Language Trainers Blog

Source: merriam-webster.com

The Merriam-Webster online dictionary’s definition for “literally” now includes a note on the ‘incorrect’ usage of the word:

2. : in effect : virtually

Since some people take sense 2 to be the opposite of sense 1, it has been frequently criticized as a misuse. Instead, the use is pure hyperbole intended to gain emphasis, but it often appears in contexts where no additional emphasis is necessary.

I know people who will literally start foaming at the mouth (hah) when people confuse the word “literally” with “figuratively”. However, this is English, and common usage dictates dictionary definitions – even if common usage is ‘wrong’. That being said, I’m surprised that the reason the definition was changed is claimed as “use of pure hyperbole intended to gain emphasis” – people say “I’m starving” if they’re very hungry, but the dictionary definition remains untouched for that word.

In the spirit of the English language, here are three more common words that used to have very the opposite meanings from their 21st century versions:

Terrific used to mean “horrible” or “frightful” (from the Latin verb terrere, ‘to frighten’. Nowadays it means the exact opposite – “great” or “wonderful”.

Manufactured used to mean “made by hand” explicitly. Again, from Latin manus (“hand”) and facere (“to make”). Nowadays it just means “made”, whether by hand or by machinery.

Awful used to mean, as the word itself implies, “full of awe” – as in, inspiring awe in a good way. Nowadays the word has a purely bad connotation – at some point, the word’s meaning remained the same but the connotation changed. The only way it has preserved its original meaning is mostly used in British English, as in “he has an awful lot of money“.

So, it just goes to show – sometimes English likes to mess with you.

Source: newscientist.com

Here’s a truly interesting article written by social psychologist James W. Pennebaker, on those little words that we never put much thought into – pronouns. Pronouns are the short words that we often substitute for other nouns – “I”, “you”, “he”, “she”, “it”, “they”, “we”, etc. What started as a study into how we use pronouns and other ‘function words’ – especially when talking about dramatic or traumatic events – became a life’s work for Pennebaker.

‘Function words’ (pronouns, articles (‘a/an’ and ‘the’), prepositions (like ‘to’, ‘for’, ‘from’, etc.), auxiliary verbs (like ‘is’ or ‘has’), conjunctions (‘and’, ‘but’, ‘or’, etc.), quantifiers like ‘few’ or ‘many’, and basic adverbs like ‘really’ or ‘very’) are those small words that don’t mean much by themselves, but are processed by the brain in a different way from ‘content words’ (nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs).

Here’s an excerpt – you can find the full article here.

By understanding language style, we gain a far clearer sense of the social and psychological processes affecting our behaviours.

What do I mean by style? In any given sentence, there are two basic types of word. The first is content words, which provide meaning. [...] The other type are “function” words. These serve quieter, supporting roles – connecting, shaping and organising the content words. They are what determines style.

Why make such a big deal about these [function] words? Because they are the keys to the soul. OK, maybe that’s an overstatement, but bear with me.

Function words are psychologically very revealing. They are used at high rates, while also being short and hard to detect. They are processed in the brain differently than content words. And, critically, they require social skills to use properly. It’s about time that these forgettable little words got their due.

As someone who is currently learning Mandarin, I find the language very challenging – both to speak and to write – as well as extremely quirky. It is, however, a very satisfying language to learn, as it’s almost impossible to learn to speak Chinese without learning a little about Chinese culture.

One element I find especially interesting is the way Chinese combines words to form new words or phrases. A much earlier post touches on this, discussing how Chinese has to combine ideas to give names to modern concepts like the computer:

The age of the Chinese language means that it has to adapt itself to new concepts and ideas. For example, Mandarin for ‘train’ is 火车 (huǒ chē), which literally means “fire car”. Likewise, a computer – 电脑 (diànnǎo) – is an “electric brain”; and a helicopter – 直升机 (zhí shēng jī) – is a “straight-rising machine”.

However, Chinese also mixes together everyday words to bring a new meaning to the combination. Two good examples of this actually concern combining words with opposite meanings: zuǒyòu (左右) and dōngxi (东西).

On their own, zuǒ (左) and yòu (右) mean “left” and “right” respectively. Put them together, however, and you get the word for ‘about’ or ‘around’. For example, when Chinese people ask me how long I’ve been living in China, I reply “Yī nián zuǒyòu” (一年左右) – “about one year”.

Onto the second example – the individual words dōng (东) and xī (西) mean “east” and “west”, but together they form a multi-purpose word for ‘thing’. My first few months in China were plagued with me pointing at food and other objects in shops, and not knowing the word for that object, asking the shopkeeper “Zhège dōngxi shì duōshǎo qián?” (这个东西是多少钱) – “how much is this thing?”. It’s a word that I still often use, and so do most Chinese people.

