Mind Your Language at Home No.5

Whimsical Articles about Language

Dear Mind Your Language Colleagues Several more articles to keep your language interests alive during our stay-at-home time! Help me out and send me any articles, jokes, etc that you come across, and I will include them in the next edition! Rodney

Lockdown lingo: courtesy of Bieneke Barwick

*Coronacoaster* The ups and downs of your mood during the pandemic. You’re loving lockdown one minute but suddenly weepy with anxiety the next. It truly is “an emotional coronacoaster”.

*Quarantinis* Experimental cocktails mixed from whatever random ingredients you have left in the house. The boozy equivalent of a store cupboard supper. Southern Comfort and Ribena quarantini with a glacé cherry garnish, anyone? These are sipped at “locktail hour”, ie. wine ’clock during lockdown, which seems to be creeping earlier with each passing week.

*Blue Skype thinking* A work brainstorming session which takes place over a videoconferencing app. Such meetings might also be termed a “Zoomposium”. Naturally, they are to be avoided if at all possible.

*Le Creuset wrist* It’ the new “avocado hand” - an aching arm after taking one’s best saucepan outside to bang during the weekly ‘Clap For Carers.’ It might be heavy but you’re keen to impress the neighbours with your high-quality kitchenware.

*Coronials* As opposed to millennials, this refers to the future generation of babies conceived or born during coronavirus quarantine. They might also become known as “Generation ” or, more spookily, “Children of the Quarn”.

*Furlough Merlot* Wine consumed in an attempt to relieve the frustration of not working. Also known as “bored-eaux” or “cabernet tedium”.

*Coronadose* An overdose of bad news from consuming too much media during a time of crisis. Can result in a panicdemic.

*The elephant in the Zoom* The glaring issue during a videoconferencing call that nobody feels able to mention. .. one participant has dramatically put on weight, suddenly sprouted terrible facial hair or has a worryingly messy house visible in the background.

*Quentin Quarantino* An attention-seeker using their time in lockdown to make amateur films which they’re convinced are funnier and cleverer than they actually are.

*Covidiot* or *Wuhan-ker* One who ignores public health advice or behaves with reckless disregard for the safety of others can be said to display “covidiocy” or be “covidiotic”. Also called a “lockclown” or even a “Wuhan-ker”.

*Goutbreak* The sudden fear that you’ve consumed so much wine, cheese, home- made cake and Easter chocolate in lockdown that your ankles are swelling up like a medieval king’s.

*Antisocial distancing* Using health precautions as an excuse for snubbing neighbours and generally ignoring people you find irritating.

*Coughin’ dodger* Someone so alarmed by an innocuous splutter or throat-clear that they back away in terror.

*Covid-10* The 10lbs in weight that we’re all gaining from comfort-eating and comfort-drinking. Also known as “fattening the curve.

Changing voices: An introduction to English language change over time

Should a language be fixed in time or should it adapt and evolve to reflect social and political change? Discover how and why spoken English changes and explore attitudes to language change.

All languages change over time, and vary from place to place. They may change as a result of social or political pressures, such as invasion, colonisation and immigration. New vocabulary is required for the latest inventions, such as transport, domestic appliances and industrial equipment, or for sporting, entertainment and leisure pursuits. But a language can also change by less obvious means.

Influenced by others

Language also changes very subtly whenever speakers come into contact with each other. No two individuals speak identically: people from different geographical places clearly speak differently, but even within the same small community there are variations according to a speaker’s age, gender, ethnicity and social and educational background. Through our interactions with these different speakers, we encounter new words, expressions and pronunciations and integrate them into our own speech. Even if your family has lived in the same area for generations, you can probably identify a number of differences between the language you use and the way your grandparents speak. Every successive generation makes its own small contribution to language change and when sufficient time has elapsed the impact of these changes becomes more obvious.

Learn more and listen to recordings which illustrate important, recent changes in spoken English including examples of phonological change, grammatical change and lexical change.

Attitudes to language change some method should be thought on for ascertaining and fixing our language for ever ... it is better a language should not be wholly perfect, than that it should be perpetually changing

Jonathan Swift, author of Gulliver’s Travels, wrote these words in 1712. They express a sentiment we still hear today – the idea that language should be fixed forever, frozen in time, and protected from the ravages of fashion and social trends. Language change is almost always perceived as a negative thing. During the 18th century, Swift and many other influential figures felt the English language was in a state of serious decline and that a national institution, such as existed in France and Italy, should be created to establish rules and prevent further decay. Even today we hear people complaining about a supposed lack of ‘standards’ in spoken and written English. New words and expressions, innovative pronunciations and changes in grammar are derided, and are often considered inferior. Yet because of its adaptability and durability, English has evolved into an incredibly versatile and modern language, retaining a recognisable link to its past.

