Language Trainers Blog

The next in the series of posts exploring how numbers are rendered in different languages is Japanese.

Japanese, along with many other Asian languages like Mandarin Chinese, Cantonese and Korean, has a reputation for being fiendishly difficult to learn for native English speakers. While this is true in many ways, the number system is in fact pretty straightforward.

When I learned Japanese, counting from 1 to 10 was one of the first things we learned to do. It was only after we had mastered the first 10 numbers that our teacher told us that by learning just a couple more words, we could effectively now count to 99,999,999 in Japanese.

Unlike English’s irregular teens (eleven, twelve, thirteen instead of oneteen, twoteen, threeteen etc. or another more regular pattern) and having a different word for each multiple of ten (twenty, thirty, forty instead of twoty, threety, fourty etc.), Japanese numbers are entirely regular – much like in Chinese. As mentioned in a previous post, this could possibly be a contributing factor towards the stereotype of Asians being “good at math”. In Japanese, “thirty five” is literally “three ten five” (san-ju-go).

For larger numbers, English tends to favour grouping digits into threes before we introduce a new term. After a thousand, we have ten thousand and a hundred thousand before introducing the million. Then, once again, we have ten million and a hundred million before we have the billion. Not so in Japanese – a hundred is hyaku, a thousand is sen, and ten thousand is man – with the Yen being a currency that often stretches into the hundred thousands, man ends up being a pretty important number. From there, a hundred thousand is ju-man, literally “ten ten thousands”. A million is hyaku-man – “a hundred ten thousands”. Ten million is sen-man – “a thousand ten thousands”. While this takes a little getting used to, it still results in pretty much a perfectly regular counting system, besides a couple of slightly irregular pronunciations (e.g. 300 is san-byaku rather than san-hyaku, because it’s easier to say).

Unfortunately, however, it’s not as simple as all that. Like Chinese and Korean, Japanese incorporates into ‘measure words’ (josuushi) into its counting system. Whereas in English, I could simply say “there are thirty four of them”, in Japanese you need to add a suffix to the number that is specific to the object, person, event, or action you’re counting. Sadly, there are several hundred of these, and they simply have to be learnt. The josuushi used depends on the qualities of what you’re counting – long, thin objects such as pencils, roads, rivers or bottles use hon or pon; but thin, flat objects such as sheets of paper, photos or plates use mai. Thus, being able to say that “there are two dogs” will not necessarily allow you to say “there are two cars”. There are around 30 commonly-used josuushi, and plenty more that are used sporadically.

There is another way, however – there is a ‘separate’ counting system that allows you to express a quantity without using the specific measure word. Unfortunately, this scale only goes from 1 to 10.

Source: nature.com/news

Here’s an old news article that talks about why English has so many irregularities when it comes to the past tenses of common verbs (e.g. “I am” -> “I was”, “I see” -> “I saw”, etc.). As it turns out, the reasons aren’t too surprising – like so many things in English, it relies on common usage.

The article compares such linguistic evolution to biological evolution – after all, the most often-used (and therefore useful) genes generally stay the same while the rest of the organism evolves. “To help” isn’t as common a verb as “to be” or “to have”, and so is more open to linguistic evolution – that is to say, the more frequently a word is used, the more it will change over time. The original past tense of “help” was an irregular form – “holp”. However, since the verb wasn’t used as often as other more common verbs, people tended to forget about the ‘special’ nature of the past participle, and simply lapsed into the ‘regular’ way of rendering a verb in the past tense – adding -ed to the end. Thus, over time, “holp” became “helped”.

Lieberman was struck by this idea when he learned that the ten most common verbs in English (be, have, do, go, say, can, will, see, take, get) are all irregular. Instead of their past tenses ending in ‘-ed’, as do 97% of English verbs, they take the peculiar forms of was, had, did, went, said, could, would, saw, took and got.

Researchers suppose that this is because often-used irregulars are easy to remember and get right. Seldom-used irregulars, on the other hand, are more likely to be forgotten, so speakers often mistakenly apply the ‘-ed’ rule. The most commonly used word that they found this happened to was the verb ‘to help’ – the past tense used to be ‘holp’, but is now ‘helped’.

You can read the whole article here. Very interesting stuff!

