Language Trainers Blog

At one time, Latin was the official academic language in Europe. Until the early 18th century, the vast majority of all academic and scientific texts were written in Latin. This was primarily due to Latin’s traditional status as a language for educated people, but also because the nature of the language allowed both accuracy and simplicity – the perfect language for explaining concepts both simple and complex.

As Latin’s popularity faded, academics started to write in their native language instead, but since there were many set phrases in Latin that were both convenient and well-known, a few survived – usually in abbreviated form, like e.g. and i.e., which were covered in an older post. Most of these will probably be recognizable; but how many of the original forms did you know?

A.M. – ante meridiem – “before midday”
Cf. – confer – “compare”
C.V. – curriculum vitae – “course of life”
Etc. – et cetera – “and the others” (things)
Et al. – et alii – “and others” (people)
M.O. – modus operandi – “method of operating”
N.B. – nota bene – “note well” (or “please note”)
Percent – per cent – “for every one hundred”
R.I.P – requiescat in pace – “may he/she rest in peace”
Vs. – versus – “against”

In older texts, etc. is sometimes abbreviated with an ampersand – &c – if you look at it carefully, the & symbol is nothing more than a slightly compressed “E” and “t” (et being the Latin word for “and”).

It just goes to show that while Latin is considered a ‘dead language’, its influence can still be seen in our everyday lives.

This is just a small selection of Latin abbreviations still in use today – do you know any others?

Vice president Joe Biden was never really known for his ability to be anything but conspicuous, but during the recent signing ceremony at the White House for the new health care legislation voted in this week he was overheard (thanks to the podium microphone) telling president Obama, “This is a big f***ing deal”.

To be honest, I completely agree with him. The new healthcare legislation is certainly the first step in the right direction, and it was such a momentous victory that it was almost worth the expletive. Whilst I’m not particularly offended by his use of coarse language (you could even argue that this is almost ‘positive’ swearing), I know that many will be. And this is hardly Biden’s first time making a PG-13 gaffe:

At a ceremony announcing funding for his beloved Amtrak, he was greeted by a former colleague as “Mr. Vice President.” He replied, “Give me a f***ing break.” Biden’s predecessor famously used the same epithet in an exchange with a senator. And Vice President George H.W. Bush, when asked how he did against Geraldine Ferraro in the vice-presidential debates in 1984, said, “We tried to kick a little *ss.”

Source: slate.com – a brief history of bad language in Washington

Slate.com has posted an interesting article on bad language in Washington over the years, demonstrating that Biden’s faux-pas was not simply a sign of our coarser modern times and highlighting the (sometimes forgotten) difference between vulgar language and vulgarity itself.

From the article, you can see that Biden is hardly the first to succumb to public political profanity – in fact he is just the latest in a long, illustrious line of potty-mouthed politicians:

Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, Truman, JFK, LBJ, Nixon, Bush and Clinton all used rough language. Jimmy Carter did, too. (Though his best moment may have come when he didn’t mean to: Speaking in Poland, he said “I want to know the Polish people,” which was translated into Polish as, “I want to have carnal knowledge of the Polish people.”)

Congratulations on the healthcare bill, America!

Here’s a rare educational post!

It is a fairly well known fact that English borrows words and word roots from a variety of sources. Wikipedia states that that majority of English roots come from Latin and French (Old Norman), though the 100 most frequently used words are all Germanic in origin. This graph demonstrates a full breakdown, taken from a sample of 80,000 words from the Shorter Oxford Dictionary:

Although we have a rich vocabulary (by far the widest of all languages, with some 2 million words at last count), the English language treats nouns and verbs (and, to an extent, adjectives and pronouns) rather differently from the Romance languages from which it borrows heavily. One of the main differences is in the morphology of words – that is, how they change depending on gender and number (for nouns and adjectives), and person, mood, voice, and tense (for verbs). Verbs in English, for example, do not change in form much, usually adding an ‘s’ in the third person singular. For example, the verb “to see”:

In the future tense, the verb form (or inflection) itself does not change at all – instead, we use the auxiliary verb “to be” in its future tense, and the present participle of the verb (in this case, “see”). For example:

This makes learning regular English verbs pretty easy. Making a “verb table” like this seems a little pointless in English, since there are only two different forms in the present tense for this particular verb. This process is also known as conjugating a verb.

Let’s compare our relatively simple English verb table (the top one, indicating the present tense) with the French equivalent, then – the French verb to see is voir:

There are 5 different forms here. The future tense in French has another 6 different forms (je verrai, tu verras, il verra, nous verrons, vous verrez, ils verront), meaning that there’s a whole lot more learning to do.

