Mind Your Language

Mind Your Language
I went to Daniel's house to have dinner with him, Patricia, Steve and Jo as it was Patricia's last night before returning to La Réunion for a few months. As seems almost inevitable when the five of us get together, conversation turned to language. For some reason the word “événement” came up. I would have sworn blind the first two “e”s carried an acute and a grave accent respectively; Patricia thought the same. Daniel said that both “e”s had acute accents on them and was proved right by the dictionary. (What hope is there for we English when even the French can't agree among themselves?) I then vaguely recalled the word as being some kind of exception from my school days' French lessons.

However, it then occurred to me that pronunciation of the word should make the spelling clear, since é is a more open sound then è (as I had been taught). I made the point and got the reply: “Oui, mais on ne distingue plus de nos jours”. This really shocked me. I remember Steve asking me why the French had so many ways of writing the same sound “e” and explaining to him at some length that there were three “e” sounds in French (as I had been taught), in fact four if you counted the last syllable of “heureux”. I've frequently chided Steve on this point since but it seems that he was right after all. My (school-based) information was that the most closed “e” sound was as in “le”, the intermediate sound was as in è or an “ais/ait” word ending and the most open sound was é or an “ai” ending. Not so any more, it seems. My old professor of phoentics at Bristol would be turning in his grave, knowing his carefully thought out phonetic graphs were no longer valid. On the other hand, he above all would know that language phonemes change with time. So what if the difference between the two accents is critical to the meaning? The answer is, of course, that some other way is found to make the distinction.

Being an Old Fogey, I find this loss of ability to easily make fine distinctions in meaning somewhat distressing. But the same kind of change can be found happening in English. I have always been very clear about the distinction between uninterested and disinterested. In practice, disinterested is taking the place of uninterested and uninterested is falling out of use (probably,ironically, to be replaced by unbiased). Similarly the use of less and few and most and majority is also becoming corrupted. I remember an old colleague, John Laski, liking to quote the sentence his sister Marghanita had created to illustrate use/misuse of the word “only”. The sentence was: the white swans fly over the black hills. You can place “only” at any point in that sentence but each time producing a slightly different meaning. The British Standards Institution, when I worked there on the definition of Year 2000 compliance, was also very keen on this; definitions, after all, have to be definite and precise.

Well, it's probably time to say goodbye to all that. Does it matter? I have to confess that it often worries and saddens me but I have to recognise that language change is continual. Moreover, the Law of Least Effort is usually the dominant one in language change, and always has been.

Footnote
In my last post I suggested English as an intermediate language for translation purposes, whilst recognising the diplomatic difficulties. The diplomatic solution would be a language like Dutch. Nobody speaks Dutch but the Dutch themselves (almost true, Afrikaans and Flemish are slightly different). So there would be less ego and nationalism involved in its acceptance.