Language Trainers Blog

Source: itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/

It seems I am a little late to the party to this one, but still worth talking about: in 2004, a French writer called Michel Thaler wrote a novel, Le Train de Nulle Part (“The Nowhere Train”), that contains no verbs. Not one single verb.

As anybody who has taken any kind of language classes (or has even the vaguest recollection of English grammar from school), verbs are… well, they’re pretty important. Integral, you might say. Try writing even one sentence without using a verb, and you’ll find that it creates a pretty strange effect – now imagine a whole novel written like that (though, of course, the novel was written in French).

Strangely, it seems that Thaler didn’t do this just to prove he could, either – he seems to be fundamentally against the entire notion of verbs. From the article on languagelog:

Thaler describes verbs as “invaders, dictators, and usurpers of our literature”, adding “the verb is like a weed in a field of flowers … You have to get rid of it to allow the flowers to grow and flourish.” He has banned infinitives as well as tensed verbs entirely from his writing, but he does exempt past participles from his linguistic Nuremberg Laws.

Thaler is also quoted (in a verbfully hypocritical passage) as saying: “I am like a car driver who has smashed the windscreen so he cannot see into the future, smashed the rear-view mirror so he cannot see the past, and is travelling in the present.”

I’ve occasionally encountered drivers like that, but none who has also written a novel. Confusingly, Thaler’s road rage is applied not to other drivers, nor even, in the novel, to the guilty imperialistic verbs, but instead to the many passengers on an imaginary train, whom he attacks individually, at length, and in vitriolic (though verbless) detail.

It takes all sorts, I suppose…

This is a slightly more in-depth grammarian kind of post than usual, but I hope it’s still interesting!

Two useful grammatical terms used when discussing certain words and phrases refer to tautology and autology. While the terms sound similar, they have very different meanings.

Tautology (sometimes also called circumlocution) is used to describe a phrase where the same thing is said more than once, even though it does not help to clarify the overall meaning of the phrase or add any further information. For example, the common phrase “free gift” is a tautology, since a gift is free by its very nature. Further often-seen examples of tautological phrases are “added bonus”, “planning ahead”, and “first introduced”. There are many, many more of these.

Tautology often occurs when we use words or phrases borrowed from other languages and integrate them into English phrases, for example “the hoi polloi” (meaning “the masses”, or “the common people”). This is from Ancient Greek (ὁι πολλοι), and is literally translated as “the many” (hoi = the, polloi = many men). Since hoi already means “the”, when we say “the hoi polloi“, we’re repeating “the”.

More familiar examples of this kind of mixed language tautology are often found in the names of places and animals, including “Sahara Desert” (sahara is Arabic for “desert” (صَحراء), “ṣaḥrā´”), so it means “desert desert”), “Koi carp” (koi is Japanese for “carp” (鯉), so it means “carp carp”), and the “Rio Grande river” (rio grande is Spanish for “big river”, so it means “big river river”).

Autology, despite being only one letter removed from tautology, is very different. Autology (from the Greek autos (αủτος), meaning “self”, and logos (λογος), meaning “word”) describes a word that expressing a property that the word has itself. For example, the word “short” is fairly short, the word “common” is common, and the word “multisyllabic” has many syllables. Autological words aren’t seen particularly often, but can be quite interesting to study – you can find a list of them on Wiktionary.com.

This isn’t to say that tautology and autology can never be seen together, however – you may remember that a while ago I wrote about RAS syndrome, “Repetitive Acronym Syndrome syndrome” – which is in itself both an example of itself and a tautology!

Source: ted.com

Today I watched an absolutely mindblowing video on ted.com, a site of small, non-profit group TED, who are devoted to “ideas worth spreading”. There is a goldmine of interesting stuff in their archives, but being somebody with a keen interest in languages this video seemed truly worthy of sharing.

The talk is given by Patricia Kuhl, co-director of the Institute for Brain and Learning Sciences at the University of Washington and expert on early language and brain development. We all know that babies and young children are better at picking up new languages than adults, but perhaps we forget just how much better. Her studies have shown that during early language learning, they can do things adults simply can’t, and to surprising degrees.

You can view the video below, or go to the page on ted.com.

One of my favorite comedians growing up (and still is today) was the great George Carlin (1937-2008). His constantly sardonic, generally profane yet ingenious rants helped shape my thoughts during my teenage years in more ways than I care to imagine, and a particular fascination that we shared was the English language. Of course, George is better known – perhaps even infamous – for another language-related sketch, “7 Dirty Words”, in which he presents and analyzes the 7 words you cannot say on television. It doesn’t take an expert to work out what at least some of these words were…

However, one of my favorite Carlin English language bits is from his 1997 book Braindroppings, which outlines, as he puts it, some of “the thoughts that kept him out of the really good schools”.

The bit itself is as follows, George’s take on some redundant phrases that have snuck past our common sense detectors and have somehow crept their way into popular usage without anybody noticing…

“Total abstinence”.

“Subject matter”.

“Honest truth”.

“Join together”.

“General public”.

“Harbinger of things to come”.

“New initiative”.

