Language Trainers Blog

Here’s a great tongue-in-cheek video on the history of English made by the folks at The Open University, dating from the Roman invasion, through the Norman Conquest, British Empire, and all the way to the modern age. It really does manage to show how many sources English has borrowed from: Latin, Greek, Anglo-Saxon, Viking, French, German, and many others. In fact, modern English borrows vocabulary from over 350 different languages, and new words continue to be coined every day.

The English language really does have a rich, fascinating history, and these videos really makes you appreciate just how far it’s evolved to become the world’s most commonly-spoken second language.

This video is a compilation of all ten one-minute-long videos. Enjoy!

Source: zompist.com

Here’s an interesting hypothetical question: what if the English writing system adopted pictograms rather than our traditional Roman alphabet? Well, for a start, it’d mean pretty much redesigning our written language from the ground up.

But Mark Rosenfelder from zompist.com has explored this hypothetical question in greater detail, coining “Yingzi” (英子), an English adaptation of Chinese characters, or “Hanzi” (汉字).

He has come up with a system of using basic pictograms for simple words such as man, tree, sun, moon and so on, and then using different additional strokes to change the phonetic classes (for example, changing sing to sting).

As somebody who is currently studying Hanzi, this is a pretty interesting idea. However, it’s impractical, and interesting really only as a study. Due to the complexity of English, with so many words borrowed from other languages and different inflections of the same words, we would end up with an absurdly complex hieroglyphic system that would be very difficult to learn, and very time-consuming to write.

Still though – it’s an interesting idea, and the article is still well worth a read!

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.

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.

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.

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!

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: endangeredalphabets.com

There are somewhere between 6,000 and 7,000 languages alive and active in the world today, but it is estimated that as many as half of them will be extinct by the end of this century. This means that not only many languages but also many alphabets and writing systems will be lost forever. Of these 6,000-7,000 remaining languages, there are only around 100 different alphabets in use.

But not if the Endangered Alphabets Project can help it – it has been discovered that of the 100 alphabets in use, around a third of them are endangered. That is to say, they are no longer being taught in schools, or being used by governments or commerce. They are used by elders, or monks, and are being passed down to the next generation only by word of mouth and tradition.

The project aims to put together a travelling exhibition, showcasing some of the world’s rarer writing systems in order to show their beauty and relevance to humanity. It hopes not only to stand as a record of these writing systems if and when they do become extinct, but also to show how similar alphabets evolved from one another, how they spread to other countries and cultures, and how they are more than just writing on a page or engravings in wood.

The founder of the project, Tim Brookes, also keeps a blog, which features posts and musings on various endangered alphabets.

Besides the occasional exception (such as the country Qatar), in English the letter Q is always followed by U – but we never question why this is the case. Why are these letters so closely linked?

It seems we owe this – along with so many other things in English – to Latin. The Classical Latin alphabet had fewer letters than we do today (for example U and V used to be one and the same), and Q was used as an alternative to C and K in certain situations. Latin orthography dictated that a Q should be followed by a U, and the habit stuck, making QU a common digraph.

From Wikipedia:

In the earliest Latin inscriptions, the letters C, K and Q were all used to represent the sounds /k/ and /g/ (which were not differentiated in writing). Of these, Q was used to represent /k/ or /g/ before a rounded vowel (e.g. “EQO” = ego), K before /a/, and C elsewhere. Later, the use of C (and its variant G) replaced most usages of K and Q: Q survived only to represent /k/ when immediately followed by a /w/ sound.

The same “QU” rule is also present in other Romance and Germanic languages, such as French and Spanish.

Most words in English that have a Q that isn’t followed by a U are naturalized words from Arabic (e.g. faqir), Chinese (e.g. qi) and Hebrew (e.g. qaddish). Most of the others are acronyms (e.g. NASDAQ, Compaq, etc.).