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Author: Oliver Bond

How to break an impasse

How to break an impasse

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Have Brexit negotiations met an impasse (where the first vowel sounds like the vowel in ‘him’), or an impasse where the vowel is like the initial sound in the French word bain /bɛ̃/? Or is it something in between?

If it is the former, congratulations! This borrowing from French has been successfully integrated into your native phonology, whilst simultaneously making a nod to its orthography.

If you opt to French-it-up then you have recognised that this word is not an Anglo-Saxon one, and that it should be flagged as such by keeping the pronunciation classic. Or you are French.

If you are somewhere between these two extremes, you are in good company. This highly topical word has no less than 12 British variants listed in the OED, reflecting various solutions to integrating the nasalized French vowel /ɛ̃/ and stress pattern into English:

Choosing which pronunciation to use for impasse is both a linguistic and social minefield, with every utterance revealing something about your education and social networks. No pressure then.

Recent news reports are providing a very rich corpus of data on the pronunciation of this specific word, with many variants being used within the same news report by different speakers, and perhaps even the same speaker.

For those yet to commit, choosing which to pick may be bewildering. So how do we avoid this impasse? Perhaps unsurprisingly, one tactic speakers use is to avoid using a word they aren’t confident pronouncing altogether. It might be safer to stick to deadlock.

Watch BBC Political Editor Laura Kuenssberg translate deadlock into German, Spanish and French.

Ultimately, our cousins across the pond may have some influence in resolving this issue in the long term. The OED lists only two variants for U.S. English, with variation based on stress, not vowel quality, and U.S. variants of words (e.g. schedule, U.S. /skɛdjuːl/ vs U.K. /ˈʃedʒ.uːl/) are widely adopted in the speech of the UK public. But this will not necessarily be the case and the multiple UK variants may continue for some time.

The impasse goes to show that languages tend to tolerate a whole lot of diversity, even when the world of politics doesn’t.

Double trouble treble

Double trouble treble

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You’ll get in trouble if you drink a tripel, the strong pale ale brewed by the most hipster of monks, the Trappists.

The Lowlands are the Hoxton of Europe

Tripels have three times the strength (around 8-10% percent ABV) of the standard table beer historically consumed by the monks themselves. This enkel or ‘single’ beer was traditionally not available outside the cloisters, while the duppel (a double strength dark brown beer made with caramelized beet sugar) was sold to provide income for the monastery. Although the term enkel is no longer in common beer parlance (it is on the cusp of a comeback), duppel and tripel have held their ground. It is generally thought that the tripel takes its name from its threefold strength, but it is also sometimes claimed that it is because it has three times the malt of a regular brew. A quadrupel is VERY strong.

As we have seen already in this blog when counting sheep in Slovenian and yams in Ngkolumbu, means for the expression of quantities and multiplication are often linguistically fascinating. Not least the doublet treble and triple, which originate from the same etymological source.

The Latin word triplus ‘threefold, triple’ first entered English via Old French treble. Not satisfied with claiming the space previously occupied by the Old English adjective þrifeald ‘threefold’, it turned up again by the 15th century as the adjective triple.

This triad of modifiers (threefold, treble and triple) exemplify some of the pathways by which lexical synonymy can come about. The first word was formed through a compounding processes (i.e. the numeral three forming a new word with the multiplicative form –fold), the second entered the language through direct borrowing, and the third through a second wave of borrowing (either from Old French triple or Latin triplus).

We don’t just find words competing to express the same meaning, but also parts of words. The –fold element of threefold, tenfold and manifold, and the –plus of triplus, are argued to have developed from the same Proto Indo-European root *pel ‘to fold’. To complicate things even further, the now obsolete treblefold was attested between the 14th and 16th centuries. Words, it seems, like to fight for the same space, and can sometimes be incestuous.

Since entering English over 500 years ago, triple and treble have staked out different paths, but retained similar meanings in at least some of their manifestations, as explored by Catherine Soanes on the OxfordWords blog. In terms of frequency, triple is the stronger twin (or is it a triplet? quadruplet?), ending up triumphant with around 6 times more occurrences in the Oxford English Corpus.

But treble has some resilience. Although the official Scrabble board has double and triple word scores, treble word scores are occasionally referred to on the net (albeit erroneously, or in a devil-may-care way), such as in Charlie Brooker’s article on how to cheat at scrabble. I even found a ‘threefold word score’ on a Scrabble knock-off site. Lawyers to the ready!

This demonstrates that these adjectives really are semantically interchangeable for the most part, even though their distributions are not identical.

The take home? While not not every monastery sells the same tripel, they will all get you drunk.

No we [kæn]

No we [kæn]

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If something bad happened to someone you hold in contempt, would you give a fig, a shit or a flying f**k? While figs might be a luxury food item in Britain, their historical status as something that is valueless or contemptible puts them on the same level as crap, iotas and rats’ asses for the purposes of caring.

In English, we have a wide range of tools for expressing apathy. But we don’t always agree on how to express it, and even use seemingly opposite affirmative and negative sentences to express very similar concepts.  Consider the confusing distinction between ‘I couldn’t care less’ vs. ‘I could care less’ which are used in identical contexts by British and American speakers of English to mean pretty much the same thing. This mind-boggling pattern makes sense when we realise that those cold-hearted people who couldn’t care less have a care-factor of zero, while the others don’t care much, but could do so even less, if necessary.

Putting aside such oddities, negation is normally crucial to interpreting a sentence – words like ‘not’ determine whether the rest of the sentence is affirmative or negative (i.e. whether you’re claiming it is true or false). Accordingly, languages tend to mark negation clearly, sometimes in more than once place within a sentence. One of the world’s most robust languages in this respect is Bierebo, an Austronesian language spoken in Vanuatu, where no less than three words for expressing negation are required at once (Budd 2010: 518):

Mara   a-sa-yal              re         manu  dupwa  pwel.
NEGl   3PL.S-eat-find   NEG2  bird     ANA      NEG3
‘They didn’t get to eat the bird.’

While marking negation three times might seem a little inefficient, this pales in comparison to the problems that arise when you don’t clearly indicate it all. We only have to turn to English to see this at work, where the distinction between Received Pronunciation can [kæn] and can’t [kɑ:nt] is frequently imperceptible in American varieties where final /t/ is not released, resulting in [kæn] or [kən] in both affirmative and negative contexts.

You might think that once a word or affix or sound that indicates negation has been removed from a word, there isn’t anywhere else to go. But some Dravidian languages spoken in India really push the boat out in this respect. Instead of adding some sort of negative word or affix to an affirmative sentence to signal negation, the tense affix (past –tt or future -pp) is taken away, as shown by the contrast between literary Tamil affirmatives and negatives.

pati-tt-ēn                    pati-pp-ēn                  patiy-ēn
‘I learned’                  ‘I will learn.’               ‘I do/did/will not learn.’

This is highly unusual from a linguistic point of view, and it’s tempting to think that languages avoid this type of negation because it is difficult to learn or doesn’t make sense design-wise. But historical records show similar patterns have been attested across Dravidian languages for centuries. This demonstrates that inflection patterns of this kind can be highly sustainable when they come about – so we might be stuck with the can/can’t collapse for a while to come.