Change can be a good thing

Most contemporary linguistic commentators accept that change in language, like change in society, is an unavoidable process – occasionally regrettable, but more often a means of refreshing and reinvigorating a language, providing alternatives that allow extremely subtle differences of expression. Certainly the academies established in France and Italy have had little success in preventing change in French or Italian, and perhaps the gradual shift in opinion of our most famous lexicographer, Dr Johnson, is instructive. A contemporary of Swift, Dr Johnson, wrote in 1747 of his desire to produce a dictionary by which the pronunciation of our language may be fixed and its purity preserved, but on completing the project 10 years later he acknowledges in his introduction that:

Those who have been persuaded to think well of my design, require that it should fix our language and put a stop to those alterations which time and chance have hitherto been suffered to make in it without opposition. With this consequence I will confess that I flattered myself for a while; but now begin to fear that I have indulged expectation which neither reason nor experience can justify.

Johnson clearly realised that any attempt to fix the language was futile. Like it or not, language is always changing and English will continue to do so in many creative and – to some perhaps – frustrating ways.

Written by Jonnie Robinson, at the British Library 13 Fascinating Facts about the

An article from Culture Trip

The official language of is complex and unique: despite the country’s location in central Europe, its dialect is nothing like those spoken in its neighbouring nations. We take a look at 13 facts about Hungarian which you may not have known before. It’s one of the hardest languages in the world to learn

Anyone learning Hungarian will be keen to tell you that it’s one of the most challenging languages to take up. While opinion varies, more or less everyone agrees it’s up there in the top 10 thanks to its 26 cases and numerous complex rules.

It’s actually called Magyar

While Hungary’s language is generally referred to as Hungarian outside the country’s borders, in fact its proper name is “Magyar”, which can also be used to refer to the Hungarian people.

It’s only spoken by 13 million people

Hungary is a small country with approximately 9.8 million inhabitants, but – perhaps surprisingly – it’s not the only country in which Hungarian is spoken. The areas surrounding the country, which used to be part of the Kingdom of Hungary, are home to approximately 2.2 million Hungarian speakers. Countries such as Austria, Croatia and Slovenia are included in the list, while the Hungarian language is also spoken by thousands living in nations such as the U.S.

It comes from Asia

The Hungarian language is totally different to the dialects spoken by its neighbours, which usually speak Indo-European languages. In fact, Hungarian comes from the Ularic region of Asia and belongs to the Finno- Ugric language group, meaning its closest relatives are actually Finnish and Estonian.

Uralic languages hu © Laurens, Poganyp / Wikimedia Commons

There are 14 vowels

The five vowels of the English language pale in comparison to Hungarian’s total of 14. As well as the basic “a, e, i, o, u” vowels, the Hungarian language also includes a further 9 variations on these: á, é, í, , ö, ő, ú, ü, ű. The pronunciation of each is slightly different and can change the meaning of a word completely. Word order is flexible

When putting a sentence together in Hungarian, there are a number of options in terms of word order (as if things weren’ complicated enough!). While the word order is flexible, it’s not totally free – there are still rules about how words need to be arranged. This depends on the emphasis of the sentence, and the sense conveyed.

A Hungarian probably visited America before Columbus

Christopher Columbus is famous for his trips to America, but the Hungarian language may just be proof that a Magyar was there before him. In Yarmouth County Museum, a stone can be found which is inscribed with an early form of Old Hungarian – which was the dialect from a time well before Columbus explored the earth.

Its longest word has 44 letters

With no English equivalent, Hungary’s longest word is the 44 letter long phrase: Megszentségteleníthetetlenségeskedéseitekért. Perhaps due to its length, it’s not used in daily conversation on a regular basis. What does it mean? Something along the lines of “for your [plural] continued behaviour as if you could not be desecrated”.

But actually, words can be much, much longer

Hungarian is an agglutinative language, which means that various grammatical components – such as affixes and stems –can be added to a word to increase its length (and change its meaning). Thanks to this, words of over 100 letters have been created in the past, although the longer the word, the more it can tend to lose its meaning! Hungarian is true to its roots

Over the years since its creation as a language, Hungarian has evolved and changed just like any other dialect. However, staying true to its ancient roots, Hungarian contains a whopping 68% of its etymons, or original words. Compare this with the four percent retained by the English language, or the five percent kept by Hebrew, and the scale is even more impressive.

There are two words for the colour red

When faced with describing something red, Hungarians have two words to choose from. “Piros” and “vörös” both offer up the same meaning however slightly confusingly, they are both interchangeable in some cases and not in others. Wine is always vörös, for example, while blood or a rose can be either.

Names are back to front

When introducing yourself in Hungary, your given name is always stated after your surname. For example, Tamás Nagy would be introduced as Nagy Tamás. This can catch some visitors out, however the given name is still the one used when speaking to or about someone.

The has 44 letters – and some letters actually have 2 or 3 parts

Not only does the Hungarian alphabet feature 44 letters in total, but some of those counted as letters are in fact made up of two or even three. Confused yet? Take, for example, ‘dzs’, a letter in the Hungarian alphabet pronounced as ‘’, or ‘’ which equates to ‘s’.