The Power of Language

New Words in the English Language

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is published on-line (http://public.oed.com) every quarter, and is usually considered to be the definitive guide to the English language. In general the OED publishes around 2,000 new and revised entries (those where new or updated definitions are given for pre-existing words) each quarter.

English has never procured an official Academy to regulate its use, as have other languages including French and Spanish, so you could argue it is much freer to evolve and reflect the cultures in which it is spoken. However, the choice of which words should be included in each new edition of the dictionary is taken by a few individuals. Their aim is to highlight words that have entered the language naturally over a period of a few years, rather than to artificially invent new ones. The OED explains the selection process as follows:

Finding new words 
Oxford University Press has one of the largest and most wide-ranging language research programmes in the world. Our most important resources are the Oxford English Corpus and the Oxford Reading Programme. The Corpus consists of entire documents sourced largely from the World Wide Web, while the Reading Programme is an electronic collection of sentences or short extracts drawn from a huge variety of writing, from song lyrics and popular fiction to scientific journals. It's based on the contributions of an international network of readers who are on the lookout for instances of new words and meanings or other language changes. 

Keeping track and making choices 
We continually monitor the Corpus and the Reading Programme to track new words coming into the language: when we have evidence of a new term being used in a variety of different sources (not just by one writer) it becomes a candidate for inclusion in one of our dictionaries. For every new dictionary or online update we assess all the most recent terms that have emerged and select those which we judge to be the most significant or important and those which we think are likely to stand the test of time.  

Evidence 
In previous centuries dictionaries tended to contain lists of words that their writers thought might be useful, even if there was no evidence that anyone had ever actually used these words. This is not the case today. New terms have to be recorded in a print or online source before they can be considered: it's not enough just to hear them in conversation or on television, although we do analyse material from Internet message boards and TV scripts. 

Timeline  
It used to be the case that a new term had to be used over a period of two or three years before we could consider adding it to a print dictionary. In today's digital age, the situation has changed. New terms can achieve enormous currency with a wide audience in a much shorter space of time, and people expect to find these new 'high-profile' words in their dictionaries. This presents an additional challenge to lexicographers trying to assess whether a term is ephemeral or whether it will become a permanent feature of the language. 

Personal inventions
People often send us words they have made up and ask if we will add their invented terms to one of our dictionaries. Unfortunately, the answer is usually no, because we only add words that we consider to have genuinely entered the language: we assess this by looking at all the evidence we have in our databases. Of course, some invented words do catch on and become an established part of English, either because they fill a gap or because they are describing something new. Examples of this type of invented word include wiki, quark, spoof, and hobbit.  

http://oxforddictionaries.com (last accessed 17/01/2013)

The complete list of words recently added to the OED can be found here. looking at many of the new additions, it does seem to me that (despite the OED's attempts to chose words which are likely to stand the test of time) many of them may become redundant as times change and cultural references become obscure. Below are some examples, together with their definitions:

New Words 

Dead Letters

12 Letters That Didnt Make the Alphabet

Official Languages

I knew that South Africa has three different capital cities, but until today I didn't know it has eleven official languages. This BBC documentary shows the importance, political divisiveness and difficulties involved in maintaining different languages in a single country. Part 3 includes a very interesting discussion of the origins of the Afrikaans language and its future in post-apartheid South Africa:

part 1
part 2
part 3

The Power of Shakespeare

Robben Island lies 6.9 km west of the coast of Cape Town, South Africa. It has been used to jail political prisoners since the seventeenth century and it was there that Nobel laureate and former President of South Africa, Nelson Mandela, was imprisoned for 27 years (together with many other opponents of apartheid).

I listened to a BBC podcast recently (see below) which told the story of a copy of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, belonging to one of the prisoners, Sonny Venkatrathnam.



He disguised it as a religious book by decorating it with pictures of Hindu gods in order to avoid it being confiscated by prison guards (inmates were allowed to keep only religious texts), and it became known, somewhat spuriously, as The Robben Island Bible. As he served his sentence, between 1972 and 1978, Venkatrathnam passed the book between the inmates and they signed their names next to their favourite passages.

