Marginally ELL-related

Just a dumping ground for my research on ELL-related stuffs

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Calling females as "guys" (collective term)

Professor Deborah Cameron, a feminist linguist at the University of Oxford, said : “If women want to be addressed as ‘guys’, I’m not going to tell them they’re betraying the feminist cause. (Particularly if the alternative is being addressed as ‘babes’ and ‘dolls’.) In language, as in life, you do your best with whatever you’ve got.” She has written a blogpost on this subject, in which she compares ‘guys’ to ‘dudes’, which is “also ‘cool’ in the sense of anti-establishment, rebellious, non-conformist”. She is against banning words, a “blunt instrument”. She rejects the suggestion that many women adopt “guys” because they are “flattered to be treated as honorary men”, as suggested by some linguists. “The question feminists should be asking ... isn’t why they’re talking like men (they aren’t), it’s why they can only express cool solidarity with other women by using prototypically male address terms. Aren’t there any female terms that would serve their purpose just as well?” If we get too po-faced about language, we lose its playfulness. “Yeah, man” as a colloquial exclamation now seems innocuously gender neutral. One of the most popular ways for gay men to address each other currently is “hey gurl hey” - a cheeky subversion of gender norms. For many, myself included, it’s a way to counter the narrow-mindedness, delusion and hypocrisy of gay men who insist only “straight acting” men are appealing, pigeonholing themselves as “masc for masc”, stigmatising femininity as undesirable – all while secretly twerking to Your Disco Needs You. Jessica Valenti wrote last week about the campaign to rid our lexicon of mistresses. And the #banbossy campaign saw celebrities like Beyoncé asking to lose the sexist term.

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Institutional discourse - sexuality, media

In the New York Times’ original reporting, it didn’t even point out that a gay club had been targeted. The Daily Mail didn’t bother to put the atrocity – the worst terrorist attack on US soil since 9/11 – on its front page, instead opting to stir up xenophobia over Turkish immigrants and publicising an offer of “free pearl and white sapphire earrings”. This is erasure of LGBT people – pure and simple – after their community was horrifically targeted.

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Singlish

Singlish is a patchwork patois of Singapore’s state languages — English, Malay, Mandarin and Tamil — as well as Hokkien, Cantonese, Bengali and a few other tongues. ------- It could connect speakers across ethnic and socioeconomic divides like no other tongue could. And in the eyes of the young, continued criticism by the state made it the language of cool. ------- The government’s war on Singlish was doomed from the start: Even state institutions and officials have nourished it, if inadvertently. The compulsory national service, which brings together male Singaporeans from all walks of life, has only underlined that Singlish is the natural lingua franca of the grunts. The tourism board can’t help but showcase it as one of Singapore’s few unique cultural creations. In his annual national address in 2006, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong made a precious contribution to the lexicon. Hoping to one-up a podcast mocking the P.A.P. that involves an argument over whether a noodle dish contains pork liver — it’s a long story — Mr. Lee mentioned another popular noodle dish, mee siam, without cockles (“mee siam mai hum”). But mee siam never has cockles, and Mr. Lee’s blunder happily became Singlish for being out of touch. Singlish seems to thrive on codifying political resistance. To flip-flop on policy matters is to prata, after the South Indian pancake made by flipping dough on a hot plate, another favorite Singaporean dish. To politicize is to “politisai,” and classic Singlish, with its lazy end-consonant and dirty pun: “Sai” is vulgar slang for feces in Hokkien. Finally grasping that this language is irrepressible, our leaders have begun to use it publicly in recent years, often in strategic attempts to connect with the masses. During a naturalization ceremony in 2012, as Mr. Lee was encouraging the new citizens to integrate, he conceded, “and if you can understand Singlish, so much the better.” (He should know.) At a rally during last year’s campaign for the general election, the P.A.P. leader Teo Ser Luck promised voters a new bus station, afterschool care centers, facilities for the elderly and more. But only “when we are voted in, ah!,” he warned with a smile, because “LIU LIAN BO BAO JIAK!” No guarantee of durians to eat! ---------- Example: Very the -- To say “very” in an incredulous way, e.g. “You know, you look smart but you talk very the stupid.”

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Emoji

The “face with tears of joy” is the most used, representing 20% of all UK and 17% of all US emoji use. It has overtaken the standard smiley-face emoji in popularity, which may mean that emoji users are moving towards exaggeration or irony or fun, or that all this emoji use has brought everyone to a higher emotional plane. Funfact: news reports in January of a Brooklyn teen who was arrested for using a police emoji next to two gun emojis on his Facebook page. - racially diverse emoji Views: "A lot of people think they are a backward step, but this misunderstands the nature of human communication.” The picture is more complicated, with emojis offering both greater freedom and constraints than verbal language. He points out that anyone can invent a word and use it, but emojis are a limited language, subject to the controls and selection processes of Unicode. “Emoji isn’t a language as such. They are artificially created. They don’t evolve in the way that the natural language does. They don’t have a grammatical system. What I’ve been trying to do is demonstrate that emoji are conforming to the same principles of communication that underpin the spoken language. Emojis are fulfilling the same function (as extra-linguistic features) in digital speech.” They are a way of smiling in the face of limited time and limited space to let people know you are digitally happy (even if you are, in person, deeply troubled)."

