Language Trainers Blog

Source: reddit.com/r/linguistics

Here’s another interesting linguistic post from social bookmarking site Reddit – something that seems to be becoming a monthly ritual. This time in concerns internet slang, more specifically laughter.

Whilst acronyms like “LOL” and “ROFL” are pretty much almost universal now in the online world, the question posed was how people from different cultures denote the sound of laughter online. English’s “hahaha” or “hehehe” sum up the sound of a hearty gut laugh quite nicely, but different languages have different phonetics for particular letters, leading to a variety of language-dependent ‘shorthand’ laughter.

Some languages are pretty straightforward – for example in Spanish laughter is often written “jajaja”, since the letter J in Spanish has a similar sound (though they also use “hahaha”).

The French have several nuanced versions, all of which have their own subtle meanings – “hahaha”, “héhéhé”, “hihihi” and “huhuhu”. Their equivalent of “lol” is “mdr” – short for “mort de rire”, meaning “dying of laughter”.

However, some other languages are more creative. Thai, for example, use “555″, since the word for the number 5 in Thai is “ha”. In Korean they use ㅋㅋ (pronounced “kk” or “keke”), which sounds like more of a mischievous giggle.

In Japanese they use “wwww”. “W” is short for “warau”, the verb meaning “to laugh” in Japanese when transliterated into English (Romaji). They also use ふふふ (pronounced “huhuhu”).

In Mandarin Chinese, they use characters with the same sound as laughing – 哈哈哈 (“hahaha”) and 呵呵呵 (“hehehe”).

For more examples from different languages, check out the original thread on Reddit.

English is a fascinating language, and like all languages has its fair share of interesting oddities. Unpaired words are one such oddity – they are words that would appear to have a related word or one with the opposite meaning, but don’t.

For example, the words disambiguate, inevitable and unkempt would seem like they have direct antonyms given the prefixes in- and un-, but the words ambiguated, evitable and kempt don’t exist.

Most unpaired words are a result of words falling out of use. However, many never had a ‘normal’ form in the first place, but happened to start with the same letters as common prefixes, such as dis-, in- and un-.

Some words have been retroactively formed, usually in for humorous purposes – gruntled as an opposite for disgruntled is one such back formation. Popular TV show writer Joss Whedon (best known for shows like Firefly, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Dollhouse) is especially fond of using these in his dialogue.

Source: bbc.co.uk/news

Since I currently reside in Shanghai, this bit of linguistic news was of great interest to me.

While China and Taiwan share the same original language of Mandarin, 60 years of going their own ways – both politically and linguistically – have caused the languages to evolve in different ways. While a native Chinese person will have little difficulty conversing fluently with a native from Taiwan, the devil is in the details, so they say. From the article on BBC News:

A Taiwanese visitor to mainland China was shocked to see sliced “tu dou” on a menu. The word means peanut in Taiwan – but potato in mainland China.

A Taiwanese professor ordering coffee at a Beijing cafe was asked if he wanted a “coffee companion” – China’s way of saying cream.

The stunned academic thought they wanted him to hire a hostess to keep him company. He told the waitress: “I didn’t bring enough money.”

To help bridge the linguistic gaps between Chinese and Taiwanese Mandarin, the “Great Chinese Dictionary” project was born in 2008. While it is yet to be finished, the final product (a preliminary version of which will be available at the end of this year for free online) will hope to sort out the confusions that arise between speakers. Many confusions arise from seemingly simple words and phrases, for example “ai ren” (literally “love person”) in China refers to your husband or wife, but in Taiwan would refer to a lover, implying a more illicit kind of partner.

The most notable difference between the two versions of Mandarin is not spoken, however – since the 1950s China has used the so-called Simplified Chinese script, which was adopted in an effort to increase literacy rates. Compared with Traditional Chinese – which Taiwan has rigidly stuck to in the hope of preserving Chinese culture – Simplified Chinese has fewer strokes and is easier to decipher.

The Great Chinese Dictionary will be available by the end of the year, with a more comprehensive version available by 2015.

