March 18, 2004 - Future of English

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Broadcast on Coast to Coast: March 18, 2004

English is fast becoming the language of science around the world, but what is its future among everyday speakers? One expert points out that the percentage of native English speakers is declining globally while the languages of other rapidly growing regions are being spoken by increasing numbers of people. But, as VOA Science Correspondent David McAlary reports, English will continue to remain widespread and important:

DM: Just 10 years ago, native English speakers were second only to Chinese in number. But British language scholar David Graddol [GRAD-doll] says English will probably drop in dominance by the middle of this century to rank, after Chinese, about equally with Arabic, Hindi, and Urdu, a south-Asian tongue closely related to Hindi. He points out that the decline will not be in total numbers of English speakers, but in relative terms.

GRADDOL: "The number of people speaking English as a first language continues to rise, but it isn't rising nearly as fast as the numbers of many other languages around the world simply because the main population group has been largely in the lesser developed countries where languages other than English have been spoken."

In a recent article in the journal Science, Mr. Graddol noted that three languages not now near the top of the list of the most widely spoken might be there soon. These are Bengali, Tamil, and Malay -- spoken in south and southeast Asia.

But another expert on the English language says Mr. Graddol underestimates the future of its dominance. David Crystal of the University of Wales, the author of the Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, says about one-and-a-half-billion of the world's six-billion people speak it as a second tongue compared to the 400-million native speakers.

CRYSTAL: "Nobody quite knows what's going to happen because no language has been in this position before. But all the evidence suggests that the English language snowball is rolling down a hill and is getting faster and faster and faster and accreting new foreign language users unlike any language has ever done before. I don't myself see that process stopping in the immediate future. David Graddol thinks even that momentum will die in the near future, but personally I think there is no sign of this."

DM: David Graddol does not dispute English's expansion as a second language, but his sense of proportion differs. While Mr. Crystal says more than three times as many people speak it as a second language than as a first, Mr. Graddol says that only recently have the second language speakers surpassed the number of native English speakers.

Whatever the total, he disagrees with the notion that English's growth as a second tongue means it will become the world language to the exclusion of all others.

GRADDOL: "We have grown up with the idea of dominance meaning that a language actually pushes out other languages and takes over the world. That's not actually what seems to be happening. Precisely because people are learning English as a second language, they are not actually giving up their first languages. They are becoming bilingual or multilingual. So the spread of English around the world is actually creating a greatly increased bilingualism and multilingualism."

Mr. Graddol says this will put people who speak only English at a competitive disadvantage. In the new linguistic world order, he says most people will switch between languages for routine tasks and monolingual English speakers will find it difficult to participate fully in society.

GRADDOL: "In India, for example, someone might speak five, six, even seven languages and not think that is a particularly unusual thing. But there will be some activities like going down to the market and buying vegetables that they might be able to do only in, say, Tamil. Then when they go home, they will talk to their family in another language, but when they go to college they will use probably English."

DM: Mr. Graddol notes that employers in parts of Asia are already looking beyond English. In the next decade, he says the most important language to learn for job opportunities is likely to be Mandarin Chinese.

For Wordmaster, I'm David McAlary on VOA's Coast to Coast.

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March 11, 2004 - Hypercorrection

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Broadcast on COAST TO COAST: March 11, 2004

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster -- getting hyper about correctness.

RS: English once had a system where nouns took different forms depending on whether they were the subject or the object of a sentence. Jack Lynch, an assistant professor of English at Rutgers University, says we've lost most of that.

AA: But this system survives in pronouns -- words like "I" and “me” and "she" and "her." And, as Professor Lynch explains, these can be confusing, and lead to common errors known as hypercorrections.

LYNCH: "Hypercorrection is not simply being fussy or a nitpicker or a pedant. The 'hyper' part, from Greek, means 'too much.' It means working so hard to avoid one potential problem that you end up falling into another one."

RS: "Can you give us an example?"

LYNCH: "Sure. We're taught as children, and beginning language learners are told, you don't say 'me and you went to the movies.' It should be 'you and I.' And a lot of people, therefore, internalize the rule that 'you and I' is somehow more proper, and they end up using it in places where they shouldn't -- such as 'he gave it to you and I' when it should be 'he gave it to you and me.'"

RS: "But we're not hearing that in common, spoken American English."

AA: "What you're hearing is someone would say, let's say, 'He took Rosanne and I to the movies -- '"

LYNCH: "Exactly."

AA: " -- where it should be 'he took Rosanne and me to the movies.' How did this happen? Why are people doing this?"