This has been seen as a vindication the power of Shakespeare (and language) and the book has been hailed as a modern icon, not least by the British Museum which is displaying it as part of its exhibition, Shakespeare: Staging the World.

It is very poignant to read the passage highlighted by Mandela (from Julius Caesar), knowing in hindsight that he would leave prison, unbroken, to become president of his country. At the time, he, himself, might have expected to die on Robben Island, and there was no prospect of release. However, I have also read comments from a number of his fellow prisoners (including some high ranking members of the African National Congress) who don't regard the book as iconic (as reported in the Toronto Star below). Some of those who signed it saw it merely as a 'study aid', and it is perhaps understandable that some apartheid prisoners failed to develop a deep reverence for these pieces of European literature.
Robben Island Bible

Glossary of Philosophy

Enlightenment Rationalism Empiricism The Encyclopaedists Analytic synthetic distinction Logic Determinism Kant	Romanticism Rousseau Schelling and Coleridge Hegel Idealism Vs. Materialism Hegel's Dialectics Marx's Dialectical Materialism Schopenhauer & Nietzsche	Analytic Philosophy Bertrand Russell Wittgenstein: Tractatus Wittgenstein: Language Games The Private Language Argument Richard Rorty Timeline	Existentialism Kierkegaard: The solitary wanderer Martin Heidegger Edmund Husserl Sartre: Existence precedes essence Albert Camus
God Proofs of God's Existence: Argument from design Ontological argument Cosmological argument Pascal's Wager Kierkegaard Marx Nietzsche The Death of God	Mind Plato Aristotle Leibniz Epiphenomenalism Dualism Descartes Identity Theory Spinoza Behaviourism Ryle Ghost in the machine	Natural Science Popper Kuhn Feyerabend Science in the post- modern world	Moral philosophy Kant's Categorical Imperative Utilitarianism Nietzsche: The genealogy of morals Sartre and Bad Faith

Slips of the Ear

'Slips of the ear' are problems of perception (or 'auditory illusions') relating to how the brain misinterprets aural information. If something we hear doesn't really make much sense, the brain tries to give it meaning and this frequently leads to misunderstandings of what was meant to be conveyed. Here is a (humorous) example:

These problems are especially prevalent in people who are learning a foreign language and have not developed a sufficient vocabulary or level of language use to spot differences between words with similar sounds. Here is an interesting academic paper on this subject: Slips of the Ear

Kusumarasdyati (2006) 'I'm orangeful' or 'I'm already awful': slips of the ear performed by learners of English as a foreign language. In Peter Jeffery (Eds) Creative Dissent: Constructive Solutions (pp.1-9) Australian Association for Research in Education, Parramatta, Sydney, Australia.

Saving Languages from Extinction

Saving Languages

In Defense of Sesquipedalians

In this (very short) podcast, author Will Self sets out his point of view that falling standards and expectations in arts and humanities education, together with our increasing desire to gain knowledge without intellectual rigour or effort are leading to the slow death of western culture. He feels we should embrace the intellectual challenge of 'difficult' books and art, and value works which are more taxing than our increasingly low-brow popular culture. On the way, he also has a few choice words to say about the work of Damien Hirst.

Incidentally, I was interested to see that the word 'sesquipedalian', as used by Self, is not recognised by the spell-checker either in Blogger or Microsoft Word.

Uncontacted Tribes

If I could walk and talk and squeak and squawk with the animals...

A while ago I posted some thoughts about communication and language in animals and the work of various researchers in this field (particularly the case of Koko the Gorilla). Here is a BBC article which discusses other examples, particularly efforts to "talk" with dolphins.

It seems to me that, while it is perfectly possible for humans to communicate with animals, their ability to use language (the animals, not the researchers) is far from being proven and (as it says in the article below), we are still a far cry from the world of Dr. Dolittle.


Will We Ever Talk to the Animals

Bilingualism and Brain Function

In this article for the New York Times, the writer looks into claims that children who speak more than one language generally have better brain power. This is a strong claim and goes against perceived wisdom that teaching a second language to a child could interfere with clear thinking and decision-making. One of the academic studies cited in the article can be found in full here.

