Language Trainers Blog

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.

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!

Following on from an earlier post on denominalisation – the increasingly popular habit of turning nouns into verbs (e.g. “Facebooking”, “friending”, etc.), here’s legendary comic artist Bill Watterson’s take on the matter through his greatest creation, Calvin & Hobbes.

Click for the full size version.

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!