Language Trainers Blog

Source: wikipedia.org

As a final note this month on foreign language adaptations (following on from the question about the consistency of Yoda’s syntax and Buzz Lightyear’s “Spanish mode”), here’s a quick note about the well-known children’s cartoon, Dora the Explorer.

While English speakers familiar with Dora the Explorer will know that during her adventures she (and the children watching) learns basic Spanish words and phrases. However, since Dora has since become a household name, there have been many foreign adaptations made – including Arabic, Japanese, Hebrew, Malay and Tamil. Each different adaptation has a different bilingual element – for example, the Arabic version teaches English, while the Serbian version teaches Spanish. However, most foreign versions teach English, both because the original was a US series and the fact that English is considered (unofficially) the world’s lingua franca.

You can find the full list of bilingual pairings on Wikipedia.

So, while Dora the Explorer may have been created to teach Spanish to English children, her fame has actually made her known worldwide as an English teacher.

For a little light relief, here’s a hilarious sketch from Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie – the latter now better known for affecting an American accent and playing Dr. House on FOX.

This sketch, from the first season of A Bit of Fry & Laurie on BBC, shows the duo discussing the very topic of this blog: language. As silly as the discussion is, Stephen Fry’s discussion points actually make a remarkable amount of sense. But maybe that’s the point!

All this talk about Yoda’s syntax raises another interesting cross-language movie question – or at least I think it’s interesting: in Toy Story 3, when Buzz Lightyear accidentally gets put into “Spanish mode” by the other toys, what language does he speak in the Spanish language version of the film?

Compared with the variety of methods used to set Yoda’s speech aside from that of others in the international Star Wars dubs, this Toy Story linguistic conundrum is a little more mundane – Buzz still speaks Spanish.

In the Spanish version made for Mexico, the rest of the characters speak the kind of contemporary Spanish that you would likely hear in Mexico, but Spanish Buzz speaks in a thick and flamboyant Castillan accent – the kind of Spanish accent used by old men in Spain and characters in bullfighter movies of old.

In the Spanish version made for Spain, Buzz speaks in a thick Analusian accent – used by people living in southern Spain, different from standard Castellano Spanish.

While most Spanish speakers would still be able to comprehend what Buzz is saying, the difference in speech would certainly be noticed, and so it has pretty much the same result in terms of the scene. However, some of the exaggerated “Spanish” mannerisms (such as Buzz greeting Woody by kissing him on both cheeks) may not work quite so well. It makes a slightly different gag – that resetting Buzz has not resulted in him speaking an entirely different language, but a different dialect of the same language.

This video shows the main “Spanish Buzz” scene from all three versions – the USA version, the Latin America version, and the Spain version.

Source: guardian.co.uk

While it may not be a well-known language (in fact, it could compete for being one of the least-known languages on the planet), Ayapaneco has been spoken in Mexico for centuries – before it was even known as Mexico. However, today there remains only two fluent speakers of the language – and they don’t want to talk to one another.

Exactly why Manuel Segovia (aged 75) and Isidro Velazquez (69) don’t enjoy each other’s company nowadays is not known, but the death of whatever friendship they may have had may also spell the death of yet another indigenous world language. Segovia still speaks Ayapaneco to his wife and son, who understand the language but cannot speak it fluently themselves. Velazquez no longer speaks Ayapaneco at all.

However, in an effort to save Ayapaneco from extinction, Indiana University linguistic anthropologist Daniel Suslak is in the process of producing an Ayapaneco dictionary; so even if there are no more native speakers, the language itself will at least survive, even if only for posterity.

As education in developing countries is increasingly standardized (much like standard Mandarin replacing the myriad Cantonese dialects in China), many indigenous languages and dialects all over the world are slowly dying out. Mexican children learn Spanish as their first language, and there is very little interest in learning the more obscure indigenous tongues. There are several languages all over the world that have only a handful of native speakers remaining, and numbers continue to dwindle as time rolls on. Mexico’s National Indigenous Language Institute may have shown interest in revitalizing the language, but through lack of funding and public interest, it looks like the sun may soon set on the Ayapaneco tongue.

The Guardian article also includes a list of other languages on the verge of extinction:

Ter Sami

Spoken by only two elderly people in the Kola peninsula in the north-west of Russia. Had about 450 speakers at the end of the 19th century until it was prohibited in schools in the 1930s.

Kayardild

Kayardild is spoken fluently by four people – all elderly Aboriginals – on Bentinck and Mornington Islands in Queensland, Australia.

Lengilu

Language from the north-eastern area of Kalimantan, Indonesia. Lengilu was at one stage spoken by 10 people. Today, there are only four.

Mabire

Three people reportedly speak Mabire in the Oulek village of Chad. The chief of the Mabire is the only Mabire speaker in his village so people doubt whether he is still fluent.

Tehuelche

Originally the language of nomadic hunters in Chile. The last four speakers live in Patagonia, Argentina.

Source: voxy.com

Voxy do make some interesting infographics – I previously posted about their detailing the use of Beatles songs in ESL classes. This time they’ve created a diagram that gives lots of great information about the difficulties of learning various languages as a native English speaker. Languages are ranked in three levels: rather simplistically labelled “easy”, “medium” and “hard”. Each language is broken down into the number of native speakers, with harder languages given reasons for their difficulty. Click to make it bigger:

It seems that the primary criterion by which they have rated the difficulty of a language is just how similar it is to English – three of the four hardest languages are Asian (Chinese, Japanese and Korean). While this may be a good rule of thumb, I don’t agree that it is a completely accurate way to judge it. With the right motivation and the ability to train your mind to think in the target language (and living in a country where it is the native language helps), it is not such a great disability for your native language to be far removed from the one you are learning.

