Semantic Shift: Meaning Changes Precipitated by the Internet

Thanks to the internet and social media the semantics of English is taking a shift. unlike a language like French in which words have to go under the scrutiny of l’Academie Francaise before they can be adopted into standard French, English accepts anything from anywhere by common usage. Being a grammar nazi in the times we are living in has become a responsibility; ask one he will tell you how badly he needs a red pen to underline words on timelines that seem misplaced.

Nominalization, coinage and other neologisms have become common in the postmodern era. We all miss those days when black berries and apples were just fruits. In those days, gingerbread was just a cookie and jellybean was a sugar candy. When friend was just a noun for what becomes of a person we have befriended and like was a verb.

It took me sometime to realize that an epic fail was neither a paradox nor sarcasm however ironic it may sound. Google is now a verb in the Oxford dictionary although my auto correct still insists that I have to write its first letter in the upper case. Today tweeting is not confined to the chirping of members of class aves; in fact, I’d be surprised to know you’re reading this and you do not tweet. 

 You are worried by the current trend? Or interested by a particular fashion trend? You better be heading to twitter to see what’s actually trending!  Talking of trends, remember you will need a tag for something to start trending. I don’t really mean that you will need to attach or stick a paper or something, but I suppose it’s something close to that. But then am afraid else where you might be tagged on photos and posts! Did I just mention post? Well seems things are murkier than I thought. By post I don’t mean mail, neither do I mean a job opening nor a piece of wood/metal in a vertical position like in a goal post. I mean something quite different, like a message posted on social media. Actually what we do to tweets is post them, perfect example! Viral isn’t only for infections, it can also be for photos and videos. Meanwhile, if you carry your notebook today, you won’t need a pen, how good? However you will be in great trouble if yout notebook’s drive gets a virus unless you have used cloud storage for your back up.

When you see me type : ) I am not trying to punctuate although I just closed a bracket that I didn’t open, I was only trying to key in an emoticonJ. Have I told you that in the present day # has gotten another use apart from denoting a sharp tone in music? Yes, when we’re chirping tweeting, we do use # and call it a hash tag. This is just a tip of the ice berg; there are more words that have taken a totally different semantic path from what used to be the obvious. Words like stumble; have I told you that Stumble Upon is a proper noun today? 

I am afraid if we continue with this discussion we might end up with annoying barbarisms that have no regard for grammar and spelling. We might end up with unintelligible vowel-less lexical items. All in all, that is how dynamic the English language is.

**italics - some of the words that have a acquired new meanings

Smart Devises**, Non-Smart Users?

Going through my Facebook feed I am saddened by what our gadgets have reduced us into.  My friend has crafted a very great status that his fellow 2000 or so friends wouldn’t resist clicking the like button but they won’t. Guess why? His auto-correct had something different in mind!  Our elephant thumbs on tiny touch keypads only make the situation worse!

Modern day devices come equipped with auto-correct features among other features that make us part with colossal sums of cash that we wouldn’t have even thought of raising in the first place. On auto correction, life has become so simple. Who needs to master the spelling of a 10 letter word in a language that’s not his first?  Suffice it to say we now have prosthetic brains in these gadgets.

Human language is way too complex for a machine to comprehend; only a human brain can. The end product i.e. utterances or sentences are after complex processes in the human brain; that’s why you should never trust a gadget to interfere with what you want to say or write. Let’s cut a long story short by a few illustrations.

My brother, who lives in Kigali, is leaving tonight.

My brother who lives in Kigali is leaving tonight.

Both of the above sentences are properly punctuated, however the semantic bearing of the two sentences isn't the same owing to the different positions of the comma. While in the first sentence the words between the commas aren’t critical to the meaning, in the second one the same words, without a comma have a lot to do with the meaning of the whole sentence. In fact, auto-correct features don’t help much where punctuation is concerned save for offering you capital letters after the full stop.

It’s quite obvious that auto-correct won’t be of much help when using proper nouns, especially when dealing with our African names. Sometimes, especially on mobile phones, these grammar/spell checkers wont detect when you improperly use homonyms  such as there and their which we can extend to you’re and your; everyone who minds grammar can bear me witness how this** are annoying in text messages or on social media.

we've all been in such a situation thought not this awkward!

Till when are we going to allow the very devices we use to tweet call our audience (tweeps) twerps?  It can be awkward in text messaging. We already know how difficult text messaging is since we don’t have the facial expressions and other non-verbal cues to complement our messages; I need not talk of the catastrophe that befalls someone when they blindly follow their devises**, or to be fair to the users; when there devices have better ideas.

