Do you speak Starbucksian? I am not simply referring to the ubiquitous, upscale coffee chain’s now famous, and much-written-and talked-about words for their small, medium, and large cups (– i.e. tall, grande, and (trademarked) venti – words that many people find pretentious to use, but actually have some basis for being: for example, a “tall” is 12 oz., two ounces more than the usual New York coffee cup. (See “grande” and “venti” explanation further below).
What I’m concerned about today is word order -- the word order necessary to get the drink the way you want it: take what my daughter, Alice, ordered the other day: a tall, sugar-free, skim, 2-Splenda, no-whip, cinnamon Dolce Latte. Alice is 17 and has been drinking coffee for about a year – when did she acquire such verbal, “barista-speak” sophistication?
In 2005 Starbucks put out a free guide to their beverages called, “Make It Your Drink” – a tiny treasure I happen to own. Some of my foreign students back then would go to their nearest Starbucks but felt their English, and especially Starbucksian English, was too weak to order much beyond plain coffee or tea. (And as a Spanish-speaking student once explained – and marketing students, please take note: “I always order the ‘grande’ size because it makes me feel at home.” “Grande,” as you probably know, means “big” in Spanish and Italian and at 16 oz. is quite big; but the biggest size, “venti,” is 20 oz. and means “twenty” in Italian.)
The little booklet, however, offered a ray of linguistic light: first came the glossary that defined the various terms – doppio, shaken, Americano, macchiato, etc. It then explained the order in which it was best to say them: what type of cup (must specify for “iced”); what type of coffee (caf or decaf) and/or how many shots of espresso; what size cup; what kind of syrup (maple, hazelnut, vanilla, etc.); what type of artificial sweetener; what type of milk (whole, 2 percent, skim, soy, etc.) and what kind of drink itself – cappuccino, frappuccino, latte, etc. (Italian drink names add that panache that English just can’t match.)
So for one who prefers a simple and relatively inexpensive “tall Earl Grey,” I am always amused by others’ ability to rattle off such word-order-perfect drinks like “an iced, decaf, triple, grande, sugar-free vanilla, soy, 1 Equal, extra-hot mocha,” for roughly 75 cents per adjective.
Word order in general is interesting, because it is so unconscious. For instance, in my first sentence I called Starbucks the “ubiquitous, upscale” coffee chain. Why didn’t I call it the “upscale, ubiquitous” coffee chain? Do I hear, “Because it SOUNDS better?” Yes, but WHY does it sound better? Why does “one, big, red balloon” sound better than “red, big, one balloon?” It’s what your English teacher might have at one time (when they taught grammar) called “syntax.” It’s the set of internal grammatical rules that are rarely taught and mostly just absorbed through listening and speaking a language.
Still, linguists and grammarians have taken some pains to analyze English word order and, though they are not in total agreement, they have come up with some basic structural guidelines. Take adjectives: “One giant, fresh cup of steaming-hot, black, shade-grown South African coffee” is following the rule of “number, size, age, appearance, color, origin, material.”
Outside of places like Starbucks, we normally keep our adjectives limited to three, tops, to describe something: “the fabulous, new, Scorcese movie;” “a sleek, antique, red Jaguar;” “comfortable, worn-out, leather shoes;” these are examples of a general word order placement that goes: opinion, dimension, age, shape, color, origin, material. Sort of like the old Burger King ad: two, all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun.
Now let’s try word order of a different sort. Which (below) sounds better?
a) I take the train every day to work;
b) I take every day the train to work; or
c) I take the train to work every day.
If English is your first language, you probably, unhesitatingly picked c). If you picked b), you’ve got Germanic ancestors calling you; and likewise, if you picked a) you’ve got some Latin blood. Those languages have different word orders from English, which is what adds to the “foreign-ness” sound when we try speaking their languages, or vice-versa.
The subtle choices in those sentences above boil down to Place and Time. Although in English we generally say, “time and place” as an expression, when it comes to word order, we put “Place” over “Time.” That is, “I go to the movies (place) every Wednesday (time).” Try adding more detail, and the order remains: “I go to the movies in the city, down in the Village, at 13th and Broadway, at the Loew’s 4-story multiplex every first Wednesday of the month at 6 p.m.” Place-place-place-place before time, time, time, time, with each phrase getting more and more specific.
Anyone who has studied French, Spanish, or Italian knows soon after cracking open the textbook that adjectives normally go after the noun – as in “sweater red,” instead of our “red sweater.” They also put prepositions like “from” or “at” at the beginning of sentences where we have switched to putting them at the end, if at all: “Where do you come from?” and “What time is the train?” in Spanish come out, “From where do you come?” and “At what time is the train?”
