Month: October 2008

Gaelic in Glasgow / Gàidhlig ann an Ghlaschu

By Simon

Scottish Gaelic is making something of a comeback in Glasgow, according to an article I found today in The Herald. This is largely thanks to the Sgoil Ghàidhlig Ghlaschu / the Glasgow Gaelic School, which provides education from nursery to secondary level through the medium of Gaelic.

Gaelic medium education has been available in Glasgow at primary level since 1986, when half the children who took this option had connections with the Gaelic-speaking highlands and islands. The Glasgow Gaelic School was opened in 2006 and currently has about 700 pupils, 80% of whom have no Gaelic connections, and some are from other countries. Demand for places outstrips supply and there are plans to expand the school over the next few years.

A new generation of young Gaelic speakers is emerging in Glasgow, and some of their parents are learning Gaelic as well. Similar things are happening in Edinburgh and Aberdeen. There is also an increased interest in Gaelic culture and music, and a thriving Gaelic pub scene.

In 1901 approximately 18,500 people in Glasgow spoke Gaelic according the census, though the actual number was probably higher. In 2001 the census revealed over 10,000 Gaelic speakers, and those speakers are spread across all age groups, whereas elsewhere in Scotland it’s mainly the older generations who speak Gaelic.

Ambiguous images

By Simon

Yesterday I did a bit of research for my Bilingualism class with a couple of classmates. It was the first time I’d done this kind of research so it was quite exciting.

The aim was to find out whether bilinguals were faster than monolinguals at seeing alternative interpretations of images like the ones below. The ability to switch between languages and to ignore irrelevant information is thought to be more developed in bilinguals.

We asked students and staff in the university, which was easier than going into town to try to find willing participants. Most of the people we asked were willing to help, which probably wouldn’t be the case in town.

We did find that the bilinguals were faster to see the two versions of the images, though nobody was able to see the second interpretation of the first image without clues. I saw a cowboy straight away, but it took me ages to see an old man, which some people saw as an old woman. Once you can see both versions, they seem so obvious that you wonder how you couldn’t see them at first. One person suggested that being left handed might also make you quicker to see the different versions of the images.

Here are the images we used:

Ambiguous images

What can you see for each one?

Adjusting to a new language environment

By Simon

Research undetaken at Michigan State University has found that girls can find it more difficult than boys to adjust to a new social and linguistic environment, according to an article on Science Daily.

The study was of 3-6 year olds at an international school in Beijing where the children, from 16 different countries, are in immersed in Mandarin and English. Most of them are learning at least one new language, and the researchers found that the girls generally had more trouble adjusting to the new environment than boys.

Previous studies have found that girls usually have better social and linguistic abilities than boys, however the girls in the Beijing study who could not understand their teachers or the other children tended to have more behavioural problems than the boys.

The study also showed that children find it harder to learn a new language than is generally thought. The popular idea is that children soak up new languages like sponges without too much effort, however this isn’t necessarily true.

Etymological help needed

By Simon

I’ve been asked for help in tracing the etymology of the Spanish word chedrón by Antonio from Canada.

The Spanish-speaking grandmothor of one of Antonio’s acquaintances used to use the word chedrón to refer to the colour of certain things. The problem is that she used the word quite inconsistently to refer to different shades of red, brown, pink, etc.

Antonino tried looking for chedrón, cheddrón, shedrón, chedron, cheddron, and shedron in the Diccionario de la lengua española de la Real Academia Española (DRAE) and the closest spelling he found was cedrón, but that refers to a plant (not a colour) and the plant is green anyway.

On the PROZ website there was a discussion about how to translate the word into English and the answer was “cedar red”.

A Google search for the word and variant spellings revealed some pictures of objects which, for the most part, are darker shades of red or brown.

Antonio hasn’t found an authoritative spelling or definition for the word chedrón, but the Google searches seem to indicate that the word is actually used at least by some Spanish speakers, even if inconsistently.

The question is, do any Romance languages have a word that sounds anything like chedrón to signify a colour as described above? If no Romance languages have a similar word, do any other languages?

