h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I thought 'maaa' was the sound of a

We've talked previously on this thread about tutoyer/vousvoyer (and equivalents in other languages). On the British English thread, there was mention of the book 'A Year in the Merde' by Stephen Clarke.

In my soulless hotel last week, I read the sequel, 'Merde, Actually.' In one episode, our narrator has an affair with a woman who, to his confusion, addresses him as 'vous' in the bedroom. During the post-coital conversation, she tells him that she gets turned on by the formality - acting like a prim and proper bourgeois couple while doing unspeakable things. But what really tips her over is changing to 'tu' at (ahem) the critical moment, because it sounds dirty.

I just thought I'd share that with you.

See what we're missing in English!

It's an interesting concept, being turned on by a subtle grammamtic shift.

I wonder if GBS was hinting at something similar in Pygmalion, when Eliza reverted to Cockney at the climax of the horse race?

I expect that GBS knew as much about the female orgasm as he did about Shakespeare. Proving once again that a little carnal knowledge is 'une thing dangerouse'.

~jwf~

What's all this? GBS read all of Shakespeare, and was not idle in bed either.

Although he was known to throw away the chance of it at times.

Lady: "Mr Shaw, we should marry, because with my looks and your brains we would have fine children."
GBS: "Aah, but what if they were born with my looks and your brains?"

Mary Whitehouse Experience, c.1991

I think that's an actual quote, not a Mary Whitehouse Experience invention.

When I say 'I think' - I know it long pre-dates 1991. It's just that one can't be sure that GBS quotes were reported accurately. For example, I always used to quote his (alleged) 'I'm sorry this letter is so long; I had not the time to make it shorter.' What actually happened was that he was asked why he had written so-and-so an unusually long letter and he replied 'Because I don't know him very well.' (and therefore could not assume understanding and had to explain certain things in full). But the true version isn't nearly as apropos.

Yeah, it was a quote, or something like it, but also a couple of sketches ending up with GBS cursing himself that his rapier wit stops him from scoring with the ladies.

Anyway, back on topic - the Shavian Alphabet. Did he *really* expect anglophones to adopt it? And would he then have produced French, Dutch, Swahili versions

That quote "I'm sorry this letter is so long; I had not the time to make it shorter" is a wonderful one. I had heard it ascribed to Pascal, and indeed http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/~susan/cyc/q/quotes.htm gives it to him as follows [start quote]

Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)

Je n'ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n'ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte.

-- Lettres provinciales, letter 16, 1657; variously translated, including

I have made this [letter] longer, because I have not had the time to make it shorter.

and

I am sorry for the length of my letter, but I had not the time to write a short one.

this quotation is often attributed to Mark Twain (and less often, to Voltaire, Proust, Pliny the Younger,...) [end quote]

I think Shaw really did hope the English would reform their spelling; many other nations did. Besides, reform, not to say revolution in all things, was very much in the air in the late 19th and early 20th c.

The opposite camp was represented by Wittgenstein who hated Esperanto because it suppressed the etymology and history of the words. Each crooked feature tells its own story.

If all Shaw wanted to do was reform spelling, that's fine. Shame it wasn't done then

Esperanto's been accurately described as a cross between Spanish and Martian and is bloody awful. It's unfortunate it's seen as *the* artificial language when there are much better ones out there, eg Interlingua - which I read about in the Loom of Language, a tome of mighty erudition

Anthony Burgess made a case for Latin being adopted as the new international language.

I have heard that Latin is making a comeback in German schools. That's a bonus!

How do spelling reformers cope with the fact that words are pronounced in different ways in different places, and that pronunciations change over time, so that different generations pronounce things differently?

Look at forrid vs fore-head, as discussed recently.

My niece produced a Beckett play (All That Fall) in college some twenty years ago, and I had to tell her how to pronounce halfpenny. They were saying "half penny"!

When the halfpenny was current I never heard it called anything but "hay-pny", and it was often spelt ha'penny.

And 'three pence' was 'thrupence'

Re artificial languages - I made a passing stab at Esperanto in my youth. It's relatively easy to pick up. It is, however, overcomplicated with case endings, which English, French, Spanish, Italian, etc. etc. manage fine without.

Interlingua is certainly simpler. In fact, I can pretty much get the gist of an Interlingua passage from my knowledge of English, French, German and Italian. Here it also scores - for me - over Esperanto which throws in the odd Slavic curveball.

But I'm not sure that 'simplicity' is relevant. The point about Esperanto is that it has a relatively large worldwide community, and the reason anyone would learn it is to communicate with members of international Esperanto societies. Interlingua's community is smaller. I think there are statistics such as taht there are more Esperantists in China than there are Flemish speakers in Belgium. Or something. And hats off to them! They don't have the advantage of starting from Indo-European grammar and vocabulary or an alphabetic writing system!

Basically, though, no language is any more difficult to learn than any other. Young children manage to cope wherever they're born.

In any case, we'll all have to speak Chinese in a few years.

>How do spelling reformers cope with the fact that words are pronounced in different ways in different places, and that pronunciations change over time, so that different generations pronounce things differently?<

I'd say spelling reform in any language can only be implemented at government level, and, in the case of English, that alone would require a minor miracle. Things are just argued out though: a recent example is when the hispanophone countries agreed to discontinue 'ch' and 'll' as separate letters from the alphabet (ie if you wanted to look up 'chico' in the dictionary, it would now come under 'C'). I think countries like Paraguay and Bolivia weren't too happy (they have lots of dialect words with these letters) but they acquiesced.

I heartily disagree that all languages are equally easy to learn. As a rather crude measure you could give a language complexity points for each linguistic component (eg grammar: Chinese and Interlingua 1 pt; writing: Chinese 10 pts, Interlingua 2.) If you added these all together you would get very different totals for different languages, even natural ones.



Perhaps unsurprisingly I didn't come across any Esperantists in China. The Chinese are disadvantaged at learning the other contender for World Language, English, due to problems such as class sizes of up to 100 and Chinese's phonological poverty (eg no consonant clusters at all). So yes, we'll probably need to learn Chinese. Well, I'd better get down the library - I'd be a fool to forget what I know already

To say all languages are equally easy to learn has a grain of truth. You could say (I often do) that all musical instruments are equally easy to learn, although the physical action of bowing with one arm while fingering with the other hand is more complex by far than pressing keys. The reason they end up equally challenging is that people always push everything to the limit of what it can do -- if not contrapuntally then expressively, or speedily, or gloriously well-roundedly or whatever.

My 'all languages are equally easy to learn' comment was, of course, deliberately provocative. There are various languages which, when you look at them, the immediate reaction is to think 'How on *earth* does anyone manage to communicate like that?' Yet, to native speakers they are second nature. One doesn't even have to look too far. To me, German genders seem arbitrary. Indeed, they *are* largely arbitrary - but nobody ever gets them wrong. (Although a friend mentioned a noun - I forget which - about which there is north/south disagreement).

As for Esperanto...am I right in recalling that there was a Nobel nominated Esperanto poet? Well - if my dear McDiarmid can manage successful poetry in an artificial language...

(But if anyone starts on Elvish or Klingon, I'm off!)