Things you learnt about your own language

ConversazioniI Survived the Great Vowel Shift

Iscriviti a LibraryThing per pubblicare un messaggio.

Things you learnt about your own language

1Felagund
Mag 7, 2021, 2:40 am

Hi everyone,

I recently heard from a distinguished linguist something I didn't know about my own language: the variety of accents in the spoken French of my area (western Switzerland) apparently share one common feature, i.e. the accent is set to the penultimate syllable of words - unlike in standard Parisian French where the accent is usually set to the ultimate syllable.
This was an interesting point of which I was totally unaware, in particular because I tend to focus on the differences between our Swiss regional accents rather than on their similarities.

Did anyone else learn something cool about their own language recently (or not so recently)?

(By the way, I inform you that I have become the administrator of this group because the LT people want an admin for all groups and it doesn't seem to be too much work here. Don't worry, I won't abuse my new powers)

2anglemark
Mag 7, 2021, 4:21 am

>1 Felagund: So your native language isn't Quenya?

Hmm, the most recent cool thing I learned about Swedish. I don't know, nothing springs to mind. One cool thing that I learnt is more of a linguistic phenomenon which I am sure occurs in all regions with more than one language that fights for supremacy, namely how small villages in Finland switched from being Swedish-speaking to Finnish-speaking back and forth during the 15th to 18th centuries, depending on all kinds of small migrations. Two Finnish-speaking families might move into a mostly Swedish-speaking village, and thirty years later letters preserved from that village were written in Finnish. Then a pastor arrived who refused to conduct Mass in Finnish, and thirty years later everyone preferred Swedish in their daily lives. I'm sure it was/is the same in small villages and communities in Switzerland, Belgium, Alsace, Schleswig ...

3Cynfelyn
Mag 7, 2021, 5:28 am

>2 anglemark: "Then a pastor arrived who refused to conduct Mass in Finnish, and thirty years later everyone preferred Swedish in their daily lives."

Here in Wales language movement in recent centuries has generally been a one-way street, from Welsh to English. But the simple, one-line explanation for the explosion of non-conformist chapels in the 18th-19th centuries (too simple to be anything like the whole explanation, but true enough to have legs) is the rejection by the Welsh-speaking 'common people' of the English-speaking Church of England (episcopalian) ministers foisted on them by the land-owners. Many Finns/Swedes may have been prepared to change language for the sake of their religion; many Welsh preferred to change religion for the sake of their language.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

4Felagund
Mag 7, 2021, 5:40 am

Quenya: that was many ages ago :-)

Language border shifts: interesting question. I'm not sure people used to be mobile across regional borders until the 19th century in Switzerland, so perhaps individual choices did not have such an effect (although we have had migrations similar to small-scale barbarian invasions in the 13th and 14th centuries). But you have piqued my curiosity, I will have to research that!
These days we do have cases of villages that would shift from one language to another for demographic reasons, as city inhabitants find housing on the countryside sometimes on the other side of the linguistic border - except that the official language of any town is now fixed by a national agreement so it won't happen.

5anglemark
Modificato: Mag 7, 2021, 5:47 am

>4 Felagund: A key in Finland, I think, is that regional borders and language had nothing to do with each other. I think that the process I describe is much rarer today, for several reasons, such as politically decided official languages and a much more prevalent tendency to equate language and identity.

6Felagund
Mag 7, 2021, 5:57 am

>5 anglemark:
An interesting point. Could you please elaborate on the meaning of "regional" in your case? I think I should have, so here's mine: I was thinking of the borders between administrative/political regions (cantons, in the Swiss system). I feel that is compatible with your point, but perhaps you meant something else?

7anglemark
Mag 7, 2021, 6:38 am

>6 Felagund: I meant the same, in this case, administrative county borders in Finland.

8Felagund
Mag 7, 2021, 9:04 am

>7 anglemark:
Thanks, understood.