He’s not so much concerned about what chedrón looks like, but where the word comes from and how it is spelt in whichever language Spanish borrowed it from.

Hydref

By Simon

Mae hydref (y mis a’r tymor) wedi cyrraedd yma, mae hi’n mynd yn oerach ac yn gwlypach, mae’r gwyntoedd yn gryfach, mae’r dail yn newid eu lliw ac yn cwympo i’r ddaear, ac mae’r myfyrwyr yn ôl yn y dref.

Fómhar

Tháinig an Fómhar anseo, tá sé ag éiri níos fuaire agus níos fliuch, tá gaoth níos móra ann, tá dathanna na nduilleog ag athrú agus tá siad ag titim go dtí an talamh, agus tá na mic-léinn air ais sa chathair.

Autumn

Autumn has arrived here, it’s getting colder and wetter, the winds are getting stronger, the leaves are changing colour and falling to the ground, and the students are back in town.

Metonymy

By Simon

Metonymy cropped up in the readings for my Semantics class this week, so I thought I’d write about it here to make sure I understand what it is.

The word metonymy come for the Greek μετωνυμία (metōnymia), which means “a change of name”. A metonym substitutes one word to stand for another that’s connected in some way.

Here are some examples which show some of the ways in which this figure of speech is used:

All hands on deck! – here hands stands for sailors (part for whole)
To fill up the car – the car stands for the petrol/gas tank (whole for part)
I’ll have a Heineken – Heineken stands for beer (producer for product)
No. 10 declined to comment – No. 10 Downing Street in London is the official residence of the British Prime Minister (place for institution)
Can I pay with plastic? – plastic stands for a credit/debit card

The first example is also known as a synecdoche.

These examples are based mainly on those found in An Introduction to Cognitive Linguistics by Freidrich Ungerer and Hans-Jörg Schmid.

Idiolects, sociolects and other animals

By Simon

This is a guest post from James P in Chile:

Two things have made me think about “vocabulary worlds” recently: reading past papers for the DELE exam and picking up a José Donoso novel (Coronación) from the library.

The vocab section of the DELE exam is going to be rather a matter of chance as significant proportions of the vocab that is used on a daily basis in Latin America – at least in Chile and on Colombian radio which are my two main sources of spoken LA Spanish – are bound to be different from the vocab used in Spain. That is certainly true of British and US English (“I like your bangs”, “Do you have any spackle?). This, rather than my joking references before, is the more substantial problem with the DELE vocab test, at least for those of us who take it as speakers of LA Spanish: even when the words might be understood by a cultured Chilean or Guatemalan, they are not used much over here as compared to Spain and so we are much less likely to have heard them, even if our total vocabulary is larger than a learner in Madrid or Seville.

José Donoso, in common with a number of other Chilean writers of the second half of the 20th Century, spent a number of years living outside of Chile (in his case in Mexico, Spain and the USA). His diction (choice of vocab) is very unusual (one of my Chilean friends says that he makes up words!). Every author has a range of words they use commonly, but for me it seems that Donoso overlaps much less with my vocab than for example García Márquez, or Roberto Ampuero. Before I get round to Coronacíon I’m reading Pérez-Reverte’s El pintor de Batallas, which also has a different vocab world, one that is new enough for me to learn new words (such as estrambótico and un chasquido), but not so alien I want to give up (which is what happened last time with Donoso when I tried to read Casa de campo about a year ago).

Can others give examples of this phenomena of different “vocab worlds”, either with specific authors or with national forms of a language which is spoken in different countries?

Irregular English spelling

By Simon

In a speech at the centenary dinner of the Spelling Society, a professor of phonetics from University College London claimed that people should be allowed greater to spell English logically. He believes that the ways of spelling English found in text messages and online chat are a good model to follow. He also said that the apostrophe “causes unnecessary linguistics barriers” and could simply be omitted, or we could use a space instead.

There are some details of the professor’s proposals on the BBC site.

Many have proposed reforming English spelling, few have made any difference.

Do you think the benefits of reforming English spelling would outweigh the drawbacks?