Posts tagged TWWEH

I’ve had a fun month of wandering throughout Europe - a lovely mix of catching up with family and friends, library adventures, meeting up with some amazing linguists and a bit of sightseeing on the side. I have a suitcase full of Euro-goodies to take home, but I think that ideally I’d like to souvenir a couple of words from some of the countries that I’ve visited. Of course, you can capture all of these ideas in English, but there’s something really nifty about wrapping it all up in a single little word.

Fusy n. Polish It’s a word that captures both the grounds left in a coffee pot and tea leaves left in a tea pot. It doesn’t have the same negative extension that ‘dregs’ carries. Given that we’re a pluri-beverage household we’re always dealing with fusy when it comes to washing up time.

Fika n. or v. Swedish This is the kind of word that always gets wheeled out in ‘why doesn’t English have a word for X’ articles - and for good reason, because it really is a lovely concept. Fika is the combination of a non-alcoholic beverage (usually coffee) and some kind of cake (usually outrageously sweet) and taking time to chat with friends/family/colleagues. It’s not entirely dissimilar to how the word ‘coffee’ is used as a verb in my lab, but I really like the emphasis on the social aspect (and the cake). Needless to say I made the most of every fika opportunity while in Stockholm.

Syrah n. French/English Ok, this one always existed in English. I always thought it was some obscure little grape variety. Turns out that it’s the French name for what Australians and New Zealanders more often call shiraz. In what can only really be a classic case of sound symbolism, if you’d asked me to describe these grapes before I knew this crucial fact I’d have said that shiraz is bolder and more peppery. This trip I’ve learned a new (for an Aussie) wine word, and made sufficiently sure to drink enough syrah to ascertain that it is just as peppery as a shiraz.

This post is entirely prompted by being in France, but I think there’s something really cool about nasal vowels. To make a nasal vowel start by making a ‘normal’ or ‘oral’ vowel. Then lower your velum (it’s the smooshy bit at the back of your mouth that opens and closes the air flow to your nose). It feels a bit weird if you’re not used to it, but you’ll know if you’re doing it right because your voice will sound nasal (big surprise there!).

French has a few nasal vowels, they’re tough to get your mouth (and nose) around at first if you’re an English speaker! There are lots of languages with nasalised vowels; in a sample on WALS 64 out of 244 languages had nasal vowels as well as oral vowels. There are no languages that I know of with only nasal vowels and no oral vowel.

The funny thing is that English doeshave nasal vowels. They often occur before a nasal consonant (m, n, or ng). So if you listen carefully to someone saying ‘tuna’ or ‘piano’ in a natural way it’s likely they’ll nasalise the vowel. The thing is that we’re not trained to hear this difference, because it doesn’t change the word, so we don’t ‘hear’ it!

I had a great few days in Edinburgh earlier this week. I put the computer away, did some sightseeing and caught up with some friends who moved here recently. Said friends introduced me to BBC Alba, a Scottish Gaelic language television station, and we sat around watching a program for children that I don’t think would have made any sense even if one of us spoke Scottish Gaelic.

There are over 50,000 speakers of Scottish Gaelic in Scotland, although the majority of speakers are located to the north-west of the country. There’s not much Scottish Gaelic spoken in Edinburgh, but BBC Alba made me curious about the language.

One of the coolest features of the grammar I noticed on the Wikipedia page is that Scottish Gaelic has emphatic pronouns. That means that it has a set of ‘normal’ pronouns and an ‘emphatic’ set for when you want to emphasise or contrast. So the normal ‘you’ form is thu andthe emaphatic form is thusa. So if I said ‘you have the cake’ using the emphatic form I’d be stressing that I mean you, and not anyone else.

We can emaphasise a pronoun in English, or any noun for that matter, by placing more stress on the word (‘no you hang up first’), but I think that using grammar instead of phonetics to do the same job is rather neat!

When we speak we make sounds (unless the language is a sign language). We make these sounds by having air flow out of our lungs, setting out vocal folds vibrating and then constrict the airflow to get different sounds. This is the case in English, as with a majority of languages. This is calledegressivesound - but it’s not the only way people make sounds in some languages.

There are a small number of languages where people can make words by breathing inwards instead of out. This is referred to as ingressive sound (because the air is going in). Think about a gasp of astonishment in English, or try it out - just don’t hyperventilate!

Scandinavian languages like Swedish are famous for having ingressive sounds. They’re most frequently used when you’re listening to someone speak and say ‘yeah’ to agree with them. It’s a fact about Swedish that I’d completely forgotten until a cousin of mine used it. It’s really distinctive to hear the breathy in-rush of air. The Wikipedia page on ingressives has an example from Norwegian if you don’t have any Swedish cousins to hand.

