Language Trainers Blog

Source: newkerala.com

Following on from previous posts on the Na’Vi language from the massive box office hit Avatar (and my subsequent disappointment after watching it that, having spent all that effort creating an entire language, it wasn’t a larger part of the movie itself), I suppose this was always going to happen at some point.

An American linguistics student living in Edinburgh, Richard Littauer, has become so obsessed with the movie (he claims to have seen it around 17 times at the theatre) that he has compiled his own Na’Vi dictionary to help others learn the language. Littauer, or Taronyu to go by his Na’Vi name (stop smirking), is also seeking a girlfriend fluent in the Na’Vi tongue. From the article:

“Strangely, I haven’t got a girlfriend at the moment. It’s hard to find someone 14ft and blue – that would be perfect for me,” he said.

“But if I could find a girl who speaks the language and lives in my area that would be a dream.

“Hopefully one day I can meet one – that would be some wedding. There are also people I know who want to start a proper tribe living in the Amazon or something.

“I plan to get a few people together to go over to Cramond Island on the Firth and we’ll spend the night there and sing songs,” he added.

While there is little difference between this and the multitude of Trekkies who speak fluent Klingon, I do sometimes wonder why these people don’t consider learning a language which, you know, has a little more practicality…

As somebody who studied Latin and Ancient Greek, I’ve always been interested in etymology – the study of where words come from.

This image caught my attention whilst browsing the other day, showing the foundations of the English word “mother”. Click it to see the full sized version:

It’s a little confusing at first, being that it’s an approximate map of Europe with a big tree on it – but if you start from the right hand side and work your way along the tree’s roots, you can see how the stem worked its way across Europe and how the word for ‘mother’ in each language eventually took shape.

It makes sense that the word ‘mother’ comes from the root of the Sanskrit word ‘to make’ (mata), and it’s interesting to see how the word maintained a lot of its original form in every language.

This fascinating picture was drawn by a Hendrik Willem van Loon (1882-1944), a prolific Dutch-American journalist and historian, and former professor of history at Cornell University.

Source: calgaryherald.com

According to the Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association, Canadians have truly embraced the medium of text messaging, having sent 35.3 billion texts in 2009 – an increase of around 70% from 2008. That’s 122 million text messages per day!

Apparently, this has also birthed a new set of vocabulary to do with texting – most infamously sexting, meaning to send X-rated messages, images and videos from phone to phone.

Also added to the new texting lexicon are portmanteaus like drexting (drinking and texting), chexting (cheating on your significant other through text messages), brexting (breaking up with your partner via text), wexting (walking and texting), and perhaps my favourite, fexting (fake texting on your phone in public to avoid looking like a loner, or to avoid talking to somebody).

Most of these words have been invented due to the sharp rise in text message popularity, and will most likely fall out of use soon enough. I’m pretty sure “sexting” will survive, however, especially following the recent revelations with Tiger Woods.

I still prefer talking face-to-face, but clearly I’m falling behind…

I read a very interesting article today about American Sign Language in the Chicago Tribune about the status of the language at Northern Illinois University, where it has recently been classified as an official foreign language – but to some controversy.

Distinct as it is from any spoken language, ASL is still considered an indigenous language to the USA, and therefore cannot be ‘foreign’. But since the language is so far removed from English – not only in terms of the non-verbal way it is expressed, but also in its structure and syntax – from a purely linguistic point of view, many argue that it deserves to be defined as such.

Another argument against ASL’s foreign language status is that a language should have its own body of literature, though unless videos would be included under this term, this is clearly impossible for a language that depends entirely on visual stimuli to comprehend. However, there are many languages around the world (many in Africa) where languages and dialects thereof have no written component, yet would still be considered foreign.

Sign language is born out of necessity – how else could those unable to hear communicate with others but through visual means?

An example of the difference between the way American English and ASL works is given in the Tribune’s article:

APPEAR tooth = PAIN ++BAD DENTIST GO NEED

This translates to “”It seems I have a toothache – I need to go to the dentist”. Grammatically and syntactically, it seems that the languages are worlds apart, yet there are only some 150 institutions across the states that accept ASL as a foreign language.

OK, so I might go a little overboard with my grammar Nazism sometimes (which I guess can be seen in a lot of my “annoyances” posts).

However, the only thing worse than a pedant is an incorrect pedant – a stickler to the rules that is not aware of the correct rules themselves.

English is a constantly evolving language, as you so often hear, so rules that were once considered solid can be eroded over time – for example, the hyphenation and/or capitalization of words like E-mail (or if you want to go much further back, good-bye). Nowadays it is perfectly acceptable to see email and goodbye.

However, there are some ‘rules’ that have permeated into the English language which simply have no basis in fact. Here are my top three:

1. “Irregardless” is not a word.
As much as it pains me to admit it, this hideous travesty of a word is actually included in most editions of most English dictionaries, in the ‘non-standard’ section. This, for all intents and purposes, makes it a word.

However, this does not mean that you should ever use it. “Regardless” is fine by itself – there is simply no need to add the ‘ir-’ to the beginning. I assume this started because people wanted to combine the words “regardless” and “irrespective”, and thus the bastard son “irregardless” was born.

Similarly, words such as “bootylicious” are also in the non-standard section of some dictionaries, but this doesn’t mean that they’re acceptable to use… in polite company, anyway!

2. You shouldn’t end a sentence with a preposition.
I always find myself trying to avoid ending a sentence with a preposition wherever possible, but I recently found out that you don’t necessarily have to.

