Englishisms in France: readers’ franglais favourites

No Comments » Written on May 24th, 2013 by
Categories: France, UK
Tags: , , , , , , , ,

A row over plans to teach some courses at French universities in English has outraged some defenders of the language of Moliere – but plenty of French people habitually sprinkle their speech with franglais. Here, readers share their favourite anglicisms.

1. On a recent visit to an aerospace company near Paris, I was surprised to hear French engineers use “no-’ow” [know-how] instead of “savoir faire”. Roy Woodcock, Olympia, WA, USA

2. When at school (circa 1966) we had a recording played in a French lesson, in which two boys going on a camping trip discussed at length the need to take “les baked beans“. I’ve tended to pronounce them as “back-ed beans” ever since, which is why I remember it! Sue Perks, Facebook

3. Amongst my favourites are “faire du shopping” and “le booze-cruising.” What could be more Franglais than “je vais faire du booze-cruising”? Peter Walter, Bromley, UK

4. I have genuinely seen this with my own eyes: At the English railway station: “The buffet is open.” At the French Railway station: “Le snack bar est ouvert.” Paul Savage, Guildford Surrey

5. My current favourite has to be “C’est le must!”, which is how some French people now translate “It’s de rigueur”. Oh the irony. AK Fortis-Evan, Southampton, UK

6. I live and work in France and have convinced my colleagues that verbing is fun. We have created a new verb (regular “er” form), “luncher” – to lunch. “Lunchez-vous avec moi aujourd’hui?” is now regularly heard in my office. Joyful playing with language is fun, not a sin! Tom, Toulouse, France

7. Just look at new technology… you will have great difficulty getting anywhere without finding English terms, from “le hardware” to “lesoftware” via the inevitable “le spam“, whilst anyone who contributes to a forum has added “un post“. Sports are also full of English terms, from “le goal average” to “le coach” via “lecoaching” (tactical substitutions). One which I admit irritates me is the relatively recent verb “scorer” which is now used almost exclusively in football rather than the traditional “marquer” (“marquer un but” is to score a goal). Paul Darby, Clermont Ferrand, Puy de Dôme, France

8. It pleases me no end that French for a walkie-talkie is… “talkie-walkie“! galaxy_nut, London, UK

9. Earlier this year, I was in Meribel, France, on a snowboarding holiday. I always make an effort to speak the language of whichever country I visit, so it was particularly strange that I was using the words “la planche a neige” (French for snowboarding) yet they all talked about “(le)snowboard“. Andrew Pratt, Cleveleys, Lancs

English is said to be more popular among younger French people

10. It has definitely become the “cool” (or “supercool“, or even “hypercool” – pronounced eepacool – as my former French flatmates used to say) thing to do to incorporate as much English into a sentence as possible, to show off your knowledge of the outside world. Made-up words like “footing“, to mean jogging, have crept up recently…. I have seen stand-up comedians being described as “un one-man-show“, or even comediennes as “une one-woman-show“. The mayor of New York was described in one newspaper as “un self-made-man“. And when I sat down for dinner for the first time with my French flatmates, they tried to embrace the English language to welcome the present company with “Good eating!” – they were shocked to hear that “Bon appetit!” makes perfect sense, not just because it’s not English, but because we seem too lazy to think of anything new for ourselves. Matthew Lewis, Watford, UK

11. ”Se geeker” – participate in geekish activity such as playing video games. “Il est en train de se geeker devant son ordi.” [He is doing something geekish on his computer.] Tom Rowell, Lancaster, UK

12. As a university student of French and Business, I went abroad last year on a work placement. At the airport in Nice, I found the French usage of “le check-in” and “le check-out” for airport terminology surprising and funny! Rob Cribb, Kent, England

13. I remember being taught “un chewing gum” in one of my first ever French lessons. Alex Pinkney, Facebook

14. Estate agents use the English sounding “home staging” to mean decorating or otherwise changing the look of a property to increase its chance of selling. Otherwise known as “relooking“, another (badly) borrowed word. Carl Woffenden, Bartenheim, France

 

Faites-vous du shopping?

