Language Trainers Blog

Source: russiansphinx.blogspot.com

It’s easy to forget our trans-Atlantic cousins in Europe speak a huge variety of languages throughout the 50 countries that make up the continent. Given the prevalence of English, it being Europe’s (and the rest of the world’s) lingua franca, it would also be easy to assume that English makes up the largest part of this multitude of different languages.

However, the truth is a little different. Blogger Russian Sphinx is something of a dataphile – her blog features a wide variety of charts, maps and graphs of a wide variety of interesting sources of data. One of her posts maps the languages of native speakers of Europe by number of speakers, and the results speak for themselves. English finishes noticeably behind Russian, German and French. Click the image below to see the full version.

However, thinking in terms of native speakers, this result may not be as surprising as English-centric north Americans would think – the only countries in Europe with English as their official first language are the UK, Ireland and Malta. Therefore, even though English may be the most popular second language by far in Europe, it has a way to go before it becomes the most-spoken native tongue.

French is renowned for being a language closely associated with love and romance – but why? Is it just our mental projections of fireworks over the Eiffel Tower, or is it simply an aural association with the lyrical, soothing accent and how it is often portrayed in popular culture?

Well, this isn’t an easy question to answer. But the French language definitely has a few grammatical and syntactical features that could be interpreted as strikingly romantic – at least to me, anyway.

For example, the phrase “I miss you” in English is fairly straightforward. When you render the same thought in French, however, it turns around. You don’t say “je manque toi” (literally “I miss you”), but instead you say “tu me manques”: “you are missing from me”. This conjures up a much deeper image than the English version of the phrase – the French rendition implies that you are a part of me, and that part is currently missing – a very romantic idea!

French has a wide variety of terms of endearment, almost all of which include a possessive pronoun, which once again implies a deeper sense of togetherness. Standards include mon amour (“my love”), mon cœur (“my heart”) and ma belle (“my beautiful”); but there are many other terms, many of which relate to animals – especially farm animals. For example, mon cochon (“my pig”), ma loutre (“my otter”), mon loup (“my wolf”), mon poulet (“my chicken”), mon canard (“my duck”), and even ma puce (“my flea”)!

We also get a lot of words in the syntactical field of love almost directly from French: fiancé and fiancée are verbatim, and it’s hard to ignore the obvious etymology of words like “marriage” (Fr. mariage) and “anniversary” (Fr. anniversaire).

There are many more reasons why French is so often considered to be la langue d’amour – the language of love! French Canadians would certainly agree, and if you’d like to see whether they’re right or not, why not take a look at some of the French lessons Toronto has to offer?

Source: arstechnica.com

This one’s a slightly different kind of language post, but still interesting I feel. Tech company Apple has been heavily involved in plenty of litigation over the past few years, most recently over claims that other phone manufacturers (namely Samsung) have modeled – or straight up copied – their devices’ designs. Whichever side you take in that particular debate, it’s clear that Apple’s penchant for trying to sue everybody is starting to grate. Thankfully, judges are also getting annoyed by it.

Apple lawyers have been arguing that “App Store” is a trademarked phrase, and it has the right to stop others from using similar phrases. That includes Amazon, which was sued by Apple in March 2011, shortly after it opened the Amazon Appstore for Android.

Now, some of those issues are finally coming to a head in public. At a hearing today in an Oakland federal court, it became clear that while Apple may have a lot of fury and passion behind this lawsuit, it has run into trouble in the form of a very skeptical judge. US District Judge Phyllis Hamilton showed great doubt that Apple will be able to prove that consumers were confused or deceived by Amazon’s use of the word “Appstore.” At this point, it’s somewhat remarkable that the company hasn’t dropped this suit, since Hamilton indicated a year ago that she was unimpressed by Apple’s arguments and denied a preliminary injunction.

Arguing over the intellectual property ownership of elements of your phones and tablets is one thing, but trying to trademark a generic term like “App Store” reeks of arrogance in my opinion, and I for one am glad that judge Phyllis Hamilton seems to agree. The arrogance is only reinforced when Apple claim that it’s not so much about the words themselves, but the fact that Apple ‘set the benchmark’ and they feel that customers would be cheated by an inferior product with a similar name.

