To Chinese people, the English language must seem full of unnecessary complications. In this article I will deal with the two small pitfalls which the newly arrived visitor from overseas invariably seems to encounter.
Our man arrives from China (but it could be from any country which was not formerly in the British Empire). He has been in Reading for about seven days, and he is being introduced to Professor X, who will be concerned with his project. The professor says:
Now what he really wants to know is the total duration of our visitor's stay in Reading. But the visitor thinks the question refers to time already elapsed, and answers "One week". Confusion, and end of conversation!
How does this come about? Two factors are here working together, of which the first is a particular idiosyncracy of the English language. Whereas, if we wanted to know how long our visitor has already been with us, we would ask:
most European languages do not use this construction. In French, they say something like "I am here since once week", and so in German, etc. Nearly all European languages, English included, have evolved from an Indo-European ancestor with a very complex structure of verb TENSES, but English is the most advanced towards a situation where the tenses are greatly simplified, and relying more on ASPECTS, like Chinese. For example:
means I am/was in the process of writing a letter
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and English, like Chinese, relies heavily on auxiliary (extra helper) verbs to express the aspect.
(The famous Chinese author Lin Yutang has noted how English is very gradually becoming more Chinese-like in structure).
But teaching of English until very recently was over-dominated by old-fashioned ideas from the days when Latin was the language of learning. So children would be taught tenses first - past, present and future. However, these days people are more aware that the aspects have come to take the more fundamental role, and are giving them priority.
Taking the verb "to eat" as a model, let us see how this should work out. To start with, I thought that one could easily construct a table of three aspects (simple, continuous, and perfect) in three tenses, but then I realized that the last two could also combine as perfect continuous:
| Present | Past | Future | |
| Simple aspect | I eat | I ate | I will eat |
| Continuous aspect | I am eating | I was eating | I will be eating |
| Perfect aspect | I have eaten | I had eaten | I will have eaten |
| Perfect continuous | I have been eating | I had been eating | I will have been eating |
However, you don't have to worry about all these when you are speaking. English people are generally able to make allowances for difficulties people have with the language. But the visitor to Britain really should be warned in advance that
means how long is your total stay.
======================
The other, more tricky one, concerns how to answer negative questions. In any language, the question "Have you forgotten to bring your passport?" simply demands an answer yes or no. Then why should one go to the bother of asking the question in a negative form:
The reason for doing this is really politeness - asking in the negative way implies that you think the person really hasn't forgotten. We will assume that the gentleman has, of course, brought his passport as required. Many overseas visitors will say "YES" - meaning <<I agree with your proposition, I haven't forgotten to bring it>>. But here is where English "logic" differs from that of other languages. We would actually say "NO" - meaning <<No, I haven't forgotten>>, pointing to the action inside the question.
The way round this one is actually to avoid simple Yes-or-No type answers, any say instead "I haven't forgotten". Here Chinese itself provides a good model. Consider the following question, as to whether or not you know someone-
The answers "renshi" or "bu renshi" are quite unambiguous - and this pattern can usually be applied in English also quite effectively.
(P.S. - I hope I haven't been making a MOUNTAIN out of a MOLEHILL)
I don't know whether they still use it, but overseas students doing an English course at the University Language Laboratory would often encounter a book "SHIP OR SHEEP", where they would struggle with English vowels, which with their sombre colours can be as difficult for outsiders as those of Cantonese! But this article will deal instead with a problem of consonants, in particular about the way the letters P, T, K change after S.
The problem was posed to me: "why does my English dictionary give the phonetic pronunciation of "steep" as "sTi:p" when my teachers in China tell me it is pronounced "sDi:p"?
The simple answer is "what you hear is NOT what you say!". Now I am CATEGORICALLY not talking about the phenomenon, whereby one's voice sounds different when played back to one on a tape recorder. No, this is something different, and related to the way the brain processes information. I first began to appreciate this when listening to a student project talk on NEURAL NETWORKS. However, I am not going to be like the 19th century English natural philosopher Herbert Spencer, and start turning a simple observation into a "theory of everything". For one thing, I haven't the time - why is it, with our word processors we still manage to be less prolific in our writings than our ancestors?
So sticking closely to the question (for once!), I will first make a point which you must attend to very carefully. When I am quoting words, I will use:
capital letters P, T, K for PHONETIC symbols;
small letters p, t, k for words as they are SPELT.
