Schedule vs Schedule
Which type of english is best? Why do we prefer the sound of some language over others?
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Transcript
Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast, where we look at interesting topics and discuss what we think they tell us about analysis and decision making. I'm Fraser McGruer and I'm here with Peter Coghill and Nick Hare of Aleph Insights, and this week we're discussing which is better, schedule or schedule? Okay, so I want to start us off on this. So something that annoys me a bit is that, and let's be clear, our podcasts are not necessarily about what's annoying us this week, but nonetheless, what's annoying me...
Speaker B:Maybe we should have a regular spot for that. Maybe we should have a regular, every month we have the moany old man spot.
Speaker C:No, that is what we have already. Anyway, carry on.
Speaker A:They tend to be more than one spot each. Anyway, yeah, no, what annoys me is the increasing prevalence of English people saying schedule. The prevalence. The prevalence. The prevalence of people saying schedule. The prevalence. Okay. I'll get you a dictionary and you can have a look. Yeah, it's, well, obviously in the UK as elsewhere around the world, we're culturally exposed to a lot of Americanisms and an Americanism or a pronunciation is schedule, right? And it just annoys me that in the UK, we've sort of forgotten how to say it, how we used to say it, which is schedule. And more and more we're saying schedule.
Speaker B:Well, who's to say it's not better?
Speaker A:And that is the question. And on the subject of things that annoy me, like H really annoys me. I'm sure that more people in the UK now say H, of a certain age, let's say, say H rather than H. And I've always dreaded working somewhere, which was a company that might be an acronym, or no, not an acronym, but having the initials H. See, I nearly did it there. And sure enough, I worked with someone once and I worked alongside him when I was freelancing and he worked for HNE Media.
Speaker C:Actually it genuinely baffles me. I mean, there's no, there's absolutely no controversy about this or controversy, which is, who knows? That's another one, a bit like Harris versus harass, which is, which is, I think people who are very attached to the way that they learnt originally get upset about. But yes, it does baffle me, this, this H thing. I mean, just because the letter is H doesn't mean that it has to start with an H sound. We don't call it Wubble U, do we? It's not Wubble U, it's W. It starts with a D. It's insane that you have to stick an H on it just because it's actually referring to an H.
Speaker A:Yeah, absolutely. But I guess going back to the original example, there's the, one of the sort of, one of the things here is, is there's a cultural element, there's another country involved, and that can be very emotive for people, as indeed it is for me, evidenced by this. So yeah, what's our question? Yeah, can one dialect, can one language, one version of a language, which I guess is a dialect, be better than another? What's the answer?
Speaker C:Statistically speaking, there's very little in it. I mean, so, although I desperately want it to be the case that you can prove that, you know, there is, some languages are better than others, and some dialects are better than others, you know, it's kind of, it's an urge that I have to prove that the way that I personally happen to speak is the best way in the world that anyone could speak. It turns out that almost all attempts to sort of measure the data content of different languages, whether you do it by, you know, character by character, or word by word, or sound by sound, syllable by syllable, there's the information throughput of almost every language is the same.
Speaker B:It's definitely true in one metric, Nick, the amount that you like the sound of it.
Speaker A:Yeah, well, I guess if we talk about accents as well then, because there are some regional accents in the UK, which I really like, for example, Northern Irish, even Belfast, quite hard, I like that, Northern Irish, Irish I like, I really like Geordie, etc, etc.
Speaker B:Well, I think now you're talking about preference versus betterness, versus... Yeah, well, I'm happy to talk about preference for a moment.
Speaker C:Yeah, but a lot of people think, a lot of people will tell you, you know, that the way that Cockneys speak is, well, there aren't any Cockneys anymore, but you know, or let's say multicultural London sort of dialect, the way that people who speak like that talk is lazy, or worse, or conveys less information, or is sloppy in some way, and that just is not true. I mean, much as I want it to be true, it isn't.
Speaker A:No, but I don't think that, but I still have a strong feeling about it, still have a strong opinion about it. And for me, it's an aesthetic thing. And so let's say Essex, English, and I live pretty much in Essex, and I hear it on the train every bloody morning, and it's so twangy, and it just makes the people just sound really superficial and thick.
Speaker C:And I just... In your mind.
Speaker A:Yeah. Yeah. But is that so, I guess...
Speaker C:They might hear you speak and think, well, you sound really kind of obnoxious and posh. This erudite young... You're a bit of a posh twat.
Speaker A:But yeah, so look, what's the question? What's, what are we, what are we getting? Why are people so territorial? Why are we so... Why am I so territorial and tribal? I guess we're talking about language, but it can be expanded to other things.
