Separated by a Common Language

They're doing some fixing-up on campus, and this week I was faced with the following in my path:



(In case you can't read the writing on your screen, the left(-)hand sign says "Please go around" and the right(-)hand one says "Please go round".) I liked this bit of linguistic indecision.

Adverbial and prepositional round is far more common in BrE than in AmE. (And just typing it gets the Dead or Alive song going through my head. Which Dead or Alive song, you ask? You mean they had more than one? I thought they just released the same one over and over and over and over again.) According to John Algeo's British or American English?, round is 40 times more common in BrE than AmE (in the Cambridge International Corpus). Though it might just be differences in lexicographical practice, Algeo also notes that (US) Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary (2003) lists 2 senses for prepositional round but 7 for around, whereas the (UK) New Oxford Dictionary of English lists 5 for around and 8 for round.

I searched for round the on the Guardian website and asked myself whether the examples I found would be round or around in my native dialect. Here are the results from the first two pages that didn't involve other Briticisms (otherwise I'd be typing explanations all day and night), repetition, compounding (e.g. a round-the-world ticket), or other disqualifiers:

1. Party round the world in 2007
2. Reading round the Christmas tree.
3. He's an expert guide, fluent in Italian, takes you round the museum
4. Pubs are to be allowed to stay open round the clock under plans for a radical overhaul of licensing laws
5. 'Listen: tinkering round the edges will change nothing'
6. On the way round the labyrinth, there are slits in the walls,
7. He has recently completed the last section of a walk round the M25 [a motorway/highway]

I'm fairly confident (though I must confess that I use a BrE-flavo(u)red round fairly often these days, and so may have lost my intuitions), that a typical AmE speaker would say around in all of these cases. The last seems to me the most natural with round, but perhaps some of you with more intact AmE intuitions will be better judges.

Using Fowler's as a guide, The Grammar Logs of the Capital Community College Foundation (Hartford, Connecticut) answers a query about round and around with:

In almost all situations, the words are interchangeable and you'll have to rely on your ear to come up with the word that sounds better. [I]n British English, there are several idiomatic expressions in which "round" is obligatory, but where "around" would work just fine in the U.S.A.: "winter comes round," "show me round," "he came round to see me." In the U.S., "around" is obligatory when you're using it to convey approximation: "He arrived around 4 p.m.," "Around two-thirds of the faculty will retire next year."

There are other idioms that must have one or the other in them--for instance to get around, meaning to go to/be in a lot of places (as in the Beach Boys song), needs around. But in the meaning 'to evade' (as in We got (a)round the security guard), BrE prefers round and AmE prefers around. Feel free to add your own examples in the comments!

An interesting example in the Guardian results was The speech heard 'round the world. Here the apostrophe seems to indicate the writer's feeling that round has been contracted from around--and probably the writer's feeling that round is a bit more informal. That was the only apostrophe'd one in the 20 I looked at. But is it round really a contraction of around? Maybe not. Around is a fairly recent addition to the language. The OED lists around as 'rare before 1600', and notes that it doesn't occur in the works of Shakespeare. Round goes back further, and Shakespeare used it in places where I would have said around (but he didn't ask me, did he?):

1602 SHAKES. Ham. III. ii. 165 Full thirtie times hath Phoebus Cart gon round Neptunes salt Wash.

So where did the a- come from? It could be on analogy with other a- prepositions like across and among. At any rate, the OED marks its fourth sense for around as an Americanism now, but perhaps not in the past or the future:

4. In U.S.: = ROUND. Perhaps orig. U.K. (cf. quot. 1816). Now coming back into British use under U.S. influence.

1816 JANE AUSTEN Emma I. x. 187 Emma..was beginning to think how she might draw back a little more, when they both looked around, and she was obliged to join them.

All this seems to indicate that apostrophes are unnecessary for 'round (at least in BrE), and that the perceived need to put them there may be analogous to 'til, which was till before it was until.

Mark Liberman over on Language Log has blogged about the following sentence, which appeared in the Guardian today:

Quite who Fatah al-Islam are, or where they came from, is a matter of dispute.