Clearly artificial intelligence cannot replace the human competence in language; I am yet to mention computer translation and speech translation where computer scientists are using an almost similar technology as the one in spelling and grammar checkers. The algorithms used in these use probability and statistics; perfection would require a replica of the model of the human language, any good student of Noam Chomsky, can tell you how (im)possible this is! Chomsky’s view on the same would require a different page!

Back to spell/grammar checkers, let’s see how many modern grammar checkers will properly correct the poem below, created for old auto corrects.

This is the best Microsoft word can offer:

Eye halves a spelling checker
it came with my pea sea.
It plainly marks four my revue miss steaks eye kin knot sea.
Eye strike a quay and type a word and weight for it to say
Weather eye yam wrong or write.
It shows me strait a weigh as soon as a mist ache is maid.
It nose bee fore two long and eye can put the error rite.
Its rare lea ever wrong.
Eye have run this poem threw it,
I am shore your pleased to no.
Its letter perfect all the way.
My checkers told me sew.

I am not saying that you shouldn’t use auto correct, use it but don’t trust it; unless you believe your device is smarter that you, but in this age of Google and Android, I wouldn’t be surprised! I personally prefer turning off my auto-correct features than letting these probabilistic guesses from mindless devices mess my texts. Now help me identify where in this text I deliberately let Microsoft office 2010 decide for me, or where it failed to save me.

** Auto correct fails in this article

About Me, Myself and I

Thanks to Kenyan English we now accept constructions like “Me I am going….” The fact that this kind of a construction may go unnoticed doesn’t mean that it is correct. However much an error is repeated, it can never become right unlike that lie which becomes truth once repeated so often. What’s even more nettling is seeing this mistake appear on documents created using word processor programs, grammar checkers are there to help to get rid of these mistakes but some people just ignore! Smart devices dumb users, right? (Topic for another page) anyhow, let us try and differentiate these personal pronouns.

Me

Only use me when you are the object in the sentence. It is used along with other objective pronouns like her, us, him etc.

E.g. the old man called john, the old man called him

Thus is such a case if we replace the personal pronoun him with first person singular it will be; the old man called me!

Easy, right?

Me is also used to refer to the person being referred to by a preposition. For example:

·         This article has been written by me.

·         Rose was accompanied by Beth and myself me.

Love yourself, not you!

Myself

Now that I mentioned in an instance where it is misused, why don’t we just have a look at how it is used before we go to I? Myself is a reflexive pronoun meaning it is used as an object that refers to the speaker who is also the subject, thus we can say it is the reflexive form of I.

·         E.g. I love me myself

·         I like being me myself

However we have developed this bad habit of using me instead of myself especially on social media, trust me I might be heading for an “un-follow expedition’’ for anyone using that after I have shared it.(Bah, Kabutha is just a single follower anyway, well to me you’re committing crimes against grammar J). Back to the track, use of myself is not limited to I, it is also used for referring to oneself after being mentioned in the same sentence.

·         E.g. you don’t expect me to tell you about myself.

Finally it is used to put emphasis that for instance someone did something without assistance.

·         E.g. I myself witnessed all the drama

·         I did all the work by myself. By+oneself=alone

The former may sound incorrect but it is correct, I bet the clarification in the latter is clear. By oneself I mean himself, herself and myself. I have deliberately avoided commenting about a common construction like the director or myself will answer all your questions. Does anyone know how correct that is? Shed some light in the comment box below

I

Perhaps I ought to have started with this, nevertheless let’s look at it. I is more or less the opposite of me.  Only use I when you are the subject in the sentence just like you do with he and she. When you use I together with another noun or pronoun to form the subject, I always comes second.

·         E.g. I am talking to you

·         Dennis and me I are talking to you.

Remember, for subject use I, for object stick to me and myself for reflexive and emphasis. They are not interchangeable at all!

Have a nice week ahead and take care of yourself J

Literally …

Our atrocious use of language is a common phenomenon, and worse still becoming more acceptable day by day. From misuse of words to non-standard sentence structures we haven’t spared any branch of linguistics. Often we defend ourselves by saying that English language is flexible and dynamic but this isn’t a justification; I choose the prescriptivism path.