Speaker C:Yeah, actually, and I think partly the question is why it is that we feel like these things are external characteristics. Why we think this is not just subjective. People really do think that there are objective features of language. Oh, you know, scousers, they're so nasal. You know, it's like people think, well, there's things that are objectively true that you can, that you can point to and say, this is worse than the way that I happen personally to do it.
Speaker A:Let's put it in another way. Is there, let's say there was a language out there that we didn't understand, of which I'm sure there are many. I wonder if we could find a language that if you, if you, if you, if you played an audio recording of that language to a good sample of people around the world, let's say, and none of them understood that language and they all went, oh, that's nice. Or that's horrible. Like people generally do with German. No one likes German.
Speaker C:That's something that people say. And I, and I, well, as Peter was saying, preferences are slightly, slightly different. Like objective measures of quality, does it contain more information or not, is one thing. But when it comes to preferences, there are, there is, there is convergence, actually. People do like, people do all always rate German, people who don't understand German, rate it as not a very nice sounding language.
Speaker A:And let's say you didn't know it was German, right? Even if it's one thing, just as a set of sounds. Yeah. And I mean, you said preferences. I'm talking about aesthetics. I don't know if we're talking about the same thing. Yeah. Or am I leading us down the sort of a cul-de-sac with that?
Speaker B:Well, let's close off a part of it then. Let's explore the difference between preference and objective betterness, some sort of quality. So betterness, so in order for something to be objectively better than one thing or another, you have to be able to measure it and demonstrate the, have some dimension of being good, more good than another thing. And there is no sort of inherent measurable quality of a thing. You have to, it has to be grounded on some sort of practical dimension. So in language, we might talk about, so written language, you might think about, well, how many, how easy is it to learn? That might be a measure of betterness. So you might say that English is quite complicated to learn, but maybe Chinese is more difficult to learn. So somebody who doesn't speak either of those two languages, they might pick up English slightly quicker than Chinese, maybe, maybe.
Speaker C:I think there's no, I mean, I think, sorry.
Speaker B:But then, so in contrast to something like Esperanto, which was an engineered language and very few people speak or write it, that, I've got a bit of a soft spot for Esperanto. I don't speak it, but I'd like to, and I know I could because it's designed so you can pick up the basic syntax and grammar in an afternoon reading four pages in this sort of how to speak Esperanto. And then all it becomes is learning vocabulary. So it becomes learning new words for things, whereas if you learn a foreign language, like as an English speaker, if you learn German or French or Chinese, then you have completely different grammar and syntax and vocabulary to learn. It's a much more complicated process of learning it. So in terms of betterness in that sense, you can rate things, you can rank things.
Speaker C:Yeah, so, sorry, just gender, that's mental. What's the point of that? I remember my first French lesson when we were told that it was like, you know, le, cha, whatever, and la chienne, or whichever way round it is, you know, whatever, whatever way round it is. And, you know, we learnt all of the genders of these kind of 20 basic first, your first, my first French nouns. And I said, well, how do you know which it is? What's the root? And he said, well, you just have to learn. I thought, no, it's ridiculous. I can't be bothered. It's like, you've got to learn the whole language twice. You've got to learn the word, and then you've got to learn the gender. It's insane. Yeah. Carry on, Peter.
Speaker B:Well, maybe the, maybe the kind of, the, this drive for women's rights and equality between sexes might destroy gender. Maybe languages will be deliberately re-engineered to eliminate language because it's discriminatory. Who knows? But, you know, so I think, so that's one dimension of betterness is like how easy it is to learn. But then you might also say, well, okay, if we take written language, how much, what's the information density of written language? That might be something you're concerned about if you're, if you're, if you're transmitting information in written text, then it might be, in certain circumstances, it might be preferential to, to, to convert it into one form or another. So you say, but it's always bound by a practical consideration as to why something's better than something else. And that's, that's the, as close as we can get to measuring quality. Quality is this undefinable thing. You have to bound it by something in order to measure it.
Speaker C:I mean, I think the, my first instinct is easy to learn must contradict information content in the sense that, you know, a high information content language is one where, you know, every word does a lot of work. You know, you don't need lots and lots of words for context because you have, it's a bit like having, you know, you imagine having a, having 500 letters in your alphabet, you know, where each letter does, contains a lot of sound, you know, versus having very few letters in your alphabet and needing more of them. My instinct, my first instinct is, well, it doesn't matter, there's no way around the fact that there's a certain amount of information that it just, you know, you've got to get it over. However, having said that, I think thinking about what Peter said about learning a language, that a language which is fairly rules driven rather than which is, you know, has got lots and lots of exceptions. So, if we, and if we get, you know, older language, I mean, you take, you know, a language like English where we have a lot of, a lot of verbs which conjugate in weird ways, you know, like I swim and you swum, and that's not, you know, that's not a kind of, that's an unconventional, that only applies to a very small number of words. Well, it will be better if they weren't there, you know, it would be better if we didn't have those weird exceptions, it would certainly be easier to learn, and we wouldn't lose information content.
