spelling-to-pronunciation ratio. For example, take words like thought, though, through and thorough. All contain more or less the same letters, but all have wildly differing pronunciation. What caused this bizarre anomaly, and are there any other languages like it?

Well, first of all, English pronunciation is best described as historically programmed. The vast majority of our words are pronounced the way they are depending firstly on when they entered the language, secondly on their origins (Latin, German, Norse, French, Norman French, etc.), and finally on their relationship to the people using them, e.g. region, class, age group.

To fully understand how we got to today's standards, we need to look at a couple of events in history. The first one was the invention of the printing press by Gutenberg and taken to England by William Caxton in 1476, when Edward IV was on the throne. But it wasn't really until Richard III, who came to power less than a decade later, that it really took off. He was the one who took away the restrictions on the printing of books, and used the printing press for his advantage.

Whereas before, everything had to be hand-written, making royal decrees issued from London mainly spread via word of mouth rather than by written order, it was now possible to send messages en masse to every corner of the kingdom.

This presented a problem: such was the variety of spelling and pronunciation from village to village, that often a local priest or other educated personage had to "interpret" the words from Head Office. Now, though, there was a chance to send mass communication for the first time.

What was known as Chancery English, the principal standard English, was now the main language of state, having superseded French only 7 decades earlier. It was totally different from the Saxon English of previous decades, as it had a lot of French words introduced into it. These were of a generally higher class than the Saxon vernacular, and their pronunciation was still quite French-sounding. The English initially resented the use of French words, as any suppressed people would, but they realised, if these words were going to enter their language, they would be pronounced using English sounds. English people commonly hypercorrected those who used French words not in an English way; a kind of peaceful revolt against the rulers.

So now was the chance to standardise the language, and it was the Chancery in London under the orders of the king that sent out representatives to each and every village within 100 miles of London with a list of words and phrases, and asked local people to pronounce them. The representatives wrote down phonetic transcriptions of those words and reported them to the Chancery. It was a wonderfully enlightening exercise, and led to a massive compromise between spelling and pronunciation, dare I say one of the most important developments in the rise of English.

This is why we have -ough- words - they are the clearest example of the compromise. For example, "through" may have been pronounced more like the German guttural "durch" in the northern parts, the Dutch "door" in East Anglia, maybe a softer "trou" in the south west, and a diphthonged "throw" in the Midlands. by using the "ough" combination here, it could cover every type of pronunciation without making too much difference to people's lives. There are not more than two-dozen -ough- words still in use today, but there are around ten different ways to pronounce them. Apart from those ones above, we have rough, tough, enough, ought, bought, wrought, dough, bough, furlough, trough, cough, hough, lough, and a few others that we still use, but that's it, and look at the different ways they can be pronounced. It is wildly different.

The same could be said of other words, such as "debt". It was actually pronounced in the French way "dette", and spelled various different ways, but by putting the "b" back in it, it highlighted its origins (Latin "debitum") but enabled people to continue to pronounce it the same as they always did. But now, people could refer to the spelling if they didn't understand the way a stranger pronounced the word. Similar things happened to "receipt", "subtle", and "doubt".

Let us tackle the Anglophone propensity for dropping various sounds. For example, why do they pronounce "comfortable" with half the letters unused /'kʌmftǝbᵊl/? Because firstly, by trying to standardise the spelling based on pronunciation, we may lead to excluding various speakers of regional dialects; secondly, by leaving words spelled as they are, people recognise them better; and thirdly, most importantly, English speakers have for centuries been dropping weaker sounds in order to make themselves *more* comprehensible to each other, not *less* comprehensible.

What do I mean? Well, let's go back 800 years. Let's say you come from somewhere like Winchester in Hampshire, and you want to go to Leicester in the Midlands. So you ask someone for the way to Laai-ses-tah. No idea. Lee-ses-terr? Oh, maybe you mean Lester? Yes! Dropping the useless sounds means people in the English-speaking world, when speaking to one another, generally listen to the constellation of consonants, whether enunciated or silent, more than the vowels. The vowels and diphthong sounds are regional; the consonants, whether enunciated or silent, are more or less universal. But the written versions have kept their useless letters for easier identification in reading by all regional dialect users.

It's as simple as that.

Try it on words like "castle" (silent T), "know" or "knight" (silent K), "hour" (silent H), "whistle" (semi-silent H). Look them up on etymonline.com and see what results you get. I'll provide the reasons:

Pronunciation of the T in "castle" was slowly dropped as it made the word too much of a mouthful, but the T remained in the written version to allow comprehension through its origins (castel, château, etc.).

The silent K in "know" and "knight" come about in the same way - enunciating a hard K before another consonant felt uncomfortable, but by keeping the K, we see it comes from "Knecht" in and "Kennen" in various Germanic languages.

There are only a handful of words in English where the H is not pronounced, such as hour/ly, heir/ess, and honour/able. The simple answer to this is because these words came directly into English from French, where the H is always silent.