Let’s explore a bit of semantics today; the meaning of some words in English has evolved sometime due to ignorant or careless usage. Sometimes someone has just learnt a new word and they want to use it in every phrase they utter. While such change maybe inevitable, it should be nipped in the bud. Use of words in ways that are antithetical to the actual meaning not only alters with the clarity of the word meaning but also destroys the aesthetic beauty of language.  

One such word is “literally”. Literally is misused in the sense that it is either used incorrectly or unnecessarily. Worse still, literally is most of the times used to mean the opposite of what it is supposed to; using literally to mean figuratively while these two words share an antonymous semantic relationship is wrong in as much as language changes. It is like saying hot while you mean cold without telling us it is opposite day!

Let’s struggle and get this right; no way are you literally exploding with excitement because someone surprised you on your birthday! You were literally figuratively dying of laughter as you watched your favourite stand-up comedian!

©Cyanide&Happiness (explosim.net)

If something is literally happening it is actually happening. I know someone will say it is used for exaggerating or stressing a point but it is not really the best of ways to do so! Striving to sound sophisticated and people also use it is even more catastrophic because where I come from people say literally even when they mean literary (Let’s not go there now please!)

©theoatmeal.com

Sheng: Another Malady Ailing Us?

Long time without an article; blame that on the intellectual assessment I was undergoing for the last two weeks in a form we all don’t like however endowed we are (read exams), anyway how about we speak about Sheng today?

This is a difficult one I must admit! It’s the kind of subject that takes me too long to begin working on, wondering from which side I should start. For a kick start, we must note that a good number of Kenyans will struggle a lot to construct a grammatically correct sentence in English as well as in Kiswahili, the two official languages. Tragic, right? Let us not even talk about vernacular languages and the urban youth!

Sheng has over time gained legitimacy and wide acceptance even from the f expected quarters while the opprobrium to which it had been subjected may have reduced. Besides it has spread beyond Nairobi and is now commonly used in many urban set ups around the country. In a country where language is considered to be a means of identity, thus sometimes our names betray us at times, sheng may be seen as a unifying language. But who does it bring together, different communities? I bet not. The youth? May be! Why am I skeptic about sheng, you realize the rich and the poor have their own varieties, in fact there is another entity called Engsh. Sheng doesn’t achieve to unite communities and to some extent even the youth. Your ethnicity isn’t measured by how well you can speak your mother tongue but by where your ancestors hail from! Sheng only has with it the possibility of unifying people simply because it gives users a contemporary identity unlike standard language. Most new words in Sheng erupt from Kenyan slums and “low class estates,” creating a barrier between the upper class youth of the upper class and those of the lower class. We would be therefore justified o conclude that apart from failing to provide a panacea of negative ethnicity and bridge the gap by creating a common identity, sheng creates another gap between the rich and the poor! After all, how could such a hogwash language without an identity itself give people an identity?

For those of us who practice the noble profession, teaching and those who sit in interview panels, we know sheng could just be another malady ailing our youth. It pains to see someone garner a mere 10 out of 40 in a primary school composition, or worse still the ever dwindling language grades in English and Swahili that the Education minister will announce year in year out, announcing the K.C.S.E results. Just like how much your grooming says about you, or better still your hair style, so does the language you use. From the school of thought that boys (not men) who wear stud earrings need an urgent visit to Mathari mental hospital, I need not mention how one appears to be when they use sheng at the wrong place at the wrong time for the right purpose. The pervasive use of sheng should be curbed so that it can stop inhibiting the comprehension of other languages.

Ghetto radio boasts to be the only sheng station in Kenya saying “your official sheng station” in English. They couldn’t use sheng to communicate such a simple message in their slogan. That is how unintelligible sheng is owing to its dynamism and constant metamorphosing. Just when you thought you knew something in sheng, you are already using archaic words. Sheng lacks its own lexicon and can only be used in limited contexts. Try listening to Ghetto Radio Sheng news and listen to how the presenter struggles to force some words to fit.

Sheng is a mishmash of different languages principally Swahili, English, Gikuyu and Dholuo. Its use has had far reaching effects on other languages and can only be comprehended by a few. Sheng is still a cryptolect, in every sense of the word.

Sheng is only good to that artist who’s making a kill out of every album he releases, its only good for that politician who wants to make an appeal to the youth, and lie that he has their interests at heart, its only good for that entity putting mega billboards in peri-urban areas! Otherwise it can be vile, repugnant and can degrade you to look uncouth. Avoid using it by all means, if you have to, toe the line of the grounds into which you shouldn’t carry along this blemish.

