What have the Finns ever done for us?

There is a famous scene in Monty Python’s Life of Brian in which the leader of an anti-Roman faction asks the question, ‘What have the Romans ever done for us?’ The answer, of course, turns out to be quite a lot: sanitation, the aqueducts, education, the roads, wine …

The influence of Roman culture on the English lexicon is similarly pervasive. Every page of the dictionary teems with words that have their origins in the Latin language. Yet English has also taken in words from some more improbable sources, and I propose to consider the influence of a less heralded culture in this blog. What have the Finnish ever done for us?

The chief contribution of the Finns to our language has to be the word sauna, the type of steam bath that originated in Finland and spread all over the world, a much more successful export, it has to be said, than either the kantele (a type of zither) or the pulka (a Laplander’s boat-shaped sledge), the two other Finnish objects that appear in The Chambers Dictionary.

However, two Finns have lent their names to respectable English words. The chemical element gadolinium and the mineral gadolinite are both named after the Finnish chemist Johan Gadolin, while the computer operating system Linux was named after its Finnish developer Linus Torvalds.

And then there is the political term Finlandization, defined as ‘a policy towards a superior power of accommodation rather than confrontation, as in the relations between Finland and the former Soviet Union’.

Add to this the fact that Finnish grammar is a somewhat singular affair which makes use of categories such as adessive, elative, essive and translative which are not found in other European languages and we start to see that you don’t have to have invaded the British Isles to have made a contribution to the melting pot that is English.

Ian Brookes

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Borrowed goods

An enquiry from one of Chambers’ readers raises the question of how English deals with the words it absorbs from other languages – words such as zeitgeist (from German) or ravioli (from Italian) that are adopted by English speakers to fill a gap in the language. These are sometimes called ‘loan words’ (as though they were hired out for a few nights only, although in practice they never get sent back to the owners with a thank-you note and a bottle of wine).

The presence of loan words in the language raises some interesting questions for users. Do we treat them as we would any English word, pronouncing them with Anglo-Saxon vowel sounds and sticking an ‘s’ on the end to form a plural? Or do we respect their heritage by using them as they would be used in their original surroundings?

In practice, there is usually a point after which it seems affected to continue treating the word as an exotic species. Insisting on writing Zeitgeist with a capital (to respect the convention for German nouns) or pronouncing ravioli with a thick Italian accent only serves to advertise to the world you are a bit of a twerp.

But for some words, aspects of their behaviour in their original language persist even after they have been thoroughly assimilated into English. This is particularly true in respect of their plural forms, and it gives English one of its many peculiarities. Because we take in words from so many languages, we have some interesting ways of creating a plural other than by the simple addition of an ‘s’: formula becomes formulae; phenomenon becomes phenomena; graffito becomes graffiti.

The Chambers Dictionary often accepts such foreign endings either as the standard plural form or as an alternative to pluralizing by adding an ‘s’. Here are ten of the more exotic ones:

cognomina (plural of cognomen; Latin)
drachmai (plural of drachma; Greek)
gardai (plural of garda; Irish)
groszy (plural of grosz; Polish)
ibadat (plural of ibadah; Arabic)
kibbutzim (plural of kibbutz; Hebrew)
knaidloch (plural of knaidel; Yiddish)
maloti (plural of loti; Bantu)
periboloi (plural of peribolos; Greek)
shofroth (plural of shofar; Hebrew)

Ian Brookes

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The social life of words

‘You shall know a word by the company it keeps.’

I recently stumbled across this lovely quote from J.R. Firth again and was reminded of how important its message is to the way we carry out language research here at Chambers. When working on a dictionary entry, it is crucial that we support our intuition by gathering evidence of the words with which the term being defined tends to keep company or collocate. This process of uncovering a word’s preferred companions is facilitated by a corpus - a collection of electronically encoded texts of written or spoken language which acts as a representative sample of ‘real-world’ language.

Here at Chambers we have developed the Chambers Harrap International Corpus (CHIC) – almost a billion words of modern, international English from a diversity of sources including newspapers, magazines, blogs, websites, published fiction and non-fiction, and transcribed speech. We use statistical analysis to identify significant collocations in the corpus. Collocations are word pairs with a strong association as opposed to words ending up in each other’s company by chance. Collocations extracted from CHIC for the word ‘powerful’ include ‘powerful politician’, ‘powerful computer’ and ‘powerful antioxidant’. Each collocation corresponds to a subtly different aspect of the word’s meaning which should be accounted for in its dictionary entry.

