IS THIS THE REAL FACE OF ELIZABETH I?

IS THIS THE REAL FACE OF ELIZABETH I?



Artist Mat Collishaw is on a quest to reveal the real woman behind the mask of this famously image-conscious monarch.



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BBC CULTURE

Why British English is fully silly-sounding words

From ‘gazump’ to ‘gobsmack’, ‘squiffy’ to ‘snog’, British English is full of words that sound like barmy balderdash. Christine Ro explains why.

“That wazzock dared to gazump me; I'm gobsmacked by this sticky wicket full of codswallop that's gone pear-shaped!”

That sentence may not sound serious. But the situation it describes is. Translated into standard English, it would be something like “That idiot dared to offer more money for the house after my offer already had been accepted; I'm shocked by this tricky situation full of nonsense that's gone awry!”

Shakespeare, this isn’t. The first sentence sounds so peculiar to certain ears not just because of the mangling of parts of speech. It’s also full of words, with origins ranging from the 1700s to the 1980s, that have two qualities in common: they’re all rather silly-sounding, and they’re all British English.

British English is full of whimsical terms like these. They reflect the UK’s cultural appreciation of wit, a long tradition of literary inventiveness – and Britain’s fluctuating global influence over the centuries.

Whimsical words like these are formed in a number of ways. These include blends of other words (eg ‘Oxbridge’, from Oxford and Cambridge); reduplicatives, which repeat sounds or parts of words (‘higgledy-piggledy’); back-formations, which often remove the suffix of their originating word (like ‘kempt’, from ‘unkempt’); and of course sheer nonsense (like Roald Dahl’s invention ‘gobblefunk’).

These types of coinages aren’t unique to English, let alone British English. But the relative simplicity of English words may lend itself to this kind of play, says Anatoly Liberman, professor of languages at the University of Minnesota and an etymology blogger for Oxford University Press. “English is largely a monosyllabic language (‘come’, ‘go’, ‘take’, ‘big’, ‘laugh’, and so forth),” he says. “This makes such games easy.”

Especially characteristic of these formations in British English is the way they reflect a certain kind of humour. Pop anthropologist Kate Fox has written about the English “ban on earnestness” (an aversion to taking things too seriously) and the pervasiveness of humour in social interaction. This humour is of a particular kind: self-deprecating and given to understatement and irony.

It’s unsurprising that this national trait has made its way into the language. Romantic activities (like ‘snog’ and ‘shag’) are spoken of in childish terms. Classic dishes are made to sound deliberately unappetising (‘dead man’s arm’ and ‘Eton mess’ – respectively, a rolled cake filled with jam and a dessert combining meringue, strawberries and cream. And there’s a healthy appetite for nonsensical ambiguity. To take just one example, ‘ladybird’ is a bugbear of perplexed Americans who wonder – although their version of the word is only slightly more sensible – “Why ladybird? Why not ladybug?”

This hints at a gleeful willingness in British English to dispense with literal meaning. Food, for instance, is a rich vein of words like this. ‘Fairy cake’, ‘toad in the hole’, and ‘jacket potato’ have nothing to do with fairies, toads and jackets.

Child’s play

There’s a long tradition in British English of inventing words just for the fun of it. Eminent linguist David Crystal writes in The Story of English in 100 Words that ‘a gaggle of geese’, ‘an unkindness’ of ravens’, and other collective nouns of this ilk were created in the 15th Century. He speculates that this was done deliberately for comic effect, giving rise to ‘a superfluity of nuns’ (pun intended).While whimsical British terms have been coined in every era, certain periods have been especially fruitful. 

According to Crystal, linguistic inventiveness, particularly of a playful kind, seems to have peaked in the Elizabethan era. This is partly due to the enduring influence of wordsmiths like Shakespeare and his fellow dramatists. Meanwhile, Crystal adds, at this time “there were more people writing, with pressure to produce new plays to feed the daily demands of the new theatres. And there were no dictionaries to act as a stabilising influence.” This created a climate of lexical creativity, which we can thank for words like ‘balderdash’ (meaning, appropriately, a nonsense word or idea).

Here are seven of our favourite silly-sounding British words:

Since Shakespeare, British writers from Charles Dickens (‘whiz-bang’) and Lewis Carroll (‘mimsy’) to JK Rowling (‘muggle’) have continued to enliven English vocabulary. As Liberman points out, it’s not that these authors had a monopoly on childlike wit. Rather, historically, British English’s “influence was mainly exercised by great authors,” he says. “The joys and charm of British English have to be sought in the works of the great wits of various epochs. For comparison, in the US, the only figure of comparable size – in this respect – is Mark Twain.”