The strange thing is, both of these combinations make a certain amount of sense. Sure, it’s not as literal as saying hónglǜdēng (红绿灯) for “traffic light” (literally “red green light”), but there’s a certain degree of poetry to the words.

Recently, having started learning Chinese characters, a few realizations have hit me. One of these was the word mǎshàng, which means “soon”. I never gave much thought to the word until I learned the characters: 马上. The second character, shàng (上) is a very common character with many meanings, but usually means ‘on’ or ‘next to’ (for example, the city in which I live, Shànghǎi (上海), means “next to the sea”). The first character, mǎ (马), means “horse” – so the word literally means “on a horse”.

Presumably, in ancient China, since horse was the fastest method of travel, anybody on a horse would be arriving soon. I don’t know if that’s the actual etymology, but I really want it to be!

Source: news.bbc.co.uk

“John’s chick is proper buff but she switched on her man the other day ‘cos he wanted to jam with his bred’rins instead of taking her out to the cinema. She was proper vexed and dust out. It was bare jokes.”

Be honest, how much of that did you understand? If the answer is ‘not much’, then don’t worry – you’re not alone.

A while ago, the BBC performed a small study on the slang terms used by children from schools across the United Kingdom, and found that the vocabulary used varied even more than they thought it would.

With England being such a small country in comparison to the USA, it’s often amazing to learn that their cultural and linguistic variation is just as pronounced – if not more pronounced – than on our side of the Atlantic. While a New Yorker and somebody from Alabama can understand one another without too much difficulty, the devil is in the details. Particular terms, words and phrases are the giveaway and often the obstacle that prevents total comprehension.

With children now growing up as part of the “Facebook generation”, there is even more opportunity for words and phrases to spread. Sites like Twitter can spread ideas around even faster and more efficiently than TV or music ever could. While there are many ‘universal’ phrases that have penetrated adolescent slang (for example, “LOL”), the regional differences of the slang terms most often used is surprising, and occasionally makes it extremely difficult to follow even simple conversations.

For those still curious, here’s the ‘translation’ of the above paragraph into plain English – the same paragraph was rendered using the slang of the 5 schools participating in the study. If you want to see the other 4 ‘translations’.

“John’s girlfriend is really pretty. But she got mad with him the other day because he wanted to hang out with his friends rather than take her to the cinema. She got really angry and stormed off. It was very funny.”

The Welsh language (known to its speakers as Cymraeg) is a language dating back to the 6th century, and is spoken daily in the small country of Wales, in the United Kingdom, by around 60% of people living there. While it is considered a minority language, the number of speakers continues to grow due to a number of measurements by Welsh authorities who want to promote the continued use of the language.

To many outsiders, the Welsh accent sounds slightly odd, as its phonology is quite rare – many of the sounds required for speaking Welsh do not exist in English. The written language is also a little frenetic at first glance, as it often seems to have not enough vowels (e.g. crwth – a traditional Welsh stringed instrument).

Wales is also the location of one of the longest and hardest-to-pronounce place names ever, on the island of Anglesey: Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch.

Sometimes the qualities of Welsh combine to give wonderful results. The official Welsh word for microwave oven is meicrodon (don means ‘wave’, so it’s a direct translation), but a more commonly-used everyday term for it is popty ping – popty means “oven” and ping is the noise it makes! It’s certainly much more fun than saying “microwave”.

Source: time.com

Here’s a fascinating article about why some languages sound so fast to English native speakers – the results may surprise you. But it doesn’t change the fact that some languages seem to fly by compared with your native tongue. Being an English speaker learning Mandarin Chinese, I often find myself flummoxed when I’m trying to comprehend native Mandarin speakers: not because I don’t know the words, but I simply can’t keep up with the speed at which they’re coming at me. One of my most common phrases in Chinese is “màn diǎn, nǐ shuō de hěn kuài!” – “speak a little slower, you talk very fast!”

They took 20 short, very standard paragraphs of text and translated them into various languages, and gave them to native speakers to read. The native speakers were English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Mandarin, Spanish, and Vietnamese. After they had finished the recordings, they edited out any silence longer than 150 milliseconds. Then they counted the syllables in each recording, and also gave each syllable a ‘meaning value’ – how much meaning is packed into each syllable.

From the article:

With this raw data in hand, the investigators crunched the numbers together to arrive at two critical values for each language: The average information density for each of its syllables and the average number of syllables spoken per second in ordinary speech. Vietnamese was used as a reference language for the other seven, with its syllables (which are considered by linguists to be very information dense) given an arbitrary value of 1.