To find the key to the problem, we have to take a short journey to India (contrary to any rumours you may have heard, I'm not the Monkey King!). We need to do this, because it was from the classical Indian language Sanskrit that we Europeans gained the key to understanding the underlying structures and relationships of our own languages. Now in Sanskrit these consonants come in sets of four:
| Aspirated | Unaspirated | |
| Voiced | BH, DH, GH | B, D, G |
| Unvoiced | PH, TH, KH | P, T, K |
Now very few languages have such a complete set of consonants, and their speakers use only a subset; but different subsets in English and Chinese (this applies to both Mandarin and Cantonese). So we have:
| Pronunciation | |||
| Spelling | Chinese | English | Latin (French, Portuguese, etc.) |
| b, p | P, PH | >B, PH | B, P |
| d, t | T, TH | >D, TH | D, T |
| g, k | K, KH | >G, KH | G, K |
I have marked with > where the English pronunciation differs from the Chinese. I have also included the Latin languages for later reference at the end of this article.
The essential difference is that the Chinese HEARER divides the sounds according to the presence or absence of breathing (un/aspirated), whereas the English and Latin hearers divide according to the voicing. But here's where the English confuse the issue, because while in hearing they divide by voice, in speaking they divide the voice AND the breath!! Except before S, so ......
| Word | Pronounced | Sounds to Chinese as: |
| tea | THea | tea |
| deep | Deep | deep |
| steep | sTeep | "sdeep" |
| and for an even better example | ||
| peak | PHeak | peak |
| beak | Beak | beak |
| speak | sPeak | "sbeak" |
So your teachers in China may have told you to pronounce "steep" as "sdeep" and "speak" and "sbeak". Don't - because native speakers of English will hear them as "sdeep" and "sbeak". Pronounce them as they are written - "steep" and "speak". This may sound funny to you, and may turn the pronunciations into into sTHeep and sPHeak, but we won't hear the difference!
* * * * * * * *
Now why do I bring in those Latins? Simply because they got to China before we did, and THEIR way of resolving the sounds led to the mess in spelling of Chinese names which persisted until the PRC made everyone adopt Hanyupinyin**. So for example, to these Latins the great lake in the middle of China sounds like "Tungting, and that's the way we Europeans spelt it, or sometimes "Tungt'ing" if we were being scholarly or pedantic, but as anyone with sense can see "Dongting" is much easier to handle.
** (I normally hate coercion in matters like this - I still prefer to use WordPerfect! - but in this case the PRC is right. I apologize to any Taiwan readers, but I say with sadness that their refusal to accommodate Hanyupinyin has driven them out of the market in International Chinese teaching.)
(I hope those of you whose English is already quite good enough will BEAR WITH ME as I send this article).
In this article I am going to talk about one very small word, but one which you should find very useful if you can handle it. This word is BEAR - but not the animal of that name, which is actually a different word that happens to be pronounced the same. The word to be discussed is BEAR in the sense of "bring" or "carry".
This is a very ancient word, and is found with varying pronunciations in many European languages. In many technical terms it appears "disguised" in its Latin form "ferre", in words like:
and in its Greek form "pherein" in
In its English form, it also has wide applications. It is not much used on its own in the basic meaning of "bring" or "carry", except in the specialized usage of "bearing children", but is commonly found in terms of "yielding a crop or harvest", as in
In geology, we have "coal-bearing" rocks - translated into Latin, this becomes CarboniFERous, but the Latin word refers to the geological period of the main coal-seams in England, so the two words are not synonyms: not all coal-bearing rocks are Carboniferous, and not all Carboniferous rocks are coal-bearing.
But thinking of carrying as a physical process, rather than as a means of producing something, we have applications to engineering:
And if we are taking the weight metaphorically, rather than physically, we can say:
Since the effort of carrying things can cause pain, the word can also mean to suffer:
If we are oppressed by are circumstances, but still managing to carry our load:
And a set phrase which might describe our reaction to the circumstances:
Bearing does not have to be a passive process: we can actively pick up something and carry it, even in the metaphorical sphere where one argument can carry weight over and against another:
And if we feel that our argument carries our case successfully, we can say:
This is a very strong phrase, much more so than simply lending support to our thesis, or agreeing with our arguments. Some people might feel that to use "bear out" in a scientific thesis is too much like "blowing one's own trumpet" - but it is an ideal phrase for politicians in Parliament:
This "active" sense leads on to one very important phrase, namely:
*** BRING TO BEAR ***
The meaning of this is simple enough:
But it acts as a kind of "transitional" phrase to those usages where the "bearing" person is the oppressor, rather than the sufferer.
and there is the word for this type of person - OVERBEARING. History and literature are full of overbearing parents and the effect this has on their children. Have any of you seen the Hong Kong film, "Fu4 Zi3 Qing2" ? As for recently history, one much in the public eye in Britain was the corrupt businessman Robert Maxwell, who forced two of his sons to cooperate with him as he stole from the Mirror Group pension fund in order to cover his losses - the two sons are now on trial.
