_Just_4_Fun_

Largely unnoticed by English speakers, our fellow Europeans are sullenly suffering the colonisation of their native languages by Anglo-American terms.

Linguistics experts met in the Swiss capital Bern on Tuesday to share ideas on how to deal with the growing language divide within French, German and Italian-speaking communities.

Who can get by these days without knowing the meaning of whistleblower, laptop, roaming or task force? They are all words that have entered into common usage in Swiss national languages.

Behind the laughter at the many comic examples of pseudo-English which have popped up, there is dismay at the unstoppable stream of borrowings and fear for the very survival of the continent’s languages.

Guest speaker Alfred Gilder, terminology chief at the French finance ministry summed it up with the battle-cry “modernise or die!”.

“If a language is not capable of creating new words to describe new advances, it will die,” he warned.

Gilder summed up his philosophy of linguistic integrity by using a drinking metaphor. “I like Bordeaux very much and I like whisky too but I would never mix the two!”

Beginning of the end

A point echoed by several speakers was that English has become so dominant in certain fields, such as finance and science, that courses in some disciplines are now exclusively being taught in English in some countries. The beginning of the end, as Gilder sees it.

The conference, attended by some 200 delegates, was organised by the Swiss Federal Chancellery.

Vice-chancellor Thomas Helbling told swissinfo.ch that Switzerland, with its tradition of language diversity had possibly less to fear from the influence of English. But he stressed that the home languages needed to be preserved.

“I definitely think that we should learn a second national language before English. It is part of our tradition and culture to speak to each other, as you can see at today’s conference where three languages are in use on the floor.”

Global dominance

Of course borrowing words and expressions from other languages is a natural function of language development and English itself has absorbed countless influences in its history – from Latin, French and Hindi, to name but a few.

What is different about the current dominance of English is that it is the first truly global language and it is spewing out words at a pace that other languages have no chance to compete with.

This rapid evolution favours those who can ride the English wave but creates a language divide, akin to the digital divide, for those who are poor in English.

Germanic expert Jürg Niederhuaser illustrated this problem neatly by quoting the head of a research department in a Basel pharmaceutical company, who said:

“In the section I lead, people like to joke that without English you won’t get so much as a cup of coffee.”

Uniformity

Bénédicte Madinier, another guardian of the French language who works for the French Ministry of Culture, spoke of the linguistic uniformity that is fast becoming established worldwide.

“It is not a question of denying the interest, the necessity of an international language of communication, a lingua franca, …. What must be avoided is that the lingua franca becomes lingua unica,” Madinier said.

Madinier has a role in the French establishment’s complex system of screening new English words and either approving them for adoption into French or coming up with a new French form.

The French can boast to have possibly the only language on the planet which put forward its own version of the word computer which is still in popular usage – “ordinateur”. But such victories are few and far between.

False friends

The English influence is so pervasive now that languages are cobbling together words that either exist in a different form or mean something quite different in English.

So you want to get your hair done? In French-speaking Switzerland you have to ask for a “shampooing” followed by a “brushing”. Those crow’s feet bothering you? It might be time for a “facelifting”.

Or perhaps you want to order an overhead projector for your speech? That will be a “beamer” to your Swiss hosts. And if you happen to point out a vintage car to a German-speaker, don't forget to call it an “oldtimer”.

Last but not least is “last but not least”, the most overused English expression among the Swiss, which pops up without fail in every speech and presentation, as any English speaker living here will testify.

A clarkston soldier is helping pick up the pieces in the Congo after a decade of civil war by teaching English.

Lieutenent Cinzia Zingone, 31, spent six weeks in Kinshasa trying to improve former guerilla fighters and soldiers' language skills.

But instead of teaching the Congolese traditional English, Cinzia concentrated on giving them a better understanding of military English jargon.

She is one of many who are helping the country get back to normal with the hope that peace will occur quicker if former guerrillas are intergrated into a United Nations force.

And she says despite the challenges she faced, she wanted to be part of bringing peace to the country.

She said: "I was delighted to be able to come and help the people move towards a peaceful country.

It was only a short course and we had to tailor it from scratch to our pupils. So it has been hard work."