Of course, there’s a risk of over-interpreting the relationship between culture and vocabulary. Fanciful terms can be found in all varieties of English: linguists also have written about how terms like ‘face like a dropped pie’ and ‘cultural cringe’ reflect an Australian culture of informality and ‘mateship’.

To make matters more complex, the border between British and American English – the two most influential forms of English – is fairly blurry. In fact, many of the words popularly believed to stem from one country actually originated in the other.

The University of Sussex’s Lynne Murphy, who has a blog and a forthcoming book about differences between US and UK English, notes that many Americans incorrectly think ‘bumbershoot’ and ‘poppycock’ are British words. That’s simply, she says, because “a lot of Americans stereotype the British as having silly words.” So words that fit that expectation are the ones that gain a great deal of currency overseas.

This is also true of terms that mainly sound comical due to their difference from US terms. Murphy explains that Americans love slang with a (non-flattened) short ‘o’ sound, such as ‘cosh’, ‘bollocks’ and ‘dogsbody’, because “that’s a sound that Americans don’t make”.

Read more: http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20170619-why-british-english-is-full-of-silly-sounding-words

How Americans preserved British English

Americans today pronounce some words more like Shakespeare than Brits do… but it’s in 18th-Century England where they’d really feel at home.

It makes for a great story: when settlers moved from England to the Americas from the 17th Century, their speech patterns stuck in place. That was particularly true in more isolated parts of the US, such as on islands and in mountains. As a result, the theory goes, some Americans speak English with an accent more akin to Shakespeare’s than to modern-day Brits.

That’s not entirely right. The real picture is more complicated. One feature of most American English is what linguists call ‘rhoticity’, or the pronunciation of ‘r’ in words like ‘card’ and ‘water’. It turns out that Brits in the 1600s, like modern-day Americans, largely pronounced all their Rs. Marisa Brook researches language variation at Canada’s University of Victoria. “Many of those immigrants came from parts of the British Isles where non-rhoticity hadn’t yet spread,” she says of the early colonists. “The change towards standard non-rhoticity in southern England was just beginning at the time the colonies became the United States.”

So at least when it comes to their treatment of the 18th letter, Americans generally sound more like the Brits of several centuries ago. So do Canadians west of Quebec – thanks to loyalists to the Crown fleeing north during the American Revolution.

Another divergence between British and North American English has been a move toward broad As in words like ‘path’. The pronunciations of the early colonists (and their English counterparts), in contrast, have stuck around in the US: think ‘paath’ rather than ‘pahth’.

At first glance, these colonial legacies of pronunciation seem especially apparent in certain remote areas of the US – hence the argument that some places in the US have preserved Shakespearean English.

For instance, Tangier Island in Virginia has an unusual dialect which can be unintelligible even to other Americans. Some speech patterns, included rounded Os, seem like a dead ringer for the dialect of the West of England. This has led some observers to claim a strong lineage from early Cornish settlers to the current Tangier dialect.

But linguist David Shores has noted that these claims are exaggerated, and that the island’s isolation, rather than any freezing of Elizabethan speech patterns, is responsible for its linguistic quirks.

Another US area that’s been linked to 17th-Century British English is Appalachia, especially the mountainous regions of North Carolina. Linguist Michael Montgomery has written that the North Carolina tourism division used to issue a booklet called A Dictionary of the Queen’s English, which claimed that the English of Queen Elizabeth I could be found in pockets of the state. Montgomery traced the idea back to an educator-clergyman who, around the turn of the 19th Century, spread the idea that mountain language was a remnant of a much older tradition. This myth helped to counteract negative impressions of oft-maligned mountain people. Turning this around – and claiming kinship with a Shakespearean way of speaking – was a way of bringing status and apparent classiness to a marginalised part of the country.

“Mountain speech has more archaisms than other types of American English, but that’s about it,” Montgomery writes. These include terms like ‘afeard’, which famously appears in The Tempest. Overall, however, “the Shakespeare myth reflects simplistic, popular views about the static nature of traditional folk cultures, especially those in out-of-the-way places.”