*** FOR DRIVERS (AND NAVIGATORS!) ***
Sometimes you come to a road junction, and find that one road leads off at a sharp angle to the left, while another one turns gently. In the latter case, the passenger may say to the driver
perhaps almost facing back in the direction you were coming, but on another road. The same distinctions also apply to right turns.
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Dear reader, I hope you have been able to BEAR WITH ME (put up with my talk, talk, talk) and read this far in the article. This last is a most useful phrase:
So please tell me - how does one say "BEAR WITH ME" in Chinese?
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From time to time, friends have asked me to look at their thesis or whatever. One of the most common things I find in theses from students from Asia (not just China) is the treating of "evidence" as if it were a "countable" thing. Now it is permissible to write something like:
but these days it does seem unnatural to an English reader if he encounters continual use of:
for a piece or pieces of evidence! It was not always so: William Paley's "Evidences of Christianity" was required reading for all students when Darwin was at Cambridge University! Now there are languages which regularly treat 'evidences' in that way, but they do not include today's English or Chinese. It is really a matter of how one uses the article: besides having two articles "the" or "a" to indicate whether a thing is definite or indefinite, English also insists on one specifying whether a thing is countable or measurable. In this it resembles a computer language like FORTRAN or C, with their distinction between "integer" and "real" numbers. Generally speaking, evidence is a "measurable" thing, as it is in Chinese - one does not say
(Note the asterisk - this is a device of linguistic specialists to say "this is not real - people don't use this / might have used this 1000 years ago!")
So although there is no absolute rule, one needs to know how to use this word in writing or conversation. When one is writing a thesis, it is better to say things like:
One talks about WEIGHING the evidence in order to decide between two parties to a case, or two rival theories. But although in this respect one treats it rather like grain, one still uses rather different words:
If you want to refer to the evidence directly, then it is simply STRONG or WEAK evidence.
But if you are writing a letter, or talking, then one is free to use all sorts of quantifiers. For a small amount, one can talk about:
These terms relate to cloth. The idea must come from detective work - perhaps the only clue to the identity of the murderer is, physically, a torn-off bit of cloth! And if the evidence is not much good:
referring to weak or thin cloth which is easily torn.
If the evidence is strong, then one can talk about a PILE, HEAP, or MOUNTAIN of evidence!
But back to your thesis or the paper you are writing. I used to think that when students were writing "evidences", they were wrong in treating it as a countable noun, but nowadays I think that their real mistake was to use "evidences" when they meant "indications" or "observations".
**** (Law students especially - if you have any observations on this article, where I may have missed the mark, please let me know!!!!) ****
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Have any of my readers had to learn FORTRAN? One of the first things you will have come up against is the difference between INTEGER and REAL numbers, necessary to know if you don't want the computer to tell you that 3/2 = 1 or 3/1.5 = 2.00000000001.
Well, we have the same in English. Probably you will have met the difference between COUNTABLE things (a man, two men...) and MEASURABLE things (a pound of rice), which you can easily see mirrors the above distinction in Fortran. The concept is easy enough, but where it starts to irritate the non-European speaker of English is (1) where different words have to be used in conjunction with the two kinds, and (2) the contrary case where the same word can appear in one or other version.
MANY and MUCH often turn up in the first kind of situation, and EFFORT in the second. So if we say:
we are looking at effort as a measurable quantity like heat, and we say "much" effort. But if we say:
we are looking at it as if the effort were a big lump of something. On this "countable" basis we could say;
and this would imply perhaps that Mr.Noname had to submit his thesis several times, or maybe that his supervisor, his friends, his colleagues and his relatives were all doing their bit to get him through!
One more simple example:
BACKGROUND has different meanings in the two different forms. One is measurable:
But we can make this countable:
Here "background" can be seen as short for "background information" (measurable) or "a COLLECTION of background information" (countable - we can easily have three different collections of something). Here is another countable:
Here "background" refers to each individual set of social, economic and family circumstances in which the children have grown up. We can talk about rich, poor or criminal backgrounds.
But what are we to make of the following example in the artistic sphere, where we seem to mix the two?
We find that when talking about language, "measurable" really means something which in theory we can measure out, like a draper measuring out cloth or a greengrocer weighing out fruit. We can, of course take the measurements of countable things:
But we cannot talk about 5.5 men, and if anybody talks about 80kg of man, it sounds as if he is organizing a cannibal feast!
