Word of the day – dreich

dreich, adjective = cold, wet, dismal, dull, bleak, misearable, dreary, overcast, drizzling

Origin: from Middle English dreig, drih (enduring), possibly from Old English drēog. Related to the Old Norse drjugr – lasting.

Examples of usage: It’s gey dreich the day (It’s very dismal today). Which it was, in Brighton at least.

It can also mean lang, borin and uninterestin. In the auld days, whan services in the kirk gaed on for oors and oors, ye micht hae fund the sermons a bittie dreich.
It can also mean long, boring and uninteresting. In the old day, when services in the church went on for hours and hours, you might have found the sermons a bit boring.

This is one of the many wonderful Scots words for describing the weather. It doesn’t always rain in Scotland, but you certainly have plenty of opportunities to use this word. On all but one of my many holidays in Scotland it has rained every day or most days. The only rainless holiday was a wonderful trip to the Inner and Outer Hebrides in September 1996.

A few other Scots weather words include: mochie – warm and damp; rumballiach – tempestuous; gandiegow – a squall or heavy shower, and smirr – light rain. The idea that Eskimos (Inuit) have many words for snow is a myth, but the Scots certainly have many words and phrases to describe wet stuff falling from the sky.

Sources:
http://www.rampantscotland.com/parliamo/blparliamo_weather.htm
http://www.scuilwab.org.uk/WirdOTheMonth/Feb2004.htm

Code switching

If you speak two or more languages fluently it’s quite natural to switch between them occasionally or frequently when chatting with other people who speak the the same languages. This type of behaviour is known as code switching.

For example, as I mentioned in a previous post, we used to switch between English and Mandarin all the time in the office where I worked in Taipei, and also with bilingual friends.

It seems that if you spend a lot of time in a bilingual or multilingual environment, you get used to switching from one language to another smoothly. However, if you only use your languages occasionally, it can be more difficult to move between them.

I find switching between languages that I don’t speak fluently and/or don’t use regularly quite difficult. When I tried to speak languages other than English or Mandarin while in Taiwan, and for quite a while after I returned to the UK, my sentences tended to come out using Mandarin word order and with some Mandarin words in them. At that time, the dominant foreign language in my brain was Mandarin and this affected my other languages. At the moment there are several languages competing for dominance in my head – Welsh, Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Manx, Russian and Spanish. My Mandarin seems to be firmly established, but the position of my other languages is less secure.

When studying Irish in Ireland last year, I tried to talk to some of my fellow students in Welsh, French or German. At the time my brain was in Irish mode and I found myself trying to construct sentences in those languages using Irish word order, Which sounded very strange. Similarly, while on holiday in Mexico last year, my efforts to speak French to a guy from Belgium were less than successful. I ended up speaking to him in a mixture of French, Spanish and English, all of which he spoke.

Although I can slip into Mandarin without difficult, it usually takes me a while to warm up my other languages. Once they’re up and running though, they tend to flow freely.

There’s an interesting article about code switching at:
http://iteslj.org/Articles/Skiba-CodeSwitching.html

Word of the day – dialect

dialect, noun = a form of a language which is peculiar to a specific region or social group (from: Compact Oxford English Dictionary). Another definition, from Wikipedia, is “a complete system of verbal communication (oral or signed but not necessarily written) with its own vocabulary and/or grammar.”

Origin: from the Greek διάλεκτος (dialektos) – discourse, way of speaking.

Deciding whether a particular form of speech is a language or a dialect is a task fraught with difficulties. As well as linguistic criteria, there are also political, geographic and cultural issues to be considered. For example, closely related languages spoken in different countries, such as Norwegian, Swedish and Danish, might be considered dialects of one language if they were all spoken in a single country. There is considerable mutual intelligibility between these languages, but each of them has its own written standard, or two written standards in the case of Norwegian, which seems to be a good criterion for distinguishing languages. Perhaps you could define a language as a dialect with a standardised written form.

In the case of Arabic, there is one standard written form: Modern Standard Arabic, and many colloquial spoken forms, all of which are considered dialects of Arabic and are rarely used in writing. Though there is a high degree of mutual intelligibility between neighbouring colloquial forms of Arabic, for example, Jordanian and Syrian Arabic, speakers of these dialects have difficultly understanding the Arabic spoken by Moroccans and Algerians. This is an example of a dialect continuum.

Where do dialects come from?
When groups of people are isolated from others, the way they speak tends to drift away from mainstream forms of their language. Changes in the mainstream forms may not occur in the isolated form, and vice versa. Over time, the isolated form develops into a distinctive dialect, and if the isolation continues for long enough, that dialect may eventually become a language with it’s own written standard.