“They [Amazon employees] admit they targeted Apple customers, because Apple set the benchmark for what consumers expected,” said Eberhart. “When you combine that with our evidence consumers associate the term ‘app store’ with Apple,” it’s enough evidence to warrant a trial.

“Everyone who uses a smartphone knows the difference between the Apple iOS system and the Android system,” responded Hamilton. “Where’s the confusion? There’s some suggestion [by Apple] that if Amazon is using the ‘Appstore’ term someone might think they have as many apps as Apple does. Well, why? And how, in fact, does that contribute to any deception on the part of Amazon?”

It’s reminiscent of cellular carrier T-Mobile trademarking the color magenta – why should one company possibly be allowed to “own” a color, or in this case, a generic, descriptive set of words?

While you’re here, why not check out the Russian classes Dallas has to offer?

What with all the election fever going on around the US at the moment, I thought it might be nice to take a look at a red/blue map more suited to our happy little language blog… click the image for the full size version!

Seems like in general the northern states favor “pop”, the south favors “Coke”, and the east and west are “soda” junkies.

Source: bbc.co.uk/news

Scholars at Oxford University working on an ancient writing system called “proto-Elamite” may have finally unlocked the secret to deciphering it, thanks to a breakthrough in technology that allows academics to view the inscriptions more clearly than they were previously capable of doing.

From the article:

In a room high up in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, above the Egyptian mummies and fragments of early civilisations, a big black dome is clicking away and flashing out light.

This device, part sci-fi, part-DIY, is providing the most detailed and high quality images ever taken of these elusive symbols cut into clay tablets. This is Indiana Jones with software.

It’s being used to help decode a writing system called proto-Elamite, used between around 3200BC and 2900BC in a region now in the south west of modern Iran.

This machine, using a combination of computer processing in conjunction with 76 photographic lights, allows every facet of the tablets to be captured, and allows it to be viewed from any angle, with every groove and notch displayed in strikingly high detail.

The writing system has no bilingual texts or overlaps, and the spoken language that it accompanies fell out of use thousands of years ago, meaning that it is fiendishly difficult to decode. Besides that, a major hurdle for scholars seeking to learn the meaning of what appear to be arbitrary dots, dashes, circles and other symbols is the fact that the only extant texts contain many mistakes and inconsistencies, due to a lack of scholarly tradition among the people who originally engraved the symbols onto the tablets. In 10 years of work, Dr. Dahl has managed to decipher around 1,200 different symbols, but due to the difficulty of the decoding process he still lacks plenty of basic vocabulary.

The key to the decoding of the language that has mystified scholars for centuries is not only the technological breakthrough itself, but the ability to easily crowd-source the entire project via the internet – the images will be uploaded online to allow any and all linguistic cryptographers to contribute their knowledge and findings to the project.

Like the building of the famous Enigma machine during the Second World War, cryptology is very rarely one person doing all the work – it usually consists of a large team each contributing their worth towards cracking the code. The ability to make the images easily available to millions of people means that the code of the proto-Elamite writing system could finally be broken.

Source: quora.com

As a learner of Mandarin myself, one question that fellow Mandarin users often have is in marking the difference between 2 words that Chinese people use to describe foreign people: laowai (老外) and waiguoren (外国人).

Due to China’s history of isolationism, many Chinese people still see people in black or white terms: either they are “Chinese” or “not Chinese”. They don’t particularly differentiate, say, an American from a French person. Both of them are waiguoren, both of them are laowai. But the two words do actually conjure up slightly different nuances of meaning.

Many foreigners who have not had much experience of Mandarin think laowai is a perjorative term, since it literally means “old outsider” (whereas waiguoren simply means “foreign country person”). However, in Chinese, lao is actually used as an honorific to describe people that you have known a long time and know well enough to refer to them in such a way. This isn’t to say that laowai cannot be used as an insult, however – like so many things in Chinese (and languages in general), it depends entirely on context.

This reply to the very same question on quora.com, a crowd-sourced Q&A website, has more information:

Whether or not laowai 老外 is pejorative depends on context.

