English

English

Linguistic Sloppiness

Published by Owen Jones on 31 July 2018

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Linguistic Sloppiness
Linguistic Sloppiness

Linguistic Sloppiness.

As my regular readers will know, I am in love with  languages, so I have noticed a strange shift in the BBC’s reporting.

When I was a student of the USSR and Russian in the seventies, we talked about THE Ukraine, THE Caucasus et cetera. Now, as a Russian language speaker, I know that Russian does not have articles (a, an the), so when I heard them dropped in reference to the recent troubles there, it was a surprise more than a shock.

Linguistic Sloppiness

However, last night, I heard a UK BBC reporter refer to THE United Kingdom as ‘United Kingdom’.
Is this a new trend or just sloppiness?
To my mind, WE, in English, have articles, if you want to be taken seriously, bloody well use them, plonkers!

** Update: I just heard a reporter referring to ‘Muslim Brotherhood’ not ‘THE Muslim Brotherhood’! Yet he used articles correctly elsewhere in his report. It’s catching on! **

Readership

On a different subject, I want to promote the advertising power of this website. I cannot believe that so few people have picked up on it.

Anyway, 90% of readers are American, that means 70k page views a month. The next best are UK at 17,788 and France at 17,648 per month.

Today, the sixteenth, Google has sniffed around this blog 3,846 times. Furthermore, the average for a human visitor has been 359 secs a visit, which is high. It translates to 22.34 pages a visit.
‘Andsome!

My Daughter

I was just talking to ‘my daughter’. Sorry, but I still don’t know what to call her even after ten years. I’ve heard she calls me ‘Dad’ generally, but Owen to my face. We will iron that one out tomorrow.

Anyway, I told her that her English was worse than it had ever been even after three years in university.

Sadly, she said that the reason was that she was scared of making mistakes. And people laughing at her now that she was older.

This is the root cause of intelligent Thais not getting on – it’s a national tragedy!
They worr that people will laugh at them.

It reveals a high level of national insecurity.

Asian Shorts

‘Asian Shorts’ is now 100% full and I have pencilled in ‘Paranormal Shorts’ for next month. So, if you have a story for it, send it as soon as you like. Or start writing one if you haven’t.

Get a free copy of the Asian Shorts audiobook here: Asian Shorts free audiobook

All the best,

Owen

PS: if you like linguistics, listen to this: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05tl3jm

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American versus English

Published by Owen Jones on 30 July 2018

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American Versus English

American versus English

American versus English

I have had a hard week one way and another, but mostly because of the way different people have a different take on things or even life, I suppose. A lot of it has had to do with language, I think, American versus English and perhaps something to do with gender

This last week, I have had ‘difficulties’ with four American women. Basically, they think that I’ve been rude to them, and I think that they have overreacted to me. I can furnish examples.

A woman responded to my appeal for short stories about Asia(ns). She replied that she wasn’t Asian, and I said that that didn’t matter, the condition referred to the story not the writer. She had first said she had a story, but when I replied as above, she wrote, ‘Right, I’m out of the loop then’.

To a Brit, using ‘right’ in this context makes it sound as if there has been an argument and she has left in a huff, yet I cannot see why she would do that. A simple, ‘Thanks for the offer, but I’ve changed my mind’ would have been more British. Did she think I was being rude? I don’t know, but I do know that her reaction seems over the top to me.

Another, I accidentally posted on a group page on Facebook. I was told, ‘Refrain from doing that…’. I said it had been a mistake and complained that that she made me sound like a serial offender. She flew off the handle, saying she wasn’t ‘in the mood to deal with me’.

I have no idea where she is coming from.

A feature is that all of these women emphasized how ‘cool’ they were, but that I’d better not rile them. That doesn’t sound very cool to me, it sounds like they’re looking for an excuse to boil over.

British women, American and British men, both sexes of all other nations (bar one person) and most American women I email, I get on well with.

Another example of American versus English, last week, a male American writer friend, told me that his book had been ‘slated’ on a famous website, so I commiserated about trolls. He quickly pointed out that ‘slated’ in the US version of English means lauded. Great! However, the point is that he didn’t jump down my throat like some of his female counterparts. He recognised the American versus English difference, and dealt with it.

An ex US Marine told me yesterday that a section of American female society was making it hard going for men because of their aggression, although he had no idea of my recent experiences.

Coincidence? I don’t believe in them. This is obviously a big problem in the USA, which is being exported via the Internet. These women are not ‘cool’, as they profess to be, they’re as taut as a tow rope on a tailhook!

