Language Trainers Blog

As someone who is currently learning Mandarin, I find the language very challenging – both to speak and to write – as well as extremely quirky. It is, however, a very satisfying language to learn, as it’s almost impossible to learn to speak Chinese without learning a little about Chinese culture.

One element I find especially interesting is the way Chinese combines words to form new words or phrases. A much earlier post touches on this, discussing how Chinese has to combine ideas to give names to modern concepts like the computer:

The age of the Chinese language means that it has to adapt itself to new concepts and ideas. For example, Mandarin for ‘train’ is 火车 (huǒ chē), which literally means “fire car”. Likewise, a computer – 电脑 (diànnǎo) – is an “electric brain”; and a helicopter – 直升机 (zhí shēng jī) – is a “straight-rising machine”.

However, Chinese also mixes together everyday words to bring a new meaning to the combination. Two good examples of this actually concern combining words with opposite meanings: zuǒyòu (左右) and dōngxi (东西).

On their own, zuǒ (左) and yòu (右) mean “left” and “right” respectively. Put them together, however, and you get the word for ‘about’ or ‘around’. For example, when Chinese people ask me how long I’ve been living in China, I reply “Yī nián zuǒyòu” (一年左右) – “about one year”.

Onto the second example – the individual words dōng (东) and xī (西) mean “east” and “west”, but together they form a multi-purpose word for ‘thing’. My first few months in China were plagued with me pointing at food and other objects in shops, and not knowing the word for that object, asking the shopkeeper “Zhège dōngxi shì duōshǎo qián?” (这个东西是多少钱) – “how much is this thing?”. It’s a word that I still often use, and so do most Chinese people.

The strange thing is, both of these combinations make a certain amount of sense. Sure, it’s not as literal as saying hónglǜdēng (红绿灯) for “traffic light” (literally “red green light”), but there’s a certain degree of poetry to the words.

Recently, having started learning Chinese characters, a few realizations have hit me. One of these was the word mǎshàng, which means “soon”. I never gave much thought to the word until I learned the characters: 马上. The second character, shàng (上) is a very common character with many meanings, but usually means ‘on’ or ‘next to’ (for example, the city in which I live, Shànghǎi (上海), means “next to the sea”). The first character, mǎ (马), means “horse” – so the word literally means “on a horse”.

Presumably, in ancient China, since horse was the fastest method of travel, anybody on a horse would be arriving soon. I don’t know if that’s the actual etymology, but I really want it to be!

Source: news.bbc.co.uk

“John’s chick is proper buff but she switched on her man the other day ‘cos he wanted to jam with his bred’rins instead of taking her out to the cinema. She was proper vexed and dust out. It was bare jokes.”

Be honest, how much of that did you understand? If the answer is ‘not much’, then don’t worry – you’re not alone.

A while ago, the BBC performed a small study on the slang terms used by children from schools across the United Kingdom, and found that the vocabulary used varied even more than they thought it would.

With England being such a small country in comparison to the USA, it’s often amazing to learn that their cultural and linguistic variation is just as pronounced – if not more pronounced – than on our side of the Atlantic. While a New Yorker and somebody from Alabama can understand one another without too much difficulty, the devil is in the details. Particular terms, words and phrases are the giveaway and often the obstacle that prevents total comprehension.

With children now growing up as part of the “Facebook generation”, there is even more opportunity for words and phrases to spread. Sites like Twitter can spread ideas around even faster and more efficiently than TV or music ever could. While there are many ‘universal’ phrases that have penetrated adolescent slang (for example, “LOL”), the regional differences of the slang terms most often used is surprising, and occasionally makes it extremely difficult to follow even simple conversations.

For those still curious, here’s the ‘translation’ of the above paragraph into plain English – the same paragraph was rendered using the slang of the 5 schools participating in the study. If you want to see the other 4 ‘translations’.

“John’s girlfriend is really pretty. But she got mad with him the other day because he wanted to hang out with his friends rather than take her to the cinema. She got really angry and stormed off. It was very funny.”

