Language Trainers Blog

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.

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.

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.

Source: dictionary.com

The word ‘psychopath’ is thrown around plenty on TV, but few may know the true definition of the mental disorder. Essentially, it’s an inability to empathize with others or establish any kind of meaningful relationship. However, this often means that a person exhibiting psychopathic behavior fits a certain pattern of other traits: extreme egocentricity, a failure to learn from experience, and a tendacy to treat other people as a means to further their own ends, rather than individuals in themselves.

Here’s an interesting article on a study recently performed by Jeffrey Hancock, a professor of communications at Cornell University. By analyzing the way convicted murderers speak – the words they use, the most common patterns of speech, etc. – they can build a model of ‘psychopathic’ language, and apply it to the real world. From the article:

They [psychopaths] tend to see people as means to their own ends, rather than as individuals. These emotional abnormalities manifest in their speech patterns in a few interesting ways. The psychopaths who were interviewed tended to use a lot of causal phrases like “so” and “because.” The researchers interpreted this to mean that they were explaining their crimes away as a “logical outcome of a plan (something that ‘had’ to be done to achieve a goal).’” In contrast, other convicted criminals who are not psychopaths tend to use more language around religion and their own guilt when describing their crime. The researchers observed other aberrations in psychopaths’ speech. Psychopaths in the study spoke of basic needs like food and money twice as much as the other subjects in the study, and they also use more disfluencies (phrases like “uh” or “umm”) to break up their speech.

The implications of this study mean that police could be able to build a sound psychological profile of people from the language used in their Facebook statuses or Twitter updates, or any posts on public sites like Craigslist, forums, and the like.

Here’s a fantastic web site if you’re learning a language and need some help with vocabulary (or in the case of langauges with different scripts, flashcards). After selecting the language you’re learning, memrise.com helps you learn with a gardening metaphor – it teaches you new words as ‘seeds’. These ‘seeds’ are then ‘watered’ through you testing yourself via a mixture of multiple choice questions and user input. Once your ‘seeds’ are ‘watered’ enough to become ‘plants’, you’ll have to keep them blossoming by revisiting the site and redoing the tests to prove that you recognize the words/characters you’ve learned up until that point, as well as adding new ‘seeds’ to your garden. Leave your ‘plants’ alone too long and they’ll wilt.

From there, you can ‘harvest’ new ‘seeds’ (i.e. learn new words/characters) and add them to your garden. Gradually your garden grows in size, and you’ll have to keep all the plants watered by continually re-testing yourself.

This novel flashcard concept brings an element of gaming into your study, and also enables you to track your progress in a rather unique way. More importantly, the site has a community of people who can assist your learning by providing helpful mnemonics and aide-memoires if you’re having trouble committing certain words or characters to memory.

Learning Chinese characters is occasionally very interesting, but mostly an arduous process, and Memrise has really helped me expand my vocabulary. When you get something wrong, it brings up the information page on the character in question, complete with tips on how to remember it next time. It also keeps track of all the characters I’m having trouble remembering, and gives them a little more emphasis during testing. Most importantly, it forces you to reinforce your knowledge by testing yourself before your plants wilt and die.

Try it out for yourself at memrise.com!

Here’s a great short film by Australian director Brian Fairbairn that has been doing the internet rounds lately. One of its purposes is to show how we can garner so much from just body language and speech intonation, even if we don’t know exactly what people are saying. In 4 minutes of conversation we can’t comprehend the actual dialogue, but we can discern what’s actually happening.

You’ll notice that there are quite a few English words in there – or rather, English phonemes. However, there’s never enough context to understand exactly what the characters are saying. The words used are often random enough to have you guessing, however, at 1:19 you can hear the word ‘crustacean’! It’s strange how the brain tries to make sense of it from the words you can understand, but then gets as lost as it would be if you were listening to another completely foreign language.

This is a little different from another popular video, titled “Prisencolinensinainciusol”, a music video made by an Italian TV show to demonstrate what English sounds like to Italians who can’t speak it.

The legendary Giacomo Casanova

This is a fantastic article about sexual eponyms – an eponym is a word derived from somebody’s name, or a place. There are hundreds of them in English, and we use them without ever thinking about their origins: for example, the Fahrenheit temperature scale is named after physicist Gabriel Fahrenheit. Likewise, a mausoleum is named after the ancient Carian leader Mausolus (Μαύσωλος), who had a huge tomb built for him by his sister and widow: now the word mausoleum refers to any grand tomb.

These eponyms, however, are more sexual in nature – words like sadism, masochism, and casanova are commonly used eponymous words, though most people simply use the words without being aware of their roots.

Here’s an excerpt from the article, interestingly-titled “the pervs behind the words” – you can read the whole article here.

Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

The words: masochism, sadomasochism

The obverse of a sadist is a masochist – someone who gets off on being abused – and no one could possibly deserve this label more than the person who inspired it, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. Besides having a sexual fetish named after him, Sacher-Masoch is best known for writing Venus in Furs, a 19th century novel about a man’s willing submission to a cruel woman who treats him as her slave. It was based on a true story – his own. In 1869, Sacher-Masoch actually signed a contract with his mistress in which he agreed to be her slave for six months (with the stipulation that she had to allow him time to write).

The term masochism was coined during Sacher-Masoch’s lifetime, and he was understandably not pleased. The man was a great writer, feminist, and opponent of antisemitism, and yet this is how he goes down in history. It was a form of abuse that was not to his liking.

Source: merriam-webster.com

The Merriam-Webster online dictionary’s definition for “literally” now includes a note on the ‘incorrect’ usage of the word:

2. : in effect : virtually

Since some people take sense 2 to be the opposite of sense 1, it has been frequently criticized as a misuse. Instead, the use is pure hyperbole intended to gain emphasis, but it often appears in contexts where no additional emphasis is necessary.

I know people who will literally start foaming at the mouth (hah) when people confuse the word “literally” with “figuratively”. However, this is English, and common usage dictates dictionary definitions – even if common usage is ‘wrong’. That being said, I’m surprised that the reason the definition was changed is claimed as “use of pure hyperbole intended to gain emphasis” – people say “I’m starving” if they’re very hungry, but the dictionary definition remains untouched for that word.

In the spirit of the English language, here are three more common words that used to have very the opposite meanings from their 21st century versions:

Terrific used to mean “horrible” or “frightful” (from the Latin verb terrere, ‘to frighten’. Nowadays it means the exact opposite – “great” or “wonderful”.

Manufactured used to mean “made by hand” explicitly. Again, from Latin manus (“hand”) and facere (“to make”). Nowadays it just means “made”, whether by hand or by machinery.

Awful used to mean, as the word itself implies, “full of awe” – as in, inspiring awe in a good way. Nowadays the word has a purely bad connotation – at some point, the word’s meaning remained the same but the connotation changed. The only way it has preserved its original meaning is mostly used in British English, as in “he has an awful lot of money“.

So, it just goes to show – sometimes English likes to mess with you.