Here’s a recording of language which is broadcast for just one hour a week on a radio station in Boston. Can you work out which language it is?
This will probably be quite an easy language to guess, so I won’t give you any other clues this time.
Category: Language
Inca writing?
I found an interesting article about the ongoing attempts to unravel the mysteries of the Inca Khipu on Wired News yesterday, thanks to Luigi of the Silverhorde. The Inca are thought to have used bundles of knotted strings known as Khipu or quipu for record keeping, though nobody knows for sure how to ‘read’ them.
In 1923, an anthropologist called Leland Locke realised that some of the khipu were like files – each knot represented a different number, arranged in a decimal system, and each bundle probably held census data or listed the contents of storehouses. However, some of the khipu followed different patterns and Locke thought these might have a ceremonial or other function.
In 1990, Gary Urton, an anthropologist at Harvard and one of the world’s leading Inca scholars, spotted several details that convinced him the khipu contained much more than tallies of llama sales. He set up a database of khipu and assembled a team of anthropologists, mathematicians and cryptographers to work on deciphering the knots. They have already spotted quite a few repeated patterns and hope to have some results from their efforts later this year.
If the Khipu turn out to be a method of recording language, which seems quite possible, what will it be called? It isn’t really writing as such. Any suggestions?
Coals to Newcastle and missed boats
Taking or carrying coals to Newcastle is an idiomatic expression that means doing something that is completely unnnecessary, pointless or superfluous. The German equivalent of this is Eulen nach Athen bringen/tragen – to take/bring owls to Athens. Are there similar expressions in other languages?
Newcastle-upon-Tyne used to be a major coal mining area and the UK’s first coal exporting port, and was first associated with pointless activities in Thomas Fuller’s 1661 The history of the worthies of England: in which he wrote, “To carry Coals to Newcastle, that is to do what was done before; or to busy one’s self in a needless imployment.”
An idiomatic way of saying that you’ve missed something such as an opportunity or an event, is ‘I’ve missed the boat’ or ‘that ship has sailed’. In German, the equivalent is der Zug ist abgefahren – the train has departed. A similar expression is used in Swedish – tåget har gått – the train has left. What about in other languages?
By the way, a good place to find information about English idioms is: www.phrases.org.uk
Useful websites
Here are a couple of useful language-related websites I came across today:
BePolyglot
Provides a systematic way to learn four Romance languages: French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese. It contains a detailed comparison of the grammars of these languages, highlights similarities and differences in vocabularly and shows how to convert words between languages.
It’s intended for those who want to improve their knowledge of one or more Romance languages, as well as for anyone interested in comparative linguistics and Romance languages. To access the full content of the site, you have to subscribe, which costs $4.95 per month or $19.90 per year.
Does anyone know of similar sites for other language families?
Kanji Converter
This site converts Japanese kanji into hiragana, katakana and/or romaji. It also gives information about the words in English.
I usually know or can guess what Japanese kanji mean and know how to pronounce them in Mandarin, but don’t always know how to pronounce them in Japanese, so this site is very useful for me.
Linguistic adventures in Cuba
My linguistic adventures started on the flight out to Cuba, during which I was sitting next to an electrician from Germany. I tried speaking a bit of German with him, but he seemed to prefer using English, which he spoke very well. I also tried out my Spanish on the cabin staff and did my best to understand the announcements in Spanish.
When in Cuba I used my Spanish as much as possible. Some of the people I encountered didn’t speak English, so I had to speak to them in Spanish and was able to communicate fairly well. Other people spoke English and some preferred to practise their English with me rather than to speak Spanish. One feature of Cuban Spanish I noticed was a tendency to drop esses, particularly at the ends of words. For example, they say buena dia rather than buenas dias, and ecuela rather than escuela.
I met some Germans and Austrians and was able to converse with them in German, though I kept on having to use English words when I couldn’t remember the German ones. Not bad considering I haven’t used my German much since leaving school many years ago.
One member of the group was Chinese and I spoke some Mandarin with her. Another member of the group was an Irish speaker and I spoke some Irish with her, though she found it a little difficult to understand me as I speak Donegal Irish, while she speaks Munster Irish. The differences between these dialects are not huge, but they take some getting used to.
