Language Trainers Blog

A collective noun is the word used to define a group of something, usually animals. Common collective nouns such as “herd”, “flock”, “pack” or “swarm” are well-known, but English has a vast collection of lesser-known collective nouns for certain creatures.

For example, “a murder of crows”, “a bed of eels”, “a parliament of owls”, “an army of caterpillars”, “a cluster of spiders”, and “a streak of tigers”.

Some collective nouns even change depending on the nature of the group in question. For example, geese are usually referred to as a “flock” or a “gaggle”, but these terms should only be used if the geese are on land. In flight, they should be referred to as a “skein”; if they are flying close, then it’s “a plump of geese”.

For a detailed list of the appropriate collective nouns to use in any situation, take a look at the Wikipedia entry.

English is not unique in using different terms to define different groups. Japanese, for example, takes it even further with measure words, as described in a previous post:

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.

Source: abcnews.go.com

The latest US Census Bureau figures show that even during a time when so many Native American tribes are struggling to retain their native tongues, 169,000 people speak Navajo at home, more than any other Native American language.

However, these figures may be easy to misinterpet.

From the article:

Evangeline Parsons Yazzie, a Navajo professor at Northern Arizona University, said the figure recently released by the U.S. Census Bureau is no surprise, but can be misleading. The country’s population of Navajos is well over 300,000. For every one who speaks the language, one doesn’t — and those are likely younger Navajos, Yazzie said.

“Navajo has the largest population, they say, of Native speakers, but it also has the largest population of non-speakers,” she said Wednesday. “And it kind of presents a skewed picture.”

The figure is based on five-year estimates from community surveys that allowed the Census for the first time to study small segments of the U.S. population. The Census found in a study released this month that fewer than a half-million people age 5 and over speak a Native American language at home. About 65 percent of them are in nine counties in Arizona, New Mexico and Alaska.

The surveys don’t gauge the level of fluency but ask whether a language other than English is spoken at home. If so, respondents are asked to write something in that language.

Source: nytimes.com

Following on from previous posts about Na’vi (the language invented for James Cameron’s Avatar), Klingon Star Trek, and most recently, the language of Dragons (The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim): here’s another language invented for the media – Dothraki.

Though the language is not actually seen in and of itself in the series of novels by George R. R. Martin, A Song of Ice and Fire, when HBO serialized the books into the hit show Game of Thrones, they undertook to create an actual language – complete with full vocabulary, grammar and syntax – for the Dothraki race of people.

Some people build model railroads or re-enact Civil War battles; Mr. Peterson, a 30-year-old who studied linguistics at the University of California, San Diego, is a “conlanger,” a person who constructs new languages. Until recently, this mostly quixotic linguistic pursuit, born out of a passion for words and grammatical structures, lived on little-visited Web sites or in college dissertations.

Today, a desire in Hollywood to infuse fantasy and science-fiction movies, television series and video games with a sense of believability is driving demand for constructed languages, complete with grammatical rules, a written alphabet (hieroglyphics are acceptable) and enough vocabulary for basic conversations.

It seems that constructing languages has become something of a fashionable addition for big-budget productions such as Game of Thrones. While Martin did not lay the groundwork for the language in the same way that J. R. R. Tolkien famously did for the Elvish and Dwarven tongues in Lord of the Rings, it’s amazing to see how the attention to detail of making a language really does help to flesh out a fantasy world and make it seem more real – even if it’s only the true fanatics who make the effort to learn to speak them.

English is abundant in idioms and proverbs, for example: “kill two birds with one stone”, “too many cooks spoil the broth”, and “woke up on the wrong side of the bed”. These are ingrained in our language, and we use them almost without thinking about their literal meanings.

Chinese also has an abundance of idioms, and one subset of them are particularly interesting: those called chéngyǔ (成语). Chengyu mostly come from ancient stories and Chinese fables, and most conservative estimates say that there are around 5,000 chengyu (though some claim the figure is closer to 20,000). To demonstrate just how many there are, a Chinese friend of mine told me that for each animal in the Chinese horoscope, a Chinese scholar could easily reel off 100 different chengyu.