Common phrases

It’s a bit surprising that Shakespearean English has come to be associated with high status and education. That’s the other oft-forgotten complication of the concept: even if Americans do speak more like the Elizabethan English than today’s Brits themselves, that doesn’t mean they’re speaking a ‘posher’ version of the language.

“We’ve always had this stigma in the UK that Shakespeare has to be posh… [but] in his time, it was everyday speech,” says David Barrett, who conducted workshops in Shakespearean Original Pronunciation (OP) while preparing a thesis on the subject at the University of South Wales. He’s also transcribed Christopher Marlowe’s poem Hero and Leander into OP. (There have been similar projects for the King James Bible and the Lord’s Prayer).

Even Queen Elizabeth I didn’t pronounce words in a particularly ‘posh’ way. Barrett has researched Elizabeth’s letters for clues to her pronunciation. Since spellings at the time were far from standardised, written texts are one tool linguists use to determine how words would have been pronounced historically. The queen’s habits likely included pronouncing ‘servant’ as ‘sarvant’, or ‘together’ as ‘togither’. These were pronunciation styles of ordinary people of the 17th Century – rather than the nobility. So like Shakespeare, the queen had a down-to-earth manner of speaking... in contrast to the upper-crust accents she is portrayed with in contemporary films and TV programmes. (It’s worth noting that today’s Queen Elizabeth II is speaking in a more ‘common’ way than she once did, too).

“The reason I find the Elizabethan period interesting is that the pronunciation contains many sounds which are far enough removed from modern English to create a challenge for the speaker, but there is also a considerable overlap with modern English,” says Barrett.

So when actors and audiences hear OP for the first time, it’s a bit of a shock to the system.

“Every English speaker who hears Original Pronunciation for the first time hears something different in it,” Barrett says. Sometimes that sounds similar to Northern Irish or West Country accents, other times South African or American.

Star-spangled Shakespeare

American actors have a head start with performing in OP: it’s “so much more American” than the prestigious Received Pronunciation accent in which Shakespeare’s plays are generally performed now, says Paul Meier, theatre professor emeritus at Kansas State University and a dialect coach who’s worked on theatre productions like an OP version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

For instance, Americans are already used to pronouncing ‘fire’ as ‘fi-er’ rather than ‘fi-yah’, as most Brits would.

It’s useful to know how words would have been pronounced centuries ago because it changes our appreciation of the texts. Because British English pronunciations have changed so much since the era of Queen Elizabeth I, we’ve rather lost touch with what Early Modern English would have sounded like at the time. Some of the puns and rhyme schemes of Shakespeare’s day no longer work in contemporary British English. ‘Love’ and ‘prove’ is just one pair of examples; in the 1600s, the latter would have sounded more like the former. The Great Vowel Shift that ended soon after Shakespeare’s time is one reason that English spellings and pronunciations can be so inconsistent now.

So what’s popularly believed to be the classic British English accent isn’t actually so classic. In fact, British accents have undergone more change in the last few centuries than American accents have – partly because London, and its orbit of influence, was historically at the forefront of linguistic change in English.

As a result, although there are plenty of variations, modern American pronunciation is generally more akin to at least the 18th-Century British kind than modern British pronunciation. Shakespearean English, this isn’t. But the English of Samuel Johnson and Daniel Defoe? We’re getting a bit warmer.

Dialect coach Meier understands the appeal of the idea that 17th-Century speech patterns have been perfectly preserved an ocean away. “It is a delightful and attractive myth that Shakespeare’s language got fossilised” in parts of the US, he says.

But as sociolinguist Brook explains, “Every actively-spoken dialect is always changing – that’s as true of the rural ones as of the urban ones.” Echoes of older dialects can be heard here and there in different places, but unfortunately there’s no living museum of Shakespeare’s English.

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http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20180207-how-americans-preserved-british-english?ocid=fbcul

Il primo "inglese" della storia? Aveva la pelle nera

Ma anche i capelli ricci e gli occhi azzurri. Ecco la rivelazione di un esame del Dna del più antico essere umano rinvenuto in Gran Bretagna, il "Cheddar Man", che visse circa 10mila anni fa.

LONDRA – Il primo “inglese” della storia aveva la pelle nera, i capelli ricci e gli occhi azzurri. E’ la rivelazione di un esame al Dna, effettuato con nuove tecniche, dei resti del più antico essere umano rinvenuti in Gran Bretagna: il cosiddetto “Cheddar Man”, che visse circa 10mila anni or sono nella regione dell’odierno Somerset, trovati un secolo or sono nella Giugh’s Cave, una caverna della zona.
 
