Peter Harvey, linguist

This blog

I am an English language teacher and translator, resident in Barcelona, Spain. To read more about my professional activities, click here. Information about my books A Guide to English Language Usage (GELU) and Great English Mistakes (GEM), and about how and where to buy them, is on the Lavengro Books web site. Click here for a sample of GELU and here for a sample of GEM.

Every English fact at your fingertips ... [A Guide to English Language Usage for non-native speakers] is a more than handy reference tool for all involved in imparting linguistic knowledge on a regular basis. In the author’s alphabetically arranged detailed content one can only admire the spirit of Dr Johnson … it will help out when dealing with potentially awkward customers, or those keen to try out a new teacher. (ELGazette, January 2009)

Namesakes

I am not a science teacher in Nottingham with murderous tendencies (BBC). But please do look around my blog while you're here.

Vote for this blog!

For the last year this blog has had a notice that it is number 20 in the Lexiophiles top 100 language blogs. Now it is time for a new selection and I ask my faithful readers to vote for this blog in the Language Professionals category. To vote, click the link below.

Group nouns

Group nouns can be singular or plural. This is not a grammar point – it depends on whether your mind sees a singular homogeneous group or a number of discrete individuals: the football team that you support is the best in the country, but who are they playing next week? It is, however, best not to  mix number when dealing with such nouns. This is from today’s Guardian (my emphasis):

Any prime minister, however powerful, serves as a member of a cabinet. When that cabinet loses faith in him or her, and its members start saying so in public, the leader cannot stay … The cabinet knows Mr Brown is leading them towards a terrible defeat. They are not seeking revenge for the past. They want Labour to have a chance for the future.

A misattached participle clause

According to the South Yorkshire Star:

IT'S been the butt of smutty jokes for years... But now fed-up residents on South Yorkshire's most embarrassingly named street - Butt Hole Road - have finally ended the jokes. The residents on the Conisbrough street have clubbed together to change its name to Archers Way.

Well that’s fair enough, but I first read about it in The Northerner, a weekly digest of news from the north of England sent out by the Guardian newspaper. And what I read was this (my emphasis):

A street in Sheffield that has been the butt of jokes for many years has finally won a battle to change its name to something less ... behind the times. Residents of Butt Hole Road long ago stopped seeing the funny side of the legions of titterers taking pictures of themselves with their pants down next to the road's sign. After clubbing together to raise the GBP300 necessary to pay for a new sign, the local council has agreed to name the road Archers Way, in honour of its half-mile proximity to Conisbrough Castle.

We know that local councils are strapped for cash but such a munificent gesture from the councillors also seems somewhat improbable!

Barça can’t be bothered with translators

It is well known that in Romance languages the superlative form is made with the preposition de. If this flag which I saw in Barcelona the other day had been written in Catalan, it would have said El millor del món. In English it should say The best in the world, as any native speaker – let alone a professional translator – could have told Barça if they had bothered to ask. As it is, they have made a Great English Mistake.

(Click picture to enlarge.)

Gothic for Goths

When I studied the history of the German language at university, I discovered that the Goths got themselves converted to Christianity by a Greek-speaker, so, like the Slavs and for the same reason, they had an alphabet that shows distinct similarities with the Greek alphabet. Now there is a lesson in the Gothic language on the Internet. To introduce it I can do no better than quote directly from LanguageHat, whom I thank greatly for bringing it to my attention:

I have fond memories of the semester I spent studying Gothic in grad school, but the texts were a little dry. That's not a problem with Ben's series of videos "Gothic for Goths," which uses for its dialogue someone trying to find a lost chupacabra. The first video (10 min.) is an introduction to the alphabet, with explanations of the names of the letters and where they came from; the second (just a couple of minutes, created because YouTube cut his first off at ten minutes) is a continuation, discussing the diphthongs; and the third, "Gaitsugja Meins" ['My chupacabras'] (5 min.), is a dialogue with explanations of grammar. It's a lot of fun, and I hope he does more of them. (Thanks, Jonathan!)

Data / datos

There is much discussion about whether data should be regarded as singular or plural in English. I regard it as plural, not least because I so often see the Spanish equivalent datos, which is unarguably plural (and I often translate it as figures rather than data). Spanish also has the singular form dato, which means a figure or, more generally, a piece of information. But in a translation that I am doing for a very big Spanish company I read: el data remitido por [la empresa] (the data submitted by [the company]), where it seems that the English singular usage has spread into Spanish.