“Audible gasp”.

“Advance warning”.

“Execution-style killing”.

“Future plans”.

“Gather together”.

“Jewish synagogue”.

“Lag behind”.

“Manual dexterity”.

“Occasional irregularity”.

“Outer rim”.

“Plan ahead”.

“Basic fundamentals”.

“First time ever”.

“Personal friend”, and…

“Shrug one’s shoulders”.

Of course George is, as always, heavily tongue-in-cheek, but you see his point.

RIP George, and thank you for all the laughs.

Source: bitesizeirishgaelic.com

I found an interesting article recently about the “switch” in the brain that occurs when you achieve fluency in another language. Everybody’s brain can train itself to the point of achieving this “switch”, which allows you to start thinking in the target language, allowing you to achieve fluency faster.

The trick, as with any other skill, is practice – and a lot of it. The article talks about learning Irish Gaelic and Icelandic – two languages with relatively few speakers – but the same rules and techniques hold true for any language that you want to learn.

From the article:

The language switch is not built, it is trained. As Vince Lombardi said, Perfect practice makes perfect. Keep on drilling standard phrases. For example, something I usually do is saying to myself Komdu sæll og blessaður! when I pass a man by the street and komdu sæl og blessuð! when I pass a woman. These are two common greetings in Icelandic, and you need to get used to the correct form for men and women. The best way to make it part of you is just to drill it in some funny way like this, until it is as natural as saying Hello!

You can also use old business cards (or here in Spain train tickets, which are credit card sized) to practise verb conjugation. Write in the blank side of one the conjugation of ‘to be’ (in Icelandic, að vera, in Irish bí) and put it in your pocket. Whenever you have a few spare seconds, like waiting in queue to pay at the store or waiting for the street light to turn green (as a pedestrian), take a look at it and repeat them to yourself. You will be amazed how easily this hard-wires constructs into your brain.

You can extend these “cheap ‘n easy” drilling techniques to harder stuff like conditional forms, future, colors, numbers and whatever just by sheer persistence and a constant playful spirit. Throw a few dices and say the number they spell. Count your pocket money in Irish. Plan your weekend in Icelandic. Be creative! If what you really want is being able to communicate, being playful is a must.

As my Chinese teacher so often tells me, “interesting is the best teacher”. If you make your language learning as fun and interesting as you can, with plenty of regular practice anybody can achieve fluency. It’s certainly a daunting prospect, but it’s certainly the best way of going about the task at hand.

Source: physorg.com

Cambridge Dictionaries Online have revealed that the top searches by English learners were generally English idiomatic phrases and slang – which are so often hard for learners due to old or strange origins. As such, they are difficult to teach, but if a foreigner can master a handful of them, it can make a great difference in how fluent their English seems.

Phrases such as “eat your heart out” (used in jest to say that someone is better), “right you are” (expressing agreement), “catch a few rays” (to sunbathe) and “no mean feat” (a worthy or great achievement) were among the most searched idioms.

Strangely enough, the top search term was the word “dictionary” – you’d think that people would have had a hard time finding the CDO site without knowing what that word meant!

You can read the full article from physorg.com here.

I found this fascinating map on my favorite news aggregator site Reddit. It details how the names of countries came into being by literally translating their names from the original languages of their founders, and has quite a few surprising entries.

Click the small image below to get the full size version – watch out, it’s big! (4500×2234)

Some of the more interesting country and continent name etymologies include “land of dust” for Africa, “village” for Canada, “abundance of butterflies” for Panama, “Where the land ends” for Chile, “isle of shrewmice” for Spain, “place of many trees” for Guatemala, and several countries in Africa all named after words for “black” or “blacks”.

There are a few less surprising origins, for example “new sea land” for “New Zealand”, and “central nation” for China (since China was originally many separate countries before they united in 221BC under Qin Shi Huang).

Being an avid watcher of the ‘fact’-debunking show QI, I’m not entirely sure about America’s origin. A popular theory is that America was named after Amerigo Vespucci, an Italian explorer and cartographer. However, when places are named after people, it’s usually the surname that is used, not first names, so it seems more unlikely that “Amerigo” became “America”. It’s more likely (in my rather uneducated opinion) that the name America came from the Welshman Richard Amerike, a rich merchant who sponsored many sea voyages to North America when it was being discovered. However, I suppose nobody really knows, which is somewhat surprising considering how young our country is compared with so many others.

A simple question this time around – the words “while” and “whilst” are relatively common, but is there a difference between them?

Simply put, no. The word “while” can act as both a preposition (e.g. “While I was walking down the street, I saw a fox”) and a noun (e.g. “It took a long while to finish”).

“Whilst” is simply an older version of the preposition form of the word “while”. It is more often seen in British English, which explains why it is mostly seen in literature, but rarely (if ever) in American publications.

While you may not end up ever using the word “whilst” yourself, it’s still good to know that it means exactly the same thing.

Do note that “whilst” doesn’t replace the noun form of “while” – that is to say, you can say “Whilst I was walking down the street, I saw a fox”, but not “It took a long whilst to finish”.