Source: languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu

This appeared in one of my favorite language blogs recently, and was too good not to share. I live in China, and often see poorly translated English signage all over the place, but rarely is something this badly (and unintentionally hilariously) translated.

This sign was found on a shower door – the Chinese character (拉 – “lā”) simply means “pull”. However, its translation here is given as “Latin America”.

While the reason why this was chosen as the best translation by the makers of the sign is a little unclear, this is Victor from Language Log’s best guess:

So how did the injunction to “Latin America” come into the picture? Some oaf who was charged with making the sign managed to find lā 拉 in their dictionary and must have been overwhelmed by the plethora of English glosses: pull, drag, draw, haul, help out, implicate, play (a stringed instrument), chat, a verbal suffix, and so forth. Bewildered, they would have spotted near the end of the entry for lā 拉 that it is also an abbreviation for Lāměi 拉美, which is in turn a short form of Lādīng měizhōu 拉丁美洲, which means “Latin America”.

Why didn’t the oaf choose the first and simplest definition, “pull”? I suppose that they thought that the English (Roman letter) part of the sign is for foreigners, so it might be smart (!!) to use the only obviously foreign definition in the dictionary: Latin America. That’s the best defense I can give on behalf of the individual who made this sign. Actually, it’s not really a defense, merely one possible explanation for this mind-boggling choice. I suppose it’s also possible that they didn’t understand any of the English glosses, and simply felt that the longest one must be the most informative.

Brilliant!

Esperanto, a language constructed by L. L. Zamenhof in 1887, was designed to be a modern language for the whole world to speak: the aim was to create a politically neutral language that was easy to learn, which would help not only foster communication between those in different countries, but also improve international relations by giving them some common ground.

The thing is, Esperanto never really caught on as Zamenhof had hoped. While it is still spoken by a small percentage of people in the world, it has a long way to go before it will be used as any kind of lingua franca.

A constructed language is just that – constructed. While the roots of Esperanto came from a variety of languages, unlike every other language it had no linguistic development – it was invented and simply sprung into existence. While every other language has some kind of more archaic form (for English think Shakespeare or Chaucer) and develops over centuries due to outside influences, common usage and, in many cases, a ruling academy, Esperanto never had any of these things.

That is, until Manuel Halvelik added another layer to Esperanto by creating Arcaicam Esperantom – Archaic Esperanto. His main purpose was to create a hypothetical “old” form of Esperanto.

Unlike many other languages, Archaic Esperanto is relatively easy to learn for Esperanto speakers: it consists of several key differences in spelling, word formation and other stylistic variants. However, like Esperanto, it is still regular. By following the rules set out by Halvelik, modern Esperanto speakers can easily translate to and from Arcaicam Esperantom.

I find it fascinating that a new language can be retroactively coined to create an older form of another language, as it creates all kinds of inconsistencies: not only the fact that nobody ever spoke the archaic form per se, but also that the ‘older’ form of the language is actually newer, and that the ‘old’ form is based from the new form, rather than the other way around.

Native Spanish speakers and those who have ever taken Spanish will immediately recognise the inverted question mark – ¿ – in the Spanish language, questions are not just ended with a question mark as in English, but are surrounded with them. For example: ¿Cuántos años tienes? means “how old are you?”.

This practice is actually quite useful. By using the question marks like inverted commas or parentheses, questions are clearly marked. But why don’t we do this in English?

The answer is very simple: word order.

In English, we have our own way of disambiguating between statement and question sentences – we change the order of the words, or add in auxiliary question words. For example: “You are going to the store.” / “Are you going to the store?”. We also mark it with a question mark, and, when spoken, raise the intonation of our voice in the last word (although this is becoming fairly common in statement sentences for certain American accents).

In Spanish, the word order remains the same, and the only clue that the sentence is a question are the question marks. So, to use the same examples as above: “Vas a la tienda.” / “¿Vas a la tienda?”.

