Language Trainers Blog

Anthony Burgess’ novel A Clockwork Orange is perhaps most famous in popular culture for the 1971 Stanley Kubrick movie adaptation starring Malcolm McDowell. While it was toned down in the movie to aid the audience’s understanding, the book puts more focus on Nadsat, a constructed language invented by Burgess to give more depth to the England that he created in the novel. Since the events of the novel took place in the future, Burgess wanted to create slang that would not sound dated to people reading it later on, but an added bonus is the unique type of narrative it creates.

In fact, Nadsat isn’t a language, but more of a vernacular or argot – it’s essentially English with enough slang to render it difficult to understand for the uninitiated. Burgess was a keen linguist and polyglot, and his love for languages shines through in the dialect he created for his teenage characters. The protagonist of the story, Alex, writes in the first person and Nadsat is used throughout the book – both in descriptive passages as well as direct speech – so readers have to familiarize themselves with it if they want to understand the events of the novel (though in most editions there is a helpful glossary in the back!).

Nadsat is a strange mixture of Cockney rhyming slang and Russian (the name Nadsat comes from the Russian suffix for ‘-teen’: -надцать, [-nadtsat]). However, Burgess didn’t stop there – he used a wide variety of methods to create words and flesh out Nadsat.

For the majority of Nadsat words, Burgess took the Russian word and Anglicized it (i.e. made it look and sound more English). Often, an English homophone (a word that sounds the same but has a different meaning) for the Russian word is used instead.

Here are some examples of Nadsat terms formed from Russian words:

• raskazz – story (from рассказ rasskáz, meaning ‘story’)
• veck – a man, or person (from человек čelovék, meaning ‘man’, shortened form)
• lewdies – people (from люди, ljúdi, meaning ‘people’, Anglicized)
• gulliver – head (from голова golová, meaning ‘head’, homophone)
• horrorshow – good (from хорошо khorosho, meaning ‘good’, homophone)

Some words are formed from Cockney rhyming slang, but with an extra twist to disguise their real meaning even further. For example, cutter means ‘money’ (from ‘bread and butter’), and hound-and-horny means ‘corny’.

There are also terms derived in other ways – existing words were shortened (e.g. cancer means ‘cigarette’, a shortened form of ‘cancer stick’), or sometimes lengthened – often in a juvenile way (e.g. appy polly loggy means ‘apology’; skolliwoll means ‘school’).

Some words were formed from onomatopoeia (e.g. tick-tocker means ‘heart’; boohoohoo means ‘to cry’).

There are also portmanteaus – words formed from combining two other words (e.g. chumble means ‘to mumble’, from ‘chatter’ and ‘mumble’; crark means ‘to howl’, from ‘crow’ and ‘bark’; and the infamous word ultraviolence means a particularly despicable or violent act).

There is also plenty of English slang, used both directly and indirectly (e.g. sarky meaning ‘sarcastic’; warbles means ‘songs’, as in the English word ‘to warble’ meaning ‘to sing’). There is also plenty of invented slang from existing words, such as sinny for ‘cinema’, or vaysay meaning ‘toilet’, from the French pronunciation for ‘W.C.’.

It’s interesting to note that Nadsat isn’t what made A Clockwork Orange the cult classic that it is today – many people remember the novel and the movie best for its portrayal of strong adult themes (mainly violent and sexual crime), and the highly disturbing nature of Alex’s punishment. However, it is a fascinating novel to read, especially for those interested in languages and linguistics.

For more information, you can find a full list of all the Nadsat used in A Clockwork Orange here.

Source: dictionary.com

The word ‘psychopath’ is thrown around plenty on TV, but few may know the true definition of the mental disorder. Essentially, it’s an inability to empathize with others or establish any kind of meaningful relationship. However, this often means that a person exhibiting psychopathic behavior fits a certain pattern of other traits: extreme egocentricity, a failure to learn from experience, and a tendacy to treat other people as a means to further their own ends, rather than individuals in themselves.