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The English language is a two-layer language. You may be familiar with this phenomenon in Japanese where the characters "San Ling" take the native Japanese reading "Mitsubishi" whereas "San Yang" follows the Chinese reading "Sanyo". In English the bottom layer is derived from Old English (Anglo-Saxon) and is basically similar to German. From this we get the words that we use most commonly in speaking. But when we want to write, we tend to use words derived from Latin, either directly, or indirectly through the French brought over by the Norman conquerors in 1066. For four centuries these invaders sat on the country rather like the Manchu rulers on China, and it was a mark of class distinction to be able to speak (Norman) French. As our famous Middle English poet Chaucer says:
It is still a mark of educated people to use a much larger proportion of Latin-based words in their vocabulary. But the basic structures of English are much closer to those of German than of French. So if one takes the song:
it is easy to see that in German a "Hamburger" basically means a person from the city of Hamburg. But it all to easy to take the analogies too far, and to fall into traps where the German structure is not quite the same as the English. So if you want to tell someone that you come from that city, you would say:
Unlike English, you should not use the indefinite article EIN (same as the Old English AN and the Modern English A). If you do say:
then people will ask you "Macdonalds, Burger King, or home-made?"
When US President John F.Kennedy visited West Berlin soon after the buliding of the Berlin Wall, he meant to express his solidarity with the people of that city by saying that he was also a Berliner and one of them. So he said:
But here he tripped up, because the Germans name all kinds of food after specific cities (think of Frankfurter sausages), and that little word "ein" changed his meaning to:
(or rather "donut", because he was an American).
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You must all have run up against the way spoken English is rather different from the way you have been taught to write. One of the ways in which they differ is that in the written language the verb to GET is hardly ever used, while it is one of the commonest in ordinary speech. This little verb seems to have been brought into our language by the Vikings, fierce Scandinavian warriors who were invading our country and settling in the northern part up to 1000 years ago. From there it has spread into our language and carved out a large empire for itself. I will explain some of its commonest uses.
Its basic meaning is to seize or grab hold of something. So for example:
but leave out the comma, and the effect changes entirely:
The thing you grab may be concrete or abstract. So:
In very rapid speech -- "GOTCHA!" = "I've got you!" - You may have caught someone cheating,
or trapped his king in a game of chess, but it can also mean "you can't answer my question!"
From seizing something, comes possession. Perhaps the most frequent use is the way the perfect aspect "I'VE GOT" is replacing the verb to HAVE. This can apply to simple possession, for example:
But this replacement of "have" goes even further. One would write "I must go" but one can say any of the following:
but so far, only in the present tense. One still must say:
Still, in the war of the verbs, "to have" has largely retreated into its use as an auxiliary verb, for example:
Another basic meaning of the verb is "to become", as in
But from here "get" is extending into use as an auxiliary verb to form the passive:
Another common use is concerned with movement or travel, especially to reach or arrive, for example:
Simple combinations such as "get down", "get in", "get out", "get up" are often used, but beware!
But the trouble only starts here. The verb to GET is used in a variety of idiomatic combinations, of which two common ones are:
"to get away with" means to succeed in an audacious, or even criminal, act. For example:
"To get over" means to recover from:
One of the difficult features of English is that the ordinary speech seems to rely even more than other languages on this type of verbal phrase, instead of on single words. But in the speech of less educated people, this gets (!) carried to extremes. In fact these days children are learning fewer and fewer "long words", and are relying more and more on such phrases. This causes great difficulty for employers, and makes it more difficult for the young people to find jobs. The fashion affected by many of them, of wearing a baseball hat backwards, was copied from American Blacks who originated it as a gesture in defiance of "white" society; but from the way they speak it seems that many of these youngsters have their brains in backwards as well!
In English, we often modify a verb by adding -ing to the end. This has so many uses, that it can sometimes confuse the issue. Take for example its use in connection with the verb "to increase".
The straightforward use is to produce what is really an adjective describing the verb, for example:
and this is sometimes combined with the verb "to be" to make a compound form:
So far, so good and easy. Where the snag comes is when we want to make a noun out of the verb.