Se discute mucho sobre si la palabra inglesa datos es singular o plural. Pero me ha sorprendido (o quizá no me sorprende) leer, en un texto que estoy traduciendo para una empresa española muy importante, lo siguiente: el data remitido por [la empresa] con el trato de singular de la palabra inglesa.

Y, en catalán, la data corresponde al castellano la fecha, como en inglés se dice date.

An unfortunate accident

From the BBC:

In a statement to the House of Commons, Ms Smith told MPs the operation had not been jeopardised by Mr Quick's act of accidently revealing a secret document when arriving at a Downing Street briefing.

As I have asked before, why don’t they use spell-checkers?

Shoots, rides and collects

Despite being a Cambridge man I must admit that the Oxford comma has a lot to be said for it. A Cambridge University press release of 23 March tells us:

Darwin famously spent little of his time at Cambridge studying or in lectures, preferring to shoot, ride and collect beetles.

What on earth kind of beetles did they have in those days?

Hat-tip to Worldwide Words.

Morning has broken …

A fire in Poland has killed at least 22 people. The BBC reports:

President Lech Kaczynski has … declared three days of national morning to start at midnight.

‘You got it wrong’

In about five seconds I can find from WordReference.com that the Russian for reset is переставля́ть (perestavlyat’).

The US State Department, however, is apparently unable to get that far, even though proper translation is an essential tool of any international activity.

Button gaffe embarrasses Clinton

Mr Lavrov was not taken with the state department's Russian language skills

Russian media have been poking fun at the US secretary of state over a translation error on a gift she presented to her Russian counterpart.

Hillary Clinton gave Sergei Lavrov a mock “reset” button, symbolising US hopes to mend frayed ties with Moscow. But he said the word the Americans chose, “peregruzka”, meant “overloaded” or “overcharged”, rather than “reset”. Daily newspaper Kommersant declared on its front page: “Sergei Lavrov and Hillary Clinton push the wrong button.”

…

As reporters watched, the US secretary of state assured her Russian opposite number her staff had “worked hard” to ensure it was accurate. “Was it right?” she inquired with a smile. “You got it wrong,” Mr Lavrov responded, also smiling, before pointing out the mistake.

BBC

What is sure?

The BBC tells us (my emphasis).

The government is to insure £260bn of loans at Lloyds Banking Group in exchange for a 60% stake in the bank, the BBC learns.

The £260bn insurance deal is part of the Treasury's taxpayer-backed Asset Protection Scheme to insure banks' riskiest assets against further losses.

I am  no expert in finance, but would it not be better for the government to assure those loans rather than insure them? Or, on the other hand, I wonder with which company it is hoping to find insurance for a remarkably dodgy but very valuable asset.

Informatics

In my Guide to English Language Usage  I say

information technology (IT): The word informatics appears in dictionaries but is not in common current use.

True the COD defines it as

the science of processing data for storage and retrieval

but I have always thought of it as falling into the category of what I call

dictionary words: Some words are found in dictionaries but are hardly ever used outside them. The synonyms architectural and western are almost always used instead of architectonic and occidental.

other examples being petroleum (excepting technical use and OPEC) and milliard.

Nevertheless, in a letter in today’s Guardian I read:

… expertise in [algorithms] is to be found predominantly in departments of computer science and informatics

I wonder what the status of this word is. It may have a precise technical meaning but I am sure that it is not used generally, as informática is in Spanish for example

Personnel

What does the word personnel mean?

According to the Concise Oxford Dictionary it is:

people employed in an organization or engaged in an organized undertaking.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary it is:

The body of persons engaged in any service or employment, esp. in a public institution, as an army, navy, hospital, etc.; the human as distinct from the matériel or material equipment (of an institution, undertaking, etc.).

And according to the BBC it is a member of the British military:

Four British personnel have died from injuries sustained in Afghanistan, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) has said.

Three soldiers from 1st Battalion The Rifles were struck by a blast in the Gereshk district of Helmand province and pronounced dead at the scene.