Ingressive breathing is mainly used for short utterances, and often as ‘backchannelling’ when someone else is speaking. Robert Eklund has done a survey on ingressive sounds, including animals (for example, leopards).

Although I’ve spent this week in Sweden, I’ve been staying with a Polish speaking aunt, and so I’ve had the chance to keep brushing up on my Polish skills.

One thing I’ve always found fun, but challenging about Polish is the use of diminutives. A diminutive is when you make something ‘smaller’ or ‘cuter’ by changing the word a little (my polyglot Polish friend settled on the Japanese word kawaii as the best way to capture the way diminutives are often used in Polish). For example, we walked past a bar in Warsaw old town called piekłoka which would be best translated as ‘little hell’ - but that doesn’t capture the warm, fuzzy affection that separates the diminutive form from the original.

English isn’t very replete with diminutives - but something like the process of calling a dog a doggy is close (although there’s an element of child-speak there too), or nicknames where Elizabeth becomes Lizzie and Robert is Robbie.

Polish, like many other Slavic languages is rich in suffixes for diminutivising things. For example, my friend Anna could easily be given any one of the following nicknames: Ania, Anka, Ańcia, Anusia, Anuśka, Aneczka, Anulka, Anuleczka or Anula. Non-human and inanimate items can also be diminutivised, so flowers (kwiaty) could be kwiatki, kwiatuszki, kwiateczki. Even adjectives and adverbs can be made diminutive.

There are underlying patterns, which are partly dependent on the gender of the word. Not all diminutives follow patterns though, and there are lots of randomly irregular ones, just to keep you on your toes!

Some diminutives become regular words, for example stołek meaning ‘stool’ is a diminutive of stoł ‘table.’ Diminutives can also be ‘stacked’ so to speak, so that the word koteczek ‘kitty’ is from kotek ‘kitty,’ which is itself from kot ‘kat’ (all of these examples, and more, are thanks to Wikipedia).

Diminutives may not make life easy for the Polish learner, but when you start to get the hang of them they’re heaps of fun!

I thought that since I was in Warsaw I would make this week’s TwwEh Poland-appropriate. The 24 hours since I got here have been rather hard on my brain; three years of Nepali have squeezed out most of my Polish, and it’s rather embarrassing when Nepali words come out instead of Polish ones. 

One thing I’ve always loved about Polish is that it has a regular stress system, which makes it a little easier on the learner. Stress is when a part of a word sounds more emphasised than the rest. Polish stress is almost always on second last syllable of a word (which is also known as the penultimate syllable). There are only a small number of examples, such as words from Latin or English, for example one I always remember is universitet (‘university’) where the stress is on the second syllable in the word.

Not all languages have stress, for example tone languages are generally considered to not have stress as well. Of languages that have stress, the location of the stress varies between languages. In a survey of 502 languages in WALS, Rob Goedemans and Harry van der Hulst found that 220 were like English and had no fixed stress pattern, and the other 282 were spread across different fixed patterns, for example the first, second or last syllable.

Stress is notoriously hard to hear for non-native speakers, most of the time when we talk quickly you don’t really hear the stress, but a native speaker always instinctively knows where it is. Take this English-learners’ website with its seemingly random collection of rules that learners of English are subjected to, and that’s not even all of them. This is one of those times I’m rather glad to be a native speaker of English!

This may just look like a gratutious holiday tie-in post, but I’ve always been mystified as to why this day in the Christian religious calendar is called ‘Good Friday.’ Sure, I’m deliberately playing up my ignorance of the finer points of Christian theology, but as a kid I never understood why such an austere day that we were all supposed to feel sad about was ‘good.’

It comes from a sense of the word ‘good’ that isn’t used much any more. It can be found in the Oxford English Dictionary as one of the many senses of ‘good;’ ‘Pious, devout; worthy of approbation from the religious point of view.’ There’s a whole sub-definition under this sense that notes it is used ‘of a day or season observed as holy by the church.’ It also notes that it’s an archaic usage; in this day and age it’s not a use that extends much beyond established religious constructions. The earliest record of the term ‘Good Friday’ in the Oxford English Dictionary is from around 1290 and it’s been with us ever since.

There are other terms for this day in English, including ‘Black Friday,’ ‘Holy Friday’ and ‘Easter Friday’ but as you can see from this Ngram below none of them have come close to the popularity of Good Friday in the last two centuries:

I quite like the alternative ‘Long Friday,’ now historical, but used as far back as the Aelfric Homily in Old English and up to around the 13th century. Another option is the post-classical Latin word ‘Parasceve’, also found in the Oxford English Dictionary, although that does sound a little to fancy for my liking.

Do you know a language that has a better name for Good Friday than English?

