World Wide Words -- 27 Jun 09
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Jun 26 15:23:53 UTC 2009
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 645 Saturday 27 June 2009
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Editor: Michael Quinion, Thornbury, Bristol, UK ISSN 1470-1448
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Contents
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1. Article: I Before E except after C.
2. My New Book: Why is Q Always Followed by U?
3. Weird Words: Collop.
4. Book Review: In the Land of Invented Languages.
5. Sic!
A. Subscription information.
B. E-mail contact addresses.
C. Ways to support World Wide Words.
1. Article: I Before E except after C
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There was a mini-fuss about spelling in the British media last week
because of a guide, Support For Spelling, that was distributed by
the British government to 13,000 primary schools as part of its
national strategy for schools. Of 124 pages of useful suggestions,
just one raised hackles. It suggested the rule, "I before E except
after C", should be dropped because it "is not worth teaching".
This famous rule has been taught to generations of schoolchildren.
It appears in that form in James Stuart Laurie's Manual of English
Spelling of 1866 but must surely be older. It is as firmly fixed in
the minds of English speakers as any maxim can be.
Advocates for various entrenched opinions rushed to comment. Those
in favour of spelling reform were delighted because it seemed to
support their position. An English lecturer seemed to argue that if
this rule were abolished we would be left with no rules at all and
that English spelling would become anarchy. Michael Gove, the Tory
opposition Children's Secretary, tried to make political capital
out of it: "Having systematically lowered school standards for a
decade, it is sadly no surprise that the Government is now actively
telling teachers not to bother trying to teach children how to
spell properly." Others know it as such an integral memory of their
schooldays that to disparage it seemed to threaten the foundations
of their understanding of English spelling.
Support For Spelling's objections aren't new. The argument against
the rule is that there are too many exceptions, such as "their",
"seize", "weird", "height", "sufficient", "neighbour", "eight",
"weigh" and "protein" as well as the plurals of words that end in
"-cy" (such as "fallacies", "frequencies" and "vacancies") and some
words of foreign origin. The length of this list led an unknown wit
to coin the much-quoted alternative: "I before E, except when it
isn't."
The authors pointed out that one problem with it is that it's only
half the rule. Many readers will be as surprised as I am to learn
that there's a longer version: "I before E except after C when the
sound is EE". Henry Fowler gave this addition in the first edition
of Modern English Usage in 1926. He said that the rule is useful,
especially for the words that derive from Latin "capio", including
"receive", "deceit" and "inconceivable". However, it's useless, he
noted, for personal names, to the chagrin of people named Keith and
Sheila.
The addition gets rid of most of the exceptions, such as "their",
"veil" and "sufficient", none of which have the "ee" sound that
phoneticians write as /i:/. It fails on "seize" and on "weird" if
you say it with a pure vowel sound and not the standard British
English diphthong. It might also fail on "neither" and "either",
since conformity depends on whether you say the first vowel as /i:/
or /aI/ (the first form is mainly American, the second mainly
British; in American spelling guides, the words are labelled as
exceptions to the rule).
You might instead add a different qualification, as seems to have
been common in American schools at one time, "or when the sound is
A, as in 'neighbour' and 'weigh'" ("eight" and "beige" are among a
dozen others that could be cited). Some writers have tried to add
"or when the C is said like 'sh'", though most of the cases caught
by it are also trapped by the "ee" rule ("ancient", "deficient").
In a note on page 106, the Support for Spelling guide suggests a
way out: "There are so few words where the 'ei' spelling for the
/ee/ sound follows the letter 'c' that it is easier to learn the
specific words: 'receive', 'conceive', 'deceive' (+ the related
words 'receipt', 'conceit', 'deceit'), 'perceive' and 'ceiling'."
A large part of the controversy seems to have arisen because many
people seem to regard it as an immutable rule. It's not, of course.
At best it's no more than a rule of thumb to help learners over a
minor bump on the road to mastery of English spelling.
The controversy was rendered irrelevant later in the week when a
leaked report revealed that the Government is about to scrap its
flagship national strategy for schools, including its guidance on
literacy and numeracy.