For all of the other languages, the researchers discovered, the more data-dense the average syllable is, the fewer of those syllables had to be spoken per second — and the slower the speech thus was. English, with a high information density of .91, is spoken at an average rate of 6.19 syllables per second. Mandarin, which topped the density list at .94, was the spoken slowpoke at 5.18 syllables per second. Spanish, with a low-density .63, rips along at a syllable-per-second velocity of 7.82. The true speed demon of the group, however, was Japanese, which edges past Spanish at 7.84, thanks to its low density of .49. Despite those differences, at the end of, say, a minute of speech, all of the languages would have conveyed more or less identical amounts of information.

“A tradeoff is operating between a syllable-based average information density and the rate of transmission of syllables,” the researchers wrote. “A dense language will make use of fewer speech chunks than a sparser language for a given amount of semantic information.” In other words, your ears aren’t deceiving you: Spaniards really do sprint and Chinese really do stroll, but they will tell you the same story in the same span of time.

So there you have it. Though some languages are spoken at a faster rate, there is less inherent value in each syllable. So even if some languages seem to be spoken so much faster than others, they are all conveying pretty much the same amount of information.

Also, with Chinese being the slowest spoken language in this survey, it seems that I have to work harder at my listening comprehension!

Source: crosswordcontest.blogspot.com

Let’s take a break from all the academic waxing linguistical for a minute, and have some fun – this crossword puzzle was made by crossword puzzle writer extraordinaire, Matt Gaffney, on his blog, “Matt Gaffney’s Weekly Crossword Contest”.

At first it seems like a pretty ordinary crossword puzzle, but the black squares arranged in a diagonal in the middle of the puzzle are actually a meta element of the puzzle itself – if you solve all the clues correctly, those squares will also form an extra word – a common method of transportation.

Click the image for the full sized version.

The amazing thing about this crossword is the fact that the 18 clues involved in the ‘hidden word’ are all ambiguous – they can be solved using more than one word. However, these words have been brilliantly chosen – one word fits, and one word is made by appending an extra letter to the start or end of the word to form another word that also fits the original clue. For example, “rose” and “arose” are synonyms, and “lock” and “clock” are both words you’d associate with “a basic function of the iPhone”. Take the extra letters added when forming the clue’s ‘alternative’ answer, and the secret answer forms in the middle – “escalator”.

The best thing? The squares themselves look like an escalator. Genius.

A lot of thought goes into the creation of crossword puzzles – even though it’s perfectly possible these days to do it all on a computer – but this one is certainly one of the cleverest puzzles I’ve ever seen.

Source: reddit.com/r/tattoos

The Tattoos section on social bookmarking site Reddit is a great place to ask for advice on body ink, and for showing off your new tattoos to the world. Unfortunately, user “MikeTheDudeHenry” got a little more than he bargained for when he revealed his new “Latin” tatto emblazoned across his shoulder blades. Clearly following the adage of quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur (“anything said in Latin seems profound”), he hoped for a wholly positive reaction to his cemel dosce tattoo, which he claimed was Latin for “know thyself“.

It soon became apparent that he had picked up the phrase from the hit movie “The Matrix”, from the scene in which the Oracle points out to Neo the sign hanging above her kitchen door.

The sign, which reads temet nosce, is not actually the most accurate translation of “know thyself” – the phrase would usually be rendered nosce te ipsum. However, MikeTheDudeHenry must have misread the sign’s curvy Blackletter font, confusing the capital “T” for a “C”, the lowercase “t” for an “l”, and the lowercase “n” for a capital “D”. Thus, temet nosce became cemel dosce.

The unfortunate recipient of this wholly innaccurate body ink – even after having been told that neither is a legitimate Latin word – is sadly still claiming that it must be correct, because “cemel nosce” has over 3,400 results on Google. Sadly, however, Google is not the best way to proof-read a 2,000 year old language.

Reddit user “thenatman” sums up the lessons we should all learn from this folly:

Moral of the story: before you get a tattoo:

• Ensure that you have reliable sources
• Ensure that these sources are able to read very simple-to-decipher Blackletter font
• Ensure that these sources are not relying on a movie for the origin of this phrase
• Ensure that the writers of the movie itself are actually proficient in the language they claim to be proficient in
• For everyone involved, ensure that the phrase in fact originates from the language you believe it originates from. Sure, there have been multiple famous uses of the Latin “nosce te ipsum” (Hobbes, for instance), but the original is the Greek, found at the Temple of Apollo at Delphi

More generally, don’t take the idea for your permanent tattoo from a font-related misreading of a non-standard translation of a phrase originally in an entirely different language, neither of which you speak or understand.

As somebody also quipped in the comments section, the more apt Latin phrase here would be caveat emptor – “buyer beware”.

Folks, always remember to run your foreign language tattoos by somebody who speaks or at least has studied the language in question!