So as I though, the Finland case is in contrast with the Swiss situation, where cantons are in general monolingual (although the situation was somewhat different in the 18th century). But I can certainly imagine that a few events similar to the Finnish/Swedish case took place within the small minority of multilingual cantons of the time, some of which actually covered several present-day monolingual cantons before the Napoleonic times.

9MarthaJeanne
Mag 7, 2021, 9:07 am

People are often not conscious of things about their own language.

My first language is English, but I've been speaking German for a long time. At one point I was trying to learn French in Vienna before we moved to Geneva. One lesson we were learning about various movement verbs that behave differently in transitive and intransitive sentences. My classmates were up in arms. 'This doesn't make sense!' they insisted. I said, 'Wait a minute. German does exactly the same thing.' Which they all denied until I added, 'Ich bin nach Salzburg gefahren. Ich habe das Auto nach Salzburg gefahren.' Oh. Right. They could all do that, but they had never consciously learned it. After my intervention the whole class could do it in French, too.

Don't ask me what the French verbs were. I was trying to learn French. I'm glad we were in Switzerland, though. Counting in standard French was really beyond me. I could deal with septante, octante, nonante.

10anglemark
Mag 7, 2021, 10:49 am

>9 MarthaJeanne: Every time I have to count in Danish, I have to take it really slowly and you can see my brain synapses firing off and emitting smoke. (It's not difficult, but you have to actively think about what you are saying/hearing.)

11Dilara86
Mag 7, 2021, 11:28 am

>1 Felagund: Time for the "Suisse?" – C’est quoi l’accent suisse? video! (Warnings: 1) This is a fun video and not all points are factually correct. 2) The music is the worst earworm I've encountered this year.)

12Felagund
Modificato: Mag 7, 2021, 12:17 pm

> 11
That's where I got the idea of this thread :-)
ETA: the distinguished linguist I was refering to in my first post being the Belgian lady interviewed at some point in the video, not the main speaker (who certainly has many other skills).

13jjwilson61
Modificato: Mag 7, 2021, 3:44 pm

>9 MarthaJeanne: about counting in French, I know that 90 is "4 20s and 10" (in French). At least I think I remember that but now I'm not sure.

14MarthaJeanne
Modificato: Mag 7, 2021, 3:52 pm

>13 jjwilson61: Which is why I like the Swiss French words for 70, 80, and 90. Even in German, I tend to switch to English even for simple arithmetic. Don't ask me to deal with French and arithmetic at the same time.

15overthemoon
Mag 8, 2021, 3:51 am

I'm completely bilingual English-French, having lived in French-speaking Switzerland since 1971, but when counting, say, the stitches in knitting, or doing basic mental arithmetic, it just has to be in English. I prefer the Swiss system of septante, huitante, nonante to the French, which is especially difficult when people are dictating numbers to you over the phone, and you have to wait till the end of "quatre-vingt-dix-neuf" before you can write down 99.

16Dilara86
Mag 8, 2021, 7:42 am

>12 Felagund: Great minds think alike! I've been going down the Swiss accents rabbit hole in the last couple of weeks, since for some reason, Youtube suggested videos by Swiss comics, from Marie-Thérèse Porchet to 120" and 26', and then started suggesting videos on ultra-specific Romand Swiss accents: L'accent d'Isérables, l'accent de Pinsec, etc. As a French person who can't differentiate between a Savoyard accent (one of the areas on the French side of the French/Swiss border) and a Swiss accent, I was amazed to learn that there are actually different accents in French-speaking Switzerland. Not that it is particularly surprising when you think of the local topography.

>13 jjwilson61: Yes, 90 is "quatre-vingt-dix", 80 is "quatre-vingts" and 70 is "soixante-dix". As >14 MarthaJeanne: and >15 overthemoon: say, it makes counting and arithmetics more difficult. The spelling of numbers in French is also diabolical. You have to remember when to add an "s" and a hyphen, and when not. 99% (quatre-vingt-dix-neuf) of the population can't. When I was taught to count in primary school, the teacher told us that people in Belgium and Switzerland used septante, huitante and nonante, that it was more logical and that we should use it too... And then she never did ! I remember feeling so confused - it never occurred to me that "should" in this context did not convey an order.