However, I could live with all that, if they just considered for one moment that the form of English that they speak is not the only one in the world and that comradeship, if not friendship, should be factored in, if they are as cool as they say. I have a sneaky suspicion that these gender warriors have never left their continent and rarely speak to foreigners.

Churchill was right, two nations divided by a common language, but now exacerbated by an unwillingness to listen to what someone is saying instead of how they say it. After all, every good linguist know that you have to translate ideas, not words.

I despair.

Oh, on the American versus English debate, but Australian, I like how the Australian prime minister expressed himself! He told the American actor via the world media that it was time his pooches ‘buggered off back to Los Angeles’.

I like it, I like it, I like it! No pussy-footing about, no PC flim-flam, no ambiguity – just straight-talking. There should be more of it, and he should have fined the bloke $1m and given it to the dog shelters or animal rights organisations.

On a far lighter note, I think I saw one of the rare birds fly out of the nest I mentioned a few days ago. I couldn’t be certain, but I hope it was one of them. Otherwise it must have been a different type of brown bird checking out their abandoned nest. Anyway, I have got my broken camera into a condition that I will take photos next time one of them puts in an appearance.

– Update I just saw one of them again! –

The temperature dropped ten degrees today to thirty-five, let’s see how long it takes for the monsoon to arrive.

All the best,

Owen

PS: If anyone feels upset after reading this piece on American versus English languages, it was not my intention, so read it again.

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Translation Service

Published by Owen Jones on 8 January 2017

Translation Service

Translation Service

Translation Service

English to Spanish in Twenty-Four Hours

My wife and I want to live in Spain for a while. I am British, so that is no problem for me, but my wife is Thai, and the Spanish Embassy in Bangkok seems to take great delight in obfuscating our right to go there together.

I can easily understand that the Spanish authorities need authenticated Spanish translations of any documentary evidence that we may rely on when applying for residency (Residencia) in Spain, and so, to accomplish that end, we searched for translation bureaux in Pattaya, but found none that could translate from Thai to Spanish, so I had them translated into English first to make it easier.

However, there is no-one there who can do that either (an opening for someone, perhaps?). So, we went to Bangkok, but most of them centred around the embassies, which were located a very long way from us. They were also expensive and required three days to translate a few hundred words.

That is what I call a rip-off.

They know that Spanish translators are in short supply so they milk the situation for all it’s worth.

So, I had a beer and a think, and turned to Fiverr for help. I checked out several translators on there and settled on one. The danger is, of course, that somebody will just run your document through an automatic, on line translator like Babelfish or Google, and they normally come out gobbledygook, and if you don’t speak the language, how would you know, until the authority that requires your document bursts out laughing?

So, with that in mind, I sent my documents off. I only had to  wait a maximum of twenty-four hours and the total cost was $5.

The one document was perfect first time. The second was difficult to format as it resembled a questionnaire, but the company tried again and I was very happy with the result.

I have one more document for them, our marriage certificate, and I am confident that these guys will make a great job of it.

So, if you need a very competent translation done in double-quick time, try this firm.

They are magic!

https://www.fiverr.com/conversations/ninodiazconsult

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All the best,

Owen

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Conventions In Writing

Published by Owen Jones on 9 September 2016

Conventions in Writing

Conventions in Writing

Conventions In Writing.

Sometimes, it seems that our lives are full of conventions. There are all sorts of them: social conventions; Star Trek Conventions; Conventions of Witches (and even witches’ conventions, I dare say); Writers’ Conventions; and writing conventions, which is what this post is about.

It doesn’t help matters in English that there are often two correct conventions: English and American, but there is now a third which is apparently called International or Global English, which seems to be a light (many would say ‘dumbed-down’) version.

A friend of mine, who works at Airbus in Toulouse, has to pass his outbound correspondence to a person who translates his proper English into International English before posting it on.

Conventions In Writing

A task that I find particularly difficult is composing titles and headlines. I know what I was taught at school in the UK, and I know what Word and Lulu (a publisher) expect, but I don’t always agree with them.

Take this example: Behind the Smile (one of my series).

That is how it should look by writing convention, but to me, and many others, the lowercase ‘t’ looks like a typo. The more words in the title the more ridiculous a single lowercase letter starting a word looks.

So, do you write it correctly and have a thousand intellectuals smile that you have got it right, while a million people think you have slipped up, or do you write Behind The Smile and please the majority?

I go for the latter. There are more readers in a million people and you’ll probably sell more books.

Not only that, but people from other nations (French, Spanish, etc) might not know the convention and just think that you are an incompetent self-publisher too.