Why Bilingual People Are Smarter

The Politics of Language

In this fantastic RSA animation of his lecture 'Language as a Window into Human Nature", linguist Steven Pinker explains how we unconsciously follow rules of language which change depending on the relationship between the speakers. He makes interesting parallels to the idea of altruism, dominance and subservience which I mentioned in a previous post with regard to Richard Dawkins' ideas of how morality developed in humans from pre-existing instincts. It is also interesting to consider that the basis of many forms of autism appears to be a lack of unconscious awareness of these complex rules.

Original Pronuncation

I never thought much before about how accents evolve and change. This clip looks at how the modern interpretation of Shakespeare is sometimes incorrect since it does not generally take into account the fact that pronunciation of many words (and the accent of Shakespeare himself) was very different 400 years ago.

Wild Children

Feral or "wild" children are those who have been abandoned or lost in the wild for all or a considerable part of their formative years. Such children have generally lived without any direct human contact and very may not even develop rudimentary language. Though there are many legends of feral children, only a few cases have been documented and verified. Perhaps the most famous was Victor, a child of about twelve years of age, who was found living alone and naked in the woods of Aveyron just after the French Revolution (French film director Francois Truffaut directed and stared in the film about Victor, L'enfant Sauvage, which was released in 1970).

Studies of feral children have led to new methods for teaching children with learning disabilities, and indirectly to the development of Braille and sign language. They have also led to new understanding of how children develop language and how human development is affected by a lack of physical and emotional contact.

Fortunately examples of extreme neglect of children are rare, but horrific cases emerge from time to time.  The most famous case of recent years was that of Austrian Josef Fritzl who, in 2008, was discovered to have kept his daughter Elisabeth confined in his house for 24 years, together with the children he fathered with her. In 1970, a similar case was discovered in Los Angeles. "Genie" Wiley was imprisoned in her bedroom by her father for all of her young life and not permitted any human contact.When she was discovered she was unable to speak or show normal emotion, presumably because she was beaten when she made any sort of sound. The documentary and article below give some details about the attempt of psychologists to integrate Genie back into society and teach her to speak. Her case also gave researchers some valuable insights into how language develops in children.




Genie

The Origin of Writing

BBC Radio 4 has produced a series of podcasts on the history and development of written language, called the "Written World", presented by Melvyn Bragg. I've uploaded them here in the order they were broadcast:

episode 1  

episode 2  

episode 3  

episode 4  

episode 5  

The History of English

This is a nice video produced by the Open University in the UK to give a brief overview of how English developed over the last thousand years. It is a good example of how closely language is linked to history, although some of the "history" is a bit tongue-in-cheek:

The King's Speech

I recently watched this film, and I thought it deserved all the plaudits and its success at the Oscars (the most boring of all awards ceremonies). At its heart I think it's a commentary about the power and importance of language. This becomes particularly obvious when Bertie is sitting watching a film of Hitler speaking and mesmerizing his audience.

The monarch's job then, as now, is to be a talking head. As Bertie's father George V (Michael Gambon) shouts at one point "This family has been reduced to that basest of all creatures - we've become actors!". The film explores what it must be like to be forced to become a public speaker and effectively be unable to speak.



I also came across a radio interview in which Colin Firth discusses the film and the real George VI. He is incidentally an excellent speaker, and is managing to make a career out of gracious awards acceptance speeches at the moment:

Aramaic...an endangered language

The common language in the time of Jesus, Aramaic, is now so endangered the written version has become practically extinct. Now the only place left in the world where it has remained virtually unchanged since biblical times is losing its Aramaic speakers, as people leave to find work elsewhere. Maaloula in Syria is one of the oldest villages in the world, but is losing its culture and its language as the modern world encroaches:

Lost in Translation.....again

More proof that you should really know what you are saying before you write it on a signpost. This is a fairly old story now, but still funny. There is a legal requirement in Wales that all public signs should be written in both English and Welsh. This sign appeared on a Swansea street a few years ago:

Unfortunately, nobody bothered to check the translation with a native Welsh speaker, and it was later found to read "I am not in the office at the moment. Please resend any work to be translated".