The "WH" sound in English, until recently, was pronounced as if one was blowing out a candle. Some still do pronounce it this way. The "WH" combination comes from Scandinavian "HV" or "KV", found in many words.

So all-in-all, if you want to know why various words in English are pronounced sometimes very differently from their spelling, look no further than their origins, because we all understand better through historical connotations, rather than thinking we should force English spelling to be phonetic!

- Raymond Goslitski

How Does History Play A Part In A Language's Development?

It is said that a person only really dies once their lives have no effect on us any more. For that reason, William the Conqueror is very vigorously still moving around. His personality, strategy and actions played an immense part in how the English language is today, even more so than that other famous William and his plays over five centuries later.

1066 was known as the year of the three kings, and it changed the course of the English language forever. It was, until then, almost fully Germanic and resembled Icelandic or Old Norse. When Edward the Confessor died in January that year, the usual practice was a period of reflection before the next coronation. But such were the fears of the English nobles of an invasion of the Danes, that the next king, Harold Godwinson, was crowned that very afternoon, right after the funeral.

William of Normandy was furious because his distant cousin, the deceased king Edward, who died childless, had promised him the throne a few years earlier. But, as the French say, revenge is a dish served cold. He waited it out until he could strike. He didn't need to wait long, as in mid-September the Danes invaded again in the north and Harold took his army up to Stamford Bridge in present-day Lincolnshire to defeat them.

William of Normandy sensed it was time to strike. While Harold was fighting off the Danes, William was busy building a fleet of ships at St Valéry Sur Somme in neighbouring Picardy to cross the Channel and take what he considered was rightfully his. He set sail in late September and arrived at the beginning of October. With Harold away, he could have walked straight into London and taken over the place, but such was the code of honour back then, he waited on the south coast for his rival to return from the north. In mid-October the Battle of Hastings took place, and as we know, the rest is history.

But what has this got to do with the English language?

Well. Once William had made it to London (his path over the Thames was blocked by English loyalists at Southwark Bridge so he had to take a detour to the next crossing in Oxfordshire), he made Norman French the language of state. You needed to switch to it if you wanted anything from the king's government. He threw out all the Saxon nobility and installed his own. All those dukes, earls, barons and other hereditary lords can usually trace their heritage back to this period, which is why they often have French sounding surnames: Baron de Clifford, Baron Vaux, Baron de Ros, and so on.

With Norman French as the language of state, words from it parachuted into English with a great rapidity. The Saxons continued to use their language but increasingly they dropped more formal words from the French into their every-day use. The Saxons were still the peasants, the farmhands, and the labourers, and the few Normans were the bosses and consumers. This is why our farm animals have Germanic names - pig, swine, lamb, sheep, cow, chicken, but as food, the names become French - beef, veal, mutton, pork, as the Normans were the ones eating the produce of their workers. The old word for cooked chicken was pullet.

Similarly, a house is a standard building with four walls and a roof. But a manor, a castle, a mansion and a palace are from French, because that's where the new overlords chose to sequester themselves away from the hordes. A seat or a stool are functional pieces of furniture, but a chair and a throne are more comfortable.

All new words in English tend to come from Latinate, and any new coinages from the Germanic side are pre-existing words that are combined with others to form new expressions.

The proportion of Latinate words in English is high - 56%, in fact. Germanic words only make up 27%. The rest are foreign borrowings.

So why is English still classed as a Germanic language? Because of its basic words - numbers, prepositions, conjunctions, most-used verbs, nouns and adjectives. This also explains why the irregular verbs are almost all Germanic in origin - they were formed before the standardisation of grammar. This is more or less the same in all languages: the oldest verbs, therefore the most used, rarely follow standard grammar practices. Take the verbs be, go, find, write, get.

I will address the spelling in another post, but there is a reason for its seemingly incoherent form. Pronunciation too - many words from Latinate seem to be badly pronounced, but it is probably the consequence of Saxon resilience - if they were going to have French words, they were going to incorporate them into the every-day English accent. Some people even hyper-corrected others who were sounding too French.

Many words have changed meaning over time, but the Latinate ones still have a much more formal, educated, erudite ring to them, which means they can sound both charming or arrogant. The Saxon words are still more down-to-earth or vernacular, which is why we use them more in ordinary speech.

So you can ordinarily "want" or "need" something, but someone in authority might "request", "require", "desire" or "demand" something.

Germanic words can have three, four or more different meanings, whereas the Latinate ones generally mean only one thing - look at the various meanings of the words get and set, compared to acquire and install.

The words we use today to reflect our moods or our relationships with our interlocutors are a direct consequence of the Battle of Hastings and William the Conqueror. For this reason, this Norman warrior king from almost a millennium ago is most definitely still alive and kicking.

- Raymond Goslitski

How Words Travel Through Time (Part 1) - the inexorable proliferation of a three-letter word

One of the most intriguing things about a language is how the meaning of words changes over the years. English is one of the most liberally-used languages of all, in that we often have to take the period in which a word was used to know its meaning and use. Also, the use of language often points to the mindset or mentality of the people that use it.