So, what is a writer to do?

Spelling and punctuation are a matter for which brand of English you like, but you need to be consistent. Don’t let anyone bully you into doing it their way. If someone criticises your punctuation, do some research, consolidate your method and then stick to it.

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All the best,

Owen

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Conventions

Published by Owen Jones on 3 April 2016

Conventions

Conventions

Conventions

Sometimes, it seems that our lives are full of conventions. There are all sorts of them: social conventions; Star Trek Conventions; Conventions of Witches (and even witches’ conventions, I dare say); Writers’ Conventions; and writing conventions, which is what this post is about.

It doesn’t help matters in English that there are often two correct conventions: English and American, but there is now a third, which is apparently called International or Global English, which seems to be a light (many would say ‘dumbed-down’) version.

A friend of mine, who works at Airbus in Toulouse, has to pass his outbound correspondence to a person who translates his proper English into International English before posting it on.

A task that I find particularly difficult is capitalising titles and headlines. I know what I was taught at school in the UK, and I know what Word and Lulu (a publisher) expect, but I don’t always agree with them.

Take this example: Behind the Smile (one of my series).

This is how it should look according to the rules, but to me, and many others, the lower-case ‘t’ looks like a typo. The more words in the title the more ridiculous a single lower-case letter starting a word looks.

So, do you write it correctly and have a thousand intellectuals smile that you have got it right, while a million people think you have slipped up, or do you write Behind The Smile and please the majority?

I go for the latter. There are more readers in a million people.

Not only that, but people from other nations (French, Spanish, etc) might not know the convention and just think that you are an incompetent self-publisher too.

So, what is a writer to do?

Spelling and punctuation are a matter for which brand of English you like, but you need to be consistent. Don’t let anyone bully you into doing it their way. If someone criticises your punctuation, do some research, consolidate your method and then stick to it.

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All the best,

Owen

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Language and Thought

Published by Owen Jones on 26 August 2015

Language and Thought

Language and Thought

Language and Thought

It is clear that man invented language. The first grunts may have been warnings like: ‘Get off my stone, my bed or my spouse,’ and the first shrieks probably warned of danger, but as people are born into a society where language, in any form, is already being used, the language may affect the way a person thinks. Are thoughts shaped by our languages or our ability to use language?

As tribes migrated, spread out and eventually became separated from one another, different languages developed, some with still-discernibly similar roots, but others began to lose all but the most tenuous vestiges of a common source. Look at Asian and European languages.

Do the differences between, say Thai and English, contribute to why Thais and Brits are so different? It must do. surely? Although all living languages are changing all the time, purists in many proud countries are complaining about the adoption of English words. Surely, this is no coincidence given increased globalisation? The peoples of the world, especially the youth have never been so similar. This has to be connected, and connected to the plethora of films for TV and the cinema too. Western values are being force-fed to the world’s young people, and its language is English.

Another aspect of language that interests me is specific words and grammatical constructions. It is often said that Inuits have a hundred words for snow (probably not true), but we only have about three (snow, sludge and, er… sleet), so would that help them have a better understanding of snow than us? It is certainly more important to them than it is to us.

The Welsh language does not have a word for ‘blue’, as far as I remember, or more accurately ‘glas’ means blue or green, but it defaults to green. Why? So if you said, ‘Isn’t the sky a beautiful shade of ‘glas’ today?’ no-one is going to think you mean green. Why didn’t we, I am Welsh, just invent a word for blue and be done with it?

German uses cases and highly structured sentences. So, the order of thoughts in German should be ‘time, manner, place’ and the verb should be held to the last word in sub-clauses. Is this responsible for their legendary love of organisation and order?

In English, we use the verb ‘to be’ a heck of a lot. ‘I am brainy; I am a student and I am studying for university’. Other languages like Russian and Thai would not have used ‘to be’ once in that sentence, and in Thai they would have left the personal pronoun out as well.

Thai has the verb ‘to be’, but they use it only with professions or positions. Therefore, our sentence above would be reduced to, ‘Brainy; am student and study for university’.

So, does our constant use of ‘I am…’ etc make us more egoistic than Thais, or at least more prone to being selfish? Thais are far more family-orientated than Brits, but the oldies are beginning to complain that young people care less nowadays than they used to. Will we see an increased use of the Thai word for ‘I’ – ‘phom’? See that? We even capitalize the first person pronoun – no other language that I know of (eight) does that.