Japanese, in particular, may be difficult to read and write due to having to learn thousands of kanji, the characters borrowed from Chinese – yet one could argue that this is more in the realms of ‘tedious’ than innately ‘difficult’. However, learning to speak and understand to a competent level is not notably harder than many other languages, given that Japanese pronunciation, syntax and grammar is not significantly more difficult than languages without such a fearsome reputation.

However, despite my small grievances (German is mysteriously missing from the graph), I think this infographic gives an excellent overview of the difficulty of various languages, as well as how long it will take in class to gain some level of proficiency.

Source: reddit.com/r/linguistics

I make no secret on this blog of my fondness (perhaps bordering on obsession) with social bookmarking site Reddit. What sets apart Reddit from other similar sites is the quality of its community: unlike the comments you’ll find in other online communities such as YouTube, the ability to ‘upvote’ interesting, thought-provoking articles and comments means that the best stuff always floats to the top. Also, given the sheer depth and breadth of Reddit’s userbase, any question you find yourself asking probably has at least a handful of people knowledgeable enough about the subject to help you.

Such was the case when I was recently browsing the linguistics section (or subreddit, to use a redditor’s parlance) of the site, and found that user Shakedown_1979 had raised a very interesting question about everybody’s favourite little green man, Yoda from the Star Wars franchise:

What is Yoda’s syntax in foreign dubs/subtitles in Star Wars?

What does Yoda’s syntax look like in non-English versions of Star Wars? For those who aren’t familiar with Star Wars (all two of you), Yoda is an alien who, when speaking English, uses what seems to be an OSV syntax instead of the traditional SVO syntax.

So how do foreign translations of the script handle this? I am particularly interested in what it looks like in non-SVO languages. Are there any translations where Yoda’s incorrect syntax is emulated by using an English-like syntax? Or are other languages’ syntax so free that mistakes in the use of case or verb conjugations must instead be used to emulate Yoda’s “alien” speech?

Put in simple terms, does Yoda muddle up his words in translated versions of Star Wars? This raises another query: since some languages are much more free with word order than the stricter subject-verb-object (SVO) syntax in English, would muddling up Yoda’s speech have the same affect?

Many comments followed from users all over the world, who shared their experiences of Yoda’s speech patterns from watching their country’s dub of Star Wars. The more detailed results follow (thank you again to Shakedown_1979, not only for asking the question but also for collating and listing the results so neatly!).

The overall answer is that thought has clearly gone into ‘translating’ Yoda for foreign audiences. While the word order may not always be the defining characteristic of his speech, in most foreign versions of all the Star Wars movies, he retains linguistic oddities that set him apart from everybody else.

(Note: S = subject, O = object, V = verb. English is a SVO language, in that we say “The cat (subject) sat (verb) on the mat (object)”. The list below denotes what the usual word order is in that language, if any, and whether Yoda follows the same template.)

• Czech: A free word order language. Yoda speaks consistently in SOV. Interestingly enough, putting an object before a verb does sound unusual to most speakers of Czech.
• Estonian: A free word order language. Yoda retains the English OSV order. This is grammatical in Estonian, but does make it seem as though Yoda is constantly stressing the object phrase as the main point of his statements. This gives his speech an unusual quality.
• French: An SVO language. Yoda speaks in OSV.
• German: An SVO or SOV language. Yoda brings the Object to the front (OSV), like in English.
• Hungarian: A free word order language. There is nothing unusual about Yoda’s speech.
• Italian: An SVO language. Yoda speaks in OSV. Note: OSV is also the syntax used in the Italian of the less-proficient speakers of Italian from the region of Sardinia.
• Japanese: An SOV language. Yoda seems to use a more or less correct syntax, with a more archaic vocabulary.
• Korean: An SOV language. Nothing is unusual about Yoda’s grammar.
• Norwegian: An SVO language. Yoda speaks in OSV.
• Romanian: An SVO language. Yoda speaks in OSV. He also places adjectives before the noun instead of after the noun, and uses an archaic form of the future tense.
• Spanish: An SVO language. Yoda speaks in OSV.
• Turkish: An SOV language. Yoda speaks in OSV. Note: This order is also used in classical Ottoman poetry, so the syntax may have been chosen in order to emphasize Yoda’s wisdom or age.

Somewhat related to a recent post about Michel Thaler’s verbless novel, I was recently made aware of a 1939 book by American author Ernest Vincent Wright called Gadsby. The novel is written as what is called a lipogram – a word game by which you avoid a particular letter or group of letters. Wright chose in Gadsby to avoid the English language’s most popular letter: E.

In case you aren’t aware of just how important the letter E is in English, it’s quite interesting to see just how limited he was in certain ways. For example, There is no number between six and thirty that he was able to use in the book, and couldn’t use any number containing one, three or five, either. Wright also had huge problems in using verbs in the past tense, since the standard past tense ending for the vast majority of English verbs is -ed.

The novel is 50,110 words long and does not feature a single E, and in order to make the lack of the letter E more natural it is written from the point of view of an anonymous narrator who curses his own poor writing skills. “I trust”, says the author in the novel’s introduction, “that a critical public will hold constantly in mind that I am voluntarily avoiding words containing that symbol which is, by far, of most common inclusion in writing our Anglo-Saxon as it is, today.”

As a novel in itself, it may not be a masterpiece – but as a work of ‘constrained writing’, it certainly is an amazing literary feat.

If you’re interested, you can download the entire text of Gadsby for free. [PDF, 389Kb)