Speaker B:So, you know, so I think there is an unnecessarily complicated symbol set, essentially.
Speaker C:And I guess that's the equivalent of genders, you know, it's like we've got, instead of having a bunch of genders to learn, we have a bunch of weird endings to learn, you know.
Speaker A:That's quite a functional view of language though, because, for example. Well, it is what it is, language is a tool for communication. Well, no, but, I mean, a French person I'm sure would say is that he would, or she would find, you know, English art so clunky and clumsy, and it loses its finesse in having a gender, and that brings a sort of a richness, a colourfulness to it.
Speaker C:That's probably how it feels if you have gender. Yeah. It's like it's, how can you possibly manage without this really vital part of the language?
Speaker B:And there are probably, there are probably sort of interesting witty word plays you can do with gender that you just can't do in languages that don't have it.
Speaker A:There's something else actually is, I remember once saying to my wife who's Brazilian, is the doing rhyming poetry in Portuguese is, well, it's just kind of not worth it, it's just too easy because of the way that verbs conjugate, for example, it's, you know, necessarily they have all the same, what's the opposite of a prefix? Suffix. Suffix. And so you can just rhyme really easily. And she said, well, actually that's the point because you, yes, you could do that, but, you know, quality poetry doesn't, and you have to sort of, it forces you to be creative. The quality comes out in some other thing. Yeah.
Speaker B:Yeah. I mean, so. That's an interesting point actually. Occasionally on Radio 4 Comedies or TV Comedies, people are berating some piece of like high school poetry, which is just crude rhymes and crude rhythm. I can't often tell the difference between bad poetry and good poetry because to be honest, a lot of good poetry is just clumsy rhymes in my opinion. Thank goodness we're not trying to be a literary podcast. That's just. But I just, it's like. Good poetry is just clumsy rhymes. I don't know, maybe I'm just being, maybe I'm, but it's like, well, he's written a poem, well, fair enough.
Speaker C:My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings. I really love these shiny things.
Speaker B:Yeah. That sort of thing. What's wrong? Okay. So what's wrong with it? Nothing. He had a go. Yeah. Why is that any better than, what makes good, what's the quality thing in good poetry? It's totally elusive to me. I don't get it. Fair enough.
Speaker A:Maybe it might be the rarity and the skill in being able to do that, you know, like a really good computer programmer is valued because he or she can do it.
Speaker C:I mean, I think we're probably, we're going in this direction of how we judge the quality of writing and I think that's a different podcast.
Speaker B:Maybe I can't spot it because I have a very functional view of what language is about.
Speaker A:So talking of being functional, let's move it beyond language. What other things can we expand this into? Can the same rules or lack of rules or judgments apply elsewhere beyond language? I'm trying to steer us onto things like where we've talked about. Yeah.
Speaker C:I'm not really ready to leave language because, I mean, in particular, I don't think we've covered this issue of territorialism. Go on then. Okay. Well, accepting for a minute that there's very little to choose in terms of functionality between languages. Why it is people get so worked up about threats to what they see as their language, you know, it's a bit like someone, you know, when someone starts saying schedule instead of schedule, it's a bit like someone took over your local pub and took out all the nice old furniture and replaced it with some, you know, gaudy modern plastic thing. You don't like it for that reason. It feels like it's incorrect. But I think one thing to bear in mind is why language is so important in all kinds of signalling. You know, in other words, it's sort of, we use the language that someone speaks for an identifier, certainly for where they, you know, for their geographical origins and so on, but also for their class, you know, for their level of education and all of these sorts of things. It's extremely useful language for telling you about someone is because it's very hard to fake. You know, when we've talked about signalling, which we do a lot, the key characteristics of a good signal is that it has to be costly for someone to fake if they're giving off a false signal. So if you want to look educated and you decide to do that by learning lots of long words, it's going to be hard for you to do that and to pull it off. Whereas if you're, you know, and likewise, if you're trying to pretend you're Irish and you're not, it's going to be very hard for you to pull that off. Yeah.
Speaker B:Likewise, if you've got a well-to-do accent and you want to fit in in an Essex pub, that's going to be a lot of work unless you practice it, pulling off an Essex accent.
Speaker C:Well, if you, yeah, I mean, so the thing is that, you know, it's very good signal. And as a result, people are possessive of it because it's valuable. It's a valuable thing for you to have for your particular use of language is socially valuable and you don't like it being diluted. That's anyway, that's my sort of theory for why we get so possessive, so apparently weirdly possessive about the words that we're using and the pronunciation we use really is neither here nor there. You know, the original word shibboleth, you know what shibboleth is? I do because you guys taught it to me in a podcast once. Yeah. Okay. Right. So I mean, basically it's a thing which you do, which marks you out as definitely one sort of type or another. And it comes from, you know, from some story in the Bible where in order to show that you were of a particular tribe, you had to pronounce a word that only they could pronounce in that particular way. So yeah.
