Pep Versus Pep: Soft drink speak

It's all a question of pronunciation, you see. Pep and Pep don't sound the same. So the argument goes. I confess that it is an argument utterly lost on me. Pep and Pep sound exactly the same to my Anglo-ears.

There have been all sorts of David and Goliath legal battles. McDonald's are familiar with the workings of the courts in this regard, whether because of defamation or the borrowing of the name, if just the Mc (aka Mac) part. Some of these battles can seem petty - Goliath throwing his weight around because he can do. Others are less so. David can try it on, and David knows that he's been trying it on. There is property to be defended - intellectual, industrial. There is reputation, name and image to be upheld. There is the inherent value of the brand to be maintained, one that has been acquired over many a long year. David can come along and try borrowing some of that value. This is one reason why PepsiCo challenged Lemon Factory's Pep name.

To explain, as explanation may be needed. Lemon Factory started up some three years ago. Here was everything that the Balearic government (certainly as now is) would love. A sort of artisan lemonade maker. There were already artisan microbreweries, so why not lemonade as well, and a product that might even be destined for rather greater sales than the artisan beers? Splendid idea, splendid product. What was there not to like?

Well, PepsiCo, via its Spanish division, didn't like. Pep and Pep, you see. Of course, as everyone knows (mostly everyone) Pep is a very common name - short for Josep. Mallorca is not short of Peps. They are everywhere. So the Pep brand name was just a reflection of a name. Wasn't it? As far as Pepsi was concerned, it was indeed a reflection of a name: its name. In court its lawyers argued, among other things, that Lemon Factory was and would be benefiting from all those decades of brand value and rivalry with another maker of cola.

It was probably cola that really did it. The original product was Pep Lemon. But then came Pep Cola. When it first appeared, I thought that they, Lemon Factory, couldn't be serious. Was it a kind of affectionate joke? Notwithstanding the accent, the missing "si" suggested so. Not, it has to be said, that there was great room for confusion in the eyes (or perhaps) ears of the consumer. For a kick-off the labelling is totally different. There is absolutely no possibility of confusion.

Pepsi, however, suggested that there was a possibility. M'learned friends at the Balearic High Court have been inclined to agree. Sorry, not inclined; have agreed. These same learned friends were likewise disinclined to go along with the pronunciation line of defence, which has to do with the "e" in the competing Peps being pronounced differently. The court had thus committed a serious linguistic error, and Lemon Factory has hauled in linguistics experts to explain why. One e is closed, the other e is open. No room for confusion, even if the letters are arranged in the same order.

Lemon Factory, instructed to drop the Pep name, is not giving up the fight. It's going to the Supreme Court, where m'learned friends may be even less aware of the nuance of Mallorquin/Catalan pronunciation. Doubtless they will be made to listen to tape recordings of Pep and Pep(si). It's all a bit, I suppose, like the court having to decide if Jimmy Page had nicked Randy California's riff and come up with "Stairway To Heaven".

It's all a shame. Here is a business that deserves to succeed. It has a good product. But the phonetic argument sounds (as it were) somewhat farfetched. There may be a legitimate reason for raising it, but especially where Pep Cola is concerned, the names are too alike.

The Balearic government (as now is) has stepped in. Or at least Més has stepped in. Parliamentary spokesperson David Abril was swigging a bottle of Pep Lemon as he announced that there will be a proposal to make brands - made in Mallorca - capable of being defended by the government. Whatever that is supposed to entail. There was, unsurprisingly, the subtext of Goliath multinational beating up David artisan lemonade maker with products that are respectful of the environment and so therefore in keeping with principles of sustainability, etc, etc.

Pepsi do have a point, though. Even so, might it not have been possible to arrive at a solution other than demand that the Pep name is abandoned completely? Would dropping Pep Cola not be a way? With the other ones - Pep Lemon, Pep Orange, Pep Toni - the potential for any confusion is minimal, if at all, while the labelling says it all, however Pep is spoken: a totally different product.