The Welsh language (known to its speakers as Cymraeg) is a language dating back to the 6th century, and is spoken daily in the small country of Wales, in the United Kingdom, by around 60% of people living there. While it is considered a minority language, the number of speakers continues to grow due to a number of measurements by Welsh authorities who want to promote the continued use of the language.

To many outsiders, the Welsh accent sounds slightly odd, as its phonology is quite rare – many of the sounds required for speaking Welsh do not exist in English. The written language is also a little frenetic at first glance, as it often seems to have not enough vowels (e.g. crwth – a traditional Welsh stringed instrument).

Wales is also the location of one of the longest and hardest-to-pronounce place names ever, on the island of Anglesey: Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch.

Sometimes the qualities of Welsh combine to give wonderful results. The official Welsh word for microwave oven is meicrodon (don means ‘wave’, so it’s a direct translation), but a more commonly-used everyday term for it is popty ping – popty means “oven” and ping is the noise it makes! It’s certainly much more fun than saying “microwave”.

Source: time.com

Here’s a fascinating article about why some languages sound so fast to English native speakers – the results may surprise you. But it doesn’t change the fact that some languages seem to fly by compared with your native tongue. Being an English speaker learning Mandarin Chinese, I often find myself flummoxed when I’m trying to comprehend native Mandarin speakers: not because I don’t know the words, but I simply can’t keep up with the speed at which they’re coming at me. One of my most common phrases in Chinese is “màn diǎn, nǐ shuō de hěn kuài!” – “speak a little slower, you talk very fast!”

They took 20 short, very standard paragraphs of text and translated them into various languages, and gave them to native speakers to read. The native speakers were English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Mandarin, Spanish, and Vietnamese. After they had finished the recordings, they edited out any silence longer than 150 milliseconds. Then they counted the syllables in each recording, and also gave each syllable a ‘meaning value’ – how much meaning is packed into each syllable.

From the article:

With this raw data in hand, the investigators crunched the numbers together to arrive at two critical values for each language: The average information density for each of its syllables and the average number of syllables spoken per second in ordinary speech. Vietnamese was used as a reference language for the other seven, with its syllables (which are considered by linguists to be very information dense) given an arbitrary value of 1.

For all of the other languages, the researchers discovered, the more data-dense the average syllable is, the fewer of those syllables had to be spoken per second — and the slower the speech thus was. English, with a high information density of .91, is spoken at an average rate of 6.19 syllables per second. Mandarin, which topped the density list at .94, was the spoken slowpoke at 5.18 syllables per second. Spanish, with a low-density .63, rips along at a syllable-per-second velocity of 7.82. The true speed demon of the group, however, was Japanese, which edges past Spanish at 7.84, thanks to its low density of .49. Despite those differences, at the end of, say, a minute of speech, all of the languages would have conveyed more or less identical amounts of information.

“A tradeoff is operating between a syllable-based average information density and the rate of transmission of syllables,” the researchers wrote. “A dense language will make use of fewer speech chunks than a sparser language for a given amount of semantic information.” In other words, your ears aren’t deceiving you: Spaniards really do sprint and Chinese really do stroll, but they will tell you the same story in the same span of time.

So there you have it. Though some languages are spoken at a faster rate, there is less inherent value in each syllable. So even if some languages seem to be spoken so much faster than others, they are all conveying pretty much the same amount of information.

Also, with Chinese being the slowest spoken language in this survey, it seems that I have to work harder at my listening comprehension!

Source: crosswordcontest.blogspot.com

Let’s take a break from all the academic waxing linguistical for a minute, and have some fun – this crossword puzzle was made by crossword puzzle writer extraordinaire, Matt Gaffney, on his blog, “Matt Gaffney’s Weekly Crossword Contest”.

At first it seems like a pretty ordinary crossword puzzle, but the black squares arranged in a diagonal in the middle of the puzzle are actually a meta element of the puzzle itself – if you solve all the clues correctly, those squares will also form an extra word – a common method of transportation.

Click the image for the full sized version.