Now in that sentence "increasing" is a acting as noun - as you can see it forms the subject of the sentence. But it is still modified by an adverb, for example we would say:
In Old English, the two forms were different, but as the language developed they were merged into one -ing form. But there is another noun, which is not derived directly from the verb:
What is the difference? The simplest way is to regard the "-ing" form as an ACTION noun, while the second form is the RESULT. You can, for example, measure the result:
an it really is a full noun, and it is described by the adjective "unexpected", rather than the adverb "unexpectedly". Unfortunately, you have to learn this "result" noun form individually with each verb, for example the verb "to grow" gives "growth". Sometimes there are two "result" forms with different meanings. From the verb "to move" we have:
The "move" refers to human beings (or chess pieces!). But there are situations where one can use either form:
There is very little difference between these two, except that in (1) we are pointing at ourselves
for making the mistake, whereas in (2) we are pointing at the company for being the mistake.
But it's really a very fine distinction.
To Let or to Leave
?
One difficulty my Chinese friends sometimes encounter is when to use LET and when to use LEAVE. It's not surprising that there should be a confusion - LET is an old English word which originally meant to leave!
The key to knowing which to use can be shown in the following examples:
LET ME DO IT means, on deeper analysis, ALLOW ME to do it - perhaps, don't interfere with me, or maybe I want to do it myself in order to learn the procedure.
The word LEAVE always contains the idea of going away:
LEAVE ME TO DO IT means go away from me, and I will do it, while
LEAVE IT TO ME means go away from the job, and I will get on with it.
All of these could be polite, or rude, depending on the tone of voice in which they are said, or the context, or the reason for saying it.
To give another example (from chemistry or cookery):
LET THE LIQUID EVAPORATE means allow it to evaporate - in both directions of "let". This means (i) don't hinder it from evaporating (by covering the dish) but also (ii) don't force it either, by applying heat.
LEAVE THE LIQUID TO EVAPORATE means that it will take a long time, so you will have to go away and find something else to do!
The subjunctive mood refers to what we would (not) like to happen, or what might (not) happen, in contrast to the ordinary indicative mood which refers to what does (not) happen.
Here LET is being used to give an indirect order to the office workers. If the Director had said to the Manager:
LEAVE THEM TO GET ON WITH IT! it would have been a direct order to the Manager not to interfere (perhaps he is over-officious, and trying to please his boss in order to get promotion to Senior Manager!)
But this subjunctive mood is often used in experiments, either real or in the imagination. For example, a laboratory lecture demonstration:
LET US FILL the measuring cylinders with ethanol.
(An American might say - "Let us fill the graduates with ethanol" - but to British ears this would sound like an invitation to students, who have just collected their degrees, to go and get drunk!)
This usage can also be taken in thought experiments:
LET US INCREASE THE INTEREST RATE BY ONE PERCENT
And we hope that this refers to an example in an Economics Course - not a decision taken by the Chancellor of the Exchequer at No.11 Downing Street!
*** This is an oddity of spoken, or informal written, English. Here an apparently singular subject (the office) is referred to as "they" and takes a plural verb. But by ELLIPSIS, we are of course actually referring to the people, not the room!
In English, we are often confronted with the problem of talking about a hypothetical person, when we don't even know whether that person will turn out to be male or female. So one does not know whether to say "he" and "him", or "she" and "her". There has been a lot of argument about this, and some people have tried to invent artificial pronouns to mean "he or she", but in fact there is a common practice which is widely accepted, and that is to use the plural "they". A typical example is:
even though the speaker is only expecting one person to come to the door. Traditionally, for example in legal documents, people would use "he" to cover both genders: this principle is known as "the male subsumes the female". But nowadays women especially find this offensive, and except in the most formal writing as well as in speech it is quite acceptable to use "they". Note that this will always take the plural form of the verb, for example:
Another feature that may puzzle the learner of English is why we appear to have "I" and "we", and "he, she" and "they", but use the same "you" for singular and plural. The reason is historical, and it appears to go back to the Roman empire. At times, there was more than one emperor, and so it was necessary to use the plural "vos" rather than the singular "tu" when speaking even to only one of them. The use of the plural was soon seen as a mark of respect, and so as Latin evolved into French, it became necessary to use the plural "vous" when speaking to one's social superior, leaving the singular "tu" for use within the family, or when talking to one's social inferiors or to children and animals. In more recent times, one would not use "tu" to anyone with whom one was not familiar.
From 1066 to about 1400, the English language was held in low regard in comparison with the French spoken by our Norman conquerors, and so this practice came over into the English language also. The singular "thou" was practically driven out of the language altogether, with "you" taking its place entirely. Earlier this century, "thou" still maintained one place, as being the way one would speak to God, but even this has proved too difficult for today's uneducated generation, and its use has practically disappeared.