C’era stato sempre grande interesse su questo fossile, la cui origine risale al tempo in cui i primi uomini passarono dall’Europa continentale alle isole britanniche al termine dell’ultima era glaciale. I bianchi anglosassoni di oggi sono dal punto di vista genetico i discendenti di quella specie. Inizialmente si riteneva che il Cheddar man avesse la carnagione chiara. Ma l’analisi al dna, condotta nei giorni scorsi da un gruppo di scienziati dell’University Collegee London e di altre università su cranio e scheletro del reperto, ha fornito un’immagine del tutto diversa.
 
Il volto ricostruito al computer e poi ricreato da due “paleo-artisti” del “primo inglese” per conto del National History Museum di Londra – nero anziché bianco – campeggia stamane sulla prima pagina di tutti i giornali del regno: alla faccia, sarebbe il caso di dire, di xenofobi e razzisti. La scoperta sembra dimostrare che gli uomini europei hanno acquisito la pelle bianca molto più tardi di quanto si pensava.
 
Apparso originariamente nell’Africa centro-orientale, l’Homo Sapiens emigrò verso l’Europa circa 40 mila anni fa, transitando attraverso il Medio Oriente e i Balcani. L’evoluzione verso la carnagione chiara favoriva l’assorbimento della vitamina D nei territori del nord Europa, dove le giornate erano più corte e c’era meno sole che in Africa. Già in passato era emerso che popolazioni di 8500 anni fa in Spagna, Lussemburgo e Ungheria avevano la pelle scura.

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http://www.repubblica.it/esteri/2018/02/07/news/inghilterra_immigrazione_dna_fossile-188233469/?ref=RHPPBT-BH-I0-C4-P3-S1.4-T1

Pidgin - West African lingua franca

What is Pidgin?

The Oxford English Dictionary definition of Pidgin is: A language containing lexical and other features from two or more languages, characteristically with simplified grammar and a smaller vocabulary than the languages from which it is derived, used for communication between people not having a common language; a lingua franca.

Simply put, Pidgin English is a mixture of English and local languages which enables people who do not share a common language to communicate.

Most African countries are made up of numerous different ethnic groups who do not necessarily have a lingua franca, so Pidgin has developed.

It is widely spoken in Nigeria, Ghana, Equatorial Guinea and Cameroon.

There are differences, because English is mixed with different languages in each country but they are usually mutually intelligible.

A form of Pidgin has developed into a mother tongue for the Krio community in Sierra Leone, which non-Krios can find difficult to understand.

What is so special about Pidgin?

"It's quite fluid, it keeps changing all the time and it's expressive as well," says Bilkisu Labran, head of the new BBC language services for Nigeria.

"Sometimes, if you don't have a word for something, you can just create an onomatopoeic sound and just express yourself. And it will be appreciated and understood.

"I can talk about the gun shots that went 'gbagbagba' and you get my gist. So it vividly captures it instead of describing or trying to find a word to say: 'The gun shots were very loud'."

Also, Pidgin hardly follows standard grammatical rules so "you can lose things like verbs", by saying: 'I dey go' to mean 'I'm going'.

Other examples are:

• I wan chop ( I want to eat)
• Wetin dey 'appen? (What is happening?)
• I no no (I do not know)
• Where you dey? (Where are you)

How many people speak it?

It is difficult to know the precise number of speakers across the region as it is not formally studied in schools and is spoken in varying degrees of proficiency.

But many millions of people undoubtedly speak it on a daily basis, especially young people.

Nigeria is estimated to have between three and five million people who primarily use Pidgin in their day-to-day interactions. But it is said to be a second language to a much higher number of up to 75 million people in Nigeria alone - about half the population.

Although it is commonly spoken, Pidgin is not an official language anywhere in West Africa.

In many schools, children are disciplined if they are caught speaking Pidgin, rather than English.

However, some local radio stations do broadcast in Pidgin.

How did it originate?

West African Pidgin English, also called Guinea Coast Creole English, was a language of commerce spoken along the coast during the Atlantic slave trade in the late 17th and 18th Centuries.

This allowed British slave merchants and local African traders to conduct business.

It later spread to other parts of the West African colonies, becoming a useful trade language among local ethnic groups who spoke different languages.

