Omniglot - the blog

Here’s a recording of part of a news report in a mystery language. Can you guess or do you know which language it is?

If you would like to turn your constructed alphabets into fonts, there are a number of ways to do so: you could buy one of the professional font creation tools available from Fontlab, you could use a free font editor such as FontForge or Softy, or use the font creation service Fontifier.

Today I found out about another font tool, FontStruct, a free online font editor which looks good and fairly easy to use. The site also has a gallery where you view fonts created by other people and add your own creations. When I can find a spare moment or two, I’ll have a go at converting some of my ideas for con-scripts into fonts.

Irreversible binomial is a linguistic term I came across today on this blog post. It was coined by Yakov Malkiel in a 1959 article in the linguistics journal, Lingua, and refers to pairs of words on either side of a conjunction such as and that are always used in a particular order. For example, bread and butter, salt and vinegar, fish and chips, meat and potatoes, gin and tonic, time and tide, cloak and dagger, ladies and gentlemen, knife and fork, and head over heels.

Some such pairs are reversible in parts of the English speaking word - is it cheese and bacon or bacon and cheese, for example? Both versions are used in the UK at least. To some extent is depends on the ratio of cheese to bacon - if you have more cheese than bacon in your sandwich, then you might call it a cheese and bacon sandwich.

Can you think of any other irreversible binomials in other languages?

In Welsh there’s bara menyn (bread (&) butter).

Image you’re at a party to celebrate a friend’s birthday. It’s a Saturday or Sunday, the party’s been going on for quite a while and you’re starting to feel somewhat fatigued. In English and most other languages it would take a whole sentence to explain this situation.

In Estonian however, there’s a word that covers just such an eventuality - Sünnipäevanädalalõpupeopärastlõunaväsimus, which according to Corcaighist, means “The tiredness one feels on the afternoon of the weekend birthday party”. Or if you break it down into parts “birth.day.week.end.party.after.lunch.tiredness”.

Today I came across an online collection of recorded exercises from W. Smalley’s Manual of Articulatory Phonetics. The exercises are design to help distinguish different types of sounds based on their point of articulation, articulators, manner of articulation, or point and manner of articulation. This looks useful if you have the book, and quite useful if you don’t.

Articulatory phonetics is a sub-field of phonetics which involves documenting how humans produce speech sounds. Specifically how our articulators (tongue, lips, jaw, palate, teeth etc), interact to create the specific sounds.

According to an blog post I found today, teaching a baby sign language can help him or her to learn to read at an very early age.

The post is about a 17 month old girl who can read, as she demonstrates on the video embedded in the post. Her parents, who are both Speech Pathologists, have taught her American Sign Language as well as English and have encouraged the development of her language skills, though they haven’t drilled her in reading. Learning sign language can also help children develop their spatial and visual abilities apparently.

Have you heard of any other similar cases?

Here’s a recording of a poem in a mystery language. Do you know or can you guess which language it is?

Today we have another guest post from James in Santiago, Chile.

There comes a stage in every language when you start asking yourself how good you are. Yes, it’s fun to play around learning the Basque verb system or to be able to speak enough to get by as a tourist in 10 different languages, but when you have to use a language day in and day out the question whether people can actually *really* understand what you are saying and just how “foreign” you sound does become more pressing: there is a big difference between ordering a skinny latte and teaching Kantian epistemology. People are normally very generous with foreigners who are trying to learn their language: “hablas perfecto”, “you speak amazing English” (mentally we add “for someone who has just been learning for a year and has never left Latvia”)

The truth is we rarely are able to assess ourselves correctly and tend routinely to over or underestimate how good we are. I’m an underestimator because I teach humanities at tertiary level and have a perfectionist streak, so I tend to put myself a level below what my teacher thinks. About a year ago (May or June 2007) I did a self assessment on the CEFR and thought that I was a middling C1. I got my teacher at the time (a Chilean who had been working with me for over 6 months) to assess me using the CEFR criteria and she said that she would describe me as a C2. I went to Guatemala in February 2008 to study more and placed myself at a 4 on the ILR scale. My Guatemalan teacher, who has 20 years experience and is one of the best I’ve had in my 20 years of language learning, put that I was a 5 on my language certificate (a 5.1 to be exact which is the lowest level in the highest category). I still don’t agree with him, which is irrational: he is the native speaker language professional and we had over 80 hours of 1-2-1 contact when I was feeling ill from altitude sickness (i.e. he saw me at my worst for a prolonged period) so he should know. But, without a trace of false modesty, I still think I’m an ILR 4.

Of course, at one level scales and numbers mean nothing: we all have a level at which we are happy with and what it’s called is irrelevant, for some it’s “higher”, for others not: artificial levels don’t actually tell us anything or make us feel any better. Some people couldn’t care less if the grammar or pronunciation is right as long as people get the point, others care so much that they barely open their mouths.

So do you care how “good” you are?

The Scales
CEFR (European)
ILR (USA, formerly known as FSI)

When I lived in Taiwan I was in a multilingual environment. The main languages I encountered there were Mandarin, Taiwanese and English. Sometimes I came across speakers of Japanese, Korean, Hakka or Spanish as well.

As a student I had friends from many countries and we tended to communicate amongst ourselves in Mandarin. In some cases this was the only language we had in common. With other students from English-speaking countries I generally spoke English, unless we were with people who spoke little or no English.

At work I spoke a mixture of Mandarin and English, with occasional bits of Taiwanese thrown for good measure. With colleagues who spoke both Mandarin and English fluently, I spoke a mixture of the two languages switching between them frequently, though some conversations were mainly in Mandarin, and others mostly in English.

Quite often when we were all be talking in Mandarin, I found myself talking Mandarin to the other Western colleagues, which felt a bit strange. When our boss was with us we all spoke English because his knowledge of Mandarin and Taiwanese was minimal, but I think some of my Taiwanese colleagues with limited English found this awkward.

I’ve heard that some people in Taiwan who speak Mandarin sometimes play the dumb foreigner and pretend they don’t. Apparently it can be quite an effective way of dealing with problems as locals don’t expect you to understand how things work and may be more helpful. Have you tried this?

Today we have a guest post from Dr. J.K. Palmer in Santiago, Chile.

I’m an English dominant Spanish and English bilingual (well not technically bilingual as I didn’t grow up with Spanish, but I am a C2 on CEFR framework and teach at university level in Spanish). Living in Chile I normally speak Spanish, but I have noticed three cases of when I speak in English here, even to native Spanish speakers:

(1) I have a relationship with someone I work with which I prefer to do in English. He’s a Spanish dominant bilingual, and can be a bit, hmm, tricky, so speaking English means that I am able to manage it better

(2) With two of my best friends I VERY occasionally speak English. One is a fairly balanced bilingual, the other raised in an English speaking school here, but is strongly Spanish dominant. I occasionally say things in English to make sure that I have said it exactly right (i.e. personal stuff, rather than “difficult” stuff). I could communicate the information perfectly in Spanish, but I am still not sure of the connotations that the way I say it might have.

(3) I will VERY rarely use English as a weapon on monolingual Spanish speakers if they are being obstructive and it will save me time. I just moved house and the guard in one of the buildings I had to get some documents from didn’t want me to go in even though the notary was expecting me, so I just ignored everything he said in Spanish and only spoke to him in English. I got the documents much faster that way. I feel mildly guilty about this use, but he was very rude to me, so I don’t feel that guilty as of course I couldn’t say anything back to him.

Any other experiences of this sort of “political” use of multiple languages?