David Brooks: English draws immigrants

I do not read David Brooks. Bad for my health. But when I saw the headline "Talent loves English" this morning, I hadn't had much coffee and didn't do what I knew was the right thing. I actually read the piece. Big mistake.

Wherever the headline comes from, here's the reference to language [emphasis added]:

Across the English-speaking world, immigrants are drawn by the same things: relatively strong economies, good universities, open cultures and the world’s lingua franca.

Wait, what? People immigrate to the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States because English is the dominant language in those places? I know a ton of immigrants, from many walks of life and from literally all over the world. Aside from a couple who came to work as English professors or something, I cannot imagine that a single one of them was motivated in any way by the dominant language spoken here.

Does anybody know of any evidence of any kind, even anecdotal, that English motivates immigration to English-speaking countries? 

Image from here.*

*Answer to question: Lingua franca is English / in English. Wasn't always English, but is now. 

'Bakery' = 'baked goods' in Dublin!?!?

Well, at the Dublin airport at least. I changed planes there on the way to England (and then Scotland), and bought a quick cup of coffee at this place:

Anybody know offhand whether Irish English has this usage generally?

English and borrowing

Got a request to comment on the source of this quote ... now available on t-shirts, etc. It's famous but I couldn't remember offhand when the message came where it was from. As many readers will recall faster than I did, it's from Jame Nicoll and widely quoted (see here). The full quote, which floats around in a set of variants, is richer:

The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that the English language is as pure as a crib-house whore. It not only borrows words from other languages; it has on occasion chased other languages down dark alley-ways, clubbed them unconscious and rifled their pockets for new vocabulary.

No idea what the original form was, but that one's pretty good. And English hasn't really stolen much grammar, in the usual senses of the term.

Department of Facepalm

Ow.  It hurts:

Things I like:  I love language.  I love reading, the sound of words and foreign languages.  I regard myself as fortunate to be a native English speaker because the language allows us to use different sentences to describe the same thought but convey entirely different meanings.

I'll be kind and not tell you who said that. (Nobody you know.)

A kiwi at the spelling bee ...

Last night, Rachel Maddow's "Best New Thing in the World" segment was about the Scripps National Spelling Bee, specifically the participation of a young fellow from New Zealand. The whole segment is worth a watch but the key stuff starts around 2:10.

 

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So, the word in question, taupe, is easy even by the standards of the early rounds, I imagine -- it's one that even I could have spelled (a low bar!), though I  cannot identify the color. (It's joke color vocab for me, like mauve stuff.)

Rachel Maddow and the judges seem pretty baffled by his pronunciation of the word, and she at least hears it as having an 'r' in there. (Mrs. Verb definitely heard it too.) I don't really quite get that, but without having this in connected speech, it was not instantly clear what he was saying. The kid seemed like the only one who wasn't bothered by the situation, at least until everybody wigged out when he pronounced the word. And he eventually  spelled it fine, suggesting that he got the deal immediately. But the Americans had real trouble understanding his pronunciation of the word.

It happens that there was a piece on New Zealand English pronunciation not long ago (Bauer, L. et al. 2007. "New Zealand English". Journal of the International Phonetic Association 37.97–102.) and they give [ɐʉ] for the GOAT vowel, along with this wicked figure (click to embiggen):

Anyway, all's well that ends well, at least in that round. (I don't see him among the finalists.)

English going to hell. Even in ENGLAND!

John, of Literacy Blog fame, called our attention (see here) to a story from the Telegraph about:

Bright pupils struggling with basic grammar, says top head

Turns out that it's one of the top schools (a 'private' school … now that does mean a 'public' school in U.S. terms, right?).

The move comes after the Government announced earlier this year that pupils would lose marks in GCSE exams for poor spelling, punctuation and grammar amid concerns over falling standards of English. 

Just one little piece of evidence for falling standard, please. Just one?

Eurovision, Lena Meyer-Landrut, English, and accents

This came in yesterday:

Hi Mr. Verb,
Love the blog. I just wanted to point out something interesting that you might want to discuss on the blog. The Eurovision contest winner from Germany, Lena Meyer-Landrut, has an incredibly strange accent when she sings. Perhaps someone could look into it. It sounds partly Australian, partly American, but she never sounds like a German singing English. Whatever it is, I think alot of people (including myself) find it really annoying. Perhaps this is something for the blog....