But Cinzia admits one of the most difficult things she found out there was dealing with the extreme humid weather.

She said: "I don't know quite what I expected but the fact that it was terrifically hot during the day and terrifically wet at night made for a steamy atmosphere."

During her time in the country, the second poorest in the world, she even got to lead the passing out parade -the first time the Congolese had been lead by a woman on parade.

The country is about the size of Europe and consists mainly of jungle, but transportation is limited to UN or British Embassy vehicles, walking is not allowed and there are virtually no shops to visit.

She said: "I couldn't wait to get back home and away from jungle and humidity.

"The people are lovely in the Congo and I have the satisfaction of knowing that they will speak better English after the course, albeit with a Scottish accent."

Cinzia is based at the Defence School of languages at Beaconsfield where she is a military instructor.

She attended the Laurel Bank School in Glasgow before she joined the Army in 2007.

We've been talking to University of Indiana professor Michael Adams about his new book, Slang: The People's Poetry. Last week, in part one of our interview, he explained how slang balances the social ("fitting in") with the aesthetic ("standing out"). Now in part two, Adams considers what happens when slang gets enshrined in dictionaries, and how we're only now appreciating the endless variety of slang forms.

VT: Let's talk about the types of slang that get recorded in dictionaries, both slang dictionaries and mainstream dictionaries. Is there a danger of focusing on slang that is considered "dictionary-worthy," rather than on things that are more ephemeral?

MA: I don't worry about it too much, because it's the nature of slang to resist that type of authority. It would be effectively a brave new world if we had the technology to produce a dictionary that captured all ephemera. There's really no way to do it.

I don't fault the slang dictionaries any more than I would fault, say, the Oxford English Dictionary for not capturing what's going on right this instant. It isn't the OED's mission to do it. It's also true that many of the words included aren't the words that people have been using most of the time. They're the ones, in a sense, that we have the best archival record for or that people noticed for some reason. And that in itself can be revealing.

The problem with it is you don't know what's it's revealing of, because it's plucking items from a very busy background of language use. People who are making the dictionary heard or saw these things and thought they were worth including, but it's difficult to know the value of that judgment unless you know all of what was going on in the background at the same time. It's good to have the terms noted, but you have to take it, in a sense, as an argument from history, rather than an argument from the current value of language in the mouths of real speakers.

VT: When contemporary slang does make its way into major English dictionaries, it's often the subject of ridicule: how silly it is that there is an OED entry for bootylicious, for instance. For many people, modern urban slang is not considered appropriate for mainstream dictionaries.

MA: I applaud the OED for including bootylicious. I have a preoccupation with suffixes, like the -y suffix for forming adjectives. I think that, in fact, dictionary structure explains why terms like bootylicious have got to end up in the dictionary, even though they represent inadequately what the lexicographer really wants to include. I think what the lexicographer really wants to include is the suffix -licious, from delicious.

In terms of the -y suffix, for instance, you could have one really, really long entry for that suffix. My continuing research suggests that there's a book to be written about that suffix — particularly in the history of English and the changes it's undergone pragmatically. It's a big subject, and the dictionary has got to figure out a way of abstracting the information about that suffix and its uses. And in the case of -licious, there are a few forms like bootylicious that have been used so prominently, at least as far as the lexicographers can gauge, that they might deserve an entry as an example of a very prominent -licious word.

Some people might react to that and say, "Well, that's a stupid word and I can't believe the dictionary included that." The real issue is to represent something about the way language is formed in including those entries. But people might misconstrue what lexicographers are valuing about those terms when they're included. I don't see an easy way of getting around that, but I certainly don't think it's a reason not to include such words in the dictionary when lexicographers judge, usually pretty wisely, that they're worth including.

VT: In your book, you have a whole section on slangy affixes (prefixes, suffixes, and infixes). This is lexical material that is not easily made into a dictionary entry, necessarily. For instance, there's the -iz- infix (hizzouse for house) and the -diddly- infix (scrum-diddly-umptious). Is your goal there to show that the "poetic" productivity of slang can work on a sort of sub-lexical level?