Is this a part of the militarisation of British society? You bet it is.

Transfer etc., spelling

According to the COD transfer makes transferred and transferring, with two r’s. But it also makes transferability, transferable, transferee and transferor, which have only one r.

I wonder why this should be. I think that it is because the e in the second group of words is weak, but this isn’t really the case with transferable and transferor. In fact, I would have expected transferrer.

False friends

In a letter in today’s El País Tarso Genro, the Brazilian Justice Minister, points out that in an interview that he recently gave to the paper he said that President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva had supported a particular candidate. He meant that Lula’s support was an advantage but in Genro’s words:

I used the word “handicap”, which has a positive connotation in Brazil. However, it was interpreted by the journalist as a barrier or obstacle, in completely the opposite way to what I said.

Of such confusion are diplomatic incidents made.

Men, women and boys

Having just posted a message with the title ‘What is a boy?’ I am reminded of the Englishman (yes really) who said, ‘I can admire a manly man, and I can love a womanly woman, but I can’t stand a boily boy.’

What is a boy?

I am interested in the way in which this is reported. What is a boy? What is a youth? What is a teenager? Who is a 17-year-old who has not previously been identified as such?

I can understand that there are legal restrictions  on reporting such cases but it seems that the BBC has got itself in a linguistic knot over this one.

Boy charged with youth's murder

Michael Simon Wright, known as Simon, died in hospital

A 16-year-old boy has been charged with the murder of a teenager who was stabbed to death near an east London railway station.

Michael Simon Wright, from Leyton, was found with stab wounds opposite Maryland station in Leytonstone Road, Stratford, on Thursday night.

The 17-year-old died at the Royal London Hospital shortly after being found at about 2230 GMT.

The 16-year-old is due to appear at Stratford Youth Court on Monday.

What do the English, Romanian, Latvian and Maltese languages have in common?

Q. What do the English, Romanian, Latvian and Maltese languages have in common?

A. The EU can’t find enough translators who can work into those languages (BBC).

The problems caused by the appalling decline in language-learning in British schools is nothing new (see here). The result is that the famous ‘international language’ will find its status impaired by the stupidity of British nationalist governments of all parties, and of British nationalist people who don’t want to find out about foreigners – because they all speak English anyway, don’t they?

Commenting on the commission statement on Thursday, Conservative MEP Richard Ashworth deplored the decline in language skills in the UK. "The lack of fresh graduates with adequate language skills is a great concern and reflects years of declining importance of foreign languages in our schools...  "Hundreds of future linguists are not being given the start in our schools that they need. Great talent is being allowed to slip through the educational net and the results will be felt in our economy," he said.

He is absolutely right.

A serious language blog

There is no shortage of places on the Internet where people with a pedantic interest in language can bang on interminably about their favourite hobby-horses while saying very little of interest to people who really understand language.

For that reason I am pleased to welcome a blog that looks at grammar and language seriously. It is appropriately called Grammar for Grown-Ups.

Derby and the rest

Why is Derby pronounced Darby in British English? I don’t know precisely, but I do know that er was once commonly pronounced as ar, so we have that pronunciation in such words as clerk, Berkshire, Berkley, Hertford, Kerr and sergeant* though the forms Barclay, Clark, Carr and Sargeant are found as surnames.

There is also a variant form of my own surname: Hervey is pronounced in the same way as Harvey. It is mentioned in Boswell’s Life of Johnson:

[Johnson] was well acquainted with Mr. Henry Hervey, one of the branches of the noble family of that name, who had been quartered at Lichfield as an officer of the army, and had at this time a house in London, where Johnson was frequently entertained, and had an opportunity of meeting genteel company.  Not very long before his death, he mentioned this, among other particulars of his life, which he was kindly communicating to me; and he described this early friend, ‘Harry Hervey,’ thus: ‘He was a vicious man, but very kind to me.  If you call a dog HERVEY, I shall love him.’

*While writing this I thought that I would look at the BBC web site to check that John Sargeant does spell his name with an a. He does. I also found this from Radio 4:

Detective Sargeant Cate Jackson has been honoured for her work on some of Britain 's most high profile criminal investigations.

The iron steak now has wings

I recently mentioned a Barcelona bar-restaurant that had a mechanical translation of its menu, so that entrecot plancha came out as entrecot irons.

