Why You Swear in Anglo-Saxon and Order Fancy Food in French: Registers

[ShawnRavenfire]

The ironic thing is that when a person wants to excuse an Anglo-Saxon swearword, they say, "Pardon my French."

[yrkteid]

"We switch between each of these registers hundreds of times a day without thinking about it"
I haven't spoken to anyone in five days.

[sauge]

Joke's on you, I order every food in French because I'm French and I live in France

[GoldenKingStudio]

Yo, yer majesty! How's it hangin'?

Remind me to visit the queen just to say that.

[DrewVanCamp]

I'm disappointed. I really wanted to hear plenty more examples of Anglo-Saxon swearing alongside French food ordering. (:

[ukieflip]

I appreciate you using a thorn to indicate the "th" sound.

[pjbaby]

This is why we eat Pork and not Swine Flesh lol!  In Germany they still eat their "Schweinefleisch".

[TaiFerret]

In Japanese there are also different registers. The higher registers tend to have fancier verb forms and more words that originated from Chinese.

[Satopi]

I just had a brain wave I wanted to note so here goes. I am a native Japanese and English bilingual speaker (also speak French and Korean but those are acquired languages and irrelevant here). I grew up in the US and my formal education has been in English so while my Japanese is native (I acquired it before English since my household was a pure Japanese household where even the TV we watched (which was limited) was in Japanese) I had to be taught English in kindergarten. I have been working in a Japanese company for a while now, and had long been frustrated by the lack of clarity in Japanese. If clarity of meaning was a 10 in English, Japanese felt like a 6. I always chalked this up to me lacking in Japanese the sophisticated vocabulary I have in English. I had never felt that lack of clarity when speaking to family and friends, but I again believed that to be related to the less complicated topics one would discuss in a social setting. However (and this is the brain wave) I have realized that it is a register problem. In English, although you have these different registers that you described, switching between them doesn’t result in a drastic decrease of information or clarity. Sure, you, have some decrease in directness but you can usually still convey your point. As long as it is done respectfully, you can still speak clearly. Respect and clarity aren’t inescapably intertwined. But in Japanese, as you move up the registers, what you can say and how you can say it get drastically limited. In intimate speech, you can be clear in your meaning. But as you go up the formality register, you are forced to become vague just by how the language is constructed. To be clear and formal makes you sound super unnatural and excessively rude or authoritarian. And this (the second brain wave and the more interesting one) is what shapes Japanese corporate culture. This is why they put such emphasis on long lasting relationships with clients and with team building social activities within the company. The Japanese get that to do business you have to be able to speak clearly. They also know that as long as they have to maintain a formal tone in their dialogue, they will never achieve this clarity. That is why they wine and dine their clients and purposefully get drunk. They do this to give an excuse as to why the formality decreased (“oh we are all drunk so it’s not one’s fault we are being so informal”) and once that barrier is breached, they can talk more informally even during usual business discussions. This why contracts in Japanese are super vague but Japan is not litigious. Everyone understands that the contract will not be clear because it is written formally, so if any misunderstandings arise, they refer not to the contract but to their relationship. They rely on informal understandings or prefer to keep the relationship even if it means giving up certain contractual rights. same within the company - they do things that massively invade into people’s private lives (company trips to onsen where you have to bathe naked with your co-workers, drinks and meals, asking your age and until recently your entire family history) to forcibly tear down the formality so communication can be clarified. I never understood why my Japanese bosses would emphasize the importance for the team to get along and like each other - I always thought that what matters is we work well together and personal feelings matter less (of course I always thought it’s great for the team to personally like each other but I didn’t think it was absolutely necessary or something I should force) but this is what was behind it. I noticed that the native Japanese teams would have the team leaders speaking informally to their subordinates and I always thought this disrespectful but this was the reason! And that is why Japan has such an ageist corporate structure. Instead of ability, age is what determines your position, and this is so that as the team leader, you are older than your subordinates and therefore entitled to speak informally to them. When this rule breaks down (like for me) it throws a wrench into the system. So language really determines how people function and dictates entire corporate cultures.

Phew that was painful to type out on an ipad. I hope to use this brain wave to help me in my work. Thanks for inspiring this eureka moment!

[Argimak]

I found this when I was learning French. It seemed like the French words that I could understand naturally as an English speaker were "posh" or more poetic forms of their translation in English. Like "profond" (or profound) simply meaning "deep" in English.

