Language Trainers Blog

Source: kalimedia.com

For those interested in etymology (the study of where words come from), this is a fantastic resource. At first glance it may look like a standard atlas, but take a closer look at the names of places and you’ll see that the map doesn’t show the modern-day names, but the modern English translation of where the name came from. For example, San Francisco is marked “St. Little Frank One”, New York is “New Yew Tree Village”, Philadelphia is “Sibling Love”, and so on.

Some places have more obvious etymology than others (for example Vermont means “Green Mountain”, easily decipherable for anybody who has ever learned French), but some etymologies are truly fascinating.

The study of where places got their names from is known as toponymic etymology. The site gives some further insight into how most places got their names:

Many geographical names are clearly rooted in Man’s observation of his natural environment; the physical location of a settlement: “At the Foot of the Mountain” – Piedmont, the character of an important water course: “The Gentle One” – The Seine, or even just the local vegetation: “Under the Oaks” – Potsdam.

Unsurprisingly, countries and landscapes often derive their names from the characteristics of the people who lived there: “Great Land of the Tattooed” – Great Britain, whilst local mythology and regional rulers also frequently leave their legacy: “Isle of the Monster’s Eye” – Peleponnese, or “Illustrious Emperor” – Zaragoza.

If you’re interested in finding out more about the origins of countries, regions and cities, you can order separate fold-out maps of the USA, Europe or the UK for £4.99 (around $7.50) directly from the site, or a wall poster of the world or the USA for £14.99 (around $23).

Source: dialectblog.com

Here’s a great article about the difference between dialect and accent – and why Americans tend to get them mixed up, even though they refer to two very separate linguistic ideas.

Strangely enough, it often seems to be linked with race rather than area – Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader during the 2008 Presidential elections, famously said that Obama spoke “with no negro dialect” – the article’s author argues that “I doubt he would have mentioned a candidate’s ‘Tennessee dialect’ or ‘New York dialect’ (he probably would have used ‘accent’)”.

If you find yourself being confused between the two terms, remember that dialect is much more all-encompassing than accent. A dialect varies from others by grammar (sentence structure), vocabulary (words used) and phonology (sound). An accent simply refers to the pronunciation.

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.

Source: newscientist.com

Here’s a truly interesting article written by social psychologist James W. Pennebaker, on those little words that we never put much thought into – pronouns. Pronouns are the short words that we often substitute for other nouns – “I”, “you”, “he”, “she”, “it”, “they”, “we”, etc. What started as a study into how we use pronouns and other ‘function words’ – especially when talking about dramatic or traumatic events – became a life’s work for Pennebaker.

‘Function words’ (pronouns, articles (‘a/an’ and ‘the’), prepositions (like ‘to’, ‘for’, ‘from’, etc.), auxiliary verbs (like ‘is’ or ‘has’), conjunctions (‘and’, ‘but’, ‘or’, etc.), quantifiers like ‘few’ or ‘many’, and basic adverbs like ‘really’ or ‘very’) are those small words that don’t mean much by themselves, but are processed by the brain in a different way from ‘content words’ (nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs).

Here’s an excerpt – you can find the full article here.

By understanding language style, we gain a far clearer sense of the social and psychological processes affecting our behaviours.

What do I mean by style? In any given sentence, there are two basic types of word. The first is content words, which provide meaning. [...] The other type are “function” words. These serve quieter, supporting roles – connecting, shaping and organising the content words. They are what determines style.

Why make such a big deal about these [function] words? Because they are the keys to the soul. OK, maybe that’s an overstatement, but bear with me.

Function words are psychologically very revealing. They are used at high rates, while also being short and hard to detect. They are processed in the brain differently than content words. And, critically, they require social skills to use properly. It’s about time that these forgettable little words got their due.

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: crosswordcontest.blogspot.com

Let’s take a break from all the academic waxing linguistical for a minute, and have some fun – this crossword puzzle was made by crossword puzzle writer extraordinaire, Matt Gaffney, on his blog, “Matt Gaffney’s Weekly Crossword Contest”.

At first it seems like a pretty ordinary crossword puzzle, but the black squares arranged in a diagonal in the middle of the puzzle are actually a meta element of the puzzle itself – if you solve all the clues correctly, those squares will also form an extra word – a common method of transportation.

Click the image for the full sized version.

The amazing thing about this crossword is the fact that the 18 clues involved in the ‘hidden word’ are all ambiguous – they can be solved using more than one word. However, these words have been brilliantly chosen – one word fits, and one word is made by appending an extra letter to the start or end of the word to form another word that also fits the original clue. For example, “rose” and “arose” are synonyms, and “lock” and “clock” are both words you’d associate with “a basic function of the iPhone”. Take the extra letters added when forming the clue’s ‘alternative’ answer, and the secret answer forms in the middle – “escalator”.