Not even the Official Sheng Station Uses Sheng on its Advertisement Banners

MIND YOUR PUNCTUATION

In our quest for short  messages and instant replies we have atrociously violated language. But before getting there we had begun with ignoring all punctuation rules. In this day and age when people almost everyone is involved in microblogging and a good number of people are now writing on their own blogs, grammar and punctuation mistakes have become more rampant. The worst part is that we carry them on to where they should never appear; which makes me think that we should just stick to the rules everywhere, isn’t that what makes the language beautiful? The importance of correct punctuation cannot be overemphasized. Punctuation is what makes the reader hear the writer’s voice. It carries with it clarity, tone and even the message itself.

One of the most blatantly misused of punctuation marks is the comma. This blog post is not enough to state the instances where the comma is abused. I would have to type my fingers sore if I were to write the many situations in which the comma is misused and where it is supposed to be used. Most of the time we aren’t aware that we are misusing the comma, we just do it unconsciously. Sometimes there’s just that irresistible urge to litter your sentences with commas since you think they are too long. Wrongly placed commas can be hilarious while lack of commas can be grave. You can entirely change the meaning by wrongly placing a comma or omitting one.

omitting a comma can cost someone's life! 

Used to play around with meaning, quotation marks have indiscriminately proliferated in all sorts of texts. Quotation marks are unique in their own way; they are the only quotation marks that are used in literary styles to produce sarcasm, they will provoke you to think more about the connotative meaning of the quoted word. The apostrophe hasn’t been spared either in as much as it’s its use is the easiest to master after the full stop. Apostrophes are only used to show possession and in contractions. However you have to master the exception, its, in possessive form does not have an apostrophe, it’s, with an apostrophe is the contraction of it is. In that light ‘til cannot be used to mean until and when you write the 70’s you mean something belongs to 70 or perhaps ‘70s as in 1970-1079. Pluralizing family name doesn’t require an apostrophe lest you need to show that something belongs to them. For words ending with an s the apostrophe to show possession comes after the s, including plural nouns.

Someone call apostrophe police!

We all like putting several exclamation marks after a statement or a word to emphasize the gravity of the matter or maybe anything else. This may be excusable in sms and social media but still, overuse of exclamation marks leaves one wondering what exactly is being emphasized, I visualize it as someone just shouting around. Likewise in ellipses only three dots (…) should be used and not four. As far as punctuation is concerned, this is just a tip of the iceberg, we haven’t mentioned hyphenation, capitalization and dashes.

Proper Punctuation matters

We are in a generation that knows colons as tools of making an emoticon and can only appear in L or J and semi colons are only used to wink ;-) accompanied by a message which has no sense of grammar or sometimes meaningless to intellectual minds. Given that using the two may be tricky, it is better to leave them out than use the wrongly. However it doesn’t break a bone to remember a simple rule a put by grammarly, one of the most popular grammar blogs. The rule is: “A colon should not separate a noun from its verb, a verb from its object or subject complement, a preposition from its object, nor a subject from its predicate.” Am starting to feel that my text here has too many commas. Moreover I know a class six lesson, on a blog post is not your cup of tea, how often do we even write apart from school work and who even marks your poorly punctuated Facebook status updates and tweets. So it’s only fair I stop at his point but remember; good punctuation is beautiful, lack of punctuation marks is harrowing and misuse of punctuation marks is awful. 

MALICE, MALEVOLENCE & ANARCHY

School term is finally over, those of us practicing the noble profession through which professionals for other careers are churned out know how hectic last week was, with exams and marking! I am surprised primary school kids are writing better compositions than so many secondary school students. My heart now bleeds for that teenager who can barely construct a correct sentence in correct English nor Kiswahili sanifu.

We know too well where the rain started beating, social media!  The impacts of social media on language are far reaching. Like a cancerous malignancy, our wanton language use on social media has not spared any vital organ of the English language from the syntax to semantics! Through social media we are destroying the concrete on which writers base their great works of art we all enjoy to read. So serious is the problem that at my age I can no longer decipher what some of my friends are trying to say in text messages, hangouts, tweeter and Facebook.