This sort of analysis is very useful when trying to tease out differences in meaning between two near-synonyms, for example ‘wind’ and ‘breeze’. According to CHIC, adjectives strongly associated with ‘wind’ rather than ‘breeze’ include ‘strong’, ‘fierce’ and ‘damaging’, while those displaying a strong preference for ‘breeze’ include ‘gentle’, ‘balmy’ and ‘cool’. This pattern is replicated in the words’ verbal associations: while a ‘wind’ tends to ‘howl’, ‘gust’ and ‘whip’, a ‘breeze’ will ‘rustle’, ‘caress’ and ‘cool’.

It is important also to observe and record any variation in the company being kept by a word as this will potentially point to new meanings or senses. Take for example the verb ‘burn’. While the primary meaning of ‘to burn something’ is to damage or destroy it with fire or heat, in the last decade or so the verb began associating significantly with digital media terms such as ‘DVD’ and ‘CD’. An examination of these cases alerted us to the ‘making a copy of’ sense of ‘burn’ which was duly recorded in the dictionary. More recently we added a new sense for the noun ‘mash-up’ to Chambers Reference Online (the web edition of The Chambers Dictionary). Originally a ‘mash-up’ referred to an audio file created by merging the vocal track from one song with the instrumental or rhythm track of another, made most famous by the Belgian duo 2ManyDJs. Now, a ‘mash-up’ also describes the combination of pre-existing audio, video, text or graphics to create a new multimedia file. YouTube contains many examples of users merging songs or dubbed dialogue with video clips. This new meaning of ‘mash-up’ is reflected in its more recent CHIC collocates which include ‘video’, ‘YouTube’, ‘ad’ and ‘trailer’ (movie trailers are a particularly rich source of mash-up fodder).

Sometimes the association between certain words is so strong that, rather than pointing to a new sense of one of the words, they point to a multiword term or phrase which has established itself in the language and is deserving of its own dictionary entry. In a recent update to Chambers Reference Online we added two such multiword units: ‘semantic web’ and ‘augmented reality’. Our decision to include these phrases was supported by analysis of the words typically modified by ‘semantic’ and ‘augmented’ in CHIC.

The corpus evidence shows that it’s impossible to underestimate the fickleness of word as social animal but regularly updating our corpus helps us to keep on top of the wealth of information that can be deduced from a word’s social proclivities. All assistance is appreciated however so if any of the words you observe in the wild appear to be behaving suspiciously or moving with a new crowd, we’d be very interested to hear about it.


Ruth O'Donovan

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Sharp-eyed readers and Uncle Sam

To many users, a dictionary is the linguistic representation of a shared culture, one they not only witness but actively participate in. So it is natural that readers often wish to contribute suggestions or amendments to a dictionary that describes the language they use themselves. At Chambers we regularly receive letters and emails that prove to be interesting reading and often include comments that we take into account in future editions of our dictionaries.

Readers often notice the most specific intricacies of language, unearth fascinating facts or citations, and raise initially baffling queries that ultimately result in new discoveries for both parties. There are all sorts of linguistic curiosities that we explore as part of our regular correspondence with readers from all over the world.

One keen-eyed correspondent recently pointed out an interesting citation in James Fenimore Cooper’s tale The Prairie (1827) explicitly linking the name Uncle Sam with the US government. Chapter 10 of the story introduces Captain Middleton of the US Artillery, and describes aspects of his attire and belongings in great detail:

‘At his back he bore a knapsack, marked by the well known initials that have since gained for the government of the United States the good-humoured and quaint appellation of Uncle Sam.’

The correspondent raised a question about the origin of this expression, which is an interesting case of folk etymology versus documented fact.

Common folklore suggests that Uncle Sam initially referred to a real person, Samuel Wilson. A meatpacker from Troy, New York, Wilson stamped barrels of meat bound for American soldiers with the initials U.S., which were jokingly interpreted by the receivers as gifts from ‘Uncle Sam’.

However, historians and lexicographers dispute this derivation in favour of a more established theory. The first traceable written record of Uncle Sam to refer to the US government or its people is in the Troy Post of September 7, 1813, in which the editors declared: ‘Loss upon loss, and no ill luck stirring but what lights upon Uncle Sam's shoulders’. They explained that the term originated with the markings on US military supplies: ‘The letters U.S. on the government waggons, &c., are supposed to have given rise to it.’ This derivation is supported by the quotation supplied by our correspondent. The Cooper citation suggests that, rather than an appellation for a real person, Uncle Sam was indeed a nickname for the government of the United States, resulting from the markings on military equipment – in this case Captain Middleton’s knapsack.

Uncle Sam has continued to be used as a visual representation of America, changing over the years until being established in his current bearded form, complete with the patriotic stars and stripes of his top hat, tail coat and striped trousers. While he may not have ever existed as a real person, he certainly exists as an iconic American symbol, albeit one with exuberant fashion tastes!

Deborah Smith

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