Liberman finds the sentence-initial quite who very strange, preferring exactly who or just who. He suspects that it's BrE, though he shows through a search for these structures in the Guardian archives that quite who is the least common of the three even in BrE.

Quite who is no doubt less common than Just who or Exactly who, but it may be more common in speech than in writing. I approached Better Half on his way out of the shower this morning and asked him what he thought of Quite who he is is a mystery and Quite who does he think he is? His immediate reply was that they were fine things to say, but that they'd sound better spoken than they'd look written. (Then he gave me one of his 'Can I go now?' looks.)

To me, quite who sounds a bit worse than quite why, so I did a little investigation of this on my lunch hour. I haven't figured out how Liberman searched for just sentence-initial examples, so my methodology here is probably a bit different. I've searched for the following phrases on the Guardian website (representing BrE) and on the Boston Globe website (representing AmE), then looked at the first 50 and counted how many were sentence-initial. I'm counting as 'sentence initial' only those that start with an upper case letter or are preceded by a colon or semi-colon and those that are immediately preceded by just a discourse particle of some sort (e.g. Well, quite why that is...). There are many more that are clause-initial in subordinate clauses or that are complement clauses, but I'm not counting those. (*Some of these figures are more reliable than others. In particular, the just what figures include some things that weren't really sentences, but noun phrases, e.g. Just what the doctor ordered! Just what I didn't need! But scanning for capital Js was all I had time for.)

phrase	BrE hits		BrE S-initial	AmE hits	AmE S-initial
quite how	452		42%	21	4%
exactly how	1160		14%	1650	10%
just how	2770		32%	3720	16%
quite why	109		72%	8	12.5%
exactly why	227		6%	380	6%
just why	114		34%	89	30%
quite what	419		16%	146	0
exactly what	3940		0	5360	8%
just what*	1140		20%	2300	24%
quite who	7		43%	6	0
exactly who	261		8%	232	16%
just who	1030		48%	223	32%

What's striking here (or should that be quite what's striking here?) is how much more sentence-initial quite we see in BrE. But then, almost all of the percentages are greater for BrE than AmE. My theory is that the Guardian is more prone to ask (rhetorical) questions than the Globe (since newspapers here identify more with political positions than they do in the States, and therefore aren't shy about having leading questions with telling presuppositions here and there). But the differences between the BrE quite percentages and the AmE ones are pretty severe, which seems to support Liberman's hypothesis that sentence-initial quite is a Briticism.

Liberman goes on to say:

What I can't figure out is why Americans should object to "quite who" in subject position but not elsewhere. It seems to have something to do with polarity -- thus my judgments are:

I don't know exactly who is responsible.
I know exactly who is responsible.
I don't know quite who is responsible.
*I know quite who is responsible.
...
Do British speakers have different rules about the scope of polarity-licensing operators? Or is (this sense of) quite not really a polarity item for our British cousins, despite the evidence in the table above? Perhaps some well-informed and sociolinguistically-inclined syntactician or semanticist will enlighten this befuddled phonetician.

When referring to polarity here, Liberman is talking about how certain words have to go or not-go with negative words like not or nobody. (For example, already goes in positive sentences, but it has to be yet in negative ones: *I haven't slept already. So already is a negative polarity item.) I favo(u)r the 'quite is not as polar in BrE as in AmE' hypothesis.

Quite differs in many ways between BrE and AmE, and maybe some of these are related to Liberman's puzzle. First, there's the use of quite in BrE as a marker of agreement. Here's Robert Burchfield in Fowler's on the topic:

quite 1. A colloquial use that often puzzles or amuses visitors to Britain is the use of quite (or quite so) to express agreement (= 'I quite agree') with a previous declarative statement: e.g. 'The minister should have resigned.' 'Quite.' Other ways of expressing agreement exists (...), but quite, quite so and rather are the ones that are likely to be regarded as distinctly British by visitors.

Now, I think of quite as being the way that a BrE speaker dismisses someone else while paying lip-service to agreement. Here's the kind of thing I'm thinking of, from a Pirates of the Caribbean fan fiction site:

"Seishin, we should really get moving if you intend to finish this business soon" said her first mate, Victor, from the docks.
"Quite" she said shortly. Ignoring the plank, she jumped of the rail and landed neatly next to him.