Here’s an interesting article on a study recently performed by Jeffrey Hancock, a professor of communications at Cornell University. By analyzing the way convicted murderers speak – the words they use, the most common patterns of speech, etc. – they can build a model of ‘psychopathic’ language, and apply it to the real world. From the article:

They [psychopaths] tend to see people as means to their own ends, rather than as individuals. These emotional abnormalities manifest in their speech patterns in a few interesting ways. The psychopaths who were interviewed tended to use a lot of causal phrases like “so” and “because.” The researchers interpreted this to mean that they were explaining their crimes away as a “logical outcome of a plan (something that ‘had’ to be done to achieve a goal).’” In contrast, other convicted criminals who are not psychopaths tend to use more language around religion and their own guilt when describing their crime. The researchers observed other aberrations in psychopaths’ speech. Psychopaths in the study spoke of basic needs like food and money twice as much as the other subjects in the study, and they also use more disfluencies (phrases like “uh” or “umm”) to break up their speech.

The implications of this study mean that police could be able to build a sound psychological profile of people from the language used in their Facebook statuses or Twitter updates, or any posts on public sites like Craigslist, forums, and the like.

Here’s a fantastic web site if you’re learning a language and need some help with vocabulary (or in the case of langauges with different scripts, flashcards). After selecting the language you’re learning, memrise.com helps you learn with a gardening metaphor – it teaches you new words as ‘seeds’. These ‘seeds’ are then ‘watered’ through you testing yourself via a mixture of multiple choice questions and user input. Once your ‘seeds’ are ‘watered’ enough to become ‘plants’, you’ll have to keep them blossoming by revisiting the site and redoing the tests to prove that you recognize the words/characters you’ve learned up until that point, as well as adding new ‘seeds’ to your garden. Leave your ‘plants’ alone too long and they’ll wilt.

From there, you can ‘harvest’ new ‘seeds’ (i.e. learn new words/characters) and add them to your garden. Gradually your garden grows in size, and you’ll have to keep all the plants watered by continually re-testing yourself.

This novel flashcard concept brings an element of gaming into your study, and also enables you to track your progress in a rather unique way. More importantly, the site has a community of people who can assist your learning by providing helpful mnemonics and aide-memoires if you’re having trouble committing certain words or characters to memory.

Learning Chinese characters is occasionally very interesting, but mostly an arduous process, and Memrise has really helped me expand my vocabulary. When you get something wrong, it brings up the information page on the character in question, complete with tips on how to remember it next time. It also keeps track of all the characters I’m having trouble remembering, and gives them a little more emphasis during testing. Most importantly, it forces you to reinforce your knowledge by testing yourself before your plants wilt and die.

Try it out for yourself at memrise.com!

An onomatopoeia is a word that mimics a sound – for example “woof”, “bang”, or “moo”. While they are popular in English (to the point where some onomatopoeias are no longer commonly recognised as such, like the word “bleat” to mimic the sound a sheep makes), they are absolutely rife in Japanese. In fact, unlike English, Japanese has two kinds of onomatopoeia: Giongo (擬音語) are words that directly imitate sounds (there’s a subgroup of these just for animal and human sounds, called Giseigo (擬声語)), and Gitaigo (擬態語) are words that express emotions, actions, or conditions. Both Giongo and Gitaigo always take the form of a doubled word – for example, a dog barking is “wan wan” (ワンワン).

Giongo are like onomatopoeia in English and are pretty self-explanatory. However, Gitaigo, which are symbolic or mimetic words, are more abstract and interesting for foreign speakers. Japanese people litter these throughout their conversation without giving them a second thought, but for non-native learners of Japanese they can often be confusing, difficult to translate, and a pain to learn.

Here are some examples of Gitaigo and what they mean:

giri giri (ギリギリ) – “just barely”, “by the skin of your teeth”

bero bero (べろべろ) – “drunk”

pika pika (ピカピカ) – “sparkling”, “shining brightly”

uzu uzu (ウズウズ) – “eager”, “raring”, “itching to do something”

uki uki (ウキウキ) – “happy”, “in a good mood”

hiso hiso (ヒソヒソ) – “in a whisper”

nita nita (ニタニタ) – “smirking”, “grinning”

Some of these may seem very random, especially since they are classified as onomatopoeia. But if you read closer, some of them reveal their mimetic nature. For example, hiso hiso mimics the sounds of a whisper; it’s almost impossible to form the sounds for uki uki or nita nita without your mouth curling into a smile; and bero bero perhaps mimics an inebriated person slurring their words.

