Omniglot - the blog

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).

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?

While looking through Language Log today, I came across the unusual words, grawlix, which is apparently a spiral used by cartoonists to indicate a character is swearing or cursing, along with other typographic symbols - for example @$£*&%!! (Here the ampersand (@) stands in for the grawlix).

According to Wiktionary, grawlix means “A string of typographical symbols used (especially in comic strips) to represent an obscenity or swearword.” It was apparently coined by American cartoonist Mort Walker.

Walker also coined a number of other terms for symbols used in comics, including jarn and quimp, which are also used as alternative names for typographic swearing; phosphene, which describes the stars that form over characters’ heads after they’ve been knocked out; and squean, which might float around a drunken character’s head.

Here’s an example of a comic character saying the cartoon-style swear squiggles.

Grawlix dollar sign jarn asterisk hash quimp!

The other day I heard that one of my colleagues had been “signed off”. As this was the first time I’d heard this expression in this context I wasn’t sure what to make of it. Later I discovered that she had been signed off by her doctor due to carpal tunnel syndrome and would be spending a week or two at home resting.

Have you heard this expression used in this way before?

I’ve heard of radio and television stations signing off at the end of the day, though many stations no longer do so as they broadcast 24 hours a day. I’ve also heard of projects, expenses and budgets being signed off.

There are a number of other English idioms involved signing here, including sign on, sign up (for), sign over and sign out. I suspect such expressions, and similar ones like get on/off/up/down, etc. might be quite tricky for learners of English.

Today’s word, nomophobia, is a recent coinage that means the fear of being out of mobile phone contact. It’s a contraction of “no moblie phobia”.

Something like half the mobile phone users in the UK might suffer from this condition, according to a recent survey undertaken by the Post Office. A lot people apparently feel anxious if their phone out of charge or credit, if they lose their phone or if they can’t get a signal.

Are you a nomophobic?

Continuing yesterday’s theme of sounds that can be challenging to pronounce, today we look at the voiceless dental fricative /θ/. This sound is usually written th in English and appears in such words as three [θriː], thought [θɔːt] and thin [θɪn]. In the Spanish of Spain it’s written c (when followed by i or e), as in cien [θien], and z, as in Zaragoza [θaragoθa]. It’s also used in a number of other languages, including Greek - the Greek letter θ (Θήτα/theta) represents this sound in the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet).

The voiced version of this sound is represented in the IPA by the letter ð (eth), which comes from Old English. This sound is written th in English and appears in the [ðə] and though [ðoʊ]. In Welsh it’s written dd; in Icelandic ð; in Albanian, Cornish and Swahili dh, and in Greek δ (Δέλτα/delta). In Spanish d can be pronounced /ð/ when it comes between two vowels, as in nada [’naða].

These sounds are fairly rare among the world’s languages and can be tricky for speakers of languages which don’t use them. They also tend to be the last sounds acquired by native speakers of English, according to this page.

There’s an explanation of how to pronounce the voiceless dental fricative here. You do the same and just let vocal folds vibrate to pronounce the voiced version.

I didn’t learn how to pronounce the voiceless dental fricative properly until the age of 23, when a Taiwanese friend who was studying English at university explained it to me. Before that, I wasn’t aware that there was a difference between three and free - I pronounced both with /f/ at the beginning. I still have to make a conscious effort to pronounce this sound sometimes and tend to slip back to the /f/ sound when not concentrating.

I often pronounce the voiced dental fricative as /v/ when it’s not at the beginning of a word, for example in brother. However, since starting to learn Welsh, which makes quite a lot of use of dental fricatives, my ability to pronounce them has improved. Combinations of /ð/ and /v/ can also trip me up, as in swyddfa [sʊɨðva].

A researcher at University College London who is looking into how we come by our accents, among other things, has found that more of the brain is involved in speech than previously thought.