18Crypto-Willobie
Feb 9, 2022, 10:11 am

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/04/opinion/caleb-love-bombing-gaslighting-trauma...

If Everything Is ‘Trauma,’ Is Anything?
By Jessica Bennett. (Ms. Bennett is a contributing editor in Opinion who writes on gender, politics and culture. Previously, she was The Times’s gender editor.}

The man had been effusive, at first — sending compliments, engaging in witty back-and-forths, making a playlist that included that song by Mazzy Star (you know the one). And then, suddenly, he wasn’t.

As it turned out, the guy had sent that same playlist to multiple women. He’d allegedly sent at least one of them an unsolicited nude photo. As he woke up next to one woman, he was planning that night’s date with another. Like so many online daters before him, Caleb was a creep.

But in the language of TikTok — and, perhaps, the language of our current moment — he was more than that: He was pathological. Caleb, better known at this point as “West Elm Caleb,” a 25-year-old furniture designer in Brooklyn who was the subject of viral mania last month, was accused of “love bombing” women by showering them with interest, “gaslighting” them by making them think he liked them, then abruptly ghosting them, leaving his “victims” to bond over their “shared trauma.”

There are plenty of words to describe somebody like Caleb: deceitful, manipulative, inconsiderate, liar. There is in fact a word, one we can’t print here, created entirely for men like this. But in the souped-up language of today, none of those words seem like enough. “All pain is ‘harm.’ All ‘harm’ is ‘trauma.’ All ‘trauma’ comes from someone who is an ‘abuser,’” said Natalie Wynn, a philosopher turned popular YouTube personality. “It’s as if people can’t articulate disagreement or hardships without using this language.” And so, Caleb became a “predator.”

Call it post-traumatic hyperbole. Or TikTok pseudo-psychology. Or even therapy-speak. There are plenty of horrible things going on in the world, and serious mental health crises that warrant such severe language. But when did we start using the language of harm to describe, well, everything?

Consider “love bombing.” The term originated with cult leaders, in the 1970s, to describe the process of luring recruits by showering them with compliments and affection, which was often followed by more serious measures, like sleep deprivation and isolation. “Love bombing is a coordinated effort,” the psychologist Margaret Singer observed in her book, “Cults in Our Midst,” that involved “flattery, verbal seduction, affectionate but usually nonsexual touching, and lots of attention to their every remark.”

Much like “gaslighting” — which comes from a British play that was turned into a Hollywood film, “Gaslight,” in which a husband drives his wife to question her own sanity — “love bombing” became an important term in the domestic violence space to describe patterns of manipulation by an intimate partner. But the terms are meant to refer to patterns, not individual instances of behavior.

And so: Holly Madison saying in a new documentary series that Hugh Hefner love bombed her to control her, yelled at her for cutting her hair and banned her from wearing red lipstick? Sounds right. The New York Post speculating that Kanye West may be love bombing his new girlfriend because he surprised her with a hotel suite full of new clothes? Meh. The HuffPost declaring “If You’ve Online Dated, You’ve Probably Been Love Bombed” via overly effusive texts? If we’ve all been love bombed, has anyone?

But where the term has really found traction is on social media, in the various spaces governed by algorithms, primed for hyperbole and awash in the language of self-care. On TikTok and Instagram, especially, there are thousands of self-appointed “wellness,” “mind-set,” “life” or “energy” coaches — as well as relationship experts and those who describe themselves as therapists — to guide you through the process of recognizing a “covert narcissist,” or even an overt one, whose love bombing tactics might include anything from big gestures early on to planning too far into the future.

“I had someone tell me the other day that the checkout person at Trader Joe’s was ‘love bombing’ them,” said Amanda Montell, a language writer and author of the book “Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism.” “And like, no, that’s not love bombing.”

The phrase “semantic creep” has been used to describe how the meaning of words change over time. What we’re seeing today, according to the psychologist Nick Haslam, a professor at the University of Melbourne, could be called “trauma creep” — when the language of the clinical, or at least the clinical-adjacent, is used to refer to an increasingly expansive set of everyday experiences.

