Language Trainers Blog

Source: quora.com

As a learner of Mandarin myself, one question that fellow Mandarin users often have is in marking the difference between 2 words that Chinese people use to describe foreign people: laowai (老外) and waiguoren (外国人).

Due to China’s history of isolationism, many Chinese people still see people in black or white terms: either they are “Chinese” or “not Chinese”. They don’t particularly differentiate, say, an American from a French person. Both of them are waiguoren, both of them are laowai. But the two words do actually conjure up slightly different nuances of meaning.

Many foreigners who have not had much experience of Mandarin think laowai is a perjorative term, since it literally means “old outsider” (whereas waiguoren simply means “foreign country person”). However, in Chinese, lao is actually used as an honorific to describe people that you have known a long time and know well enough to refer to them in such a way. This isn’t to say that laowai cannot be used as an insult, however – like so many things in Chinese (and languages in general), it depends entirely on context.

This reply to the very same question on quora.com, a crowd-sourced Q&A website, has more information:

Whether or not laowai 老外 is pejorative depends on context.

Many Chinese will argue that it’s not pejorative at all. Lao 老, after all, is an honorific denoting seniority and informality, such as when used with a surname: Lao Liu 老刘, “Old Liu”. Laowai is often used in a similar way to demonstrate informality, with the feeling that terms like waiguoren are too formal and stuffy. In certain circumstances, however, this informality can be interpreted as showing a lack of appropriate respect. If one were to refer to Hu Jintao, President of China, as Lao Hu, this would normally be interpreted as a lack of respect. In the same way, laowai can be interpreted as slightly disrespectful rather than as a term of endearment.

In some uses, laowai is clearly pejorative, for instance when used as an adjective. “You are too laowai” 你太老外了 literally means “You are too foreign”, but in fact carries the meaning “You are ignorant”.

Perhaps the best measure of whether a word is pejorative or not is to gauge what the subject himself/herself perceives. In my experience, most foreigners do not like being referred to as laowai except in the most informal of surroundings and by close friends who may use the term in a joking manner, similar to the way one might refer to a close Caucasian friend as a “honky” without causing offense.

Personally, I never use laowai to refer to myself or other foreigners.

There is nothing negative about the word itself; it’s all about how the word is used. In this sense it’s similar to “Chinaman”. There is nothing inherently pejorative about this term; it simply denotes “a man from China”. However, through widespread misuse this term became recognized as being racist. Laowai is nowhere near “Chinaman” in terms of negative connotation, but through misuse has also gained a certain pejorative sense.

Live in the City of Brotherly Love and need to improve your Mandarin? Take a look at some of the Chinese lessons Philadelphia has to offer.

I was asked recently by a co-worker what the correct grammar for this is – “The United States are big” or “The United States is big”. Although both sounds right in my mind, one (“is”) definitely sounded more right than the other.

The confusion obviously lies in whether “The United States” should be considered singular or plural. At first glance it seems like it should be plural – it refers to a collection of states, after all. However, it describes a singular unit – that is, the USA. However, the United States have not always been strictly “united”, even when they were first called so. So which one is ‘more’ correct?

Since this kind of thing is usually determined by popular usage, it’s great that we have tools such as Google Ngram Viewer, which allows you to choose several terms and pit them against each other. Ngrams Viewer will return their comparative frequency in written works from a vast corpus of books dating back as far as 1770.

Here’s the output graph:

So then, it appears to be a resounding win for “The United States is…” – ever since around 1880. It seems that the catalyst for this change was, as you’d expect, the Civil War, which ended up giving a far-reaching sense of unity to the USA, even in linguistic terms. “The United States is…” really starts to take off around 1910, during the Reconstruction.

Take a look at some of the English classes Miami has to offer!

Source: itchyfeetcomic.com

I think anybody who is in the process of learning another language knows this feeling all too well – you’re at a stage when you can communicate reasonably well, you can express your thoughts and opinions on a variety of topics… and then your confidence is utterly shaken when you’re suddenly faced with a small gap in your vocabulary that suddenly becomes a yawning chasm.