The best thing? The squares themselves look like an escalator. Genius.

A lot of thought goes into the creation of crossword puzzles – even though it’s perfectly possible these days to do it all on a computer – but this one is certainly one of the cleverest puzzles I’ve ever seen.

The next in the series of posts exploring how numbers are rendered in different languages is Japanese.

Japanese, along with many other Asian languages like Mandarin Chinese, Cantonese and Korean, has a reputation for being fiendishly difficult to learn for native English speakers. While this is true in many ways, the number system is in fact pretty straightforward.

When I learned Japanese, counting from 1 to 10 was one of the first things we learned to do. It was only after we had mastered the first 10 numbers that our teacher told us that by learning just a couple more words, we could effectively now count to 99,999,999 in Japanese.

Unlike English’s irregular teens (eleven, twelve, thirteen instead of oneteen, twoteen, threeteen etc. or another more regular pattern) and having a different word for each multiple of ten (twenty, thirty, forty instead of twoty, threety, fourty etc.), Japanese numbers are entirely regular – much like in Chinese. As mentioned in a previous post, this could possibly be a contributing factor towards the stereotype of Asians being “good at math”. In Japanese, “thirty five” is literally “three ten five” (san-ju-go).

For larger numbers, English tends to favour grouping digits into threes before we introduce a new term. After a thousand, we have ten thousand and a hundred thousand before introducing the million. Then, once again, we have ten million and a hundred million before we have the billion. Not so in Japanese – a hundred is hyaku, a thousand is sen, and ten thousand is man – with the Yen being a currency that often stretches into the hundred thousands, man ends up being a pretty important number. From there, a hundred thousand is ju-man, literally “ten ten thousands”. A million is hyaku-man – “a hundred ten thousands”. Ten million is sen-man – “a thousand ten thousands”. While this takes a little getting used to, it still results in pretty much a perfectly regular counting system, besides a couple of slightly irregular pronunciations (e.g. 300 is san-byaku rather than san-hyaku, because it’s easier to say).

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.

There is another way, however – there is a ‘separate’ counting system that allows you to express a quantity without using the specific measure word. Unfortunately, this scale only goes from 1 to 10.

Source: nature.com/news

Here’s an old news article that talks about why English has so many irregularities when it comes to the past tenses of common verbs (e.g. “I am” -> “I was”, “I see” -> “I saw”, etc.). As it turns out, the reasons aren’t too surprising – like so many things in English, it relies on common usage.

The article compares such linguistic evolution to biological evolution – after all, the most often-used (and therefore useful) genes generally stay the same while the rest of the organism evolves. “To help” isn’t as common a verb as “to be” or “to have”, and so is more open to linguistic evolution – that is to say, the more frequently a word is used, the more it will change over time. The original past tense of “help” was an irregular form – “holp”. However, since the verb wasn’t used as often as other more common verbs, people tended to forget about the ‘special’ nature of the past participle, and simply lapsed into the ‘regular’ way of rendering a verb in the past tense – adding -ed to the end. Thus, over time, “holp” became “helped”.

Lieberman was struck by this idea when he learned that the ten most common verbs in English (be, have, do, go, say, can, will, see, take, get) are all irregular. Instead of their past tenses ending in ‘-ed’, as do 97% of English verbs, they take the peculiar forms of was, had, did, went, said, could, would, saw, took and got.

Researchers suppose that this is because often-used irregulars are easy to remember and get right. Seldom-used irregulars, on the other hand, are more likely to be forgotten, so speakers often mistakenly apply the ‘-ed’ rule. The most commonly used word that they found this happened to was the verb ‘to help’ – the past tense used to be ‘holp’, but is now ‘helped’.

You can read the whole article here. Very interesting stuff!

Source: my.vocabularysize.com

If you’ve ever wondered just how many English words you truly know, here’s a test that does a pretty good job at estimating the number of English word families you recognize.

A word family is a set of related words by form – for example the verb “to conquer”, the noun “conqueror”, and the adjective “conquered” and any other related forms are all one word family.

The test consists of 140 questions – each time it gives you a word, and uses that word in an example sentence. You then have a choice of 4 definitions for that word. You simply need to choose the definition that best matches the word given. The whole test takes around 10-15 minutes, and you get your results immediately at the end.

I scored 23,000 word families – can you do any better?

Here’s a great playlist on YouTube of 10 one-minute videos gradually detailing the history and evolution of the English language. They’re presented in an entertaining, bite-sized, yet educational and engrossing way.

The videos are provided by the Open University, a British institution that provides distance learning to a huge number of people.

Here’s the first video in the series – “Anglo Saxon”.