[CyriilB]

That explains why English has so many interchangeable words that have completely different linguistic origin. So many words so similar to Germanic language and so many synonymous words more similar to Latin based languages. English is confusing when you think about it. There can be so many different ways to convey exactly the same point.

[ashagerhard]

In French even grammar changes between registers :
-Mange-t-il? Is written language or really polite.
-Est-ce qu'il mange ? Is standard with teachers or people who are not your friends .
-Il mange? Is friendly or familiar.
And it functions with each verb of course

[itz_nfected]

You know what I love about Tom? His videos just seem so timeless. You can watch one of his recent videos and then some of his oldest ones and not even notice any change other than his physical appearance

[PyroTyger]

This whole series should be bundled up as a MANDATORY opening lecture for all language degrees. It's astounding how many students spend years harping on about the weirdness of their language(s) of choice, utterly oblivious to the fact that every day they intuitively navigate the very quirks they find so vitally fascinating - or even weirder ones.

Seriously, these videos are wonderful.

[milifilou]

Oh my, this sounds like nothing compared to our mess of a system. You see, I come from Luxembourg, a place where French is standard, Luxembourgish is proper and German is for people some people don't want to talk to. In our school, which is in Germany, some teachers can't speak all 3, so you try your best to use the ones your teachers and class mates understand, else you will be told of as gossipers or get the weirdest kind of looks. You should also talk German in German class, French in French class and English in English class. Then you have that one odd one out able to talk proper casual English, and you made your self a secret language. If you don’t know a class mates nationality, don’t ask. If you make good friends, you figure out soon enough and find yourself ingrained to use German as everybody does if you don’t know them. This happens because of the lingo you make between you. Add this to people adding in and out of conversations and listening radius, as well as interest fields, French teachers not speaking German and the mess that your brain has as thinking routes, as most of the songs are thought about in English and most of the comics in German, voilà, something everybody in my place is supposed to know. I lost points for making mark be a synonym to sign instead of grade on the English test and me and the odd one out (from Scottish routes) both said to be able to instead of to be allowed to. I had a friend with that previously mentioned Lingo problem. Some examples of weird registers.
That’s not half of it. In restaurants, you talk French to the waitress from the Chinese place, but you talk English to the Indian and Luxembourgish to the person who makes you cheese sandwiches. Some people hate French and make songs about it, others don't make efforts to make German, our formal but not paper-formal language, Paper-formal. A lot of Immigrants only speak French (hence most china restaurants, of which we have a lot, have a default French). Your mom wants mostly their home language, and if they want to, will force you into French and just wander into English.
Your extended family comes from all over the continent.
How is this of a system, and yet, most think of it as normal.
:D

[yuppi]

Tom: *talks about cows*
Portuguese speakers: *wheezing*

[sunriselg]

I was raised with a strong dialect in rural Austria but we heard standard German on TV and radio every day. Now I spend most of my time in the city where only few people speak dialects anymore and there I talk standard German (though of course with an Austrian accent).

This means, not only do I switch registers, but I also slide on a spectrum between dialect and standard German. Dialect, however does not have a formal register. Another thing: As you can see, I mainly write formal English. I start accessing lower registers in English as I see informal language on the internet every day and some phrases tend to stick. I think it's also easier in talking. (... and I just went down a register within this text.)

Writing this text is interesting. I just realized that I tend to write sentences down how they sound in an imaginary conversation in my head. (like the "..." four lines above.)

[colinp]

Here's a video for you to do - Has Tom Scott only got 1 set of clothes?

[wibhadstrenchvorkel]

One of the things I love about English is how we instinctively assume there's no such thing as synonyms. The 'beef' vs 'cow' example is a good one, but it's happened more recently. Until the end of the last century, wedges of fried potato were in Britain called 'chips' and that was fine... until the word 'fries' which meant the exact same thing showed up. What did we do? We assumed 'chips' were the thick clothes-peg type that you ate with fish, and 'fries' were the thin pencil-type that you ate with a burger. Similarly, when 'cookie' appeared alongside 'biscuit', we refined 'cookie''s meaning to 'a larger, less uniform biscuit, almost always more expensive, and normally consumed only one at a time'.

[getataste]

I don't know what intimate language is because nobody loves me