Word of the day – mezzanine

I had my first lecture today, which took place on one of the rooms on the mezzanine floor of the Main Arts building. A mezzanine or entresol is usually an extras floor between main floors of a building. A mezzanine might often projects from the wall like a balcony and may share the same ceiling with the floor below. The term can also be applied to the lowest balcony in a theatre, or for the first few rows of seats in that balcony. The word mezzanine comes via French from the Italian mezzanino, which is derived from mezzano, middle, which itself is from the Latin medianus, of the middle.

The lecture was on semantics and focused on theories of meaning. The lecturer had little time for the formalist view that each word has a core definition independent of context. Instead she explained how the meanings of words and sentences are derived from the context and our knowledge of the world. One exercise we did was to come up with necessary and sufficient conditions for defining pet, friend and bird – quite a challenge.

Language quiz

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

[audio:http://www.omniglot.com/soundfiles/blog/quiz270908.mp3]

Clue: some would call this a dialect rather than a language, even though it does have it’s own literature.

DELE exam

Today we have a guest post from James P. in Chile.

I am preparing for the advanced DELE exam (just as it will be useful to have a piece of paper to say I can speak Spanish … such is life). I won’t go into how odd it is (muy suyo), but one thing that is very noticeable is that the “vocab” section is very strongly focused on Peninsular Spanish, which makes it almost impossible for all the other Spanish learners. This puts it’s standing as a world level qualification somewhat in question (even native speakers here can’t pass that section).

Let me illustrate with Chilean Spanish. If someone responds to your question about how the party was by saying “bacán won; la pasamo la raja. Había harta mina ¿cachai? Puro carreteando tóo el rato, won.” Is that good or bad? Do you have any idea what they just said to you?

Anyway, it set me thinking about languages with two (or more) “centers” (there is a proper term for this and I can’t remember it at the moment). English is the same: standard UK English is not “better” than standard USA English: there are two norms.

Are there other examples of languages with two or more “standard norms”?

Word of the day – zeugma

A zeugma is a figure of speech that joins two or more clauses together in a way that allows you to omit the key verb or noun in all but one of the clauses. The word comes via Latin from the Greek ζεύγμα (zeugma) – yoke.

Here are examples of different kinds of zeugma:

Prozeugma or Synezeugmenon
The verb in the first part of this zeugma governs subsequent parts.

  • Some people like cats, some dogs, some crocodiles.
  • We ate octopus on Monday, camel on Tuesday and ostrich on Wednesday.
  • I speak sense, you nonsense.

Hypozeugma
In hypozeugmas the verb appear at the end of a number of clauses. This results in a sense of suspense in listeners and readers until they reach the end of the sentence.

  • Neither rain nor fog nor dragons will slow this knight on his quest.
  • Friends, Romans, Countrymen, lend me your ears. (William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar)

Syllepsis
A syllepsis joins clauses with different meanings together with a common verb, the meaning of which changes for each clauses. It can be used for comic effect due to the unusual connections and ambiguity involved.

  • She went home in a huff and a taxi.
  • I left my heart and my wallet in San Francisco.
  • Don’t forget to put out the cat and the lights before going to bed.
  • He had to eat his words and his lunch.

Yn ôl mewn addysg llawn amser

Mi gychwynodd y prifysgol yr wythnos hon efo wythnos groeso. Roedd gyfarfod groeso i’r Ysgol Ieithyddiaeth ac Iaith Saesneg ddoe, ac mi gwrddais i â mwyafrif y tiwtoriaid ieithyddiaeth ac â’r myfyrwyr eraill. Dim ond wyth, yn gynnwys fi, sy’n gwneud graddau meistr mewn ieithyddiaeth – pedwar Saesnes, Siapanes, Groeges ac Americanwr. Efallai bydd myfyrwyr eraill yn cyrraedd yn ystod yr wythnos hon. Mae’r mwyafrif ohonyn nhw yn bwriadu gwneud doethuriaethau ar ôl iddyn nhw’n gorffen eu graddau meistr, ond ar hyn o bryd, dydw innau ddim bwriadu gwneud yr un beth.

Yfory mae rhaid i ni cofrestru, talu ein ffïoedd dysgu, ac yn penderfynu pa fodiwlau i ddewis – mae dau fodwl gorfodol a dau ddewisol pob semester. Yn y semester cyntaf fy modiwlau gorfodol ydy cystrawen, a semanteg a phragmatig, a modiwlau dewisol mewn seineg a dirwedd; dwyieithrwydd a meddwl. Yn yr ail semester bydda i’n gwneud modiwlau mewn seineg, a dirwedd mewn Saesneg, a modiwlau dewisol mewn caffaeliad iaith mewn plant, ac anhwylderau llefaru ac iaith.