15. My favourite while living in France 2000-2005 was “lifting” to indicate cosmetic surgery. Michael Knibbs, Saigon, Vietnam (UK)

16. Some of the most commonly-heard franglais mixes derive from grabbing parts of common English and creating strange hybrid nouns such as a “smoking“, a “parking“, a “dressing“, a “shampooing“, a “snacking” etc which leave you waiting for the finishing word. (A “smoking” describes a smart jacket – from smoking jacket, a “dressing” would be where you store your clothes – a dressing room.) Another annoying misappropriation is the noun “fashion” which, in French, becomes an adjective, as in “J’adore tes chaussures - tres fashion.” Here in France I admire the brave efforts of many small restaurant owners who offer English translations on their menus. Unfortunately, their choice of words from their well-thumbed family dictionaries can sometimes result in startling dishes such as “Menu of the Earth” (menu de terroir), “Jumped Chicken” (poulet sauté) “Duck’s Foot” (cuisse de canard) and, my favourite so far, “Salmon Pavement” (pavé de saumon). Wyn Scourfield, Tours, Central France

Article taken from www.bbc.co.uk on 24 May 2013

The Origins of 9 Great British Insults

No Comments » Written on May 17th, 2013 by
Categories: UK
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

 

IMAGE CREDIT: THINKSTOCK/BRYAN DUGAN

For as long as people have been speaking the English language, they’ve been deploying it to poke fun at one another. Let’s dig a little deeper into the grab bag of insults that language has bequeathed us throughout history, and find out where those terms come from.

1. WAZZOCK

Wazzock was a particularly prevalent—and particularly loutish—insult in the 1990s. At the time, “lad culture” ran throughout British music and television, and wazzock, a North-England accented contraction of the sarcastic wiseacre (a know-it-all) became a powerful tool to shoot people down in an argument.

2. LUMMOX

Though the etymology of lummox is heavily disputed, one thing is for certain: It came from East Anglia, the coastal outcrop of Britain above London. There, around 1825, someone threw out the word as an insult, and it stuck, becoming a typically British go-to term. Some linguists believe it comes from the verb lummock, which typified a lummox: it means a clumsy oaf.

3. SKIVER

Skivers and shirkers are one and the same. Someone who manages to duck under any responsibility and loaf around, doing very little, is a skiver. The origins of this particular insult are contested: some think it’s from an Old Norse word—skifa—meaning “slice,” whereby the worker slices off as much work as possible.

4. MINGER

Often hurled at the opposite sex, to call someone a minger is to say they are objectively unattractive. Though etymologists struggle to agree where the word came from, it seems likely that it stems from the Old Scots word meng, meaning “sh**.” We didn’t say it was pretty.

5. NINCOMPOOP

For such a colloquial word, nincompoop actually has a very learned past. Samuel Johnson, the compiler of England’s first proper dictionary, claims the word comes from the Latin phrase non compos mentis (“not of right mind”), and was originally a legal term.

6. PILLOCK

As words are used more regularly, the laziness of pronunciation can often warp them slightly. So it was with pillock. Originally pillicock (a Norwegian slang word for penis), the word has since been condensed to plain old pillock—though its meaning remains.

7. CLOD HOPPER

According to the brilliant Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, dating back to 1811 and compiled by Captain Francis Grose, a clod hopper refers to a country farmer or ploughman—with the implication nowadays that you’re slow witted and bumbling.

8. DUNAKER

Grose’s Dictionary of vulgarities is a rich seam of overlooked insults. In the 200 years since it was published, there have been several terms that have fallen out of favor. One of them is dunaker, a common thief of cows and calves.

