Language Trainers Blog

As 2011 beckons and the wanton partying that goes with the celebration of a new year, people have usually planned their night out well in advance. Traditionally spent with friends and loved ones, the celebration (for me, anyway) usually culminates in screaming “HAPPY NEW YEAR!” at the top of our lungs before breaking out into an impromptu (and generally slightly inebriated) rendition of Auld Lang Syne – usually as many of the words as I can recall at that point. I’ve never questioned why we do this, and why other English speaking countries have the same tradition. And what exactly is “Auld Lang Syne”?

“Auld Lang Syne” was originally a poem, penned by the great Scottish poet Robert Burns. The words are set to the tune of a very popular folk song at the time. The titular words literally mean “old long since” (or less literally, “old times” or “days gone by”). So when we sing the final line of the chorus (“… for Auld Lang Syne”), we’re saying “for the sake of days gone by” – curiously enough, looking backwards to past years rather than forward to the new one.

The tradition of singing the song originally came from the Scottish version of New Years Eve, Hogmanay. Singing the song became a tradition in Scotland, which soon spread to the rest of the British Isles. Since the British had a far-ranging overseas empire at the time, it soon spread around the world to other English-speaking countries.

So from all of us at Language Trainers, we hope you have a fantastic start to the new year! Perhaps, like so many others, among your new year resolutions is learning another language…

We use so many acronyms in modern day English: especially on the internet, where terms like LOL (laughing out loud), AFK (away from keyboard) and BRB (be right back) are so commonplace that they are almost universal. Some are a little rarer and less-known, such as FWIW (for what it’s worth) YMMV (your mileage may vary) and TIL (today I learned), but spend enough time on internet messageboards and discussion threads and you’ll end up learning a great deal of them.

Acronyms are something of a 20th century invention, and were extremely rare before that. Some acronyms have become so part of our vocabulary that they are no longer treated as such, instead as words in their own right. For example, the well-known words radar and scuba are very rarely capitalized, belying the fact that they were originally abbreviations (RAdio Detection And Ranging, and Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus, respectively).

A more recent variant of the noble acronym is the backronym – unsurprisingly a compound of the words back and acronym – and is used to describe when the opposite process of forming an acronym occurs, i.e. a word is broken up and each of its letters is assigned a word.

Sometimes this is done for humor (e.g. Ford, the automobile company, “Found On Road Dead”), sometimes to aid the learning process (e.g. in music, the notes on a stave found in the spaces between the lines, ascending from the lowest, F, A, C and E – Face). However, sometimes backronyms become so embedded in culture that they give rise to false etymologies – that is to say, a fake story of how a word came into being.

A popular folk etymology spawned by a backronym is “posh”, a word referring to rich people. The story, popularized by musical Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, goes that on long-distance boat journeys across the Atlantic, the richer passengers would travel on the port side outwards, and the starboard side homewards, in order to avoid the glare of the sun in their cabin (Port Outwards, Starboard Homewards – POSH). This has since been debunked as a myth, though people continue to believe it (the actual source of the word is unknown).

Another example of this kind of backronym is the sport of golf – some thought that the word originates from the saying “Gentlemen Only, Ladies Forbidden” (it is actually derived from the Scottish word for the sport, gowf).

Here are some more examples of false etymological backronyms from the Wikipedia page on the subject:

Other examples include the brand name Adidas, named for company founder Adolf “Adi” Dassler but falsely believed to be an acronym for “All Day I Dream About Sports”; wiki, said to mean “What I Know Is”, but in fact derived from the Hawaiian phrase wiki wiki meaning “fast”; or Yahoo!, incorrectly claimed to mean “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle,” but in fact chosen because Yahoo’s founders liked the meaning of the word itself.

English is a tough language to learn. Recently I was discussing difficulties I was having with Chinese pronunciation with some native Chinese speakers, and they told me that Chinese pronunciation was far easier than English. They had a point.

