Language Trainers Blog

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!

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!

An onomatopoeia is a word that mimics a sound – for example “woof”, “bang”, or “moo”. While they are popular in English (to the point where some onomatopoeias are no longer commonly recognised as such, like the word “bleat” to mimic the sound a sheep makes), they are absolutely rife in Japanese. In fact, unlike English, Japanese has two kinds of onomatopoeia: Giongo (擬音語) are words that directly imitate sounds (there’s a subgroup of these just for animal and human sounds, called Giseigo (擬声語)), and Gitaigo (擬態語) are words that express emotions, actions, or conditions. Both Giongo and Gitaigo always take the form of a doubled word – for example, a dog barking is “wan wan” (ワンワン).

Giongo are like onomatopoeia in English and are pretty self-explanatory. However, Gitaigo, which are symbolic or mimetic words, are more abstract and interesting for foreign speakers. Japanese people litter these throughout their conversation without giving them a second thought, but for non-native learners of Japanese they can often be confusing, difficult to translate, and a pain to learn.

Here are some examples of Gitaigo and what they mean:

giri giri (ギリギリ) – “just barely”, “by the skin of your teeth”

bero bero (べろべろ) – “drunk”

pika pika (ピカピカ) – “sparkling”, “shining brightly”

uzu uzu (ウズウズ) – “eager”, “raring”, “itching to do something”

uki uki (ウキウキ) – “happy”, “in a good mood”

hiso hiso (ヒソヒソ) – “in a whisper”

nita nita (ニタニタ) – “smirking”, “grinning”

Some of these may seem very random, especially since they are classified as onomatopoeia. But if you read closer, some of them reveal their mimetic nature. For example, hiso hiso mimics the sounds of a whisper; it’s almost impossible to form the sounds for uki uki or nita nita without your mouth curling into a smile; and bero bero perhaps mimics an inebriated person slurring their words.

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.