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http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-38000387

'Th' sound to vanish from English language by 2066 because of multiculturalism, say linguists

Visitors expecting to hear the Queen’s English spoken on the streets of London in 50 years may need to "fink" again.

By 2066, linguists are predicting that the "th" sound will vanish completely in the capital because there are so many foreigners who struggle to pronounce interdental consonants - the term for a sound created by pushing the tongue against the upper teeth.

Already Estuary English – a hybrid of Cockney and received pronunciation (RP) which is prevalent in the South East – is being replaced by Multicultural London English (MLE) which is heavily influenced by Caribbean, West African and Asian Communities. But within the next few decades immigration will have fundamentally altered the language, according to experts at the University of York.

The "th" sound – also called the voiced dental nonsibliant fricative – is likely to change to be replaced an "f", "d", or "v" meaning "mother" will be pronounced "muvver" and "thick" will be voiced as "fick". However the ‘h’ that fell silent in Cockney dialect is set to return allowing ‘ere’ to become ‘here’ once more.

Dr Dominic Watt, a sociolinguistics expert from the University of York,said: “Given the status of London as the linguistically most influential city in the English-speaking world, we can expect to see significant changes between now and the middle of the century.

“The major changes in the way we speak over the next 50 years will involve a simplification of the sound structure of words, they’ll become shorter probably

“By looking at how English has changed over the last 50 years we can identify patterns that seem to repeat. British accents seem to be less based on class these days. 

“Languages also change when they come into contact with one another. English has borrowed thousands of words from other languages: mainly French, Latin and Greek, but there are ‘loan words’ from dozens of other languages in the mix.”

The Sounds of The Future report was produced from a study involving analysis of recordings from the last 50 years as well as social media language use. Other changes likely to become widespread by 2066 include a habit known as "yod dropping" in which the "u" sound is replaced with an "oo". It means that "duke" becomes "dook", "news" is pronounced "nooze" and "beauty" changes to "booty".

Consonant "smushing" is also predicted where two sounds collapse together completely so that "wed" and "red" will soon be indistinguishable. Likewise the "l" at the end of words will be dropped so that the words "Paul", "paw" and "pool" all sound the same. Similiarly, "text" will lose the final "t" to become "tex".And, the glottal stop pronunciation of "t" – a brief catch in the throat when the tongue tip closed against the roof of the mouth – will be the default pronunciation.

Brendan Gunn, a voice coach who is currently working with Pierce Brosnan on his new US series said: “The younger generation always wants to be different from the older generation and that process will continue throughout history.

“Text speak which is a form of shortening will become ordinary speak, so you may end up saying ‘tagLOL’ or ‘toteschill’ which means hashtag laugh out loud or totally chilled.

“Even in the Royal family it is probable that Prince George will speak much differently to the Queen. In London I think we will see the ‘th’ becoming an ‘f’ all the time.”

Technology will also change the way people speak, and the experts predict that as artificial intelligence emerges the, computers could begin to invent new words.

Dr Watt added: “It is conceivable that some of the words that will come into English in the next 50 years will have been invented by computers because as computers become more intelligent it may be they start creating words of their own and feeding the, back to us.

“Already we’re seeing text words phrases coming into respected dictionaries. As time goes on we’re going to see more and more of that kind of thing.

“The traditional dialects will die out and others will morph into the speech of large urban centres.”

The Sounds of the Future report was commissioned by HSBC to coincide with the launch of its new voice ID, which is currently being rolled out to 15 million users.

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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2016/09/28/th-sound-to-vanish-from-english-language-by-2066-because-of-mult/

The vanishing words we need to save

Robert Macfarlane collects words that describe nature and landscape – and which are dying out. He explains their power to shape our relationship with the earth itself.

Robert Macfarlane is a compiler of words: an explorer of hedgerows and roadsides, salt marshes and sea-caves. But he is also a magician, of sorts – one who weaves spells using lost phrases that recall a different connection with our landscape. In his latest book Landmarks, the British naturalist calls for “a glossary of enchantment for the whole earth, which would allow nature to talk back and would help us to listen”.

We speak on the phone the day before he is due to talk at the Hay Festival. I am sitting in my car at a rest stop next to the river Wye in Wales, opposite public toilets, trying to stay still to keep my mobile from cutting out. Macfarlane is in the kitchen of his home in Cambridge, also clinging to a patch of reception. He laughs as I describe my location. This is a man who has found peregrine falcons at a power station and water voles at a municipal dump, claiming in his 2007 book The Wild Places that “the human and the wild cannot be partitioned”.