Some of my young, elementary school students who have now been in this country long enough to master English word order have begun to unconsciously occasionally slip in English word order while speaking their native language – much to the amusement, shock, or horror of their parents.
So whether or not you speak proper Starbucksian, you now know basic Starbucksian word order – and probably even some Italian names for coffee drinks. And just knowing that should help you, if you’re ever in doubt, sidle up to the counter, give a venti-sized grin and ask for any big-beige-frothy-artificially sweetened-or-calorie-laden drink you want. Cheers.
Sunday, January 28, 2007
Sunday, January 21, 2007
English as a Spelling NITEmare
A response last week from Dan from Los Angeles on the relative difficulty of learning Spanish vs. English:
There's a good case to be made that from the Martian perspective (someone equally unfamiliar with both languages), English is far more irregular and hence harder to learn. Look at our spelling: tough, bough, cough . . . lotion, ocean . . . lazy, daisy . . . Try explaining that to the Spanish.
Thanks for your insights, Dan. And Language Lady agrees with you and your Martians that, on the whole, Spanish is easier to learn as a foreign language than English, due to the regularity of Spanish spelling and pronunciation. The point I wanted to make last week was specifically about English GRAMMAR, and the verb declensions, which were simplified to accommodate all the various cultures living, conquering, or trying to do business in England hundreds of years ago; beyond that, the spelling, pronunciation, numerous verb tenses, and staggering amount of words alone all make me happy that English is my first language.
Dan’s comment (re tough, bough, cough, etc.) reminds me of a little ditty on the idiosyncrasies of English spelling and pronunciation written by an English author, T.S. Wyatt, in 1954 and often found in linguistics textbooks:
RECOVERING SOUNDS FROM ORTHOGRAPHY
BRUSH UP YOUR ENGLISH
I take it you already know
Of tough and bough and cough and dough.
Others may stumble but not you,
On hiccough, though, lough (loch) and through.
Well done! And now you wish, perhaps,
To learn of less familiar traps.
Beware of heard, a dreadful word
That looks like beard and sounds like bird,
And dead--it's said like bed, not bead.
For goodness's sake, don't call it deed!
Watch out for meat and great and threat:
They rhyme with suite and straight and debt.
A moth is not a moth in mother,
Nor both in bother, broth in brother,
And here is not a match for there,
Nor dear and fear for bear and pear,
And then there's dose and rose and lose--
Just look them up--and goose and choose,
And cork and work and card and ward,
And font and front and word and sword,
And do and go and thwart and cart.
Come, come, I've hardly made a start.
A dreadful language? Man alive,
I'd mastered it when I was five.
Yes, English spelling is a notorious nightmare (though, as Wyatt pointed out, we do seem to learn it fairly quickly) – with most of our everyday words the orthographic results of some loose decisions made some 600 years ago. It started with a hodge-podge of West Saxon spellings and pronunciations; then post-Norman Conquest medieval monks changed certain spellings to look more like the new prestige language, Anglo-Norman French: for example, “cwen” became “queen;” then, around the 1400s people started pronouncing words differently: “great,” which was originally said, “gray-aht” became “great” as we know it, while “bread” changed from the Old English “bray-at” to Middle English “breed” and then to our current short-e’d “bread.” And those nasty “gh” spellings were trying to convey the gutteral Germanic “ch” sound, as in “Achtung!” But trying to understand the reasons for all English’s spelling conundrums doesn’t make it easier. We just have to accept that English spelling is what happens when conquest happens and no one is really in charge …
George Bernard Shaw, the famous English playwright, once wrote a plea for spelling reform by demonstrating that the way our language stood now, you could spell “fish” as “ghoti:”
“gh” as in “rough”
“o” as in “women”
“ti” as in “nation.”
Spelling reform has been tried at various times, but it just doesn’t work – at this point, there are too many English speakers with different accents and pronunciations. What if they standardized a phonetic spelling so we all pronounced words like Texans? And do you think the British could stand a phonetic alphabet that sounded like standard American? Or vice versa? It’s one thing for American spelling to remove the “u” in the British “honour;” another thing all together to try to force the Brits to say “On-er” instead of “on-ah.”
Which is not to say we won’t ever see any simplification -- advertising and commerce will see to that. The main spelling shifts I’ve seen in my lifetime have come about through just such routes. Take: donut, lite, nite. Triboro and thru. I credit Dunkin’ Donuts (born in the 1950s, part of mass culture by the 1970s) with the popularization of “donut” from the original “doughnut” – a variant sanctioned by the dictionary for over 25 years. “Nite” and “lite” are also listed in the dictionary as informal, simplified spellings of “night” and “light;” even so, the dictionary only recognizes “nite” as a noun -- as in TV’s “Nick at Nite” -- and not as an adjective -- as in Nite Lite, though there are now dozens of products, company names, catalogues, and TV shows with the name, “Nite Lite.” Meanwhile, the dictionary specifies that “lite” is mainly used in advertising to describe something with less substance or fewer calories – as in lite music and lite beer.