LYNCH: "It tends to come from areas where people are aware that there's something a little tricky in the language. Now it doesn't often happen if the preposition -- words like 'to' and 'for' and 'with' -- comes before one of these tricky pronouns. You would never say 'he gave it to she and I.' 'To she' just sounds wrong to us immediately. But 'to you' is right because 'you' has the same form whether it's the subject or the object."

RS: "So that's a piece of cake there."

LYNCH: "There are other areas where we make these mistakes; the word 'whom,' for instance."

RS: "And 'who.'"

LYNCH: "Yes, 'who' and 'whom.' Many people know there's this word 'whom' out there and they have a sense it's associated with 'proper' usage. But they end up using it wrong, such as 'whom should I say is calling?' It should, in fact, be 'who should I say is calling?' because 'who is calling' -- it functions as a subject."

RS: "So this is a subject/object thing again."

LYNCH: "Yes. You wouldn't say 'him is calling.' You would say 'he is calling.'"

RS: "So what's an easy way to remember this?"

LYNCH: "Well, whenever you're considering using 'who' or 'whom,' try converting it into 'he' and 'him.' If your ear tells you that you want a 'he' there, you probably want 'who.' If your ear tells you [that] you want a 'him' there, you probably want 'whom.' And the 'm' at the end is a good way to keep them straight."

RS: "Now what about speakers of English as a foreign language, that's another group entirely."

LYNCH: "Sure, and they'll make many of these same kinds of errors, especially with these forms where the language has been changing over a long time, and even native speakers can get confused in them. If you're not really confident in the rules, stick with what you do understand, rather than trying out the things that you don't quite get. Honest errors always sound better than hypercorrections, which run the risk of sounding pompous."

RS: "We talked about pronouns. We've talked about who/whom. Are there any other features that ...

AA: "There's one more. How about 'feeling badly.'"

LYNCH: "Yes, 'feeling badly' is a common problem. Again, we're taught growing up, or we're taught as we're first learning language, that we have to use adverbs with verbs. We don't say 'he did it good,' we say 'he did it well.' We don't say 'he ran quick.' We say 'he ran quickly.' But there is a whole class of verbs, verbs of being, which can include verbs related to sense, that do properly take the adjective. So 'I'm feeling badly' is in fact a hypercorrection."

RS: "So 'I'm feeling badly' is you're not really feeling some thing well."

LYNCH: "Exactly. 'Feeling badly,' what that would mean is something like I'm not doing it correctly, or I'm not touching something very sensitively, something like that. But if you mean feel in the sense of feeling good or bad in yourself, then it should be 'I feel bad' or 'I feel good.'"

AA: Language continually changes. Rutgers Professor Lynch says today's hypercorrection will probably become another generation's correct usage.

RS: And speaking of another generation, Jack Lynch looks back in time in his new book. It's called "Samuel Johnson's Dictionary: Selections from the 1755 Work that Defined the English Language."

AA: And that's Wordmaster. Send e-mail to word@voanews.com. And we've got all our segments at voanews.com/wordmaster. With Rosanne Skirble, I'm Avi Arditti.

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HEALTH REPORT - New Drug Cuts Blood Supply to Cancer

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This is the VOA Special English Health Report.

There is an expression that describes the traditional three steps that doctors use to treat cancer: "cut, burn and poison." Cut out the growth. Burn the cancerous cells with radiation. Poison those that remain with chemotherapy drugs.

More than thirty years ago, a young American doctor proposed another way. Doctor Judah Folkman thought cutting the blood supply to cancers could block their growth. For a long time, many other scientists dismissed this theory.

But, last month, the United States Food and Drug Administration approved the first drug that works the way he proposed. The drug is called Avastin. The Genentech company developed it to lengthen the lives of people with colon cancer that has spread in the body. It does not cure the disease, however.

To test the drug, some patients received both Avastin and chemotherapy chemicals. Others received only chemotherapy. The people who had both generally survived for twenty months. That was about five months longer than those on chemotherapy alone.

Avastin is a genetically engineered protein. It connects with a protein in the body that helps blood vessels grow. That protein is known as V.E.G.F., vascular endothelial growth factor. Blocking this growth factor can interfere with the supply of blood to the cancer and starve the cells.

Avastin is designed to target the weak places in cancer cells. It does not damage normal tissue. Chemotherapy drugs kill cancer cells, but usually also kill other cells. This can cause infections along with stomach and intestinal problems.

