Llanharan Concrete Co. Limited has today been fined after a worker was injured when his glove got entangled with the moving blade of a table saw.

Cardiff Magistrates’ Court heard how the employee of the company was cutting wood with a table saw when his glove got entangled, pulling his finger into contact with it. The injured worker was rushed to hospital where he underwent surgery to amputate the top of his left index finger to the first knuckle.

An investigation by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) found there was a lack of supervision, no risk assessment or safe system of work was in place for using the table saw, and no training was given to the worker before using the saw. This was despite the company having previously been advised by a HSE inspector, and their own health and safety consultants, to implement safe systems of work for their machinery.

Llanharan Concrete Co. Limited of Llanharry Road, Llanharan, pleaded guilty to breaching Section 2(1) of the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974, and Regulation 3(1) of the Management of Health and Safety Regulations 1999 and has been fined £6,000 and ordered to pay costs of £1,889.

Speaking after the hearing HSE inspector Lee Jones said, “This injury could have easily been prevented had the risk been identified.

“Employers should make sure they properly assess and apply effective control measures to minimise the risk from dangerous parts of machinery.”

Notes to Editors:

1. The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) is Britain’s national regulator for workplace health and safety. We prevent work-related death, injury and ill health through regulatory actions that range from influencing behaviours across whole industry sectors through to targeted interventions on individual businesses. These activities are supported by globally recognised scientific expertise. hse.gov.uk
2. More about the legislation referred to in this case can be found at: legislation.gov.uk/
3. HSE news releases are available at http://press.hse.gov.uk

PhD placement student, Rowan Campbell, writes:

If you’ve been listening to our podcast (Shameless Plug #378902), you just might have noticed that I, the Scottish one, love glottal stops. This is the sound that’s often written as an apostrophe where you would usually see a /t/ – for example, wa’er instead of water. But it actually has its own super-cool symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet, and looks a bit like a question mark: ʔ

That’s the first of many fun things I could write about the glottal stop, but rather than descending into a clickbait listicle (You Won’t BELIEVE These Seven Facts About Glottals!), I’m going to focus on something interesting that I’ve noticed in the Evolving English VoiceBank: non-native English speakers using glottal stops. Have a listen to these three clips – the first recording is of a young RP speaker, the second is a speaker from Cardiff, and the third is a woman whose native language is Czech.

C1442 uncatalogued female speaker

C1442X5884 Cardiff female (b.1982)

C1442X5843 Czech female (b.1986)

As you can hear, all three speakers use glottal stops, but the main difference is that the RP speaker only uses them before consonants and pauses, where they often go unnoticed:

… opened the biscuiʔ tin, took out a biscuiʔ, brought iʔ back upstairs …

Compare this with the Cardiff and Czech speakers, who replace every word-final /t/ with a glottal stop:

… opened the biscuiʔ tin, took ouʔ a biscuiʔ, broughʔ iʔ back upstairs …

This is something that is now quite common among young British speakers, but we might not expect to hear it from a non-native speaker – the glottal stop is a stigmatised and often-criticised variant of /t/when it occurs between vowels, and as such is not generally taught to language learners.  Presumably, this Czech speaker has noticed the people around her using the glottal stop and has incorporated it into her own linguistic repertoire. But why has she picked up on this feature in particular?

Some recent research on sociolinguistic variation amongst Polish-born teens in Edinburgh suggests that t-glottaling may be a relatively easy native-like feature to acquire. In Sociolinguistics in Scotland (2014), Miriam Meyerhoff and Erik Schleef examine two features that can vary phonologically and sociolinguistically:

• T-glottaling, or using the glottal stop /ʔ/ instead of /t/
• Apical (ing), commonly referred to as ‘g-dropping’ – for example, pronouncing the last syllable of ‘walking’ as ‘kin’ rather than ‘king’. These are represented phonetically as /kɪn/ and /kɪŋ/ respectively, as the ‘ng’ sound has its own (also super-cool) phonetic symbol: ŋ

Without wanting to overload you with new terminology, you might notice that these features also vary in linguistic complexity. T-glottaling is only phonological, in that it just requires knowledge of the phonological variants /t/ and /ʔ/. Both of these sounds can easily be substituted for the other at the end of any word. However, to ‘g-drop’ in a native-like manner requires additional knowledge, as not all ‘ings’ are created equal – compare the ‘ing’ in ‘king’ versus ‘walking’.  We can pronounce the last syllable of ‘walking’ as either /kɪn/ or /kɪŋ/, but we can’t pronounce /kɪŋ/ as /kɪn/ without changing the meaning of the word. Learning where we can and cannot ‘drop the g’ requires knowledge of both the phonological variants and the grammatical difference between these two types of ‘ing’.

As such, it’s harder to learn the relevant linguistic constraints for ‘g-dropping’ than t-glottaling, making the glottal stop a great candidate for non-native speakers to pick up – and that could be partly why the Czech speaker’s English sounds very fluent and native-like!

Your request will be handled by the Press Office of the General Secretariat of the Council in accordance with the provisions of Regulation (EC) No 45/2001 on the protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data by the Community institutions and bodies and on the free movement of such data.

Your data will be stored in the database until you unsubscribe from the service.

Certain data (name, e-mail address, preferred language, media name, media type) may be disclosed to the press offices of the European institutions, the Permanent Representations of the Member States and to European Union agencies, under the conditions laid down in Articles 7 and 8 of Regulation 45/2001.

If there is data which you would not like to be stored, please let us know at: press.office@consilium.europa.eu

The Spring Statement was a non-event.

The OECD gave us the clearer picture – that the economy is bumping along the bottom of the G20, well behind the likes of Australia, Canada and the Euro area.