Speaker B:But you wouldn't, so here's an interesting thing. You wouldn't, so if you met a fellow Brit and they said, oh, I'm staying at such and such, it's a hotel and I've scheduled in a meeting in the morning, you would take offence to that? No, he likes schedule. He doesn't like schedule. Okay. So I'm sorry. And I've scheduled in a meeting in the morning. I wouldn't take offence, but I would notice. It would kind of agree with you slightly. Yeah. On a very small scale. But if then somebody, an associate from America or Pakistan came along and used their version of English that they've learned, which is probably American, which is going to be American English. They said the same things. You would probably, you wouldn't be, you wouldn't, you wouldn't be a little bit more forgiving.
Speaker A:Be more forgiving. Actually, my anger would still be directed at the United States cultural imperialist complex. But what's interesting, you said if they were staying at a hotel. Yeah. A deliberate mistake. Right. Okay. Yes. Yeah. A hotel and hotel. I, you know, I'm not fussed too much about that.
Speaker C:You can't say in the hotel. You'd say anotel.
Speaker B:Anotel. Yeah. No H in anotel. Anyway. What's the concept? So you would, you would hold these other people of the higher, hold these Brits of the higher standard. Yeah.
Speaker C:This is to do with outgroups though, isn't it? This is because it's such a good outgroup marker, your language, you know, that actually your outgroup isn't someone a long way away. Your outgroup is someone very like you, but slightly different. And so it makes sense that you should be angry and see, you know, it's like you get, it's a bit like, let's say you're a, you know, you're left wing and you meet a British right winger. You're going to feel more antagonistic towards them than you would say a Japanese right winger. Just not see them as a threat to your in group. And I think that's, that's probably the issue here. Someone who is very like you, but pronounces schedule wrongly is a massive threat to you and your family. And so you have to take against them in a way that you wouldn't with a foreigner.
Speaker A:And by the way, as an aside, I'm not mad about people who call me Frasier either, that's starting to get into other territory there, but okay, look, where do we go with this? I mean, we need to finish shortly. Yeah. No, we do. Something I want to talk about briefly, I don't know if it's a question. So I want to talk about Jabberwocky. Yeah.
Speaker C:Towards Brillig and the slidy toves did gyre and gimble in the wave.
Speaker A:Which was a poem contained within, is it Alice in Wonderland, Alice Through the Looking Glass, whatever it was. Yeah. Are you aware that there are translations of Jabberwocky? Yeah. Have you? Okay. Because one of the things this makes me think about was I was just in classic British style slagging off Germans and German language. I remember when I was a teacher, just for laughs, I printed off different versions of the poem in the languages of the people who I had in my class. It was a mixed language class. And when the German, I think she's Austrian actually, when she read out the poem in German, it was just, we were all sort of standing back, that was beautiful. And it was the most beautiful German I'd ever heard. Yeah. I don't know. I guess a comment, a question, anything to say about that? I don't know. And I've heard it in Portuguese, I've heard it in Italian, I've heard it in French. And it's, yeah, I don't know.
Speaker B:There was definitely an interesting challenge there in translating meaningless words into other meaningless words.
Speaker C:Well, although it's not fair to say that they're meaningless in the, you know, if you take something like slithy is clearly related to, it sounds like slimy and it sounds like, you know, yeah.
Speaker B:It's the invocative of an emotion. Yeah.
Speaker C:So I feel like, you know, you just, every language is going to have words like that, which you can mash together and create the equivalent of slithy. It seems like it's an impossible challenge, but actually I think it probably isn't. Yeah.
Speaker B:I have a friend who translates as a sort of job on the side between French and English. She's an excellent speaker of both. And she relishes the chance of being able to make up those kinds of words where there isn't a word. There's some sort of idiom or some sort of word somebody's made up in that language or some sort of interesting kind of accidental vernacular speech that they've used. And she has to decide how that would look in the other language. And she relishes that challenge. That's the art of it, isn't it? Being a creative thing, because otherwise translation is quite functional. She relishes that sort of opportunity just to add her own creativity into the work.
Speaker A:And actually, I recall now that it was sort of true to type when I did hand out these poems. I think the person, it was the Austrian girl who was actually quite resistant to the whole idea of it at first, just saying, well, this isn't German, this isn't proper German. Before I'd sort of explain what it was all about. Anyway, I think we should stop there. Yeah. So, yeah, you've been listening to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast with myself, Fraser McGruer, with Peter Coghill and Nick Hare of Aleph Insights. Thank you, as always, for listening. And until next time, auf Wiedersehen.
