Aspects of variation in the Papua-New Guinea newspaper ‘Wantok’

PATRICK HONEYBONE replies to Michael Bulley's article ‘A wild gene chase’(ET51)

THOMAS M. PAIKEDAY lists some more new words and senses that do not yet appear in mainstream dictionaries.

LI LAN considers the current state of on-line lexicography

To the making of wordbooks there is no end, and a recent addition to the long list is the Penguin Wordmaster Dictionary (1987), compiled by MARTIN H MANSER and NIGEL D TURTON (with a preface by DAVID CRYSTAL). Its publishers describe it as ‘a unique new dictionary which combines the elements of thesaurus, usage guide, lexicon and historical survey’. The PWD has 838 pages, and costs £4.95 in the UK, $12.95 in Canada, $16.95 in Australia, and $19.99 in New Zealand; there is no indication of how many words are covered. The three columns reproduced below show how the compilers have combined snappy, stripped-down definitions with boxed notes about usage and etymology. The PWD is an entertaining book, marred only by the quality of the paper used for the first edition.

In his short list of predictions for the future of English, written in 2006, David Graddol wrote that ‘Asia may determine the future of global English’ (2006: 15). India and China especially, he suggested, were likely to be the major influences on how the concept of English as a global language would develop. As Asian economies grew, so did their political status, potentially offering a different model for the global ecology of languages. Nearly two decades on, we are beginning to see notable shifts in the way English is perceived in different parts of the world. As a variety in an Expanding Circle country (Kachru, 1985), English in China has conventionally been seen as a foreign or international language, and the concept of an indigenized variety has received less discussion than it has in Outer Circle countries. But with shifts in geopolitics, the conventional rationales for naming practices around English in China may no longer be applicable. The discussion below is centred, therefore, around the issue of what might be a better term to capture the contemporary reality of English use, and attitudes to this use, in China; and on how an emergent variety, associated with the term China English, is becoming a more and more accepted part of linguistic culture in Chinese society.

Not everyone interested in English needs to give much thought to Chinese. This statement is so true that it borders on the banal, and a similarly true and banal statement might be: Many people involved with Chinese don't need to give much thought to English.

TIM CONNELL considers some cases of particle abuse in British English

TOVE SKUTNABB-KANGAS replies to Anthea Fraser Gupta (‘Language rights’, ET50: Apr 97) regarding issues of linguistic diversity

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are big news in higher education at the moment, with hundreds of the world's leading universities offering free access to lectures and other resources. Many MOOC providers operate through platforms such as edX, a not-for-profit consortium formed by MIT, Harvard and Berkeley, or commercially oriented platforms such as Udacity and Coursera. The last two provide the courses free, but aim to make money by charging for certification, or by making data on MOOC graduates available to recruiters. And the numbers involved are huge: MOOCs can attract tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of enrolments.

A tale from the streets of New York. In the main story I focus on two people in particular as an example of the ways in which a writer's workshop helped awaken me to the lives outside the workshop of the participants.

The fruits of the plant family Cucurbitaceae – variously called the gourd family, the pumpkin family, the melon family, or the cucumber family – offer rich pickings for charting the distribution of English dialectal variations and the curious ways in which they get fixed. The cucurbits are a medium-sized plant family, with representatives native to both the Old and New Worlds. They are what taxonomists call a monophyletic family, or a clade: all representatives of the family known today have a single ancestor, which presumably sprouted up somewhere on Pangaea. This paper explores this linguistic phenomenon.

A study in accentual compromise.

There is something in the very name Estuary English which fills certain sectors of British society with horror and fear, as if we were in the presence of a contagious and potentially devastating disease. It can provoke what John Maidment (1994:7) termed the ‘Disgusted-of-Tunbridge-Wells Syndrome’ (DTWS):

“Nothing is likely to enrage DTW more than the suggestion that the standard language which he/she holds so dear, the grail of which he/she sees him/herself the guardian, is usurped by the usage of people who are NOT OUR CLASS. DTW is not going down without a fight, you may be sure.”

This Times-reading, Radio 4-listening guardian of the English language, armed with pen and paper, is ready to pick up on mispronunciations, misspellings, and misusages of grammar and send in a letter of complaint, bemoaning the decline of the language.

Some aspects of a corpus of personal correspondence.

English as used in business letters, job applications and different types of bureaucratic communication in India has become more or less standardized and is not much different from the language of similar letters written elsewhere in the English-speaking world. But this is not the case with private letters, which are intimate, informal and often lax. Since a personal letter is written to a friend, spouse or relative, the writer comes out with his/her ‘real self’ in the use of language. It may therefore be taken as an authentic indication of the extent to which one is proficient in English and also the extent to which nativised features of English in this specific genre are attributable to native socio-cultural factors.

A discussion of the centrality of imagery in the promotion and use of English worldwide. Metaphor is traditionally considered a “figure of speech”, describing one thing by stating another with which it can be compared, as discussed by rhetoricians and grammarians, from Aristotle in his Poetics and Rhetoric to I. A. Richards in The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1936) and Kenneth Burke in A Grammar of Motives (1945), a growing number of recent linguists have been trying to establish metaphor at a cognitive, conceptual level (such as Lakoff and Johnson, 1980; Gibbs, 1994).

Most disciplines seem to have their “K factors”, though linguistics has so far been an exception. Now a language-related K factor has surfaced, kindled by Italian text messages and the influence of English.

Translation techniques favoured by Tolkien in rendering Beowulf and other medieval poetry into modern English. J. R. R. Tolkien was a prolific translator, although most of his translation work was not actually published during his lifetime, as occurred with the greater part of his fiction. He never did any serious translation from modern foreign languages into English, but rather devoted himself to the task of turning Old English and Middle English poetry into something that could be readily understood by speakers of the modern idiom. His largest and best-known published translation is of the anonymous 14th Century poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which was published posthumously with two other translations from Middle English in the volume Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl and Sir Orfeo (Allen & Unwin 1975). The translation of Middle English texts constitutes the bulk of his output in this field, both in the above volume and in the fragments that appear in his lectures and essays. However, his heart really lay in the older, pre-Norman form of the language, and particularly in the greatest piece of literature to come down to us from the Old English period, the epic poem Beowulf.