DCblog

My OP correspondent (see previous blog) also asks about interactivity between actors and audience. He was thinking about OP and the Globe, but today I am still getting over my most recent experience of audience/performance interaction, namely, last night at the Capital Centre at Warwick University. Fail Better Productions concluded a Beckett study day by presenting a brilliant production of two Samuel Beckett shorts. No failing better at all, here; indeed, I can't imagine them succeeding worse.

You might not have come across the Capital Centre, as it only started in May of this year. It's a great idea - a partnership between the University of Warwick and the Royal Shakespeare Company, established to use theatre performance skills and experience to enhance student learning and to draw on University research and resources to shape the development of the RSC acting companies. It's already done some exciting work, as I discovered yesterday.

The two pieces were Rough for Theatre 2 and Ohio Impromptu. The first is a duologue in which two men, 'A' and 'B', review the life of 'C', who is standing motionless, with his back to the audience, ready to jump out of the window. The second is also a duologue, but of a rather different kind, between two characters, a Reader and a Listener. The Reader reads from a book (with blank pages, in this production) telling the Listener's story. The Listener says nothing, but controls the reading by knocking on the table with his hand, thereby making the reader go back over parts of the story.

I had seen both before on film - and indeed, apart from Waiting for Godot, the only Beckett I have ever seen has been on film (I have the Beckett on Film DVD), and therefore very much as a passive observer. In an intimate space, such as the Capital, with the actors just a few feet away, I was enthralled by the way Beckett's language sucked me in, so that it felt that I was almost a part of the action, and I was surprised by the number of places where the Rough for Theatre 2 dialogue invited me to react. I had never felt that when watching on film, where the experience was (for me) primarily an intellectual one. It was a delight to discover so much humour in the play - not least because it was so well brought out by the actors and the director, who it appears - from comments in the talkback afterwards - were reinforced, energized, and sometimes surprised by the audience's reactions. For the record, the actors were Jonathan Broke ('A' and Listener) and Ben Crystal ('B' and Reader) and the director was Jonathan Heron (who also played 'C').

The whole thing reminded me so much of Shakespeare's Globe - which is what prompted this post in the first place! - where an audience can take a while to realize that it is allowed to be dynamic in its relationship to what is going on on stage, but once it does, it takes off! There were several moments in the OP productions when the use of the distinctive accent triggered a specific response - the one I remember best was the pronunciation of the name Ajax as 'a-jakes' (where jakes is the Elizabethan word for 'pisshouse'), which always got a laugh when normally the line would have been heard in silence. I would try and remember some other examples, but my head is full of Beckett today, and once he is inside your head it takes a while for him to go away.

A correspondent writes to ask whether there have been any further productions of Shakespeare in 'original pronunciation' (OP), following the Romeo and Troilus at Shakespeare's Globe in 2005 and 2006 respectively - and whether there are to be any more.

The last question I can't answer - though I hope so. Every time I turn a piece of Shakespeare into OP I find something new - a rhyme that now works, a piece of unexpected wordplay, a fresh metrical reading, or just a general frisson that comes from hearing familiar lines read in an accent that is as close as we can get to how it would have been in 1600. So with only two plays done and (depending on what you include) 37-odd more to go, there is plenty of opportunity for doing something new.

The interest is continuing. In July this year an American director, Alex Torra, put on a performance of extracts from various plays in OP at a theatre in New York, which was evidently very well received. He is one of several expressions of interest I've had from people in the US, some of which I expect will turn into productions in due course. Also earlier this year I did an OP transcription and recording of the Sonnets for the sonnet marathon-man, Will Sutton. Maybe we'll hear them at the Rose one day: that would be electrifying. I'll keep readers of this blog posted, as soon as I hear of anything happening.

A correspondent writes as follows: 'When I came across nouns for meals in my teaching I faced a problem because I belong to a non-Western culture. Dinner is the main meal of the day, I believe, in Western societies. It is usually eaten in the evening. What about lunch? It is usually a midday meal and people often have it at work. In Eastern societies, however, the main meal is usually in the afternoon [like lunch]. So, should we call it lunch or dinner?'

Dictionaries define dinner as a main meal, and leave open the question of time of day. This is because there is a great deal of regional and social class variation. In some parts of the UK (and also in some other parts of the English-speaking world) when people take their main meal in the middle of the day (eg in some farming communities) then that is called dinner. They wouldn't use the word lunch at all; and for them an evening meal would be called tea or more likely supper.

My own usage has changed over the years. When I lived in Liverpool, as a teenager, the meal I had in the middle of the day, whether at school or at weekends, was called dinner. Today, after a few decades of eating in the south of England, I call this lunch.

The standard word for a meal taken in the middle of the day is lunch. For many people, lunch is a light meal - it might only be a sandwich. Note that there are several ways of expressing variation at lunchtime, such as light lunch, big lunch, heavy lunch, and working lunch, which don't usually apply to the word dinner. After some publisher's lunches I've attended, I don't feel like eating for a week.

As always, there are exceptions. In schools, the traditional phrase for the lunchtime meal was school dinners and the people who serve it were called dinner ladies - and still are, in many places. And on Christmas day, most people sit down to a Christmas dinner - at lunchtime.

The two elements influencing usage, therefore, are the importance of the meal and the time of day. The main factor seems to be the importance of the meal, and so dinner would seem to be the solution, in the case of my correspondent. But he needs to listen out for the way others use the terms in English in his part of the world, for that will be more important than anything.

A correspondent from Italy writes to ask if there is any connection betweeen speech and altitude. Do languages spoken in the mountains have a distinctive phonology?