MA: In a way, I think it's both sub-lexical and super-lexical. The very practice of using infixes like that can be slangy, so that's super-lexical. The same is true with suffixes like -y. The slanginess comes out of the suffixing as much as it comes out of a particular suffix that you would define. But it's also true that because those structures are so flexible and they can be used so readily on the fly or in the moment, it's easy for people to use them to come up with nonce words. They're infinitely productive.

One of the things that I argued in Slayer Slang and argue again in this book is that we think that there are constraints on these suffixes, but there really aren't. Always, eventually, we figure out a way to get outside of those constraints, so that we can make up new words. You'd think if you were looking historically at the language, you'd say, "Well, you can see what some of the rules applying to -y suffixing are. You can't add the -y suffix to a seven-syllable word." But you can, if somebody decides to do it. And in some situation where that could be a slang opportunity, it's not just that somebody could do it, somebody will do it. We just won't know about it.

VT: Or we'll know about it if we Google for it.

MA: Well, exactly, and as I say in the book, one of my most astonishing adventures over the last several years has been just plugging these in, really just saying, "Now surely, this can't take the -y suffix," and then finding out about fifty percent of the time that it can. Fifty percent of the time it doesn't, but there's no natural reason that the words that I tested that haven't appeared with a -y suffix yet couldn't take that -y suffix.

VT: How much do you think that this actually changes our perception of slang, the ability to determine the productivity of forms that might not have ever been described or analyzed before but can easily be found now through online searches?

MA: It's clearly true that now that we can look back into things, suddenly we discover that what we thought was new just isn't new, that these things have been going on for a long time. And we discover that where there's a morphological possibility, for instance, there's very likely to have been the fulfillment of that possibility. Somebody will have tried to do it or will have done it, if it's structurally allowable.

So it's really a matter, as you say, of discovering what's already there and having that underscore the natural creative impulse in language use It's not as though people suddenly became creative, just because they had new media or just because society changed in some way that then empowered people to be creative in language. In fact, they've always been pretty good at it. I think that's why I get to the point finally that this is somehow a matter of language structure. It's not just a matter of superficial usage. This is something that's in the grain of language, that we can do these things.

In our continuing saga to become isolated from the rest of the world, researchers are developing software that can analyze a person’s speech patterns to tell how they are feeling.
Your Computer May Soon Be Your Therapist
People often complain nowadays that computers are replacing personal interactions. Well, if MIT’s Media Lab succeeds in one of their latest development projects, computers may eventually replace therapists.

Professor Sandy Pentland, a researcher with the MIT Media Lab, has a group of researchers working to develop algorithms in speech recognition software that can help determine whether a person is feeling anxious, awkward, disconnected from others, or even depressed. Most speech recognition software is focused on turning phrases and words into written text, but Pentlant’s scientists are fine-tuning the algorithms to analyze very subtle cues within a person’s speech patterns that can reveal a lot about their moods and feelings. Cogito Health of Charlestown MA, is employing Pentland’s research in their voice-analysis software program that screens telephone callers for depression.

Psychiatrists have identified a characteristic pattern recognized in the speech of many people diagnosed with clinical depression. They speak slowly, haltingly, in a quiet monotone. Joshua Feast, Cogito’s CEO, is working with his colleagues to train computers to recognize these vocal patterns in recorded audio samples. Feast says that the software, after it is perfected, could be a valuable tool for doctors and psychiatrists to use when managing patients dealing with chronic disease, which often leads to despair and depression. Read more on how does speech recognition work.

In many disease-management programs, specially trained nurses call patients regularly to check on them, see if they are taking their medication, and be available to answer questions the patients may have. But symptoms of depression are not easy to identify over the telephone, and nurses are not always trained to recognize them in speech patterns. Feast claims that voice analysis software that detects moods would provide a noninvasive method for nurses to be able to screen for depression when they make their routine checkup calls. "If you’re a nurse and you’re trying to deal with a patient with long-term diabetes, it's very hard to tell if a person is depressed," says Feast. "We try to help nurses detect possible mood disorders in patients that have chronic disease."

Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer had a similar idea recently when it developed a voice analysis software program that could detect the early signs of Parkinson’s disease. Scientists designed the software specifically to identify tiny tremors within a patient’s speech patterns, which were able to offer clues to help doctors gauge their physical responses to certain medications.

