The Linguist

@Linguist_CIOL APRIL/MAY The Linguist 29 OPINION & COMMENT The tides of language change Guys (and gals!) Christine Pocock rightly condemns the use of 'below' as an adjective but she then goes on to say "come on guys" (TL59,6). Nobody would call a woman a 'guy' so why subsume us in this masculine plural? Could we please all be referred to as people! Linda Sherwood MCIL What the NDA? I enjoyed the article about non-disclosure agreements (TL59,6). We do battle with this topic every day in my current workplace and it is very important to understand what the NDAs are about. I can also confirm that many people don't read the agreements, which causes major problems later on, unfortunately. Joanna Biernat MCIL While agreeing with Mike Fulton (Letters, TL60,1), I would like to pick up the thread of what he says. Many words I have understood and used in a certain way all my adult life are now often used differently, and that includes the change of function from one part of speech to another. While I personally may find these irritating, I cannot help making a point that I frequently pass on to anyone who's interested that language is not, and can never be, influenced much in its development by what Mike calls central control. One thinks straight away, of course, of the Académie française [pictured], and efforts that have been made to render the French language 'purer'. This has meant persuading people that English has infiltrated too far into current French, though attempts to moderate this tendency can only remind one of King Canute. Examples I find unfortunate are (as Mike suggests) using prepositions and adverbs as adjectives, changing verbs from passive to active while retaining their passive meaning (e.g. 'the new series launched today'), and so on. Just as pertinent is the French tendency to adopt English words when this enhances speed of expression. This is hardly new – le weekend is definitely slicker than la fin de semaine and manages somehow to embody the whole concept of two days of leisure. Mike is right in reminding us that the purpose of language is communication. This is why some newly popularised expressions, such as le télétravail, work better than a franglais phrase might, while other uses of English in current French may have arisen simply because something requiring a label was first identified with a word in the English language (une start-up is arguably less of a mouthful than une entreprise en démarrage). I remember Jacques Toubon attempting to regulate the amount of English transmitted in pop songs on the radio… Influencing culture through central control is doomed to failure. Especially in France! Nigel Pearce MCIL Across 1 A pleasant place on the Med (4) 3 Policy of openness introduced by Gorbachev (8) 9 Writer of The Cherry Orchard (7) 10 Unit of magnetic induction, named after a Croatian scientist (5) 11 Alphabet used to write the early Irish language (5) 12 Permafrost area of the far north (6) 14 Having an absence of any colour or pigmentation (6) 16 Ravel's one-movement orchestral piece (6) 19 A neck adornment originally from Croatia (6) 21 Perform better than (5) 24 Seeing clearly (5) 25 Polish dumplings (7) 26 Treachery (8) 27 Lower House of the Polish parliament (4) Down 1 English version of the first name of 10 across (8) 2 Someone who lives in Praha, for example (5) 4 As opposed to gravity… (6) 5 Old Harry, meaning 'adversary' in Hebrew (5) 6 Look (7) 7 Russian emperor (4) 8 Faith healer, or medium between this and the spirit world (6) 13 Element named after Curie's homeland (8) 15 We know best the Ukrainian variant of this soup, made from beetroot (7) 17 A hook-shaped diacritic in Polish (6) 18 Thomas More's imagined world (6) 20 A little water, or a strong spirit (5) 22 Plural demonstrative (5) 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 Crossword no.28 Solution opposite NITO, 'EL INSTITUTO DE FRANCIA, SEDE DE LA ACADEMIA FRANCESA' CC BY-SA 2.5

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