For example, let us take French: it has a stuffy Académie that regulates and standardises the language to the extent that it often (unsuccessfully!) tries to ban words that it deems not "French" enough. It is a behemoth, and makes rulings on the acceptability of usage. In the same vein, the whole legal and governmental system acts in a similar way: there is a rule for everything.

English, on the other hand, goes completely in the other direction: the language is governed by both nobody and everybody at the same time. There is no academy, just the Oxford English Dictionary that listens to what people are saying, and if a new word comes into general use, and survives for a set period, it goes in the dictionary, never to be removed. This also points to the libertarian attitudes in the mindset of the people and their governance.

Why is a word never removed? Because if, in a hundred years, someone is reading a book or an article from today, the reader may not know what a particular word or phrase means, for example "dial-up Internet". Firstly, dialling - we stopped using dials on phones in the nineties, but the verb "dial" kept being used even for push-button phones. By 2120, probably even smartphones will be long gone.

Words also make appearances with variations of themselves and mean similar things, or at least things connected to the original.

Let us take the word "wit": describing this word would provide a variety of ideas amongst a group of Anglophones. For some it is speed of the mind; for others it is the ability to reply instantaneously to a comment in a humorous way; the Oxford English Dictionary has a number of explanations, among them:
1. The seat of consciousness or thought, the mind: sometimes connoting one of its functions, as memory or attention
2. The faculty of thinking and reasoning in general; mental capacity, understanding, reason.
3. Mental faculties, intellectual powers (plural)
4. Denoting a quality: good or great mental capacity; intellectual ability; genius, talent, cleverness; mental quickness or sharpness
5. A person of great mental ability; a learned, clever or intellectual person; a man of talent or intellect; a genius

To discover its origins, one needs to look further back in time and to another language, German. A large number of Germanic words in English that have "t" in them are recognisable from their German equivalents as they contain ss or ß. For example foot = Fuß, shot = Schuß, vat = Faß, and even shit = Scheiße.

And so, this evidence, any speaker of German would be able to conclude that the word "Wissen", meaning to know (a thing or fact, not a person or place) would be the most logical word in German that the word "wit" in English would be related to.

Furthermore, the word "Witz" in German means “joke”, which would further clarify any lingering doubts over its beginnings. But digging deeper into their historical backgrounds one would see that this is only one branch of a quite expansive family tree.

As a word with such a long history, "wit" has broadly kept a similar meaning over time. It is a versatile word which symbolises deftness of articulation, quickness of mind and strong attention, making a distinct difference with the idea of learned intelligence, as well as the idea of "knowing", which comes from the Germanic root "kennen", and gives us the fairly outdated word "ken", that is still used in some northern English and Scottish dialects.

The lexicalisation of wit has lasted through the ten centuries since its first recording and although in the 21st century we associate it more with repartee and humorous ripostes, its original meaning lives on in various other guises, for example:

1. In plural form, as in:
a. to keep one’s wits about one, which the Oxford English Dictionary describes as “to have one’s mental powers in full exercise”;
b. to be at one’s wits’ end, meaning “to be utterly perplexed; at a loss what to think or do”, according to the OED;
c. to be out of one’s wits, or “insane, mad, out of one’s mind”;

2. In collocations and compounds, such as:
a. nitwit, dimwit, and half-wit
b. wit and reason and have the wit to

3. As a person of great mental ability; a learned or clever person

The word "nitwit" has a very interesting and colourful history: Etymonline says that it probably comes from dialectal German or Yiddish. But it does hint upon it coming from Middle Low German, which is what I believe it to be: from this assertion, it can be suggested that "nit" harks back to German dialect for “nothing”, as in "nicht" or the more dialectal "ned" or "net" rather than to “nit”, the creatures that sit in some people’s scalps. LEO translates nitwit as Nichtswisser, literally a nothing-knower, which cements nitwit’s place firmly in the Germanic structure of English.

"Half-wit" is another fun one: in 1755 Samuel Johnson in his dictionary listed it as “a blockhead or foolish fellow.” Noah Webster entered the same meaning in his American dictionary soon after in 1828.

Lastly, "witness" also hails from this same root: from as early as the middle of the tenth century it meant “knowledge, understanding, wisdom”, but consecutively “attestation of a fact, event, or statement; testimony; evidence…” Another example of this variation on a word could be "wise", and "wisdom", which the OED explains means “having or exercising sound judgement or discernment”. This firmly places the word "wit" as the centrestone of the idea of brain power, as all this shows.

The process of conversion, which is the use of a new word in a different form (such as nominalisation, i.e. a verb becoming a noun) without changing the form of the original word, has given "wit" various meanings that we have seen above, for example “to wit”, which is used to signify a more formal way to say “namely”.

Due to the nature of the ownership of the English language, which differs from French, Dutch and German in that it has no official overseeing body, unlike the latter three, many more words can be formed without hindrance, and a much greater lexical diversity can be guaranteed through this non-interventionist approach.

Never underestimate how many combinations we can make from one small three-letter word!

- Raymond Goslitski