The words, “Triboro” and “thru” are also now commonplace, informal substitutes for “Triborough” (as in the bridge spanning three boroughs of New York City) and “through.” “Boro” is not in the dictionary but it may be soon: as part of a name, “boro” can be found in a bike tour group, a bar and grill, a bookstore, and so on; but “borough” is still the more standard --nor are we close to being thru with “through.” Still, perhaps with the speed that technology changes things, it will not be too many years from now that all “gh” words will be obsolete, and the variant forms the new standard ones. Perhaps in the future linguists will refer to the early 21st century as a period of The Great Silent GH Exodus.
For now, the word to watch is “you” (and “yours” and “your”): as text messaging and email are on their way to making this Y-O-U spelling look archaic to anyone under the age of 25; we can start watching to see when the dictionary accepts this second person pronoun’s variant -- the simple, lowercase “u”.
So keep ur eyes peeled! And good nite.
There's a good case to be made that from the Martian perspective (someone equally unfamiliar with both languages), English is far more irregular and hence harder to learn. Look at our spelling: tough, bough, cough . . . lotion, ocean . . . lazy, daisy . . . Try explaining that to the Spanish.
Thanks for your insights, Dan. And Language Lady agrees with you and your Martians that, on the whole, Spanish is easier to learn as a foreign language than English, due to the regularity of Spanish spelling and pronunciation. The point I wanted to make last week was specifically about English GRAMMAR, and the verb declensions, which were simplified to accommodate all the various cultures living, conquering, or trying to do business in England hundreds of years ago; beyond that, the spelling, pronunciation, numerous verb tenses, and staggering amount of words alone all make me happy that English is my first language.
Dan’s comment (re tough, bough, cough, etc.) reminds me of a little ditty on the idiosyncrasies of English spelling and pronunciation written by an English author, T.S. Wyatt, in 1954 and often found in linguistics textbooks:
RECOVERING SOUNDS FROM ORTHOGRAPHY
BRUSH UP YOUR ENGLISH
I take it you already know
Of tough and bough and cough and dough.
Others may stumble but not you,
On hiccough, though, lough (loch) and through.
Well done! And now you wish, perhaps,
To learn of less familiar traps.
Beware of heard, a dreadful word
That looks like beard and sounds like bird,
And dead--it's said like bed, not bead.
For goodness's sake, don't call it deed!
Watch out for meat and great and threat:
They rhyme with suite and straight and debt.
A moth is not a moth in mother,
Nor both in bother, broth in brother,
And here is not a match for there,
Nor dear and fear for bear and pear,
And then there's dose and rose and lose--
Just look them up--and goose and choose,
And cork and work and card and ward,
And font and front and word and sword,
And do and go and thwart and cart.
Come, come, I've hardly made a start.
A dreadful language? Man alive,
I'd mastered it when I was five.
Yes, English spelling is a notorious nightmare (though, as Wyatt pointed out, we do seem to learn it fairly quickly) – with most of our everyday words the orthographic results of some loose decisions made some 600 years ago. It started with a hodge-podge of West Saxon spellings and pronunciations; then post-Norman Conquest medieval monks changed certain spellings to look more like the new prestige language, Anglo-Norman French: for example, “cwen” became “queen;” then, around the 1400s people started pronouncing words differently: “great,” which was originally said, “gray-aht” became “great” as we know it, while “bread” changed from the Old English “bray-at” to Middle English “breed” and then to our current short-e’d “bread.” And those nasty “gh” spellings were trying to convey the gutteral Germanic “ch” sound, as in “Achtung!” But trying to understand the reasons for all English’s spelling conundrums doesn’t make it easier. We just have to accept that English spelling is what happens when conquest happens and no one is really in charge …
George Bernard Shaw, the famous English playwright, once wrote a plea for spelling reform by demonstrating that the way our language stood now, you could spell “fish” as “ghoti:”
“gh” as in “rough”
“o” as in “women”
“ti” as in “nation.”
Spelling reform has been tried at various times, but it just doesn’t work – at this point, there are too many English speakers with different accents and pronunciations. What if they standardized a phonetic spelling so we all pronounced words like Texans? And do you think the British could stand a phonetic alphabet that sounded like standard American? Or vice versa? It’s one thing for American spelling to remove the “u” in the British “honour;” another thing all together to try to force the Brits to say “On-er” instead of “on-ah.”