The Felanitx Theory: Columbus

At the end of 2011, I offered an annual award for the "historian of the year". To this day, I would imagine that Gabriel Verd remains blissfully unaware of this accolade but four years later he may be placing himself on the shortlist to pick up a far more celebrated prize. The citation in 2011 went along the lines of perseverance in the face of almost overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Verd is the Mallorcan historian who insists that Christopher Columbus was from Felanitx. His life's work has pretty much been devoted to proving this. In 2011 he was convinced. Now, he is on the point of producing evidence which will demonstrate definitively that Columbus was from Felanitx and not from Genoa or any other place which has laid a claim on him.

At the weekend at a restaurant (Son Colom) in Felanitx which doubles as an exhibition centre for Columbus, Verd was able to explain his theories to visitors who included the president of the Council of Mallorca, Maria Salom. He asserted that the "Felanitx theory is the most coherent that there is". The competing theories include Ibiza, Galicia and, of course, Genoa, which is the city that history scholars over the centuries have accepted that Columbus came from.

Having Maria Salom along for the day was understandable, as the Council is one of the keepers of Mallorcan culture and heritage and as it was the Council, in 2004, which forwarded a grant of over 50,000 euros for research into Columbus's origins and genetics; one of the biggest supporters of this research was Gabriel Verd. There have, subsequently, been DNA tests carried out which have sought to establish links between local populations and Columbus (certainly with his younger brother, Bartholomew). These don't, however, seem to have proved anything - definitively.

The research has been and is valid. Though it is the accepted version of history that Columbus came from Genoa, there have always been certain questions, e.g. why he himself made little reference to Genoa and, more importantly, why he spoke in the strange way he did. Linguistic research has held much of the key to resolving the arguments regarding Columbus's origins. It is this linguistic element, along with Mallorca's culture and heritage, which was what interested a former president of the Council, Maria Antonia Munar, who held this office when the 2004 grant was made. She admitted at the time that she had "a patent interest in Columbus being from Mallorca", and one suspects that this interest would have been partly kindled by nationalism. Munar's party, the Unió Mallorquina, was Mallorcan nationalist. Columbus a Mallorcan? The discoverer of America was Mallorcan all along and not an Italian and definitely not a Spaniard? It's the stuff of nationalist dreams and one, moreover, that features some version of Catalan as the mother tongue.

A further linguistic element is the name Porto Colom in Felanitx. Colom means pigeon in Catalan. In Italian the word is "colombo". In the Genoa region of the fifteenth century it was "corombo". There were people called Pigeon all over the western Med. Porto Colom, as in "colunbi", was noted on an Italian map of Mallorca from the thirteenth century, so it is perfectly logical that people might have adopted Colom as a surname because of the place name. Or alternatively, they were just named after a pigeon. Either way, as far as Columbus was concerned, Verd has maintained that his name came from his mother, Margarita Colom, who gave birth to the illegitimate son of Carlos, an Aragonese nobleman who was the brother of Ferdinand, later the husband of Isabel and so one half of the Catholic Kings. And the precise location of the birth was the Felanitx finca of s'Alqueria Roja.

Gabriel Verd believes that this year he will add to the celebrations of notable Mallorcans (Ramon Llull, 700th anniversary of his death, and Fray Junipero, his canonisation) by proclaiming that Columbus was definitively a Mallorcan. There is a part of me which really wants him to be right, for him to turn historical orthodoxy on its head and for history to therefore have to be rewritten. But despite his confidence that he will prove Columbus's Mallorcan birth definitively, unless it is in such a powerful way with new, previously unseen, original source documents that can substantiate the Felanitx theory and be scrutinised by peers who might be convinced of the arguments, the overwhelming evidence in favour of Genoa will remain.

Even if he were to provide definitive proof, would all Mallorcans be happy? History is less kind to Columbus than it once was. He is now accused of genocide and so of the extinguishing of Taino Indian culture in Hispaniola. The fact that smallpox and other diseases were largely responsible for the Tainos being all but wiped out doesn't stop contemporary views which portray a barbarous Columbus. Would Mallorca really want that legacy?