9. GIT

By calling someone a git, you’re invoking the old Scots word get, which means “bastard.” When it came down south of the border, it lost its harsh vowel sound and became something softer, albeit with the required spikiness in.

Article taken from mental_floss on 17 May 2013

7 words brought to you by British colonialism

No Comments » Written on April 29th, 2013 by
Categories: UK
Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

The British Empire once shaded fully a quarter of the world’s map pink. The political reach of Britain was unparalleled, and throughout history it was one of the most dominant countries worldwide. (Research shows that throughout all history, only 22 countries haven’t faced an incursion by British forces.)

The Empire brought trade, literature and governance—of a sort—to far-flung nations. The cotton trade, British imperial sea shipping lines, and the need for raw materials to power the Industrial Revolution are arguably the reason why, decades after the sun set on the British Empire, English is still the global language of business.

But it’d be wrong to think it was all one-way traffic. The spread of language wasn’t just top down, from colonisers to colonies. With the spread of the Empire came the diversification of language and the bottom-up rise of certain loan words from colonial languages.

Words we use every day in modern English owe their inclusion in dictionaries to a British army officer picking up a few slang words from the cotton traders in Bangalore, street food vendors in the Caribbean, or the Boer warriors who fought against Britons just over 100 years ago. They brought them back to the homeland and they spread, becoming as British as Shakespeare, scones and smog over London.

1. JUNGLE

Place yourself in the shoes of a rich Englishman—the type likely to lead foreign expeditions—in the late 1700s. You live in a grand country house with vast surroundings; perfectly manicured lawns and ornate fountains. Suddenly you’re thousands of miles away on the Indian subcontinent, and all around you is a thicket of strange trees. What do you call it? You hear your Hindi guide calling it a jangal. You start calling it that, and bring it home. Your descendants call their home town a concrete jungle without second thought, not imagining where the term originally came from. That’s the beauty of language.

2. PUNDIT

Nowadays we are a nation of armchair pundits, waxing lyrical on football plays as if we had played in the big leagues. But in Hinduism prior to the 17th century, you could only be called a pundit if you had committed vast screeds of the Vedas, the Hindu holy books, to memory.Pandits, as they were called in Sanskrit, were few and far between—but when Britons picked up the term, we used it in a more generic know-it-all sense, and threw the praise around a little more loosely.

3. PAJAMAS

It seems incredible to think, but before British colonialists first came across Indian Muslims wearing baggy trousers akin to harem pants, called pai jamahs by the locals, in the early 1800s, pajamas didn’t really have a name. But now they do, and have become a pants and shirt ensemble, rather than simply describing the lower half of our nightwear.

4. BELEAGUER

Of course, not all of the colonial loanwords in the English language come from colonies themselves. A whole host of naval terms—including avast, skipper, keel, freight, and cruise—come from contact with other colonists maintaining their empires. The Dutch had a colony in India, and traded regularly with Britons. It’s likely there, in the lively banter of business, that one Dutch term—beleaguer—came into the English language.

5. TREK

South Africans today are often bilingual, speaking in a hodge-podge of Afrikaans and English. Back in the early 1800s, Boers, inhabiting South Africa, would load up their ox-drawn cart with belongings and go on cross-country treks. Contact with the British brought the term into English by the 1840s, and it became used for any long journey—not just one driven by oxen.

6. SWASTIKA

The word, and the symbol, stem from Buddhism – when both had a much less mendacious association than that used in conjunction with Nazism. The svastika in Sanskrit was a sign of inner harmony and well-being, with its root word svast meaning good health.

7. JUGGERNAUT

As we’ve seen above, the Indian subcontinent was one of the richest linguistic seams mined for English. And one of the words we now use most in politics—juggernaut—came from the religious tradition of Hinduism. The Jaganath Krishna was so named from a Sanskrit compound word that meant a world-moving god. Locals would have used the term to describe actions such as the British Empire’s overtaking of their land, and the term found its way into the conversations of the soldiers who encountered locals.