Today, Judah Folkman is a professor at the Harvard Medical School in Massachusetts. During the nineteen-sixties he worked at the Bethesda Naval Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland. Doctor Folkman thought that cancers put out some kind of material that made new blood vessels form. He thought it might be possible to develop new treatments if the vessel growth could be blocked. Today other drugs are also being tested to see if they can stop the formation of blood vessels.

Avastin is one of three new drugs approved for colon cancer in the past two years. But some doctors also note that these new medicines cost a lot more than older treatments.

This VOA Special English Health Report was written by Jerilyn Watson.

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March 4, 2004 - Lida Baker: Keyword Method as a Memory Aid

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Broadcast on COAST TO COAST: March 4, 2004

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on WORDMASTER -- a lesson we'll never forget!

RS: Like lots of people, our English teacher friend Lida Baker says she has trouble remembering names. So lately she's been trying a memory aid known as the keyword method.

AA: She’s been reading about the psychologist R.C. Atkinson, who devised this technique thirty years ago to help students learn foreign language vocabulary.

RS: Which is how Lida tested it on us.

BAKER: "I'm going to give you a word in Hungarian, because Hungarian is a language that I don't think -- probably not too many of your listeners speak Hungarian. Neither do I, but I happen to know this word. The word is kaposzta. Can you say it?"

RS: "Kaposzta."

BAKER: "Kaposzta. Good. Now, the first step in the keyword method is you listen to the word, kaposzta. And a kaposzta is a cabbage. It's the Hungarian word for a cabbage. So now the trick becomes, how are we going to remember that word? The first thing you have to do is you select something called a keyword, which is going to serve as a cue to help you remember that new word.

"There are three characteristics of a good keyword. The first one is that it should sound like the target word. So our target word is kaposzta. So, first of all, our keyword has to sound like it, OK? The second thing is that it should be a word that is easy to visualize. And so a good keyword is usually a concrete noun, because nouns are easy to visualize."

RS: "So it wouldn't be the same word as the word."

AA: "You're not supposed to visualize a cabbage."

BAKER: "No. Hold on a second and you'll see -- yes and no. The third thing about the keyword is it has to be something very familiar to you. So given those three conditions -- the most important is the very first one, which is that the keyword you pick needs to sound like the word that we're trying to learn. So if our word is kaposzta, why don't we take that first syllable, which is kap (cop), and we will use that as our keyword -- cop, meaning police officer. It's a slang word for police officer in English, OK?"

RS: "But it has nothing to do with a cabbage."

BAKER: "Ahh -- not yet! Here's where the technique really comes into play, because once you've picked your keyword, what you want to do is to imagine the definition doing something with the keyword. So the keyword is cop and the definition is cabbage. What we're going to do is create an image in our mind where the cop, the police officer, and the cabbage are somehow interacting. The more exaggerated it is, the better. So the image I came up with for this word is a cop, in uniform, whose head is a cabbage."

RS: "I was thinking exactly the same thing."

BAKER: "OK, see? And it's kind of a ridiculous image -- the more ridiculous or silly it is, the harder it's going to be to forget. So we have a police officer, a cop. He's got a cabbage for a head and he's got eyes, a nose and a mouth on that cabbage. And let's put a cop's hat on him and maybe a mustache, OK?"

"Now we could even, because our word is kaposzta, the second syllable is 'post,' we could have our cabbagehead cop standing in front of a post office, OK? Now let's just take that silly image and focus on it for a moment and see it in our mind's eye and really concentrate on it, so that the image becomes fixed in your memory."

RS: "I'll never forget it."

BAKER: "You won't ever forget it! Now let's suppose that it's a week later and you're studying for a big vocabulary test and you have your list of Hungarian words that you need to learn and remember for tomorrow's test. So you come to the word kaposzta on your list of vocabulary words. Now what happens?"

RS: "You think of a cop with a cabbage head."

BAKER: "You think of the cop and the word cop conjures up, it brings back that image of the cop with the cabbage head. You know, they're bound in your memory. You can't even separate them anymore."

AA: "And this has helped you remember your students' names, picturing them with cabbages on their head?"

BAKER: "Well, only if their name is kaposzta. But for other names, I've used other images. And I have to say, you know, for certain words, this technique has really worked for me."

RS: Lida Baker teaches in the American Language Center at the University of California at Los Angeles. And tells us she's working on some new textbooks for English learners.

AA: That's Wordmaster for this week. We hope you can remember our e-mail address, word@voanews.com, and our Web site, voanews.com/wordmaster. With Rosanne Skirble, I'm Avi Arditti.

MUSIC: "Cabbage Head"/Dr. John

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