Today I happened to walk past it again. They have done something about it. It now says entrecot wing irons. I suppose they decided that the Spanish really should be entrecot a la plancha – but then they put ala as one word into the computer. And ala is the Spanish for wing!

What a coup!

The Concise Oxford Dictionary recognises:

• coup: 1 (also coup d’état) a sudden violent seizure of power from a government. 2 an unexpected and notably successful act. 3 Billiards a direct pocketing of the cue ball, which is a foul stroke. 4 historical (among North American Indians) an act of touching an enemy, as a deed of bravery.
• coup de foudre: a sudden unforeseen event, especially love at first sight.
• coup de grâce: final blow or shot given to kill a wounded person or animal.
• coup de main: a sudden surprise attack.
• coup de maître: a master stroke.
• coup d’état: see coup (sense 1).
• coup de théâtre:1 a dramatically sudden action or turn of events, especially in a play. 2 a successful theatrical production.
• coup d’œil: a comprehensive glance.

However, the coup de poule is known only to the Independent newspaper.

Sir James, a chief executive of HBOS, was appointed to the regulator by Mr Brown in 2004, when the Prime Minister was still at the Treasury. Even then, the decision smacked of putting a fox in charge of the chicken coup.

(My emphasis)

Misattached participle

There is a spectacularly misattached participle on the BBC news site:

Sir James Crosby has resigned as deputy chairman of City watchdog, the Financial Services Authority (FSA).

The move follows allegations that, when head of HBOS, he sacked senior manager Paul Moore after raising concerns the bank was exposed to too much risk

The subject of a participle clause must be the same as that of the clause to which it is subordinate. Sir James was not the one who raised concerns about the bank’s risk level.

And sic, there is no full stop at the end of the sentence.

A.E.I.O.U.

I took this photo in the regional government (Landesrat) building of the Austrian town of Graz last summer. It shows the letters A.E.I.O.U. which were used by the Habsburg emperors to symbolise the Austrian empire. They are said to stand for either Alles Erdreich Ist Österreich Untertan (All the world is subject to Austria) or Austriae est imperare orbi universo (It is Austria's destiny to rule the whole world). Other suggestions have also been made.

I am unable to read the symbols above the letters, which I take to be numerals showing the date of the inscription.

Between you and … ?

A few days ago I found myself at lunch with an Englishman who informed me with horror that he had been to see the film Australia and had seen between you and me subtitled as entre tú y yo. He insisted that it should be entre ti y mí, these being the prepositional forms of the pronouns. I told him that entre tú y yo is how it is said in Spanish, and finally, after an appeal to a Spanish friend who was with us, he accepted that I must be right however ‘illogical’ this was in Spanish.

What is the situation? The Spanish version with two subject pronouns following entre is perfectly standard and correct; the Diccionario panhispánico de dudas states explicitly (entre 1.) that, although in the past the forms mí and ti were used with entre, ‘en el español actual se usan siempre las formas pronominales del sujeto yo, tú’ [In modern Spanish the subject pronoun forms yo, tú are always used]: Ahora mediaba algo entre yo y el mundo (Nasarre País [Esp. 1993]; Nada se interpone entre tú y la muerte (Leguina Nombre [Esp. 1993]) … Esta es la diferencia entre tú y yo (Somoza Caverna [Cuba 2000])

What about English? It is often said that the use of between you and I is an example of hypercorrection; people have been told so often not to say You and me were there that they say you and I when they shouldn’t do so. No doubt there is something in that but it can’t be the whole story. The OED says (I pers. pron. B2.):

2. Sometimes used for the objective after a verb or preposition, esp. when separated from the governing word by other words. This was very frequent in end [sic] of 16th and in 17th c., but is now considered ungrammatical. The qualification that it makes (my emphasis) is interesting.

One quotation that it gives (1596) is from Shakespeare: All debts are clear’d betweene you and I, (The Merchant of Venice, Act 3, scene 2). It has another from 1698 but its quotations from 1866 and 1959 are critical of the usage.

If the usage was ‘very frequent’ 400 years ago, hypercorrection cannot really be the whole reason for its use nowadays.