I can bet that whoever came up with the idea of a 140 character limit wanted to ensure that there is fun in sending clear and concise tweets, without rambling on or being verbose. What have we done instead? We have taken advantage of the situation, we have shamelessly wrecked grammar, and we have reduced ourselves into a throng of simpletons committing all sorts of atrocities against the queen’s dialect. You may describe language as liquid or dynamic prone to change anytime. This change might be anytime but not anyhow. As a student of linguistics I appreciate this; indeed all languages do change but some of the changes in question are just unjustifiable and uncalled for.

Vowels have suddenly been rendered useless! How do you omit all the vowels of a word? Doesn’t your conscience tell you something isn’t right? You are about to tell me it’s because you want to maximize on your 140 characters, right? What about those who substitute i with y, like in phylosophy? Thanks to social media, a good number of students and young professionals can no longer spell simple words even in academic and formal writing. Even with the ubiquitous presence of spell checks and auto corrects in our devices which are apparently smarter than the users, we still force these mistakes into all our writings.

I am told that  preceded by a hashtag has a new meaning apart from being successful while two strange bed fellows, epic and fail have been married! Such profligacy with language is illicit! The two nations to which English can be said to be native are commonly referred to by their acronyms. The same acronymy has now boomeranged on language, clearly lol and omg were just an indication of danger that was looming. Today I see whole sentences reduced into an acronym, needless to say I no longer bother to discern what the person is trying to say! Worse still these have been also adopted into normal parlance so that when someone is late for class and the no nonsense professor needs an explanation, the first thing one says is OMG! Such people should thank God am not their professor! I now understand why my friends are confused by their BFs, GFs, BFFs, FWBs and any others I might have forgotten. Words have been fragmented in the guise of shortening in such a way that they are no longer intelligible. Others have just been deliberately spelt wrongly for no particular reason, that’s how serious the escalation of anarchy and impunity has become in the use of English. I am yet to find the correct words to describe dolts who are x instead of s and k as a reply that means okay, if I guessed right.

Language:Stop this madness

As I confess having committed some of these heinous crimes against language, I must mention that for quite some time now I have completely exonerated myself from such barbarisms as the use of moronic and mutant lexical units with no semantic bearing. Every time I witness this idiocy, read a vapid colloquial, every time I receive vowel-less word-husks in a text message, I wonder what our successors will make of the troglodytes we are, who will(by then) have irreparably polluted the beauty of the English language! Clearly social media is a bitter pill to swallow, sociologists will tell you there is more to worry about other than language. As you embrace this mutant and unintelligible language; netspeak, fingered speech, chat speech or whatever other name it has been baptised, take caution lest it boomerangs on you. But before you get there be sure to open those two links (I cannot overemphasize how factual the information there is!). The English language is desperate for justice! The only way tou can dispense justice is by following grammar and spelling rules.  Otherwise I hope I will not have a BFF soon, Best Friends Funeral; apana! 

Homonymy: The Spelling Monster

Earlier this week when flipping through a standard 6 pupils report form I came across something that shocked me in some way, something poorer than the pupils performance; the teacher of English who also happened to be the class teacher had noted, “David you need to pay more effort expesially in science!” If you haven’t noted the mistake in the sentence I suggest you either restart reading or just quit! I understood why our English is terrible. If a teacher could make as a grave mistake as that one, how many others has he transmitted to you. Apart from mother tongue interference, there’s one other monster in written language: homonymy. Homonymy consists of two: homographs which refers to words that are spelt the same but have different meanings and the notorious homophones! Like the suffix phone suggests, homophones have to do with talking, hearing and listening just like in telephone. These are words that sound the same or almost the same, more often the latter than the former. This is a nightmare for many non-native speakers of the English language. Here are a few of the most tricky pairs:

1.       Hear/here: one of them being among the 5 senses, mistaking the two is unforgivable. Can you hear me? Come over here! I don’t think I should explain what each means but can please show that you know the difference in your writing.

2.       Heard/had: we aren’t done with hear yet. You heard me, didn’t you? Here comes hear reincarnated in its past form. Heard is the past of hear while had is the past tense and participle of have. Again, show you know this in your writing.

3.       Definitely/Definately: the former is the correct while the latter is the misspelt form!

4.       Sight/site: site has everything to do with seeing (5 senses again) while site refers to physical location or website. What happens when it comes to writing that you suddenly decide they are interchangeable?

5.       Its/it’s: which is the possessive and which is the contraction of it is? Ask any grammar teacher how many time they have had to repeat this in class. Its is the possessive to mean belonging to something.