In this context, the quite-sayer knows that Victor is right, but probably doesn't want to hear it from him (either because he interrupted her thinking about something else, or because she doesn't like her first mate bossing her around). Agreement quite is certainly not always said in a 'short' way, but it's a stereotypical way of using it.

Second, there's the fact that quite is often (but not always, the story is complicated--see Fowler's!) used to weaken the force of an adjective in BrE, while it strengthens the force in AmE. So, a sentence like that book was quite interesting is probably enthusiastic praise in AmE, but probably a damp squib of praise in BrE.
Now, these are not (quite!) the senses of quite that are operating in Liberman's examples, nevertheless I'm wondering whether some of these facts are somehow connected.

From the "Up the Albion" Facebook page

The comments on the last post mostly cent{er/re} around uses of up as a verb...which led me to recall one of my first encounters with a BrE sense up. (This one a preposition.)

It was on the back of a bus, and it said: UP THE ALBION!

Now, the Albion is Brighton and Hove Albion, also known as the Seagulls, the local (BrE) football club / (AmE) soccer team, so I was puzzled as to why the local bus company would want to say something rude about the local team. You see, in AmE I would have to say up with the Albion (reminding me of a slogan from my childhood, Up with People). Without the with, I could only presume that I should interpret it as I interpret Up yours, which is a rude thing to say wherever you are.

Better Half says that Up the Albion! is a kind of cheer that one used to hear on the terraces, but these days one is more likely to hear You are going home in a fucking ambulance! (he sang that, but I can't figure out how to give you a sense of the rhythm) or some of the chants available on this website. (I'm sending you to the Albion page, but there are lots more on that site for other clubs too. For an intro to football chants, see also this BBC site.) Terraces in this sense means steps or tiers where people stand to watch the (BrE) match/(AmE) game. They're kind of like (AmE) bleachers, except that they're for standing, rather than sitting. Terraces are becoming a thing of the past (whereas increasingly abusive football chants are not), because of safety concerns, following a number of horrible incidents in the 1980s (including and especially the Hillsborough disaster). New stadiums have seating throughout.

Of course, there are other ways in which up is used differently in AmE and BrE, but they'll have to wait until I haven't got so much marking/grading to do.

Months ago (I am a bad blogger), Brett wrote to ask:

Can you enlighten me any further on the differences between interpretations of "It's gone" in NA & the UK?

(You can probably tell from the NA [=North America] that Brett is writing from Canada.) Brett covers this issue on his English, Jack blog, where he writes:

I was somewhat taken aback recently when a disucssion on the ETJ mailing list brought to light the different interpretations of the 's in "Where's my car? It's gone." It turns out that most North American speakers of English interpret this as "My car is gone?" while British speakers tend to parse it as "My car has gone."

In the comments to the last post, I promised a posting on housing types...so here we go!

In his book The English: Portrait of a People, Jeremy Paxman quotes from (an English translation of) Hermann Muthesius' Das englische Haus (1904-1905):

There is nothing as unique in English architecture as the development of the house . . . no nation is more committed to its development, because no nation has identified itself more with the house.

Paxman (and he is not alone in this) attributes English interest in house and home to the English sense of privacy:

Because the English dream is privacy without loneliness, everyone wants a house. Given a choice between their own back garden and life in a communal living project where they might share the benefits of a common swimming pool or playground, most will choose their own plot of ground. In France, Germany and Italy, about half the new homes being built in the 1990s were apartments. In England, the best estimate was about 15 per cent. It reflects a belief that at the end of the day, instead of sitting on the street chatting, the English would rather go home and slam the door.

The English passion for houses, and insistence on owning rather than renting them, is often remarked upon by European observers, but there's something of a family resemblance between English and American attitudes about optimal housing situations. A major difference between them, however, is that the US has a lot more space in which to fulfil(l) the dream of every nuclear family having their own house with their own siz(e)able (BrE) garden/(AmE) yard. England has one of the highest population densities in Europe, with 383 people per square kilomet{re/er}. For London, the figure is 4,700 per km². (For more figures see this.) Compare this to the US average of 31.7 per km². My home state of New York averages about 195 per km². This includes New York City, which has an average density of 10,316/km². That just goes to show how sparsely populated my part of the state is.