From being addressed as "you", kings and emperors rapidly acquired the habit of referring to themselves in the plural as "we". If you listen to our Queen's Christmas message, you will hear her say things like:
and she is actually referring to herself, not the collective "we" of the British people. But often people use this "Royal We" sarcastically. A parent may say to a stubborn child:
In so putting words into the child's mouth, the parent is in effect saying:
With they, you, and we the persons have been counted down from 3, 2 to 1. Now it is time for zero, and our rocket will blast off, to discover the tricks for talking about "no-one", "nobody" and "none". The first two of these are quite easy, as they always take the singular: "We need this machine, but no-one HAS any idea of how to fix it."
(Alas, not true! There is a Flat Earth Society for people who refuse to believe that our world is round). But "none" is more difficult, because people use it both ways. It is originally a contracted form of "not one".
But you can say either of:
According to traditional rules of grammar one should use "has", but "have" is becoming increasingly common. Recently a professor of English was told off for writing "none have" in a letter to a newspaper. What is happenening is that people are now seeing the pronoun "none", not as a negative of "one", but rather as the negative of "they". Since we are talking about a number of employees, the "none" is really being thought of as "none of them".
Of course, this defies the strict grammatical logic that we have inherited from our Indo-European ancestors, but as Lin Yutang says, English is gradually becoming more like Chinese!
So, have fun with the English language!
For expressing alternatives in English, we often use the words RATHER and INSTEAD. Which to use? There is a simple way to remember:
RATHER means SOONER while INSTEAD means SUBSTITUTE
So a chemist might say:
or for the same situation:
This is a situation chemists find themselves in quite often, because Ethanol with an E is the kind of alcohol found in wine, and in this country it is heavily taxed. Methanol with an M is the poisonous wood alcohol. Because ethanol is a useful fuel and cleaning fluid, it is often mixed with a few percent of methanol and a trace of foul-tasting oil to make it undrinkable, and the product is sold as Methylated Spirit.
In America during prohibition (the 1930s) it was illegal to sell alcohol, so people used to distil their own, creating an illegal product known as Moonshine. (In British English this word generally means specious talk by lying politicians!) This illegal alcohol was often sold by gangsters, especially in Chicago. But home-brewed moonshine often contained methanol as well as ethanol, and people would go blind, or mad, or even die as a result.
The word RATHER is also used to mean a little, rather in the way that the expression "Yi dianr" is used in Chinese, to make a sentence more polite. To say:
is much more polite than:
The word by itself, however, is used for emphasis:
expresses very strong agreement: note the stress on the second syllable.
I would like to say more, but I think I've gone on rather too long already.
No, this article is NOT about a lonely professor, working away in the laboratory, and with no opportunity to look for a wife or husband! Instead, it's to do with some subtleties of expressing logical relationships in the English language. I will be using scientific examples, but I hope those in other disciplines can work out what I mean.
The first of these is related to my previous "Ing" article. Take the following four sentences:
The first three belong together, because "increasing" is the "action" form of the word. They mean pretty much the same thing, but the emphasis is different:
in 1 we concentrate on what we are doing, in 2 the focus is on the result of the action, in 3 the emphasis is rather more vague, it could be either. Sentence 4 is quite different, because here "increasing" is the "descriptive" form of the word. In fact, 3 and 4 describe the same state of affairs, but the grammar is quite different. Sentence 4 translates into Chinese according to the
yue X yue Y
pattern. It sounds like a graph, doesn't it? In fact, this is a way of "plotting a graph with words", or describing a RELATIONSHIP between two variables.
Another sort of relationship is the 1:1 relationship. No, I'm still not talking about people! This sort of relationship is expressed in words as in the following:
One does not use the continuous form, for if one says:
then it sounds as if they are writing letters (or emails) to each other. And one more "nasty" which I encountered in a scientific paper:
which looks as if "shifts" is a verb, and the peak or its position is doing the shifting. But in fact the author went on to say something like: "the peak position shifts downward are explained by ..."
so that he was in fact using the word "shifts" as a noun. In this case, he should have said:
so that it is the order of the words, not the form, which tells us which is noun, which is verb, etc.
Compared to other European languages, English words alter very little according to what part of
speech they are. In this respect, It is becoming much more like Chinese, a process which the
famous author Lin Yutang refers to as the "Sinolization" of the English language.
Small Rules
It must be very frustrating for visitors from overseas, when they arrive in this country only to find that the English they have been taught differs from what the people around them are speaking. Sometimes, this is simply because the teaching materials at home were compiled by Englishmen of a previous generation, and have not been updated. Take, for example, the simple matter of introduction. The only place you are now likely to see the following conversation:
is in an old black-and-white film! These days, when people are introduced, they are more likely to say:
while the following:
are generally used between people who already know each other.