6.       There/their: their parents were there/there parents were there? A mistake one shouldn't be forgiven for!

7.       Principal/principle: their principal emphasized on the principle of generosity. This is one of the most mischievous, always putting to test one’s spelling. I think my example is clear enough to distinguish one from the other.

8.       Lose/loose: loose is what happens to your jeans when you lose a lot of weight. I am sure you know this but somehow you’ll always make this mistake once you put pen to paper!

9.       Breathe/breath: doing some work that you want to be error free and then find you have to use one of the two things get bumpy. To make matters worse you don’t have a dictionary to help you distinguish which is the verb and which is the noun. Paraphrasing won’t help. Worry no more, just master that the verb has an e at the end, so that if you breathe you have taken a breath! J

10.   Too/two/to: need I say anything about these?

right, rite or write?

I just listed ten, I could have listed even 50 but the list is endless. With most of these not even Microsoft grammar check will save you, if anything it might correct where you were right and give you a wrong alternative. You just have to be keen. It doesn’t understand meanings but you do. I found it somewhat pointless to keep writing the meanings because that’s not where the problem lies. And* we didn’t find a solution for our English teacher with his expesially, that wasn’t precipitated by homonymy!

Let Us Not Allow Political Correctness Destroy Language

Over time I have had to accept living with the anathema of one of the most prevalent and deliberate violation of grammar rules; the use of plural pronouns instead of singular one in the name of seeking gender equality! Who said the use of he is exclusively male? Mankind, does this exclude the very existence of women?

Descriptivists will argue that he isn’t gender neutral, as if that is not enough they will also tell you that having to write he/she or s/he is cumbersome. Perhaps if English was like French we would not have to deal with such quagmires in language. The purity of the French language is the responsibility of L’Academie Française; English lacks such an authority! English like Wikipedia takes anything from anyone! Like Gelernter I’ll ask, “can we afford to allow virtual feminists to elbow our way like noisy drunks into that inner mental circles where all your faculties(such as they are) are labouring to produce decent prose(or speech for that matter!)? I am not against feminism in any way, I don’t understand why they say they are fighting for gender equality. This sounds like a paradox! Aren’t they trying to fight a virtual misogyny? One that they have created for themselves to such an extent that they have changed feminism into some form of misandry! L  (Let’s not deviate from language, reserve this debate for another page)

“The feminist movement as we have come to know it in recent decades is fundamentally a "con."...As it is considered treasonous to criticise a sister feminist, no standards of accuracy or honesty are ever enforced. Hyperbole and deceit thus become the formula for success, "peer review" playing no role in reining in misinformation. Any would-be feminist who raises scholarly objections to the rampant misinformation is branded an 'enemy of women' and is drummed out of the movement.” ― Robert Sheaffer

Back to matters of the heart, language. Since time immemorial, he has been known to represent male and female genders just like man has been used to refer to all human being, irrespective of their sex. Mankind does not assume that women do not exist! Come to think of a phrase like “man breastfeeds his young.” Biologically man refers to all the members of the species Homo sapiens. Out of biology, “Every man for himself, god for us all,” so what about women? Don’t create a fuss about it, they are covered. I can bet if one is a feminist and does not believe in god then he/she must be baying for my blood after seeing that phrase (he/she? Yes, you can be a member of the male sex and a feminist). But then there’s a funny trend by feminists where we’ll only hear them battle for chairperson instead of chairman(which does not prescribe that it has to be a male) and don’t want to recognize that words like conman or manhole may be demeaning to members of the male sex. If you are really fighting for equality it’s only fair that you recognize even what may demean your counterparts!

Pronouns he, she, his, her, they, their; in no way can they be used to refer to a singular. Consider a sentence like “everyone has their rights” given that everyone is singular, this construction is not grammatically correct! When we are told to be our brother’s keeper, does it imply that we should let our sisters to the hounds? It is so ridiculous that we’ve seen feminists suggest herstory instead of history! The epitome of this dispute is as seen in Pauwels (Women Changing Language) work where feminists have tried to re-spell the word woman by removing the man part and giving bizarre suggestions like womyn, wommin and wommon. At this point I feel tickled, someone give these people morphology classes! As if that is not enough they go ahead and change the stress pattern of a word like chairman to make sure stress does not fall on –man. As a result they have [tʃɛər ′mæn] instead of [′tʃɛərmən]. I thought feminism was about equality and not man hating!