Which is not to say we won’t ever see any simplification -- advertising and commerce will see to that. The main spelling shifts I’ve seen in my lifetime have come about through just such routes. Take: donut, lite, nite. Triboro and thru. I credit Dunkin’ Donuts (born in the 1950s, part of mass culture by the 1970s) with the popularization of “donut” from the original “doughnut” – a variant sanctioned by the dictionary for over 25 years. “Nite” and “lite” are also listed in the dictionary as informal, simplified spellings of “night” and “light;” even so, the dictionary only recognizes “nite” as a noun -- as in TV’s “Nick at Nite” -- and not as an adjective -- as in Nite Lite, though there are now dozens of products, company names, catalogues, and TV shows with the name, “Nite Lite.” Meanwhile, the dictionary specifies that “lite” is mainly used in advertising to describe something with less substance or fewer calories – as in lite music and lite beer.
The words, “Triboro” and “thru” are also now commonplace, informal substitutes for “Triborough” (as in the bridge spanning three boroughs of New York City) and “through.” “Boro” is not in the dictionary but it may be soon: as part of a name, “boro” can be found in a bike tour group, a bar and grill, a bookstore, and so on; but “borough” is still the more standard --nor are we close to being thru with “through.” Still, perhaps with the speed that technology changes things, it will not be too many years from now that all “gh” words will be obsolete, and the variant forms the new standard ones. Perhaps in the future linguists will refer to the early 21st century as a period of The Great Silent GH Exodus.
For now, the word to watch is “you” (and “yours” and “your”): as text messaging and email are on their way to making this Y-O-U spelling look archaic to anyone under the age of 25; we can start watching to see when the dictionary accepts this second person pronoun’s variant -- the simple, lowercase “u”.
So keep ur eyes peeled! And good nite.
Sunday, January 14, 2007
“Why Can’t Spanish Be More Like English?”
It was Sunday night, that notorious time when a student realizes that certain homework requirements have not been met. Thus, my disgruntled teenager, Nick, plopped himself down on the couch so I could quiz him on the Spanish past tense verbs. At that moment, Nick was pretty much “disgusted” (his word) with the whole language: “There’s like 25 ways to say one word,” he complained. Spanish verb forms, like the Latin ones they grew from, give each “person” (I, you, he, etc.) a different ending. English, on the other hand, simplified the whole thing long ago.
Compare:
To Speak (past tense)
I spoke
You spoke
He/she/it spoke
We spoke
They spoke
Not bad! As long as a person remembers that the past tense is “spoke” and not, say, “speaked,” getting it right is a sure thing. In Spanish, it’s a different case:
Hablar (To Speak, past tense)
(I) Yo hable
(You – familiar) Tu hablaste
(You – formal) Usted hablo
(He/she – there is no “it”) El/ella hablo
(We) Nosotros hablamos
(You, familiar & plural) Vosotros hablasteis
(You, formal & plural) Ustedes hablaron
(They, masculine & feminine) Ellos/ellas hablaron
Even if your eyes just skim over that last part, it’s clear at a glance that English takes home the Simplicity Prize.
Not that this simplicity came overnight: it took every bit of 300 years, and then some, to change the mind-boggling complexities of Old English grammar into the comparatively streamlined Modern English grammar. Old English was a West Germanic dialect spoken from roughly 400-1100 A.D. and had all the personal pronouns that Spanish still has, masculine and feminine nouns, and – most difficult of all -- five fully inflected grammatical cases; (if you don’t know what that means, you probably don’t want to know, at least right now.)
Suffice it to say, without the benefit of Old English as Second Language lessons, it was a hard language for foreigners to master. And for a good long while, England was a veritable polyglot nation. Norman French (native tongue of William the Conqueror, who sailed from Normandy, France and conquered England in 1066) was the language of the nobility, government and literature, and later science and commerce; meanwhile, Latin was the language of the Church. At the same time, there were parts of England where commoners still spoke the Danish or Norwegian from their Viking forbears. And each of the 25 English counties, from Berkshire to Yorkshire, had its own local Old English dialect as well.
All this multiculturalism took a toll on good ol’ Old English and got what I call the big Linguistic Shakedown. Basically, people crossing boundaries and language borders to raid, trade, marry or otherwise communicate started speaking the most basic English in order to be understood. Sort of like tourists do when they go to another country and can’t speak the local language. In time, the simplifications simply became standard. Just one “you”; no more case endings, no more adjectives that have to modify their nouns, and really easy declensions (I do, you do, etc), and adding “s” to make nouns plural – though some Old English irregular plurals have hung on – like men, women and children.
