La bienvenue à Dr. Trista Selous, notre nouvelle collaboratrice invitée. Cet
article a été écrit spécialement pour ce blog. Trista, qui a reçu son doctorat
de l'Université de Londres, est traductrice agréée par l'UNESCO et membre de
l'association des traducteurs du Royaume-Uni. Elle habite à Londres, où
elle a enseigné la langue, la littérature et le cinéma français dans divers
établissements de l'éducation tertiaire. Traductrice depuis plus de vingt ans,
Trista traduit des livres, des essais et des dialogues de film, fait du
sous-titrage et assure l'interprétation pour des cinéastes et acteurs
francophones en visite aux festivals londoniens. Auteur de The Other Woman (Yale UP, 1988)
sur Marguerite Duras, elle a aussi publié divers articles sur le cinéma et la
littérature français.
English is an ocean, with all that implies
in terms of great currents, quiet bays, areas of calm and storms. It is
uncontrollable and ungraspable, so any attempt to describe the way that it has
changed in any given period must inevitably be not only very partial, but
highly subjective. What follows is an account of things I have noticed about
changes to the English I hear in my everyday life in London. My main sources
are friends and family and the BBC’s Radio 4, the serious talk station that
represents perhaps the only benchmark we have for the current state of standard
British English. The station is aware of this role, as its listeners write in
and complain if they think it is propagating linguistic usage that they don’t
approve of. As a result, changes don’t make it onto Radio 4 unless they have
become entrenched and accepted.
So what has been happening to the English
used in our house? Let’s start with pronunciation. There have been many
changes over the last 30 years to the kinds of sounds British speakers make,
but as these are hard to describe, I’ll stick to linguistic stress. We have
constant arguments at home between the older and younger generations over where
the stress goes in compounds and words of several syllables. My partner and I
say ‘ice-cream’, our children insist
on ‘ice-cream’. They all argue over
whether they are watching ‘Top Gear’ (him)
or ‘Top Gear’ (children). For us
oldies, stress plays a role in meaning, separating words and indicating which
is more important, so that the blanket stressing of the first element causes
semantic chaos. But our children’s language operates according to different
rules and all the arguments in the world won’t make them hear it our way.
Things are also on the move among the prepositions, those jewels of English
subtlety over which no one really agrees. As a child I was told off if I said
anything other than ‘different from’
and still follow that rule today, but am unoffended when others don’t. More
recently though I have been bothered by the adoption by train announcers of
‘arriving to’, rather than ‘arriving at’. To me ‘arriving’ refers to the very
specific moment of reaching a destination, but this sense of stopping is
undermined by the use of ‘to’, pulling my inner linguistic web out of shape.
Still more disturbing and far-reaching are the ‘tips of a flat belly’ I’m regularly offered on the internet, and the
‘instructions of using the
smartboard’ provided at the college where I teach, where in both cases I would
expect to see ‘for’. That ‘arrive’
should change its meaning is one thing, but the threat of losing for altogether is alarming and I hope
that we can hang on to it in our little bay at least.
Other changes have affected the use of tenses, particularly those expressing
the past. Alongside the present tense systematically used by historians to
describe events taking place in previous centuries – apparently afraid no one
will be interested unless they can be persuaded it’s all happening at the time
of telling – is the perhaps related fading of the present perfect, the compound
tense that relates past events to the present. So whereas, in the past, a
newsreader might have said ‘Three British soldiers have been killed by a
roadside bomb in Afghanistan’, where the tense indicates this is a new piece of
information about a recent event, you are now more likely to hear ‘Three
British soldiers were killed by a roadside bomb in Afghanistan’, where the
tense cuts the event loose to float through days, weeks and centuries, leaving
the context of the news programme alone to tell you this is something that has
happened recently. Both the historians’ present and newsreader’s simple past
seem based on a sense that the past and present are separate and different, and
both are comparatively new phenomena. Do they reflect changes in a culture of
constant upgrading that focuses more on the immediate and the future and gives
less importance to the past? We can
speculate endlessly.
Another new tense-related phenomenon that
seems more superficial and fashion-related is the use of the present continuous
with the verb ‘love’ (eg. ‘I’m loving your new dress’), which seems to have
been triggered, in the UK at least, by McDonald’s ads. This nightmare for
teachers of English as a second language is an interesting case, precisely
because it involves an obvious bending of a fundamental rule of English
grammar, which native speakers would hear as an obvious foreigner’s mistake in
most contexts. My own pet theory that this trendy use of the present continuous
was originally triggered by the line ‘She’s a model and she’s looking good’ in
a very successful song by the German band Kraftwerk back in the 1980s, which
managed to sound cool rather than silly. But the more obvious source is American
via the McDonald’s publicity machine. We in the UK have a love-hate
relationship with the American language to which we are constantly and
unavoidably exposed, enthusiastically adopting some elements while resisting
others and blaming it for contamination of our linguistic souls, depending on
which Americans we want (not) to sound like.
But American English isn’t the only
influence. When the Australians started selling us their soap operas and even
their pop music in the 1980s, Australian became cool, the language of
sun-drenched cousins with no ambitions for world domination by anything other
than straight-talking cheerfulness, and Brits rushed to adopt the ‘no worries’
philosophy and rising intonation, among other things replacing American
‘college’ with Australian ‘uni’ overnight.
More broadly and less tangibly influential
no doubt is the use of English as a global lingua franca by people whose first
language is different.. Perhaps this is also a
factor in the changing use of prepositions: ‘arriving to’ might have been first
uttered by a francophone rail employee; perhaps the ‘tips of a flat belly’ are
the work of someone who preferred not to dip into the battery of prepositions
English has to offer. Perhaps the news stopped telling us that something ‘has
happened’ under the influence of other languages in which they simply
‘happened’.
Whatever the case, what is clear is that,
like every other language, English will go on changing, and that this will continue
to be a source of both joy and profound discomfort to some of its native
speakers. The way we speak is part of who we are. Language is the medium we use
both to ‘express ourselves’ and to identify and place ourselves in relation to
others. But we don’t own it and we can’t control it. We adopt its changes often
unawares, or in spite of ourselves, for reasons we can never pin down. The one
thing we can be sure of is that, like the ocean, it pays no heed whatsoever to
our will.