 

Article taken from mental_floss on 25 April 2013.

Sprechen Sie job?

No Comments » Written on April 25th, 2013 by
Categories: Germany
Tags: , , , , , ,

More southern Europeans are going where the jobs are. But not enough 

Daniel Gómez Garcia, aged 23, is the sort of person Europe’s leaders may have had in mind when, on paper at least, they turned the European Union into a single labour market like America’s. Mr Gómez, from Andalusia in Spain, learned a smattering of German in school and passable English while studying in America. But when he came back to Spain he saw that hardly anybody in his class of ‘80 had a job. “Nothing to do, so let me go to Germany and get the language,” he recalls thinking. In autumn 2012 he took an unpaid four-month internship at his embassy in Berlin and paid for his tiny flat-share by helping a local holiday-rental firm with its Excel spreadsheets. Last month that turned into a low-paying but permanent job as an accountant.

That is how the single market is supposed to work. Spain has a youth unemployment rate of 56%. In Greece it is 58% (see chart). By contrast, Germany has negligible youth unemployment (8%) and a shortage of qualified workers. Theoretically, people should be willing to move from the “crisis countries” to the boom towns, just as the Okies once flocked to California.

To some extent this migration is indeed happening. New arrivals in Germany in the first half of 2012 grew by 15% over the same period in 2011, and by 35% net of departures. And the numbers of newcomers from the euro crisis countries increased the most—Greek arrivals were up by 78%, Spanish by 53%, for example. But the absolute numbers (6,900 Greeks and 3,900 Spaniards during those six months) are still modest.

It is “astonishing how astonishing it still is that they are coming”, says Holger Kolb, at the Expert Council of German Foundations on Integration and Migration. Some things are beginning to work as intended, such as the elimination of bureaucratic hassles for moving within the EU. Yet it seems that the EU can never become a truly integrated market. That is mainly because of language. Mr Gómez finds Germans challenging—“always nagging you about recycling or noise or whatever”—but the language is “the hardest part”.

Thus language has replaced work visas as the main barrier to mobility. When the euro crisis began, the branches in southern Europe of the Goethe Institute, the German equivalent of the British Council, were overwhelmed by demand for German courses, says Heike Uhlig, the institute’s director of language programmes. That demand was also different, she adds: less about yearning to read Goethe’s “Faust” than about finding work. So the institute retooled, offering courses geared to the technical German used by engineers, nurses or doctors.

Language, besides proximity, explains a lot of today’s movements in the EU, says Klaus Bade, another migration expert. For example, the largest group of new arrivals in Germany is still from Poland, which is poorer though not a crisis country. But its schools often teach German alongside English.

Meanwhile Britain, thanks to English, has an advantage in the competition for foreign talent, which big German firms try to minimise by accepting English as their working language. But many of the job openings in Germany are to be found in medium-sized and private Mittelstand firms, often in remote places, where speaking German is still a must. That’s why Mr Gómez is advising his friends back home in Spain to bone up on the language and then “leave, get out”. 

Article taken from The Economist on 16 February 2013.

A little bit of “smekalka” can save the day

No Comments » Written on April 4th, 2013 by
Categories: Russia
Tags: , , , ,

We have a great word in Russian: смекалка, pronounced “smekalka”. I’m not even sure how you would translate it in English. It means the ability to overcome (seemingly impossible) challenges in extraordinary and often surprising ways.

Russia has recently tightened up its alcohol licensing laws. Purchasing alcohol (including beer) from shops and supermarkets after 11 p.m. was made illegal earlier this year, which is why all the stores that used to be 24-hour off-licences near where I live now close at 11. This restriction does not apply to bars, clubs and other similar venues. However, any form of advertising related to alcohol is also strictly prohibited.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, starting this summer, shops will not be allowed to sell alcohol if they are located within 100 metres of any medical facilities or schools. This begs the question: what do you do if you own a supermarket which is already situated 90 metres away from a dentist’s, for example? You obviously can’t move the building and God forbid that you stop selling alcohol.