This happens a lot to me here in China, where it seems that I can be doing absolutely fine in a conversation until a word comes up that I don’t understand, and suddenly I lose all sense of context. Only one way to fix it – study more vocabulary!

Credit to the great webcmomic Itchy Feet, which often features comics about language learning and expat life. This comic is talking about German, but it really could be talking about any language! Take a look at all the German classes Vancouver has to offer.

While the term seems rather… wordy, initial-stress-derived nouns are something that can be a dead giveaway when telling a native English speaker and a very proficient non-native speaker apart. So, what is it exactly?

Initial-stress-derived nouns, simply put, is a process in English whereby the stress of a verb moves to the first syllable in the word when it becomes a noun or adjective. Still confused? Here are some examples:

Record (v): “I forgot to record my TV show.”
Record (n): “Usain Bolt has broken the 100m world record again!”

Permit (v): “I’m sorry, Dave. I can’t permit you to do that.”
Permit (n): “Looks like my parking permit has expired.”

Insult (v): “There’s no need to insult me!”
Insult (n): “That movie was an insult to my intelligence.”

Even though I’ve highlighted the stressed syllable in bold, native English speakers can do this automatically via context, on the fly, just as we can instantly differentiate between read (“I love to read books”) and read (“I read 3 books last week”). Sometimes the spelling of a word will change, which helps (e.g. envelope / envelop), but there are a surprisingly large number of initial-stress-derived nouns in the English language that are spelled exactly the same but pronounced differently, and we use them every day without even thinking about it.

For a non-native English speaker, this kind of flexible word stress can be a minefield, and something that they may never fully master. In a way, initial-stress-derived nouns are something of a “secret handshake” for English speakers.

Thanks to the depth of English’s vocabulary, English is a little more prone to little ‘easter eggs’ like this.

Back in the 60s, famous logologist (a studier of words) Dmitri Borgmann came up with a sentence that is pretty impressive in a certain way, while also making complete sense. Here’s the sentence in question – see if you can work out what feat of vocabulary engineering makes it impressive!

I do not know where family doctors acquired illegibly perplexing handwriting; nevertheless, extraordinary pharmaceutical intellectuality counterbalancing indecipherability transcendentalizes intercommunication’s incomprehensibleness.”

The fact that the sentence gets increasingly loquacious (or, rather, sesquipedalian) is a big clue as to why this sentence is so impressive. It starts with a 1-letter word, then with each successive word increases the word length by a single letter, all the way to 20 letters – while managing to maintain sense (and also being quite witty, too).

This probably won’t make you any more popular at parties, but I still think it’s pretty cool!

Source: xkcd.com

Randall Monroe’s popular nerdy webcomic XKCD usually focuses on maths, physics and everyday situations, but his love for language and etymology occasionally comes to the fore.

A few days ago he posted a strip titled “Cautionary Ghost”, which deals with the ever-controversial prescriptivism vs descriptivism argument over the word ‘literally’. Some believe that the misuse of ‘literally’ is a heinous crime that ought to be corrected every time somebody makes the mistake; others believe we should allow the meaning of the word change to reflect its new usage (which is a lot more like the word ‘figuratively’ – i.e. not literally at all).

No matter on which side of the debate you stand, I think Monroe’s take on it is pretty amusing, and helps put it in perspective. Click the thumnail for full size.

Source: sporcle.com

Here’s a fun little game on Sporcle, a web site for trivia and word games.

You’re given 26 words that mean ‘nonsense’, and you have 10 minutes to match each one with its more specific definition or etymology.

I got 20 out of 26: can you do better? You can take the test here.

Source: languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu

Popular linguistics and language blog Language Log latched on to a post on a “grammar fail” blog that featured a screenshot of one of my grammatical pet peeves: a confusion of its and it’s.