2. My New Book: Why is Q Always Followed by U?
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Not only a new book, but the first to come from Particular Books, a
new Penguin imprint. It's out on 2 July and will soon be available
worldwide. The question of the title is one of 200 that I answer.
Though all have been taken from this e-magazine and its associated
Web site, every one has been freshly researched to find facts not
available when the answer was first written. Such is the pace of
etymological discovery, several had to be rewritten a second time
to include new information that came to light during the writing of
the book. Almost every one is illustrated by annotated quotations
that help readers understand how terms evolved and to place them in
their historical context. A review by Erin McKean, formerly editor
in chief of the New Oxford American Dictionary, and editor of
Verbatim, will appear here shortly.
[Michael Quinion, Why is Q Always Followed by U?, to be published
by Particular Books, an imprint of Penguin Books, on 2 July 2009;
hardback, 352pp; publisher's UK list price £12.99. ISBN-13: 978-1-
846-14184-3; ISBN-10: 1846141842.]
AMAZON PRICES FOR THIS BOOK
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3. Weird Words: Collop /'kQl at p/
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You may not recognise it, but it's an old word for a familiar meal:
bacon and eggs or ham and eggs. The first recorded example is so
old that its English needs translation:
I haue no salt Bacon, Ne no Cokeneyes, bi Crist
Colopus to maken.
[Piers Plowman, by William Langland, c1350. A
"cokeneye" or "cokeney" is literally a cock's egg, a
dismissive term for a small or misshapen egg; in another
old sense, of a pampered child, it's the source of
"Cockney". In modern English, Langland's sentence would
read "I have no salt bacon or small eggs, by Christ, to
make collops."]
Later, "collop" came to refer to the bacon by itself, without the
egg; later still to mean any flat, boneless piece of meat, whether
raw, fried or roasted. At one time, the Monday before Ash Wednesday
was called Collop Monday, because slices of bacon were the usual
dinner dish.
It may remind you of "escalope", which has led at least a couple of
cookery writers to assert that "collop" is in fact from that French
word. Not so. "Collop" is an old Norse word of which a close modern
relative is the Swedish "kalops", a meat stew. It may be that the
first part of the word is from "coal"; that origin is supported by
this example of its use:
The Scottish Celt is more shifty. In the old days when
he had flesh and little else to eat, he could broil it on
the coals; and a Scotch collop is perhaps equal to a
Turkish kebob. We wonder if in Australia the long-
forgotten Scotch collop has been revived? It requires no
cooking-vessels. It may be held to the fire on a twig, or
laid on the coals and turned by a similar twig - bent
into a collop-tongs - or even by the fingers.
[Chambers Edinburgh Journal, 14 Feb. 1852. "Shifty"
here doesn't mean the Scottish Celt is deceitful or
evasive but that he's able to shift for himself, manage
without help, from "shift" in the sense of an
expedient.]
4. Book Review: In the Land of Invented Languages
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"Cu vi parolas Esperanton?" If you're able to say "jes" in reply,
you're a member of a smallish group who knows that it means "do you
speak Esperanto?", the language that was created by Dr Ludwig
Zamenhof in Poland in the 1880s. I learned a little as a teenager,
to the extent that - to my own mild surprise - I could still today
write that sentence without having to look it up.
Arika Okrent's experience began with the very different Klingon. It
was invented so that the aliens in Star Trek could speak in a macho
warrior tongue that sounded sufficiently unEarthly. If you know
that "tlhIngan Hol Dajatlh'a'?" means "do you speak Klingon?", you
are also a member of a minority group, one irretrievably and rather
sadly tarred with the brush of ultra-geekdom. I must confess to at
least semi-geekdom, since I have a copy of The Klingon Dictionary
on my shelf, written by Marc Okrand; he built on a few words
invented by James Doohan (Scotty) for Star Trek: The Motion Picture
to make a detailed language for Star Trek III: The Search for
Spock.
Klingon and Esperanto are, of course, utterly different in form and
purpose, the one created as a way merely to make an entertainment
more linguistically plausible (albeit one that has achieved a life
beyond Star Trek), the other designed with the deeply serious - if
naive - intent to promote world peace by helping people to talk to
each other (English has become widely used internationally in the
century since Zamenhof, but conflict hasn't noticeably reduced).
