Language Trainers Blog

This is something that really irks grammarians – that darned apostrophe appearing where it isn’t wanted, usually in a misguided attempt to pluralize something.

You see them everywhere, but there’s still no excuse. If, like so many others, you’re in need a refresher (or you just want some hard and fast rules for remembering where you should and shouldn’t dump apostrophes in your sentences), check out this guide on theoatmeal.com. As well as being pretty funny, the rules of apostrophe usage are made pretty clear.

The most important rule is the one in big letters at the bottom – when it doubt, don’t use an apostrophe.

Couldn’t agree more!

Here’s a fun little site for language lovers and those who know anything about the perils of those instant online translators such as Babelfish: Translation Party.

Type in a phrase in English, and it translates it to and from Japanese until it reaches ‘translation equilibrium’ – i.e. returns the same translation in both languages. You’ll usually see that the ending phrase is quite different from your starting point…

Here’s another little error you hear on a daily basis in the States, and one that can really bug uptight language nerds like myself. Sadly, it’s probably not going anywhere any time soon, but you can still do what you can by correcting your friends and family next time you hear it!

“I couldn’t care less where we go for dinner tonight”
“I could care less where we go for dinner tonight”

These phrases at first might appear interchangeable – they both mean the same thing, right?

Nope. Unless you really are trying to say that you could care less about something – and that can pretty much be descriptive of any level of caring – you should only technically use the first one. If you cared about something a lot, you could easily care less about it. But then, if you hardly cared about something at all, you could still care less.

On the other hand, if you couldn’t care less about something, that means that your current level of caring is zero. Zilch. Nil. There is no way that you could care less about it, and that’s what you’re emphasizing. You care so little about it, that you couldn’t possibly give less of a hoot.

Shamefully stolen from incompetech.com, this little graph sums up the oft-mistaken concept quite nicely:

So there you have it. “I could care less” really means nothing, if you think about it.

Following on from my earlier post about prescriptive vs descriptive opinions when it comes to linguistics – as something of a prescriptivist myself, I find that holding myself to a decent standard of English has its many difficulties and pitfalls. Occasionally I find myself going beyond that.

There are many English errors I see or hear on a daily basis which simply annoy me, even when I know they shouldn’t. Most of the time I should just chill out. One such thing is RAS syndrome, or Redundant Acronym Syndrome syndrome.

RAS syndrome is the act of using an acronym but redundantly saying one of the words contained within the acronym anyway – for example, one that everybody will have heard is “PIN Number”. Since “PIN” stands for “Personal Identification Number”, by saying “PIN Number” you’re essentially saying “number” twice.

The keener-eyed of you may have noticed that “RAS syndrome” is itself an example of it – who doesn’t love self-referential humor?

A few more examples of RAS syndrome – can you think of any more?

ATM machine – automated teller machine machine
HIV virus – human immunodeficiency virus virus
LCD display – liquid crystal display display
DC current – direct current current
UPC code – Universal Product Code code
CSS style sheets – cascading style sheets style sheets

Sometimes there is a reason for RAS syndrome – for example, “please RSVP”. Since the “SVP” part of the acronym is from a foreign language – French for “please” (s’il vous plait) – you’re technically saying “please please respond”.

When it comes to English – the world’s lingua franca – there is such a wealth and depth of vocabulary borrowed from hundreds of sources, and grammatical rules (along with their exceptions). This results in a lot of arguments about what is strictly ‘right’ and ‘wrong’.

And so there are two schools of thought: prescriptive and descriptive linguistics.

Prescriptive linguists believe that the rules should be obeyed, and try to enforce standardization for how the language should be employed. This includes spelling, syntax, grammar, as well as deciding the political and social correctness of certain words or phrases. Prescription tends to resist change in favour of keeping everything nice and regulated.

Descriptivism contrasts with prescriptivism in that it works on the basis of how the language is used, rather than how it ought to be used. Linguistic study must by definition be descriptive – how can you study a language without knowing how it’s actually used? However, most language learning text books you’ll find are very prescriptive in the way they explain how to use words and phrases, often with little room to manoeuvre.

In reality, for a language as idiomatic, varied and constantly evolving as English, the two should be able to work together, and indeed they do – but often their priorities and aims are different. Without a governing body to regulate the English language (such as the French have with the Academie Francaise), the argument of whether certain words or phrases should be formally ‘accepted’ will forever be part of our language.

Learning a new language can be helped by your own understanding of English grammar – most people who have English as their primary language learn it ‘as-is’ – that is, without truly ever being explained the grammatical or morphological reasons behind things.

I studied Latin and Ancient Greek since a young age. While this doesn’t exactly make me immediately popular at parties, it has helped me recognise word forms, even if I hadn’t seen a word before.

One of the things that helps the most is recognising prefixes – those bits that are commonly attached to the beginning of words which give you a clue to their meaning (if you know what they mean, of course). Due to English’s wealth of linguistic sources, we tend to use a lot of prefixes – but the vast majority come from Latin or Ancient Greek.

You may be familiar with most of the numerical prefixes, such as kilo- for thousand (Gk. chilioi / χιλιοι), mega- for million (Gk. μέγας – “large”), cent- for hundred (Lat. centum), or nano- for a billionth (Gk. νᾶνος – “dwarf”).

A pretty comprehensive list of prefixes (and other word bases) can be found here, if you’d like to learn more.

