Language Trainers Blog

Here in the UK, it’s traditional to wish people a “Merry Christmas” at this time of year, as opposed to the North American greeting “Happy Holidays.” In fact, the word for Christmas in Old English is Cristes Maesse, and later Christ’s Mass. Mass, in religious context, means a death sacrifice. So maybe not a nice thing to wish, after all?

When some of us are sending our Christmas cards, some write “Merry Christmas,” whilst others use “Merry Xmas” as a shortened version of the former.

In Ancient Greek, the word Christ was spelled with an X – Χριστός (Xpistos) so some believe that the shortened version of the word stems from this.

Either way, the word “Christmas” undeniably has religious connotations and has certainly made me think of the meanings behind the phrase “Merry Christmas.” Maybe “Happy Holidays” is best after all?

New research from British scientists at Cardiff University’s School of Psychology shows that infants can recognise their mother’s voice, rather than the words, in any language; demonstrating that tone is key to voice recognition.

Researchers studied 84 babies aged between 14 and 18 months and conducted two studies – one in English and the other in Greek. None of the babies had prior exposure to the Greek language.

Research leader Dr Merideth Gattis explained, “in this research we aimed to investigate the contribution of prosodic cues, or tone of voice, to infants’ understanding of mental states. Tone of voice is a really useful signal to what someone is thinking. We used the words ‘whoops’ and ‘there’ accompanied by relative vocal inflections in two languages and got exactly the same results – whether in English or Greek, which none of the children understood.

This study showed us that children can judge the intentions of other people based on tone of voice alone. The acoustic features of speech accompanying actions allow infants to identify intention in perceptually similar actions. They are able to use prosodic cues as a guide to how to act on the world, demonstrated by their tendency to copy intentional actions more than accidental actions.”

Source: Cardiff University News Centre

Growing up, we referred to Friday the 13th as Black Friday. It wasn’t until last November that I found out that Black Friday is also the name for the big shopping day immediately following Thanksgiving in the USA, and apparently the Friday just before Christmas in the UK (a big party day). It seems that my usage is non-standard at best (that is, pretty much unknown). Black Friday is also the name that has been given to numerous tragic events, as it seems like bad things happen fairly often on Fridays.

In some places, especially the United States and Commonwealth countries, today is especially unlucky because it is the combination of two unlucky things: Friday, and the number 13. The superstition causes many people to pay extra attention to staying safe, not letting black cats cross their paths, and not walking under ladders (other supposedly unlucky occurrences). Some people are so paralysed by a fear of this day that they can’t leave their houses and some can’t do anything on these days. The phobia is known as paraskavedekatriaphobia, or friggatriskaidekaphobia, which I think is an excellent word to try to say.

Interestingly enough, though Friday and 13 have individually been seen as unlucky for centuries, the combination has only been seen as a particularly unlucky day for the last 100 or so years.

In Greece and in certain Spanish-speaking countries (Mexico, Spain, and some parts of Latin America), it’s not the Friday that should be feared, but Tuesday the 13th. Tuesday is considered the worst day of the week, and why not, as you haven’t even reached Wednesday (the ‘hump’ day) yet. As a result of this, the horror film franchise Friday the 13th, although released in Spain as Viernes 13 (Friday the 13th), was released in Argentina as Martes 13, or Tuesday the 13th.

In the news last week, an Athens court dismissed a case requesting that the word ‘lesbian’ be only used to refer to residents of the small island of Lesbos in the Aegean Sea.  Three such residents requested that the word be banned from being used to refer to homosexual women.  One of the plaintiffs was photographed holding a banner that proclaimed “If you are not from Lesbos / you are not a lesbian”.

“This is a good decision for lesbians everywhere,” Vassilis Chirdaris, lawyer for the Gay and Lesbian Union of Greece, told Reuters. “A court in Athens could not stop people around the world from using it. It was ridiculous.”

The female poet* Sappho was famous for her love poems in ancient Greek times, and the word ‘lesbian’ was derived from her birthplace, Lesbos.  It turns out that the island has become something of a popular destination for gay women, and this has provided a boost to the local tourism industry.

It’s not unheard of for certain towns or regions to restrict the use of their name for commercial purposes, and for this reason the word ‘Cognac’ can only be used to describe brandy made in that region.  Unfortunately for the people of the village of Champagne, Switzerland, they can’t even use their own village name on local produce.  France is very proud of its Champagne wine region, and Switzerland has, for politico-economic reasons, agreed to forbid this tiny village from using the word ‘Champagne’ on their products.

Despite all the efforts of the French, ‘champagne’ has become synonymous with almost any ‘sparkling white wine’ in many places in the world, despite not being technically correct.  We could use ‘methode traditionelle’, or ‘bubbly’, but it’s just not the same.  ‘Champagne’ is becoming generic, which has to be somewhat of a compliment for the region, surely?  Similarly, whatever the ruling had been in Athens, I doubt many people worldwide would restrict the use of the word ‘lesbian’ to the description of the 90,000 inhabitants of Lesbos.

*I’m not a fan of the word ‘poetess’, for some reason.  Maybe ‘poetress’ would be better?