Omniglot - the blog

Here’s a short conversation in a mystery language. Do you know or can you guess which language it is? Any ideas what the conversation’s about?

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.

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.

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.

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.

If someone told you that they suffered from logolepsy, what would do?

1. Look concerned and advise them to consult a doctor.
2. Confess that you’re a fellow logolept and discuss your shared obsession.
3. Run away screaming.
4. Other (please specify)

I’m currenty rereading Louis de Bernières’ series of novels set in a ficticious South American country. In the first book, The War of Don Emmanuel’s Nether Parts, the revolutionaries give people receipts whenever they take something from them, and say that they will pay everything back after the revolution. Many of the people who receive these receipts are unable to read them and don’t really understand their purpose, however they are impressed by the writing on them and start using them as an alternative currency. The value of the receipts depends on the number of words, so people ask the revolutionaries to write more on them.

I haven’t been able to discover whether receipts have been or are being used in this way in South America or elsewhere. Does anyone know?

On another matter - Radványi Balázs would like to create a font for his Harta alphabet. If you can help, please contact Balázs at guti@tvnetwork.hu. He can supply the images in vector format.

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

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

I was listening to Catalan radio the other day (long story: short version, I’m thinking of whether to live in Spain and if I can be bothered with learning Catalan or whether it would just get mixed up in my Spanish).
They had interviews with people about the Madrid Spanair crash, and the people were talking in Spanish. No big deal really, as all Catalan speakers in Spain will know Spanish too. However , I’ve just been listening to Radio España 5, and they had clips of untranslated Italian, which assumes mutual intelligibility in all listeners. That reminded me of one time on Colombian Radio Caracol, when they had untranslated (Brazilian) Portuguese in an interview with a footballer. Again, they assumed that all listeners would be able to understand the Portuguese.

Do others have examples of bilingual radio, which assumes mutual intelligibility at a general level?

(I have strange half memories of listening to Italian radio and hearing an interview when one person spoke in French, and the other in Italian, but I may be hallucinating.)

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I’ve heard people on Irish language radio (Raidió na Gaeltachta) speaking Scottish Gaelic without translation.

I came across an interesting article on Michel Thomas and his methods for teaching languages in the Guardian today.

Thomas believed that “there was no such thing as a bad student, only a bad teacher” and that with the right teaching method, anybody can learn a language quickly and easily. However was very reluctant to explain his teaching methods with others. He believed that people would only take parts of his ideas if he shared them, which would dilute them and make them much less effective. It was only in the 1990s that Thomas was persuaded to record language lessons by Hodder Education.

In a new book, The Language Revolution, by Jonathan Solity, an educational psychologist, discusses how Thomas taught languages and the psychological prinples that underpin his methods. Solity believes that if such methods were adopted in schools, they could made a huge difference.

The article mentions some of Thomas’ methods, which include breaking down languages and explaining how they work in easy-to-understand ways; teaching relatively small amounts of material at any one time; and going over things until the students really understand them and can use them. There is also a link to a BBC documentary about Michel Thomas on YouTube.

Have you tried any Michel Thomas language courses? How effective have they been?

I haven’t tried any yet, but am thinking of having a go at the Russian course.