But what are far more vexatious are the SILLY LITTLE RULES that people have made up, probably civil servants trying to define an "official" style of writing. One of these rules is for how to express the future. Perhaps you have been taught that in English, the future tense in expressed by:
Well, this is nonsense. SHALL is an old auxiliary verb meaning what is going to happen, or what must happen; while WILL expresses what one is intending to do. Now the past and present can be known, while even physicists cannot agree whether it is even possible in theory to predict the future course of one single atom! So it is reasonable to have two separate ways of expressing the future, and one can easily see how a king (or bureaucrat) can confuse in his mind what he wants to happen and what must necessarily take place. So SHALL is more likely to be found with "I", and WILL with "you" or "he": but there is no ground for turning this into a half-baked rule which completely misses the point!
However, in normal speech, SHALL is rapidly disappearing and WILL is grabbing its territory (but at the same time losing ground to expressions like "I'm going to"). Apparently, this has been due to a heavy Scottish and Irish influence in the media (being Celts, they tended to speak English in a slightly different way). But the present-day habit of the English themselves, who shorten both "I shall" and "I will" to "I'll", has really killed off the distinction between the two forms.
Another silly rule is that you must never end a sentence with a preposition. But it is silly to impose a rule derived from Latin on the whole English language. Simply compare these two sentences:
To say the second sentence, simply in order to obey the rule, is not only clumsy, but alters the meaning slightly.
But it is the German language, rather than English, which has been really damaged by such rule-making. It seems that three or four hundred years ago, some clerk (xiao ganbu) in the Hapsburg (Austrian) empire imposed the rule that the main verb in every German sentence must come at the end of the sentence, even if it consists of several clauses. In a negative sentence, this would take the order:
Clause 1 .......... main clause VERB NOT.
Here two instances of what this can lead to:
I heard this one from a Hungarian professor of physics. In the 1930's, an English student, fluent in German, went to study Physics in Germany. He sat down to his first lecture from a very prestigious lecturer, but at the end of it was completely lost, in spite of his good command of the language. He turned to his fellow students in despair.
The next incident could easily have been more serious:
Many years ago, my boss was a Polish lady who, with her husband, had escaped to this country across occupied Europe in the middle of the Second World War. She told me once about learning chemistry from German textbooks. Here (in rough translation, but preserving the structure) is a sentence from a practical textbook:
......... put the reagents in the flask, and SHAKE +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ NOT.
Note carefully the page break! However, the student in question thought the sentence had ended at the bottom of the previous page, and shook the flask. The mixture exploded, but fortunately did not cause any serious injury.
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I went to the University Library, in order to research "shall" and "will", and also to see if there was any book I could recommend to you all as a useful guide to these difficulties in English. However, not only could I not find any useful book, the ones I did read only made me more confused! It is just like in the poem:
Don't worry - the following article has NOTHING to do with E = MC squared !
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In learning Chinese, one of the things that impressed me was the clever economy in use of words, for example the way "xia4" can serve for both space and time, as in "di xia" (underneath) and xiage xingqi (next week). Here now I will talk about some expressions of space and time in English, which I hope will be interesting, and useful. I am thinking particularly of situations where the newly arrived visitor from China is meeting his professor for the first time. Having to handle English in this way, without previous situational practice, is (as we say) like being taught to swim by being BEING THROWN IN AT THE DEEP END.
EARLY and LATE are words which have to be handled carefully. They are always used in a RELATIVE sense: even on their own they are used relative to a set point in some real or imaginary timetable:
This use may or may not indicate something bad: an early spring is usually something to be happy about, but
is not good. However, the addition of the word TOO introduces the idea that something has gone wrong as a result: for example
Here again, there is an extra, external, point of reference, as in:
The situation being referred to does not have to be stated explicitly: if the farmer simply says:
he and his hearer will know what external circumstance (the harvest) he is referring to.
LATER and EARLIER are always used in comparisons:
These words are never used simply in reference to the present time: later never means *"later than now"*. The normal way to express this sort of idea is:
In this context, early/earlier or late(r) should not be used because they have a different meaning.
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I think spatial references are less troublesome, even if one does occasionally see an upward pointing arrow saying "Underground", indicating a footbridge leading from the main railway network to the ground-level outer parts of the London Underground system.