The amazing thing about this crossword is the fact that the 18 clues involved in the ‘hidden word’ are all ambiguous – they can be solved using more than one word. However, these words have been brilliantly chosen – one word fits, and one word is made by appending an extra letter to the start or end of the word to form another word that also fits the original clue. For example, “rose” and “arose” are synonyms, and “lock” and “clock” are both words you’d associate with “a basic function of the iPhone”. Take the extra letters added when forming the clue’s ‘alternative’ answer, and the secret answer forms in the middle – “escalator”.

The best thing? The squares themselves look like an escalator. Genius.

A lot of thought goes into the creation of crossword puzzles – even though it’s perfectly possible these days to do it all on a computer – but this one is certainly one of the cleverest puzzles I’ve ever seen.

Source: reddit.com/r/tattoos

The Tattoos section on social bookmarking site Reddit is a great place to ask for advice on body ink, and for showing off your new tattoos to the world. Unfortunately, user “MikeTheDudeHenry” got a little more than he bargained for when he revealed his new “Latin” tatto emblazoned across his shoulder blades. Clearly following the adage of quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur (“anything said in Latin seems profound”), he hoped for a wholly positive reaction to his cemel dosce tattoo, which he claimed was Latin for “know thyself“.

It soon became apparent that he had picked up the phrase from the hit movie “The Matrix”, from the scene in which the Oracle points out to Neo the sign hanging above her kitchen door.

The sign, which reads temet nosce, is not actually the most accurate translation of “know thyself” – the phrase would usually be rendered nosce te ipsum. However, MikeTheDudeHenry must have misread the sign’s curvy Blackletter font, confusing the capital “T” for a “C”, the lowercase “t” for an “l”, and the lowercase “n” for a capital “D”. Thus, temet nosce became cemel dosce.

The unfortunate recipient of this wholly innaccurate body ink – even after having been told that neither is a legitimate Latin word – is sadly still claiming that it must be correct, because “cemel nosce” has over 3,400 results on Google. Sadly, however, Google is not the best way to proof-read a 2,000 year old language.

Reddit user “thenatman” sums up the lessons we should all learn from this folly:

Moral of the story: before you get a tattoo:

• Ensure that you have reliable sources
• Ensure that these sources are able to read very simple-to-decipher Blackletter font
• Ensure that these sources are not relying on a movie for the origin of this phrase
• Ensure that the writers of the movie itself are actually proficient in the language they claim to be proficient in
• For everyone involved, ensure that the phrase in fact originates from the language you believe it originates from. Sure, there have been multiple famous uses of the Latin “nosce te ipsum” (Hobbes, for instance), but the original is the Greek, found at the Temple of Apollo at Delphi

More generally, don’t take the idea for your permanent tattoo from a font-related misreading of a non-standard translation of a phrase originally in an entirely different language, neither of which you speak or understand.

As somebody also quipped in the comments section, the more apt Latin phrase here would be caveat emptor – “buyer beware”.

Folks, always remember to run your foreign language tattoos by somebody who speaks or at least has studied the language in question!

The next in the series of posts exploring how numbers are rendered in different languages is Japanese.

Japanese, along with many other Asian languages like Mandarin Chinese, Cantonese and Korean, has a reputation for being fiendishly difficult to learn for native English speakers. While this is true in many ways, the number system is in fact pretty straightforward.

When I learned Japanese, counting from 1 to 10 was one of the first things we learned to do. It was only after we had mastered the first 10 numbers that our teacher told us that by learning just a couple more words, we could effectively now count to 99,999,999 in Japanese.

Unlike English’s irregular teens (eleven, twelve, thirteen instead of oneteen, twoteen, threeteen etc. or another more regular pattern) and having a different word for each multiple of ten (twenty, thirty, forty instead of twoty, threety, fourty etc.), Japanese numbers are entirely regular – much like in Chinese. As mentioned in a previous post, this could possibly be a contributing factor towards the stereotype of Asians being “good at math”. In Japanese, “thirty five” is literally “three ten five” (san-ju-go).