Whilst English is not a tonal language like Chinese (where the same word said 5 different ways can have 5 very different meanings – for example, māo means a cat, but mào means a hat, and máo means hair), at least Chinese pronunciation is regular. That is to say, if you see the word māo, at least you instantly know how to pronounce it. Their difficulty with English is not with learning the rules of pronunciation, but learning which words adhere to them as well as the vast number of words that don’t.

My problem with Mandarin is mainly one of listening: my ear is not finely tuned to the Chinese tonal system, so it’s difficult for me to make out exactly which tone a speaker is using – especially as they speak so quickly. However, with English one of the main problems is one of reading – just because a word is presented to you in a certain way, there is no guarantee that you’ll be able to pronounce it correctly, even if you follow the rules to the letter.

A native English speaker doesn’t really think about these things, we simply learn not to trust spelling for pronunciation. To demonstrate that I understood their problem, I pulled an old trick I learned at school: I took a piece of paper, and wrote the word ghoti on it, and then asked them how to pronounce it.

The majority of them went with “go-tee” or “got-ee”, as do most people unfamiliar with this particular English play on words. When I told them that it’s a made up word and it’s pronounced “fish”, they could only exchange confused looks with one another until I explained it.

This is an old trick, of course: for the ghoti/fish trick to work you simply have to be selective about how which particular pronunciations of certain letter combinations you choose to use. Take the gh from rough, the o from women, and the ti from patient, and you end up with a very different sound from what the word ghoti would initially imply.

Of course I emphasized that this was a made up word, and I was just trying to demonstrate just how fiendish English pronunciation can be, and that “fish” was spelled, well, how it sounds.

However, it’s an interesting point – native English speakers so rarely think about how difficult our language is for foreigners to learn unless they study another language in depth. So, next time you hear a non-native English speaker butcher a word, be a little more forgiving – it’s tough!

Source: questvisual.com

Every day we seem to move a little closer to developing the equivalent of Douglas Adams’ legendary Babel Fish: a device that allows instant translation, transcending the language barrier and enabling universal communication. The idea of the Babel Fish has fascinated me from the first time I read The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, and I find it incredible that just 15 or so years later, what I originally thought to be a quirky yet impossible invention is fast approaching realization.

Of course, machine translation has been around us for a while – from Altavista’s Babelfish service and Google Translate, Google Goggles and speech-to-speech translation – but never before has it been realized so clearly and so simply.

The software in question is called Word Lens, marketing itself as “a dictionary, evolved”; and the idea is simple. Using augmented reality (a rather complicated sounding term meaning taking visuals from a camera and overlaying other data on top of it) together with translation algorithms, the concept is that you point your phone at some foreign text, and you the translation replaces the text on your screen. Instantly.

Here’s a video of Word Lens in action – believe it or not, this is actually how it works:

It may not recognize handwritten or particularly stylized printed text, but it’s good enough for signs, menus and the like.

Unbelievably the software is available for free from Apple’s App Store, though you have to purchase certain language pairs in order to enable translation (currently only English <-> Spanish is supported, but more languages are on the way). It works with all Apple devices with a camera with autofocus (iPhone 4, 3GS or the new iPod Touch with video camera), with firmware version 4.0 and above.

The demo version reverses the letters in words instead of translating them, but it still demonstrates that the software recognizes the words (and it does it well, too). Adding the translation layer is pretty simple from there, but you have to pay for it.

This kind of thing would be invaluable while on vacation, on a business trip, or in any situation where you need to be able to understand your surroundings.

Admittedly, it’s not quite a Babel Fish, but we’re getting closer every time… it won’t be long now!

Source: pleco.com

As someone who is living in China and has only recently started learning Chinese, I am constantly flummoxed by Chinese characters. They might call it “Simplified Chinese”, but it still looks pretty complicated to me!

I have been using a dictionary on my phone called Pleco, which has been a fantastic tool. It’s packed with features, including flashcards, audio pronunciation (very useful for a tonal language like Mandarin), handwriting recognition (which is so accurate it’s almost eerie).

However, their latest update has brought along with it something that makes reading Chinese a complete breeze – an OCR recognition module, using the phone’s camera.

OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition, and has been around for a while – it basically takes an image and turns it into text. This has a wide variety of uses, but for Chinese it is invaluable: now when I want to know what something means in Chinese, I can simply point my camera at it and let Pleco do the rest.

Here’s a video of this amazing technology in use:

Naturally I will still be learning Chinese as I can’t be entirely dependent upon my phone, but with so many Chinese characters, this has really helped me decode menus and signs when I needed it.

Isn’t technology fantastic?

I’ve recently started learning to read and write in Chinese, and while learning some of the characters for some of the basic words I learned a while ago, I came across the characters for “Mĕiguó”, Mandarin for “America”.

As it happens, the two characters that make up the word are 美国. Chinese characters each have their own distinct meanings, but can alter their meanings depending on the characters they are combined with. 国 means “country” and is part of most words for countries in Chinese (e.g. 英国 (Yīngguó) is England, 法国 (Făguó) is France, 德国 (Déguó) is Germany, etc.).

What I later discovered when looking at the individual characters that made up the names, was that America in Chinese literally means “beautiful country”!

In turn, England “hero country”, France is “law country”, and Germany is “heart country” or “kindness country”.

I wonder how these were chosen? It seems like they went with Mandarin words that sounded reasonably similar to the actual names of the word (Amer- / mei, Eng- / Ying, Fra- / fa, Deu- / de), but purposefully chose words with positive connotations.

Source: reddit.com

As a regular user of Reddit – the best news aggregation and social bookmarking site on the internet – I’m often filled with a sense of glee when a topic like this arises. One user asked Reddit what their favorite “culturally untranslatable phrase” was, and it prompted an outpouring of fantastic idioms from other users – some hilarious, some witty, some downright weird.

Some of my picks (thank you to the individual users who submitted these!) included the original poster’s Bangladeshi phrase, “gacche kathal gophe tel”, which roughly translates to “oiling your mustache in anticipation of the jackfruit tree bearing fruit” (a similar synonym in English would be “don’t count your chickens before they hatch”).

Another excellent one was the Spanish “no te peines, que en la foto no salís”: “don’t comb your hair, you’re not going to be in the picture”. This would be used to tell somebody not to get too excited as the matter under discussion doesn’t concern them.

Another excellent Spanish addition was “cuanto mas alto trepa el mono, más se le ve el culo”: “the higher the monkey climbs, the easier it is to see its rear end”. This comes to mean that the more famous you become, the more the dirtier aspects of your private life will become known. Good advice!

The Pakistani phrase “mera damagh kharahayho” literally means “you’re eating my brains!”, and is used to tell somebody that they’re being particularly annoying!

One with particular significance to me since I’m currently learning Mandarin Chinese was “mă mă hū hū” (馬馬虎虎), literally translates to “horse horse tiger tiger”. Somehow, it comes to mean that something is “so-so”, or “passable”.

Named after creator Stephen Wolfram, Wolfram Alpha is a different kind of search engine from Google, Yahoo and all the others – it brands itself as a “computational knowledge engine” with hundreds of practical uses. You can input math calculations, get in-depth weather reports, study socio-economic data, or even find out how many calories there are in a cubic light year of fried chicken (hint: a lot).

However, it also has linguistic uses, and one that I’ve found myself using a couple of times is a kind of “crossword puzzle solving” feature. You know when you have a word on the tip of your tongue, but just can’t get it out? For example, you know the word you want starts with a “T” and ends with “-ation”, and it means to represent a word in another alphabet… but you can’t for the life of you remember the exact word.

Wolfram Alpha can help out: simply type in T and the ation parts, and fill in the gap with underscores (_). It will then calculate that you’re looking for a word that fits the template, and give you a list of possible results.

In this case, it found my word (transliteration).

This is a very basic feature of WA (it can perform some dizzyingly complex mathematical operations in a matter of milliseconds), but still worth mentioning as it can be incredibly useful if you want a quick solution to your vocabulary woes. You can find a gallery of other uses of Wolfram Alpha on the site. Pretty impressive if you ask me!