Many Chinese will argue that it’s not pejorative at all. Lao 老, after all, is an honorific denoting seniority and informality, such as when used with a surname: Lao Liu 老刘, “Old Liu”. Laowai is often used in a similar way to demonstrate informality, with the feeling that terms like waiguoren are too formal and stuffy. In certain circumstances, however, this informality can be interpreted as showing a lack of appropriate respect. If one were to refer to Hu Jintao, President of China, as Lao Hu, this would normally be interpreted as a lack of respect. In the same way, laowai can be interpreted as slightly disrespectful rather than as a term of endearment.

In some uses, laowai is clearly pejorative, for instance when used as an adjective. “You are too laowai” 你太老外了 literally means “You are too foreign”, but in fact carries the meaning “You are ignorant”.

Perhaps the best measure of whether a word is pejorative or not is to gauge what the subject himself/herself perceives. In my experience, most foreigners do not like being referred to as laowai except in the most informal of surroundings and by close friends who may use the term in a joking manner, similar to the way one might refer to a close Caucasian friend as a “honky” without causing offense.

Personally, I never use laowai to refer to myself or other foreigners.

There is nothing negative about the word itself; it’s all about how the word is used. In this sense it’s similar to “Chinaman”. There is nothing inherently pejorative about this term; it simply denotes “a man from China”. However, through widespread misuse this term became recognized as being racist. Laowai is nowhere near “Chinaman” in terms of negative connotation, but through misuse has also gained a certain pejorative sense.

Live in the City of Brotherly Love and need to improve your Mandarin? Take a look at some of the Chinese lessons Philadelphia has to offer.

I was asked recently by a co-worker what the correct grammar for this is – “The United States are big” or “The United States is big”. Although both sounds right in my mind, one (“is”) definitely sounded more right than the other.

The confusion obviously lies in whether “The United States” should be considered singular or plural. At first glance it seems like it should be plural – it refers to a collection of states, after all. However, it describes a singular unit – that is, the USA. However, the United States have not always been strictly “united”, even when they were first called so. So which one is ‘more’ correct?

Since this kind of thing is usually determined by popular usage, it’s great that we have tools such as Google Ngram Viewer, which allows you to choose several terms and pit them against each other. Ngrams Viewer will return their comparative frequency in written works from a vast corpus of books dating back as far as 1770.

Here’s the output graph:

So then, it appears to be a resounding win for “The United States is…” – ever since around 1880. It seems that the catalyst for this change was, as you’d expect, the Civil War, which ended up giving a far-reaching sense of unity to the USA, even in linguistic terms. “The United States is…” really starts to take off around 1910, during the Reconstruction.

Take a look at some of the English classes Miami has to offer!

Source: cnn.com

Last week, a 92-year old retired engineer in Scotland passed away, and with him died the first unique Scottish dialect to be lost in Scotland. Usually, regional minority dialects will end up blending into standard English and form a hybrid or mixed language. But in this case, the distinct dialect known as Cromarty fisherfolk has, with the death of its last remaining native speaker, now become extinct.

Cromarty fisherfolk is interesting in that not only does it not aspirate any “h” sound, but it is also devoid of any ‘wh’ sound – a feature unique only to this Scottish dialect. Therefore, what becomes ‘at, where becomes ‘ere, and so on.

Robert Millar, a linguist of the School of Language and Literature at Aberdeen University, has said that could be a telling sign of things to come. From the article:

“The loss of Cromarty is symptomatic of a greater, general decline in the use of the Scots language,” according to Director of Scottish Language Dictionaries Chris Robinson. “This should be a wake-up call to save other struggling dialects.”

Ten miles down the coast from Cromarty is Avoch, another sleepy fishing village with the closest surviving dialect to Cromarty fisherfolk, one that may also be endangered, according to Robinson. “It looks more than likely that this will go the same way as the Cromarty dialect,” he said.

According to Millar, out of the 6 or 7 thousand languages throughout the world, one or two die off every week, and the majority of languages are such minority tongues that they are spoken only by a couple of hundred speakers. In all, 96% of the world’s population speak only 4% of the languages.