Similarly, he doesn’t believe that the words he has collected in Landmarks are just for shepherds or hill-walkers. “I’m talking to you from my edge-of-the-suburb house in Cambridge – most people are in cities now,” he says. “The book is about all of us finding ways to celebrate and enrich the language that we have for landscape and nature.”

In Landmarks, Macfarlane pulls together nine glossaries of terms taken from 30 languages, dialects and sub-dialects around Britain and Ireland. They all describe aspects of weather, nature and terrain – and many of them are dying out, slipping out of conversation and off the tongues of those who once spoke them. They have been lost. Macfarlane wants them to be found.

He describes two of his favourites: “One is this lovely Cornish word ‘zawn’, which means a wave-smashed chasm in a sea cliff – it’s so evocative of that gaping mouth, and the power of those places,” he says. “Another is this soft, Gaelic phrase ‘rionnach maoim’, the shadows that clouds cast on moorland on a windy day. There’s something about the poetry of that, the precision and the need to compress that phenomenon down into that gorgeous soft phrase.”

In his book’s lists, he has included words coined by poets along with agricultural or geological terms. There is the ‘shepherd’s lamp’ imagined by the 19th-Century poet John Clare to describe the first star that rises after sunset, and a smattering of terms from the Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins: ‘heavengravel’ for hailstones, ‘endragoned’ describing a raging sea, and the ominous ‘doomfire’ – meaning, as Macfarlane puts it, “sunset light which has the appearance of apocalypse to it”.

Macfarlane delights in the language. “There’s just the sheer joy of exactitude; I see it as a form of beautiful elegance. These lovely poems that fold up inside these words and spring out of them like jack-in-the-boxes – they’re gorgeous forms of precision,” he says. 

The glossaries include ‘zwer’ (Exmoor dialect for “the noise made by a covey of partridges rising in flight”), ‘frazil’ (“loose, needle-like ice crystals that form into a churning slush in turbulent super-cooled water, for example in a river on a very cold night”) – and ‘blaze’, which along the North Sea coast means “to take salmon by striking them at night, by torchlight, with a three-pronged spear”.

As might be expected in Britain, there is an entire list devoted to words for rain, most of them Gaelic. From ‘virga’, meaning “observable streak or shaft of precipitation that falls from a cloud but evaporates before reaching the ground”, to a ‘beum-sléibhe’, or “sudden torrent caused by the bursting of a thundercloud”, every drop is accounted for. Some of the definitions are lyrical – like ‘smirr’, “extremely fine, misty rain, close to smoke in appearance when seen from a distance”, and the “torrent of brutal rage” that is ‘burraghlas’. Others are more prosaic, like ‘clagarnach’, Irish for “clatter of heavy rain on an iron roof”, and ‘letty’, “enough rain to make outdoor work difficult”.

But Landmarks is more than an ode to language. By enriching our vocabularies, Macfarlane believes, we can change the way we interact with our landscape. “We increasingly make do with an impoverished language for nature, a generic language: ‘field’, and ‘wood’, and ‘hill’, and ‘countryside’. It’s a very basic way of denoting, and that’s fine, and sometimes we need to speak generally,” he says. “We can’t always speak absolutely precisely. But I’m fascinated by details and by the specifics of nature, and its particularities – and language helps us to see those.”

Early in the book, Macfarlane describes flying over the Scottish Outer Hebrides in a twin-prop plane. He saw “the tawny expanse of Mointeach riabhach, the Brindled Moor: several hundred square miles of bog, hag, crag, heather, loch and lochan that make up the interior of Lewis”. Across the aisle from him, two people looked out of the window. Macfarlane recounts: “One of them laughed. ‘We’re flying over nothing!’ she said.

Seed fund

“If we just see a landscape as some kind of waste space and devoid of detail, it becomes more vulnerable to dismissal or disinterest or improper use,” Macfarlane tells me.

In Landmarks, he quotes the American essayist and farmer Wendell Berry: “People exploit what they have merely concluded to be of value, but they defend what they love, and to defend what we love we need a particularising language, for we love what we particularly know.”