This is exactly the sort of situation where a little bit of smekalka can save the day.

Take a look at this photo of an entrance to a supermarket in Dubna – a town near Moscow:

Why do you think they built this fence? That’s right. To make the path 10 metres longer. This is confirmed by the satellite image below:

That’s how smekalka works. How do you feel about adding this word to the OED?

The images used in this post were taken from http://forum.dubna.ru/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=58625

Between the pear and the cheese, combing the giraffe is a monkey sandwich story

No Comments » Written on January 4th, 2013 by
Categories: France, The World, UK, Uncategorized
Tags: , , ,

A book on international idioms reveals much about our national characters

It was my French flatmate who alerted me to the clunkiness of British idioms. She taught me tenir la chandelle – the eloquently captured French idiom for the third wheel on a date. The image of a third person holding up a candle while two lovebirds enjoy a dimly lit dinner is perfectly rational. You can imagine Miranda Hart doing it for Carla Bruni and Nicolas Sarkozy.

The English equivalent – playing gooseberry – is frumpy and seemingly obscure. The etymology is less allegorical here: the “gooseberry” is the unwanted guest; it was once synonymous with the devil, or a bored chaperone idly picking bitter fruit while two lovers sneak off to expose a daring bit of ankle to one another in a nook of the orchard.

Said French roomie fell victim to my idiomatic mischief making. She was still learning metaphorical phrases when The Inbetweeners was on TV. After some drinks, I told her the outrageously crude phrase used by the randy teenage boys in the series – “frothing at the gash” – meant you were starving. I came unstuck weeks later when, in front of mutual friends waiting for dinner to be served, she remarked: “I am so ‘ungry, I am – ‘ow you say? – frothing at my gash!”

No wonder, then, that in a recent book exploring the quirky world of international idioms the French ones are the best. Idiomantics, by Philip Gooden and Peter Lewis, lists each peculiar idiom by thematic category alongside its host country. They range from bonkers to richly evocative. A fine example of the latter is avoir un coeur d’artichaut – to have the heart of an artichoke. It means to be fickle in love – as the artichoke heart has several layers.

The French love foodie idioms. The authors highlight those that are “just so quintessentially French”: retombler comme un soufflé (to sink like a soufflé) is to run out of steam. Chanter comme une casserole (to sing like a saucepan) is to sing terribly. Entre la poire et le fromage (between the pear and the cheese) is an off-the-record remark; when the palate-cleansing pear was served at a medieval meal, drinking began and people divulged more freely while awaiting the cheeseboard. My favourite, pédaler dans la choucroute (to pedal in sauerkraut), is to get nowhere fast. Naturally, some élan is lost in translation.

Life’s existential futility is melodramatically reflected by French idiomatic phrases. Métro, boulot, dodo (underground, work, sleep) captures the daily grind. The authors express its power as articulately as the idiom itself: “The rhymed endings of the three juxtaposed two-syllable words only serve to underscore the stultifying, inescapable monotony of it all.” Quelle horreur! Meanwhile, avoir un cinq à sept (to have a five-to-seven) means to have a post-work affair and return to your spouse by evening. That’s one way of alleviating the monotony. Wasting time on a pointless task is peigner la giraffe (combing the giraffe) – which could either relate to Zarafa, the first giraffe on French soil, who had four keepers, one tasked solely with grooming her coat; or a euphemism for self-pleasure owing to the phallic nature of a giraffe’s neck. Either way, it’s fabulous.

Even insulting idioms are delivered with typical French panache. To speak French like a Spanish cow is to do so very badly. “The English have landed” or “to have the English” means to have your period: Napoleon’s army were defeated by the despised, red-coat wearing English. How xenophobic, how crass – but how utterly brilliant.

