Language Trainers Blog

Besides the occasional exception (such as the country Qatar), in English the letter Q is always followed by U – but we never question why this is the case. Why are these letters so closely linked?

It seems we owe this – along with so many other things in English – to Latin. The Classical Latin alphabet had fewer letters than we do today (for example U and V used to be one and the same), and Q was used as an alternative to C and K in certain situations. Latin orthography dictated that a Q should be followed by a U, and the habit stuck, making QU a common digraph.

From Wikipedia:

In the earliest Latin inscriptions, the letters C, K and Q were all used to represent the sounds /k/ and /g/ (which were not differentiated in writing). Of these, Q was used to represent /k/ or /g/ before a rounded vowel (e.g. “EQO” = ego), K before /a/, and C elsewhere. Later, the use of C (and its variant G) replaced most usages of K and Q: Q survived only to represent /k/ when immediately followed by a /w/ sound.

The same “QU” rule is also present in other Romance and Germanic languages, such as French and Spanish.

Most words in English that have a Q that isn’t followed by a U are naturalized words from Arabic (e.g. faqir), Chinese (e.g. qi) and Hebrew (e.g. qaddish). Most of the others are acronyms (e.g. NASDAQ, Compaq, etc.).

Here’s a great playlist on YouTube of 10 one-minute videos gradually detailing the history and evolution of the English language. They’re presented in an entertaining, bite-sized, yet educational and engrossing way.

The videos are provided by the Open University, a British institution that provides distance learning to a huge number of people.

Here’s the first video in the series – “Anglo Saxon”.

Following on from a previous post on the relative complexity of counting systems in different languages, it struck me as interesting to explore a couple of the more interesting number systems in certain languages.

Starting in relatively familiar territory, French compares very similarly with English, up until a point. Whereas we name our multiples of ten using the base number and adding “-ty” (e.g. sixty, seventy, eighty, etc.). French does the same, until 70, which is soixante-dix, literally “sixty-ten”. 80 gets even stranger – quatre-vingts, literally “four-twenties”, and 90 is quatre-vingts-dix, “four-twenties-ten”.

Why the switch? Well, the upper numbers were thanks to North Germanic influence, first appearing from Normandy in northern France. The Normans picked up the vigesimal system (counting in groups of 20) from the Vikings. Given that lower numbers were much more frequently used and thus much more resistant to change, the original decimal system stuck for those. In Old French there is still evidence of the vigesimal system: treis vingts and cinq vingts, “three-” and “four-twenties”.

A similar English is also apparent in Old English (also due to Viking influence) – when counting was often done in “scores”. There are only vestigial remnants floating around in modern English, generally only recognizable in historical contexts, such as in the iconic opening to the Gettysburg address: “Four score and seven years ago”.

The only language that uses entirely base 20 for numbers is Basque.

Source: translation-telephone.com

Here’s a fun site – enter a message in English, and it’ll translate it through 15 different languages and then back into English. Machine translation – as much as it has improved in the past 10 or so years – is very rarely perfect, especially with language pairs that are very different (such as English and Chinese). As a result, it often mangles the original phrase into something that’s barely recognizable – much like the old party game also known as “Telephone” or “Chinese Whispers”.

It works particularly well with song lyrics – the chorus to Rebecca Black’s famously abysmal YouTube anti-hit “Friday” changes from “It’s Friday, Friday, Got to get down on Friday” to “Friday, Saturday and Friday, he was able”.

Try it for yourself at translation-telephone.com.

Source: sf.airnet.ne.jp

Another interesting link found on my favorite content aggregator, Reddit, shows one man’s research into the counting systems in different languages, and how some are more complicated than others. Creator Takaguchi Shinji is a mathematician at heart, and wanted to show whether or not the common stereotype of Chinese students being good at math could be related to the supposed relative simplicity of their counting system.

As it turns out, the Chinese counting system is far more regular than that of English – in fact, Mandarin rated 65th out of the 69 languages polled in terms of complexity, whereas English placed 41st. Japanese and Cantonese were 66th and 67th respectively, showing that perhaps due to the simplicity of their counting systems and how numbers are formed, Asian children may have a slight advantage over English children when it comes to picking up early mathematical concepts.

It should be noted that Takaguchi’s sorting criteria is fairly unscientific -a lot of it is his own opinion from primarily studying the numbers through 1 and 100 in each language. The relative complexity of English is not so much down to the actual formation of the numbers – like most Asian languages it uses a strictly base-10 system (numbers are in groups of 10). English makes things a little harder by adjusting the factor of ten from the original number, and having slightly irregular words (one/eleven/ten, two/twelve/twenty, three/thirteen/thirty, etc.).

Chinese, in comparison, is entirely regular. There are distinct numbers from 1 to 10, and from then on, you make the number the exact same way, using the exact same words (e.g. 15 is “ten-five”, and 57 is “five-ten-seven”. So, if you can count to 10 in Mandarin and learn just a few more words (for “hundred”, “thousand”, etc.), you can essentially count to infinity.

Unsurprisingly, Esperanto – a language designed to be logical and easy to learn – has one of the simplest counting systems (rating 68th of the 69 languages polled). However, Tongan takes the cake in terms of utter simplicity – it is simply a per-digit system. 11 is “one one”, 56 is “five six”, and 100 is “one zero zero”. Once you’ve learned 0-10 in Tongan, you can literally count to whatever number you like.

The most complex language on the list, Huli (a language spoken in Papua New Guinea by some 70,000 people) is base-15, which seems highly unusual for anybody raised with the more common base-10 counting system. To make things more difficult, every group of 15 numbers has its own identifying word – so 23 is “15 and 8″, but 56 is “15 threes, plus 11 of the 4th set of 15″.

Sometimes a foreign language is foreign in a much more pronounced way than grammar, syntax and the vocabulary. Something as everyday as how to count in another language can take some serious getting used to.

Source: mcclatchydc.com

Here is a great article on how technology may be helping preserve languages and dialects that are slowly becoming extinct, rather than help kill them off as sometimes believed.

Across the globe in the Philippines, teenagers think it’s “cool” to send mobile phone text messages in regional languages that show signs of endangerment, such as Kapampangan.

Technology, long considered a threat to regional languages, now is being seen as a way to keep young people from forsaking their native tongues for dominant languages. YouTube and Facebook, as well as Internet radio and cell phone texting, are helping minority language groups stave off death.

Linguist Samuel Herrera said he was elated to find teenagers zapping each other with text messages in Huave, an endangered language spoken only by about 15,000 people in the Tehuantepec region of Mexico, along the Pacific.

“This really strengthens the use of the language,” said Herrera, who runs the linguistics laboratory at the Institute of Anthropological Research in the Mexican capital.

Dr. Gregory D.S. Anderson, the director of the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages in Salem, Ore., agrees. Somewhere between the ages of 6 and 20 or 25, he said, “people make a definitive decision whether to break with the language.”

“If the language isn’t being used by their peer group, then they reject it categorically,” he said.

Technology as simple as text messaging can draw them back.

You can read the rest of the article here.