Source: idlewords.com

I found this brilliant blog post a few days ago, and had to share it here. My father’s native tongue is Arabic, but I was brought up speaking English – something I regret deeply, as it would have been great to have been raised a bilingualist. I picked up bits here and there growing up, but have little understanding of the grammar and syntax of modern Arabic, so this post really opened my eyes to what a complex language it is. In this blog entry, they give 11 reasons why Arabic is such a varied and interesting language, though sadly this goes hand-in-hand with it being difficult for native English speakers to learn.

Here’s an excerpt – you can read the whole entry here.

Broken Plurals

In English, you make most words plural by adding a suffix, except for a very small number of words (like ‘feet’) where there is a vowel change instead. Arabic does this the other way around. There are a few words that take a regular plural suffix, but most of the time to make a plural you have to change the structure of the word quite dramatically:

kitaab -> kutub (book)
ustaath -> asaatitha (teacher)
maqha -> maqaahi (café)
dukkan -> dakaakiin (store)
ahdar -> hudur (green)

This holds even for borrowed words:

film -> aflaam
jaakit -> jawaakat

Other Semitic languages have broken plurals, but as with other unusual language features Arabic runs this one furthest into the end zone.

The Writing System

The Arabic writing system is exotic looking but easy to learn, which is a rare combination. The language uses a straightforward alphabet, but because letters change their shape depending on what their neighbors are it is quite impenetrable to the uninitiated.

For exmaple, here are some “words” consisting of a single letter repeated three times:

ييي ععع ههه ككك للل

You can easily master Arabic writing without learning the language (here is a great book for it if you’re interested); it will take you about two weeks. Go to the museum and impress your date with your ability to appreciate Arabic calligraphy on a deeper level!

Here’s a funny comic I found on webcomic Rooster Teeth, about word sizes in English. It’s funny, but he has a point…

Source: my.vocabularysize.com

If you’ve ever wondered just how many English words you truly know, here’s a test that does a pretty good job at estimating the number of English word families you recognize.

A word family is a set of related words by form – for example the verb “to conquer”, the noun “conqueror”, and the adjective “conquered” and any other related forms are all one word family.

The test consists of 140 questions – each time it gives you a word, and uses that word in an example sentence. You then have a choice of 4 definitions for that word. You simply need to choose the definition that best matches the word given. The whole test takes around 10-15 minutes, and you get your results immediately at the end.

I scored 23,000 word families – can you do any better?

Source: endangeredalphabets.com

There are somewhere between 6,000 and 7,000 languages alive and active in the world today, but it is estimated that as many as half of them will be extinct by the end of this century. This means that not only many languages but also many alphabets and writing systems will be lost forever. Of these 6,000-7,000 remaining languages, there are only around 100 different alphabets in use.

But not if the Endangered Alphabets Project can help it – it has been discovered that of the 100 alphabets in use, around a third of them are endangered. That is to say, they are no longer being taught in schools, or being used by governments or commerce. They are used by elders, or monks, and are being passed down to the next generation only by word of mouth and tradition.

The project aims to put together a travelling exhibition, showcasing some of the world’s rarer writing systems in order to show their beauty and relevance to humanity. It hopes not only to stand as a record of these writing systems if and when they do become extinct, but also to show how similar alphabets evolved from one another, how they spread to other countries and cultures, and how they are more than just writing on a page or engravings in wood.

The founder of the project, Tim Brookes, also keeps a blog, which features posts and musings on various endangered alphabets.

Source: futilitycloset.com

In 2001, the editors of the New Oxford American Dictionary purposefully inserted a fake word into their 2001 edition, in an attempt to fool other lexicographers (people who are involved in the making of dictionaries) into proving that they stole material from them. If another dictionary cited the word that the NOAD had invented, it showed that they were simply lifting words from them.

The word was esquivalience, and the fake definition given was (rather aptly) “to shirk your duties”.

Predictably, the word was picked up by dictionary.com (who later removed it when they found it it was a fake word), as well as Google Dictionary.

Given that English has no official governing body, since the word has now been featured in a dictionary, one could argue that it is now an official English word – though such things are usually decided by popular usage.

Source: dictionary.com

Reference site dictionary.com recently compiled a list of the most often misspelled words in the English language, featuring words such as “accommodate”, “definite”, “foreign”, “miniature”, “judgment”, and “pronunciation”. You can see the full list here. Most of them are pretty simple in terms of meaning, but have various properties that lead many people to spell them incorrectly – for example many people like to add an “e” to “judgment”, since the root word is “judge”. However, “judgement” is incorrect.

Using their flashcards, you can make sure that you know how to spell each of these 29 words, and so teach yourself to avoid some of the most common spelling errors.