One of the book’s most revealing finds is how languages express the same idea through different idioms. Pigs might fly translates as “when hens have teeth” in French; “when donkeys fly” in Italian; “when frogs grow hair” in Spanish; “when a cow coughs” in Portuguese; and “when fish climb trees” in Turkish. Some idioms can only be satisfactorily translated by another idiom: “to have a spider on the ceiling” or “to have a little bicycle in the head” in French means to have a screw loose/be as mad as a box of frogs.

There are some slightly grim examples. “Basket case” (US) is used to describe something utterly dysfunctional because it referred to soldiers who had all four limbs amputated. A pernicious phrase, which the guardian’s blog has made the case against using. Creepily misogynistic but “in purely linguistic terms, it’s snappy and inventive” is the German Von hinten Lyzeum, von verne museum (“from behind, a girl’s school, from the front a museum”.) The worn out “mutton dressed as lamb” (its closest translation) was given fresh breath in English when “Whitney dressed as Britney” entered into popular parlance.

Idiomantics teaches that other languages can be just as idiosyncratic as ours. So in the Netherlands, a “monkey sandwich story” is an urban legend. If you “draw the arse card” in Germany, you’ve been given a bum deal. In America, a “Mexican breakfast” is a cigarette and water, while a “Mexican jeep” is a donkey.

What of the best of British? Aptly, one of our best is “sweet FA”. Originally, FA stood for Fanny Adams, – an eight-year-old murdered in 1867. Sailors joked that the Royal Navy’s tinned mutton contained the remains of “sweet Fanny Adams”. The handy acronym lends itself to the modern expletive revision.

George Orwell’s first rule of writing in Politics and the English Language is: “Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.” How refreshing that we can ditch our clunky, hackneyed idioms and start doing what we’ve always done so well: borrowing from other countries.

Article written by Gary Nunn, taken from Guardian on 4 January 2013.

‘Combing the giraffe’: a French alternative to painting the Forth bridge. Photograph: Harriet Williams

English where she is spoke

No Comments » Written on October 26th, 2012 by
Categories: The World
Tags: , , ,

LAST YEAR we looked at the first-ever global survey of English-language skills by EF Education First,a teaching company. This year, EF has produced its second study of the same subject. It’s worth revisiting for the changes between last year and this one.

First, I’ll repeat my caveat from last year: “This was not a statistically controlled study: the subjects took a free test online and of their own accord.  They were by definition connected to the internet and interested in testing their English; they will also be younger and more urban than the population at large. But Philip Hult, the boss of EF, says that his sample shows results similar to a more scientifically controlled but smaller study by the British Council.”

The test will obviously not reach poor and rural folk who lack internet access.  So if a country has an urban elite who are good with English, and a lot of rural poor people who cannot take the test, its score might be relatively inflated. In another country where nearly everyone is online but English skills are mediocre, the scores might be relatively depressed.

Despite that, the index has value. It is based on the test results of a huge sample: 1.7m people over three years in more than 50 countries. For the first time this year, gender, age, industry and job-level are broken out for those who want to get further into the data. (Spoiler alert: women do better than men, and the 30-35 set does best in terms of age. Those working in tourism do better than those working in mining and energy.)  Fascinating individual country reports, including regional maps, are here. We learn, for example, that Moscow compares with Austria in its English skill, while Russia’s Urals region compares with Qatar or Mexico.

Last year, the biggest surprise to me was that China and India were ranked alongside each other, despite India’s much better reputation for English skill. That has changed this year, owing to a methodological tweak. India is now well ahead. Michael Lu of EF explains in an e-mail:

“The 1st EF EPI report was based on four tests and in the 2nd report, we removed one of the four tests that didn’t fully test listening skills (it was optional).   This change was made to ensure the EPI gets more accurate over time. Countries that are better at vocabulary/grammar/reading and weaker at listening had their rankings slightly inflated in the 1st report, as was the case with China. Conversely, countries such as India which are better at listening moved up in rankings.”