Of course, understanding why English grammar is comparatively easy compared to Spanish does not do Nick any good. Even if I tell him that Spanish is a dialect of Latin and took out some of the harder parts of that Mother Tongue, he is not going to feel any better. Spanish never got the Linguistic Shakedown that English did because it was adopted by the King of Castile, in Spain, and then established as the principal language of government and trade; later, explorers and conquistadors took Spanish overseas – to Latin America and other places, without any problem. It’s now one of the most widely spoken (close to 400 million native speakers worldwide) and widely studied languages in the world.
So … statistically, the chances that Nick will eventually master those past tense verbs are pretty good. But for now, Nick sees little future with the past.
Compare:
To Speak (past tense)
I spoke
You spoke
He/she/it spoke
We spoke
They spoke
Not bad! As long as a person remembers that the past tense is “spoke” and not, say, “speaked,” getting it right is a sure thing. In Spanish, it’s a different case:
Hablar (To Speak, past tense)
(I) Yo hable
(You – familiar) Tu hablaste
(You – formal) Usted hablo
(He/she – there is no “it”) El/ella hablo
(We) Nosotros hablamos
(You, familiar & plural) Vosotros hablasteis
(You, formal & plural) Ustedes hablaron
(They, masculine & feminine) Ellos/ellas hablaron
Even if your eyes just skim over that last part, it’s clear at a glance that English takes home the Simplicity Prize.
Not that this simplicity came overnight: it took every bit of 300 years, and then some, to change the mind-boggling complexities of Old English grammar into the comparatively streamlined Modern English grammar. Old English was a West Germanic dialect spoken from roughly 400-1100 A.D. and had all the personal pronouns that Spanish still has, masculine and feminine nouns, and – most difficult of all -- five fully inflected grammatical cases; (if you don’t know what that means, you probably don’t want to know, at least right now.)
Suffice it to say, without the benefit of Old English as Second Language lessons, it was a hard language for foreigners to master. And for a good long while, England was a veritable polyglot nation. Norman French (native tongue of William the Conqueror, who sailed from Normandy, France and conquered England in 1066) was the language of the nobility, government and literature, and later science and commerce; meanwhile, Latin was the language of the Church. At the same time, there were parts of England where commoners still spoke the Danish or Norwegian from their Viking forbears. And each of the 25 English counties, from Berkshire to Yorkshire, had its own local Old English dialect as well.
All this multiculturalism took a toll on good ol’ Old English and got what I call the big Linguistic Shakedown. Basically, people crossing boundaries and language borders to raid, trade, marry or otherwise communicate started speaking the most basic English in order to be understood. Sort of like tourists do when they go to another country and can’t speak the local language. In time, the simplifications simply became standard. Just one “you”; no more case endings, no more adjectives that have to modify their nouns, and really easy declensions (I do, you do, etc), and adding “s” to make nouns plural – though some Old English irregular plurals have hung on – like men, women and children.
Of course, understanding why English grammar is comparatively easy compared to Spanish does not do Nick any good. Even if I tell him that Spanish is a dialect of Latin and took out some of the harder parts of that Mother Tongue, he is not going to feel any better. Spanish never got the Linguistic Shakedown that English did because it was adopted by the King of Castile, in Spain, and then established as the principal language of government and trade; later, explorers and conquistadors took Spanish overseas – to Latin America and other places, without any problem. It’s now one of the most widely spoken (close to 400 million native speakers worldwide) and widely studied languages in the world.
So … statistically, the chances that Nick will eventually master those past tense verbs are pretty good. But for now, Nick sees little future with the past.
Monday, January 01, 2007
Auld Lang … Hogmanay?
“Hog-ma-nay?”
“How do you spell that?”
“What is it again?”
“Hogmanay. H-O-G-M-A-N-A-Y.”
This past Friday, December 29, was my sister’s birthday and I had driven up to her home in the wireless wilds of the northwest woods of Massachusetts to celebrate with her, her family, and assorted friends. As a way of extending the evening into what became the early morning, we played “Dictionary,” the game in which one person searches the dictionary for a word that no one else knows; while everyone else writes their own anonymous definitions for the word on separate pieces of paper, the word selector writes the real meaning on his own; then the word selector collects and reads aloud all definitions, sneaking in the official one too. People then vote on the definition most likely to be the word’s real meaning. That evening, the randomly chosen – and amazingly fitting -- word was “Hogmanay.”
None of us supposedly well-traveled, well-educated individuals had ever heard of this weird word, which was spelled with a capital H. It naturally lent itself to such porcine-associated definitions as:
“Asking a pig for permission (see: hog/may);
*A large swine-breeding facility;
*The relationship between man and hog; farmed pigs.
Others thought the hog relationship was perhaps a little too obvious and went other, more random meanings:
*A threatening declaration as a result of an irrational, negative emotion;
*A large purple sweater, loosely knit; orig: Kenya;
*The debris that falls out from between the treads of shoes or boots.