Beneath our collective embrace of such language, Mr. Haslam argues, is in fact a better understanding — and in turn, sensitivity — to the psychological aspects of harm. Which, to be clear, can be a good thing. “We’re calling out bad behavior that was previously tolerated, identifying harm that was previously ignored,” he said.

The word “trauma” comes from the ancient Greeks, who defined it as physical injury. And while the term is still used to describe physical harm, today it’s more commonly expressed in the context of the emotional. That shift was critical in the 1990s and early 2000s to legitimizing the concept of domestic abuse, said the sociologist Paige Sweet, the author of “The Politics of Surviving” — and even helped shelters gain government resources because it “medicalized” the concept.

But as words gain useful new meanings, over time, they can also lose precision.

“Gaslighting” is now “thrown out anytime someone’s perception of something is challenged,” said Shantel Gabrieal Buggs, a sociologist at Florida State University. “Emotional labor” was once used to refer to a workplace burden; today, it’s an umbrella term for unpleasant household tasks.

And #Traumatok, a real place on TikTok with nearly 600 million views, teaches us that struggling with decision-making, overachieving, or the inability to stop scrolling might not be just products of indecisiveness, or drive, or boredom, but “trauma responses.” All the while, the public broadcasting of our personal traumas — sexual assault, self-harm, eating disorders and so on — has become so ubiquitous that it now has a name: “trauma dumping.” Seriously, what is going on?

The backdrop to all this, of course, is the real, collective “age of trauma” we are all living through. Many things are genuinely not good. When everything feels so dire, why wouldn’t our speech patterns be shaped by those extremes? The Trump years, for instance, brought on the rise of “gaslighter” in place of “liar,” because the latter seemed “just not strong enough anymore,” said Ms. Montell. Discussions around systemic racism and inequality have helped usher in concepts like “generational trauma,” or the trauma of racism, or the way that trauma manifests in the body, and such awareness has helped erode the stigma around talking about such problems. (We can proudly thank our therapists at the Emmys!)

But part of the context, too, is that the age of trauma is unfolding in the age of social media — where everyone is striving, on some level, to rise above the noise, to be taken seriously, to (using another phrase of the moment) “feel heard.”

Words have always reflected culture. But at what point do they start to shape it?

We know, at this point, that algorithms reward outrage and public shaming online — and that, as the Yale psychologist Molly Crockett explained, those algorithms can’t distinguish between language that is proportionate or disproportionate to the original transgression.

We also know that victims of wrongdoing tend to be perceived as more “moral” or “virtuous” than others, and that using medical language tends to give a speaker authority, each of which are likely to result in more positive feedback.

It is not a huge leap, then, to imagine that deploying the language of trauma, or of harm, or even of personal struggle, carries cultural capital.

“There’s an economy in knowing that people will have a highly emotional, outsized response,” said Ms. Buggs. “Because they can monetize clicks. They can monetize followers. There is clout in it.”

And in the era of #MeToo, where hardly anyone has to be convinced anymore that the personal is indeed political, trauma-tinged language may offer a quick way to connect the dots between private grievance and righteous crusade, said Ms. Wynn, the YouTube artist. “Like, ‘Caleb hurt my feelings’ — nobody cares. But ‘Caleb is an abuser …’ Now there’s a reason to care.”

Suddenly, Demi Lovato is not just annoyed by having to pass by sugar-free cookies in a frozen yogurt shop; the singer is a victim of diet culture’s “harmful messaging.” The artist who claimed, falsely, that Taylor Swift doesn’t write her own songs isn’t just misinformed or a jerk; his words are “damaging” — the implication being, damaging not only to Ms. Swift but also to the culture.

And Caleb? Caleb becomes a meme, self-help influencers capitalize on the spectacle, brands use the moment to sell mayonnaise, and maybe, subconsciously, the rest of us plumb our souls for what we can interpret as our own trauma — because, wow, does trauma get results.

