CD Voice | Making sense of the little idiosyncrasies
All this talk of Brexit over the past week has got me thinking about the perversities of the English language.
Brexit, after all, is a neologism - a portmanteau of "British" and "exit" that barely registered in the world's consciousness mere months ago. Few thought the UK would realistically vote to leave the European Union, so from 2012 - when the word was first coined - until earlier this year, it barely saw any use.
Now the realities of a potential Brexit are all too apparent and this strange new word has been plucked from obscurity, to be plastered across the world's media.
And it's far from the only example of unorthodoxy and weirdness to appear in my mother tongue.
To paraphrase the American author, speaker and English language teacher Richard Lederer (who, by the way, also goes by the monikers "Conan the Grammarian" and "Atilla the Pun") in what other language do people recite a play, and play at a recital? Or have noses that run and feet that smell? How can a slim chance and a fat chance mean the same thing? Or an alarm goes off by coming on?
It is, as he puts it, "the unique lunacy" of English. But I would argue that Mandarin has some equally infuriating concepts laying in wait, ready to bamboozle any new language student such as myself the first time they are encountered.
Take time for instance. I learned the other day that when speaking about weeks or months in Mandarin, the past is above us and the future below. This timeline makes a certain amount of sense, and once the words for up and down are learned they can also be used to speak about weekends or days of the week that are in the future or have already passed.
Days and years, however, follow a different pattern. If I want to refer to 2014 (the year preceding the one just gone) in Mandarin, I would use the word meaning in front of me, whereas a reference to 2018 (or the day after tomorrow, for that matter) would involve me employing the word that translates as "behind". This timeline, then, flows from front to back - with the past stretching out before us and the future consigned to the rear.
And therein lies the rub - for an English speaker, the future is most always ahead of us, while we leave the past behind. Such a timeline, however, can encourage us to take great leaps into the unknown - as Britain did on June 23, the day 17.4 million voters made the potentially disastrous decision to sever ties with their continental brethren.
Perhaps we English speakers could stand to learn a little more from Chinese. Our timelines may seem diametrically opposite, yet it's fitting that they converge in the middle - which is, after all, one of the words we use in Mandarin to refer to China itself.
Tough love, but no hard feelings
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