In trying to guess the real definition, no one gave the slightest consideration to the seemingly random: “The eve of New Year’s Day. Scottish. Origin: obscure.” All the other definitions seemed to hint at some truth or other, but not that one.
And yet that was exactly the definition given by my sister’s 40-year-old Miriam- Webster’s dictionary. We laughed off the Scots’ odd name for “New Year’s Eve” and went to bed.
Meanwhile, little did we know that on that same evening over in Scotland the thousand-year-old, originally pagan Hogmanay celebration was already under way: in Edinburgh, the annual torchlight parade had kicked off the three-day event with a horde of men dressed as Vikings and carrying torches through the town, while a crowd of some 15,000 strong from Scotland and all over the world followed behind to see the ceremonial burning of the Viking long-boat on the top of the city’s Calton Hill.
Wikipedia’s suggested etymology of Hogmanay (pronounced Hug-M’nay, according to a friend’s Scottish husband) may have come from Old French(via the Normans who settled in England in the 11th century who trickled up to Scotland, perhaps?), from the phrase, “au gui mener,” meaning “to lead to the mistletoe.” (Well, it’s possible, considering the pagan reverence for the evergreen plant that they believed held health and fertility powers.) Wikipedia also said that
Hogmanay could be from Scottish Gaelic for “Og Mhadaninn,” meaning, “new morning.”
One of the main customs of Hogmanay is for children to go from house to house asking for presents; it is also traditional for adult Scots to go visiting from house to house (without asking for presents). Some Scottish-American friends of ours keep up the Hogmanay “foot first,” luck-bringing tradition that requires a (preferably) dark-haired (blond-haired would imply Viking – enemy – descent) and (preferably) tall and handsome man (yes, only men -- go ahead and boo, ladies) to be the first person over the threshold each New Year’s Day, and for the man (or teenager or little boy) to bring with him something to eat, something to drink, and some fuel -- traditionally, a lump of coal.
The http://www.hogmanay.net/ site lists all the goings-on in Edinburgh over the New Year holiday: concerts, a “Night Afore” party, revels, fireworks, runs, a bike triathlon, and even a “dogmanay” – a dog sled race with Alaskan huskies. And there are the fires -- big-big bonfires – originally to ward off those evil spirits that started haunting the pagans back around Halloween. So, together with bonfires and fireworks, imagine helmeted Vikings and long torchlights; bagpipers, drummers, fireworks, effigies … THAT is Hogmanay! And up until about twenty years ago in Scotland this event outranked Christmas, which was still a regular working day even in the 1970s. Nowadays, Christmas and Hogmanay are both national holidays, though Hogmanay no doubt draws in more tourists.
My question is, why didn’t Hogmanay make it to the United States? Why, given the amount of Americans with Scottish ancestry, is this word and festival so little known? If the Scottish could bring us plaid skirts and bagpipe parades, why not Homanay? To me, the only off-putting part of it is the sound of the word – so awkward and giving no clue to its real meaning; but could that have been enough to keep the Scots from transplanting this tradition when they started coming to America some two hundred years ago? (Their arrival began before Christmas was firmly established here.) Perhaps if the holiday had had a better name or marketing campaign, we’d be saying, “Happy Hogmanay” today.
Still, if the United States has lost out on Hogmanay – and perhaps small towns and cities are better off without the Viking hordes and torches setting fire to longboats on the edges of town – at least we have one other Scottish New Year’s tradition to salute: “Auld Lang Syne.”
This 18th century Scottish song is heard, played and sung (sometimes drunkenly) at the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve all across the U.S. – on TV, at fancy balls, at family firesides. Credit for this American New Year’s anthem -- as unifying a force as noisemakers and confetti – must first go to Scotland’s Robert Burns (1759-1796), who breathed new life into the otherwise dead and buried words and tune, written anonymously long before; more recent credit must go as well as to the Canadian bandleader, Guy Lombardo (1902-1977), whose rendition of this song marked midnight on New Years Eve, first on American radio and later on TV, from roughly 1930-1970. By now, it’s the song that everyone sort of mumbles along to until getting to the words, “auld lang syne.”
Perhaps the song has survived because the tune is slow, you can drape your arm around friend or stranger for one brief, bonding moment while you sing; and no matter how much champagne you’ve had, few will notice if you skip or hum the words, because so few people know them all anyway.
