A lazy Sunday called for a day of print, rather than a day of screen. And so I dug into my treasure chest of unread books and picked up ‘A little book of language’ by David Crystal.
David is a serious linguist, but the book is an easy read – presumably aimed at the hoi polloi rather than the academically inclined. The author starts at the basics, and goes on to describe the evolution of language in children, and in the course of this, also touches upon many intricacies of the spoken word in general.
Some excerpts:
Babies can hear things in their mother’s womb before they’re born. It normally takes nine months for a baby to grow from being just a group of tiny cells to being ready to come out into the world.
And after it’s been in the womb for about six months, its little ears, and all the pathways inside its head that allow it to hear, are fully formed. So it can hear any noises going on around it.
Here is something that I didn’t know:
The story goes that, in the Garden of Eden, Eve gave Adam an apple to eat. He wasn’t used to apples, of course, and a piece stuck in his throat. Eve didn’t have the same problem. That’s why men’s Adam’s apples stick out more than women’s do.
The real reason is far less exciting. It was probably due to a bad translation from the Hebrew language, in which the Bible was written. In Hebrew, the word for ‘man’ is ‘adam’ and the word for ‘bump’ is very similar to the word for ‘apple? So when people translated the phrase into other languages, instead of working out that it meant bump of man’ they thought it meant ‘apple of Adam. And the name stayed.
And this:
Big letters are called ‘upper-case, or capital, letters. Little letters are called lower-case’ letters.
These terms come from the days when printers used to keep the letters they needed for printing in two large boxes, or ‘cases. The different capital letters were held in compartments in the top box, or upper case; the small letters were held in the lower box – the lower case.
An interesting reason behind the ‘silent letters’ in the English vocabulary:
In Anglo-Saxon times, people pronounced the <k› in such words as know’ and ‘knight, and they carried on doing it into the Middle Ages. So Caxton naturally printed these words with a <k>. But then they stopped pronouncing the <k› (we’ll see why in a later chapter), giving us the pronunciation that we still have today. It would have been nice if the spelling had changed to reflect the new pronunciation, but this didn’t happen. Caxton’s spelling stuck. And today, we have to learn the ‘silent letters’ in many words like those.
And the extra letters that don’t make sense:
Take a word like ‘debt.
We pronounce it [det] – and that’s how it was spelled in the Middle Ages. We find such spellings as ‹ det> and ‹dett>. So where did the <b> come from? ‘Debt’ comes from a Latin word, ‘debitum.
Writers added the <b> in order to give a hint about the words origins, and the practice caught on. We all spell it that way now.
Ah, and that quintessential ‘British accent’? Well, humor me this:
Received Pronunciation – or RP for short, Is an accent that developed at the end of the eighteenth century among upper-dass people…And, to this day, the accent that most foreigners are taught, when they learn to speak British English, is RP.
A lot of people simply call it ‘posh. It was never spoken by huge numbers – at most, by about five per cent of the population – but it was the accent that people associated with someone who was from the higher social classes or who had received the best education.
That’s why it was called ‘received’ pronunciation. It was seen as a sort of inheritance from your ancestors.
Reminds me of another classic by my favorite THE Bill Bryson – ‘The Mother Tongue’ – English and how it got that way. Bill (of course) adds dollops of humour (or humor, as in American English) that elevates an otherwise dreary subject to another level, an endeavor that many attempt (David included) and few achieve (well, David fell short on this one).
On another note, here is Keshav’s favourite phrase these days (may last around a week):
Stop this shemozzle,. this hullabaloo! Scarper, Skedaddle, BE OFF WITH YOU- SHOO!
100 pages done today, will finish the book by the morrow. See you then!