The beauty of chengyu is their succinctness: the vast majority of them are 4 characters long. However, this means that unless you know the story behind the chengyu, at first hearing it’s likely you will have no clue what they’re about. Here are a few examples of chengyu, where they come from, and what they come to mean:

对牛弹琴 (duì niú tán qín): lit. “playing the lute to a cow”. It comes to mean somebody talking to the wrong audience, similar to English idioms “to cast pearls before swine”, or “to howl at the moon”. It comes from a story of a man who was a great lute player, and thought that he was so good that if he played to a cow it would appreciate the beauty of his music. However, it just carried on eating the grass.

老马识途 (lǎo mǎ shí tú): lit. “an old horse knows the way”. It comes to mean that experience should be valued, from a story about an army that lost its way on their return home, and the general ordered for several of the older horses to lead the army, who eventually led them home.

杀鸡吓猴 (shā jī xià hóu): lit. “to kill the chicken in front of the monkeys”. It comes to mean the act of scaring somebody by punishing somebody else, from a story about a man who raised monkeys. The monkeys were becoming more and more mischievous, so he killed a chicken in front of them to scare them into behaving.

三人成虎 (sān rén chéng hǔ): lit. “three men make a tiger”. It comes to mean that people will believe anything, no matter how ridiculous it seems, so long as it’s repeated enough times. It comes from a story about a high-ranking official who was trying to demonstrate to his king that the lies told about his corruption were false: if he told the king that a tiger was in the marketplace, he wouldn’t believe him; but if three men claimed to see the same tiger, the king would be inclined to agree.

望洋兴叹 (wàng yáng xīng tàn): lit. “to gaze at the ocean and sigh”. It comes to mean the act of being able to do nothing but sigh in the face of a mammoth task, or being powerless against somebody else’s strength.

There are chengyu for almost every occasion, and Chinese children grow up knowing many of them as naturally as we pick up our own idioms. Chengyu are fantastic in that every one has a story behind it, which gives even more of a glimpse into Chinese’s ancient culture.

You probably know some chengyu without even realizing it: for example, 卧虎藏龙 (wò hǔ cáng lóng), lit. “crouching tiger hidden dragon”. This refers to somebody who is unexpectedly talented or strong, even though they appear not to be. This explains why the famous kung fu/romance movie was named this way.

A palindrome is a fairly well-known term for a word or phrase that reads the same forwards and backwards. For example, “Madam, I’m Adam” is a palindromic phrase, as is “Go hang a salami. I’m a lasagna hog”.

Palindromes get trickier the longer they get: the longest palindrome I know is “A man, a plan, a canal, Panama!” – though somebody with the aid of a dictionary and an algorithm has created the world’s longest palindrome, with 17,826 words that read the same forwards and backwards.

A variant of a palindrome is a semordnilap. They’re like palindromes, but reading the words backwards creates different words, instead (‘semordnilap’ is ‘palindromes’ backwards). For example, diaper / repaid, or stressed / desserts.

An ambigram, however, is different. An ambigram is something that reads the same when you look at it from another direction, orientation or viewpoint. That is to say, if you turn a word upside down, you can still read the same word. Here’s an example, taken from Dan Brown’s book “Angels and Demons”:

Here you can see the four words “earth”, “air”, “fire” and “water” – but if you turn the image upside down, you get this:

The same four words can still easily be read, even though the image has been rotated through 180 degrees.

You can get much more complex ambigrams than these simple ones – check out the Wikipedia page to see more!

Here’s a nice scene taken from the Young Indiana Jones TV show from the 1990s, showing one great benefit of being a polyglot (somebody who speaks several languages) – impressing the opposite sex!

Although some of the accents are, let’s just say, a little suspect, it would certainly still be very impressive to be able to have a conversation journey through French, German, Italian, Hungarian, Swedish, Greek and Arabic all in the course of around one and a half minutes… certainly something to aim towards!