The original definition of an internet troll is somebody who purposefully posts something inflammatory or purposefully incorrect online in order to gain the attention and ire of fellow internet users. However, these days it is used in a general way to describe anybody who posts malicious or offensive on the internet. Trolls tend to target places that are easy to sabotage or have a large audience that are otherwise sympathetic, like Wikipedia, or Facebook memorial and tribute pages for deceased people. Due to the anonymity of the internet it is very difficult to locate and prosecute offenders.

This has sparked linguistic experts at the university of Central Lancashire in England to begin development on an automated system to track and identify certain word patterns and vocabulary often used by these malicious users. From the article:

Claire Hardaker, lecturer in linguistics and English language at UCLAN, said: “Everyone has a unique way of writing, of putting certain words together, which is subconscious.

“Many teenagers say they are able to identify who sent a text to them – just by the style of writing and word habits or the way the words are written.

“Someone might be pretending to be someone else, but by analysing the way they write online, we can determine a probable, age, gender – even a probable region from where they come from.

“In its simplest form, people use different words for things – for example a bread roll. Some people would say a tea cake, some people would say a barm – it is these sort of elements that help to narrow down a search.”

It is proving hard for authorities to trace so-called trolls and there have only be two people in England successfully prosecuted.

In related news, next Tuesday is Safer Internet Day, an annual event with the purpose of encouraging people to be safer online. Remember: don’t feed the trolls.

Learning Chinese is difficult for many reasons, but one of my main weaknesses is learning hanzi, the Chinese pictographic characters. Although some of them make sense (e.g. 川 [chuān], meaning “river”, looks kind of like a river; or 门 [mén], meaning “gate”, looks like a gate), some are a little more cryptic, and some require leaping a few mental hurdles to remember consistently.

While sites like memrise.com are very helpful in committing characters to memory, after a while it gets a little stale. In an effort to make rote learning more interesting, a company have released Fridgelingo in Chinese, a range of fridge magnets that you can rearrange to make phrases.

Very similar to those fridge magnet poetry sets, these magnets have the Chinese character, the pinyin so you know how to pronounce it, and the English translation. There are 3 sets, and each one is tailored to a specific topic (food, talking to your ayi (maid), and sex). The magnets can even be used to leave messages for your maid (“please wash the dishes and make the bed”) or start a shopping list.

Since these are the kinds of things that people like to play around with, and since the fridge is an indispensible part of the house, these magnets help make it a little more fun and interesting to learn Chinese characters.

All 3 sets of magnets are available to order from fridgelingo.com or iwantone.cn.

According to painstaking calculations, Shakespeare used 17,667 different words throughout all his works, and at least 1 in 10 of these words had never been used before. That’s somewhere in the region of 2,000 words that Shakespere coined himself. Among them are common terms such as lonely, excellent, submerged, countless, dwindle, hurry and hint – words without which it would be quite difficult to imagine present-day English. While it’s true that he lived in an era when the English language was going through something of a growth spurt, with new terms and ideas being invented constantly; it’s still an amazing achievement to have made such a major contribution to the language’s evolution.

He also coined many phrases throughout his plays, for example “in a pickle”, “all that glitters is not gold”, “foregone conclusion”, “one fell swoop”, “heart’s content”, “up in arms”, “vanish into thin air”, “pound of flesh” and “in the twinkling of an eye”. Perhaps it’s more a testament to his skill not so much that he invented such phrases, but that these phrases have survived to modern times.

The Angles (where we get the word English) were originally a Germanic tribe hailing from Denmark, and they inhabited the British Isles after the fall of the Roman Empire. The Saxons joined them later, and the Anglo-Saxon language later flourished, but it was not finished there. The Vikings brought their language to the islanders, and even later the French, and all the time the English language continued to grow, develop and evolve with all the new vocabulary and linguistic influences.

Nowadays, it’s very difficult even to speak English without using words borrowed from other sources – a great deal of English vocabulary comes from Latin, Greek, German, French and other languages besides, and even extremely common vocabulary like street, wine, marriage, take and husband are non-Anglish in origin.