However, there is one usage which even I as a native speaker found hard at first, and that was when I was taking driving lessons. When driving, the INSIDE lane of the road is the one nearest the kerb or the pavement (known as the "sidewalk" in American English). So when overtaking, one generally uses the OUTSIDE lane, so called even though it is actually towards the middle of the road.
Even though I am no ** Einstein, I will touch once more on space, time, and relativity. This is where one has to deal with a fixed frame of reference, regardless of which way you, the individual, are facing. Actors have to learn to take directions STAGE RIGHT or STAGE LEFT, never mind how they are standing. And on ships and aircraft, there are special words for directions, to avoid this trouble. These are:
This makes sense: if you are in the middle of a battle at sea, with pirates attempting to board the ship, one needs to distinguish between:
POSH is a colloquial word meaning luxurious or fashionable, and can refer to people or things. I don't know whether the following explanation is the true origin of the word, but it is commonly thought that it is short for:
Port Out Starboard Home.
In the days of the British Empire, people would sail out to India through the Suez canal. So if you were able to pay a little extra, you could ensure that on your way to India, you would have a cabin on the port side, not facing the sun, and vice versa.
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** The "no" is not a "typo": you all know that I am not that great physicist! I'm simply saying that my mind is not in the same category as his!
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Have you ever come up against the difficulty, whether to spell a word as
ENERGIZE or ENERGISE?
English is a language where there are no formal rules, and where usage decides. Being myself in favour of the "Z" spelling, I find it vexing that the "S" comes marching in increasingly, aided by spell checkers from the big American software companies. There are some spellings (and pronunciations) where there is a sharp distinction between the American and English practices, for example
ALUMINUM (American) and ALUMINIUM (English) -
in which particular case the Americans are more correct, because "Aluminum" is what the discoverer named the element, and the extra "i" was put in over here because that made it roll more easily off the English tongue. However, this is one of the cases in which it is always clear which is USA and which is UK usage. Similarly where we spell:
the Americans spell
Now these were originally Latin words, and are still spelled with "-or" in Italian or Spanish. However, in French the pronunciation shifted, and with it the spelling. In the middle ages, we were dominated by the Norman French and took in a lot of their words, such as "colour" (it is, however, changed further to "couleur" in modern French). However, after their Revolution, the Americans did a few simplifications of spelling, and restored these words to their original Latin value, which anyway fits the English pronunciation. However, it is still clear which is USA and which is UK usage, though if one wanted a standard for the English language as a whole, in this particular case I would say the USA version is much better.
However, in the case of "z" or "s", we have a situation where there is no set rule on either side of the Atlantic. Moreover, there is a further difficulty, and that is, there are some words which must always be spelt with a "s". The two classes of word are quite easily told apart. The "ize" ending is an original classical Greek suffix added to a noun to give a verbal meaning:
It is a "living" suffice, which means that you can still use it to make new words, such as:
But in words like;
the "ise" is simply part of the word, not a suffix at all.
But why is it (as it seems to me) that the education authorities and big organizations of the world are trying to kill off the "z", and make us spell everything with a "s". I think there are a number of reasons:
One is, that teachers find it easier not to have to teach this sort of thing to children. At first, such systematization seems a saving of effort, though it can have dire consequences. It is much easier in a school syllabus to teach children systematic names for chemicals such as "ethane, ethene, ethyne, ethanol, ethanal, ethanoic acid" instead of the irregular "ethane, ethylene, acetylene, ethyl alcohol, acetaldehyde, acetic acid". But the down side shows itself when the wrong chemical gets used because of a spelling mistake, or confusion because the systematic names are so similar.
But I think that the deeper reason is this. In the English language, "Z" is a rare letter, which is why it counts for 10 points in the spelling game "Scrabble". Because of this, it has a certain "fun" value, and hence is popular in names for science fiction and computer game characters such as "Zartid" and "Zool". And so perhaps the bosses of big companies and heads of civil service departments feel that the "z" spelling does not fit their corporate image, while the traditional schoolteacher may think that if the children find "z" more fun, it must be wrong!
Of course, simply because something is "fun" does not make it right. One cannot justify the Walt Disney Corporation in filling children's heads with false versions of history and sugary-sweet corrupted versions of great literature, simply because it is better entertainment. However, there are also people who are enemies of fun - "grey men in grey suits" who want to impose their own drab uniformity on the world. But perhaps one cannot blame them too much: maybe their parents, or their nanny or Amah, were KILLJOYS (or SPOILSPORTS) who worked on the principle:
"Find out what the baby is doing, and make him stop it!"
But still, let us keep the "Z". It's not simply a spelling - it actually functions in the word like a part of a Chinese character, and contributes something to the meaning.
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