The The: Chaucer was not Mallorcan

In days of yore when obliged to do Chaucer for English Literature, my school's headmaster - who only ever left his study to do any teaching when the Father of English Lit was on the curriculum - would produce one of those old-fashioned, vinyl LP things, place it on the school's gramophone player and inflict Nevill Coghill on his group of uncomprehending sixth-formers. The headmaster was passionate about Chaucer, passionate about Coghill's interpretation and so therefore passionate about the language that was being used - Middle English.

Chaucer's language was not the finished article by any means. English underwent various iterations before something like a standard version was hit upon. "The Canterbury Tales" and "Troilus and Criseyde", which would crackle from the needle on Coghill's intonation, were arguably written through a collision of Kentish and Midlands dialects. Whatever the precise linguistic background to Chaucer's Middle English, his works contained what by then had become a standard form: the definite article "the".

Chaucer's great achievement was to give legitimacy to the native language in its then different varieties and to so challenge Latin (and French) as the dominant formal languages. His English was just one step along a route of influence, alteration and hybridisation which introduced its own conventions and abandoned others. One such was the distinction between the masculine, feminine and neuter articles which had existed in Old English. "The" became "the" and only "the" (or strictly speaking, "þe").

English nowadays reflects its historical, linguistic melting-pot in one particularly significant way. There is no language arbiter. There are no language diktats. English does not have academies, as the French and Spanish do, which establish rules.

English is hardly unique in having passed through phases of development brought about through migration and conquest, but while English, and other languages, evolved almost naturally, occasionally there was a linguistic shock, a moment in time when language (or dialect) changed almost totally. The conquest of Mallorca represented one such moment in time.

The natives on Mallorca didn't wake up on 1 January, 1230 and start speaking Catalan. The process of language assimilation took time, but as the island's population was probably no more than 20,000 (if that), the time that was required was uncommonly short. Once established, this new language took two paths. One was a regular Catalan which made its way into administration, documentation and religion. The other was the colloquial Catalan, one that represented some continuity with pre-conquest Vulgar Latin and Mozarabic, which had existed before Jaume I arrived on the scene. This colloquial Catalan became the Mallorquín dialect. It differs in certain respects, and one of the more notable ways in which it differs to regular Catalan is in the use of the definite article - the masculine and feminine of "the".

I recently drew attention to the row that had broken out because the Mallorcan broadcaster IB3 had started using the Mallorquín "the" in its news reports. Known as the "article salat", this colloquial use broke with tradition which deemed that regular, more formal Catalan was used. The row has since gone as far as the Balearic parliament and has intensified, as the Partido Popular-dominated parliament has approved the use of the "salat" at IB3. As a consequence, there are many, especially those in scholarly circles, who are now in a right old lather because of the parliament's decision. The argument has everything to do with the Partido Popular undermining Catalan. Again.

For we English-speaking descendants of Chaucer, the argument may well appear absurd. It will seem doubly so because of the absence of an English usage rule-making body. But where such bodies do exist, as in France and Spain, they are non-governmental and supposedly independent. For a government to make a direct ruling on language use is a different matter, and it is - despite the apparent absurdity - a pretty serious matter.

Inevitably and understandably, parliament's approval can be seen as having echoes of past official rulings on the Catalan language. But those were different to the current row. This is a local one, predicated as much if not more on political dogma as on linguistic common sense. The right-wing, characterised by elements within the PP and the anti-Catalan Circulo Balear (recently lampooned for its apparent role in determining government language policy), advances the cause of Mallorquín and the dialects of the other islands and attacks Catalan hegemony. It is as though Jaume I and the conquest never happened. But without that moment in time, that linguistic shock, Mallorquín would not now exist; or it would exist in a different form.

Yet, for all that there are political overtones, from experience of having spoken to Mallorcan people over the years, the majority might well agree with parliament's decision. They speak Mallorquín and not Catalan. How confusing. If only there had been a Mallorcan Chaucer. Though there was one - of sorts. Ramon Llull. And he used ...?