Do you say what you mean?

Do you say what you mean? It might seem a strange question, but a huge amount of human communication takes place when people say the opposite of what they actually mean.

No, we're not talking about the "men are from Mars and women are from Venus idea", an idea based on the fact that men and women communicate differently. We're talking about the fact that most human communication is a co-operative effort where we deduce meaning, as much from what isn't said as from what is said.

It might seem a bit confusing at first, but think about it: you walk into a room and say "It's hot in here!" What do you expect other people in the room to do?

a)Turn the heating down?
b)Open a window?
c)Reply "Yes it is isn't it" and continue doing whatever they are doing?

In most cases we would expect someone to suggest a) or b) or at least explain why it is so hot in the room, and that's probably why we said "It's hot in here!" in the first place. So our comment was designed to elicit a response on the basis that our listeners can work out what our intention is.

In linguistics this is described as:
1. The locutionary effect - the literal meaning of our utterance
2. The illocutionary effect - what we actually mean by the utterance ie. will someone open a window please
3. The perlocutionary effect - what we want our listeners to do ie.get up, go to the window and open it.

So, what about you, do you say what you mean?

Glaswegian Interpreter - shocking to some?

It was interesting to see that Jonathan Downie, a graduate of Heriot Watt is now the worlds first "official Glaswegian interpreter" - see http://news.stv.tv/scotland/west-central/157749-parliamo-glasgow-meet-the-worlds-first-glaswegian-interpreter.

For some, the news that visitors to Glasgow need an interpreter is not surprising but for others it's a crying shame that "badly spoken English" is being promoted. (That's for those who see Scottish English as a variety of British English.)Interestingly, the concept of "good" or "bad" English tends to hold little ground in modern linguistics and is seen as a throwback to the complaint tradition where a prescriptive approach to language was the norm - telling people what they should and shouldn't do with language.

These days linguists tend to follow a descriptive approach - they try to describe what actually happens in real-life language rather than what "should" take place according to some textbook.

Personally it's a far more practical approach to language study, after all language is a vehicle for social identity, social change and individual expresion, and it's something that lives, grows, changes and develops.

Higher Education drops out

The Higher Education finance debate rages on only to add fuel to the fire over funding and the quality of education here in the UK. It's a sad state of affairs that a party which once promised to put "Education, education, education" at the heart of it's agenda now wants to make cuts in education!

Of course everyone needs to tighten the belt when the economy goes through a rough time, but it's a question of priorities.

Universities need to find cash to provide a quality student experience but this is difficult at a time when funding cuts result in staff cuts, courses being axed and perhaps most worrying if you're a happylinguist cuts in language degrees and departments.

It fails to look at the bigger picture. On one hand China and India continue to churn out graduates as quickly as they churn out goods for export, and this will result in stiff competition in the global job market in a few decades time when Chinese and Indian universities rise up the list of top notch institutions.

On the other hand, the inability of the UK to measure up to our European neighbours in terms of language skills already means that there are not enough qualified UK linguists to properly represent British companies abroad.Even the Directorate General of Translation for the EU can't find enough qualified native English speakers to work as translators!

The gap will only widen - soon it'll be an abyss - and the UK will be left even further behind, or in political terms, we could say that it will be "Dole, dole, dole" for a lot more people.

Why is learning a language such hard work?

For many people the thought of learning a new language seems a bit overwhelming, even though millions of people worldwide do exactly that when they move to new places (either because of work, family, war or natural disaster) and learn new languages.

One of the reasons why we feel that its more bother than what it's worth is that we think back to our school days - years spent learning French or German grammar and we still couldn't have a conversation with a Frenchman or a German at the end of it! Maybe we put it down to the fact that we British "just aren't good at languages."

In fact, it's more to do with the age we started learning the foreign language or the methods used to teach us. Have a look at the following clip (courtesy of Eddie Izzard and YouTube) which illustrates perfectly what I mean...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9IzDbNFDdP4

Au revoir!

No such a thing as "Five Easy Steps"

"Five Easy Steps." How many times have you read those words (or something similar) and fallen for the gimmick? Well, I've spent about five hours trying to set up a website for a Alex Carlin, and I'm still wondering which of the steps shoud be counted as the five easy ones!

I was mug enough to think that we could just follow the demo video and launch ourselves into cyber space before tea-time, only to sit back and wait for the phone calls and e-mails to start flooding in with new business! No, not quite, and no matter how many word combinations I put into the Google search bar I still can't find the site! I should have learnt from my previous "Five Easy Steps" moment when I tried in vain to get my ipod sorted out - nothing is as easy as the "plug in, click here, hey presto!" instructions.

Serves me right, after all the language of advertising is designed to make the reader feel that they're missing something essential, something that everyone else has got, something that will make life a bit easier - or in the case of this blasted website it designed prey on the weak minds of people like me and lead them down the garden path...

By the way, the website in question is for a singing teacher/vocal coach, Alex Carlin, who teaches from the Seagate Recording Studio in Dundee, Scotland, the web content is all his own work, check it out at http://www.u-learntuition.co.uk/