Likewise, nouns in English have a singular and plural form – we don’t have to worry about gender or case, which explains why these are seen as new and slightly unusual concepts when it comes to learning a language like Spanish, French or German.

Let’s take the word ‘table’ as an example (since above I listed two ‘verb tables’) – in English, you either have a table, or you have several tables. Singular and plural – simple, right? Let’s compare the Latin word for ‘table’ (mensa, which happens to be a 1st declension feminine noun) and see how many forms it has (listing the different forms for a noun is also known as declining):

You can safely avoid the case names for now (though you may recognize a few), but straight away you can see that there are far more noun forms in Latin than in English (in this case, 7 different inflections in Latin vs. only 2 in English). Latin is perhaps an extreme example here, since it is an extremely inflective language and relies on the inflections of the words to ‘fill in’ the rest of the words in a sentence far more than English does. Moreover, this is just how you decline 1st declension feminine nouns in Latin – there are 5 groups of nouns, most of which have several genders, and there are all kinds of identical and similar forms across the groups, meaning that you really have to know your word endings to understand what is going on.

This is just a short demonstration of morphology at work, and barely begins to touch on the subject. However, if you’re thinking of learning another language (especially if it’s a Romance language), then it’s useful to see what you’re going to be up against. Learning your nouns and verbs in all their forms early on in your studying – especially the irregular ones – will put you in a much better position once your vocabulary expands and you start learning more complicated constructions and idioms, which sometimes combine several forms to create different or subtler meanings.

Sorry for all the technical talk – I hope this was useful to some!

I hope I’m not showing my age here, but when I was younger I stumbled across a British TV show called Mr Bean, starring Rowan Atkinson. The original TV show followed the story of an eccentric, hapless, mute man getting himself into scrapes whilst attempting to do everyday things like cook a roast dinner, go to church, or paint his apartment. A concept that was interesting to me at the time was the fact that Mr Bean never spoke – and if he did, it was an easily distinguishable sound like a scared shriek, an unhappy groan, or an elated “whee”. This gave it an international quality, so even though I generally don’t ‘get’ a lot of British humor, I still found myself laughing along.

Nowadays Mr Bean is considered a little old-fashioned and silly (especially after the 2 pitiful and unfaithful attempts at Hollywood movies, Bean and Mr Bean’s Holiday), but I still remember the show as my pre-pubescent self saw it – hilarious. But what has this got to do with languages, you may be asking, besides the fact that Mr Bean barely spoke a word?

Well, today I learned that the Mr Bean theme tune – a short choral piece sung in Latin – is not simply text taken from a hymn or Latin text as I’d originally thought. The lyrics change depending on how far through the show you are, and translate as follows:

ecce, homo qui est faba – “Behold, the man who is a bean” (intro)
finis partis primae – “End of part one” (before commercial break)
pars secunda – “Part two” (after commercial break)
vale, homo qui est faba – “Goodbye, man who is a bean” (end)

You can hear the intro for yourself on this clip, taken from the intro:

What a quirky little tidbit in the show! I wonder if the creators thought many people would pick up on it?

Source: langladder.com

I recently stumbled upon LangLadder, a super useful extension for the Firefox web browser which has an array of features to help intermediate and advanced level language learners reinforce your vocabulary while you browse the web. By merging the learning experience with how many people spend the bulk of their free time (statistics have shown that the average person spends around 2 hours a day on the internet), it creates a fun way to practice your target language in context. By browsing foreign language sites, you can add words you don’t know to a vocabulary list that pops up in your sidebar, which gives you definitions as you go using Google Translate. You can later test yourself with the plugin’s built-in flashcard system, which tracks your progress as you improve.

You can learn more about how LangLadder works from its creator, Erik Larson, by watching this video:

I love when technology can legitimately aid your language studies – this is a simple yet great idea for those who want to sharpen up their skills. Check out langladder.com to download the plugin, and for more information. It works on both PC and Mac; all you’ll need is the Mozilla Firefox browser and the Jetpack plugin, plus the LangLadder add-on.

Source: sentex.net

Here are a few interesting language facts…

Did you know that English is the only language that capitalises the first person singular (I)? No other language does this. Does anybody know why this is?

Did you know that there are more English speakers in China than in the USA? Sometimes I forget just how many people there are in China!

Did you know that in almost every language in the world, the word for ‘mother’ begins with an m sound? Is this because it’s often a baby’s first sound?

Did you know that in some Eskimo languages, a single noun can have around 1,000 different forms? That’s going to be a lot of homework.

Did you know that around one quarter of the world’s languages are spoken by under 1,000 people? Also, about 175 languages in the world are spoken by fewer than ten people each. That’s a lot of languages…