Here’s a great short film by Australian director Brian Fairbairn that has been doing the internet rounds lately. One of its purposes is to show how we can garner so much from just body language and speech intonation, even if we don’t know exactly what people are saying. In 4 minutes of conversation we can’t comprehend the actual dialogue, but we can discern what’s actually happening.

You’ll notice that there are quite a few English words in there – or rather, English phonemes. However, there’s never enough context to understand exactly what the characters are saying. The words used are often random enough to have you guessing, however, at 1:19 you can hear the word ‘crustacean’! It’s strange how the brain tries to make sense of it from the words you can understand, but then gets as lost as it would be if you were listening to another completely foreign language.

This is a little different from another popular video, titled “Prisencolinensinainciusol”, a music video made by an Italian TV show to demonstrate what English sounds like to Italians who can’t speak it.

Source: dialectblog.com

Here’s a great article about the difference between dialect and accent – and why Americans tend to get them mixed up, even though they refer to two very separate linguistic ideas.

Strangely enough, it often seems to be linked with race rather than area – Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader during the 2008 Presidential elections, famously said that Obama spoke “with no negro dialect” – the article’s author argues that “I doubt he would have mentioned a candidate’s ‘Tennessee dialect’ or ‘New York dialect’ (he probably would have used ‘accent’)”.

If you find yourself being confused between the two terms, remember that dialect is much more all-encompassing than accent. A dialect varies from others by grammar (sentence structure), vocabulary (words used) and phonology (sound). An accent simply refers to the pronunciation.

Kanji are the Japanese forms of the traditional Chinese characters that were first used as far back as 8,000 years ago. Many countries in Asia use some form of traditional Chinese pictograms: variants are present in the written languages of Korea, Vietnam and Taiwan, as well as mainland China and Japan.

Frustratingly hard to learn for westerners, a competent Kanji reader can identify at least 2,000 different characters, though there are apparently around 50,000 different characters in all. However, most of those are archaic, technical or very rarely used.

Some of the most basic forms of Kanji are straight pictograms – characters that are used to express literal things. The kanji for “tree” (木) looks a little like a tree, but many Kanji that are expressing even simple ideas seem pretty far removed from their real-life meanings. The main reason for this is that the script has changed somewhat in the last 8,000 years. Here’s a table from Wikipedia, showing how some simple characters have evolved over time from forms that closer resemble their meanings. Click it for the full size version.

For learners of Kanji or any other Chinese-inspired characters, there are great sites like memrise.com, which have interactive flashcards and quizzes that can really speed up your learning. Memrise in particular brings a small gaming element into your character learning, by introducing characters to you as ‘seeds’, and having you ‘water’ them into becoming fully-fledged ‘plants’ by repeatedly recognizing, translating and transliterating them correctly. However, with so many characters, it’s truly a long-term goal – which just goes to show how learning Japanese can be a truly challenging task, especially if you want to get a real grip on Kanji.

The legendary Giacomo Casanova

This is a fantastic article about sexual eponyms – an eponym is a word derived from somebody’s name, or a place. There are hundreds of them in English, and we use them without ever thinking about their origins: for example, the Fahrenheit temperature scale is named after physicist Gabriel Fahrenheit. Likewise, a mausoleum is named after the ancient Carian leader Mausolus (Μαύσωλος), who had a huge tomb built for him by his sister and widow: now the word mausoleum refers to any grand tomb.

These eponyms, however, are more sexual in nature – words like sadism, masochism, and casanova are commonly used eponymous words, though most people simply use the words without being aware of their roots.

Here’s an excerpt from the article, interestingly-titled “the pervs behind the words” – you can read the whole article here.

Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

The words: masochism, sadomasochism

The obverse of a sadist is a masochist – someone who gets off on being abused – and no one could possibly deserve this label more than the person who inspired it, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. Besides having a sexual fetish named after him, Sacher-Masoch is best known for writing Venus in Furs, a 19th century novel about a man’s willing submission to a cruel woman who treats him as her slave. It was based on a true story – his own. In 1869, Sacher-Masoch actually signed a contract with his mistress in which he agreed to be her slave for six months (with the stipulation that she had to allow him time to write).

The term masochism was coined during Sacher-Masoch’s lifetime, and he was understandably not pleased. The man was a great writer, feminist, and opponent of antisemitism, and yet this is how he goes down in history. It was a form of abuse that was not to his liking.