“It’s hard to talk about this without sounding like you’re policing the language,” said Mr. Haslam. “But when we start to talk about ordinary adversities as ‘traumas’ there is a risk that we’ll see them as harder to overcome and see ourselves as more damaged by them.”

In a recent piece in The New Yorker, Parul Sehgal writes about the trope of the trauma plot in literature and television — which, she argues, has the tendency to flatten characters into a set of symptoms. Is all this trauma talk — and #traumatok — doing the same, but in real life?

19Cynfelyn
Feb 9, 2022, 5:31 pm

This message is brought on by reading that Putin called Merkel the familiar/informal Russian "ty" rather than the formal "vy" (they both speak both Russian and German).

I was brought up first language standard English, only vaguely aware of the dialects that have managed to keep the second person singular/familiar thou/thee/thy/thine. So I always used you/your/yours for both second person singular and plural. (Except in religion, where God was (is?) addressed in the familiar/informal thou/thee/thy/thine - never understood that).

I am second-language Welsh, and although it is my main day-to-day language and I am fuctionally fluent, I will never have good, idiomatic spoken Welsh. Like a good many other European languages, Welsh uses the singular (ti) for the famiiar and the plural (chi, or more formally, chwi) for the respectful. I have reached an age (60+) and have lived in this area long enough (30+ years) to have earned "chi" from my grown-up children and other locals, and to use "ti" with anyone who calls me "ti". Although I do feel more comfortable using "chi" if I'm talking to someone in their professional capacity, say a librarian, teacher or doctor. And as a learner, I'm quite prepared to be getting it wrong.

Do other languages do it differently? Do other languages police the border between tu and vous, du and Sie, and of course ty and vy more or less stringently?

20anglemark
Feb 10, 2022, 5:06 am

Yes. Firstly, this is a European phenomenon. Many non-European languages of course have similar sociolectal or differences due to politeness or rank, but this particular using the second person plural form as polite for second person singular comes from the court languages of the High Middle Ages. In brief, languages that were used as national languages in this common court culture have this, those that didn't, don't. English has it, for example. What is peculiar with English, is that English lost the informal pronoun thou/thee. Using the plural ye/you became mandatory in all social relations, except in religion, because the relation to God is an intimate one. You are not polite toGod. You are intimate with Him, he is your Creator and Father. You love and fear him.

But, for example, Irish does not have this second person plural form as polite for second person singular, because the Irish language was relegated to second class status at the time that this spread. English and French were the court languages during the period in question. I am sure the same holds true for other small languages, like Basque. Welsh, on the other hand, was the official language at the Welsh court.

This is what my teacher in Irish taught me, at any rate.

21MarthaJeanne
Feb 10, 2022, 8:13 am

I have met people who don't like modern church services in English because it doesn't feel polite to call God 'you', and you can't convince them that thou/thee is actually less polite.

22MyopicBookworm
Feb 10, 2022, 11:58 am

German seems oddly to use not the 2nd person plural (Ihr) but the 3rd person plural (Sie) as the polite form. There are formal ways of using the 3rd person singular in English ("Would Sir like his toast with jam or marmalade?"), which I suppose are comparable; English has also the condescending or patronising use of the 1st person plural in place of 2nd person singular ("Have we finished our tantrum yet?"), and the frequently pilloried yet entirely idiomatic gender-neutral use of 3rd person plural for singular.

23AndreasJ
Feb 11, 2022, 12:19 am

Older German did use “Ihr” for polite sg. You might still hear “Eure Majestät”.

I don’t recall how the Sie business arose.

24languagehat
Feb 11, 2022, 2:26 pm

Crypto-Willobie: Please remove your #18; it is ridiculously long and has nothing to do with the topic.

25MarthaJeanne
Feb 11, 2022, 2:35 pm

>24 languagehat: He has a right to post his message. You don't have to read it.

26Crypto-Willobie
Feb 11, 2022, 4:10 pm

It's long because I feared folks might not be able to read it behind a paywall, so instead of just providing the link I printed it out.

It does have to do with the shifting meanings of some English words.