Say Thank-You

To better understand how people express gratitude in normal life, anthropologist Simeon Floyd, at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands and his colleagues     1     a large, cross-cultural study covering five continents and eight languages. They included English, Italian, Polish, Russian and Lao, as well as     2     languages such as Cha’ palaa, spoken in Ecuador, Murrinh-Patha, spoken in northern Australia, and Siwu, spoken in Ghana. Both verbal and non-verbal expressions of gratitude, such as a smile or a nod, were regarded as interactions.

Floyd’s team left cameras in household and community settings and captured more than 1,500     3     of social interactions in which one person asked for something and another     4    .

They found that in every culture, people fulfilled requests, but expressions of gratitude, such as saying “thanks” or nodding in     5    , were remarkably rare, occurring just 5.5 percent of the time.

English and Italian speakers had slightly higher rates of gratitude expression—14.5 percent and 13.5 percent of the time,     6    , but still surprisingly low considering how polite Western people think they are, says Floyd. “English speakers are not so     7     other people, and often prefer not to express gratitude in informal contexts,” he says.

Cha’ palaa speakers had the lowest     8     of expressed gratitude, with zero examples in 96 recorded interactions. But this starts to make sense when you learn that the language has no easy way to say “thank you”.

Also surprised by the findings was David Peterson, a linguist (语言学家) who developed the     9     language Dothraki for the TV show Game of Thrones. It too, has no word for thank you, something Peterson     10     considered to be unlikely. “I thought that you had to have a word to express gratitude,” he says.

Internet English

Twenty years ago this week the British inventor Tim Berners-Lee created the world’s first webpage. It is worth pausing to consider the    1     impact that his invention has had on the English language.

Everyday words like google, unfriend and app simply didn’t    2     in 1990.

Even more words have had    3     shifts in meaning in those two decades. If you had mentioned tweeting to an English-speaker a few years ago, he would have assumed you were talking about bird noises, not the use of the microblogging site Twitter.

Long ago, if someone lived online, it didn’t mean they spent every    4     minute on the internet, but that they travelled around with the rail network.

And wireless still means, to anyone of a    5     age, a radio, not the system for retrieving (找回) internet pages without wires.

“The internet is an amazing    6     for languages,” said David Crystal, honorary professor of linguistics at the University of Bangor. “Language itself changes slowly but the internet has    7     up the process of those changes so you notice them more quickly.”

English is a    8     inclusive language, and if words continue to be used for at least five years they generally end up in the Oxford English Dictionary.

Grammatically correct? An LOLcat.

But less accepted are the peculiar dialects that have    9     up amongst some users. For example, “LOLcat” is a phonetic, grammatically-incorrect caption (说明文字) that accompanies a picture of a cat, like “I’m in ur bed zleeping”.

In an article called “Cats Can Has Grammar”, the blogger Anil Dash referred to LOLcat as “kitty pidgin”. But does something like LOLcat have the staying    10     to become an accepted form of English?

Not according to Professor Crystal. “They are all clever little developments used by a very small number of people — thousands rather than millions. Will they be around in 50 years’ time? I would be very surprised.”

In the workplace, there many different cultures that     1    —including the company culture, the local culture of the business and the national or regional cultures of employees.

The culture of the workplace starts with the company’s mission and core     2     and helps the leadership team manage the employees. It affects all major operations, including recruiting employees, providing employees with compensation (赔偿金) and benefits and     3     employees for good behavior. It also informs the way an organization trains and develops its staff, how it promotes employees and any workplace traditions it follows.

The work environment is     4     affected by the culture of the organization. For example, if one of the main elements of the workplace culture is teamwork, employees will know how important it is to help one another. They will be less competitive with each other, and will instead focus on succeeding together. Such a cultural feature can enable teams to be highly productive and motivated.

Local culture affects the way people behave in the workplace. For example, if it is a     5     in local culture to spend a lot of time enjoying the natural landscape, then many employees will place importance on that activity as well.

Employees can use elements of local culture to connect with and motivate their employees. Using this example of cultural behavior, the workplace can offer outdoor activities as prizes for     6     business targets. In addition, having company functions outside at the beach or at a local park can further make the employees engaged and     7    .

In today’s global economy, it’s common for workplaces to be made up of people from different national and     8     cultures. Being culturally sensitive and aware helps employees to communicate effectively with their teammates and work toward     9     goals. It’s important for employers to take cultural diversity into account when establishing their workplace policies. Teach employees how to be     10     sensitive to their colleagues and customers who have different cultural backgrounds.