A chapter in the book is dedicated to the Scottish-American John Muir, whose writings inspired the US president Theodore Roosevelt to create the country’s first national parks. “Muir gives me hope,” Macfarlane said in his talk at Hay. “His writing changed the course of landscape history. It’s the idea of hope in the dark.” He described the seeds of the bristlecone pine, which lie dormant in the soil and are germinated by forest fire. “Individual actions in culture – art, writing – can be dropped, like the pine seeds. They seem dead but decades later they can flare into life.”

Subtitled a “field guide to the literature of nature”, Landmarks is a work of great scholarship – but also a call to action. It explores “how reading can change minds, revise behaviour and shape perceptions”. And it fits within a wider resurgence of nature writing in Britain, including Costa award-winning H is for Hawk and The Shepherd’s Life, the memoir of a sheep farmer.

Macfarlane believes there is an “astonishing surging cultural energy that’s working across photography and art and in literature”. He credits it to an acute sense of loss. “It’s because we live in the shadow of destruction and damage, because we are a generation that’s grown up conscious of climate change, and that internalised anxiety at the world’s ongoing peril is a really powerful imaginative force that we don’t quite register in its full form but is deeply in us,” he says.

‘An A-Z of words lost’

Macfarlane was inspired to write the book both by discovering a “peat-deep word-hoard of Hebridean Gaelic” and after the culling of nature words such as buttercup and kingfisher from the Oxford Junior Dictionary, which he described at Hay as “an A-Z of words lost”. He thinks we can learn from how children encounter nature.

“The last chapter is about a group of children in a country park which has the busiest A road in the east of England on one side, and a hospital on the other,” he says. “It’s about the limitless wonder with which children meet even a very unwild place, which is an inspiration to all of us who’ve forgotten how to speak ‘childish’.”

Just as important as the words that are vanishing are the words being created every day. Macfarlane explains in the book that his seven-year-old son, when told there was no word for “the shining hump of water that rises above a submerged boulder in a stream”, quickly suggested ‘currentbum’. “Since the book was published, I’ve been sent many words – on postcards, and letters, from diaries and clippings, as well as emails and Twitter – and children and parents have begun to send me ones that they make up,” Macfarlane tells me.

The collecting of terms in Landmarks is not a form of hoarding, an attempt at control in the face of loss. At his Hay talk, Macfarlane expressed how he hoped the book might give new life to the place-languages within. “I want these words to be released and let their energies and their poetries run wild,” he said.

To that end, the last glossary, Childish, is left blank. It is a sign of hope. As Macfarlane says in Landmarks, “We have forgotten 10,000 words for our landscapes, but we will make 10,000 more, given time.”

His glossaries, then, are much more than vocabulary-expanding lists. This is where Macfarlane the magician takes over.

“I wanted them to become spells, really; chants, incantations – you step into them like you might step into a flowing stream and let the words run over you. They do have their own magic, which is nothing to do with me. I just put them on the page,” he says. “But they become spells.”

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http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20151126-robert-macfarlane-on-the-wild-words-were-losing?ocid=fbbrt

Juncker parla in francese al convegno: “L’inglese è lingua in uscita”

Il presidente della Commissione: “Dobbiamo abituarci al fatto che altri linguaggi ufficiali vengano utilizzati con altrettanta intensità”

Bruxelles – L’inglese è “una lingua in uscita”, e quindi meglio rivolgersi alla platea in francese. Jean-Claude Juncker con una battuta ha mandato una frecciata ai britannici che si avviano sulla strada della Brexit. Intervenendo al convegno organizzato dalla Commissione, ‘The European Pillar of Social Rights: Going forward together’, il presidente ha iniziato parlando in inglese, ma dopo pochi minuti è passato al francese, riaprendo così il dibattito sul futuro dell’utilizzo dell’inglese come lingua dell’Ue ora che il Regno Unito, unico Paese ad averlo scelto come propria lingua ufficiale, smetterà di far parte della famiglia europea.

“L’inglese è una lingua in uscita nell’Unione europea, quindi dobbiamo abituarci al fatto che altre lingue ufficiali vengano utilizzate con la stessa intensità con cui usavamo prima l’inglese, quindi parlerò in francese e forse in tedesco”, ha affermato per poi aggiungere “non parlerò però in lussemburghese”, riferendosi al fatto che il Granducato non ha chiesto che la sua lingua venisse inserita tra quelle ufficiali dell’Ue.

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http://www.eunews.it/2017/01/23/juncker-inglese-brexit/75959