But why should we care if yet another dialect is gone forever? Back to Millar:

Why mourn the loss of a language? “At a banal level, it’s a little bit of color in our lives is gone,” he said. “Any time something dies, it’s lost. Whether it be languages or species, we lose something. Everyone in the world loses something. Diversity surely is a good thing, and we’ve just lost a bit of it.”
Greater communication and interdependence among communities is resulting in “dialect homogenization,” Millar said.

And people tend to abandon their own languages for one of the larger languages for good reasons, according to Anthony Aristar, professor of linguistics at Eastern Michigan University and director of the school’s Institute for Language Information and Technology.

“They want modern conveniences; they want their children to have decent jobs,” he told CNN in a telephone interview. “All this requires being able to speak in the dominant language. So they see little use in preserving their languages.”

But the loss of a language often results in the loss of the stories that were told in that language, and in the cultural knowledge they contained. “Even medical know-how,” he said.

Source: andaman.org

In the 1992, language magazine Language Today had a feature on the world’s 10 most influential languages, written and researched by George Weber. This article was thoroughly researched (Weber spent 5 years compiling the data before writing up the article itself), and uses several surprisingly simple criteria to determine just how influential any given language is, awarding languages points for each of the following categories:

1. Number of primary speakers: max. 4 points
2. Number of secondary speakers: max. 6 points
5. Economic power of countries using the language: max. 8 points
4. Number of major areas of human acitivity in which the language is important: max. 8 points
3. Number and population of countries using the language: max. 7 points
6. Socio-literary prestige of the language: max. 4 points (plus an additional point for being an official UN language)

It is perhaps unsurprising that English, French and Spanish dominated the list, with Russian, Arabic and Chinese following behind.

It cannot be stressed enough that it is not inherent superiority, not linguistic but historical factors that have put English, French and Spanish where they are now.

Whatever the historical factors that have pushed English into the top position, they are still at work and look like continuing.

It should be a sobering thought, however, to any triumphalist impulse that in 100 AD Latin looked set to dominate its slice of the world forever.

It is also interesting to note that 1000 years ago, French was the language that would have topped the list, but the rise of English has brought its dominance to an end. It really makes you wonder what people will be speaking in another 1000 years!

However, using only certain criteria yielded very different results. For example, going only by number of native speakers, Chinese is spoken by 20.7% of the world’s population – the next in line is English with only 6.2%. However, it should be noticed that Chinese has many different dialects, some of which could almost be considered languages in their own right.

The data can be further broken down, and provides some fascinating results. Take a look at the article and see the results for yourself!

Idioms are funny things. In my efforts to get better at Mandarin, I have found that there are some things I can work out on my own, and some things that – even if I look them up and find out the meaning – completely flummox me until they’re explained to me by a native speaker.

One thing I recently discovered that is heavily in the latter category is the phrase 炒鱿鱼 (chǎo yóu yú). It literally means “fried squid”, 炒 being a very common word in the world of food for any fried dish, and 鱿鱼 simply meaning “squid”. However, after I heard the phrase come up several times in a conversation having seemingly nothing at all to do with food, I had to ask, why the fried squid?

As it turns out – and much to the amusement of my Chinese friends – their conversation had nothing to do with food at all. They were talking about an ex-colleague who had recently been sacked from their job. As it turns out, in Chinese the phrase 炒鱿鱼 (chǎo yóu yú) is an idiomatic phrase meaning ‘to be fired’.

It was only when they explained how this phrase came to be that I started to understand what was going on. To my surprise, the etymology has nothing to do with squid or frying, but more the shape of a fried squid. As anybody who has had fried calamari will know, squid curls into a little coil when you fry it, just like in the picture above. This is a reference to a long time ago in China, when itinerant workers would be provided lodgings by whoever employed them, and so if they were fired they would have to go back to the house, roll up their bed covers (卷铺盖 juǎn pū gài), and move out. Over time, due to the similarity between rolling up bedrolls and the shape of fried squid, the phrase 炒鱿鱼 (chǎo yóu yú) came to mean ‘to be fired’.

Mandarin certainly is an amazing language, but sometimes I feel like the more I learn, the more I realise just how much there is to take in!