Another source of the differences between dialects comes from the languages once spoken in the regions where the dialects are now spoken. When people shift from one language to another, they usually carry over some features of their original language, including pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar. The dialects of English spoken in Ireland, for example, retain quite a few features of Irish. Similarly, substrates of the languages once spoken in the different regions of England can be found in some of today’s regional dialects. Moreover, the modern Celtic languages may contain substrates of the languages they replaced, whatever they were.

What do you do for a living?

Continuing yesterday’s theme of identity, describing what you do for a living can be tricky if you don’t work in a well-known profession. If someone tells you they’re a doctor, teacher, lawyer or police officer, you have a pretty good idea what their job entails. However, if you work in such professions as web development, computer programming, management consultancy, etc, many people don’t really understand what you do.

Many of us define ourselves by our jobs. We say “I am an X” or “I work as a Y”. We also define ourselves in other ways, including by sex, race, age, nationality, language(s) spoken, interests, and/or in terms of our families and our position/roles therein.

In my case, my current job title is “Web Developer”, but few people understand what that entails. There are in fact many different specialisms under the umbrella of web development – my particular specialism is building multilingual websites. So I usually just tell people that I build and translate websites. This often prompts questions like “Do you design the sites as well?”, and “Are you a translator then?” – in answer to which I explain that someone else usually does the design and translation. My role is to turn the designs into websites, and to add the translations to them, which involves a lot of copying and pasting. I think my parents just tell people that I work with computers and/or do something with websites.

The company I work for (Study Group) is even more difficult to describe, so usually I just say that I work for a college.

Sometimes I tell people I’m a circus performer or translator. I could also claim to be a musician or teacher. I do occasionally do translations and act as an interpreter, and used to do these things more often. I did work as a teacher (of English) for a while in Taiwan, and sometimes help friends with various languages. I also teach juggling and other circus skills to anybody who wants to learn them, on an informal basis, and occasionally perform in public. I play, or used to play, the clarinet, saxophone, tin whistles, and a few other instruments. I used to play with wind bands, big bands and an orchestra, and have performed with these groups in parts of England and France.

Where are you from?

The answer to this question may depend on who’s asking it, where you are at the time, and what and how much you want to reveal about yourself. In many countries it’s rare to meet people who have lived all their lives in one place. Most of us move, at least a few times, to different parts of our countries and possibly to other countries.

We might choose to identify ourselves with our place or country of birth, the place or country where we grew up, or our current place or country of residence, or even the place or country from where our anscestors originated.

I myself currently live in Brighton in the southeast of England, was born and grew up in Lancashire in the northwest of England – specifically I was born in Morecambe and grew up in Silverdale. I’ve lived in various parts of the UK, and also in France, the Channel Islands (Jersey), Taiwan and Japan. So when asked “Where are you from?”, my answer might be Silverdale, Lancashire, the northwest of England, England, the UK, Britain, Brighton, the southeast of England, or somewhere near London. It all depends. Sometimes I mention the Welsh origins of my mother’s side of the family if I want to emphasise my Welshness and/or to establish my Celtic credentials.

If we ever colonise other planets, we will a new layer of identity as citzens of the Earth.

Language choice

If you’re with a group of people who speak various languages, which language do you all choose? In some cases you may switch between several languages, in others you may all settle on a single language. In many parts of the world, English is used as a lingua franca, though it is not the only language to be used in this way.

When studying Mandarin in Taipei, I had classmates from all over the world. The one language we all could speak, with varying levels of proficiency, was Mandarin. One interesting thing I noticed was that we were generally able to understand one another without too much difficulty, but talking to native speakers was a different matter: they weren’t always as tolerant of mistakes, dodgy pronunciation and incorrect tones.

The common languages of the office Where I worked in Taipei were Mandarin and English. Most of the Taiwanese staff spoke fluent English, though some only had basic English and weren’t very confident about speaking it, and some were more comfortable speaking Taiwanese. Many of the non-Taiwanese staff, a mixuture of Brits, Aussies, Canadians, Dutch, and Spaniards, spoke fluent Mandarin, though some spoke none at all or only a little bit. We used to switch between Mandarin and English all the time, though if anyone present couldn’t speak or wasn’t confident about speaking one of those languages, we all spoke in the other language. Sometimes I ended up speaking Mandarin to non-Taiwanese colleagues, which felt quite strange.

The other day I was hanging out with some friends from the Czech Republic and Slovakia. I don’t speak Czech, yet, so they were all talking to me and amongst themselves in English. Though they sometimes swtiched to Czech or Slovak when they got excited.

Which languages are the most difficult to learn?

This question was posed in one the emails I received today. I managed to find some information about the relative difficulty of learning particular languages for English speakers, but not for speakers of other languages.

