Language Trainers Blog

A palindrome is a fairly well-known term for a word or phrase that reads the same forwards and backwards. For example, “Madam, I’m Adam” is a palindromic phrase, as is “Go hang a salami. I’m a lasagna hog”.

Palindromes get trickier the longer they get: the longest palindrome I know is “A man, a plan, a canal, Panama!” – though somebody with the aid of a dictionary and an algorithm has created the world’s longest palindrome, with 17,826 words that read the same forwards and backwards.

A variant of a palindrome is a semordnilap. They’re like palindromes, but reading the words backwards creates different words, instead (‘semordnilap’ is ‘palindromes’ backwards). For example, diaper / repaid, or stressed / desserts.

An ambigram, however, is different. An ambigram is something that reads the same when you look at it from another direction, orientation or viewpoint. That is to say, if you turn a word upside down, you can still read the same word. Here’s an example, taken from Dan Brown’s book “Angels and Demons”:

Here you can see the four words “earth”, “air”, “fire” and “water” – but if you turn the image upside down, you get this:

The same four words can still easily be read, even though the image has been rotated through 180 degrees.

You can get much more complex ambigrams than these simple ones – check out the Wikipedia page to see more!

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!

Many English speakers who enjoy long words will have heard of the 45-letter word pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis. The word did not come about organically, however: it was invented in 1935 by Everett M. Smith, president of the National Puzzler’s League, to serve as the longest word in English. It is primarily made up of common Latin and Greek prefixes and suffixes, and means “a lung disease caused by inhaling very small particles of silica dust”. The rather easier to remember 28-letter antidisestablishmentarianism is also a classic choice for fans of long words – meaning “against the disestablishment of the church”.

However, many languages, such as German, Hungarian and Turkish, are very agglutinative: that is to say, longer words are formed by adding shorter words on to enhance their meaning. Here’s an example, taken from Wikipedia (click for the full sized version):

It is actually possible in Turkish to continue adding suffixes to words infinitely, creating an endless word that makes grammatical sense. However, if the same suffix is repeated too many times, the word becomes nonsense.

So, the longest word in Turkish is generally accepted to be muvaffakiyetsizleştiricileştiriveremeyebileceklerimizdenmişsinizcesine, which (like pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis above) mostly comprises a variety of different suffixes and prefixes. The word comes to mean “as if you were one of those people we could not easily turn into a maker of unsuccessful ones”. This word isn’t likely to come up in conversation any time soon, but the point is that it’s grammatically sound, and could easily be understood by a native Turkish speaker.

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: medicalxpress.com

I don’t usually refer to medical documents on this blog, but I thought this was a fascinating discovery from the neuroscientists at Georgetown University Medical Center (GUMC), and well worth linking to. Their studies showed that readers who are able to read especially quickly are relying on a ‘visual dictionary’ in their heads, which helps them immediately recognise common words. These findings are contrary to the long-held belief that our brains work on phonics, ‘sounding out’ words while reading in our heads.

How exactly did they discover this? Through a series of fMRI scans performed while test subjects were reading texts, and keeping track of which neurons were firing when each word was encountered.

Glezer and her co-authors tested word recognition in 12 volunteers using fMRI. They were able to see that words that are different, but sound the same, like “hare” and “hair” activate different neurons, akin to accessing different entries in a dictionary’s catalogue. “If the sounds of the word had influence in this part of the brain we would expect to see that they activate the same or similar neurons, but this was not the case, ‘hair’ and ‘hare’ looked just as different as “hair” and “soup”. This suggests that all we use is the visual information of a word and not the sounds.”

This reminds me somewhat of the well-known study performed by researchers at Cambridge University, wherein they showed that so long as the first and last letters of a word were recognizable, you could scramble the other letters in the words of a sentence and the brain can still comprehend the meaning. For example: “Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae.”

“One camp of neuroscientists believes that we access both the phonology and the visual perception of a word as we read them and that the area or areas of the brain that do one, also do the other, but our study proves this isn’t the case,” says the study’s lead investigator, Laurie Glezer, Ph.D., a postdoctoral research fellow. She works in the Laboratory for Computational Cognitive Neuroscience at GUMC, led by Maximilian Riesenhuber, Ph.D., who is a co-author.

“What we found is that once we’ve learned a word, it is placed in a purely visual dictionary in the brain. Having a purely visual representation allows for the fast and efficient word recognition we see in skilled readers,” she says. “This study is the first demonstration of that concept.”

This study also gives a somewhat more elegant explanation for dyslexia – the brains of dyslexic people have a much smaller or less effective ‘visual dictionary’, and so they generally find reading a slow and laborious process – especially for words that they haven’t come across before. However, due to the findings of this study, it could be possible to help improve these skills at a younger age and thus offset the reading difficulties experienced by those with dyslexia.

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!

The new video game from famed studio Bethesda, Skyrim, is the fifth instalment of the Elder Scrolls saga, and puts the player in a medieval fantasy landscape that has suddenly come under siege by dragons.

I have previously posted about both Klingon and Na’vi – invented languages for Gene Roddenberry’s em>Star Trek TV show and James Cameron’s Avatar movie respectively. Skyrim has adopted a similar technique to give their world more depth and character, and it takes on a pivotal role in gameplay. The player’s character is the only one who can speak the Dragon language, and so is uniquely positioned to fight them off, and Bethesda arms the player with a surprisingly rich linguistic framework with which to do it.

The Draconian script, resembling the kinds of claw marks and scratches a 3-taloned creature would make, resembles Cuneiform, the language of ancient Mesopotamia and one that has also been mentioned before on this very blog.

The further into the game the player delves, the more important it is to have some mastery over the Draconic tongue. Rather than going the Avatar route and asking a linguistics professor to invent an entire language and syntax that was barely used in the final movie, Skyrim‘s Dragon language was invented entirely in-house by Bethesda, and makes for a surprisingly concrete addition to an already rich virtual world.

Source: matadornetwork.com

Here’s one of the great things about English – since it is ruled by popular usage, all it would take for words that have long fallen into disuse to come back into fashion is for people to start using them again.

A blogger is trying to do just that, by taking a selection of 20 words from Erin McKean’s series on weird words – titled Weird and Wonderful Words and giving definitions so people can start slipping them into conversation.

The words include wonderful terms like jargogle (to confuse), jollux (a fat person), ludibrious (to be an object of mockery), brannigan (a drinking spree or ‘bender’), and illecebrous (alluring or attractive).

Using words like these – many of which haven’t been uttered in centuries – would confuse the people around you, but who knows… maybe one of them will take off. The internet has certainly proven itself to be a great tool in coining neologisms and spreading them around the world!

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.