So then, the first time I heard one of my all-time favourite words, pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis – which, even though it is basically something of a linguistic hoax, is referred to in the Oxford English Dictionary – it sounded pretty much like nonsense. But once I saw it written down I noticed that it was basically a bunch of Latin and Greek prefixes and suffixes thrown together to make one long word. Break it down into its parts and you get:

pneu- Gk. meaning “breath”
-mono- Gk. meaning “one/alone”
-ultra- Lat. meaning “beyond”
-micro- Gk. meaning “small”
-scopic- Gk. meaning “looking”
-silico- Gk. meaning “rock/sand”
-volcano- Lat. meaning “volcano” (from Vulcan, the God of fire)
-coni- Gk. meaning “dust” (from konis)
-osis Gk. meaning “condition”

So when I found out that the word was supposed to mean “a lung disease caused by the inhalation of very fine silica dust, causing inflammation in the lungs”, it almost made sense.

Do not adjust your browser – I’m veering clear of the usual academia to post about something I’ve always found a little interesting… I read recently that around 6% of all the languages on our planet are spoken by around 94% of the world’s population. This seemed like a crazy statistic to me, but when you think about the prevalence of English, Chinese and Spanish in a world with such a wide variety of spoken languages, the proportion becomes a little more realistic.

This also made me think of one of my all-time favourite sci-fi TV shows, Joss Whedon’s Firefly – a show that burned bright, but for a very short time due to the network’s inability to display the episodes in order. Its 15 episodes have since enjoyed fantastic DVD sales, and there was even a movie made, Serenity.

Firefly was different from most sci-fi shows of its kind, in that it was more like a sci-fi western than your Star Trek/Star Wars kinds of stories. There were no alien races and very few laser guns; just a very stylised and specific vision of the human race some 500 years from now, depicted in great detail. Earth was no longer habitable, and so we moved on, colonizing other planets and solar systems. If it sounds like something you think you’d like, buy the DVDs or check out the Firefly Wiki for more information on the show. You won’t regret it!

Being a bit of a language nerd, I always found Whedon’s take on languages in the future to be very interesting and well-conceived. In the Firefly universe, everybody speaks both English and Chinese – though with the way Chinese words are inserted into otherwise English statements, it’s more like a mash-up of the two. There were no subtitles in the show, but it was generally very easy to tell from context what the actors were saying when they broke into Chinese. Given the crazed fan following the show generated, there are even sites where you can find out for sure what the characters were saying. Another advantage was that it gave Whedon an opportunity to put swear words into the show to emphasise the characters’ frustrations, without having to bleep or soften the language.

Even the English in Firefly has its own modified syntax – context is often dropped (for example, one of the characters sees a shop with a lot of pretty dresses, and says “Look at the pretties!”), and there is plenty of ‘future vocabulary’, such as the oft-used “shiny!”, which means something along the lines of “good/great”.

Can anybody think of any other TV shows that have gone to this length to create such an immersive universe?

It’s an interesting concept to think about, though. When you think in universal terms, where countries and cultures are spread across worlds rather than continents, ways of communication would have to merge and be made easier and clearer, rather than diverge. The choice of English and Chinese as the two languages makes a certain kind of sense, since they are the two most spoken languages in the world today.

Still, that’s all a long way away right now…

Hi there, I’m Dave, and I’ll be doing a little bit of blogging here.

I suppose I should introduce myself a little – I’ve always been fascinated by languages and have studied them my entire life. I took Classics (Latin & Greek) at university, partly because they’d always been my strongest subjects, but mainly due to the fact that they form the basis of most European languages, which has stood me in good stead for picking up languages since. I also took some extra classes at university in Japanese, which is a language I had always wanted to learn – although it was made harder by the fact that in terms of vocabulary, grammar and syntax, it bears no resemblance to any other language I’d ever studied!

One of my first experiences with Japanese was reading about onomatopoeia. For those that aren’t aware, an onomatopoeia is a word that imitates the sound it describes, such as woof, pop, bang, etc.

It’s also a pretty fun word to say. Onomatopoeia. Try it.

I noticed early on how different and strange Japanese onomatopoeias were from their English counterparts, and thought that the Japanese people couldn’t possibly be hearing different sounds, could they? Later on I learned that the Japanese phoneme system is a little limited compared with that of English, and doesn’t really allow for some sounds to be made. However, I found during my studies that Japanese is positively littered with these little words, which are not only used to describe sounds but also, unlike English, sometimes even the emotions and things you don’t hear. Strictly, they should be called mimetic words, of which onomatopoeia are just a part.

Here are a few interesting mimetic words in Japanese (they usually come in twos), and if you hover over the blank bit underneath each one, you can see its corresponding English sound (or the feeling/condition it intimates). See if you can guess what they mean. Like a lot of Japanese things, some of them seem a little weird – try saying them out loud!

• gero gero
  ribbit (frog croaking)

• ton ton
  (footsteps)

• kira kira
  (sparkling/shining)

• wan wan
  woof (dog barking)

• mogu mogu
  om nom nom (eating/chewing food)

• chuu
  mwah/smooch (kissing)

• kokekokko
  cock-a-doodle-doo (rooster crowing)

• potsu potsu
  drip drop (water dropping)

• paki paki
  crack (ice cracking)

• yobo yobo
  wobbly-legged (from old age)

There’s a long list of them here, if you find yourself wanting to learn more.