Here is a clip of her famous song that won the Eurovision thing.

Enjoy!
Larry Linguist

Well, first off, thanks Larry. Yup, that sounds pretty much unlike any dialect of English I know. Sounds very affected, and plenty of singers do that. Of course she's a German high schooler and who knows what coaching she's had and how this got created. I haven't heard her interviewed in any language. How does she talk?

Second, it turns out that her language is a whole nother issue for some people in Germany. One of our contributors tells me that the Verein Deutsche Sprache is complaining bitterly about her 'embarrassing' Germany by singing in English. This link gives their argument, pretty lame I think, that singing in German leads to better results.

Offical language in the news

Apologies if you've seen this one already, but it popped up in an ad in one of our student newspapers (The Daily Cardinal, and, yes, we have two), I kinda liked it.

Ask The Verb: My brain is already melting

The questions continue to come in. I can't promise to answer them all, let alone quickly, but I'll try. Here's the next one …

Dear Mr. Verb-

My husband Bruce has been teaching himself Russian for the past year and has found some Russian email penpals who want to improve their English, so everyone benefits.

One penpal wrote the following in an email, in English: "I like to ask my grandma about that." Bruce thought this might be a misstatement of "I would like to ask my grandma about that", but no, the penpal said it was meant as it was written: he enjoys regularly asking his grandma about whatever it is he asks her.

As a card-carrying English major I agreed with Bruce that this sentence sounds slightly awkward to us, though grammatically it seems well formed, particularly if restated slightly ("I like to ask my grandma about these things"). It seems even better stated as "I like asking my grandma about that", which is where the question of a gerund comes in.

Apparently some verbs of preference or affinity take a gerund form after the first verb: I adore asking my grandma (never I adore to ask), I dislike asking my grandma (never I dislike to ask). But despite my card-carrying status, I cannot find a linguistic rationale for the perceived awkwardness of "I like to ask my grandma about that".

In Russian one can imagine this sentence being used with an imperfective verb to enhance the repetitive/unfinished nature of the action, and the syntax would reflect this. English doesn't have this, so we're left with an ambiguity in what is otherwise a sincere effort to communicate the speaker's delight in asking his grandma about something.

Are we wrong to perceive awkwardness in the sentence? Or is there a deeper complexity at work?

Many thanks for your enlightened response.

Regards,
Debra

Wow, what a nice, carefully crafted letter. Thank you. I'm not quite sure about that sentence and be forewarned: This is a corner of the world I really know nothing about. First, with a speaker of a Slavic language, I would automatically have my aspectual radar scanning, so might get hypersensitive in this situation.

Out of context, it does sound odd to me, because like to V is a repeated action, and that sounds like it might be a single piece of information, something you wouldn't ask about repeatedly. "Does she read Tolstoy? I like to ask her about that." That doesn't work pragmatically or semantically. Even with a general topic ("What does she remember from the old days? I like to ask her about that."), it seems vaguely odd, unless you have a situation where repeatedly asking about the same thing is appropriate: "She meets the most amazing people every day and always has great stories about them. I like to ask her about that." Your first reformulation is along those lines, I think. For me, it doesn't seem like I like asking changes the above.

I turned to Monica for advice on this one:

Monica sez: Well, I agree with Mr. Verb — it all depends on context. And my first thought about what was weird about the sentence was exactly what Mr. V wrote — that the weirdness may come from the conflict between the habitual (which is the unmarked interpretation of present tense in English*), which implies doing something more than once, and the singular "that" - there's just a pragmatic problem with asking habitually about a single thing. ("Gramma, is it Tuesday?" "Gramma, is it Tuesday?" "Gramma, is it Tuesday?")

* This was just to let me footnote that this does of course vary between stative and active (or "dynamic" or whatever you want to call them) verbs. But let's not go there. Please.

So, this probably isn't really satisfying, but I'll keep chewing. In the meantime, people who actually know something about the area are invited to chime in!