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“The fact that English alone is proving insufficient to meet the needs of 21st-century digital communication is a huge shift,” says Grathwohl

Caspar Grathwohl, president of Oxford Dictionaries

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Emojis

asking them to tell her how they felt about their loans “in three emojis or less”. Then Moby-Dick was translated into emojis (and renamed Emoji Dick.) Alice in Wonderland underwent the same update – a task that required the use of 250,000 emojis. The author TR Richmond, who used emojis in What She Left, a novel built around texts, blogs and Facebook posts, says that emojis “have a place at the heart of our language”.

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https://linguisticus.wordpress.com/2015/09/18/man-made-language-language-and-reality-by-dale-spender-1980/ http://www.eolss.net/sample-chapters/c04/e6-20b-09-01.pdf

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Jargon

a kind of shorthand. It can be useful for people as a shortcut to communicating complex concepts. But it’s intrinsically limited: it only works when all parties involved know the code – to communicate an idea to a broad, non-specialist audience, it doesn’t matter how good you are at embroidering your prose with evocative imagery and clever analogies, the jargon simply must go. Reasons for use of jargon: - gives an air of understanding that is just about convincing enough to maintain power - politicians deliberately use jargon to diffuse our ire and frustrations. They pitch their speeches and briefings at a level most of us will never understand in order to limit public scrutiny. Their reasoning is thus: if we can’t understand what they’re talking about then how can we possibly begin to question them? - Advertisers do the same thing when they use pseudoscience to market their products. They say things like “the pentapeptides in our anti-ageing cream are the active ingredient” or “our makeup remover contains micellar water to give you a fresher look”. Although this is complete drivel, the advertisers know that many of us are happy to accept the claims as fact because we don’t have the capacity to challenge them. All of this is worrying because it represents a genuine threat to democracy. If we can’t fully comprehend the decisions that are made for us and about us by government then how we can we possibly revolt or react in an effective way? Yes, we have a responsibility to educate ourselves more on the big issues, but I also think it’s important that politicians and journalists meet us halfway. Quote: old Einsteinian cliche: “If you can’t explain something simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”

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Diction - cancer and wartime rhetoric

language used around cancer seems to revolve around wartime rhetoric: battle, fight, warrior, beat. While I recognise that these violent words may help others on their journey with cancer, as someone who is never going to "win her battle" with this disease, I find them uncomfortable and frustrating to hear. However, I do understand why this military language has penetrated the media, charities and everyday life. It is meant to evoke positivity at an unimaginably difficult time in someone's life. But I think it can have the opposite effect and we need to challenge it and to break away from how we have been conditioned to think and speak about a disease that will affect one third of us at some point. instead of reaching for the traditional battle language, [life] is about living as well as possible, coping, acceptance, gentle positivity, setting short-term, achievable goals, and drawing on support from those closest to you

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Singlish words in OED

These words include “char siu”, which the OED has defined as “In Cantonese cookery, roast pork marinated in a sweet and savoury sauce, typically served sliced into thin strips. Also used in char siu bun, char siu pork, char siew rice”; hawker centre, a term first used in 1966 to denote “a food market at which individual vendors sell cooked food from small stalls, with a shared seating area for customers); and killer litter, defined as “objects thrown or falling from high-rise buildings, endangering people below”, which was first coined in 1984.

The OED noted that while some of the words are also used in Malaysia and the rest of Southeast Asia, there were some formations in English that are used only in Singapore, like "sabo" ("to harm, inconvenience, or make trouble for (a person); to trick, play a prank on").

The dictionary also shed light on the etymology of the words, noting that the exclamation "wah" ("used to express admiration, encouragement, delight, surprise") is of multiple origins, partly a borrowing from Hindi as well as Chinese.

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Maybe useful

Gaulish was spoken by the Celtic tribes of what is now Belgium and France but died out soon after the Romans converted Asterix and his Gaul friends to Latin

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Women: Technically called "creaky voice," vocal fry is produced by compressing the vocal chords, which reduces the airflow through the larynx and the frequency of vibrations, causing speech to sound rattled or "creaky."

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Double negation

standard in middle english French - negates verbs by affixing the particles ne and pas to either side of the verb Also found in Afrikaans, Greek, and a number of Slavic languages

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Judgements about speech are judgements about the speakers themselves