Cogito Health is working to refine their software to detect specific patterns in audio recordings to measure the consistency of a speaker in tone, energy, fluidity, and engagement in the conversation - such as whether a person responds with a simple acknowledgment or even silence, rather than responding by talking. Pentland explains that the software doesn’t listen to the words, but rather to the patterns within the speech. By measuring the signals contained in the speech, doctors can tell what is going on in the patient’s mind. Such technology can help doctors monitor the long-term progress of patients, rather than seeing them only every few weeks or months.

Cogito is conducting a large-scale software trial using a collection of hundreds of telephone conversations between patients and nurses. After giving the patients follow-up questions to determine which of the patients were depressed, researchers used the software to evaluate the audio recordings to see if it was able to identify the depressed patients accurately. Cogito plans to design software that can recognize other mood disorders within at-risk groups of people, such as post-traumatic stress affecting soldiers. Being able to detect psychological despair early and provide treatment can make an enormous difference in the outcome of post-traumatic situations.

The trials are still ongoing, but so far Feast says the results are encouraging. First results are expected to be published in 2010

Computers have affected every aspect of our day-to-day life. Let’s look into the advantages of computers.
Advantages of Computers
The present global age is the consequence of the computer age. A computer is an electronic device that stores and processes data, according to a list of instructions. It allows a user to manipulate data easily. The speed of performance of a computer is incomparable. The computer and Internet have affected our way of working, communicating, playing and also writing. In fact, computers are used in every aspect of life today.

Advantages of Computers

Because of the many advantages of a computer, it has become an important household item. A computer operated by an individual without any specific computer operator is called as a personal computer (PC). A PC can be a desktop or a laptop computer and can be used at home or at office. As per the requirement of the user, softwares are installed in a PC. Let’s discuss the advantages of computers.

One can write more effectively by means of a computer. There are tools like spelling and grammar checker, thesaurus and dictionary, installed in the computer. Thus, it takes less time to proofread a written document and also, there is no need to open up a dictionary book to look for meanings of words. Typing is much faster than writing on a paper. If there is a need for reorganizing the sentences or paragraphs, one can cut and paste and make the necessary changes. Thus, overall a computer allows the user to create documents, edit, print, and store them so that they can be retrieved later.

Using a computer, one can remain connected to the world through Internet. Internet is a network of computers that communicates via the Internet Protocol Suite (TCP/IP). The World Wide Web (WWW) or simply web is a huge resource of information that can be accessed via the Internet. To mention a few of the resources, there are electronic mail (e-mail), file transferring and sharing, online chat and gaming. The Internet allows people from around the world to share knowledge, ideas and experiences in any field.

E-mail is a method of communication used globally and is provided with a system of creating, storing and forwarding mails. It may consist of text messages with attachments of audio-visual clips. One can also download or upload files using the Internet. There are also facilities like online chatting available on the Internet. As compared to telephonic conversation, both e-mail and online chat are cost saving. Online gaming is another important resource of the WWW. Many online games are available, which are of common interest for any age group. In addition, one can read current news, check weather conditions, plan vacations and make hotel and travel reservations, find out about diseases and treatment methods, conduct transactions, learn about specific countries and their cultures, seek jobs, buy products, etc via the Internet.

Nowadays, computers are widely used for education and training purposes. In schools, computer education has been made compulsory to spread awareness about computers. As a matter of fact, computers have become a learning tool for children. Also, there are many universities that provide online degrees, which is very advantageous for those people staying in the remote areas and for the disabled. In fact, online education is one of the most flexible and convenient forms of learning. One can take the benefit of such online degree programs staying at home without the need of relocation. Computers are also used for training purposes. Many companies use them to train their staffs.

However, in spite of the many advantages of computers, there are some disadvantages that cannot be ignored. The easy access to information via Internet has made students lazy in terms of their education since they are able to download information without exploring their topic of research. They also use computers for mathematical tables and calculations without actually solving the problems. Also, it is important for parents to keep a check on the browsing habits of their children as some websites are not meant for their viewing. Other disadvantages include identity theft and virus threat. Computers viruses are harmful to the systems and can be transferred from one computer system to another.