Back in full-time education

University started this week with welcome week. There was a welcome meeting for linguistics postgrads yesterday, and I met most of the linguistics tutors and other students. There are only eight of us, including me, doing masters degrees in linguistics – four from the UK, one from Japan one from Greece, and one from American. Maybe more students will arrive during this week. The majority of them are planning to go on to PhDs after completing their masters degrees, but I’m not planning to do that, at the moment.

Tomorrow we have to register, pay our fees, and decide which modules to do – there are two compulsory and two elective modules each semester. My compulsory modules in the first semester are syntax, and semantics & pragmatics, and elective modules in phonetics and variation, and bilingualism and thought. In the second semester I’ll do compulsory modules in phonetics, and variation in English, and elective modules in child language acquisition, and speech & language disorders.

Why German can sound funny to English speakers

In English when you talk about scientific, technical, legal or medical topics, you tend to use a lot more words of Latin, Greek and French origin. However in everyday conversation words of Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse origin are much more common. Therefore you could say that English has two distinct registers – a higher register used in academic and other formal settings, and a lower register used elsewhere. New scientific terms are usually coined from Latin and/or Greek roots. Mixing the registers or using one where the other would normal be used can a source of humour.

In other languages, such as German, new words tend to be coined from native roots. This gives you words like Wasserstoff (water material/stuff), for hydrogen, Sauerstoff (sour/acidic stuff) for oxygen, and Stickstoff (close/stuffy stuff) for nitrogen.

According to this post, such words can sound funny to English speakers because they are made from words similar to lower register English ones which are not normally associated with serious vocabulary like this.

There have been suggestions and proposals that new English be coined from native Old English / Anglo-Saxon roots, none of which have really caught on. For example, in a text on atomic theory, Uncleftish Beholding by Poul Anderson, almost all the words are of Anglo-Saxon origin and there are many newly coined words, including beholding for theory, waterstuff for oxygen, ymirstuff for uranium, bulkbits for molecules, and worldken for physics.

There is even a group of people called The Anglish Moot, who aim to create a version of English free of loanwords from other languages.

Taiwan to adopt Hanyu pinyin

According to this report, hanyu pinyin is to be officially adopted in Taiwan from the beginning of next year.

The main romanization systems currently used in Taiwan are Wades-Giles and Tongyong Pinyin. However, as they are not taught in schools, mistakes and misspelling are very common, and it’s not usual to see the romanized name of a street written in several different ways. The Wade-Giles system was devised by Thomas Francis Wade, a British ambassador to China and Chinese scholar, in the late 19th century, and refined in 1912 by Herbert Allen Giles, a British diplomat in China. The Tongyong Pinyin system was invented in Taiwan and adopted in 2000. Hanyu pinyin was developed in China in the 1950s and was adopted as the international standard for romanizing Chinese in 1979.

It hanyu pinyin is adopted for place names as well as street names, Taipei will become Taibei, Kaohsiung will change to Gaoxiong, Hsinchu will change to Xinzhu and Keelung will change to Jilong, along with many other changes.

You can find details of places names in Taiwan at:
http://pinyin.info/taiwan/place_names.html

This is a positive development, however it remains to be seen whether local governments in Taiwan will be more consistent in their use hanyu pinyin than they have been with Tongyong pinyin.

Txtng nt bd 4 U

The abbreviations and variant spellings found in text messages are not detrimental to your language, according to this article. In fact kids who send the most text messages tend to be more literate better at spelling than others.

David Crystal, an independent language consultant, author and honorary professor of linguistics at Bangor University, and has done some research into text messaging and has discovered that most of the things people believe about them are wrong. It’s not kids who send the most messages, but adults and businesses who send 80% of them. He comments that:

“If you can’t spell a word, then you don’t really know whether it’s cool to misspell it. Kids have a very precise idea of context – none of those I have spoken to would dream of using text abbreviations in their exams – they know they would be marked down for it.”

What many fear are the ways new technologies will change language. This was true for printing, which some was a devil-inspired machine that would be used to print unauthorised versions of the bible. Some believed that the telephone would lead to the breakdown of family life as people would stop speaking to one another directly, while radio and television stirred worries about brain-washing. Each generation is also concerned about the next generation taking over ‘their’ language and changing it for the worse. Such concerns are not a recent phenomenon and people have been complaining about the way the kids are ruining the language for millenia.

Word of the day – poc

In Welsh a poc (/pok/) or pocyn (/’pokɪn/), is a kiss, however this word is rarely used in everyday speech. The more common word for kiss is cusan (/’kɪsan/) or sws (/sʊs/) and ‘to kiss’ is cusanu.

When I came across the word poc while looking for something else in the dictionary, it immediately reminded me of the Irish word for kiss – póg (/po:g/) and I assumed that they came from the same root. At first I thought the root was a ancient Celtic word, but have since discovered, via MacBain’s Dictionary, that both words come from the Latin pâcem, “the kiss of peace”, a part of the Mass.

There are similar words for kiss in the other Celtic languages: pòg in Scottish Gaelic, paag in Manx and pok in Breton.