However, since the preceding question mark is really just a flag that a question is coming, unless the question is very long, Spanish is slowly moving towards ditching the ¿ entirely in informal situations. In internet chat rooms, for example, the ¿ is often omitted since it’s faster and easier for people just to type the final question mark.

English has more words than any other language – around 2 million at the last count – but the average person’s vocabulary only spans from around 12,000 to 17,000 words. That leaves a lot of perfectly acceptable words that seem strange to most native speakers, since they’re either words with a more common synonym, rarely-used variants of otherwise known prefixes and suffixes, or just simply words that have become obsolete.

Here are a few examples of words that probably aren’t part of the average person’s vocabulary. It’s probably better not to think of this as an exercise in expanding your vocabulary, since the vast majority of people will still have no idea what you’re talking about…

Nudiustertian – a word that is often part of other languages, but not in common English, this means “the day before yesterday”

Zenzizenzizenzic – an obsolete form of mathematical notation, from back when numbers would be written out as words

Flibbertigibbet – sounds like the catchphrase of some kid’s cartoon character, but in fact it’s a legitimate word, meaning “a silly woman”

Syzygy – No vowels, a Zs, 3 Ys a G and an S? That’s not a word. Except it is – it’s an astrological term for when 3 or more planets are in alignment. How to pronounce it is another story…

Inaniloquenteloquent, this word is about speaking. In fact, it’s a combination of the words inane and the -loquent stem, and means “pertaining to idle talk or chatter”

Nebbish – a weak-willed person

I’ve stumbled across this in written English many times – for when somebody wants to announce “there it is”, English borrowed the French word “voila” (not to be confused with a “viola”, the stringed instrument one size larger than a violin). “Voila” literally means “see there”, and comes to mean “there it is” or, more idiomatically, “there you have it”.

An example usage might be “I couldn’t find my glasses, until I checked my head – and voila! There they were.”

However, since it is a word you rarely see written out – and being French has a slightly unexpected spelling for English speakers – people have been spelling it somewhat phonetically, resulting in the word being seen as “walla” or “wallah”. While both of these words do exist, their meanings are very different from the intended “voila”.

“Walla” is a word used in American English to describe the background noise of a crowd murmuring, usually on a movie set. It’s called such because moviemakers discovered that background actors could easily recreate the sound of background conversation just by repeating the word “walla” over and over again to each other. There are different variations of this in different countries – in the UK they use the word “rhubarb”, in Germany “rabarber”, and in Japan “gaya”.

“Wallah” is also an Arabic word meaning something along the lines of “really”, and is used when a speaker wants to express that what they are saying or what they have just said is indeed true. It’s literal meaning is “(I swear) by Allah”.

So there you have it. If you want to say “there it is”, use voila. If you want to mimic the background noise of American English speakers in conversation, use walla. And if you want to declare that something is the truth in Arabic, use wallah.

Et voila! There you have it.

It’s not difficult to notice which story has been dominating the news this week. The death of Osama bin Laden has brought with it a variety of reactions from around the globe, the vast majority of it celebratory.

With one death, however, something else has been born – a quotation, attributed to the late Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.: “I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy”. This very apropros quotation has been spreading around Facebook like wildfire, but perhaps it’s just a little too apropros – in fact, quite simply, it’s a fake.

The actual source of the quote was a 24 year old teacher called Jessica Dovey, who wrote a similar Martin Luther King Jr. quote and added the above as her own thoughts. It was then mistaken as a full quotation from the Reverend King, and spread across the web. If anything it goes to prove the power of the internet, that something can spread so fast, even if it’s incorrectly sourced. A while ago I posted about “ungelivable”, a Chinese-English hybrid word that sprung up out of nowhere and became extremely popular in China thanks to the internet – this fake quote has enjoyed the same kind of birth.

This kind of misappropriation is known as a mondegreen, though this term is more often used to describe a phrase or word that has come into being from mishearing (for example, “excuse me while I kiss this guy” is a popular mondegreen for the line from Jimi Hendrix’s Purple Haze, “excuse me while I kiss the sky”).

Perhaps Mark Twain’s (actual) quote is more suitable here: “a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes”.