However, Anglish – a name coined by Paul Jennings writing a series of articles for Punch in 1966 which riffed on how English would have developed without the Norman conquests – still exists, even if it is a purposeful return to the language’s roots. The Anglish Moot is a wiki-type site composed wholly in a form of modern English without any loanwords at all. While it can be a little work to get through, Anglish is pretty mutually comphrensible with modern-day English speakers. Howver, it does give you something of a new appreciation for just how many loanwords English uses on a daily basis.

take the first few paragraphs of the article for the USA, for example (or as it is known in Anglish, The Banded Folkdoms of Americksland (BFA):

The Banded Folkdoms of Americksland (BFA) is the most dwelt-in land in the landstretch of North Americksland. Its makeup is that of an evenly banded rike, with three branches of rike: the Leaderly, the Lawmootly, and the Lawlordly. The foremost tongue in the land is English, though some Spanish is spoken also.

Americksland, its shortened name, has the greatest landgeld and warband in the world, and is thought to be the world’s lone overrike, since the fall of the Band of Workermootly Kithish Commonwealths (BWKC).

Americksland was banded with England until the Americkish Uprising, which began with the Saying Forth of the Selfhood of the Banded Folkdoms of Americksland in 1776. Americksland has since fought other wars, namely: the War of 1812, its war with Mexico, the Americkish Kith War, its war with Spain, and the two World Wars.

Not recommended for younger learners, Swearport allows you to explore the various vulgarities in a multitude of different languages, and is available for both iOS and Android.

While swearing is neither funny nor clever, it can actually be an important part of speaking a language fluently. It is said that no matter how proficient they are at speaking another language, people always return to their native tongue when uttering profanities due to surprise or pain, but with the help of Swearport you can also become proficient in expressing yourself in an intense way in your non-native language.

The app’s marketing blurb claims that “Swearport lets you become a global swearing master”, and not only gives you a list of rude words, but even an audio pronunciation for each term from a native speaker. It even gives an “intensity rating” for each word, letting you know just how offensive each term is considered to native speakers.

This is one app that you may need to be a little careful with…

• Swearport for iOS
• Swearport for Android

A friend asked me last night why we sing a song called “Auld Lang Syne”, and what it even means. I knew it was a traditional Scottish song and that the words were penned by legendary Scottish poet Robert Burns, but as far as what the words meant, I was at a loss.

After a quick Google (remember the days when your phone couldn’t tell you anything you ever wanted to know?), we found out that auld lang syne literally translates to “old long since” (or rather, “a long time ago”).

Here’s the full song, with a modern English translation:

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
and never brought to mind ?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
and auld lang syne* ?

CHORUS
For auld lang syne, my jo (or my dear),
for auld lang syne,
we’ll tak a cup o’ kindness yet,
for auld lang syne.

And surely ye’ll be your pint-stowp !
and surely I’ll be mine !
And we’ll tak a cup o’ kindness yet,
for auld lang syne.

CHORUS

We twa hae run about the braes,
and pu’d the gowans fine ;
But we’ve wander’d mony a weary fit,
sin auld lang syne.

CHORUS

We twa hae paidl’d i’ the burn,
frae morning sun till dine ;
But seas between us braid hae roar’d
sin auld lang syne.

CHORUS

And there’s a hand, my trusty fiere !
and gie’s a hand o’ thine !
And we’ll tak a right gude-willy waught,
for auld lang syne.

CHORUS

English translation:

Should old acquaintance be forgot,
and never brought to mind ?
Should old acquaintance be forgot,
and old lang syne ?

CHORUS
For auld lang syne, my dear,
for auld lang syne,
we’ll take a cup of kindness yet,
for auld lang syne.

And surely you’ll buy your pint cup !
and surely I’ll buy mine !
And we’ll take a cup o’ kindness yet,
for auld lang syne.

CHORUS

We two have run about the slopes,
and picked the daisies fine ;
But we’ve wandered many a weary foot,
since auld lang syne.

CHORUS

We two have paddled in the stream,
from morning sun till dine† ;
But seas between us broad have roared
since auld lang syne.

CHORUS

And there’s a hand my trusty friend !
And give us a hand o’ thine !
And we’ll take a right good-will draught,
for auld lang syne.

CHORUS

For example, “a murder of crows”, “a bed of eels”, “a parliament of owls”, “an army of caterpillars”, “a cluster of spiders”, and “a streak of tigers”.

Some collective nouns even change depending on the nature of the group in question. For example, geese are usually referred to as a “flock” or a “gaggle”, but these terms should only be used if the geese are on land. In flight, they should be referred to as a “skein”; if they are flying close, then it’s “a plump of geese”.

For a detailed list of the appropriate collective nouns to use in any situation, take a look at the Wikipedia entry.

English is not unique in using different terms to define different groups. Japanese, for example, takes it even further with measure words, as described in a previous post:

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.

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.

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.

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.