I’m off to Europe for a few weeks after Easter. Most of my time will be spent poking around in archives and buying coffee for colleagues and picking their brains on a number of topics. I’m also wedging in some social calls - including a weekend in Warsaw, which I’m very excited about.

One of the few things I still remember from my Polish-learning days was that the @ ‘at symbol’ was known as małpa, which means ‘monkey.’ Since then I’ve always been impressed by how creative the speakers of Polish were compared to the relatively unimaginative English.

The origin of the @ is not entirely clear. It was used in Medieval versions of the Bible to save precious parchment space, and appeared in Norman French in the grocers’ ‘at’ sense of 2 apples @ $1 each. This is where it got its even less appealing English name ‘commercial at.’ It first popped up on a typewriter in 1900 at a good thing it was, given how useful it’s been for the interwebs. Indeed, the addition of the @ symbol to Morse Code in 2004 was the only change since WW1.

English hasn’t just lagged behind the Polish in the naming of the ‘at’ sign. Languages all over the world have done a much more creative job of naming it; there’s a big list at Wikipedia but I’ll just share some of my favourites. In Bosnian it’s known as ‘crazy a’ (ludo a), while in Basque it’s ‘wrapped a’ (a bildua). I generally have a fondness for the animal names it’s been given, which include ‘worm’ (kukac) in Hungarian, ‘duckling’ (papaki / παπάκι) in Greek and ‘puppy’ (shnik / շնիկ) in Armenian. The Swedes refer to it as an ‘elephant trunk a’ (snabel-a) but also use another common naming theme, food, and call it a ‘cinnamon roll’ (kanelbulle). The Czechs also go with the food theme and refer to it as ‘rollmops’ (zavináč). I also like Kazakh, which has two great names; the official is ‘moon’s ear’ ( айқұлақ) and the unofficial is ‘dog’s head’ (ит басы). 

Do you speak a language with a cool name for @?

Although many of my claimed desires for improving the English language are firmly tongue-in-cheek today I’d like to make the most facetious suggestion in my quest to improve the English language to date.

I’ve discussed matters of phonetics and syntax, and also thought of ways to jazz up the semantic offerings of English. But at the end of the day, what the language is really missing is an awesome name. We should go for something more extravagant, and as a model of such language name excellence I would nominate Extremaduran.

Extremaduran is spoken in north-west Spain. It’s usually considered by the general population of the country to be a dialect of Spanish, but it’s sufficiently different to be a language in its own right. Don’t worry if you’ve never heard of it, there’s a whole patchwork of languages in the Spain/France area being squashed into non-existence by the nationalistic desire for a single language.

This post is partly inspired by International Mother Language Day, which was on Tuesday, Georgia’s recent holiday to Cambodia where she got chatting with the locals, and my current field work in Nepal, which involves me spending my days talking a second language (Nepali) to try and document a third (Yolmo).

Today’s area of improvement for English is more something to do with the kind of English I grew up speaking, and the attitude of those English speakers. There are certainly parts of the world where English speakers are at home with linguistic diversity (Singapore and South Africa are two that come to mind) and of course there are many people for whom English is their second (or third, or fourth) language and inherently part of people’s multilingual lives.

I grew up in an Anglo middle-class suburb where speaking English was the norm. In fact, ‘norm’ understates it - I couldn’t name a single friend from primary school who I knew spoke a language other than English at home. Like many people in Australia I have a migrant background, but even though my grandmother was a native Polish (and German) speaker it never occurred to me that I should learn Polish - she speaks more than competent English and never spoke her own language with my mum.

We ‘learned’ language at school. In fact, if you look at my school records I apparently have ten years worth of Italian education, but you’d never know given that all I have to show for it is some arbitrary vocabulary and the ability to break out the occasional verse of a nursery rhyme. When I changed schools halfway though high school there was never any serious discussion that I should try and keep up my Italian, or try and catch up on their German or Japanese.

I certainly had friends in high school who had a greater love of language than I did - but it’s because I’d never been shown the intrinsic worth of learning another language. It wasn’t until living in Poland, and finally learning my grand-maternal language that it clicked. The thrill of learning to say things in the past tense, the realisation of patterns in your own language, and most formative thing for me on that trip was the ability to communicate with elderly and distant relatives who had never learned English.

Sure, I didn’t rush home and double major in Mordern language, but it gave me a much greater appreciation of the linguistic convenience of my monolinguistic lifestyle. Since my adventures my sister spent half a year living in China and learning Mandarin, and my parents are celebrating their mid-life crisis learning French. I’ve lived in Poland and Nepal and when travelling in other countries I’m much more aware of how convenient it is more me that I happen to be a native speaker of the language that so many use.

I’m going to cut this short before I steer into the usual platitudes about language broadening the mind - but sometimes the mind needs to be broadened before the language learning can start.