They are perhaps today the two most widely known examples from an
astonishingly large collection of invented languages. More than 500
of them are listed in an appendix to this book. Europal, Simplo,
Geoglot, Volapük, Ulla, Novial, Ehmay Ghee Chah, Basic English,
Tutonish - the vast majority are now just footnotes in obscure
scholarly texts.
Early created tongues arose out of the scientific rationalism of
the seventeenth century. Natural languages were criticised, fairly
enough in one way, for their design flaws: they're irregular, full
of idioms that make no sense to a learner and contain words with
more than one meaning while sometimes lacking words for concepts we
need. How much better it would be, philosophers felt, if one could
be designed from scratch on logical principles. Many have tried, as
Arika Okrent explains. Her main example is that of John Wilkins, a
member of the Royal Society, who published his detailed attempt, A
Philosophical Language, in 1668. All such languages were rooted in
attempts to classify the whole of human knowledge, which their
inventors only gradually came to realise was an impossible
endeavour. A similar idea, but based on modern mathematical logic,
surfaced in the 1960s as Loglan (and its successor Lojban), a
language designed to test the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, that the
structure of a natural language influences the way its speakers
think about the world.
Another type appeared as a result of a more pragmatic attitude in
the nineteenth century. This focused on creating languages that
were easy to learn and would help people to communicate. Esperanto
is the classic example but there are dozens of others. A third
class of invention grew up in the twentieth century - languages
based on pictorial symbols, such as Blisssymbolics or aUI, which
sought to avoid what their authors saw as the tyranny of words. Yet
a fourth kind was the result of a personal artistic and linguistic
impulse - to create a tongue that was satisfyingly complex and
complete. The most famous examples here are J R R Tolkien's elven
tongues Quenya and Sindarin in his Lord of the Rings trilogy.
Interest in making artificial languages is currently high through
Internet discussion groups specialising in conlangs (constructed
languages) and artlangs (artistic languages invented to give
aesthetic pleasure).
Arika Okrent wittily tells the stories of many of these invented
languages, as well as of one natural language - Hebrew - that in
effect was recreated in the twentieth century some two millennia
after it vanished as a native spoken language. She focuses as much
on the men who created the languages and the cultures in which
their creations were born (and almost invariably soon died) as on
the languages themselves, though she discusses a number in enough
detail for readers to get a good feel for them. Her personal and
entertaining book wears her research lightly. It will be a good
read for anyone with even a general interest in this aspect of
linguistics.
[Arika Okrent, In the Land of Invented Languages; published under
the Spiegel & Grau imprint by Random House, New York, May 2009;
hardback, 341pp, including index; publisher's list price $26.00;
ISBN13: 978-0-385-52788-0; ISBN10: 0385527888.]
AMAZON PRICES FOR THIS BOOK
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[Please use these links to buy. They get World Wide Words a small
commission at no extra cost to you.]
5. Sic!
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Department of Ambulatory Architecture. From the BBC site: "Quaid-I-
Azam University in Islamabad is the country's most prestigious
university. Walking through its green and leafy campus, are four
mosques." Thanks to David Lay for spotting that.
In common with many journals, the Daily Galaxy Web site reported
the unveiling of a computerised sign in New York that displays the
tonnage of carbon dioxide being emitted into the atmosphere. One of
its comments, on the other hand, was entirely its own, and startled
Carl Bowers: "Designed by scientists at MIT hanging outside Madison
Square Garden ..."
Mark Jones encountered an intriguing item on the menu in a Dutch
restaurant. "One of the two starters was 'duck's udders'. After
checking the Dutch original, rather than the tourist version of the
menu, I discovered it was 'eendenborst' or duck breast. I chose the
salmon nevertheless."
Gavan O'Connor was reading a review of an exhibition on Pompeii at
the Melbourne Museum in the July 2009 edition of Royal Auto, the
magazine of the Royal Automobile Club of Victoria, when he came
across this sentence: "Pompeii is also an acronym for sentient
death in its most tormented form."
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