In addition, he notes that 12 countries were added to the survey, and that the scores are very close to each other. For that reason, countries may seem to have moved quickly up or down the rankings despite no great real-world change in their English skills in the year.  Many of the newly added countries ranked ahead of Brazil, for example, and that plus a slight score change caused Brazil to fall 15 places in the rankings. The index, Mr Lu says, should get more accurate over time as data continue to come in and the methodology is refined.

Article taken from the Economist, Oct 24th 2012 (by R.L.G.). For original article, click here

 

The rise of ‘Hinglish’: modern necessity or dire threat to India’s culture and languages?

No Comments » Written on October 12th, 2012 by
Categories: India, UK
Tags: , ,

British diplomats serving in India will need to learn how to speak in “Hinglish” – the hybrid of Hindi and English that has become the prevalent language in Indian business and political circles.

According to a report in Britain’s Daily Telegraph, U.K. officials believe that the use of Hinglish will foster better understanding between Western and Indian businessmen who do not speak flawless English.

“The Foreign Office under [Foreign Secretary] William Hague is placing increasing importance on the ability to transact business in foreign languages. In India we’re looking to build a stronger, deeper relationship, and having diplomats able to speak Hindi and other local languages has become increasingly important,” said a spokesman for the British High Commission.

“English news channels [in India] often have a portion where people choose to express themselves in Hindi because it captures what they’re trying to say better than the English equivalent, so it’s increasingly important for British diplomats to be able to appreciate the nuances.”

With 350 million speakers, India is actually the largest English-speaking nation on earth.

Hinglish has crept its way into advertisements, TV shows and Bollywood movies, as well as the corridors of corporate and political power in India.

A popular new film is titled “Jab We Met” (“When We Met”), while a shampoo commercial on TV features actress Priyanka Chopra calling out, “Come on girls, waqt hai shine karne ka!” (“It’s time to shine”).

Even “English-language” newspapers in India pepper their text with words borrowed from Hindi.

Hindi and English have long enjoyed an incestuous relationship ever since the British first landed in India. English words such as pajama, shampoo, bungalow, dungaree, pundit, juggernaut, among many others, trace their origins to India.

Abha Sinha, a professor of informational technology at the University of Toledo in Ohio, wrote in her blog: “Hindi language magazines and periodicals are harder to come by in the U.S. and the Hindi film industry now uses ‘Hinglish’; an amalgamation of Hindi and English. Communications with friends and relatives too has become Hinglish-ized!”

Hinglish is also becoming a staple in Britain itself, which has large South Asian community.

Six years ago, a female Indian teacher in Derby, England, named Baljinder Mahal published a dictionary called “The Queen’s Hinglish.”

“Much of it comes from banter – the exchanges between the British white population and the Asians,” she told BBC.

“It’s also sometimes a secret language, which is being used by lots of British Asians, but it’s never been picked up on.”

But not everyone is happy with the emergence of Hinglish in India’s daily life, viewing it as a threat to Indian culture.

In a letter to the editor of The Hindu newspaper, a man named Jagriti Thakur from Shimla complained: “It is the domination of English that is more troubling than the domination of Hindi. Among youngsters, speaking in English – weird slang or broken English – is a style statement. Hinglish is in vogue even though it threatens our regional languages.”

Thakur added: “The diverse local languages are disappearing as the next [generation] next does not value them. Nor do schools offer them as a medium of instruction. A balanced education system that understands the importance of multilingual learning can bring about a steady change.”

Posted in the International Business Times, by Palash R. Ghosh | October 11 2012. For original article, click here

Words we wished we had

2 comments Written on October 5th, 2012 by
Categories: The World
Tags: , , , , , , ,

Trying to share how you feel with someone who speaks a different language can often be challenging and frustrating – especially when there’s a word in your mother tongue that perfectly encapsulates a feeling or situation, yet this word simply doesn’t exist in translation. You may think that a language as global and widely spoken as English would have an expression for every possible emotion or scenario, but interestingly there are many foreign words that have no English equivalent.