An article in The Times explains how the brain of an impressionist was scanned while he was saying short phrases in a variety of accents, or as an impersonation of someone famous. The scan revealed that not only was he using the parts of the brain known to be involved with language, but also other parts involved with movement: one for visualising images and one for body movement. The conclusion was that he was “literally thinking himself into someone’s skin when he was adopting a different accent.”

It is suggested that this research could lead to new ways to help people with communication problems.

The question at the beginning of the article - “Why do some people hold on to their accents all their lives while others drop them overnight?” is no really discussed.

Do you still have the accent you had as a child? Or has it changed? Do you slip into other accents from time to time?

I used to have a bit of a Lancashire accent, but it now closer to RP and tends to vary depending on whom I’m talking to. I often slip into other accents, especially Scottish, Irish and Welsh ones.

What do the above have in common?

Well, believe or not they’re different sizes of paper in the English Imperial system. An emperor is the largest size - 72 × 48 (all measurements in inches), an antiquarian is 53 × 31, and an elephant is 28 × 23. There are also double elephants (40 × 27) and grand eagles (42 × 28 ¾), while the smallest size of writing paper is the pott (15 × 12 ½). A bit more interesting than A4, A3, etc!

Quantities of paper also have special terms to describe them:

• quire = 24 sheets of paper
• ream = 480 or 516 sheets of paper, or 20 quires
• bundle = 2 reams
• bale = 5 bundles

Quire comes from the Latin quaternī, set of four, four each, via the Vulgar Latin quaternus, the Old French quaer and the Middle English quayer.

Ream comes from the Arabic rizma, bundle, via Old Spanish resma, Old French reime, and Middle English reme.

Sources: The Free Dictionary and Paper measures

“Well”, “there you are then”, “Oh dear!” and “That’s life!” are all examples of phatic expressions, which are used as conversation openers, to establish and maintain contact with people, to show that you’re listening, and/or to give you time to think of something else to say. They don’t usually have much meaning in themselves. Greetings and farewells are also examples of phatic language.

The term phatic was coined by the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski in the early 1900s and comes from the Ancient Greek φατός (fatos) ‘spoken’, from φάναι (fanai) ‘to say’. Other terms for these types of expressions include small talk and grooming talk - one theory is that humans developed phatic language to replace grooming, an activity that takes up quite a lot of time for our ape relatives and ancestors.

If you’re able to use the common phatic expressions in languages you’re learning, you will sound much more fluent. The actual content and usage of phatic expressions various from culture to culture, so just translating such expressions from your mother tongue won’t necessarily work. You need to find out which expressions to use and when to use them.

For those of you learning Chinese, this blog post on phatic communication between Chinese people and Westerners will probably be of interest.

I came across the term timeboxing today on this blog. When I first read it, it conjured up images of someone boxing with a clock. Now I know that it’s a technique for managing your time that’s often used for software development projects. It involves setting yourself set ‘boxes’ of time to do things, but not worrying about completing them. Instead you just do as much as you can as well as you can in the time available. Then you use as many more timeboxes as you need to complete the tasks. The aim is to curb perfectionist tendencies by setting a time limit and to avoid overcommiting to a task.

The author of the blog post mentions that he finds it easier to make a start on tedious tasks because he has decided in advance that he’ll stop after a set time. Once he’s conquered the initial inertia of getting started and becomes more focused and interested in the tasks, he might spend longer than originally intended working on them.

This technique could be applied to language learning. You could set yourself a box or boxes of time each day when you’ll study, and study as much as you can manage in that/those time(s). While you might find it difficult to study a whole lesson in the time available, studying part of a lesson is still a useful thing to do.

One of the commenters on the post mentions that he rewards himself each time he completes a period of study. He finds that he rewarding himself in small doses at regular intervals helps him get a lot more done. This idea could be applied to language learning as well - the rewards could be doing something you really enjoy in the language, such as listening to or singing a song or watching a video.

More information about timeboxing.