Here, for the record, are the words – so you can resolve (and no doubt break the resolution) to learn them for next year’s celebration … Although Americans are happy enough to get through the first verse and chorus, this being a language column, I’ve given you the song in its old Scots entirety – with my own rough translations – thanks to Hogmanay.net
Auld Lang Syne (resurrected from an old Scottish poem and traditional melody) by Robert (aka Rabbie) Burns, 1759-1796
Should auld acquaintance be forgot, And never brought to mind? Should auld acquaintance be forgot, And days of auld lang syne?
(Should old friends be forgotten and never thought of? Should old friends be forgotten and days (literally: “of old long since.”)
CHORUS: For auld lang syne, my dear, For auld lang syne, We'll tak a cup of kindness yet, For auld lang syne!
(For old times gone, my ear; for old time’s gone, we’ll drink a cup of ale, for (approx) old times gone.)
And surely ye'll be your pint-stowp, And surely I'll be mine, And we'll tak a cup o kindness yet, For auld lang syne!
(And surely you’ll pay for your tankard of ale, and surely I’ll pay for mine; and we’ll take a cup of kindness/ale, for old times gone.)
We twa hae run about the braes, And pou'd the gowans fine, But we've wander'd monie a weary fit, Sin auld lang syne.
(We two have run about the hills, and pulled the daisies fine; but we’ve wandered many a weary foot, since the days so long ago.)
We twa hae paidl'd in the burn Frae morning sun till dine, But seas between us braid hae roar'd Sin auld lang syne.
(We two have paddled in the stream from noon til dinner, but seas between us wide have roared since days of long ago.)
And there's a hand my trusty fiere, And gie's a hand o thine, And we'll tak a right guid-willie waught, For auld lang syne
(And there’s a hand my trusty friend, and you give your hand to me;
And we’ll take a right good drink … for old times gone.)
And from the Westchester highlands of Larchmont, the Language Lady wishes you all “a right-good willie-waught” (“waught” a great expression!) and a cup o’ kindness in any form, for 2007!
“How do you spell that?”
“What is it again?”
“Hogmanay. H-O-G-M-A-N-A-Y.”
This past Friday, December 29, was my sister’s birthday and I had driven up to her home in the wireless wilds of the northwest woods of Massachusetts to celebrate with her, her family, and assorted friends. As a way of extending the evening into what became the early morning, we played “Dictionary,” the game in which one person searches the dictionary for a word that no one else knows; while everyone else writes their own anonymous definitions for the word on separate pieces of paper, the word selector writes the real meaning on his own; then the word selector collects and reads aloud all definitions, sneaking in the official one too. People then vote on the definition most likely to be the word’s real meaning. That evening, the randomly chosen – and amazingly fitting -- word was “Hogmanay.”
None of us supposedly well-traveled, well-educated individuals had ever heard of this weird word, which was spelled with a capital H. It naturally lent itself to such porcine-associated definitions as:
“Asking a pig for permission (see: hog/may);
*A large swine-breeding facility;
*The relationship between man and hog; farmed pigs.
Others thought the hog relationship was perhaps a little too obvious and went other, more random meanings:
*A threatening declaration as a result of an irrational, negative emotion;
*A large purple sweater, loosely knit; orig: Kenya;
*The debris that falls out from between the treads of shoes or boots.
In trying to guess the real definition, no one gave the slightest consideration to the seemingly random: “The eve of New Year’s Day. Scottish. Origin: obscure.” All the other definitions seemed to hint at some truth or other, but not that one.
And yet that was exactly the definition given by my sister’s 40-year-old Miriam- Webster’s dictionary. We laughed off the Scots’ odd name for “New Year’s Eve” and went to bed.
Meanwhile, little did we know that on that same evening over in Scotland the thousand-year-old, originally pagan Hogmanay celebration was already under way: in Edinburgh, the annual torchlight parade had kicked off the three-day event with a horde of men dressed as Vikings and carrying torches through the town, while a crowd of some 15,000 strong from Scotland and all over the world followed behind to see the ceremonial burning of the Viking long-boat on the top of the city’s Calton Hill.
Wikipedia’s suggested etymology of Hogmanay (pronounced Hug-M’nay, according to a friend’s Scottish husband) may have come from Old French(via the Normans who settled in England in the 11th century who trickled up to Scotland, perhaps?), from the phrase, “au gui mener,” meaning “to lead to the mistletoe.” (Well, it’s possible, considering the pagan reverence for the evergreen plant that they believed held health and fertility powers.) Wikipedia also said that
Hogmanay could be from Scottish Gaelic for “Og Mhadaninn,” meaning, “new morning.”
One of the main customs of Hogmanay is for children to go from house to house asking for presents; it is also traditional for adult Scots to go visiting from house to house (without asking for presents). Some Scottish-American friends of ours keep up the Hogmanay “foot first,” luck-bringing tradition that requires a (preferably) dark-haired (blond-haired would imply Viking – enemy – descent) and (preferably) tall and handsome man (yes, only men -- go ahead and boo, ladies) to be the first person over the threshold each New Year’s Day, and for the man (or teenager or little boy) to bring with him something to eat, something to drink, and some fuel -- traditionally, a lump of coal.