Let’s dive straight into the emotional side of things, with the Spanish word “cariño”. Used widely, it has several meanings that depend on context or tone of voice: it can mean “affection” when used as an abstract noun and as a concrete noun it means “a kiss”, “a cuddle”, or “a hug”. But that’s not all, this fantastically multifunctional word is also a verb, meaning “to be fond of something”, and is commonly used as a term of endearment, equivalent to “honey” or “darling” in English, too. There are similar words in the English language – like the Americanism “cute”, that can mean everything from “adorable” to “good looking”, but none come close to the elegance and expressiveness of “cariño”.

The example above is just one of many causing people to bemoan the limitations of the English language. The Dutch word “gezellig” is another candidate for the “word wish list”– it can refer to a situation, to a person or to surroundings and has no real equivalent in English. It’s often translated as “nice”, but we all know what a generic word this is in English and it doesn’t come close to sparking the same associations as the Dutch word. This makes it something of an untranslatable word that English can never do justice to, but is it not better that every language retains a certain degree of enigma? After all, we don’t need any more over-used additions to the English language, like the word “über” that all too few people recognize as the German word it is.

Aside from words that will always remain a mystery to non-native speakers, there are also those which are culturally defunct. The Spanish the word “sobremesa”, for example, refers to the period after lunch. In Spain, it is typical to enjoy a big lunch with family or friends, and stay chatting afterwards – the absence of anything similar in English-speaking countries negates the need for a word to describe it.

Looking beyond the borders of Europe, you still find words that many English speakers wish they had – the Hebrew word נו (pronounced “noo”), is a good example. It is used to add urgency to a situation, when someone isn’t doing something quickly enough. The equivalent in English is something like “get on with it already!” or “come on!”. Unlike the Hebrew, both of these examples rely on tone of voice to fully convey their meaning. However, it is worth mentioning that at least one English dialect has adapted to accommodate this absence of a single word implying the need for urgency or speed – the Geordie expression “haway” is used to mean exactly this. This speaks in favour of the richness of the English language – especially the way in which it is spoken in different regions of the UK.

The diversity of regional dialects means that even within the UK, there are some words we would like to adopt from other parts of the country. “Tartle” is one popular example – this word is used by Scottish people to describe the embarrassing hesitation you make before introducing someone whose name you’ve forgotten. It’s happened to all of us at some point, and is one of life’s awkward, but unavoidable issues – so why not take the Scottish approach, face facts, and give it a name!

The list of “words we wish we had” is virtually inexhaustible, but we shouldn’t see this as an indication of the shortcomings of the English language, rather a reason to embrace the expressive possibilities of language. Just because a word doesn’t have a direct translation, this doesn’t mean that we can’t understand it and much less that it cannot be translated. English may never feature the “words we wish we had”, but this is all the more reason to get creative and find new, and even better, solutions for these idiosyncrasies of language. What do you think? Which words do you “miss” when speaking English?

Catherine, London

 

The Little Book of Transcreation – excerpt #14

1 Comment » Written on October 4th, 2012 by
Categories: France, UK
Tags: , , , , , ,

If you grew up with the Asterix books, you’re already familiar with a great example of transcreation.

The characters’ names are all puns, many of which don’t translate – but do transcreate.

In fact, the English is sometimes even cleverer than the original French.

The names of the tone-deaf bard and food-poisoning fishmonger are merely silly in French: Assurancetourix (“assurance tous risques” means “comprehensive insurance”) and Ordralfabétix (“ordre alphabétique” means “alphabetical order”).

But the English names actually reflect character traits: Cacofonix for the bard, and Unhygienix for the fishmonger.

Unhygienix the fishmonger (the English names of the Asterix characters actually reflect character traits)

« Older Entries