So, every time my mother comes to England and sees views like this (from my university's website), she cannot help but wonder aloud at the fact that people can live this way--with no lawn separating them from the neighbo(u)rs. This type of housing is called terraced housing or a terrace (and thus terrace is a frequent element in UK street names. In pre-Better Half days, I lived on/in Denmark Terrace). In AmE, these are townhouses or row houses--but they're not nearly as common in the US as in the UK. The ones here may be single-family dwellings or they may be divided into (AmE) apartments/(BrE) flats. Better Half and I got lucky in buying our current flat/apartment, as it's end-of-terrace, meaning that we have windows on three sides, not just the front and back.

The next step into privacy is the semi-detached house, known in AmE as a duplex--that is, a building that is divided into two houses, so that each shares a wall with the other. In fact, it was only in adulthood that I learned the term duplex--we referred to the duplexes in my neighbo(u)rhood as apartment houses when I was a child.

Going one further (privacy-wise) than semi-detached, are detached houses, which are what Americans would simply call houses. To get a detached house in an English town, one must have a pile of money--especially down here in the South East:

The average property price in Brighton in 2006 was £187,309 with detached houses selling for just over £350,000. The average property in Brighton now costs £213,566 (up to £248,000 according to Halifax figures) with detached properties selling for over £400,000. The national average stands between £177,000 and £228,000. (from Edison Ford; for rough US dollar conversions, double all the numbers).

One can see here why assumptions about class are made on the basis of what type of house one lives in--although it would be extremely déclassé to go around mentioning that you live in a detached house. My first experience of these words was back in the US, watching Are You Being Served? (an old British sitcom that is--to the bemusement of many British people who lived through it--incredibly popular with PBS viewers. John Inman, RIP). Miss Brahms, the junior ladies' department assistant, frequently defends her claims to middle-classhood by proclaiming in her working class accent that she grew up in a detached house, but Mr Lucas seems to have knowledge that it was really semi-detached.

Postscript (4 May): Dean over at Brighton Daily Photo has provided us with a great view of the housing density in Brighton.

Speaking of déclassé, Ben Zimmer points out that the New York Times has caught up with the rest of the world and has published an article about Kate Middleton's mother's alleged class-signifying no-nos--including and especially using the word toilet. All the news that's fit to already have been printed.

I wasn't going to do a whole post tonight. Really, I wasn't. I was going to be a productive member of academia and get some real work done--having spent all of my day in meetings. But in a clever moment of self-sabotage, I brought the wrong version of my document home, so there's no point in working on it. Genius!

This post is in response to some off-topic commenting after the (the) menopause post. (I do have some rather control-freaky tendencies when it comes to off-topic commenting. If someone comments about something that deserves its own post, then I try to stem the tide of comments on it. It's not [necessarily!] that I want the glory for posting about it. It's that the comments are not searched when one does a 'search this blog' search, thus no one can ever find those interesting comments again--and I aim for searchability here!)

So...the comments back there are about which geographical names get a the in front of them, and whether or not these differ by dialect. Before I get into listing these, let's start with a little primer on the relationship between proper nouns (particularly place names) and definite determiners like the.

A referring expression--that is to say (typically) a noun phrase that is uttered/written in order to represent some entity in a (real or imaginary) world--is definite if it is used in a particular context to refer to something that is uniquely identifiable. So the indefinite noun phrase a linguist is used when the speaker does not expect that the hearer will be able to identify a unique linguist for the context--as in (1).

(1) A linguist walks into a bar...

Once you've said (1), there is a unique linguist in the context, so you can then go on to say (2):

(2) The linguist says to the bartender "Is that a Canadian accent I'm detecting?"

Proper nouns, like England or lynneguist are (sometimes phrasal) nouns that refer uniquely. Even if you knew your conversational partner didn't know someone named Letitia Bogbottom, you would (usually) utter it without any determiner, as in (3), because there's no reason to mark it as definite since it's inherently definite.

(3) (*The) Letitia Bogbottom walks into a bar...