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Owen

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‘i should of known’

Published by Owen Jones on 24 August 2015

'i should of known'`

‘i should of known’

‘i should of known’

I know that this period of time, August, is a time that is greatly concerned with education, since exam results are being released now in many countries. I hope that all pupils and students get better grades than they expected, but I am not so inexperienced as not to know that that will not be the case. To those who are disappointed, I address this article and perhaps to their teachers as well.

About fifteen years ago, when I was l was working for our family construction firm, our parents retired and my brothers, co-directors, insisted we take on a secretary to help me run the office.

Eventually, I reluctantly agreed and phoned the Job Centre. The manager there, who knew of our firm, gave me the tip that it was better to phone the Civic Offices, since they ran training programmes and regularly had to ‘let people go’.

So, I did that and our offices were inspected and I was interviewed to see whether we were respectable enough to employ one of their proteges, which we were. The man from the council said that all his students had stayed in school until at least eighteen years of age and then had worked in the Civic Offices for at least a year.

It was a good deal, and there were no two ways around it, so I interviewed two girls, my preference, and took one on full-time.

She was great, and I only say ‘was’ because I am no longer with the firm. However, I noticed a repeated error in her work, which I just could not understand. Unless the first person personal pronoun, was the first word in a sentence, she used a lower-case ‘i’ as in ‘i should of known’.

One day, I had to ask her why she did that, and she said that she always had.

I couldn’t believe it. She was nineteen, had worked for the government for ‘at least a year’ but no-one had picked her up on it.

I did though. I asked her to take any book or magazine off our shelves and show me where ‘I’ could be written ‘i’. I told her to take thirty minutes and a coffee.

She couldn’t find an instance, and cursed her teachers for putting her in such an embarrassing situation. However, she had one more failing, which is seen more and more often these days. She would write “ve’ as ‘of’ as in ‘i should of known’.

I had first noticed it when she wrote me a note: ‘i should of got more milk in but I forgot. Sorry”.

I waited a week and told her, She couldn’t believe why her state educators of fifteen years had not told her she was spelling it incorrectly.

I sympathized with her and still do, but at least she hasn’t been making those embarrassing mistakes for the last fifteen years.

How many people are screwing up their own futures by submitting illiterate CV’s because their teachers thought it better not to tell them about their errors?

Or, and this is almost unthinkable, but how many teachers didn’t realise she was making mistakes?

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Owen

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Pronunciation

Published by Owen Jones on 17 August 2015

Pronunciation

Pronunciation

Pronunciation

I have formally studied six languages to fluency, taught myself another and am now learning Thai and Thai is hard enough for me! I perfectly understand how difficult pronunciation must be for most other students of it.
However, I hear it every day, which should make it easier – trying to learn Thai and the correct pronunciation of it abroad a few hours a week would be impossible.
People will often say something to me in English, but it makes no sense or I get it wrong and this is often because people try to translate their own language word for word.
So Thais miss a lot of words out that we in the West are looking for to complete the sense: like: the verb ‘to be’, and personal pronouns like I, we, he etc.
A tip is to assume they are talking about themselves and their own first, in the present tense.
So ‘Love Mum’ becomes ‘I love my Mum’
‘Go town’ becomes ‘I am going into town later on today’.

‘Go home’ (bpai bahn) usually means ‘Let’s go home’ unless it’s spoken angrily 🙂
Further complications in Thai pronunciation are that Thai words can only end with one of six sounds (so ‘football’ becomes ‘footbon’) and they don’t aspirate the last letter (a bit like the French), they swallow them. So, ‘house’ becomes ‘hou’; screen becomes skee; bike becomes buy, whereas English-speakers tend to explode the ending of words (to mark their ending, like the German glottal stop).
If you listen really closely you can hear them say the last letters, but it was very hard for me and I’m not deaf.
A man asked me what ‘funtock’ was in English the other day, I said ‘rain’.
‘Ray’ he kept repeating to himself.
‘No,’ I corrected ‘Rainnneh’
He pronounced it with such a heavy ‘N’ that no-one would ever understand him whichever version of the word he used.
However, he has a rotten memory, so it doesn’t matter. He’s been asking me words for ten years and has never remembered one of them.
Neem just told me that it’s ‘Buy Mum Day’.
‘What?’ I asked not so incredulously as I would have done ten years ago suspecting the pronunciation.
‘Buy for Mum Day,’ she said trying to be helpful.
‘It was Mothers’ Day on the 12th,’ I reminded her, knowing that I was missing something.
‘No, keep fit, Bicycle for Mums’ Day. Can I borrow your bike?’
How can you possibly guess that from the words ‘Buy Mum Day’?

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Owen

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