Maintaining multiple languages
A recent post on The Linguist discusses an interesting idea for maintaining one’s abilities in various languages. The idea is that you load up your mp3 player with audio files for the languages you want to maintain and/or improve, then you set it to randomly repeat them. The files could be language lessons, podcasts, audiobooks or anything else you have to hand. This method ensures that you don’t get tired of listening to one particular language, and should help you to switch between languages.
I think I’ll give this a try. I already have quite a few language courses loaded onto my mp3 player and will set up a playlist for the ones I’m working on at the moment. I’ll add more lessons and chapters from my audiobooks to the playlist once I’ve read through them. This will enable me to revise material I’ve already covered. I might add some podcasts in languages such as French, Spanish, Russian and Japanese.
Why you no understand?
Although I’m very used to hearing English spoken by non-native speakers, I do sometimes have difficultly understanding some of what they say. This is often because of mispronunciation and/or misplacement of word stress. Sometimes people have to repeat a word several times before I work out what they’re trying to say.
The same happens to me when I’m speaking other languages. I do my best to get the pronunciation and intonation correct, but am not always successful, which leads to confusion in the minds of those I’m talking to.
Sometimes it’s not the pronunciation, word stress or intonation that lets me down, but the way I put my sentences together and/or the words I use. I may get the words in the wrong order, or use words that are unusual or obscure. Fortunately in some languages you can get away with mixing the words up, as the word order is flexible.
I was talking about this with a Japanese colleague this morning. She told me that at a party she went to recently, where there was a mixture of English and Japanese people, the English people were all speaking English slowly and clearly to make sure that Japanese could understand them. Later she overheard the English people talking amongst themselves and found it quite difficult to understand them as they were speaking at normal speed and using lots of slang.
Regular contact with non-native speakers of your language can help to accustom you to a variety of foreign accents and ways of speaking. In the cases of languages few people study, their native speakers are perhaps less likely to have heard foreigners attempting to speak their language and might be less tolerant of mispronunciation and grammatical errors. I’ve read that this might be true for Czech. Does anybody know if this is the case?
Slavic similiarities
While talking with a Bulgarian contact today, we were discussing the conjugation of the verb ‘to juggle’ in Bulgarian, as you do, and I was struck by how similar Bulgarian verb endings are to Czech ones. Below is the present tense of this verb with the Bulgarian on the left and the Czech on the right.
- жонглирам (žongliram) / žonglovam – I juggle
- жонглираш (žongliraš) / žonglovaš – you juggle
- жонглира (žonglira) / žonglova – he/she/it juggles
- жонглираmе (žonglirame) / žonglovame – we juggle
- жонглирате (žonglirate) / žonglovate – you (pl) juggle
- жонглират (žonglirat) / žonglovají – they juggle
The more I learn about the Slavic languages, the more similarities I see between them. So far my knowledge is limited to a smattering of Russian, a little Czech, and a few Bulgarian words, so my impressions and thoughts may change as I learn more. One encouraging factoid I’ve discovered is that Czech only has about seven irregular verbs.
I also came across an interesting site today which contains useful words and phrases in a number of Slavic languages, with translations in English and Japanese.
Correction: the Czech conjugation of the verb ‘to juggle’ is actually:
- žongluji – I juggle
- žongluješ – you juggle
- žongluje – he/she/it juggles
- žonglujeme – we juggle
- žonglujete – you (pl) juggle
- žonglují – they juggle
There are Czech verbs with endings similar to the Bulgarian ones above, but not ‘to juggle’, unfortunately.
Practice makes perfect
I’ve been chatting with a number of people in Mandarin, Taiwanese and Japanese today. After many years of neglect, my command of these languages is gradually improving.
My Mandarin is more or less fluent, though there are many gaps in my vocabulary, which I’m doing my best to fill. Some of the people I’ve been talking to told me that they thought I was a native Mandarin speaker, which is encouraging.
I only have a limited knowledge of Taiwanese, but that should improve with practice. I can understand the language to some extent thanks to many years of hearing it while in Taiwan, and when I hear people speaking it, it brings back lots of memories.
My Japanese is also gradually coming back to me. I can’t speak it particularly well at the moment, but can understand quite a lot. When talking to my Japanese contacts today, I was pleased to realise that I could actually follow most of what they said in Japanese. One problem I have is that I often find myself at loss for appropriate verbs when I get to the end of my Japanese sentences.
Name the country
In which country might you hear these languages?
These are both minority languages in this country, one of them is indigenous, the other was first brought to the country by immigrants in the 17th