 “Professors often advise every student to buy their own book” to whom does they refer to here? Is it that professors want students to buy books they have written or are they asking that each student has his/her own book? Why don’t you just spare your audience this kind of ambiguity by following a simple rule of grammar? If indeed we are looking for a gender neutral pronoun, one that will clearly include both genders indiscriminately using plural ones as singular is not the solution. In fact, English has a gender neutral pronoun it! As such saying that we are looking for gender neutral language is misleading. Unfortunately that cannot be a solution, it is used to refer to inanimate objects and animals; not human beings.  Scholars have further argued that the unknown gender (neutral) is not the same as the aspect of being either masculine or feminine. Let us not allow political correctness pollute the aesthetic beauty of language. 

For a solution, if you won’t accept he to represent all genders, then try avoiding constructions that require pronouns where you can. Try using one and oneself where possible but in no way should you go the wrong route of “pluralizing”. Otherwise when I tell you to list the great men in Kenya’s history be sure to have Wangari Mathai as the first one on that list, if I say I am my brother’s keeper I don’t mean that I don’t care about my sister. I don’t think I need explain what I mean by “man has a gestation period of nine months.” All in all, apart from wrongly painting men as villains and women the victims, feminism has raped the English language!

                     Let us not allow political correctness pollute the aesthetic beauty of language

Your Accent Betrays You

I still have issues with ‘Kenyan’ English, even if I am as guilty as accused (I’m the prosecutor, the judge and the lawyer here!). You’ve heard of Kenyans who visit France for a week and come back with an American accent? African countries are known to have peculiar accents, but hey let’s give Anglophones a break here; listening to the heavily accentuated French spoken in the francophone Africa and comparing it to what would be considered as standard French will leave you wondering why we didn’t develop our native languages into one regional language in Africa(say Swahili or Yoruba).

Back to the Kenyan dialect of English, one of the distinctive features of this dialect is its multiple accents. Unlike in Britain where they are obsessed with accents given that they are native English speakers, in Kenya accents are involuntary! This is where your accent betrays you and not your name; in fact had one Kalonzo Musyoka known this he would have spared himself the ridicule of being labeled tribal. Supposedly, Kenyans should be speaking in the Received Pronunciation (RP) which is regarded to as the standard accent of Standard English, however this is not the case. One of the most sought after Kenyan linguists (and purist), Prof Okoth Okombo attributes this to our first teachers of English. His scathing remarks about them are better not quoted here. Among the most notorious sounds for Kenyans are the post-alveolar affricates /tʃ/ and /dƷ/ the post alveolar fricatives /ʃ/ and /Ʒ/ and the /r/! Those who miss the R either produce an L or a plain aahJ. If you thought the R troubles are with people from the mountains, engage the Samburu who roll their tongue when trying to utter the R. What is the letter H called? I can bet 98% of you got this wrong, H is the only letter that doesn’t have the sound it represents in its name. Don’t call it heich, it’s an eich! Our Swahili (which isn’t any better) has also taken a heavy a heavy toll on our pronunciations, especially the vowel sounds so that each of the vowels is pronounced with one standard sound. You realize English spoken out of a classroom does not recognize the existence of short and long vowel sounds and does not distinguish monophthongs, diphthongs and triphthongs.

At least everyone speaks with an accent, we can actually narrow it down to beyond where you come from. Fortunately sociolinguists are at our defence! The primary function of language is communication. If your accent doesn’t inhibit communication then it should be the last thing you should think about before you speak. But we all want to speak in a refined standard language, don’t we? Well, I personally do!

If you do, try listening to BBC, Maina Kageni will take you nowhere with his endless relationship issues if you’re seeking to learn language! Seek to speak in RP and not British English, if you seek the latter, you will end up with many other accents from the United Kingdom while the former is the queens dialect.

One of the most obvious features of RP is non-rhocity in that the R occurring at the end of a word is always silent (I bet this isn’t a problem with Kenyans). Learn the vowel sounds in English; learn that ‘a’ in certain words like bath and dance is long like that of father, that it is rather “scheewpid’’ than “stoopid” for stupid, it is “epitemy” and not “epitome” for epitome this list is endless. I can promise you this won’t be a walk in the park with a language like English whose pronunciation is very irregular and unpredictable, did I mention it is “tirany” and not “tairany” for tyranny? Learn the intonation of the language (the French are very particular on this), what is the correct intonation for statements and question?  Know that produce the verb and produce the noun can only be differentiated by which syllable you stress! Learn to drop the Ts where you can in such a way that we won’t accuse you of ‘twenging’, instead block the air with your tongue at the end of the first syllable before expelling it at the beginning of the second syllable. Try practicing that with 'battle'. Suffice it to say, the only way out is by speaking, listening, living, walking and talking proper English. Oh, I almost forgot, you also need to invest, invest in a pocket dictionary!

if i had a British Accent I'd Never Shut, but then I Am Ever Talking!