Again, this doesn’t mean that you have free license to add prepositions to sentences that already make sense. “That’s what I’m talking about” is fine (you simply can’t rephrase that to avoid the preposition being at the end and have the sentence come out sounding natural – “that is about which I am talking” just sounds silly). However, saying “That’s where it’s at” is incorrect, because you can remove the preposition from the end and still have a sentence that makes perfect sense: “That’s where it is”. Of course, both these sentences have a basis in slang, which makes it harder to apply rules to them anyway.

The rule shouldn’t be “don’t end a sentence with a preposition”, but more like “don’t use unnecessary prepositions”!

3. It’s incorrect to split your infinitives.
For those of you unaware of what a split infinitive is, the infinitive is the form of any verb which is prefaced with the word “to”. For example, “to play”, “to love”, “to see”, etc.

To split an infinitive is to put a word inbetween the “to” and the verb – the most famous split infinitive in history is probably the tagline to Star Trek – “To boldly go where no man has gone before”.

The reason grammarians often tell people not to split their infinitives goes all the way back to good old Latin and Ancient Greek – the founding languages of much of the English language. In Latin and Greek, infinitives are one word: “to play” in Latin is ludere, “to love” is amare, “to see” is videre.

Thus the split infinitive rule is a throwback to English’s roots – but English splits the infinitive anyway, by dividing it into two words. However, it is still considered a single part of speech, and is an issue that will no doubt continue to divide anal retentives for centuries.

English being English, there are some situations where refusing to split the infinitive will actually change the meaning of a sentence. For example, “I told my sister to quickly get off the bus” means that my sister should get off the bus quickly; but “I told my sister quickly to get off the bus” coupld imply that I spoke rapidly, or my telling her was a fast reaction to a previous event.

Personally, I always try to avoid splitting infinitives wherever possible – to me it just sounds inherently wrong – but I don’t correct others when they do… because it just isn’t a hard and fast rule.

I suppose that this one is going out of fashion, since I’m seeing more and more ‘txtspk’ online these days, with people simply replacing any instance of the words ‘to’ or ‘too’ with the number 2… but it still annoys me anyway!

“Too” can either mean ‘in addition’ or ‘to an excessive degree’. For example, “I’m going there too” (i.e. “I am also going there”), or “I’ve had too much food”, or “You’re standing too close to the fire”.

For pretty much everything else, you use “to”, which is a word that usually expresses motion towards something (e.g. “I am going to work”, “The plant has grown to six feet”, “Give it to me”, etc.). It has many other meanings, too – which is probably why it is occasionally confused.

Back when I first learned this rule, I remembered it as there being “too many Os in ‘too’”. This helped me remember only to use the word when I wanted to express that there was an excess or something.

My latest travels have brought me to Ukraine, an eastern European republic with a rich cultural history – though in recent years it is too often only recognized for the Chernobyl disaster in 1986.

Whilst I have been here, I have attempted to learn some Ukrainian in order to get by. This has of course involved learning the Cyrillic alphabet, which dates back to around the 9th century. There are elements of the Greek alphabet in there, which has helped me – letters such as ф (еф) for the f sound (identical to the Greek phi), п (пе) for p (or Greek pi), and р (ер) for r (or Greek rho).

This also helps with letters that are the same in the Greek alphabet as they are in our Roman alphabet – a, e, i, o, k, m and t all perform pretty much the same function in Ukrainian and Russian as they do in English.

However, it’s taking time for me to learn to read billboards and shop signs with any kind of fluency – not due to the letters whose forms are completely new to me such as д for d, and ц for ts; but due to the letters that I do recognise but are sounded entirely differently in Ukrainian.

For example, the с (ес) is pronounced like an English s, and an н (ен) is an n sound. This creates a lot of confusion and second guessing on my part.

So, the word for “alphabet” comes out as алфаві́т – not so tough. But the word for “Ukraine” is written Україна (Ukrayina), but my brain wants to say something like “ykraiha”, which is nothing like what it should be!

Still – like anything else, I’m sure that I can get the hang of it if I practice, practice, practice.

Here’s another mistake that I hear almost every day, but has become so widespread that it is now considered correct by many. Of course, English is constantly evolving, but that does not mean that the rules should be completely ignored due to ignorance!

A conditional clause in English requires a couple of things – the word if, on one side of the sentence – and then a verb in the conditional tense (for example, “I would have seen”, or “I would go”) on the other. Let’s look at an example:

In this (correct) sentence, the second part of the sentence is hypothetical – since I did not enter the competition, I did not win.

However, often in American English you hear:

This may sound correct due to the fact that you hear it so often, but you should not have a conditional verb on both sides.

A similar error involving conditional sentences is the difference between “would have” and “would of”. It is quite easy to see how this mistake comes about – since “would have” is so often shortened in conversation to “would’ve” (see my earlier post about apostrophes to see why it contracts like this), it can sound a lot like “would of”.

For example:

When written out like this, it is easier to see that the first sentence (“would have”) is correct, and the second (“would of”) is incorrect. “Would of” means nothing, since “would” modifies the verb that follows, and “of” is, of course, not a verb.

The very same applies to “should have”/”should of”, “will have”/”will of”, and “could have”/”could of”. In all instances, “have” is correct.

Whilst there is only one word for more, there are two words for its opposite – fewer and less, and they are sometimes used incorrectly.

Happily this is a very simple error, with a very simple rule to prevent yourself from falling into the trap.

Use fewer when you are talking about things that can be counted. For example:

Use less when you are talking about things that can’t be counted in the traditional way. For example:

Hopefully if you learn this rule, you will make fewer mistakes, and find yourself less susceptible to making this error!