Language Trainers Blog

English is abundant in idioms and proverbs, for example: “kill two birds with one stone”, “too many cooks spoil the broth”, and “woke up on the wrong side of the bed”. These are ingrained in our language, and we use them almost without thinking about their literal meanings.

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.

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!