As the more grammatically aware will know, the words get confused often due to the fact that apostrophes usually imply possession (e.g. “This is Fred’s shoe”) or missing letters (e.g. “I didn’t do it”). In the case of its and it’s, one implies possession and the other is short for “it is”, so it’s not surprising that some people forget the rule of which one to use in a given situation. The way I’ve always remembered it is that his and hers – also third person possessive pronouns – do not have apostrophes, so neither should its. It’s is always short for “it is”.

Anyhow, the “grammar fail” quote in question is “milk it for all it’s worth”. While its is usually used in this context, this Language Log post nicely sums up why “it’s” can also be perceived as the correct form to use, whether the author intended it to be or not:

[...] Fiona Hanington pointed out to Language Log that it’s not necessarily a fail. It’s the wrong spelling if worth is the noun meaning “value”, so the intended meaning was “Milk it for all the worth (= value) that it has.” The genitive pronoun its is not spelled with an apostrophe; the right spelling would be Milk it for all its worth. However, there’s another meaning, where worth is an adjective: it could be intended to mean “Milk it for all that it is worth.” And there the apostrophe would be correct (indeed, required): Milk it for all it’s worth. (English is loaded with little gotcha things of this sort, isn’t it?) Since both mean roughly the same thing (they put it in different ways, but it’s hard to imagine one of the meanings making a true claim where the other didn’t), Fiona is right to note that this is one of the very rare cases where it’s and its are both correct in the same context with the same meaning. You won’t find many of those.

Such instances of both forms being correct are rare, but as this goes to show, they do still happen.

Idioms are funny things. In my efforts to get better at Mandarin, I have found that there are some things I can work out on my own, and some things that – even if I look them up and find out the meaning – completely flummox me until they’re explained to me by a native speaker.

One thing I recently discovered that is heavily in the latter category is the phrase 炒鱿鱼 (chǎo yóu yú). It literally means “fried squid”, 炒 being a very common word in the world of food for any fried dish, and 鱿鱼 simply meaning “squid”. However, after I heard the phrase come up several times in a conversation having seemingly nothing at all to do with food, I had to ask, why the fried squid?

As it turns out – and much to the amusement of my Chinese friends – their conversation had nothing to do with food at all. They were talking about an ex-colleague who had recently been sacked from their job. As it turns out, in Chinese the phrase 炒鱿鱼 (chǎo yóu yú) is an idiomatic phrase meaning ‘to be fired’.

It was only when they explained how this phrase came to be that I started to understand what was going on. To my surprise, the etymology has nothing to do with squid or frying, but more the shape of a fried squid. As anybody who has had fried calamari will know, squid curls into a little coil when you fry it, just like in the picture above. This is a reference to a long time ago in China, when itinerant workers would be provided lodgings by whoever employed them, and so if they were fired they would have to go back to the house, roll up their bed covers (卷铺盖 juǎn pū gài), and move out. Over time, due to the similarity between rolling up bedrolls and the shape of fried squid, the phrase 炒鱿鱼 (chǎo yóu yú) came to mean ‘to be fired’.

Mandarin certainly is an amazing language, but sometimes I feel like the more I learn, the more I realise just how much there is to take in!

Source: princeston.edu/~lingclub

The University of Oregon have come up with a fascinating selection of linguistic puzzles, and they’re free to play! While certainly challenging your brain, they may also introduce you to a few lesser-known minority languages.

The vast majority are basically linguistic logic puzzles – after being given a few examples of vocabulary from that language, you are then asked to render some other words in the target language.

The very first language is Agta, an endangered language from a northern island in the Philippines. With only around 600 speakers, the vast majority of English speakers have never heard (and probably will never hear) of it, but its morphology and word formation happen to work well for this kind of logic puzzle.

Agta is just one of around 30 languages featured in the linguistic challenges. Check them out for yourself here – test your linguistic side and see how well you do!