As for It’s me, the OED only quotes examples in the sense of it suits me e.g. I like this dress, it’s me. Nevertheless, the use of it’s me to mean I am here, I am the person you can hear is so widespread as to be hard to criticise, as is the use of me in sentences such as He’s bigger than me. Randolph Quirk’s Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language gets round this problem by talking of ‘object territory’, meaning that the object is usually at the end of the sentence, so when a pronoun is in that position the tendency is to use the object form whatever the actual grammatical structure may be in classical terms.

In these cases Spanish has Soy yo (literally I am I) and Él es más grande que yo (than I with no alternative). In French, Louis XIV did not say L’état, cést je; French has what they call the disjunctive pronoun so they can say Cést moi and Il est plus grand que moi. The German forms are Ich bin es (I am it) and Er ist gröβer als ich (again, than I with no alternative).

What a rollyo!

There is a thing called Rollyo that allows you to ‘roll your own search engine’. I can say nothing about how it works or how good it is, but I doubt if they’ll do much business in Spanish-speaking countries. Un rollo, pronounced rollyo, is a pain in the neck!

The client is always right … or at least he thinks he is

Last week I did a translation of advertising copy for a small luxury item for personal use (for professional reasons I can’t be more specific). It is aimed at women and the text was written in a lush, romantic style. Today it came back. The client wasn’t happy and had made his ‘corrections’.

• First, my fount of inspiration had become a source of inspiration. Well, source is a perfectly correct translation of fuente; indeed it is the standard form. But in view of the style of the whole piece I thought that fount would meet the case better. The Concise Oxford agrees, defining it as: 1 a source of a desirable quality. 2 poetic/literary a spring or fountain.
• The punctuation had been messed about. Punctuation is variable, but it varies differently in English from Spanish. In particular, in Spanish it is heavier than in English and is often ‘oratorical’, i.e. it marks points for breathing in speech rather than grammatical structure. It is normal in Spanish to see a comma between a long subject phrase and the verb, or at the start or end, but not both, of a parenthesis – as had been introduced twice in my text.
• A whole paragraph that wasn’t in the original had appeared, and a phrase that was there had disappeared.
• And finally, it seems that the greengrocer’s apostrophe is colonising the world: my finishings had been changed consistently to finishing’s.

All in all, it took more time (unpaid of course) to make the corrections and argue with the client than the translation job (a mere 467 words) had taken in the first place!

Take care!

The picture shows an advertisement for coffee in a bar-restaurant in Barcelona (Pg. de Gràcia / València). The Catalan says Cuida’t amb el nostre cappucino (Spanish Cuídate con nuestro cappucino). Fair enough, but the translation doesn’t work. It’s not an easy translation; if I were doing it – and I do do translation work for advertising – I would probably go for a free version: Treat yourself to our cappuccino. In any event, a more literal translation would be something like Look after yourself or even Take care of yourself, which might be too long for the available space. But the translation that has been published is simply wrong. The English word care has two meanings (COD):

1 the provision of what is necessary for the health, welfare, maintenance, and protection of someone or something…

2 serious attention or consideration applied to an action or plan.  a feeling of or occasion for anxiety.

and it is the second, the idea of precaution, that is expressed in take care (COD again):

take care 1 be cautious; keep oneself safe.

So Take care with our cappuccino is not a proper translation of the original. In fact, it means Alerta al nostre cappuccino! or ¡Cuidado con nuestro cappuccino!

Posh

A folk etymology is one that is widely believed but which is unfounded linguistically, though often it ‘seems’ right. One example is the widespread belief that the word posh derives from an acronym of Port Out Starboard Home, these being the preferred sides, being sheltered from the sun, of passengers on P&O liners sailing between Britain and India. However, there is no real evidence to support this theory. The etymology given in the OED is:

[Of obscure origin, but cf. posh n.² The suggestion that this word is derived from the initials of ‘port outward, starboard home’, referring to the more expensive side for accommodation on ships formerly travelling between England and India, is often put forward but lacks foundation. The main objections to this derivation are listed by G. Chowdharay-Best in Mariner’s Mirror (1971) Jan. 91–2.]

The reference to posh n.² leads us to the definition:

A dandy

which seems quite plausible.

The Mariner’s Mirror article and other comments can be found here. There seems little room for doubt: the acronym etymology is not valid.