The 'Advent' of Kenyan English

Finally, the first Kenyan blog on language!! With sociolinguists insisting that a distinct variety of English is slowly developing, (yes, you guessed it right, Kenyan English!!) although we purport to be speaking British English. That doesn’t mean you should start minding whether each word you utter is British or American; in fact one of the features of Kenyan English, (un)fortunately is that it is confused in that it doesn’t mind whether it is American or British. This is of course to the detriment of the purity of the English language, the “standard English” if you like.

                                      Kenyan English, a mishmash of British and American English

Apart from heavy borrowing from vernacular languages (especially the Bantu languages) and Kiswahili, one distinctive feature of Kenyan English is redundancy which will be what our first blog post will be aboutJ.

Trust me this is the most annoying feature! It can’t get worse than appearing in motivation letters, you don’t want to wait for feedback forever from your ‘would be employer’, do you? So let’s examine the phrases worst hit by redundancy!

         i.            Me, I don’t like….. : occurs mostly in spoken language, Nairobi ladies are the worst hit, right? No offence :-D . Do I really need to emphasize how wrong repetition of the subject is? Just say ‘I don’t like….’ And spare yourself the trouble of saying me and making a grave grammatical mistake.

       ii.            Write down these notes: even teachers of English (not English teachers) are culprits here! If something is written, hasn’t it been taken down? Take down some notes! Write some notes!

      iii.            Repeat again! Do I really need to say anything about this! It is not only wrong but also rude. Mostly occurs in the spoken language in the imperative.

     iv.            Few in number: what else can something be few in apart from number? Few already shows we are speaking about number thus in number is redundant.

       v.            Enter in: please consult your dictionary and tell me if you will see in in the definition of enter. Besides, you cannot “enter out”!

     vi.            Add something additional: only do this if you are looking for repetitions and alliterations in poetry!

    vii.            End result: results only come at the end and never the beginning, end is thus repetitive.

  viii.            Final outcome: isn’t this synonymous to end result? The same explanation thus applies!

     ix.            Still remains: what remains is what is still there. Still is evidently redundant.

       x.            Although they are friends, the have nothing in common with each other.

Although they friends, they have nothing in common.

Adding “with each other” to “in common” is superfluous!

     xi.            Return back: returning is taking back, back is thus very unnecessary.

    xii.            Postpone to a later time: we need to get serious now, can something be postponed to an earlier time?? So this phrase does not make sense. Postponing is late enough! Don’t make it later.

  xiii.            Protest against: protesting is usually to express opposition, against is redundant. Kenyan members of the fourth estate are as guilty as charged here!

  xiv.            An unexpected surprise: if it is expected then it cannot be a surprise, so once you say surprise we already know it was unexpected. Spare yourself the pain of being redundant.

   xv.            Plan ahead: it’s as if people plan ‘back’, no further comment about this one.

  xvi.            Foreign import/local export: an import is implicitly foreign by virtue of coming from a different country, and an export is implicitly local!

xvii.            Invited guests: 90% of speakers and entertainers in Kenyan ceremonies are guilty here. A guest is an invited person, that makes invited redundant in this phrase. Saying invited guests is as ridiculous as saying uninvited gatecrashers.

xviii.            Basic essentials/fundamentals: the three are more or less synonymous, thus choose to say basics, fundamentals or essentials, otherwise you will be accuse you of being redundant.

  xix.            I have….of mine: of mine is evidently redundant.

   xx.            The reason why……was because….: when you start a sentence with the reason why be sure to use that instead of because to avoid being redundant.             

I know having to read such a list might not be your cup of tea, so I stop there. It’s worth reading though. And that is just a tip of the iceberg, there are many other 'mistakes' unique to Kenyan English as well as phrases that lack a "semantic bearing" (NEVER start a sentence with a conjunction, though I just did). There is a plethora of common redundancies, the list is inexhaustible.  As a Kenyan I am not to the same mistakes brought by Kenyan English, so correct me!

Have a great weekend ahead, won’t you?