I don't know of any correlation between speech and altitude environment - and, indeed, I wouldn't expect there to be any. I can't think of any reason why a sound system of a language should be affected by height or, for that matter, by any other physical environmental factor. I know there are popular views which argue to the contrary - for example, saying that people who live in mountains will have a higher and more sweeping range of intonation patterns, whereas people who live on low plains will have a flatter intonation, but phonetic investigations give no support. I've also come across such views in relation to the accents within a language (eg from dialect coach Joan Washington in a BBC4 TV programme earlier this year called 'How the Edwardians Spoke'). Another example is the belief that people who live in coastal districts have a lot of back consonants or a nasal twang because the sea mists cause more nasal catarrh - this has been claimed with reference to the Liverpool accent, for example. Again, there's no basis: back consonants and nasal twangs turn up in non-marine environments and lots of accents on coasts don't show these features.

The only language phenomena I can think of which relate to physical environment are the speech surrogate systems - the so-called 'drum or whistle languages', used to cope with the need to communicate across distances (such as mountain valleys). I give a brief account in my Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, but there will be several references online.

A correspondent writes to take up a point in an earlier blog, where (in relation to a question about authorship and Shakespeare) I say I always write while and never whilst. He claims he does make a distinction, as follows: 'Fred danced while Ginger walked tells us that they were doing separate things at the same time. Fred danced whilst Ginger walked suggests that Ginger's walking was in distinction to Fred's dancing.' And he feels that 'This meaning of whilst is perhaps a synonym for whereas, except to me it conveys a clearer sense that things are happening at the same time.'

The problem is a local one, in British English. Whilst is virtually unknown in US English. But I can easily believe, because of the ambiguity in while/whilst - words which express both a temporal and a contrastive meaning - that some speakers have introduced a semantic difference, and it sounds as though my correspondent is one. I've heard while/whilst being contrasted in some regional dialects (eg Yorkshire), so he certainly isn't alone. But it isn't a feature of standard English - or, at least, not yet! Dictionaries (such as the OED) treat them as straightforward synonyms. Those who want to make a distinction, then, face a problem, in that they would need to ensure that the context was very clear, to avoid a risk of being misunderstood.

I do share my correspondent's intuition that the contrastive meaning is stronger in whilst than it is in while. But with whereas competently handling that sense, I have no motivation to use it in my idiolect.

An ELT correspondent writes to say he thinks he has a problem with the verb like. He has been interpreting such sentences as I like reading mind-tickling books as an expression of an ongoing habit, but I like to read a good book as an expression of current want, and not as a statement of habits - equivalent to I'd like to read a good book. He thinks that 'the would like form is simply more polite or perhaps putting more stress on the "want" aspect of the verb'.

His suspicions are right. Both constructions after like are habitual, though in slightly different ways, for there is a potential contrast of aspect here. ELT books tend to concentrate on tense rather than aspect, and often say little or nothing about cases like this. It's a major theme of the reference grammars, though, and readers wanting to follow up the point should take a look at, say, section 16.40 in the big Quirk grammar (A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language).

Usually the infinitive form gives a sense of potentiality for action whereas the participle gives a sense of actual performance. To adapt one of the Quirk examples:

Sheila tried to bribe the jailor [but he took no notice of her offer].
Sheila tried bribing the jailor [but although he took the money she didn't get the result she wanted].

In the first example the jailor didn't take the bribe; in the second example he did.

The potentiality/performance contrast is clear with emotive verbs such as dread, hate, love, loathe, prefer - and like:

I like to visit Mary [whenever I can, but I don't actually get the chance very often]
I like visiting Mary [and manage to get to see her most weekends]

Transfer the contexts, and the sentences - especially the second - don't work so well:

I like to visit Mary [and manage to get to see her most weekends]
I like visiting Mary [but I don't actually get the chance very often]

It's because the infinitive has this strong implication of potentiality that the would like construction uses it for hypothetical situations: I would like to visit Mary. Here, I would like visiting Mary is much less likely to occur, and for me it's ungrammatical. The contrast is even more marked in interrogatives: Would you like to visit Mary? is OK, but Would you like visiting Mary? isn't.

Notice that the aspectual nuance varies with the kind of verb. With a verb like read (which lacks the iterativity implicit in visit) the notion of continuity implicit in the act of reading reduces the contrast, so that the following two sentences are as close to being synonymous as you'll ever find:

John likes to read a good book
John likes reading a good book

In both cases, you do read good books regularly. To get a hypothetical sense, you have to alter the construction, and that is where the would form comes in. In John would like to read a good book he has not yet done so.

A correspondent from the Czech Republic, having noticed that the amount of space devoted to individual letters in a Czech dictionary is different from what is found in English, writes to ask why some letters of an alphabet contain more words than others.

It's an interesting question, which it's possible to answer in general terms but not always in detail. The basic point is that writing systems reflect phonologies, and the individual vowels and consonants of a sound system occur at different frequencies (there's a list of the frequencies for English in my Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language). So, when an alphabetic orthography is first developed, the letter frequencies are likely to reflect the sounds. That is why, for example, in English the 'largest' letter in the dictionary is /s/ - this is because English phonology allows more clusters of consonants (C) in which /s/ is the first element than for any other sound - sing with C-, sting with CC-, and string with CCC-, this last sequence being the most complex you can have in initial syllable position in English.

The complication is that, over time, other factors intervene, so that the original phonological system becomes obscured. In English the arrival of the Normans meant that French spellings complicated the originally clear relationship between sounds and letters. Classical spellings caused further complications in the 16th century. And it only takes an influx of loan words to alter the balance of letters in a language or even to introduce a letter which was not there before. There is no native w in many languages, for example (such as Spanish), but loan words (such as World Wide Web) have meant that there is now a W section in a modern Spanish dictionary.