But some proper names include a definite determiner (and some languages put determiners with proper nouns more regularly--so in German, I'm told, it's much more natural to call someone the equivalent of the Donald than it is in English). In English, a number of types of place names take a definite determiner as a matter of course:

River names: the Mississippi, the Yangtze, the Ouse (which, along with the Uck ranks among may favo(u)rite British river names. Fancy a paddle down the Uck? Aren't you glad to know that Harveys Bitter is made on the Ouse?)

Plural names: the United States, the Outer Hebrides, the Netherlands

(Some kinds of) descriptive phrasal names often take a the: the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union

And then there are some apparently exceptional cases. For instance, cities generally don't take the but the Bronx does (because it's named after its river). Mountains generally don't, but the Matterhorn does (I have no idea why). And countries whose names aren't plural or descriptive phrases generally don't take a the (Canada, Russia, Sri Lanka), but some do. Which brings us (finally!) to: which ones do, which ones don't, which ones are AmE and which ones are BrE. Last night, I sat down at a very nice pub (with a sausage-and-mash [BrE; AmE mashed potatoes]-themed menu; woo-hoo!) with BrE-speaking Better Half and AmE-speaking Recyclist (whom I called the Recyclist last time I mentioned her, but what's a definite determiner among friends?) in order to quiz them on country names. Here's what we came up with:

BrE	AmE
the Congo (referring to the river or the country)	(the) Congo (referring to the country--aka Congo-Brazzaville)
the Gambia	Gambia
(the) Ukraine	(the) Ukraine
the Lebanon	Lebanon
Argentina	Argentina
Sudan	Sudan

Each of these deserves some comment.

Congo: The name of the country is based on the name of the river, and any river gets a the. Confusingly, there are now two countries that border that river that have Congo in their names, but the country formerly known as Zaire (and before that the Belgian Congo) is generally referred to these days as DRC (Democratic Republic of the Congo). Now I have to say here that this is more my judg(e)ment than Recyclist's. In Africanist linguistic circles, at least in the US (in which I used to travel), the name of the country doesn't have a the, as the the gives it a kind of 'colonial' feel. So, I might say the Congo to refer to the place in pre-independence days, or to refer to the region more generally, but in order to refer to one of the sovereign nations, I'd leave off the the. Note that in the full names of the countries ([Democratic] Republic of...), there is a the, translated from the French name.

Gambia: Here I'm cheating and ignoring Recyclist's evidence. Recyclist says the Gambia, and so I insisted to her that she couldn't, because she's an AmE speaker. After some prodding, it turns out that she has a Gambian sister-in-law and she learned to say the Gambia from her, not from other AmE speakers. I don't think I'd ever heard the Gambia until I left the US, but I hear it frequently from a fellow Scrabbler, the Twitcher, who travels often to that part of Africa. He is of a certain generation. A certain generation older than Better Half, who says: "I'd never say that. It's too colonialist." Again, this has a the because the name of the country is based on the name of the river.

Ukraine: Both AmE and BrE have the Ukraine, but both my informants and I believe that since it's become a country in its own right, we're more likely to call it Ukraine. We've probably been influenced by the fact that many newspapers are now eschewing the the. It's thought to have originally meant 'borderland', and the the came from the sense of the name as a description.

Lebanon: While Better Half generally thought most of the definite-determinered examples sounded "old-fashioned", he was adamant that it's always the Lebanon. I think he's been unduly influenced by the Human League. The the here apparently comes from the name of the mountain that the country is named after: Mount Lebanon or the Lebanon. But why does this mountain have a the when most others don't? Don't ask me. Other than in the context of discussing 1980s music from Britain, I've never heard the Lebanon from an AmE speaker.

Argentina/Sudan: Neither of my informants had any inclination to say the Sudan, perhaps demonstrating that that the is pretty far on its way out of regular use. (Sudan comes from the Arabic for 'black land'.) And while neither would say the Argentine to refer to the place, BH recogni{s/z}ed it as a really old-fashioned name for Argentina. The Argentine seems to have poetic roots.

After that tour of the world, I'm exhausted. Feel free to leave other examples in the comments.

P.S. 22 August 2014 Twitter follower  @maceochi has pointed out another: BrE is more likely to say the Vatican City and AmE more likely to say plain Vatican City.