Language Trainers Blog

Source: columbia.edu

A linguistic map is a map that shows the geographical distribution of speakers of certain languages or regional dialects. While in the USA the main languages would obviously be English and Spanish, in areas of the world with diverse languages like south Asia, linguistic maps can very very interesting and varied.

Here’s a linguistic map of that very area, thanks to Columbia University’s linguistics faculty (click on the map for the full-size version):

India is famed for its incredibly diverse linguistic landscape, and this map shows that its fame is well-deserved.

As with the etymology map posted a while back, this map seems alarmingly complex at first, but the closer you dive into the map, the more you realize that it’s simply listing regional languages and dialects and showing which family each language branch belongs to.

If you’re interested in seeing more linguistic maps, there are plenty available on muturzikin.com, including many linguistic maps of the USA.

Source: guardian.co.uk

Although Margaret Thatcher is not the recipient of very many popularity awards, the former UK Prime Minister has been warped from the traditional “Iron Lady” image to a rather more sinister, heartless leader – thanks to a bad Russian translation of the movie starring Meryl Streep.

“The Iron Lady”, an oscar-winning biography of Conservative ex-Prime Minsiter Margaret Thatcher, was, like so many other movies, another pirated movie in Russia, but the ‘translator’ responsible for the subtitles took some rather alarming liberties to the script. In fact, ‘lost in translation’ is a major understatement.

While she might not be known for being a friendly, approachable woman – certainly in the mind of her fiercest detractors – the Russian pirated version of the movie portrays Thatcher as a Hitler-loving leader who desperately wanted to destroy the working class. In the movie, the Russian version tells of her desires once she is Prime Minister: “crush the working class, crush the scum, the yobs”.

Funnily enough, the pirated version managed to make it into the hands of one of Russia’s most prominent film critics in the newspaper Kommersant, who even quoted lines from the amended script in a review (which was generally positive towards the movie, even given the dramatic re-write).

Source: accreditedonlinecolleges.com/blog

A belated St Patrick’s Day to everybody!

While St Patrick’s Day may be the best-known Irish import into everyday American life, the Gaelic Irish language has actually had more of an impact that you’d think. Thanks to English’s constant desire to steal words from other languages and assimilate them into itself, there are quite a few common words that come from the emerald isle.

For example, “whisky” (or “whiskey”) comes from the Irish uisge beatha, meaning “the water of life”. “Galore”, meaning an abundance of, comes from gu leor, meaning “enough”. The word “slogan” also comes from Irish: sluaghghairm, a combination of sluagh (“army”) and ghairm (“shout”).

For 15 more common words derived from the Irish language, check out the full blog post here.

Source: justmeans.com

When people say that sites like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube bring people closer together, it’s easy to think of it as a one-dimensional thing. However, these kinds of sites that help and encourage social engineering have a few other major benefits that you might not consider at first.

For example, of the some 7,000 languages that are spoken around the world today, half of those are expected to be extinct by the year 2100. The cause of this sad fact is often cited to be globalization and the fact that common language is the only real way for otherwise disparate cultures to come together.

However, sites like Facebook are helping speakers of the more minority (and thus endangered) languages find their voices. People like Professor K David Harrison, an associate professor of linguistics at Swarthmore College and a National Geographic Fellow, explains the phenomenon:

“Small languages are using social media, YouTube, text messaging and various technologies to expand their voice and expand their presence. We hear a lot about how globalisation exerts negative pressures on small cultures to assimilate. But a positive effect of globalisation is that you can have a language that is spoken by only five or 50 people in one remote location, and now, through digital technology, that language can achieve a global voice and a global audience.”

Whilst plenty of minority languages will still die off in the years to come, it’s good to know that technology has brought us all a way to connect with others, no matter what languages you speak.

Unlike langauges like German, English is said to lack the ability to make a new word by simply piling on other words onto another. Thanks to noun agglutination and the ease of making more specific words out of different existing words, German can make words like Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz (their term for a cattle marking and beef labeling supervision duties delegation law).

What English does have, however, is our own compound words, which coupled with English’s amazing ability to coin new words, is pretty much the same thing but without the ability to keep adding words almost indefinitely. Words like “afternoon”, “bathroom”, “blackboard”, “blueprint” and “brainstorm” are everyday compound words, but if after lunch one day you came up with some good ideas in a classroom, you couldn’t call it an “afternoonblackboardbrainstorm”.

Though limited in how they’re formed, there are thousands of compound words in the English language, and nowadays there always seems to be more coming into popular usage. 30 years ago words like “internet”, “broadband” and “microsoft” would not have much special meaning, but they’re part of common English parlance nowadays.

Compound words aren’t to be confused with portmanteaus, which is where 2 other words are blended together to make one single word (e.g. “smog” (smoke + fog)), rather than keeping both of the words intact.

Source: nativenewsnetwork

While I so often say around here that languages bring us together, it seems that there are many who disagree.

This story happened a few weeks ago, and was pretty upsetting. Happily this kind of thing is the exception rather than the rule. When a Wisconsin 7th grader, Miranda Washinawatok, decided to speak a few words of her native Menominee language to a classmate, her teacher decided to punish Miranda for her own ignorance.

“The teacher went back to where the two were sitting and literally slammed her hand down on the desk and said, “How do I know you are not saying something bad?”

The story did not end there. In the next session, another teacher told Miranda she did not appreciate her getting the other teacher upset because “she is like a daughter to me.”

Miranda was later sent to the principal’s office and suspended from school for “attitude problems”.

The words she had said to her classmate? “Posoh”, meaning “hello”, and “ketapanen”, meaning “I love you”.

In typical backtracking fashion, the school administration sent a form apology letter to the parents once the media picked up the story of Miranda’s unfair treatment.

Although Menominee is one of many native American tribal languages that is slowly dying out in the USA, that certainly doesn’t mean that people should be punished for speaking it. Miranda’s mother, Karen, is in fact a former tribal chair, and the director of the Language and Culture Commission for the Menominee Tribe. With a degree in linguistics from the University of Arizona’s College of Education-AILDI American Indian Language Development Institute, it is no surprise that she is passing on her knowledge of the Menominee language to her daughter. Little did she know that this would be seen by some as a punishable offence.