The http://www.hogmanay.net/ site lists all the goings-on in Edinburgh over the New Year holiday: concerts, a “Night Afore” party, revels, fireworks, runs, a bike triathlon, and even a “dogmanay” – a dog sled race with Alaskan huskies. And there are the fires -- big-big bonfires – originally to ward off those evil spirits that started haunting the pagans back around Halloween. So, together with bonfires and fireworks, imagine helmeted Vikings and long torchlights; bagpipers, drummers, fireworks, effigies … THAT is Hogmanay! And up until about twenty years ago in Scotland this event outranked Christmas, which was still a regular working day even in the 1970s. Nowadays, Christmas and Hogmanay are both national holidays, though Hogmanay no doubt draws in more tourists.
My question is, why didn’t Hogmanay make it to the United States? Why, given the amount of Americans with Scottish ancestry, is this word and festival so little known? If the Scottish could bring us plaid skirts and bagpipe parades, why not Homanay? To me, the only off-putting part of it is the sound of the word – so awkward and giving no clue to its real meaning; but could that have been enough to keep the Scots from transplanting this tradition when they started coming to America some two hundred years ago? (Their arrival began before Christmas was firmly established here.) Perhaps if the holiday had had a better name or marketing campaign, we’d be saying, “Happy Hogmanay” today.
Still, if the United States has lost out on Hogmanay – and perhaps small towns and cities are better off without the Viking hordes and torches setting fire to longboats on the edges of town – at least we have one other Scottish New Year’s tradition to salute: “Auld Lang Syne.”
This 18th century Scottish song is heard, played and sung (sometimes drunkenly) at the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve all across the U.S. – on TV, at fancy balls, at family firesides. Credit for this American New Year’s anthem -- as unifying a force as noisemakers and confetti – must first go to Scotland’s Robert Burns (1759-1796), who breathed new life into the otherwise dead and buried words and tune, written anonymously long before; more recent credit must go as well as to the Canadian bandleader, Guy Lombardo (1902-1977), whose rendition of this song marked midnight on New Years Eve, first on American radio and later on TV, from roughly 1930-1970. By now, it’s the song that everyone sort of mumbles along to until getting to the words, “auld lang syne.”
Perhaps the song has survived because the tune is slow, you can drape your arm around friend or stranger for one brief, bonding moment while you sing; and no matter how much champagne you’ve had, few will notice if you skip or hum the words, because so few people know them all anyway.
Here, for the record, are the words – so you can resolve (and no doubt break the resolution) to learn them for next year’s celebration … Although Americans are happy enough to get through the first verse and chorus, this being a language column, I’ve given you the song in its old Scots entirety – with my own rough translations – thanks to Hogmanay.net
Auld Lang Syne (resurrected from an old Scottish poem and traditional melody) by Robert (aka Rabbie) Burns, 1759-1796
Should auld acquaintance be forgot, And never brought to mind? Should auld acquaintance be forgot, And days of auld lang syne?
(Should old friends be forgotten and never thought of? Should old friends be forgotten and days (literally: “of old long since.”)
CHORUS: For auld lang syne, my dear, For auld lang syne, We'll tak a cup of kindness yet, For auld lang syne!
(For old times gone, my ear; for old time’s gone, we’ll drink a cup of ale, for (approx) old times gone.)
And surely ye'll be your pint-stowp, And surely I'll be mine, And we'll tak a cup o kindness yet, For auld lang syne!
(And surely you’ll pay for your tankard of ale, and surely I’ll pay for mine; and we’ll take a cup of kindness/ale, for old times gone.)
We twa hae run about the braes, And pou'd the gowans fine, But we've wander'd monie a weary fit, Sin auld lang syne.
(We two have run about the hills, and pulled the daisies fine; but we’ve wandered many a weary foot, since the days so long ago.)
We twa hae paidl'd in the burn Frae morning sun till dine, But seas between us braid hae roar'd Sin auld lang syne.
(We two have paddled in the stream from noon til dinner, but seas between us wide have roared since days of long ago.)
And there's a hand my trusty fiere, And gie's a hand o thine, And we'll tak a right guid-willie waught, For auld lang syne
(And there’s a hand my trusty friend, and you give your hand to me;
And we’ll take a right good drink … for old times gone.)
And from the Westchester highlands of Larchmont, the Language Lady wishes you all “a right-good willie-waught” (“waught” a great expression!) and a cup o’ kindness in any form, for 2007!
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