Effortlessness

When you listen to someone speaking a foreign language, whether it’s yourself of someone else, you may notice that some aspects of the pronunciation and intonation are more exaggerated and seem to be quite effortful, especially if you compare them to a native speaker of the same language.

This struck me particularly when listening to the new recordings of Greenlandic phrases, which were made by a learner of Greenlandic from the Czech Republic, and then listening to a Greenlandic news broadcast on YouTube. The native speaker pronunciation seems to flow effortlessly, while the learner’s pronunciation seems more effortful. Having said that though, the uvular plosive /q/ and doubled consonants of Greenlandic do seem to interrupt the smooth flow somewhat, even in the native speakers.

When I first started learning Mandarin Chinese I was taught to pronounce each syllable clearly and separately with exaggerated tones. About five years later I was more of less fluent and didn’t distinguish the tones as much, except in careful, formal speech, and tended to run syllables together a bit, though perhaps not as much as native speakers.

With a lot of careful listening and practise, you can acquire good pronunciation in a foreign language. It does take time though, unless you’re a very good mimic.

Even in your native language there may be certain sounds that trip you up. For example the voiceless dental fricative /θ/ (as in three) did not exist in my original idiolect – a sort of modified RP with Lancastrian influences – and I didn’t know there was a difference in pronunciation between three and free until I learnt some phonetics at university. These days I tend to use /θ/, though it sometimes still requires conscious effort.

Xenoglossy – Are the Reports True?

Today we have a guest post by Carrie Oakley

There’s a general theory that if the news is sensational, it cannot be true; however, in certain cases, truth is stranger than fiction and so sensational that it is hard to accept it as fact. Of late, there have been a few news reports of people waking up from comas or accidents and speaking another language fluently, one they’ve never conversed in before or even learned properly. The Croatian teenager who woke up and could converse in German is one such case while the accident victim from Czechoslovakia the Czech Republic who could speak fluent English after he recovered is another. The scientific term for this phenomenon is of course the title of this article – xenoglossy.

For the layman who reads these news items, the question is not “Is it really possible?” but “How is it possible?” After all, these are not sleazy tabloids that are reporting the news but respectable and reputable newspapers and publishing houses. However, papers have taken to reporting half-truths nowadays, so we can safely say that these are not miraculous happenings. So how is it that people are able to speak in a whole new tongue without putting in the effort and time to learn it the natural way? It takes most of us the better part of a year to master a language, and even then, unless we keep practicing it, we don’t retain fluency. If that is so, does brain trauma make it possible to learn a new tongue?

On closer examination of the above mentioned two cases, it was found that the Czech victim’s claims of conversing in fluent English were propagated by the people around him at the time of the accident, his friends and others known to him. So while he may have spoken a few words in English, the report could have been grossly exaggerated. And in the case of the Croatian girl, she had been taking German lessons through self-help books and could understand enough to watch German programs on television.

The point is, you don’t end up speaking a new tongue that you’ve never come in contact with after you undergo psychological and physical trauma; and while your recovery may be miraculous, there’s nothing spectacular about speaking an almost new language. While the exact reason for the change in preferred tongue is not known, experts speculate that it could be because of damage in the speech centers of the brain that causes selective aphasia – you forget how to converse in the language you’re fluent in, and because our body tries to adapt, it automatically communicates in this other language that you are familiar with but not necessarily fluent in.

The sensationalism is caused because the victims’ families and friends would have never heard them conversing in the new language ever, so to them it is a sort of miracle. But what the brain does not know, it cannot acquire after a trauma. Yes, xenoglossy is possible, but only when the foundation has already been laid for the new language.

About the writer

Carrie Oakley, who writes on the topic of online college . Carrie welcomes your comments at her email id: carrie.oakley1983(AT)gmail(DOT)com.

Word of the day – Sny

I’ve heard today’s word sny in the Czech phrase hezký sny and from the context I thought that it meant “sleep well” or something similar. I knew that hezký meant beautiful or pretty and assumed that sny meant sleep.

When I finally got round to looking it up, I discovered that it means “nice dreams”. Hezký has a number of meanings, including pretty, seemly, sweet, attractive, becoming, bonny, comely, fine, neat, endearing, fair, good-looking, handsome, nice, smart, good, lovely, and so on.

Sny means dreams or moonshine, and is the plural of sen, which also means ambition, vision or sleep. The verb, to dream, is snít.

Do you have any interesting ways of wishing some one a good night?

One I know is “Good night, sleep tight, hope the bedbugs don’t bite”.

Word of the day – Splodge

Splodge [splɒdʒ], noun – a large irregular spot or blot; verb – to mark (something) with such a blot or blots [source]

I’m making some apple and raspberry jam at the moment using a recipe that calls for a ‘lemon juice splodge’. It just specify how much lemon juice there is in a splodge, so I guessed it was a bit more than a splash or a splat.

I’m looking for ways to use the glut of apples from my apple tree at the moment and have made various types of jam, jelly, cakes and puddings with them so far. If you have any good recipes for apple jam, jelly, ice cream, sorbet or others that use plenty of apples, please let me know.

Chinese gooseberries

Kiwifruit

I discovered today that the kiwifruit is known as 獼猴桃 (míhóu táo) or macaque peach in China. It is the edible berry of the woody vine Actinidia deliciosa native to southern China, and the name kiwifruit was dreamt up by marketing people in New Zealand in the 1950s, before which it was called the Chinese gooseberry in English.

In Chinese it’s also called:

  • 獼猴梨 (míhóu lí) – macaque pear
  • 藤梨 (téng lí) – vine pear
  • 陽桃 (yáng táo) – sunny peach – now used to refer to star fruit
  • 木子 (mùzi) – wood berry
  • 毛木果 (máo mù guǒ) – hairy tree fruit
  • 奇異果 (qíyì guǒ) -“unusual/wonder fruit” – the most common name in Taiwan and Hong Kong, which also sounds like kiwi

[Source]

Many other languages call it a kiwi, or variants of that name, eg kivi, kiivi, ciwi, etc. Do you know of any other interesting names for it?

If you want to talk about more than one of this type of fruit, do you say kiwis, kiwifruit, kiwifruits, or something else?

Location Lingo

Today I came across an article on the BBC website about a project called Location Lingo, which is run by The English Project and Ordnance Survey and aims to collect local nicknames for places in the UK. That is, unofficial names that don’t appear on maps.

Some examples they give include Skem and Barlick for Skelmersdale and Barnoldswick, two towns in Lancashire, and Swindump for Swindon. As well as collecting nicknames for cities, towns and villages, they’re also interested in nicknames for neighbourhoods, parks and landmarks, and you can contribute your nicknames on their website.

Do you have nicknames for places near you?

Where I grew up in Silverdale in Lancashire we called a wet area that used to be a well “The Swamp”, and a valley over the road from it “The Grand Canyon”. The official name of the former is Bank Well, but I’m not sure about the latter.