Vivian Cook

Boysenbeeren?

I have just realised displays of lavish Christmas food are a reversion to pre-19th century English meals where all food arrived at once from the later custom where it is served consecutively in separate courses. So why is posh food now so obsessed by the plate and the course?

The advice in Oxford around 1960 was to avoid naughty North Oxford. All the undergraduates hastily took notes on this useful information. Though the people I met there were no naughtier than elsewhere. Hang on, don't Le Carre ex-agents live there? Was the advice coded?

This seems to me a much fairer way of displaying the richness of languages across the world rather than by numbers of speakers. It shows how much we are missing if we spend most time on say IndoEuropean languages rather than African languages. And build in a bias to UG studies...

As the discussion of whether word X is racist or non-racist now concerns so many people, can I remind them of the Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights pen-international.org/app/up…. At least it’s a massively thought-out background framework to draw on.

Hear hear!

Many thanks! I'll check it out. However plurilingualism according to say CEFR is different from multilingualism, I think. The former implies separation of languages in society, the latter integration on one society. Sad that Ethnologue now has to be cited from secondary sources!

The heading of the figure is ‘A World of Languages’, not ‘… of native speakers of languages’ – Africa has 2,154 languages. Ethnologue give L1 and L2 speakers of Hausa as 49 + 26 million, Swahili as 16 + 53. Multicompetent L2 users probably outnumber monolinguals worldwide.

Today is Steve Biko Day. He justified English as the lingua franca of the Black People’s Convention in South Africa, because it was ‘analytical’ (Biko, 1978). Using an international language does not necessarily mean endorsing the values of the society from which it sprang.

Well so far as questions on computer security checks are concerned, it may be safer to leave your Wiki biography with some fuzzy details...

Sorry for obscurity! Despite my linguist's neutral stance towards language, I am still slave to my upbringing in which origins of words matter as much as contemporary usage. Latin decem=10; decimate=to cut by 1 in 10, not 50%. Modern meaning of 'destroy' is historically incorrect

Professionally I see no reason why children should learn Latin, as now UK policy, rather than a ‘living’ language. So why was I shouting at the BBC saying a 9 woman omnium crash had ‘decimated’ the field of 21? Despite ‘to ruin’ now being the main OED sense.

In my, probably dated, knowledge, Alex Scott’s -in’ pronunciation is: nothing to do with the letter ‘g’; Trudgill’s downwardly mobile class marker; a mid-20th-century shibboleth of the posh huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’ set. Why are the media always so ignorant about language?

From memory some books with university EFL teacher protagonists of a sort are: A Burgess The Doctor is Sick O Manning Baltic Trilogy I Watson the Embedding but they are not exactly prototypical. Burgess' hero has nightmares about phonemes.

When Ellington replaced Gonsalvez at the 1964 RFT concert with a local star Tubby Hayes I was too busy fuming and planning how to get my money back to listen to what was apparently an excellent version of Diminuendo and Crescendo. But not the amazing 1956 version.

An eccentric circle of poetry-obsessed Oxford undergraduates in the early 1960s from the back cover of a fascinating new book by Gavin Bantock ‘Thys Felyship’ amazon.co.uk/THYS-FELYSHIP-O…. I asked my wife which one she would have gone out with. Luckily she got it right!

You can also make transfer mistakes within your L1. On my first visit to New York in the 1980s, long before Starbucks etc, I was dying for a coffee but the city strangely only had coffee shops, where you obviously bought your beans or ground coffee, rather than coffee bars.