The difficulty of learning a particular language depends on which language(s) you already know. Each language presents you with a different set of challenges, including differences in pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar, spelling and writing system. Generally the more differences there are, the harder a language is to learn, though there isn’t necessarily a simple correlation between interlingual distance and the difficulty learning.

Most people seem to think that Japanese and Chinese (any variety) are very difficult languages to learn. Having studied both I can confirm this. When learning these languages, the biggest challenge you face is reading and writing them.

Chinese grammar is straightforward; the pronunciation is not too difficult, though the tones take a lot of getting used to. It takes quite a long time to build up enough vocabulary to be to have more than a basic conversation, but the more words you learn, the easier it gets to learn new ones. Most of the vocabulary is constructed from native roots and there are very few foreign loanwords.

Japanese grammar is more complex than Chinese, though a less complex than most European languages, apart from the intricate politeness registers. Japanese pronunciation causes few difficulties, though the irregular intonation is quite a challenge. Japanese vocabulary is a mixture of native words and words borrowed from other languages, particularly Chinese and English. The English loanwords are all changed to fit Japanese phonology, and are often abbreviated and combined with native and/or words from Chinese. As a result, they are difficult to recognise as words that were originally English.

The Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, classifies the languages they teach into four groups based on the number of hours of instruction (English-speaking) students need to attain a certain level of proficiency. In this scheme, the most difficult languages are Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and Korean. For more details, see:
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~wbaxter/howhard.html

e-books

e-books have been with us for quite a few years, but have yet to gain widespread popularity. Maybe this is due to the lack of suitable devices on which to read them. Reading text on a back-lit screen tends to strain the eyes more than reading text on paper.

Perhaps the new Sony Reader for e-books will change this. It uses e-ink technology for the display, which is supposed to look almost link real ink on paper and doesn’t need to be back-lit so can be read even in bright sunlight. It can also play mp3s. Sony have done deals with major publishers to ensure that there are plenty of e-books to read on their Reader.

When I read this news, I thought that this device could also be very useful for learning languages. If you had the text and audio of a language course in a suitable format, you could save them on your e-book reader and access both on the one device. It would be even better if you could add dictionaries, grammars and other reference books. Maybe you could also use it to listen to audio books and magazines in a language you’re learning while reading the text of those books and magazines.

The idea of a gadget on which you can store and read hundreds of books, and listen to music and other recorded material, really appeals to me. I read a lot and have so many books that there’s never enough shelf space. I often borrow books for my local library, but also like to buy books by my favourite authors. This device would also be handy when travelling as it would save you from having to lug around numerous real books.

Word of the day – diphthong

Diphthong, noun = a vowel sound, occupying a single syllable, during the articulation of which the tongue moves from one position to another, causing a continual change in vowel quality. For example, the ou in doubt.

Origin: from Latin diphthongus, from Greek δίφθογγος (diphthongos) – with two sounds, which is made up of δίφυες (diphues) – twofold and φθογγος (phthongos) – sound.

Related words
diphthongize, verb = to make (a simple vowel) into a diphthong

monophthong, noun = a simple or pure vowel

triphthong, noun = a composite vowel sound during the articulation of which the vocal organs move from one position, through another and ending in a third

The Chinese word for diphthong is 二重元音 (èrzhòngyuányin) or 雙元音 (shuangyuányin), which literally mean “two weight vowel” and “twin vowel”. 元音 (vowel) means literally “primary/fundamental/basic sound”. This demonstrates a fundamental difference between English and Chinese: many words from other languages are used in English, and technical, scientific and medical terms are often cobbled together from Greek and/or Latin roots. However in Chinese, there are very few foreign loanwords and most words are made up of native roots. If you didn’t know the meaning of diphthong you could only guess it if you knew Greek, whereas you could probably work out the meaning of 二重元音 even if you had never seen it before.

What is a word?

The dictionary definition of a word is:

one of the units of speech or writing that native speakers of a language usually regard as the smallest isolable meaningful element of the language.

In most written languages, words are separated by spaces so it’s easy to see where each word begins and ends. In spoken language however, words are uttered in a more or less continuous stream and we mentally insert the gaps between the words. If you listen to an unfamiliar language, you are probably unable to separate the sounds you hear into individual words. As you learn a language your ability to ‘hear’ to individual words in speech gradually improves.

I think that written language shapes our perceptions of spoken language, at least to some extent. In some languages, such as German and Dutch, words are often glued together to make long compound words, e.g. Donaudamfschifffahrtskapitaen. If you speak on of these languages but can’t read or write it, you may perceive such compounds as separate words. In other languages, such as Chinese and Vietnamese, every syllable is written separately, which gives you the impression that such languages are monosyllabic, when in fact they do have many multi-syllable words.