For larger numbers, English tends to favour grouping digits into threes before we introduce a new term. After a thousand, we have ten thousand and a hundred thousand before introducing the million. Then, once again, we have ten million and a hundred million before we have the billion. Not so in Japanese – a hundred is hyaku, a thousand is sen, and ten thousand is man – with the Yen being a currency that often stretches into the hundred thousands, man ends up being a pretty important number. From there, a hundred thousand is ju-man, literally “ten ten thousands”. A million is hyaku-man – “a hundred ten thousands”. Ten million is sen-man – “a thousand ten thousands”. While this takes a little getting used to, it still results in pretty much a perfectly regular counting system, besides a couple of slightly irregular pronunciations (e.g. 300 is san-byaku rather than san-hyaku, because it’s easier to say).

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.

There is another way, however – there is a ‘separate’ counting system that allows you to express a quantity without using the specific measure word. Unfortunately, this scale only goes from 1 to 10.

Source: nature.com/news

Here’s an old news article that talks about why English has so many irregularities when it comes to the past tenses of common verbs (e.g. “I am” -> “I was”, “I see” -> “I saw”, etc.). As it turns out, the reasons aren’t too surprising – like so many things in English, it relies on common usage.

The article compares such linguistic evolution to biological evolution – after all, the most often-used (and therefore useful) genes generally stay the same while the rest of the organism evolves. “To help” isn’t as common a verb as “to be” or “to have”, and so is more open to linguistic evolution – that is to say, the more frequently a word is used, the more it will change over time. The original past tense of “help” was an irregular form – “holp”. However, since the verb wasn’t used as often as other more common verbs, people tended to forget about the ‘special’ nature of the past participle, and simply lapsed into the ‘regular’ way of rendering a verb in the past tense – adding -ed to the end. Thus, over time, “holp” became “helped”.

Lieberman was struck by this idea when he learned that the ten most common verbs in English (be, have, do, go, say, can, will, see, take, get) are all irregular. Instead of their past tenses ending in ‘-ed’, as do 97% of English verbs, they take the peculiar forms of was, had, did, went, said, could, would, saw, took and got.

Researchers suppose that this is because often-used irregulars are easy to remember and get right. Seldom-used irregulars, on the other hand, are more likely to be forgotten, so speakers often mistakenly apply the ‘-ed’ rule. The most commonly used word that they found this happened to was the verb ‘to help’ – the past tense used to be ‘holp’, but is now ‘helped’.

You can read the whole article here. Very interesting stuff!

Source: idlewords.com

I found this brilliant blog post a few days ago, and had to share it here. My father’s native tongue is Arabic, but I was brought up speaking English – something I regret deeply, as it would have been great to have been raised a bilingualist. I picked up bits here and there growing up, but have little understanding of the grammar and syntax of modern Arabic, so this post really opened my eyes to what a complex language it is. In this blog entry, they give 11 reasons why Arabic is such a varied and interesting language, though sadly this goes hand-in-hand with it being difficult for native English speakers to learn.

Here’s an excerpt – you can read the whole entry here.

Broken Plurals

In English, you make most words plural by adding a suffix, except for a very small number of words (like ‘feet’) where there is a vowel change instead. Arabic does this the other way around. There are a few words that take a regular plural suffix, but most of the time to make a plural you have to change the structure of the word quite dramatically:

kitaab -> kutub (book)
ustaath -> asaatitha (teacher)
maqha -> maqaahi (café)
dukkan -> dakaakiin (store)
ahdar -> hudur (green)

This holds even for borrowed words:

film -> aflaam
jaakit -> jawaakat

Other Semitic languages have broken plurals, but as with other unusual language features Arabic runs this one furthest into the end zone.

The Writing System

The Arabic writing system is exotic looking but easy to learn, which is a rare combination. The language uses a straightforward alphabet, but because letters change their shape depending on what their neighbors are it is quite impenetrable to the uninitiated.

For exmaple, here are some “words” consisting of a single letter repeated three times:

ييي ععع ههه ككك للل

You can easily master Arabic writing without learning the language (here is a great book for it if you’re interested); it will take you about two weeks. Go to the museum and impress your date with your ability to appreciate Arabic calligraphy on a deeper level!

Here’s a funny comic I found on webcomic Rooster Teeth, about word sizes in English. It’s funny, but he has a point…